The Character This Bastard Wants to Raise Is Weird?
The almost expressionless protagonist studied my hair in the mirror for a long moment, then set the comb down with a faint, satisfied smile.
"Yeah. It's pretty."
"......."
What the hell.
Who even is this guy?
Why is he so good at styling a woman's hair?
Sure, his own hair was long for a guy — but nowhere near the full-length cascade I was carrying around.
"Ah…"
Shit. Thinking about it, I'd just been whimpering and moaning right in front of this dickhead.
I wanted to die.
And the bastard himself just sat there looking like he had no idea why I was acting this way…
"I—I'll just step into the bathroom for a moment."
My mood was at rock bottom, but the problem area needed fixing first. I hurried into the bathroom, pulled a pair of panties from the cabinet in the corner, and—
…Having to change clothes over a little combing. There was humiliation, and then there was this.
"Oh…"
I hated that I actually gasped in admiration while peeling the old pair off.
But come on — a beautiful girl's discarded panties, stained, with thin sticky threads still clinging to the fabric. How was anyone supposed to look at that and not get turned on?
Anyone who didn't would have to be a eunuch.
Of course, the arousal came packaged with a crushing wave of existential dread. The cool bathroom air helped the heat die down a little, at least. I managed to wipe myself off with a towel and get into the clean pair without further incident.
Then, terrified someone might discover the evidence, I filled the sink with water, wrapped the dirty panties in a towel, and dunked the whole bundle. Looking at the state of my life right then, the dread hit all over again.
Yeah. This felt exactly like rinsing out an onahole.
…Was that even a fair comparison?
"You okay?"
"Yes, I'm fine. Shall we go eat?"
This was exactly the kind of moment that called for a meal — something to get my strength back. As miserable as everything was, surviving came first, right?
Hah. Yeah. Eating something really does help.
I hadn't felt like hunting for anything fancy, so we'd ducked into the nearest snack shop. The tteokbokki was sweet and decently tasty, so it hadn't been a bad call. The guy across from me still wore that blank face, but he was eating pretty well for someone who looked so uninterested.
"What's that?"
"Things I couldn't organize yesterday because I was asleep."
Time was too precious to waste, so I chewed tteokbokki with one hand and sorted the flood of information in my head with the other. The main story flow and the character pickup order were the same as in the game, so confirming the pickup sequence brought the story back piece by piece. Old memories surfaced one after another — it was actually kind of fun.
And once a stretch of story came back, I'd carefully recall the events from that period and catalog every useful scrap of information and every reward. Character gacha was gone now that this was reality, of course. But affection could still be raised to a certain point without gifts, and some characters even dropped Affection Gifts themselves.
If I used the resources we already had carefully, I could probably snag a few must-have characters. That wasn't just a reality-adaptation strategy — even in the original game, slowly collecting characters this way was a perfectly normal approach. It just wasn't one I'd ever gotten used to, since I'd solved most problems with money.
First acquisition was one thing, though. Raising star ranks later often went more efficiently if you took it slow, so I still remembered exactly where every Affection Gift could be found.
The lineup for recruiting characters should be built around the Deadly Battles.
Deadly Battles had always been the most important content in this game. But the real reason to prepare for them now was that they were genuinely tied into the main story. In the lore, a Deadly Battle was a boss raid on Perfumery — an invasion you had to defend against.
And the only version the story treated as "canon" was the highest difficulty. Odds were high that reality would scale the challenge the same way. Even if we only aimed to clear rather than rank, that still made Deadly Battles the single hardest survival wall we faced. Most must-have characters were defined by their Deadly Battle performance, which meant we absolutely needed them.
Of course, even must-haves need filtering.
Affection wasn't the only resource I had to compress. Every currency had to be spent as tightly as possible. So I'd clear most Deadly Battles with the smallest possible roster — which meant picking only the must-haves and citizenship-tier characters that were actually effective. Deadly Battles were especially brutal the first time a new difficulty dropped, so the key was choosing units that excelled in those debut windows. And anything built around frequent retries was out. This was reality, not a game. We only got one shot.
"Ah — finished already? I think I've got this mostly sorted."
"Mm."
He could have said something when he was done eating. He'd just been sitting there quietly watching me take notes. A whole day had passed, and I still had no idea what went on in that head of his.
"This way."
I'd considered heading back to the lodging for the lesson, but being sealed in an enclosed space together had not gone well yesterday. I needed somewhere clean, open, and free of interruptions — and then I remembered a place only Jasmine would know. A place no one else would visit at this point in the timeline.
"The sea?"
"A lake. Artificial. It's so large it looks like the ocean."
In the original game, this was a location Jasmine eventually showed the protagonist — but never this early. She only brought him here after she'd completely fallen for him, after she'd decided to serve him as her Master.
Makes sense it'd come late.
Originally, this was the place Jasmine and the Queen used to spend time together. A spot loaded with their shared memories. That was why Jasmine only brought her new Master here once she'd let go of her lingering attachment to the Queen. Jasmine being Jasmine, she would have used the place earlier if a mission required it — she was the type to put even a memory-soaked space to work if an order demanded it. And the one who'd given those orders had been the Queen who'd built those memories with her in the first place. But there was rarely any real need for a location like this, so it never appeared in the story at this stage.
I'd wanted to avoid using it if I could help it… but no matter how hard I thought, this was the only open, private space that came to mind where the two of us could be alone.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?"
"Mm."
I'd been the one to ask, but the sweeping view of the lake really was beautiful. Completely different from seeing it as a game background — the sheer reality of it made my chest feel wide open.
…And the cold water against my feet felt good, too.
I sat on a rock with my back turned toward him, making sure he had a clear view of it. Time to start the lesson, one step at a time.
"There's a ten written on my back, right?"
"Mm."
Along the lower edge of the Stigmata was a status display that activated when the protagonist got close — level, stats, support skills, that kind of thing. What I needed to teach him right now was the level.
"Bring your hand here, and imagine pushing it in."
"Like this?"
"Hhk—!? N-ngh…"
The sudden contact against my back dragged a weird sound out of me before I could stop it. Then a thick, writhing mass of mana began seeping from his hand into the flesh of my back. The sensation was so strange I couldn't even describe it — I shuddered and scrambled away.
"You okay?"
"Ah— probably. What does it say now?"
"Thirteen."
"That's called a level. When it goes up, your physical abilities permanently increase."
"Physical abilities?"
"Yes. When you put your hand on it just now, you saw the remaining amount of Linger, right?"
"Mm."
"You can spend that to raise it — up to a maximum of fifty."
Fifty was the level cap at this stage of the game. Later, as the protagonist progressed through the story, he'd be able to break the injection limit. But hitting even fifty would be hard enough for now, so that was a problem for later.
Originally, Linger was obtained by spending Scent — the game's stamina resource. For whales who bought Scent in bulk with Star Candy, the premium currency, it had been an overflowing resource. But this was reality now, with no stamina system at all. The way of obtaining it would be completely different.
"It's going up a little at a time."
"Is it?"
"Mm."
Apparently just moving your body counted as spending stamina. In that case, I could roughly estimate the supply rate based on free-to-play numbers with no recharges…
…Which meant we were going to be desperately short.
There were starter resources and event sources, sure. But the conclusion was the same: right now, the amount available was tiny. Even dumping everything the early game handed out, we probably couldn't get a single unit to level forty.
And in the extreme early game, leveling was everything. Gear and skills mattered, but they only meant something if the base stats were already there.
I went back over the notes I'd written.
First priority: assemble the party members for the first Deadly Battle.
I'd need to focus on 0-Star and 1-Star units rather than natural 2-Stars. The first Deadly Battle opened fairly early in the main story. Before it dropped, I needed a decent roster secured and every member leveled to at least thirty.
Damn level penalty.
The first-difficulty boss was level forty, and this insane game slapped you with a four-percent penalty for every single level you were below the enemy. So you needed at least level thirty just to keep the penalty down to forty percent and have any kind of chance. Alternatively, you could leave the rest a bit lower and push the main dealer up to around thirty-five.
"From now on, listen carefully to what I'm about to— what are you doing right now?"
I'd just finished thinking and was about to explain which characters we needed to find and raise. While I'd been staring at my notes, he'd opened the warehouse window and was doing something inside it. I realized too late that it was the Affection Gift purchase screen — and my blood ran cold.
"A gift."
"W-wait a second…!"
Click.
Before I could stop him, he hit confirm. A rather large box materialized right in front of my eyes.
…And the instant my instincts made me grab it—
"Hahk—!?"
A searing jolt drove straight into my lower back, and the world flipped upside down.