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And that was the moment.
Before Master could even accept my confession, my vision began to cave in on itself. My body burned as if it were overheating.
"Hah... hahh..."
I exhaled a scorching breath without thinking, desperate to cool the heat. By the time I registered that my entire body was soaked through with sweat, the touch of Master's hand against my back had slowly fallen away.
"You okay?"
"...Master?"
My head was a mess. The place looked similar to where I'd just been, but my posture and the situation itself were completely different. Had I somehow gotten amnesia and blanked out everything in between?
"Chocolate?"
In Princess Fourmi, you could use Choco to send Affection Gifts. Those gifts would then convert into chocolate tailored to that character's preferences before being delivered. The package in front of me was probably a bundle of rich hot-chocolate sticks meant to be stirred into warm milk.
"Ah...!?"
Only then did the situation finally click. I'd experienced so many memories that I'd completely forgotten. Which meant every feeling I'd been harboring toward Master until now was...
Fake...?
...The moment that thought landed, the trembling in my body stopped, and my mind began to settle into cold, sharp clarity.
No — it started to.
Just how far had these goddamn Affection Gifts eaten into me?
...This is disgusting.
The truly revolting part was that even now, with my wits supposedly back, recalling the contents of those fabricated memories still made a stupid little smile tug at my lips. My brain was literally processing them as happy memories. Judging by how it couldn't even tell the difference, my brain clearly had a few screws loose.
"Master, are you in your right mind?"
...What a load of bullshit.
Master, my ass. I wanted to spit the words out, but the second I looked at that face, nothing harsh would come. Worse than that — even using any title other than Master felt nearly impossible. I was genuinely going to lose it. A sensation like I was committing some terrible sin rose up like a wall and blocked off certain actions before I could take them.
"I told you earlier. Those are precious resources. How can you just throw them away like that?"
At least reading the situation wasn't hard. My current affection sat at 19 — a full eighteen points higher than before — and at some point my level had climbed all the way to 37. The last event I'd seen right before snapping back to myself was familiar, even if the details were a little different. In the main story, this pathetic Jasmine poured out a declaration of absolute slave-like loyalty right before hitting affection 20, offering up everything she was. Watching her fall the moment she hit 2-Star was so pitiful that players had coined the nickname "Pushover Jasmine."
Since my affection was sitting at 19, the event must have cut off mid-scene. At 20, I probably would have heard his answer too... and if that had happened, there might really have been no going back.
"But I don't need anyone except Jasmine. So I can just give everything to you, right?"
"Nh...!?"
He said it so casually, exactly the way he had in those fake memories I'd just lived through. In the memories, he'd done that sort of thing so often that if I just leaned into them, I could let it slide as natural. The problem was that looking at the ordinary, loving version of him made my heart race — which was dangerous. And if I tried my hardest to filter those memories out and look at him cleanly, that absurdly pure, transparent affection of his invaded me anyway and set my pulse hammering.
...No matter which option I picked, it was a landmine. A genuine hell of a binary choice.
Being brainwashed under the banner of "affection" was already hard enough. On top of that, this body itself was so easy to conquer that it was pure agony. I did not want a reverse-dom tag slapped onto my plan to guide this newbie...
"Master, I'm sorry, but you need to take care of the others as well — not just me."
"Why?"
Because this floating city, Perfumery, was scheduled to be invaded by boss monsters under the name of the Deadly Battle. I'd poured so much effort into calculating the optimal specs to stop that from happening. And this idiot had just blown the two most critical resources for the very first Deadly Battle.
"We'll have to fight soon. And I can't handle that alone."
"If I make you stronger, couldn't you fight alone?"
As if.
There's a limit to how strong one person can get. And since I was a support, not a dealer, powering myself up barely increased my personal damage output.
"And please don't give me resources unless you absolutely have to."
"Why? If you need people, then you need yourself too, right?"
"...I'm weak by nature. It's a waste."
To protect Master, stronger limited characters would be better than someone like me—
Ha. It really never stopped crawling out of me, did it. Exhausting.
I only needed him to protect this place so that I could keep surviving here. That was all. I was absolutely not trying to protect him.
Still... some of this is my fault.
I'd been so buried in planning that I'd left the newbie unsupervised for far too long. If I'd at least given him the bare minimum of an explanation, we never would have ended up in this shitty situation.
...Honestly, the Choco wasn't the urgent problem. The real issue was the Linger he'd dumped entirely into my level.
That was the largest amount you can get in the early game...
At this rate, the other characters probably wouldn't even hit level 20. Of course the difficulty itself might differ from what I'd expected, so I fully intended to raise them as best I could. But knowing I'd lost a margin I could have prepared for still left a bitter taste.
...It's still early, so any characters we can recruit right now should start at level 10.
Princess Fourmi had a peculiar newbie-support system: pickup characters started at a level matching their most recent point in the main story. In other words, the game handed you characters already above the level cap you could currently raise them to.
...But that won't really solve anything.
That system only existed to show that, as the story progressed, characters had already grown by the time you formed a relationship with them. By current standards, any character we recruited would top out around level 10. Even the most critical post — the Queen's Royal Guard — was only level 10 right now.
"Are you really mad?"
"No."
Thinking about it coldly, the idiot hadn't done anything wrong. The fault was mine for not explaining properly. ...Though it was still a shame he wasn't the careful type of newbie who asked before doing things.
"Anyway, Master. From now on, I'll explain properly what you need to do. I've already written it down on this paper, and I'll give you the paper too, so you don't have to worry about forgetting."
"Okay. But..."
"Yes. Go ahead."
"That 'Master' thing...?"
"......."
He sure asked early, this bastard.
And I had no idea how I was supposed to answer. But the fact that the root cause of all this was the one asking made my blood boil. If he hadn't force-fed me those Affection Gifts in the first place, I never would have had to go through any of that. Yes, not explaining was my fault — but why the hell did he have to use them at that exact timing? And if he had even a shred of tact, he'd just let it go. Did he really have to dig into it and torment me?
I didn't want to use the title "Master" either, for the record. Every time I said it, something inside me felt like it was being ground down. Call it "guiding the newbie" all you want — I'd been working myself half to death trying to help him. And the result of all that effort was this harassment?
"Hic... hh—"
"Ja— Jasmine!?"
"Whose fault do you think this is... You don't know a single thing, and you just sit there asking questions so casually... I— I don't want to say it either."
"Did I... do something wrong?"
That clueless expression was infuriating. Knowing it was the truth only made it more unfair. I was suffering like this, and the actual perpetrator didn't know a thing. It was so completely unfair.
"You used Affection Gifts and made me like this... My opinion never mattered, did it? Because I'm just a toy you raise affection on until I become a slave...!"
"W-what are you talking about. A toy?"
"Hic... hh, hh—!"
The terror of having myself stolen away. Across all eighteen fabricated memories planted in me, I'd shaken with that fear every single time. The whole thing was so humiliating and stupid that I'd planned to just curse him out internally and be done with it...!
"I'm sorry."
"Let go of me...!"
Don't.
Don't look at me with that worried face and hold me. Let me hate you. Leave me alone so I can resent you.
"Next time, I'll ask your permission first before I use them."
"...Really?"
"Yeah. I never meant to force you into something you hated. I thought it was okay."
Well — even I hadn't expected Affection Gifts to have that kind of effect. Right. I knew that much. That was why I'd decided it wasn't his fault.
"To me, Jasmine is a very precious person."
"A person..."
"You're not a toy. Not ever."
"......."
Maybe it was lucky the protagonist was this much of an idiot. If some genuine piece of garbage had used Affection Gifts on me, how nightmarish would that have been?
...Just browsing the recommended posts was enough to find every kind of twisted fetish crawling around. What was Jasmine's most famous meme, after all? Grabbing her by the hem of her clothes and bending her over on the spot. There were even guys who called her useless and said she should at least do her job properly as a toilet. Absolute psychopaths...
"...You really won't be rough with me from now on?"
"Yeah. I'll always ask first and get your permission."
"Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely?"
"Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely."
For someone who normally spoke in such short sentences, he sure got talkative the second it involved me...
Fine. If my Master was a newbie who liked me this much and still had his head screwed on straight...
...I could probably manage to endure it.