I Became the Mid-Boss Who Kidnaps the Heroines (2)
If a story has the heroine getting kidnapped, how do people react? It depends on whether the one taking it in is a player, an audience, or a reader.
In games, a heroine being abducted is practically routine. Some titles have spent decades kidnapping their princess in every single installment, and in certain cases the kidnapping itself is the theme of the main story. To a movie audience, it is a device that lets the hero shine in a crisis: the enemy organization snatches the heroine and holds her hostage, and the protagonist floors the accelerator, slaughters every last member of the outfit, and brings her home.
And a reader? What if the story is a web novel?
All hell breaks loose. I will not describe in detail exactly how, but if the one doing the kidnapping is a man rather than a woman, the comment section will almost certainly go up in flames.
In this godforsaken game—the one called Esdinas of the Azure Heavens—there is exactly one character like that. A mid-boss who specializes in Hypnosis, Brainwashing, and Aphrodisiacs: Regiph. He shows up in a medieval fantasy academy game as the tanned-blond thug who envies and resents the popularity of the protagonist, a freshman at the academy, and kidnaps the heroines.
The players made their disgust just as plain. And no wonder. From the face alone, he was the textbook tanned blond. I could tell just by looking at myself in the mirror. His hair, thankfully, was not a sport cut or a short, bristling mess; it fell in a neat line. The bangs, though, were long enough to cover his eyebrows and reach his eyes.
Someone once said it. This commoner character named Regiph existed purely as a device to make the player uncomfortable.
I agreed. Someone on that development team had surely, as a child, watched a senior he liked, or an older girl, or a classmate get grabbed by the school delinquents and dragged off somewhere—and then, a few days later, seen that thug lay a hand on the waist of the girl he had liked and vanish with her into some secluded corner. Either that, or the studio's main director simply had that kind of taste.
Of course, no such scene appears in the game. He may kidnap a heroine, but she resists with everything she has, and the protagonist immediately rushes to save her, cutting Regiph down before he can do anything suspicious to her. Along the way Regiph becomes a demonkin through a contract with the Demon King, the root of all evil in this game; a boss fight breaks out; the protagonist locks in his relationship with the heroine he has rescued; and an event unfolds in which she awakens.
That is right. Regiph is, quite literally, a device. He was made to stage a crisis that tears the protagonist and the heroine apart, and to trigger the event in which she awakens to a clear love for him and grows stronger still. From the moment he was first designed, he was a character prepared to be killed by the protagonist. And in the fan-work community, among people of a certain taste, he is more popular than the protagonist himself.
It was an RPG with a medieval fantasy setting, but the bones of the game were a dating sim, so fan works existed, and those fan works caught fire in earnest on the bait the studio had thrown out: two hundred billion on a full clear. Was the gameplay bad? No. The dating-sim elements cost it some points, but as a character RPG it was a tremendous masterpiece. The spine of the main story—defeat the Demon King together with your companions—stayed the same, yet that story shifted from moment to moment according to the protagonist's choices, with routes varied enough that every run could be a different game. The world was fixed through the opening of the academy, and everything that unfolded after was like a tale of countless parallel worlds. The heroines' settings and personalities, and the narratives of the supporting cast and the villains, were all remarkably well done.
So much so that it actually posted a fairly strong showing at the real Game of the Year awards.
People were saying as much even in the West, so the gameplay really was outstanding. I had not pushed through to my nine hundred and ninety-ninth run for nothing. Reaching 99.99 percent of the endings and events collected did, at some point, come with the thought that I had come this far and might as well take the two hundred billion—but until I hit about ninety percent, it was because the game itself was fun.
Who would be the main heroine? Who would be my companions? Which heroine would become an enemy, and what would her relationship with the main heroine become? Would the side characters end up a couple, sworn siblings, or in-laws somewhere down the line? Would a character abandoned in the early game return in the late game as reinforcements for reasons of their own, or fall to the Demon King's temptation and appear as a demonkin?
Jokes like that circulated, and they were only half jokes, because the routes really were that varied.
Amid all that constant change, three things never changed.
One. The protagonist is a male character.
Two. By some method or other, Regiph kidnaps the female character with the highest affection, and when that character awakens, the heroine route is decided.
Three. The awakened main heroine becomes an Angel, and only a being who holds an Angel's power can wound the Demon King.
In other words, the easiest and fastest way to save this world was for the tanned blond Regiph to kidnap the protagonist's lover, or the girl he was almost dating, and then—through the story of the protagonist saving her—to awaken that heroine as an Angel and be killed for it.
"Young Master Regiph, what are you thinking about?"
"Survival."
"...??"
And Regiph was me. Present day. Regiph, age seven. I had come to, and found myself the human who, in the future, would have to NTR a heroine and be killed by the protagonist if the world was to have any chance of being saved. Time remaining: a little over ten years.
I was fucked.
I knew nothing about the character called Regiph. More precisely, I knew the Regiph from after he entered the academy quite well, but as for the years before enrollment, I knew only the outline of his background. Status: commoner. Presumed to be of fallen nobility. The Brainwashing, Hypnosis, and Aphrodisiacs he chiefly used were aid from whatever had sent him to the academy.
The picture drew itself, didn't it? His house had fallen early, he had drifted through the world as a ruined noble, made a contract with a demon, and been ordered to obstruct the protagonist's faction. That was the past Regiph carried. He did have the sort of details that let you say he had actually been a good kid, but look at what he does in the original story and the words come out on their own: just kill him.
It varied by route, but Boss Regiph's patterns fell into three broad types.
One. A fight against Regiph after a demon's scheme has turned him into a demonkin. The difficulty, for a boss battle, is fairly high, but aside from the heroine being held hostage, it is not especially unpleasant.
Two. A fight against demonkin Regiph with a heroine under Hypnosis and Brainwashing serving as his subordinate. Compared with the first battle, there is a moment when the heroine turns on you, but once you save her, demonkin Regiph collapses far too easily, like a man who has just been NTRed.
Three. A fight against demonkin Regiph while the heroine is addicted to an Aphrodisiac. This one is the most infuriating of all. Why? The kidnapping was already enough to make your blood boil, and now they were throwing an aphrodisiac into it? The vast majority of the R-18 tags in the fan works come out of this part. Regiph, the Aphrodisiac, and the captured heroine. Some people say that the moment a heroine is captured, she is no longer the heroine of that route. And so that players who think that way will not be displeased, there are also cases in which the kidnapped heroine is thoroughly violated. There is a route where the protagonist looks after the defiled heroine, and a route where he abandons her, flirts with another heroine, and starts dating that one on the spot—as if the developers had gone and built routes for people who would actually make that choice, or who claimed to respect that taste.
The latter, especially, went further once the route was discovered. People used the mechanic to invent a heroine-killing routine. Throw the heroine you dislike at Regiph, awaken her first as the essence of an Angel, and then drive that Angel into a berserk frenzy and turn her into Apocalypse.
Apocalypse. If a heroine who holds an Angel's power suffers a mental collapse, and you fail to put her down, the world is destroyed. An Angel is the power God of this world sent down to the earth so that it might stand against the Demon King, but that same power can annihilate not only the Demon King but the world itself. And the power can be taken by killing the fallen angel who has become Apocalypse, then bestowed on another heroine, granting her an Angel's strength. On that foundation, there is an actual ending in which you deliberately kill the heroine you hate, keep the one you like as a sub heroine, hand her the Angel's power, and capture her as the main heroine.
So. To put it all together. I had to avoid the original Regiph's tanned-blond heroine-NTR kidnapping, dodge my own death, and at the same time help the protagonist and the heroine fall in love so that she would awaken as an Angel. If I failed, the Demon King would descend on this world, enslave every human being, and take the land for himself.
That had to be stopped. No exceptions. The Demon King was not a white-haired, red-eyed woman with an enormous chest, and not a woman with blue skin and the lower body of a serpent. The Demon King was a man. And the Demon King did not discriminate between men and women. He toyed with humans the way a child toys with ants, and he also used them for that which I could not even bring myself to say.
Absolutely not.
There were any number of methods, but two goals came to mind at once.
One. At least one person had to be awakened as an Angel, if only to bring down the power of God to stand against the Demon King.
Two. The heroine who became that Angel had to be kept from a mental collapse and a berserk rampage, if only to stop a being with the power to kill even the Demon King from going mad and destroying the world.
Which meant that from this moment—me, possessing Regiph at the age of seven—until the day of enrollment at the academy, there was a great deal of preparation to do.
"My son."
"Yes, Father."
"You are the proud son of the house of Count Hapsderk."
...Haps?
"Big brother."
From behind me.
"Is something wrong?"
One of the main heroines was standing there.