On Possessing a Body, Only to Find I Was a Princess Knight
Explaining a game whose very title seemed to advertise why, hello, I am obscene did not take ten minutes.
All it required was a computer, a mouse, and a finger. Left-click, and the scene advanced. The buttons tucked into the corner of the dialogue box handled the rest — fast-forward, rewind, replay the voices, save, load. Those particular scenes, scattered through the story, were filed in a gallery you could open straight from the main menu and play again whenever you liked. Now and then a binary choice appeared, and whichever option you took decided which scenes you collected. Three endings in all.
That was it.
"If you're going to possess a game, possess a different one."
Saying it in a hollow voice changed nothing. I braced my hands on the washbasin and looked into the mirror, and what looked back was a girl, striking for the lavish waves of her golden hair. A beautiful face. An elegant dress. The rank of a princess of a kingdom. She was the sort of girl who ought to have been happy — who had no business being unhappy unless something truly extraordinary had gone wrong. Unfortunately, for the girl in the mirror, that extraordinary something existed.
Her name was Evangeline Failondia. Protagonist of the porn eroge The Ravished Princess Knight, Evangeline — and a reincarnator who, only moments ago, had remembered the life that came before.
"...All right. Calm down."
That was the short conclusion I managed to reach after thirty straight minutes alone with the mirror, cycling through despair, cursing, and denial. If I didn't get a grip, nothing would come of anything. I drew a long breath and stripped the situation down as far as it would go, and it collapsed into a single sentence.
The me of my previous life was dead, and when I opened my eyes, I was Evangeline.
So what was I supposed to do now?
Finding an answer took, surprisingly, very little time at all.
"The happy ending."
The only ending in the game where the protagonist, Evangeline, could cross the finish line with her virginity intact. Numbered Scene #2 among the endings, it showed Evangeline victorious in the war, home again, spending her wedding night with her fiancé, the empire's younger prince. I had, obviously, not the slightest intention of spending any wedding night. What mattered was the hymen — whether it was still there. Get onto the happy-ending route in one piece, and everything after that was free: break the engagement, sock the crown prince in the jaw, whatever I liked.
So how, exactly, did one reach the happy ending?
One of the quirks of The Ravished Princess Knight, Evangeline was that a choice always appeared before a scene. Always two options. And always, the first one led into a scene. Pick nothing but the second, every time, and the ending you got was Scene #2 — the one where she finished the war untouched, came home, and gave her virginity to her fiancé.
And the choice that mattered most of all was the very first one, at the very start of the game.
1. Do not join the war as a princess knight
2. Join the war
...That was it, I think.
It mattered more than the rest because it was the choice that split the bad ending off from everything else. Choose do not join, and a single year after the Demon King's army began its invasion, Evangeline's homeland, the Failon Kingdom, lost its capital. And you could collect ending Scene #3, available only on the bad-ending route — the one where the kingdom's three princesses were fucked side by side.
If, instead, Evangeline marched as a princess knight, the royal army, its morale driven to the breaking point by her mere presence, held the terrifying Demon King's host off for five full years and at last succeeded in saving the kingdom. That, of course, was only the story you got by reaching the happy ending. Pick even one wrong choice along the way, let Evangeline be taken alive, and the kingdom lost.
...Thinking about it now, that was genuinely insane. One princess knight joins up, and a war that should have ended in a year drags on for five?
Well. That's a porn game for you.
Anyone who expected much from an eroge's plot was a fool to begin with. Either that, or Evangeline really was just that strong.
Anyway, what mattered wasn't only joining the war. It was not making a mistake in it. The game had expressed all of this as choices, but the world I'd been reborn into wasn't a game. It was reality. Reality had nothing so convenient as a menu. The multiple-choice question had turned into an essay. One mistake — a single one — and my virginity would be taken on the spot, and the story would run straight into the normal ending.
"I need to prepare."
Preparation, so I wouldn't slip. Preparation, so the war wouldn't be lost. All of it for Evangeline's hymen, and for the happy ending.
"...You wish to study military science?"
"Yes."
Karl Failond, fourth king of the Failon Kingdom, made no effort to hide his bewilderment. His second princess, Evangeline — twelve years old, no more — had come to him out of nowhere, begging to learn military science.
"And why, exactly, do you wish to study military science?"
"...Just because."
There wasn't even a reason. Nothing but a groundless please let me learn, and that was the whole of it.
He sighed, thrown, but Karl was not so rigid a father as all that.
"Well. I don't see the harm."
"Thank you!"
When one's own child announced, of her own will, that she wished to learn something, was it not a father's duty to see that she could? Besides, Evangeline was already studying the sword under Sir Scabbard, a knight of the kingdom. Leave this with him as well, and the matter would be settled quickly.
"Then I shall speak to Sir Scabbard about this too. Will that do?"
"Yes!"
Evangeline answered in a bright voice.
Sir Scabbard.
The name rang a bell, and when I chased the memory down, it came back. There was a scene where she walked into an enemy trap, was captured alive alongside one of the knights who had marched with her, and publicly ravished in front of him. Sir Scabbard was that knight's name. Raymond Scabbard, in full. To think that here — two years before the war — he was already close to Evangeline.
So that's why she reacted so hard.
No wonder the scene had practically reeked of a personal bond between them. And to think he was her master in the sword.
"I have had word from His Majesty."
"That you wish to study military science."
"Uh, yes."
I answered in an awkward mumble, and Sir Scabbard abruptly knotted his brow. What was that for? Terrifying.
"Answers are short and sharp. Have you forgotten?"
"Yes, yes!"
"No stammering. Again!"
"Yes!!"
...More of a Spartan than I thought, this one.
"...With this, the lesson in military science is concluded. Rest a moment. Then we move to the training ground and resume the sword."
"Haaah..."
The words were barely out of his mouth before I heaved a miserable sigh and collapsed over the desk.
"...Mind your dignity."
"But it's hard. What am I supposed to do about it?"
The Sir Scabbard preserved in Evangeline's memory had shown no mercy even in ordinary sword lessons, and his character came through without a drop of softness in military science as well. From the very first lesson he tortured me — a child of thirteen, nothing more — with a flood of proper nouns and specialist jargon.
"The lessons are too hard."
"Did Your Highness not say you wished to learn?"
"I can't even say they're difficult?"
I was still grumbling when Sir Scabbard asked, abruptly, "What change of heart came over you, all of a sudden, that you thought to study military science?"
"Pardon?"
"The reason I was charged with Your Highness's sword lessons in the first place was a royal command from His Majesty. He asked me to do something about the energy you had to spare."
That was it?
While I reeled, just a little, from a truth I hadn't seen coming, he asked again. "Is there... perhaps some reason you came to feel you absolutely had to learn it?"
As he said it, his eyes wavered. Only slightly. At that hairline crack in a man who had seemed nothing but an iron wall, my mouth opened on its own, as if something had pulled the words out of me.
"...Five years at the latest. Two, if it comes soon. The Demon King's army might... invade."
Sir Scabbard's eyes flew wide.
Ah. Was that a slip?
Only then did I realize I'd let it out. How long had I even been inside this twelve-year-old body, for my mind to have turned childish with it? I was still scrambling for an excuse when his voice reached me.
"...It would seem Your Highness sensed it as well, however faintly."
I did? Sensed it? Sensed what?
"Just as you say... of late, the monsters pressing our northwestern border have grown fiercer. The attacks remain scattered, but they are growing stronger, and they come more often." He spoke in a voice as grave as his face. "Within the kingdom, we suspect they are the remnants of something driven out of the Demon Realm, at the far western edge of the continent."
"Th-then..."
"Yes."
Sir Scabbard gave a short nod.
"Beyond the Swamp of Death, in the Demon Realm, something is stirring."
I had nothing to say to that.
"We do not yet know what it is. But perhaps, just as Your Highness has said, that being is the 'Demon King' of the prophecy."
He nodded, his face set hard.
What? What was that? Terrifying. I'd never heard a word of this.
But... so that was how it was. Some people had already predicted the war.
So long as the kingdom wasn't full of fools, scraps of information would have been enough to sketch the shape of things. They would have begun preparing, at least to some degree, and that was why they had managed to hold out for a year. Which meant the reverse as well. If Evangeline did not join the war, then even after they had prepared, even after they had fought, the capital would fall inside a year.
...Could I really keep my chastity through five years of war?
"Truly remarkable, Your Highness."
He said it with a smile. Looking at him, I could manage nothing but an awkward smile of my own.
Sir Scabbard's lessons were brutal. If one of Her Highness's station possessed insight of that caliber and meant to devote herself to the kingdom, then answering that resolve with everything he had was a vassal's duty — or so the logic went. The sword lessons grew ten times harsher than anything in Evangeline's memory, and the military science, if anything, grew harsher still.
Two years passed that way.
And then, Year 34 of the Era of Peace. Word reached the royal capital that a host of monsters calling themselves the Demon King's army had invaded the Failon Kingdom and the Solion Holy Kingdom at the same time.