Raging Flames (1)
Raging Flames (1)
At the time, you would have been hard-pressed to find that kind of heroine outside of an 18+ eroge, but around twenty years earlier, heroines with a history of sexual abuse still showed up from time to time. Even in all-ages games, that held true.
Of course, the games never actually showed those scenes. Most of the time they just went, "This kid has been through a lot," and moved on. But even looking back at the time, a backstory that made you cough up blood was still a backstory that made you cough up blood.
Claire Fangriffon was, strictly speaking, a heroine in the character classification sense, but she was not a romanceable heroine. At least, there was no route for her up through the installments I played.
No, the problem was not merely that you could not romance her. She was a character you could not keep alive, period.
The series had been around for twenty years, but the setting at that time had only been running for five. The fourteenth title came out five years ago, and three more had followed since then.
And by the late 2010s, the era for that kind of defilement-backstory character had long since passed.
Her character was appealing... I guess you could put it that way. A history of misfortune like that could produce certain types of character traits, after all.
Forcing herself to act cheerful to hide her dark past. Becoming more precocious than her peers. Playing the villain to seem strong. Being rescued from a brutally dark past and reconciling with an estranged stepsister—
—those kinds of setups certainly existed, but honestly, that sort of dark past could be built without resorting to "defilement" at all.
Maybe it was the production team's taste, or maybe the scenario writer who'd been writing twenty years ago simply never stopped.
Whatever Claire's popularity was, that lurid backstory kept dragging it down.
And whatever the situation was in Japan, in Korea specifically there were a handful of users who constantly stirred up trouble over her past. That pushed her reputation even further into the gutter.
I didn't know whether the developers realized this, or whether she'd always been meant to be used that way, but in the final installment that was released, the character ended up defying the emperor's orders and sacrificing herself for the sake of her stepsister, the emperor's real daughter.
No matter how much the character was dogged by controversy and trolling, nobody could trash that particular story. A character who "remained unhappy until the very end yet still met a death she chose for herself" was always popular.
"Hmm..."
The problem was that the Claire sitting restlessly in front of me had not yet earned the name "Fangriffon," nor had she acquired that kind of grim past.
Claire was a character whose orphanage director sold her to a brothel for money.
No, strictly speaking, the orphanage itself had a special relationship with the brothel. While pretending to be an ordinary orphanage, they screened the orphans and supplied them whenever the need arose—whenever one of the brothel's orphans, procured for those particular tastes, broke down and was discarded, they'd be replaced like parts, one after another.
... The child who'd been "adopted" not long ago had probably been sold off for that same purpose, too.
Since the "clients" were buying according to their "particular tastes," gender obviously didn't matter to them.
A girl who'd been rolling around in a brothel became the emperor's daughter. Ordinarily that made no sense, but there was a reason in this case.
Because this character, Claire, had talent.
During one of the incidents she was forced to endure, as always, Claire eventually snapped and killed the "customer" she'd been made to service.
When the thugs came running at the sound of screaming, she slit every one of their carotid arteries with the fork she'd been holding, and on the way out she accidentally knocked over an oil lamp. As a result, the entire brothel went up in flames.
This was a setting without proper firefighting equipment and where people had barely any rights to speak of. The fire that started in the ramshackle, densely packed brothel district swept straight through the slums, turning into a massive conflagration and causing countless casualties.
Ironically, a large number of nobles who had opposed the emperor happened to be in the brothel district and were consumed by the blaze, dealing a heavy blow to the noble faction... or so the background lore went.
The emperor, who learned of Claire's existence while investigating the incident, simply took her in and made her his daughter.
The many "children" beneath the emperor became his allies and loyal servants in that way.
Of course, they had no right to inherit the throne. They were merely close aides the emperor had created to achieve his ambitions.
Claire's true origins had not been revealed even by the latest title. There was some bait about her biological parents possibly appearing in the next game, but that was it.
In any case, she wasn't "Fangriffon" yet, so she wasn't a child who'd already been through something that horrible...
... Which, on the flip side, meant that the orphanage I was currently in was connected to that insane brothel.
That's right. That meant not only this child but me as well. I could be sold off too.
Because the face I'd seen in the mirror was, to put it plainly, a girl with a genuinely mysterious aura.
What difference did it make that the person inside was an adult man? To the nobles who bought children and did those things, that would just feel like another form of entertainment.
"I'm screwed."
"Scrooo...?"
"Ah."
Claire had repeated my muttering after hearing it.
I clutched my head at the sight of her.
For the past month, I hadn't been able to do anything.
Not that I hadn't tried to think of something. I had at least considered somehow escaping this orphanage and running away somewhere decent.
And I knew a place that might be possible.
This game's protagonist was an incredibly diligent and kind kid. Naturally, his parents were the same. They were a baronial family with a long history in the capital, and probably to make the "good family" characterization stand out more, the family ran a proper orphanage.
Not a place that was only an orphanage on the surface, but an actual one. A place that truly worried about and loved the children, and took full responsibility for them until the moment they became adults.
I'd earned platinum medals on the console versions of every Aetherna Chronicles I'd ever played. I was even the sort of person who'd imported the Japanese version before the official Korean release came out, cleared it with a Japanese dictionary in hand, and wrote strategy guides. So I knew the map of the Imperial Capital reasonably well. If this world really was the world inside that game I knew, I could at least manage to find my way using the map I remembered.
The problem, though, was the game's scale.
Unless a Western studio with an absolutely staggering amount of money was involved, practically no company went to the trouble of reproducing an entire city exactly inside a game. For a mid-sized company with around forty staff, it was simply impossible.
They had implemented the setting's districts in a fair amount of detail, but not every district was connected in a continuous, seamless layout. They'd picked out only the essential or important areas from a gameplay perspective and implemented those. Something on the scale of two or three blocks of streets. About eight such districts appeared in the game.
Everything else was combat fields outside the city. And naturally, because those fields were part of a JRPG, they had to contain monsters and treasure chests, so the layout couldn't exactly be called logical. They had to be built purely as dungeons, so it wouldn't be strange if they turned out completely different from the outskirts of this world's city.
Anyway, so I knew the city's layout to some degree, but I wasn't so skilled at orienteering that I could find my way just by looking at a map or signs. The Imperial Capital was repeatedly described as a complicated place. The main thoroughfares of the metropolis might have been manageable, but you couldn't expect the back alleys, a chaotic jumble of illegally constructed shantytowns and century-old wooden tenements, to be laid out in detail on any map.
So, I'd just been dragging my feet this whole time.
"Big Sis Sylvia, is something wrong?"
The children there rather readily looked up to me.
Maybe it was because the previous boss had kept the kids in line with his fists. Whenever the children caused trouble, he was the one who'd get beaten, so he'd swung his fists around in the old woman's place to keep everyone quiet.
He hadn't hit me during all that.
Maybe it was because of this pretty face.
... It felt strange saying that about a child's face, but it definitely was the kind of face a kid would find pretty through their eyes. From an adult's perspective, it was a face with "promise for the future," and...
Through a criminal's eyes, it was probably a face they'd want to take for themselves immediately.
I didn't really know why I'd ended up in an orphanage with this face.
If this were a web novel, I'd probably save this child in front of me now, and then the main story would unfold completely differently from the original—
—but how, exactly?
I looked around at the other children staring blankly at me and thought.
Since they were all "merchandise," their faces were uniformly decent. I had no idea how they'd managed to pick out only kids like this from the backstreets.
... Maybe they weren't "just orphans" after all. Not that I had any way to prove it at the moment.
Sure, being reborn into another world was fine. Encountering the heroine in her childhood was fine too. Honestly, when I first realized what was going on, I'd even been a little moved. Magic, warships that flew through the sky, countless devices equipped with absurdly advanced steam engines—weren't those all the stuff of dreams?
The problem was that before I could enjoy any of that, I seemed destined to be sold off, exploited, and killed.
Right, maybe a character named Sylvia Black had existed all along. Maybe the backstory was that she'd known Claire before Claire became the emperor's daughter. Maybe she just didn't appear because she was a character who'd been sold off before the main story began, and nobody knew what became of her.
"......."
Even as I racked my brain anxiously, no solution came to me.
No status window had appeared, and no disembodied guide voice had chimed in out of nowhere. When I searched my mind, I didn't seem to have any incredible ability, either.
"Sis?"
"......."
The fact that I could feel that distinctive Japanese-game speech cadence even though everyone was clearly speaking something like English was probably not just my imagination.
In truth, there was a strong chance my age and Claire's weren't all that far apart. A year's difference at most. Maybe just a few months. Our heights were similar, so that was probably the case.
But maybe because the old woman had said I was the oldest, every child there called me their older sister.
"... It's nothing. Don't worry about it."
And as long as things were the way they were, I tried my best to be good to the kids.
Because it was all I could do.
I was a long way from the kind of good person who fully empathized with everyone else's suffering and did whatever they could to help children in need.
A bystander who kept their distance and simply watched when something was beyond them. That was my place.
But even so.
I could at least offer the kids a kind word at the end, when a terrible fate had already been decided for them.
... Now that I thought about it again, maybe the reason the children readily followed me was the same.
*
And the day of parting arrived quickly.
"Claire!"
In the worst possible way, at that.
"The person who's going to take you in has arrived! Come on out, and look happy about it!"
"......."
Normally, when the children were about to leave this place, they were a little happier. Their surroundings consisted of nothing but people who hit and tormented them, so naturally they were glad to get away.
And besides, the children didn't even know they were being sold.
They simply thought they were being adopted into a well-off household where they'd grow up warm and well-fed.
... The children didn't yet know that no aristocrat or member of the bourgeoisie would ever come to a grimy place like that to take them.
But even so, Claire just looked up at me.
Her eyes held fear and reluctance.
Had she grown attached to me during that time?
"...I'll walk you to the front."
I got to my feet as I said that.
As if she had no idea what was about to happen, Claire looked at me and broke into a bright smile.