Three Men Make a Tiger
They buy this?
Three men make a tiger.
It is the old saying that if three people insist they have seen a tiger, even a nonexistent one becomes real. In other words, when enough mouths join in chorus, they can erase something that truly happened and rewrite it as if it never did.
Exactly as they were doing now.
The fighter Castro. The mage Aria. The saintess Isabel. The elf Vivian. The thief Olivier. And the hero Adonis.
Every single one of them, the party that had set out on that long, grueling journey to slay the Demon King, now spoke with one voice to diminish Adonis’s achievements. They claimed Adonis had always swung his sword while trembling like a leaf, and that even when they finally stood before the Demon King he had been unable to do anything properly. Because only the holy sword could sever the Demon King’s life completely, he had merely delivered the final blow. The ones who had driven the Demon King to the brink of death were Castro and the rest of them.
That was the perjury they offered.
There had been no witnesses. There was no solid evidence that could be produced. And so, in a single moment, Adonis was cast down as a cowardly piece of trash.
It was unjust. The injustice boiled in his chest until his eyes burned blood-red and he screamed until his throat tore.
“No! I never did any of that! I can swear it on my life!”
He spat blood and shouted until his voice went hoarse, yet every person gathered in the church only looked at him with cold eyes. They found him repulsive. In their gaze he was not the hero who had returned from a brutal journey, but a petty man thrashing about because he feared his reward might shrink.
“Enough, enough! I understand your grievance, so cease this!”
At last the emperor, unable to endure the spectacle any longer, stood on the dais, shook his head, and shouted. He glared at Adonis as though the sight itself disgusted him, then granted the entire party the same rewards. The noble titles and territories made public were identical for all of them. Yet Adonis alone received a remote frontier region of the Empire, while everyone except him was quietly given additional unofficial consolation money—vast sums of it.
After Adonis took up his post, every soul living in his territory pointed fingers at him. Whenever mouths gathered out of sight they freely cursed his name. With every insult Adonis withered further. Clutching only the glory that had already plummeted into the abyss, he rotted a little more each day. His face grew gaunt; dark circles settled thick beneath his eyes. He looked more like a living corpse than a man.
“Adonis. Are you okay?”
Yet because he was not yet a corpse, the memories that had once been joyful—and now were nothing but pretense and nightmare—tormented him without end. The face of the saintess who had healed him with Holy Power and spoken so kindly. The lips of the thief who had saved him from a trap and scolded him with a cute pout. The voices of the mage and the elf who had supported him so steadfastly from the rear. Even the shy flush of the mage who had fought beside him at the front and laughed with him. He now knew that every last one of those moments had been a lie.
“…….”
No one needed Adonis. He was nothing more than a discarded child, convenient fodder for people who loved to gossip. Adonis himself understood that fact better than anyone.
In the middle of the night he rose from his bed and sat at the desk. The hands that had been trembling from this nightmare reality were, astonishingly, perfectly still. Thanks to that calm he wrote without a single shake. It was a lonely will that never once said he would renounce his title and leave, never once said he intended to die.
Adonis no longer wanted to breathe inside this nightmare. The betrayal that cut deepest was that of Aria, the childhood friend and mage he had believed he shared a profound bond with. The promise that once they defeated the Demon King they would live together. Even the shy smile and the first kiss they had shared. All of it had been a sharp, heart-rending lie. The moans that drifted to him every night… the occasional flustered, sweat-soaked scrambling… only now did he realize none of it had been his imagination.
And so the hero Adonis left the Empire without honor, wandered foreign lands, and died. It was one of the common endings of a typical fantasy NTR game.
As usual, any game stamped with the NTR genre prioritized stimulation. To maximize the jolt that came from the plunge in atmosphere, it cast a kind, revenge-impotent protagonist. No matter how much power or ability he possessed, his role was always to have every woman stolen by another man. If anyone asked why, the only answer was “because it’s NTR.” At least, that was how I saw it.
And the game whose ending I had watched was just another one of those common titles. There were multiple endings, but the one in which the protagonist wandered until he died seemed the least terrible. There was the ending where, right after the Demon King fell, he took a blow to the back of the head, became a vegetable who could only think, and had to watch the women couple right in front of his eyes. There was the cuckoo ending in which he married the mage Aria, raised a child without ever knowing it was Castro’s, and remained blissfully ignorant of the endless affairs that continued the whole time. There was the degradation ending in which he was sold to the remaining demon remnants with his limbs cut off… Compared to those, dying on the road was far better.
But.
“You buy this?”
The moment he realized he had become the very man who was supposed to be dead, a hollow laugh escaped on its own.