Commander, Memory Loss?
A friend of mine once told me a story.
Back when he was serving in the military, he had two seniors over him: one who was infuriating, and one who was a complete piece of shit. When the infuriating one got discharged, they all at least rolled him up in a straw mat and beat the daylights out of him as a send-off. When the shitty one left, nobody even blinked.
The first had a foul mouth, but he was good at his job and knew where to draw the line, so he felt like a friend you loved to hate. The latter had no ability to speak of and a personality so thoroughly wrecked you didn't even want to share the same air as him.
The moral of the story, I suppose, is that a person needs a decent measure of both ability and character. Fall too far short in either one, and forming any kind of real relationship in society becomes a tall order. Someone who causes disasters every other day and gets cussed out the moment you lay eyes on them—if a person like that were at your company, would you want to get close to them? I wouldn't.
In that sense, the person who'd been playing Commander before I possessed this body must have been... remarkable, in more ways than one. Reputation, professional competence, take your pick. Because if that weren't the case...
...there was no way a mere subordinate would ever welcome you this intensely.
I would have preferred it if all of this were an act—some calculated bit of flattery. But the alarming strength in the arms locked around me, and the uniform slowly soaking through with someone else's tears, made it impossible to dismiss what she was doing as anything so cheap.
...Commander. Just what kind of boss were you?
If you were going to leave, you could have at least told me how you did it. What kind of person runs off without even leaving a manual? Your successor is stranded here. Not that I could look at one now even if it existed, seeing as I've been thrown straight into the deep end. Still pisses me off, though.
I'd seen the story, sure—but that was the story line, nothing more. I knew how the work was supposed to proceed and what direction she'd been aiming for, but there was no way to know how she'd actually lived day to day. And even if I had known, I couldn't have reproduced it perfectly.
The one stroke of luck was that I hadn't possessed this body immediately. There'd been a blank period of some kind before I arrived. At least, that's what the circumstances suggested. Anyway, if anyone asked about the ways I'd changed, I could fudge an answer. I'd had time to sort through my thoughts and undergone a change of heart, or something like that. How convenient.
Yes, convenient, except...
When is she going to let go...?
Stuck with no good move in either direction, I looked down at the source of this peculiar pressure. A light-brown-haired maid, face buried in the nape of my neck, sobbing her heart out.
At a glance, you might think she was just an unusually dressed maid. Not even close.
What kind of game was Firma, again? Modern setting, plus a world that had gone to hell so thoroughly that a certain country—the one with the bright red flag, more land than anyone knew what to do with, and a national character as broken as its borders were vast—had split apart into several pieces. It wasn't quite the apocalypse, but it was the kind of world where the weak didn't last long.
And in a world like that, you wear a maid uniform? Not just anywhere—at a military corporation? I mean, fine, I could give them that much, I guess. But once you remember that this is the inside of a gacha game... it starts to look a little different.
This girl is captain-grade, for one thing...
A 5-star operative of Firma, which was both the title of the game and the name of this company. Her name was Rielly. Position: frontline attacker. Title: Captain of the Internal Security Unit.
Six stars was the highest rank in the game, so you'd think the tier just below that would be hard to pull. It wasn't. They just handed her to you for free once you pushed the story far enough.
And "internal security" sounded a little odd, but as I recalled, her unit was responsible for the Commander's entire daily life on top of the actual bodyguard work. That was why players had taken to calling Rielly's unit the Maid Guards.
...Now that I say it out loud, she sounds like a textbook maid. Those bastards at the game company. They were doing this on purpose, weren't they?
Anyway, for a free unit, her illustration was solid and her kit was decent enough, so her popularity had been pretty well established. Power creep eventually pushed her down the priority list, of course, but even then she remained a ray of light for new players. I'd leaned on her plenty myself.
"Hic... nngh..."
...And that same girl was now crying in my arms.
No, wait. You weren't this kind of person. In the story, she'd barely been warm at all, and her expression hardly ever changed—the typical stoic-maid archetype, as I remembered it. Meanwhile the outfit was cut out in so many places you had to wonder if it even counted as a maid uniform, and the gap was so massive that the fanart it generated could have filled a truck...
Ah, that's not important, is it? Anyway.
How was I supposed to handle this? Things had gone sideways before I'd even fastened the first button. I was flustered. Flustered, with a thousand thoughts spinning through my head—but I decided to start with whatever I could do right this second.
As for why: first, overthinking it wasn't going to solve anything. Second, even if I fumbled a little, my position was more than enough to cover for it. And more than anything else...
...she was crying that miserably, and standing there running calculations in front of her felt a little too cheap.
"Um... Rielly?"
"Hic... what is it..."
"I understand how you feel, but... could we talk for a moment?"
...For now, let's start by taking that first step again.
First things first: gather information.
I didn't really think it'd be that drastic, but there was a chance the events in this world were completely different from the original, which meant gathering information wasn't optional. Collect as much as I could. Cross-check whatever I could cross-check. I'd already been possessed into another body. Who knew what else was waiting? I wasn't about to sit back and relax. At the very least, I didn't want to take a bullet to the back of the head because I didn't know any better.
So I decided to lay the groundwork for getting information as fast as possible.
I waited until Rielly had cried herself out, then made my declaration without flinching.
I don't have my memories.
Fortunately, I still knew where I was, and I remembered all their names and faces. I just didn't know how we'd lived.
"You... don't have your memories?"
"That's how it is."
...I mean, that's not wrong, is it?
I felt a little like a con artist, and it needled at my conscience, but I hadn't actually lied, okay? Everything I knew was limited to what I'd confirmed by playing the game. I'd wolfed down everything from the main story to the side stories, and thanks to burning through a few hundred dollars a month on the gacha, I'd collected almost every character they'd released. That still didn't tell me a thing about how the Commander had lived in private. Nothing I could do about it. How was I supposed to know?
...The game company never put that out.
...Not that I didn't want to know.
One way or another, I was stuck playing Commander, a role that had never been in the cards for me. I'd learn the work side of things like some newbie who'd parachuted into the job, and as for everything else, I had all their faces memorized, so I could probably wing it. They knew the Commander, not me, but that wasn't a huge problem. Up to this point, these were all things I could handle—me, not the Commander from the game.
The problem was...
Even if they found out... they wouldn't kill me, right?
Wait. Let's say, just for a second, that I completely lost my mind and spilled the truth.
I'm actually a man from another world, and the place you all live in is nothing but a world on a screen! I don't know where your Commander went, and it's none of my business!
If I said that, what do you think would happen? You think they'd clap their hands and go, Ah, I see, and believe me without a fuss?
...Like hell they would.
They wouldn't believe it, and even on the most optimistic roll of the dice I was looking at a one-way trip to a psych ward. I'd never set foot outside again. I'd be locked in a room until I died. I had no interest in living that kind of life in a cage.
...And no, I don't mean I want to die, either. That's the worst-case scenario. A bad ending complete with a line like "You're not my Commander!" was the thing I'd hated most, before the possession and after. I hated it even when it was just a game or a comic. And now look. Now I'm the one about to get that ending? Is this for real?
And that is why I went with the relatively stable option. Unless a way home dropped out of the sky this instant, there was no reason to take a pointless risk. I needed to pick the option that would give me the fewest headaches. Real life doesn't come with a second playthrough.
Getting found out would be a headache no matter how it happened, but with this one, I only had to watch my mouth. If I just kept it shut, I was more likely to get struck by lightning than shot to death.
...I wasn't sure if that counted as optimistic. Anyway.
This should be enough to buy me some time, right?
Amnesia. What a beautiful excuse. With this, I could squeeze information out of anyone. I didn't have the Commander's memories to begin with, so it wasn't even really a lie, was it? Something seem off? And what exactly are you going to do about it? Of course I'm different from usual. I have amnesia, remember?
Besides, judging by what I'd seen in the game and by the intensity of Rielly's reaction... she seemed to have built a deep relationship of trust with the Commander, which meant she'd tell me only the truth, as far as she knew it. I felt a little bad about deceiving her, but cut me some slack. I don't have any other way to survive.
"The Commander... has amnesia...?"
"Uh... Rielly?"
"Then... the things you couldn't do before... perhaps...?"
...Rielly's face had returned to the expression I knew, and she kept mumbling something or other, but that much was probably fine, right?
Or not. Whatever.