Lingering Dreams (1)
An axe came flying in and split my head clean in half.
"Never seen you before. What are you doing out here? The other kids won't play with you, so you're just playing by yourself? But... you're hurt really bad. What? Your dad did that to you?"
I tilted my head just enough to dodge the incoming axe. Then I raised my sword in one hand.
A shield wall surged forward in tight formation, almost as if it were alive. Five soldiers carrying shields and spears. Looked like they’d decided to handle me by themselves.
Made sense. I’d gotten pretty famous over the last three months. They were veterans, so they stepped in perfect unison on command and thrust their spears at the same time.
I knocked aside three. The other two punched straight through my chest and face.
"Sulking out here by yourself again, huh. Anyway, I brought some chocolate today. Want some? Why am I being so nice? Mom told me to look after pitiful kids like you! What’s so pitiful about you? You’re always covered head to toe in dirt."
…Again.
I stepped in as if I’d meet the thrusting spears, then lightly retreated once. I brought my sword down hard from above, shattering three spear shafts in a single strike. I smashed one of the remaining spears and caught the other with my bare hand, yanking it forward.
The soldier hiding behind his shield got dragged out with it. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the guy I pulled out was screaming and begging. Probably asking to be spared. I killed him without mercy anyway.
I raised my sword and brought it down in one clean motion, then threw myself through the gap I’d opened in the shield wall. I slipped inside and cut down three more.
About ten seconds later, I was completely surrounded.
It didn’t take long before a blade sank into my waist and another into my neck.
"Rihen, long time no see? Wow… you’ve grown a lot in three years. We were the same height before I left. By the way… I heard you got knighted!? Come on, you’re lying. How could a weakling like you become a knight! Anyway, try this! I baked it this morning. How does it taste?"
…Again.
I slipped into the shield wall, cut down three, and counted inside my head. One, two… two and a half. I caught the hand coming for my waist by the wrist. The one going for my neck I severed at the wrist with my sword. The shield wall slowly crumbled apart.
Soon a horn sounded, and the enemy soldiers turned tail and ran. I didn’t bother chasing them. Our allies would hunt them down and finish the job.
Anyway, today’s battle was over.
While I was staring blankly at the sky, something flew in and embedded itself in my head. I reached up in a daze and felt around. An arrow, probably. If I left it in, it would hurt like hell for a long time. So I pulled it out.
"Don’t leave? I always told you, didn’t I? That someday I’d leave this tiresome village and become an adventurer. A free one who could go anywhere she wanted. But… you always said I could become an adventurer when we were little, so why are you saying that now? Is it because of that man? There’s nothing between me and him. It’s just… I have talent, so he said if I joined his guild he’d help me with all sorts of things…."
I took half a step back and the arrow buried itself deep in the dirt at my feet.
“……Huh. Your father really is one cold-hearted bastard.”
The man who had brought me here—the Captain—rode up on horseback and let out a dry chuckle, as if he couldn’t believe it.
“Even if you brought a bunch of decent knights, none of them would be able to fight like that.”
He looked back and forth between the enemy corpses scattered on the ground and me, who didn’t have a single scratch. Then he snorted.
“Even rotten, it’s still a Grayan, huh.”
Fuck that Grayan. The duke was bad enough, but that son of a bitch Rihen Grayan was a genuine lunatic. The kind of bastard who couldn’t keep his own shit together so he scattered it all over everyone else and then ran away. Every time my head got split in half, the feelings that had only existed as memories were dragged kicking and screaming into reality.
I had zero desire to synchronize with a piece of trash like him, but surviving in a place like this without dying was basically impossible. I’d gotten somewhat used to it lately, but when I first got dragged here I’d thrown a complete fit every single time I died—crying, screaming, the works. That phase only lasted half a day, though.
If I tried to run, the mages would freeze me to death with their spells. So in the end, the only way to survive was to keep killing the enemy no matter how many times I died. To everyone else it probably looked like I was some kind of sword demon who danced across the battlefield without taking a single wound.
Thanks to that, disgusting emotions had begun to pile up inside me. Stupid things like wanting to be acknowledged by my family, wanting Arin to look at me again—none of which had anything to do with me.
A ducal family that had produced Sword Saints for generations. Another noble house name that felt strangely familiar. A childhood friend with ridiculously huge breasts for no good reason, and a fiancée with equally ridiculous proportions. A slender younger sister who looked almost like a boy compared to those two. And several other women whose faces were blurry in my memory but somehow felt familiar.
At this point it was obvious. I had been thrown into the game called Endrogue.
It was famous for being absolutely vicious. It had gained a reputation for its NTR endings, but the real problem was the flood of bad endings. You could follow a heroine’s route, save her, or settle for an ambiguous normal ending. The player even got to set the protagonist’s full name, so I had no idea what the canon one was.
One wrong choice and it was straight to bad end. Even if you maxed out a heroine’s favorability, if you missed an event she’d get stolen by some other guy. And if you didn’t pump enough stats in the academy arc, you couldn’t even reach the main story… Yeah. It was just a fucking piece of shit game.
Still, it had a strange charm and was pretty popular. I’d played it for a while, hit a couple NTR endings, got pissed off, and installed a cheat trainer.
By the standards of the game, I had already stepped into a bad ending right from the prologue.
The Captain who brought me here was apparently from some count’s household. He used to be a knight commander but got on the wrong side of the higher-ups, got kicked out of the order, and was eventually sent here. Everyone in this place had been dragged here after committing some crime. Even if you hadn’t done anything, falling out of favor with the people above you was crime enough.
Just like how it was obvious that the protagonist’s pure, big-breasted, pink-tinted childhood friend would get NTR’d.
After the battlefield was roughly cleaned up, I returned to the barracks with the main force and sat down to eat with my comrades. Every single one of them was a real piece of work. A knight commander who’d been kicked out after sleeping with a duchess. A mage who had performed human experiments on the children of nobles. A thief who’d been caught robbing the imperial treasury. I was actually one of the more normal ones.
Thin porridge and a chunk of hard bread. Still, after moving my body that much, it went down well enough.
“Did you see that!? Did you guys see it today?!”
A loud, high-pitched voice burst out from beyond the campfire like always. On the first day her ridiculously high tension had just been annoying, but now it felt empty when I couldn’t hear it.
“He just smashed straight through the shield wall! And dodged every single spear from those pointy-eared bastards!”
It was the doll-like mage, whose delicate, pretty face looked completely out of place on a battlefield. It was still hard to believe that this cute girl had been sent here after freezing her entire family to death.
“No, you muscle-brained idiots were too busy swinging swords to see it, but when that horned bastard threw his axe—!”
“Shut your mouth and eat your food.”
“Ugh… Anyway, it’s seriously amazing that he didn’t die again today!”
The mage chewed on her bread and pouted at the comrades sitting around the fire.
“At this rate, we’ll get pardoned and go home soon, right?!”
“…You make it sound so easy.”
The rough-looking man beside her set down his porridge bowl and scoffed.
“We’d be lucky not to die on the way back.”
“But we have Young Master Grayan with us…!”
The moment she said that, I threw my bowl and stood up. The atmosphere instantly froze over.
“…….”
Like I was any different. We were all equally exiled, so what the hell was she expecting?
The ruined mood was none of my business. Once I shut myself in my tent they’d start chattering about pointless shit again anyway. These days just hearing that damn family name made my blood boil.
How many times had my head been split open today?
“The Captain wants to see you.”
While I was taking a walk and absently tapping the Attachment Stone I’d picked up a few days ago, a messenger approached and called for me. I nodded and waved him off. I tossed the Attachment Stone into my tent and headed for the Captain’s.
His tent was only slightly better than the others. When I entered, he looked up from his drink.
It was just watered-down wine he’d luckily gotten his hands on somewhere.
“You’re here. Sit.”
He filled another cup and pushed it toward me.
“The war with the demi-humans will be over soon. You’ll return alive as the hero who brought them to their knees.”
I took the cup but didn’t drink.
“We’ve been lucky. Ever since you arrived, our penal unit has been pushing the front line forward. And since you’re a Grayan, you make a perfect figurehead.”
He took a sip and stared straight at me.
“So let me ask. When you return alive, what do you plan to do?”
What would I do if I went back?
“Do you have anywhere to go?”
Of course not. I brought the cup he offered to my lips. At the very least, I was sick of watered-down wine.
“Doesn’t look like it. Anyway, we received a proposal from the academy. They say they need a proper instructor. Or… you could be dispatched to another front.”
The academy was in the capital.
“You have time. Think it over carefully.”
And in the capital…<|eos|>