This Wasn't an Eroge
I had no gacha luck.
Nothing ever rolled the way I wanted—absolutely never.
Back then I figured I was just unlucky, but goddamn.
I never thought I'd bomb the reincarnation gacha too.
***
The Jericho family—renowned prophets.
I was born their youngest son. My older brothers and sisters prophesied as easily as breathing, but I reached adulthood without ever glimpsing so much as a hint of the future.
"You useless wretch who can't even prophesy!"
Naturally, I was treated like garbage in my own house.
I ended up doing the sort of menial chores servants usually handled.
Even so, my life wasn't all that bad.
The ability to see the future was always a lucrative profession, and because of it, the Jericho family was wealthy enough to be called upper class.
As they say, even if you have to beg, beg at a rich man's house.
I lived doing menial work, but my absolute standard of living wasn't really that low.
But I guess a happy ending just wasn't in the cards for my life.
When I was around fifteen.
One day my parents went on an outing with my brothers and sisters, got into a traffic accident in the most absurdly anticlimactic way, and died screaming all together.
And so my family was ruined.
Thoroughly ruined.
A traffic accident?
Yes, those can happen.
A tragedy in which people died was entirely possible.
But the whole lot of a family of prophets dying at once was a serious problem.
"People who claim to prophesy didn't know their own traffic accident was coming, so they died?"
"How preposterous."
"Guess their prophetic abilities faded as they got old. They spent their final years spouting nothing but that sort of nonsense, after all."
"So these so-called prophets couldn't foresee their own deaths in a traffic accident? What kind of clueless fools are they?"
"Their fees were nothing but expensive. They must have been frauds."
Ridicule and scorn.
Now no one would ever believe a word the Jericho family said again.
And so, the people who had treated me with contempt yet still called me family—they vanished overnight.
On top of that, my misfortune didn't end there.
"Jericho Amael, I offer my condolences for your tragedy. However, you will need to offer condolences for my financial situation as well, I'm afraid. Your parents left behind quite a lot of debt."
As it turned out, my parents had racked up a fair amount of debt in various ways.
The creditors explained that if my parents had stayed alive and kept paying it off, there would have been no problem, but thanks to their sudden violent deaths, they had no choice but to seize the house and assets put up as collateral.
And just like that, at fifteen, I became penniless with nothing to my name.
A dazzling reincarnation in another world?
Awesome skills and a harem life with buxom heroines?
Those things were a distant, distant dream for me.
But every cloud has a silver lining.
They say misfortune is a blessing in disguise, don't they?
"Amael! Table three needs beer!"
"Yes! Coming right up!"
The life skills I'd built up doing menial work saved me.
I found a job at a restaurant near my family home.
Today, once again, my lot was scrubbing tables, carrying food, and refilling beer, but well.
It was a daily life not all that different from what I'd lived since my reincarnation.
***
All day long I served food and wiped tables, and when night came I lay down on the little staff cot the owner provided and ended my day.
Still, the owner wasn't a bad person—the pay was decent enough, and if I needed to, I could even wash up in the bath barrel in the corner of the restaurant. It was a pretty good workplace.
But what good was that?
I had no future.
After I consoled my weary body with hot water and lay down in bed, pulling the covers up and staring at the ceiling, a sense of hopelessness struck me anew.
In a few hours, it would be my twentieth birthday since my reincarnation into this other world.
For twenty years I'd struggled through all manner of things in this place, and I had nothing to show for it.
I had no awesome reincarnation skills, and I hadn't been born into a body with genius talent either.
My family was ruined, and even when I tried to make something happen using my experience from Korea—well, I had to have been someone impressive in the first place.
The "modern person equals genius" theory is a lie.
If you had no talent in Korea, it's the same when you come here.
If I had been able to at least prophesy according to my family bloodline, I could have made a living working as a prophet.
But I couldn't even do anything resembling a prophecy.
My life was a textbook example of a screwed-up reincarnation in another world.
"Tomorrow I'll be twenty. Happy birthday, Amael."
That was the name I'd been given in this place.
Twenty years of a meaningless, wretched existence.
I didn't feel much like celebrating.
I was tired.
I had to get to sleep soon.
If I slept well instead of thinking these thoughts, I could do my serving work again tomorrow.
Having worked hard, my eyes shut quickly.
Before long, a deep sleep came over me.
***
The Arkal Empire was burning.
Mountains of corpses were piled everywhere, and rivers of blood ran through the streets.
The horrible screams of humans being burned alive poured endlessly from all directions like a ghastly concerto.
At the center stood a witch.
That witch with four arms had bared her naked body to the world.
Emitting mad laughter without hiding her sensual body, the witch cast all manner of devastating magic, slaughtering people over and over without end.
The flames she unleashed drew closer.
Just before the fire consumed my body.
My eyes met the witch's.
Her hair, stained a dark red from blood, raised high into the sky, she posed a question to me.
"Do you think I'm ugly too?"
One side of the witch's face was so very beautiful.
But the opposite side was the exact reverse.
On her distorted skin, more than ten eyes were embedded like clustered spider eggs, blinking irregularly.
A hideously twisted shape that made me want to retch.
Gazing at me, frozen in terror, the witch laughed.
Anybody could see her mind was gone—she cackled, spewing madness-filled laughter.
"You think I'm ugly too! Hahahaha!!"
The witch unleashed her magic.
The flames that had scorched the empire did not stop there—before long they began to burn the entire continent.
The world burned.
And I too was consumed by the flames.
In the midst of the gruesome agony, I too had to add my voice to the screams people around me were letting out.
Happiness no longer existed in the world.
Only ash, flame, screams, and monsters that had once been humans twisted beyond death remained, all howling.
***
When I sprang up from the bed like a coiled spring, the first thing I felt was my clothes soaked in sweat.
As if I'd taken a bath, my clothes and blanket were drenched in an incredible amount of sweat.
I had never once seen the future before, but having grown up in a renowned prophetic family, I'd picked up a thing or two here and there—so I knew that what I'd just seen wasn't a simple dream.
The sensation was unmistakably different from a dream.
What I'd just glimpsed was the future.
A wretched future that would happen someday.
Why?
Why did you show me the future now, when you'd never shown me anything all this time?
Was I the type who could only see misfortunes on a colossal scale? Me?
Seeing the future was good.
But when the future I'd seen would happen.
And who the witch in that dream was.
Even if I knew who the witch was, I had absolutely no plan for how I was supposed to stop her.
I clutched my head and sank down onto the bed.
"How in the world... what am I supposed to do about this?"
Needless to say, I didn't have the ability to handle a mega-event like the empire's destruction.
Reincarnation-in-another-world powers?
I had none. Just none.
The thought of telling people about the prophecy briefly crossed my mind, but I realized there was no way anyone would believe me.
Of all things, precisely because my entire family had died in a traffic accident, the Jericho family's prophetic credibility was in the gutter—and far below it, at that.
And what's more, I was the person who'd been doing menial work since childhood because I lacked prophetic talent even in such a family—so even if I spoke of the future, would people believe me?
No one would believe the prophecy.
I didn't have any special talent either.
And I didn't have any reincarnation-in-another-world skills either.
What was I supposed to do?
Huh?
Just what the hell was I supposed to do?!
The first thought that came to me was to run as far away as possible, but when I recalled the memory of that insane witch burning the entire continent, I had a feeling that even running wouldn't let me avoid an ending where I burned to death.
No!!
At the very least, give me some kind of ability before showing me a future like this!
What was this, telling me to just sit still and wait to burn to death?!
What sort of spiteful sabotage was this?!
At that moment, as I screamed internally and tore at my hair, I heard the distinctive bong-bong sound of the grandfather clock hanging in the restaurant, signaling that midnight had passed.
It was my twentieth birthday.
But I wasn't the least bit happy.
I'd just seen a prophecy that I was going to burn to death at some unknown point—how the hell could I be happy?!
Unless I awakened some SSS-rank reincarnation skill that had been hidden all this time as a birthday present, I'd be completely helpless and dead!!
[Confirmed: 20th birthday has passed. Adulthood reached!]
[Congratulations!]
[You have acquired four skills: Body Modification, Absolute Hypnosis, Time Stop, and Sensitivity 3000x!]
And the moment I had that thought—as if on cue—
No sooner had I thought that than I witnessed the sight of a status window floating before my eyes for the first time since my reincarnation.
Looking at these skills...
These were eroge skills.
Was the reason they hadn't unlocked until I became an adult because it was an erotic game?
Because minors aren't allowed to use them?!
What kind of dogshit—
No.
No.
Let me think positively.
I was in a situation where I had to stop a nuclear-bomb witch from destroying the world, by any means necessary.
Compared to having nothing at all, having even eroge skills was far—
A hundred million times better.
Right.
Now that I had skills, that was good, but...
How was I supposed to use eroge skills to save the world and myself from a witch running amok like a maniac?
Let me think carefully.
Let me recall exactly what the witch had said to me in the dream.
I carefully reviewed each and every scene that had appeared in the prophecy.
I clenched my fist and desperately racked my brain, combing through my memories like that.
One idea came to mind.
"Do you think I'm ugly too?"
In the prophecy, the witch had definitely asked me that question.
The moment I heard those words, one scenario sprang to mind.
A witch, discriminated against and persecuted for her ugly, filthy appearance, had undergone a darkening and gone berserk!
There was no other way to interpret it!!
So what did that mean?
Before the witch went berserk, all I had to do was find her and fix her unsightly face, right?
Fix the left side of her face with the clustered eyes, fix the four arms too.
Wouldn't that do it?
Yeah!
I could solve this like that!!
And to solve it that way, there was something I had to check first.
The four skills were Body Modification, Absolute Hypnosis, Time Stop, and Sensitivity 3000x. Of those, the first—Body Modification—was the one I especially needed to test.
I needed to verify first whether this one worked properly, whether it had any penalties, and what characteristics it possessed.
Conveniently, a test subject was right in front of my eyes.
With my heart pounding, I placed a hand on my own body.
And quietly tried using Body Modification on myself.
And a short while later.
"...It really did get bigger?"
I confirmed that the skill worked remarkably well.