Chapter 1: The World's Most Conquered Target

It really was a strange game, I thought. This game had no playable character for the player to control directly from beginning to end.

Choosing the hero route didn't make me the hero, and entering the Demon King route didn't put the Demon King under my direct control. All the player could do was pick from the choices offered at key moments, meeting exacting conditions to steer the story in the desired direction. Who would meet whom, who would win and who would lose. Which characters lived and which died. How far affection and karma rose or fell. In the end, the whole game amounted to how those trivial flags piled up to unlock which events.

On the surface, you could call it a fairly well-crafted fantasy RPG. Level and equipment systems existed, of course; dungeons lurked across the continent; and the front line between the kingdom's army and the Demon King's forces was rendered with surprising realism. The combat system wasn't bad either—dug into properly, it might have earned a respectable reception even released as an ordinary RPG.

But every hardcore veteran who'd spent dozens—no, hundreds—of hours chained to this game knew the truth. All that intricate machinery was nothing but buildup for the events.

Unlocking the Ancient Dragon Mountain Range required a combat rating above a certain threshold; entering the Corrupted Saint branch meant grinding the hero's karma below a set value. The special branches of the Defeated Hero variety were even more vicious: you had to spare a specific demon before Chapter 3 ended, then thread several choices with zero margin for error, and on top of that the gender-swap flag had to align precisely. Miss a single one, and it was over. Save files painstakingly cultivated over dozens of hours being thrown away over a single line of dialogue—that was an everyday occurrence.

As a result, the strategy boards were always drowning in endless question-and-answer threads.

I'd read countless threads like that myself, and I even remembered posting questions of my own. Not that I'd ever planned to get this hooked on the game in the first place.

The awkward gap between graduating from university and landing a job, and a cheap little eroge I stumbled across while wandering the internet—that was the root of everything. A sprawling setting, a density of choices that bordered on the grotesque, and branching paths beyond counting. I went past the standard route into the bad endings, the TS routes, the Demon King victory route. I watched the hero's corrupt, ruinous fall, and even reached an absurd IF scenario where a nameless mob monster, after clearing a handful of conditions, devoured the final boss whole.

At some point along the way, I couldn't even have told you what I was playing to see anymore—and yet one fact stayed fixed in my memory. It would never happen, of course, but if I truly had to enter that world, I figured it would be better to be born as the hero or the Demon King. At least those two spent most routes in positions where they weren't helplessly toyed with by others.

And one more thing.

The Ancient Dragon, Arseria. She wasn't a bad pick either. No—if we were talking pure combat strength, she might have been the single best card in the deck. The pinnacle of individual combat power among all living things. A monster who didn't budge an inch even trading blows head-on with the Demon King, and whom the epilogue lore book noted actually edged him out slightly in raw physical might. Even in-game, set foot in her mountain range unprepared and your lovingly raised party would be erased in a handful of turns.

So really, if I ever did fall into that world, a character with that kind of guaranteed strength—

I opened my eyes.

At first I took it for an ordinary ceiling. But as my gaze drifted and fixed on one side, doubt crept in—could this really be called a ceiling at all? It stretched so far that my vision simply gave up. An enormous chamber of black rock filled the space before me, blue ores set into the walls and ceiling breathing out a faint glow, and between thick crystal pillars hanging like stalactites, a soft haze of mana rippled in slow waves.

I slowly pushed my upper body up.

Rustle.

With a strange sensation, something spilled softly down over my shoulder. Long hair, gleaming crimson-red.

"……?"

I pinched a handful between my fingertips. Quite long. Quite soft. And that wasn't the only thing wrong.

"What the—"

The moment I opened my mouth, the voice that came out stopped my thoughts cold. Far too high. A clear, limpid woman's voice I had never heard in my life.

I raised my hand slowly. Pale, slender. The fingers stretched smooth and unblemished, the nails a touch sharper than a human's—but such trivial details hardly mattered.

"……No way."

Sitting up fully only deepened the bewilderment. The center of gravity was wrong from the ground up—and above all, the alien weight at my chest, the unfamiliar feel of waist and hips, the subtly shifted balance of a body that moved differently with every motion. A dozen things I needed to check right now flashed through my head, but at the edge ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of my vision hung a massive wall of smoothly polished crystal, and it claimed all of my attention.

I practically ran to it. And then I froze.

Reflected in the crystal was a woman I had never seen in my life. Skin white and flawless, crimson hair spilling like flame down past her waist. Above her temples, thick black horns swept back in great curves. A golden crown resting on her head, and faint ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠draconic markings tracing her cheeks.

And above all—golden eyes that could not possibly be human. Within vertically slit pupils, gold light flickered and swirled like embers.

There was no mistaking it. I had faced this face countless times. In illustrations, on battle screens, and…… in the many, many event cutscenes of the gallery.

"Arseria……?"

The woman in the crystal opened her mouth exactly when I did. A chill slid down my spine.

ERODIA. The Ancient Dragon who only revealed herself from Chapter 4 onward, the last direct descendant of the Ancient Dragon lineage. A candidate for strongest being in the entire setting. And in the original—

"Wait."

I cut the thought off by force. It wasn't time for premature despair yet. No point dredging up the bad memories and souring the mood.

Whatever else was true, I was Arseria. A dragon—and not some low-tier drake, but a True Dragon ranked among the very finest this world had to offer. Even the Demon King's Four Heavenly Kings couldn't promise victory swarming her together, and even the standard-route hero party couldn't escape annihilation without their exclusive equipment and scenario buffs. Wasn't this, if anything, the best possible starting hand?

As for the whole gender situation……

I stared once more at the unfamiliar face in the crystal.

"……I'll deal with that later."

It would have been a lie to say I wasn't rattled. Twenty-odd years living as a man, and no one wakes up as a woman and takes it in stride. But it beat dying for nothing, a hundred times over. The fact that I'd fallen into an eroge of all places did stick in my craw, but…

I closed my eyes for a moment and quietly recited a single word in my head.

Status.

Nothing happened. Just as I was concluding that no convenient system functions existed here—

Ding.

With a crisp little chime, a jet-black translucent window flashed open before my eyes.

"……This is insane."

A low laugh spilled out of me. The human knights' commander topped out around 5,000 HP at best. The early-game hero didn't even break 3,000, and even the final chapter's Demon King sat in the 170,000s, if I remembered right. My HP was north of 180,000, and my magic pool was just as overwhelming.

As an experiment, I raised my hand. No incantation, no ritual—I simply drew on that vast abyssal power, with no more force than a breath, the way you might fan a dying ember.

Vmmm—

In that instant, the air across the entire cavern seemed to scream.

"Huh?"

Primal terror made me snatch the power back, but the mana that had already left my hand was already rampaging free.

KRA-KOOOOM!

The cavern wall several hundred meters away burst apart without a trace. The collapsing rock face let out a roar that shredded my eardrums, and every time a boulder the size of a house slammed into the ground, the earth beneath my feet heaved like something alive.

For a long moment I just stared at the devastation.

"……I really did add the tiniest bit."

The corner of my mouth curled upward on its own. Yes. This. This was the answer. Game world or not, every danger headed my way could simply be crushed under this power. With strength like this, it was doable. If the hero party came sniffing around, I'd chase them off. If the Demon King himself showed up, I'd fight him. If the Black Witch started her insidious scheming, I'd march straight to her lair and stomp it flat before she could blink.

Slimes? Goblins?

"Slimes, my ass."

A hollow laugh burst out of me. Eroge or not, once it became reality, the rules changed. The reason Arseria had drowned in all that violation and corruption in the original was, in the end, that she was a helpless NPC who could only move as the scenario dictated.

But I was different. I knew every major event that was coming, and I had zero intention of meekly selecting the prescribed bad-ending choices. Above all, I had power. And knowledge of the original on top of that.

With conditions like these—

I had survived. No—by my rough math, I might even get to coast through the rest of my life—no, my dragon life—without so much as lifting a finger.

"……Although."

A tiny blinking indicator in the bottom-right corner of the status window caught my eye.

▶ NEXT

Without much thought, I reached a finger toward the window hanging in the air. The screen slid smoothly to the next page.

Nodding in satisfaction, I touched NEXT again without delay. And then the next moment—

"……"

Wordless, I stared at the window through golden eyes.

F. F. F-. E. And then another F.

"……No."

I blinked again and again, flatly refusing reality. The letters beyond the cold glass did not change by a single character. I read it again. And once more, by the end half-praying it was a typo. From the top, very, very slowly.

"Fuck."

Only then did the memories come back—the ones I'd forgotten so completely, or rather, the ones I'd deliberately buried in some far corner of my skull for the sake of my own peace of mind.

The Ancient Dragon Arseria. ERODIA's flagship heroine, in a popularity class of her own. She was strong, she was beautiful, and she was proud to the point of pathology. A haughty dragon who treated humans as vermin—who wouldn't grant so much as an audience when the king of the kingdom himself knelt and begged, if the mood struck her wrong.

Of course the players loved her. More precisely: precisely because she was a character who soared so high she looked down on the sky itself, the obscene events of her being broken down so utterly were all the more acclaimed.

"……"

With fingers gone stiff, I reluctantly pressed NEXT.

A thirst like something burning dried my mouth out from the inside.

"Why are there so goddamn many of them……"

Arseria wasn't a character who carried the story from the opening. She didn't show her face until Chapter 4, when the narrative reached its middle act. But once she took the stage, she tangled herself into every scenario with a viciousness that bordered on obsessive. Hero route, Demon King route, witch route—even the monster route. Every grotesque IF and EXTRA branch you could name, and on top of that she'd barge uninvited into scenarios that had nothing to do with her and hijack their events outright.

The reason was simple. Strongest, most beautiful, with the flashy title of world's strongest dragon attached—from an adult game developer's perspective, there was no finer subject for training and violation anywhere.

Back then, I'd been bloodshot-eyed over hunting unlock conditions through other people's screenshots, reloading save files, aligning flags to the decimal to fill out my gallery. I cursed the brutality of the requirements more than once—and unlocked every last CG anyway.

And now?

"Did they think I wanted to become this bitch, fu—"

I pressed a hand to my forehead against the throb of a headache. When the explicit scenes I'd once savored tried to surface in my memory, I shook my head desperately and strangled the thought.

It's fine. Nothing has happened yet. A game is a game and reality is reality. Above all, I have power.

So what if my resistance values crawled along the floor? I simply had to make sure no situation capable of inflicting those bizarre ailments ever arose in the first place. In the original, for the hero's party to face Arseria on anything like even terms, certain exclusive equipment and scenario event items were mandatory—and I remembered exactly where every one of them dropped, which dungeon hid which piece. I could go destroy them all before anyone got there. I could erase the event ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠trigger zones from the map entirely, or simply steer well clear of the hero party's route. And if it came to the very worst, abandoning this mountain range and fleeing to the edge of the continent overnight was on the table too.

"Right."

My ragged breathing settled, little by little. Like coaxing myself, I nodded deep and slow.

"It's not over yet."

I had the game knowledge. I had the power. I had a rough grip on the shape of every major event still to come. Given enough time, I could bend any unjust flag to my will.

Which left exactly one thing that mattered: where, precisely, in the original timeline was I standing right now?

The instant the thought completed—

Ding.

"……"

My eyelids sank like stones. With the eyes of a condemned man, I read the text through again.

Chapter 4. The Ancient Dragon Mountain Range.

"Hold on—tell me this is a joke?"

I retraced the timeline in a panic. Chapter 1, opening in the Royal Capital. Chapter 2, the Saint joins. Chapter 3, the pitched battle in the Demon Territory. And then the grand Chapter 4—the point at which the Ancient Dragon Arseria and the hero's party came face to face for the very first time.

Cold sweat broke out down my spine without ceremony.

"Don't tell me you mean right now?"

Ding.

This time, as if determined to confirm the kill, the system lined up its helpful text in neat rows.

I was struck utterly speechless.

Twenty-seven days. A measly twenty-seven was all that remained. The opening sequence of a game I'd played ages ago reassembled itself in my head, frame by frame, in perfect clarity.

Chapter 4, hero route. The Ancient Dragon Arseria. An infamous scenario shredded into hundreds of ruinous branches—but its overture was fixed identically across nearly every route. The hero's party breaches the barrier around the mountain range and enters. They come face to face with Arseria. An unavoidable battle begins. And then—

"……"

I slowly lifted myself off the ground and stood.

Enough. There was no need to replay the ruinous ending in my head. The original Arseria, limited by her artificial intelligence, had sat here like a fool waiting for the forced event to trigger—but I was a living, breathing human being. There was still a grace period of twenty-seven days. I'd go out first and blow the exclusive items to pieces. I'd raze the event trigger zones. If it came to it, I'd abandon the entire range and run. Or better yet, I could go find the hero first and try talking—actual negotiation, with words. I was not data enslaved to a row of choice buttons.

Thought through, it was a dead-simple problem. All I had to do was choose an off-script option that had never existed in the game system—

Ding.

My entire body locked up. Dead center in my vision, a system warning far smaller than the others—and far redder—was flashing.

"……"

My outstretched fingertips hung in the air, their destination gone. After a beat of silence, more lines began appending themselves beneath the warning, one by one.

For a long, long while I stared at the red number 73.

I'd been smug about it: avoid every route I remembered, thoroughly, and that would be that. Certain of myself: break every flag I recognized before it could set, and the problem was solved. But the moment I took an action the original never contained, unknown routes the original never contained would be forcibly carved open instead. Which meant the strategy guide living in my head wasn't a safety net—it was nothing more than an unreliable reference book. And there were no fewer than seventy-three unfound hidden events waiting out there in the dark.

"……"

Barely holding onto my drifting mind, it took me a long time to work enough moisture back into my lips to speak.

"Maybe I should just run."

The system, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of course, offered no reply.

Instead, through the cavern wall I had vaporized minutes ago, the jet-black night sky caught my eye. Stars beyond counting packed the cold darkness close, dense as scattered jewels.

It was a beautiful world, honestly. A fantasy paradise I had once stared at through a monitor screen, grinding away hundreds of hours of my life.

But this place was no virtual reality. There was no logout button. No save file to load when the odds turned against me. That was the truth of it: die here pointlessly, and there was no New Game—I would simply cease to exist. And in twenty-seven days, the hero's party, the de facto protagonists of the main event, would come crashing into this nest.

Gazing up at the constellations beyond the broken rock, I slowly closed my eyes. A question I had never once thought to ask while gripping a controller in front of a monitor drifted past: what, in those days, had the Ancient Dragon Arseria been thinking, on the far side of that pixelated screen?

There was no point wondering. Back then, Arseria had been nothing more than a character built to entertain me. A taxidermied lump of data, preserved for the sake of collecting lewd, sadistic event scenes.

The problem was that now, I was that Arseria.

"……For now—"

My eyes snapped open, bright with resolve.

"Let's just survive."