First, Stay Alive

First, stay alive.

That was the conclusion I settled on.

But if I meant to stay alive, I had to know exactly what I could do in this body. I knew well enough that Arseria, in the original, was a monster who sat outside every measure of strength — and yet the numbers I used to watch from the far side of a monitor, and the act of actually swinging that power now that it had become my reality, were two entirely different things.

Worse, I had opened my eyes in this flesh barely a few dozen minutes ago. Even the feeling of shifting my weight from one step to the next still refused to sit naturally.

"...Ha."

A sigh slipped out of me on its own, and I went back to stand before the crystal wall.

A little earlier I'd been too rattled, busy confirming that the face was a stranger's. Looking at it calmly now, the beauty was almost offensive. If someone took the illustration that had existed in the game, dragged it into reality, and beautified it to the absolute limit, this was what they would get.

Smooth skin of a pale reddish brown. Crimson hair spilling past the waist. Between the vivid red strands, a few locks of bluish green were threaded through, and the thick black horns rising near the temples swept back in a gentle curve. A crown-like ornament of gold rested on the head, and along the cheeks and the line of the throat there lingered faint draconic scales, so subtle that a careless glance would miss them entirely.

And what caught the eye above all else were the golden irises.

The pupils, split sharp and vertical down the center, belonged to nothing human. Anyone could see that.

If someone asked whether the face was beautiful—

"...Yeah. Filthy pretty."

I had no choice but to admit it.

Even in the original, Arseria's appearance came with the note that it occupied an unrivaled place at the very top. The design went past mere good looks on purpose, stressing the sense of a transcendent species born something other than human from the start.

The problem was that the one moving that face inside the crystal wall was me.

When I opened my mouth, the woman within moved her lips in perfect time. When I knit my brow, those cold eyes narrowed with me. No matter how long I stared, there was no sign I would ever get used to it.

Especially—

My gaze started, without my meaning it to, down past the throat, and I stopped it cold.

"..."

I jerked my head up. Staring at the ceiling for no reason at all, I caught sight of a blue ore set into the rock. Pretty ore. Truly, pointlessly pretty.

"Ha. Seriously. How long am I going to keep dodging this?"

In the end, it was something I had to confirm.

I had lived more than twenty years as a man, and then, without warning, I was in a woman's body. Not just any body, either — the body of a named character famous for every kind of hardcore adult event the game could stuff into her route.

Pretending I hadn't seen it would not make reality disappear.

I moved slender fingers with care.

Checking the body for myself was stranger than I had imagined, and at the same time chillingly dangerous. To the eye it was unmistakably an unfamiliar woman's flesh, yet the sensation traveling up from my fingertips was unmistakably my own. When I traced skin through the thin cloth, the warmth against it stabbed straight into my head, and every time red hair brushed the nape or the line of the collarbone, a feeling sharp enough to raise the hair on my spine spread up my back.

A faint body heat circulated. My breathing stayed even. Deep in the chest, a heart beat in a steady rhythm. I was registering each of those facts in turn when, without thinking, I let my hand slide—

"...Nnh."

All my fingertips had done was graze, through thin fabric, the soft rise beneath them.

That slight friction alone sent a sensation like electric current racing along the nerves and striking straight down into the lower abdomen. I had barely brushed the skin, and yet an unfamiliar heat surged up from somewhere deep inside, and the belly below my navel drew tight and ached.

"Hhh... ah, wait—"

What leaked through my lips was, unmistakably, a woman's panting breath. I bit down hard, but I couldn't stop the physiological flush burning up around my temples.

It was an utterly simple contact: checking my own body with my own hands. There hadn't been a shred of lewd intent, and still, everywhere my fingertips landed, absurdly sensitive nerves answered and raked through my mind.

...I only brushed it, and it's already this bad?

I felt it in my bones, then — those unpleasant words that had flickered past on Arseria's stat window, the figure labeled pleasure-status resistance F−, had not been decorative text.

If that hand had gone even a little deeper, into some more secret place, what would have happened? Imagining it was enough to make my skin crawl.

My mind was still a man's, and it hadn't even finished accepting the situation, yet this obscene dragon's body was trying to take the lightest friction for pleasure whether its owner willed it or not.

Flustered and ashamed of myself, I let out a rough breath and snatched the trembling hand away.

"...This body is insanely, ridiculously lewd...♡"

In the mirror, the eyes had gone faintly wet from nothing more than a moment's stimulus.

Hearing it leave my own mouth, I almost laughed.

In the game, sex had been nothing but a data value.

[Male]

[Female]

[TS]

[Futanari]

It was different now that I was moving inside the body myself. Every sensation came straight into the whole of me, into every nerve.

That was when it happened.

Ding.

A light chime sounded, and a translucent window rose before my eyes.

"...Now what."

Up to there, it was an ordinary status window.

The problem was the red button attached beneath it.

I stared at that arrow for a while.

I didn't want to press it.

From having played this game until I was sick of it, I knew that a tab labeled DETAIL generally insisted on showing you, in loving detail, the parts a player would really rather not know.

Still, better to confirm it and prepare than to stay ignorant.

In the end I moved my finger and pressed the empty air.

"..."

I looked at the screen without a word, then waved a hand and closed the window.

"This insane game, I swear..."

I had been a user of it myself, but once those figures became information about my body, I felt all over again just how far down into the fine print the developers had gone. I'd wondered whether there was any need to implement entries like that in a character's data at all—

...The reason was obvious.

Because it was an eroge.

And I was in no position to blame the developers now, not after I'd used that very system to watch every bizarre route under the sun.

"Haa."

I sighed and leaned my back against the cold crystal wall.

The one mercy was that my current arousal sat at zero percent. No abnormal status was applied, either.

Which meant, in the end, that it was conditional.

Even in the original, Arseria was not a character who fell for no reason at all. Simply meeting her and fighting her demanded a fair amount of preparation, and if you couldn't bring her down in a straight fight, the later events — violation, breaking, any of it — never even opened.

The problem would come after the conditions for defeat were met.

"Combat difficulty is the worst there is, and her resistance after a loss is the lowest there is..."

The system offered no response to that mutter, half of it self-mockery.

In the middle of it, strategy posts from the original game's community flickered through my head.

Back then I'd laughed it off as a meme.

Now that I was the one those guides were written about, I couldn't laugh at all.

"...Keep it simple. If I don't get caught, that's the end of it."

The answer was clear.

Do not lose in combat. Do not get exposed to status ailments. Do not step on the trigger of a violation event in the first place.

For now, the priority was confirming what I could actually do.

When I stepped out of the cave, the whole of a savage mountain range opened across my vision.

I was above the clouds.

Literally — the clouds lay beneath my feet.

Below them a deep green conifer forest ran on farther than I could measure, and beyond it black peaks rose in overlapping ranks. Thick mist circled under the mountain flanks, and on a few distant summits, white snow still clung even though it was high summer.

A backdrop I had seen countless times on a game screen.

Arseria's nest, the place players called the Wall of Lamentation — known, in short, as Red Dragon Peak.

The name looked as if it had been given because a red dragon lived there, but in truth it came from the red ore bared all through the range.

Walking to the cliff's edge, what I saw was a dark drop so sheer that the bottom vanished into nothing.

In my old body, merely standing near a height like this would have taken the strength out of my legs. Now, strangely, I felt nothing at all. The flesh and instincts of a dragon, most likely.

"For now... should I just jump?"

I said it aloud, and then I hesitated.

Dragon or not, what I was wearing right now was a completely human shape. What if I thought I could fly, and the wings simply didn't come out?

The ground looked like a good few kilometers down.

I eased a step back.

"...Let's check something else first."

If there was even a tenth of a percent chance of falling, there was no need to gamble my life on it.

Instead I decided to test the most intuitive thing first.

Boulders taller than a person lay scattered around me. I picked one that looked fairly large and took it in both hands.

Then, without any particular thought, I straightened my back.

"...Huh?"

The rock came up far too easily, and a dumbfounded sound left me because of it.

Absurdly, it was hardly different from lifting an empty box.

Before I quite knew what I was doing, I had hoisted it overhead. A boulder about the size of a small van. I couldn't say how many tons it weighed, but my arms felt no particular strain at all.

"This works?"

I thought for a moment, then hurled the rock toward the peak opposite.

Boom—!

The boulder split the air and vanished from sight in an instant.

"...?"

A few seconds later.

KRRRROOOOM—!

Across the valley, a ridge erupted in thunder and a plume of dirt.

"..."

I quietly looked down at my palm.

I had only swung my arm the way you'd throw a baseball, and the mountainside bore a sunken scar.

"...So this is what it feels like when a game's ridiculous setting gets embodied in reality?"

Next was mana.

I focused my attention into my fingertips.

Instead of dumping power out all at once the way I just had, I called up a single tiny spark.

Fwt.

A red flame bloomed at the end of my finger.

Exactly the size of a candle flame.

"Oh. It works."

I tried making it a little larger, and it grew to the size of a fist.

I pushed in a little more mana, and it swelled into a fireball about the size of a human head.

"Good."

It wasn't difficult in the slightest.

As if I had known how to breathe from the moment I was born, the method of moving mana was already soaked into the body.

Wind, next.

I swept my hand, and the air at the summit churned into a rough vortex.

Then earth.

I tapped the ground lightly with my heel, and a long crack ran across solid bedrock.

Last, water.

I opened my hand, and clear droplets beaded in the empty air and scattered.

"So I can use every element."

Well. There was nothing strange about that.

One of Arseria's titles was Sovereign of Magic.

An Ancient Dragon was not like a human, specialized into one particular element. With vast mana, they could interfere with the world directly.

That had been the setting of the original, too.

"The last thing left is..."

"Dragon Form."

I murmured it quietly, and nothing happened.

"...True body? Transformation?"

Still no change.

I slowly closed my eyes.

Not a human shape. The original form.

Arseria's true appearance, the one I had seen over and over in the in-game cutscenes, passed through my mind.

Wings vast enough to hide the sky. Black and crimson scales. A body so enormous that even ruling over a mountain range it would never look small.

And—

Thump.

My heart lurched hard.

"Uh...?"

Deep inside the body, in an unseen abyss, something was waking.

Thump.

With the second beat, my field of vision shot upward.

No. The vision hadn't risen. The body itself was becoming enormous.

An unfamiliar sensation followed — the whole skeleton twisting, breaking apart, reassembling. Strangely, there was no pain. As if this had been my shape from the beginning, the flesh changed form with perfect naturalness.

Fingers lengthened and thickened into sharp claws. Dark crimson scales spread over the skin. From the back, a framework of bone pushed out, and enormous wings unfurled.

The view climbed without stopping.

Ten meters. Twenty. Thirty.

The trees that had crowded the summit were, before I noticed, small as specks beneath my feet.

"..."

I tried to use my voice without thinking, and flinched to a stop before I meant to.

It was not a sound that could come from a human throat.

"This... is me?"

A low, heavy voice shook the mountains.

I had spoken with a clear awareness that the words were language, yet what spread through the air was closer to a vast vibration than to speech.

A colossal ancient dragon. An elder wyrm.

When I spread both wings wide, one whole side of the cliff sank into darkness. A long-stretched neck, a heavy tail, black scales washed with red light. Above the head, horns of pitch black rose far larger than they had been in human form.

In that moment, instinct whispered.

I could fly.

There was no need to learn how. I only had to put my will into it and fly.

FWOOM—!

I beat the wings down hard.

The eternal snow and the dust covering the peak burst outward in every direction, and the massive body lifted into the air with astonishing lightness.

"...Incredible."

The awe came out of me on its own.

For the first few seconds my balance wavered a little, and that was all. What angle to move the wings, how to steer with the tail, how to tilt the upper body when climbing — the body remembered every part of it.

I shot up through the clouds.

The magnificent range grew faint beneath me.

One more wingbeat, and the speed exploded; the landscape shoved itself backward. Even the violent wind slamming into my face felt, far from painful, nothing but exquisitely cold and clean.

Only after flying the sky for a long while did I drift back into the nest.

Returning to human form was not especially difficult either. The huge body shrank, scales and wings drew in along the ribs, and before I knew it I was wholly back in the shape I'd had.

The peculiar part, if there was one, was that the dress and ornaments I'd been wearing were restored exactly as they had been.

"...I suppose I should call it a game allowance."

Seriously pondering the conservation of clothing in this world would have been ridiculous. If a dragon was going to transform into a human, there was nothing strange about a single outfit transforming along with her.

I walked into the cave and sat on a stone seat.

What I had confirmed with my own body was already harvest enough.

Strength. Magic of every element. Flight. And a complete dragon form.

All of it had manifested without a problem. No — the power I actually felt was far more overwhelming than the simple numbers I had seen in the game.

In a straight fight, there was no way I could lose.

The problem, as expected, was the system.

I called the status window back into the air.

No matter how many times I looked, the specs were miserable.

"What were the original devs even thinking, building a balance this rotten?"

Of course, I already knew the answer.

Because it was an adult game. An eroge.

The stronger and prouder a character was, the greater the drop when you broke her.

An ancient dragon praised as the strongest in the world. A being like that needed at least one fatal weakness, or the violation events and the training events would have been difficult to design. From the developers' side, it might even have been a reasonable buildup.

...Not a pleasant story at all, from the side of the person who had become that character.

What snagged in my mind especially were the status ailments.

The debuffs in this game were not limited to simple mental magic.

Sleep, paralysis, confusion, hypnosis. And, as befitted an adult game, every kind of drug that acted directly on the body. The further into the late game you went, the more viciously the list of ailments multiplied.

I closed my eyes and groped through memory.

What was the gimmick Arseria had been particularly weak to, again?

Against magical mental domination, she was surprisingly resistant. Mental-interference resistance was A+, curse resistance S. So she would not fall easily to anything as simple as a brainwashing spell.

The real weakness was drugs and toxins that invaded the body directly. Among them—

An aphrodisiac made for monsters.

"..."

The moment the memory cut across my mind, my expression hardened.

A special drug compounded from bodily fluids secreted by certain monsters of the Demon King's army and from rare herbs. Used on an ordinary human, it only made the senses somewhat oversensitive, but against particular nonhuman races the effect amplified several times over.

And for Arseria, an Ancient Dragon, there was an additional hidden modifier on top of that.

What had the reason been? Back when I was a player, I hadn't bothered with setting details that fine. So long as the event-unlock conditions were met, that was enough.

"I'll have to do something about this first."

I chased the fragments of memory for where the drug was mainly produced. The marshlands in the west of the Demon King's domain, wasn't it?

No. That place had been a workshop mass-producing the low-grade supply version. The refinery for the high-concentration stock that had been used on Arseria was—

That instant.

Ding.

A new transparent notice rose at the edge of my vision.

"...There was a support function like this, too?"

It was a system I had never once seen in the original game.

I hesitated a moment, then lightly indicated [YES].

The moment I saw the question marks carved into the last line, an unpleasant premonition crept over me.

"Why is the most important part a question mark?"

The system returned no echo at all.

Whatever the case, it was critical information. This drug was dangerous. Then the best course was to find the formula, or the source of the materials, and destroy it before the hero's party got their hands on it.

When, in the original, had Kyle obtained this?

It had definitely been one of the spoils from bringing down an officer on the Demon King's western front. A major branch point late in Chapter 3.

Wait.

The present moment was immediately before Chapter 4 ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠began.

"...Don't tell me he already has it."

The nape of my neck went cold all at once.

I hurriedly dismissed the window. No — it was too soon to decide. This game shifted inventories and routes according to the player's choices and flags.

The priority was figuring out which path Kyle was walking to get here.

But the system only indicated the hero party's rough location. It did not see through any individual's inventory, so in the end I would have to move my feet and investigate myself.

"Twenty-seven days."

If the original's standard timeline held, the grace remaining before the hero's party arrived at Red Dragon Peak was a mere twenty-seven days.

There was far too much to do. Confirm the hero ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠party's current strength and their artifacts. Determine whether any items existed that were made specifically to capture Arseria. Cut off the dangerous drug at its source. If possible, snap the flags of the original events tied to me before they could trip.

And—

"The Demon King..."

The moment I put that name in my mouth, my tangled thoughts stopped all at once.

The essential problem I had been consciously looking away from, chased by everything right in front of me. Arseria's relationship with the Demon King. More precisely, the question of how the humans of this world looked at Arseria, the ancient dragon.

Back when I enjoyed the game from beyond a monitor, I think I treated it as background setting, something you could dismiss as text and be done with.

Arseria was a well-known named boss, and Kyle was the central protagonist running through the scenario. The two of them needed a justification for colliding with their lives on the line, so the developers had stuck on a suitable epithet and left ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it at that.

But if this place was truly reality, then that setting, too, had to be regarded as actual history, a line that had continued in fact.

Arseria had not been neutral. She had clearly been an ally, bound to the Demon King by a secret pact.

She had not personally crossed into human lands and carried out a slaughter, but she had opened a corridor so the Demon King's host could pass safely through the northern mountains, and she had supplied the high-density mana stones essential to waging the war. There was also a record of her hiding, in her own domain, high-ranking demons who had been gravely wounded in retreat from the front.

And the things the Demon King's army, with that aid at its back, had done to humanity—

"..."

Petty figures I had once skimmed without thinking in the original setting book came back to me.

A long war of eleven years. Nations erased from the map for good. Dozens of fallen strongholds. Prisoners who had perished. I couldn't remember the statistics down to the exact count, but I was certain of this much: the scale of the dead had approached the millions.

Recalling that, a sense of dissonance unlike anything so far closed around my throat.

What, exactly, was Kyle coming here to find Arseria for?

While playing the game, it would have been perfectly clear. A boss existed, so you encountered her, and an adult event existed, so you watched it.

But to the people who lived in this world, it was never a simple amusement. Kyle was someone who had actually passed, with his whole body, through the misery of the war. He would have seen, down to the shudder in his bones, his own people butchered by the Demon King's army.

And Arseria had been that army's unmistakable accomplice.

Of course, it was an outrageously unfair position to be in. I wasn't the one who had done it. I had become the owner of this body only after opening my eyes this morning. I had never harmed a single person, and I had no memory of benefiting the Demon King's army.

But there was no way I could make anyone accept that.

The truth is, I was an ordinary Korean man living in another world, and when I opened my eyes I found myself possessing the body of a dragon allied with the Demon King.

"...I'd be lucky if a blade didn't go straight into my forehead."

It was nonsense even I would never believe. In the end, what their eyes would project onto me was Arseria entire: the Demon King's sturdy friend, the ancient dragon who had indirectly contributed to the cruelty of the war.

"...Haa."

My head knotted itself into a mess. If I could simply write the hero's party off as villains coming to violate me, things would have been quite clear.

I would only have to crush whoever approached, with overwhelming force, and drive them off. But if they carried their own cause, and a desperate hunger for revenge, then the story was different.

Even so, I had not the slightest intention of letting myself be bound and taken quietly. Absolutely not.

However heavy the original sin borne by the previous owner of this flesh, there was nowhere any justification that I should endure, intact, the wretched violation events I had witnessed in the original. Moral responsibility and my survival were different problems.

I reached out and gently stroked the black horn rising near my temple. A smooth, cool texture traveled into my palm.

The organ that symbolized Arseria's outstanding mana. In several of the original's bad-ending routes, Kyle had snapped this horn without hesitation and mounted it like a trophy.

"First, stay alive. Somehow."

Whatever came after, I could look for it once I had survived. If the being called Arseria owed the world a debt that had to be settled, then I could pay the price by some other, roundabout means. Sever every tie with the Demon King's army, and if necessary, sit down at a table and negotiate directly with the human leadership. That would be enough.

And if even that wouldn't do—

There was also the method of cutting off the Demon King's head myself. With the power of Arseria that I had just confirmed, it was by no means an impossible scenario.

Once my thoughts reached that far, one corner of my chest, which had been pressed down until I could hardly breathe, felt a little lighter. But I was not granted even a pause long enough to steady my breath.

Ding.

The moment I tried to gather my thoughts, an inorganic system voice sounded.

I stared at the text before my eyes and said nothing.

Morgana. A named character I could never forget. An officer who had commanded the Demon King's western front, and — the pivotal character who had been the point at which Kyle's unique skill, Female Corruption, truly began to bloom.

"They've already crushed that front...?"

The great incident that broke out just before the curtain rose on Chapter 4.

Yes. The pieces fit. After forcing Morgana to submit and making her a subordinate, Kyle absorbed the demons' innate mana in vast quantity, and his growth curve climbed at a geometric rate. From the flag of that event onward, Kyle's strength became a monster of a different kind than before.

And if the original's fixed route held—

I slowly lifted my head and looked at the sky beyond the cave.

Twenty-seven days from now.

Kyle, having bound Morgana and swallowed her power whole, would invade this place. Red Dragon Peak.

This time, for me. To bring down Arseria, the ancient dragon.

"...There's less time than I thought."

I rose slowly and walked out to the lip of the cliff beyond the cave.

I had detailed knowledge of the original. I held a power that would not fall short of being called the strongest in the world. But my opponent, too, was growing enormously inside a scenario that was, for the most part, already decided.

And perhaps.

...It was already entirely too late.