Chapter 2
#02. Matching (2)
Blinded by an unexpected flash, I reflexively had no choice but to close my eyes.
At that moment, I was enveloped by the sensation that the air around me had changed, and when I opened my eyes again—
“U-Uaaah!!! Fuuuck!!!”
I was falling from the sky.
Naturally, there was no parachute or anything like that, and the more I thrashed around, the faster I fell.
'Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy...!!'
The closer I got to the ground, the memories of my childhood flashed rapidly through my mind like a video playing at fast-forward.
Was this what they called a life review?
Amid the waves of memories flashing past, even things I had long since forgotten came back to me as though they were being chewed over again.
I remembered everything: being rejected after confessing to the girl beside me when I entered elementary school; falling in love at first sight with a third-year middle-school student when I was in eighth grade, confessing to her, and getting beaten up by a group of upperclassmen; even asking a college student I met in the library during high school out on a date and getting completely cut off.
‘...No, why are only things like this coming to mind?’
Wasn't this a life review—it was just a public execution.
“Cough!”
Just as I was enjoying a parachute-free skydive, entrusting my body to gravity, my falling body suddenly came to a jerking stop in midair as though something had grabbed me firmly by the nape of my neck.
I looked around, but trying to figure out what was happening in a cave-like place without a single light was no easy task.
After only a brief moment of being startled by the succession of inexplicable events, my body began slowly descending toward the ground.
Eventually, when my feet touched the hard floor, I finally felt that I had survived.
As they say, even rolling around in a field of dog shit is better than the afterlife.
“But where am I...”
“Um...”
“?!”
Just as I was fumbling through my pockets to see if I could turn on my phone's light, a woman's voice came from the darkness.
“Who are you...?”
I tensed up, given where I was.
The woman's voice suddenly coming from this gloomy darkness reminded me of the opening scene of a horror movie I had watched the day before yesterday, so I couldn't help but become even more tense.
Step, step-
In response to my wary demeanor, the footsteps of the woman hiding in the darkness gradually drew closer.
When she came close enough to touch if I only stretched out my hand, I was finally able to identify the woman with my own eyes.
“...Wow.”
Her blond hair, clearly visible even in the darkness, and the green eyes staring straight at me gave her an intensely exotic air.
On top of that, she was so beautiful that I couldn't even speak.
However, her ears were a little unusual.
‘Her ears are kind of long...?’
She looked just like an elf from a fantasy novel.
"...An elf?“
The woman's appearance made her look as though she were cosplaying a video game character.
But it didn't take long for her long ears to flutter with lively, lifelike movements, proving that this wasn't cosplay.
She was a real elf.
“A-A person...?”
Just as I was startled to see an elf, the elf was startled to see me as well.
Thankfully, she didn't seem to be one of those elf bastards; I couldn't detect any hostility in her gaze.
No, she was far too beautiful to be an elf bastard.
“Hello...?”
I cautiously tried speaking to her.
"...You spoke?"
“Pardon?”
The female elf stared at me with a somewhat dazed look in her eyes.
"Excuse me?"
"...You spoke again."
Something seemed to be wrong with her.
How should I put it? She seemed rather airheaded.
‘By the way, where is this?’
It was so dark that I couldn't properly see my surroundings.
“Excuse me, do you happen to know where this is...”
"...A living person.“
While I was distracted for a moment, the female elf had somehow approached right in front of me and was turning my hand over and rubbing it with a look of wonder, as though she were examining something fascinating.
Her touch was incomparably softer than my rough hand.
"Right? I'm only twenty-one..."
Before I could finish speaking, the female elf suddenly rushed into my arms.
“Sob...!”
It was baffling enough that she had suddenly thrown herself into my arms, but now she had started crying.
I wasn't sure what to do, so I quietly patted the back of the female elf, whose shoulders were trembling violently, and waited for her to calm down.
‘What on earth is going on...’
I was certain that today would become the most hectic and absurd day of my entire twenty-one-year life.
***
"Sniff, sob..."
"Have you calmed down?"
"Y-yes..."
"Are you done crying?"
"I-I wasn't crying!"
"My clothes are damp."
"Gasp! W-what do I do... I-I'll dry them for you!"
As the female elf's palm moved over the front of my shirt, soaked with her tears, a warm breeze emerged from it.
‘Magic...?’
There were so few mages that this was the first time I had ever seen magic from this close up.
Thanks to the breeze that came from the female elf's palm, my clothes were soon perfectly dry, as if they had never been wet.
“Thank you.”
“N-no, it's my fault... I dirtied them...”
By my standards, tears shed by an unbelievably beautiful elf girl were absolutely not dirty.
‘This is the first time my clothes have ever smelled this good.’
Why did my clothes smell like flowers?
It was simply fascinating.
Of course, there were countless things even more fascinating than that.
For starters, there was the existence of the female elf standing before me, as well as the question of how I had ended up here after skydiving without a parachute despite clearly having been in my studio apartment.
No matter how much I racked my brain, there was only one answer.
‘The Otherworld Dating App.’
It was reasonable to assume that the app installed on my phone was the cause.
Anyone who heard me would probably ask if I had gone insane, but there was no other way to explain this phenomenon for now.
This probably wasn't Earth, at least. There were no elves on Earth.
Of course, it was possible that elves existed on Earth and I simply didn't know about them as an ordinary person.
But even if that were true, they probably weren't anywhere near my place.
"Um..."
"Yes?"
While I was lost in thought, the female elf was looking up at me.
And she was looking at me with an incredibly uncomfortable gaze.
It was the first time in my life that a beautiful woman had looked at me like that, and I felt slightly nervous.
"Y-you're a person, right? Definitely a person??"
"Uh... I guess? What, do monsters wearing human disguises show up around here?“
I had once heard in Magical Beast Studies during my school days that monsters like that existed.
"N-no! It's not that... I've never seen anyone but me come here before..."
"Here?"
I looked around.
It was still pitch-black, but perhaps my eyes were gradually adjusting to the darkness, because I could at least make out my surroundings.
A huge cave? An underground chamber? Something like that.
“How did you get here?”
"...I don't really know either."
I couldn't imagine explaining coherently that I had crossed dimensions and come here because of a dating app I had used for fun.
'So is she really five hundred years old?'
No matter how I looked at her, the female elf appeared to be around my age, but I couldn't rule out the possibility that she was roughly that old since I had set her age to five hundred before matching.
She really was an elf—she didn't have so much as a wrinkle, let alone a visible pore.
Did she have some kind of anti-aging magic cast on herself at all times?
“Where are we?”
As time passed, I could see more and more of the surrounding scenery.
The place was so vast that my voice echoed every time I spoke, and strange, ancient-looking ruins were scattered here and there.
What on earth was this place?
“This is... a prison.”
“A prison?”
The female elf's complexion darkened slightly.
"It's an underground cavern in the deepest part of the sacred site where the World Tree has taken root. It's being used as a prison now, but..."
The World Tree? Was she talking about the enormous tree that often appeared in comics or anime?
‘So those roots growing sparsely over there must be the World Tree's roots.’
I suddenly felt an intense desire to dig up just a little, boil it down, and drink it. It seemed like it would be far more effective than most of the medicinal elixirs available on the market.
If its effects were proven, I might even be able to make a decent amount of money selling it at an auction house.
Of course, I thought I would be torn limb from limb by the female elf if I actually did that, so I decided to keep it to myself.
"By the way, I don't see any other prisoners for a prison?“
To begin with, this place had neither iron bars nor guards, which made it difficult to call it a prison.
"...Actually, though it's called a prison, it's more accurate to say it's solitary confinement. If a criminal's offenses are bad enough to warrant imprisonment here, it's better to execute them."
I was curious why she was imprisoned here alone, in a place where even criminals guilty of such serious offenses were not kept, but the female elf's complexion was still so pale that I didn't dare ask.
"Ahem, shall we start by introducing ourselves?"
"...Ah."
I held out my hand lightly to change the mood.
"I'm Kang Hyunwoo. As you can see, I'm human, and I'm twenty-one this year."
Fortunately, the female elf immediately took my hand.
"I-I'm Iris Lumeria Baiart Pheldia!"
"...Pardon?"
Was she nobility?
The fact that a person's name could exceed ten characters left me so concerned about how to address her that it felt like my head was splitting in two.
"...May I call you Ms. Iris?"
"O-oh, yes!"
My memory wasn't good enough to instantly memorize a name practically as long as a sentence, like the names of European nobles.
Fortunately, Iris looked strangely pleased.
The smile of a beautiful woman lifted my mood as well.
It was a pure, gentle smile without a trace of malice, entirely different in nature from the fake smiles of the girls at my school.
Just as I was beginning to think that, despite getting caught up in something unbelievable because of a suspicious app, things might not be so bad after all—
Ding-
A familiar alarm sounded from my pocket.
‘This place doesn't even have a signal, let alone Wi-Fi, does it?’
I secretly took out my phone and checked it while Iris wasn't looking.
[Thank you very much for using this Otherworld Dating App]
[This app is offering its first customer a romance consulting curriculum free of charge]
[Would you like to agree?]
[Y/Y]
“What...?”
[If you do not respond, your acceptance will be automatic shortly]
[3,2,1…]
[Y]
[Analyzing the tendencies of Iris Lumeria Baiart Pheldia]
[Analysis in progress···]
[Analysis complete]
[Name: Iris Lumeria Baiart Pheldia
[Age: 524 years old
[Affiliation: EB-17
[Occupation: Mage
[Disposition: Benevolent ruler, pacifist, devoted, vegetarian······]
The choice screen, which offered no choice, moved on in an instant and displayed Iris's information to me as though it were showing me the profile of an NPC in a game.
‘...Not much to it, huh?’
I had already heard her name when we introduced ourselves.
Her race and age were also exactly what I had entered in the matching survey; although she was twenty-four years older than the five hundred I had specified, that wasn't particularly important.
"What is that?"
Iris had approached right up beside me at some point and was gazing at my phone with sparkling eyes.
At the sight, I hurriedly returned to the home screen.
“Ah, this is...”
Ding-
Just as I was trying to explain the phone to Iris in a way that wouldn't cause any misunderstandings, a new screen appeared.
[Iris Lumeria Baiart Pheldia's past has been detected]
[Advanced study of the romance consulting curriculum is proceeding]
[Proceeding with past monologue]
‘......What?’
I immediately checked on Iris, unable to make heads or tails of the app's explanation.
“M-Ms. Iris...? Ms. Iris??”
Even when I waved my hand or called her name, Iris did not answer.
She merely stared vacantly into space.
She looked just like a female protagonist who had fallen victim to a hypnosis app in something I'd often seen on Hixmi.
It felt as though the genre had suddenly changed from a sweet, devoted romance with a beautiful elf into a story about a vile human abusing an elf.
"I...“
Just as I was wondering what I should do, Iris began to speak in a low, heavy voice.
"I was the queen of the Kingdom of Pheldia.“