Chapter 2
#02. Matching (2)
Blinded by a flash without any warning, I had no choice but to reflexively 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-uuuaaa!!! Fuuuck!!!”
I was falling from the sky.
Naturally, there was no parachute or anything like one, and the more I flailed, the faster I fell.
'Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy...!!'
As I drew closer to the ground, memories from my childhood flashed through my mind at high speed, like a video set to fast-forward.
Was this what people called a deathly flashback?
Amid the waves of memories flashing past, even things I had forgotten came back to me as though they were being dredged up.
I remembered getting rejected after confessing to the girl who sat beside me when I entered elementary school, falling in love at first sight with a third-year senior when I was in my second year of middle school, only to get beaten up by a group of upperclassmen after confessing, and even asking a college girl I met in the library during high school out on a date, only to have her cut me off.
‘...Wait, why are only things like this coming to mind?’
Wasn't this less a deathly flashback and more like getting publicly roasted?
“Ghk!”
Just as I was enjoying a parachute-free skydive while surrendering my body to gravity, my falling body suddenly jerked to a stop in midair, as though something had grabbed me firmly by the nape of my neck.
I looked around, wondering what was going on, but it wasn't easy to make sense of the situation in a cave-like place without so much as a light.
After the shock of one inexplicable event after another, I soon found myself slowly descending toward the ground.
At last, when my feet touched the hard floor, I finally felt that I had survived.
As expected, even rolling around in a field of shit was better than being dead.
“But where is this place...”
“Um...”
“?!”
I was rummaging through my pockets, trying to turn on my phone's flashlight, when a woman's voice came from the darkness.
“Who are you...?”
Given the location, my voice came out tense.
The sudden voice of a woman in such a gloomy, dark place had been the opening of a horror movie I'd watched the day before yesterday, so I couldn't help but grow even more tense.
Clop, clop.
Because of my wary attitude, the footsteps of the woman hiding in the darkness gradually drew closer.
When she came close enough for me to reach out and touch her, I was finally able to see what the woman looked like with my own eyes.
“...Whoa.”
Her blond hair, clearly visible even in the darkness, and the green eyes staring intently at me gave her a strongly exotic air.
On top of that, she was impossibly beautiful.
There was just one thing: her ears were a little unusual.
‘Those ears are kind of long...?’
She looked just like an elf out of a fantasy novel.
"...An elf?“
The woman's appearance looked as though she had dressed up as a game character for a cosplay event.
But it didn't take long for her long ears to flap about with lifelike energy, proving that this wasn't cosplay.
She was a real elf.
“A-a human...?”
Just as I was startled to see an elf, the elf was startled to see me.
Fortunately, she didn't seem hostile like some knife-ears.
No, she was far too beautiful to be a knife-ear.
“Hello...?”
I cautiously tried speaking to her.
“...You spoke?”
“Pardon?”
The elf girl looked at me with a somewhat vacant gaze.
"Excuse me?"
"...You spoke again."
Something about her seemed to be in a bad state.
How should I put it? She seemed completely airheaded.
‘Anyway, where is this place?’
It was so dark that I couldn't see my surroundings properly.
“Excuse me, do you happen to know where this is...”
"...A living person.“
While I was distracted for a moment, the elf girl had somehow come right up to me and was kneading my hand as though she were looking at something fascinating.
Her touch was incomparably softer than my rough hand.
"Yes, that's right. I'm only twenty-one..."
Before I could finish speaking, the elf girl suddenly rushed into my arms.
“H-hic...!”
It was absurd enough that she had suddenly thrown herself into my arms, but now she had even started crying.
I wondered if this was what being at a loss felt like, but I quietly patted the elf girl's violently trembling back and waited for her to calm down.
‘What on earth is going on...’
I was certain that today would become the most chaotic and absurd day of my twenty-one years of life.
***
"Sniff, sob..."
"Have you calmed down?"
"Y-yes..."
"Are you done crying?"
"I-I wasn't crying!"
"My clothes are damp."
"Eek! W-what do I do...? I-I'll dry them!"
Warm air burst from the palm of the elf girl's hand as she rubbed the front of my shirt, which had been soaked with her tears.
‘Magic...?’
Given how few mages there were, this was the first time I had ever seen magic from so close.
Thanks to the breeze that emerged from the elf girl's palm, my clothes soon became perfectly dry, as if they had never been wet.
“Thank you.”
“N-no, it's my fault...”
Calling it dirty was absurd; as far as I was concerned, the tears of a breathtakingly beautiful elf girl were absolutely not dirty.
‘This is the first time in my life my clothes have ever smelled this nice.’
How could clothes smell like flowers?
It was simply fascinating.
Of course, there were countless things even more fascinating than that.
Starting with the existence of the elf girl right in front of me, there was also the question of how I had ended up here after skydiving without a parachute from my studio apartment.
No matter how much I racked my brain, there was only one possible answer.
‘The Otherworld Dating App.’
It was reasonable to assume that this app installed on my phone was the cause.
Anyone who heard that would call me crazy, but for now, there was no other way to explain this phenomenon.
At the very least, this probably wasn't Earth. There were no elves on Earth.
Of course, it was possible there were elves on Earth and I simply didn't know about them as an ordinary person.
But even if there were, they probably weren't anywhere near my house.
"Um..."
"Yes?"
While I was lost in thought for a moment, the elf girl was looking up at me.
And she was looking at me with an extremely intense gaze.
It was the first time in my life a beautiful woman had looked at me like that, and I grew slightly nervous.
"Y-you're a person, right? You're really human, right??"
"Uh... I guess? What, do monsters wearing human skin show up around here?“
I had once heard about monsters like that during Monster Studies class back in school.
"N-no! It's not that... It's just that you're the first other person I've ever seen come here..."
"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 now.
It was an enormous cave—or cavern, perhaps—or something like that.
“How exactly did you get here?”
"...I don't really know, either."
I had no confidence that I could coherently explain to her that I had crossed dimensions and come here because of a dating app I had used for fun.
'Then is she really five hundred?'
The elf girl looked no older than someone my age, but I couldn't rule out the possibility that she was somewhere around five hundred, since I had set her age to five hundred and started matching.
She was definitely an elf; she didn't have a single wrinkle—or even a visible pore.
Was she constantly using some kind of magic that rejected aging?
“Where are we?”
As time passed, I could see more and more of the surrounding scenery.
The place was so vast that our voices echoed every time we spoke, and strange, ancient-looking ruins were scattered here and there.
What on earth was this place used for?
“This is... a prison.”
“A prison?”
The elf girl's expression darkened slightly.
"It's an underground cavern deep within the sacred grounds where the World Tree has put down its roots. It's being used as a prison now, but..."
The World Tree? Did she mean the enormous tree that appeared so often in manga and anime?
‘Then those roots growing sparsely over there must belong to the World Tree.’
The urge to dig some up and boil it down into a medicinal decoction grew stronger and stronger. It seemed as though it would be far more effective than most of the elixirs sold on the market.
If its effects were proven, I might be able to make a pretty penny selling it at an auction.
Of course, I decided to keep the thought to myself, since the elf girl would probably tear me limb from limb if I actually tried it.
"By the way, I don't see any other prisoners, considering this is a prison?“
To begin with, there were neither iron bars nor guards here, making it hard to call this place a prison.
"...Actually, even if you call it a prison, it's more accurate to think of it as a solitary cell. If someone has committed a crime bad enough to be imprisoned here, executing them would be preferable."
I wondered why she was being kept here alone when even criminals guilty of such serious crimes weren't locked away, but with the elf girl's complexion still so pale, I didn't dare ask.
"Ahem, shall we start by introducing ourselves?"
"...Ah."
To lighten the mood, I casually held out my hand.
"My name is Kang Hyunwoo. As you can see, I'm human, and I turned twenty-one this year."
Fortunately, the elf girl immediately took my hand.
"I-I'm Iris Lemeria Baiart Pelledia!"
"...Pardon?"
What was this? Was she a noble?
The fact that a person's name could exceed ten characters had me seriously worrying about what form of address to use, to the point that it felt like my head was being split in two.
"...May I call you Ms. Iris?"
"Ah, yes!"
My memory was not good enough to memorize a name nearly long enough to be a sentence in one go, like the name of a European noble.
Fortunately, Iris looked strangely happy.
The smile of a beautiful woman put me in a better mood, too.
It was an innocent, gentle smile without a trace of malice, completely different in character from the fake smiles of the girls at my school.
Just as I began to think that this might not be so bad, despite being caught up in something unbelievable because of a suspicious app...
Ding-
A familiar alarm sound came from my pocket.
‘This place doesn't even get a signal, let alone Wi-Fi, does it?’
I secretly took out my phone while Iris wasn't looking and checked it.
[Thank you very much for using this Otherworld Dating App]
[This app is offering a free dating-consulting curriculum exclusively to our first customer]
[Would you like to consent?]
[Y/Y]
“What...?”
[If there is no response, acceptance will occur automatically shortly]
[3, 2, 1…]
[Y]
[Analyzing the disposition of Iris Lemeria Baiart Pelledia]
[Analyzing···]
[Analysis complete]
[Name: Iris Lemeria Baiart Pelledia
Age: 524
Affiliation: EB-17
Occupation: Mage
Disposition: Benevolent ruler, pacifist, devoted, vegetarian······]
The choice screen, which didn't even offer a choice, flashed by in an instant, and the app showed me Iris's information as though it were displaying the data of an NPC in a game.
‘...That's less impressive than I expected.’
I had already heard her name when we introduced ourselves.
Her race and age were also exactly what I had entered in the survey when I matched with her. Of course, she was twenty-four years older than the five hundred I had entered, but that wasn't particularly important.
"What is that?"
Iris had somehow come right up beside me and was gazing at my phone with bright, sparkling eyes.
At that, I hurriedly returned to the home screen.
“Ah, this is...”
Ding-
Just as I was about to explain the phone to Iris in a way that would minimize misunderstanding, a new screen appeared.
[The past of Iris Lemeria Baiart Pelledia has been detected]
[Advanced study of the dating-consulting curriculum will commence]
[A past monologue will begin]
‘......What?’
Confused by the app's explanation, which I couldn't make heads or tails of, I immediately checked Iris's condition.
“M-Ms. Iris...? Ms. Iris??”
Even when I waved my hand or called her name, Iris didn't answer.
She merely stared blankly into the air for a long time.
She looked just like the female protagonists in hypnosis-app stories I'd often seen on Hixmi.
It felt as though the genre had suddenly changed from a sweet, pure-love romance with a beautiful elf into an elf-violation story involving a vile human.
"I...“
While I was wondering what I should do, Iris began speaking in a low, heavy voice.
"I was the queen of the Kingdom of Pelledia.“