Chapter 4
Having decided that I needed to do something, I ended up boarding the carriage without doing anything after all.
If you're asking why I didn't do anything, all I can say is that it would be unfair to blame me.
The Hero had already gone ahead and told them we would be riding, then came back and told me to get on.
I wanted to say that this carriage belonged to slave traders and that we shouldn't board it, but I had the fatal problem of being unable to speak.
Even if I called those smiling gentlemen slave traders, I doubted they would believe me. I had no way to communicate it, and after already saying we would board, I couldn't exactly say I didn't want to anymore..
All those circumstances combined, leaving me unable to do anything and forcing me to board the carriage.
I looked around.
As was usually the case with carriages cheap enough to offer such low fares, other people were riding in it as well.
Is this really okay..?
I sighed inwardly.
If something happened, I considered reaching a hand toward that piece of luggage emitting the soporific scent while pretending not to know anything, but there would surely be someone inside watching for anyone doing anything suspicious, so it would be pointless.
For now, I had no choice but to remain still.
Still, one fortunate thing was that I could prevent myself from passing out from the soporific scent.
Apparently, perhaps to keep people from noticing, it wasn't a scent that made you fall asleep immediately. Instead, it gradually made you drowsy until you fell asleep on your own. Once you did, you would sleep so deeply that you wouldn't notice even if someone carried you away.
In other words, if only I could use magic, I could secretly cast a purification spell on myself and erase the effects of the soporific scent accumulating in my body, which would be practically the same as never falling asleep from it at all.
Should I pretend to fall asleep on purpose, then lie in wait and launch a surprise attack?
Or perhaps I should secretly cast a purification spell on the Hero, too.
To do that, I needed to be able to use magic, but I didn't know how. I was racking my brain over it and trying one thing after another when someone approached from the side and tapped me on the shoulder.
It was the Hero.
“Are you hurt?”
At the Hero's question, I shook my head.
“If you get hurt, you have to tell me, okay?”
It's not as though I'm planning on getting hurt anywhere.
What worried me right now was the Hero.
To return to my original world, I would surely have to defeat the Demon King, but to do that, I would apparently have to have sex with this guy and even get pregnant.
However, there was one problem with that premise now.
I'm not Lumia.
I wasn't Lumia. I had originally been a man from South Korea—one of the users who had played this game. I had only played it because a friend kept recommending it, since I hardly ever played games of this kind in the first place.
Naturally, that meant I knew next to nothing about the game.
If the hidden happy ending had prerequisite conditions I didn't know about, then the happy ending would be as good as lost.
In other words, if I wanted to try anything before that, the Hero had to stay alive and remain near me.
If all else failed..
“...”
No.
That was truly a last resort.
Giving up all my pride as a man over something so uncertain was a bit much. Above all, I was a man with perfectly ordinary tastes, so I had absolutely no interest in being pinned beneath a man and moaning.
For now, it would be better to wait and see.
...
Wait.
Then didn't that mean there was another prerequisite?
This game was basically a harem story.
Naturally, the default setting of a kind-hearted eunuch protagonist meant that the heroines would fall for his charms and eventually try to seduce him in hopes of becoming the winner.
In this game, where every ending was either the mage-sacrifice normal ending or a bad ending, the only way to get the happy ending was to pursue only the mage heroine without so much as looking at the other heroines—and to impregnate me, that mage heroine.
I had heard that fulfilling these two conditions would result in the happy ending.
In other words, until the Demon King was defeated, the Hero had to withstand the advances of two heroines. No, even if he was a eunuch, there was no way someone like me—whose only advantages were being extremely beautiful and cute, while having a somewhat inferior figure to theirs—could serve as a deterrent against the two of them.
If the Hero gave in to their advances and started living out a harem story, it was all over.
At that thought, my whole body broke out in goosebumps.
Wait a second.
Isn't this kind of dangerous?
If I just sat around, the world would be destroyed, and I'd end up in the ending where I was forced to sacrifice myself. If I didn't sacrifice myself, everyone would eventually die, so I'd rather go through a sacrifice that at least wasn't painful.
‘Hold on.. I think I'm fucked..?’
Ultimately, the most ideal approach was to take an ambiguous stance and make the Hero fall for me, then somehow arrange things to keep him from confessing, buying enough time to withstand the advances of the two heroines.
Even if I couldn't do that, I would have to etch the heroine Lumia Secriphice deeply into the Hero's heart, making her a deterrent so he couldn't hastily get involved with the other heroines.
I felt terrible for the Hero, but I had to do this so I could buy time to find another way while preserving the final remaining condition for the happy ending.
With cold sweat streaming down my face, I turned toward the Hero.
Was I supposed to make such oblivious advances that he'd get the mistaken impression I liked him, even though I didn't actually mean anything by them..?
Me..?
‘I'm screwed.’
I covered my face with both hands.
There was no answer.
It came down to one of two choices.
Either I gave up, slept with the Hero, and bore his child, or I fucking died. Even if I dragged things out, I wasn't the Hero, so I had no way of knowing whether this bastard had slept with the other girls or not.
Besides, even if I managed to drag things out, there was no guarantee that another method existed.
Even if I gave up, slept with the Hero, and got pregnant, if another prerequisite happened to be that the mage and the Hero had to love each other, then making a child without love would amount to the same thing, so it would truly be over.
A pure-love fanatic would never let something like that slide.
He definitely put that condition in.
He'd definitely made it so that raping the mage and getting her pregnant resulted in a bad ending!!
This fucking shitty pure-love-fanatic developer bastard, seriously!!!!
Why is this world full of nothing but things trying to kill me?
This world is fucking garbage.
While cursing the developer and running through every possible thought in my head, I sat quietly in the carriage, pretending to watch the scenery outside. Before I knew it, we had arrived in front of a checkpoint. I would put those complicated thoughts aside for now and deal with the problem right in front of me.
Normally, when guards came to inspect you, didn't they at least check what you were carrying and what you were trying to transport? Just in case, I checked the guards outside. Surely they would come inside to inspect this place.
Please..
“Hmm, everything's fine. You may depart.”
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
Well, it was practically standard practice for guards stationed in a remote village not to conduct proper inspections, but I never imagined they would wave us through without even checking what was inside. I wanted to hurl a whole stream of abuse at them, but since I couldn't speak, I could only sit back down.
Bastard.
I hope you slip on the road and fall over.
Better yet, I hope you break your nose.
As I glared at the guard, putting all those feelings into it, the guard who was yawning as he walked away in another direction suddenly slipped on something and pitched forward. He must have hit the ground hard, because he couldn't get up quickly and was trembling all over.
Even the guard who came over to ask if he was all right slipped too and slammed his head into the ground.
Are they filming a sitcom or something? What's wrong with them?
“What the hell is this place?! Why's the floor so slippery?!”
Huh, it's slippery..?
“That must hurt.”
The Hero said it sympathetically, but since I had been the one silently wishing that he would slip and fall, I couldn't bring myself to look him straight in the eye. I nodded at the Hero's words and sat back down, then thought about magic once again.
Right. Why had I forgotten?
A heroine who couldn't speak but could use magic because she was a child of the stars...
That was Lumia, wasn't it?
Maybe I'd been approaching magic the wrong way.
I was wondering how I should practice when...
How long had it been?
It seemed that about ten minutes had passed.
“Hey.”
Someone grabbed me and yanked me toward them.
Just as I was about to turn my head in surprise, something was thrust against my neck.
More importantly, that's a knife.
“You'd better stay still if you don't want to see this woman die.”
Well, shit.
Looks like I'm fucked after all.