The second day at the school I was attending for the second time.
I walked along, secretly hoping I might meet the student council president again—the girl who had my ideal looks—but I did not see her all the way to school, nor even when I entered the classroom.
Was it because she and I had walked at different times? Or was it because Inna had linked arms with me?
The crowd swarming toward Inna had swallowed me up, so I could not see the people passing beyond them. Even if we had walked the same route to school, I probably would not have seen her.
It was different from yesterday, when she had left me behind on the way to school to go greet her friends.
Whether she had changed her mind overnight or not, this time she did not abandon me and leave.
Of course, just because Inna kept me at her side did not mean a single one of the people flocking to her spoke to me.
To me, that was not unpleasant at all. It was a very good thing.
In my eyes, I cannot see the faces of extras.
Even if I greeted them, I would not be able to greet them first next time or respond by saying their names, so it was more comfortable for me if they did not talk to me from the start.
So, without meeting the student council president and without anyone welcoming me, I entered the classroom. This time, there was no graffiti or anything of the sort on my desk. Since the graffiti from before had appeared because I had been absent for three days, I would have to observe the situation slowly.
In order to clear my character scenario, I had to find the queen, so I could not view the act of carving graffiti into my desk as entirely bad. If such acts continued, I might be able to uncover the queen’s identity, and I could get out.
Honestly, light bullying like carving graffiti with a knife or having unpleasant things spill out of my desk drawer was something I had experienced plenty of times at school in my original world, so I was already immune to it and did not feel particularly upset.
“What are you staring at like that?”
“I’m thinking about when you’re going back to your own seat.”
“This is my seat now, though?”
No matter how I thought about it, this girl seemed like the queen. I thought that inwardly as I looked at Inna, who was smiling brightly in the seat beside me.
Judging from the way she stole someone else’s seat because she wanted to sit next to me, and the fact that she was one of the few people who would obsess over me, Inna was the only person I could suspect as the queen.
Of course, I also had to take into account that it had not been long since I had fallen into this world. Still, a queen was normally a position that ruled over people, so I could not exclude Inna from the candidates.
But I was worried about the backlash the system had warned me about if she was not actually the queen, so I could not be certain it was her either.
I lay my head down on the desk, my head aching more and more the longer I thought. The more I thought about the queen, the only feeling that arose was the question of how I was supposed to find her.
Why did this dating sim have to be made so needlessly complicated?
What people who play dating sims want is, at most, romance. It was not as though they were asking for a masterpiece with a perfect game system. Especially when no murder case even happens—what kind of company makes a mystery dating sim?
The more I searched for an answer, the deeper I fell into an answerless maze.
To prevent that, I had no choice but to increase my clues. My eyes turned toward a girl sitting a little farther away. Toward the girl whose ability name floating above her head was written as “Lie.”
*
As soon as break time came and I had a moment, instead of preparing for the next class, I grabbed the hand of the ordinary-looking girl and immediately ran into the hallway. My target was the staircase right in front of the entrance to the rooftop.
That was the only place where we could avoid the students coming out into the hallway during break and have a relatively safe conversation. There were other places, but either I did not know them or they were too far away.
Among the heroines, there seemed to be plenty of people whose physical abilities surpassed mine—the girl preparing to become an idol, the girl who woke up at dawn every day to cook for me, the student council president, and so on—but whether this girl did not resist my strength or could not, she followed obediently.
“So why? Didn’t you say we’d look slowly?”
I had never told Seo Yuri that we should look slowly, but perhaps she had heard the conversation I had with Inna, because she showed her confusion at being dragged out, her voice tinged with slight displeasure.
Well, last time, I had not properly kept the promise where I would be in the position of the perpetrator and she would be in the position of the victim, so it was only natural for her to feel displeased at me dragging her along one-sidedly.
“We didn’t even exchange phone numbers, so I had no choice but to come in person and talk. So who exactly is this queen who supposedly carved knife marks into my desk?”
“Don’t you know very well? Someone who would do that to your desk. Ah, maybe there’s more than one?”
Her displeasure was fully present in her next words as well. I wondered if what I had done was really something worth speaking so unpleasantly about, but I decided to let it slide, thinking that maybe it was because I had never had the chance to talk to girls my age in high school.
This girl was one of the few sources of information I could use at school. It would not even be wrong to say she was the only one.
“Hoo. I’m saying this because there isn’t anyone. It’s only Inna, isn’t it? A queen who could easily bury someone with a single word.”
The girl let out a deep sigh. As if, in her mind, Inna being the queen was already a fixed answer.
But I had not dragged this girl all the way here because I wanted such an obvious answer. What I wanted was a possibility that, even if imperfect, was broad enough. Something that would let me think and decide for myself.
“No, it’s not Inna. She knows I’m not the kind of person who would so much as blink at that kind of childish prank. So the person who did it is someone who doesn’t know me. For the same reason, it isn’t the student council president either.”
It was not that I had completely removed them from the list of suspects, but what I wanted to hear about was someone other than those girls, so I deliberately lied.
Perhaps the lie that had fooled my workplace superiors several times worked, because the girl sat down on the stairs with a slightly serious expression.
Taking that as a sign that she would speak with me a little more, I naturally sat beside her, leaving enough space for one person between us.
“...Really? Then I’ll try thinking about it from another angle.”
From Inna’s reaction, I had been able to tell that this girl was not close to this body. As expected, Kang Yuri was not close enough to me to know this body’s usual personality, and she easily fell for my words.
The girl lowered her head and sank into thought. If she came up with something good like this, that would be good for me too, but the chances were very low, so I asked a question that would interrupt her pondering.
“If you don’t know, I’ll ask something else. What superpower do you have?”
“Why the ability name? You know that unless you’re very close, people usually don’t tell each other their ability names, and asking so directly like this is rude, right?”
If you were not very close, you did not know about each other’s abilities? Then did that mean the student council president and Inna, who knew somewhat about my superpower, were very close to me? Or rather, had been very close to me?
I had not been in this world as long as everyone else. There was no narrator explaining the worldbuilding at the start of this dating sim.
There was information shown in the system window, but compared to the differences between this world and the world I came from, that was only an extremely small portion.
In that sense, when someone told me about the unique characteristics of this world like this, it was better to accept it without even the slightest thought of arguing.
“Hoo. Since we’ve formed something like an alliance, I’ll tell you for now. My superpower is stage magic. In other words, it’s the perfect superpower for playing pranks.”
Perhaps after confirming the sparkling look in my eyes as I waited for her to answer, Yuri told me what I had asked.
...Though I could not know whether she had told me properly or not.
Was her ability only hidden by the word “Lie,” and in reality, she had a superpower called stage magic? Or was she currently lying about her ability, and her real superpower was “Lie”? Or was she simply mistaken about her own superpower?
There were too many possibilities, making it difficult to even speculate. Since Yuri had already said she would tell me, I could not interrogate her and demand she say her ability properly either.
If Yuri had really told me her ability, then I would be the one saying something strange. If she had told me a fake one, then she would start suspecting how I knew what she said was a lie.
At any rate, were all the heroines in this world abnormal? The same went for the student council president, who had supposedly been lovers with this heroine of bizarre personality, and the idol who could not come today because she had something to do.
Perhaps I, who came from another world, was the only normal one after all. Of course, in a world of one-eyed people, a two-eyed person would be considered disabled, so in this world, I would be treated as abnormal...!
While I was briefly thinking about something else, several cards appeared before my eyes. Before I knew it, the girl had summoned cards and blocked my field of vision with them.
“What do you think? Does it look a little more like a superpower now?”
“I didn’t see it from the start, so I can’t tell the difference from a real magic trick.”
“Then one more time. This time, a disappearing magic trick.”
The Queen of Hearts and five cards with numbers I could not identify vanished from my sight.
It looked like something akin to magic, but since I knew card tricks were illusions that happened at the fingertips, I ended up laughing at the faint trembling of her fingers.
If you’re going to scam someone, at least do it properly. Why are you so bad at it? That was the feeling behind my laugh.
“Well, that should be enough, right? You’d better not ask other people to tell you their superpowers. Though people who have them are rarer. But, in that sense, who did you hear from that I possess a superpower? Was it Inna, by any chance...”
“What does it mean if someone tells you their superpower without you even asking?”
I cut off her attempt to drag out my source of information while spouting something obvious.
My source of information was the system itself anyway. Even if I told her, there was no way she would understand. Cutting off her attempt to pry into something she would not understand was the better choice for both of us.
Though it seemed that kind sentiment did not reach her, because the dissatisfaction on her face grew larger than before.
“Mm. It would mean they’re an extremely close friend, or someone like family who will spend their whole life with you, I suppose?”
“Then someone who talks about another person’s superpower must inevitably be the opposite. The same goes for revealing whether they have one or not.”
She seemed perceptive enough to understand that I had indirectly told her I would not sell out the person who had told me about her, because the face the brown-haired girl was making stiffened completely, to the point where it felt like she was staring at an [enemy].
“Hey, didn’t we form an alliance?”
“Because we formed an alliance, I’m at least telling you whether I have one or not. If we hadn’t, I would’ve just ignored you completely.”
“...I understand why you get ostracized by others. First of all, people in the same group help each other. That’s how you avoid being ostracized—”
At the sudden start of her nagging, I plugged both ears with the index fingers of both hands. Blocking my ears with my fingers did not make the sound stop.
I knew perfectly well that even if you blocked your ears with your fingers, you could still hear what you were going to hear. I only used the action because, as shown by the girl in front of me now looking as if she could not possibly get any angrier and falling silent, it had the effect of making the other person stop talking.
“...For some reason, it seems I’ve become unnecessary to you in just one day? Seeing how eager you are to cut me off right away.”
“No, that’s not it. It’s not about needing you. I started getting suspicious. As you know very well, I’m someone who has experienced a lot of bullying, so I found a few strange things.”
Looking at the countless pieces, Inna was the queen of the school.
However, the shape of those pieces was so perfect that anyone would see Inna as the culprit bullying me, and that instead aroused my suspicion.
“The fact that putting smelly things into my desk harms the people around me too, so even kids who like Inna wouldn’t easily allow it. Conversely, you’re telling me someone would step forward out of half-baked sympathy to help me escape the eyes of a person with such powerful authority that they can make others permit even unpleasant things? Unless it was that powerful person herself acting from the start, or someone ordered by that person, they’d have to be insane enough to want to die.”
“Ha.”
“Puhahahahahaha.”
I could have said more, but the girl laughed refreshingly, as if admitting her own guilt.
“Wow~. I didn’t think you’d figure it out from that. Well, [he] warned me too~. I was going to play with you a little more before telling you, but you’re sharp about one thing, aren’t you?”
The ordinary-looking girl’s face collapsed.
The words floating above her head changed.
[Kang Yuri]
[Role: Villain]
[Ability: Lie Development.]
[Affection: -20]
[Find the Queen has been resolved. You have successfully completed the scenario. Participants: two. Rewards will be issued.]
And what appeared was the queen herself.
So clearly that I could recognize it even without the word villain.
A person filled with malice toward me.