“Mmm, this is the taste.”
Holding a chocolate ice cream, Erika chased after the retreating figure of the woman, who walked ahead licking a vanilla ice cream cone bought from a street stall.
The path the woman was taking was a bit of a detour, but it was indeed the way to her home.
In other words, the woman called Iska definitely knew the way to her house. She seemed to be an old acquaintance, so perhaps if Erika asked Yu Inna or the Student Council President, she might find out who that woman was.
“Is it good?”
“Since I’m not paying for it with my own money, I suppose it’s fine. I’ll consider this a settling of the debt I owe this time.”
That woman had insisted the money was payment for the trouble of bringing her home and had squeezed her dry. Recalling that memory made Erika’s brows furrow on their own.
The money that had left her account was, in some sense, no different from money obtained for free, but precisely because of that, thinking of it as someone else’s money gave her a strange feeling of indebtedness to this body’s older sister every time she spent it. And since street ice cream cost as much as 5,000 won, she felt it was an even greater waste.
If Iska hadn’t saved her from nearly getting hit by a car earlier, Erika would have absolutely refused to buy it, putting up an iron wall. The fact that the accident was caused by the system yet she was the one who had to repay the favor annoyed her greatly, but she couldn’t exactly not buy ice cream for someone who had shown her goodwill.
“Why were you out here?”
It was nearly evening, so there must have been a reason. Since the woman’s stride was larger than her own and she was gradually pulling away, Erika caught up with a slight jog before finally asking what she was curious about.
Though it was something she should have asked long ago, the woman did turn to glance at Erika, but she didn’t seem particularly puzzled—perhaps because this didn’t deviate too much from the ‘Erika’ she had known.
“Looking for someone.”
Looking for someone? At such an out-of-the-blue remark, Erika’s face displayed an emotion of puzzlement plain enough for anyone to read.
Erika thought of herself as the type who hid her emotions well, and she also believed the body she possessed was a master of poker faces, but the reality was entirely different.
If it were out of 100, it was around 70 or 80. Perhaps not to the degree of reading her thoughts in real time, but what emotions she harbored could be easily read by anyone who wasn’t completely oblivious.
The Queen of the School, who could only properly use her ability when others believed in her and thus had developed the ability to read people’s hearts and emotions, had felt the desire to subjugate Erika precisely because she had read the emotion of how Erika viewed her.
Complete contempt. A disregard that could only arise from not treating the other party as a human equal to herself—a disregard resembling the forgiveness one gives for dirtying a desk.
Without knowing that the Queen had been enraged by how Erika unconsciously treated the people of this world as mere creations, Erika—who had been trying to prevent a Bad Ending—naturally had no way of knowing that her facial expressions were being read by others.
Even if everything showed on her face, the Student Council President thought Erika was displaying ‘regret’ because she herself was dating someone, and thus couldn’t tell her; Yu Inna knew of Erika’s misunderstanding but didn’t bother to mention it either.
Thus, the ‘weakness’ that had arisen was also a weapon that Erika possessed, for whom information was power. Those abundant expressions made others take it upon themselves to explain what she was curious about without her having to say a word—quite the advantage for someone as taciturn as her.
“There are two people I absolutely must find. Today, I came out to search for the lower-priority one first, and while I was at it, to do a favor for a friend.”
A favor, or who she was trying to find, was a matter of personal privacy, so she shouldn’t ask, right?
As the girl licked her chocolate ice cream, deliberating over what to say and what not to say, Iska suddenly grabbed Erika’s shoulder and held her in place, turning her to face her.
‘No matter what happens from now on, I’ll protect you, so don’t worry too much.’
A sentence formed only by lip movements, without sound. Though she had never learned anything like mind-reading, Erika could understand those words at once.
However, there was no explanation whatsoever of what she was being protected from. Just as Erika opened her mouth to ask for more of an explanation at such a sudden remark, extras who had been walking slightly apart from the self-proclaimed woman named Iska suddenly rushed in, took out handkerchiefs from their coats, and pressed them against the girls’ mouths and noses.
“Mmph?!”
Belatedly realizing that someone was trying to kidnap her, Erika’s body, which had tried to draw out the power of her blessing, went limp in the kidnapper’s grasp without being able to put up any significant resistance.
Roughly over two weeks had passed since Erika entered this world, but gaining control over her blessing in such a short time was impossible.
Iska, who had fallen unconscious from the sleeping drug on the handkerchief, was dragged away along with Erika, and after a short while, they were thrown into the cargo bed of a truck that arrived shortly after.
Their captors locked the cargo bed so it couldn’t be opened, then climbed into the seats excluding the driver’s and began heading toward some destination.
If there was something the kidnappers failed to notice, it was the fact that Iska, loaded in the cargo bed, opened her eyes and provided a lap pillow so the girl who had come with her wouldn’t be uncomfortable amid the truck’s rattling movement.
*
Where is this place.
Her head throbbed. Though she couldn’t grasp the situation, a window containing information sufficient to understand it—unlike before—appeared before Erika’s eyes.
[Even until the final week before advancing to Episode 2, you failed to capture the School Queen. Were you negligent, or were you foolish? While a Bad Ending is guaranteed once the number of believers exceeds one million, there was no reason whatsoever for the School Queen—who cannot see the system—to wait for that one million just to give you a Bad Ending. What has happened now occurred precisely because you let your guard down. In other words, Erika, you are merely receiving punishment for having been lazy and negligent here. Therefore, do not feel wronged.]
It was a dark place where she shouldn’t have been able to see, but the window visible only to Erika was unaffected by darkness or brightness, so she quickly read the words in front of her.
‘It is unfair, so how can I not feel wronged.’
What dating sim under heaven claims to be a dating sim world yet puts you on a ‘route’ to a bad ending before the bad ending gauge is even full?
When the system window delivered a message that seemed like a scolding, Erika felt her insides boiling with rage, but before she could vent that anger, she tried moving her body to assess her situation.
Each time she moved her ankles, a rattling sound of chains scraped against the floor. No handcuffs bound her wrists, so she could move them freely, yet she felt far more powerless than usual.
Was it a side effect of the sleeping drug she had inhaled while unconscious? Or was it for another reason? The system provided the answer instead.
[The chains you are currently wearing are one of the tools that suppress superpowers. As a tool capable of instantly neutralizing even a heroine with powerful abilities, it has been heavily modified by the School Queen.]
So it was because her ankles were bound by the superpower-suppressing tool made by the School Queen.
Though her hands were free, given Erika’s characteristic of being significantly physically inferior to girls her age, merely having her wrists free would make it difficult to create a variable for escaping this place.
It was practically checkmate. Information regarding superpower-suppressing tools was something even Erika, who had searched the internet diligently, did not know, but she hadn’t expected from the start that a brief search would reveal all the crucial information that could determine such an ending, so she wasn’t greatly disappointed.
[The first Bad Ending—Slave of the False World—is approaching right before you. However, the greatest variable is by your side. Depending on her choice, the existing Bad Ending content may change, may be greatly intensified in terms of severity, or may be modified into a different Bad Ending.]
[This is a difficult situation to overcome alone. It is always another heroine or the protagonist who rescues a heroine. A salvation event activates to overcome this desperate situation. Favorability toward whoever rescues you increases by 50.]
To Erika, who was simply trying to accept her situation positively as she had when she first came to this world, the words ‘greatest variable’ caught her eye.
Right. She hadn’t been kidnapped alone. Light returned to Erika’s eyes as she recalled the situation before the kidnapping, and at that moment, a sound came from a corner of the place where she was confined.
“Are you awake? You kept sleeping even after being moved from the truck to here.”
“You knew, so why didn’t you stop it?”
Before fainting, it was clear that Iska had noticed someone was trying to kidnap them—unlike Erika herself. Yet why had she allowed herself to be captured?
Even in the pitch-blackness, she was clearly visible. The woman, who glowed faintly in the darkness to a degree that made Erika wonder why she was only noticing it now, was leaning fully against a gray wall wearing an eyepatch and heavy-looking handcuffs on her wrists.
“The person I’m looking for is probably here. They’re the type who’s very good at running away, so I had no choice but to let myself get caught like this.”
There was no reason for the School Queen to target her. Though there had been a slight connection at school, Erika had been unable to fathom any reason the Queen would target her, and only after hearing Iska’s words did she finally understand the situation.
“There was no reason at all for the School Queen to target me, so I was dragged here all because of you.”
“...Huh?”
The reason Iska had said she would protect her was probably exactly that. In other words, her helping Erika was merely something she naturally had to do for Erika, who had been dragged here because of her, so even if her favorability increased, a rise of 50 was an extremely unfair affair.
Even though Erika tried to persuade herself of this, the system remained silent as if it had no intention of sharing its judgment, and the wronged woman opened her mouth on her own.
“How do you know they dragged us here?”
“A lucky guess...?”
Naturally, she knew because the system had told her. But telling someone she was meeting for the first time about the system would be madness, so Erika worried over what to say and spoke in a tone that even she found puzzling.
“...I see. A lucky guess.”
Hearing that, Iska replied in a predictably disgruntled tone.
But even while the two were making small talk, time continued to pass, and with the clicking sound of high heels from outside came the sound of someone approaching.
To the extent that one could tell from the cheerful heel sounds that the approaching person was in quite a good mood. Yet someone approaching a place where others had been kidnapped in such a good mood could not possibly be normal.
The two currently trapped in the dark place could guess who could be approaching here in such a good mood.
—Because there could only be one person.
The former School Queen.
The Queen who had left the school to become the Queen of this city was approaching this place.