There Was No Happy Ending

"My Presepe."

Siegfried's elegant face glittered, bright and lovely, in the moonlight.

"You are exquisite again today. Were the goddesses of legend anything like you, I wonder."

Deep affection soaked the voice that followed, slow and unhurried. It was not the voice alone. The face turned toward Presepe was tender, warm, and gentle, like sunlight on a spring day.

It did not last.

"Is it because you are this beautiful, Presepe?"

His expression had gone cold as midwinter frost. A hand corded with standing veins closed around her soft cheek as he went on.

"The reason other men look at you. And look. And look again."

"…"

"Every time, I find myself thinking. Would it not serve me better to kill men like that, rather than monsters and beasts?"

Siegfried was the last character Presepe had set out to capture, and the one who had felt, if only by comparison, sane.

And yet…

No. Surely not.

Her violet eyes wavered, brief and unsteady.

"Absurd, is it not? That the knight commander, who ought to carry on God's will and protect the people, should harbor so impure a thought."

Right. Don't harbor it. Please. You're a holy knight. The commander of the order, no less.

Presepe muttered the words where they would never reach him.

"But I cannot be sure."

Siegfried lowered his voice and whispered at her ear.

"Whether God's will, or this seat of a holy knight, can ever weigh more than a jealousy so vicious."

No… wait…

"You are the first person who ever made me feel the desire to make someone wholly, entirely mine."

"…"

"So I brooded on it. What I would have to do—what method, exactly—to make you exist as mine alone, forever. What it would take."

Her fingertips were trembling with bewilderment when a heavy thud split the air, and a row of translucent windows rose before her. Things Siegfried could not see. In other words, things visible to Presepe alone.

And upon those translucent windows…

Every manner of choice was written there.

Presepe clenched her fist. Throw out the second, for a start. Then the answer is the first or the third. Whichever I pick, it's fifty-fifty.

Doesn't the first one sound like too much flattery? She had given another character a similar answer once, and already died for it.

So it has to be the third. Listening to him, Siegfried still hadn't found a method. He was hardly about to snap and draw his sword out of nowhere…

Presepe decided on the third choice.

"If you find a way, please tell me. Whatever it is, I will follow you."

"…You will follow me?"

In that instant she saw the affection window above Siegfried's head fill to the brim. Presepe understood that she had chosen correctly.

Yes. So now, please…

Just let me live.

And it was that very moment that Siegfried drew something from within his robes.

"You said it then, didn't you. That my god is the chief deity of Atelloia, but your god is not that deity. Your god is me. Siegfried."

I only said that because I had no choice if I was going to capture you…

"Perhaps it began then. The belief that someday you would give me an answer that pleased me, just like this."

The moment she saw the vial brimming with black liquid, Presepe knew. She was fucked. Again.

No!

I don't want this!

You die, not me!

That was what she wanted to say. What slipped from her mouth was something else entirely.

"I love you, Sir Siegfried. If only I can be with you, there is nothing I cannot endure."

She wanted to clap a hand over her mouth, but the water was already spilled. Siegfried smiled as if overcome, and slowly drew the stopper from the bottle. Then he filled his mouth with the drug, and kissed her.

She felt the acrid medicine slide, unmistakable, down her throat.

You bastard. In the end you aren't even drinking it! I'm the only one swallowing this!

"Look, Presepe."

"Siegfried… sir…"

"Now you become wholly mine. Mine alone, that no one else may covet…"

And then his handsome face began to blur.

"…And so you will be able to worship only me, forever. Even if we are parted."

Her vision was flickering out.

I thought this time, at least, would be different…

With that last thought, Presepe slowly closed her eyes.

The fifth male character, Siegfried. On Siegfried's route, too, there was no happy ending.

A bleak reverse-harem game of suffering that had gathered every expectation upon itself even before release. As with every game of its kind, the rules were simple. Five male characters in all, and within that number the player had only to pursue whichever routes suited her taste.

A story more elaborate than any other game could match. Artwork so delicate and beautiful that tremendous care had plainly been poured into it. With one voice, everyone had proclaimed the coming success of Presepe Outside the Birdcage.

That talk had held only right up until launch.

To put it in a single line, Presepe Outside the Birdcage had failed.

The story was elaborate, yes, but far too bleak. The ordeal she was suffering through now made that plain enough: how wretched an ending Presepe met on every route. These were not the sort of conclusions one could dress up as merry bad endings, the bittersweet kind a player might almost be glad to reach. The art was beautiful, and lovely, but far too fine, and it had been a mistake to turn that skill toward rendering Presepe's vicious endings with endless, merciless realism.

Even so, one might somehow have argued past all of that. The greatest blow, however, was still waiting. The bugs.

No matter how many times the developer patched them, it did no good. Now and then the bugs froze the game, or swapped the male characters' lines with one another. They even deleted the saved files entirely, of their own accord. In a game whose playtime ran to days, with so many men one might pursue, it was a fatal blow.

In the end the developer went bankrupt, and Presepe Outside the Birdcage slipped from people's memory. And Yoon Juyeon had made the mistake of playing that ruined game.

Something was strange, though. She received it, installed it, pressed the start button… and it would not run.

Nothing appeared but an unfriendly notice window. She ought to have stopped there. For some reason, she spent a long while fumbling, trying to make the game run. Juyeon struggled like that through the whole of the night, and only gave up around the break of dawn.

"Fucking trash game. It's nasty and cheap, and I'm not playing."

She poured out curses for a good thirty minutes, then grumbled her way into bed and set about courting sleep.

And then…

Across her blinking eyes, a vivid notice window rose.

That was the beginning of all of this.

Not long after she was forced to swallow the poison Siegfried had fed her, and felt a pain as though her insides were burning away, Presepe opened her eyes in a familiar place.

"This fucking…"

The first thing out of her mouth was, of course, a curse. From habit she clutched at the left side of her chest and began hurling maledictions into the empty air, which had done nothing to deserve them.

"Goddamn bastard."

Presepe Outside the Birdcage featured five male characters in all. Presepe had reached endings with the other four only with enormous difficulty—truly enormous difficulty—picking the wrong choices, gutting their trust, and dying over and over again. But every ending with them had been wretched beyond words. A double suicide, imprisonment, abuse… it had been pure chaos.

Set beside that legion of psychopaths, Siegfried alone had looked different. Eldest son of a count's house spoken of with awe, and the knight commander of highest standing among all who had ever held the post. Born on the holy day of the god who guarded Atelloia, he had been called noble from birth, and as if to prove the words true, he entered the knight order while still young and began to display his skill.

Before even three years had passed, he cut down the monsters teeming in the west and slew the dragon that had been the worst trouble of them all, and for that, so the story went, the Archbishop bestowed the Holy Sword upon him. Some even said that Siegfried was a man God had sent down to protect Atelloia. His character and his nature were admirable as well, and his epithet was nothing less than the Sun of Atelloia.

So you won't kill me.

She had believed that…

"The son of a bitch fed me poison?"

And only me?

"At least the others died with me!"

Presepe seethed. Honestly—they do say the quiet cat is the first one up on the stove. Ah. Maybe that proverb didn't quite fit.