The Woman in the Mirror

In the end Presepe sank to the ground, soaked through with despair.

"I really... I want to stop..."

How was anyone meant to play a game cobbled together out of bugs like this? If she was honest, it was close to a miracle she had endured as long as she had. The ambition of finding the True Male Lead, capturing him, seeing an ending, and escaping the game was already long gone. Everything frightened her. Everything. She felt as if she had been flung into the open sea with nothing but the body on her back.

"What did I even do that was so wrong..."

Presepe bowed her head and let out a small, broken sob.

"Why did it have to be me..."

I can't be the only person who installed this game. So why is this only happening to me?

Alone, she wept and piled up questions that had no answers. Then, worn out from crying, she slipped under, as if she were simply losing consciousness.

The moment she opened her eyes, something she had not seen in a very long time was there to greet her.

The ceiling of her room.

"Huh...?"

Am I seeing things?

Or am I just not awake yet?

Dazed, she blinked several times, then turned her head with a blank face. What met her was a desk with its corners worn ugly, and on top of it a laptop left sprawled any which way among the trash. A half-eaten cup of instant ramen. Wooden chopsticks stained red. A medicine packet torn open without a scrap of care. That sort of thing. The whole world of one narrow, cramped room.

She realized she had come back to her original world.

"Was it... a dream...?"

A nightmare, vicious and far too long.

"Right. Something like that could never actually happen..."

Yes. That kind of thing only happened in novels.

She muttered to herself as if she were trying to brainwash her own mind. Even as she said it, everything she had lived through inside the game rose up with perfect clarity, and she strained with everything she had to ignore it.

Enough. I'm awake now. That's all that matters. I'll forget the whole thing before long anyway!

The words she had been repeating died away. Her gaze snagged, all at once, on the laptop sitting atop the desk. It was still on.

She scrambled down from the bed, dropped into the chair, and stared at the screen.

The title of that damned game, and its opening screen. Presepe, shut inside a cage just as the title had always shown her, wearing that sad expression.

And the familiar notice window, too.

She stared without a word at the Presepe tucked into the corner of the opening screen. Then she mashed the power button any way it would go. With all her strength.

The screen drowned in black with a soft click, and the laptop died easily, without the slightest resistance.

"Ha..."

Only then did she let out a sigh of relief and slump back in the chair.

I'm never playing that garbage again. I'll throw the laptop out with it. Why did I ever throw a fit about playing a broken game like that in the first place...

...Why did I, really?

Why...

And in that instant, a voice she had been muttering to herself brushed past her ear.

"Right... check..."

...Check what?

A stupid look crossed her face. The idle thought did not last.

Rubbing at her dry cheeks and muttering to herself, she went rigid, like someone who had seen a thing they were never meant to see. Her eyes had fixed on what lay behind the laptop: the mirror hung on the wall.

A very familiar woman occupied the glass. Lustrous silver hair falling to her waist. Skin white past the point of reason, and violet eyes the very image of violets. The woman who, only a moment ago, had been looking back at her from the laptop screen. The protagonist of the game. Presepe.

"N-no..."

Presepe groped at her own cheek and babbled like a madwoman.

"I'm... I'm not Presepe..."

I...

My name...

...What was my name?

In that instant a familiar voice reached her. It was not only one. Dietrich, Ivan, Siegfried, Noah, Atar — all of them were calling Presepe aloud, as if to insist that this was her true name.

And then a voice she did not remember at all — utterly strange — spoke as well.

It came with a laugh that crawled over her skin.

"No...!"

Presepe tumbled off the chair, curled her back in pain, and clamped both hands over her ears. Their voices did not stop. They only swelled, ringing louder, boring deep into her ears.

"...pe."

"Presepe!"

With a cry that was nearly a shout, the eyes she had squeezed shut flew open. The first thing she saw was Dietrich's face, looking down at her while his hand clamped hard around the shoulder of her lying body.

It did not take her long to understand.

It was a dream.

Not this place. That one.

She wanted to scream.

"You..."

Dietrich started to say something, then shut his mouth. Tears were sliding without a sound, soaking the whole of Presepe's white face. She gave no reaction at all. She did not look startled. She did not flinch or hesitate. She only stared up at him with eyes like a dead fish.

It was a face Dietrich had never seen.

Slowly, he let go of her shoulder. Then, with a warped expression, he tossed the words at her.

"Wipe your tears. I have questions to put to you."

There was a reason Dietrich had come for her the moment dawn broke. There was something he had to hear, or none of it would make sense. He waited while she wiped her tears. It lasted only a moment. His face soon hardened, and he looked at her with an expression that could not have been colder.

"What were you doing in the garden with Atar Hanan yesterday?"

She did not answer.

"If you value your life, you'd best not think of lying. I heard it straight from Noah Debern."

With Dietrich's shout, choices rose over Presepe's swollen face.

"Speak. What were you doing in the garden with Atar Hanan yesterday!"

This time all three choices shone gold. Faced with options that were plainly bugs, Presepe wore a blank expression.

They're all ordinary choices... not like last time.

She could not begin to tell what this was, either.

"Answer me!"

And there was the notice window she already knew. Presepe was not unaware of it either — that if she failed to answer within three seconds, the game would return to the very beginning. If even one of those choices had not been a bug, it might have been different. What, exactly, was she supposed to pick up there?

It was not that the thought had failed to cross her mind. It was that she had no clever way out of it, either. In the end she decided to lay everything out honestly. It was a small mercy that the choices were, at least, comparatively normal.

"I-I only went to the garden for a moment, for some air, and Lord Noah caught hold of me."

Dietrich said nothing.

"So we exchanged greetings... and then Prince Atar appeared and drove Lord Noah away."

Whether it was Noah who displeased him, or Atar, or both of them at once, the space between Dietrich's brows twisted, faintly.

"But Prince Atar tried to do something strange to me, so I slapped him. I know I shouldn't have, of course, but..."

"...Something strange?"

Dietrich asked it again with a face from which the cold seemed to drip.

"What is that supposed to mean. Say it plainly."

"...Th-the shackles. The ones that had been cinched around a corpse's throat. He tried to lock them around my wrist, so I ran."

He gave no answer.

"And then someone suddenly shouted that Prince Atar was dead. I was so shaken I went back, and... that was what happened."

Dietrich still did not answer. He only looked at her with that warped face, then down at her small, violently trembling hand, and back again.

"...It's the truth."

Presepe murmured it in a shaking voice and looked at Dietrich. More precisely, at the favorability window floating above his head. Just as it had with Atar, Dietrich's window began to darken, little by little, until—

—it had turned into unknowable question marks. Just as it had with Atar.

Since last time, it's almost as if something is pressing me to pick the bug...

There would be no more choices in her conversations with Dietrich. It had been the same with Atar. From now on she could speak with him freely, without a menu of answers, but she could not tell whether that was a good thing.

...Then will Dietrich get all his memories of the previous loops back, too?

The ones where he killed me.

The face with which Presepe had been staring at him grew wretched.

Looking down at her, Dietrich made to go on, then faltered for a brief moment. The Presepe before his eyes wore an expression he had never once seen.