Secret Mode

It was enough, in any case, to drive her out of her mind. That Siegfried—so meek, so endlessly kind—had killed her by such a vicious, underhanded means!

“I saw the ending all the way through. So why am I back……?”

She couldn’t make sense of it. Siegfried’s route had hardly been a happy ending either, and yet a thread of hope had remained: she had romanced every target the game would allow, and so perhaps, at last, she might be permitted to leave. That hope had burst like foam.

“What in the world do you want me to do……?”

If she could not get out, and if romancing anyone at all only repeated the same miserable death, then none of it meant a thing. Was she meant to live inside this game forever, murdered in one way after another?

Presepe’s face went blank.

“If there were even one other character left……”

Then she might still have had something to hope for.

Light glittered across her face as she stared into nothing and muttered. A system window.

“……What is this?”

So what, then? Did that mean she could leave the game now?

Color rose in Presepe’s face and her eyes went round, but the hope broke almost at once. In its place came a notice she had never expected.

“What?”

Presepe’s violet eyes began to shake.

……The true male lead?

In games of this sort, the true male lead could usually be romanced only after every other ending had been cleared. Sometimes you could not even meet him before then. But had a wretched game like this actually contained such a thing?

As if to mock the worry, the system window glittered again.

Dangerous. As if things were not dangerous enough already.

“Then if I romance the true male lead……”

If she succeeded, might she truly be able to leave the game this time?

She no longer cared about any of that. She would only die again, so what was the point? This was a choice whose answer had already been decided.

“Fine. I’ll do it. I understand, so just tell me who the true male lead—”

Tell me.

But the system window offered nothing except a useless courtesy.

“W-what? Wait.”

And that was the end of it. The window vanished as swiftly as it had come, without leaving so much as a trace.

“Hey!”

Presepe shouted, her face twisted with disbelief.

“You have to at least tell me who it is! What am I supposed to—”

Her mouth snapped shut before she could finish.

Damn it.

She knew it in her gut. This damned game—no, this already-ruined game—had started again.

“Lady Presepe.”

A voice reached her, and the body that had been slumped on the floor was hauled upright of its own accord. Her tangled hair slipped back into place with a soft gleam, and the clothes that had been in disarray straightened themselves as if by magic. None of it was Presepe’s will. The game had simply begun.

“Come in.”

Once again, a voice that was not hers slipped out between her lips.

And then……

She could have recited them with her eyes closed. She couldn’t even be bothered anymore. Presepe sighed and chose the third.

“What is it?”

The words written on the choice came out exactly as they stood. She was nothing but a parrot.

“His Majesty has commanded that Lady Presepe be brought to him. This instant.”

The Emperor. Dietrich. Ateloia’s tyrant without precedent or equal. The first person ever to kill Presepe—which was to say, the first male character she had romanced.

Presepe stared at the choices floating before her eyes and bit down hard on her lip.

“All right.”

Then she chose the second. In her heart she wanted the first, but she would have to start the game if she was ever going to find the true male lead. Besides, the other endings were nothing short of horrific. In the first, she died to an arrow loosed by the soldiers Dietrich sent. In the third, Ella, harshly punished by the Emperor, nursed her grudge and slipped poison into Presepe’s food.

“Come out at once. And don’t dawdle over nothing the way you used to, and get me scolded for it.”

Ella seized her and yanked her along, grumbling all the while. No one watching would have taken it for the manner of a servant attending her mistress.

Damn it all.

Presepe swallowed the curses she could not let past her lips.

Dietrich Atelloia. As the name itself declared, the Emperor who had inherited Ateloia’s legitimate blood.

Dietrich did not like Presepe in the slightest. Far from liking her, he loathed her. She had once thought that if he hated her that much, he might as well simply kill her—but she understood only after she had romanced him. The reason he despised her and the reason he could not bring himself to kill her were one and the same.

Unlike the man he was now, who looked as though a blade would not draw so much as a drop of blood from him, Dietrich had been sickly from childhood. Worse, his father, the late Emperor, had set his affection not on the Empress’s son—the legitimate heir, Dietrich—but on the second son born of a concubine, and had meant to yield the throne to him as well. As if that were not enough, Dietrich’s mother, the Empress, fell ill and died around the same time, and within that bleak Imperial Palace he was left utterly alone.

The one who remained at his side was the child Presepe.

She was the daughter of a concubine the Emperor had taken in his later years, and she was hardly a princess who basked in his favor. Her mother, Vanessa, was a commoner, and so possessed not a shred of power inside the palace. The Emperor had never intended to give her any. He had dragged Vanessa in because he coveted her beauty; from the very beginning, he had felt no desire to do anything for her once she was there.

Just as Vanessa received no proper treatment in the palace, Presepe grew up without the dignity due a princess. The man she had believed to be her father did not spare his daughter so much as affection; he only ignored her. And her mother, her mind worn down to ruin, was in no state to tend her with any tenderness. She must have been lonely too. During the tutorial, Presepe had watched the child she had been and the child Dietrich slowly open their hearts to each other and pass gentle hours together.

But Vanessa’s infidelity came to light too late. Once it was revealed that Presepe was not the Emperor’s daughter, she was stripped of her rank and driven from the palace, without even the time to bid Dietrich farewell.

Not long after, Dietrich—his health restored, his moment waited out—killed his younger brother, took the throne, and sent soldiers to drag Presepe back. Then he locked her away, in the tallest building of the Imperial Palace: the West Tower.

In the meantime he had misunderstood a great many things. Roughly this: that Presepe, like everyone else, had abandoned his sickly self and gone to cling to the Second Prince. Even so, a tender feeling remained, and in the end he could not kill her. He only shut her in the tower.

In a word—love and hate.

The first time she romanced him, she had thought him a little pitiful. After everything she had steadily endured since, and knowing how it ended, all she felt was irritation.

“If you can settle it by talking, why lock someone up out of nowhere? You have a mouth. Why don’t you use it? What are you even saving it for?”

Presepe stopped halfway down the corridor and grumbled to herself, then let out a thin, self-mocking laugh. Well. She was no different—she had a mouth, and still she could not speak. Once the game was underway, Presepe could do nothing as she pleased. All she could do was choose, in order, from the options that appeared.

“Hah……”

She breathed out the sigh and looked ahead. A red door, shut fast. Dietrich’s room.

……She had to look at that loathsome face again.

Irritation burning, Presepe poured every curse she knew into the privacy of her thoughts and took a step. Her arm stretched out on its own, and against her will she opened the closed door. Then, offering a formal bow to the Emperor seated at a crooked, languid angle before her, she muttered to herself.

You miserable piece of shit. Rot in hell.

A sentiment rather far from a courteous greeting.

“……I greet His Majesty the Emperor.”

Unlike the profanity flooding her true feelings, an impeccably polite address spilled out of its own accord.

“Stripped of your rank, living in the palace as a nobody, and still as pretty as ever.”

If she were honest, there was a flaw in Dietrich’s words. It was true enough that she had been stripped of her title as princess and lived in the palace as nothing at all—but the one who had ordered it was Dietrich himself. Presepe’s will had been nowhere in it.

“They say the vulgar know no shame. You are precisely that.”