Switching to a Reverse Harem, But the Male Lead Changed the Genre
"You said you had something important to ask me, Miss Pereira?"
The man urged her on in an indifferent voice—indifferent, that is, if you ignored the unmistakable edge of annoyance bleeding through it, the tone of a man who would rather be anywhere else on earth.
His hair was damp with sweat and tousled, as though he'd just come from a sparring match, and yet he looked so devastatingly handsome that it might as well have been a deliberate piece of staging.
Natalie tilted her face up toward the male lead's infuriatingly gorgeous features and asked her question with practiced nonchalance.
"Hey there, McLane Lindhardt. Are you a transmigrator?"
"I—excuse me, what?"
At her question, a hairline crack ran across the man's impassive face.
Natalie noted that this was the first time she'd ever seen him so flustered, and pressed on.
"I don't mean you any harm. I'm asking because I'm a transmigrator too—same as you."
His flustered state didn't last long, though. Instead of answering, he narrowed his eyes and studied her in silence for a long moment.
His gaze was clearly probing for her intentions. Natalie met it evenly and gave a careless shrug.
"Really, that's all. No hidden agenda. I just thought—since we're both in the same boat, maybe we could pool our efforts and figure out a way home together."
For all her breezy delivery, Natalie was actually quite desperate. The original McLane Lindhardt should, by this point, have been tripping over himself at the heroine's plight—a heroine who might well be sold off to some other man—and offering her a contract marriage. But this man showed not the faintest sign of doing any such thing.
Could it be that the backstory—his loving the heroine since childhood—had somehow gotten dropped during the transmigration process? Surely not.
While Natalie drifted off into this tangent, the man prodded her with visible displeasure.
"And how exactly did you figure out I'm a transmigrator? Have you been spying on me?"
"Spying? Please. Why would I need to? We're in a rather complicated situation at the moment, you see, so quite a few things reach my ears whether I go looking or not. But never mind how I found out."
Natalie lowered her voice even further, referring to him as that kind of person rather than saying the word "transmigrator" outright.
She could hear the servants moving back and forth beyond the parlor door.
"I happened to catch you using your Status Window. This isn't exactly a world where hunters exist, you know. That sort of thing—there's no way to use it unless you're a transmigrator."
"Ha, this…."
At her words, the man frowned and let out a small groan. The way he raked a rough hand through his disheveled hair suggested he was cursing his own carelessness.
Natalie watched him for a moment, then asked, tilting her head in apparent puzzlement.
"But you can actually see your Status Window, can you? Because I don't have one. We're both transmigrators—isn't it unfair that one of us gets a Status Window and the other doesn't? If I had something like that, I bet I could put it to very good use…."
With the man offering no response, she murmured on in a light, almost talking-to-herself tone—then suddenly snapped her eyes up and stared straight into his. Into the jewel-green irises gleaming beneath his slightly furrowed brow.
As though uncorking every question she'd been bottling up since first realizing he was a transmigrator, she fired at him.
"But honestly, do you have no intention of going back to your original world at all? Why on earth are you burying yourself in training and adventuring like someone who has to grind out levels, without sparing a single thought for the ending? This isn't some kind of game, so I just don't…."
As Natalie shook her head in utter bewilderment, the man's indifferent voice cut into her ear.
"It is a game."
"I'm sorry—what?"
She stared back at him blankly, unable to process what she'd just heard.
The man regarded her with something like pity, then drove the point home, enunciating each word low and deliberate, like hammering in a nail.
"What I transmigrated into is the game. Which means that if I want to return to my original world, I have to hit max level. Simple as that."
This time it was Natalie's turn to lose her voice. She couldn't close her hanging jaw, couldn't hide the shock written across her face.
His answer was so far beyond anything she'd imagined that her mind had gone completely white.
Only now did she remember. The worldbuilding of How to Marry the Hero of the Century—the novel she'd transmigrated into—was so airtight that it had been adapted into a webtoon, and then, on top of that, a game.
And that game, while sharing its characters and setting with the novel, had branded itself as an adventure RPG all about battling evil, delving into dungeons, and leveling up.
As Natalie reeled, still trapped between shock and confusion, McLane was the one to ask next, sounding genuinely curious.
"Then what on earth did you transmigrate into, if not the game?"
"A-A romance fantasy webnovel."
At her answer, McLane gave a short, hollow laugh.
It was unmistakably a sneer—enough to spark her temper under normal circumstances—but Natalie still hadn't recovered the presence of mind to notice even that.
Her brain finally began to turn again only after she heard the man's next words.
"Ah, romance. So that's why you've been making eyes at me all this time."
"No, I was not making eyes at—"
What an outrageous thing to say. She wanted to demand when, exactly, she had ever flirted with him, and to insist she didn't have a shred of interest in him—but the words wouldn't leave her mouth.
Because she had, in fact, been making eyes at him.
Please, show some interest in this poor, pitiful heroine! I'm the one you're supposed to want! Come here and say you'll buy me everything from here to there!—that was more or less the look she'd been throwing him at every available opportunity.
And that wasn't all. She'd had him tailed to map out his movements, then engineered one "chance" encounter after another to manufacture points of contact between them.
Just thinking about how all that effort must have looked to a man transmigrated into a game made her want to die of mortification on the spot.
Then, like a struck flint, a thought flashed through her: either way, she had to make this man into the male lead and reach her own ending.
An adventure romance, presumably—two people weathering danger and hardship together until trust deepens into love, something like that. She'd never so much as slain a monster in her life.
A headache came crashing in. Regret crashed in with it—she never could have predicted things would unfold this way, and she'd transmigrated hopelessly unprepared.
She'd assumed that if she revealed she was a transmigrator too and proposed they cooperate to build a sweet, lovey-dovey ending together, the man would happily accept.
Instead, she now found herself facing a situation that would require combat—something she'd never once done, either before her transmigration or after. Or, well, before this one.
Unable to wait out Natalie's lip-biting agonizing any longer, the man rose from his seat as if to cut the meeting short.
"If your business is concluded, I'll be going. I'm on my way to interview party members for a raid—ahem. Combat personnel, I mean."
Before Natalie could get a word out, he gave a shallow nod, then turned and made for the door with not a trace of hesitation.
Natalie grabbed his arm in desperation, grinding her teeth as she spoke.
"I'll do it. That thing."
"Do what, exactly?"
"A party member—no, a combatant. I'll do it. I may not look it, but I'm a fairly accomplished mage."
Panic made her speak faster than usual.
She hated being reduced to clinging to this man, but it was the only option she could think of on the spot.
"Hm. As it happens, we are recruiting a mage, but…"
Hearing the connector that all but promised a refusal on the other end, Natalie hurriedly cut him off mid-sentence. She needed to showcase an ability that would make anyone's jaw drop—especially backed by a transmigrator's special privileges, making her second to none.
"I'm devoted to my research at the moment, but I'm attribute-less, which means I can cast a whole range of offensive spells. Any mage applying for a combat position would be, what, fourth or fifth circle at best? I'm on the verge of seventh circle, so I can guarantee attack power far beyond the average. And as befits a transmigrator, my growth rate is frankly absurd."
"Hmm."
Despite her impressive résumé, the man hummed noncommittally, as though the decision were a difficult one.
Natalie hastily piled on more.
"I can handle basic barrier spells, scouting magic, healing magic—all of it. I don't need wages or anything. All I want is for you to stay with me until the ending—"
But the man was more resolute than she'd expected.
He shook his head briefly, as though he'd weighed it every which way and the answer was still no, then spoke in a voice that went beyond firm and landed squarely on final.
"I'm sorry, but I have no intention of putting a woman in my party."
"No, wait just a—"
As Natalie opened her mouth to object, the man curled the corner of his lips into something like a sneer and finished for her.
"And let me say this with absolute certainty: I will never, under any circumstances, be making a romantic ending with you. Good day."
Natalie stared blankly at the parlor door as it slammed shut, and made herself a promise.
She was going to drag that man's genre out of game-transmigration territory and turn it into a romance fantasy if it killed her.