Switching to a Reverse Harem, But the Male Lead Changed the Genre

She was so thoroughly absorbed in her own little calculations that she failed to notice McLane occasionally drifting past the carriage to peer in at her with a puzzled look — or to register that the motion sickness which had plagued her so wretchedly on the first day had vanished as though it had never been.

When, half a day later, they finally pulled into the midpoint stop, Bertel — who had ridden out ahead of them — was there waiting at the entrance to the territory. And the moment Natalie finally looked up to check what hovered above his head, her mouth dropped open in astonishment and refused to close.

"Good heavens!"

Of everyone whose favorability Natalie had checked so far, Bertel was showing the highest number yet. At the gasp that escaped her before she could stop it, Bertel asked in a puzzled voice.

"Is... something the matter, Miss Pereira...?"

"Oh, it's nothing! I was only thinking you must have had a hard time of it — heading out ahead of us and rushing about to sort everything out."

She scrambled to arrange her features, though concealing every trace of her surprise proved no easy feat.

"Oh, it was no trouble at all... It was nothing, truly. It's only what I ought to do, after all."

At that, Bertel smiled sheepishly and scratched the back of his head. In the process, the tips of his ears, freshly exposed, seemed to have gone a faint shade of red.

At the very same moment, the favorability message hovering above his head flickered and refreshed itself.

Having confirmed the change, Natalie pretended to smile bashfully, lifting both hands to cover her mouth — and to hide the jaw that had swung clean open.

What was more, this man's single-gain increase was larger than anyone else's she had seen. And all it had taken was a few flattering pleasantries that amounted to little more than social ritual.

At this rate, it seemed she might actually manage to bring Bertel's favorability toward her all the way to 100% before the expedition even ended. In one stroke, the plans she had spent the entire half day calculating became meaningless.

So then — should she try capturing Bertel first?

Once you come to know a thing, you begin to see it — and what you see then will not be as it was before. Wasn't that how the old saying went?

Bertel's good looks, which she had never paid the slightest attention to before, now registered with her anew. The brown hair she had thought of as merely unremarkable shone lustrous in the sunlight, and beneath his neat, even brows, a pair of careful, keen-looking grey eyes glinted.

Grey eyes, no less — wise characters did so often come equipped with grey eyes, now that she thought about it.

He gave off the air of a cautious, earnest type as well. Just look at those eyes of his, lost in some quiet contemplation. From the abundance of his lashes down to a mouth pressed stubbornly closed and yet somehow lending his face a softness — the longer she studied him, the more nothing about him seemed lacking.

He wasn't the type whose beauty leapt out at you the way McLane's or Orlando's did, but he might be called the sort who grew more trustworthy with every glance.

Coming to think of it now, she liked, too, that despite carrying favorability this high, he had never once flaunted it and had shown only a discreet warmth instead. Surely that was him acting with such deliberation precisely so that she wouldn't feel some needless sense of burden. He was, unmistakably, the type to look after the person across from him quietly, without ever making a show of it.

Perhaps she had spent just a bit too long gazing at Bertel so fondly.

Someone's ill-tempered voice barged in, severing Bertel's gaze from hers.

"Bertel! What are you standing around for! Get us to the lodgings, and be quick about it!"

The voice, thick with what could only be anger, belonged — as ever — to McLane.

Why has that man been wound so tight ever since we set out?

Could it be he took a dislike to whatever the village chief sent him off with?

But unfortunately, Natalie — the very person who had supplied the cause of his sour mood — never managed to puzzle out what lay behind his change of temper. She was far too busy weighing and re-weighing the abundance of choices spread out right before her eyes.

"Yes! Understood, Captain! Then I'll take my leave for now, Miss Pereira."

With a fond gaze fixed on Bertel as he bowed and turned away, Natalie climbed back into the carriage as well.

Measured by his current favorability, or by the size of a single jump, Bertel had to be ranked her first-priority male lead candidate. That said, entirely writing off the others was also rather a problem.

Yet the brief elation she had felt sank slowly, the more she turned it over in her mind. It ought to have been a relief — a thing to celebrate, even, with her options for escape multiplying — and yet somehow, as time wore on, she found it hard to shake a nagging, faintly queasy feeling.

The sense of having overlooked something. The doubt of whether escaping this world could truly be this easy, this painless. And — different in substance, but needling all the same — a pointless guilt over whether she really should be letting go so readily of McLane, her one-time favorite male lead of all. All of it came pricking at a corner of her heart once more.

The lodgings Bertel had procured were a small inn with a dining hall on the ground floor. As it wasn't exactly a season when outsiders came pouring into the territory, each of them was granted a room to themselves.

Coming downstairs for the evening meal, Natalie caught McLane hurriedly stepping out of the inn, and asked Orlando about it.

"Where's the Captain off to?"

"Ah, he said he had somewhere he needed to drop by, and stepped out for a time."

At Orlando's answer, Natalie gave an ahh of understanding and nodded. Most likely he'd gone to pick up another quest, she figured.

"Has something else come up, then?"

"No, nothing like that. Apparently the lord of this land somehow found out we had arrived — again — and asked to meet with him briefly."

At Orlando's answer, Natalie pulled a face of faint surprise.

"Oh — is the expedition's route confidential, then?"

"No, nothing of the sort. It's just that our itinerary is tight, and as I mentioned before, whenever we stop in at a territory we quite often end up tangled in some tiresome business or other."

"Ah... so this time, too...?"

"Well, fortunately, it seems there's no separate commission this time around. I'm told the lord has something he wishes to hand our Captain in person."

"Something he wishes to hand over?"

"We swept out the goblins on the road here, did we not? Apparently the village that was attacked falls under this territory's jurisdiction."

"Aha!"

Only now fully grasping the reason for his outing, Natalie clapped her hands together with a snap and nodded. He had gone to collect a quest reward. Since the chief had pressed something into his hands before their departure, she had naturally assumed that had been the reward for the goblin extermination — but it seemed that hadn't been it at all.

Whatever the lord hands over is bound to be the rarer prize, I suppose. I wonder — could it be some artifact or other?

Later, once I'm on somewhat easier terms with him, I'll have to probe, ever so casually, what sort of reward he ended up with.

In the meantime, Bertel — who had reached the territory first and gathered word of this and that — continued with his kindly explanation.

"From what I hear, the village draws a fairly substantial income from its herb cultivation, so the taxes it paid to the territory were apparently considerable as well. Under the circumstances, it would have been difficult for the lord to feign ignorance and simply let the matter pass."

"I suppose that would be so."

"Besides, our Captain is a man of no small renown, is he not? There is his connection with His Majesty the Emperor, the standing of House Lindhardt — and atop it all, the fame he carries as the foremost hero of the Empire."

"True enough, and it's why the rest of us follow him the way we do."

"Less for his fame than his strength. The Captain is a hero in the truest sense of the word."

As the other members each added a remark of their own, the warm, lively dinner wound to a close.

"My, it's gotten quite late. Everyone rest well."

But it was only once the meal was over and she had gone up to her room that the real business began.

Her plan — to stretch out comfortably in bed and take her time, step by careful step, weighing which option to choose — had been all but impossible from the start. Because the men came knocking at her door in hopes of courting her favor, not a moment alone remained to her.

The first to rap on her door was, of all people, Jorel Hato.

Knock, knock, knock. At the cautious sound she opened the door, and there stood Jorel Hato, the rims of his ears tinged faintly pink.

He was a man graver and more reticent even than Bertel — reticent to the point that one might take him for indifferent — and never in her wildest dreams had she imagined he would come calling on her.

"Oh my. Sir Hato. What brings you here...?"

"I... that is... while scouting the area this afternoon, I found something."

"You found something?"

"Yes, this here. If I'm not mistaken, this is used as a potion ingredient..."

"Good heavens! Why, it's a Veramot seed! These are truly difficult to come by — however did you manage to find one?"

"As it happens, a Veramot habitat lies close along the route we're taking. I kept a careful watch while scouting, and when I spotted one, I brought it back at once."

"You're truly remarkable!"

Even as she marveled aloud, her mind was already running busily through its calculations.