Chapter 3 : Chapter 3
Chapter 03: Book One
Chapter 01. So This Was the Great World of Galgames?
—Do you want to be popular?
Of course I do.
—Do you want a life like the protagonist’s?
What kind of stupid question is that? Does anyone not?
—Do you want to experience a story wrapped at every moment in youth and romance?
The kind of story you get in Senren O Hana?
—Do you want to be surrounded on all sides by beautiful girls of every possible archetype, each one different from the last?
Yes. Very much yes.
—Good. Then open your eyes.
Open my eyes?
—Oh, right.
—Do not forget her.
Her? Who is she...? Ugh, why is it... so cold, and I cannot breathe—w-what is going on...!?
“Pblblbl!?”
A sound like a crab drowning in a bog wriggled out of Chang Rong’s mouth, only to be frozen solid at once by the bitter, piercing cold.
“Mmph—mmmmmph!!??”
He had no idea what was happening. His brain, starved of oxygen, had no spare room left to think. All Chang Rong could do was passively receive, in a roller-coaster rush, one signal after another.
Pain kept coming from his skin, impossible to tell whether it was the agony of burning or freezing.
Pain came from deep inside his scalp, sickening, as though needles were punching through it.
Pain came from his lungs as they shrank, twisted, convulsed, and tore beneath the strain of suffocation.
Pain came from the left side of his chest with every beat of his heart, as though it were being crushed to pieces and reassembled over and over in a cycle without end.
Damn it—even if you tied the Ruined King and Kaneki Ken together and threw in Eren as a bonus, they still would not hurt as much as he did right now!
In the brief gaps between those endless waves of pain battering his nerves, scattered flashbacks and a temporary return of reason let Chang Rong piece together at least a little of his current situation.
—My name is Chang Rong. I am the sort of low-polygon student you could find anywhere. Last night, after wearing myself out solving practice problems, I was idly playing on my phone and accidentally triggered one of those damned shake-to-open ads. Then a bizarre message popped up asking whether I wanted to transmigrate to another world and become the male lead of a romantic harem.
I tapped yes half as a joke, and then, and then—
Then I got stuffed inside this block of ice.
“Mmmmmmph!!!!”
Chang Rong tried to call for help again. With his whole body frozen solid, the only thing he could still move was probably his vocal cords.
But if you were trapped inside a block of ice screaming for help, could anyone even hear you?
What kind of dogshit transmigration system was this? Even a cheap, crudely made fangame knew enough to stop the player from clipping into a wall. And this thing had dropped him directly into a block of ice the instant he spawned—what the hell was that supposed to accomplish?
“Mmph—cough, cough...!!”
No, at this rate he would suffocate before he ever froze to death...
His eyes, slowly losing focus from lack of oxygen, managed to catch sight of something through the ice just before darkness swallowed everything. It looked like... a blue blob, maybe.
“Hanna, Hanna~ I think the corpse inside this ice block just blinked!”
“Eek!? W-what? Do not make such a horrible joke!”
Voices? Damn it, he could not hear clearly, and he could not see clearly either...
It seemed that other people had come to stand in front of him. Nearly unconscious, Chang Rong could only force his mouth open again and desperately try to make a sound.
“Waaah! It really is blinking, and it opened its mouth too!”
“Hmph, I told you my observational skills as a great detective would not be wrong. In any case, let us get him out first~”
“Eh!? Setting aside whether it might be a crazed witch already, how are we supposed to get him out through ice this thick—”
“Hanna Demolition Punch!”
Thud!
A dull impact rang through the ice and reached Chang Rong’s ears.
He could just barely make out the outline of a person. Though he very much wanted to complain, Punching ice with your fist? What are you, some kind of gorilla?, he no longer had even that much strength left...
Crack crack crack crack crack crack—
No, wait. What was that constant cracking sound...?
Boom!!
Before he could react—or rather, before he had the energy to analyze what was happening—the next second brought an enormous crashing sound, and Chang Rong tumbled out of his frozen coffin.
He landed with a thump on something much softer and warmer than the ice, and somewhere in the haze he thought he caught the scent of apples.
She... really smashed it open? What did that even mean...?
He wanted to lift his head and look at the superhuman currently holding him, the one who had just blown apart a giant block of ice with a single punch. But at that very moment, both his body and his mind reached their limit. Boundless darkness wrapped around him and devoured him whole, dragging him down once more into the abyss of unconsciousness.
——————
【My real hobbies are gaming and watching anime. The football and music thing is just me trying to look cool so it is easier to raise the other girls’ affection. By the way, OO, what is your hobby?】
【Counting dust. Counting ants.】
【How should I put it... that sounds, uh, very Zen.】
【Also—killing humans.】
【......】
【Rong, I will kill everyone.】
【......】
【That was the “you poor idiot” look, was it not? I could tell this time.】
【Do not worry. Even if OO has chuunibyou, I will still be the same as ever—ow ow ow, aghhh! Do not suddenly kick me in the shin!?】
——————
“Ugh... urk...”
Chang Rong opened his eyes as though he had downed an entire barrel of liquor, blissfully spent the night hugging a roadside utility pole, and then risen the next morning fresh and clear-headed to greet the sun.
Thank Heaven. This time his respawn point was not inside a block of ice. The sensation beneath his back was that of a soft, warm mattress, and from the corner of his vision he could feel the bright noonday sunlight.
There was a faint, reassuring fragrance in the air, like flowers, mixed with the smell of disinfectant and medicine.
—An unfamiliar ceiling. Was this some kind of infirmary?
“Ah, you are awake!”
A timid yet happy, soft little voice broke into Chang Rong’s thoughts.
He turned toward the sound and saw a girl leaning over the bedside. She wore a black-and-white long dress with cute flower petals stitched into the sleeves. Her short hair faded from pale pink into white, she wore a soft black cap, and her eyes were pink as well.
“......”
“Um, are you all right?”
Noticing his dazed expression, the pink-and-white-haired girl looked at him with concern.
“Oh—no, I am fine. Well, not exactly fine. My head hurts as though someone smashed it from behind with a block of ice... but all in all, it is probably nothing serious.”
Chang Rong immediately pulled himself together, smiled at the girl, and rubbed his head, all while doing his absolute best to stop the corners of his mouth from shooting upward like an AK rifle.
—Heh, hehehe... hehehehe... It worked! It worked! By Heaven, I actually made it!
Though the spawn point had been a malicious prank, he really had transmigrated into a world full of beautiful girls!!!
Chang Rong laughed inwardly, laughed with pure delight, laughed with the carefree abandon of someone putting on brand-new underwear for the New Year.
Just from the girl before him—so cute it was practically illegal, soft and puppy-like—Chang Rong was already able to make the sort of professional judgment any commentator worthy of the name would make:
this was absolutely a galgame world, the sort of place where sweet, soft, absurdly adorable girls of every hair color and every archetype were everywhere, and every last one of them would cozy up to him, raise their affection, and eventually, once enough emotions had built up, do something reckless from which there was no turning back and unlock special CGs!
“Let me ask you something first. Is this some remote place full of mysterious girls with mysterious powers and mysterious happenings?”
To confirm his suspicions, Chang Rong asked the girl before him.
“Eh? Um... yes... maybe... I suppose it is?”
The pink-haired girl hesitated, then nodded.
—YES!!
“And do unexpected, miraculous things happen here all the time? The kind that make everyone’s hearts race?”
“Well... although everyone is doing their best to avoid that, if what that owl said is true... then perhaps they definitely will happen—but no, no, that will not do. I have to believe in everyone!”
The pink-haired girl answered heavily, then shook her head hard as though trying to rally herself.
—That settled it! Affection events everywhere, beautiful girls everywhere, strange adventures everywhere. This was absolutely one of those romance-game worlds where beautiful girls were walking around in droves!
I am very sorry, O ignorant and short-sighted insect that I was, for insulting the gods before. I will absolutely seize this chance you have given me and live a glorious youth-romance-harem life in another world!
It had to be so!
Chapter 02. You Are Saying I Am Supposed to Romance the Corpse in Front of Me?
“I think I more or less understand the situation now, so what are we supposed to do next, Miss?”
The flood of good news had made Chang Rong’s head hurt a little less. With an energetic grunt, he sat up on the bed and asked the pink-haired girl in front of him how he was supposed to trigger the new player affection tutorial.
“Since you are awake now... the first thing to do is tell everyone. It is really a good thing this place has an infirmary. I never thought it would be used so often. First Mage-chan, then An’an-chan, and now you, Chang Rong-kun—ah, um, you are Chang Rong-kun, right? That is what Xueli-chan found in the records. My name is Yingyu Emma. Like you, I am also a witch candidate imprisoned here, though I still do not know what my magic is exactly. Hehe...”
The pink-haired girl answered in a slightly troubled tone, but she quickly forced herself to perk up, tilted her head, and introduced herself to Chang Rong with a smile, awkward but sincere.
“Just call me Chang Rong, Emma. There is also something I am curious about.”
Smiling in return, Chang Rong greeted Yingyu Emma, then at once pressed her on the part of her words that had caught his attention most.
“What exactly do you mean by 【witch candidate】 and 【imprisoned】?”
“Eh? You do not know those things, Chang Rong-kun? But Xueli-chan said you were one of the prisoners from some previous batch...”
—What was this? This was not a good development.
Looking at the troubled, confused expression on Yingyu Emma’s face, Chang Rong’s heart skipped a beat. He suddenly felt an extremely, extremely, extremely bad sense of déjà vu.
“Well, the truth is, I am not entirely clear on the details either—”
“Aaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!???”
Emma’s words were cut off by an ear-piercing scream.
“Urk!?”
“It came from downstairs?”
Emma instinctively shrank in on herself, while Chang Rong immediately judged from the direction of the sound that it had come from some room below their feet.
“There are only the cells and the Punishment Room downstairs. C-could it be...?”
Terror spread across Emma’s face. She seemed to be desperately rejecting some thought in her mind.
“I-I have to go and look! Sorry, Chang Rong-kun, I—”
“I am coming too.”
Using the hospital bed for support, Chang Rong slowly rose to his feet. His whole body hurt like hell, and his head still throbbed with a nail-driven, nauseating pain, but something he could not put into words was telling him that this was something he had to face, something he had to get used to.
Or rather... something he was already used to?
“Y-yes!”
Emma nodded at him, forcing a faint smile onto her pale face.
The two of them left the infirmary, passed several rooms decorated like chambers in some aristocratic European castle, and followed the stairs down to what Emma had called the “underground cells.”
This was probably the basement level. The luxurious old-fashioned décor had vanished entirely.
All that remained was a long corridor whose end could be seen at a glance, lined with crumbling masonry. One wall was packed with rusted pipes with the paint peeling away, while chains of unknown purpose hung down from an arched stone ceiling.
On the opposite side of the corridor were dim rooms large enough for two people to live in.
Every one of them was fitted with heavy iron bars at the entrance.
If one put aside the rather painful fact that these cells were more livable than quite a few student dormitories, then yes—the place was exactly what the words implied: an old-fashioned prison.
Several people had already gathered at the entrance to one of the rooms halfway down the cell block. Chang Rong took a rough look. Like Yingyu Emma at his side, they were all school-age girls, though each was dressed in a completely different style. They were probably the people Emma had called 【witch candidates】.
“Hanna!”
Emma seemed to recognize one of the girls squeezed near the doorway, and the short blonde girl in the green-toned Lolita dress with the absurdly long twin-tails immediately answered.
“Emma! Huh, so that scary one woke up after all—n-no, that is not the point right now! Meruru, Meruru she...!”
The girl called Hanna looked at Chang Rong in surprise, but immediately turned her gaze back toward the cell, face pale green as she covered her mouth.
“No... no way... no, this cannot be...”
Her worst guess having become reality, Yingyu Emma pressed both hands to her lips as well and walked over to the cell, all color drained from her face.
—Could this development really be... no, maybe it was just some kind of prank show setup.
Even after realizing what it probably meant, Chang Rong clung to the very last shred of hope, arguing with himself all the while as he followed Emma to the cell.
The sharp stink of paint rushed straight into his nose, and mixed with it was another smell impossible to miss—the abrupt metallic scent of rust: blood.
Looking through the bars into the room, Chang Rong’s last scrap of wishful thinking shattered completely.
Inside the cell was a room inexplicably splashed all over with white paint, and on the floor lay two female bodies.
The girl in the white nun’s habit, closer to the inner side of the room, lay sprawled on the ground.
The front of her chest was covered in ragged, shredded wounds. Blood had burst from them in countless sprays, turning into butterflies that flapped through the air together with bits and scraps of viscera.
There was no mosaic, no artistic softening, no cognitive filter...
No—those crimson blood-butterflies did seem to be trying to conceal something, but the effect was only to deepen the unreality of it all, and the warped terror.
“Urgh—bleeghhh...!!!!”
He did not even have the strength left to look at the other body. Chang Rong doubled over and retched.
Bzzzt! Bzzzt!
A strange vibration came from his pocket. Still gagging, Chang Rong fumbled into it and pulled out a phone that he had no memory of ever putting on himself.
There was no password, no fingerprint lock. He merely tapped the screen twice at random, and it lit up. On the glass screen appeared a large blue-and-white iron bucket wearing a round hat.
A speech bubble popped up from the bucket:
【Hii~~ dear Master, this is your very own super☆practical love system, YUKI-chan! This system exists to help Master spend a period of romantic-story time overflowing every second with joy, noise, sexy moments, steamy moments, shameless moments, and the sour stink of youth! So from here on out, please make abundant use of this system and strive to set foot as soon as possible upon the scoundrel route where you hold beauties in both arms and collect the entire harem. Let us begin by conquering the girl right in front of you! As long as you conquer her, Master can unlock Administrator Mode in one step!】
...The girl right in front of him?
Chang Rong looked at the corpse in front of him, looked at the screen, then looked back at the corpse. In the end, he silently turned the phone screen off.
To my dearest God—
Where exactly have you sent me?
This was not a galgame at all. This was a damn Danganronpa world!!!!
——————
At what moment did people feel the deepest regret?
It was not when you wanted to perform Haruhikage and realized the keyboardist was no longer by your side, leaving you unable even to say onegai.
It was when you had finally managed to obtain a romance system, only to charge headfirst into a death-game script—at which point the system suddenly came online and enthusiastically urged you to romance the corpse in front of you.
Chapter 03. Well, Well, the Veteran Has Arrived
The chaos unexpectedly did not last long. After the first burst of panic and confusion, the strangely dressed girls immediately began to act. By contrast, it was Chang Rong, standing there dumbly in place, who now seemed out of step with everyone else.
“Shiro, pull yourself together!”
The first to gather her courage and enter the cell was a black-haired, purple-eyed girl in a Japanese-style kimono patterned in white, violet, and black.
These girls clearly already knew one another, or at the very least knew each other’s names.
That only made Chang Rong’s own alien presence stand out all the more.
Calling out to her by name, the kimono-clad girl helped up the “other corpse” lying on the ground. Only then did Chang Rong realize that the girl in the black-and-red school-uniform-style dress lying beside the nun’s body was not dead at all. She was only just waking up from unconsciousness.
“Ugh... what happened...? Ah!?”
The girl called “Shiro,” the number one suspect, rubbed the back of her head as she was helped upright. The instant she saw the murder scene before her, she too let out a short cry of alarm.
But anyone who saw her at that moment—splattered with blood and white paint, her clothes a total mess—would likely assume she was only trying to feign innocence.
“Y-you really are the witch after all! You actually killed her just like that! Though I suppose this does make things simpler...”
A girl in the crowd wearing cat-ear-shaped headphones pointed at Shiro and shouted the accusation.
“...A witch? What kind of joke are you making? I am not a witch.”
Faced with that sudden accusation, the suspect girl suppressed her confusion and panic, and instead answered with an expression almost like hatred.
“Hah? You killed someone and still want to deny it? That look on your face says you want to kill me too. Your true colors are completely showing!”
“C-calm down, Coco... Besides, the one standing next to Emma—could that be the ‘senior’ that Xueli and Hanna found underground earlier?”
The orange-haired girl with the cat-ear headphones hissed at the black-haired suspect, only to be frantically stopped by the scantily dressed blonde girl beside her, who looked like a full-fledged gyaru.
The blonde gyaru noticed Chang Rong standing beside Yingyu Emma, having somehow blended himself into the crowd, and immediately tossed the topic at him as though he were the cure to the current situation.
At once, every girl present turned to look at the boy who had appeared here for no obvious reason, abrupt and glaringly out of place in every respect—most especially his gender.
“Uh, what? A senior?”
Chang Rong blinked, completely at sea.
—What senior? Come to think of it, Emma mentioned back in the infirmary that I was from some “previous batch.” In other words, to them, I am some kind of veteran?
But that experience had nothing to do with the current him. It belonged to “someone else.”
The conversational opening the blonde girl had offered was one he had no way to take. The downside of having the character-creation step skip the opening background setting was now on full display. It almost felt as though his entire life had been skipped right along with it.
“Beep beep beep—ah, I have received a report. So a deeply regrettable murder really has occurred. The victim is—wait, what in the world is going on here...? Mm. In any case, everyone is to gather in the reception room immediately. Anyone who resists will be executed. My workload is already guaranteed to exceed its limit today, so for the sake of my sleep quality, I ask that none of you make extra trouble for me.”
A display screen embedded in the wall suddenly lit up. A doll-like owl appeared on it, and its announcement briefly diverted everyone’s attention from Chang Rong and returned it to the murder in front of them.
“Shiro killed Meruru...? Impossible. Shiro would never do something like that! But...”
“Emma? Are you all right?”
Chang Rong noticed that Yingyu Emma was acting oddly. She had been the first person he met after arriving on this werewolf-game stage, and combined with the soft, pitiful impression she gave off, it made him instinctively want to look after her a little more.
“Eh? Chang Rong-kun, um... I am fine. In any case, let us head to the reception room first.”
Emma forced a smile, waved her hand, and went with the others. But her gaze remained fixed the whole time on the suspect girl in the distance.
Under normal circumstances, Chang Rong would already have been grinning and thinking, Ohoho, I smell gossip.
But right now, the stinging blend of paint and blood still hanging in the air, the grotesque state of the corpse burned into his mind, and the wary, peculiar looks the other girls kept casting his way left him no leisure to care about anyone else’s business.
This was a death-game world where people really did die. No—it was a world where people had already started dying. Better put away those unrealistic fantasies.
After all, everyone knew that when you went around collecting special CGs, sometimes instead of getting the max-affection event, you accidentally wound up collecting the elimination screen.
———Reception Room———
Chang Rong followed the others upstairs into a drawing room. The room was still decorated in that same luxuriously archaic style, the only thing even faintly connected to modern technology being the television on the table. On the other hand, bizarre things that modern technology could not explain were much easier to find.
For example, the owl that until a moment ago had only appeared on the screen was now there speaking in person. And blocking the entrance to the reception room was a grotesque twisted being nearly three meters tall, holding a gigantic scythe like a guardian deity at the gate.
These things were themselves the greatest abnormalities. Their very existence was a direct mockery of “reality.” Yet judging from the calm reactions of the girls, they had already seen and accepted such supernatural things.
The thing at the door was probably this prison’s equivalent of a guard. Just looking at it made one feel it was almost impossible to resist. If he rashly made a move, there was only one outcome.
Nine-one.
That is to say, he would go from one person to nine pieces in one second.
Honestly, werewolf games were bad enough already. What kind of monstrosity was a supernatural werewolf game?
Originally, Chang Rong had wanted to ask Emma what exactly the word “witch” meant in this place. But now it seemed that perhaps he only needed to take the term literally.
“......” “......”
—Why is that guard staring at me the whole time!? I am just a harmless ordinary student who wandered into the wrong timeline!
The fixed gaze of the guard made Chang Rong’s skin crawl, and he could only force himself to turn his attention back to the owl in the reception room.
—In any case, all I can do for now is wait and see. My head still hurts so much...
The stabbing pain that had been with him ever since he awoke in the infirmary had not faded. Even now, it was interfering with him.
He had originally wanted to gather as much information as possible during this emergency meeting, but his brain was behaving like some secondhand, outdated computer that kept freezing up. In the end, all he could collect were scattered scraps:
This place was Prison Island, a prison specifically used to confine “witch candidates.” They contained them, they failed them, they let them escape.
That owl was the 【Warden】, the familiar of the one managing the prison from behind the scenes, and the being actually responsible for running the prison’s daily operations. It also seemed to hate overtime.
Counting both himself and the victim, there were fourteen “prisoners” on Prison Island.
The murder victim in the nun’s habit seemed to have been the manager of this prison—or at least, that was uncertain.
What sort of final boss just dropped dead for free the moment the story began? Hah. Chang Rong had watched Saw and played Danganronpa before. This was definitely a smoke screen put up by the mastermind, a fake death on Junko’s level, the very pinnacle of mind games.
There was also a setup almost identical to Danganronpa’s: once a murder occurred on Prison Island, the Warden would give everyone time to investigate the scene and gather clues. After the investigation ended, everyone would go to the courtroom and conduct a debate called a 【Witch Trial】 in order to vote on and identify the murderer, who would then be executed by the Warden.
However, before the evidence-gathering phase, there was apparently also a 【preliminary vote】 in which the most-suspected person could be locked up in advance. The girls were currently arguing over who that person should be.
“Why is there even any need to think about it? The witch is obviously her!”
“Do not say that, Zedu Coco! Until we have evidence, we should stop suspecting each other!”
“Shiro would never be the killer!”
“Tch. I do not need your hypocritical act... Yingyu Emma.”
“I cannot wait for the grand investigation~ I am so excited, so thrilled!”
Watching the girls in the distance arguing—some tense, some scatterbrained, some frightened, some angry—Chang Rong, huddled off to one side, felt strangely dazed.
The scene before him was so familiar, and yet like clouds floating in the sky. No matter how hard he tried to think, he could not grasp it.
He rubbed his hair hard, trying to physically squeeze that déjà vu out of his brain—or at least suppress the throbbing pain.
“You look unwell. Is it because of the smell on Noah?”
A familiar scent suddenly slipped into his nose—the smell of the murder scene. No, rather, the smell of spray paint.
In order to avoid being dragged into the center of the conversation and collectively focused down before he even understood what was going on, Chang Rong had deliberately tucked himself away in the least noticeable corner of the reception room. Yet somehow, a girl had now appeared before him.
“Uh...?”
Chang Rong looked up and met her eyes.
How was he supposed to describe the girl in front of him?
She looked like a color palette inflated into a balloon.