A brilliant gold filled my vision. Blond hair, golden eyes, a man built gentle and solid all at once. He had the face of a righteous hero by anyone’s reckoning, and he was shoving me up against the wall.
The instant my back met cold stone, gooseflesh crawled up my spine. Those golden eyes, which had only ever been mild, were holding me with heat. They were the eyes of a madman. The eyes of someone who sees nothing else in the world and throws himself forward regardless of fire or flood. Meeting that half-unhinged stare head-on was frightening enough to make my skin crawl.
“Th-Theo...? What are you talking about?”
I forced a harmless smile and called the name of the man in front of me. Theo, that is.
But my winning smile seemed to have had the opposite effect. The hand gripping my shoulder tightened. At this rate my shoulder was going to snap.
A grim voice came out of his mouth, nothing like his usual bright tone.
“Rihen. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“F-Find out what?”
“You’ve been doing shameful things every night behind my back. Things you couldn’t let me notice.”
I froze on the spot.
Don’t tell me he found out.
Has he figured out that I’m the notorious Thirteenth Corps Commander of the demons? Did he catch on that Rihen is a fake name I threw out at random, too?
I was sure I’d hidden it well. Where on earth did I slip up?
Question marks trailed one after another. So many of them pressed down on my throat that I could hardly breathe.
No, the problem started with the appearance of this character I’d possessed, “Shane,” in the first place.
Shane was what people call a slit-eyed character. The type saddled with the cliché of being a traitor, or a villain hiding his true identity. And sure enough, in the original game he was a demon corps commander and a spy who played at being a decent human being.
Narrow eyes, eerie blood-colored irises, ashen hair like the ruins left behind after everything’s burned down. Add the smirk he wore at every opportunity. Objectively a handsome face, and still an ominous impression that somehow made you not want to get any closer.
And I, wearing that face, crept around every night with my footsteps muffled. Whenever Theo asked where I’d been, I always brushed him off with a that’s not your concern. So how suspicious must I have looked to him?
I had to weigh every single word. Right now one wrong sentence would decide whether I lived or died. If I let my mouth run, our hero, whose memories might be incomplete but whose righteous nature was fully intact, might take my head off in a single stroke.
I forced my hammering heart to settle and put my mind to work.
Should I just confess?
Tell him he’s right.
That by day I played the guardian who read you books, taught you swordsmanship, showed you the world... and by night I went out and committed every kind of evil there is.
That I smashed the statue of light, set fire to temples, destroyed the holy knights’ weapons depot, and committed more atrocities than I could count.
But that all of it was for you, and for this world.
If I told you that... would you forgive me?
One day, I was transmigrated into an RPG called How to Save the World. On the side of evil, no less.
It was a game where you could pick one of two factions, good or evil. I’d played the good alignment over five hundred times, but I’d only tried evil once.
Committing murder, arson, and human trafficking for the sake of racking up infamy points didn’t feel good, game or not. On top of that, I couldn’t stand the idea of ruining a world I’d saved hundreds of times, this time as the villain.
So I quit partway through and went to sleep. And when I opened my eyes, I’d become “Shane,” the character I’d used on that evil-faction run.
The game’s basic system hadn’t changed. Clear a quest and you got renown points on the good side, infamy points on the evil side. With those points you could learn new skills, raise your stats, and buy rare items that couldn’t be made by human hands.
And you could also raise the stats of whichever character you’d set as your “companion.”
I might have possessed a figure from the evil faction, but I loved this world. I wanted to save it. So I set “Theo,” my favorite character from all those good-alignment runs, as my companion. Theo was the linchpin in resealing the Demon King, and the hero of this nation.
If I gathered infamy points to raise his stats and put the best skills in his hands. If I raised him into the strongest hero, one who could stand against the Demon King... then even stuck in a villain’s body, I could save this world. The process might be a little wrong, but I was confident I could make the result as good as anyone’s.
And I kept to my own lines. I carried out the evil quests in whatever way cut down on pointless slaughter. The one standard I never abandoned was that I wouldn’t sacrifice innocents.
To a righteous hero like Theo, all of that might sound like nothing but a coward’s excuse, though.
I let out a deep sigh and looked Theo straight in the eye.
“I’m sorry. But there’s a reason for all of this...”
“Of course there’s a reason.”
Theo said it with a trembling voice.
“Raising someone like me properly, someone who’d lost his memories and his abilities, must have taken a lot of money. But even so, selling your body every night is-”
“...Huh?”
It hit me a beat too late that something was off. My identity hadn’t been exposed at all. Instead, I was being wildly, wildly misunderstood.
Why does this kid think I’m the family breadwinner who built up the household with OnlyFans? The unfairness of it pushed my voice up on its own.
“What are you talking about? Selling my body? Why would I do that?”
Even after the words were out, my chest stayed tight. This wasn’t a misunderstanding, it was a delusion that turned a person into an entirely different species of human being. Me, out there breaking my back every night to save the world, recast as a whore trading on a pretty face. How could this be happening? But Theo didn’t back down. Those golden eyes narrowed.
“Are you still denying it? I clearly saw Rihen walk into a brothel last night.”
He saw that. My breath caught. I pulled myself together and spoke with confidence.
“I didn’t go there to sell my body. I went because I had something else to do.”
It was the truth. My assassination target just happened to be a regular at that brothel. I’d only slipped inside to clear an assassination quest. Not that I could come out and say so.
Theo seemed to think I was lying. He laid out one small detail after another.
“You were wearing different clothes going in and coming out. And you reeked of that strong perfume they say the working boys use.”
My mind went blank. The clothes had changed because too much blood had splattered on me during the kill. I couldn’t very well walk out in bloodstained clothes, so I’d thrown on a courtesan’s outfit in a hurry. The smell of blood clinging to my skin had bothered me, so I’d doused myself with perfume from the drawer. I never imagined it would come back to me like this.
I’d been misunderstood far too thoroughly. There was exactly one way to clear this misunderstanding up: to confess that I hadn’t been selling my body every night, but had been committing murder and arson and every manner of atrocity as the demon army’s infamous corps commander and spy.
Given time to think it over I might have come up with something more convincing, but for me right now, with my mind gone blank, it amounted to having only two options.
Become a tragic whore, or be exposed as the worst demon corps commander alive, a man without blood or tears.
Swallowing my tears, I chose the former.
“So you found out...”
I hung my head low. As if I couldn’t bear how pathetic I was, I murmured with a hollow laugh.
“I knew it was something I shouldn’t be doing. That’s why I meant to hide it to the very end.”
I was silent a moment, then added in a low, sunken voice.
“I’m sorry. For being this kind of guardian...”
Theo pressed his body more firmly against mine. His face was close enough that his breath touched me. Those golden eyes were fixed on me as though to dissect me.
“I’ll buy.”
“What?”
“Tonight, I’m saying I’ll buy Rihen.”
I doubted my own ears. I couldn’t understand what this brat was babbling about, and I didn’t want to. Theo pressed his lips right up against my ear and whispered like he was chewing the words.
“If it’s a body you sell to just anyone for money, then you can sell it to me for one day, can’t you? As for the money... I’ll come up with enough that Rihen won’t feel shortchanged.”
A siren went off in my head. This was an emergency. I tried to keep a composed face, but there was nothing to be done about the cold sweat beading on my forehead.
Where in the world did my life get so thoroughly tangled up?
Right. The start of all of it was...
...the moment I possessed the body of the game character “Shane.”
