I Reincarnated as the Villain in an Eroge, But Before I Realized, I Became a Capture Target
Translator: Reo
Editor: PalenMisha
Read at Watashi wa Sugoi Desu!
Luca POV 11 (Part 1)
In January, I fought Zagan in the dungeon and managed to get his approval without any major problems, and in April, the girls and I faced off against him. In May, Zagan and I had our one-on-one, and at the end of September, I went to pick up his corpse. Then in December, at the dawn of the new year, I defeated the Evil God.
That was how my year went.
It had been a while since I got to the end and defeated the Evil God, and now I found myself standing in the phantom world where the tsuki was located… the real world.
As I didn’t get to this world when I died in the middle of the game, I was pretty sure the condition for seeing it was to defeat the last boss – the Evil God.
The tsuki was as beautiful and mesmerising as always. A sigh naturally escaped my lips.
I was standing in the same place as before, a veranda of some private house.
Thinking about what kind of information I was going to learn this time around, my chest hurt from anxiety. No, it would be fine. I was different from the panicked, uncertain me of the past. I had already reached rock bottom. I’d already accepted reality. That’s why, this time, I’d be able to take it.
“Pardon me,” I said, entering the room, and found the same man sitting in front of the game screen. The game, however, had been stopped mid-battle and the man had taken his hand off the magic device, petting his dog instead.
I watched this happy scene for a bit, then took a deep breath to make sure my heart was truly ready, before reaching out towards the game box. When I touched it, as expected, information began to flow inside my head.
Information about monsters, obtainable weapons, and trap solutions inside the dungeon. Then came stuff like where to go, by what date, and what choices to make in order to win over the capture targets.
Why was I getting this information by touching the box?
I didn’t get it.
Was it because I was this story’s protagonist?
Did my world have a will of its own… Did this game want to tell me something?
I didn’t understand, but for now, it was best to closely examine the new information. Maybe among it, I could find a way to escape from this loop.
I mean, when I thought about it carefully, I had existed in those twenty years before the game started. In other words, maybe there’d be a future beyond this game. Of course, I had no evidence, but it was good to hold onto that hope. Otherwise, I was sure that, in years to come, Zagan would feel sorry for me again.
No matter what it was, if I had some hope, Zagan wouldn’t realise how depressed I was.
That’s why I’d use this information and first conquer the Miranda route. Then in turn Nina, Camilla, Bennett, and Cindy. I should have already cleared the Noel route, so there probably wasn’t any need for me to go through it again.
After getting through those five, I would have finished all the routes.
This game would be perfectly cleared once I filled up the entire gallery. This meant the individual ending for each of the girls and the harem ending.
If I cleared those and filled out the gallery, I’d be able to get my hands on the celebratory ending illustration.
If I cleared it completely, maybe I’d be able to move forward. Maybe there would be a future.
I’m fine, Zagan. I’m definitely ok. So please acknowledge me from now on as well.
How many times have I repeated this year since then?
I was determined to clear the Miranda route, but from the beginning, it didn’t go as well as planned.
Though I invited her to have sex with me, I felt like throwing up when she touched me and couldn’t get an erection. I was worried about it, but it wasn’t like I was impotent, it was just the likability gauge that would go up after we had sex that repulsed me.
It wasn’t until five years later that I was finally able to compartmentalise it.
I drank an aphrodisiac which forced an erection and swallowed down the urge to vomit as I slept with her.
Every time she did or said something that I remembered from the game, my dislike for her grew. I didn’t want to hate her, but in my mind, I could only see her as a puppet.
It was the same for Nina, Camilla, Bennett, and Cindy.
Around fifteen years had probably passed since I set my mind to clearing the game.
I think I did quite a good job at it too, if I do say so myself.
Being the only one who knew this world was fake, being the only one to repeat this never-ending year – how many times did I almost fall apart from loneliness? And even though it was something I had to keep doing in order to hold onto that hope, how painful was it to force myself to sleep with the girls?
I had to keep deceiving them and myself as well. My spirit was exhausted.
It had been a long time since the world had grown dull.
Still, I didn’t fall apart.
Because Zagan was there.
My heart was soothed whenever I met with my idolised hero. I was happy when he told me I put up a good fight—it gave me the strength to move on.
Leaving his corpse out there on its own was inconceivable, so I always came to pick him up. And, from time to time, I’d take him out of the magic bag and look at him while calculating how long I could leave him out so that he wouldn’t start to decompose.
Looking at his corpse and stroking his cold cheek grounded me.
At that point, I’d probably started going crazy. But I couldn’t stop myself. It was because Zagan, whose eyes would never open again, was so serene, so beautiful, it calmed me down.
We’d slept next to each other once in the past, but I didn’t want to do that again. Because for him to sleep next to me, I had to be overcome by despair, and also he would kill me afterward because he felt pity for me.
I wasn’t going to let Zagan kill me over and over again. I never wanted him to dirty his hands like that.
There were some plus sides to the infinitely repeating time. One of which was that I could read books. However, since I could only read between dungeons, training, etc. my knowledge didn’t increase overnight. Still, I genuinely enjoyed reading novels and manga I’d never heard of before, and learning new stuff from reading specialty books in various fields.
Which was why, not once in over twenty loops, did I not befriend Cindy.
The traps and riddles in the star fragment dungeons were randomised, so it was possible to encounter only those I knew how to solve, but in the 3rd dungeon, there’d always be a very specific riddle that I wouldn’t be able to solve without going to the library. It was as if I was being told not to stray too far from the story.
Another thing the loop let me do was obtain weapons inside the dungeons.
The dungeons all started out with great halls that then split into twelve paths you could choose from. For some reason, which path led to what wasn’t part of the information I’d gotten from the real world.
I wouldn’t say that memorising where these paths led was completely useless, but there was always a point in the middle where they converged. For example, the safe space where we’d meet Zagan in the 4th dungeon was always the same place no matter what starting path we went down.
After getting to the point where the paths merged, all I had to do was follow the story that I already knew.
In the 11th dungeon, after getting past the traps on the labyrinth floor, I’d get my hands on a weapon – the sword called Amaterasu.
According to the game info, this was my ultimate weapon.
Indeed, just by holding it I could feel tremendous power and could easily defeat even SS-rank monsters. It also reduced the amount of time it took to defeat the Evil God, so from some point on I always made sure to go pick it up.
Each round I would acquire what I remembered to be the most optimal weapons for my comrades and try to give them as many accessories with special abilities as possible. Armour, however, didn’t appear in the dungeon, so we regularly had to go into town to buy some.
The real world where the tsuki was, the world that I could glimpse whenever I defeated the Evil God, was always beautiful. And most of the time I found myself on that very same veranda.
At first, I’d always try to gather more information about the game, but after a while, there wasn’t any need to do so anymore, so I started looking around the room instead. Observing the magic tool on which the game was played and the desk that it was set on.
Next to that desk, there was another desk on which books were lined up. These books were different from the ones on the big bookshelf on the other side of the room. There were no interesting illustrations inside and, though the titles were made up of the same letters, the authors all seemed to be different. Which made me assume that these were specialty books.
Sometimes that desk was filled with magic device parts or various tools and other times it was neat and tidy.
Next to the desk was a display cabinet where some automata and flying devices with several wings were on display. There were also things that looked like bicycles but were fitted with a lot of magical devices. I had assumed that these things were all just models, but could such a bicycle actually work?
Perhaps because I was having such thoughts, the next time I came to the real world, my location had changed. I was floating in space like the very first time I came here. It wasn’t night though – the sky before me spread blue. However, I could still see the tsuki. A faint, white tsuki.
Beneath me was a grey path on which a lot of machines were running. Most of them had four wheels and they were fast despite there being no horses to pull them. From time to time, I could see one of those bicycle-looking things similar to the ones in the man’s room.
Now I knew that they did work.
Afterward, I went back to the usual room and I remember feeling relieved. I’d grown attached to this room and to the man who lived there.
He didn’t always sit in front of the desk. Sometimes he’d sit on the sofa next to the bookshelf and read or pet his dog. He didn’t have much of a presence but his eyes were beautiful and incredibly striking. Whenever he’d coincidentally glance my way, it felt like his eyes were piercing through me.
Was it because he was a real person? Or was that gaze unique to him?
I only came to this place once a year and that too was only for several minutes, but I found my quiet and peaceful time with the man soothing.
Ah, if I could stay in the real world just like this, how happy would I be? I too wanted to be a person in the real world.
However, no matter how many times I wished it to be so, after a few minutes I’d find myself back in that corridor, and I’d have to go on again in that world with faded colours.
This time seemed to be a failure as well. I just couldn’t seem to meet the requirements for the harem ending.
The reason was as clear as day – I just couldn’t bring myself to have that kind of relationship with Noel. The thought of it repulsed me. Just asking her out on a date made me gag, and whenever I tried to touch her, the bile in my stomach would rise up.
Apparently, the past in which I had loved her, loved someone who was nothing more than a doll, had become a source of trauma.
And maybe, just maybe, even if I did clear the harem route, I’d still go back to the start. Then these thirty-plus years of effort would have been meaningless.
Just imagining the despair I would feel if that were to happen made me so scared that I couldn’t start a relationship with any of the girls let alone Noel.
The more time passed, the weaker my determination became and the more I hated myself.
Though I knew that dragging on my hope and repeating this loop endlessly would never make me happy, I was still so scared I couldn’t take a step forward.
And then I made Zagan worry about me again. After we’d fought and he’d acknowledged me, he asked me why I was suffering so much. I made the excuse that it was because of the imperial order, but Zagan knew it was a lie. He didn’t dig into it though, which was very much like him.
Speaking of which, Zagan would die soon. Just a few more days now. On the night he died again, I’d leave the city and go get his body…
No, maybe I should go save him this time?
After being transferred out of the dungeon, if I left right away, I should be able to catch up to him.
He was a criminal who’d murdered many people, but if I saved him just this once…
If I was going to repeat this again anyway, I wanted to try saving him at least once.
Though I decided that, my heart was uneasy. Despite being in a dungeon and needing to be on high alert, I couldn’t help feeling flustered.
The rest of my party didn’t notice though. Probably because I was always hiding my emotions in front of them.
A few days passed after I made my decision to save him when our bodies started to glow. It was a sign that the forced transfer was coming.
Bennett disappeared first and then I too was transferred to the great hall.
“Sorry Bennett, I have something I need to do. You go ahead with the rest.” I apologised to her.
“Uh? Ah, y-yes. Understood.”
I left the confused Bennett behind and exited the dungeon. Then I started running.
