Brilliant golden light filled my entire field of vision. A man with golden hair and golden eyes, with a gentle yet firm appearance. Wearing the face of a righteous hero that anyone would recognize at a glance, he shoved me against the wall.
The moment my back touched the cold wall, goosebumps ran down my spine. The golden eyes that had always been nothing but gentle were now holding me in a burning gaze. They were the eyes of a madman. The eyes of someone who could no longer see anything, who would rush forward without caring whether it was fire or water. Meeting that half-crazed gaze head-on was frightening enough to make me feel fear.
“Th-Theo…? What are you talking about?”
Forcing a harmless smile, I called the man before me by name. That is, Theo.
But it seemed my carefully prepared smile had only produced the opposite effect. More strength entered Theo’s hand where it gripped my shoulder. At this rate, it felt as though my shoulder bone might break.
From his mouth came a sinister voice completely unlike his usual bright way of speaking.
“Rihen. Did you think I wouldn’t know?”
“K-Know what…?”
“You’ve been doing shameful things every night without telling me, haven’t you? Things I wasn’t supposed to find out about.”
I froze on the spot.
Could he have found out?
Had he discovered that I was the infamous Commander of the Demon Army’s 13th Legion? Had he also realized that Rihen was just an alias I had carelessly blurted out?
I had been certain I had hidden it well. Where in the world had I slipped up?
Question marks followed one after another in an endless chain. Countless questions pressed down on my throat until I could barely breathe.
No, in the first place, the appearance of this character named ‘Shane,’ whose body I had possessed, was the problem.
Shane was what people commonly called a narrow-eyed character. The kind of character who carried the cliché of either being a traitor or a villain hiding his true identity. In the original game, he really was a commander in the Demon Army and a spy who pretended to be a good human being.
Narrow eyes, eerie blood-red irises, and ash-gray hair resembling the ruins left behind after everything had burned away. Even the way he grinned whenever he had the chance. Objectively speaking, his face was handsome, but he gave off an ominous impression that somehow made people not want to get close to him.
With that kind of appearance, I went around here and there every night while silencing my footsteps. Whenever Theo asked where I had been, I always brushed him off by saying it was none of his concern. So just how suspicious must I have looked in Theo’s eyes?
I had to choose every single word carefully. Right now, a single sentence could determine whether I lived or died. If I carelessly ran my mouth, the heroic sir before me, whose memories might be incomplete but whose righteous nature remained intact, might cut my head off with a single stroke.
I forced my pounding heart to calm down and worked my brain.
Should I confess honestly?
Should I tell him that he was right?
That during the day, I pretended to be his guardian, reading books to him after he had lost his memories, teaching him swordsmanship, and showing him the world… while at night, I went around committing all kinds of evil deeds.
That I had destroyed statues of the God of Light, set temples on fire, destroyed the holy knights’ weapons storehouse, and committed countless other wicked acts.
But that all of it had been for him, and for this world.
If I told him that… would he forgive me?
One day, I became possessed by a character inside an RPG game called ‘How to Save the World.’ And not just any character, but one from the evil faction.
It was a game in which you could choose between two factions, good and evil. I had played through the good route more than five hundred times, but I had only played the evil route once.
That was because committing murder, arson, and human trafficking just to collect Infamy Points made me feel awful, even if it was only a game. On top of that, I could not stand the thought of becoming evil and destroying the very world I had saved hundreds of times.
So I turned the game off midway through and went to sleep… but when I opened my eyes, I had become ‘Shane,’ the character I had used during my evil-faction playthrough.
The game’s basic system had not changed. When you successfully completed a quest, you received Virtue Points on the good route and Infamy Points on the evil route. With those points, you could learn new skills, raise your stats, and even buy rare items that could not be made by human hands.
And I could also raise the stats of the character I had designated as my ‘companion.’
Although I had become possessed by someone from the evil faction, I loved this world. I wanted to save it. That was why I designated ‘Theo,’ the character I had cherished most during my good-faction playthroughs, as my companion. Theo was both a key figure in resealing the Demon King and a hero of this country.
If I gathered Infamy Points, raised his stats, and gave him the very best skills. If I raised him into the strongest hero capable of standing against the Demon King… then even while possessing the body of a villain, I could save this world. Even if the process was somewhat wrong, I was confident that I could make the outcome more righteous than anyone else’s.
And I kept to my own line. I carried out evil quests in a way that reduced meaningless slaughter as much as possible. I never abandoned my standard of refusing to sacrifice innocent people.
Though to a righteous hero like Theo, words like these might sound like nothing more than cowardly excuses.
I let out a deep sigh and looked straight at Theo.
“I’m sorry. But there’s a reason behind all of this….”
“Of course there must be a reason.”
Theo spoke in a trembling voice.
“It must have taken a great deal of money to raise me properly after I lost both my memories and my abilities. But even so, selling your body every night—”
“…What?”
Only then did I realize that something was strange. He had not discovered my true identity. Instead, he had formed a completely absurd misunderstanding.
Why does this guy think I’m the head of a household who pulled the family out of poverty through OnlyFans? My voice rose on its own from sheer indignation.
“What are you talking about? Selling my body? Why would I ever do something like that?”
Even after saying it, my chest felt stifled. This was beyond a simple misunderstanding. He had mistaken me for an entirely different kind of person. I spent every night working myself to the bone to save the world, and yet somehow I had become a male prostitute who relied on his pretty face to sell his body. How could this happen? But Theo did not back down. His golden eyes narrowed.
“Are you still pretending otherwise? Last night, I clearly saw Rihen entering a brothel.”
So he saw that. My breath caught in my throat. I pulled myself together and spoke confidently.
“I didn’t go there to sell my body. I went because I had something else to do.”
It was the truth. It just so happened that the target of my assassination was a regular customer at the brothel. I had only infiltrated the brothel to complete an assassination quest. But I could not exactly tell him that honestly.
Theo seemed to think I was lying. He began bringing up every little piece of circumstantial evidence one by one.
“You were wearing different clothes when you came out than when you went in. And your whole body reeked of the strong perfume male prostitutes supposedly use.”
For a moment, my mind went blank. My clothes had changed because far too much blood had splashed on me during the assassination. I could not walk out wearing bloodstained clothes, so I had hurriedly put on a prostitute’s clothes. The smell of blood lingering on my body had bothered me, so I had sprayed myself with a great deal of perfume from a drawer. I had never imagined those actions would come back to haunt me like this.
He had misunderstood the situation far too thoroughly. There was only one way to clear up this misunderstanding. I would have to confess that instead of selling my body every night, I had been committing murder, arson, and every kind of evil act as an infamous commander and spy in the Demon King’s army.
If I had time to think, I might have been able to come up with a more convincing excuse. But with my mind completely blank at that moment, it was practically as though I had only two choices.
Become a tragic male prostitute, or reveal myself as the worst, cold-blooded commander in the Demon Army.
With tears in my eyes, I chose the former.
“So you found out….”
I lowered my head deeply. As though I could not bear how pathetic I was, I muttered with a hollow laugh.
“I knew it was something I shouldn’t do. That’s why I tried to hide it until the very end.”
I fell silent for a moment, then added in a low, subdued voice.
“I’m sorry. For being this kind of guardian….”
Theo pressed his body even more firmly against mine. His face was so close that I could feel his breath. His golden eyes stared at me as though he intended to dissect me.
“I’ll buy you.”
“What?”
“I said I’ll buy Rihen tonight.”
I doubted my own ears. I could not understand what that bastard was saying, and I did not want to understand it either. Theo brought his lips close to my ear and whispered as though grinding out each word.
“If it’s a body you sell to anyone just to make money, then you can sell it to me for one day too, can’t you? As for the money… I’ll prepare enough that Rihen won’t feel disappointed.”
Sirens went off inside my head. This was an emergency. I tried to keep a calm expression, but I could not stop the cold sweat from gathering on my forehead.
Where exactly had my life become so hopelessly tangled?
Right, the beginning of everything was….
When I became possessed by the body of ‘Shane,’ a character inside a game.