I stood in my dorm room at night, phone in hand, staring at my bank account like it had personally insulted my family.
The amount was pitiful. Absurdly, tragically pitiful. Original Ellen had been an orphan with a scholarship and apparently the financial planning skills of a caffeinated squirrel. There was barely enough in there to cover underwear and given her thong based lifestyle, even that was a questionable investment.
Why couldn't I be reborn as one of the main heroines?! I raged internally, pacing the room. At least they have MONEY! Rose Mira comes from a wealthy Awakened dynasty! And I know their plots! I know their routes! I could plan around them with a safety net!
But no. No, no. I get the beautiful orphan with zero savings who exists in the game to be passed around like a communal snack. Fantastic. Great character design. Love it for me.
I flopped onto my bed, arms spread, staring at the ceiling.
This is exhausting. Genuinely exhausting.
Because here was the thing I'd had to face these past two weeks: I had mapped everything. Every route I could remember, every character arc, every trigger point from the first third of the game. I'd written notes. Diagrams. A full strategic dossier. And two days ago, I'd executed Phase One the Cassius approach.
And it had worked. Better than I'd expected, honestly. The man had looked like I'd hit him with a hammer made of his own suppressed feelings. The seed was planted. Rose's route would accelerate.
But.
As soon as he looked at me, I saw it. The desire. Full force. And that was CASSIUS. The harmless one. The good guy. The one Conqueror in this entire game with a functioning conscience.
If the nice one looks at me like I'm a three course meal, what do the actual predators look like? What does the Dean an S+ rank with a grudge against my future SP farm's family look like when he decides I'm on the menu?
Unfair. Unfair. Unfair.
I rolled onto my side, glaring at the wall.
Being in this body means one simple, brutal truth: even if I'm cold, even if I'm perfect, even if I never smile they will want to break me. That's what this game is. It's a machine designed to break beautiful women, and I am the most beautiful one in it. I can't opt out of being a target. I can only choose how I get targeted.
I had hoped hoped, naively, like a fool that I could run the entire operation on Source B alone. Pure NTR facilitation. Clean hands. The architect who never touches the construction site.
But two weeks of reality had forced the rationalization I'd been avoiding.
For the plans to work, I will have to interact with Conquerors. Up close. Personally. And interactions with men who look at me the way Cassius did... come with costs. Garanties. Negotiations. Moments where my composure is the only currency I have to spend.
Part of my former masculine dignity is going to have to be sacrificed. I've accepted that. Reluctantly. Bitterly. With extensive internal complaints. But accepted.
I sat up, hugging my knees to my chest which, on this body, was more of a suggestion than an actual position.
But let's be crystal clear about the lines. Because there ARE lines.
I will never become what original Ellen was designed to become. I am not the Academy's communal stress relief. I am not a 'third rate sensitivity' punchline. I am not becoming a slut just because the game wrote me as one.
I held up a finger to the dark room, as if swearing on something sacred.
Virgin. Until the spider dies. That's the rule. That's the LAW. The World Eater gets killed by a Transcendent virgin, and then and ONLY then do we renegotiate the terms of this body's lease.
"...Assuming I still want to. Which I won't. Probably. Maybe. Shut up."
Suddenly I received an email.
I frowned at the notification, half expecting another of Aya's scientific reels she sends them at all hours, timestamped like a woman who doesn't believe in sleep.
But no. The sender was the Academy's internal network. Which meant whoever this was didn't have my number they'd gone through official channels. Formal contact. Addressed not to Ellen, the girl, but to Ellen Frost, second rank of the first years.
I opened it.
'Good evening. It's Cassius Desde. I had hoped we could continue our conversation. I have... questions.'
I placed the phone face up on the mattress and leaned back, staring at the ceiling in my nightclothes thin, flimsy things that hid absolutely nothing, because apparently even my sleepwear had been curated by a dead girl with agenda.
Two days, I thought. It took him two days to crack.
I gave him 'cowardice with good branding' and walked away, and the man spent forty eight hours chewing on it until he couldn't stand it anymore. Good. That's exactly the wound I wanted to open. A man who's been in love for a decade doesn't need persuasion. He needs permission. He needs someone to tell him the window is a door.
Now, one might reasonably ask: why accelerate the NTR routes at all? Wouldn't they happen anyway?
Yes. They would. I'm certain of it. Jin's fetish is baked into his soul, the Academy's atmosphere is a corruption incubator, and even with a rewritten Ellen floating around causing butterflies, the routes are structural. The game's plot is less a story and more a gravity.
The problem is time.
From D rank to Transcendent in three years isn't ambitious. It's a miracle with a deadline. And miracles require cash flow SP, points, resources. Which means I can't let the plot unfold at its leisurely, eroge approved pace. I need to industrialize it.
Take Rose and Cassius. In the original timeline, their story doesn't even begin until the second month of the first year. Two months! That's an eternity when you're on a three year sprint to godhood.
And there's a second reason the timeline drags, one the game never states outright but that I've pieced together:
Everyone is scared of Jin.
The Conquerors every single one of them hesitate at the start, because their targets orbit the greatest genius of the generation. Getting beef with Jin Kang? The son of the strongest human? Most of these men would rather fight a Gate boss. So they circle. They wait. They convince themselves the timing isn't right.
That's where I come in. I'm not here to make them fall in love or lust that's pre installed. I'm here to remove the brake. To tell Cassius that Jin won't kill him. To arrange the timing, the place, the witness. To make the machine run fast.
My phone buzzed.
I picked it up.
'Tomorrow. After classes. The café two streets from the East Gate. If you're available, Cadet Frost.'
Polite. Hesitant. Still using my title. He's nervous. Perfect nervous men sign contracts faster, because they want the conversation to end before they change their mind.
I typed back with flat efficiency:
'Available. 5pm. Don't be late.'
Sent.
I put the phone down and pulled my blanket up to my chin, staring at the ceiling with the deep satisfaction of a manager whose first project just accepted the kickoff meeting.
...Now sleep. Tomorrow I have classes, a meeting to run, and an empire to build. Being the secret architect of an entire eroge's corruption schedule is a full time job and the benefits are terrible.
***
I arrived at the café in my full Academy uniform, maintaining the rigid, untouchable posture that had become my second skin. The establishment was an upscale place, exactly the kind of venue a boy from a family like Cassius's would choose to appear respectable.
The receptionist, a young woman who clearly wasn't prepared to handle an SS rank beauty walking through her door, stared at me with wide, unblinking eyes. I didn't give her the chance to stammer.
"I have a reservation as Cadet Frost," I said, my voice as flat as a frozen lake.
She nodded dumbly and led me toward a private room at the back, away from the main floor. The walk felt longer than usual, partly because I could feel the weight of every gaze in the café tracking my hips, and partly because my own body was already starting to betray me.
When I opened the door to the private room, Cassius was already there. He was standing straight, looking every bit the composed student leader, but the moment his eyes landed on me, the facade cracked.
I saw it. That hunger. That raw, unfiltered desire that flashed across his face before he could clamp down on it.
Instantly, my lower abdomen did a slow, nauseating spin. A familiar heat pooled between my thighs.
Damn it, I thought, a flash of genuine irritation crossing my mind. I'm becoming accustomed to this. I'm becoming accustomed to the feeling of being wanted like this. This body is adapting to the attention too fast. It's supposed to be a foreign sensation, not a daily routine.
I checked my SP status in the corner of my vision.
[ SP: 100 ]
A pathetic number. A small, shameful reminder that I had spent the last few days treating my own body as an emergency resource. One hundred SP from rounds of desperate, late night self service.
At least it's working, I rationalized. But I need to stop relying on Source A as a crutch. I need the real money. I need the big scores.
I pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down, not waiting for an invitation. I didn't do pleasantries. I didn't do 'how are you.' I was here to conduct business, not to make friends.
"Alright, stop looking at me like that," I said, cutting directly through the charged silence. I kept my face perfectly neutral, the [Expression Suppression] ensuring that my internal panic about his gaze didn't show. "I thought it was Rose you wanted, not me."
I watched him flinch, his eyes widening slightly at my bluntness.
"Now, what exactly do you want to say?" I asked, leaning forward just enough to make the movement deliberate, making sure the uniform stretched across my chest just enough to remind him exactly what he was sitting across from. "I'm not here to play social games, Cassius. Get to the point."
Cassius swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing visibly. He didn't look away, but the intensity in his eyes shifted from simple lust to something more complicated a mixture of shame and desperate honesty.
"You're right," he admitted, his voice dropping to a low murmur that made the space between us feel dangerously small. "I have wanted her since we were children. But you... you're not wrong about the staring. I couldn't help it. You don't exactly make it easy to look elsewhere."
He leaned forward, mirroring my posture, though his hands were clenched tight on the tablecloth. "But I didn't ask you here to talk about my feelings for Rose. Well, not entirely. I asked you here because of what you said at the window. About cowardice."
His green eyes locked onto mine, searching for something behind my icy facade. "You said I'm standing at a window mourning a battle I haven't even fought. How could you possibly know that? How could someone like you someone who barely knows me see through something like that?"
I felt a flicker of amusement. He was hooked. The opening gambit had worked perfectly. He wasn't just here to confess; he was here because I had challenged his entire self image.
"I don't need to know you to read a pattern, Cassius," I said, my voice as cold as the ice I wielded. "People like you always think they're being noble when they're really just being afraid. You think you're protecting Rose by staying away from her, but you're actually just denying both her and Jin the chance to see what happens when things actually get complicated."
I watched him tense at the mention of Jin's name.
"So, tell me," I continued, tilting my head slightly. "What is it you actually want? Because if you're looking for sympathy for your unrequited love, you've come to the wrong person. But if you're looking for a way to stop watching from the window and actually change the outcome..."