WETRIED TRANSLATIONS

Is It Bad That the Main Character’s a Roleplayer?

[Translator – Aren]

◈ Chapter 321 If Only I Could (7)

“If I hadn’t done what I did, none of this would have happened……”

Ignoring the emotions surging inside me, I muttered as calmly as I could. The words were meant for the Archmage, but this cry was also addressed to myself.

"How could I possibly do that?”

Let’s not resent something no one wanted to, but inevitably had to happen.

If I trace everything back to its starting point, it ultimately leads to my roleplaying and to the lingering attachment that had sunk so deep into me that I’d gone this far with it even in a game. If we’re going to call those things sins, then I’d rather just say this whole mess was one big accident.

If an unavoidable misunderstanding ultimately became a sin, then that would make these actions wrong as well. So let’s just call all of it null and void.

The sins I committed because of that role, whatever I lost, even the fact that I’m still deceiving all of you… Let’s just let each other move past it under the excuse that none of it could be helped.

Please, let’s just leave it at that.

"H-how could I……?”

I quietly whispered as I looked at the emotions that remained after reaching that compromise.

Don’t let yourself get swallowed by resentment. Don’t let yourself get dragged around by anger that could never be resolved. Otherwise, you might end up reliving those days that were even more acrid and poisonous than cigarette smoke.

Whenever the emotions I’d turned away from began to churn, reminding myself of facts calmed me again. And so I swallowed my sorrow one more time. Probably.

"I always regretted it. Why didn’t I hug that person back then? It wouldn’t have been difficult to lend them my arms for a moment, so why didn’t I?”

But before I could repeat that I was fine, I felt a warm hand envelope mine. It was a warmth I couldn’t bring myself to shake off.

"Only now, after growing old, do I think I finally know the answer.”

Still holding on to me, she pulled me toward her. Her intention was obvious.

"We were just too rational about everything. It would have been fine if we just allowed ourselves to be emotional sometimes. We could have thrown logic and reason aside and simply cried, blamed each other, resented each other, forgiven each other, and kept living. But back then, we thought being rational at all times was for the best.”

Should I push her away? Or should I just stay like this? I froze for a moment at the unexpected situation I was faced with.

In the end, doing nothing was also a choice.

With my quiet, albeit reluctant acceptance, the Archmage’s arms wrapped around me. The fur slipping out between layers of smooth fabric felt almost like a cradle. Soft and warm.

"Don’t worry about cause and effect. Don’t think about who did wrong first or whose sins run deeper.”

Warm enough to make me cry.

"Just tell me. Tell me all the sorrow you’ve carried with you.”

I desperately tried to reason with myself. I should refuse. She has nothing to do with this. She has absolutely no reason to bear all of this for me.

"I’ll take your side and accept all of it.”

But I’d missed the warmth of someone simply holding me far too much. I’d desperately longed for someone to just take my side.

『Trying to endure every hardship simply because your circumstances are better than someone else’s is also a form of arrogance.』

And of all things, it was only a day after I heard those words.

I stood there blankly before finally tilting my head. In the end, my tears soaked her shoulder.

"...This is all that kid’s fault.”

Truthfully, I was too miserable to keep holding it in any longer.

* * *

The moment the tears began to silently fall, Mephistopheles knew.

So trying to prod at his resentment was a bust too. She hadn’t expected much, but she’d held out a little hope, and now that plan had fallen apart. Her mood soured uselessly.

ㅡIf I hadn’t done what I did, none of this would have happened……

The faintly trembling voice only made her more irritated.

‘Idiot. How the hell is that your fault?’ Gretchen’s thought process never made any damn sense to her.

He couldn’t tear other people down, so he’d tear himself down instead. She didn’t even want to begin to understand what kind of thought process someone had to go through to reach that conclusion.

『My dear, you must have your revenge.』

And it wasn’t as though he was currently in a position where he had no choice but to endure or lacked the power to fight back.

『Upon my flesh and bones, you must see it through.』

She ran her fingertips over her bone mask. She had started wearing it at some point, and now that it had become part of her very essence, it remained as cold as ever.

Clink.

Then, when she raised her arm a little too far, the chains wrapped around it pulled taut and restrained her movement. They were the chains that had appeared when she had tried to ignore every contract and escape from the body faced with death.

[Hah, this is the worst……]

If the boy with the broken soul had become a sickly patient who was constantly collapsing, then she had become a prisoner of the mindscape. She could pull her soul-form outside if she wanted, but since all she could do was watch, it hardly held any meaning.

Mephistopheles bitterly ground her teeth at her predicament.

[Would it have been better if I’d made him overuse the Ancient Magic? No, no…stopping that was the right call.]

Mephistopheles moved the hand that had been touching her mask underneath it. Her fingers slipped into the gap between the mask and her mouth, and because they were longer than an ordinary person’s, they quickly reached her forehead.

The scar left behind when her entire name had been ripped away felt uneven beneath her fingertips.

[Damn it……]

Click. Her fingernail struck the shard of stone embedded in the center of the scar. From time to time, it devoured her memories and contaminated her essence.

But it had been warped by the presence of the Ancient Magic during the transaction, so removing it was impossible. There was nothing she could do except suppress it as much as possible and live with it.

Mephistopheles found herself getting irrationally angry at it.

[How the hell did things end up like this……?]

Instead of blindly jumping into the body because she was short on time, she should have found some way to get the brat’s name and steal the body properly.

She went over the regret she’d dwelled on endlessly for the past several years once more, scratching the stone shard with her nail a few times. She already knew perfectly well it couldn't be removed, but it still helped her vent.

[I thought there was no such thing as a human who couldn’t be corrupted……]

No, there definitely was no such thing as an incorruptible human. But failing to anticipate that someone with such an absurdly high threshold would come along had undeniably been her fatal mistake.

Mephistopheles fumed over that point again and again until she finally scratched her forehead open. Ash and flame flickered over the wound before it repaired itself.

[...Shit.]

It healed quickly enough, but having ash and flame run over her skin and into her eyes was unpleasant. So she took her hand away from her face.

Instead, what rested on her snapped fingertips were the things she had either hidden or simply never told him.

[Would it have been better if I’d told him everything back then……?]

When would these be most effective? When should she reveal them to finally break through Gretchen’s limits? Mephistopheles’ eyes sank into thought.

[I kept my mouth shut because I thought telling him would either make him angry only at me or send him flying off the handle again and trying to kill himself……]

In truth, Gretchen had only heard half the truth from her.

For example, the fact that Gretchen had been chosen by the Absolute Law had not actually been a coincidence. It had been an inevitability deliberately created.

[No… I was right not to tell him then.]

If there wasn’t a suitable person, it intervened and made one. If someone met only some of the conditions, it added whatever was missing until they became fully suitable. That was what the Ancient Magic was like.

In other words, if no one existed, it could simply make someone new. It could choose a person with the right temperament and talent for its conditions, then provide information in the form of a game to further improve their chances of survival.

[Damn it, he’s not some damn sunfish. Why is killing himself the first thing he thinks of when he’s stressed? Isn’t the normal response to stress trying to vent it outward?]

Of course, providing information in the form of a game had been the result of Mephistopheles persuading the Ancient Magic.

She had also been the one to suggest deliberately creating small discrepancies between the game and this world, using those gaps to guide him toward realizing that this was reality.

If the game and this world matched perfectly, there was a high chance he would become confused over whether this place was a game or reality. The escape method most people trapped inside a game would think of was reaching the ending, and the clear condition for the game Legend of Heroes was the heinous act of killing Satan. So if he mistook this world for the game, he might die trying to kill Satan, which would violate the conditions… It was through that argument that these discrepancies had been created.

It was a scheme she had only been able to pull off because Faust hadn’t known that she could persuade the Ancient Magic.

If he’d known, he probably would have fought her tooth and nail over it. The boy had wanted Gretchen to continue believing this world was a game until the very end.

Well, in the end, things turned out the way they did because they both were oblivious of some things.

[But if I leave him alone like this, his mind’s going to stabilize again……]

And the current situation was hardly favorable to her. In fact, it was heavily stacked against her.

Mephistopheles thought of Gretchen’s patience, how even now, pushed to his limits, he was stubbornly clinging to his original self.

He was still holding out this well even after being pushed and driven to this state. If his mind stabilized again, there would be no getting through to him at all.

[Should I just kill her?]

Which meant she needed to do something. Mephistopheles quietly observed the outside world reflected in the mindscape.

—Just tell me. Tell me all the sorrow you’ve carried with you.

If that woman died, would Gretchen collapse into hating the outside world instead of blaming himself?

[...I don’t know. But there’s no harm in trying. I’ve got plenty of time anyway.]

She couldn’t be certain. Still, Mephistopheles forced herself to remain patient. She could afford to wait, because the ’time remaining’ she knew of was longer than what Gretchen believed.

Mephistopheles wondered how furious Gretchen would be 9 years from now, when he discovered that a loophole in the contract meant he couldn’t return after all.

She couldn’t quite imagine it, but it seemed certain he would be consumed by rage. The question was whether that rage would turn inward or outward.

[My dear Gretchen… How many years will it take before you come to hold me dear as well?]

Then what she had to do now was make absolutely certain that direction pointed outward.

[Well, before that, I’ll have to make sure your shell doesn’t come off.]

Mephistopheles narrowed her eyes and partially withdrew the translation spell cast on the body and the illusion spell cast on the lips.

* * *

I never wanted to kill people in the first place, I hate fighting monsters too. Why do I have to fight?

Why do I have to risk my life fighting? I’m scared too. I’m exhausted too. So why me?

This is all that kid’s fault. None of this would’ve happened to me if it weren’t for him. If he hadn’t dragged me into this just because he was suffering, I never would’ve had to suffer like this.

But shit, of all things, he’s a kid. A child. I can’t even get properly angry at him, so what the hell is this? What the hell am I supposed to do?

Why does he have to be so young that it’s hard to even blame him? Why does the kid who’s the cause of all this have to watch my every expression and bow his head, apologizing, whenever I say anything……? How am I supposed to resent him comfortably like this? When he’s so small he doesn't even reach my shoulder, when he’s got those damn round cheeks, how the hell am I supposed to stay angry at him……?

And fucking hell, we even share the same body, so I can't even curse him out however I want. I want to scream at him, asking why it had to be me, why he did this to me. Even if I could just spit out every curse I know somewhere no one could hear, I’d feel a little better.

But shit, he sees everything I do, so if I get angry and start swearing, he’ll obviously hear every last word. And he’ll obviously hear it all, bow his head, and cry. So I can’t even cry or get angry about any of this.

If he were some shameless little bastard who never read the room and acted like he was the victim, at least I could curse him out to his face. But why does he have to be a kid who properly knows shame and feels guilty…? Why does he have to be such an idiot who never makes excuses and only keeps apologizing to me……?

That damn brat, seriously……

That Demon bastard is the same. Fine, she’s a Demon, so I can’t exactly blame her for not having basic human decency, but why the hell did her attribute have to be Wrath? She’s the root cause of everything, so why did getting angry only make her happy? I’m already pissed enough that no matter what I say, that bastard doesn’t listen to a damn thing I say……

Fuck. Fuck. Everything is so fucking awful. All of it.

I’m the victim, and yet I still have to worry about that kid’s feelings. The kid isn’t even someone I can properly blame. And the actual bastard responsible just laughs her ass off when I get angry, while somehow I’m the one who ends up with all the damn problems…this is just too damn unfair. So fucking unfair.

You people are the same. It’s true that I was the one who ■■■ first, but even so, how could you just ■■ that and nothing else? I wanted to ■■ you properly too. I wanted to ■■ ■■ as well. But because you ■■■■ me first, I couldn’t even ■■ it out, and I had to keep ■■, while even sleep was something I could only ■■ ■■.

I don’t want to ■■■ either. It hurts that even now I still have to keep ■■. But if I completely ■, I feel like I’ll ■■ again… Like you’ll ■■ me even if I don’t ■■........

This is all your fault.

* * *

"It’s all your fault......."

Once the words finally burst out, they poured from the Demon Knight like rapid fire. The Archmage quietly rubbed his back.

Every now and then, she heard words she’d never encountered before, but she simply let them pass. The Demon Knight was speaking so quickly, his words blurred by tears, that even ordinary words she knew were difficult to make out. She assumed she’d simply misheard them.

"I like you. I do. I love how kind and gentle you are…But I really hate that wall you put up. I hate it more than anything. How can a person be like that? How can you decide on one side of someone and refuse to see anything else?”

So instead of fixating on the words she hadn’t understood, she tried to understand the wounds the Demon Knight had been accumulating all this time.

It was a little strange to hear him whine like a child, but that was fine. In the face of truly deep, painful wounds, children and adults eventually acted the same.

"If you weren’t so kind, it would’ve been easier. If you weren’t, then maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so much when you blindly looked at only that one side of me.”

And precisely because of that, because everyone was equal before truly deep, painful wounds…

“I know this would’ve been resolved if I just hadn’t ■■■. But, but that wasn't my fault. Wanting to ■■, even if only inside a ■■, isn’t such a terrible sin……”

“Yes. You’re right. That wasn’t your fault.”

"I was really struggling too……”

“None of what happened to you was ever your fault.”

The Archmage gently stroked the head of the one writhing in such terrible pain.

"I didn’t… I didn’t want to become the Demon Knight either……”

"You really did everything you could.”

They had taken far too long to get there, but at last, they had reached each other.

_________________________________________________________________________

Join our Discord for updates on releases! https://dsc.gg/wetried