You Said You’d Marry Me If You Became a Woman

I replied with an [Okay] and saw Yukino and Saber reply in kind. Thinking about my brothers, who had now all turned into beautiful girls, lessened my despair. My HP bar, which had been sitting at a critical 1%, ticked up slightly. At least I wasn’t alone in this bugged-out, hell-difficulty game.

I stood up like a zombie, my joints creaking with emotional rust. I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked out of the garden with my head down, startling quite a few couples and single brethren who had come for their dose of secondhand romance. Maybe it was the crazed giraffe on my pants, the evil eye on my shirt, or simply my gloomy aura that seemed to physically warp the space around me, but while the people who noticed me still had looks of amazement, they all actively cleared a path.

They probably thought I was a cool and aloof pretty boy or pretty girl, the type you could only admire from a distance, a lone wolf character with an aura too strong to approach. But they had no idea that I was just a pitiful soul whose love life had ended before it even began, a drowning dog whose confession had failed without uttering a single word. My charisma stat was at an all-time high, but my happiness stat was in the negatives.

I walked all the way to the “old spot,” entered the shabby shed, and ignored the admiring gazes that instinctively turned to the door and lingered on me. I sat down at the four-person table we always occupied, right next to Exusiai.

A moment later, Yukino and Saber arrived as well. They didn’t even need to scan the room; they walked straight to the four-person table that was our unspoken meeting place, drawn by the beacon of our shared misery.

Once they both sat down, the dejected atmosphere surrounding the four of us seemed to weave itself together, blanketing the plastic table in the corner. It was like we had deployed a misery-based reality marble. The rest of the shed was brightly lit, but our corner seemed to have fallen into a pocket dimension of shadow and despair.

Students at the nearby tables chewed their food while sneaking curious glances at us, wondering why four people who looked like winners in life—SSR-rank characters walking among mortals—were engulfed in a gloom darker than the night itself.

Exusiai turned her melancholic, handsome face, looking at me with her one visible ruby-red eye, and asked weakly, “Kiriko, looking at you… did the confession go wrong?”

Hearing this, I was on the verge of tears again. My small face crumpled, and my voice was choked with sobs. “It went very wrong. I was rejected before I even got to confess… I took a critical hit before the battle even started.”

“Don’t lose heart,” the stylish Exusiai said, forcing a smile to comfort me. “Back when some not-so-pretty girls wanted to confess to me, I also rejected them before they could say a single word.”

“That’s… not comforting at all, is it?! That’s just a flex!” The more I thought about it, the more her words sounded like a boast than a consolation.

But then I suddenly remembered something. “Exu, do you remember a promise you once made to me?”

Exusiai, the pale blue veins visible under the fair skin of her neck as she swallowed, hesitated slightly before answering. “…I don’t know if the promise I’m thinking of is the same one you’re talking about.”

“It’s that one,” I said, my voice firm. “You promised that if you were a girl, you would marry me!”

The moment I said it, I heard audible gasps from the next table.

A boy’s voice whispered, full of excitement, “Hey, it’s yuri! And such pretty yuri! A top-tier ship!”

A girl’s voice retorted, “It’s obviously BL, okay! They’re such handsome guys! I will go down with this ship!”

Both Exusiai and I had androgynous looks. The boys wishfully thought we were an yuri couple, while the girls hopefully thought we were an yaoi one. In reality, though, I, Kiriko, am a boy, and she, Exusiai, is now a girl. This was a normal, heterosexual romance route, thank you very much.

“I do… remember making that promise.” Exusiai tilted her head back, recalling the memory in her crisp voice. “I remember it was one winter. You agreed to walk with me through the cold night to the corner store, even though you weren’t buying anything. On the way back, walking with you, seeing you shivering, I was very moved and promised that if I were a girl, I would marry you. By the way, I was buying sanitary pads for one of my little lovers at the time.”

“No wonder you wouldn’t let me see what you were buying!” I never would have thought that a question I had long since forgotten—a piece of unresolved lore—would be solved at a time like this.

Exusiai’s soft pink lips moved. She lowered her head and shook it. “Can we not talk about this for now? I’m really not in the mood.”

Seeing her hands resting on her shorts-covered knees, looking like a basketball player who had just lost the championship game, I understood immediately.

I asked, “Things with your little lovers… also went wrong?”

“Yeah,” Exusiai sighed, a sound of pure defeat. “I talked to all eight of my little lovers, one by one, and found out that, just as I expected, reality has been modified. Originally, I had actually succeeded in… getting all of their bodies. I had cleared all their flags. But in the current, modified reality, we’ve only ever been ordinary lovers, the kind that stops at kissing. We’ve never done anything else, which has led them all to believe I’m still male.”

“Oh…” I mostly understood. “So you’re saying that in this modified reality, you were actually cross-dressing as a boy to get with them?”

“Exactly,” she said, her expression tragic. “And all of my little lovers are straight. Their sexual orientation is completely normal; they would never like a woman. That means, while a chaste relationship like this is fine for now, the moment we get into bed and my real gender is exposed, they’ll all leave me!”

“Uh…” To be honest, this problem was a bit beyond my experience, but I still tried my best to console this good brother who might just become my future wife. “If you’ll be exposed in bed, then just don’t take it that far, right? At least your relationships are still intact! You haven’t gotten a ‘Game Over’!”

“But, but…” Exusiai was sobbing now, her handsome face full of sorrow, a truly pitiful sight. “But… I was only in it for their bodies!! If I can’t get their bodies, what the hell is the point of the relationship?! The main quest is locked!”

I fell silent. In that moment, my understanding of the fact that my brother was an animal deepened significantly. A bottomless abyss of lechery.

Who in their right mind would pity you!

But she was still my brother, and might even become my future wife, so I took her hand from her knee, held it tightly, and offered my sincere consolation. “No matter what, life has to go on. Maybe you could try to… turn your little lovers into lesbians? If that doesn’t work, you can always find other women who accept your real gender. And if that still doesn’t work… don’t you still have me!”

I won’t lie, of those three suggestions, only one was truly heartfelt.

Exusiai’s small hand was held in mine. She stared at me blankly, as if I were the warmest light in the dead of winter, a bonfire in a blizzard. If Exusiai and I were two burly men with special skills, this gesture would look like two old partners clasping arms after a long separation in a Hollywood blockbuster, full of passion and brotherly love.

The problem was, in reality, we were two androgynous pretty boys/girls. In the eyes of others, as we held hands, a garden of lilies or roses probably bloomed behind us, complete with sparkling shoujo effects. I could feel the fiery gazes of the boy and girl at the next table, who were still quietly arguing over whether we were a yuri or a yaoi couple. Their shipping senses were going into overdrive.