The Helper System.
It was nothing special.
It was a system usable only in Dreamland, one that let you summon male leads whose Affection had passed a certain threshold and form a party with them.
Of course, you had to have built up their Affection past a certain point, and naturally, you could not summon characters who were hostile toward you.
Still, since any male lead whose Affection you had raised could be summoned, it was possible to call people at a higher level than yourself, such as Cassian or Silves.
According to the setting, they were literally being called into a dream, so male leads summoned by the heroine treated what happened in Dreamland as though it were a dream.
That was why, unlike the heroines, male leads brought into Dreamland did not truly die even if they died; it was treated as them simply exiting the dream.
Moreover, the experience the male leads gained in Dreamland did not disappear. It accumulated in full.
Of course, that did not mean there was absolutely no penalty for dying in Dreamland.
Either way, you could cheese it with this, so unless I was on a challenge run, I used to call Cassian and farm to my heart’s content.
But.
I did not think this lady would just let me cheese it.
Then.
"Headmistress."
"Not that one."
The little girl folded her arms and vigorously shook her head as if to say no.
See?
"Are you crazy? If you bring in someone with such a powerful mental image, you and I will both be saying goodbye to this world just like that."
The little girl explained as though she were scolding me.
Her face openly held the emotion of sheer terror.
【Maugis】
◈ Level: @_×%
◈ The target is terrified.
Judging from [Insight Eye], she did not appear to be lying…
Well.
I had expected it.
Then naturally, Professor Luke would be out too.
Besides, this was not a game, so even if I called him, I did not think he would listen to me.
"Then roughly how far does that restriction go?"
"To put it in terms you’ll understand, you can’t call anyone who’s too high-level here."
In other words, no cheesing.
That ruled out Cassian and Professor Silves.
"What about Angelica?"
"That child… no, she’s out too."
Fuck.
I really could not cheese this.
And after narrowing it down and down some more,
four candidates remained.
Dante, Dolnesia, Iris, and Isabella.
The Second Prince was strong, but I did not particularly want to call that guy.
Haede was weak.
Then it had to be—
"Iris."
Iris, who had awakened as the Holy Maiden and could throw around absurdly overpowered buffs, would be perfect.
"That child is out too."
But the little girl shook her head again.
Fuck, why now?
"It would be fine if you called only that child, but if you summon her now, the Holy Virgin will come along with her. Her mental image won’t devour this place, but the problem is that this bridge was hastily put together. If you call Iris, it will definitely collapse."
"…"
Then Dol—
"And the child named Dolnesia is the same."
"No, why is she out too?"
"This bridge cannot withstand the presence of three spirits. Especially not three of the highest rank."
Listening to the little girl’s explanation, I clutched my throbbing forehead.
Fuck.
Why were there so many things I could not do?
Then that left Isabella and Dante… I had to choose one of the two.
Isabella was strong too, but perhaps Dante would be the better choice here.
At their current levels, Dante was stronger than Isabella.
And while Isabella fought through sheer firepower, Dante’s magic was more geared toward crowd control and support.
Besides, I had experience working together with that guy several times.
"Then Dante is possible, right?"
"Dante? Ah! That child should be fine."
At my words, the little girl nodded emphatically, as if to say he was possible.
That was a relief.
"Then I’ll call him, okay?"
As she said that, the little girl snapped her fingers.
At the snap, mana began spreading from her fingertips.
That mana headed into the empty space between the little girl and me, beginning to gather in one spot.
Then, centered around that mana, clusters of light gathered as if drawing in the radiance of planets and stars, soon beginning to shape themselves into a human figure.
When the light had formed a complete human shape, it began gradually vanishing from the bottom up, as though its task was complete. The places it vanished from were painted over in other colors, and the process repeated.
When all the clusters of light had disappeared, Dante stood there.
Yes.
He should have been there.
#
Creeeak, click.
I went all the way into the shower room and shut the door.
Normally, I should have undressed in the changing room before entering.
But he could see me even through the shadow cast upon the door, so I had decided to always undress and shower in here.
And when I had let out a groan because my chest suddenly felt constricted, Ian had tried to come in.
He had only been worried, but I had barely managed to stop him from entering…
I could not let him see me like this.
I drew a breath, then, just as I brought my hand to my chest to undo my buttons,
his naked body suddenly came to mind.
His muscles… they had been enormous.
No, I already knew that.
Even in the largest uniform size, his muscles had bulged so prominently beneath the fabric that he could not hide them.
Still, it had been my first time seeing him naked.
‘Want to shower together?’
When that blunt tone, spoken from his intimidating-looking mouth, suddenly came back to me,
my face flushed hot before I knew it.
Surely, he had said it without any particular thought…
He could not have said it because he noticed anything. Ian was oblivious.
Ha ha, it was incredibly hot in here.
Honestly, Ian, how hot had he made the shower water…?
The heat against my face.
I blamed the pink tint painting my pale cheeks on the lingering moisture in the shower room and slowly undid the buttons around my chest.
With every uniform button I opened, white steam began to seep out from within as if it had been tightly trapped. When I removed my top, a bandage wrapped around my chest was revealed.
I frowned and began unwrapping the bandage around my chest.
Whoosh—!
I had only removed the outer bandage, yet as though they had been waiting for it, two large things sprang out amid a rush of hot white steam.
Two pale mounds, beaded with droplets of sweat like dew.
The identity of those two mounds was breasts.
A chest that could never belong to a man, one that unmistakably belonged only to a woman.
Perhaps because the constriction around my chest had been released, breathing became much easier. Despite standing in a shower room filled with hot humidity, I paradoxically felt cool around my chest.
It was suffocating.
It seemed as though it would be difficult to hide them with compression bandages alone now…
One had torn before too, and I had nearly been caught by my friends.
Until three years ago, I had somehow managed well enough…
But ever since entering the academy, how should I put it? It felt as though they had become especially constricting and come undone more often.
Had my breasts grown in the meantime…?
With a sigh, I set aside the bandages and clothes drenched in sweat so they would not get wetter.
Then I turned on the shower and let the pouring hot water run over my breasts.
When the stream washed away all at once the beads of sweat that had gathered from the compression bandages, it felt good enough to bring a smile to my lips.
But what soon followed was the small anxiety that had always lingered in my mind.
With one hand gripping the wall, I looked ahead.
There was a mirror.
The reflection in that mirror was telling me that I was unmistakably a woman.
"How long can I keep hiding my gender?"
Astoria.
Its members were always born bearing the mana of hot starlight, but there was an exception among them.
Coldness.
Just as hot stars hung in the sky, there were also stars chilled cold as ice. Thus, by an exceedingly rare chance, a child could be born with the mana of frigid coldness.
Such children died young. They never lived past twenty.
Every one of them.
The reason was that humans could contain a star’s warmth, but not a star’s cold.
That was why every person born with coldness like mine before I was born had died young.
The moment they became adults, they never saw what came after.
And I, too, had been born carrying coldness and was meant to die young, but there was a solution.
Crossdressing as a man.
The logic was that, to control that coldness, I had to conceal my femininity and imitate a man in order to neutralize the extreme yin.
It was an utterly ridiculous method, yet it actually worked.
It was a method taught by none other than the Red Duke, who now served as the academy’s headmistress. Though there had initially been some resistance, the imperial family, lacking any other option, had no choice but to follow her words.
And the members who disguised themselves as men survived.
It was absurd.
To live, I had to imitate a man.
To think that I could only survive by hiding who I was for the rest of my life.
Because of that prophecy, which barely even qualified as superstition, I had lived as a man until now.
And I had to continue doing so.
Perhaps that was why I was alone.
I could not belong among groups of girls because I had to imitate a man.
And because I was born female, I could not fit in with groups of boys either.
On top of that, my lofty status as a prince made it even worse.
Every time I saw young ladies who harbored affection for me, guilt pricked at my heart, and I naturally grew distant from people.
That was how, with no one I could call a friend, I was ultimately left alone.
That was why I envied my older brother and sister.
They did not need to hide who they were.
And so there had been more than one or two times when I resented the body I had been given.
If I did not have this coldness, then I too…
What would Ian think of me like this?
Ian.
My first friend, and my dormitory roommate.
I first learned of him through a newspaper article about the train terrorist incident.
An unusual person with an extremely intimidating appearance who beat up fanatics while saying embarrassingly grandiose things.
Still, despite those ridiculous words, I could not deny his accomplishment of saving the passengers from the terrorist attack. When I saw him in the newspaper, I had thought he was an impressive person.
That had been my first impression, but then I was suddenly assigned to the same dorm room as him.
As I slept in the same space as him, got caught up in the same incidents, and spent more time with him, I gradually came to know more about him.
An odd person who, despite being the illegitimate son of a ducal family, did not eat in the dining hall and instead roughly filled his stomach at the convenience store.
An unusual person who paid no heed to public rumors, whose judgment was good enough to infer a situation from only a few clues, yet who was utterly oblivious to social cues.
Unlike his intimidating appearance, his personality was not like that at all.
He had the odd habit of imitating chivalry in ways that should have been embarrassing, yet when a dungeon or even a Sword Master came for him, he did not run away and instead stood to fight.
That kind of friend.
Today’s outing had been my first time going out with him too, right?
My first time buying food to eat on the street had been with him.
And my first time sitting beside someone in class and studying together had been with him too.
Of course, Miss Iris was the second friend I made in the club.
But how should I put it? Ian was…
Everything had been a first with him, hadn’t it?
My first friend, and the friend who had been by my side every time I experienced something new.
"Isn’t Ian a freshman like me anyway? Then we’re the same age, so speak casually to me."
"Then… I’ll speak casually."
When I told him to speak casually, he immediately did so.
No one else would ever actually speak casually even when I told them to.
But you were unusual. You spoke casually to me.
Thinking about it now, I teasingly wonder, ‘Was it just because he was so oblivious?’
But you kept doing it.
You kept seeing me not as an Astoria, but as Dante.
That was why…
I do not want you, of all people, to discover that I am a woman.
If you discover that a princess has been disguising herself as a man and hiding that she is a woman, I do not know what feelings you would have toward me.
You might point at me, feeling betrayed that I deceived you.
You might look at me with contempt in your eyes.
And this relationship too…
You already have such an intimidating face. To think of you looking at me with contempt in your eyes.
I do want to see what that would feel like once.
But I do not want to see it.
For some reason, that was the one thing I did not want to see.
You, my first friend, looking at me with eyes like that.
For some reason, I think it would frighten me.
Well…
Ian was truly dense, so unless I told him, he would never know.
Well then, I was all washed up.
Having finished bathing, I turned off the shower, dried my whole body, took out the clothes I had set in the corner and put them on, then took out a fresh bandage and began wrapping it around my chest.
Every time I wrapped it, my breathing became tightly constricted, and the flesh of my breasts protruded above and below the binding bandage.
—Ngh!
The tightness and the rough sensation of the bandage against my breasts drew a faint moan from my lips.
But.
For some reason, the bandage would not wrap properly today.
I kept trying to wrap it, but it could not compress my breasts at all.
They kept protruding.
Seriously, what was wrong?
I had to hurry… What if Ian came in…!
As that thought reached me, I gritted my teeth and was just about to pull the bandage tighter.
Huh?
My vision blurred.
#
Silent space, where not a sound could be heard.
It could not have been otherwise.
…
Neither I nor the little girl.
Nor the thing presumed to be Dante.
Could say anything, because all of us had our mouths shut.
What the hell was this?
I had definitely summoned Dante, hadn’t I?
No, the face was definitely Dante’s.
It was definitely my friend Dante.
But where Dante’s chest should definitely have had firm, solid pectoral muscles,
there was something more magnificent and softer than that…
"Aaaaaah—! Don’t look—!"
A scream that sounded somehow familiar burst from Dante’s mouth, and he hurriedly covered his chest with his arms.
But even those arms could not conceal their presence.
Rather, pressed by his arms, they protruded above and below, making their presence even more pronounced.
No, why?
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