The Simulacrum - Chapter 76~ Part 4

“How?! How did you become so powerful so quickly!?”

“I’m not that powerful,” I answered humbly, but apparently it wasn’t satisfactory enough.

“Not that powerful my ass! I leave you alone for just a little while, and when I check on you again, you suddenly have a legion of demons!”

“I wouldn’t really call that a ‘legion’, at least not yet,” I tried to excuse myself, but I was cut short.

“Whaaa?! Why do you have fifty pit fiends?! This is total bullshit!” Josh exclaimed at my side, and while his volume level didn’t agree with my lingering headache, I graciously let it slide and only sent him a questioning glance.

“Is there a problem with that?” I asked with all the innocence of a white dove landing on a newborn lamb in the backyard of Lotario dei Conti di Segni. For the record, that’s very, very innocent.

“Of course there’s a problem!” my host fumed without even trying to hide his outrage. “That’s a tier-five ranged unit! You can only recruit four of them every week! How the hell do you have fifty of them on week three?!”

“Just a combination of luck and creative utilization of a few skills,” I told him humbly, but he only continued to stare daggers at me.

“Then care to explain how you got these guys without cheating?” he continued to pester me while pointing at the screen in front of me, with an expression that said he will totally strangle me if I won’t tell him the truth.

“It wasn’t that difficult. First I passed a diplomacy check to recruit one of the monster armies near my starting position, and using them I beat this other army that was guarding this relic, and combined with these two artifacts I found nearby it forms a set that upgrades my faction skill so that when I sacrifice the captives after the battle, I get pit fiends instead of imps.”

“What?! Let me see that!”

Saying so, Josh snatched the mouse out of my hand and quickly checked my main hero’s inventory. In case it wasn’t obvious enough, I was currently in the process of hanging out at my friend’s house, as planned. Things were pretty laid back at the beginning, but after some random discussions about unimportant things, Josh proposed to play a game he recently bought. It was a retro, turn-based strategy game with great pixel art, good music, and terrible balancing, and it perfectly fit Josh’s similarly retro PC with its small CRT monitor. I wasn’t ragging on the guy though; it wasn’t his fault that computer tech leapfrogged twenty years in a few months. If anything, I had a feeling it was my fault, but let’s keep that one to myself for now.

Anyhow, it was a game where you had your castle where you recruited your fantasy units, captured resource nodes, fought neutral armies on the map to level up your hero’s skills, and your goal was to capture all enemy castles on the map. It also had a fun little feature the options menu called ‘hot seat’, where two players could play on the same machine by taking turns. As such, since I was a total newbie, and Josh only played the game enough to get the basics, we decided to form an alliance and fight two medium-difficulty AI players while also continuing our discussions. Since Josh picked the goodie-two-shoes human faction with knights and priests and angels, I thought it would be funny if I picked the evilest looking faction for our team up, so I ended up with the demonists that received low-tier units for free after every victory. Well, at least on paper.

“This is such a broken set bonus,” Josh grumbled just as he finished inspecting the artifacts on my hero character. “And you say you just found all the pieces around your starting location? Seriously?”

“Yeah. They were guarded by some pretty strong neutral armies, but after I got the first one to join me, the rest was easy to take care of.”

“Wow… You’re either insanely lucky, or you’re cheating,” my friend concluded, and I could only shake my head.

“I don’t even know any cheat codes for this game. Not to mention, can you even cheat in multiplayer?”

“Can you? I’ve no idea. All I know is that I left you alone for just five minutes to get some chips, and by the time I returned, you suddenly had enough pit fiends to steamroll the rest of the game.”

“It gets better,” I noted with a not-at-all shit-eating grin. “Once I get my main castle up to tier four, I can upgrade them to pit lords, and then they will do AOE damage to everything in a two hex radius.”

“Seriously?” When I nodded, my friend let out a long whistle and then concluded with, “This game is just broken.”

“I don’t know. I kinda like it,” I admitted, earning me a roll of an eye from Josh. “Anyhow, it’s your turn now.”

Saying so, I got up and let him switch places with me while the screen showed the AI players rapidly taking their turns. While we waited for that (as I said, Josh’s machine wasn’t exactly cutting edge), I picked up one of the bags of chips on his bed and opened it up without any reservations. However, by the time I turned back to him, I found my friend absently gazing at the screen with a contemplative expression on his face. I stopped in my track to take a second glance, but whether I liked it or not, it was indeed a very familiar look. It was the kind that was subtly hinting at the viewer to ask if everything was all right. I had a feeling I’d run into something like this today, so I resolved myself to get it out of my hair and be done with it.

“What’s eating you?” I asked with my best reassuring smile in tow, and Josh glanced over at me in a way that said he was waiting for me to ask. See, I told you it was that kind of expression.

“Idunno. Honestly, I’m just feeling a little muddle-headed lately. I guess I still didn’t fully digest nearly getting killed the other day.”

I wanted to once again point out that he wasn’t in mortal danger, but if it didn’t help the last time, I had a feeling it wouldn’t work now either. Instead, I walked over and softly asked, “Is that what’s bothering you?”

“Yes. I mean… I think it is. Maybe,” my friend answered, sounding about as uncertainly as the words he used. I waited for him to collect his thoughts, and once he did so, he opened with an unusually dramatic sigh. “I think I’m just feeling… burned out isn’t the right term, but it kind of is. I mean, after I got over the first shock about all the fantasy and sci-fi crap showing up out of the blue, things just kind of… petered out.” I raised a curious brow to prompt him to continue, and he did so right away. “I guess it’s because for a while I thought I was important. You know? All the prophecies and stuff? I was pretty scared by all the other things that came with it, and I could honestly live without any of it, but it wasn’t a terrible feeling. Being important, I mean. You can relate on that point, right?”

“I… suppose?” I answered a touch absent-mindedly, not expecting the question. “I was pretty shocked at first as well, but humans are pretty flexible.”

“No, I mean, being important in the grand scheme of things,” Josh corrected me with a frown. “But then again, maybe you can’t. You got where you are because you worked for it. Me? It was just a bunch of prophecies.”

For a moment I studied Josh’s face to see if he was being sarcastic, but since he looked entirely serious, I decided to drop all pretenses and tell him, “Trust me, it might not look like that from the outside, but I’m not nearly as important as you are. Also, it had less to do with hard work and more with stumbling around in the dark while pretending that I totally knew the way. How does the idiom go? In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is mistaken for an almighty janitor?”

“I’ve… never heard that one.”

“I might be remembering it wrong, but I like my version better,” I responded with a shrug. “More importantly, don’t speak of the devil like that, or you might just get visited by the trouble you’re asking for. If you ask me, the reason why all hell hasn’t broken loose around you yet is all thanks to nobody knowing about how crucial you are to all of the supernatural folks yet.”

“And because they’re all focusing on you,” my friend pointed out, and when I rewarded him with a frown, he raised his voice to add, “Come on, we both know it’s true. You’re the one who got all the money and powers and influence, and you’re the one who keeps causing all kinds of incidents. For example, I never caused a bunch of old men to stampede and wreck an entire lecture hall.”

“It wasn’t the entire auditorium, and I don’t remember ever telling you about this.”

“Heard it from Ammy,” Josh responded with a grin, and I couldn’t help that feel that it was obvious in retrospect.

“Go figure,” I grumbled, much to my friend’s amusement. It only lasted for a second thought before he returned to a more somber countenance.

“Speaking of Ammy, I think I stuck around with her mainly because I just wanted to do something. I mean, you’ve been doing all of these secret things in the background, so I thought I’d try it too. In the end, I just felt like a third wheel, and when push came to shove, I even failed to protect her and got beaten, and you had to bail me out again. I mean, don’t take me wrong, I’m not complaining about being saved from the jaws of death in the nick of time and stuff, but it just made me think: am I really that important?”

“I don’t think the two things are closely related,” I pointed out, only to get dismissed with a soft huff.

“Aren’t they? I never thought everything would be smooth sailing, but I figured there would be something. A conspiracy to unravel, some hidden potential or technique to master… Heck, I would’ve been fine with one of those famous whirlwind romances you see on TV all the time, but I got nothing.”

“To be fair, I never experienced anything like that either.”

“Says the guy with two girlfriends,” Josh scoffed at my objection with a decidedly undeserved amount of righteous indignation. “I don’t even have one.”

“Maybe you could try doing something about it then?” I proposed in the heat of the moment, and my friend practically threw his hands into the air.

“Again, says the guy with the two girlfriends! It’s not so simple for the rest of us!” After saying that, he fell silent for a second or two, then quietly added, “Or maybe it’s just me? I mean, even Ammy got a boyfriend.”

“Wait, you mean Mike?” Josh nodded, so I told him, “They aren’t going out.”

“They aren’t?”

“Nope. Remember how I told you the girls interrogated her? Apparently, they are still in the UST phase.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I have a feeling I don’t even want to know. Also, that’s surprising.”

“Tell me about it,” I agreed, though probably not for the reason he thought. After all, just the fact that one of his entourage successfully ‘escaped’ his harem protagonist aura without any dramatic incident or relationship woes was remarkable in and of itself, but the way nobody, including Josh himself, seemed to be against it was another thing entirely. Anyhow, I decided that if this topic came up, I might as well run with it, so I said, “So what if the class rep is in a ‘will they won’t they?’ kind of relationship with another guy? It’s not like there aren’t enough fishes in the sea.”

“Oh, really? Fine, let’s do a headcount of the girls I know,” he responded defiantly and began counting on his fingers. “Judy and Elly are obviously off the table. So is Ammy. Ms. Rinne is my teacher, so that’s not happening, Ichiko is too small and she bites, so that’s a no-no, and Galatea… well, she’s hot, and she has the best knock-knock jokes I’ve ever heard, but not really my type.”

I wanted to ask him just when did he even have enough time with the androidess to learn that, but there was a much bigger elephant in the room to fry, so instead I asked, “What about Snowy and Angie then?”

“What about them?” Seeing that I wasn’t going to back down, Josh let out a long breath and said, “Fine, I get it. Lili is just…” he suddenly paused, and after a beat he asked, “For the record, I know you have this whole ‘overprotective big brother’ thing going on, so do I really have to talk about her?”

“Depends. Are you going to say something that would make me want to inflict grievous bodily harm upon you with a grapefruit spoon?”

“… I’d say… no?”

“In that case, you’re probably safe.”

Josh didn’t look entirely convinced but spoke up anyway.

“So, the thing about her is that… she’s cute, right?”

“Yep,” I agreed.

“And she’s pretty too, right?”

“We can also agree on that,” I granted again.

“So, I think I kinda like her, but she’s… well, being your sister makes it a little weird.”

“It does? How so?”

“I don’t know, it just does,” he blurted out before averting his eyes. “That’s just how it is.”

“If you say so,” I relented with a shrug, and for some odd reason Josh looked downright relieved for a moment.

“So, what I’m trying to say is that ever since she moved in with you, things have been… different. She’s always doing something or hanging out with the girls and doesn’t seem like she’s interested in… you know? I mean, just the other day we spoke for a while during lunch, and she was only talking about this new tablet thing you and Elly bought her and how great it is.”

“Yeah, she’s quite enamored with it as of late,” I agreed, and my friend nodded right along.

“That’s what I mean. We also don’t have much to talk about to begin with, but I had absolutely nothing I could add to that. I mean, we don’t really have any common topics in general, with her growing up in that Abyss place and everything. I just feel like she and I are far apart.”

“Isn’t there a term for that? Opposites attract?” I teased him a little, but he only shook his head again.

“Not even that. I mean, we aren’t ‘opposite enough’ for that. She’s just nice and a good friend and I think I like her, but I’m not sure I like-like her yet, and it’s just awkward. Do you get what I’m saying?”

“More or less,” I told him, but to be perfectly honest, I kind of lost the thread a while ago, so I decided to move on to greener pastures. “What about Angie?”

The moment I uttered her name, Josh almost let out a snort.

“If anything, she and I are too similar. Also…” He abruptly paused here and sent me an odd look, and after urging him with my brows a little, he apparently resolved himself to something and stated, “So… I don’t want to cause you any trouble or anything, but I think she might like you.”

“Me?” I repeated after him without bothering to hide the ocean of disbelief roiling under my voice, and he nodded again.

“All week, she’s been only talking about romance. I mean, she does that a lot when she’s talking about her terrible young adult books, but this time it really felt like she was hinting at something in particular, and she’s been saying some strange things. Like that she could be convinced to try a relationship with multiple people. You’re the only one with one of those around, so it wasn’t hard to put two and two together.”

I awarded my friend’s forthcoming words with a skeptical frown for the ages, but since he didn’t get the clue, I had no choice but to state, “Dude, you really need to work on your math. Among other things.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s…” I had a hard time deciding whether I should say anything more, but considering we were already neck-deep in this topic, I figured I might as well try to nudge him a bit. “Okay, let’s take a step back. When exactly did she start talking about these things with you?”

“I told you, she’s been going at it all week.”

“Yes, but when did she start doing it? What was the trigger?” I led him on, and after some thinking, he finally came to a realization.

“I guess it was after what happened on Monday? You know, with Ammy in the bathroom.”

“Good. Now, try your equation again.”

Josh fell silent for almost half a minute at this point. I was initially a little reserved about interfering with Josh’s love life, but honestly speaking, his ‘potential harem’ has been in tatters thanks to my interference anyway, so I figured I might as well give him a push, Narrative be damned. In fact, looking at it objectively, his entourage already got whittled down to a run-of-the-mill love triangle, with Josh liking Snowy but being unsure about it and Angie nursing a crush on the guy but getting stonewalled by the whole ‘childhood friend always loses’ trope.

While the premise was always about Josh making up his mind, both literally and narratively speaking, at this point things wouldn’t progress anywhere unless he at least realized the situation he was in and made it move. Speaking of which, my friend finally came to a realization of some sort and he promptly shook his head.

“Dude, no way. We’re talking about Angie here. Angie.”

“So?” I responded while simultaneously picking up an already opened can of soda from the nearby nightstand. “I don’t see how that makes a difference.”

“But it does! I mean, we knew each other since kindergarten! I would’ve noticed if she was… you know? Interested and stuff?”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” I stated quite emphatically in return.

“Come on, man! That’s just uncalled for,” he griped so hard he was practically whining, probably thinking that I called him dense… which he kind of was, but that’s beside the point. “Not to mention, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would she start talking about dating multiple people if she was… you know?”

The wishy-washy question earned my friend another skeptical frown which slowly morphed into one of exasperation as I decided to just ignore my reservations about the whole ‘muddling with the Narrative and its conventions’ thing (not that it ever did any good for me, now that I think about it) and be a bit more blunt about things.

“Listen, Josh. Think about your situation a little, will you? You’re the prophesied chosen one of a bunch of different folks. Elly literally came to this island to rekindle your childhood relationship and marry you, Ammy has been hanging out with you since middle school, Snowy tried to seduce you the first time you met, even if on his brother’s orders, and Angie is your childhood friend who’s been with you all through this. Why do you think she would consider going polyamorous in this situation?”

Josh remained suspiciously silent for a good while, only to then blurt out, “No way. Does that mean… I’m actually popular?”

“Was that seriously the first conclusion you drew from what I just said?!” I exclaimed in a mixture of indignation and disbelief, and my host immediately raised his hands in defense.

“Hey! Just because you’re popular with the girls, it doesn’t mean everyone else can take it in stride like you do!” After uttering that objection of wildly misplaced priorities, he let his hands down and asked, in a considerably lower voice, “But… am I really popular? I mean, Elly was a weird case, and Lili is… I don’t know, man. It still sounds a little sketchy to me.”

“It’s not though, and you’re just being obtuse at this point.”

“Cut me some slack, will you? You can’t just dump all that on an unprepared guy all at once!” Josh grumbled as he crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I told you, I still have to wrap my head around the idea of being popular, and… I still can’t really believe it. I mean, it’s Angie we are talking about! And Ammy is… well, we were pretty close in middle school, but she never really showed any real interest… or at least I think she didn’t? Man, this is all kinds of screwy.”

“It’s not. Just go and ask them if you don’t believe me.”

“Hey! Not all of us are the reincarnation of Casanova in this room, you know?” Josh continued to fume.

“You don’t need to be. Just go over to Angie and ask her how she feels about you. Easy peasy.”

“I tell you, it’s not. I get it that you think it’s easy because you’re surrounded by girls all the time, but it’s not that simple.”

“You’re also surrounded by girls, blockhead,” I pointed out just a touch impatiently. “Do you even have any other guy friends aside from me?”

“Of course I… erm… there’s Pascal I suppose. I think we’re friends. Or at least acquaintances, I guess.”

“And the rest of them are all girls, so drop the pretenses,” I concluded, only for my friend to go on the offensive in turn.

“That’s beside the point! At least I’m not actively increasing the number of girls around me!”

“I’m not doing that either,” I noted, only to get scoffed at for my trouble.

“Aren’t you? You got Judy, Elly, Snowy, Rinne, Ichiko, Galatea technically lives in your base so she counts too, and there’s that whole thing with Sahi or Saahira or whatever, so that’s seven girls just off the top of my head. Then, on top of that, now we even have the new girl who’s running away from you while making Elly-noises whenever she sees you!” There was a long beat at this point, during which Josh apparently realized that he just said something weird, and he followed it up with a casual, “What’s the deal with her, anyway?”

If it was anyone else, I would’ve figured they were trying to change the subject, but Josh was generally too guileless for that, so a quick sigh later I told him, “She’s not running away from me per se, but from the princess, and I think I mentioned this before, but she’s the Knight you were supposed to keep an eye out for.”

“Oh, right. You did say something like that yesterday, soooo… is she your old acquaintance? Wait, hold on! Forgot about your amnesia again, my bad.”

“No biggie. Also, she’s apparently my estranged sister.”

“Ah! So it’s actually eight girls!” Josh declared with a grin that even showed his molars, much to my irritation. “Seriously, you can barely go a week without another girl attaching herself to you.”

“The situation is a tad more complicated than that, and speaking of her, you should probably avoid her for the time being.”

“Why? Is she dangerous?”

Josh suddenly sounded apprehensive, so I waved a hand to calm him down.

“Not necessarily, at least to you in particular, but I’m kind of in the middle of a thing with the Knights, and it would be bad if you got caught up in it. It involves her, some magical oaths, and a sword you were probably supposed to have. No take-backsies though; it’s helping me heal my hand.”

“Is that so?” Josh muttered a little absent-mindedly as he digested my words, only to latch onto the weirdest tidbit, as usual. “Is it at least a cool sword?”

“Nah, they are a little naggy and melodramatic.” My friend was giving me a weird look in return for that answer, so I quickly added, “Oh, you mean how it looks? It’s pretty neat if a little too ornamental for my liking. Next time we’re having a training session in the base, I’ll introduce you.”

“You’re talking about it like it’s a person. Is this another of those ‘sword is going to turn into a girl’ situations?”

“I really hope not,” I answered with palpable foreboding, earning me a chuckle in response.

“So, I should stay away from the new girl, huh? Too bad. She looked kinda cute from a distance.”

“… Dude, weren’t you just carping about your difficult love-life five minutes ago? How about you sort that out first before you start eyeing the new girl?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” Josh grumbled as he turned around in his chair and began to absent-mindedly play the game again. “I still don’t know how I should go about it, but after that recent near-death experience, I guess I could at least try. Those are supposed to give people all kinds of epiphanies and stuff, aren’t they?”

“Even if they do, they’re overrated, and I already told you that you didn’t have a near-death experience.”

“Yeah, sure. I’m going to totally believe you one of these days if you keep repeating that enough times,” Josh continued to grumble, though there was a small smile on the corner of his lips. However, it quickly disappeared as his brows descended into a frown and he leaned closer to the monitor to take a better look at something. “Where did I get eight more cauldrons?”

“Oh, that? You said you needed a couple to finish building your town center, so I sent you over a few.”

“You can do that?” he asked in surprise as he turned back to me, and I nodded back while pointing at the corner of the screen.

“Yeah. You can send resources to your allies in the trade menu.”

“Huh. I didn’t know that. Thanks, pal.”

“You’re welcome, buddy,” I replied, and just like that, we continued our fun, if occasionally heated, gaming session. All things considered, it was a pretty nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon, though knowing that dastardly Narrative, I had a feeling I was experiencing yet another one of those ‘calm before the storm’ moments. Didn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy them all the same though.