Villainesses All Around You (1) (Patreon)

A/N: Another work that I've written some time ago. A crossover between Bleach and an original world of my creation. This story follows our protagonist's misadventures in the demon kingdom as he tries to complete the 'game'. Oh, did I say that he's going to have to deal with a yandere harem?And yes, just like the others, this one will feature in**** down the road. You've been warned. Chapter 1: At some point through the night, I woke up. It was not to a sudden jolt. I didn’t come to in a sweaty mess, gasping for air. It was with a gradual fluttering of my eyelashes that I was roused into consciousness.So what? You might be wondering, reasonably so. Hold your horses, and I’ll very patiently explain everything. You see, there’s a teensy-weensy caveat to this otherwise boring introduction. I was supposed to be six feet under a solid ton of dirt somewhere in St.Louis cemetery—a dreary place to spend eternity in, but dead people can’t be choosers. Instead, there I was, sprawled quite immodestly on a vast expanse of linen sheets. A beautiful royal purple. The velvety fabric was soft and warm, a far cry to the cramped space of my casket. Despite the veneer of darkness that shrouded my bedroom, a lone shaft of moonlight that poured through the wide windows allowed me to make out how extravagant yet nerve-wrackingly familiar all of this was. ‘I have been here before.‘Not physically, mind you. But the deja-vu was strong in this place. There were a few memories related to this setting in some alcove of my mind. A name hung at the tip of my tongue.And unless dead people could dream, this was pretty much reality.Well, not really, really, reality. I was not in my world. In fact, I was not in any world. Not Earth. Not Mars. Not Proxima Centauri. And no, not Kepler-16b either. I was currently in a reality that was built on thousands of lines of code. How did I know? Familiarity. Oh, and the hologram in front me might have clued me in. [Welcome to the experimental multiverse simulation. ‘Villainesses All Around You’.][In this run, the subject will have to play the ‘Anti-Hero’. Prevent the deaths of the Villainesses. Bring an end to the Council of Noblemen. Defeat the Hero’s Party. And lead the Devildom of Deynus to glory. Failure will see the subject’s soul thrown into the deepest pits of the underworld.]The screens fizzled out in wisps of gilded smoke. What a cosmic joke. Unfortunately, there were no hidden cameras for this one. ‘Villainesses All Around You’. It was a game I used to play many years ago. It had a brief flash of popularity, becoming a major hit, and had accolades heaped upon it. It had a simple storyline on the surface—interact with the villainesses; slowly lead them into a path where death was not the end game, and eventually marry one of them. To do so, you had to grind your character into a proper level to protect the villainesses and also choose the right conversation options. Pretty straightforward, right?The problem was the last arc of the story. The confrontation with the Hero Party. That arc was also one of the reasons why the game’s popularity took a dive for the worse. The Hero Party was simply unbeatable. It was to the point that podcasts and videos about it were always trending on YouTube. Streamers were on live for hours on end, striving to be the ‘one’ to complete the game. The result? No one managed to reach the true end-game. The sheer impossibility of it veered the streamers’ attention to other games. All of them born from the same formula as ‘Villainesses All Around You’, but significantly easier to complete. As such, the company behind the game released a new update. The Hero Party wouldn’t be summoned up until a certain point in the story, which would give the player substantial time to max out their characters. And that was fine. What was not fine was that the developers sneaked ‘eroge’ content that could be unlocked by following certain conversation prompts. I’d wager that this venture was an ill-conceived attempt to retain whatever trickling users still played the game. Sex, as always, was the best currency to buy someone’s attention. In this case, the mistake was the lack of transparency. You see, no one knew about this little risqué addition. The devs didn’t even bother to leave a note. Everyone was caught unaware. As a consequence, when one unassuming streamer, armed with an old computer, a faulty keyboard, and a big smile on his face stumbled upon ‘that’ content and accidentally streamed it, his dreams of riches and fame were cut short by a ban. The news immediately spread. From one media outlet to another. A spark turned into a wildfire. And soon, hardly anyone was posting content about it. ‘Villainesses All Around You’ slowly faded, pushed down by its uprising competitors. I had actually stopped playing it long before its inevitable descent into obscurity. Not because I disliked the game, but life as an adult cut way too deep into my hobbies, and small sacrifices had to be made. That game was an afternoon of levity that I allowed myself on a particular rainy weekend. However, even though I had to abandon it in favor of focusing on my career, it always retained that soft spot in my heart. A burst of gilded smoke converged into a screen. The words typed themselves in real time. [Fortune awaits you. All it takes is one spin of the wheel.]As far as I could recall, there was nothing like this in ‘Villainesses All Around You’. I was way too calm for this… The nagging suspicion churned in my head. I propped myself up, leaning on my elbows. Despite the bizarre situation, my heartbeat was steady, my breathing regular, and there was no emotional upheaval. All traits of a psychopath—and a psychopath I was not.Which meant there was an outside force at play here. It was a reasonable conclusion. And unless the original developers managed to plant my mind into the game as some sort of VR experiment, I was likely playing the unaware puppet in the hand of some omnipotent puppeteer. [For applying critical thinking in a stressful situation, +1 INT]‘A numerical value added to INT…’ I narrowed my eyes. ‘Is INT short for intelligence or something else, perhaps? Given the situation in which it was awarded to me, I would say it’s ‘intelligence.’ Though ‘intel’ would also make sense as it could simply mean the amount of information I have summed up in digits. Or even ‘integer’, a number which can be positive or negative but with no decimals or fractions. And 1 is indeed an integer… ’[For steadily figuring out the mechanics of ‘The Game’, +1 INT and +1 WIS]A new word. WIS. Which stood for…? ‘I can’t think of any WIS-related word that could be correlated to ‘intel’ or ‘integer’. On the other hand, ‘intelligence’ would blend perfectly with ‘wisdom’. Two facets of someone’s cognitive ability.’The Game. I stared at the screen intently. The words warped before the hologram vaporized in a gaseous burst of pure gold, leaving no trace of its existence behind. All that was left was…[Fortune awaits you. All it takes is one spin of the wheel.] It didn’t matter which direction I turned my head to, the screen would stay affixed to the corner of my peripheral, faded to a point where it wouldn’t hurt my field of vision, but visible enough that I could keep track of it. I reached a hand out, driven mostly by curiosity. The fingers phased through its surface. The words were not even warped, instead, they sought a baseline grid on my skin, like putting a hand in front of a projector. The image would appear on you instead of the wall behind. “How do I spin it?” Even the voice wasn’t mine. It wasn’t the deep rumbling of a man into his late thirties, but a very magnetic and smooth cadence of a young man barely scratching adulthood. The hologram must have heard me for it dissolved like its predecessors, and in its place, a wide, square projection stretched from one corner of my vision to the other. Right in the center was a fortune wheel, with… an infinite amount of sections. Infinite because the more I tried to read everything, the more would appear, as if the sections multiplied, tripled and quadrupled every time my eyes landed on them. I briefly read names like ‘Triage X’, ‘Absolute Duo’, and ‘Irregular at the Magic School’. There was a degree of familiarity in some of them that I couldn’t help but do a double take. Animes. There was a short window in my teenagehood where I used to consume them to the point where it was becoming unhealthy. However, it was not a hobby that lasted long. As the old adage went, ‘All good things must come to an end.’Still, I grew up watching Dragon Ball, so when I saw the iconic title written in one of the sections, I smiled, reminiscing the good old days of coming back home from school just in time to catch the catchy intro of the anime. Life was so simple back then. A child with nary a thought for the future. And now, where was I? An undead inside a fictional character’s body in said fictional character’s world. ‘Are you proud of me now, mom?’ I laughed a little, which helped bleed out some of the tension. [Spin Now!]It read, right above the fortune wheel. ‘Well… here it goes. Am I fortunate enough?’“Spin.” I commanded.The wheel spun around in a frenzy, getting progressively faster, until each section was nothing more than a blur. The ticking noise reverberated in my head like drops of water hitting the asphalt. I held my breath. The ticking reached an all-time peak before it started to slow down. The names became visible again. ‘Tokyo Revengers’, ‘My Hero Academia’, ‘Tokyo Ghoul’, ‘Demon Slayer’, ‘The Daily Life of the Immortal King’, ‘Guilty Crown’.The ticking was even slower now, almost stuttering to a stop.‘Steins; Gate’‘Hunter x Hunter’The tick struggled to move one section forward, but fortunately, it did. ‘Bleach’[Seek not aesthetics in war. Seek not virtue in death. Think not of thine own life. Should thee seek to protect thy Queen, slay all foe as indifferently as shadows of leaves.]