It all happened in a flash. One moment, I was navigating the nonsensical dreamscape of my own subconscious; the next, reality came crashing back in.
It was a bright, sun-drenched morning when a girl’s blood-curdling scream ripped me from my sleep like a kunai to the throat. The shriek wasn’t just loud; it was laced with a raw, primal terror and a despair so profound it felt like a physical weight in the air. It was the kind of sound someone makes when they’ve just witnessed the world itself crack open and swallow something irreplaceable whole.
At first, my sleep-addled brain tried to file it away as a dream. Either a nightmare starring a particularly nasty banshee, or, you know, that kind of dream. I mean, this was a men’s dorm—a sacred sanctuary of instant noodles, unwashed laundry, and questionable life choices. What girl in her right mind, or with a functioning sense of smell, would be in here?
But the frantic, broken muttering that followed shattered that illusion, along with my entire sense of normalcy.
“It’s gone… It’s gone… It’s all gone…”
Her voice, now that it wasn’t a shriek capable of shattering glass, was surprisingly melodic—the kind of voice you’d expect from a rare SSR-rank character in a gacha game, not something you’d hear in the mundane drone of daily life. But the tone was steeped in pure, undiluted hopelessness, confirming my suspicion that she’d lost something precious.
That snapped me wide awake with the force of a system shock.
A girl. In a men’s dorm. Having lost her “most treasured possession.” You didn’t need to be a genius detective—or have watched all sixteen hundred episodes of Case Closed—to connect the dots. She’d lost that one “magical” thing she could never get back.
(For the record, I’m pretty sure Case Closed doesn’t actually have sixteen hundred episodes. Yet.)
The girl kept repeating “it’s gone” in a voice that should have belonged to a spirited anime heroine about to embark on a grand adventure, and hearing it twisted into such misery made my blood boil. Which one of my scumbag roommates had done this? Dragged this poor girl into our den of depravity and stripped her of that one precious thing. What an absolute animal.
More importantly, he didn’t even wake me up to join in! He just let me sleep like a log right next to them while he committed this heinous act. What did that make me? Worse than an animal?!
Of course, that thought was just a fleeting, half-joking impulse from the darker corners of my brain. In all seriousness, I knew our dorm was in deep, deep shit. Abducting a girl and leaving her in tears at dawn… that’s a one-way ticket to a very bad end, complete with jail time and social ostracization. I couldn’t wait to see which of the animals was responsible so I could immediately wash my hands of him.
I shot upright in bed, my eyes locking onto the source of the voice. It was coming from the bunk against the opposite wall—the one belonging to our dorm’s “Big Bro.”
Our Big Bro. To all the girls in our year, he was the cool, stoic type—a silent, disciplined hard-ass who communicated in grunts and stern looks. Only we, his roommates, knew about the lecherous, dimension-breaking fantasies that were constantly raging in his mind.
…Don’t tell me Big Bro actually went through with it?!
Stunned, I stared. There, sitting on Big Bro’s spartan bunk, was a half-naked blonde girl. She had a thousand-yard stare, as if questioning every decision and branching dialogue path that had led her to this point. Her golden hair cascaded down her back, catching the morning light in a way that was almost hypnotic, like a waterfall spun from pure sunshine. It looked so soft it was practically a physics-defying anime wig. Her fair, delicate skin was bare, revealing… well, revealing certain beautiful things that would get this novel censored. I say “half-naked” only because the lower half of her body was tucked under the covers, a tantalizing mystery hidden from my view.
Right then, the blonde beauty had one hand under the blanket, frantically checking something right in the center of her being. From the tell-tale lump moving under the sheets, I could guess exactly what she was doing.
…Gods, where did Big Bro even find a blonde bombshell who looked like she’d just walked off the cover of a light novel?
The shock sent a tingle across my scalp, but in the midst of it, I noticed a crucial detail. Or rather, a blind spot in the whole picture.
The bombshell was on the bed, but our stoic Big Bro himself was nowhere to be seen.
…Where’d he go? Did he flee the scene of the crime? Worse, what if he was pulling a ‘pot calling kettle black’ and had already called the cops, pinning the whole thing on the three of us who were still here?
But then I reconsidered. That seemed too elaborate. The reason was simple: Big Bro just wasn’t that smart.
Just then, a rustle came from the bunk adjacent to mine, the one lined up end-to-end with my own. Seems the noise had woken someone else up. After all this time rooming together, I didn’t even need to look to know it was Number Four.
Number Four was handsome—we’re talking influencer-level, five-star-rated handsome, the kind girls flock to online. All that effortless attention had turned him into a champion-level player, a harem protagonist in the making. The girls he brought to hang out with us were a constantly rotating cast of characters. I remember after the week-long National Day break, he told us he was dead on his feet. When I asked why, he said he had too many girls to see and not enough days in the holiday to make his rounds. A real animal, that one.
I was just about to get Number Four’s help in hunting down our fugitive Big Bro when I saw a topless, red-haired girl sit up in his bunk.
The words died in my throat.
She was also bathed in that same ethereal morning light. Her short, fiery red hair somehow reminded me of apple pie and rebellion, the kind you’d see on a hot-headed tsundere character. Her slender back was a work of art, with the delicate lines of her shoulder blades pressing against her skin like nascent angel wings. Just the sight of her back was enough to make you drool.
What the hell? Number Four brought a girl back, too?
The redhead, still groggy, seemed confused by the situation, scratching her head with slender, pale fingers. And I realized something else: just like with Big Bro, the girl was there, but Number Four was gone.
…Don’t tell me Number Four and Big Bro skipped town together!
My breath caught in my chest. If it was just Big Bro, the rest of us could have teamed up and pointed the finger at him. But with him and Number Four in it together, that left just me and Number Three to be framed. It would be our word against theirs, two on two. Who would the cops believe? And in the dark, these poor girls probably wouldn’t even know who their real kidnappers were! This was a terrible, unwinnable scenario from a visual novel, and I didn’t have a save file to reload.
Just then, another sound came from the bunk diagonal to mine—Number Three’s bed. A wave of ice-cold dread washed over me.
No, I told myself. Not Number Three. He wouldn’t pull the same stunt as those two animals. He had a long-term girlfriend. Hell, they’d just had a pregnancy scare last week, and he’d been agonizing over it for days, looking like a man who’d seen the abyss and found it wanting. He wouldn’t have the time or the inclination for this kind of unforgivable, save-file-deleting crap.
But maybe Fate is just another name for Loki, the God of Mischief, because she decided to play the cruelest possible joke on me.
A girl with long, straight, jet-black hair sat up in Number Three’s bunk. I watched, frozen, as she ran a hand through her silky, ink-black hair, looking completely bewildered with the quiet grace of a classic yamato nadeshiko. Thankfully, she wasn’t naked. She was wearing a simple, oversized t-shirt, just like Number Three usually slept in.
Oh my god.
I was going to lose my mind. My sanity points were dropping to zero.
My three roommates had conspired. They’d each brought back a beautiful girl—all with different hair colors, like they were collecting party members for an RPG—had their fun, and then snuck out while I was dead to the world. By now, they’d probably already called the cops, all three of them pointing the finger at me as the sole culprit. If these girls had been unconscious, if they had no idea who had actually hurt them… I’d be screwed. There’d be no way to clear my name. A “Game Over” screen was flashing before my eyes.
How was I supposed to explain this to the police? Tell them I didn’t have the stamina—or the MP—to… handle… three beautiful women in one night?
What was I going to do?!
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