The slender Exusiai, still unconcerned about her bare torso, patted my shoulder comfortingly. “Look at me,” she said in her energetic voice. “Right now, I have no idea how the memories of all my little lovers have been modified. It’s possible all eight of my relationships have gone down the drain at once. A complete server wipe. But what can you do? You still have to keep on living.”

“I’m different from you…” My new, delicate Kiriko-face crumpled, on the verge of tears. “I genuinely like her. It’s not just lusting after her body. This is the true love route! You wouldn’t understand…”

“Are you saying I’m just lusting after my little lovers’ bodies?” Exusiai’s smile vanished. She spoke with a serious and earnest expression, her handsome face suddenly intense.

“…As expected of my brother, you guessed right!” Then she said.

“I thought you were going to argue with me!” My retort was weak, drowned out by the sheer shamelessness of her declaration.

In any case, Exusiai’s interruption did manage to improve my mood a little. Before, it had sunk to the bottom of a trench so deep the corpse would never be found. Now, at least, there was some hope of salvaging the body.

…Wait, doesn’t that still mean my mood is as heavy as a waterlogged corpse?!

I watched as Exusiai puffed out her small but perky and alluring chest, grabbed the light-colored lace bra she’d found in her locker, and began to put it on. She folded her arms behind her slender back, fumbling with the clasp. Her movements weren’t skilled, but after a moment of concentration, she managed to get the job done with a triumphant click.

Seeing me staring dumbly, she smiled a little sheepishly and said in that energetic, handsome voice of hers, “I’m used to unhooking these from other people. This is the first time I’ve ever had to put one on myself, so I’m not very good at it. Sorry for the poor show.”

“Uh…” She was being so polite it threw me for a loop. “You really don’t have to apologize to me…”

But Exusiai, whose collarbones were as elegant as a bird’s spreading wings, misunderstood my meaning entirely. She licked her soft pink lips, a predatory glint in her eyes. “You think my apology wasn’t sincere enough? Okay, I get it. I’ll now demonstrate for you my ‘Divine Bra-Unhooking Technique,’ which I’ve spent years perfecting! It’s my ultimate skill!”

“You don’t have to show me! And why would you spend years perfecting something like that?! Don’t you know how envious that makes people?! That’s a legendary-tier skill!”

“It makes you envious? Unhooking bras?” Exusiai crossed her arms and thought for a moment, then spoke to me in a tone that said, we’re brothers, what’s there to be shy about? “Alright then, how about this? From now on, you can help me unhook my bra every night after we get into bed~ It’ll be good practice for you!”

“No way!” …Even as I said it, my heart was bleeding. “But… I have someone I like! I must remain pure for her!”

“Um…” A heroic voice, filled with a profound sense of defeat, cut into our conversation. It belonged to Saber. “Since I really can’t remember our original names, I’ll just use our character names for now… Exusiai, Yukino, could one of you teach me how to put on a bra?”

Saber had probably never imagined in her entire life that she would one day have to ask someone for help with such a question. The mighty King of Knights, defeated by a piece of lace and underwire.

By now, it wasn’t just Exusiai; Yukino, who had a long-term girlfriend, had also taken off the T-shirt she slept in and, with a quiet sigh, put on a bra with practiced ease that was slightly unnerving.

But Saber—our Big Bro, who had been such a hard-ass before her transformation that girls only dared to admire her from afar—had never had a girlfriend. Of course she didn’t know how to put on a bra.

I wasn’t looking down on him at all.

Because I was in the same boat, completely clueless about this new marvel of human ingenuity.

Thankfully, even after the transformation, I was still a man, not a woman. I didn’t have the equipment slot for a bra. A small mercy from the cruel System-Hime.

Hearing the request, Yukino, who had just finished putting on her own bra and was searching for suitable clothes, paused. Her slender white arms stopped moving as she seemed to be processing her good brother Saber’s request for a bra-donning tutorial. A beat later, she turned around, revealing her small, pale navel to my line of sight, her expression unreadable.

Exusiai, of course, reacted with lightning speed. Before Yukino had even turned, she laughed brightly and teased, “My dear daughter, you’re this old and you still don’t know how to put on a bra? I’ll teach you this time, but you have to remember, okay~”

Saber, the one who had made the request, looked like she was about to cry again. “Don’t talk to me like a mother talking to her daughter!”

Exusiai was teasing, but when it came to her area of expertise—bras—she didn’t mess around. Worried that the sizes would be different, she took a dark, dangerously alluring bra from Saber’s locker, placed it against Saber’s delicate chest, and brought the straps around her back.

“Just do it like this yourself in the future,” she instructed, her voice suddenly serious, like a sensei teaching a secret technique. “Hands behind your back, and hook the straps together. Feel for the hooks, guide them in. Easy.”

Saber pursed her lips and nodded silently. This was a new skill she had never encountered in her entire life. In this sacred domain, she was still a child.

We each picked out new clothes from our lockers according to our tastes. Unanimously, not a single one of us worked up the courage to wear a skirt. So lame. Not a single brave soul among us. We were all cowards.

We nervously opened the door and peeked out, merging into the crowd of lightly dressed girls in the dormitory hallway. We found that no one gave us a second glance of surprise. While we did attract a lot of stares, it was only because of our stunning, S-tier character-model looks. This was all thanks to System-Hime’s reality-altering patch.

Feeling a bit out of place, like NPCs who had suddenly become player characters, we washed our faces and brushed our teeth at the large, U-shaped sink area, surrounded by a cloud of girls. Eager to see what else had changed, the four of us left the dormitory building together.

The morning sun was still hanging in the sky, its bright light spilling down. It seemed as if everything was the same as always, a perfect illusion.

“This feels… very strange,” Yukino said softly, her long-lashed, fair eyelids lowered. “Even though we’ve gone through such a huge change, no one else has noticed. I feel like none of this is real. Like we’re in a dream.”

I patted her on the arm from the side, just like I would have as her brother, trying to offer some comfort. But the feeling that came back to my palm was much softer and more delicate than before. “At least we still have each other,” I said. “Whatever happens, us brothers will face it together.”

I knew that saying this among our circle of beautiful girls would sound incredibly weird, but what else could I do? I couldn’t very well say, “Us sisters will face it together,” could I? That would just make Yukino even more depressed. And if she retorted with, “Only the three of us are sisters, you’re the odd one out who’s still a man,” I’d be truly speechless.

“So we’ve been moved to the girls’ dorm right by the school entrance,” Saber said, looking back at the dormitory building and changing the subject.

Our campus was in the suburbs, where the land was cheap and the area was large. There were many dormitory buildings, and it now seemed System-Hime had moved us into the one just inside the main gate, a prime real estate location.

The four of us discussed the new changes in low voices as we walked towards the academic building. We gradually noticed that the students we passed, both male and female, and even the teachers, were all sneaking glances at us. It wasn’t the shocked stare of someone who had noticed something amiss, but rather the admiring and amazed gaze of someone seeing something beautiful brought to life, like 2D had just broken through into the 3D world.