When I Woke Up, I Seemed to Have Become the Villain in an Erotic Game I Was Hooked On, But the Route for This Character Is Nothing but Death Flags? - Episode 3: A Fake Is Still a Fake

Episode 3: A Fake Is Still a Fake

To survive as Yuya Saijo until the game’s ending at high school graduation without revealing that my mind had taken over his body—that was the plan.

It wouldn’t be easy. Still, with Yuya’s knowledge and memories now fully integrated into my own, I felt I had a shot.

For now, I entertained a theory to make sense of this bizarre situation: What if my consciousness had replaced Yuya’s as a result of his brain’s self-defense mechanism? Maybe, unable to bear the stress of his life, Yuya’s psyche had collapsed, and instead of forming a new persona from scratch, his mind had pulled mine from another world.

It’s a wild, half-baked sci-fi explanation, but it’s the best I could come up with. Leaving a deeper analysis of that theory for later, I focused on a more pressing question: was Yuya’s original personality still somewhere within this body?

I searched for traces of him, and what I discovered was unsettling.

The Yuya Saijo that once inhabited this body had ceased to exist the moment his engagement to Ayane Hojo was finalized. He couldn’t handle it. He had vanished entirely.

His final memories and emotions, however, lingered faintly in my mind. Yuya had realized that his worth in others’ eyes boiled down to his parents’ status, the Saijou family fortune, and his position as heir to their corporate empire. 

He held no intrinsic value in their eyes. Even Ayane Hojo, his fiancée, saw nothing more than the privileges that came with being attached to him.

No matter how he acted out, no matter what evil he committed, his family’s wealth and power would always shield him from the consequences.

His misdeeds, which often strayed into delinquency and outright criminality, were never about malice. They were desperate attempts to leave a mark—any mark—on the world. Even if it was through infamy, Yuya wanted proof that he had lived.

But when the engagement was finalized, he understood something that broke him: even his worst actions had been meaningless. Nothing he did mattered in the face of the unshakable system propping him up.

That realization shattered his psyche. Unable to shoulder the weight of his sins or the crushing expectations placed upon him, he chose to flee from everything.

He was rotten. That was my first thought upon grasping his story. It was quickly followed by an intense surge of anger. But just as he had been powerless to escape his circumstances, so too was I.

Destroying the Saijo  Group in a misguided act of rebellion wasn’t an option. It wasn’t just about me; thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of employees depended on the company for their livelihoods. I couldn’t let my crisis bring ruin to so many innocent people.

A fake is still a fake. I couldn’t fully embrace being a villain. I lacked the mental fortitude for it.

“So that’s why… in the routes where the protagonist or heroines kill him, Yuuya looks… relieved.”

I didn’t want to know this. I didn’t want to understand the reason behind the unease I’d always felt when finishing his routes in the game.

But now I did. For Yuuya, death had been the only form of salvation left.

Perhaps… he had already been broken long before any of this began.