Ansys had many questions about his life.
Like how exactly he had ended up transmigrated inside the most dangerous harem game he used to play back on Earth.
Or like the broken screen that had been flickering at the edge of his vision for the past twenty seven days — appearing without warning, dissolving before he could read it fully, like a signal fighting its way through too much interference.
[ Name — Ansys ]
[ #&€¥@! ]
[ ─── SYSTEM FAILURE ─── ]
[ W̵a̸r̷n̵i̷n̸g̴ —̶ E̵x̸t̷e̴r̵n̸a̷l̴ f̵o̸r̷c̴e̵ d̸e̷t̴e̵c̸t̷e̴d̵ ]
[ I̵n̷t̸e̵r̴f̷e̸r̵e̴n̷c̵e̸ l̵e̷v̴e̵l̸ —̷ U̵n̸k̷n̴o̵w̸n̷ ]
[ Synchronization... ]
[ S̵y̸n̷c̴h̵r̸o̷n̴i̵z̸a̷t̴i̵o̴n̶..̸. ]
'Twenty seven days,' he thought, a chill crawling up his spine. 'Something blocked the system so completely that it has been stuck like this since the moment I arrived. What exactly is powerful enough to do that.'
But the broken system was not even his biggest problem.
At the top of that list was the dream.
Always the same one. A woman whose face never came into focus no matter how hard he tried to see it. A vast estate. Walls he was never allowed past. And underneath everything else, buried too deep to reach — a scream with no name attached to it.
He had stopped trying to understand it. For now.
He had been many things in his short existence. A boy with a disease that had taken everything from him piece by piece. A patient in a hospital room where the ceiling was the most familiar thing in his life. A player who had escaped into a game because it was the only place his body worked the way bodies were supposed to.
Erosbound: World of Endless Heroines.
He had played it obsessively, thoroughly, in the way only someone with nothing else to do and nowhere else to be truly can. He had learned its world the way other people learned geography — not as entertainment, but as the place where his actual life happened.
And then he had died.
And woken up here. Inside the world of the game.
He had spent twenty seven days adjusting to that with the quiet stubbornness of someone who had learned long ago that falling apart was a luxury he could not afford. He found work. Kept his head down. Paid attention to everything.
And every single day the broken screen flickered and refused to resolve.
Until today.
---
The air in his small room shifted without warning.
Not dramatically. Just a change in quality — like the atmosphere had been holding its breath for twenty seven days and had finally decided to exhale.
The broken screen vanished.
What replaced it was clean. Sharp. Completely different in character from everything that had come before.
[ Oh good. You're actually talking to me. I was beginning to think you planned to pretend I didn't exist. ]
Ansys stared at it. "You were broken for twenty seven days. What exactly was I supposed to do."
[ Fair. But I am the Framework. Not a system — THE Framework. The underlying structure that allows every system, skill, and ability in this reality to function. Regular systems are rooms. I am the ground beneath the building. You have been selected as my host. ]
"Why were you late ?"
[ Something interfered mid-transit. An external force — unknown origin — attempted to destabilize your anchor while it was still forming. I spent twenty seven days keeping you from fragmenting across the void between realities. ]
[ You are welcome, by the way. ]
External force. Unknown.
That line from the broken screen suddenly felt less like a glitch and more like a warning.
The Framework's tone shifted before he could ask anything else. What had been casual became flat and deliberate. The air felt heavier.
---
[ ▣ PRIMARY TASK ASSIGNED ▣ ]
[ Objective: Form genuine bonds with all designated heroines within this reality. ]
[ Success Condition: A stable network of genuine bonds in which all parties reach true fulfillment. ]
[ Failure Condition: Gradual Existential Dissolution — complete and retroactive Erasure. ]
---
The cold that moved through his chest was slow and thorough.
"Dissolution," he said. "Explain that."
[ You arrived in this world without an anchor. No roots. No history. No reason for reality to keep you here. The heroines carry more weight than ordinary people — their existence is woven into the foundation of this world in ways that most people's simply are not. When one of them forms a genuine bond with someone, that person becomes anchored to reality through her. The world recognizes it. It holds. ]
[ Bond with them — truly, not manufactured — and reality cannot reject your existence. Fail, and you fade. People will find you harder to remember. Harder to notice. The impact you leave unravels behind you like loose thread. And at the end of that process — Erasure. Complete. Retroactive. As though you were never here at all. ]
The silence that followed was complete.
"All of them," he said finally.
[ All of them. ]
"How many ?"
A pause that felt, for the first time, like genuine discomfort.
[ Unknown. The heroines are not a finite catalogued list. Even the original developers of Erosbound never confirmed a number. They exist throughout this reality — some prominent, some buried so deep that most people will never encounter them at all. The full number is not known. It may not be knowable. ]
He laughed.
It came out short and quiet and completely without humor — the kind that escapes when the mind encounters something too absurd to process any other way. He pressed a hand over his mouth and held it there for a moment, staring at the screen.
'Unknown. The number is unknown. Of course it is.'
He had played Erosbound for years. More thoroughly than almost any player he had known. And he had never once reached a point where the game felt finished. There had always been another route, another name, another flag hidden behind conditions he had not thought to meet.
He had assumed that was good game design.
Now he understood it differently.
He dropped his hand. Exhaled once. Pulled himself back together.
"And the second problem," he said. Because there was always a second problem.
[ The heroines do not love gently. When they fall — truly fall — their attachment does not settle into something warm and manageable. It becomes something that does not recognize limits. Something that, without the right foundation beneath it, moves toward outcomes that cannot be undone. You played this game. You know what the bad routes look like. ]
The memories came without invitation.
He remembered Seraphine — the Saintess of Eternal Devotion, her route warm and slow-building and genuinely beautiful in its early stages. In her worst ending she had burned an entire city. Not from rage. Not from grief. She had stood in the middle of the fire smiling, calling it divine purification, holding the protagonist's hand while thousands died around her. Completely calm. Completely certain. The final image was her face in the firelight — peaceful, satisfied, telling him that now nothing would ever come between them.
He remembered Vivienne — the Ice Queen, her route earned through real patience. In her darkest ending she had sealed the protagonist inside a perfect crystal. Preserved. Conscious. Unable to move or speak or age. She visited every day, talked to him for hours, and the final scene was set three hundred years later — her voice unchanged, telling him through the crystal that she was so glad he could never leave.
And then there was Lyara — the healer, the gentle one, the one every player trusted without thinking. Her bad ending had no fire, no crystal. Just years of quiet patience and medicines that mimicked natural illness, until the day there was no one left but her. She had looked at him then and said, simply —now we can be happy.
That was the one that had made him put the headset down and sit in the dark for a long time.
These were not game characters anymore.
They were real people. With real consequences attached to every path they walked.
"I don't like this," he said. Quiet. Honest. "I want that on the record."
[ Noted. ]
"If I do this — I do it my way. I treat them like people. Every single one of them."
[ That ] the Framework said, something shifting in the quality of the text in a way that was difficult to name, [ is precisely why your soul was chosen for this. ]
[ There is one more thing. There are six protagonists. ]
Ansys went still.
[ When you played Erosbound, you selected a character before entering the game. Six options. Six routes, six starting points. Those six are real people in this world — their destinies written into the foundation of this reality's structure. The heroines exist within the currents of fate that flow around them. Many are already beginning to move. ]
[ Your task is not simply to reach the heroines. It is to reach them before those bonds solidify. ]
The weight of it settled into him — not as panic, but as the specific clarity that arrives when you look at something impossible and understand it completely.
An unknown number of heroines. All of them dangerous in ways that had nothing to do with weapons or power. Six protagonists already moving through this world without him. And his own existence depending entirely on whether he could navigate all of it without losing himself somewhere along the way.
He was quiet for a moment.
In his previous life he had not been able to do anything. He had watched his own existence dissolve slowly, without ever getting the one thing he actually wanted — something normal. Warm. Entirely his own.
He had never gotten it.
But he was here now. And if failing meant fading — the same slow erasure he had already lived through once — then he was not going to let that happen again.
'Whatever it takes,' he thought. 'Even if nothing about the path is normal — I will build something normal out of this.'
"Alright," he said.
Not with enthusiasm. Not with relief. Just the quiet, stubborn acceptance of someone who has already lost everything once and has no intention of losing it again.
Outside his window, Velmorra City continued its evening — lantern light, distant voices, completely indifferent to what had just been placed on one person's shoulders.
Ansys looked at his hands.
'Then I had better get started.'
His mind drifted, almost without meaning to, to the girl who had been coming into the café every day for the past two weeks. Same seat. Same order. Same quiet sideways way of watching him when she thought he was not paying attention.
Serina.
He had told himself it was none of his business. That she was a minor route, easy to overlook, not worth the attention.
But she was already here. Already close. Already looking at him in a way that, now that he understood what he was dealing with, felt considerably less innocent than it had this morning.
She had been looking at him long before the Framework ever arrived.
He exhaled slowly and looked at the mirror.
'Of course she was.'