บท 9: But How?

I was able to finally get to my room with Nathan. It was a fairly big room, and inside were various papers out on the desk that appeared to be related to magic. There was also a wooden sword resting near the bedside, which seemed to indicate that I practiced the sword.

I was a little confused why a mage had to learn swordsmanship, but I didn't think about it too hard.

I cleared my throat.

"Alright, first things first, we need to come up with a plan. In order to do so, we gotta first write down all the information we have."

Following that thought, I grabbed the various papers as well as the ink pen and set them on the ground, spreading them out. Nathan held onto his chin and closed his eyes.

"If we are writing this stuff down, I think we shouldn't be that specific. That way, if it goes into the hands of the wrong person, it will just look like random scribblings. We already know the story well enough, so just some keywords should be enough to remember."

I smirked and pointed at him.

"Ha, thankfully you're not an idiot when it matters."

Nathan smiled strangely. He was a little angry.

"You fuckin... let's just focus..."

We began writing out the plot of the story using a feather with ink. We started off with the prologue and slowly began branching out depending on the choices that we made. Unfortunately, a problem came up very quickly.

Though we had remembered most of the game, there were simply way too many branching paths, and even if we did try and list it all out, chances are it wouldn't be too helpful. At least it was a nice refresher if nothing else.

I stopped writing and looked at Nathan, who looked back at me. After a few moments, I scratched the side of my head and sighed.

"What if we try to do something else? Instead, we list out the people we are trying to save and list out the things to note and do to save them."

Nathan nodded intently.

"Alright, then for Jess we need to first take down that piece of shit magician academy, stop the god damn idiotic army and kill them all! Ah, but most importantly fuck up that Jeff guy!"

I pinched the bridge of my nose with frustration.

"Ok, ok, we can get to that, but out of all the girls, Jess is the one that needs our help the least. She has the highest survival rate anyway, fitting of the only starting Class S in the main cast."

He crossed his arms.

"We should still save her first!"

I blinked a few times, staring at him blankly.

"...Why the hell should we help the girl that hardly needs our damn help?! Minori dies in so many of the goddamn endings, she doesn't even have a ten percent survival rate! We should be helping her!"

Nathan crossed his arms and let out a snort.

"If it's so hard to save her, then doesn't that mean we're just going to fail? Wouldn't it just be a waste of effort then?"

I fell silent after hearing that. Ever so slowly, I breathed in.

"...At the end of the day, I think it's unrealistic that we can save everyone. Honestly, just saving the kingdom might be too much for us."

My eyebrows furrowed further as I continued to narrow them.

"I think... we have to choose which people we save."

Nathan's expression fell slightly as he became serious.

"That makes us sound like evil people."

I shook my head.

"Just because we have knowledge of the future doesn't make us some omnipotent god. At the end of the day, there are limits to what we can do. We can't save everyone. Especially not if it's this shitty dating game."

Nathan raised a hand to his chin, looking down in thought.

"No matter what, I want to save Jess."

I nodded.

"And I refuse to let Minori die."

Nathan scratched the back of his head.

"So now we decide which other people we will try to save..."

From there, we looked down at the list of characters. They were all different targets you could go for in the dating game.

Jess

Minori

Ela

Arianne

Cheryl

Charlotte

Sophia

Most of them were actually in Class A itself, though Sophia was a hidden target. Honestly, the two of us probably had more resentment than anything against her because of how difficult it was to just meet her, much less actually choose the proper options for her route.

We were initially quite excited about her route as it was a 'secret' but afterwards we kinda just felt disappointed, as she wasn't exactly either of our styles.

I guess all things considered, there was also Raisa, but I decided that I was just going to ignore her for the most part. If she had a good impression of me, then she probably wouldn't get in the way.

I sucked in a cold breath.

"Anyway, we should list out the requirements for each person..."

From there, the both of us began discussing various important things to do and adding essential parts underneath the respective girls' names. We had to keep each other in check in terms of Jess and Minori because many of the things we wanted to do were get revenge on someone that had somehow slighted the respective girl. Now, while there were many people that were just kinda assholes, they weren't trying to kill them by any means.

As such, considering our main goal was saving people, we decided not to care about those things.

For Jess, the main thing was doing something about the Magician Association. They were a collection of mages and naturally gained quite a high status because of it. Jess attempted to join said association, but just because the organization was big and powerful, didn't mean that they were righteous.

Jess was tricked into becoming an experiment, which would then let these mages learn of a special weapon that would backfire spectacularly, one of the things that sent the kingdom into ruin.

Honestly, if we planned on saving the kingdom, we had to prevent that anyway, so I wasn't very against saving her.

On the other hand, for Minori, if we wanted to save her, we would have to prevent the Peasant Rebellion. Essentially, at some point, a certain mentality would spread among all of those working on the farms. It was related to a gradual lack of food.

They would all get afraid, paranoid, and eventually turn that fear into anger. Their main goal would be to attack the nobles and their properties, causing lots of damage. However, in the process of doing that they would actually end up harming many of their fellow commoners. In fact, because of their rashness, many more peasants would end up killed compared to nobles.

Minori was one such unfortunate person that would end up getting killed by said peasants because of that rampage.

Solving this would also help out the kingdom, but wasn't too strictly important in the short term. After the rebellion, the king would lower taxes for all nobles forcefully which greatly calmed them down. Of course, the monetary damage was huge, but the deaths were relatively low.

I explained all of this to Nathan, but after I said that he added to my statement, without his bias of Jess coming in.

He mentioned that while not many people would die, the damages would be severe for the kingdom's economy. It wasn't just the noble's property that got damaged, but farms and peasant houses too. We wouldn't have to care much about it in the game, because it ended before those effects would matter. However, we were now living in this game.

Down the line, something like that would surely cause a great amount of trouble and even be the source of the kingdom's downfall not far in the future.

My eyelid twitched as I realized that was definitely a good point. Unfortunately, this was no longer a game. It wasn't as though we could just ignore the ramifications of our actions in the long term.

I let out a sigh and looked up to the ceiling as though there was a sadistic god watching.

"Since when did two idiots like us have to save the day?"

Nathan laughed.

"Ever since we decided to transmigrate here I guess."

I rubbed one of my eyes using my index finger before shaking my head.

"I guess that also means we can't use cheap solutions either, like locking up Minori somewhere while the Peasant Rebellion happens so that she doesn't die because that doesn't solve the root cause."

Nathan nodded.

"Honestly, that was the first thought for saving Jess, but even if I could get her to agree to hide away, if the mages keep looking for her then it doesn't really matter."

I massaged my temple.

"...Let's ignore the other girls for now. The Magician Association is far too big of a beast for us to deal with right now. But what we can do is get the commoners on our side, and maybe we can somehow use them to influence the Magician Association while preventing the rebellion at the same time."

Nathan narrowed his eyes slightly.

"I mean... I don't think they'll be able to do anything to the Magician Association, especially considering they can all just be blown away."

I smiled bitterly and tried to stick with my logic, even if I didn't really believe in it.

"They have to like... care a little bit, right?"

Nathan clicked his tongue.

"Well, I would prefer to help out Jess right away, but I guess this makes sense more or less. It's not like we can just barge in there despite how much I want to."

I raised my finger with a confident smile.

"Thank god I'm a noble then, I should have the resources to like, help out, right?"

Nathan looked at me like I'm stupid.

"...But you're just a Duke's son, not even a duke. Sure you may be able to help some people, but the biggest problem is that there are far too many commoners."

I rubbed my chin.

"Er... so how hard should it be?"

Nathan let out a sigh.

"I searched this up before, nobles are about three percent of the population, religious people are about seven percent."

He looked me dead in the eye.

"And at least ninety percent of people are commoners. The game said that there are twenty thousand damn people in this kingdom."

I frowned rather deeply at his statement

"...In other words, we have to find a way to feed eighteen thousand people?"