[I can finally… sleep….]
The woman in black on the monitor dissolved into light and vanished.
Her fading form disappeared completely, and the ending credits began to roll across the dark screen.
"Phew! Barely managed it!"
I let out a long, satisfied breath as I watched those credits scroll by.
"That was one hell of a fight…."
⟨The Saintess Seeks the Hero at the Academy.⟩
Known simply as Saintess & Hero.
An RPG game adapted from an original female-oriented romance fantasy novel.
Given its source material, it had initially been planned as a female-oriented dating simulation—but somewhere along the development process, the combat system that had started as a side feature kept growing until the genre shifted entirely to RPG. A game with a rather unusual history.
At first, people were skeptical. Could an RPG really succeed when it was based on a female-oriented romance novel? The answer turned out to be a resounding yes.
The absurd degree of freedom, the pulse-pounding combat system, and the lavish, gorgeous art style that was distinctly romance-fantasy—all of it came together to earn the game a reputation as a masterpiece not just among female players, but male players as well.
The developers, sensing the tide was in their favor, pushed even further—releasing a Hero Mode aimed squarely at male players, and a Custom Mode that let you build and play as your own original character.
It was impossible to believe this had started as a romance novel adaptation. The game swept every award worth sweeping that year and cemented itself as a titan among titans.
I'd been completely hooked on Saintess & Hero ever since it blew up—going on two years now.
And today, I finally got to see the end of that long, long journey.
To be fair, I'd cleared the main story modes—Saintess Mode and Hero Mode—ages ago.
But that woman who had just fallen on my screen.
The so-called villainess, Aiolette Drnaris.
She had stopped me cold. For months, I'd been stuck in an endless loop of attempts and retries.
Aiolette only appeared as a hidden boss in Custom Mode.
In Saintess Mode and Hero Mode, she was just a standard antagonist—a noble young lady who got in the way of the hero and saintess. But for some inexplicable reason, in Custom Mode she showed up as a hidden boss with stats that made the game's actual final boss look like a warm-up act.
Drawing on a seemingly bottomless mana pool, she casually blanketed entire fields with massive area attacks like she was breathing. And whenever she got bored, she'd throw out instant-kill moves on a whim. Her pattern was like something a ten-year-old had dreamed up for the ultimate unbeatable boss.
The game had been out for nearly two years, and not a single verified clear of Aiolette had ever been posted. That was the kind of obscene difficulty we were talking about.
The community had long since reached a consensus: Aiolette was never meant to be beaten. The developers probably hadn't designed her to be killable at all.
And I had just killed her.
The months of effort flashed through my mind like a slideshow.
Every waking hour that wasn't spent at work had been spent dissecting Aiolette's patterns, looking for the crack.
It wasn't until she started showing up in my dreams that I finally managed to clear it.
I was still sitting there, soaking in the afterglow of victory, when something changed on the screen.
[Remarkable Achievement!]
[You have defeated the great evil that no one could overcome!]
[A new possibility awakens.]
[Trait ⟨Sword Saint⟩ has been unlocked!]
"Sword Saint!?"
As I mentioned, Saintess & Hero was a game with an extraordinary degree of freedom.
With thousands of classes and traits to choose from, players could build their characters in virtually any direction they wanted.
But among all those options, Sword Saint had never been one of them.
Even with classes like Hero and Saintess in the game, the Sword Saint—a staple of the fantasy genre—was nowhere to be found. Countless players had theorized it was hidden somewhere as a secret piece and had gone hunting for it, but no one had ever succeeded.
"So the unlock condition for Sword Saint was beating the hidden boss… that's brutal!"
My mouth was complaining, but my body was already being honest about how I felt.
Before I knew it, I had started a new game and was in Custom Mode.
But how could I possibly wait?
I'd mastered every build worth mastering, I'd taken down the hidden boss, and I'd been on the verge of finally putting this game down—and then a brand-new trait appears. Not just any trait. The Sword Saint.
Normally I'd take my time with character creation, but right now my mind had exactly one goal: check the Sword Saint trait.
I slapped together a random character design and jumped straight to the trait selection screen, clicking on Sword Saint.
"Alright, let's see what we've got…."
«Sword Saint»
[You are beloved by the sword.]
"Wait, that's it?"
Normally, selecting a trait brought up a detailed breakdown of its bonuses and effects. The Sword Saint trait gave me one cryptic line and nothing else.
There was no way to tell what kind of power it actually granted from that alone.
"Nothing for it, then. Let's just play and find out!"
One run would tell me more than staring at the screen ever would.
I'd been grinding a boss fight for hours and should have been exhausted, but the dopamine surge had wiped the fatigue clean away.
Heart pounding with anticipation, I pressed the start button.
And then—
Flash!
"Ah—!"
A blinding light erupted from the monitor and flooded my vision entirely.
At the same moment, my consciousness began to blur at the edges.
Through the fading haze, I caught a glimpse of text on the screen.
[The world stirs at the arrival of one who would shake the currents of fate.]
[You have been burdened with the ⟨World's Trial⟩.]
[To you, who embarks on a new adventure—boundless blessings.]
***
When I came to, what I saw—or rather, what I felt—was absolute darkness.
My first thought was that I'd been kidnapped and taken somewhere pitch-black.
But that wasn't it.
I was simply… blind.
When I first realized I couldn't see, I fell into a panic unlike anything I'd ever experienced.
The act of seeing—something I'd taken for granted my entire life—had been stripped away without warning. The fear was overwhelming. For the first time in my life, I didn't care who was watching. I just sank to the ground right where I stood, trembling, tears streaming down my face.
I cried for a long time. When I finally managed to calm down, I started to piece together what had happened.
The unfamiliar emptiness below my waist. The weight on my chest.
"…You've got to be kidding me."
I tried denying reality for a moment, but nothing changed.
All I'd wanted was to play a game. Instead, I'd gone blind without warning—and apparently changed gender in the process.
***
A month had passed since I became a woman.
I'd managed to get a rough picture of where I'd landed.
This appeared to be a fantasy world with roughly medieval-level civilization.
Listening to the conversations of people passing in the streets, I kept catching references to mages and knights. That confirmed it well enough.
And what was I doing in this fantasy world?
"Oh… someone threw away a half-eaten loaf of bread. Lucky me."
Digging through trash bins, as it turned out.
Yes. In a fantasy world where mages and knights ran rampant, I had been assigned the role of beggar.
Tap. Tap.
I quickly tucked the bread I'd found into my clothes and brought the stick in my other hand down against the ground, listening to the sound it made.
The echo bounced back, sketching out the rough shape of the alley around me, and I slipped into the gap between a pair of abandoned wooden crates.
In the early days after losing my sight, taking a single step had been agony. A month later, I could manage this much.
Echolocation, they called it.
The basic idea: make a sound, feel how it bounces off walls and objects, and use that to map your surroundings.
I'd once read something online about how people who lose one sense sometimes develop an abnormal compensation in another—some other faculty sharpening to fill the gap.
At the time I'd thought, huh, interesting, and moved on.
I hadn't expected to be living it.
Still. At least it let me rummage through trash bins.
Chew, chew.
"At least I won't go hungry today."
It wasn't as though I'd planned to live as a beggar from the start.
But what exactly could a blind woman do in a medieval world?
With no family, no connections.
If I could use magic, I might have found some way to earn a living—but that wasn't an option either.
After wandering into the streets without knowing any better and nearly being dragged off to work in a brothel, I'd retreated to the back alleys and stayed there.
"…I can't keep living like this forever."
Scraping by day to day, just barely keeping myself fed. It felt like sinking into a bog with no visible bottom.
But the honest truth was that I didn't have many options.
"Hah… I'll just sleep. The faster I'm unconscious, the longer before I'm hungry again."
I turned away from the bleakness of it all, set my stick down beside me, and curled up on the ground.
The cold seeped up through the stone and into my back, but I was used to it by now.
It didn't matter whether my eyes were open or closed. Either way, there was nothing to see.
I was just letting go of consciousness when—
Tap.
"…?"
A faint sound. Almost nothing.
But it landed sharp and clear in my ears.
Tap, tap, tap-tap-tap!
Rough, urgent footsteps.
Someone running at full speed.
Someone just entered the alley.
I'd only been here a month, but this back alley was my territory.
I knew the footsteps of everyone who had reason to come through here. These were new.
Too light…
Tap-tap, tap-tap-tap!
Hard, desperate strikes against the ground.
One person.
No—
More footsteps behind. Closing in.
Two, three… more than that.
I needed to move.
Whoever these people were, running into strangers in a back alley was never good news.
I tapped my stick against the ground—once, twice.
The sound spread out and came back, tracing the shape of the alley in my mind.
I was just about to slip away when—
Crash!
Something slammed into the wooden crate right beside me and went down.
"Ha—hah—!"
Ragged, gasping breaths. A young girl's voice.
And then—
"Heh. Gotta hand it to you, you run pretty damn well."
A low, rough voice.
"Didn't expect a noble brat to have the stamina."
The situation was obviously one I wanted no part of.
I pressed myself back against the ground and held my breath.
I'm a rock. I'm just a rock.
Maybe if I stayed still enough, they'd overlook me—
"You ran in here and now some poor beggar's going to die alongside you. Shame."
With those words, I felt the weight of attention shift toward me.
Oh, come on. Seriously. My life.