Chapter 12 — It All Ended Up This Way Because of the Three Eroge Nobles

The twenty-six Sage candidates were gathered in the reception room of the building, easily large enough to accommodate all of them. Strictly speaking, only twenty-four of them had received the Gift, so it wasn't clear to the others whether the remaining two should be considered "candidates," but either way, they were now settled into their mansion within the palace. It was almost like a small castle in and of itself.

After taking the group to the entrance, their guide had left them. At that point, the class had turned back to Yogiri and Tomochika. They'd hesitated to speak about internal issues in front of strangers, but now they were alone.

"I don't think leaving you two behind was a mistake." Yazaki was the first to speak. "In hindsight, there may have been a better way, but with the information we had at that point, there was a limit to what we could do with the people we had." For him to take such a defensive stance, there must have been some lingering guilt in the back of his mind.

The class that Yazaki had received from the Gift was "General." The General class had command skills, which helped groups to form cohesive teams focused on a single objective. As long as one concurred with his objective, he could even force others to comply to a certain extent. As such, the responsibility for the plan to use them as bait rested almost entirely with him. That being said, no one in the class had disagreed with his heartless scheme either, so it wasn't like they were free of blame themselves.

"I don't really care. I was asleep anyway." Yogiri meant it. He had never really gotten along with the class, so he didn't feel like he had been betrayed.

"Honestly, I'm not too happy about it, but complaining about it now would just get annoying, so let's leave it at that," Tomochika said firmly. "Or do you guys want to complain about us coming back?" Despite her words, it seemed she wasn't quite willing to let it go.

"Well..."

"I believe we should accept them with open arms," one girl interjected while Yazaki struggled to find a response.

"Who is that?" Yogiri whispered.

"Wait, you don't know Akino? She's, like, super famous." Tomochika seemed shocked by his ignorance, but if he didn't know someone then he didn't know them; there wasn't much he could do about it.

Her name was Sora Akino. According to Tomochika, she was the leader of a nationally famous idol group. After hearing that, Yogiri did notice that she seemed an awful lot more refined than the others, but perhaps because he didn't have much of an interest in idols, he still thought Tomochika was cuter.

"In a strange new world where we have few friends, how can we survive if we don't cooperate?"

"But...can we trust them?"

"You just think that because, in the same situation, you would have been seeking some sort of selfish revenge, don't you?"

Yazaki fell silent at the sharp rebuttal.

"I thought Yazaki was the leader," Yogiri whispered again.

"I did too, but..." The moment Sora stepped forward, Yazaki seemed to lose all of his energy. Noticing Yogiri and Tomochika whispering to each other, Sora turned to them with a smile.

"However unworthy I may be, I am currently leading our class. I look forward to working with you."

◇ ◇ ◇

After their conversation in the lobby, they each split off into their own rooms. Up until that point, they had been working in teams. With each team claiming one room, the assigning of quarters was over quickly.

The teams were apparently ranked based on their combat abilities, so Yogiri had been placed in the lowest-ranked team.

"If we're not allowed to go up to the second floor, how come the girls are allowed to use the first floor freely?" one of the guys with Yogiri complained the moment they entered their new room. The second floor was reserved for the girls, while the lower level had been given to the guys.

"Come on, Yuugo. Takatou clearly has no idea who either of us are," the other guy said.

Including Yogiri, they were now a team of three. As the class had been divided into seven groups, they had been deemed Group Seven.

"Yeah, who are you exactly?" Yogiri asked.

The room was quite spacious, holding four beds. Yogiri took a seat in one of the chairs prepared for them, and the others took a seat across from him.

"Are you serious? I talked to you all the time! About all sorts of things! I never saw you talk to anyone else, so I didn't want you to be completely isolated!"

"Haha, Takatou always looked so sleepy, he probably wasn't even listening to you." The more energetic one was Yuugo Izumida, and the other was Yukimasa Aihara.

"Well, we're the useless ones, so welcome to the dropouts!"

"Yuugo, we haven't assessed Yogiri's ability yet. He's only here because they didn't know where to put him. I don't know if we can call him a 'dropout' already."

"Really? But all he does is kill bugs, right?"

As agreed earlier, Yogiri had told them that his class was Insect Hunter, and that his ability was to kill insects. He explained that his Gift had showed up late, but no one seemed to doubt his story.

"That's right. What about you guys?"

"My class is Cook. My ability is that no matter what I make, it always tastes good, so it's pretty useless in a fight."

"My class is Reader. I can read books written in any language. I'm pretty fond of it myself, but like Yuugo, it's basically worthless in combat."

"It looks like our abilities come from our own personalities. I did always want to be a cook, and Yukimasa does love books. So, do you hate bugs or something, Takatou?"

"Sure? I mean, mosquitos are annoying, so I guess I'd say I hate them."

"Yeah, anyone would hate mosquitos, though."

Yogiri hadn't given any thought as to why that particular ability might have been given to him. But just making it seem like he hated bugs would probably be the easiest way to pass it off.

"Can I ask how you guys got here? I'm curious about how the class managed this whole time. Yazaki divided you all up to start with, didn't he?"

"Ah, yeah. We ended up like this because we started losing people. There are eleven guys and fifteen girls left in the class. There were more guys in the beginning, but a lot of them left to do their own things."

Three of them must have been the ones Yogiri had first encountered back at the bus. There were originally nineteen in the class, so it looked like they had lost quite a few.

"Well, in the end, it probably ended up this way because of the three Eroge Nobles."

"Who?"

Maybe the term was related to why Ushio had been called the Eroge Baron. Beside him, there must have been two more. Yogiri was quite curious, but before they could answer his question, they heard a knock at the door.

Yukimasa stood up and answered it, letting a shy, long-haired boy inside.

"Ugh, Fukai? What do you want?" Yuugo openly grimaced when he saw him.

"T-Takatou...c-could I speak to you for a moment?" Perhaps nervous, the new arrival spoke in a somewhat halting voice.

Unsurprisingly, Yogiri had no idea who he was.

◇ ◇ ◇

"So, what the hell does 'Eroge Baron' mean?" Tomochika asked her new roommates in their room on the second floor.

"That's what you care about most?!"

The one who answered her was Jiyuna Shijou. Together with Romiko Jougasaki, they made up Group Six. The groups were built in such a way to avoid mixing boys and girls, so this was the lowest-ranked team on the female side. Fighting had apparently been left up to Groups One through Five.

"I'm sorry for leaving you behind," Romiko said nonchalantly as she lounged on a nearby sofa.

"Ah, I guess I should apologize too. You said it was okay, but I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it. There was nothing you could have done anyway. So, what is this Baron thing?"

"You really are stuck on that, aren't you?" Jiyuna said in an exasperated tone. "Well, I guess I can explain that too. Eroge Master, Shinya Ushio. Eroge Meister, Keiichi Munakata. Eroge Maniac, Mitsuo Yatate. I don't know who started it, but we've ended up calling them the three Eroge Nobles."

"Uh, is that Eroge-whatever their class name or something?"

"Yep."

"That's pretty cruel!"

"Then someone started calling Ushio the Eroge Baron. Munakata was the Eroge Marquis, and Yatate became the Eroge Count."

"Who came up with that? It sounds a bit mean to me."

"You say that, but it looks like you're enjoying it an awful lot."

"I don't think so, really, but please continue."

"Since the classes were handed out by the Sage, we didn't think it was any fault of theirs that they got such a horrible one...but after we saw everyone else's classes, we figured out that classes reflect the personalities of the people who have them."

"So, we realized that those three like to play those kinds of games," Romiko added, "and all the girls started staying away from them."

"I mean, isn't it pretty normal for guys to do stuff like that? All of them do to some extent, don't they?" As a video game aficionado herself, Tomochika was a bit more in the know.

"Well, some people tried to be understanding. But Ushio's ability is Time Stop, Munakata has Invisibility, and Yatate's is Tentacles."

"How are tentacles an ability?!"

"Of course that's what would bother you," said Jiyuna. "Yeah, he can make tentacles grow out of anywhere. I've seen him do it, and frankly, it's gross. But anyway. For someone to play those games to the extent that that's the main facet of their personality, and for it to give them such easily abusable powers, people started keeping their distance. It's like an instinctive response. At the start, Yazaki acted as the leader, but he ended up losing control of them. Akino managed to pull things together from there."

"Akino's class is Idol, by the way," Romiko interjected again.

"Well, she's an idol in real life, so that makes sense." It was hardly a surprise to Tomochika that she'd end up with a class like that.

"Oh, this version of 'idol' is more like the statue kind, though. The more religious meaning —" As Jiyuna tried to explain, she was interrupted by a knock on the door, surprising them since they weren't expecting anyone to visit.

Tomochika stood up and opened the door. On the other side were Ryouko Ninomiya and Carol S. Lane.

"Excuse me, Dannoura! Could we speak to you for a second?" Ryouko blurted out the moment she saw her face, clearly stressed.

"Sure, come on in." But even as she invited them into the room, she felt suspicious. She had no particular relationship with these two.

"No, it's kind of a secret, so could you come out here?"

"Huh? Well..." Tomochika's suspicion grew. Ryouko looked totally flustered, yet Carol was perfectly calm. They made a strange pair.

"It's about Takatou! Please! We need your help!"

Tomochika sighed. "Fine. I'll be back in a bit," she called to the two inside. While she was definitely acting strangely, Ryouko also seemed awfully desperate.

And if it was about Yogiri, she couldn't really ignore it.