“Lily, I love you.”
I decided to press forward. Empty words of comfort like, “You don’t need to cry, I’m here for you” simply weren’t impactful enough. This was an important place for Lily, the two of us were alone together, and she was crying. If I didn’t take this chance, then I didn’t deserve to call myself a man!
“Huh?” She looked up at me in surprise. “H-Hold on. I-I...”
Now that I’d started down this path, I couldn’t stop midway. I looked at her long eyelashes and teary eyes, and knew that she was the one for me.
“Ah...” She let out a soft breath and slowly closed her eyes. A second later, there was a loud bang and my vision went blurry.
“Whuh?” My voice came out slurred, and my vision grew even more distorted until eventually it went completely dark. I could tell I was staring at the cave floor, but I still had no idea what had happened.
As I struggled to pick myself up off the floor, a voice as cold as ice reached my ears.
“Oh, you can move already? I was trying to crush your balls with that kick, you know. Blech, you’re even tougher than an orc.”
Once I managed to parse what Lily was saying, my mind went blank. This has to be some kind of mistake!
I looked desperately up at Lily, but what I saw plunged me even deeper into despair.
“Phew. Thank god I took you into an equipment-restricted dungeon. You’re one tough cookie, Mr. Hero. Can’t believe you can get up already.” Her sarcastic, condescending tone would make even saints fly into a rage.
I no longer knew who this woman standing before me was. Or perhaps, I was simply averting my eyes from the truth because I couldn’t accept it.
“He he he he he.”
I watched, stunned, as Lily grinned at me and lifted her leg high into the air. There was a Thud! as it slammed it down onto my head, and then I once again found myself staring at the ground. It wasn’t until she started speaking again that I realized Lily was stepping on my head.
“God, it pisses me off that you’re acting like you’re the victim here! Do you have any idea what you did? Well, do you?!” Lily snarled, punctuating each word with a stomp.
However, I was the world’s greatest hero. A girl who wasn’t even a combat class was no match for me. I pushed myself off the floor, forcing her to move her foot off of me. As her face came into view, I glared angrily at her.
“Don’t get too cocky, you fucker. I— Oh.” Lily clapped her hands together, as if she’d suddenly realized something. “Let me guess, you think a big strong man like yourself can take on a frail little girl like me as long as your body can still move, don’t you?”
I narrowed my eyes at her. Well, am I wrong?
Lily’s lips curled up into a sneer and she started snickering. “Well, sorry to burst your bubble.”
Confused, I watched as she started undoing the buttons of her blouse. With each button undone, her bust became more and more prominent.
“What’re you—?!”
“Unfortunately for you, there’s no way you’ll be able to beat me. Because...” After undoing the last button, Lily spread her blouse wide open.
“Ah!”
My initial instinct was to close my eyes, but it turned out I didn’t need to bother. Because what I saw wasn’t Lily’s bare breasts. Instead, two blue blobs dropped out of her blouse as she spread it open.
“H-Huh...?”
The two blobs hit the ground with a splat, and it slowly dawned on me that they were chest pads made of processed slimes. When I realized that, the truth became clear. Lily...wasn’t a girl after all. She was...
“I’m a guy!”
“What?” I croaked.
Lily’s words had pierced through my very soul. My breath came in short gasps, and my mind was spinning. I wanted to deny what he’d said, shout that it couldn’t possibly be true, but I knew I was deluding myself. Underneath the slime pads, Lily’s chest was undeniably that of a man’s. But I still couldn’t understand why he was doing this.
“The question’s written all over your face. ‘Why? Why would you do this?’ Honestly, it’s kind of a pain to explain but whatever, I’ll tell you. For starters, my real name actually is Lily.”
That came as a surprise to me. Analyze let you see someone’s stats, but the name it showed was the name they were using for themselves at the moment, not necessarily what their parents had named them. When I’d learned that Lily was a man, I’d thought their real name might be something different. Names in the game were gendered pretty similarly to how they were in real life. So why was a guy like him named Lily?
“Yeah, I figured you’d have that reaction,” Lily said with a snarl. He looked dismissively down at me. “Remember how I told you I didn’t really like my name before? Well, that’s because I was bullied for having a girl’s name as a kid. All of the boys in my village made fun of me for it. And whenever I met people for the first time, they’d always be surprised I was a guy despite having a girl’s name.”
The perverse joy with which Lily recounted his past sent shivers down my spine.
“I always wanted to tell those losers that Lily was a perfectly good boy’s name, but I was a weakling back then so I could never argue with my bullies. Back then I actually resented my parents for giving me this name. But then I asked them why, and their answer surprised me.” Still grinning, Lily said, “My mom told me that she’d had a miscarriage a few years before I was born. Her first baby had been a girl, and she’d been planning on naming that girl Lily. After telling me the story, mom had hugged me and said, ‘I’m sorry you’re suffering so much because of your name. The reason we named you Lily isn’t because we don’t love you. We gave you the name Lily because it’s most beautiful name we could think of.’”
At this point I’d forgotten about the dire situation I was in and was engrossed in Lily’s story.
“When I heard that, I was at a loss for words. Afterward I went back into my room and stared at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t particularly manly, but I wasn’t all that girly either. I was far from pretty, and I hated myself for it. But then I realized something. I could just work to make myself pretty.”
The tone of Lily’s story shifted dramatically from that point on.