Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate

Chapter 371: A maid’s psyche (2)

The night passed—

or rather, it didn’t.

She lay still in her chamber, eyes half open, watching the faint blue trace of the ceiling’s chrono-lights shift from night mode to dawn mode, every hue calibrated to mimic natural light patterns. Yet her body didn’t respond. The rhythm was wrong. The pulse that usually lulled her to sleep—the one she’d been trained to synchronize her breathing with—felt foreign.

Sleep had come in fragments. Not rest. Just fragments.

Moments of drifting, interrupted by flickers.

Soundless images—

A door closing.

A hand brushing past her shoulder.

A voice.

Not a dream. Never a dream. She didn’t dream. She wasn’t supposed to.

Elysia opened her eyes fully. The clock read 05:12 AM.

Her breathing was calm. Too calm. It was the calmness of someone pretending.

She sat up. Sheets folded perfectly despite her movement—habit. She swung her legs off the bed, feet touching the cold marble floor, and paused for half a second before standing.

Something… was off.

Her mind catalogued the sensation immediately.

Body temperature: nominal.

Heart rate: steady.

Mana levels: consistent.

External stimuli: none.

Then why—

A faint tremor passed through her fingers before she could mask it. She stared at them, frowning slightly. The micro-spasm shouldn’t exist. Her nervous system was balanced, reinforced. There were no fluctuations.

And yet, there it was.

She flexed her hand once. Twice. The tremor disappeared. But the unease didn’t.

‘You’re overthinking,’ she told herself.

Except she never overthought.

She rose and moved toward the mirror. The reflection that met her was immaculate—hair pinned, posture perfect, eyes sharp and green. No fatigue lines. No tension. Nothing.

But she could see it anyway. The smallest wrongness. Like a note out of tune.

Her pupils dilated, just slightly slower than they should have.

Her own body felt a heartbeat behind her thoughts.

That had never happened before.

By 06:00, she was in the control suite. Diagnostics ran automatically across the villa’s systems. Everything came back optimal. Energy lattice: stable. Security perimeter: intact. Neural interface: calibrated.

Yet—

one line blinked on the holo-panel.

Subroutine Warning: Behavioral Loop Detected.

She froze.

Her lips parted just slightly, breath catching in the quiet hum of the room.

That couldn’t be right. She didn’t have behavioral loops. Her routines were intentional, not automated. The combat maid’s neural conditioning wasn’t AI—it was will.

She typed a command.

The system returned the same message.

Behavioral Loop Origin: Undefined.

Her eyes narrowed.

For the first time, she disabled the monitoring display and shut the console off entirely. The room went dark again, the faint hum of the villa’s ambient systems filling the silence.

She exhaled slowly.

This wasn’t something she could report. Not yet. Not when she couldn’t define it.

She wasn’t malfunctioning. She refused to believe that.

Still—her pulse ticked slightly higher as she turned toward the main corridor.

The villa lights flickered. Just once. Barely noticeable. But she saw it.

Every sensor in her body registered the shift.

For a split second, the air felt thicker.

Like pressure.

Like someone else was breathing in the same room.

She turned sharply—

Empty hallway.

Her eyes scanned the mana traces automatically—no signatures, no anomalies.

Still, she stayed there, perfectly still, her senses extended to the edges of perception.

Nothing.

Later now.

Hours had passed, though Elysia couldn’t tell how many. The villa’s chronos displayed a steady cascade of digits—09:47, then 11:12, then 13:00—but she had long stopped tracking.

She trained.

Not because she had to. Because she didn’t know what else to do.

Each motion was mechanical at first. A sequence she had mastered years ago—stances, kicks, evasive steps, redirection drills. She executed them flawlessly, but every repetition rang hollow. Precision without pulse. Control without center.

And somewhere between one strike and the next—

her breath caught.

A mistake.

Her palm missed its alignment by half an inch. Just half an inch. The impact still landed, the mana dummy still recoiled, but her stance felt wrong.

Her heart stuttered in her chest—an unfamiliar, dissonant rhythm—and for one horrifying instant, she thought she felt it ache.

She stopped.

‘No.’

It wasn’t physical. It couldn’t be. She was trained beyond that. Emotional interference was for the unrefined. For amateurs.

She reset her posture. Exhaled.

Again.

The next blow hit clean. So did the next. And the next after that. But it wasn’t enough. The tension didn’t bleed out. It stayed coiled, buried under her ribs like a wire pulled too tight.

She struck harder.

The training hall echoed with a rhythmic, brutal cadence—impact after impact, her limbs a blur of precision and fury, sweat cutting clean lines down her neck. Every strike was a denial. Every exhale a command.

‘He will return.’

The words pulsed through her like a mantra.

‘He always returns.’

She heard her own voice in her head, calm, steady, methodical—except it wasn’t calm at all. It was desperate in a way she didn’t recognize.

She hit harder. Faster.

The dummies began to spark. One collapsed entirely, its mana shell fracturing under the force of her final kick.

The air burned.

‘He will return.’

Her hand trembled again. Not from exhaustion. From something else.

She pressed her palm to her sternum, breathing through the faint tremor that shouldn’t exist. Her training was perfect. Her pulse never spiked without cause. And yet it did.

She closed her eyes.

‘Focus. You’re malfunctioning.’

But she wasn’t. She knew that now.

A sensation that refused to obey.

*****

By dusk, the villa’s AI dimmed the external lights automatically. The horizon outside the reinforced windows burned violet, city haze stretching across Vermillion’s skyline.

Elysia stood beneath it, her hair damp, her breathing shallow but measured. The floor beneath her bore faint cracks from where she’d pushed too hard.

She should have stopped hours ago.

She didn’t.

Because stopping meant silence.

And silence meant remembering that he was gone.

The Cradle.

Only one in a thousand ever returned alive.

And those who did… weren’t the same.

She’d read all of that before. Known it. Memorized it. And none of it had mattered when Damien said he was going.

Because he’d smiled.

That stupid, unshakable smile. The one that made her believe the impossible wasn’t just likely—it was inevitable.

He’d said, “You’ll see me again.”

And she’d believed it.

She’d bowed, replied “Understood,” and turned away before her composure broke. But now, hours later, that same memory gnawed at her.

Not because she doubted him.

But because she didn’t understand why she cared that she might.

She was trained for absence.

For silence.

For orders that might never come back.

So why did this feel different?

Why did the air in the villa feel heavier without his presence?

Night again.

She sat by the main console, arms crossed, staring at the still-blank communication log. No new signals. No activity. The Cradle’s coordinates were classified—she wasn’t even supposed to know where it was. But she did. And that made it worse.

Because she could imagine it.

The underground chamber. The hum of mana resonance. The blinding white cocoon that devoured everything inside.

She inhaled slowly.

He’s fine.

He’ll conquer it.

Of course he would. He always did. That was who he was.

Damien Elford didn’t fall. He refused to.

He didn’t yield to systems or to fate. He mocked them.

If anyone could defy the odds of the Cradle—it was him.

So why couldn’t she believe it fully?

Her hands curled in her lap. Her pulse betrayed her again—steady but wrong. As if it belonged to someone else.

“Stop this,” she whispered. “You’re acting irrational.”

Her voice didn’t sound like hers. Too soft. Too human.

She looked at the clock again. 22:38.

The villa was utterly silent now, the hum of its core systems the only heartbeat in the house.

And then—

A sound.

Low.

Distant.

The soft purr of an engine rolling up the drive.

Her head snapped up.

The AI chirped quietly.

“Registered vehicle detected: Damien Elford.”

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