I came to my senses the next day, but by then it was too late. I had already given my word. While the intruder went to school, I rolled about on my bed in regret. I didn’t have school or a job to distract me from my folly, which meant that I was stuck in my room stewing in my own despair.

Tower of Yg was a Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, or VRMMORPG for short. The game was created by Vanguard to help reduce casualties on the battlefield by giving warriors ample amount of training through a virtual world.

I had never played it myself, but it was easy to understand how being able to revive as many times as you wanted in a world that closely mirrored reality might be helpful. Even if it had a grand purpose such as saving lives, it was nothing more than a game to most people.

Tower of Yg allowed you to upload your own personal echo weapons into the game. Echo weapons were artifacts that held the experiences and abilities of past users etched into their core.

Even if I had never participated in a battle as a healer, I would be just as experienced as a veteran healer the moment I picked up a healing related echo weapon. Those that used echo weapons were known as Inheritors. How well one utilized the experiences stored in an echo weapon was what separated a strong Inheritor from a weak Inheritor.

I spent the day researching the basics of playing as a healer in Tower of Yg. I only intended to do the bare minimum to satisfy the intruder, but that didn’t mean I wanted to put on a performance that embarrassed myself.

Healers utilized different sets of echo weapons to heal allies, increase their allies strength, and weaken enemies. As a trade off, they had very weak damaging abilities and they would die the instant a strong attack came their way.

Tanks utilized echo weapons to shield their allies from enemy attacks and endure as much as possible. Damage dealers focused on attacking the enemy. The three roles were known as the holy trinity of combat and almost every party had at least one of each role.

Eden and her hero party was rather unusual in that their party consisted entirely of damage dealers and tanks. They made up for the lack of a healer by making use of smart positioning and rotating which tank had the aggro of the enemies.

The door to my room slammed open while I was in the middle of researching how to play as a healer. I hastily swapped my screen to the usual big titty milf images. This time, the intruder didn’t stop at the entrance.

“Sorry to interrupt you while you are in the middle of your important research.”

The intruder flung sharp, sarcastic words my way. I didn’t miss a beat in responding.

“I appreciate your understanding. My research on judging whether a woman’s breasts are fake will save the lives of boys around the world.”

“By the way, the woman in the third image from the left has fake breasts.”

“What!?”

I brought my eyes right up against the screen to examine the woman the intruder pointed out, but I couldn’t tell anything different about her chest when compared to the others. Mocking laughter came from the intruder behind me.

“It looks like your research still has a ways to go to save the world.”

“Damn you…”

I grit my teeth in frustration, but there was nothing I could say to the intruder who was looking down on me with a teasing smile. My eyes fell on the two sets of VR headgear in her hands. The intruder quickly explained the reason for her intrusion into my domain.

“I brought you the VR set to enter Tower of Yg with.”

“I thought we were starting much later.”

“We need to get everything setup first before the others join.”

Her words made sense, but I didn’t see why she brought a second VR headgear into my room. I silently took the VR headgear from her and pulled out Mom’s echo weapon. The intruder was quick to question me.

“This is?”

“A memento from my mom. I heard I could register it with the game.”

The intruder didn’t ask any further. I quickly registered Mom’s echo weapon with the VR gear and leaned back in my chair. Most found laying down on a bed to be the most comfortable way to enter the Tower of Yg, but one could enter in any position. The creaking sound of my bed drew my attention and my eyebrows scrunched up.

“...What are you doing?”

“I am entering the Tower of Yg with you to help you get set up.”

The intruder had laid down on my bed without an ounce of shame. I would have been a blushing mess if it was any other girl, but it was my annoying intruder. Irritation was the only thing filling my heart.

“Fine. Whatever.”

Getting into an argument would only delay fulfilling my promise. I pressed the button on my VR gear to enter the Tower of Yg and my vision went dark. Threads of color raced past my vision far faster than I could perceive as I sank into the abyss.

A flash of pure white filled my vision and suddenly, sensations returned to my body. I was in a brightly lit cabin in the woods. Birds chirped happily outside and fresh sunlight shone in through the window. It didn’t feel like I was in an artificial, virtual world.

“Tower of Yg is really something else… Huh?”

Someone else spoke up the words I wanted to mutter to myself. Her voice was bright, cute, and delicate like a flower. My head darted around the cabin, but there was nobody in here but me. Warning bells rang in my head.

“This voice is… mine?”

I glanced down at myself and froze. Two lumps of fat protruded from my chest to form a healthy amount of cleavage. The truth of the situation hit me. I was playing as a girl character in the Tower of Yg.

There was no denying it. The white battlesuit had an inner sideboob cut that displayed the full valley of my character’s chest. The back of the battlesuit was completely open and my legs were bare.

Long, transparent purple cloth in the shape of flower petals hung from my waist to form a pseudo skirt, but it left my front completely open for some reason. Female clothing in Tower of Yg was rather skimpy, but this battlesuit must have belonged to a particularly perverted individual.

I knew that my appearance would be different because I would be using an alternate account, but I hadn’t expected that alternate account to be a female character. She had some guts to suggest that I play as a girl.

The door to the cabin slammed open and I nearly jumped in surprise. My hands moved to cover myself. I realized what I was doing at the last moment and turned the movement into crossing my arms in front of my chest.

A soft, plump feeling pressed against the inside of my arms. Belatedly, I remembered the lumps of fat attached to my front. The girl in front of me had not said a single word this entire time. Her eyes roamed from top to bottom as they greedily drank in my appearance.

“H-Hey.”

My words launched her into another daze. A tinge of disbelief colored her absentminded reply.

“Iris spoke to me…”

Her expressive face revealed just how happy she was to hear my… no, this character’s voice. I would have been thrilled to have a girl looking at me like that if it was anybody else but her.

“Iris?”

“Your character’s name.”

In online games, it was common courtesy to call people by their online usernames rather than their real names. As long as I was playing as this character in Tower of Yg, I would have to go by Iris.

“Quit staring at me… Eden.”

My disgusted voice seemed to awaken something in the leader of the hero party. Before I knew it, Eden was begging me.

“Say that one more time, please.”

The entire situation unnerved me. Suddenly playing as a girl character already threw me off balance and Eden’s strange behavior sent me tumbling into chaos.

I wanted to curse at her, but my mind somehow decided that it was inappropriate to curse with this appearance. As a result, my curse was translated to something much… cuter.

“Shut up.”

“An angry Iris is cute too.”

I got goosebumps from being called cute. Before I knew it, I had retreated a step. The silver haired hero took a step towards me, returning us back to our original distance. I was learning more about Eden than I ever wanted to know. She may look like a shining hero, but she was in fact a huge pervert.

“I’m seriously mad. How dare you trick me into playing as a female character.”

“What should I do? Iris is so cute that my heart can’t take it.”

Eden wasn’t listening to me. The strange situation raised alarms in my head. I took a step back and then another. I lost my balance when my legs bumped something and fell on a soft bed.

“That is it. I am logging out.”

“No!”

Eden activated an echo weapon skill and shot towards me like a bullet. I was looking for the logout button when a strong force pushed me down against the bed. Eden’s slender body was on top of me. Her hateful face was mere inches away from mine.

“Iris.”

…Iris? It took me a moment to realize that Eden was talking to me.

“It is okay, right Iris?”

The hungry light in her green eyes was fixed on this character’s chest.

“Like hell it is okay!”

I shoved Eden off of me. She gave a startled yelp as she fell off the bed. I quickly had my finger hovering over the logout button. My stupid promise was the only thing holding me back from leaving. Eden shouted at me with tears in her eyes.

“What was that for, Iris?”

“You are asking me that? Really, I should be the one asking you. What in the world were you thinking?”

“I created Iris as my ideal wife. There is nothing wrong with asking my wife to fulfill her duties.”

I was speechless. My shitty father and his new wife always talked about boys around Eden, but her replies were always rather unenthusiastic. If I wasn’t misunderstanding her words, Eden had just come out of the closet about liking girls to me. Her mother and my shitty father both still thought she liked guys.

No, I shook my head, I didn’t give a damn about her sexual orientation.

“You know it is me on the inside, right?”

“So what? Like you said, we aren’t family. Iris is my wife and everything else is irrelevant.”

“Hmph. So you only care about Iris’ body. How shallow.”

Eden averted her gaze with a blush at my words. I sighed and let the logout menu fade from my vision.

“If you like Iris so much, why don’t you play as her?”

“It doesn’t suit me to play as a cute princess like Iris.”

“Who said that? No, forget I asked. I don’t care.”

Whether Eden wanted to play as a fairy tale hero or a cute princess, it didn’t matter to me at all. I was only here to do one thing and that was to be a healer for the hero party.

“Can you even focus on fighting with Iris present?”

Eden wouldn’t look me in the eyes. Something told me that her goal of defeating the Demon King was thrown out the window the moment she saw her ‘wife’ in front of her.  I accessed the storage artifact on my wrist and scanned through the list of items stored within the bracelet.

Unfortunately, the skimpy outfit I was currently wearing was far stronger than everything else. On the bright side, I did find a nice purple cloak that I equipped to cover my body. Eden’s fatal weakness, Iris’ face, was mostly suppressed once I wore the hood.

“What? Are you dissatisfied?”

“No.”

The pout on Eden’s face told me otherwise. I kept my thoughts to myself and went through the final checks. Mom’s echo weapon was sheathed at my hip. I wouldn’t be able to use it, but it was a familiar presence that helped reassure me amidst this unusual situation.

The three core echo weapons Eden had set up for Iris’ healer build were bound to me and could be materialized at a moment’s notice. Skilled Inheritors could only have up to three echo weapons bound at once. There was a way to use a fourth echo weapon, but that method was not without its own risks.

“Let’s go meet the others.”

The sooner we lost to Demon King Serafall, the sooner I could return to my own body in the real world. I left the dazed Eden behind and opened the door to the cabin. The blinding light of the outside sun burned my eyes.

My feet were rooted in place. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t take a step into that new world. The last time I stepped out underneath the sun, I became a laughing stock throughout the world. Memories of my trauma continued to hold me back even to this day.

I had thought I would be okay if it was a virtual world, but Tower of Yg mimicked reality so closely that I couldn’t tell the difference between the two.

“What are you waiting for, Iris? Let’s go!”

Eden was different from me. She shone so brightly under the sun that it was painful to look at. The silver haired hero had that hateful smile as she easily accomplished something that was impossible for me.

My heart fell further into darkness while she shone even brighter. There was an insurmountable barrier between us. Even so, the hero easily crossed that barrier and grabbed my hand. She pulled me past the doorstep of the cabin and into her world of light.

As I thought, I really hated her.