Romance Route!! Goes Dungeon Crawler
It's my birthday! Have a bonus chapter and some new art.
This March, my writing group challenged each other to write a genre-flip of our current WIPs. My choice was less a flip, more a tilt—what if I Unlocked the Villainess’s Romance Route!! was a fantasy video game isekai rather than a dating sim isekai?
It was a fun way to escape some of the writing-on-a-weekly-deadline pressure, and it inspired some new art of AU Antoinette. Been a while since I’ve drawn my own characters!
Enjoy :)
Clearing room after room of low-level, EXP-fodder plant enemies was kinda like a vacation for a healer like me.
I hung back as Louis, Rémi, and Étienne cut through the swarm of neon, carnivorous flora, filling the forest clearing with clouds of leaves, pollen, and thorny fangs bloodied from their usual feasts of squirrels and birds. The hardest part of fighting these guys seemed to be stopping them from crawling up your pant leg like overzealous kittens (Étienne saved Louise from exactly that thanks to a quick zip of his rapier, and Louis returned the favour a minute later by incinerating a vine as it shot from the canopy and tried to tangle in Étienne’s silvery armour).
“Oh, rabbit foot!” I said, pointing at a ball of fluff in the rooty remains of a walking venus fly trap. It must’ve been feasting on bunnies before my party blasted in. “Those are worth a lot!”
Rémi tossed it to me and I just barely fumbled it. Lucky me that the game world was more or less loyal to the original pixel art, and the Rabbit Foot item was less a limb and more a shimmery lilac pompom. I popped it in the pocket of my white healer’s robes. There was only one monster left, so me and my squishy HP bar felt safe to rejoin them.
“My heroes!” I called sarcastically as I ran over. Rémi ruffled my hair as vengeance for my teasing.
“If you want us to grind to be ready for the next boss, we need a bigger challenge than these things,” he said, brushing plant bits off his rogueish leathers.
“I have a reason! A really good one. Look!”
Louis gave the last carnivorous plant a smack with a zinging ball of energy and it wilted into ash. A bright panel flickered to life above my head.
Weed Whacking: Defeat Forty Carnivora
QUEST COMPLETE!
Tap to Claim Your Reward
And tap I did. We all got a healthy batch of EXP, replenishing our HP and mana with a feeling like a gust of clean, cool ocean air…plus the last ten Pearls I’d been waiting for.
“Tired of us already?” Rémi joked as I conjured up my armload of sixty stashed Pearls. Despite the wise-cracking, he dutifully picked up all the Pearls that fell out of my arms as I headed over to the biggest tree I could find. The other guys followed, seeming apprehensive.
I knocked the bark thrice.
A door swung open, circular and squat and Hobbit-y. A familiar pixie yawned and stretched her arms in the entryway, squinting one eye to peer at my eager face.
I lifted my armload of Pearls. Rémi dropped a stray one on top of the pile. “Takin’ a spin on the gacha machine!”
“You’re still free-to-play?” she said, lifting her eyebrows at the guys behind me. “No clue how you got this far with that armour set for your wizard. Okay, fine. Wanna know who’s on Rate Up?”
I shook my head. I knew perfectly well which high rarity character had the best odds right now, but I was willing to gamble regardless. I know, I know, never bet against the Rate Up character, because fate will drop it in your lap for a laugh. Still, I was desperate. The pixie was right. I desperately needed better equipment for the guys. Étienne had been stuck with a quest reward shield since two regions ago and he was…prohibitively squishy. If my next quest went sideways…we’d need all the protection against dragonfire that we could get.
The pixie whisked away all sixty Pearls…taking it slow so she could make sure I wasn’t trying to pass off a stone or two as currency like I did when I first woke up here. I crossed my fingers and closed my eyes as the magic melted into pure, random numbers.
Ten capsules rained out of the branches like oversized apples. Louis and I popped open all the plain old Rare ones–a dagger here, a DEF circlet there, some SPD boots here…
Louis handed me the final capsule. It was rainbow and shimmery like a soap bubble. SSR–Super Super Rare. “Good luck.”
Shield, shield, shield, shield…
I popped open the capsule. Before us, a silhouette shimmered into view like a Pokemon tossed out of a Pokeball. A human silhouette. I held onto hope for that last second–maybe it was a copy of Rémi or Louis, and I could go through the wholly weird work of breaking him down to build the stats of my guys. That wouldn’t be as bad as having to deal with–
Yep. Never bet against the Rate Up.
Sylvain Laflamme, mister Super Super Rare conjuration warlock himself, appeared on the grass, surrounded by a deep purple glow that boiled like a cauldron to reflect his character class.
He seemed as unhappy to see my ramshackle party as I was to see him.
“There it is, gents,” I said, pointing at the final, dragon statue checkpoint in the dungeon. “Last stop before the boss.”
I stepped confidently forward, but Étienne took my hand. Even if the sweltering air didn’t even know the meaning of breeze, his sky-blue half-cape still softly swayed, never daring to touch the dirty floor. He said, “Wait. We should rest.”
“Everyone’s doing fine, right?”
“We are–”
“Thanks to Sylvain carrying us,” Louis said.
“But are you alright? You used all your offensive mana against the wyvern hoard, and surely something even worse lies ahead…”
I wasn’t planning on any of us fighting the boss at all, actually. “Nah, don’t worry. I’ll just stick to healing!” I patted his shoulder.
He’d sure gotten more worried about me lately. Maybe the game was trying to remind me that there were some Fire Emblem-style romance beats to hit in The Blooming Darkness. Maybe it was a side effect of me expanding his skill tree and giving him buffing and healing priorities.
Either way, I strolled on over to the checkpoint and selected the usual suspects on the Team Selector menu. I called Étienne over like Tyra Bank inviting the winning girls into the next round, then Louis, then Rémi, who I’d shelved because as much as I hated him, Sylvain was better at dealing with the dungeon’s brand of baddies.
“Sylvain,” I said, “wait here.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had extra party members before. You’re a DPS with the best stats on the team,” I scoffed. “You’ll totally be fine on your own!”
Sylvain parked himself against the dungeon wall, the furls of smoke on his coat flickering menacingly at me.
Ahead of us was a huge chamber with a grid of symbols on the floor, with a matching map on the left-hand wall. Past the grid was a black-bottomed chasm and then the huge boss door, glowing at the seams like dragonfire roared perpetually on the other side of it.
My sandal brushed a symbol. It lit up. Right, this part! I remembered it from…copying a walkthrough video.
“Just a puzzle.” Rémi put his longsword on his back; it hovered without any silly straps or sheaths. “We’ll be slaying this dragon and his minion in no time.”
I wouldn’t be so confident, Rémi…
Rémi was studying the grid. Sparks jumped between Louis’s fingers, a nervous habit. Étienne’s cape flip-flapped, like it was already anticipating the heroic pose he’d strike over the dragon’s corpse. Each of their backstories had a piece of the puzzle that illustrated the evil of the dragon and his minion. Those two had done all the classic dragon things: burning towns to cinders, stealing maidens, eating heroes of legend, choking the skies with ash, blah, blah, blah. If the guys entered the boss chamber with me, they’d be raring to roast some dragon.
“Okay,” I announced, using my unearned party-leader authority. “Everyone find an outside panel that matches one of those symbols.” I pointed at the wall. “You can only step on panels with those symbols, or else you’ll get booted back to the start, and if you run out of symbols to step on, you hit a dead end.”
“Should we follow you?” Louis asked.
“Nope, every man for himself. Okay, go!”
I scrambled to the far right side. Rémi was loitering, trying to plot too many steps ahead before he picked his starting panel, so I snapped, “Hurry up! Time’s a-wasting!”
There was only one pathway to the end. In the game, the party followed the player character, but I’d forced them to all have to pick dead ends while I hop-scotched to the end.
I hit the last panel. A bridge shimmered to life over the chasm. I ran across it, and as soon as I hit the other side, the bridge vanished and a panel of light nearly smacked me in the face.
All party members must be present.
[Reset and try again.]
I ducked underneath it, ignoring the guys yelling at me, and dug the three segments of the boss room key out of my infinite-capacity pack. We’d gathered them from previous rooms in the dungeon, and I’d kinda worried that we’d need to bring it to a blacksmith or something, but the magical logic of video games still applied: the three segments floated, twisting and fitting together, before slotting into the illogical lock in the center of the glowing boss door.
The door rumbled open. The room beyond was so suffused with a hazy red glow that I couldn’t see what I was walking into…until the door slammed shut on the puzzle room–and my party’s shouting–behind me.
Now this was a boss battle arena. Coliseum-like, with crumbling ruined walls stretching up so high that they seemed to curve inwards around me. The floor cracked and shifted under my dinky healer’s sandals, laval bubbling forth like overflowing jelly filling. A heavy, oily smoke filled the skybox. And the back of the arena was filled with the fire-red shape of an enormous slumbering dragon. Intimidating as he was, though, he wasn’t what drew my gaze.
In the middle of the arena stage was a woman shackled to the floor. Awaiting me, like all good bosses must, especially a first-phase boss like she was. Her head slowly lifted to face me, and I’d seen this cutscene about a thousand times, but she captured my heart all over again.
Her calf-length red waves fell off her strong shoulders, richer and shinier and softer than any of the messy physics could ever manage; the light caught in the four gold-tipped dragon horns on her head; her weight shifted from a despondent stance into one that was ready to hunt me down, huge black wings spreading wide.
“Mistress Delphine!” I called. I ran towards her, white skirt in my fists.
She straightened to her full height. She had an enemy NPC’s proportions (at least a foot taller than me so she’d be easier to keep track of on the screen, but all it did now was make my head spin pleasantly). She was yet another victim of the early-aughts gravity-defying, Morrigan-copycat leather bodysuit, with dragon-scale accents and fingers tipped with golden claws that caught fiercely in the light before she attacked.
“Step back!” she ordered.
How could I not obey? Still, I said breathlessly, “I’ve come here for you!”
“I know you have, worm.”
“No, I mean–”
“This isn’t your kingdom, and yet here you are, laying down your insignificant life for it.” She stepped towards me, the chains that attached her to the floor extending enough that it was nearly impossible to escape her attack range. The modelesque sway to her hips was cartoonish and annoying in the game, but here, it was fluidly natural, bringing brutal attention to the shape of her wide hips and long legs. “How pathetic. How small you are. How easy you will be to cr–”
“Mistress Antoinette Delphine, I’ll conquer the whole world with you! Look at me! I’m level sixty-seven and everything!”
She paused. “...You only needed to be level fifty–”
“I know, but I loaded up with EXP multipliers so I could heal you no matter what happens.” I showed her my forearms full of charmed bracelets and jewelry. “I’ll be your most loyal servant. Plus, I’ve been doing every stupid little fetch quest in the kingdom so I’d have enough level-up materials to max you out right away. Look at this armour set I got for you from the gacha, like, three months ago!”
I upended my pack so I could show her the ultra-expensive sorceress robes I won off the evil queen Gabrielle after fighting through twenty levels of her necromancy tower. Antoinette reached for the shimmery, blood-red silk gown–and then snatched her hand away.
“You don’t understand.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re supposed to destroy me. I meant it. I’ll protect you forever. From anything. I don’t care about those villages you burned down!”
“You don’t understand,” she repeated, but her tone had slipped from sharp and scalding to shockingly brittle. Her wings drooped. “I must stay. I’m…I’m bound to this dragon.”
“Oh, we can take the dragon too, if you want! I’ll just kick out one of the guys to make room in the party.”
“No.” Antoinette lifted her hand between us, and the air shimmered around the shackle. It was veined with red-hot sigils. “I’m bound to this dragon.”
“Wait one sec.” I shrugged off my pack and rummaged through its infinite contents, burying myself armpit-deep in its depths. Nope, didn’t need my level one armour set…not that wheel of emergency cheese…not my jangling box of unsellable quest-completion items…aha!
Out came a dagger.
Antoinette bared her teeth and inch-long claws, ready to attack–until I cleaved through the cuff on her wrist. It hit the floor with a loud clang-clank.
She gasped.
“There!” I exclaimed with a grin. The dagger was from an earlier level in the dungeon and was supposed to cut her connection to the dragon so she couldn’t share his power, making her an easy kill once she was in her cool-down phase.
She stared at me, blue eyes wide. “You…you…”
“You are free.” I grabbed her hand, holding tight, despite the cumbersome golden claws biting into my healer-soft fingers. I brought our hands to my chest. “Come with me, Dragon Princess.”
“It’s you,” she said, a softness the game had never coded for washing over her beautiful face. “I always heard that a hero would come to slay us…but you came to save me.”
A rumbling shocked us apart. We both spun around to see the dragon lumbering to its feet, unfurling in a way I’d practically memorized considering how many times I fought this battle, hoping the ending would change.
“Run,” Antoinette said. “There’s no way to defeat him. I know his power and you’re no match.”
“I mean, I am like fifteen levels ahead–”
Still, I’d rather run away with Antoinette than stay and fight, so I loyally followed her out of the arena. The giant door slammed behind us. The magical key slid in the lock, turned with a deafening clunk, and tumbled to the ground.
The glow around the seams burned blindingly bright, but the dragon didn’t break through. Seemed like while he couldn’t leave that room, the rules could bend for the princess. That was about a million times more romantic than the game’s canon, half-assed romance routes.
The guys were all on the other side of the chasm, feet tapping and arms crossed.
Rémi shouted, “And who’s that? She sure doesn’t look like a sack of loot to me!”
“She’s–she’s the trapped princess! Don’t you remember? There’s always a trapped princess.”
Antoinette leaned over the edge of the chasm, frowning.
“Yeahhhh,” I said. “See, there’s this puzzle, and usually, um…” Usually the dragon’s death throes break the ceiling so we climb out that way…
Antoinette held out her arms to me. “Come on, then.”
“C-come on?”
Her sharp eyes were impatient. I stepped closer and she scooped me into her arms, her dragonkin arms strong, her sharp nails digging into my back, her breasts practically overflowing from their impractical leathery corset.
She kicked off the ground and her dragon wings carried us over the chasm in a few effortless seconds. She gently set me down.
“See? Princess,” I said, fixing my hair and speaking as if my face wasn’t as red as the dragonfire that had killed my player character so many times in that room before. “Antoinette, these are my friends. Louis, Rémi, and Étienne. There’s Sylvain too, but he’s…elsewhere.”
She gave them terse nods. She wasn’t impressed when the PC whose party came to fight her was a tank, a wizard, a rogue, nothing. Maybe all along it was a healer and a helper that was meant to change things.
“Well…uh…right then,” Étienne said, straightening up and nodding at me. “Where shall we travel next?”
Louis suggested, “That lady in Altolia’s been waiting for us to get the slimes off her farm for, like, two months, and we’ll get thirty Pearls for it.”
“Nah, we’ve totally lapped those slimes in levels by now. Boring,” Rémi scoffed. “Let’s check out the commission board for a side quest in the next town, so we can start building our reputation.”
Étienne neatly cleared his throat. “And, just to remind us all, I’m still missing my signet ring somewhere in the Black Forest, and finding it will give you enough friendship points with me to unlock my next personal quest…”
Pearls? Reputation? Personal quests? Who needed all of that now? I snuggled up to Antoinette, hugging her arm. “Oh, we’re gonna do whatever she wants.”
“And…what does the fair lady want?”
She tilted her head, scanning them all. “Well, to conquer the kingdom, steal all their riches, and destroy anyone who gets in my way, of course.”
I held her hand tightly, giving her my most starstruck grin. “And we’re gonna do all that together.”