The Pengele RPG Is in a Battle Royale

Recently, a friend recommended a game to you.

This game combines character raising, combat, management, farming, home-building, romance, and more. You can choose your own route according to your preferences, and it offers a great deal of freedom.

Tired of formulaic otome games, you set out with a heart full of maternal love. You skipped every prompt without even reading them, selected chibi mode, and headed straight for the character-raising route.

You were going to explore the entire map, pick the cutest characters, raise them properly, and have a great time playing through their growth routes.

For a more immersive experience, you chose not to create a player avatar and played entirely from an omniscient viewpoint.

The System randomly assigned you a strange faction. Its emblem was a seashell. This faction must really love seafood.

After choosing your game character, your happy life raising a kid began.

Every day, you took your chibi little darling to explore the map, rummaging through NPCs' homes and looting them clean. You stuffed everything into your bag without a shred of guilt, acting more like a bandit than a bandit.

As time went by, your inventory grew fuller and fuller, while your kid showed up every day with a bruised and swollen face. Clutching the things you'd "picked up," he took on challenges from NPCs all over the place and ran faster than anyone. His combat experience and level shot up at an astonishing pace.

You felt that your character-raising route was going extremely well. Extremely well!

You kept thinking that right up until a starless night, when your well-behaved little darling, now a grown man, shyly held out a diamond ring the size of a pigeon's egg and asked if you would marry him.

You were bewildered: "???"

You gave him a look of wisdom: "Huh???"

You punched your grown-up son into the wall. "What the hell is wrong with you?! How dare you go off my route!!!"

Furious, you quit the game.

After that, you chose different maps, different factions, and different characters, yet every single time you ended up with an ending that had nothing to do with raising them.

One after another, your targets for character raising went off the beaten path. Not one of them was easy to handle. Just when you thought the raising route was finally secure, they would always give you a huge surprise.

You were shocked. You were furious. You were livid.

You decided this was a conspiracy by the game developers.

In a fit of rage, you wrote a ten-thousand-character complaint letter. Every line showcased the refined manners of modern youth as you invoked the developers' ancestors and extended your greetings to their entire family tree.

Then you quickly exited the game, lay down, and fell asleep.

The next day, when you woke up, you stared at the unfamiliar ceiling and slowly formed a question mark.

...You must still be dreaming... right?

[Upcoming story, centered on the Home Tutoring arc.]

[Lighthearted tone, pairing undecided, probably with a side character becoming the lead in an extra.]

[If anything makes you uncomfortable, please exit in time.]

[Hope all you lovely readers enjoy the story!]

Theme: Spending money in games is a bad idea; your wallet will weep.