Chapter 4: Riley Weimar

By now the snow that covered the garden completely disappeared and I am able to move my body again. While the bright and warm spring sunlight enters the room through the window, Fortuna is helping me with a daily workout that mainly exists out of light stretches.

My cute little sister is currently gently pushing my back. Anyone being with such a cute girl would be happy. 1 But the eyes of the servants trying to burn holes through me hurt.

Please stop looking at me like that… At this point, I"m not sure if I"m bending, rolling, stretching or sitting down. When doing light jumps, my whole body bounces with it. Even the floor looks like it might break due to my weight. It almost looks like the entire room shakes whenever I jump. I usually receive help from Eldor, but Fortuna seemed to want to help with my workout today. I would never force my precious Fortuna to do this against her will!

Fortuna suddenly interrupts my chain of thought with a question. "Nii-san, am I doing it right?" My stomach is starting to hurt, but I won"t tell her that.

Truth be told, I thought I would be able to rapidly diet with the knowledge of my previous life. However, I didn"t have any knowledge of dieting in the first place. In my previous life, no one in my family really had problems with overweight either. I also thought about starting a vegetable garden as a way to earn some cash while exercising, but that didn"t work out so well in my previous life either. Although back then you could say it was caused by playing too much otome games which lead to me oversleeping in the morning making me unable to water them. Even when I occasionally woke up on time in the morning I would forget watering them and other times I would only water them at night, which isn"t that beneficial. So in any case, even if I try planting a vegetable garden, I"m pretty sure I would end up killing any vegetable I try to grow. Also, since the Duke already has a vegetable garden, it seems kind of pointless for an amateur like me to start growing one as well.

But then, how do I lose weight? I"m not sure if there are any special work outs for dieting, but for now, I"ll keep doing stretches. Even if the stretches don"t help directly, they still help me build some muscle and warm up my body.

Every day, I mainly eat vegetable dishes, with a meat dish in between sometimes. Whenever I eat a meat dish, I make sure it"s meat with the least amount of fat in it. But even with all this effort, my weight is not decreasing. Or, at least I think it doesn"t. I have asked Eldor to weigh me before with magic, but it seems the method to weighing is the same as in my previous world. They have a magical weight scale, but since it looked kind of thin and soft, I didn"t dare to step on it. I was scared it would break due to my weight.

Even if I could weigh myself on it without breaking, I would be afraid to look at the weight it shows.

This is why I"m not entirely sure how much I weigh but judging by appearance, it looks like I haven"t lost or gained any weight since I regained my memories. When I got bed ridden I was mostly unable to move, which made me exercise even less than what I did before and my small muscles seem to have lost even more strength in that period of time. I would love to do a marathon right now, but without suitable clothes and this body, that seems to be a pipe dream. Sadly it"s not possible to borrow someone else"s body. Even if I wanted clothes that are easy to move in right now, they have to be custom tailored, which takes a while. Since they don"t have jerseys in this world, I asked a tailor to fabricate easy to move in clothes. I"m looking forward to it.

Yoshiko, my tailor, who came to measure my width… was astonished by my measurements.

I"m unable to do push ups due to my weight, even if I did try, I would be scared that my arms would collapse under the pressure. I wonder how long it will take before I"m able to run long distances properly since I"m unable to even do a simple crunch right now.

"Fortuna, can I ask you to press down harder?"

"Are you sure nii-san? It looks very painful."

"Yeah I"m sure, just increase the pressure on my back slowly."

I need to keep pushing forward without giving up. If I can"t even do something like dieting, how could I change my sister"s future? For now, let"s get my metabolism on the right track.

I guess I have to aim to bend forward a little further every time I do this exercise…

"Nii-san, how far do you think I could bend myself?"

"You could probably easily touch your toes with your hands."

"Really?"

An excited shine sparks up in her pink colored eyes, but let"s not get ahead of ourselves.

"I"m pretty sure you could easily do it, but it"s better if you don"t."

"Is it bad for me?"

"Yeah, small children shouldn"t do it." 2

"Okay, I understand. I will keep concentrating on helping nii-san."

That was a complete lie though, stretching is actually really good for your body. But Fortuna doesn"t really need to work out, she already looks beautiful.  Besides, if the lady of the Duke of Jack Berry suddenly starts sitting on the floor doing stretches, people"s heart will start bleeding, mine included.

Fortuna kept pushing his back over and over and sweat started to slowly gather on my forehead. Eldor who realized this quickly wipes the sweat away with a wet towel.

After sweating a lot, I wonder if we should stop for today. Fortuna who kept pushing on my back also seems to feel a bit tired.

"Let"s take a break for a while."

"Yes, nii-san."

When I finally was in high spirits, the door is knocked followed by a loud voice.

"Langlease my brother, why didn"t you call for me when you"re in such a sorry state, I would have come straight away!"

After hearing this voice, Eldor heads to the door to open it but before he reached it a strange boy already barged into the room. Fortuna and her servants let out a small shriek. But Eldor and I were not surprised by the action.

"Riley, what are you doing…?"

"I was recognized already?! I thought my disguise was pretty good."

In front of me, a strange boy is dancing and scattering a glowing powder while laughing, slowly turning into a familiar boy, Riley Weimar. It"s transformation magic. Although magic to change one"s appearance is extremely difficult for lower level magic students, Riley made it look easy. It was a magic lesson that I used to skip before I regained my memories, but I have followed one lesson about it recently. And since I started reading magic books by myself, I started gathering more knowledge about magic.

I am unable to use transformation magic and I also suck at attack magic. Those are both high-level magic that needs years of practice. On the other hand, it is quite easy to learn healing and defensive magic. But for some reason, I"m not able to perform healing magic. Which means I"m only good for one thing…

A meat shield. This unpleasant word crossed my mind, but I will overlook it for now.

"Riley, even though the disguise was brilliant, people rarely visit me by kicking in the door."

No matter what, we are still at a Duke"s mansion, it"s not a place where just any unknown stranger can just confidently come and go. Besides, no matter how much you use transformation magic to distort your appearance, it becomes kind of obvious that it"s Riley when he barges into my room like that. Last time he did something similar, but back then he came through the window. Since I had no idea what was going on back then, I let out a shout and Eldor instantly sent out a kick towards Riley. If he didn"t scream "It"s me!" in time, he would have been kicked hard in the stomach.

"That was quite a splendid showing of magic, Riley."

"Ah, Miss Fortuna, it"s been a while… hasn"t it?"

"Yes, it has been a while. Nii-san"s condition is very good today."

"Seems like it."

Eldor prepares tea and places it on a table. Looks like today"s tea is from Bradin. It slightly smells like Roselia flowers. After serving everyone tea, Eldor prepares milk for me and sugar for Riley and Fortuna. I used to have plenty of sugar in my tea, but I want to prevent taking in unnecessary calories. I think milk is better than sugar in this regard. While Eldor hands some cookies over to Riley and Fortuna, I urge Riley to talk.

"So, what brings you here today?"

"When I heard that you were hit by Miss Fortuna"s magic and blacked out after, I became worried. I came to visit many times, but I wasn"t allowed to see you. I was getting a little impatient."

I heard from Eldor that he visited many times in the past, but his timing was bad, I was unconscious whenever he dropped by. After consulting with Eldor I send him a few letters and goods, so I thought that he knew I was alright already.

"I know you were worried, but as you can see, I"m completely fine now."

"Well, there"s fine and there"s "fine", but I do remember you being completely white before and now you just look a little pale. Sadly, your skin tone is still lighter than that of Miss Fortuna though."

Riley and I have known each other since we were babies and even though he was born of a lower cla.s.s, he usually speaks in a condescending manner towards me. We don"t really like standing on formalities with each other. The only time we follow formalities is when we are in the presence of our parents. Eldor seems to have become used to Riley"s manner of speaking, but Fortuna and her servants look a little puzzled by it. 3

Riley is the second son of Earl Weimar. My aunt on my mother"s side is Riley"s mother, because of that he somewhat resembles my mother. He has light brown hair in a soft hairstyle and his eyes contain a little pink.

And by the way, Riley did not appear in the game.

Andy Weimar is his older brother and it just so happens to be that he is one of the capture characters, so I don"t mind interacting with Riley since it makes a strategic connection to his Brother easier. Nonetheless, it"s strange that there is no memory of Riley in his past life.

Thinking about the game, I am truly disgusted by the poor personality of my character that it had before…

Before I regained my memory, I was always hara.s.sing the hard-working people. Even in front of Riley, I was giving the servants a rough time. Hanging on their legs while they tried to prepare tea, making them trip and throwing dirt on the cleaned clothes just to name a few things. Riley tried to stop me every time.

Since I was still a child, the hara.s.sment could still be called mild, but I remember that around the time Langlease turns sixteen, his hara.s.sing increases. It was to a degree that the servants became scared of him. The images at the end of the Langlease route reflect his s.a.d.i.s.tic character.

In the last image, the heroine has quite the sad appearance. She was wearing gray colored maid clothes that almost let loose at the seams, that you probably wouldn"t even let the servants wear. At first, she wanted nothing more than to cut off his head, but in the end, she"s standing in a corridor in that appearance. Langlease who was supposed to be her lover was just enjoying the view and had a distorted grin on his face. In the game Fortuna ends up as a villain, so together they corrupt the heroine. For some reason, the heroine had an enchanting smile on her face and the game ends with, "I"m so happy to spend my time with my two favorite people."

"Seriously, what type of twisted "M" setting was that?!" 4

"Oh dear, what"s the matter? Are you still feeling pain somewhere?"

"Ah, no, no at all. I was just reminiscing about something."

d.a.m.n, I let something slip out of anger. Fortuna also gives me a surprised look. Anyway, I unwillingly spent several hours on the Langlease route to finally reach that ending. It wasn"t a "bad end", but it couldn"t be called a "normal end" either. Maybe it was the "true end" of the game? All the other routes seemed to let the Heroine end in a fairy tail ending. In any case, that last image of the Langlease route portrays how bad of a personality he had…

"Hey, are you okay…? Maybe you should lie down in bed?"

Riley who noticed me being lost in thought was looking at me. Fortuna also followed up by saying "Nii-san, was the exercise earlier too hard on your body after all?" Looks like I was completely distracted by my memories again.

"I"m okay, I"m just a little distracted."

"In any case, I"m amazed that you were able to save Miss Fortuna."

"Imagine my surprise, I didn"t know I could move like that."

In retrospect, it really seems unreal how fast I ran, hugged and protected her.

In the end, I was saved because that Professor Credil who was standing next to us suppressed the berserk magical power.

Riley who is drinking tea keeps gazing at me while nodding.

"Somehow, the atmosphere around you has changed."

"Really? I don"t feel any different though."

"Yeah, you have the feeling of a thorns stickiness. Wouldn"t you say?"

It"s not unusual for Riley to say stuff to cloud his words. Sometimes it"s hard to decipher what he actually means. He used to say "something that is f.u.c.king nasty is bad".

"Perhaps it"s because I had a high fever, I felt quite refreshed after I was cured of that."

"Hmm. Well, let"s leave it at that for now. But in other news, you clearly have been trying to burn fat lately, why are you dieting?"

"I wonder who you heard that from?"

"Fufufun~ It"s a rumor going around in the mansion." 5

Well, I guess rumors spreading about me working out all of sudden is not that odd.

"There is even a bet going around for how long you will be able to keep this up."

"What… did they bet?"

"The majority bet on 1 month and about 20% have bet on 3 months at most."

Sigh, I know my chances aren"t that high, but hearing it is still painful.

"No matter what they say, I need to keep going."

“It"s going to take forever if you keep going like this. How about we both put in an effort?”

Riley starts snickering with an evil grin on his face.

Eh…? Why do I have a bad feeling all of a sudden?!

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Thanks for the new chapter!