He finally did it!
He achieved the Harem End in the infamous eroge "Highschool Love: The Pain Of Romance", where the Harem End was declared to be impossible.
The game was cursed in every way a player could imagine.
A psychological gauntlet of suffering, betrayal, and hopelessness disguised as a high school romance simulator.
The developers never officially acknowledged it, but veterans of the underground gaming community swore the game was alive, as if it reacted to the player's decisions with cruel sentience.
In this eroge, there was no such thing as a happy ending.
A beautiful, poisonous flower wrapped in bright anime visuals, with stunning heroines and a haunting soundtrack that made you want to believe it was a game about love and romance.
If you tried to raise every heroine's affection, thinking you could reach a peaceful, happy route, the game would wait until your hopes were at their peak before turning on you.
You'd be forced to watch as each girl was ripped away from you one by one. Where they will be manipulated, violated, and corrupted.
And the worst part was that their eyes still looked at you with love as they were dragged into fates worse than death.
The devs really put in the budget for the animation just so it would hurt you even more.
If you chose one girl, stuck with her, stayed loyal, tried to protect her, you'd soon learn your devotion was meaningless.
One wrong move, one single dialogue mistake, and your chosen heroine would get stolen and corrupted beyond imagination.
The others who remained unchosen and unloved, would fall into despair.
One would get blackmailed into submission, another would vanish without warning, and others would be seduced by manipulative rivals.
It wasn't uncommon for the endings to feature disturbing CGs accompanied by soundless credits, followed by a cold message:
"You wanted everything. So now you have nothing."
Truly a system built not to challenge the player, but to punish them.
And he had played through it all.
Every route.
Every decision tree.
Every hidden flag.
And no matter how perfectly he moved, no matter how carefully he navigated every line of dialogue, every moment of vulnerability, the result was the same, painful heartbreak.
The heroines were beautiful, nuanced, and tragically realistic, but all of them were doomed from the start.
Still, he persisted. Over and over.
His heart had been shattered more times than he could count.
But he couldn't let go.
Somewhere deep inside, he refused to believe this was all there was to the game.
Until one day, he snapped.
His eyes bloodshot, his hands trembling, despite this, he restarted the game. But this time, he did something no sane player would dare.
He cranked the difficulty to the maximum.
Zero Error Margin.
No Forgiveness AI.
True Consequences Mode.
Real-Time Reaction Lock.
Settings added by the devs for insane players to experience even more heartbreak that they will doubt life.
Rumor has it that someone once turned the difficulty to maximum and almost offed himself.
With this setting, every input now mattered. Every second wasted in-game had a consequence. The heroines weren't just digital characters anymore, they had become living systems that learned, adapted, responded with suspicion or warmth depending on his behavior not just toward them, but toward others.
He didn't stop there.
He gave himself the worst possible starting stats. Then, he clawed his way back, slowly and agonizingly.
From a nobody to a legend.
He trained in the in-game gym, hour after hour, day after day.
Maxing out "Physique Stat" and "Health Stat" required near-robotic consistency.
Maxing out "Intelligence Stat" came from mini-games, hidden books, and answering obscure trivia under time pressure.
Maxing out "Wealth Stat" meant investing in shady business side-quests that could bankrupt him if he missed a single prompt.
And "Charisma"? That was the hardest.
The AI girls in the game could detect even the slightest inconsistencies in speech, tone, and presence.
His dialogue choices had to be perfect, which seems easy, until you realize you had to write your own dialogue!
He even obtained the legendary skill "Martial Arts" after helping out an old beggar who turned out to be an ancient martial arts master.
To gain the old man's approval required your all your stats to be at the maximum level. And take down a group of delinquents who was harassing the old man.
After that, the old man would give you a series of quest to complete before he deemed you suitable to be his disciple.
Learning the martial arts required non-stop grinding of getting beaten up by the old man, and endure training that can only be described as torture.
But it was all worth it.
His physique stat and health stat have broke through the maximum level and reached a nigh supernatural level.
With martial arts, he began saving heroines before they were even targeted.
He preemptively eliminated the villains, disrupting their routes before they could take root.
He fought off bullies, stalkers, corrupt teachers, and rival suitors.
Eventually, the game itself seemed to react to him.
Once your stats have broken through the max level and reached a new level, and beat up any villains trying to steal the heroine, the game's narrative would shift, or rather, its worldview would expand.
School bullies and delinquents who once harassed the heroines evolved into full-blown organized highschool gangs.
Massive street fights, school-wide conspiracies, underground criminal networks.
Things like Ki and superhuman feats have started appearing.
The stakes rose higher, but he rose with them.
He united high school delinquents, defeated their leaders, and formed an alliance that spanned the entire city's youth.
He became more than a player character. He became a living legend within the game world. The overlord of the city's underground world.
And throughout it all, he kept the heroines close, protecting them, supporting them, listening to them.
For the first time, they smiled without sadness. They laughed without pain. Their eyes no longer flickered with scripted sorrow.
And when he finally took down a massive underground organization that acts as the main villain of the game… it happened.
A new scene.
One no one had ever seen before.
A golden sky stretched out above him. The girls stood at his side, each of them in their final outfit, each holding his hand or leaning on his shoulder.
They weren't jealous. They weren't heartbroken. They weren't suffering. And they weren't in despair.
They were content.
They loved him—and each other.
He had done it.
[HAREM END ACHIEVED]
The screen shimmered with warmth. The final CG that is rumored to not exist, played before his eyes.
It was over.
The impossible game had been beaten.
He sat back in his chair, breathing hard.
His fingers trembled over the keyboard.
He stared at the screen, at the happy faces of the girls who had once only known tragedy.
The warm light of the sunset glowed across their features, frozen in the most beautiful image he had ever seen.
And at the end credits, when a final message appeared, he nearly sobbed.
"In a world written in sorrow, you became our unwritten hope."
"Where fate gave us endings, you gave us beginnings."
"You held our hands when the story let us go."
"Now, even if the game ends, our hearts will always belong to you."
—Yours, always.
We, Whom You Saved.
He stared at the screen, motionless.
Then, slowly, his hand moved to the keyboard. He hit the final key, and the game closed gently.
Silence returned to the room.
He sat there, blinking at his desktop, the faint reflection of his own face staring back from the monitor.
It was over.
He had beaten the unbeatable game.
He had done the impossible.
"Hahaha," he chuckled softly, "...Now I feel empty."
He shook his head as he stood, ready to finally stretch, to step outside, to breathe fresh air for the first time in weeks.
But then...
A strange wave of weakness surged through him.
His vision blurred.
His knees gave out.
He collapsed to the floor, his body trembling, energy drained, head spinning.
Then everything faded to black.