It's Troublesome That My Doting Dad Became A Villain

I slowly turned my body.
At a suitable distance, Prima was standing there, facing me.

I thought I’d be found out eventually, but I never expected him to appear this quickly.
Since greetings weren’t important, I gestured toward the screen and asked,
“What’s that?”
It didn’t seem like something from the original game. However, the exact line that my father had spoken in the game’s ending came out of his mouth.

That meant the scene was somehow related to the original game.
Could it be that there’s another person who’s reincarnated, like me?
Could it be Prima?

What the hell was his identity?
There were so many things that were both shocking and hard to understand.
Prima, still gazing at me with a somewhat dreamy expression, spoke.
“My past.”

“What?”
What was he talking about?
I wondered if I had heard that wrong.

But his pronunciation was crystal clear.
He was definitely saying that the scene I saw in the dimensional portal was his past.
“…That’s your past? If it were the future, maybe I’d believe it, but how could that be possible? The Demon King is dead.”

Even now, the Demon King, or my father, was still alive somewhere in the Demon Realm, still united with his body.
But for Prima to claim that he killed the Demon King in the past? That didn’t make sense at all.
Suddenly, Prima gave a faint smile and took a step closer.
“Why wouldn’t it make sense? You’ve met me before, haven’t you?”

“…”
At that moment, I clenched my lips shut.
The atmosphere around Prima felt strange.
A sense of danger crept up my spine. Why did I feel this overwhelming sense of unease?

I immediately gave a firm response,
“I’ve never seen a demon like you.”
“Can’t you even imagine it?”
With the same soft smile, Prima tilted his head slightly.

Once again, the dangerous feeling returned.
It felt ominous.
The clues about his identity swirled around in my head, but whenever I thought I was onto something, it slipped through my fingers.

I furrowed my brow slightly.
“How could that be the past? It’s impossible. Your existence itself is impossible. You look exactly like Meteor, and it doesn’t make sense that we met in the past.”
The scene from the screen could not possibly be the past.
Most of all, why would he say something like “I will protect Crescent” to my father?

Why would he gently close my father’s eyes in his final moments?
There was no reason for him to protect me.
Everything about Prima was impossible.

He let out a small laugh.
“Yeah. I’ve been curious about how you would react when you found out about me. I’m glad I made it this far. This is fun.”
His sudden comment made my vision blur slightly.

Should I just smack him?
“Want me to tell you? Are you curious?”
“Forget it. I’m not curious at all. What good would it do to know about you? I can just kill you.”

“I’m not planning to die in your hands, unlike some people.”
“?”
My gaze grew sharper.

Suddenly, Prima’s eyes deepened.
His head swiftly leaned toward me. I flinched, but before I could move, Prima’s voice came so close to my ear that it almost tickled my face.
“You… Crescent, your existence is impossible to me too. You’ve already died once.”

“!”
My eyes widened, so wide it felt like they couldn’t get any bigger.
Thump, thump, thump—

My heart began racing furiously in an instant.
To hear something so personal coming from Prima’s mouth was beyond shocking.
No, Cyrillote must have known too.

Did Prima learn about my true identity through the power of dimensions?
Ah, demons…
As this realization sank in, a chill ran down my spine, and I began to regain my composure.

“Right, you died trying to save me.”
“…”
This time, my heart stopped altogether.

It froze and stilled.
I didn’t even question how he knew about it; I knew what he said had to be true.
The memories from long ago pierced my mind like an arrow.

No.
It couldn’t be.
That couldn’t be what happened.

I suddenly burst into laughter.
This translation is the intellectual property of .
“Hey, what are you talking about? When did I die trying to save you? Am I insane?”

“You may not believe it, but accept it, Crescent.”
“….”
“I didn’t come here through a dream or fantasy. This isn’t impossible.”

“….”
It felt like time stopped once again.
I stood still, unable to think of anything else, my thoughts completely blank.

I stared at Prima, as if seeing every detail of his face, even the fine hairs on his skin.
Somehow, he didn’t look like Prima anymore.
He had become something else—neither a demon nor Meteor.

In the stillness of time, my breath escaped me as I spoke.
This can’t be true… But everything pointed to one possibility.
“You… are Meteor, aren’t you?”

No wonder he looked so much like him.
But the idea of Meteor from another dimension crossing over here seemed beyond anything I could have imagined.
I had always thought of the tutorial world as just that—a tutorial.

It had been a single timeline for me, back then and now.
Now that I thought about it, Cyrillote had once said something to me:
“When you were fourteen, you died saving Meteor Pluto and went back to the past.”

“That’s when another timeline was created.”
Was that what this was?
Because of my regression, a whole new dimension had opened up from that moment on.

I had thought the world I left behind— the tutorial world—had simply disappeared after I died.
But somehow, that Meteor was still alive in a world without me.
I took a deep breath, now calm.

“When I died, I thought your time would’ve ended too.”
“I thought you were gone when you died.”
“If you’re Meteor, then why did you become a demon?”

That was the part I couldn’t understand at all.
The Meteor from the tutorial world must have been the same as the one here. He would’ve been as faithful and strong a holy knight as ever, and surely he succeeded in defeating the /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ Demon King, just like in the original game.
So why, then, was he standing before me as a demon—the Duke of Dimensions, no less?

Was it possible that in one of the millions of dimensions, one Meteor turned mad enough to become a demon?
No.
Even if there were millions of versions of Meteor, they would never betray the gods. I knew this because of the Meteor I knew.

The Meteor standing in front of me now was something entirely wrong.
He wasn’t pretending to be Meteor.
“Crescent, when you died trying to save me, my whole purpose in life went off course. Someone sacrificing themselves to save me—it’s something that should never have happened. I always thought I had to be the one to save others.”

“….”
The moment he spoke those words, something clicked in my mind.
I had heard those exact words from Meteor before. When he was nine.

“I will always be the one to save others. Not the one who’s saved.”
He said that before he left for special training and returned six years later.
The realization hit me like a slap in the face.

Meteor, no matter how self-sacrificial he was, could never accept being saved or helped by others.
If someone had sacrificed themselves for him, what would have happened?
The thought twisted my insides.

Now, I couldn’t ignore the truth anymore.
“You are Meteor, aren’t you?”