Let Her Highness Suffer Through Military Life Instead
I made my way toward the carriage bound for Astria.
From common soldiers to foreign nobles, I could not fathom why so many people had gathered at such an early hour—yet every last gaze was fixed on us.
Countless eyes stealing glances at me, as if licking me bare.
It was a sensation utterly alien to me, one I had never once received in all the years I had been a man.
These were the raw, carnal stares of males hungering after a beautiful female.
Astonishingly, even as they pretended otherwise, they were covertly lusting after my body, and a strange thrill rose in me because of it.
An unfamiliar sense of wrongness stabbed through me from head to toe, leaving my mind reeling.
Every soul in the castle was thoroughly consuming the present me—no, this body of Leticia—as a sexual object. That fact alone was the most certain proof of the extraordinary calamity that had befallen me.
Their eyes raked stickily over every part of my form.
Men who drove their stares into my full chest and flushed red.
When I tossed them the faintest smiling glance, every one of them went slack-jawed, utterly lost.
Fierce lust shimmered in the way they looked at me.
They were greedily intoxicated by Leticia's flesh, their eyes obscenely hungry.
A sticky desire, like insects crawling over bare skin.
Had the real Princess Leticia lived her entire life under stares like these?
Men who stole furtive looks, then whipped their heads away in panic the moment our eyes met.
Did they really think I wouldn't notice?
When I lightly brushed back the golden hair that blazed in the morning sun, thick gasps of admiration burst out from all sides of the crowd.
The way they reacted to every little gesture of mine was truly ridiculous.
Like dogs in heat, they had surrendered their eyes to my every movement, utterly consumed by my beauty.
As their hot desire sank into me, shame and a dizzying pleasure I had never tasted before climbed my spine together.
Yes. Right now I was, no matter what anyone said, Princess Leticia of Astria—the most beautiful woman on the continent.
The flower on the cliff you never dared even look up at—that dazzling body was mine alone in this moment, completely monopolized.
The thought sent a thrilling superiority racing through me, and a tingling heat settled low in my belly.
Along with that superiority, a light, electric pleasure welled up from deep inside and spilled over into excitement.
When I cast my eyes downward, I saw the breasts swelling as if ready to burst from the tightly laced dress, and the dizzying plunge of my cleavage.
Turning my head, I caught a foreign noble who had been passing by—his gaze already planted firmly in that valley. His blatant stare made me feel strangely bashful.
I turned my back on him and descended the stairs at a leisurely pace, waving with elegant grace.
I could feel his sticky gaze clinging doggedly to my retreating figure with every inch of my body.
Wherever I went, countless men lost their wits to my beautiful, dignified presence.
I answered the cheering crowds with a light wave of my hand.
When I greeted them with a radiant smile, they all stared at me in a daze, while the Astrian knights and soldiers escorting me puffed out their chests for no good reason.
"Haa…"
What drove me most mad of all was the vivid sensation of a woman's body crashing over me at every moment.
The ticklish brush of long golden hair softly stroking my nape and cheeks.
I could feel that hair, cascading all the way to my waist, swaying gently in the breeze. For some reason it felt good. A pleasant freshness spread through me, following the wind that ran through the strands.
Walking with my full breasts, my cinched waist, and the heavy sway of my hips, I felt how completely different the body's center of gravity was from before.
Because of that, even walking was subtly difficult, and my pace inevitably grew slower than usual.
The heavy bounce of a chest so full it swayed with every step.
The ache in my heels as the high heels pinched with each footfall.
The smooth thighs that never stopped brushing against each other inside the dress.
And the hem of the skirt that fluttered teasingly against my knees.
The thin panties clinging without a gap to my groin, and the scratchy lace trim, left a faint itch between my legs.
And yet, whenever the cold silk fabric grazed the sweat-damp valley of my breasts, a strangely shivery pleasure rose in me.
Above all, even the sighs that slipped unthinkingly from my lips felt like those of a frail woman.
"Ah… I just can't calm down."
A lovely voice that would sound, to anyone who heard it, like a beautiful princess murmuring adorably to herself.
That this was my voice now—that I had become a woman this dizzyingly beautiful—sank into my bones with full force.
Even the soft rustle of the dress fabric sliding against itself as I walked made my face burn.
The secret sensation spreading from my cleavage through my entire body lifted me higher and higher.
With every step, the thin panties rode up and dug into the sensitive cleft, and the sweat tracing down my thighs left the inside of the dress hot and feverish.
I could feel the countless people—especially the men—letting out sighs of wonder and casting their eyes at me every time my full hips swayed up and down.
Those blatant stares, and a body slick with sweat. In all of it lived a depraved pleasure I had never known when I was a man.
Receiving with my whole body the sticky gazes so many men poured upon me was, honestly, a shiveringly good feeling.
Regardless of age or station, men sent me looks of fierce lust, while women gazed up at me with eyes mixed of jealousy and envy.
I approached the carriage that would take me to the Silvermoon Palace of the Kingdom of Astria.
Standing there was the Defense Corps private who had once been my body—'Kite.' Thick despair was written across his face.
"Give me back my body!" the real Princess Leticia, dwelling inside Kite, cried out in a wail.
Her desperate thrashing stirred a scrap of pity, but I could hardly step forward and announce that the continent's most beautiful princess and a colonial bottom-rank private had switched bodies.
The King of Astria would surely use any means necessary to reverse the swap, and I—the culprit behind this sacrilege—would end up beheaded.
If, on the other hand, I simply kept my mouth shut, my life would never be in danger.
Honestly, I did feel sorry for the princess.
I had been nothing but a pathetic private in the Latvian colonial Defense Corps, and overnight I had become the most beautiful woman on the continent. Meanwhile the noble princess had become a wretched man named Kite.
But what choice did I have? The magic orb was broken, and there was no way back right now.
She kept thrashing in the body of a Defense Corps private.
"That woman… no, that person isn't the real Leticia! I am the real Leticia! Let me go…!"
But it was nothing more than empty noise. No one would believe the ravings of a lowly private.
Her desperate cries were swallowed without resistance by the crowd's feverish cheers pouring toward me.
"N-no! I don't want this disgusting man's body! Gilbert, please, help me!"
The real Princess Leticia screamed in utter despair, yet all that came from her mouth was the thick, coarse voice of a man in his twenties.
When she spotted me wearing her original shell, she bellowed in a voice thick with blood-spitting rage.
I glanced sidelong at her struggling form and quietly apologized in my heart.
I'm sorry, Your Highness.
I truly was sorry… but living the glittering life of a princess was a hundred times better than having my own neck on the line right now.
He looked pitiful in his despair, but I could not expose of my own free will that the Princess of Astria and a private from the weak nation of Latvia had switched places.
I shot her a sidelong look and, in front of all those people, deliberately put on an elegant smile.
Savoring the thoroughly ruined face of the real Princess Leticia, I sank into pleasant fantasies of how I would put this captivating body to use from now on.
What kind of gutter life would she live from here on out in Kite's body?
She would have to endure that wretched reality with her whole being—in my place.
The real Leticia had lost the continent's greatest beauty, and now she would have to weather hellish days in my rough, ordinary male body.
Her once-dazzling golden hair had become a commoner's dull black; her sapphire eyes had gone cloudy. Her snow-petal skin would turn coarse, and her alluring red lips would be hideously mottled by army beatings.
If she kept raising a racket like that, she would be dragged straight to the military police stockade.
After the stockade would come hellish daily runs and drills. Instead of a princess's sweet scent, she would live steeped in the nose-stinging stench of stale sweat.
The woman who once sank into a luxurious marble bath while maids waited on her hand and foot…
Would now stand naked and shivering in a cramped shower room packed with sweaty men, forced to dump cold water over herself from a bucket.
The woman once praised as the continent's greatest beauty would wash her body among beast-like naked men.
But not a single man in that sewer of a washroom would look at her with lust. Only murderous eyes that regarded an incompetent 'deadweight trainee' like a worm would stab into her. Anyone could see what miserable treatment a washout soldier received in the army.
In her original life she would have spent every day in splendid court luxury, receiving invitations from countless nobles. Princes and heroes—even the crown prince of a neighboring nation—would have pressed love letters and party invitations on her just for one more glimpse.
She would have swept through high society in the finest dresses stitched stitch by stitch by master artisans, the Astrian treasure inherited from the queen—the tiara called the Goddess's Smile—crowning her head.
Everything she wore set trends even in the empire, but all that glory was over now.
The only clothes permitted to her now were the rough, shabby, worn-out uniform of the Latvian Defense Corps.
Instead of a tiara she would wear a heavy, ugly iron helmet; instead of dizzying high heels, she would lace up crude, stinking combat boots.
Instead of the diamond necklace the crown prince had offered, the only thing choking her throat would be a dog-tag made of cheap scrap metal.
The mouth that once savored foie gras, truffles, and the finest wines would now squat in a dusty corner of the parade ground and shove ghastly mess-hall swill from a dented mess tin down her throat like an animal.
The refined aristocratic etiquette she had learned since childhood would have to be thrown to the dogs.
The army's oppressive drill and punishment would be the only code she was allowed to keep.
When she grew thirsty, instead of a crystal goblet she would have to gulp down the dubious water from a rusty canteen left over from a war fifty years ago.
No longer of a station that could attend society parties, she had lost fine dresses and jewels forever.
The place she would return to was not the luxurious Silvermoon Palace, but a colonial Defense Corps barracks crawling with rats.
In a cramped barracks room she would endure the loud snoring and teeth-grinding of ten filthy men, then startle awake at the dawn reveille and scramble into her combat uniform.
Not a single pleasure of a noble lady remained to her. She who had always been the dazzling heroine of high society and of men's hearts.
But the romantic courtship of the age's heroes no longer existed.
She would simply wear a filthy, hole-ridden combat uniform and roll in the dirt every day like a dog, defending the walls of Astria's frontier colony—as a nameless bottom-rank soldier.
The moment I imagined that horrific contrast, a shiver of depraved delight climbed my spine.
The real princess had become Kite, a lowly Defense Corps soldier of a weak nation, and from this moment on I was the noble and beautiful Leticia Ritz Astria.
Yet not a soul in the world knew that breathtaking truth.
Even Gilbert, Astria's pure Swordmaster, and even Iola, the loyal maidservant, would risk their lives to protect and serve 'me'—a shell that was not a lowly foreign soldier at all.
It was I who would taste the sweet desserts Iola offered, and I who would set upon my head the diamond tiara the queen had bequeathed.
Yes. I had usurped everything that was hers.
The dizzying looks praised as the continent's greatest beauty. The perfect curves that seemed sculpted by the Creator's full devotion.
The absolute power and station of a princess of Astria, a land of milk and honey. Even the dazzling golden hair and sapphire eyes that were the symbols of the Astrian royal house.
Having had every last one of those brilliant joys stolen from her, she was looking up at me with a face full of despair.
The moment I looked down at that ruined face, a dense sadistic pleasure whirled inside me.
I, who had been a bottom-rank colonial soldier, had seized the perfect chance to live a new life as the proud princess of a great power.
With every moment I was becoming the dazzling Princess Leticia herself. I decided to bid farewell to that miserable bottom-rank soldier just as I was, in this beautiful form.
That damn hard military life can be your problem now, Your Highness. I'll thoroughly enjoy your glittering life for you.
Toward the utterly devastated real princess, I deliberately took an elegant step forward for all to see.
Softly, demurely, with every step the click of my high heels tapped the floor with cheerful grace.
The real princess trapped in my old body watched my retreating figure grow distant and wept bitterly.
I felt that wretched gaze clinging stickily to my back, but I did not turn my head. She could not tear her eyes away until I had vanished completely from sight.
Drunk on my own fatal beauty as I stood upon her, I climbed into the luxurious carriage with elegant poise.
As the carriage set off with a jolt, the two full breasts that swelled as if ready to spill over the top of the corset rocked roughly.
Every time those heavy breasts swayed, a thrilling pleasure seemed to stab deep into my core. I felt my cheeks flush scarlet with shame and excitement.
Under the jealous stares of the maidservants who gazed, spellbound, at my proudly rising chest, Iola asked carefully,
"Your Highness, shall I open the carriage window if you are too warm?"
"…Yes."
The carriage soon passed through the main gate of Silvermoon Palace. Along the broad, stone-paved roads of the royal capital, countless subjects had crowded in like clouds, lining up in wait for their princess—me—to pass.
The instant my carriage came into view, a colossal roar erupted as if it would shake heaven and earth.
Was it a cheer of joy welcoming the princess's procession? Or the howling of beasts entranced by this breathtaking beauty?
Either way, it did not matter. Receiving the feverish attention of such a vast crowd with my whole body was an enormous pleasure I had never experienced in my life.
When I lightly waved my hand through the open carriage window, the people's cheers rose to an even more frenzied pitch.
"Ahh! Your Highness! Look this way!"
"Your Highness, you are dazzlingly beautiful!"
"Long live Princess Leticia!!!"
Countless subjects were fiercely yearning for me, worshipping me.
This blind love and desire directed at me. The thought sent a shiveringly intoxicating feeling through my entire body.
The people gathered along the roadside waved their hands at me like mad, and I answered their worship with an elegant smile, waving my small white hand again and again.
I was completely drunk on the dense pleasure of having become, perfectly, the continent's most beautiful woman—a noble princess.
Perhaps it was the heat of excitement. Through the thin silk dress I could feel with naked clarity the stiff sensation of my nipples standing rigidly upright.
Every time I turned my body with a bright smile toward the crowd, my enormous breasts heaved heavily as if about to spill free.
A depraved, lewd heat I had never once known stirred thickly in my lower belly. Feeling the thin panties between my legs already growing sticky with wetness, I secretly fidgeted and twisted my thighs together inside the narrow carriage.