The Moment I Opened My Eyes
For a human being, a sudden change of environment arrives as stress.
A shift in surroundings meant adaptation was required, and the more abrupt that process, the greater the stress that came with it. People like to say humans are creatures of adaptation, but we aren't chameleons. You cannot simply snap into a world that has changed overnight and be fine.
That is why most people want a life that is not so different from the one they already know—something they can predict, control, and prepare for. Flip that around, and a change that arrives without warning, unpredictable and uncontrollable, something you were not even ready for, is never welcome.
"......"
Which is why I could not even begin to grasp what was happening to me.
This went beyond any notion of adaptation. My brain simply refused to accept the situation. No—I could not even tell, exactly, what had been done to me.
The instant I came to, my hand moved on reflex to seize a weapon, and found only empty air. Worse than that: the gunfire that had been coming from every direction was gone. So was the heavy weight of the body armor that had been pressing down on me.
I blinked dully and slowly sat up. A nameless weakness seemed to fill my whole body and hold me in place, but I rose without a shred of hesitation.
"This is..."
It was a space I had no memory of. Unfamiliar. A room just large enough for one person to live in, furnished with pieces of every kind—a table, chairs, a cabinet, shelves, a door, a wardrobe, an air conditioner, a computer. Familiar-looking objects, all of them.
The thought that someone might have carried me here after I had passed out lasted only a moment. Then the state of my own body came into view.
A soft physique that looked as if it had never seen a day of training. Far too thin and slender to call a man's arm. The strange part was that this thin, slender arm moved according to my will.
Have I finally gone insane?
I turned my gaze. Across from me, a full-length mirror held my reflection. It did not show the face I was used to. It showed a stranger—a woman.
The thought that I had finally lost my mind crossed my mind even as my eyes were drawn to the woman in the glass. Pale skin. No color in it at all. It looked like the skin of a corpse that had been dead for hours; anyone who saw it would seriously tell her to go to a hospital.
Shimmering black hair made that skin look even whiter by contrast. The dark circles under her eyes ran deep, and even those circles, which might have looked gloomy on anyone else, were transformed by that face into something like makeup. Anyone looking would have a hard time denying she was beautiful.
But the fact that she was me... that was not so easy to accept.
"Ah..."
A bottomless helplessness seized me. Even now, if I closed my eyes, the memories rose in perfect clarity: the sound of bullets cutting the air, the vibration of explosives going off nearby, the acrid stench of gunpowder filling every breath.
Was I dreaming? I pinched my cheek and pulled, then winced at the pain.
"...Reality."
No. Then what was this unknown house, and what was this body?
"Hah..."
I let out a heavy breath and tried, little by little, to understand the situation in front of me. The more I understood, the more a vast emotion kept welling up. I could not understand it. I could not accept it. And there was nothing I could do. I just sat there in the room, unable even to think. All I could manage was to look away from the reflection in the mirror and deny reality.
In my frustration I clutched at my chest—and the moment my hand closed on a different kind of chest I had not expected, dark, dense emotions swelled as if they would swallow me whole.
People say you should think positively. Negative thoughts don't help. The words came to mind, but even that was not easy. Then I would like to ask those people something.
If they were in my situation, could they smile and think positively?
Overnight, a stranger's body. A woman's body, no less. If I were supposed to be positive here, would I have to think, Wow, I'm a woman now. I can start a whole new life with this!?
That is just being insane. Humans may be creatures of adaptation, but this was something beyond adaptation.
"Fuck... if it was going to be like this... I should've just stayed there..."
Exhaustion filled every inch of me. A body so slender and fragile it had never known training. This was not the body I had tempered, over and over, through brutal drills. I had repeated a technique hundreds, thousands of times so I could execute it perfectly when it counted. I had liked watching myself grow every time I survived another brush with death.
In a way, I might have been content as a mercenary. But this reality, which had stripped all of that away, swallowed me like a despair so vast I could barely endure it. It was a different kind of pain from every agony I had ever known.
What was the point, when every effort I had ever made had vanished in an instant? I denied those thoughts and affirmed them, over and over, among countless others.
The comfort of being home. The absence of enemies. The relief of no longer living under a threat you could not see an inch ahead. I felt none of that. All that remained was the loss of a body that had been perfectly trained—gone in a single moment.
The pleasure, the thrill, of a life that made you feel alive every second. Maybe I had been addicted to the dopamine of situations where your life hung in the balance. It did not matter. That life had already become ordinary to me.
I stayed like that for a long time. The first time I moved was when a bodily need I could no longer hold back finally became unbearable. I lifted my face from between my knees and staggered toward the bathroom.
That was the first time I used a toilet as a woman.
The second day did not amount to much either. To be specific, I spent most of it lying in bed, asleep. I woke around five in the afternoon, and even that was only because I was hungry; otherwise I would have slept longer. I tried to ignore the negative thoughts squeezing up through the dregs of sleep, searched the apartment, and found a few packs of instant ramen and a bottle of water.
The water came to a rolling boil. I dropped in the noodles and stirred the seasoning through. An egg would have been nice, but the barren refrigerator did not even have that. All it had held was a half-liter bottle of water—and I had used every last drop cooking the ramen.
The pot hissed and rattled, jumping slightly on the burner. I killed the heat, wrapped my hand in a damp cloth, and lifted it. I sat at the table and absently put ramen in my mouth—then coughed before I knew it.
"Cough!"
I had shoved in a mouthful of scalding ramen without thinking, and it had gone down the wrong way. The spice hit my windpipe and airways directly. The pain was hell itself. I yanked open the fridge for water... and all that greeted me was a refrigerator as empty as a barren desert.
If I had known, I would have saved some of the water.
"Cough! Cough!"
The coughing would not stop. On top of that, the heat sent a pain through my whole throat as if it were being stabbed with needles.
"Cough! Cough!"
Pain is always worst while you are feeling it. With time it fades, and you remember it as something you could endure—but while you are in it, nothing else compares. A second feels like a minute. Every nerve in your body stands on end. You wish the moment would pass as soon as possible, but pain does not fade that easily.
"Cough! Cough...! Ugh..."
The pain finally ebbed enough that I could settle. An ordinary choke ends in a light cough, but choking on spicy food is genuinely dangerous. I could feel my face burning in real time, it was that hot.
Once the spice receded a little and I could breathe, I picked up the chopsticks again. Humans are creatures of forgetting. You forget even the pain you just went through and repeat the same mistake.
Of course, I am not an idiot. I do not mean I was the kind of moron who eats something knowing it is poison that will kill them. The reason I went back to the ramen was simply that I was hungry. After searching the studio apartment once, there was essentially nothing to eat except the ramen in front of me. I even found myself wondering what this body had been living on.
Slurp. The ramen tasted like ramen. Becoming a woman had not changed how it tasted, apparently. I ate it in a frenzy. One pack did not seem like it would fill the emptiness, but I ended up full enough to leave a little broth.
When the meal was over, the things I had to do rose naturally into my mind. I had been buried in negative emotion, but once a few needs were met, those tasks surfaced like bubbles. There was a lot I had to do.
And so I started tearing through the apartment.