The World Is Not Equal
I knew the web novel Geum Hayang of the Armored Academy was a mecha story. A mecha story. The genre where you pilot massive robotic weapons and duke it out with monsters. A genre that captured the pure romance of being a man. Anyone who nitpicked about the realistic problems of bipedal war machines wasn’t a real man. You got to fight inside a robot hundreds of times bigger than a person! What man’s chest wouldn’t swell with excitement at that? And on top of that, the protagonist was apparently a Sex Examiner. Holy shit. Just being a mecha story had me hyped, but a Sex Examiner? The tags proudly boasted an R-19 label too. That’s right. It was a straight-up harem fuckfest. Just imagining the protagonist swinging his holy dick around and conquering all the heroines made my heart race from the title alone.
But this novel was dogshit.
The setting was a mess, the writing was mediocre, and the only reason I kept forcing myself through it was because it was a mecha story with porn. I never expected that to show up.
“That fucking author bastard… ugh, NTR drift… this is actual garbage, seriously.”
This novel was an NTR story.
If you’re gonna do that, at least put the damn NTR tag in, you hack. The heroine who first paired with the protagonist, Han Seo-ah—a girl who screamed “main heroine” from every angle—had been building flirty tension with the MC. Then suddenly the protagonist gets knocked out of battle, and some asshole named Geum Taeyang swoops in to take his place as her partner. Before long, Geum Taeyang was getting way too close to the heroine. It couldn’t even give me any catharsis; it was all just endless frustration. The comment section exploded. Half the readers dropped it right there. The ones who stuck around out of morbid curiosity finally bailed after the graphic sex scene between Geum Taeyang and Han Seo-ah, hurling curses the entire time.
Honestly, something felt off the moment Geum Taeyang appeared. The name itself was basically a walking NTR flag. As soon as he showed up, I sent the author a private message. 5,700 characters long. I don’t remember the exact wording anymore, but the summary would’ve been something like this:
Dear Author,
The next chapter, that bastard dies, right? Any male who touches the heroine without permission must die. That is the natural flow of the story. If you want to give us proper catharsis, that’s how it has to be.
The author only killed off Geum Taeyang after the comment section caught fire and the reading numbers tanked. But by then it was already way too late—he’d already fucked her. After that the story kept drifting further off course, but the author’s tastes never changed, so more NTR characters kept popping up. Fucking hell.
And because there weren’t many decent mecha novels out there, I had no choice but to keep reading… and that’s how I ended up getting completely screwed over by that author bastard.
“Ugh, fuck. That goddamn NTR-loving piece of shit.”
But the worst part right now was that I had become that very same Kang Jae-hee. The guy who gets brutally killed for daring to sleep with the heroine once. That Kang Jae-hee. That Geum Taeyang.
“Goddamn it, what a fucking asshole.”
The novel eventually went on indefinite hiatus. The final notice said this:
— Author’s Note —
If that’s what you all want, I’ll do a remake.
— The Author
“This is your idea of a remake?”
The legend that sending the author a private message gets you sucked into the novel. What a creatively bankrupt son of a bitch.
Korea Giganoid Pilot Academy. KGPA for short. Also commonly called simply the Academy. It was located in Yongin. The grounds spanned roughly 2.5 million pyeong. It featured two tactical training fields for Giganoids, multiple hangars, facilities to house the stationed security forces, plus shopping centers, training centers, and all kinds of other amenities. This place was the core of the government’s ambitious state-led Giganoid project.
Even though the first developer of the Giganoid had been Korean, the related industry in Korea had stagnated for a long time. Various interest groups tied to Hunter-related businesses were behind it. Then the new administration came in, pushed through a special bill on strategic Giganoid development and pilot training despite opposition from the minority party, and poured in astronomical funding. They restructured the existing Awakener Academy into the Giganoid Pilot Academy.
The opposition screamed about a rushed bill, but since state-led Giganoid programs were the global standard, they had no real grounds to stand on. And so the Academy was reborn. The proud, highly competitive first-year cadets who made it in became the protagonists of this very novel.
Total enrollment: 375 students. 150 female operators and 225 male combatants. While each Giganoid required one operator and one combatant, there were more combatants because each active unit needed reserve combatants on standby.
And right now, I was one of those reserves, being deployed onto the battlefield.
A Gate had opened near Yongin, so the Academy cadets were being sent out for “training.” Or so they said.
Fuck… If you’re gonna send me here, at least drop me at the very beginning of the story.
Getting thrown into the novel as a character who dies quickly was bad enough. To make it worse, I hadn’t even arrived at the start. If I’d been sent before enrollment, I could’ve just run away or avoided stacking up bad karma… After rolling around in this world for a few days and matching my memories with the events I remembered, I realized today was the day.
Today was the day that incident was supposed to happen.
The NTR event involving the heroine Han Seo-ah, Geum Taeyang—also known as Kang Jae-hee. In other words, me.
But if I sleep with Han Seo-ah, I die.
A multi-pronged spatial rift—the Gate—loomed before us. According to the novel’s description, this was a Type-D Gate. Soon, monsters would come pouring out of it.
“Thirty minutes until breach!”
“Units 1, 2, and 3 are all on standby.”
“Good. Cadets, take your positions. This is your first real battle, but there’s no need to be nervous. Just do it exactly like in training. Understood?”
Lieutenant Colonel Lee Kwan-yong, the tactical combat instructor and the officer in charge of this operation, gave a short briefing.
Training, huh… Of course, I hadn’t been in this world long, but I had done the drills. It wasn’t that difficult. You gripped the control yoke, but the setting was that Giganoids could read the flow of a combatant’s supernatural ability and move according to their will to some degree. Honestly, it was even kind of fun. After training like that, I actually started looking forward to it a little.
What would it feel like to personally pilot one of those massive Giganoids described in the novel during real combat? As expected, giant robots really did make a man’s heart pound.
Guuuuung—
The enormous trailers carrying the Giganoids behind us moved into standby positions, and the protective panels began dropping one by one. Finally, the Giganoids revealed themselves.
Beautifully designed humanoid giant robots that blended curved and straight lines. Honestly, no man could look at a giant robot without feeling his chest tighten with excitement.
…Okay, fine. The Giganoids were pretty damn cool.
The cylindrical cockpits carrying the female cadets, including Han Seo-ah, connected to the Giganoids and were soon inserted into the main bodies. While pilots could enter the Giganoids directly, the setting said they did it this way to maintain the same conditions as training. Once the cockpits were inserted, the Giganoids’ eyes glowed with blue light—a sign that the Fetus System had activated.
The magical power amplified by the Fetus System lifted the massive Giganoid bodies. The trailer wheels, which had been sunk into the ground, rose slightly. The basic magical power output lightened the unit’s weight. Thanks to that, even during intense combat, ground pressure issues were reduced.
“All operators have completed entry. No abnormalities.”
“Good. Combatants, board your units.”
After the female cadets boarded, the male cadets simply walked in. Female operators had a lot of preparations to do for piloting, but male combatants only needed to get inside. Since this world was closer to a Hunter-type setting, the cadets were all superhuman. Even though the Giganoids stood over ten meters tall, climbing in with just their bodies was entirely possible. Especially since the Giganoids were currently lying down, it was even easier.
Following the instructor’s orders, the protagonist of this novel, Lee Hyun-woo, walked past me with a slightly nervous expression. He was the primary combatant, and I was his reserve.
Lee Hyun-woo had the perfect protagonist looks befitting the novel’s attempt at a harem story. Slightly messy hair, long dark lashes casting a melancholic shadow over his eyes. His features were so perfectly sculpted that he could pass for a top-tier idol without any sense of dissonance. On top of that, his current skills and future potential were both top-class. His specs were so broken they felt like cheating… but that was all just according to the setting.
In reality, the protagonist got his heroine stolen by Geum Taeyang and only got to have sex a few times after the novel was basically over. All because the author was an NTR addict.
Tsk tsk, poor bastard.
In his first real battle, the guy would get nervous, burn his ultimate skill Brave right at the start, run out of ability power, and retire. Then I would swap in. That was how the NTR was supposed to happen.
According to the novel, anyway.
But I had no intention of letting that happen.
As he passed by me, I spoke up.
“Lee Hyun-woo, don’t get too nervous. Save your Brave. If it gets dangerous, just run. It’s not like you’re the only one who can take it down.”
By the way, Brave was an ultimate skill. It consumed an insane amount of ability power but delivered equally insane firepower. The downside was that once a male combatant used it, they were completely exhausted. Further combat became impossible. That was why reserve combatants existed.
My advice was completely sincere. The enemy appearing today was one we weren’t supposed to be able to defeat anyway. That was how it was set up.
But maybe the same words sounded different depending on who said them. Unbeknownst to me, the original Kang Jae-hee—Geum Taeyang—had already made Lee Hyun-woo extremely wary of him. After all, I was the bastard trying to steal his woman. Lee Hyun-woo glanced at me with a cold glare, said nothing, and walked past.
Looked like he wasn’t going to listen to a single word I said.
I let out a quiet sigh.
“Haa, fuck. Fine, do whatever the hell you want. As long as you don’t fuck her… that’s all that matters…”
Today, after Lee Hyun-woo retired, Han Seo-ah would fall into danger. Then I—Kang Jae-hee—would save her, earn her favor, and the two of us would naturally raise our affection levels until we ended up having passionate, sweaty, mind-blowing sex. That was the original flow.
I had zero plans to have sex with her. If I did, I’d be branded a demon and killed.
But I still had to save Han Seo-ah. Because she was the heroine. If she died, I had no idea how the story would change. Since I didn’t know how long I’d have to survive in this world, I wanted to avoid changing the plot as much as possible.
However, this novel’s story had already been rewritten.
And in a way that was far more fucked up than I could have ever imagined.