An Unexpected Encounter
The system window floating in front of me carried on with its scathing tirade. I turned my eyes away to escape it, but the more I looked away, the more relentlessly it pressed in.
"Even with ten mouths I wouldn't have an excuse, but—"
"I'm sorry. Honestly, I didn't expect things to turn out this way either."
Whatever I said was only going to sound like an excuse, so I laid my feelings bare instead.
"Back before I came here, when I used magic against Maten and his goons, it never came out anywhere near this monstrous. That's why I figured it would be fine."
When I first possessed this body and Solis's memories were implanted, I could have wiped out Maten and his ragtag crew ages ago — but just in case, I held my breath and quietly studied mana control and spellwork in every spare moment I could find. The one actually at the controls was, after all, me: a possessor who had never so much as held mana, let alone wielded it, so I wanted to err on the side of caution. Contrary to all that needless worry, though, less than a few days passed before I'd digested every spell Solis had and wiped out Maten's entire gang.
"I used the Solar War Body back then too, and I went all out. All that came of it was a bit of extra speed and lasers firing out of my fingertips. You saw it yourself."
The tail end of Part 3, where Solis and Eva clash head-on, lies three years in the future. If he'd grown into something like a mid-boss by then, sure — but right now, he was nothing more than unripe fruit. It was a plain, obvious fact: the strength of Solis that I knew as a reader and the strength recorded in Solis's own memories simply did not match. Unless he pulled out the Halo, a hundred days of effort shouldn't have made that estimate reachable. That's how it was supposed to be.
"Something come to mind?"
"Explain. In detail."
Ah. So that's the lore? Listening to the Writer's explanation, it seemed possession in this world did come with its own set of conditions to satisfy.
"So that's why you dumped me into this trash's body."
A body hardened by trained muscle. Nearly two meters tall, with the frame to support it. Setting aside the bronze skin and the blond hair, it resembled the me who'd lived on Earth in a dozen different ways. As a kid I'd been freakishly bigger than the other children, and "giant" was a taunt I heard constantly — though once I packed on muscle through exercise, the mockery dried right up.
"And what if I'd been small and scrawny instead?"
"So what you're telling me is I came this close to being railroaded into TS yuri."
"I enjoy it because it's fiction. If it actually happened to me, nothing on this earth would piss me off more."
A future where, man's memories intact, I'd stare down at a tragically vacant crotch while a female identity gradually settled into my skull, until at the very last came the total fall into bitchhood—
"'I'm a hopelessly easy bitch pussy that cums from fingers aloneee!' — as a man, I flatly refuse to spend the rest of my life spouting lines like that."
"Dunno, both genres were written around the male ideal, so I don't see much difference?"
"Wait, you're a guy?"
"That explains it — no wonder foaming at the mouth and throwing a fit over a single shit-tier drawing wasn't enough for you; you had to get petty and drop a man into this trainwreck of a world on top of it. Our dear ajumma could really use some hysteria meds."
The Writer spent the next stretch hurling profanity at me, and I ignored every last word of it. More pressing was hearing the conclusion to the topic we'd set aside earlier.
"Still — does it really track that good soul-body compatibility alone produces this kind of output?"
Oh. Oh, I know this one. It's that thing, isn't it.
Enlightenment achieved — the core of my power, laid bare! The only difference was that instead of awakening by straddling the boundary between life and death, I'd deduced it by close-reading the novel's lore. But an enlightenment is an enlightenment, whatever the route.
"Now that I know the cause, I'll just be careful from here on out."
"What's past is past. Cling to it, and a world that's already hard enough to live in just gets harder."
Since things had come to this, might as well think positive. Which meant Plan A — the original scheme to conceal my true power, infiltrate the Academy, and secretly back the protagonist — was officially scrapped.
"On to Plan B, then, Plan B. I march right up to the Academy officials, proudly announce that I was the one who shattered the barrier, and snag myself student status."
"So? Say I don't play along — what exactly are you going to do about it?"
She had a point. Hurrying was probably the wise move — the city was already boiling over with opportunists and sinking into chaos, after all.
"I don't know what happened, but the barrier's down!"
"Move it, I was here first!"
The instant the towering wall everyone had believed impassable came crashing down, those who had dreamed all their lives of becoming Academy students apparently decided this was a once-in-a-lifetime opening, shoving rivals aside and racing each other forward. That human tide had jammed streets that used to be quiet until there wasn't an inch of ground left to plant a foot.
For the current me, though, this much is a piece of cake.
Nothing back in Korea had ever been quite this packed, but I'd been through something similar once. A long-awaited AGF event, a line stretched out to the horizon, a building entrance that felt impossibly far away — I'd even caught myself thinking it might be faster to just ignore the queue and climb the building itself. There, that thought had died a fantasy. Here, I held the power to make it real.
"Geronimooo!"
I circulated mana through my entire body once more, reactivating the Solar War Body. Determined not to repeat my earlier blunder, I throttled the amount of mana down before kicking off the ground and leaping. To any onlooker it would have looked like nothing more than a simple jump — but the height I gained belonged to another dimension entirely. A launch high enough to graze the summit of a high-rise, a weightless euphoria like soaring through open sky wrapping itself around me.
Gravity soon came dragging me back down — but before the fall could take me, I set the soles of my shoes against the building's transparent glass face. I concentrated mana there, and like a thin smear of melted pizza cheese, my feet slapped flat against the wall.
"I'm scaling the buildings straight to the arena. Not a bad idea for something I made up on the spot, right?"
"Whoa, whoa — don't rush me. I'm leaving right now."
Can't keep our dear Writer waiting when she asks so nicely, can I? I wreathed the tips of my feet in mana and began sprinting up the wall. Like the superhuman Infected out of the games, I kicked off walls and ran; like that spider-guy from the movies, I flung myself from building to building.
A crisp wind sank deep into my lungs and woke every nerve in my body. A rush like a full-body shiver peeled the crust of worldly cares away in one clean stroke.
Yes — this is what a munchkin possession story is supposed to feel like.
Hiding your strength is the classic delicacy of the munchkin genre, but I'm of the school that says if you've got power, you might as well swing it freely. My skills were growing at a pace that blew past my own expectations, so whenever something blocked my path, I simply smashed through it and kept moving. The world's attention was a bill I'd have to pay sooner or later regardless. Merely being a man who could handle mana destined me to be stared at.
So — no hesitating. Like a canary escaping its rusted old cage and beating its wings into open sky, let's soar up in style. That's the spirit!
"We're here already."
Thanks to my sprint along the buildings' faces, I'd bypassed the human tide flooding toward the arena and arrived at its doorstep without breaking stride. The entrance was a sea of humanity, but it wasn't yet so dense that I couldn't wedge myself through. All that remained was to punch through that crowd, reach the information desk, and hand in my application — and then I'd be done.
"S-s-s-save meee!"
Out of the din of the restless crowd tore a scream, stuttered so badly it could barely stand on its own legs. That strange, desperate voice drilled sharply into my ears. I'd never heard the voice before in my life — and yet that one-of-a-kind stammering pattern, which I had only ever seen written down, matched a character from the novel I knew to perfection.
Deliberately ignoring the Writer's bewildered question, I hurled myself — not toward the arena entrance, but straight into the heart of the crowd the voice had come from.
KA-BOOM!
"Wh...what the—?!"
"Oh my god — someone just fell out of the sky!"
Leaving the stunned onlookers behind, I swept my gaze across the crowd and found her — a pitiful figure trembling like a leaf in their midst.
"I-I-I'm so-s-s-sorry. I'll n-never go outside ag-g-gain..."
Identical. Identical to the very image the novel had painted in such vivid detail.
A person curled up beneath a blanket embroidered with cute characters and little animals, moving as though she couldn't bear for a single soul in this world to lay eyes on her.
"Well. We're meeting sooner than I expected."
Eva Amethyst.
So this was the protagonist of Academy Yuri Princess, was it?
But where was Chloe — and why was she all alone?