Victory, Wounds, and a Slut
“Hey, hey… my pride’s taking a beating here…!”
Lee Jiho’s maid cafe, Marchen.
There, among the part-timers who worked at the cafe, the top spot in popularity had once belonged to a maid named Liria.
Her real name was Lee Jimin.
You could probably guess from the surname, but she was Lee Jiho’s much younger sister.
Because she’d been the late-born child, she’d grown up monopolizing the family’s affection from the time she was small. Cute and naturally good at acting spoiled, she’d put that talent to work as a maid part-timer at her older brother’s cafe—only to run headfirst into a natural disaster called an otokonoko and get completely blown out of the number-one-maid seat.
She wasn’t a star anymore.
“He stole all the regulars who used to come to the cafe just for me──!”
Lee Jimin screamed inwardly, practically shrieking with frustration.
When her brother had first come to her, grinning from ear to ear and saying he’d brought back a savior to revive their cafe, she hadn’t thought much of it.
That’s really a guy? Huh. Weird.
That was about the extent of her impression.
Why?
Because she was confident.
No matter who came along, the number-one maid at Marchen would still be her. She’d been overflowing with that kind of certainty.
Besides, no matter how pretty he looked, he was still a man in the end. If the people visiting a maid cafe were men, then of course they’d prefer women, she’d thought. There was no way they’d rather go for a guy who just happened to look like a girl.
A perfectly rational judgment.
But that was common sense only by ordinary standards. It didn’t work on degenerates who answered to the name of gentleman.
A boy who looked like a girl in this line of work?
Somewhere else, it might have sparked outrage—people calling it deception, a scam, a fraud. But this world was different.
Here, it was more like a prize. An indulgence. Something they couldn’t help going wild for.
Of course, not all otaku were the same. There were light otaku and there were hardcore otaku.
The kinds with only a shallow amount of otaku power often reacted to otokonoko types with stuff like, “Well, he’s got one after all, so why like it? That’s not even gay.”
But the kind of active otaku who actually went to maid cafes… they were different.
“Nnngh, this is lethal! A guy with a face like that!”
“Not a thin booklet but an actual otokonoko existing in reality…?! Truly a gourmet delicacy!”
“Huff, huff, from now on my oshi is Sangnangja, nya~n.”
What the hell….
Lee Jimin, who only worked as a maid and didn’t know much about subculture, simply couldn’t understand why they got so excited over another guy. She’d always thought they were just people with very strange tastes, but now that she looked closer, they were downright bizarre.
So the world really is huge, and tastes really are all over the place.
“These homo bastards….”
“L-Liria? I get how you feel, but there are customers around, so watch your language.”
“Ah.”
Lee Jimin, who’d accidentally reversed the insult without realizing it, snapped back to herself at the manager’s warning, spoken while using her stage name.
She quickly armored her face with a business smile and looked around.
Luckily—or maybe unfortunately—everyone was too busy being transfixed by Lee Harang to notice her slip of the tongue.
And yet somehow, that was even more irritating than getting caught.
That face, those mannerisms, and he’s a guy? That’s fraud!
She was practically seeing red.
He’d suddenly appeared, stolen the position of the designated number-one maid, and to make matters worse, Lee Harang was also making a huge contribution to the cafe’s rising revenue.
His presence kept drawing in customers one after another, so naturally the owner, Lee Jiho, was dancing with joy and treating Harang like some kind of heavenly benefactor.
Seeing him look as though he might carry Harang around on his back if he could made it impossible for Jimin, who’d once held the role of lucky mascot, not to feel resentful.
That place was supposed to be mine!
She was straining herself to the limit, trying to reclaim her ace position by any means necessary, but…
“Huff, huff, Sangnangja-chaaaan…. You’re just too noble again today….”
“That’s a guy…? I can’t believe I actually lived to see an otokonoko in person…!”
Against the natural disaster that was Lee Harang, an actual, living otokonoko, it wasn’t easy.
No matter how actively and energetically she tried to serve customers, their eyes were all on Harang.
Before long, the guests had begun competing fiercely with one another just to be the ones who got to request him by name.
At this rate, until Harang quit his part-time job and left, it really did look like her ace position would stay stolen.
Her pride couldn’t accept that.
She had to find a way.
She wasn’t going to lose and let him run off.
For that reason, Lee Jimin had—
“So this is… the work that’s been popular with otaku lately?”
“I’m telling you, yeah.”
With the help of a fujoshi friend, she’d begun entering the world of subculture.
Know yourself and know your enemy, and you’ll never lose a hundred battles.
Up until now, she’d mostly just relied on her natural looks, tossed in some aegyo, and called it a day. But she’d admitted that wasn’t enough anymore.
So she started studying—learning how to better understand the “otaku” and target the things that drove them wild.
“Ugh, why the hell does this character wear clothes like that? Fighting in high heels? Is she out of her mind?”
Lee Jimin was a social butterfly who only knew things like pirate protagonists looting their way around while shouting that they’d stand on the sea, or the one and only Mrs. Door Lock when it came to anime. But now she’d started studying subculture.
All to beat Lee Harang, and to appeal to the otaku customers.
She studied manga and anime, and even played those so-called hardcore nerd games.
With help from her fujoshi friend, she devoured male-oriented subculture one piece at a time, and the effort paid off.
“Liria-chan’s moe power today is insane?!“
“Awakened Liria-chan has arrived!”
As her subculture proficiency deepened, she gradually started reading otaku psychology and teasing their moe instincts better than before, reclaiming a large number of requests that had been stolen by Lee Harang.
I won!
Lee Jimin smiled smugly.
Then, all at once, she looked around at the otaku customers swarming her and realized something.
Did I… actually win?
How serious had she gotten about beating a man, anyway?
Belatedly struck by a wave of self-loathing, Lee Jimin had definitely reclaimed the ace position, but she didn’t feel all that happy about it.
Meanwhile, thanks to Lee Jimin’s one-sided competitive fire, Lee Harang—
“Finally, I can breathe.”
—was happy to have even a little room to breathe now that the number of people requesting him had dropped.
───────────────
The rooftop of the building where Marchen was located.
Lee Harang was in that perfect little hideaway for escaping people’s eyes and taking a break.
There was a rest room for the maids, sure, but Harang was a man, after all, even if he looked like this.
It was awkward being there with the other maids, so whenever he got a chance to catch his breath, he tended to duck up to the rooftop like this.
“Man, I’m wrecked.”
The kind of gruff, earthy speech that made it sound like he ought to have a cigarette dangling from his lips.
He did, in fact, have something in his mouth.
Not a cigarette—just a lollipop for a quick sugar fix.
“Hwaa~.”
As the sweet flavor spread across his mouth and the sugar rush quickly brought his brain back to life, Lee Harang let out a long exhale.
To anyone looking on, he might have seemed like he was smoking, but Harang hated both alcohol and cigarettes.
Having experienced death already, he took his health more seriously than anyone, and anything that shortened his life was a hard no.
He might drink occasionally for social reasons, or for stream content, but cigarettes were absolutely out of the question.
He wanted to live long and stay healthy!
So instead of a cigarette, he sucked on his lollipop and sighed out his complaints.
“Man, I guess I’m used to this now.”
Honestly, he didn’t really want to be used to it… but time had a way of smoothing things over.
They always said people were creatures of adaptation, and sure enough, the more he kept doing maid work, the more normal it started to feel.
And, somewhere in the back of his mind—
It is kind of fun.
—he found the way people reacted when they saw him exciting.
That kind of goodwill had been something he’d never once received in his past life.
Everywhere he went, people had either avoided him or looked at him like he was suspicious. Now they were all scrambling just to talk to him.
For someone who’d suffered so much because of a scary face, Lee Harang couldn’t help feeling happy.
So happy, in fact, that he’d started thinking things like—
Maybe I should do stream cosplay too?
Lately, every time he went live, the out-of-town Byeolsu were practically weeping blood, demanding to see Sangnangja in a maid uniform too.
When he told them they could just look at photos taken by other people, they’d all jumped down his throat.
They’d gone on and on, telling him not to talk nonsense like some clueless amateur.
So since the reaction was good, he’d started thinking maybe he should try streaming in cosplay from now on.
Plenty of other streamers used a bunch of props aggressively, if not full-blown cosplay.
Since Lee Harang had decided to live by making full use of his face and enjoying the benefits, it seemed like a pretty solid option.
And cosplay doesn’t have to mean cross-dressing.
He figured it would be worth looking into, and so Lee Harang began to open his eyes to a new world called costume play.
Not that it meant he’d developed some weird fetish or anything.
It was more like the feeling of dressing up a pretty female character and pouring time into making her look perfect in a game.
If he thought of it as buying gear and fashioning up his look, then wearing stuff like this didn’t seem bad at all. The only problem was—
Where the hell do I get cosplay props or outfits?
At the question, he found himself touching the maid outfit he was wearing.
Since it was basically a work uniform, it was surprisingly comfortable compared to the image he’d had of cosplay clothes.
The fabric was nice too… stuff like this looked like it’d be easy to wear without a fuss.
I should ask the boss about it later.
If he was going to do it more than once, then it was better to have something comfortable.
“Sangnangja-nim.”
Just then, he felt someone’s presence nearby.
“You’ve got a request~.”
At the manager’s voice, Lee Harang realized his break was over and it was time to get back to work. He crunched the last of the lollipop in his mouth and stood up.
“Yep, coming.”
Time to go pay his dignity tax and earn money again.
After ending his sweet break, Lee Harang returned to the main floor.
Wondering who had requested him, he followed the manager’s instructions to table eleven, and—
“Huh? Why are you here, BlackStar?”
BlackStar Kim Junsu was sitting there at the table with a woman Lee Harang had never seen before.
“Haha, it’s not really been that long—well, anyway, it’s nice to see you again.”
Kim Junsu greeted him, looking both surprised and delighted.
Again, Harang’s maid uniform fit him so perfectly that it was hard to believe he was a man, and Junsu couldn’t help but admire it all over again.
He’d heard the rumors from the Byeolsu and half-suspected they were exaggerating, but now that he’d come in person and seen it for himself… it was seriously no joke.
Honestly, even knowing Harang was a man, he couldn’t suppress the feeling that this was eye candy.
He’d originally planned not to come, worried it might be rude, but now he almost felt glad he’d been pushed into it.
“I came after hearing the rumors.”
“Ah, ha ha….”
Lee Harang smiled with twitching cheeks, wondering exactly where the rumors had spread, and in what form, and how far they’d gone.
Thinking too hard about it made his head hurt.
So, to change the subject, he asked about the woman who had been left out of the conversation and was now staring at him with burning eyes.
“But who’s this one…?”
Maybe she was Kim Junsu’s girlfriend?
Was that why she was glaring at him with jealous eyes?
That was his first thought, but the atmosphere between the two of them made it seem like that wasn’t it.
From the woman’s gaze, Lee Harang caught a sticky sort of feeling.
The same kind you might get from those middle-aged creeps you sometimes ran into on an overcrowded subway, the type that started with “perv” and ended with “suit” if you were unlucky enough to meet them.
No, no, no. That’s incredibly rude to think about a woman.
It was probably just his imagination.
Harang was trying to brush it off when—
“Ah, I’m late introducing her. I think I mentioned her once before, right? This is my younger sister, Kim Dana, and actually this kid has been harassing me so much──.”
“Sangnangja-nim, can I request a spanking service?”
He realized it wasn’t just his imagination.