I Became a Yankee
I stared at the mirror in the bathroom, blinking slowly. “…You’ve got to be kidding me.”
No matter how many times I looked, the guy staring back wasn’t the ‘Kang Siwoo’ I knew. Well, technically the face was mine, but the style was all wrong. Actually, even the face looked like it had been maxed out—flawless skin, zero blemishes or breakouts. Like someone had taken my potential and cranked it to the absolute limit.
But all of that was completely overshadowed by one glaring difference.
The style.
His—my—hair had been bleached platinum blonde and meticulously styled with wax. Two silver piercings glinted on my left ear, catching the light. The school shirt was unbuttoned just enough to show off my collarbones, and a thin leather choker hugged my neck. It was the kind of look that screamed “I’m a total party animal” from every angle. Pure Yankee vibes.
If this had been the old me from my previous life, I never would’ve tried something like this. Hell, I probably would’ve avoided eye contact if I passed a guy like this on the street.
“Huu…”
I let out a sigh, and a faint minty scent tickled my nose. For a second I panicked, wondering if I’d just been smoking, but when I checked my pockets all I found was breath spray and some fruit-flavored candies.
‘So he just likes dressing up. Not actually a delinquent, huh.’
Seeing that he didn’t go for any major rule-breaking stuff, it seemed like at his core he was still me. But these little details were pretty different. I’d been a pretty sociable college student prepping to go back to school, but even I didn’t have this level of main-character energy.
The uniform had clearly been customized, but it still felt like a proper school outfit at heart. A normal person would’ve been panicking, completely lost. But someone like me—a hardcore weeb who loved socially awkward girls—knew exactly what this was.
This was, at minimum, a possession.
And since I still had my own face, the most likely scenario was that I’d been dropped into the school days of some parallel world.
Right after getting discharged from the military, I’d binged every novel, game, anime, and movie I could get my hands on. Honestly, I couldn’t even remember most of the specific titles. It was probably easier on my brain to just assume I’d been isekai’d into a completely unknown world rather than one from a story I’d read.
Because forgetting the meta-knowledge would’ve been such a waste.
While I was standing there in front of the mirror, sorting through my chaotic thoughts, the bathroom door swung open. A student built like a damn mountain walked in.
Of course the bathroom had constant foot traffic, but this guy didn’t just exist—he forced you to acknowledge him. His presence was so overwhelming it practically branded itself into your brain.
I wasn’t exactly small, but this dude was on another level. He had to be at least 190cm, way taller than me, and his back muscles looked like they were about to rip through his uniform jacket.
I instinctively hunched my shoulders and started to step aside to make room for him…
“Oh my, it’s Siwoo. You look as pretty as ever today.”
The words that came out of that deep, rumbling voice were ‘pretty.’ That coquettish tone, that booming chest voice. The moment I heard it, I instinctively understood the horrible truth.
Ah. This is definitely a gender-reversed world.
Either that or some weird Marine Corps doujin world. But since I’d already finished my mandatory service in the army, there was no way they’d make me volunteer again. So yeah, gender-reversed world it is.
…Probably?
“Umm. Thanks. I’m kinda in a hurry, so I’ll head out first?”
I brushed it off vaguely and slipped away. It didn’t make sense that I’d blacked out in front of a bathroom mirror and lost my memories, after all. For now, I needed to act natural.
The moment I stepped out of the bathroom, I was greeted by the average ethical standards of this other world.
“Hey, isn’t that first-year Kang Siwoo? What’s with the choker? Is it like… a dog collar thing? For real?”
“Holy crap, he’s so bold about it. That aggressive flirting style is totally my type.”
“But I heard his personality’s no joke. Apparently he slapped a judo club senior who tried to hit on him last time.”
The girls’ blatant stares and evaluations… or rather, sexual harassment. But it seemed like this was just everyday life for Kang Siwoo, the Yankee guy in this world.
It might sound like a misunderstanding, but as those casual comments flowed naturally into my ears, I felt fragments of ‘Kang Siwoo’s’ memories slowly returning.
The conclusion I reached was simple: from Kang Siwoo’s perspective, this was indeed a gender-reversed world.
Gender reversal? A world where women are strong?
To a guy with the mental fortitude of a discharged Korean soldier, the teasing from cute girls was nothing more than adorable aegyo. Actually, the original Kang Siwoo of this world seemed to be pretty much the same as me—he didn’t seem particularly stressed by any of this. That’s probably why he dressed like this in the first place.
Ah, maybe it was because of this world’s completely broken sense of ethics. If I exaggerated a little, it wasn’t all that different from the ethics of an erotic manga world.
And that’s when it hit me.
“I’ve figured out the core of this world.”
Previous life IQ 120, current life IQ 110. (The current me honestly looked a bit dumber no matter how I thought about it.) With a combined IQ of 230, I arrived at an incredible conclusion.
Among us weebs, there’s always a favorite character. A waifu so irreplaceable, so beloved, that even the pickiest degenerates can’t find a substitute. The reasons can vary—character design, story, chemistry with other characters, abilities, presentation, or even external factors like childhood memories or getting through tough times with that series.
That favorite character takes the position of official wife in our hearts.
And my favorite character was a certain goddess named Hestia. (Okay, I technically had multiple wives.) She was the goddess of home and hearth, and her character concept of protecting the home (never leaving the house) and the hearth (computer screen) made her the perfect delicious heroine.
Yeah. The so-called gloomy girl archetype.
My other wives were the same. Yandere gloomy girl, menhera gloomy girl, regular human gloomy girl, the kind that smells bad and gets bullied next year gloomy girl, and so on. I loved the gloomy girl concept.
It wasn’t like there was some big incident. When I was little, I secretly watched a girls’ manga where an enemy executive turned ally was this gray-haired girl with messy long hair that completely covered her eyes, cackling “ehehe~”. I fell for her at first sight. It wasn’t that she matched my ideal type—I fell for her, and she became my ideal type.
As I grew up, met people in real life, and consumed more media, that preference only became more solid.
And in the real world, the conclusion was that either the ideal gloomy girl didn’t exist, or the chances of meeting one were ridiculously low. All I could do was shed tears of blood.
But this world—this gender-reversed world—was different.
It was the perfect environment for a Yankee to be kind to gloomy otaku girls. In other words, the optimal environment for me to kidnap—er, gently romance—any gloomy girl I wanted.
It was the kind of trashy, scummy way of thinking that made me sound like the worst kind of person, but…
So what? I’m a Yankee adopted son in another world.
That famous line about having your virginity stolen by a girl you don’t even like—isn’t that exactly what a gal would say? It’s not like having slightly broken values means you can’t survive in society.
The real problem was that even though it was only my mind that had traveled here, I was still an adult, and this was a school.
I’d just been thinking about kidnapping girls and all that, but as a normal Korean adult man, there was a huge ethical and psychological barrier to actively hitting on high school girls.
No matter what, there’s a difference between laughing and joking about characters and actually dealing with real people. Even if I’m singing the praises of gloomy girls, to the actual person it could be hurtful. When dealing with people in reality, courtesy and respect were necessary.
Aaah, I don’t know anymore!
Maybe my intelligence really had dropped. Just thinking a little made my head hurt. It felt like my body was screaming that it absolutely hated this kind of agonizing.
While I was lost in thought, I somehow arrived in front of the classroom. It wasn’t because of a sudden memory—it felt more like muscle memory. The body’s memories are pretty interesting.
I opened the door and naturally found my seat. In most academy stories, the classroom would fall silent the moment the protagonist entered, then slowly return to normal. But here, everyone was already too busy chatting among themselves to even notice.
At most, one or two people who happened to spot me coming in gave a casual greeting. Seeing that made me a little sad that this wasn’t actually a fictional world. It would’ve been nice if a more protagonist-like event happened to me.
Speaking of protagonists, in these kinds of school stories, the protagonist’s seat is always the same. The very back row, by the window. That prime spot where sunlight pours in just right and you can look down over the entire sports field.
But that ‘protagonist seat’ already had an owner.
“……”
A girl with her face buried in her desk like she was trying to become one with it. Long black hair hung like a curtain, completely hiding her face. She wore an oversized hoodie over her uniform and stared intensely at her smartphone screen, completely ignoring everyone around her. A girl so lacking in presence that even in my borrowed memories, only her name barely surfaced.
“Hey, Daseul. Morning.”
“Uh… uhh…? Ah, g-good morning?!”
The girl who stuttered in panic, her voice cracking. And I was sitting right next to her.
…Wait. Isn’t this the heroine’s seat?
Maybe I should ask to switch seats?