Tiss's Awakening
I woke up and found myself a girl.
Trapped in an orphanage bustling with children.
I don’t know how to answer if someone asks me what happened.
Even with the power of modern science, I have no idea why this impossible anomaly occurred.
I had simply gone to bed after finishing my usual daily routine.
Yes. It was just an ordinary day like any other.
If I had to point out something different, maybe my dreams were more intense than usual?
It could be because today is Monday, or perhaps the effects of the tropical nights that have been going on for weeks.
Or maybe it’s not even that… Honestly, I don’t know.
Is it a dream? That would be much more natural.
Time to wake up from the dream.
I pinched my cheek as hard as I could with my small, soft hand, which was less than half my original size.
“Aya!”
Tears welled up in my eyes.
I felt clear pain on my cheek.
Did I really become a girl?
This situation without any intermediate process, just the result, felt so unreal that I thought it was a dream, but unfortunately, it seems not.
“Status window, logout, system, status.”
I listed all plausible words, but the semi-transparent game screen never appeared.
It didn’t matter right now.
First, I needed to figure out where I was and who I was now.
As I looked around trying to gather information, the children who had been staring at me earlier approached.
“Tiss unnie. Are you okay? Your cheek is like an apple!”
“Tiss noona. What have you been mumbling about all this time?”
Tiss?
It wasn’t a common name, but somehow it felt strangely familiar.
“…Yeah, I’m fine.”
After answering the approaching children casually that I was okay and sending them away, I started digging into my memories earnestly.
I had heard the name, but the image was hazy.
I knew who it was, but it felt like it was buried deep in the back of my memory, not important.
Who is Tiss?
Creak.
After a long time of holding my head in pain, the door opened and a person who looked like an orphanage teacher entered and gathered the children including me in front of her.
“Teacher!”
“Everyone~ What time is it now?”
“Time to pray before eating!”
“Yes. Before meals, we always pray. To the meat friends coming into our bodies and the one looking down on us from above. So, shall we all pray together.”
The teacher’s words that we should know that we could always end up on the table were crazy, and the children answered in loud voices.
Ah.
Thanks to that, I remembered where I was.
Even though it was a place I had never seen before, it felt familiar because I had experienced this place countless times in the game I had lived in the future.
This place was the tutorial area in the game I had played.
.
.
.
Several days had passed since I became Tiss.
I decided to postpone the reflection on why I was in this body and focused on adapting to orphanage life.
“Tiss unnie~ What is this?”
“Tiss noona! Let’s play together!”
“Thanks for helping. Tiss.”
Even though the person inside was different, because Tiss was originally a precocious child, there was no big commotion.
The children treated me like an adult and followed me right away, and the teachers liked it, saying Tiss seemed to have grown up earlier than other children.
So, before I knew it, I was being treated like the reliable older sister among the children. Although it was bothersome, I decided to endure it since moving based on trust was convenient in many ways.
At first, I thought that living here would naturally wake me from the dream, but now I had given up.
Instead, I focused on reality, but the problem was that the game I had reincarnated into was a game where the world was doomed to end.
The virtual reality game where the protagonist, after entering the Academy that trains ability users, grows into a hunter or hero who fights monsters with comrades through countless training and battles, and stops the world-ending calamity, a somewhat clichéd story.
Project Zion.
The game was pretty good in terms of gameability.
There were many endings and branches, and the basic settings changed slightly with each replay, with log-like elements appropriately added. The various random events and time-attack elements that arose from that constantly demanded choices and concentration from the player.
The fact that characters became stronger or survived depending on my choices became the driving force to play a new replay.
It was a game where I could grow the protagonist’s combat style in various ways according to the given situation and accumulated know-how, and depending on choices, enemies could become allies or multiple heroines could appear.
Not recommended (2,812 hours played at the time of evaluation)
[It was pretty good, but the content seemed a bit lacking.]
It was a full-fledged game in terms of volume, but I pressed not recommended as a way to say “try harder”.
Was it not because I played it well and pressed not recommended that I reincarnated?
If I thought the cause was on my side, it would only make my mood worse, so I quickly erased it from my mind.
Tiss was not the protagonist of Project Zion.
Not even the main heroine or scenario boss, and not even a supporting character.
In the prologue, the protagonist who lost consciousness opened their eyes and saw the first monster they faced was a girl.
That was Tiss’s identity.
A character whose death was predetermined from the start.
No way to save her, and there was no need to; she was just a sacrificial item in the protagonist’s growth background.
A tutorial boss, as commonly called. How could I be the one inhabiting such a being.
There were many heroine characters, and each character’s narrative had good endings and bad endings, but Tiss had none of that.
How could I save a character who was doomed to die in the tutorial phase where the protagonist was still a young child before the game even started properly.
It was the worst situation.
The only consolation was that it was still a normal body before becoming a monster.
At least if I were a normal extra student in the Academy, I would have mobilized all the knowledge I knew to fight against fate.
This was before starting, it seemed like I was going to die.
It was unfair. I didn’t want to die.
I knew that if I wanted to live, I had to escape from here by any means.
But how?
The orphanage was described as a rare paradise where they nurtured and raised children by taking care of them from both sides in a world half-destroyed by the calamity.
It was a place where the original game’s protagonist also remembered the time spent here as one of the few good memories.
But the reality was completely different.
This place was not a normal orphanage.
It was a cult’s lair named the Gregory Cult that worships the calamity Abaddon and its descendants.
To escape from this cult’s dungeon where they made a bunker underground without being caught by their eyes in this small body, it was impossible without awakening an ability.
There was another reason why I had been obediently here until now.
It was to confirm whether the protagonist existed in this place.
Sometimes in games or novels, characters in the protagonist position die or don’t exist at all.
Depending on their existence, I would have to plan a completely different future.
And finally, that day came.
Creak.
A change came to the regular daily life of the orphanage.
The teachers who had been preparing for snack time suddenly stopped what they were doing and hurriedly went around the orphanage cleaning up.
“Teacher, what are you doing all of a sudden?”
“Sorry kids, apparently new friends are coming today. You can all welcome them with smiling faces, right?”
Then, after a while, the door of the classroom where the children were gathered opened.
“This will be your new home where you will live from now on.”
With the teacher’s introduction, the unfamiliar children entered the classroom one by one.
As expected.
Like the saying “the new one is the cutest”, exactly two new children stood out to me.
Not only me, but all the children were looking at the two.
Not only appearance, but also the girl who gave off a similar atmosphere to the handsome blond boy.
It was the protagonist siblings.
“Tiss, can you help the new kids adapt well?”
“Yes.”
I naturally approached the two as per the teacher’s request.
Player characters also have origins in the game.
The content is just a few lines of text, but among them, there was definitely content about being a sacrificial item and the orphanage they lived in.
The default names were probably Siu and Sia.
“My name is Tiss! Nice to meet you all.”
With a bright smile of a naive child on her face, she opened her arms wide to welcome the newcomers.
She slowly approached one step at a time so the children could feel familiarity without tension.
“Hey, are you all okay?”
Even though she only spoke, the two flinched and then glared at her with wary eyes.
And then, realizing that the target was a peer in the same situation, their caution softened a bit.
“It’s a bit chaotic right now, right? I’m fine too, when I first came here, I was like that too.”
By spilling a memory-lacking lie to create empathy for being orphans, we sowed the perception that we were on the same side.
“Teacher, can we give snacks to the new friends?”
“Oh! What a good idea.”
The teacher praised me as being thoughtful and handed me the snack bag, saying Tiss had taken the lead to share it.
“Are you hungry? Everyone, eat this!”
After saying that since dinner time was coming soon, eat this and wait a bit, I took the snack bag received from the teacher and distributed it to the children one by one.
“Give me!”
Kwang.
“Uwaaang!”
“You can’t cry. You have to follow the order. It’s not like only you want to eat. Besides, you go to the back.”
The little one who rushed to eat first after seeing the food tripped on his own foot when I moved my body first and fell.
The watching teacher also scolded that instead of comforting the crying child, you shouldn’t do as you please and follow the rules.
“Th… thanks…”
The children weren’t stupid.
After realizing that if they lined up quietly they could receive the food, there was no commotion.
The guys received the snacks I distributed in order.
“Delicious.”
“Eat slowly. Kids, let’s share drinks with the new friends too.”
I poured water and milk so they wouldn’t gulp down as the children ate hungrily.
While doing that, I cautiously approached the two siblings who were distracted by eating snacks.
With something in their stomachs, they looked up and saw me.
A faint smile appeared at the corners of their mouths.
Seeing them, I smiled happily and said “enjoy your meal” as if it was fortunate.
The protagonist siblings approached me a bit hesitantly.
“Hello? You heard, but my name is Tiss. What’s your name?”
“I’m Siu. This is my sister Sia.”
“Thanks, Tiss! We were really hungry. Thanks to you, we lived.”
“Nice to meet you, Siu, Sia. Thanks! New friends are always welcome. Since there’s time until dinner, I’ll introduce our orphanage briefly.”
“Got it!”
I slipped between the two and handed them the chocolate hidden in my hands and whispered in their ears.
“This is a gift. Eat it secretly later when no one is looking. Okay?”
“Ch, chocolate!”
Emphasizing it was secret with a wink, the two siblings who were sparkling with joy at the chocolate hurriedly pretended it was nothing and expressed thanks to me in a whisper.
While wandering around the orphanage with the new students, I closely observed the two siblings.
Thanks to their appearance and names, I was sure.
Those two were the protagonists of the game.
The boy was Siu, the girl was Sia. Exactly the default names and appearances of the player character.
<|eos|>