Into a Romance Fantasy
What's so great about getting dropped into a romance fantasy?
Everyone would give the same answer. You get to cozy up with heroines whose looks blow straight past the standard scale.
I'll agree with them that far.
But before you ever reach that conclusion—the one that sounds so obvious—there are a pack of shitty prerequisite quests latched on like free gifts taped to a grocery-store purchase.
— First, your abilities have to be stupidly broken. Swordsmanship, magic, or at the very least some talent for making money.
— Your face? Average at minimum. Preferably god-tier handsome.
— You have to solve every last one of the heroines' problems—family, curses, old trauma, the works—as if they were your own.
— And while you're at it, you can't turn down a single request. You're not some sucker.
— Reading the room comes preinstalled.
— Your family background had better be good, too.
Every time I scrolled my phone and ran into clichés like these, I had exactly one thought.
Why the hell does the protagonist have to suffer through all of that?
Sure, I'll admit the heroines are beautiful—elf-beautiful, goddess-beautiful. But if you asked me whether they were worth swallowing that entire exhausting process, I wasn't so sure. Wouldn't real happiness be using that time to date in peace, then marrying some ordinary, kind woman?
Lost in the thought, I glared at the single letter lying on my desk.
Is there something you wish for, inside a romance fantasy?
A few days ago, was it? Some anonymous letter shoved through the crack of my studio door. At first I took it for spam from a lunatic and nearly crumpled it—then stopped just short of doing it.
My intuition sent up a warning. A fierce one. Practically disaster-alert level.
My intuition had always been unusually sharp. I'd feel appendicitis coming and get myself to a hospital ahead of time, or get a bad feeling right before boarding a bus that later crashed. Thanks to that, I'd made it through this rough world without any major accidents.
And now that same intuition was screaming sirens inside my skull.
"Fuck. What kind of psycho pulls a stunt like this..."
A hollow laugh slipped out of me, but the cold sweat crawling down my spine wasn't lying. This was no ordinary prank. A primal sense of crisis wrapped my whole body—the certainty that if I handled this wrong, I might actually die.
"Haa..."
In the end I let out a long sigh, pulled a pen from the desk drawer, and scrawled onto the paper the simplest, most primitive, most shamelessly material desire I had.
I want to be the hottest guy in a romance fantasy.
The whole time I wrote it, a wave of soul-crushing cringe rolled over me. I was past twenty. What kind of idiotic bullshit was this? And yet my survival instinct was howling at me not to throw the scrap of paper away, and not to ignore it either. A damned mess, all of it.
Clack.
It happened the instant I set the pen down.
Light burst from the words I'd written. Not the sort of thing you could shrug off as a metaphor. A pure-white flash, as if the sun had been shoved in front of my face, swallowed the entire room.
"Agh!"
A ringing tore at my eardrums, and my body was dragged in helplessly, like a scrap of tissue sucked into a vacuum. Before I could even get my bearings, everything vanished into the light.
How much time had passed?
A musty stench stabbed my nose and yanked me awake. Damp earth, old wood gone to rot, and straw soaked through with moisture—all of it tangled together.
"...Ugh."
I groaned and opened my eyes. In the faint light, a rough wooden ceiling sagged under cobwebs. Sitting up set off a loud creak. The mattress might as well have been stuffed with bundles of straw; my back ached, and my whole body was sore.
Bewildered, I looked around. A cramped little room, maybe a hundred and eighty square feet. Dirt walls. One worn-out wooden table and a single chair.
This was not my room.
Then I noticed an old mirror hanging on the wall beside the bed. Barely the size of my palm, filmed with so much dust I could hardly make out a shape. As if possessed, I stepped closer and wiped the surface with my sleeve.
And in that moment, every thought stopped. Even breathing.
Inside the mirror was a man I had never seen in my life.
Not even a dusty, faded old mirror could erase his presence. Silver hair, as if moonlight had been melted down and cast into shape. Blue eyes that gleamed like jewels even in the shadow. Features as perfect as a sculpture, with not a shred of realism left in them.
Dazed, I lifted my hand to match the man in the glass and carefully brought it to my cheek. A cool touch. My hand was resting against the cheek of the man in the mirror.
This was no dream.
That perfect being reflected in the glass was me.
I had become the hottest man in a romance-fantasy world.