An Unfamiliar Sky
An unfamiliar sky.
An unfamiliar ceiling… no. A sky.
"Ugh…"
I pushed my stiff, aching body upright, and the world around me swam into focus.
An alley that looked for all the world like some kind of garbage slum. When I lifted my head, I found a small tarp strung overhead, clearly meant to keep off the rain, and scattered across the ground were scraps of what might once have been food—or might simply have been trash.
It was a dark, narrow alley, but brilliant sunlight still managed to cut through the gaps.
The place I was in right now…
It was the kind of back alley you only ever saw in comics—the kind of place where getting kidnapped would not have been the least bit surprising.
Why had I woken up here?
I cast my mind back, carefully, through everything that had happened before.
…Did I get possessed…?
I had blacked out, but the memories right up until the moment my eyes closed were perfectly clear.
The post I had written, piecing together the identity of the mastermind. The deranged comments that had flooded in underneath it. And then me, reading those comments—and losing consciousness.
For someone who had torn through countless regression and possession novels, the situation was painfully familiar.
Except this was supposed to be reality.
Possession and reincarnation were fun when they stayed inside novels. They were the sort of thing that absolutely, under no circumstances, was supposed to happen in real life.
Humanity had advanced hand in hand with science. Nowhere in that progress had anyone ever developed a technology for stuffing people into novels.
Fuck. If I had known I was going to get possessed like this…
I would have put off military service as long as humanly possible.
I wouldn't have killed myself trying so hard to land a job…
And even if I had known I would get rejected, I still would have confessed to that girl…
A flood of regrets washed through my head, and bit by bit, a grasp of my present reality began to take shape.
Maybe it was all those novels I had read. Even dropped into a situation this absurd, I managed not to panic.
First things first. Sort out what's going on.
If the clichés of countless possession stories held true, then the world I had fallen into had to be the world of The Indomitable Hero.
And if this really was the world inside The Indomitable Hero…
Then something was bound to be here.
I tipped my head back and looked up at the sky.
The blazing sunlight made it almost impossible to keep my eyes open, but in the end I found it.
I knew it.
What I had found was a moon hanging in the sky right alongside the sun. Not a real moon, of course. But that star, shaped so much like one, had been described in the novel exactly like this:
— From the beginning of time, the radiant sun and a mysterious star resembling the moon have shared the daytime sky.
The foreshadowing around it had never been resolved. I had just shrugged it off as another bit of worldbuilding and moved on.
But thanks to that, I now knew for certain that this was the world of The Indomitable Hero.
Confirmation complete, I slowly began dredging up everything I remembered about the novel.
The Indomitable Hero was a classic hero fantasy, and the story of its protagonist, Robin.
In this world saturated with mana lived humans, demons, beastfolk, elves, and any number of other races. As time passed, clashes between them grew inevitable.
As the conflicts dragged on, a war broke out to decide which race stood supreme, and countless lives were lost.
Judging that nothing but meaningless death would follow if things continued, the leaders of every race signed a peace treaty to end the pointless fighting.
Each race claimed a territory of its own and swore never to trespass on another's.
Time flowed swiftly after that.
Every race except the demons gradually built understanding and consideration for one another, growing into friendly relations, until at last a peaceful age arrived.
But eternal peace was never in the cards.
A demon uprising, invasions by monsters, and all manner of other calamities began to surface, little by little.
The great empire—the Karaz Empire—established Regis Academy to train promising young mana users in preparation for disaster.
And at Regis Academy, Robin would meet various heroines and companions, defeat the calamities, and bring peace to humanity. That was the story.
Thinking it through on my own…
…Isn't this a total free ride?
It didn't seem like there was anything I actually needed to do here.
This was not a tragedy novel.
It was a growth-type fantasy where the protagonist passed through trials, seized fortuitous encounters, and steadily grew stronger.
It had a bright enough tone that comedy bits regularly made readers laugh, and no matter how dire the situation, the unyielding protagonist always overcame every ordeal.
Even if I didn't lift a finger, the protagonist would handle everything.
So what was my job, then?
Simple. Stay out of the protagonist's way.
If I went charging after fortuitous encounters and ended up hindering Robin's growth, I might be the one stuck dealing with the calamities instead of him—and that was something I wanted absolutely no part of.
Live quietly somewhere safe, wait for the protagonist to reach the ending, and maybe I would get sent back to my original world.
"Athena is a bit of a concern, but…"
The author had announced in a notice that the story would absolutely never turn into a tragedy, so a happy ending was a given. One way or another, the protagonist would sort it out.
All I had to do was look out for myself.
With that settled, I pushed myself up to figure out exactly where I was.
"Ugh…"
Had I taken a fall the day before or something?
The moment I tried to stand, pain throbbed through my whole body.
…?
No—more importantly.
"Aaaah… what the hell is this voice?"
That was not my voice.
The sound that had come out of my mouth was not a man's low, rough tone. It was a pleasant, clear, feminine voice.
I dropped my gaze—and what filled my vision was a soft swell pushing out against my clothes.
A woman's chest.
"You've got to be kidding me!!"
I scrambled around looking for anything that might show me my face.
There was no mirror to be found, but nearby I did manage to locate a puddle of standing water.
I immediately leaned over it and checked my reflection.
The face looking back from the water belonged to a beauty with deep black hair and eyes so red they bordered on ominous.
She was a mess, filthy and disheveled—and still beautiful enough to give the heroines a run for their money.
So it wasn't enough to possess me. They had to throw in a full gender-bend on top of it?
You insane bastard of an author!!!
I had read a few TS novels before.
But I could say with absolute certainty that I had never once wanted to become a woman myself.
Isn't that how it is for everyone?
You like pretty girls because you want to date one—not because you want to be one.
"Pick one, you hack!!"
Shouting at the sky changed nothing, of course.
I steadied my breathing and forced myself to calm down.
I can't stay like this.
Even at a glance, this was not a neighborhood with good public safety.
It might even be one of the lawless zones that appeared in the novel.
In which case, my current appearance was pure poison.
Bright novel or not, that only applied to the protagonist's story. It was hard to believe nobody in a place like this would try to jump me.
I tore down the tarp overhead, wrapped it around my face, and stepped out of the alley.
First priority: figure out where I was.
Drax—a lawless zone on the outskirts of the Karaz Empire.
It was a city that had collapsed in the past during Athena's campaign to subjugate a monster.
The aftermath of the battle between the beast and the "hero" had been catastrophic. A city that had been doing reasonably well for itself was reduced to ruins in an instant.
Countless people died. Comfortable homes crumbled. When the subjugation was over, all that remained were buildings past recognition and a handful of survivors.
But no one could bring themselves to blame Athena.
The monster that had appeared in the city had been a beast of dragon-class bulk, and once a creature of that scale showed up, the city's destruction had already been a foregone conclusion.
Simply defeating something like that was an extraordinary achievement in its own right.
Among the few survivors, those with wealth or reputation emigrated to the Empire's other cities.
The citizens left with nothing became homeless among the ruins.
The terrain itself had been destroyed beyond any hope of restoration, so the Empire abandoned the city of Drax and granted the territory to Athena as a reward for the monster subjugation.
Athena, however, left the city to rot.
In the end, Drax became a haven for wanderers with nowhere else to go and for criminals of every stripe—and naturally settled into a lawless zone ruled by the law of the jungle.
"Which is why lowlifes like me get to live easy. Heh heh…"
Rick was prowling the streets again today, hunting for anything that might turn a profit.
Even in a lawless zone like this, money still functioned as currency, and there were any number of "methods" for earning it.
You could trade resources—food, clothes, jewels—for coin.
You could earn money the honest way, through work or by helping people out.
But in a den of criminals like Drax, pure-hearted types were few and far between.
Wonder if that merchant from last time will show his face again…
Lawless zone or not, a fair number of merchants still visited Drax.
After all, you could sell all sorts of goods here that you could never move inside the Empire.
Aside from the handful of merchants the "Boss" had marked as off-limits, it didn't matter whether you threatened them or killed them and stripped the corpses.
Rick was so deep in thought about how to squeeze out his next score that he wasn't watching where he was going.
Thud—
Lost in his own head, he collided with someone's silhouette.
"What the fu— Who the hell are you?!"
"I-I'm so sorry…"
A voice pretty enough to make a man lose his mind. The cloth wrapped around her face kept him from seeing properly at first, but when he looked closer, he caught a glimpse of the face hidden underneath.
Ruby-red eyes you could drown in. Skin far too fine to belong to anyone from this city. She was a lovely woman.
Rick's nose for money was second to none. His mind raced, and he moved straight to the next step.
"Sorry? So if I smash that pretty face of yours flat and say I'm sorry, that makes it fine?"
"I'm truly sorry. It won't happen again."
The woman bowed her head a full ninety degrees and apologized once more, perfectly polite.
"I said, is 'sorry' supposed to fix everything?!"
Rick snarled and kicked her.
The blow sent the woman sprawling. When she hit the ground, the cloth covering her face slipped free.
The face that emerged was a beauty the likes of which Rick had never seen in his life. He stared, dumbstruck.
This one's top-shelf merchandise…
He licked his lips, a filthy smile spreading across his face.
Have a taste first… then sell her… no, wait, the price would—
While Rick was drowning in greedy fantasies, the woman scrambled up and bolted.
"Where the hell do you think you're going, bitch?!"
But Rick was a criminal who could kill a full-grown man without breaking a sweat.
With her relatively short stride, she was never going to outrun him for long.
It took almost no time at all before he caught her.
"Keh heh… Why don't you just come along quietly?"
Rick clamped down on her wrist so she couldn't run.
"You creepy piece of shit, you bastard!"
The woman spat a string of curses and threw a punch at him.
Rick saw the fist coming and didn't even bother to dodge.
Gonna have to fix this bitch's mouth first.
A little woman's punch wasn't worth his attention.
Crunch.
"Huh…?"
"Huh…?"
Shock colored both Rick's voice and the woman's at the exact same moment.
The last thing Rick saw in his field of vision…
was his own body, lying far away from him.