I Ended Up Possessing Her
Twenty-four years old. Male. The name was Kang Yuhwa — an ordinary face, a height on the modest side of average. And right now, he was living through the loneliest stretch of his life.
What do I even eat today.
After his discharge and his return to school, there wasn't a friend left to him. It couldn't be helped. His department was almost entirely women, and the handful of male classmates were either still on military leave or had come back on a schedule that didn't match his.
"Maybe I should've gotten closer to the girls."
There were girls he'd been friendly with, sure. They'd all graduated ages ago.
Crunch. Today, same as always, he chewed through a convenience-store triangle kimbap without even bothering to heat it.
As a kid he'd grown up in an orphanage packed with children, and once he started school there were friends who shared his tastes, so he went around with them. After he came of age he was always out drinking with someone, and even at part-time jobs he warmed up to people fast. The army had been full of peers his own age. Not once had it occurred to him that he was lonely.
...Put it like that and it almost sounds like the life of a social butterfly.
Most of those circles had been small. Still, so long as he was inside one, loneliness never really found him. Going around like this — wholly, completely alone, with no group at all — was a first.
"......And so, in this formula—"
A university with a decent name, which he'd entered for the sake of getting a job.
Truth be told, he'd meant to walk straight into a workplace the moment he turned twenty. The director had talked him out of it. Better to finish college, the director said. The director would cover the tuition, so go and finish college.
"...I should've just gotten a job."
The director hadn't been wrong. Other people didn't grind through a four-year degree and then enter the workforce because they were idiots.
If you want a major company, or any job with real benefits, coming out of a good university is the way.
So even if none of it was sticking in his head, he still had to sit there and listen. He spun his pen through whatever idle thoughts drifted by, and before he knew it class was over. It had been his last general-education course of the day, and he made it back to the dorm faster than anyone.
"You back?"
"Yeah."
The shut-in college student who passed for a welcome. Calling it a welcome was generous. It was roommate courtesy, nothing more.
After the greeting, the guy sank straight back into his game. Kang was used to that sort of roommate, so he flopped onto the bed however he landed.
"You're lying down without showering? That's disgusting."
"I'll get to it~"
He let the nagging slide and opened a webtoon.
A hero series he'd been following for a long time. The story had a worn, familiar feel to it, but the art and the action scenes were good enough that the series was fairly popular.
...They really did draw her pretty.
The main villain of Part 2, showing up in this chapter: Lee Yuhwa.
At first I couldn't figure out why my name was in it...
The director had told him the name was a mistake — he'd thought the baby was a girl when he first named him. Said little Kang had been pretty enough back then to mix the two up. So why did his face look like this now?
Stray thoughts and all, he stared blankly at the comic.
Amid a barrage of crashing sound effects, the pretty villain who shared nothing with him but a name went down.
Hero: "You. Why aren't you resisting?"
Lee Yuhwa: "Haha... how could I possibly resist? Against you."
Lee Yuhwa: "I'm a villain, and you're a hero. It was a fight I never could have won, from the very start."
Hero: "...You hurt a lot of people. You killed them, too."
Lee Yuhwa: "Yes... you're right. So hurry and kill me. Kill the one who ravaged you, and the world."
Hero: "I'll ask one last time. Do you regret what you've done?"
Lee Yuhwa: "Regret...? Ha. I don't have anything like that. ...So just kill me already."
Their exchange ended on a panel of the protagonist looking at Lee Yuhwa. On the next scroll, a wet crack — and the episode was over.
He'd been staring at it in a daze, and then, same as always, he dropped into the comments.
The usual fight over the rankings.
The usual love-it versus it's-mid argument.
He stared at the comments in a daze, and for some reason his eyes kept trying to close.
The moment he saw a comment from the sort of person the internet calls a real one, a laugh slipped out of him before he could stop it. His eyes kept sinking shut. His finger scrolled the comments without meaning anything by it.
This chapter was pretty good.
Lee Yuhwa's villain arc had been piling up for a long time now. The half-polite speech, the cool-type act, the beauty, the chic — just about everything a female villain could have, she had.
They're not wrong.
Yuhwa's past, as the comic had shown it, still hadn't really appeared. Even when something had, it was only a glimpse of a silhouette — never the past laid out in full.
And because of her ability, there were times I thought it was the past when it was actually the present.
Turning that over, he backed out of the comments.
Anything else worth reading...
He meant to hit back and open another series. He didn't get that far.
His eyes kept closing. The strength was leaking out of his hand. Was it the warm sunlight, or had the day's classes simply worn him out?
...I'm sleepy.
Sensation came apart. His vision smeared, and his eyelids were heavy. In the end, he fell asleep.
Beep-beep. Beep-beep.
"Mmm..."
The alarm was going off. His head hurt like it was splitting.
I didn't even drink. Why does it hurt this much?
Clutching at the throbbing in his skull, he sat up slowly from the bed. His vision was still blurred. He couldn't make out the room around him.
What time is it... my major class is at nine, so...
"...My head hurts far too much."
...?
Why was he suddenly hearing a woman's voice? And a very young one, at that. This was a room with only two men in it, and neither he nor the shut-in had a girlfriend.
"What? A woman's voice—"
He stopped halfway through the sentence. That clear, ringing voice had come out of his own mouth.
His eyes flew open.
What they opened onto was a room of pure white, with beautiful sunlight pouring in.
He looked down at his body. The skin the army had roughened was gone without a trace, and what he saw was the pale, soft back of a hand. His legs were short. His arms were short. The clothes, strangely, were something airy and light, cut from a fabric that felt unmistakably expensive. Without thinking, he looked inside them.
"Huh...?"
What he found there was small, but it was unmistakably a woman's chest. Just to be sure, he touched it lightly — and the feeling was nothing at all like a man's.
You've got to be kidding me...!
"A mirror... where is a mirror...?"
No — and why was his way of speaking like this, too? Strange honorifics had glued themselves onto the words he'd meant to say. Against his will.
He swept the room in a hurry. Whatever kind of hobby this was, the place was crammed with nothing but white objects, and at the far edge of that white a full-length mirror caught his eye.
What kind of situation is this supposed to be?
"Ack—!"
It hurt. Had he gotten that much shorter? It was a height he should have cleared, but he hadn't adapted to the body he'd been changed into, and he went sprawling on the floor. For some reason the pain felt sharper than it used to. Rubbing at his throbbing knees, he got himself upright in front of the mirror—
"...What is this, exactly."
Silver hair, falling in waves. Vivid gold eyes, as if someone had cut them from jewels. Soft cheeks, a cute-looking face. A short frame, and skin pale as milk.
The figure in the mirror was a young girl — the sort of child who might have belonged to a royal house.
"What is happening..."
Faced with a situation he simply could not believe, he dropped onto the floor.
Sitting there, he poked the child's face in the glass, caught it in both hands, prodded it, tugged at it. The sensation came back sharp and clear. This was not a dream.
The situation was absurd. Even so, everything he'd picked up from webtoons and web novels was enough to tell him what kind of mess he'd landed in.
Possession... right?
The development where you become a character in some game, comic, or novel. A premise that had been popular for a long time, and one that still turned up constantly.
Then the question is who this is...
He'd read quite a lot of webtoons. Webtoons and novels were something he'd first gotten into in the army, and once he fell in, every scrap of his personal time went to reading them.
"Silver hair and golden eyes... and a girl, no less..."
The polite speech kept correcting itself and coming out on its own. Against his will, it rewrote whatever he meant to say into honorifics.
Was there a character like this?
Stories with little kids in them were everywhere. Some were outright parenting series — The S-Rank Hunter Dotes on His Daughter, or The Heavenly Demon Raises a Daughter — and there were comics where a childlike character showed up announcing, I'm a thousand-year-old vampire~.
Silver hair and gold eyes... silver hair and gold eyes. On Earth that pairing was rare enough to turn heads, and even inside comics and novels it wasn't especially common. Among the things he could call to mind right away, there was the child version of Yuhwa...
"Wait a moment."
The child version of Yuhwa? Now that he thought about it, they were similar. Similar to Lee Yuhwa, from Hero Record — the last webtoon he'd been reading before he possessed this body.
Of course, the Yuhwa in the webtoon was an adult most of the time. A cold, beautiful woman with a very large chest, black hair falling in waves, and blue eyes frozen solid. The chapter where Lee Yuhwa first appeared had drawn a very good response. A haughty, cool-chic female villain — that was Lee Yuhwa.
Then, somewhere around the middle of the series, a young character with silver hair and gold eyes had appeared out of nowhere. The timing was right in the middle of the protagonist's rise, and over something connected to that, the child spoke to another villain in a fluent, icy tone no child ought to have had. At first he'd thought they were minting a new villain out of a kid character. In the last panel, the child changed back into Lee Yuhwa.
The comments went insane.
After that, people tore through the earlier episodes hunting for the silver-haired, gold-eyed girl. From that single scene, you could finally understand how Lee Yuhwa had been showing up at such perfectly timed moments all along.
"Then... am I Lee Yuhwa?"
The voice that answered him was the soft, unripe voice of a child who had never gone through a voice change.
He studied the mirror. In the glass, a cute-faced girl pressed close and stared straight through him.
Once I think of it that way... it's almost exactly what I saw in the webtoon.
He looked at the mirror for a long while, and in the end there was only one conclusion he could reach. Before he fell asleep, he had been reading Hero Record — and he had possessed its Part 2 villain, Lee Yuhwa.