Sorry, Little One
Sorry, little one.
Magic.
It was the art of dazzling the eye with quick hands and silver-tongued patter, then deploying your prepared tricks one after another in the gap that distraction created. People knew they were being fooled, and they watched the show anyway. So long as the spectacle was a delight to the eye, any trick would do — and even a failed illusion had its own charm as entertainment.
That was the important part.
People believed magic was fake.
Bang—!
"Whoa!!"
The cards in my hand vanished and bloomed into a brilliant bouquet of tulips, and the audience erupted in cheers. I swept my other hand over the flowers from bottom to top, and the tulips transformed into a long, twisted pretzel.
"Ooh—."
"Miss, is that real? Can I try some?"
I held the pretzel out to the boy in the front row who was already licking his lips. He took a bite off the end, and his eyes went wide.
"Holy crap! This is good!"
"Gimme some, I wanna try. …Wait, it's warm? How is this warm?"
At that, people started volunteering left and right to have a taste. Not just the kids and students — even the adults were leaning in with interest.
A successful reaction.
Up to this point, anyway.
I laced my fingers together in front of my chest.
"Does everyone want something to eat?"
"Yes!"
The audience answered as one. I grinned and unlaced my hands, and half a dozen candies tumbled out from between them. Far too few for a crowd this size. I lifted the ones that had fallen to the floor back into the air, then tapped them one after another with my staff.
Bang, bang, bang!
Smoke blanketed the view, and gift boxes the size of my palm popped into existence. The reactions were more of the same — Did you just see that?, They stopped midair!, Totally worth the money, This is so freaking cool — the usual reviews I heard wherever I went.
People snatched up the gift boxes and tore into the wrapping with greedy hands. Inside were candies and chocolates ready to eat on the spot. I pressed my palms together and spoke as if making a request.
"Everyone, please finish everything inside. If any of it spoils later and someone gets a stomachache, I'll be the one in trouble."
A few of them would try to squirrel some away, no doubt. That was why the cute little magician girl's coaxing request was necessary — it would make the audience police those types for me.
"Hey—you idiot. She said not to hide any. What a jackass."
Exactly like that.
I gave the boy who'd gotten angry on my behalf a small nod of greeting. A good kid deserved praise. A happy smile spread across his mouth.
In the end, every last snack disappeared into people's stomachs, and I was able to finish the show without incident. The audience drifted off in twos and threes, looking satisfied.
"I don't even need lunch today."
"Yeah, right. You say that every time…"
"Dad! You gotta buy me snacks!"
"No. We're done for today. Your teeth are gonna rot."
Amid the chatter of people scattering in every direction, my eyes met those of a six-year-old girl. She looked rather put out — probably because of me, she wouldn't be getting any more treats. I spoke to her father.
"You can buy her snacks if you want. They're sugar-free and zero-calorie."
The girl's father offered a troubled smile.
"Ah, right, right. Still…"
A snack was a snack, I supposed. I didn't push any further and turned away.
Well. That was how parents thought, wasn't it? Even if something truly had no calories, holding back for the sake of a child's health was the right call.
The problem was that they really didn't have any.
Didn't have what?
Just… nothing. They were gone. Completely gone. I wasn't talking about nutritional content — the snacks those people had just eaten no longer existed in this world at all.
Because keeping a materialization active for too long burned through mana at a terrifying rate.
…That's right.
I don't know how to do magic tricks.
Sleight of hand? Manual dexterity? What even was that? Cards cascading from empty hands, doves bursting out of a hat — how did people pull off those bizarre parlor stunts in the first place?
The world was full of remarkable performers, but nobody would ever guess that I was a fraud who couldn't even grasp the basics of their craft.
And so…
"But I'm hungry, Dad!"
"I said no."
"Waaaaah!"
I'm sorry.
My conscience pricked, and I quickened my pace. But how was I supposed to explain? That what I'd done wasn't a magic trick but real magic, and that those snacks had only been temporarily sustained by mana?
Trying to convince anyone of that would be insane. If the other person actually believed me, I'd have far too much to explain — because I was an unregistered Awakened.
No. Something far worse than unregistered.
I was a Dungeon Gate boss.
Why was a dungeon boss living among ordinary people?
Let me be clear from the start.
I am not a dungeon boss.
I'm not a goldfish with a three-second memory, forgetting what I just said. I mean that the shell is a dungeon boss, but the contents are not.
In other words, the body I currently occupy was originally a mid-boss from a game.
Queen, the Magician of Rainbow Amusement Park.
In the original story, her role was to conceal the gate's entrance with magic, then one day suddenly trigger a Dungeon Break and produce countless casualties. She was a high-intelligence monster. Instead of attacking the moment she burst from the dungeon, she slipped into everyday life and waged organized guerrilla warfare. The boss looked exactly like a human, and her subordinates were adorable teddy bears and toy soldiers — spotting them before an ambush was practically impossible.
Even the original protagonist's party had a brutal time of it. More precisely, the players had a brutal time of it.
I pulled two all-nighters straight just trying to kill that girl.
It was a stage that generated no end of complaints. The clear difficulty was already absurd, and stopping toys and a boss that ambushed you out of nowhere all over the city map took more than raw skill. You needed luck, observation, and actual brainpower. On top of that, under the concept of "the magician's meddling," every single save file corrupted the moment you saved it…
It would have been stranger if the developers hadn't gotten flamed for that one. Even after possessing this body, I spent a good while grinding my teeth every time I looked in a mirror.
"Ugh."
Why did I have to reincarnate here, of all places?
That was because of a truck… no. Here, a different story needs to come in for a moment.
…
Chiai was a friend studying abroad from Japan. We met through a university group project, and one day she struck up a conversation, saying she was interested in the game I played. For someone who'd expected to silently finish the assignment and part ways, it was an unexpected connection.
I wasn't some heavy online user who knew the game inside and out, so I told her to ask someone else — but she insisted on learning from me.
"I feel safer this way."
Apparently, men who approached her aggressively made her uncomfortable. I was an introverted game addict who never paid her that kind of attention, so it worked out. She was a pretty girl, though. The kind that drew stares from toddlers to grandfathers alike.
I had no choice but to accept Chiai's request, and that was how we became friends through the game Gate Apocalypse.
The stage Chiai loved more than any other was Magician Queen's. Every time she failed a clear, she'd pout and get angry — and yet every time she saw that cute purple-haired girl, she'd hum to herself and sink right back into the VR.
"A girl this cute… I'm so jealous."
Whether it was a Japanese thing or just her personal taste, her preferences were rock-solid. Hero or villain didn't matter — if it was cute, free pass. Watching her sit there sightseeing when she should have been carving the boss up with skills was enough to make me angry sometimes.
And I'm certain my current situation is not unrelated to that peculiar taste of hers.
It was a day we'd planned to meet at a café. I spotted Chiai across the crosswalk, buried in her smartphone. That day she was wearing a Bluetooth headset — probably watching a final-boss clear guide on YouTube, or listening to the Magician Queen stage BGM.
When the light turned green, Chiai started walking with her eyes still glued to her phone.
That was when the frantic blare of a horn came from the right. A cargo truck the size of a house was barreling straight at her. Whether the driver had dozed off and hit the brakes too late, or whether something had broken, I still don't know.
Because by then, my body was already moving on its own.
KWAANG!
……!
As my body lifted into the air, what I felt wasn't so much pain as a blank huh? Instinct told me everything I needed to know. The impact alone should have pulverized me — and if I hit the ground like this, it would be instant death.
But it didn't feel real.
I was a gaming shut-in, after all. You know how people say it — that life will somehow work itself out, that even if you die you'll just respawn. Of course I knew that wasn't true. And still, I just gazed up at the sky in perfect calm.
And a short while later, I absurdly opened my eyes in an amusement park overflowing with cards and toys.
…….
What does any of this have to do with possession?
Honestly, I have no solid proof. But there's that running joke, isn't there — in Japanese fiction, if a girl gets hit by a truck, she reincarnates into another world. And this wasn't even a regular truck. It was a full-sized cargo hauler. With that much momentum, launching one small-framed guy into another world wouldn't be strange at all.
Sorry for the nonsense.
Anyway, if you frame it as me taking the fate that should have been Chiai's, the story gets a lot simpler. There's one more piece of evidence, too.
Chiai never enjoyed ordinary possession stories. The reason was this:
"You're stealing someone else's life."
Inhabiting an innocent person's body was something she couldn't stand, even in fiction. Put yourself in their shoes — you'd hate it if someone took over your body like that, too. So she only liked content where you possessed someone already dead, a soulless doll, or a villainess.
A classic Japanese zero-nuisance mindset. Don't cause trouble, and don't receive any either.
So the fact that I possessed not some extra or the protagonist, but a villainous monster, was only natural.
…….
Ah, whatever.
Anyway — I became the Gate boss known as Pecia von Chiffonside.