Why Is That Here
"Nnngh."
My whole body hurt, as if it were about to crack apart. I forced the pain down and opened my eyes, and a rough sense of what had happened to me came back.
Right up to the moment I had tried to take my own life, I had been sick. It was an illness that could have been cured quickly if caught early, but I had told myself I had no time for a hospital, that rest would fix it, and I had simply gone on. By the time it had worsened enough to interfere with work and I finally went in, all I heard was that it was already too late.
They said they could put me on morphine. Even that was something only people with money received. I refused the admission, the medicine, all of it, and had to leave the hospital. Still, as if the state meant to keep the barest upkeep on one of its slaves, national health insurance had at least filled the prescription.
After that I did the most cathartic thing of my entire life. I walked into the company that had never properly given me any rest, told them I was quitting, and left. Then I thought I might as well just die, drank myself blind, and dumped every last one of the pills they had grudgingly called painkillers down my throat in a single swallow.
They must have failed at their job. I could open my eyes, after all, and my whole body was throbbing like this. Was this shitty life refusing to let me go, even when I tried at last to rest? Or, because one slave was attempting an escape to the underworld, were they dragging me back by force?
"Haa. ...Huh?"
The sigh came out strangely thin. Your own voice always sounds different in your own ears, but this was not a man's voice. The sigh alone belonged to a calm, lovely woman, and it left me bewildered. Had I taken the wrong medicine and changed sex? What kind of drug rebuilt a body down to the cells? Or had they botched some anesthetic while treating the overdose? Helium changes your voice when you breathe it in. Maybe it was something like that.
"Haa, tsk tsk. Same old habits—off to the back alleys to brawl again. This is why the church should never take in girls from the slums."
"Sister, don't say that. They say she fought this time to save a child who was being kidnapped. She's reforming under the teachings of Nals."
"And why would she go back to the alleys in the first place? She had no reason to. Obviously she went to deal drugs or some—"
I was still reeling at the sound of my own voice when I heard two nuns talking as they passed the open door. Their habits were strange. They were not the ordinary kind that covered the whole body and hid even the hair. These had side slits that bared the legs clear below the hips, and clung so tightly that the lines of breast and waist showed through completely.
The moment I saw them, I understood this was not my world. If it had been cosplay I might have understood, but their manner was far too natural for that. And the teachings of Nals? I had never heard that god's name anywhere.
Still turning that over, I kept darting glances their way and listening. The nun who had been tearing someone down met my eyes, startled so hard she flinched, and backed all the way to the opposite wall.
"L-Lady Nals! Sister Selenia, you didn't hear that, did you? I wasn't talking about Sister Selenia—I meant some other immature sister..."
Look, Sister. Tremble and stammer like that, and anyone can tell you got caught badmouthing me.
While I was still deciding whether to say it, the nun who had been slandering me grabbed the other's arm and fled. Calling her back just to scold her sounded like too much trouble, so, since I was already inclined to be lazy about it, I decided to stay lying down. What some stranger thought of me was none of my business.
So my name was Selenia. Which meant I really had ended up in someone else's body—a woman's body, and not just any woman's. A devout one, devout enough to give herself over to a religion, a woman set entirely apart from men. Funny. I had spent my whole life resenting God.
My parents had fought until they divorced, and the mother who raised me for the child support had never particularly looked after me. She coaxed me with the line that the way to get revenge on the father who had left us was to study hard and succeed, and the result of living diligently under that lie was nothing more than dying of an illness I had let get worse. Had I lived just so I could die like that? A life spent carefully never breaking the law had been a truly stupid one. If it was going to end like that, I should at least have gone around cracking the faces of the bastards who had treated me like shit.
I was sunk in that idle little reflection when a sharp woman's voice carried from not far off. The fleeing nuns seemed to have been caught by the woman who owned it.
"Why is there such a commotion in the corridor? If you carry on like this in front of the infirmary, the sisters who need their rest will be unwell."
"I'm sorry, Sister Victoria. The truth is, Sister Selenia has woken up, so..."
"Oh. That is a relief. Even so, you know it was wrong to make a fuss outside the infirmary. Go and reflect in the penance room for an hour each."
"S-Sister Victoria! My only fault was running because Sister Anila started running..."
"Sister Betty. Then you ought to have stopped her, not run alongside her. To try to look away from a fault like that—you will spend another hour in the penance room."
"Yes..."
They addressed one another by name, but from the way she gave orders, and from how strict she was, Sister Victoria seemed an extremely exacting sort. Hmm. If I told someone like that that I was not the owner of this body, that I had washed in by accident, wouldn't I end up on the receiving end of an exorcism? Whether souls were real or not, anyone who heard a story like that would decide a devil had taken hold.
From the clothes to the shape of the furniture, none of it belonged to modern culture. I did not know Western culture in any detail, but there was not a single electronic device or television in the room, and the statues looked as if they had been carved in the shape of the number seven. This had to be a parallel world, or else something like the Middle Ages. A world where witches, demons, and that whole occult superstition were taken as fact.
So I said nothing. I simply lowered my eyes and waited until Sister Victoria came toward me with the click of her heels.
"Sister Selenia. That you survived like this must be because Nals bestowed grace upon you. I believed it. I believed you would reflect upon your past and come to follow Nals's teachings."
With that she took the hand I had left outside the blanket, and Sister Victoria—where had all that strictness gone—began to fuss over me with embarrassing warmth. A beauty I would not even have dared speak to in my previous life was holding my hand, and I was so overwhelmed I did not know what to do with myself, until the name of a god I had never heard snapped me back. Religion in the Middle Ages. Corruption was usually the first thing that came to mind, wasn't it? No—it did not even have to be the Middle Ages. It could just as easily be a cult.
"I, uh, don't really know what this Nals person's teachings are. I was only trying to save a kid from being kidnapped."
I answered with roughly what I had overheard. What I noticed as I spoke was that this was not Korean. Even so, the words came out naturally, and I understood Sister Victoria. So they had at least made sure I could communicate. I felt sorry for the owner of this body, but it was a genuine relief.
"I understand why you would be so modest. It is all right. The righteous thing you did, Sister Selenia, does not change. How is your body? When thunder struck several times and the Holy Knights and the guard rushed toward the commotion, they found you covered in blood, holding the child."
"Thunder..."
Had the person trying to kidnap the child used magic? I did not know about the rest, but if this was a fantasy world, that was a little thrilling. It was the sort of premise that showed up all the time in web novels, films, and comics: for one reason or another you went to another world, gained tremendous power, and lived a happy life. Of course, depending on the genre, some of them clung so hard to grim realism that the protagonist did nothing but suffer.
Still, even just having a beauty I could not have spoken to before I died hold my hand like this—no. Even the simple fact that I had not opened my eyes in the middle of a battlefield, or among monsters, was enough, as I saw it, to say the chances of living happily were high. There had been nuns badmouthing me—no, badmouthing Selenia—a moment ago. But they were the sort who yelped and ran the instant our eyes met, weren't they. This life was probably not the sort of genre people usually called a bleak suffering story.
Not that it seemed like a world where I was free to raise hell, either. It was a world where people kidnapped children, and a world where I had taken several blasts of thunder—presumably fired by the kidnapper—and collapsed. They must have been after some kind of subject for a magical experiment. At the same time, it was a world where saving a child earned praise as a good deed. Its sense of morality was not much different from the modern age. Then again, the modern world was hardly free of kidnappings either. Measured by danger, maybe there was little difference.
Which meant I could live according to how I played it. Perhaps, since I had suffered and died in my previous life, this was meant as compensation—a somewhat better life.
"According to the others' testimony, a weapon believed to be a staff was aimed at you. Fire burst from its tip, and you collapsed with blood pouring from your whole body. I worry the sight of it may shock you, injured as you were by it... but others must not come to harm from this weapon, so may I ask what happened? If you remember any incantation the kidnapper who held it was chanting, we could entrust the investigation to the Mage Tower. At present we feel no divine power from this weapon, nor mana, nor demonic energy, and the investigation is running into difficulty."
"Yes. If you show it to me, I'll tell you whatever I remember."
She was probably being considerate, thinking the weapon that had attacked me might shock me if I saw it. Sister Victoria had been so strict with the other nuns, and yet with me she was this gentle. So I had little choice but to cooperate. I did not remember anything that seemed likely to help. Even so, I was on the verge of answering the inquiry in earnest when the weapon came out of Sister Victoria's sleeve.
Setting aside the question of how it had come out of there at all, it had a shape that was plenty familiar to me.
"Uh...?"
A grip, bent at a modest angle, set at the end of a black rod. Compact and sleek enough to fit in a single hand, with a place that would rest neatly under the index finger once you closed your hand around the grip.
It was a handgun.