So-and-So Crashes a Fantasy World Full of Adventure and Romance
A few gestures from Hamil, and we were back in the graveyard behind the cathedral before I had time to blink.
It didn't seem to be the sort of magic that could drop you wherever you pleased. Touch a headstone, and you were sent on to some place already designated.
Even that was magic. Interest stirred whether I wanted it to or not, so I asked him.
"Could I use that too?"
"If you take up the collection of death, the one who becomes Sister Selenia's partner will teach you."
So they weren't handing it over for free. Fair enough. It was a means of travel to the Holy See; keeping it confidential was the sensible thing.
I could grant him that. What I couldn't shake was a word that drew something tight in my chest and set it racing.
"You collect death?"
"They are weapons that kill a person with an operation simpler than a blade. Death that arrives in a fraction of a moment. That is why people so often speak of them by likening them to death."
I sincerely hoped nothing of the sort ever happened around me. Still, taken as a concept, or looked at the way you look at a work of fiction, it was an awfully stimulating subject. Heard like that, the idea of collecting modern weapons began to sound genuinely tempting.
And they were even assigning me a partner who would lay a barrier over me. I had a gun I could fire if it came to that, and a nun stuck to my side to guarantee my safety on top of it. Add the privileges of an Inquisitor, and pay enough to put down roots and live here...
Honestly, even if the life of a fantasy world brimming with adventure and romance never materialized, viewed as a job it might be pretty decent. I had suffered enough in my previous life. Maybe this time I was allowed to live a little more comfortably.
And more than anything, the place where the Pope kept himself had been that austere. If the leader of a religion didn't indulge in luxury, I found myself thinking it might be a decent religion after all. Hamil, for all that he was an Inquisitor, wasn't grinding me under his heel either. He was being reasonably courteous. I had honestly thought I was being marched off to a burning, or at least to a torture chamber.
So I meant to sound out the otherworlders about the Church of Nals, and if the impression was tolerable, I was already leaning toward taking the work.
A nun who handled a handgun. How cool was that. Skirt snapping as she dropped people with kicks, and the gun — bang — held back as a last resort, because a shot meant someone died. It was a little disappointing that I had become a woman rather than a man, a nun rather than a priest. The figure, at least, was satisfactory, so I decided to be content with that. The chest was large, and yet just walking told me how quick this body was. If I was going to be stuck in a body this leggy and busty, it would be nice if the face were pretty too. I wanted a mirror, and soon.
"That district over there is where the otherworlders live gathered together. Of course there will be those active elsewhere, and I am told there are otherworlders of other races as well. The ones assembled there, however, are said to have originally lived in the same region."
The place Hamil had brought me to was, as it happened, that very district where the otherworlders were said to live. So now I might meet people from home. While I was at it, I could hear the things to watch for here, the know-how of getting by. I could have asked Hamil what kind of world this was, but that felt like far too vast a question. Better, if I could, to ask someone in the same position as me.
The place I stepped into with that thought was certainly built in a fantastical style. And yet the signs were a jumble of the local script and Hangul.
"...Is this some kind of Korea Town?"
"Mm. Precisely. The otherworlders who live here call the street that. You must be from the same homeland."
"I hope so."
A Korean town in a fantasy world. This isn't fantasy at all! ...was what I wanted to say. Then I looked at the dwarves, elves, and orcs wandering around up ahead, and I couldn't deny that this was a fantasy world after all.
Well. A story in which you are reincarnated alone into another world, or possess a body, and become a hero or an emperor or a demon king was never going to exist for my sake alone. Someone had said it: if you were reborn into some other world you wanted, the odds were high you would be one of the extras lying around thick enough to trip over, rather than the protagonist or even a supporting lead. This was the moment I had to repent for the past in which I had sneered that nothing of the sort would ever happen — that you only assumed, for fun, what it would be like if you became the protagonist.
I really had become one nun among a great many. A delinquent nun, at that. It was a little regrettable I hadn't come out a king, or a prince, or a princess, or some genius mage of a magic tower. Still, better than being born again as something like a goblin. A person has to know how to be satisfied if they want any peace of mind. By the same token, I ought to recognize it as luck that I could see people who had crossed over from the same place as me.
Among those buildings, Hamil led me straight into one. The board over the door read:
Judging by a sign like that, I thought stepping inside would be a good way to hear all sorts of news. In a fantasy world, most of your information comes from a tavern or a guild, doesn't it. In the usual stories, the two are often combined — tavern and inn, tavern and guild, or all three at once. Korea Town had let the air out of me for a moment, but a sight like this swelled my chest with expectation again.
And whether he was a regular here or not, the moment Hamil stepped through the door the woman at the reception desk welcomed him warmly.
"Oh, Brother Hamil! It's been a while. Is the person beside you a new partner?"
"A pleasure. This is Sister Selenia. She is in the same situation as all of you."
"Oh, how long has it been since we had a newbie. Wow — I thought everyone who was going to cross over already had, and here's a fresh newbie besides. Nice to meet you! I'm AggroRunsTankWont. Call me Aggro."
"..."
The name I was hearing by way of introduction was strange. Not the sort of name an ordinary person would have. Well, somewhere in the world there is a surname that means drinks water, and a surname that means kills people. There was even one that meant an eagle astonishes the world, or something of the sort. Names are whatever parents decide to make them, and yet how could a person's name be that? Anyone could see it was just a game ID.
I was staring blankly at the woman behind the desk, too dumbfounded for words, and when she tilted her head I hurried out a greeting.
"Ah, I'm sorry. Your name was so unusual... I'm called Selenia. But if that's the kind of name you go by, is this world inside a game?"
The disappointment was huge. I might not be a dragon or an archmage or a hero, but I had thought a fantasy world would still have a little dream and hope left in it. Call it a game world and it became neither one thing nor the other. And if these were people who had crossed over as game characters, they would certainly be tremendously strong, and they would only grow stronger as their levels rose. I had read plenty of novels about becoming the game character you used to play. That much was easy to guess.
Of course, someone might ask what the difference was if the world inside the game had a fantasy setting. If I alone knew this was a game, I might still have been able to treat it as fantasy. But if other people were here... Hm. It felt different, and I had no way to put the difference into words. How was it different? In any case, until you actually died, both versions were nothing but delusions.
"Wow, a real newbie. How long have you been over here? A week? A month? Is this your first time meeting possessors like us?"
"I don't think it's even been an hour. Ah — maybe it's just past an hour."
Well, in the end nothing really changed. I wanted to live the life I had been given again, and live it well if I could. For that, advice from people who had already settled here would help, and if those people were from Korea, like me, so much the better. So I steadied myself and answered in a way that wouldn't be rude.
At which point Aggro resolved the question I had just been holding, all on her own.
"Then it figures you wouldn't know. The bodies we came into, you see — turns out when we made our characters, the name, the looks, and even the class were already decided. Wild, right? Did those characters already exist, and that's why we picked our nicknames, or did characters like this spring into being the moment we picked our nicknames and start running around living their lives? Chicken or egg. Nobody knows."
"Wait a moment. Then the person who gave a name to the body you're using now — ordinarily that would be a parent, anyway. You're saying they named you like that?"
"Yep. Fun, right?"
Well. It was funny, I supposed. I just wasn't sure this was a situation where I was allowed to laugh. Aggro was beaming. Hamil, face perfectly blank, was in the middle of being handed a beer. If everyone else is laughing, you laugh along. This gave me nothing to grab onto. If that was how it was, better to change the subject. And there was the thing that had been weighing on me most.
"Then what happened to the person who originally used this body? That Pope said the original owner was dead. Were they fated to die from the start, or did they die because of me...?"
It was something I had been forcing myself to look away from, because thinking about it only left me feeling sick. Now that I had a chance to ask, letting it pass would be its own wrong against the body's original owner.
And to that question, Aggro answered with a warm, easy smile.
"You killed her!"
"What?"
"Kidding. They say it was just fate. We entered the bodies of people who were simply destined to die."
My heart, my liver — every organ I had nearly plunged straight down.