This Is Clothes? Better Call It Everyday Wear
Reality hit me like a truck.
The self-loathing flooding through me was on par with the time I'd failed a pickup banner three times in a row and slammed straight into pity pity.
The second I became fully aware of the outfit I was wearing, it felt like something was ripping my inner masculinity to shreds.
This was way more humiliating than that hazy college memory of my female classmates dressing me up and dragging me into a cross-dressing contest.
I was pretty sure that the first time I'd seen this outfit, I'd written some nonsense about how it should just be classified as everyday wear…
I was starting to feel nothing but disgust for that past version of myself.
Honestly, the most horrifying thing about this clothes wasn't even how revealing it was.
It was the material. Being a sweater, it stretched and slipped so easily that I kept getting this anxious feeling like I could end up naked at any second.
It was this lingering, vaguely unpleasant unease that didn't seem like it would go away unless I just took the damn thing off.
"You bastards. Just sell a maid outfit skin already."
Of course, why would they bother releasing a skin for a character nobody used anyway?
Still, today of all days, I really resented those developer assholes.
Right now, even a neat and proper maid uniform would have been infinitely better.
"Haa…"
Granted, even this garbage character had one unique skin to her name.
But every single person who owned that skin had, without exception, written a recommendation post about it.
There were people who'd written multiple recommendation posts, but not a single person who'd gotten the skin and stayed silent.
That was because the skin was a wedding skin you could only obtain by raising her all the way to her original maximum star rank of 4-Star, then using rare materials to perform a 5-star evolution called Princess Awakening.
Wasting that much investment on a trash character like this? Yeah, that absolutely warranted a recommendation post.
Even I—someone who completed the full collection as a matter of course and casually dropped a million won on disposable characters just to pad my scores—had never done anything as insane as Princess Awakening Jasmine.
"No, wait. Fuck. I almost let myself get gaslit there. Why the hell would I transmigrate into the female Jasmine instead of the male protagonist in the first place? Matching the gender is the normal way this works, isn't it?"
Honestly, if I'd possessed the protagonist, I would have had a decent amount of confidence. I might even have gotten excited about the harem world everyone dreams of.
I was the kind of whale who ranked first in the endgame content—someone who had long since graduated from "veteran" and fully embraced being a walking oil well.
Sure, that foundation was built on dumping every paycheck into the game like a maniac, but that was only because relative ranking competition never ends.
If the goal was simply survival, getting and raising just the essential characters would have been more than enough.
Having whale-spent my way through so many characters, I knew better than anyone which ones actually mattered.
If anything, I was confident I could survive just fine as a free-to-play player.
"You damn bastards. Fine. I'll play along."
I could see right through the intentions of whoever had put me in this situation.
But I was the guy who had bought every single one of the Princess Fourmi developers' blatantly predatory packages up until now.
It looked doable enough, so I'd take them up on it.
If I shifted my thinking a little, Jasmine actually had an advantage: thanks to her guild affiliation, she could make contact with the protagonist right from the start.
In other words, it meant a veteran like me could raise a complete newbie.
That alone made it worth trying.
The ones who already had some half-baked personal style were always the worst—they never listened and made everything a pain.
But if I poured my entire playstyle into him while he was still a blank-slate newbie?
He'd naturally become something like my clone.
I was someone who had spent years playing this psychotic game where even your own orders got ignored at a certain probability.
If I just thought of it as the protagonist now having a chance to ignore me too…
It was more than doable.
Alright. My first goal was to gaslight the protagonist brat…
No. To educate him with correct and accurate information.
If I could turn him into a doll that obeyed my every word, I'd be able to survive even a shitty situation like this.
"Well then. Now that I've decided to adapt… I should start by being careful with my speech."
Having accepted the role of "Jasmine," I needed to perform that role thoroughly.
Trampling on the characterization of a character from the game I loved was something I couldn't forgive—even from myself.
Of course my own tastes and interpretations might color the story going forward, but the idea of Jasmine speaking casually was something I couldn't even…
"Jasmine unnie, what are you doing here?"
"Eek!?"
Holy crap.
I'd been sitting on the edge of an empty fountain practicing polite speech when a figure suddenly appeared, startling me so badly I nearly toppled straight into the water.
"A-Are you okay?"
"Ahh…"
The culprit who'd startled me seemed flustered too, hurriedly grabbing my arm to steady me.
In that instant, a sweet, fruity fragrance brushed past the tip of my nose.
This scent—I definitely remembered smelling it before.
"Fruity."
"Yes, unnie. Did you find Master?"
So it really was Fruity's scent.
This subtle, mood-lifting fragrance was one I already knew.
Not from inside the game, of course—from reality.
The game I'd transmigrated into, Princess Fourmi, was so obsessed with smell that even its action points were called "Fragrance."
People joked that it was a perfume-moe game.
The developers were such freaks that every collaboration sold perfume, bath bombs, air fresheners, and the like.
I'd bought every single event product myself just to get the bundled in-game items.
If a character was popular enough to get collab merch, I remembered their scent.
Fruity had come out as a perfume, right?
I had a memory of displaying her figure, so that had to be it.
These developers didn't even make normal figures. They stuffed the figure inside a clear perfume bottle, staging it like they were extracting the character's scent. Absolute degenerates.
"Unnie? What are you thinking so hard about?"
"Ah, sorry… I couldn't find him."
"I figured as much."
Fruity—not quite human-rights level, but treated with something like full citizenship—had been the featured pickup target of the very first banner when the game launched.
Cute looks, pure behavior, and the occasional streak of madness that bubbled up from that very purity.
Together with her twin sister Citrus, she was a mascot-tier character with massive popularity.
I'd benefited hugely from her performance, and she was cute enough that I liked her in my own way.
…It had been a while since I'd seen her in that maid outfit.
Ever since I'd switched her to the Children's Day skin that dropped ages ago, I hadn't had any reason to look at her default clothes.
Still, having a game character standing right in front of me like this felt strangely surreal.
"Mmph…? Unnie? Mmmphh!?"
"You're like a soft rice cake."
Without realizing it, I'd started squishing her soft, squishy cheeks.
The way she just blanked out instead of getting mad was adorable.
Ha. Fuck. If I kept this up for another ten minutes, my favorite character was going to change.
"Sorry. I must have been feeling unsettled."
"O-Oh, no, it's fine. If it helped ease your heart even a little, I'm happy instead."
Look at that broad, beautiful heart of hers.
Her physical chest might have been small, but the spiritual one was what really counted.
"By the way, were you looking for me?"
"Yes. It's almost time for the meeting."
"…I see."
"You don't like it after all, do you?"
"Hm?"
"Serving a new Master."
"……"
What Jasmine was supposed to say here was already decided.
It would change later on, but for now, this was the only answer she could give.
"You know how it is. My only Master is the Queen."
"Jasmine unnie…"
"Of course, that doesn't mean I'm going to refuse orders. We can't disobey Master's commands, can we?"
"Of course not."
"I'll help him and follow him. But I can't serve him as my Master the way I do the Queen."
Before Jasmine was captured by the protagonist, she always had this kind of vibe.
It came off a little tsundere, but at this point she must have genuinely hated the situation.
"Let's head to the meeting. Everyone will be waiting."
"Yes!"
Savoring details I could never have experienced through a game, I slowly followed Fruity toward the conference room.
The moment Fruity and I stepped inside, four pairs of eyes stabbed into me with razor sharpness.
The atmosphere was brutally tense.
"You're late."
"Sorry, Captain."
"…Please sit. We'll fill you in on the decision we've made."
That was Powder, captain of the Royal Guard—normally the type who walked around with a constant smile.
Even she made a face like that when her Master went missing.
I'd been thinking of teasing her a little at first, but that impulse vanished on the spot.
Incidentally, they'd already finished organizing their own opinions without me.
In a way, their loyalty put even Jasmine's to shame.
Jasmine wouldn't be able to kill the Queen even if ordered to—but these women would carry out that command even while crying.
"So the plan is that once we find this 'male,' we'll serve him as our new Master, correct?"
"……"
"Captain, I have no intention of opposing that. In the end, it's Master's order."
"Is that true?"
"Yes. However, please expel me from the Royal Guard."
"Jasmine!"
Oh. I don't think I'd ever seen her make an angry face like that before.
Games and reality really were different.
Expressions that varied and natural…
"Am I to take that as you refusing Master's command?"
A slightly prickly voice cut in.
This time it wasn't Powder—it was Aroma asking the question.
Aroma was usually pretty easygoing and relaxed, but when her mood soured, that icy tone came out.
"Maybe."
"W-Wait, Jasmine unnie! That's not what you said earlier!"
"Fruity, I never lied. I'm going to act exactly as I told you before."
But there was no way this group would tolerate such an ambiguous choice.
That was why Jasmine ended up helping the protagonist while sticking close to the Royal Guard—yet still showed up in the system as having no guild affiliation. A unique character quirk.
"Earlier conversation? What did you two talk about?"
"Th-That's… Jasmine unnie—"
Bang!
The razor-edged atmosphere that felt one second away from open fighting snapped toward the door as it burst open with a loud noise, locking onto whoever had interrupted.
The interrupter, however, spoke in a rush, as if none of that mattered right now.
"R-Right now. They say an unidentified Minor Unit has been spotted near the plaza."
"Fougere, we're in the middle of a meeting— Wait. The plaza is sealed off right now. Don't tell me…?"
That "don't tell me" was almost certainly right.
It was time for the new Master you'd all been waiting for to make his entrance.
Yeah. The protagonist of this game.