I Became a Calamity-Class Magical Beast
More than forty years had passed since Gates first opened across South Korea and the Awakened appeared.
It was an age when the hunter profession stood as the ultimate symbol of wealth and power—but for me, Min Siho, an ordinary twenty-four-year-old college student who'd just finished his military service and was about to return to school, it might as well have been a fairy tale from another country.
Haa... If I could just Awaken as even a D-Rank, I wouldn't have to worry about finding a job.
I was on my way home, bitterly smacking my lips as I scrolled through Awakening verification posts on the hunter community I lurked on every day. A plastic bag dangled from my hand, weighted with a six-pack of canned beer and a cup of instant ramen from the convenience store downstairs.
And then—
BEEEEEEEP—!
S-Rank Gate anomalous overload detected across Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul. Nearby residents, proceed immediately to a shelter...
My phone erupted in a shrill, blaring alarm. I hadn't even finished reading the message when the sky above my head split open like a sheet of thin ice.
KRSSSHHH—!
Barely fifty meters ahead, the asphalt heaved upward, and a vast darkness began swallowing the ground whole.
"W-what the hell is this?!"
A Gate Break. The worst catastrophe imaginable—the kind of thing I'd only ever seen on the news.
I spun around to run, and in that same instant a pitch-black shockwave slammed into my back.
RUMMMMMBLE—!
The air shattered to pieces. Every bone in my body felt like it was being crushed, and the world before my eyes dyed itself pitch black—and right then, in that sliver of a moment—
Thud.
From somewhere deep inside a heart that should have already stopped, something bizarre and enormous, something I had never felt in my life, began to stir.
Unique Factor seal released.
The soul of the primordial apocalypse, the Black Dragon of the End, is being forcibly synchronized.
A sensation like lightning striking through my skull crashed over me, ringing in my ears, and a transcendent power that had slept through eons of time came roaring violently through every vein in my body.
"...Hack! Kh—!"
How long had I been out? I forced my eyes open, coughing up the acrid smoke that clawed at my throat.
Ah, my head... Am I alive?
I planted a hand on the ground to push myself up—and my field of view was all wrong. My eye level had dropped so absurdly low it felt like it was about to scrape the dirt. I'd been a solid six-foot-one at my last physical. Now, even standing upright, my gaze sat somewhere around an adult's chest.
"Uh...?"
That single, vacant syllable brought my brain to a complete halt. Because the voice that had come out of me was no longer mine. It was the tiny, crystal-clear voice of a child, like jade beads rolling across a tray.
...?
I whipped my head around in a panic, staring into a shattered pane of glass in the wrecked shopping street. The thing reflected there was not a man in his twenties caked in dirt and dust.
Hair shimmered like the night sky itself had been melted down and poured into waves of pitch black. Golden eyes glowed with a brilliant, liquid light, carrying all the majesty of a dragon. The body beneath them was petite and slender, four-foot-seven at the most.
And yet a presence utterly alien to that delicate frame stood on the other side of the glass. Two black horns jutted from between those small locks of hair, larger and sharper than a grown man's forearm. Jet-black wings had sprouted from my back, and behind my hips a massive, thick tail swayed to and fro, heavy enough to press its weight into the ground.
Wait.
With a trembling hand, I frantically groped inside the sagging waistband of my now-enormous pants.
Pat. Pat.
...Smooth.
It was gone. The most precious, magnificent companion I had greeted every single morning for twenty-four years—the other half of me that had been through thick and thin at my side—had vanished without a trace.
"M-my other half... where did you go?! Why is it smooth?!"
I let out a scream that was practically a howl of despair, but what actually burst from my lips was something closer to an adorable kitten's hiss.
There was only one conclusion.
I'd Awakened... and become a girl.
Please give me back my original body!
I was clutching at my head in total confusion when—
GRRRRRRR—!
The ground shuddered as if an earthquake had struck, and a crimson fog billowed up. A three-headed hound the size of a building. A colossal Bone Dragon made of nothing but skeleton. A horde of hundreds of grotesque chimeras. Monsters pouring out of an S-Rank Gate had filled the heart of Eunpyeong-gu to bursting.
And for some reason, they had all stopped, trembling.
The instinct of the Black Dragon, carved into the deepest part of my soul, told me at once why those giants hadn't simply piled on top of me. They were crushed beneath the transcendent predator's aura rolling off my body, too cowed to make a reckless move.
But only for a moment. Hundreds of beasts, cornered and mad with terror, turned bloodshot eyes on me all at once. Thick drool slid from their jaws. The stench of blood hung in the air. Any ordinary hunter would have had their heart seize up from sheer terror just standing there.
A strange realization struck me. I didn't feel a thing. Instead, the Black Dragon's instinct seated at the bottom of my soul looked down on those enormous monsters and offered up a single thought.
Who do these pathetic little gnats think they're looking down on?
I was extremely annoyed. I was already confused enough from the body swap—and now these insolent beasts were drooling on me from above. Hot rage surged up from the pit of my stomach.
"KYAAAAAGH—!"
A sound of pure instinctive threat tore its way out of my throat before I even knew I was making it. At that single roar, roughly half the chimera pack packed in front of me burst apart on the spot, spraying a mist of blood. At the same time, every drop of mana in the surrounding air came screaming into my lungs like a typhoon.
Space warped. The atmosphere shivered, and the dark clouds covering the sky twisted into a vast spiral.
Disappear.
The act required nothing. As naturally as letting out a quiet breath, I parted my lips and unleashed the mana I'd gathered toward whatever stood in front of me.
KRAAAAAAAAAANG—!
A darkness so black it could have swallowed the sun itself casually devoured the twilight pouring down from the sky. The thin stream of void that left my mouth swelled, in the span of a heartbeat, into a colossal bombardment dozens of meters across, and the world drowned in it.
The instant that light grazed them, the chimeras' bodies vanished without even a scream. The Bone Dragon behind them. The three-headed hound. Even the steel high-rises and the Gate itself.
It was over in a single instant.
Where the Dragon Breath had swept through, nothing remained but an enormous crater carved in a perfect semicircle. The flesh and bone of the magical beasts had evaporated without a trace—and yet, for some reason, only the magic stones had been spared from the flames, scattered across the ashes and shining with a brilliant light.
"...?"
I looked down at the wasteland the earth had become, and a hollow laugh slipped out of me.
That... came out of my mouth?
I couldn't even begin to gauge what kind of ridiculous monster I had Awakened as.
Wee-woo, wee-woo!
In the distance, the sirens of Hunter Association vehicles wailed in a panic, and I felt the mana signatures of high-ranking hunters cutting across the sky toward me.
This is bad.
If those people spotted me, it was going to be a massive headache. Tail swaying, I slipped my body into the rubble of a collapsed building. The instant I thought about wanting to move through space, my small frame melted soundlessly into the empty air.
Slip—
My familiar, cramped little studio. I landed safely on the floor via spatial travel and collapsed onto my backside.
"Hah... that was mentally exhausting."
The second the tension left me, my heavy tail went slack, thumping against the floor. In the full-length mirror standing in the corner, a black-haired child with enormous dark horns was still blinking a pair of golden eyes.
It wasn't a dream. This was reality.
What the hell do I do now...
In an era where having some part of your body change upon Awakening was common as dirt, I had never once, even on the hunter boards, seen a case where not just your gender but your entire age had been swapped out wholesale. A four-foot-seven little dragon girl, all of a sudden. With this cute, tiny appearance, never mind the university return that was staring me in the face—I'd get treated like an elementary schooler wherever I went. My life as an ordinary adult was well and truly over.
Haa... How am I supposed to live after this?
I was about to clutch at my head over the bleakness of the future when a transparent notification window slid quietly into being before my eyes.
Manifestation of the Calamity
Summons into the present world the Four Primordial Calamities—beasts who once knelt before their sovereign, now forgotten by the world.
...Huh?
I dug through my memory, and they surfaced—the subordinate magical beasts who'd picked a fight with me back in the mythic age, gotten the dust beaten out of them, and sworn absolute obedience. Once there'd been no one left worth fighting, they'd sunk into a deep sleep alongside me out of sheer boredom.
Wait a second.
A brilliant idea struck me out of nowhere.
Fine, so I might have to go outside now and then—but did I seriously have to do the housework and chores too? Why not dump all the petty stuff on my subordinates and just kick back in my room playing games?
It was the perfect life plan.
Without a shred of hesitation, I called up the name of the one who'd always been the most obedient and loyal of the lot.
Come forth.
"Tiamat."
Fsssshhh—
Space warped and crumpled above the cramped linoleum floor, and a fog of pitch-black darkness billowed up. A calamitous presence so heavy and overwhelming it could have swallowed the Earth whole. And from within that fog, a woman walked slowly forth.
A tall beauty whose face I could only see if I craned my neck all the way back. A dress that held the deep blue sea itself, clinging precariously to a figure whose bursting curves stood in stark contrast to her slender waist. Ocean-blue hair drifted over pale skin, and her eyes—vertical-slit black pupils set in glowing blue irises—shone with an arrogance that seemed to look down on the entire world.
This was Tiamat, ruler of the primordial deep sea, who in the mythic age had sunk every continent on Earth beneath the waves. The cold killing intent rolling off her was enough to drop the temperature in the room below freezing in an instant.
"Who is the insolent whelp who dared awaken me, and where do they hide?"
Her gaze, sweeping the room in a voice like a sheet of ice, fell on the little kid sitting blankly on the sofa—or more precisely, on the enormous horns on my head and the radiant golden eyes.
And in that instant—
"...?!"
The arrogant expression drained from her face as if it had never been there. Her blue eyes shook wildly, and without a single heartbeat of hesitation she dropped to her knees on the floor.
THUD!
She knelt hard enough that the studio floor nearly cracked, laid her trembling hands over her heart, and bowed her head all the way to the ground. Every trace of the arrogance from a moment ago had vanished. Tears of overwhelming emotion welled in her eyes.
"Uh, uh... yeah. Long time no see?"
I gave an awkward little wave as I answered, and she looked up at me with a face lost in rapture.
She wasn't like this before...
...I had the distinct feeling something in her eyes had gone a little off.
Either way, recruiting the strongest subordinate imaginable to perfectly support my lazy everyday life seemed to have been a roaring success.
