Welcome Back, Savior
I was one of only seventeen S-Class Hunters in all of South Korea—and an embarrassing epithet had stuck to me besides. The Untitled. Third among the S-Class.
My final mission was to clear a Gate. The last Gate, and the worst. Left alone, it would swallow not only Korea but the entire world, and I had been chosen as one of the raiders sent to bring it down.
"We are placing all our faith in you."
After that, the leaders of nations around the world stepped forward to back the raid party. Even so, the clear was anything but easy. The force had started at over five hundred, and in a blink it was cut to less than half. Barely a few dozen of us ever reached the boss room. Along the way, A-Class Hunters died without number, and S-Class Hunters as well.
We did not give up. We couldn't. If this final Gate went uncleared, everything ended anyway.
The boss waiting for us there was horrifyingly strong. Demon, demon king, or something beyond either—I couldn't tell. Weapons that had carved through countless monsters did nothing more than nick the thing.
"Aaaagh!"
Because of that, the desperate fight dragged on and on. More Hunters died, and the raid's situation worsened by the moment. Then a handful of spatial Hunters offered a scheme. Don't kill it. Open a dimensional gate and fling it somewhere it could never come back from.
The idea itself was sound enough. The trouble was that even if they made such a door, no Hunter remained who could shove the boss through it. Who was going to bell the cat?
"…I'll do it."
I volunteered for the role. It wasn't any grand spirit of sacrifice. Of the Hunters still alive at that point, I had simply judged myself the one best suited to the job.
The battle resumed, and the instant the dimensional gate finally opened, a grinding crack split the air. I wrung out every last scrap of strength and drove a single blow into the boss—not to wound it, only to force it a few steps back. Fortunately, the attempt worked. That strike, squeezed from whatever I had left, sent the Gate's boss tumbling out through the dimensional gate at last.
There was one minor problem in the process.
As the thing fell beyond the gate, its hand caught hold of me. I was dragged through before I could so much as struggle, swallowed into a subspace from which no one was ever supposed to return.
Even so, it was all right. I had accepted death from the moment I joined the Gate raid. It was a pity, but I had no regrets.
What came after, I can say without hesitation, was nothing I had expected.
…I didn't see this coming.
I looked around. I had fallen through a dimensional gate into subspace, and the place where I opened my eyes was a back alley—not like any I had known in Korea. It was the sort you would have to travel much farther, and much further into the past, to see. A back alley out of medieval Europe. And I was lying in a heap in one corner of it.
Instinct took over. I scanned my surroundings, half afraid the Gate boss that had fallen with me had come along. All that reached my ears was a drunk bellowing somewhere nearby.
"Where the hell am I?"
The words slipped out, and I flinched at the sound of my own voice. It had changed. Not only the voice. I looked down at myself. The sculpted muscle I had built living as an S-Class Hunter was gone, replaced by a body that was severe obesity given flesh. So that was why breathing felt strangely difficult. It wasn't just my voice that was different. The body itself had been swapped. Worse, what had come out of my mouth wasn't Korean, but some unfamiliar tongue—a strange language I had never learned and never heard.
"Ugh…!"
That was when it hit. A splitting headache, and with it a rush of memory. Memories of the man this body had belonged to.
Lucas Arcent von Roenheim…
To someone who had been Korean, the name felt long. It was his. And he was a noble—the eldest son, no less, of a ducal house called Roenheim. A noble, out of nowhere. I didn't even have time to be shocked.
This guy's already dead.
Lucas's memories ended in death. Bold past the point of sense, he had been drifting alone through illegal gambling dens and taverns when some robber put a knife in him. An absurd death for a noble. The proof was the red blood smeared across the clothes I was wearing.
And yet.
There's not a scratch on the body.
I checked myself in a hurry. The bloated mass of flesh was nothing but an irritation. There was no injury anywhere, and I felt no pain.
"What in the world is going on…"
I raked my fingers through my hair. However I lined the facts up, it seemed that after passing through the dimensional gate I had possessed this body. But had dimensional gates ever worked like that? I didn't know. A dimensional gate was only a spatial Hunter's skill, and all I had been told was that going through one dropped you into a subspace you could never come back from.
"More importantly…"
What was I supposed to do now? The question had barely formed when a voice cut in.
"Young Master!"
A soldier burst from the corner right beside me. Neat armor, a spear in his hand—he took one look at the state of me and his eyes went wide. Then he started bellowing, calling for others. More soldiers appeared soon after, and with them an elderly knight.
A man with a face both dignified and rough. Meeting that deep gaze, a name rose on its own. Walter Kreuz. One of the ducal knights, and Lucas's escort.
"What is the meaning of that blood?"
He asked it with more irritation than worry in his voice. There was no point telling him I had been stabbed when my body didn't bear a single mark, so I dodged the question.
"…Beats me."
"If you are unharmed, we ought to return at once."
"To where?"
"To the ducal house, of course."
He answered as if I should not even think of going anywhere else. So they had come to drag a runaway heir back home.
I hesitated only a moment over what to do. The answer came quickly. A back alley where you could be stabbed, dumped, and have no one care was far less safe than the ducal house.
"Let's go."
I hauled my waddling body upright. Under the soldiers' escort, I headed for the ducal house.
Three days later, I was still shut away in my room at the ducal house.
The first thing I had received upon arrival was confinement. By order of the duke, Lucas's father, I was not permitted to step outside the room for three days. For me, that was a mercy. I needed time to grasp the situation. So I dug through Lucas's memories and tried to understand this world, and I had managed it, more or less.
…A strange sensation.
Maybe because the memories were not wholly mine. They had not simply seeped into my knowledge. They helped in another way: whenever I reached for something, the answer surfaced then, and only then.
The world those memories described might have come straight from a film about medieval Europe. Kings and nobles, knights and the Church—and monsters called demons, with magic and aura that truly existed. This place was the south of a nation called the Regenhart Empire. More precisely, it was the domain ruled by the Roenheim ducal house to which Lucas belonged.
"…I feel like I've seen this somewhere."
For some reason, the names were oddly familiar, and not because of Lucas's memories. A sense of déjà vu clung to me, as if I had known them from the start. I turned it over for a little while, and before long I found the source.
"Ah. Crius Saga!"
That was the name of a smartphone game I used to play. An MMORPG whose main purpose was growing your character, built around hardcore combat and fierce competition. Among games of its kind, it was especially notorious for how viciously it pushed players to spend. The Roenheim ducal house, the Regenhart Empire—those were absolutely things that appeared in Crius Saga.
"But why would that…?"
The question remained. Money I had possessed, yes, but the life of an S-Class Hunter had been a brutal one. Why had I ended up inside a game I had only played to kill time?
That was the moment.
Welcome once again, Savior!
The message appeared before my eyes, and with it a familiar screen unfolded in the empty air. The game screen of Crius Saga.
"What is this?"
I stared at it, blank. No matter how long I looked, it neither vanished nor so much as shifted.
Carefully, I brought a hand to the screen. Touch input seemed to work even in midair. I could operate it with my bare hands. First I opened the character information—what people usually called a status window.
"Ha…!"
A hollow laugh escaped me as I looked at it. Was this supposed to be the state of my body? Every value except Strength was 1.
"Well, I do look like I'm in rough shape…"
I looked down at myself. Morbid obesity, ready to spill over at any moment. From a certain point of view, even a 1 might have been generous.
"Then this is…?"
I muttered at the button beneath the window marked Traits (+). When I pressed it, new text appeared below.
Hero Possession
The soul of a hero who saved an entire world possesses this body.
A hero? Could this be—
"…Me?"
I couldn't think of anyone else. In a sense, what I had done had saved a world, and it was also true that I was possessing someone right now. Even so, hearing the word hero to my face was a little embarrassing.
"If you knew I was a hero, you could've at least given me a decent body."
I dismissed the status window and returned to the main screen. Most of the interface that should have been there was inactive. The only button still lit was, of all things, the cash shop.
"These bastards are trying to bleed me dry even here."
I couldn't believe it. The game had been cursed endlessly for a monetization policy vicious enough to earn the hatred, and I knew that better than anyone. As an S-Class Hunter I had spent without envy and stayed in the rankings the whole time, but even I had been appalled when a single game devoured more money than a home.
"Still, if the items are actually real…"
This was a world in which the game had become reality. The cash shop's goods, then, might not be mere graphics. They might be physical things. If so, paying wouldn't feel like such a waste.
But was paying even possible? I had neither a card nor cash.
I entered the cash shop with that doubt, and what met my eyes was—
"How much is all of this…?"
An absurd hoard of premium currency.
Crius Saga's spending system worked by first purchasing a paid currency called Blue-White Stones, then using those stones to buy items in the cash shop. Seven thousand stones went for about a hundred dollars. They had deliberately chosen an awkward rate—a bit of salesmanship, so that a price listed only in stones would be difficult to convert into real money in your head.
And the number of Blue-White Stones I currently held was roughly seven billion.
Converted into cash, that was more than a hundred million dollars.