Joining the Guild — Possession
Saying you want to die doesn't necessarily mean you're about to kill yourself. It's just a way of saying things are that hard.
Saying you want a TS reincarnation doesn't literally mean you want a sex change. It's just a way of saying the idea gets you that painfully hard.
So, uh, yeah. Waking up out of nowhere to find yourself possessing a female character from a video game is a development I could really do without.
"I-is this... me?"
The person in the mirror was a beauty I could not possibly accept as the original me. The ordinary, scrawny guy hovering around 170 centimeters had vanished without a trace. In his place stood a gorgeous girl of about 155 centimeters, with a pair of outrageously full breasts and a head of striking pink curls.
I knew who this girl was.
Her name was Astera von Libenheim.
She was a mage from a game called Guild Scramble — a noble who, despite her status, had run away from home to join a guild because she yearned for adventure and heroics. A classic setup, and one that was pretty damn ridiculous if you thought about it in real-world terms.
She had a cute design, her combat performance was solid, and she had a ton of sweet, romantic events with the protagonist, so she was popular. I'd liked her too.
I'd liked her, sure.
"That didn't mean I wanted to become her."
I clutched my head as a throbbing headache set in. I more or less understood the situation. I had possessed Astera. It was a dime-a-dozen plot development in web novels and the like. Possession is a convenient storytelling tool when you're reading those things for fun, but when you're the one it happens to, it is this brutal.
"Going from a country where your safety is guaranteed to suddenly dropping into a medieval fantasy is one hell of a hurdle!"
Guild Scramble wasn't a particularly heavy game. If anything, it sat firmly on the lighthearted side. Most of its scenarios were noisy, chaotic romps set in a fantasy world, and the main cast almost never took a serious wound or died.
But a light atmosphere does not mean a light world.
Monsters that sat wildly beyond anything ordinary people could handle. Terrorists with a long list of grievances against the Empire. Half-mad cultists. Natural disasters so bizarre that science couldn't begin to explain them. The protagonist's party had the strength for it, and they had plot armor besides, so they could keep the tone comedic. From the standpoint of a nobody with nothing, though, this world was brutally hard.
But what was I supposed to do about it? Now that I'd landed here, this was the world I had to live in. All I could do was cling to the shaky hypothesis that clearing the game's scenario might give me a clue about how to get back to my original world.
"Which means I should join the guild first and make contact with the protagonist. Even a noble house isn't a guaranteed safe haven in this world. Staying close to the protagonist is also the best way to read the flow of the story."
I was turning all of this over faster than I ever had in my life when I happened to glance at the mirror again and tilted my head.
"Come to think of it... were Astera's breasts always this big?"
I'd known they were large for her height. But this large? The pair shoving my top aside without the slightest hesitation, asserting themselves for all they were worth, belonged to my body, and they still managed to look vulgar. Of course my stomach was completely hidden behind them. Every time I gave my upper body the slightest shake they went boing, sloshing around in a way that made them look less like a part of a person and more like some kind of toy. There must have been a fantasy correction in effect, because the bouncing didn't hurt.
"So even the illustrations couldn't fit this entire chest on the canvas? Or is this just what first-person view is normally like?"
The sight of an utterly stunning girl sloshing her breasts back and forth would have made any man pitch a tent on the spot. Sadly, I no longer had a cock to pitch one with.
Was there a more miserable contradiction in the world? When I'd had a dick that could get hard, there were no tits in front of my face. Now that the tits were right there in front of my face, I didn't have a dick to get hard. Why the hell hadn't I possessed someone as a man in this world? I shed tears of blood.
...But shedding tears of blood at this point was getting ahead of myself. I could just as well have saved those for after I realized this world wasn't ordinary Guild Scramble, but Guild Scramble with a Common Sense Alteration Mod installed.
Not that I figured that out until quite a lot of time had passed.
"So this is the guild."
The guild's name was Kaihen. In the game, the player got to name the guild themselves, so from the perspective of someone who had actually been that player, it felt pretty unfamiliar.
The word guild might conjure up something impressive, but to put it bluntly, a guild was a temp agency. Handy errand-runners you could call when you needed help and weren't sure where else to turn. They took relatively hardcore requests, sure, but they also took jobs so trivial you wanted to tell people to just handle it themselves. Strip away the packaging and it wasn't a proper professional association so much as a stage device for moving the story along. But what was the point of nitpicking realism in a game world? A body that goes on and on about realism has no romance in it. No romance.
"Whoaaaa. I thought it looked pretty big on the game screen, but seeing it for real really opens your eyes."
In sheer scale, the buildings of Seoul — where modern civilization actually breathed — were more imposing. But the exoticism unique to fantasy, the premodern architecture, the air of mystery: those were things Seoul could never give you. I got excited in a way that hardly suited the title of a noble young lady. The sheer presence of stepping into a game I had loved playing only wound me up further.
The anxiety that had been wringing my chest the whole way here receded, and in its place a completely baseless hope began to sparkle — the feeling that whatever happened, I'd figure it out somehow. Maybe it was only now that the reality of possessing my favorite game was starting to sink in.
"Life's about charging in anyway! Let's do this!"
I shouted it with all the bravado I could muster and stepped across the guild's threshold. The instant I did—
—Kiiiiiiiiing—
"AAAAAGH!!!"
A piercing pain rang through my skull. I clutched my head and dropped to my knees. The pain was as fierce as a storm and vanished as fast as lightning. Even after it receded, my startled heart kept pumping like mad.
"Hah... hah... Wh-what the hell was that?"
The game had never had a description like this. Was the possessed body rejecting a foreign soul? I couldn't pin down a cause, so a pointless anxiety started sprouting fast.
"Um... are you all right?"
A gentle hand and a kind voice came down to me. Apparently she couldn't just walk past someone kneeling in agony in the middle of the street. I was grateful that kindness still lived in this world.
"Ah, I'm fine. Just a little anemia..."
I offered a white lie so I wouldn't cause any unnecessary worry, and lifted my head. The moment I did, I froze solid, unable to fully process what I was looking at.
The woman's outfit was, in several respects, extraordinary.
Bikini armor, they call it, right? That fantastical article of clothing that is metal — and therefore technically armor — while exposing so much of the wearer that you couldn't possibly expect it to defend anything. Hers was especially skimpy. The top barely covered her nipples, and the bottom was closer to a pussy flap than actual armor.
This world was a game fantasy, and women in bikini armor did exist in it. But there was a truly enormous difference between seeing one in an illustration and seeing one in the flesh. If only I had possessed someone as my original sex. God damn it.
"What's wrong? Are you still feeling unwell?"
The woman touched my body, checking my condition with a worried look. It hardly seemed right to keep worrying such a kind person, so I shook my head in a hurry.
"N-no, no! I'm fine! My head hurt for a second, but it's better now."
"Hehe. Is that so? I'm glad. I've had that happen too. Pretty startling, isn't it? Still, I'm relieved to hear you're all right now. Did you come to join the guild?"
"Ah, yes."
"I see. With a face that cute, I'm sure you'll get in no problem. Do your best. I'll be cheering for you."
The woman in bikini armor said that, turned her back, and walked away from me. She had gone out of her way to say something nice, and my eyes were glued to her ass, which sloshed obscenely with every step. I had never felt the absence of my dick so painfully.
"...But was the bikini armor in the original game ever that blatant?"
Not all bikini armor is created equal. The range runs from the extremely revealing all the way to pieces that at least vaguely resemble actual armor. Guild Scramble was a game aimed at otaku, but it had never adopted designs that extreme — not if it wanted room to expand the business. The level of eroticism on that woman was something you could only get away with in an eroge.
"...Well, I guess that's possible. There's only so much a game can actually show you."
She hadn't been a main character, that was all. Among the extras, there must have been a few people who walked around dressed that filthy. I understood. To wear an outfit like that and still carry herself with that much composure and kindness... I almost wanted to be like her.
"It's not like everyone dresses that way, so I should get a good look while I can."
Everyone dressed that way.
"Wh-what the hell? What is even happening right now?"
To my right, a woman in a bodysuit so thoroughly slashed open that the cleft of her sex showed as plainly as an axe-mark, leaving her practically naked. To my left, a rabbit beastkin strutting around in a reverse bunny outfit. The adventurer walking ahead of me wasn't committing the fashion crime of a missing bottom so much as pioneering an entirely new frontier: the missing backside. The one walking behind me was a maniac who had thrown on a mage's hat and cloak and not a scrap of anything else.
Huuuh? That's weeeird? Was Guild Scramble an eroge this whole time? I didn't think it was.
...No, this was genuinely weird. The people I'd met before coming to this guild had been more or less normal. However they were on the inside, the outside had been fine. Unless this was some kind of fantasy-specific mental attack...
—Kiiiiiiiiing—
"Ah, shit!"
A headache like the one before stabbed through my skull again. The intensity wasn't nearly as high this time, so it only got a muttered curse out of me, but feeling pain is never a pleasant experience. Did Astera have some chronic condition I didn't know about?
Hmm... but the more I thought about it, seeing things here that I'd never seen in the game wasn't actually strange at all. Games, by their nature, only reflect the protagonist's point of view and cut out everything else whenever they can. So what if it was different from the reality I knew? What was weird about that? If anything, being a prisoner of common sense was the weird part. This was inside a game.
Thinking that, my head cleared considerably. Flexible thinking really was important.
With my mind at ease, the hesitation left my steps. I straightened my back and spoke to the receptionist at the desk.
"Excuse me. Um..."
"Yes, welcome. Are you here to join the guild?"
The receptionist intercepted what I'd been about to say. For the record, she was wearing relatively ordinary clothes — relatively being the operative word. The cleavage plunging to a serious depth, the openly bared shoulders, and the nipples whose shape I could read right through the fabric, since she clearly wasn't wearing a bra, were anything but ordinary.
"Y-yes. You could tell at a glance?"
"Of course I could. Bringing fresh blood into the guild is what we do."
The receptionist flashed a bright, refreshing smile and said,
"We always welcome female slaves who want to join the guild, you know?"
...Female slaves?
"U-um. I came here to become an adventurer..."
"Adventurer?"
The receptionist repeated the word with a perfectly innocent face, as if she had never heard it in her life. Yeah, this was bad. I couldn't put it into a clean sentence, but this was fucking dangerous. Something in my head was screaming at me. If I didn't run right now, there would be no going back.
"U-um! I'm sorry! I think I came to the wrong place! Excuse me!"
Before I could even finish fumbling through it, the receptionist pushed her face in right up to my nose. I hadn't felt her stand, hadn't felt a hint of presence — it was as if a lagged-out computer had finally rendered the screen. She poked two fingers into my forehead.