This Body of Mine, a Scoundrel Mage
There was a man who did not even know the land of his own birth.
Born a complete orphan, he had grown up in abandoned back alleys. One day he would vault the garden wall of a noble estate, pose as a hired hand, and steal a cask of wine; the next, he would walk out of a swamp that reeked of corpses with a wanted man's severed head in his grip.
Once he had laughed and bantered with the whores of the street while cleaning out a ramshackle inn. Another time, he had shared a drink with a bandit chief, then taken the man's head and walked out carrying the money bag.
He belonged nowhere. He fought under no one's name. He introduced himself like this:
"Me? Leon Belgard. Freelance mage. Pay me, and I'll do anything. Don't pay—and you're the one who dies."
That day, too, was much the same as any other.
Having sold the horn of a hunted monster and pocketed a fat reward, Leon Belgard skimmed through the guild documents and picked a quest that looked thoroughly uninteresting.
Unexplained mana vibrations detected
3-Person Team Exploration Request
Reward: 30 Kingdom-Certified Magic Stones
+ Additional compensation negotiable
Thirty Kingdom-Certified Magic Stones... that'd keep me in a cheap inn for a hundred days.
What he calculated was always perfectly clearclear.
Survival. Meals. Drink. And a little pleasure.
Leon climbed aboard the carriage with a cheap wine bottle still unfinished in his hand.
"Destination: the Eldrian Ruins."
Once a forward outpost of the kingdom, it was now a place buried in sand and eaten away by wind, where only collapsed stone pillars and half-submerged magic circles remained.
"Traveling alone, sir?" the coachman asked, having just started the horses.
Leon shrugged as if the question were a bother and tipped his head back.
"Had a team, yeah. They're all dead, though."
"...Th-that's a rather frightening joke, sir."
"Wasn't a joke."
At that, the coachman flinched. With the man no longer attempting conversation, Leon went on muttering to himself.
"A ruins investigation this time? That's the kind of job the kingdom bastards ought to be doing. Tch..."
Even as he said it, he smirked.
"But the interesting stuff always blows up in the weird places. Pain-in-the-ass ancient relics, annoying forbidden magic—they always come crawling out of dumps like this. That's why I go."
His eyes held equal parts hunger for coin and addiction to the scent of blood.
The road was peaceful. The chirp of insects in the grass, the clop of mule hooves, the clink of the bottle with every jolt of the carriage.
Leon hooked a thick leg over the side of the carriage and looked up at the sky. It was late afternoon, steeped in a wash of red.
Should make it before the day's out.
Seeing the ruins in the distance, he sprawled out and gazed at the sky.
But when the wheels passed over a certain trace in the road, the flow of mana in the air shifted all at once. The wind brushing Leon's nape turned unnaturally cold, and he sat bolt upright, eyes narrowing.
Something was wrong.
This was not ordinary natural mana. Something someone had deliberately hidden... remnants of a magic circle were writhing somewhere beneath the earth.
"...If we just drive over it, it's gonna blow."
He stopped mid-swig and bent forward at the waist. They hadn't even reached the ruins yet.
"Coachman. Stop a second."
"Yes? What's the matter, Mage-sir?"
That was when it happened.
Clunk.
As the coachman turned the carriage to pull over, the rear wheel—exactly where Leon sat—rolled over the center of that magic circle.
BZZZZT!
An unpleasant, static-like crackle tore through the air, and a crimson circular ancient magic circle, long hidden beneath the earth, flared and surged upward.
"Oh, sh—"
Leon shouted, but it was already too late.
The magic circle unfurled with Leon's body at its center, and crimson mana swallowed him whole.
A sensation like blood coming to a boil. The pain of bones twisting out of true. Muscles collapsing, organs rearranging themselves—an utterly alien feeling.
"Gh... aagh...!!"
Agony that felt as if it would snuff out his breath crashed over him, and his mana circuits began twisting into an entirely different configuration.
He did not yet know that this was the beginning of the change that would turn his infamy into true legend.
He couldn't breathe.
More precisely—an alien sensation of mana writhing inside his body, crushing down on his lungs, came flooding in. His heart hammered like a mad thing, and a tingling that spread from the tips of his limbs raced up his spine and engulfed him from head to toe.
And in that instant, his bones— crack, snap, thud!
With grotesque sounds, they left their proper places.
"...Ghk, uwaaaaaah!!"
His body was turning itself inside out.
Inside the crimson magic circle, Leon's bulk shrank. His arms grew slender, but his legs, luckily, stretched out long and smooth. For all that he had been a large man, his muscle vanished at speed, thinning into something supple and flexible. Around the time the center of his body began to change, his pelvis—
Widened. Unpleasantly. Impossibly.
And that was not the end of it.
Those things...
Grew hot, then swelled.
His chest.
His chest actually burst outward at a speed that made no sense at all.
"...Huh?"
As the magic circle vanished without a trace, Leon lowered a neck gone stiff and looked down.
Sway.
The size was a flat denial of reality.
Neither palm nor forearm nor anything else could cover them. Looking down was like staring at two balloons inflated to their absolute limit, hanging there. And yet they were flesh. They had weight. When they moved, they swayed in a heavy, periodic rhythm.
"...F...uck."
A low curse slipped from Leon's lips.
Her vision went white.
Well—not that her sight had actually gone out. Her feet simply weren't visible beneath a chest that had grown far too large.
The body was clearly intact. Hell, the mana circuits were even stable. And the body had become this? Leon raised a hand and squeezed her chest.
The intent had been a reality check. The result...
Squish.
The moment she squeezed, a strange sensation bloomed outward. She wasn't even aroused, and yet a sensitive feeling spread through her.
"...No. What the fuck..."
Leon yanked her hand away without thinking. But the sensation lingering on her fingertips would not fade. It was a feeling she had never experienced in her life—a response blooming from inside the body. If she squeezed just once more, it felt as if it would feel so good it would send goosebumps racing over her skin.
"Shit... what is this, a mana pouch? Which bastard made this—no! What the hell am I supposed to do with this—ah, wait a second!"
She hurriedly tried to cast a spell. If it was a hallucination or a temporary transformation, a shock ought to snap it.
"Fortis Ignis."
⟨ Fireball ⟩
The moment she stretched out her hand to generate a fireball, the pressure of the air around her pulled her chest forward, and her center of gravity wavered.
"...Uweh?!"
The mana alignment went to pieces. Instead of a fireball, a tiny spark of flame went puff and leaked from her fingertips.
"Fuck. Right now the tits look more dangerous than the magic..."
She had neither a hand free to wipe her sweat nor the composure to cover her face.
That was when it came.
"U-um, sir...?"
The coachman's voice, ringing timidly from the front. He had clearly witnessed the passenger who had looked like a hulking mercenary mage become a woman in a single instant, and he was trembling with panic and terror, pouring sweat by the bowlful.
The coachman swallowed dryly. The situation before his eyes was simply unbelievable.
The black-haired man who until moments ago had been broad-shouldered and fierce-faced, radiating an atmosphere more terrifying than the carriage itself—was now a pink-haired beauty, flailing helplessly around two masses of flesh that had burst out of nowhere.
"...Is this... um, perhaps some kind of... transformation magic...?"
The coachman's voice grew smaller and smaller, his eyes wider and wider. Before he could even close his astonished mouth—
"Dammit."
Leon crouched and sprang from the carriage as if bouncing off it. The instant her feet hit the ground with a thud, her chest surged up and down in unison.
"...Ack, fuck!"
Instinctively she tried to cover her chest with both arms, only to realize her mage's cloak was sliding down uselessly. It was a robe that clung as if it would burst at the top, while the bottom hung loose, the wind whistling straight through.
"You call this clothes?! The tits got bigger and the whole damn thing's sliding off!"
She had to run.
If she stayed in the carriage any longer—if the coachman so much as spread a rumor about what he had just seen, the entire kingdom would lose its mind.
The merciless scoundrel Leon Belgard, suddenly a woman with absurdly massive breasts?
That wasn't legend. That was humiliation.
Leon Belgard ran.
With every stride her chest bounced, her clothes rode up, and she could feel sweat gathering beneath her breasts. The light-material breastplate fitted to her former male shape kept swaying and striking her, so she left the clinging pieces behind and stripped off the flowing garments as she went.
"Ah... ah, for fuck's...!!"
These things swaying in time with her running speed—every bounce or two, a sensation shot all the way up to the crown of her head. It wasn't that she was out of breath. The bouncing of her breasts as she ran was so distracting that her speed dropped.
"...I... was Leon Belgard, right? I was an expert at running away, wasn't I?"
Even as she talked to herself, self-loathing washed over her. For crying out loud. A mage whose getaway speed dropped because her tits were bouncing...!
Luckily, in the opposite direction from which she had come, beyond the ruins, she arrived at the outskirts of a nearby town that lived off the visits of travelers.
A few residents were drawing water near the well, and across the road children were playing with a ball.
And they—all of them—stopped at once.
"...Whoa."
"...She's actually gorgeous...."
"...What the hell is that chest..."
"Hey, don't look at that!"
These kinds of stares were a first. In the past, Leon had been ignored or feared—but a reaction this extreme to a woman's appearance was something she had never experienced.
Something didn't add up. No—it added up too well, and that was the problem.
"Ah... these tits are actually......"
Before she knew it, Leon had sunk to the ground, clutching her chest and panting. She had thought she needed to catch her breath, but the gazes resting on her chest were far more suffocating than the breathing itself.
"...Shit. Now even just walking is a problem."
She shot to her feet. She yanked the robe to force the top closedclosed, but the hem lifted by the same amount, laying the line of her hips completely bare.
"...Ah, forget it! Forget it!!"
Leon stopped tugging the robe and sprinted at full speed again. Her chest bounced once more, and a few young men in the side alley clapped before they even realized what they were doing.
"Hey—any room, hurry!"
She ducked into the shabbiest inn in the most out-of-the-way back alley and immediately found a room—breathing ragged, face flushed scarlet, her appearance a complete wreck.