I Became a Dragon in the Game
I opened my eyes and found myself inside a game.
Stories like that were flooding the world, and never once had I imagined I would be the one living them. A vast hollow of stone, and at its heart an enormous body—twenty-eight meters long, seventeen tall, an overwhelming mass of physical presence sheathed from end to end in red scales. I had become the dragon from the game I used to play.
It had been an ordinary day at the keyboard. My playtime had finally crept past a hundred hours. Every quest was done. The achievement list sat at a perfect one hundred percent.
"Ugh... I'm dying. This is killing me."
With that, I could fairly say I'd finished the game's tutorial. The real start would come once I began applying the mods other people had made for it. The game was so absurdly popular that you had to sink a thousand hours before anyone would even call you a beginner.
I opened the mod site and downloaded the base mod, a thing so bloated it might as well have been an expansion pack. That single mod was half the reason the game's popularity had exploded. I was paging through the list, wondering what else to add, when an unusual mod caught my eye.
A mode that lets you play the game as the character NPC Kria Elenium.
Not a single person had downloaded it yet. She was a dragon who appeared as the protagonist's supporter—an NPC who supplied items, and in exchange laid trials upon the hero. No one had ever seen her face. She only ever wrote on the walls and left the rewards beside the words, which was how the player base had stuck her with the nickname Hikikomori Dragon. That was precisely why my curiosity stirred.
"If I play as this character, do I start with all the gear already in my pockets?"
I opened the mod at once and downloaded it. After grabbing a few more that other people recommended, I launched the game again, and a completely transformed set of graphics welcomed me. A sidelong glance at the clock said I had thirty minutes until my shift.
I hit character creation, selected the NPC Kria Elenium mod, and made the character.
"What the hell. This is a girl?"
Long hair, a ram's horns, crimson hair and crimson eyes, a sharp gaze, and a teardrop mole just beneath the right eye. She was strikingly pretty. And true to the dragon race, her stats were absurdly high. Even so, I'd always insisted on playing male characters, so I decided I'd only step in once. The name couldn't be changed.
The character finished generating. The moment I pressed start, a window unlike the usual one appeared.
"A mod changes even this?"
Normally it would have been something like this.
I thought it was a little cringey, and yet it didn't feel bad. They'd clearly put more care into the NPC mod than I'd expected. I moved the cursor to Yes.
Sleep crashed over me without warning. I forced my eyelids up and stared at the alarm clock on the desk. Twenty minutes until work. There's no way I'm getting up... Even that thought sank under in an instant. My mind went completely blank.
How much time had passed?
When I finally came to, the first thing that struck me was that I was late for my shift.
A sudden, uncanny voice locked my body stiff. My eye level was nothing like usual. No—everything I could see was wrong. Strange blue motes drifted through the air like mist. I drew a light breath, and the mist slipped into my mouth; when I breathed out, it vanished.
Slowly, alien knowledge began to surface. The coronation of a new king in the Demon Kingdom. Wars between nations. Dragons meddling in them. Dragons enjoyed wars like that. They liked that such things kept life from growing dull. But Kria Elenium found no worth in war. She was a slightly peculiar dragon who simply gathered wealth and took satisfaction in watching someone gifted grow.
Am I... Kria Elenium?
But I was not that Kria Elenium. Rather than watch someone else grow, I wanted to eat more delicious things myself. I wanted still more wealth, and I wanted to order other people around as I pleased. An ordinary dragon would have kept a fair number of guardians, but Kria Elenium had none at all. All she ever did was wait in a temple that worshipped her as a god and, on the very rare occasion a gifted soul appeared, give them a trial and a reward. And she made those rewards with her own hands.
A dragon, living that shabbily...
I wanted none of it. I just wanted to live at ease, indulge my laziness to the fullest, enjoy my amusements, and eat well. A pretty girlfriend on top of that would have been nice, but I knew my own timid nature too well. That much was asking too much.
Knowledge kept rising without end. From the lore of a dragon's body to the methods of forging armaments, everything this dragon had ever learned was becoming mine. A day, two days... Time kept flowing, and the knowledge showed no sign of ending. Even so, my mind stayed perfectly clear. Now and then I dozed a little, and now and then I tried a spell drawn from the knowledge that had surfaced. I could even keep exact time merely by thinking of measuring it. That alone told me how absurdly overpowered this race was.
A month in that vast, empty hollow. I neither ate nor drank, and still I wasn't hungry. Only after every last scrap of knowledge had settled could I finally move my body.
First I began changing into human form. A dragon's human appearance is fixed. You can alter it with magic, but they say it usually feels like wearing uncomfortable clothes. The transformation itself took no time at all.
I flinched at the beautiful, clear sound of a woman's voice. Hearing that voice come from my own throat sent a faint shiver through me. A mirror wrought of magic hung before my eyes, reflecting my naked body.
One hundred and seventy centimeters. Large breasts, a narrow waist, wide hips—built for an easy birth, I thought. For a moment I envied whatever boyfriend would get to have her. Then it hit me that this body was mine, and the envy curdled into despair.
"If I'm thinking that, everyone else is going to think the exact same thing, aren't they...?"
I'd always been sensitive to other people's eyes, always straining to come off as well as I could. My reputation had been excellent because of it, but being around people left me exhausted. So I'd kept my distance and met them with a strictly businesslike attitude. In this body, the people lining up to hit on me would fill several trucks.
The thought of just holing up here folded almost as soon as it formed. There was nothing in this place. No smartphone, no computer, no TV. And because of that, it was unbearably boring.
I was staring into the mirror when, for reasons I couldn't quite name, my hands closed over my breasts. I was sure I'd heard somewhere that a woman's pleasure was several times a man's. That lasted only a moment. After fumbling at them a few times, self-loathing set in and I stopped. Doing something like that in a completely empty cavern—what was I, an idiot? The figure in the mirror looked downright pathetic.
Fine. I'd settle for eating well instead.
I took clothes from subspace and put them on. They were things prepared for the Talented One, but there would be no one left to receive them now. Underwear woven from dragon scales, and clothes over that. Cut to cling so I could move as freely as possible, the outfit traced every curve of the body exactly as it was. If the woman in the mirror hadn't been me, I would have asked her to marry me on the spot.
Over it all I added a dragon-scale robe plastered with every kind of spell. I didn't particularly want to show this body to anyone else. When I drew the hood up, the neatly curved horns jutted free through it, courtesy of the magic. Even hidden beneath the robe, I was so beautiful that a satisfied smile tugged at my mouth.
"Magic really is convenient~."
Humming a song I'd made up on the spot, I dismissed the mirror spell. From here on, I meant to go somewhere full of people and live it up. I tied a subspace pocket at my hip and tucked in the items meant to prove who I was. It was a noble title obtained two hundred years ago, no question. I'd be treated as fallen nobility, but nobility was still nobility, and life would be easier for it.
At the mouth of the lair, I spread a spell. A geometric pattern bloomed, and without a sound the lair became nothing more than a hill of plain earth.
Among the knowledge that had risen was a way to go home. Die, or see every nation made one. If I wanted to return, all I had to do was unify every country. When that day came, I would probably help the Talented One the way this body's original owner would have. Which was exactly why, in this world, I wanted to live at ease and enjoy myself.
Then it occurred to me. What was I even supposed to enjoy here?
Back in the modern world I'd scrolled the internet on my phone, played games, and gathered with like-minded people on community sites to scribble posts at one another.
"Uh... is eating well really all I've got?"
Some people took travel as a hobby. I was not one of them. I hated moving any real distance. What kind of travel was there for someone who found walking itself a chore? Still, this was a place where people lived. There had to be plenty worth enjoying. Feeling a faint unease, I traveled by magic.
My destination was Gemini, the imperial capital of the Pyro Empire—the strongest and greatest empire of two hundred years ago. The coordinates were two centuries old, which left me a little nervous, but I cast invisibility magic and triggered the warp.
The Lenium Family, a house made from the tail end of Kria Elenium's name. I had fixed a travel coordinate upon that family's mansion.
The warp spell, folding space against space, showed me what lay on the other side. The place I remembered as a secret underground storehouse was full of men and women tangled together, lost in an orgy.
The sight struck so suddenly that I scrambled to cast invisibility. The warp gate sat in the farthest corner, mostly hidden behind wooden crates, so it seemed no one could see it. The instant I stepped through, the gate vanished.
"Aaaah! Stop! Stop! S-save me, hiiik!"
The woman, who looked like a beastkin, was being taken from behind while someone held her by the horns.
"What are you even saying, you stupid bitch! You've got a handle right here and everything! Shut up and take it till you drop!"
"Hiiik! I'm dying! I'm dying! Hiiik!"
With a sound like a waterfall, the woman's tongue went slack and she sprayed with incredible force. Naked women screamed in the men's arms and clenched tight around them down below. Faced with the kind of porn I'd only ever seen on a computer, I couldn't move an inch. I just stood there and watched.
The men drank as they took the women. The women on the receiving end didn't hate it either. If anything, they only clung to the men more eagerly, fawning and coaxing. The ones crying for it to stop had simply passed out, drunk on pleasure too fierce to bear. The men didn't leave even those women alone. They kept thrusting. Black out from pleasure, wake, black out again. It was as if the women existed for no purpose but to vent lust.
The frenzy finally broke an hour later.
"You bastards! What the hell kind of magic did you use!"
Heavily armed soldiers and knights burst in and started hauling the naked men and women away. As they dragged the women off, the soldiers groped them—shoving fingers into their cunts and the like—and not a single person said much of anything about it.
The door opened. Still cloaked in invisibility, I fell in beside a soldier in the middle of the column and moved with them. My panties felt sticky and wet. A cold wind struck me, and the head that had heated from watching all that pleasure cooled a little. I brushed a hand over my lower belly and flinched hard. A considerable amount of slick fluid had soaked through my underwear. Apparently the stimulation had been a bit much.
Mixed in among the soldiers, I made it out of the underground. In my memory the mansion had been splendid and old-fashioned. The mansion before me now was red. A vulgar red had spread from the house out through the streets in every direction. Half-naked women were scattered all along the roads, tempting passersby. From the back alleys between the buildings came the moans of men and women. My mansion had become the heart of the red-light district.