Description
Ding ding ding ~ Good morning ~ Ding ding—
My hand moved reflexively to the bedside table to turn off the alarm. I didn’t know who composed it, but it was a great song to force yourself to wake up. My body reacted before the song could reach the annoying trumpet section coming up next. I felt warmer than usual. Was it because I stayed up all night reading?
When I was in school, I stayed up all night to read novels and woke up just fine, but noticing firsthand how much my body had changed just a few years later, I could really feel myself getting old. I didn’t think much of it before, but now that I thought back on it, I missed those days as a student. That was why the novels I was reading these days were set in schools. Of course, since I went to an all-boys’ high school, I didn’t see anything close to a cute girl at school like in the novels. It did make me wonder what it would’ve been like if things were different.
I was a big fan of high school novels and even read the less popular works. The novel I read until the sun came up last night, Holy Sword Master of the Academy, was one of these. The good writing and attractive characters were buried in all the adversity and death, and the resulting dark atmosphere. I liked stories with a light atmosphere, but I was quite engrossed in the way the main character and the heroine somehow managed to overcome the adversity and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting.
Now it was coming back to bite me. After all of the main characters overcame countless enemies and pushed themselves to the edge, the last chapter ended with, “If it were you, could you save them?”
I felt dizzy.
My instincts cried out to send a strongly worded, 5,700-character e-mail to the evil writer right away, but as a lover of genre novels, I had no choice but to comment sheepishly, That’s it…? It wasn’t like the novel was on hold, and it was the first time I had read such an anticlimactic ending since, “This bastard’s smiling.” Even thinking about that now made me mad, which might explain why I was so warm. I opened my eyes to get up and take a shower, but something shone in my eyes. I frowned, thinking the sun was particularly strong today, and bowed my head.
My body was on fire. Not metaphorically, but physically.
Blinking my eyes and thinking I was still dreaming, I stared at my burning body for a second. Then, I went to the bathroom and turned on the shower to put out the fire. The water was so surprisingly cold! I quickly turned the lever to the left and waited for the water to warm up, but for some reason the fire wouldn’t go out.
Am I turning into Meramon?
Feeling strange, I glanced down and realized something terrifying. I was showering with my clothes on.
Regardless of why my clothes were fine while my body was on fire, the fact that I was an idiot wearing clothes in the shower felt like being pierced with a dagger. As my mood subsided, the flame that had been burning brightly in my body went out as if it was never there. Then, the curvy body that I had been trying to ignore since I woke up came into view. To be honest, I had roughly realized what was happening from the moment I saw my body on fire, but…
I tried to stay calm, shut off the water, and stood in front of the mirror. In the reflection was a beautiful girl with red eyes and red hair, the lines of her body revealed through the wet clothes. Normally, I would have admired her beautiful and erotic appearance, but if the beautiful girl was me…
“Why TS…?”
