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…?”
My heart ached at the unnecessarily nice voice. Being drawn into the world of fiction was a common cliché, but TS, or “transsexual fantasy”, was a minor genre. Even in a fantasy novel, it was impossible to make money off internet broadcasts. So, what was the point of TS? The female fall? I didn’t know anything about that.
If I had harassed the writer saying, “I can’t tolerate an ending like this!” or had narcissistic thoughts like, “If it were me, I could have done better,” I would have accepted this situation, but it wasn’t like that, either. Why did I have to go through having my gender changed?
While frustrated by my reality, my body was moving diligently. I took off my wet clothes and wiped my head and body with a towel. My hair was unnecessarily long and it was difficult to dry. After drying my body, I changed into the clothes in the closet. It was the school uniform the character on the cover of Holy Sword Master of the Academy was wearing. I was reluctant to wear the short skirt, but I had no choice but to follow through. The moderately puffy breasts seemed to proclaim this as a female body. I peeked under the skirt to check, and the bottom was still flat.
I sighed and searched the pocket to find the student card. Looking at it, I felt sparks flying through my hair. My body apparently caught on fire when my emotions intensified, and I was pretty pissed off right now. Written on the student ID was a name that went along with the face I had seen in the mirror: Scarlet Evande.
“Really.”
The author had to be a timid bastard.
