The protagonist’s party is overly diligent
~if sidestory~
For some reason, I ended up back on Earth.
*
Thinking it over, it seems like challenging the Goddess was possibly a mistake.
Of course! The opponent was ‘literally’ a Goddess, right? One with the power to drag my soul to another world and stuff it into a body she created.
It’s only natural that I would be at a huge disadvantage fighting such a being.
“……”
While gazing at the ceiling of my one-room apartment, I pondered and tilted my head again.
No, wait.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to think that everything that happened until now was just a dream?
Right? I woke up as a woman, and the world I woke up in wasn’t even reality. It was a world from a game series I liked.
No matter how I think about it, it seems more believable to think I just had a pleasant dream.
Thinking that way would probably be better for my mental health.
The thought that everything I did there was all for nothing, or that all the bonds I created just vanished—those kinds of thoughts weighed much heavier.
Thinking that I just had a long, nice dream that’s hard to forget would be way better.
…Though the real issue was that the dream was so long, I didn’t even know what I should do starting tomorrow.
What was I doing before I fell asleep?
Ah, should I just go back to sleep like this?
Feeling a bit empty, I considered closing my eyes again, but I soon got back up. I hadn’t died, so I had to gather my senses and get on with life.
I had to survive somehow, after all.
Wobbling to my feet, I headed for the bathroom. Checking my disheveled appearance was the priority. —
—And then I saw my face, wearing the tattered uniform of the Avalon Academy.
The clothes were in tatters, my face had stuff smeared on it, but there were no wounds. My body was the same.
Ah, right. Thanks to Gryphon’s magic, my wounds had completely healed.
As I touched my face reflected in the mirror, I also felt my body for confirmation.
I didn’t think I was seeing things. My body felt entirely the same as what appeared in my eyes.
I have… returned to my original world.
With my changed body.
“……”
Should I be happy about this?
*
And soon, I discovered a few problems.
I turned on the tap, but no water came out.
I tried igniting the gas stove, but tick tick tick tick, there were only sparks, and the flame wouldn’t light.
It wasn’t just the stove. The lights in the room wouldn’t turn on. I tried turning on the lights, but they didn’t come on—it had been a while since the electricity was cut.
I sat back down on the dusty floor and thought.
This is bad.
The last place I lived was on rent. Even if I wasn’t found dead, the contract would automatically end after the lease expired.
So I needed to know when I came back here. Naturally, the utilities would have been cut off, so it was impossible that the phone and internet services were still running.
How is there not a single clock in the house? Well, it makes sense. In modern society, you wouldn’t need anything if you have a smartphone.
That smartphone had long been dead and out of battery.
The one power bank I had was the same.
How do they calculate overdue electricity or gas fees? No, more importantly, I think there’s something specific that happens when all signals of a person’s residence get cut off.
“……”
The more I sat and thought, the more my mind wandered.
“I need to resolve something ASAP.”
I muttered and got back up.
Right. Now that I’ve come to this world, I need to solve the situation. I can’t just let myself die—
I have to survive.
First things first: what to do about the overdue utilities?
I have clothes at home anyway. The ones I wear now might not fit well, but if I tighten my waist, they shouldn’t fall off.
If it really doesn’t work, I can just buy new clothes once I go out.
Thinking that way, I rummaged through the desk drawer.
*
Isn’t this strange?
Amazingly, I’m still me in this world.
My wallet was sitting inside the desk drawer, and surprisingly, my ID in the wallet had ‘my current face’ on it.
If someone went and changed my info, that’s some seriously unethical stuff. Sylvia Fanggriffon’s face is clearly European. Even if my hair and eyes are black, that wouldn’t be enough to pass as Asian.
Plus, the ‘Korean ID’ in my wallet registered my name as ‘Fanggriffon Silvia’. That’s right. Shockingly, the name I used in the other world was still intact.
Thinking about it, it’s not impossible for a foreigner who naturalized in Korea to keep their name as it is.
My date of birth was also different. Calculating it out, I was just over 18—the threshold of adulthood.
So, does that mean I’ve become ‘this world’s Sylvia Fanggriffon’?
That doesn’t seem right. To clarify, this room was originally my old rented place. An old five-story villa without an elevator.
Moreover, the clothes I returned wearing were torn and damaged, the same ones I had rolling around on the floor just before.
That’s not something that can be easily made up. There’s even a wound on my stomach that matches the original hole, and the blood that couldn’t be washed out was still dark red.
Well, fine.
You wanna play this way, huh?
Even if saving the world and returning to the original world is a cliché, I don’t want that. I do have friends in this world, but I also don’t want to give up what I built over there.
Just as I’m dirty, I’ll return.
First, let’s handle the utilities.
*
Surprisingly, there were no overdue taxes.
Thinking back on it, I had set most of my utilities to auto-pay, so the money would have come out of my account even if I disappeared from this world.
Still, is the power and gas being cut off a courtesy from the Goddess?
I’ve never exchanged a word with her, but thinking about it, this might be part of some ‘order’.
“Phew.”
I let out a sigh of relief knowing that my wallet situation wasn’t as serious as I thought, and that I could exist in this world without any other problems.
Returning to Korea after several years felt both familiar and strange. I’d lived there for so long, and I didn’t know how time passed, but the difference between my last visit and now was only about a year. Most things remained as they were in my memory.
However, even if everything was just as I remembered, redoing things I hadn’t done in a while felt unfamiliar.
Waiting at the crosswalk felt a bit awkward, and standing in front of the ATM felt strange. Inputting my pin code on the touchpad and withdrawing cash felt the same. Walking into a mobile shop with cash in hand to reactivate my phone felt the same too.
In the process, I found it a tad embarrassing that my ‘Korean name’ was ‘Fanggriffon Sylvia’.
Finishing all that and sitting down at an internet café felt the same.
…And above all, the looks directed at me during the process were quite burdensome.
I received looks in that world too. But they weren’t the same kind. In that place, I was ‘of the same race’.
No matter how globalized Korea has become, with foreigners shopping, the ratio of ‘other races’ is still quite low.
Besides, if you’re incredibly pretty and speak Korean fluently, it would be easy to attract attention. The fact is, even if excluding race, I had an appearance that caught attention. In Azernar, every child around me had a pretty face, so it wasn’t that my looks stood out.
Sitting in the internet café, I charged my smartphone and resolved my bills through websites, and those gazes kept lingering on me.
…Let’s get home quickly.
I finished what I needed to do.
After leaving the internet café and going to a supermarket, even while buying daily necessities and checking out, the attention on my face didn’t fade.
It might be because I’m pretty, or maybe it’s just fascinating that a foreigner speaks Korean well. It could be both.
Finally, returning home, putting food in the pantry, and taking out cleaning supplies to tidy up the dusty home—
Boom!
“Eek!?”
Startled by the sound of something exploding in mid-air, I screamed.
At the same time, two objects came falling towards me from the spot where that something exploded.
One was shining golden, while the other was a glossy blue, both about the same size as me.
“Sister!?”
“Silvia!”
And those two objects that tumbled down to the floor called out to me.
…What on earth is happening now?
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