Chapter 23
‘That’s why you can’t turn a profit, selling nothing but things like that.’
I’ll admit that metal gear does give off its own brand of fucking cool. My idols, the Vector Men, wear armor too.
If Beast Regression had been a spell that equipped armor instead of some weird ball of energy, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all the first time I used it. I would’ve had to change my underwear after pissing myself from how cool it looked, though.
Metal robots are one of the two pinnacles of fuck-awesome coolness that make men lose their minds, aren’t they? The other is obviously dinosaurs. In other words, no amount of tax money would be wasted on metalworking for building dinosaur robots.
After thinking that far, I agreed with her.
“Metal is pretty cool. Aside from being noisy, full plate armor is a man’s dream.”
“Right?! Right?!”
“But I can’t afford it.”
Don’t make that face. You’re making me feel like I’ve committed a crime.
“…Hold on. I’m sure I made something around here after swallowing my pride.”
She drooped dejectedly and brought over something that looked like a pair of pants. At first glance, they looked like ordinary black pants.
“How about this armor? It’s made from monster hide and reinforced with iron plates over the vital areas. You wear it like a pair of pants.”
“It looks pretty good. How much is it?”
“65 coppers. Ah, the leather is from a Rock Turtle.”
“That’s reasonable.”
It was fucking expensive, but even bulletproof and stab-resistant clothing cost more than that in the modern world.
For reference, Rock Turtles were easy to hunt, but their hides became sturdy after processing, so they were sold everywhere. They were the cowhide of the otherworldly armor industry.
I checked the crotch area. It wasn’t the protruding steel-dick design or boomerang panties; it was sturdy leather armor made from monster hide.
I wouldn’t be embarrassed to wear this around. It was enchanted, so it was durable, and the weight was reasonable enough that it didn’t seem likely to come off while I was fighting.
“Try it on over here.”
Clara pointed toward a place far too shabby to be called a fitting room. I went inside and tried it on.
‘…Damn, it’s tight.’
The leather was sturdy enough to be used as armor, but it seemed to lack a little elasticity. Maybe that was because it was a midrange product that sold on value for money.
‘No, wait.’
Something felt a little off.
I took off the pants and looked at the longsword inside my underwear.
Underwear culture in this otherworld wasn’t very advanced either. Women had the concepts of bras and panties, but men’s underwear was closer to swim trunks or shorts.
Mass-produced men’s underwear was tied at the waist with a string to fit the wearer’s size. The legs were simply made long, with the instructions to go home and have your mom or wife cut them for you.
─So that was why I hadn’t fucking noticed until now.
As I said, I barely drank water aside from coffee, cola, and alcohol, and I hadn’t even gone to the bathroom since getting up today.
─Ptooooo.
“Ddet?”
The longsword in my underwear had become a zweihander.
***
─For men, dick size was sometimes a sensitive and taboo subject.
While women were relatively open about discussing breast size and sometimes even used it as a subject for jokes, men rarely talked about dick size, even among other men.
Because everyone knew.
They knew that comparing dick sizes and ranking them could be an extremely sensitive matter—one that could even lead to bloodshed.
Men were naturally obsessed with dick size.
Almost no man had transcended that obsession. The undisputed number-one urological procedure was dick-lengthening surgery—the upgrade patch—which proved it beyond doubt.
Dick size was such a momentous issue that, when told to divide 280 among height, IQ, and dick size, some people even wanted to become a balding gorilla with a horse dick and stats of 180/70/30.
There were probably more people in the world who wanted a side-effect-free dick-enlargement technique than a side-effect-free steroid.
If someone developed a drug that gave a dick Gear Third, it would probably rival the Perfect Hair-Growth Formula in medical popularity.
This bizarre obsession with size was a uniquely human trait. Big-dick supremacy was hardly seen among other creatures. I didn’t know how the otherworld’s various races were, but that was how things were on Earth.
Among nonhuman animals, reproductive competition was decided not by dick size but by combat power.
Even if some lion or tiger cub bragged about being hung and performed a display of dominance, any other cub that took offense could simply bite it by the scruff and send it across the Sanzu River.
The body parts they probably showed off for their power were their claws, not their dicks. That was why even gorillas, whose physical strength far surpassed humans’, had dicks the size of pinky fingers.
There might have been a lion in history with a thirty-centimeter dick, but that dick-lion would have lost out in competition and disappeared, just as saber-toothed tigers went extinct because of their huge teeth.
A vital organ that was merely long was only useful during sex. If just the tip of the glans got cut off in a fight, the victim would be unable to have sex until death and would be eliminated from the breeding competition.
It was only natural that compact dicks, which allowed animals to fight quickly and often and were advantageous in combat, would win the reproductive competition. Charles Darwin had advocated this Dick Selection Theory during his lifetime.
So that was why I didn’t fucking understand what was happening to me.
‘Why has my little snake turned into an anaconda?’
No, honestly, I could guess the cause. This was the second time I’d said that.
‘Is this also because of Beast Regression? Why?’
Beast Regression.
A strange magic whose origin and true nature I still didn’t know. Just as the phrase primitive sorcery suggested, it was absurdly old—a deep-rooted, powerful enhancement spell.
The enhancement of my body made sense. The effect of this magic was to imbue my flesh with the strength of an Earth hero.
I didn’t know why it had only worked on me, but thanks to Beast Regression, my body’s path to handling mana had been opened, and my muscles had grown stronger even in everyday life.
‘But what the fuck does that have to do with my dick?’
I was thrown into utter chaos in the smithy’s fitting room.
I had gained the strength of a beast, so my physical power had increased. That made sense.
My defense had increased too, as though I were wearing an animal hide. That made sense.
And, as a side effect, my dick had become fucking huge and thick.
That made no sense.
“This is driving me insane.”
Did a dick normally get bigger just because someone had gained the strength of an animal? That didn’t seem right.
Come to think of it, there were animals with enormous dicks. Take horses, for example, the archetypal big-magnum-dick animal.
Apparently, their bodies made mating difficult unless they were that size, so only the genes for big dicks survived. Since they couldn’t produce offspring without horse dicks, they all ended up with horse dicks. That could also be considered a form of Dick Selection Theory.
But did it make any sense for Beast Regression to affect only my dick—and specifically transform it into the horse dick of an enormous, heavy-artillery, giant-dicked animal?
“Fuck! What the hell is going on?!”
I was driven into delirious madness by a spectacle more incomprehensible than anything I had experienced when meeting a katydid or Nefertiti!
Ah, sure, there was nothing bad about my dick getting bigger.
There was nothing bad about it. Fuck, there was nothing bad about it, but if it had grown, shouldn’t I at least know why it had grown?
Waking up after a good night’s sleep to find that my dick had become fucking huge meant that it could suddenly become fucking tiny one morning too.
In the worst case, my dick might vanish with a poof, and I could become a female graduate-student roe deer in another world!
“Gwaaaaaaaah!!!”
It was truly the work of overwhelming madness!
My mind broke down like a young kid experiencing his first erection.
Had the Surgeon of Death flown in while I slept last night and ‘Sembles’ my dick with a horse dick before leaving? I was going so insane that thoughts that bizarre seemed plausible.
A man’s dick was a human-friendly endorphin-generating device that he was born with. People said that one’s body, hair, and skin were received from one’s parents, but even an orphan would cherish his own dick as much as his life.
That was why I needed to know exactly why this had happened to my dick.
Otherwise, I would have to clutch my dick every night and tremble in fear in bed!
“Sir?! Is something wrong?!”
Just then, I heard Clara’s voice from outside. She seemed to have spoken up because she was startled by me making a huge fucking scene in the fitting room.
I barely calmed myself down and answered in a composed voice.
“No. I’m sorry. Nothing’s wrong, so don’t worry.”
I hurriedly put on the pants and went outside. Unfathomable chaos and blind uncertainty had descended upon me, but cowering in fear wouldn’t solve anything!
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes. I’m perfectly fine.”
I handed the pants first to Clara, who looked as though she was agonizing over whether she had taken in a lunatic as a customer.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, but the pants are a little small. Could you adjust them to a slightly larger size?”
I couldn’t exactly say, My fucking dick got huge and the crotch is too tight.
“Huh? They’re too small? That can’t be right. I left them completely loosened so they could be adjusted after you tried them on.”
Clara spoke as though she couldn’t understand.
“What part doesn’t fit, exactly? You don’t look particularly fat around the waist or…?”
Clara stopped in the middle of her sentence. Her gaze locked onto the pants I was wearing—specifically, the groin area that had felt sore and heavy since this morning.
“…Ah.”
What do you mean, ‘Ah’?
“Ah, ah! Ah! Y-yes! Y-yes, I understand!”
Clara spoke while bouncing around and making a fuss like a spring that had been pressed down and released.
“You want the size adjusted, right?! Just a moment! I’ll adjust them for you!!”
Crash-bang-bang!!!
Clara ran toward the workshop, turning her own store upside down as she went. Fuck, I was so embarrassed that I didn’t know where to put myself. Seriously.
“Goddammit.”
I folded my arms and waited for Clara to bring back the repaired pants.
I felt like just turning around and leaving, but I liked those leather pants quite a bit, and I needed them, so I waited quietly.
“Eek!!”
Just then, the quack bastard came to his senses and got up, then screamed when he saw me.
Judging by how he trembled whenever our eyes met, he didn’t seem likely to act tough later and try to get revenge on me. Of course he wouldn’t. A bastard who threw the first punch, got beaten up, and then went looking for the law was a disgrace to machismo.
A true macho man would be too embarrassed about getting thoroughly beaten in a one-on-one fight to report it or seek revenge.
Even if he tattled to his friends, the guys who hung around with a macho bastard like him would only be the same kind of pathetic machos. They would just scorn him too, saying he was an idiot who went around getting beaten up.
But if they came in a group and attacked because their friend had been beaten up? Then fuck, they weren’t machos; they were a mafia cartel.
If those bastards dared to come back and pick a fight while displaying Chinese-style brotherhood and loyalty, that would be when the Ungnyeo inside me awoke.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Hammering sounds came from the workshop Clara had entered. It seemed she was skillfully adjusting the crotch of the leather pants.
She must have been skilled enough for the Blacksmiths Guild to assign someone specifically to her. The personnel choice was questionable enough to make one seriously worry about their parents’ well-being, though.
A dwarf I knew had mastered living in the forest like an elf despite possessing superb dexterity, but apparently Clara had excellent blacksmithing skills despite being human.
No, could Clara perhaps be a half-dwarf too?
More than anything, the very expression half-dwarf was already the result of human-supremacist thinking. From a dwarf’s perspective, a human-dwarf hybrid would be a half-human, not a half-dwarf.
If you traced their family trees back far enough, surely most blacksmith bloodlines had one or two dwarves in them. People in the same industry often married one another.
It was a fairly logical deduction.
‘Is she the type who has skill but can’t run a business?’
That was my guess after looking at Clara’s shop.
A weapons merchant’s main source of income was merchandise like leather armor that sold well, wore out easily, and had to be replaced.
Armor being durable was good, but if it never broke at all, fewer customers would come back to buy new armor.
Not every warrior was looking for better equipment. There were more than enough adventurers who were satisfied with decent gear and only accepted jobs they could handle.
Clara lacked commercial creativity and management ability in that area.
Weren’t there plenty of restaurant owners on Alley Restaurant who were good cooks but struggled because they lacked the sense to run a business? Technical ability and management ability were separate stats.
In that sense, the way that quack bastard operated was extremely effective for squeezing out short-term revenue.
Raise the prices, cheapen the product, and borrow against future profits. Even shameless CEO bastards used that method all the time.
They forcibly increased profits only during their time as CEO, then put them in their portfolios as though they were some great achievement.
After sucking a company dry and ruining it in the short term, they would make a mad dash for the exit and go to their next target, saying this:
─See? Hire me as your CEO. I increased Mom’s Touch’s profits by 30% for three years straight. What? They’re bankrupt now? That’s none of my business.
Fuck, give me back my Mom’s Touch, you bastards.
That method was a vicious way to fleece everyone from brain-dead small-business executives to mid-sized-company chairmen. Getting pissed off again at the thought, I decided to stomp the damned sword-peddling bastard a few more times.
“You fucking bastard!!! Die, ghost of McGeun-hye! Pound the dictatorship regime!!!”
“Gyaaaagh!! Why are you suddenly doing that again?!”
Do you know which part of the human body can be beaten with the least concern?
The thighs. They were dangerous places to stab because they contained many blood vessels, but since they held no vital organs, you could punch them freely without worrying when pounding someone into meat paste.
Even without vital organs, simultaneous internal bleeding and muscle rupture would leave someone groaning for a long time, making the thighs ideal for a slow, petty revenge.
They also hurt so much that the victim writhed when struck, which made them satisfying to beat.
“Gyaaaagh!! Gkyaaaagh!!!”
“Cry! Scream! And die!!!”
Wham!! Wham!! Wham!!
I surrendered myself to my rage and pummeled the quack’s thighs. The strange phenomenon that had occurred to my dick had driven me into endless fury.
“Gyaaagh….”
The quack made a goblin-like noise and fainted again.
Listen to that bastard’s pronunciation. He sounded like a native. Could this quack bastard be an Ancient Goblin or something?
Every brat eventually grew into an adult. Goblins probably grew too. Maybe the ones who had been brats as children grew up without ever maturing and hid among human society. It was a surprisingly plausible theory.
“I’ve finished the alterations! Try them on!”
While I was connecting the dots between brats and old fogies, Clara returned. That was a fast repair job.
─Sliiide.
The pants looked wider even from the outside. When I tried them on in the fitting room, they didn’t turn into a protruding steel dick or a snail crawling over my thighs, thankfully, and the alteration was satisfactory.
“I’ll take these. How much did you say?”
“S-six, 65 coppers.”
I opened my wallet and took out the money. I had brought plenty because I also had to pay the inn fee today. I had even planned to buy a weapon if I found one I liked while visiting the smithy.
What I actually bought here was armor, but that wasn’t the issue right now, so let’s move on.
“Here you go.”
“Y-yes. T-thank you.”
Clara tried to avoid my gaze. When I stared at her, unable to understand why she was acting that way, she covered her face and turned away from me.
“P-please don’t! I’m a married woman!”
“I didn’t ask.”
Anyway, that was how I left the smithy with new armor and a dick afflicted by a status ailment.
Fuck, what the hell was I supposed to do now?
‘Dick, if you’re watching over me, please tell me the answer.’
There was no fucking chance it would answer.
Living in the otherworld was this fucking awful.