Chapter 2
A beautiful woman, whose origins I couldn’t begin to guess, smiled gently at me.
I’m sure anyone, man or woman, would love to see that smile.
Women go crazy for pretty and cute things, too.
And men need no explanation.
Long, blond hair
About 170 centimeters tall
She wore a loose dress, but
the outline of her figure revealed a body like a sculpture’s.
As I stayed captivated by the smile of such a beauty, I noticed a sadness hidden beneath it.
'Why?'
As the question crossed my mind, I reached toward the cheek of the tearful woman, worry in my heart.
When I placed my hand on her cheek to comfort her, she closed her eyes, and a clear tear rolled from one of them.
The sad woman opened her eyes and parted her lovely lips.
"What are you doing?"
My eyes flew open in surprise.
The voice I’d expected to be warm and beautiful was instead a man’s low, resonant voice, and his choice of words had no refinement whatsoever. I froze for a moment.
Regardless, the woman moved her lovely lips again.
"I said, what are you doing, you lunatic!"
It was shocking.
When I opened my eyes in surprise, a man’s face came into view right in front of me.
A handsome man with neatly groomed silver hair that swayed as he moved was looking at me with brown eyes.
And his expression was turning sour, as if he’d just stepped on a bug.
"...?"
Looking more closely, I saw a slender hand resting on the man’s cheek, as if caressing it.
I followed the hand with my eyes, from the wrist up to the elbow, and soon realized it was mine.
"?!"
Smack!
Startled and horrified to realize I was stroking my childhood friend’s cheek, I slapped Chris across the face without thinking.
"Gah!"
Ah... My hand moved on its own.
Oh, crap.
Ah... My head hurts...
When I put a hand to my head, I felt a small bump.
I’d only done it because I was startled, but the bump on my head made me feel wronged, so I stuck out my lower lip.
As I rubbed the bump, aching from the pain in my head, a question suddenly occurred to me.
"Why does it hurt?"
Chris was here in his game-character form, not the way he looked in real life, so it still seemed like we were in the game...
But the dull ache spreading through my head told me this was reality.
And it made no sense that I’d even lost consciousness.
"I’d been wondering about that too, but after you hit me just now, I figured it out. I don’t think this is the game we knew."
Not the game? Then where are we?
"I don’t know either."
No matter how much I looked around, this definitely didn’t seem to be Korea, where we’d lived.
After coming to, Chris was startled to realize he’d passed out and checked his own condition first.
I remembered a news story about how game companies had created devices that connected more of the body’s nerves to the capsule in pursuit of even more realistic virtual reality, which had led to a lot of problems.
One of those problems was that people who fainted from shock in the game became vegetative or suffered nerve damage that caused various symptoms.
Remembering that, I tried to log out, but got no response. I tried to open the map to at least find out where we were, but that was unresponsive too.
Only the status window and inventory were working—and I soon realized even those weren’t normal.
My level and skills have reset, and I don’t have any items?
Startled, I confirmed that there was nothing in my inventory, then opened my status window.
Katrina (Elf) Female Lv. 1
Class: None
Stats
Strength[10]
Agility[14]
Magic[7]
Stamina[12]
Bonus Points: 30
Skills
[ Alien Language Expert max ]
Titles
None
Possessions ??
??????
Ah... Seeing nothing of what I’d worked so hard to achieve left me in despair.
The only thing I had was the ability to read, write, and understand the languages of humans and similar races, which was pretty goo...
Wait, and what was that Possessions ?? at the end? There’d never been a category like that before. And what were those question marks in it?
As for my stats... I did have a few more bonus points than usual for a level 1 character.
But what good were a few bonus points when I was only level 1?
"Haa..."
As I lowered my head and sighed, I felt a breeze slip through my clothes, and a faint scent of peaches reached my nose.
I could feel pain, and even sensations like touch and smell—things I couldn’t experience in the game—were real now.
Then I noticed my loose, short sleeves fluttering.
When a character isn’t wearing any equipment, they appear in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. The outfit is there to keep the character’s bare skin from showing.
Once in a while, a few players use illegal programs to strip their characters, but normally, these clothes can’t be taken off.
But now I could see what was underneath them.
"Ooh..."
I turned around and sat down. When I pulled up the top of my white T-shirt, a magnificent pair of breasts came into view.
It was the first woman’s breasts I’d ever seen in my life.
"... What are you doing?"
"Ahem..."
When I turned back at Chris’s question, he was looking at me as if I were something disgusting.
"W-what! I was just testing it because you said this felt like reality!"
Tsk, tsk.
Chris clicked his tongue and sighed.
"Yeah... Get a good look. You might have to live as a woman from now on."
At Chris’s words, I took a moment to gather my thoughts.
Ah... Have I become a woman now?
The feeling of my thing, which I’d only used to pee for 27 years, was gone, leaving an empty feeling between my legs...
My junior...
As I sat there looking dejected, Chris shook my shoulder.
"For now, let’s look for water. I’m thirsty, and if we follow the water, we should find something."
"Yeah... Let’s look around this forest first."
We walked through the forest, and kept on walking.
After about an hour, we were lucky enough to find a stream.
Relieved, I quenched my thirst. Then, hoping we’d find a settlement if we followed the water, we decided to walk along the stream.
After walking for quite a while, we saw that the stream had grown as wide as a river.
"How long are we going to keep walking?"
"Yeah, going any farther would be too much. The sun looks like it’s about to set."
How long had we been walking?
The sun sank, painting the sky a beautiful orange with the sunset.
We’d been walking since morning, so I was tired and getting hungry.
If we’d had even a beginner’s weapon, we could’ve hunted, but all we had were our bare hands...
It would get cold as soon as the sun went down, too. We were in trouble.
"There’s a cave over there."
At Chris’s words, I turned and saw that there really was a cave.
At least if we gathered some fallen leaves in the cave and slept on them, we wouldn’t freeze to death like we might if we just lay down by the roadside.
The cave entrance we approached wasn’t very large.
It was just big enough for me. Chris would have to duck his head and bend at the waist to get inside.
We had no torches, and I was debating whether to enter the dark cave when a revolting smell wafted from within.
"Ugh! What is that smell? It’s awful!"
I pinched my nose and grimaced as I muttered. Chris covered my mouth and grabbed my shoulder, tugging me backward as if telling me to move away.
I wondered why, but for now I backed away and hid in the bushes.
Soon, something came out of the entrance.
"Kieek!"
The fading sunset illuminated the figure that emerged from the cave.
A hideous goblin with green skin, small eyes, and a big nose—about waist-high on me—looked around, flaring its nostrils.
'Are you kidding me? There are goblins here?'
Holding a sword that looked like a kukri, it slowly approached the spot where we were hiding.
'What do we do?'
If I’d been in my previous condition, I might’ve been fine, but a goblin was a manageable fight only once you were around level 15.
Each goblin was weak on its own, but since they lived in groups, there were probably other goblins deeper in the cave.
Even after allocating my stat points, I’d only be about as strong as a level 10 character, and without a weapon, the best we could manage was barely a two-on-one.
As I stared at the approaching goblin, tense, I felt a light tap on my shoulder and looked at Chris.
"I’ll take care of it. Don’t move."
Chris spoke so quietly I could barely hear him, then began moving silently to the side.
Soon, the ugly goblin came right up to the bushes where I was hiding and thrust its hideous face toward me, flaring its nostrils.
Just as it was about to part the bushes with both hands, Chris suddenly sprang out and twisted the goblin’s neck.
Crack!
A chilling sound of bones snapping rang out, and Chris subdued the goblin in an instant. He gently picked up the still-twitching corpse and its weapon, then carefully slipped into the bushes.
That was when it hit me.
This wasn’t Korea anymore. It was a world like the ones in fantasy novels, where goblins and the like existed.
"You have bonus stat points too, right? Spend some. Its companions might come out."
Nod.
Looking more closely, unlike a typical goblin settlement, there were no guards at the entrance. It seemed more like a cave the goblins used as a resting place.
If they’d come out as a group to gather food, there’d probably be five or six of them.
I desperately wanted to run, but if we left without dealing with them, they’d return to their camp, call their companions, and come after us.
I put 10 points into Strength and 11 into Agility, bringing them to 20 and 25, then put the remaining 9 into Stamina.
Since I couldn’t use mana right now, spending points on it felt like a waste.
Hoping not too many goblins would come out of the cave, we watched the entrance. Four goblins emerged.
Fortunately, that was a number we could handle.
Two were armed with daggers, and two had bows.
Like the goblin that had just come out, they sniffed the air and slowly approached us.
"Kirreuk!"
The ones who’d nocked arrows and aimed into the bushes let out a shriek, as if they knew we were there.
Chris suddenly charged out, swinging the kukri and severing one goblin’s wrist. He kicked the falling wrist toward me.
"Kieek!"
I saw two arrows flying toward Chris,
and hurriedly lifted the severed hand, still clutching its dagger, to knock one arrow aside.
Chris knocked the other arrow aside while blocking the dagger of a goblin rushing at his legs.
I snatched up the dagger that had fallen from the wrist hit by an arrow and charged the two goblins nocking more arrows. I kicked one in the solar plexus, knocking it down,
then spun to dodge an attack from the side with a bow and plunged the dagger into its temple.
The goblin with the dagger in its temple rolled its eyes back and fell over, so I couldn’t retrieve the weapon,
and instead grabbed an arrow the goblin had been carrying and drove it into the throat of the one getting back up.
"Kereuk!"
I grabbed the head of the goblin in pain and twisted with all my strength.
Its neck turned grotesquely, and it fell forward.
When I turned around, Chris was finishing off the last goblin by cutting off its head.
We’d managed to take down the four goblins more cleanly than expected, so we hid again and waited in case any more came out.
Fortunately, no more goblins appeared.
Relieved, we dumped the corpses in the river, erased our tracks as best we could, grabbed the weapons, and ran along the river.