It was a life where I should have been living easy as hell.
I opened my eyes to find myself in a gender-reversed world where the sex ratio was utterly destroyed.
A paradise where all that awaited me was women cooing over me.
A future with no worries about employment, where I could just marry comfortably and live with women on either side of me, had been right there in front of me...
Could anyone really be this unlucky?
That dreamlike world fell apart in less than a year.
Suddenly, bizarre phenomena began boiling over, and countless people died. The sky turned ash-gray. Screams never ceased from every direction.
Thanks to a string of ridiculous events, the genre went from dating sim to apocalypse in an instant.
I used to worry about what to eat today. Now my goal had changed to figuring out how to survive the day.
Fuck... Looking back, I should have just been satisfied with reality. What riches and glory was I even trying to enjoy?
I got greedy, and divine punishment came down on me.
“Urgh...”
The pain of my crushed arm ate into my mind. It had already been hours since we started being chased by a monster whose form wasn’t even clear. Without even the strength to walk, I borrowed the shoulder of my companion, Seoyeon, and moved forward little by little.
“Give up. I won’t last much longer. At least you should live.”
“No. How could I abandon you?”
How long had we even known each other? I wouldn’t have blamed her if she left me behind, yet she stubbornly dragged along the burden that was me.
Honestly... as someone who had planned to toy with her for a while and then throw her away, my guilt toward her only grew.
[Gruuuuuh...]
Squish, squelch—
A hideous mass of flesh soon filled the corridor and came toward us. If Seoyeon ran away alone right now, she would more than have enough time to escape. It wasn’t as if both of us had to die. It was about time I made a decision.
“That’s enough. Stop now. Go to the survivor camp alone.”
“What?”
Thud—!
Before the building was completely swallowed by that thing, I pushed her out the window with all the strength I had. Lee Seoyeon, that fool, couldn’t take her eyes off me even as she fell. But I had already hardened my resolve.
“I want to rest a little too.”
I was tired of being chased.
My arm would fester and rot, and without any medicine, it was obvious I would die before long. I didn’t want to desperately cling to a life that was basically terminal anymore.
I could already feel it well enough. The day those things devoured my mind wasn’t far off.
I would rather end this pain quickly now and be free.
“Dying once is hard. But twice? How hard could it be?”
I had already experienced death once before coming to this other world.
It had been horrible pain, but even so, it had hurt less than this.
Back then, I got hit by a car so cleanly that I died before I could even register it. Thanks to that bastard who fell asleep at the wheel, you could say I went almost painlessly.
“Haa...”
Without even the strength to stand, I soon collapsed to the floor. A tingling pain gnawed at my mind as it dug into my flesh. A thick sweetness filled my mouth. At some point, I had even forgotten how to breathe properly.
Would that thing kill me in one go too...?
I looked at the anomaly writhing grotesquely as it approached within arm’s reach.
Every single way those anomalies killed humans had been cruel. Some twisted necks a full 180 degrees, while others swallowed people whole. Their appearances were just as wildly varied, all kinds of shapes, impossible to understand within the bounds of common sense. In that case, humanity’s extinction was also only natural.
Guns didn’t work. No matter how much you stabbed or cut them, they regenerated. Despite this world having a civilization slightly more advanced than Earth’s, physical methods couldn’t even deal an effective blow.
“Haa...”
I closed my eyes. My back leaned against the wall.
I simply hoped that, in my next life, I would be born in a slightly more comfortable world.
It didn’t even have to be gender-reversed. As long as I could live happily, anything would be fine.
...
Ah... I lost too much blood... My strength is leaving me... My eyes...
My consciousness drifted away. The place where I lay was being dyed red.
My eyelids slowly grew heavy and fell. Foolishly enough, even in this moment, I desperately prayed from the bottom of my heart that I wanted to live. If only I could reach it with my hand, I wanted to grab hold of anything at all.
“A-A man? A real man?”
Right before my consciousness cut off completely, light faintly seeped into the edge of my vision.
It shimmered. I couldn’t tell what it was, but a blurry afterimage lingered around me without disappearing.
“No way... A living man... I’m not dreaming, am I? I have to take him to the shelter. He can’t die.”
No... I can’t hold on anymore. My breathing is fading... My consciousness is completely...
“S-Save him! What are you doing?! Bring the serum, hurry!”
Beyond the deep depths...
***
Did I die? As my faint senses gradually returned, I heard a regular beeping sound. When I forced my eyelids open, what entered my vision was a ceiling of gridded tiles. The acrid smell of medicine, the kind you could only find in a hospital, soaked into my nasal passages.
Looks like I died again.
It had been like this last time too.
After crossing into another world, the place where I opened my eyes was always a clichéd hospital room.
When my mind had returned to its place somewhat, I struggled to raise my body.
There’s no one here...
From the floor to the walls to the ceiling, everything was covered in a feast of white. In a space that looked large enough to accommodate ten or more people, I was the only one there.
Ugh... My head hurts...
The headache came late, after all the accumulated stress. Since I had always been in a state of tension, it was only natural in a way.
Once the string of tension snapped loose, my body naturally began to ache as well.
Pushing aside the pure-white sheet, I grabbed the pole placed beside the bed.
“Nutrients...? Who went this far...?”
Liquid flowed from a transparent IV bag, down a long tube, and into the back of my hand. There were also countless wires extending out from between my patient clothes. They sent faint electrical signals, monitoring my vital signs on a screen.
I removed all the annoying electrode patches and grabbed the pole again, rising from my seat. Soon, both my legs trembled violently. After taking one or two steps, I reached my limit.
No... I can’t walk any farther.
I gave up quickly. My legs were one thing, but the moment I tried to use my muscles, the right arm bitten by the anomaly began hurting like crazy.
Just in case, I sat on the bed again and rolled up my sleeve.
“Fuck...”
Only a large scar remained where the anomaly had crushed it.
“Wait, then I’m not dead?”
I had thought I had died cleanly and reincarnated again. It made sense, because a hospital room and medicine of this scale shouldn’t have existed in that world. Normally, the city infrastructure itself had collapsed, so a properly functioning hospital shouldn’t exist.
I thought I had somehow escaped to another world...
But after seeing my arm, I knew for sure.
I wasn’t dead yet.
I had merely been saved by someone somehow, and was being kept alive.
But... by who?
I had been right on the verge of being eaten by an anomaly. As far as I knew, a mere human couldn’t defeat an anomaly... Like I said before, those things could even block bullets. No matter how much you hacked up their bodies, they regenerated and regenerated again. How did anyone save me from a monster like that...
Ugh... I don’t know. I feel like I heard something.
In the moment right before my consciousness cut off, someone’s voice.
It was blurry, but...
I’m sure they said something... but I couldn’t remember the details beyond that.
Letting out a deep sigh, I lowered my sleeve and covered the scar on my right arm.
If I wait, I’ll probably get an answer somehow.
There was nothing good about forcing myself to move right now.
For now, let’s be satisfied that I survived.
...
Once my thoughts were more or less sorted out, my narrowed field of vision naturally grew a little brighter. Only now did I notice the strong sense of foreignness.
This hospital room I was in, for one.
Objects made with cutting-edge technology I had never seen anywhere before. The heavy iron door and the machines in operation all looked like something out of a movie.
Even the flooring in the hospital room wasn’t ordinary rubber flooring. Antibacterial tiles, maybe? There were monitor devices everywhere, and I couldn’t understand what any of them were.
[Life-support device operating]
[Vital Core: No abnormalities]
[Current status: Electrode patches removed]
I thought I had finished investigating most things about this world, but were there actually more technologies I didn’t know about hidden somewhere?
Out of curiosity, I lightly touched the monitor.
Piiing—!
Flash—!
“Whoa!”
The moment it reacted to my fingerprint, a blue, translucent window appeared in my vision. I’m asking just in case, but is this what they call a hologram or something? No matter how I looked at it, the technology was so unreal that I was left speechless.
At some point, I had frozen, even forgetting to breathe. With a trembling hand, I placed my fingers on the translucent window.
Beep—!
[Rescanning biological vitals]
Name: Baek Seohan Gender: Male
Biological age: 24
Life Value (HP): 95%
Neural Stability: 89%
Heart Rate: 72 BPM
[Anomaly erosion phenomenon successfully defended against via nano regenerative particles.]
[The managed subject has left the recovery bed. Please lie down immediately.]
With a half-dazed expression, I stared blankly at the hologram. Amid the dense rows of incomprehensible text—
“Oh my, you’re awake. I was wondering why the signal suddenly cut off. How do you feel? Is your body all right?”
At that moment, along with warm breath tickling my ear, a heavy sensation pressed against my back. Startled, I turned around.
“Hiiik! Wh-Who are you...?”
“Ah, me?”
How long had she been there? A woman pulled up the white gown that had slipped below her shoulders. She deliberately swayed her bouncing breasts, then swept up the pink hair that had fallen over her forehead.
“My name is Seo Yura. I’m the owner of this shelter, and the benefactor who saved you... I suppose that’s how I should put it?”