The Protagonist’s Party is Too Diligent
if Side Story
For so reason... I ended up back on Earth.
*
Now that I think about it, maybe going against the goddess was a bit of a mistake.
Yeah. I an, wasn’t she literally a “goddess”? The kind of being with enough power to drag my soul into another world entirely and stick it into a body she created?
Considering I picked a fight with soone like that, it’s only natural I was at an overwhelming disadvantage.
“......”
I stared blankly at the ceiling of my one-room apartnt—not exactly an unfamiliar sight—and thought through it again, then tilted my head.
No, wait.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to believe that everything that happened until now was just a dream?
I an, co on. I wake up and I’m a woman, and the world I woke up in wasn’t even reality but another world. A world from a ga series I liked, no less.
No matter how I think about it, it makes way more sense to just chalk it up to a pleasant dream.
That’s probably better for my ntal health anyway.
Thinking that everything I did there never happened, that all the bonds I made just vanished into nothing—those thoughts were way heavier.
It’d be better to believe it was just a long, beautiful, unforgettable dream.
......The only problem is, the dream was so long that now I have no clue what I’m supposed to do starting tomorrow.
What was I doing before I went to sleep?
Ah, maybe I should just fall asleep again like this.
I felt an odd emptiness creeping in and almost closed my eyes again—but in the end, I sat up. I wasn’t dead, so I figured I should get a grip and deal with reality.
I still had to survive, after all.
Staggering to my feet, I headed for the bathroom. First priority: check what state I was in—
—And then I saw my reflection, still wearing the torn-up uniform of the Royal Rondarium Academy.
The clothes I had on were ragged, and my face was smudged with dirt and who knows what else—but there weren’t any wounds. Sa with my body.
Ah, right. The gryphon’s magic had fully healed .
I touched the face in the mirror with my fingertips, then checked my body too.
It didn’t feel like a hallucination. The body I saw in the mirror matched the sensations under my hands perfectly.
I... had returned to my original world.
With my changed body still intact.
“......”
Was I supposed to be happy about this?
*
And soon enough, I discovered a few issues.
I turned on the faucet, but no water ca out.
I tried to light the stove, but all I got was tick tick tick tick—a spark, but no fla.
It wasn’t just the gas stove. The lights wouldn’t turn on either. I tried the switch, but the power must’ve been out for ages.
I sat down on the dusty floor and thought.
I’m fucked.
The last place I lived in was a jeonse rental. Even if I hadn’t been found dead, once the contract ended, it would no longer be considered my ho.
That ant I needed to figure out exactly when I ca back. But obviously, if the electricity and gas had been shut off, the internet and phone bills were definitely cut off too.
And how is it that there’s not a single clock in this damn place? Then again, it makes sense. In modern life, if you have a smartphone, you don’t really need a clock.
The problem was, that smartphone had long since died, battery completely drained.
Sa with the one power bank I had.
How do they even calculate the late fees on utilities? Wait—wasn’t there so kind of procedure when signs of human life suddenly disappear from a ho?
“......”
The more I sat and thought, the more my mind kept drifting.
“First, I gotta ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) deal with sothing.”
Muttering to myself, I stood up.
Yeah. Now that I was back in this world, I needed to sort things out. I was alive, so I had to keep living.
First things first—figure out the overdue utility bills.
At least I still had clothes at ho. They probably wouldn’t fit right on this body, but if I cinched the waist tightly enough, they shouldn’t fall off.
If it really didn’t work, I could just go out and buy sothing new right away.
With that in mind, I opened the desk drawer and started rummaging through it.
*
How strange.
Surprisingly, in this world, I was still .
Inside the desk drawer was my wallet, just as I had left it—but the ID card inside bore my current face.
If soone had changed my records, then that was one hell of a bold move. Sylvia Fangryphon’s face was obviously European. Just because her hair and eyes were black didn’t an she could be passed off as East Asian. Not even close.
On top of that, the na written on the Republic of Korea ID in my wallet was none other than Fangryphon Sylvia. That’s right. As ridiculous as it was, the na I had used in the other world had been carried over exactly as it was.
This translation is the intellectual property of Novelight.
Thinking about it, there are foreigners who naturalize in Korea and keep their nas unchanged, so maybe a na like this wasn’t completely impossible.
Even the date of birth had changed. After doing the math, it turned out I had just passed my 18th birthday—barely a legal adult.
So had I beco this world’s Sylvia Fangryphon?
That didn’t seem quite right either. Once again, this room was the very rental I had lived in before. A fifth-floor apartnt in an old building with no elevator.
And the clothes I had on when I returned to this world were the sa torn and ragged ones I’d been rolling around in just before.
That wasn’t sothing you could easily fake. There was even a hole in my abdon, in the exact spot where I’d been wounded—and the dark, dried blood hadn’t washed away, still faintly staining the fabric.
Well, fine.
So that’s how you want to play it.
Even if it’s a cliché to save the world and then return to your original one, I didn’t particularly want to follow that script. Sure, I had friends in this world, but I didn’t want to abandon everything I’d built in that one either.
Even if I had to crawl through filth, I’d make my way back.
First, I had to deal with the utilities.
*
Surprisingly, there were no overdue taxes or anything like that.
Now that I thought about it, most of my utilities were set to auto-paynt. Even if I’d vanished from this world, the money would have kept coming out of my account.
So why were the gas and electricity shut off? Maybe it was the goddess’s doing—so kind of gesture of consideration.
I’d never had a conversation with her, but thinking about it now, maybe it was part of so kind of “order” she maintained.
“Phew.”
The fact that my financial situation wasn’t as dire as I’d feared, and that I could remain in this world without any major issues—those were enough to make let out a sigh of relief.
Returning to Korea after a few years felt both familiar and unfamiliar. I’d lived here for so long, and while I didn’t know how much ti had passed, compared to when I was last here, it seed only about a year had gone by—so almost everything was exactly as I rembered.
Still, even if it was just as I rembered, doing things I hadn’t done in a long ti didn’t co naturally.
Standing and waiting at a crosswalk felt a little awkward. So did using an ATM. Entering my PIN on the touchscreen and withdrawing cash felt just as odd. And taking that cash to a phone store to reactivate my phone—sa thing.
And saying my “Korean na” was Fangryphon Sylvia during that process... that was seriously embarrassing.
Even going to a PC room, paying for a seat, and sitting down felt strange.
......And more than anything, the stares I got along the way were incredibly uncomfortable.
I’d gotten looks in the other world too. But not this kind of look. Over there, I was “one of them.”
No matter how globalized Korea had beco, and how many foreigners lived here now, the percentage of “different races” was still low.
On top of that, if soone was ridiculously beautiful and spoke fluent Korean, of course they’d stand out. Honestly, even without being a different race, my appearance alone was enough to draw attention. In Azerna, the kids around were all so gorgeous that my looks didn’t stand out on their own.
Even while I sat in the PC room charging my phone and using websites to resolve utility paynts, the sidelong glances kept coming.
......Let’s just go ho already.
I wrapped things up as fast as I could.
Even when I left the PC room and went to the supermarket—while buying daily groceries and checking out—those stares stuck to like glue.
Maybe it was because I was pretty, or maybe it was just curiosity at a foreigner speaking fluent Korean. Probably both.
After returning ho, I put the groceries in the cupboard. I was just pulling out cleaning supplies to sweep away the dust in the apartnt when—
Bang!
“Eek!?”
Sothing exploded mid-air, and I scread without thinking.
At the sa ti, two objects fell toward from that burst in the air.
One was a shining golden blur, the other a glistening blue figure—both around the sa size as .
“Unnie!?”
“Sylvia!”
And the two bodies that tackled to the ground shouted like that.
......What the hell is happening now.
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