"Guh... ugh, ugh ugh... I'm so sleepy...
How, how long have I been out..."
Darkness, everywhere.
The mumble came from Chen Lin, surfacing out of a sleep that had left him boneless.
He lay there a while longer before he stretched out his left hand and groped lazily around the edge of the bed.
"Where's my phone? It was right by the headboard, wasn't it?
What the meow, when did this bed get so hard? Hard as a rock, it's digging into me, and it's freezing..."
In that instant a good deal of the fog cleared out of Chen Lin's head.
Something... wasn't right here.
Hadn't he been in his dorm, reading a novel until he was too sleepy to keep his eyes open, and then dropped off?
Chen Lin shot upright — and only then discovered he wasn't on the top bunk of his dorm bed at all. His feet were already flat on a cold, cold floor.
Wh-where was this? He didn't know this place.
Had he been kidnapped?
"Wh-wh-wh-wh-what... huh?"
Chen Lin had only just started to yelp when the yelp broke off into a startled little huh.
Why had his voice turned so soft and sweet? It brimmed with girl.
That was his voice?
In the pitch dark, Chen Lin slowly raised both hands and gave an exploratory squeeze.
He came away holding two firm, full, mysterious objects!
"Nnh—!"
Chen Lin had never handled anything of the sort and had no sense of how hard was too hard. He successfully squeezed a cry out of himself — and the cry came out unbearably pitiful and pretty!
Chen Lin locked down a face he suspected had gone red, and turned serious.
Judging by the sensation the body reported back... those two soft things belonged to him... and judging further by the change in his voice, Chen Lin arrived at a solemn conclusion.
He appeared to have been gender-swapped.
But what was this place?
"Hss... my head hurts..."
The moment Chen Lin tried to think, a mass of tangled images and scenes surged up in his mind.
Assembled, those scenes looked for all the world like a whole life someone had actually lived!
While Chen Lin was still mumbling through the headache, a thread of light opened up ahead of him.
He thought for a second that some holy radiance was splitting the darkness.
Then he looked properly, and it was only a curtain being drawn back.
A grey-green creature, so hideous it might as well have been a goblin, stood behind the curtain and poked its head in for a look around.
"Lady Komachi, is something the matter?"
"Mm...? N-nothing."
Chen Lin used that voice — even he thought it sounded good — and feigned indifference. "Draw this blackout curtain all the way open. Then get out."
"B-but, but."
The goblin scratched its head and spoke in a quavering voice. "But, Lady Komachi, isn't it nearly time for the joint council?"
Joint council? What was that?
Chen Lin's mind was a fog. He had no idea how to answer.
He hesitated a beat or two, then stood up and forced the severity back into his voice, pitching it as a question.
"Mmm—?"
"Ah, ah! I'm sorry! Lady Komachi! I'll open the curtain for you right now and wait outside!"
The goblin hurriedly threw the curtain wide, turned, and left to wait outside.
Morning light flooded the room!
Only now could Chen Lin see clearly: the place he lived in was a cave hollowed out of a mountain.
A crude stone bed. An exquisite full-length mirror. Furniture that was practical and very expensive. Some alchemical apparatus...
Huh?
Something was off, Chen Lin thought. How did he know what that alchemical apparatus was?
The instant that registered, Chen Lin felt every broken image and scene in his head lock together into one complete set of memories.
"I... I'll be damned...!"
Chen Lin had transmigrated!
And the place he'd transmigrated into was the novel he'd been reading before bed!
"What was this novel called again? Guh, I can't remember. I'd only just started it. I just thought there were fewer and fewer novels where the protagonist is a local, so it seemed interesting..."
Chen Lin dredged up everything he knew about the book.
The male lead was called Casper Valentine, a boy with short black hair and one streak dyed white, sunny and cheerful and answering to nobody, which left him a natural airhead to the point of being a little sadistic...
Then the heroine... no idea about the heroine. Chen Lin probably hadn't gotten one percent into the book... But presumably he'd end up collecting all of them; it was a harem novel, after all...
So what point in the plot was this?
The most recent development Chen Lin had read was the male lead and two probable heroines wiping out a squad from the Calamity Plague High Priest's camp.
"Oh, right, I remember there was a zako villainess in that squad. Real sultry piece of work...
And Casper, for a harem-novel male lead, cut the zako girl down clean without a second thought, which honestly surprised me...
What was that character called again... mm... Komachi Yua, I think..."
Huh?
That goblin just now — hadn't it called him Lady Komachi?
Chen Lin hurried over to the full-length mirror.
About one meter sixty. Cherry-pink hair down to the waist. Emerald eyes. Cheeks with a trace of baby fat that made the face look soft and fragile. And a figure so full it jutted, high and ripe and inviting.
Over it all hung an alchemist's robe of no discernible purpose, cut away in so many places that the draught went straight through it, the upper chest left open entirely to bare a broad stretch of snow-white cleavage and shoulders white flushed through with pink.
So cute...!
"Whoaaaaaaa!"
Chen Lin stared, dumbstruck, and couldn't hold the cry in.
A second later Chen Lin came back to himself and patted his own reddened cheeks. "N-no! Wrong! I need to get the situation straight first!"
Komachi Yua's background and standing might look impressive, but the fact was she was a zako the protagonist Casper had swatted aside without breaking stride!
And this moment, right now, was just before her squad's departure council!
"What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?"
By this point Chen Lin had already accepted that he was Komachi Yua.
Since that was the reality, the thing to do was see whether there was any way to stay alive!
Komachi Yua paced circles around the room carved into the mountain!
"Should I run...? No, that doesn't feel like it'd work..."
The Calamity Plague High Priest, the Corruption Plague High Priest and the Depravity Plague High Priest all served under the Plague Horseman, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The Four Horsemen and the High Priests beneath them worked ceaselessly across the whole world, laying the groundwork for the doomsday drawing steadily closer.
And Komachi Yua was the "Left Hand" of the previous Calamity Plague High Priest, Morag, possessed of formidable authority and power.
But from the moment her superior Morag became the previous holder of that office, the Plague Horseman had moved the authority elsewhere, transferring every scrap of granted power to the new Calamity Plague High Priest and his people.
Which turned Morag, his "Left Hand" Komachi Yua and his "Right Hand" Hino Yosuke from arch-villains whose names emptied rooms into holders of rank with nothing behind it — strays by the roadside.
Which was exactly how the protagonist's party, still in its beginner phase, could one-shot them at will.
But a villain was a villain, and a villain who had lost both power and favor most of all. Running would only get her hunted by the righteous and the wicked at the same time!
Just then the goblin outside the door seemed to have received word, and prompted her, very cautiously.
"Lady Komachi? The warriors are ready. They're only waiting for you to come out and give the order."
Komachi Yua jolted hard with fright.
The goblin's voice really was piercing. Having it bark something at you out of nowhere was rather frightening...
She drew a small breath, then answered in a cold, haughty voice, the voice the memories said was correct. "I heard you."
Walking step by step toward the door, Komachi Yua couldn't help puffing out her cheeks a little.
Had an outsider been present, they would absolutely have found it adorable.
Komachi Yua herself gave that side of it no thought at all, because she still hadn't worked out what to do next!
"Guh guh guh... I'll just have to take it one step at a time!"
TL Note: Zako — Japanese gamer slang for the weak mob enemies you clear without thinking; here it is both an insult and Komachi Yua's own honest assessment of her odds.