The Protagonist's Party is Too Diligent

The Protagonist’s Party is Too Diligent

if Side Story

For some 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 mean, 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 someone like that, it’s only natural I was at an overwhelming disadvantage.

“......”

I stared blankly at the ceiling of my one-room apartment—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 mean, come 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 game 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 mental 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. Same with my body.

Ah, right. The gryphon’s magic had fully healed me.

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. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

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 came out.

I tried to light the stove, but all I got was tick tick tick tick—a spark, but no flame.

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 home.

That meant I needed to figure out exactly when I came 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.

Same with the one power bank I had.

How do they even calculate the late fees on utilities? Wait—wasn’t there some kind of procedure when signs of human life suddenly disappear from a home?

“......”

The more I sat and thought, the more my mind kept drifting.

“First, I gotta ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) deal with something.”

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 home. 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 something 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 me.

Inside the desk drawer was my wallet, just as I had left it—but the ID card inside bore my current face.

If someone 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 mean she could be passed off as East Asian. Not even close.

On top of that, the name 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 name 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 names unchanged, so maybe a name 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 become 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 apartment in an old building with no elevator.

And the clothes I had on when I returned to this world were the same torn and ragged ones I’d been rolling around in just before.

That wasn’t something you could easily fake. There was even a hole in my abdomen, 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-payment. 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—some kind of gesture of consideration.

I’d never had a conversation with her, but thinking about it now, maybe it was part of some 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 me 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 time had passed, compared to when I was last here, it seemed only about a year had gone by—so almost everything was exactly as I remembered.

Still, even if it was just as I remembered, doing things I hadn’t done in a long time didn’t come 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—same thing.

And saying my “Korean name” 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 become, and how many foreigners lived here now, the percentage of “different races” was still low.

On top of that, if someone 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 me 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 payments, the sidelong glances kept coming.

......Let’s just go home 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 me 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 home, I put the groceries in the cupboard. I was just pulling out cleaning supplies to sweep away the dust in the apartment when—

Bang!

“Eek!?”

Something exploded mid-air, and I screamed without thinking.

At the same time, two objects fell toward me from that burst in the air.

One was a shining golden blur, the other a glistening blue figure—both around the same size as me.

“Unnie!?”

“Sylvia!”

And the two bodies that tackled me to the ground shouted like that.

......What the hell is happening now.