Renya’s first ever dungeon excursion had included an unexpected encounter with a demon that had quickly devolved into a battle. Though he somehow managed to defeat the demon and survive, dealing with the fallout kept him occupied for a good while. Finally, after all the dust had settled and a semblance of normalcy had returned to his life, this next story began.
How? How did this happen?
That question was the first thing to leap into Renya’s mind. His breaths came in faster and faster gasps. He slapped one hand over his mouth in an effort to calm his own breathing. His chest tightened, and his heart leapt to his throat. In a panic, his other hand clutched at his chest, where it felt not the comfortable firmness of a slab of muscle, but the curious softness of something entirely unknown.
Well, not entirely unknown. Technically, he knew this feeling. Except it existed within the bosoms of women. And Renya was undoubtedly a man.
Nevertheless, one morning, when he had woken up in his room at the inn, something about his body felt strange. He had sat up on his bed and, his head still heavy with sleep, touched his own chest. There, he had discovered two generous bulges.
The sleepiness vanished in an instant.
His hand shot down past his lower abdomen.
This time, nothing was there. Something should have been, but it was gone.
Reeling from these two new realities, Renya’s nerves quickly began to get the better of him. His breaths were coming in gasps. His heart had leapt to his throat. He pressed his hands to his mouth and chest, trying to halt his descent into utter panic, and willed himself to calm down. It didn’t help him to make sense of any of this, but in a display of what was almost autohypnosis, his breathing slowed and the pounding in his chest waned.
“What… What the hell is going on?”
The soft whisper that escaped his lips, higher-pitched than what he was used to, would easily have passed for a husky female voice. It sent him into another bout of panic, followed by more autohypnosis. After an extensive session of reassuring himself, he managed to avert a nervous breakdown. Deciding that he couldn’t afford another descent into madness, he tried to sort out the mess of thoughts in his head and get a grasp on the situation.
Up until he went to bed and closed his eyes last night, Renya was definitely male. The memory was fresh in his mind, so he was certain that he wasn’t dealing with a “turns out, I’ve actually been a woman all this time” situation. He considered the possibility that his gender was somehow switched when he was sleeping, but he soon dismissed the thought. Someone would have to have opened the door, entered his room, and done something to him. There was no way he could have slept through all that, especially when they had to tinker with his gender; he wasn’t sleeping that heavily. In that case, it was natural to assume the cause lay in something that had happened before he got into bed last night. A sequential review of his memories of the previous day, however, produced no particular events that stood out.
He then contemplated another possibility: was this some sort of side effect of crossing a world boundary? Some Wanderer-specific syndrome? But if so, then that self-proclaimed God would have told him about it before sending him here. She wouldn’t forget something like that.
…She’d better not have, or there was going to be some epic deity abuse when he saw her again. Not if — when.
With that said, it still seemed very unlikely. She was the one who had asked him to come here. You don’t ask someone for a favor and then forget to mention the possibility that his freaking gender might change. The problem was that ruling her out meant he was back to square one; he was no closer to figuring out what caused this.
“Renya, are you in there?”
As though fulfilling the age-old adage, “when it rains, it pours,” Shion’s voice sounded at the door, further stressing his already-frayed nerves. He hadn’t even gotten his own thoughts in order; he did not need more on his plate right now.
For a short instant, Renya considered pretending he wasn’t there, but soon reconsidered. A vagrant soul in an alien land, he had no other friends to speak of and no family to see. It would be absurd for him to leave his room without letting Shion and Rona know. If he gave them the impression that he had disappeared, not only would it cause a lot of commotion, he’d also have a hard time convincing anyone afterwards that he actually was Renya. So, he got off the bed and opened the door.
“Oh, Renya, I almost thought you weren’t there,” Shion said as she made to enter his room. “It’s almost time for breakfast. Do you want to go… toge… ther…”
Her voice faltered. Speechless, she stared at Renya with the wide eyes of one who had just seen a ghost. Shock, horror, and disbelief vied for dominance in her expression. With the awkwardly stiff motions of a rusty machine, she slowly looked from his face to his chest, and finally down at his feet. Then, she did the same in reverse, except this time at half the speed. After thoroughly ogling him, she opened her mouth.
Was she going to scream? Or demand to know who he was? Either way, she was about to cause a scene. He lowered his head and sighed. What Shion said next, however, took him completely by surprise.
“Big Sis…”
“Wha—?”
“I-I mean, um… What a beauty! Wait, no, that’s not… it’s just, they’re so big, and…”
“Huuh? Okay, how about you calm down first? Come on, deep breaths.”
Shion’s face grew redder and redder as she nervously fluttered her hands up and down. Seeing that she was on track to have a nervous breakdown right in the middle of the hallway, he placed his palm on her left shoulder and gave her a reassuring squeeze. Pacified by the warmth of his hand, Shion’s erratic movements waned and her eyes refocused themselves on his face.
Finally. Geez, if anyone should be having a nervous breakdown right now, it’s me.
His calming gesture, however, had the concurrent effect of eliciting a breath of awe from her, who was gazing at him with starry eyes.
“Big Sis…”
“…All right, Shion. Time for you to snap out of it,” he said as he firmly wedged her head between his fists. Then, he began to grind at her temples with his knuckles. Immediately, his victim yelped in pain.
Shion’s cry soon brought an alarmed Rona dashing toward them, but before she could aid her abused friend, she took one look at the scene and froze.