Chapter 53: A Gentleman’s Perspective
Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations
Editor: PlumSauce
Carolyn stomped hard on the creature’s neck and fired a shot into each of its two legs. The monster shrieked in pain, thrashing violently. Just as Carolyn was about to shoot its tail, its arm folded backward unnaturally, like a dislocated joint, and it grabbed her ankle, pulling her down. The tail smacked the gun from her hand.
Left hand drawing the dagger from her belt, Carolyn slashed across the creature’s throat as it flipped over to pin her down.
“No — !” Liz screamed. She was halfway through preparing her spell, the array she was drawing still incomplete.
“You can’t—”
She never got the chance to finish. The creature’s throat split open, and it collapsed with a shudder. Its blood drenched Carolyn, and its body pinned her to the ground.
“We have authorization, don’t freak out,” Carolyn said calmly, lying there to catch her breath. “If we can bring it back, we will. If not, we kill it. That’s what headquarters wants. Relax.”
Liz held her forehead in anguish, unwilling to get closer. Not that she was afraid to get dirty. “Carolyn… you have to understand, that’s a Phantasmal Bug!”
A long tail trailed behind the dead creature, its pale skin stretched over a face with fly-like compound eyes and a siphoning mouthpart. Its humanlike head and limbs overlapped subtly with human features, falling squarely into the uncanny valley1 — like something straight out of a nightmare.
A Phantasmal Bug. They fed on human fat, sneaking out at night to pierce flesh with their proboscises. Some victims lost belly fat overnight; more died from overfeeding.
Even those who survived weren’t spared consequences. Like a mosquito bite leaving a welt, the worm’s punctures caused lasting side effects. Victims suffered hallucinations of unpredictable form and duration. Very few ever survived without side effects to live peacefully until old age.
“The blood of a Phantasmal Bug can cause infection… Oh my god!” Liz dialed quickly with one hand while pressing her other hand over her heart.
“What? No way!” Carolyn worked to push the corpse off. “I kept my mouth shut — I didn’t swallow any.”
“Your face is cut!” Liz said, holding the phone and stepping outside. They were in an abandoned factory district.
Carolyn freed herself, stood up, and felt no unusual symptoms. She picked up the gun and scanned the area; nothing seemed off.
But just as she was about to follow Liz, a wave of exhaustion hit her like a hammer. Everything in her hands dropped to the ground, and she staggered a few steps before collapsing into unconsciousness.
When she finally woke, Carolyn felt alert, refreshed, and completely normal.
She lay in the Association’s medical room, wearing loose pajamas. Sitting up, she stretched. As she raised her hands, the door opened. A young man in a black suit entered.
Her first thought: he looked strikingly like Lucian — Liz’s brother.
The next second, he lunged toward her in two long strides and hugged her without warning.
Carolyn went rigid, stunned. Then he placed a hand on her face. Goosebumps erupted across her back as she shoved him and kicked hard. He screamed as the kick landed squarely in his stomach, sending him sprawling to the floor.
Shouts erupted outside. Two young women rushed in — one with dirty blonde hair in a jacket and jeans, the other a black-haired woman dressed neatly like a department store manager. They helped the man to his feet. He grabbed his glasses, panic written across his face.
“Carolyn?” Objectively speaking, the man appeared graceful, but his behavior was wildly unsettling.
“Carolyn, are you okay?” the black-haired woman asked.
Carolyn felt a rising panic and tried to swing her legs off the bed, only to realize heart-rate monitors were stuck to her chest. She reached under her collar to peel them off — and froze.
Her chest… was gone.
Not just that, she looked down. Her arms were thicker, her hands larger — clearly male hands. She muttered a curse under her breath and realized her voice had dropped into a deep timbre.
The black-haired man edged closer, cautiously this time, not lunging.
“You don’t recognize us? My god, have you lost your memory?”
His next words caused Carolyn to nearly scream: “I’m Liz…Lizbeth Blackmoon!”
About half an hour later, Carolyn had kicked out the two women who called themselves “John” and “Coraci” and crawled under the covers, thoroughly inspecting her body…especially the lower half.
Then, boldly, Carolyn pinned down the man who called himself Liz, insisting on stripping him to see for herself.
After finding her answer, Carolyn sat dumbly on the bed, staring despairingly at the ceiling.
“What did you say?! You think I turned into a man?” Liz buttoned his shirt, staring at Carolyn in shock.
Carolyn looked “him” over from head to toe and nodded sadly.
In Carolyn’s eyes — and even in her sense of touch — Liz appeared as a young man in a black suit, his short hair combed meticulously. No wonder he looked so much like Lucian! Meanwhile, John and Coraci seemed to have become women, their hairstyles and outfits changed to something more feminine.
“You…you didn’t actually change, did you?” Carolyn questioned pitifully. She rarely spoke like that.
Liz nodded. No one had actually changed gender. Liz had been wearing a black suit that day — of course, it was women’s clothing, and her long hair was still neatly coiled into a bun behind her head. Coraci and John looked the same as always; no one was wearing low-cut T-shirts or high heels. Only Carolyn’s mind insisted that everyone’s gender had flipped.
“What am I doing right now?” Carolyn asked, placing her hand on her chest.
“…Touching yourself.” Liz frowned.
“What about like this?” Carolyn crossed her legs and went straight for a more intimate spot.
“You’re touching the sheet between your legs… Oh my god, what kind of hallucination is this? Trust me, there’s nothing there!”
But to Carolyn, it felt completely real. She found a mirror and studied her reflection: a young blond man with slightly long hair — shorter than what she had before — messily falling around his neck, an expression of pure impatience, looking every bit like a lazy, delinquent teen.
“Liz, I have to say…you’re more handsome than me as a man,” Carolyn admitted weakly, setting the mirror down.
“I’ve always been more handsome than you,” Liz said unfeelingly. When Carolyn shot her a protesting glance, she deliberately rubbed her stomach, reminding Carolyn of the kick she had just received.
They opened the door to let John and Coraci in and explained Carolyn’s problem. John had wanted to laugh the whole time but held back out of a little fear of Carolyn.
Coraci mulled over the problem for a while, then suggested Carolyn try touching his “chest” — at least, the chest she saw in her hallucination.
“How embarrassing,” Carolyn muttered, but didn’t hesitate. She could clearly feel herself reach out her hand — a man’s hand, with distinct knuckles — and pinching Coraci’s…chest.
Coraci and John exchanged a glance.
To everyone else, Carolyn hadn’t touched anything; she had only stretched out her hand toward Coraci’s chest and made a pinching motion.
Next, they took Carolyn to meet the rest of the Association. Despair struck her — almost everyone had changed.
The receptionist, Erica, had become a short man with a delicate, almost effeminate face, wearing a white suit and a pink shirt; Instructor Jere had turned into a stern middle-aged woman, reminding Carolyn of her old history teacher, complete with brown socks; the Witch Blood Descendant, once a man, now appeared as a strikingly sexy woman, her body like something from an adult magazine; the mortal-born demon Lathander had changed the most — he appeared female and wore only a bikini in Carolyn’s vision.
“What were you wearing before?” Carolyn asked.
“Black leather, with chains on my pants…” Lathander touched the studs on his jacket, but to Carolyn, he seemed to be adjusting the straps of his bikini.
Experiments confirmed that Carolyn’s hallucinations went far beyond simple gender reversal.
She couldn’t find the building’s elevators, and firearms appeared to her as flowers, vegetables, or frozen tuna. Some takeout food looked unchanged, while other items appeared as pebbles, business card holders, or dead sparrows. Pens looked like pencils, asphalt streets looked like cobblestones, and traffic lights were impossible to interpret.
Carolyn’s world was in utter chaos, with some parts following no discernible pattern.
There were many cases of hallucinations caused by the Phantasmal Bug, and each patient experienced them differently. Some could no longer recognize food or see obvious dangers, eventually either losing their sanity or falling victim to the illusions.
The Association scrambled to research, make calls, and find a way to break the hallucinations. They even called Smith, who changed his appearance four or five times on the spot, each transformation different from what Carolyn actually saw.
Next came the camera experiments. In photos, people appeared with reversed genders, their clothing adjusted accordingly, and even the backgrounds changed subtly. Then came the artwork experiments: in Carolyn’s eyes, The Birth of Venus became “Batman surfing while holding a white dog,” and the poster for Black Swan looked like “Jack Frost eating pizza.”
“This is ridiculous…” John said, trying so hard not to laugh that his face ached. “Even more ridiculous than us turning into women!”
“You’re laughing?” Carolyn asked, glancing at the woman with the dirty blonde hair.
“I’m not,” John insisted. “It’s just…your hallucination.”
During the next few days, as everyone searched for a cure, Carolyn lived every moment in a constant state of disorientation.
When Liz brought her home, Carolyn saw Mariana “transformed” into a boy, with long, catlike ears and a tail, a slender body clad in nothing but underwear — like a scene straight out of an adult film. In reality, Mariana was wearing a camisole nightgown, skillfully cooking corn chowder.
The hallucinations felt utterly real to Carolyn. Even the smallest routines had to be altered; bathing had become a surreal ordeal. Her room seemed different too, and to prevent her from kicking over objects on the floor, Liz and Mariana had to help her onto the bed as if she were an elderly person.
“I can’t even watch movies anymore… Everything turns into nonsense…” Carolyn said, covering herself with a blanket. In her ears, her own voice sounded male, and she still hadn’t adjusted to it.
Meanwhile, Coraci leaned against the couch cushion, a laptop on his lap. John sat opposite, holding a stack of printed research.
“Dragon-breath roasted porcini powder…” John drew out the words. “What is this even supposed to be?”
Coraci kept his eyes on the screen, typing as he spoke. “Don’t worry about that. Many spell ingredients can now be replaced with equivalent chemical compounds. We don’t need to actually find a dragon.”
“And what about ‘juniper gin mixed with bat ashes’?”
“Unfortunately, that one can’t be substituted. We have to prepare it for her to ingest.”
“Just hearing that is disgusting… She really has it rough,” John said, marking the unprepared materials one by one with a pen.
A new email popped up in the corner of Coraci’s screen — from Lucian.
“The results from last time are in. Thank you for your cooperation. I must keep confidential the parts relevant to my research. At present, you show no lingering effects from the spellwork, though details still need further review. Next, we may conduct memory detection and attribute stress tests, which could be painful. If you are willing to continue, we will discuss the details in person.”
Coraci allowed a faint smile before immediately masking it. He thought that this phrasing was just like a dentist’s. If a dentist says “no pain,” that usually means it will hurt a bit; if they say “it will hurt a little, but it’ll be over quickly,” you should be ready for pain that makes your legs go weak.
Author’s Note:
This section is basically a “We’re here for you — don’t give up on treatment” story… The previously mentioned black-robed bloodkin is expected to appear later…
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