Chapter 2 :

Chapter 2 — The Axis of Evil (1)

 

At first, I thought there was some kind of crow model sitting there, so I rubbed my eyes several times.

 

But the thing was still tilting its head, its black eyes gleaming.

 

My vision was clear, and it was still vivid.

 

Once it became certain that there was nothing wrong with my eyes—and that thing was not a model—I had no choice but to raise myself from the soft bed and look around.

 

Though the passage of time could be felt, what entered my eyes was a luxurious room that looked even larger than my house.

 

“……Where am I?”

 

“Caw!”

 

The crow cried, as if answering my mutter.

 

What the hell was this thing, staying still even though a human had been yelling since a while ago?

 

Half because I felt that crow was strange, and half because I first needed to check where this place was through the window, I got out of bed and approached the window.

 

Though I soon had to stop at the unfamiliar face faintly reflected in the window.

 

“....Huh?”

 

A dumbfounded voice, unlike me, came out.

 

A face with upturned eyes that made it look a little fierce, and a slightly youthful face somewhere between a boy and an adult.

 

Was he around twenty?

 

Unfortunately, I had not become younger.

 

Because, aside from black hair and black eyes, it was simply the face of a complete stranger.

 

It was a strangely familiar face, but it was definitely not the face I saw in the bathroom every morning.

 

Nor was it my face when I was younger.

 

I fumbled over the face reflected in the window.

 

My hands moved according to my will, and my facial muscles also moved as I controlled them.

 

It was undoubtedly my body, and yet the sense of discrepancy from seeing another person’s face move left me dumbfounded.

 

In the end, the conclusion I reached was—

 

“......Should I faint?”

 

But,

 

“...Caw?”

 

Thanks to the crow crying behind the window where my face was reflected, as if answering my mutter, my strength drained away and I could not put it into practice.

 

I stared at the thing, dumbfounded that it had broken the serious atmosphere.

 

“Caaaw!! Caaaw!!!”

 

Letting out cries that were hard to distinguish from someone scraping cotton, the thing now even flapped its wings a little, as if it were excited about something.

 

“Do you understand what I’m saying or something?”

 

“Caw!!!”

 

It was even faithfully giving something resembling an answer.

 

To think I was in an unfamiliar kid’s body, communicating with a crow.

 

If something that could never happen in reality was happening, there was only one answer.

 

“It’s a damn dream.”

 

Tap! Tap!

 

At my hollow mutter, the thing answered again by tapping on the window.

 

Since it clearly meant it wanted me to open it, its will to come inside also seemed certain.

 

Even so, I had no intention of opening the window.

 

Even if this was a dream, I did not want to see that kind of total chaos.

 

Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tatak!

 

But when it seemed I would not open it, the thing began striking the window even more fiercely.

 

It was not just a funny crow, but a crow with a nasty temper.

 

Rattle. Rattle.

 

If it had simply been noisy, I might have ignored it, but when the window frame, which plainly bore the passage of time, began shaking in time with the thing’s pecks, I had no choice but to raise my hands in surrender.

 

“Shh! Damn it, fine, so stop.”

 

Even though this was a dream, my petty commoner side, unable to watch an expensive-looking structure get damaged, sprang out, and I had no choice but to open the window.

 

The thing flew into the room as if it had been waiting.

 

Then it naturally perched on my shoulder and rubbed its head against me.

 

“Are you the bird the owner of this room raised?”

 

For that to be true, there was no birdcage or any sign of an animal having been kept anywhere in the room.

 

For now, it did not seem right to let a winged beast into an expensive-looking room, so to release the now-quiet thing outside again, I put the arm it was perched on out the window.

 

The thing did not seem afraid of my hand trying to shake it off my shoulder, and merely looked at me quietly.

 

Knock, knock.

 

“Cawk?!”

 

The hand I had stretched out to lightly shake it off startled at the knocking sound, and in that instant, I ended up grabbing the thing by the neck.

 

The bird panicked and struggled, and I was startled along with it, so I hurriedly let it go.

 

I did not know for sure, but it seemed certain that the thing was cursing me with its eyes.

 

“Uh…I didn’t mean to.”

 

I offered an apology as calmly as possible to the flustered thing, but the crow stared at me with eyes full of betrayal before flying far away.

 

“Ugh.”

 

Before my guilt toward the thing could fade, what came next was a faint pain transmitted through my fingers.

 

Blood was flowing from a wound caused by the struggles of that poor bird a moment ago.

 

The problem was,

 

“Why does this hurt?”

 

The pain, which should not be felt in a dream, was far too distinct.

 

* * *

 

Knock, knock, knock.

 

Before the confusion could even subside, the continuing knocks began pressing down on me this time.

 

In this sudden situation, it was difficult to make a rational judgment.

 

Why does this hurt?

 

Was I even a person with this much imagination in the first place?

 

That absolutely could not be it.

 

Suddenly, an ominous thought that perhaps all of this might be reality flashed through my mind.

 

The sense of reality that had been faint until then gripped me fiercely.

 

* * *

 

This is seriously a huge problem, isn’t it?

 

I am currently inside the body of someone I do not know. And now I am about to show that state in front of another person.

 

But should I just tell them honestly?

 

Would they even believe me?

 

If it were me, I would think the person was sick in the head.

 

I had no certainty that the other party would not think the same.

 

Moreover, although the body I had entered was quite tall, judging by the face, it looked like a child who might not even be an adult.

 

It would be fortunate if they at least accepted it as the lie of an adolescent boy wanting an adult’s attention.

 

What would I do if they immediately suggested outpatient psychiatric treatment—or even hospitalization—without hesitation?

 

When I gave no answer, the one who had knocked on the door revealed his identity.

 

“Your Highness. It is Sein.”

 

He sounded like a young man.

 

But Your Highness?

 

Was that meant for me?

 

Was I really, literally, an imperial prince?

 

If not, then his parents had an incredible naming sense.

 

Even while I was thinking this, the other party continued speaking, as if refusing to give me time to agonize.

 

“Excuse me.”

 

Then I heard the sound of his hand touching the door.

 

Since I had not expected him to come in like that when I had not even answered yet, I had to make my head spin at full speed.

 

Right, first I should pretend to be the owner of this body and buy time.

 

That would be better than immediately saying that I was not this boy, but a twenty-eight-year-old office worker from some faraway place.

 

Having reached that conclusion, I leaned against the window in the most natural pose I could manage, with the feelings of a prisoner awaiting a death sentence.

 

A cool wind blew in from outside the window and dried a little of my cold sweat.

 

At this moment, I almost became envious of the crow that had escaped this complicated situation by flying away.

 

Damn it, I wish I could fly away like that bird from earlier.

 

It was just a silly thought.

 

Like briefly wishing, “Ah, I wish I had teleportation”, inside a packed subway, it was not some sincere wish, but merely a private complaint.

 

It was at that moment.

 

Suddenly, heat rose from deep within my stomach.

 

That was…that was, in other words, a sensation I had never felt once in my twenty-eight years of life. It felt as if heat starting from my dantian was wrapping around my entire body in the form of warm slime.

 

It was the kind of feeling that made me briefly lose my mind, wondering if this was what it felt like to become a fetus inside my mother’s womb.

 

But it disappeared so quickly that it felt empty.

 

As if it had merely been my imagination.

 

What was that just now?

 

Click.

 

While I was bewildered by that instant of sensation that had felt like eternity, I came back to my senses at the sound of the doorknob turning.

 

Right, first I have to do something about that person.

 

The door opened, and a tall man strode inside.

 

I prepared my heart to begin acting with everything I had.

 

The owner of this body did not look like he had a very pleasant impression, so I matched that and stood there with my brow furrowed.

 

“My goodness.....”

 

Contrary to my expectations, it was clear he must have been a person with a gentle nature who never lost his smile.

 

Otherwise, there was no way the face of the person who entered could look that horrified.

 

The man’s face crumpled violently.

 

“What is this?”

 

It was a reaction that seemed to indicate he had noticed something was strange about me.

 

At the man’s voice, which even contained anger, I immediately changed my stance and relaxed my expression to explain, then opened my mouth.

 

In as calm a voice as possible.

 

—I am not a strange person.

 

“Caw! Ca...aw?”

 

But what traveled up my vocal cords was not a human voice, but the sound of a crow.

 

Startled, I opened my mouth once more.

 

—No, I’m not the kind of person who suddenly makes crow noises at someone I’ve just met.

 

“Caaaw!! Caaaw!!”

 

But what came out was still the sound of a crow, so it had no persuasiveness.

 

“To think the room has been managed this disgracefully......”

 

The man, frowning as he muttered, approached me.

 

“Shoo! Get out!”

 

I had thought he was big, but once he approached, he was not just big—he was truly enormous.

 

Ah, no.

 

It was not that the man was enormous.

 

Only then did I realize that I had become small.

 

He swung his arms this way and that to chase me out, and while sitting on the window frame, I flapped my arms in confusion and flew once around the room.

 

Before I could even be shocked by the fact that I was flying, I had to escape out the window to avoid the man, who was now rolling up a piece of paper and aiming at me.

 

My appearance, briefly reflected in the window before I left, was—

 

“Caaaw!!!”

 

Nothing other than a crow.

 

* * *

 

This concludes the record of the humiliating yet useful experience from the first day of possession that no one else would ever know.

 

The reason I called it useful was because, thanks to it, I came to understand the situation I was in.

 

That day, I became a crow and had to drag my bewildering body around, flying through the area until night.

 

Thanks to that, I overheard the conversations of the soldiers guarding the imperial castle’s surroundings, and I rose high into the air to confirm the three circles drawn on the fluttering national flag.

 

And when night came, I was able to sit for a long time beneath the three clear moons floating in the night sky.

 

These were enough for me to reach one definite conclusion.

 

The conclusion that I had possessed a character in the fantasy novel I had loved so much, ‘Dark Header’.

 

* * *

 

A little over a week had passed since I possessed the Seventh Imperial Prince in the world inside the book.

 

I tried waiting to return to my original world on my own, but my body still did not go back.

 

Surprisingly, no one noticed that I was a different person.

 

They did not seem to care about that at all.

 

They merely faithfully followed the order not to let anyone in except during mealtimes.

 

Thanks to that, I came to understand my situation calmly, very slowly, and thoroughly.

 

I crossed the room I had now grown used to and examined the mirror attached to the wall once more.

 

Black hair and eyes, upturned eyes, and a scar mark cutting through my left eyebrow that could only be seen if one looked closely.

 

This body was undoubtedly that of the Seventh Imperial Prince of the Abiran Empire, Ran Abiran.

 

“Damn it, of all people....”

 

A sigh escaped on its own.

 

Of all people, it had to be the seventh.

 

Not the first, second, or third, but the seventh imperial prince.

 

The one treated the worst among the siblings, and with an awkward age on top of that.

 

The current Emperor had quite a lot of children, so I was not even the youngest.

 

In an instant, I went from being an only son to having countless brothers and sisters, but I was not happy at all.

 

Because most of them were going to die within three years anyway.

 

Some of them would even die at the protagonist’s hands.

 

Yes, unfortunately, we are the axis of evil.