Okay. System reboot. Data processing. Let’s try to parse this absolute cluster-fail of a situation.

Fact one: I’m a college student, currently residing in a men’s dorm. Fact two: I woke up to a scream that could curdle milk, only to find my three roommates have executed a flawless vanishing act. Fact three: In their place are three beautiful girls, each with a distinct anime-character hair color, occupying their respective beds.

My brain, bless its panicking little heart, skipped right past ‘denial’ and ‘anger’ and landed squarely on ‘bargaining for my future prison life’. The only question currently plaguing my mind was… how can I make it hurt less when I inevitably drop the soap?

Wait a minute! Why have I already accepted a game-over screen that ends with me in a prison shower?!

Just as I was contemplating whether soap might actually provide some helpful lubrication in that dire scenario, the red-haired girl on the adjacent bunk suddenly exclaimed:

“Holy crap, when did three hot girls get in our dorm?!”

Her voice was crisp and cool, a refreshing counterpoint to the blonde girl’s tragic mantra of “it’s gone… it’s gone…” but her choice of words was… let’s just say it lacked a certain feminine grace.

Her exclamation completely short-circuited my brain.

…You are one of the three new hot girls, what are you so surprised about?!

My head was spinning, a mountain of questions piling up so high they were about to trigger a server-crashing avalanche. I wanted to work up the courage—to pass the speech check—and ask these three strangely familiar beauties a few things. Do you remember what happened last night? Do you know who the real culprit is? Can you please, for the love of all that is holy, prove my innocence to the police? And also, maybe, could we exchange contact info?

Okay, one of those questions was a critical main-quest objective. The other was a side-quest I’d probably fail.

I watched as the red-haired girl on the neighboring bunk twisted her slender, pale body around. Her gaze swept past the black-haired girl in the t-shirt, lingered on the celestial body of pure fanservice that was the blonde, and finally, came to a dead stop, locking onto me.

My entire body went rigid. The blizzard of questions in my mind flash-froze and shattered into confetti. My consciousness was filled with nothing but the image of the redhead’s delicate frame, the subtle, artistic outline of her ribs showing.

Oh, I could feel a critical blood pressure warning. A nosebleed felt imminent. What if I shot off like a rocket, propelled by a jet stream of my own vital fluids, and crashed into the ceiling? That would be a truly pathetic way to go.

The redhead, the one who gave off the sweet-and-sour impression of an apple pie tsundere, muttered to herself again, “Where’d these three beauties come from?” before her pomegranate-red eyes widened in delayed realization.

“Huh? Why does my voice sound like this? Like a girl’s?!”

Her words sent a jolt of high-voltage electricity through me. A horrifying suspicion, like a skinned, multi-limbed monster from a cosmic horror story, began to crawl, dripping ichor, from the darkest corner of my subconscious into the forefront of my mind.

At the same time, the long-haired girl in the t-shirt asked us in a voice as soft and cool as fresh snow, “Who… are you?”

I rushed to answer. “I’m Number Two…” I started, but the words caught in my throat. It felt like an invisible, gnarled hand had wrapped around my neck, choking me. It was like trying to access a corrupted save file; the data was there, I knew it was there, but a firewall made of pure, eldritch wrongness was blocking me.

I had meant to say, “I’m Number Two, so-and-so,” with so-and-so being my name, to clarify my identity. But when I tried to say it, I couldn’t retrieve my own name from my brain’s memory banks. Instead, a strange name popped into my head, a default character name assigned by a cruel god.

“…Kiriko? Why do I think my name is Kiriko?”

Of course, I knew the legendary Black Swordsman Kirito, and his GGO avatar, but I’d never once identified as Kiriko!

What shocked me even more was when the red-haired girl spoke up in her cool, handsome voice, “I’m Number Four, Exusiai… huh?! Why do I think my name is Exusiai??”

The black-haired girl, the one with the delicate features of a kuudere heroine, swung herself to the edge of her loft bed. A pair of slender, milky-white legs dangled down, and her expression was like Columbus discovering the New World—a mask of placid, world-altering shock.

Her voice, however, was still gentle. “Are you Number Two and Number Four? I’m Number Three… and why do I also feel like… my name is Yukinoshita Yukino?”

My horrifying suspicion was rapidly being confirmed by multiple sources. And the one who cemented it into undeniable, terrifying reality was the despairing blonde who had been chanting “it’s gone.”

She pulled her damp, delicate hands from under the covers, clutching the blanket to her sun-kissed body. Her gaze was unfocused, her heroic voice now laced with the bitterness of utter defeat.

“No one was added, and no one is missing… I’m your Big Bro. And it looks like I’ve become Saber. That Yukinoshita Yukino is Number Three, the Kiriko opposite me is Number Two, and Number Four turned into Pineapple Pie.”

“It’s Apple Pie!” the redhead shot back reflexively, before correcting herself with a blush. “I mean, it’s Exusiai!”

Perhaps it’s a little late for this now, but allow me to reintroduce myself.

I’m a university student, currently living in a men’s dorm with my delightful, idiot roommates. There are four of us in total, each with a loft bed. I’m Number Two in the dorm hierarchy, and it now appears I’ve become a variant of the great Kirito, Kiriko.

Most importantly, I can’t even remember my original name. The character sheet has been overwritten.

I turned to my three similarly transformed roommates. “Do you guys remember… what my name was?”

All three shook their heads. The slender, bony girl, Apple Pie—I mean, Exusiai—was the first to reply. “Nope. Not yours, not mine. Whenever I try to think of our real names, all I get are Saber, Kiriko, Yukinoshita Yukino, and Exusiai.”

“Me too,” Yukinoshita-san said, her voice still soft and cool like snow. “It seems we can only remember the names of the anime or game characters we’ve become. Our original names have been blocked.”

“Why are you all still worried about names?!” Big Bro, now Saber, shrieked from under her blanket, only her fair, elegant back and face visible. She looked utterly incredulous, her despair momentarily replaced by rage. “The priority here is that we’ve turned into women! Women! Our most precious thing is gone!”

Her simple, primal sentence sent a shockwave through the room. The sun-filled dorm was suddenly thick with a tragic, mournful atmosphere, as if three souls had just been told their favorite anime was getting a live-action Netflix adaptation.

I watched as Lady Yukinoshita and the ace of Penguin Logistics began to frantically search their own bodies. Influenced by their panic, I unconsciously raised my hands to my own chest.

Ah, so this is a girl’s che… huh??

Why is it flat?!

I really, really wanted to cry now. The only thing more tragic than getting turned into a girl is turning into a girl with no chest. This was a low-tier, F-rank gacha pull of a transformation.

A shiver of misfortune ran through me. My hands, trembling like leaves in a storm, crept down into my blanket. My heart pounded like an old man about to open a terminal diagnosis. And then…

…I felt it. The most treasured possession of my life! My Excalibur! My one and only!

I sucked in a sharp breath, my eyebrows shooting up past my hairline. I sat bolt upright. “I… still have it!!!”

So, while the character model for Kiriko looks like a beautiful girl, the underlying hardware is still male. To put it bluntly, I’d become a trap! A Schrodinger’s girl!

My triumphant cry of “I still have it!!!” was particularly jarring amidst the sorrowful waves of “It’s gone… it’s gone…” coming from the other three.

In an instant, the three beautiful girls—Saber, Yukinoshita Yukino, and Exusiai—turned to look at me. Their faces, once masks of despair, twisted into a unified expression of rage so ferocious, so profound, it could have powered a Gundam.

They let out a collective roar, the righteous cry of the proletariat rising up against the one member of the bourgeoisie who hadn’t been liquidated:

“””You still have it?? LEMME SEE!!!”””