System-Hime explained herself in our minds with an exasperated loli voice that sounded like it was rolling its eyes at our stupidity:

【Ghost-hunting livestreams, duh! I want you guys to go to all the spooky, haunted places in the world and livestream your explorations! That’s how you’ll spread fear across the globe! Don’t be fooled by my cute voice, I’ve thought this through completely! I figured that if you guys just started a ghost-hunting stream, probably no one would watch. So, I turned you into eye-catching beautiful girls! It’s basic marketing! That’s how you’ll get popular! And making you forget your original names? That’s just to help you get into character~ It’s called method acting, look it up!】

Turn us into beautiful girls → attract viewers to the stream → conduct terrifying ghost-hunting livestreams → spread fear across the world.

The logic… was surprisingly sound. It was the kind of galaxy-brain, five-dimensional chess move that was either sheer genius or utter insanity. Still, there was one glaring bug in the program.

Miss Yukino, ever the voice of reason, asked the question that was also pinging relentlessly in my mind: “Why did the three of us become beautiful girls, but Number Two still has his ‘number two’?!”

I am that Number Two. Please don’t refer to my treasured possession with my dorm number.

System-Hime replied as if it wasn’t a problem at all, her tone breezy and dismissive: 【Because all that matters is that you look like beautiful girls! I just randomly picked some character data from popular fictional works who look like girls and remodeled you after them. As long as your appearance can attract an audience, I couldn’t care less if you’re actually a boy or a girl under the hood! It’s all about the aesthetics, you know?】

To put it bluntly, I only became a trap because this cosmic gacha machine happened to randomly pull a character who looked like a girl but wasn’t. My entire existence was now a statistical anomaly.

“Why… why wasn’t I so lucky…” Exusiai, who had been deprived of her essential ‘tools’ despite juggling multiple girlfriends like a circus performer, stared up at the ceiling, her handsome face a mask of profound tragedy. She was trying her best not to let the tears fall, a hero facing her cruelest fate.

【Oh, by the way,】 System-Hime’s loli voice now sounded to us like a demon toying with our bodies and fates, a GM enjoying our suffering a little too much, 【you’ve only received the appearances of these characters. You don’t have any of their special abilities. If you want Noble Phantasms or Dual Blades, you’ll have to complete the livestream missions I give you!】

My ears perked up. “There are… rewards for completing the missions?”

【Of course! First off, I won’t take a single cent of the money you earn from the livestreams. All super-chats and donations are yours to keep. Secondly, every time you complete a mission, I’ll give you rewards based on the difficulty and how well you did~ Think of it as a quest system!】

“So we’re not working for free,” Saber, who had been stoic and cool-headed before but had just been on the verge of tears, remarked with a sigh of relief. “As long as I’m not getting screwed over for free, I feel a little better.”

Why do I feel like you’re making a dirty joke? And why do I feel like it’s aimed at me?

【First things first, it’s time for System-Hime’s first mission~】 the loli voice chirped as if announcing a festival, complete with mental confetti and fanfare. 【Tonight at midnight, using your shared livestream account, go to your school’s abandoned No. 1 female dormitory and start a stream. The better the stream’s effect, the richer the rewards~~】

The four of us did indeed have a shared livestream account on Tw*tch. But that account had exactly one follower (probably my mom), and the number of concurrent viewers had never exceeded five (us and my mom). The reason was simple: what we streamed wasn’t exactly thrilling content. The four of us liked to play Dota, so we started an account to stream our party games.

The stream was just for fun, so we never spoke or showed our faces. The only audio was the in-game sound effects and our frantic keyboard clicks. We communicated with each other in person and typed insults to the poor randoms who got matched with us. The whole stream was like it was being run by ghosts—you couldn’t see the streamers or hear their voices. Of course it wasn’t popular.

This time, though, it seemed we were going big.

【One last thing to tell you,】 System-Hime’s loli voice lingered like a phantom, a final line of patch notes, 【to prevent your transformations from affecting your daily lives and the livestream, I’ve made some small modifications to the reality around you. It’ll be helpful~ Bye-bye for now~~】

Like a whimsical little girl, the loli voice in our heads vanished without a trace, leaving behind a deafening silence.

“Modified reality?” Just as Yukino muttered this in confusion, the sounds of girls chattering like a flock of songbirds began to fill the dormitory building. It was probably the time most students were waking up.

That’s right, songbirds. I could hear girls’ sleepy, faint voices chatting as they walked past our door on their way to the spacious communal washroom.

The four of us immediately looked at each other, our faces a mixture of shock and dawning horror… or in one case, dawning ecstasy.

I could see pure astonishment in the eyes of Yukino, who had been agonizing over what to do about the baby she’d accidentally made with her girlfriend. This new reality presented a whole new set of complications for her.

Meanwhile, Exusiai, the champion-level player, grinned with an expression of keen interest. A new hunting ground had just opened up.

Only Saber—our Big Bro turned Saber—was flushed beet-red, her face a mask of pure, unadulterated excitement, as if she’d just pulled an ultra-rare SSR character on her first try and reached the absolute peak of her life.

Yep, Big Bro was definitely the biggest animal among us.

(For the record, I’m not an animal at all. I’m a gentleman.)

Before we could recover from our shock, we heard the sound of a key being inserted into our door. With a click, the wooden door swung open, and a stout, round-waisted dorm matron walked in.

My eyes widened once again.

The dorm matron doing morning checks was standard procedure at our school; nothing strange about that. The problem was, the men’s dorms were checked by a male supervisor. Only the women’s dorms were checked by a matron. Her presence, along with the chorus of female voices behind her, laid one solid-gold, 24-karat fact before us—

System-Hime had moved our entire room into a girls’ dormitory building.

The dorm matron didn’t seem to find our presence strange or surprising at all. In fact, she teased us with familiar ease:

“Oh my beautiful little ladies, look at yourselves, why are you all crowded onto one bed without any clothes on? That’s not very ladylike.”

Thankfully, Exusiai and Saber on my bed were blocking the view of the one thing that absolutely should not be seen in a girls’ dorm. Otherwise, the discussion wouldn’t be about being ladylike or not, but about being a gentleman or not.

The four of us just smiled foolishly at the matron, our brains completely fried. Only after she closed the door and left did our expressions drop.

“Uh… if we don’t wash up soon, we’ll be late for class?” I said, desperately trying to change the subject, hoping the other three would forget the cruel fate they had planned for my Excalibur just moments ago.

Yukino shot me a look with her eyes, which were as clear as a deep night pool. An expression that would have been plain on her male face now looked exceptionally charming, carrying a hint of wry amusement.

She said in her soft voice, “We’re all brothers here. You didn’t really think I was going to cut you with a shaving razor, did you?”

Exusiai also flicked the bangs covering one of her eyes and said coolly, “What good would cutting you do us? We were just joking, man. And you actually took it seriously?”

For a moment, my eyes welled up with tears. You guys really are my good bros… My party members…

“Huh? It was a joke?!” Saber’s face was the perfect picture of the word ‘unexpected.’ “I already took off his  pants… I mean, I had already figured out how to make the first cut, and now you’re telling me it was a joke??”

Yep. Even as Saber, Big Bro was still the biggest animal in our dorm. And I was trapped here with her.