Chapter 5
Chapter 5
♥ ♥ ♥
Milana’s eyes snapped open and she stared blankly at the ceiling above her. A small chandelier hung against the spotless white marble, wrapped in darkness. It wasn’t big, but as a Magic Department student who’d handled countless minerals, Milana recognized the clear crystals dangling from it right away. Real quartz.
‘Where am I?’
That kind of decoration was far too luxurious for her room. At first she thought it was a dream, but everything felt too vivid. She wiggled her fingers a few times, then shakily sat up.
‘Huh?’
Her movements were so light. The muscles moved too easily. But something was off. The weight of her body, the size of it. It didn’t feel like her own.
As if in a trance, she lifted both hands and stared. Her hands were gone. The ones people said were too small, like little maple leaves. In their place were large hands with thick veins and prominent knuckles. Stiff calluses on the palms. Neatly trimmed square nails. Nothing about them was hers. These were clearly a man’s hands.
A dream? No. Every sense told her this was real.
She touched her face and body, fumbling, and felt her breathing grow short. Her trembling hands pressed against a hard frame with no curves at all. She hurriedly cast a spell. Clutching the summoned orb of light, she looked around and spotted a large mirror against one wall. She walked toward it, holding her breath. Cold sweat beaded at her temples.
Her worn-out self was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a tall man with a broad frame stared back at her.
“Who are you?! Where is this?!”
Her mouth fell open.
As she stumbled back, one thing burned into her mind. The violet eyes in the mirror. A strange, deep color, almost blood-red. Unmistakable.
‘These eyes…’
In that moment, Milana felt her soul leave her body. She might be a grade-A loner, a total recluse who barely interacted with the world, but even she knew who this person was. Those violet irises.
Vladimir Yefronsky.
The mad young lord of the Yefronsky mafia family, rulers of the country’s underworld. A man at the top of a world full of schemes and atrocities, so powerful and wealthy he appeared openly in the major newspapers.
They said his looks were as famous as his infamy. They weren’t wrong. Even with Milana’s dumbstruck expression plastered on it, that inhumanly perfect face, like something carved from ice, didn’t lose an ounce of its beauty.
“What, what, what what what what.”
Think. Assess the situation. What the hell is going on?!
Her eyes darted around and landed on a pair of large glasses on the nightstand. Thick, clunky black horn-rims. They didn’t match at all with that cold, murderous face, the kind that dropped the room temperature by fifty degrees.
But those glasses. Why did they look so familiar?
With trembling hands, Milana picked them up and brought them to her face. She looked in the mirror.
“Hah!”
Her breath stopped. That comfortable, familiar look…
The blurry features staring back at her were the same face she’d been talking to just this afternoon. Her first and only close friend at school. Bova.
‘Bova is… Vladimir? Ehh?’
The glasses clattered to the floor.
“No way… this can’t be…”
The words slipped out and Milana gasped, her hands flying up to clutch her thick neck. She’d been too rattled to notice before, but that voice. It was the same voice she’d always heard from her dear friend. She couldn’t mistake it. She’d always thought to herself how nice it sounded.
‘But… why did Bova and I swap bodies?’
Her head was spinning. Then a memory from the afternoon hit her. Chased out of the lab, Milana had started her experiment in an empty clearing. She’d been forced to use a substitute for the missing mandrake juice. She’d improvised, managing to recreate a similar effect with the leftover reagents. It worked fine through the first half. It did. Until…
Boom!
The mandrake juice she’d absentmindedly stepped on earlier had reacted to the vapor from the new mixture. The explosion came out of nowhere.
‘Milana!’
Bova had appeared from somewhere and thrown himself around her. She’d thanked him for saving her again. After that, the reagents showed no further reaction, so they’d parted ways and she went back to her dorm…
Had something gone wrong in that moment?
Panicked, Milana looked around the room. It was massive, the size of four or five of her dorm rooms put together. Luxurious. Books neatly lined on shelves. Furniture so perfectly crafted, so clean in its structure and color, it had to be the work of a master artisan. Swords and weapons mounted on the walls. Her eyes caught on each thing, one by one. And then something in the corner stopped her cold. A large desk. No, more precisely, the small papers covering the whole wall above it.
What are those?
The moment she realized what they were, Milana’s eyes went wide as lanterns. Her vision had sharpened with the body swap. Even without glasses, she could make out the tiny papers on the far wall. Proof that the huge, ugly glasses Bova always wore weren’t for fixing any flaw in his eyes.
Discussion
0 CommentsNo comments yet.