Prologue

Everything changed when the Monmusu attacked.

Memes aside, Shin Lee had been living an ordinary life, with an ordinary nine to five customer service job, with the ordinary complications of Karens doing their best to make it as miserable as possible... No, he couldn't refund them for half of the bag of snacks that their kid had opened and didn't like, for fucks sake... and with the ordinary stress release valves of internet porn and anime to make it all bearable as he indulged in the fantasy of cute boys that were more often than not the best girl of their setting.

And then shit started hitting the fan. Everywhere, all at once.

He didn't really have the whole story, but from what Shin understood of it, it hadn't begun with the invasion. It had begun with pinhole portals, off in nondescript locations... places where people didn't really go, where they could remain undetected in the basement of an abandoned building or in a hole behind a short three or four foot drop over a ledge for a creek, where they could quietly pump out corruptive energy into the world at a steady and unceasing pace.

This had visible effects. But... implausible ones. A 'haunted' building being extra creepy and unsettling, a stretch of riverbed where people said they could hear whispers enticing them into the water, stories of strange dancing lights out over a swamp... the sort of campfire ghost stories that had transitioned into creepy copy-and-paste memes to be shared for clout over the internet and that nobody really believed in.

The actual invasion came later. Once the stage had been set, the foundation laid, and the other side were ready to make a massive and unanticipated push across the boundaries of dimensions.

It was surprisingly even. The shock and awe tactics of dragon women smashing their way through military bases as they looked for fights, ogres barreling through unprepared infantry, skeletons and zombies moving at the direction of liches and vampires... it was difficult to make an immediate response to. But at the same time, the Monmusu's information gathering ability wasn't perfect. They couldn't send scouts and spies through in advance, when those scouts and spies would go off target and just immediately find themselves a husband from the comparatively incredibly plentiful supply in Shin's world, compared to that of the Monmusu, where the population of men remained a static number while that of the females only continued to climb.

That would give the game away. It would warn the world in advance that they were coming, in a way that couldn't be ignored or brushed off as superstitious backwater yokels seeing things in the swamp gas. So instead, they picked important targets based on logic and best-guesses, with some hits and as many misses, which dragged things out.

In the end, it honestly wasn't terrible for everyone. There were a lot of people that found themselves happier, and Shin could very easily have become one of them. Found a wife or two from the throng of monster-women, settled down and let them pamper and take care of him forever.

But there had been a cute couple living in the apartment across the hall from him.

Very gay. One fit and muscular, one smaller and softer and cute, and Shin could honestly say that he was envious of them. Not quite enough to want to try any Netori plays out of the doujins sourced from the stickier parts of the internet, that was how he would wind up in jail after all, but... it was a reminder that the cute trap boyfriend, housemaid, and male waifu tags could all happen IRL. To other people.

So he was coping and living vicariously through their antics. Right up until the ambient corruptive Demonic Energy found it's way inside them and the fit and muscular boyfriend became the fit and muscular girlfriend and their relationship shattered apart into a mess.

That was what the invasion meant to Shin. The personal element of it.

In the end, he decided to go into hiding and become a hermit, avoiding the monmusu out of spite for ruining his IRL OTP neighbors. It wasn't actually very hard. They were focused mostly on large populations, city centers, and locations that were building up bunkers and defenses to keep them out as much as possible. He slipped through the cracks and wound up living in a cavern in the hills, sitting quietly and eating less and less over time, going out to gather food and water on fewer and fewer occasions.

It was quiet. And as he lost weight, he found himself often contemplating the breaking dawn, the starlit night, and the beauty of nature... when nature didn't consist of wild cougars pulling deer up trees or which needed to be chased off with hurled stones, that was.

And then, just like in a few of his martial-arts animes, Shin Lee comprehended the Tao.

A force of balance. Of benevolence, which could not act without a counter-posing malevolence. The guiding hand of nature, and the ever-turning wheel of Karma.

It brought an offer. This world was valuable, not in its own right, but because it had been connected to another. The invading world of monster-women, and through that one a dizzying expanse of clustered and similar worlds, ripe for the harvest by interested parties. A quantifiably evil force, but one which could be leashed and used as a tool for greater good. A compromisable conglomerate entity, filled with good people and bad ones, all using it to achieve their own goals in their own way.

They needed only a way in. And the simplest way to do so, to pry open the door and wedge a stopper in it, was to offer some people a way out. When someone left, that meant there was metaphysical space for someone to enter. Not the only way to gain access, but the simplest and the most effective. Efficient and with a rapid turn-around.

Shin Lee was among the lucky selected handful that were being offered their own almost-Jumpchain World-hopping Isekai Fantasy. The Tao would prepare an opportunity for him to seize, leading to glory and adventure, if he had the strength to walk it.

He could only smile at the thought, as the details and options dripped into his mind.

"I want my very own Saber Astolfo." Shin stipulated.

With that, and an agreement made, Shin Lee's body collapsed into mist and drifted away on the winds, leaving behind a small crackling campfire and threadbare clothes in a pile.

Far, far away, worlds and universes distant, Shin Lee was reborn near to a continent suffering under the seemingly eternal state of war between the kingdoms of Hoshido and Nohr.