Mad Year
“Ow!”
Squelch.
A little blood had seeped through the hastily covered wound, and that was all it took for Tania to discover I’d been hurt.
She dragged me straight into the girls’ bathroom and forcibly stripped me of my clothes… sob.
With my dress shirt half peeled back, Tania wound the bandage so tightly I started to wonder if any blood was going to reach my arm at all.
“Ow! A little gentler, please… huh?”
I was whining about the pain when I caught the sorrowful look on her face and fell silent at once.
“Eli…”
“Yeah…”
“Where did you get hurt like this…?”
“Um…”
How was I supposed to explain this?
That I’d gotten hurt fighting to protect the protagonists? That was something I could never tell another living soul…
That I’d blacked out and woken up already injured? Technically true, but I’d walked into that place of my own free will, so it made a pretty weak excuse.
So after a full four seconds of deep thought, I settled on the most perfect alibi I could invent.
“I got hurt saving the world!”
It wasn’t a lie.
This world was the inside of the webtoon How to Become a Hero. If its protagonists, Yi Siyun and Carmen, vanished, no one could say what would become of everything.
Tania, however, did not look convinced.
Why wouldn’t she believe me…? Did I not look the part of a magical girl or something?
Impossible. There was no role I couldn’t fill. Right now I was the girl in this entire world who suited the magical-girl image best.
Tania only heaved a long sigh and muttered as if her heart ached.
“Fine… so you just don’t want to tell me…”
“Ah…”
When she said it so dejectedly, my own chest started to hurt…
A beauty’s pain transmits to everyone around her. Bluetooth suffering, if you will.
When a beauty gets angry, you get angry with her; when a beauty cries, you cry with her. That’s just how it works.
So right now my heart felt like it was being torn in two. Tears were already rolling down my cheeks.
Seeing my face, Tania panicked and wiped them away.
“W-what? Why are you crying?”
“T-Taniaaa…”
“Huh? What’s wrong, Eli? Don’t cry, stop!”
After drying my tears, Tania carefully met my eyes.
“Eli… why are you crying? Did the bandage hurt that much?”
Guilt and regret colored her voice.
“It’s not that… I just got sad because you looked like you were about to cry…”
“…Me?”
Tania blinked in confusion and tilted her head.
“…I wasn’t crying, though?”
“Huh? Really…?”
“Yeah…”
She gave a tiny smile. Cute.
Then she smoothed out the dress shirt still draped over my shoulders and began buttoning it for me, starting from the bottom.
“Eli.”
“Yeah?”
The hand that had fastened the lowest button climbed a little higher and started on the next one.
“I won’t ask where you got hurt anymore. So…”
After the second button came the third, then the fourth.
“Don’t come back hurt again. Every time you show up like that, it makes me miserable. Got it?”
“…Got it.”
“And…”
Her hands rose one button at a time until they stopped right around my chest.
Her fingertips flushed faintly red; with a slightly trembling touch she began fastening the button just beneath my chest.
“I-it’s not just me. Adel and… Luna would definitely worry too.”
Slip. Her fingertip missed the button and poked me squarely in the chest.
I didn’t feel a thing, but Tania herself jumped and shuddered.
With hands that shook a little more than before, she went back to fastening the buttons.
“If you ever have to go somewhere dangerous, even if it’s not me, you have to tell someone. Okay?”
“Mm… I’ll try.”
I couldn’t give her a firm promise.
There were things only someone who had read How to Become a Hero could know, and even the girls I loved were not allowed to learn them.
“…Tch.”
Tania muttered under her breath, finished every last button with trembling fingers, and took a step back.
“…I did them wrong.”
One button remained at the very top. Starting off on the wrong foot—maybe this was what people meant by that.
I grinned playfully at her. Tania’s face went scarlet with embarrassment, and she began undoing the misaligned buttons one by one to fix them.
“Getting undressed by Tania twice in a single day… what a novel experience.”
“W-what on earth are you saying?!”
She glared at me with all her might, but with her face that red the expression only looked adorable.
When I beamed at her, Tania finally gave in and smiled back.
The moment Yeris learned that yet another branch had gone dark overnight, she dispatched people at once.
And, as expected, the result was total annihilation.
Not a single survivor this time either.
The scene of the massacre was, if anything, more horrific than the last.
The one silver lining was that, unlike the previous branch, this one had functioning CCTV, so a record remained.
That footage was delivered intact to Yeris, boss of Bind.
“…Hmm.”
Yeris let out a low sound before she hit play.
What she was about to watch was nothing less than critical intelligence on the witch.
Until now, every scrap of information about the witch had been secondhand rumor.
There hadn’t even been a proper eyewitness account.
Just that the districts of the organizations she wiped out were left carpeted in crystal. That was about it.
Even the claim that she was beautiful was nothing more than hearsay.
But once this video started, she would learn the witch’s appearance, the nature of her power, and just how strong she really was.
Gulp. Yeris swallowed, hovered the mouse over the file, and—click—started the playback.
For a long while she watched as if entranced.
When it ended, her only comment was a single line.
“What a crazy bitch.”
From the very beginning the witch had approached with an almost unnatural boldness.
She hadn’t snuck in; she had walked straight up to the entrance, smiling, and asked them to open the door.
Of course that shouldn’t have worked… except the witch was far more beautiful than anyone had imagined.
The guards at the door opened it for her as if hypnotized, and the next instant their heads burst with a wet pop, blooming into crystal flowers.
After that it was the same scene on loop.
The witch wandered the halls, killing people, sealing them in crystal or turning them into crystal flowers.
Yeris watched in silence, about to shut the video off because she didn’t think she would learn anything new—when the anomaly occurred.
One of the strongest fighters in the now-extinct branch managed to wound the witch.
She dodged as if she had trained in hand-to-hand combat somewhere, so all he managed was a shallow cut across her arm.
It wasn’t a tiny scratch, but it wasn’t a serious injury either.
The witch’s reaction, however, was something else entirely.
She didn’t look like she was in pain. She didn’t look angry either.
She simply stood there, blank.
Vacant, as if something inside her had been shaken.
And the moment the syndicate members rushed her, crystal flowers erupted from nowhere and tore their bodies apart.
Ripping, slicing, skewering them into pieces.
Only a single member survived the slaughter.
He seemed to think, for a fleeting second, that he might actually live.
Then the witch began to move.
The blood she had spilled on the floor rose and became her shoes.
She walked unsteadily, as though high heels were still unfamiliar.
By the time she grew used to them, the crystal flowers that had swallowed the syndicate members vanished without a trace.
Blood from the corpses soaked the floor.
The witch slipped off her shoes and danced across it.
As if she had already forgotten the last living member standing before her, she spun and twirled wildly.
It wasn’t even a real dance, yet her unreal beauty turned every clumsy motion into something that looked like choreography.
Then the blood she was treading on lifted into the air, gathered around her, and began transforming into a crimson dress.
The final survivor, sensing something ominous, flung a blade of energy from his hand—but the blade failed to tear the red dress and bounced off with a sharp ting.
In the next instant the blood swirling around the witch shredded the air like a storm of razors and, in a heartbeat, reduced the last man to ground meat.
Immediately afterward the witch strolled out of the building as if nothing had happened.
“…Haha. I think we should call her a madwoman, not a witch. Or wait—maybe just a mad year? A crazy bitch?”
And contrary to the rumors, she wasn’t pure white either.
The only pure white things about her were her hair and her pale skin.
Everything else was soaked in blood.
Those eerily crimson eyes, the way she freely manipulated blood to kill people and even fashion it into clothing…
“I can’t even get a read on what her ability actually is.”
Crystal blades would suddenly materialize and bury themselves in a member’s forehead; crystal flowers would sprout from nowhere and rip people apart.
On top of that she controlled blood at will—other people’s blood included.
“…Monster.”
That was the impression the witch left on Yeris.