Suspicious People in Black Suits

A whole crowd of suspicious men in black suits who refused to name their affiliation.

A throng of middle-aged officers whose combat-uniform collars glittered with stars.

And another throng of people who looked like military police, white stripes riding their shoulders.

Seated dead-center in a conference room dressed up like a hearing chamber, I swept my gaze across every face present.

Truth be told, they had tried the rope and the handcuffs on my wrists earlier—once each. I hadn’t even meant to break them; I’d simply reached for a water ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠glass and the restraints had snapped off like dry twigs. So they had given up on restraint altogether and parked me at the far end of the long table. That was the behind-the-scenes story.

“We will now commence the emergency meeting. Those joining via VTC, if you can hear my voice, please draw a circle once… Yes, confirmed.”

The officer who announced the start of the meeting flicked a glance at me, then returned his eyes to the camera.

“Before we begin, let it be noted that this session is convened for the purpose of gathering intelligence on the unidentified individual intercepted and guided over Seoul airspace at approximately 11:05 a.m. on 28 April 2035. The session is jointly chaired by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of the Intelligence Headquarters.”

I snuck a look at the wall clock. Four in the afternoon.

On one ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wall of the control room a half-drawn curtain still covered a map; the place-name “Jecheon” peeked out, so I figured we were somewhere in Chungcheong Province.

The fact that all these high-ranking people—who should have been in Seoul or Gyeryong—had managed to assemble here in only five hours told me the incident was a very big deal indeed.

—Swish.

A soldier carefully raised his hand and received permission to speak.

“Uh, about the intelligence side and the VIP contingent…”

“We’re here.”

The answer came from a middle-aged man in a suit with a closely cropped head. The nameless, affiliation-less men in black offered awkward little laughs.

“Please don’t mind us and proceed.”

“Ah, yes. Then we will begin the meeting.”

What followed was, as expected, essentially an interrogation.

“Who are you?”

“A Korean who was kidnapped to another world long ago. And, after many twists and turns, a returnee who has come back to Earth.”

“Another world? Does that even make sense?”

“And a person flying at the same speed as a fighter jet makes perfect sense?”

“Th-then how did you fly?”

“You just have to be good at magic. A technique I picked up in the other world.”

“Magic… good grief. Ah, before that—your name?”

“I lost my name. Complicated reasons. For convenience… call me Yuria.”

“You lost your name?”

Everything I remembered was everything except the “me” who had lived on Earth.

I’ll make the contract. I’ll hand over every memory of the “me” that existed on Earth…

The image of that moment flashed up and a headache stabbed through my skull. It was the kind of pain that always rose whenever I tried to recall something that simply would not surface—yet still scraped at the edges of my mind.

“Ugh… I’d rather not talk about that.”

“Fine, whatever. More importantly, earlier you mentioned a crisis facing Earth…”

“Yes. I’ll explain. Visualization. Projection.”

I unfolded an illusion spell in mid-air. A horned Demon King appeared, and stick-figure versions of myself and my companions dashed about.

“I hunted the Demon King in the other world. No rebuttals or questions, please.”

“…”

The projected stick-figure Demon King toppled. Behind him, formless monsters, demons, and beasts appeared one after another—all rendered in cute, stupidly squashed shapes. My drawing skills were the issue.

“But there are other things that threaten humanity besides the Demon King. The Goddess who sent me to that world returned me to Earth with the order to protect it from those beings.”

The explanation ended with a stick-figure mage spinning in place, staff in one hand and sword in the other.

In truth I could have cursed the Goddess for hours, but this was not the place to trash-talk or tear her down.

“To me, the Goddess’s words carry absolute credibility.”

After all, her words were the only evidence I could produce.

The questioning dragged on for a very long time after that. Most of what I said was simply written down; there were almost no follow-up questions or expressions of doubt.

The sun set. The atmosphere lightened a little over boxed lunches. I had no idea which unit’s mess had prepared them, but the stir-fried fish-cake and spicy pork were excellent.

“I’ve really missed this chili-powder taste…”

“There’s plenty, so please have more.”

“Oh. Then just one more…”

After the meal the conversation turned to heavier subjects.

The incidents I had lived through in the other world, the comrades I had fought beside, the occasional falling-outs—those were not particularly heavy. But the possibility that the Demon King himself might once have been a person of this Earth, and the fact that I had been forced to kill him with my own hands… those were stories that could easily become controversial.

“Hooo…”

“I have no intention of hiding almost any of the information.”

My stance was simple: if it meant saving Earth from annihilation, I would even do a stint in prison. But would they really send me to prison? Magic—a technology with endless applications—was sitting right here in my hands.

“The sun’s gone down. Everyone should head home before it gets too late, yes?”

With those words from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—who had remained silent the entire time on the far side of the screen—the room emptied in an instant.

Under the guidance of the black-suited men I climbed into a sedan.

“National Intelligence Service?”

“…”

They clearly had no intention of exchanging a single word with me. I was seated behind an acrylic partition that sealed off the rear seats.

I briefly considered punching a hole through space and swapping places with the agent in the passenger seat, then discarded the idea. It had been so long since I last rode in a car that the experience itself was fun—the soft seats, the peculiar new-car smell, even the vibration of the engine. I realized I had missed the strangest little things.

I watched the darkened scenery beyond the heavy tint and simply went where they took me.

I had no idea where we were. The moment the black-suited uncle riding with me got out, he slapped a blindfold and a cloth over my head.

“This is a bit stuffy.”

“…”

“…Sigh.”

Judging by the direction of magnetic force and the travel time, I could tell we had returned somewhere in Seoul—but that was all the geographic information I could glean.

Come to think of it, every scrap of information that might have identified the air-force base where I had been held had already been carefully covered. Of course they had failed to hide the map with the name “Jecheon” on it.

Unit flags, nameplates on signboards, framed photos on desks, stacks of documents—even the origin of every soldier who had sat in that conference room.

“Thorough, aren’t they…”

I suppose that was only natural for people who spent their lives locked in a life-or-death struggle with the neighbors up north. They had put in a fair amount of effort. Still got caught, though!

“…”

We entered a building, wound through corridors, climbed a spiral staircase, walked more corridors…

—Bang.

After a long trek I was finally led into a room and seated in a chair.

“Removing the cover now.”

—Rustle.

At last the stifling black cloth and blindfold came off. I looked around and drew a deep breath.

“Phew.”

I exhaled and surveyed the room.

White wallpaper, gray office flooring, a private room of maybe ten square meters. Behind a desk sat a young man in a suit with his hair slicked back.

It did not look like a room that was actually used as an office. The desk was arranged the way you usually see in a hospital examination room; aside from a monitor there were no office supplies or bookshelves. Most strangely, the window behind the man had been boarded up from the outside with wooden planks, rendering it useless.

And the wooden school-style desk I was sitting at had been placed a little distance away, facing him squarely, creating an odd sense of separation. On that desk lay a single pencil.

“Hello. I’m Investigator Bang Jun-ho.”

So this man was apparently the one assigned to investigate me.

“Ah, yes. I’m Yuria.”

Investigator Bang Jun-ho merely dipped his head, then pulled a thick sheaf of paper from a drawer.

“Please write down on these sheets everything about the environment in which you were born and raised, from birth until now. No page limit.”

“…Everything?”

“Yes. Even the smallest, most trivial details—as long as they remain in your memory.”

I looked down at the stack of paper he had personally stood up to hand me.

…Not a chance.

“The volume is probably going to be ridiculously large.”

“Doesn’t matter. We need it for verifying the reliability of your testimony and for intelligence analysis.”

Is that so… Still, this felt a bit excessive.

The volume itself was no problem for me. My hand would never get tired—I had magic that could write for me, a magic tool that served as a printer (something the other world never possessed), and a memory-playback device. And I preserved every single memory.

In other words, I could replay every single day of the three thousand years I had spent in the other world in perfect clarity.

“…You really said it doesn’t matter? No taking it back later, okay?”

“Yes, yes. People usually produce over a hundred pages as a matter of course, so it truly doesn’t matter.”

A hundred pages?

A hundred pages was nothing. I would give them the full million-page treatment. I would tell them everything. Sorry, trees.

“I’m going to use a little magic.”

“…Go ahead.”

“Subspace deployment.”

—Flash.

“…Huh.”

The investigator, who had been trying hard to look unfazed, finally let out a hollow laugh. From the subspace I pulled out the memory-playback device, the printing magic tool, and a mana pen.

The memory-playback device looked like a crown bristling with thorns; I settled it on my head. Then I linked the fist-sized hemispherical printing tool to the mana circuits with the mana pen.

“What are all those devices?”

“Tools that transfer the contents of my memory into writing.”

I set the printing magic tool on the thick stack of A4 paper and poured mana into it.

“Print.”

—Fwaaat!

One hundred sheets of A4 paper, both sides packed solid with text in 10-point font, finished printing in two seconds.

“I lived three thousand years in the other world—a little over a million days if you count by the calendar.”

“Ah… yes.”

“That was about twenty days’ worth.”

“…Huh.”

The investigator gave an awkward smile. He took the pages, skimmed them, and smiled even more.

He simply kept smiling.

“Could you bring me some more paper? Preferably a truly massive amount.”

At this pace, roughly six million sheets would be enough to transfer every memory I possessed.

…Sorry, trees!

“Ah, haha. Then we’ll need to compress things a little.”

Fortunately the investigator proved flexible, and we managed to negotiate a reasonable volume. I would feel a bit less guilty toward the trees.

“It probably won’t finish inside ten thousand sheets… but I’ll try to cut it off in the ten-thousand range.”

“…”

“Haha… ha…”

In the end I burned through sixteen thousand sheets ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of A4 paper.

An electronics-service-center truck rolled into a facility in Anyang.

“Washing-machine manuals have arrived.”

Why the drivers inside were wearing suits, why heavily tinted SUVs escorted the truck front and rear—those were questions one was not supposed to ask.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

Nor was one supposed to wonder why the “manuals” filled entire boxes of A4 paper.

Nor why the security guards standing on the first floor of an ordinary-looking building carried assault rifles instead of gas guns.

Nor why there was a PX on the street that ordinary civilians were not allowed to enter. One simply pretended not to know.

The neighborhood residents already knew everything worth knowing: this was the company where the scary uncles near the off-base PX worked.

“Let me clock some overtime!”

“Just do your job, sir.”

“Yes, yes~”

The staff of Chungmu Sangsa, busy sorting the sixteen thousand pages of “washing-machine manuals” that had arrived from an arts center in Seoul, groaned as they rapidly skimmed the contents.

“Last time when that Three-Star technician defected from up north, we only got a little under a thousand pages, right? And everyone called that historic.”

“This one’s literally from a completely different world. The content itself is insanely alien.”

Even for Chungmu Sangsa—whose usual work was analyzing defectors and illegal entrants and collecting human intelligence—this kind of material was completely foreign.

No, probably no one on the entire planet had ever encountered anything like it.

A person who had lived three thousand years in a wholly separate world? If she hadn’t been floating over downtown Seoul, they would have shipped her straight to a psychiatric ward.

“This person’s memory is ridiculous too. She filled six-hour lecture sessions with one-to-one transcription.”

“There’s even the magic teacher’s first-love story that he told during class. Take a look.”

That had been Yuria’s thoughtful touch, meant to convey magical knowledge in exhaustive detail.

First came admiration for the sheer volume, density, and meticulousness of the information.

Then came horror at the near-impossible task of assigning priority to any of it.

Anything involving “magic this” or “magic that” would have to be farmed out to authorities in the science and engineering fields; they simply gave up.

“…Looks like we’re going to need a lot more people.”

“Shall I put out the call?”

“820, and civilians as well. Request them by team if possible.”

“820” was the number that designated the intelligence specialty branch—the same way “111” matched to riflemen.

“Yes, sir!”

The soldier rapidly drafted the approval documents. Even an intelligence-specialty private whose usual duties consisted of standing watch or making coffee felt his heart race.

An alien! Well, more precisely he had heard something about a “returnee,” but still!

His typing accelerated.

The content was simple:

We don’t have enough people. If possible we also need civilian consultants on language, symbols, and cryptography. There are many requests that we form a large-scale task force to achieve informational parity. Therefore please authorize additional personnel and the creation of a task force.

…All of which he padded out with a grand introduction-body-conclusion structure and printed in a stiff-looking font that began with “HY.” Thick blue lines of differing weights above and below the title. Perfect formatting.

The team leader would probably give it one glance and send it straight up.

The four-stripe private threw himself into the work with the new stimulation that had arrived in his otherwise boring final months of service.

Watching quietly from behind, Master Sergeant Lee Jin-hyeong of the investigation side curled the corner of his mouth upward.

Seeing a soldier work so diligently and without complaint in his final months made him think the kid would make a perfect sergeant. The private never noticed the way the master sergeant’s mouth watered at the thought.