Ajumma
"...Let's evacuate first."
"Yes, Team Leader."
The sudden turn of events had been a bit of a shock, but this was the Hero Association. Everyone here had been drilled on the manuals from the day they joined, so far more people were evacuating with level heads than making a fuss.
A siren going off inside the Association — of all places — could only mean one thing. Something had gone wrong inside the building. And it wasn't a simple fire. A villain, obviously.
"All right, everyone take the stairs. Grab your valuables and get moving."
The Team Leader took command of every employee in the office as if it were the most natural thing in the world and began herding the staff toward the underground bunker. The Association building was enormous, so using the stairs was no small ordeal — but in a situation like this, there was no other choice. And it wasn't just the Welfare Bureau, either.
"Well... it really is a madhouse."
"Yeah."
A stairwell packed with countless employees funneling toward the bunker was always going to be chaos. Shoulders collided, bodies shoved, and the whole descent was a bit of a struggle.
"Ah—"
"Charlotte, you need to be careful."
"There's only so much I can control in a situation like this."
"Still, be more careful. If you go down, you'll get trampled flat."
"You're probably right. Thank you."
Having a Team Leader with years of hero work under her belt meant I made it down those stairs without taking a tumble, and we reached the underground bunker in one piece.
The moment people filed in, everyone moved exactly as they'd been trained. Regular office staff got on their phones to figure out what was going on. Combat-capable employees pulled out the weapons kept on standby, just in case. Team leaders and directors gathered off to the side for a hurried meeting.
And me...
"Ugh... what even is this..."
I just sat down on the bare floor and lamented my fate. Of all the days to actually show up at the office. If I'd known this was coming, I would have been so much better off rolling around at home and wasting the hours. How had things ended up like this? I felt genuinely wronged.
"...Maybe I should try messaging someone."
A villain wasn't about to storm the bunker, and by the time one got this far the heroes would already be here. I unlocked my phone and texted the person among my nearby acquaintances who was most likely to have absolutely nothing to do.
"...Oh."
Of course the timing would be this catastrophically off. Saran was a hero, so this kind of thing was perfectly ordinary — but given the current situation, it was almost insultingly absurd.
"Huh."
I hadn't seen that coming. Somehow, I had just summoned one of my carefully cultivated secret heroes straight to the Association. All I'd meant to do was ask whether Saran — who already needed to come in today to talk about something — would be all right. I had no idea why she'd been planning to stop by in the first place, but I'd just called her in even earlier than she'd intended.
Well... other heroes would answer the dispatch and handle it anyway. By the time Saran got here, it would probably already be over. Most likely.
"...Maybe I should text someone else."
My last message to Saran hadn't even been read, so sending her anything more wasn't going to fix a thing. I decided to try another hero I knew.
"...Hm."
That familiar feeling creeping in was probably just my imagination. If I said anything more, I was almost certain the next reply would be that Baek Eun-hwa was already on her way here. So I left it at that. If I told her what was going on, she would make a far bigger production of it than Saran ever would.
"...Should I text Horns?"
My last option arrived as naturally as breathing.
The reply that came back was bright and cheerful, a world apart from how tense she always was in person. It struck me all over again how enormous the gap was between talking to Batori face-to-face and talking to her through a screen — but she was cute, so I didn't mind. I found myself smiling as I kept typing.
"Hm..."
So the alert had already gone out to the entire area. I'd read the emergency text the moment the siren went off and hadn't given it a second thought — but of course anyone on the outside would be worried. That was why Saran had ignored my messages and bolted straight for the Association, wasn't it?
If I told Batori any more, she'd only worry more. So in that case...
Click!
I even threw in a cute sticker for good measure. Situations like this were honestly pretty common, and there was no real reason for her to be worried. I'd sent the messages to put her at ease, and I'd been thinking of sending the same thing to Saran — but she'd almost certainly already left, and she wasn't reading her texts anyway.
So I just waited for Batori's reply.
I waited.
"...Huh."
She'd read it. And she wasn't answering.
This... don't tell me...
"......"
Looks like I'd accidentally issued a Buster Call. And basically in order of hero ranking, at that...?
"Charlotte, what are you doing?"
"...Ah, Team Leader. How did the meeting go?"
I couldn't keep dwelling on it, and I couldn't stop them now that they'd already left, so I turned my attention to the Team Leader, who had come back looking rather worried. Had the meeting gone poorly? Or was the villain outside just that strong? I was essentially a regular employee, so I hadn't been able to sit in. I had no way of knowing the specifics.
"Well... we sent dispatch requests to the nearby heroes right away, but it's so early in the morning. It'll probably take them a little while."
"Ah, I see..."
"We sent a request to Baekyeou — she's A-Class — as well, but I hear her home is a fair distance from the Association building..."
"I see."
Hm. Nothing to worry about, then. In a few minutes, the heroes I'd Buster-Called would show up on their own and wrap the whole thing up nice and tidy.
"Team Leader, why don't you just sit down next to me? It's not like there's anything else for us to do in here."
"Should I?"
"Yep."
"Aigoo... I never expected something like this to happen out of nowhere. I really wasn't prepared..."
"Team Leader, that's not an 'oof' or an 'umph' or even an 'nnngh'... doesn't 'Aigoo' sound a little too much like an ajumma?"
"...At thirty, I am an ajumma."
"Ah."
Right. She looked so young that I'd completely forgotten our Team Leader was thirty — nine years older than me. I didn't usually think about her age at all. She outranked me, and there wasn't much reason to dwell on your boss's age in the first place. She was such an easygoing person that I couldn't help treating her comfortably.
Spend a few months like that, then a year and more, and... well.
"...Thirty years old."
"......"
"Thirty."
"......"
"Henho—"
"Hey!"
"Gack."
One word at a time. I'd been slowly needling her about her age, and I paid for it. I mean, was the whole 'henhouse' thing really that...
"Did you hate it that much?"
"When you get to this age, you'd hate it too, okay? That's that really messed-up one! The one about how you start to smell... that kind of thing...!"
"...You know it in a lot of detail, huh?"
I hadn't expected her to know the origin of the joke that thoroughly. If anything, knowing she knew it that well made me feel even worse...
"...But Team Leader, you don't really have a reason to get mad about something like that, do you? You're just pretty. Of course you don't look thirty."
"...What are you even talking about."
"At the company dinners people keep calling you 'miss,' too. They just treat you like you're in your twenties."
I meant it, too. The Team Leader was... well, she was just pretty, wasn't she? She didn't have the striking inhuman features of the heroes around me, but she was unmistakably a beautiful woman.
"What would you know. Coming from a twenty-one-year-old, it just sounds like you're making fun of me."
"I'm being serious..."
"...H-honestly, tone down the exaggeration."
"......"
She'd started out looking genuinely appalled. But the more I complimented her, the more she started smiling in spite of herself, quietly enjoying it. She really was...
"...Ajumma."
"Heyyy...!"
"Heheh..."
This was fun. We usually only ever saw each other for work, so even though we got along, we'd never really let our hair down like this. Talking with the Team Leader with absolutely nothing between us was surprisingly enjoyable.
"Haa... if I were still active, you wouldn't be able to tease me like this."
"Active-duty schoolgirl?"
"...That was ten years ago, and I obviously meant active hero."
"Well, of course. Team Leader, you were a hugely famous hero until just a few years ago, weren't you? Even now, just searching your hero name is enough to..."
"...Anything after that is embarrassing, so stop."
"Yes, ma'am."
She was pretty cute for a thirty-year-old, too. Thirty years old... thirty...
If you thought about it, I was around forty myself, past life included. Maybe that was why none of this felt like a big deal to me.
"...Why do you keep staring at me?"
"I was just thinking you're prettier than I realized?"
"...What kind of weird thing are you saying at a time like this? Even if you suddenly start complimenting my looks like that... it's not like I have anything I can give you."
That was true enough. I'd never had the chance — or the reason — to look at the Team Leader's face this steadily before, so I'd never really paid attention.
That violet hair of hers... and those amber eyes sitting right on the border between gold and yellow were lovely. The mole at the corner of her eye, together with that neat hair that just brushed past her shoulders, gave her the air of a charming older-sister type. She was older than me, after all. And with the glasses, she had that whole composed, competent workplace-superior energy going on — which, to be fair, she actually was competent, and she actually was my workplace superior... but still. That was the vibe.
But...
"How has someone this pretty never dated even once by thirty?"
"Hey...!!!"
"...Oops."
I'd been thinking it and the words just fell out of my mouth. But she really was pretty, her personality was easygoing and kind, and she was fun to tease. On top of that, for someone with a reasonably high position like team leader, she didn't have a shred of that power-tripping energy — just a gentle nature and a soft way of speaking...
How on earth had she ended up a thirty-year-old spinster?
"Don't worry. They say we're in the age of hundred-year lifespans, and now people are talking about a hundred and twenty, right? You've still got... um... plenty of time left! Fighting!"
"You little...!"
Looks aside, even just teasing her like this didn't feel like teasing someone who was actually thirty, you know? Thirty was really just someone who'd been at a company for five or six years. Even counting from college graduation, it wasn't as if some enormous stretch of time had gone by. Being thirty was a lot younger than the image suggested, wasn't it? And she didn't even wear heavy makeup, so she looked even less her age.
Or was it just because she was pretty? I did have a rather fragile defense when it came to people's faces. Even my own slight streak of vanity was only there because I actually was pretty.
"......Hmph."
"...Would you please stop teasing me."
"Should I?"
I hadn't seen the Team Leader in a while, and we'd somehow ended up stuck in this boring situation, so I supposed that was how I'd ended up conducting a thorough study of my thirty-year-old team leader's appearance. Come to think of it, I'd thought she was pretty even when I first met her after joining the bureau. After that I'd seen her every single day, so I must have just gotten used to it.
"Everything's been cleaned up upstairs! Let's head out at our own pace!"
"Oh."
"That ended faster than I expected."
"Right? I thought it'd take longer."
The Team Leader had asked me to stop teasing her, but I'd been bored, so I'd kept quietly needling her anyway — and somewhere in the middle of that, word came down that the situation above the bunker had been fully resolved. And at the same time, my phone started buzzing like crazy.
Looks like it was time to deal with the Buster Call, not the thirty-year-old teasing...
"......Team Leader. Team Leader. Wouldn't it be fun if we just hung out in the bunker all day?"
"At this rate I'll either die of rage or die of embarrassment."
"Ah."
Well, it wasn't like I'd done anything wrong. I had clearly said I was fine. The problem was the heroes who hadn't even listened to the end of what I was saying — who hadn't properly heard me at all — and come running all the way to the Association, wasn't it?
It might have been an ungrateful thought... but honestly, I really didn't think I was at fault. At least not for anything that happened today.