I Became an Elementary School Girl
"So it really is you, Hunter Choi Min-woo."
"Mm-hmm......"
Inside the Hunter Association headquarters. The bespectacled beauty of a secretary, cold-eyed as she reviewed the chart bearing my test results, shot me a sharp sidelong glance.
Sitting primly on the plush sofa in the reception room, I hunched my shoulders against her gaze and quietly lowered my head.
The secretary set her chart down on the table and settled into the seat across from me, crossing her legs with a languid, elegant grace.
She couldn't tear her eyes off my face, wearing the grave expression of someone who had just stumbled upon a miraculous creature found nowhere else on Earth.
"Still, when you look this much alike, there's hardly any room for doubt. The DNA results are a perfect match, after all......"
She adjusted her glasses once, then added:
"To think you'd turn out this cute. Your looks are a massive upgrade from that insufferable male high schooler, don't you think? Why not just live out your days like this?"
"Don't go running your mouth about other people's— mmph......"
The moment I tried to fire back, I flinched at the soft, delicate voice that slipped out of me and clapped both hands over my mouth.
Everything felt wrong.
The tiny, snow-white hands of a small child pressed over my lips. The clear, girlish timbre of my voice. A height that had shrunk beyond all reason.
And above all....
"Your stats as an awakener measure F-rank. Aside from the transformation into a little girl, you're in perfect health."
"A little girl......"
With hollow eyes, I stared at the secretary as she laid out my situation in neat, clinical lines on her chart.
Then, out of old habit, my hand drifted down to grope at the strange emptiness of my lower half, and I muttered in a listless voice.
"A little girl...... I'm a little girl...... a girl......"
"What kind of young girl gropes at herself so shamelessly?!"
Smack!
Face stern as a schoolmarm, the secretary rapped the back of my hand — the one creeping toward my vacant groin — as she scolded me.
A faint sting throbbed across my knuckles.
I — Choi Min-woo, who at nineteen had earned the whole nation's respect as its youngest-ever S-rank hunter —
"......Waaah!"
— was now shedding bitter tears and bawling at the top of my lungs, all over a little smack on the hand.
Choi Min-woo had made a name for himself by becoming an S-rank hunter at the youngest age ever recorded.
His awakened ability, though, was laughably simple for an S-rank classification.
His power was Body Enhancement.
In an era overflowing with awakeners flaunting flashy gifts — fire pouring from their palms, lightning crackling at their fingertips — he was a hunter who had climbed to S-rank on nothing but plain, unadorned physical reinforcement.
His deeds were staggering enough to be called a victory for humanity itself.
Coupled with his creed of always putting his comrades first, it was no exaggeration to say that not a single person alive didn't look up to him.
His future had been nothing but radiant.
Right up until the day he put his comrades first inside an emergency S-rank gate outbreak — and received his death sentence for it......
"So you're telling me... those five minutes I spent in the gate were six whole years out here?"
When the secretary finished her explanation, I sniffled and threw out the question.
Kim Aran, chief secretary to the Association Chairman himself, nodded in affirmation without a single hair out of place.
"It's only because I was the one who found you. If any other manager had gotten to you first, you'd have been thrown out on the spot, no questions asked."
"Tch...... You were the one lunging to kick me out, though......"
Smack!
"Waaah!!!"
The sting across my knuckles turned my grumbling complaint into a wail mid-sentence.
Maybe it was because my body had become a little girl's, but this frame had zero tolerance for pain.
"Honestly... six years since I last saw this face, and even a rotten history like ours feels damn welcome."
"Sob, hic... It was only five minutes for me......"
"Still, you're alive — that's what counts."
Kim Aran, who had been watching me sniffle for a while, then reached out and stroked my head with a tender hand.
Huh?
Why did this feel like I was being handled like some kind of......
"So cute......"
"Eeeeeeek!!"
A chill crawled up my spine.
As an S-rank hunter who had danced with death in gates and dungeons, I was a seasoned master at sensing ulterior motives and killing intent.
This was not the Kim Aran I knew.
Her gaze alone — saturated with naked, shameless desire — told me everything.
"Why are you running away? I'm only doting on you because you're like a little sibling to me."
"Eep!! This noona is just brimming over with ulterior motives, isn't she!!!"
That's right.
This woman... on the outside she played the cold, flawless businesswoman, but in truth she was utterly helpless against anything cute......
"It's your own fault for turning yourself so cute."
"Bullsh— whoa whoa whoa!!! Put that palm down right now, please?!"
The instant the curse mumbled out of me on pure reflex, Kim Aran's palm rose through the air, locked on target with the back of my hand.
Drenched in a cold sweat, I seized her arm with both hands, my eyes wide and sparkling in wordless plea for mercy.
She was an awakener in her own right, and even with me hanging off her arm, not a flicker of strain crossed her face.
Dangling from her arm like a wet rag, my shrunken legs swaying limply beneath me, I kept a wary eye out for her utterly unpredictable next move.
And that was when—
BANG!!
"Aran-unnie!! Min-woo came back alive?! You're messing with me right now, aren't you?! Huh?!!!"
The firmly shut door of the reception room was practically ripped off its hinges with a violent crash.
At the same instant, a familiar woman's voice — thick with tears — rang out and filled the room to its corners.
"Uh......"
I turned toward the familiar voice, and there stood a woman who, contrary to all my expectations, had changed almost beyond recognition.
A beauty with jet-black hair falling straight to her waist, her whole bearing somehow matured.
Those signature golden eyes of hers rolled anxiously as she scanned the room.
"......Noona?"
The moment I met the woman's face, the word slipped out of my mouth before I could think.
My voice shook.
Only now, staring at how completely she had changed, could I truly grasp just how long I had been inside that gate.
"Ah...... y-you're......"
The young woman's golden eyes found me.
They quivered finely, without even a pretense of hiding the storm of emotion behind them.
Meeting her gaze, I flinched and stumbled back a step despite myself.
Choi Yena.
My beloved older sister — the only family I had left in a world without our parents.
The bob cut that had brushed her shoulders when we'd said good morning just hours ago now swayed all the way down to her waist.
The mischievous air that had always clung to her was gone as if it had never existed, and the noona before me now watched me with something mature — and shadowed — hanging about her.
"Noona...... it's really you, right?"
At my half-question, she closed the distance in a flash and brought her face right up to mine.
Close enough for our breaths to mingle, she slowly traced every inch of my face with an expression of aching sorrow.
"What is this...... you're the spitting image of yourself as a kid......"
"U-um, noona......"
"Why did it take you so long to come back?!!!!!"
"Wow, seriously...... so much has changed."
Even though I'd come home after only a few hours, something about the place felt different.
That was how heavy six years could be.
The layout of the house itself was exactly as I remembered it.
But it seemed the traces of time had spared nothing.
To me, barely a few hours had passed — yet somewhere in that span, the whole atmosphere of the house had shifted beyond recognition.
"Your room is still just as you left it. I never threw anything away......"
Noona, tidying the shoes neatly by the entrance, looked over at me with a gentle smile.
With a death sentence and six years behind me, I'd assumed my belongings would have been cleared out long ago......
"Wha, really?! Yay!"
The room was still crammed with all the private things I'd never shown a soul.
They had survived six whole years untouched, waiting for me all this time.
I turned and looked noona full in the face.
Relief had surged up before I knew it, and a bright, guileless smile bloomed across my face.
"Ack?!"
Before I knew it, noona's face had flooded with relief as she crushed me into her arms all over again.
As if she'd never let go again, the arms locked around my waist trembled with strength.
When I peeked up at her, the dark gloom that had shadowed her face had already melted back into the noona who'd seen me off that very morning.
"N-noona! I can't breathe!!"
"S-sorry!! Ahaha!! S-sorry! Too tight, huh?! Ahaha......"
The moment I squirmed in her embrace, she jolted and hastily released me.
Tears spilled endlessly down her cheeks as she flailed both arms wildly at the empty air.
For me, it had been only a few hours.
The S-rank Hidden Gate.
A gate whose hazard level defied all measurement — one that could have erased an entire nation if left unresolved — had torn open in the very heart of Seoul.
With me, an S-rank hunter, at the very front, noona and I had led our guild members onto the scene.
A raging Monster Tempest was underway — monsters from C-rank all the way to A-rank bursting out of the gate in an unstoppable flood — and the area around Gangnam Station had been flattened into a wasteland in the blink of an eye.
Me — Choi Min-woo, S-rank hunter — and Choi Yena, the S-rank healer and our only true heavy hitter.
The two of us siblings, resolved to die if we had to, stepped through the gate alongside our elite comrades to put it down.
Before long, we came face to face with an unidentified monster whose rank couldn't even be read.
Crushed beneath its overwhelming power, we must have fought with everything we had just to save a single life.
The monster shaped like a wooden doll — wearing the form of an adult man and radiating the most sickening aura......
"No!!! You come here too!!!!!! Please!!!!!! Don't leave me behind!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Noona's scream — a shriek of raw desperation echoing from the far edge of my memory — was the last thing I heard before my memory cut out.
And then, the present.
When I came to, I was sitting all alone in the middle of the living room, in the body of a little girl.
A children's cartoon perfectly suited to my new face played on the TV while I sat curled up on the sofa, staring blankly at the screen.
"You know, sitting there like that, you're just too cute for words?"
"Huh?"
I whipped my head around at the presence I felt behind me.
Strange as it was to realize all over again......
"Pnicure...... why is this so fun?"
My very first girls' anime was turning out to be a genuine delight.