Chapter 1. In a Foul Mood (1)
I am in a very foul mood. Because right before my eyes, quite a few students stood wrapped up in each other's arms, a hair's breadth away from full-on smooching.
Students should act like students and study. Why were they already playing at romance? ...Ah, wait. Is that too much of a boomer way of looking at things?
"Jieun, Jieun."
"What?"
"Jealous?"
"..."
"You are jealous, aren't you? Admit it."
"..."
Watching this girl—my childhood friend in this world—poke me in the ribs as she teased, I gave serious thought to what on earth I was supposed to say to her.
I hate couples. I've hated them intensely ever since I was little.
The reason was nothing special. I was never part of one.
Right? Honestly, laid bare: a relationship where simply having someone at your side made you happy—that was something I could barely imagine.
You could ask, aren't there relationships other than romance? Well, sadly, I'd hardly ever had any of those, either.
My personality wasn't particularly good, and I wasn't handsome, or capable, or rich, either.
"If you're that jealous, you should've said yes when they confessed to you the other day."
"...They only confess to me because they can't confess to you."
"Where in the world did you get that idea?"
"You know how it goes. When a genuinely pretty girl and a less pretty girl are together, people look at the less pretty one and figure there might be a chance with her."
"How can you say something like that even as a joke?"
No, I'm serious.
"Even so, someone like you could land a boyfriend, no? I bet there are girls who'd say yes if you confessed."
Easy for you to say.
...Well, even judging myself objectively, I'd say it's 'possible.' If you asked whether that assessment contains zero subjective bias, I couldn't argue—but I'm confident my face isn't so hopeless that no one anywhere would go for it.
The problem was, that didn't mean I could just grab anyone and start dating right now.
I had no time, no money, and a mountain of things to do—and on top of it all, I liked women.
Yes. I liked women.
And right now, I was a woman.
You could ask what's wrong with a woman loving women in this day and age, but that's the kind of thing only people it has nothing to do with would say.
Above all, the situation I was in right now was itself extremely 'special.'
Date a high schooler? However rotten and conscienceless a person I might be, I wasn't that far gone. Sure, technically I was a high schooler at the moment too, but that and this were two different things. A romance between someone who was 25-plus-16 and a 16-year-old was more than enough to spark a social scandal. For the record, both ages were counted the international way.
You might find my way of counting ages strange. And you might think I'm out of my mind for even entertaining the idea of dating a high schooler with that extra age stacked on top.
There's a story behind this.
Hmm, where should I start?
It was seventeen years ago now, and my memory of it is hazy—hazy enough that things get confusing unless I reread what I wrote down in my notebook.
So, you see... right. I was an ordinary university student.
A nameless school in an area that only barely cleared the Gyeonggi metropolitan region, one that couldn't even fill one hundred percent of its freshman quota. The campus had five buildings in all, and one of them—the oldest and most unremarkable—was the dormitory.
Even at a school that couldn't fill its enrollment, dorm rooms were always in short supply, and the school had no particular intention of adding more.
Some of the bathrooms in the classrooms still had squat toilets you had to hover over, no less.
Even in a town like that, the studio apartments near campus catering to students rented for quite a bit. So my parents and I decided that rather than paying for me to live on my own nearby, I'd simply commute—riding the school shuttle an hour and a half to two hours each way, morning and evening.
Ah, right. That's how it was. For over a full year after my discharge from the military, I commuted like that. Looking back now, I have no idea what I was thinking.
Anyway, well.
Naturally, a swaying bus left plenty of time to spare, and if there were no assignments to work on in that time, it came down to one of two things: sleeping, or finding some other way to kill the hours.
Mostly, I read webtoons and web novels.
It wasn't that I had hipster tastes... actually, being an otaku down to the bone, I read Japanese web novels by running them through my browser's built-in translator, or otherwise mostly read novels with 'that sort of feel.' You know the type. Stories that would probably do well if they got an anime adaptation in Japan.
As for webtoons, I mostly read ones individuals posted on blogs or community sites, not the official serialization platforms.
Most of the time, they'd simply stop uploading midway for no reason at all, or if they did upload, a single new chapter took a year, or else the comic got picked up for official serialization and the original run was cut off.
And what I hated most of all was that last one—'official serialization.'
Why?
Isn't it a good thing when a comic by an artist you like gets an official run? Chapters come out on schedule, the artist benefits in their own way, the pages usually even get colored, and the rough lines get cleaned up.
The problem, you see, is that the taste of the 'raw' version disappears.
What gets posted on blogs and sites usually starts out as a short one-shot. And usually, those one-shots turn provocative to grab people's attention.
Characters get naked, or busty, or every line of dialogue drips with innuendo—and with all those traits piled together, those comics usually become absolutely hilarious.
The problem with such provocative material, though, is that it's hard to stretch the drama over the long haul.
Shall I give an example?
Say you have the clichés of a traditional magical girl story. The magical girl transforms, and afterward, without anyone ever teaching her, strikes her signature pose. Her battles with the villains are, for whatever reason, divorced from reality so that no one else knows about them, and even when real-world problems intrude, it usually amounts to nothing more than a spat between friends or a bit of romance.
Now suppose there's a comic that skewers all those clichés.
The magical girl is embarrassed by her own transformations, so ground down by reality that she'd rather brawl than use magic; the villains attack while she's mid-transformation; their battles make the evening news; there's an agency managing the magical girls; civil servants toil; people protest...
All of that can be played for laughs as satire.
But all those 'realistic' settings inevitably drag the story into serious territory.
Yes. That's the trap.
What I mean is: gag comics that become long-running serialized webtoons end up laced, more and more as they go on, with strangely serious material, until the comedy stops being comedy.
The 'magical girl story' I'd been reading was like that, too.
"Hey. Hey."
"Hm?"
This pink-haired girl, tapping my arm from beside me. The same went for this girl, who had somehow ended up as my childhood friend in this world.
Unless she were an idol required to wear her hair that way, how many high schoolers, really, would go around with such perfectly pink hair?
Besides, she'd had that hair ever since we first met back in elementary school.
According to her, it's her 'natural color.'
...Fine. Let's grant that. Let's say the world harbors some staggeringly rare genetic trait, and once in a great while, a person like that happens to exist.
But here's the thing.
That purple bob passing by in the distance. Or the green ponytail walking beside it.
Orange, lime green, blue, sky blue, navy, yellow... ah, right, yellow is a color people have naturally. My mistake.
Anyway, the hair of the passersby came in every color under the sun.
And nine times out of ten, people with hair that vivid had body hair to match. At least, the eyebrows, eyelashes, and beards I could see did.
As if they'd stepped straight out of a comic panel. In this world, that was 'normal.'
"What's wrong? Is having no one to spend Christmas with really so lonely? Hm? Want me to keep you company?"
"...Sorry. I have a prior engagement that day."
"Oh?"
A sly look crept over my pink-haired childhood friend's face.
"You're not secretly dating some boyfriend behind my back, are you?"
Getting a girlfriend once I became a university student—that was the plan.
I never got to date in university. And I died that way.
...Well, given my current 'special' circumstances, I wasn't sure that was possible anymore.
"Anyway, I'm busy."
That's right. I'm busy.
I happen to be working part-time for the evil organization of a magical girl story, of all things.
It's legal work, mind you—for a part-time job at an evil organization.
...Honestly, it's a wonder the girl in front of me hasn't caught on.
This girl in front of me is, hmm.
Happy Cherry Blossom, a magical girl affiliated with the Galaxy Federation. Every magical girl active in Korea took the name of a flower, but she's the only one whose name ends in 'Blossom,' so everyone just calls her Blossom.
A naming sense so lazy it's almost cheerful.
Well, that's one-off blog comic shorts for you. The author probably just slapped on whatever name came to mind at the time.
The 'Happy—' prefix was something like the Galaxy Federation's official motto. 'Our Federation works for the happiness of every planet in the universe!' That, too, was part of that webtoon's signature brand of black comedy.
Not that she's an alien. She's an Earthling.
...Well, I'll get to that story in due time.
"So... here again today?"
"Yeah."
The walk home from school. We always parted ways at the bus stop.
The bus was that way; I walked. Every penny saved counts.
It goes without saying that I'd never once invited a friend to where I lived.
Frankly, apart from her, there weren't many people who bothered to strike up conversation with me in the first place.
"You won't wait for me?"
I heaved a deep sigh, and white breath came pouring from my mouth.
I stopped the steps I'd been turning to take and stood facing Blossom.
How many times had it been now, losing fights to her?
Losing meant my transformation coming undone, so managing to stay undiscovered for about a year now was impressive in its own way.
Honestly, by this point it had even stirred up a strange fighting spirit.
...People would call it absurd—a small fry who wasn't even a cadre believing she could beat the protagonist, one who practically stood at the head of the magical girl team, no less.
"...Three minutes left."
"Geez, why are you even counting down the minutes?"
When I muttered at the time shown on the bus stop display, Blossom waved a dismissive hand.
I exhaled deeply once more.
"...You could just head home with your friends like usual. What, did they all get boyfriends too?"
At my words, my childhood friend whistled and turned her gaze away.
"W-well, we've kind of drifted apart lately anyway. I figured it might be nice for old friends to walk home together once in a while!"
"...Really?"
I looked back at the stop's display.
"Says the bus is almost here."
"Oh. So it is."
Blossom studied the display, sounding a little disappointed.
"Um... Jieun."
Then, hesitating slightly, she spoke to me.
"What."
"Have I, by any chance, done anything lately that might've made you mad?"
"..."
When I stared at Blossom, packing all of my what-nonsense-is-this feeling into my furrowed brow, she looked up at me with her head slightly bowed.
Her hands were clasped behind her back, and the toe of her shoe tapped at the pavement.
"It's just... you seem a little colder toward me these days."
"...I'm not."
I breathed out another long plume of white and said,
"...I just—haah, I don't really know either. I guess it's that having to spend this Christmas the same way as always has me feeling gloomy."
"Really? So it's not my fault, then?"
"Did you do something wrong?"
"Mm... no, I don't know."
"Then you didn't. Since neither of us knows."
When I said that, Blossom—no, Hayun—smiled.
"Really? Then that settles it."
What on earth had just been 'settled'?
By then, the bus had arrived.
"Let's meet up after Christmas, then!"
I waved back at Hayun as she waved to me.
It'd be nice if winter break started right after Christmas.
Watching the bus shrink into the distance with that thought, I turned and started walking.
...Cold again this winter.
I should stock up on heat packs to tuck inside my combat suit. Thank goodness for the money I saved on bus fare.
Breathing in the cold air, I thought that.