Chapter 16: Intimacy (1)

There was no undoing my regrets, but for the moment, the mess had to be cleaned up first.

Though somehow, the work we did to clean things up only seemed to create more work — and if we didn't take that on, nothing would ever get settled, so round and round we went.

First thing every morning, we turned on the radio. And someone always sat beside it, soaking up the broadcasts morning, noon, and night. We couldn't afford to miss the news.

It wasn't much of a burden. James and Cherry were far too busy overhauling the building's interior to mind, and there was nothing stopping anyone from working with one ear on the radio.

We tended the fields, checked that the meat hadn't spoiled, and measured how much it had grown. Our daily routine was set. These magical girls weren't the type to actually sit around doing nothing just because there was nothing they had to do.

As the days grew warmer, we cleared away the weeds springing up around the area, along with the big rocks and trash littering the road. We didn't go so far as to tidy inside the collapsed, abandoned houses, but at least nobody would trip over a stone while wandering around in the middle of the night anymore.

The house we were staying in had even begun to look, from the outside at least, like a place where "people might actually be able to live." We'd patched the broken sections of wall with magic and equipment and swept away the dust until things looked almost tidy. We couldn't manage a coat of paint, though — no paint to be had.

With five of our six working that hard, how was I supposed to sit still? So in the end, I went around with Hayun, doing this and that.

"Haah."

Hayun straightened up from her bent-over work, stretching her torso long as she caught her breath, and a single bead of sweat slid down the nape of her neck. Sunlight caught her face and left it gleaming.

And, watching her, I caught myself thinking — without meaning to — that she was pretty.

......

No, Hayun was pretty regardless of what I thought. The webtoon had drawn her as a spectacular beauty, and in the flesh she'd been the most popular of all the magical girls. Posters, photo cards — there had been plenty of merchandise, anyway. Whether any of it was still being made and sold, I had no idea.

If production had stopped, would the prices fall, or climb? A few things I'd received from Hayun herself were sleeping away in the orphanage's storage room even now. I'd left them there because ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hanging them in my room would have sent Jihye into fits of laughter... Then again, at least that meant they hadn't been smashed in the last attack.

"Why ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠are you looking at me like that?"

Noticing me staring blankly, Hayun asked with a smile.

"Nothing. It's nothing."

This was the girl who slept pressed right up against me in the same tent every single night. Actually, tent or no tent, something told me Hayun would manage it anywhere. She had prior form, after all.

I had no idea why she was like that. To be perfectly honest, it was why I lay awake every night drowning in anguish. She probably just clung to me because she figured that's what close friends did. No — friend or not, did girls really cuddle up that tight just sharing a bed?

Then, out of nowhere, I remembered what Hayun had once said about "yuri." In this world too, the genre was called yuri. Naturally, I'd looked into it. It wasn't as if landing in this world had stripped me of all my hobbies — I still read the occasional web novel or webtoon.

There was no way Hayun knew about any of that, though. She had surprisingly little knowledge in that department.

......

So it probably didn't mean anything. I'd already spiraled on my own once and turned everything into the mess it was now — there was no reason to go misreading things all by myself again. That was probably just what happened when you were a webtoon character inside a webtoon world.

I was shaking my head at the thought when Hayun tilted hers at me. I decided to wrench my mind elsewhere.

Thankfully, I still had other things to occupy it. Things that didn't just give me something to think about, but stirred up complicated feelings in every possible way.

...I wondered if Jihye was doing all right.

Regret washed over me every time Jihye's face crossed my mind. Would it have been better to bring her along after all? But Jihye was surely attending school just fine. Dragging a girl like that out here could never help her future.

It felt a little shabby to compare like this, but the magical girls at least had something to fall back on. Even if Rose's words had been meant to tell me not to worry, they weren't entirely wrong.

In this world, there are people who can only afford to fail once, and people who can afford to fail again and again. And the more money you have, the more failures you're allotted. Jihye, living in the orphanage, was someone who could only afford to fail once. The kind of person who falls once and never gets back up. I was no different.

Whereas—

No. Scratch that.

I shook my head again. No matter what, I couldn't think that way about the magical girls who'd come here for my sake. That was nothing but self-serving rationalization. What person anywhere would want to abandon their schooling and get buried in a backwater like this?

Not Iris. Not Rose. Not Delphinium. Not Dahlia. And not Hayun—

"Jieun?"

At Hayun's voice, I turned my gaze back. In the end, my thoughts had circled right back to her.

"Is something wrong?"

Wrong? As if. We all lived together here — there was no hiding anything even if I'd wanted to.

"It's nothing. Really."

"If it's too much, want to go inside and rest? It's starting to warm up out here, isn't it?"

It wasn't exactly hot. It was only mid-April.

"Let's finish up what we're doing first."

Saying that, I bent back to work. Right. Let's just do the work in front of us. It was harder to drown in my thoughts that way.

—And so the day passed, ordinary as any other. The government had said they would conduct an audit, but no exact date had been set, and for all we knew that schedule could drag on indefinitely.

That night.

I set off in a direction I didn't usually take. Toward the woods. To be more precise, toward the spring we drew our water from.

Whenever I wandered the village, Hayun was always right on my heels. And then I couldn't help thinking about Hayun. It wasn't that I had something else I needed to focus on, but, well. There it was. Sometimes I just wanted to spend a little time alone with my head empty. ...I couldn't say that to Hayun, though. I'd already told her far too much.

"So this is where you were."

I was leaning against a tree, listening to the water burble past, when the voice cut in out of nowhere.

"Iris."

"Didn't I tell you to call me Jua?"

"...What is it?"

"Hayun's worried about you."

Her way of speaking was as peculiar as ever. A register that felt out of place even written down in Korean.

"Because I disappeared?"

"Yes."

I closed my eyes.

"Did you two fight, by any chance?"

"No. Nothing like that."

Reading my expression, she seemed to have concluded that I found being around Hayun awkward. It wasn't, honestly. Not after everything? We'd already seen far too much of each other. Besides, emotions burn stamina too — hating someone outright is harder work than liking them. All the more when that someone was a person I already liked.

The jealousy, the inferiority — I still felt them both. But at least they didn't cut as deep as they had at the start. How could they? Not when ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Hayun had stepped up herself and gifted me a magical girl's name, doing everything she could to keep me at her side. And even I could feel that, in a fight now, she wouldn't be steamrolling me the way she used to. In the end, Hayun would still win if it came to blows.

So the inferiority and the jealousy still lingered, but— ...more than anything, what I felt now was guilt. The guilt of someone who'd made the wrong call from the very beginning and dragged everything to this point.

"If you two weren't fighting, there'd be no reason to run all the way out here."

"It's just... it's nothing."

"Nothing, and yet you ran out here?"

More tenacious than I gave her credit for. Then again, that was exactly the Iris I knew. Even back in my combatant days, the two of us had collided at every opportunity.

Iris had hated me. It stood to reason she'd hate the thing that kept hurling itself at her, trying to smash her face in. Add the whole business about what was under a skirt, and — well. That's how it had been. Judging by her expression now, though, it didn't look like pure hostility anymore. Maybe because last time, the skirt comment had been turned back on her.

When I gave no answer, Iris settled herself against a nearby tree. Leaning on it, just like me. We weren't standing especially close. Exactly that far apart.

"Why not come a little closer? We've bathed together, haven't we?"

Something about that prim, prickly face made me spiteful, and the words popped out before I could stop them.

"Hmph."

But Iris dismissed it outright with a scoff. Back in battle she'd been thrown off by my every word — for her to pull this now was honestly a little hurtful.

"Unbelievable."

"Me?"

"What you said is unbelievable too, but what I don't understand is why you'd speak to me in that tone at all. Aren't you at least a little more careful in front of the others?"

"...Am I?"

I... suppose I might have been. Not that we'd exactly talked all that often before, either.

Honestly, things between me and Hayun had changed in all sorts of ways too. Back then, it had never once occurred to me that speaking to Hayun first might be difficult. Sure, I was working as a combatant, but I planned to quit once I started university. And I'd figured that as long as Hayun didn't find out before then, everything would pass without a problem.

Even if it came to a fight — I couldn't beat a magical girl anyway. Even the one time I'd achieved my objective as a "combatant," I'd never gone so far as to break any of their arms. So I supposed I'd felt I had nothing to be ashamed of.

Then I got found out, and everything after that twisted and tangled until we ended up here — and once I learned that the reason it had all unraveled was my own existence, a quiet discomfort had taken root in my chest.

...Huh. Come to think of it, that's strange. Iris was every bit as tangled up in that mess as I was. So why was it that I could say these things to her?

"...Is it because I look like easy prey?"

"Shall I kill you?"

"Haven't heard that one in a while."

I looked straight at Iris. If you asked about my relationship with her, it was actually Iris who had acted like my presence bothered her. Ever since she'd seen my real face beneath the combatant's helmet, she hadn't approached me at all — as if she thought she'd done something wrong.

"Haven't you been the one dodging me like I was a nuisance this whole time? If anything, it's your attitude that's strange."

"...Heh."

My words shut Iris right up. After a moment of silence, she opened her mouth carefully, eyes narrowed up at me.

"Were you... uncomfortable, perhaps?"

"Huh. Didn't know you had it in you to say something like that."

"......"

"No death threats this time, I notice."

"Shall I?"

"No, well — as long as you're not actually going to do it, threaten away. It's your business."

I mulled it over for a moment, then spoke.

"But that part about me seeming like easy prey? That might actually be true."

Iris glared at me.

"No, hang on, let me put it this way. You were incredibly emotional whenever you fought me. You were never an easy opponent — I never beat you, not once. But... the others almost never showed that kind of feeling toward a single combatant. Normally they'd put you down with one punch, the way you'd clear out any other mook, and head off to whatever they were actually there to do."

Iris, who'd pick me out from far away and fly in a dead-straight line to take me down... back then, she'd been anything but easy. Honestly? She terrified me. But at the same time, of all the magical girls, she was also the least frightening. She was the only one who walked through midair, or made a show of acknowledging me from a distance.

"How do you always recognize me, anyway? Like I said last time — I've swapped out my helmet before."

"......"

Iris stayed quiet for a long while before finally managing to speak.

"There's a way to know. Every time."

But she clearly had no intention of telling me what it was. I decided there was nothing for it and let it go. And so we stood there without a word for some time.

"Do you... hate it?"

"Huh? Hate what?"

"Becoming a magical girl."

When I answered her out-of-nowhere question sounding a bit dim, Iris pressed on, dead serious.

"You've been like this ever since you heard the news. Do you hate it that much?"

"And what about you lot? Are you fine with it?"

I asked, looking her dead in the eye.

"Fine with what?"

"With me becoming a magical girl."

"'Become' or not — weren't you already a magical girl months ago?"

I hadn't expected her to see it that way. Sure, the mood around her had softened somewhat since we started living together. I figured that was simply because I looked pitiful. At the same time, though, I'd always thought Iris was stiffer about the word "justice" than even Hayun.

Even in the webtoon, part of why Iris hadn't gotten along with the other magical girls — Hayun excepted — was that uncompromising streak. It was why she'd clashed with Dahlia time and again, Dahlia who never specialized in any one corner of the field and was content to hold a comfortable middle ground. Though the Iris and Dahlia I'd seen with my own eyes never actually came to open conflict like that. This strange situation probably just made fighting feel awkward. Besides, magical girls or not, neither of them was a bad person at heart.

"That's a different question from this one. What I mean is—"

"What matters is your own will, doesn't it?"

"Huh?"

"I couldn't tell you what you think being a magical girl means. But those of us who were already magical girls were never chosen by some god or anything, you know?"

"......"

"We were just fighters under the Federation's banner. You need hope to fight, sure — but I don't think what we did ever amounted to more than that."

I blinked. Was she blaming herself just now? She hadn't shown it on the surface, but maybe ever since she'd begun rejecting the Federation's story, she'd been harboring doubts about the work they used to do.

"No one would object at this point anyway. You've fought beside us any number of times, you use magic, and you're a girl who transforms, no less."

"...Well, technically, you're not wrong."

"Besides, the 'justice' the Federation used to preach has all but collapsed by now."

"......"

I stared at Iris for a long moment.

"Iris."

"I do believe I told you to call me Jua." Iris snapped at me.

"What can I say? The name's already worn into my mouth."

"You called me by my name until just recently, and now you're telling me you'll switch to 'Iris' because it's 'worn into your mouth'? What kind of logic is that?"

she said, as if I were the ridiculous one.

"You were using my name back when we were defusing bombs."

"......"

I shut my mouth. Tried to land one word and took ten in return. I drew a deep breath and let it out slow. Then I nodded and said:

"Fine. Jua."

"What."

The sulky look on her face was pure Jua. Come to think of it, we'd already fought side by side with our lives on the line. There was no reason to go back to code names now. Usually nicknames come after you've grown close, but whatever.

"Have you ever said that in front of the others?"

"Could I?"

I stared at Jua, flabbergasted, as she asked it like the most obvious thing in the world.

"But you say it to me? How long have we even known each other?"

It hadn't even been half a year yet.

"Well, that's..."

Jua started to answer, then her face went odd. As if she were thinking, huh, fair point.

"Maybe... it's precisely because we haven't known each other long that I was able to say it."

Then she continued, slowly.

"...There are things you can't bring yourself to say to someone you've known long enough to know too well."

"Ah, that one I get."

I said, nodding. For some reason, Jua looked at my face like something was boiling up inside her. What now?

"Oh, right. And I've figured out one more thing."

I kept staring at Jua as she spoke with her chin lifted, and she curled the corner of her lip — the same way she used to when she'd catch me back in my combatant days — and said:

"It's because you look like easy prey. And isn't that exactly why I can say these things to you?"

"It would've been far more impressive without that flimsy excuse tacked on the end."

"'Flimsy'—!?"

Jua barked at my words. And at the sight of that face, I smiled a little. Somehow, it looked like the Iris I used to know. Well. Same person, technically. I just hadn't seen that face lately.

"Let's head back."

"Hold on — what was that 'flimsy' comment just now?"

"Come to think of it, you keep copying me, you know. Last time, you pointed under my skirt and parroted my own words right back at me."

"I was only returning ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the favor! And you really were wearing nothing but panties under there!"

"...If I really was wearing nothing but panties, shouldn't you have kept quiet about it? That's sexual harassment."

"Sexual harassment!? And you don't remember a single thing you did!?"

"Hey, keep it down. We're hiding out here in secret — what if the others hear you?"

"That's because you started—!"

It really was strange. This was the first time I'd ever talked with Iris "like this." And yet, somehow, it didn't feel unfamiliar at all. ...Well, maybe that's because she's the "Iris" I'd always imagined. Though what exactly the Iris in my head looks like, I couldn't tell you either.

Hmm. Maybe it's because she reminds me of a Chihuahua? That might be why she feels so familiar.