The Game That Must Not End
"So, like, magical girls? Basically only girls can become one. And even after they transform, they're still girls. That's why they're called magical girls."
"Yeah, I heard that part."
Nobody actually knew how magical girls came into being. Scientists from every field imaginable had apparently thrown themselves at the question — origins, causes, the whole works — and they still hadn't turned up a thing. The one fact anyone had managed to pin down was that only women could become magical girls.
"And I'm a girl, so that's how I became one, right?"
Dusick popped a bite of bibimbap into her mouth, chased it with a spoonful of soybean-paste stew, and kept right on talking.
"Mmffgh."
"Dusick. Swallow first."
Rice grains flying out of a beautiful girl's mouth. Not nearly as charming as it sounded.
"Anyway, so I did become a magical girl. The problem is, when I transform, I turn into a guy."
"Ah."
That gap was enormous, no question. The idea that this delicate little blonde beauty turned into a buzz-cut mountain of a man the moment she transformed was, on every possible level, something you just could not get used to.
"I'm the only one who becomes a guy after transforming. So, you know."
"Ah…"
"And the Magical Girl Association is nothing but complete lunatics. It's not just Pricue, Prabel, and Frilly, either."
"Wait, hold on."
Frilly?
"Frilly — that's the Magical Girl Association's Gwangmyeong Branch Leader I'm supposed to meet tomorrow night, right?"
"That's her. She's a lunatic too."
"She didn't look like one…"
"Unni, you know what they say. A guy who likes big-chested women is a pervert, no two ways about it. But a guy who likes flat-chested women? That's a dangerous pervert."
"That's a saying?"
She swore to every heaven that existed she had never heard that one in her life.
"Pricue's the kind of crazy you can see coming a mile away, so if you smack her around she'll actually listen. But Frilly's the quiet kind of crazy. You never know when or where she's going to lose it, and that makes her way more dangerous. Anyway, let me finish."
"Go on."
"It's not regular crazy, either. It's more like… ugh, this is kind of hard to say out loud."
"What? Why? Spit it out."
"Do you, uh, know what a lesbian is?"
"Why wouldn't I?"
Yuri. It's yuri.
"The Magical Girl Association is packed with lesbians. I mean, sure, there are some straight ones too. But the lesbian ratio is just ridiculously high. Not that being gay is a bad thing or anything. The problem is they're the kind of lesbians with a few screws rattling around loose."
That was… not even remotely what she'd expected to hear.
"That's how bad it is. Someone even posted this on the Association's internal intranet board once."
Apparently the Association had its own private intranet, complete with a magical-girl gossip board, and a post had gone up there.
She should never, under any circumstances, get involved with these people.
"That's the level we're talking about. So picture it from their side — I transform and turn into a magical boy. How thrilled do you think a bunch of lesbians are to look at me? I got stuck with all the dangerous missions. All the heavy lifting, too. It was so filthy and so cheap that I just said screw it, fell from grace, and defected to Mogumogu."
"That's… huh."
Well, none of that really has anything to do with me…
"For the record, that Frilly you're meeting tomorrow? She's the top-tier crazy lesbian of the entire bunch."
…Okay, it has everything to do with me. Is my virtue already in danger?
"Look at your eyes, Unni. Vertical pupils. Super distinctive. Plus you're busty, you're tall, your style is insane, and your transformation form is a military uniform. You are a complete, total, grand-slam strike in the dead center of Frilly's strike zone."
Yeah. Virtue officially in danger. No matter how you look at it. How does that even happen? It can't just be because they're surrounded by nothing but women… does becoming a magical girl change your sexual orientation? What is going on?
"Wait. So when she told me the dress code was to show up in my transformation form…"
"Uniform fetish. She's completely unhinged about uniforms."
That… actually explained a lot. She'd been wondering why a Korean barbecue place needed a dress code in the first place.
"Hey, Dusick. Come to think of it, you said Prabel was a lesbian too, right?"
"Yep. She is."
"Then what was that at the mall last time? She just attacked you out of nowhere."
"Ah. That."
It wasn't as if she couldn't think of a reason. She just really, truly hoped it wasn't that one. If it was, the last remaining shred of her magical-girl fantasy was about to—
"I turned down her confession. And she didn't confess to my transformation form, either. She confessed to me looking like this."
It's all crumbling. It's over. There is no fantasy left.
A cup of coffee after a meal was the unwritten law of the land.
Her personal taste ran toward the sweet instant mix kind, so she was sprawled at a table in the hall with a paper cup one of the Mains had brought her, when Keru came ambling over. A leopard just casually strolling across the floor. The dissonance never got old. He settled himself at her feet, coiled into a loaf, and started licking a forepaw.
"The facility repairs wrap up tomorrow afternoon."
"Yeah? That's a day ahead of schedule, isn't it?"
"Mm. We should get ready to attack sooner rather than later. Need to send the official notice out in advance, too."
Which raised a question she still could not wrap her head around. Why announce exactly where you were going to attack, and exactly what time you'd be there, in a formal letter? They talked a big game about world conquest, but this whole thing felt like a rigged round of cards that everyone at the table had already agreed on.
"Hmmm…"
Something tasted bitter, and it wasn't the coffee. Years in sales honed a certain instinct — the gut-level read on whether a client was going to sign or walk. Let that instinct develop far enough and you started picking up on what people were thinking, even when they weren't saying it.
"Keru."
"Yeah."
"You're hiding something from me, aren't you."
"Uh…?"
"Does any of this make sense to you? We tell them exactly when and where we're going to attack. And now you're saying nobody even dies, and the buildings just put themselves back together afterward. In what universe is that an organization aiming for world conquest?"
"M-Mother. Let's take this to the office."
Fair enough. This was the hall — Mains everywhere, too many ears. Not the place for a conversation like this. She and Keru relocated to the office.
CEO Yoo Yeonwoo. A nameplate coiled with a dragon sat at the front of the desk. She took the chair behind it. Keru hopped up onto the sofa across from her.
"Be honest. There's something you haven't told me."
"Well…"
"Should I just retire? Go hunting for another Mother to the ends of the earth?"
"No, no no no. I was just organizing how to say it."
She laced her fingers on the desk, propped her chin on them, and fixed Keru with a long, level stare. The conditions he'd laid out when he first recruited her, the bits and pieces that had been drifting her way ever since she actually started this boss gig — it was more than enough to make her suspicious.
An evil organization bent on world conquest. In reality, a wheezing, half-dead outfit barely dragging itself along.
Magical girls who were supposed to stand against that evil and wipe it out. In reality, the ones keeping the evil organization on life support so it wouldn't actually die.
When the villains attacked, the magical girls fought back. In reality, they were told exactly when and where the attack was coming, nobody died or even got hurt once the fighting started, and when it was over the wrecked buildings put themselves back together on their own.
What kind of convenient plotline was that supposed to be?
An evil organization that didn't harm people and didn't cause property damage — and it was still going for world conquest?
"Do I look that stupid to you? What's the real goal here."
"That's…"
Keru was watching her face carefully. Judging by the look of him, he hadn't expected her to catch on this fast. Well. She hadn't spent all those years in the working world for nothing.
She hadn't gone to the military, and she'd started working the second she graduated high school — ten years on the clock already. Even after joining her last company five years ago, her promotions had been delayed and delayed because she was a high-school grad, and she'd only just been about to make assistant manager. Worn smooth by one office after another. That was the body she was working with.
"Haaah. Fine. I'll tell you everything. It's going to throw you, but listen carefully."
Keru let out a long sigh. For a leopard, he sure did some weird-ass things.
"You heard this when we made the contract, but I'm a guardian of the Underworld. 'Guardian' is the title, but I'm actually with the Administrative Bureau that governs the entire Underworld. And just so we're clear, the Underworld isn't actually evil. We're just cast in the villain role. We're not demons or anything. That's the crowd down below, on the Hell side."
This conversation had taken a sudden and extremely strange turn. The Underworld? An Administrative Bureau? A role? What was he even talking about?
"It's natural that none of this makes sense yet. You'd need to go through a few more fights, clash with some magical girls, before it really clicked. You just caught on way too fast. Anyway, I'm going to keep talking, so listen and file it away."
"Uh. Yeah. Okay."
"And my mission, like I told you before, is to maintain the balance of good and evil on this Earth. More precisely, in Korea. The Underworld has a pretty close relationship with the mortal world as it is, and we're not big fans of people dying in droves. At the end of the day, this is just gods playing games with each other. Why should people have to die for that? But when the ones up top decide they want their entertainment, it's not like we can tell them no. So the best we can do is keep the balance as even as possible, and stretch this game out so it doesn't end."
"Then what about the magical girls?"
"Same deal. They're just affiliated with the Light Realm instead of the Underworld. We're on opposite sides, but that doesn't make us enemies. Someone from the Light Realm's Administrative Bureau is attached to the Magical Girl Association president as a mascot. The Light Realm is cast in the hero role. And they think the same way we do. Why should people die so gods can amuse themselves? They can't pick a fight over it, so the plan is to manage things so the game just… keeps going. As long as possible."
"So?"
"The whole 'world conquest' thing is just a pretext, honestly. It's the most natural slogan for an organization like this to shout when it shows up. And when we first appeared, people did die."
"They did, yeah."
"That was because the magical girls didn't show up in time. If they had, the balance would've been way too lopsided the other direction. Our side — Mogumogu, the evil faction — kept getting stronger, and no magical girls were appearing, so we had to force them onto the stage even if it meant hurting people. Whatever the intent was, it worked. The idea that we're the villains spread far and wide across the mortal world, and that's what allowed magical girls to be born in the first place. So we started getting the balance in place, but…"
"Okay. I get that much. I get it. So what happens if you can't keep the balance?"
"They flip the board."
"What board?"
"The gods' game board. The Heavenly Realm — which sits far, far above both the Underworld and the Light Realm — flips the board called Earth. One match, over."
"What?"
"How many times do you think this Earth's game board has been flipped already? If you go all the way back, you've got the extinction of the dinosaurs, the great floods, the massive earthquakes — natural disasters like that. Come a little closer to the present and you've got the First World War and the Second World War. Plus every regional war that breaks out here and there."
"And those are disasters that happen when the balance breaks and one side completely collapses?"
"Yeah. A lot of people die."
What… what was she even listening to right now.
"It doesn't matter whether good wins or evil wins. That's not the problem. But if one side completely collapses, that means the other side won, right? The game is over. This board is finished."
Keru was looking at her with completely serious eyes.
"Then you have to start over."
"Then can't we just sit still? The evil organization exists, the good organization of magical girls exists. Done."
"No. Think about it. You put a coin in an arcade machine and the game doesn't start. You'd get pissed, right?"
"Well, yeah."
"From the gods' point of view, if we don't fight, the game doesn't start. It's a bug. They'd be going, 'Hey, what's wrong with this thing,' and start smacking the machine around."
"Then just attack halfheartedly and take the hits. Easy."
"Mother."
"What."
"If we obviously go easy on each other, is that a fair game? We may care about the mortal world and its people, but a game still has to be fair."
"I mean, I guess, but…"
They really had come right up to the edge of that. Keru stretched, drawing his whole body out long in a lazy, luxurious arch. They were in the middle of a conversation this serious, and he was doing that, so the atmosphere refused to land.
"If we hadn't found you — if we'd kept failing to find a Mother — they were going to flip this board too. Disaster on this land. New game, new start. And we would've had to go along with it. Watching people we'd grown attached to die, right in front of us."
"That is… what…"
"Anyway. That's why we need to grow our forces, and fast. We don't have to match the Magical Girl Association one-to-one, but we need the gods to look down and think, ah, two evenly matched sides going at it. And we need that balance to hold."
Keru looked at her again.