Paper Maps and a Vanished Past
“Hmm.”
Smartphones were hard.
For someone who had, at best, checked messengers and email, opened a portal site, and watched baseball streams or looked up the scores, a smartphone was far too much.
“If you spread your fingers like this—”
Ohh. The map on the screen got bigger…
“And if you pinch them back together—”
Oh. The map got small again…
Tomorrow was the end of October. Halloween, at last.
With the decisive day right ahead of her, she had the map open on her phone, trying to get a sense of what Itaewon looked like.
Apparently she looked clumsy enough at it that Dusick, watching from beside her, finally spoke up.
“Unni… you can’t use a smartphone like a feature phone…”
She was staring at it like someone from another era.
“I just never had much reason to use one…”
“You’re in your early twenties and you still don’t know modern tech this badly? That’s even weirder… Did you grow up in the middle of nowhere?”
“No, it wasn’t like that…”
Was this really the kind of thing people got scolded over?
“Anyway, we don’t have many Mains. And we don’t know how many of them are going to show up on the other side either. If it’s about four, like in the simulation last time, we should at least be able to put up a fight.”
They hadn’t managed to install the production unit.
Originally it was supposed to go into the Magical Girl Association building, but once the plan changed, the installation site changed with it. Re-scouting a new location had pushed everything later than scheduled.
“Yeah…”
Truthfully, she and Eve already had an unspoken understanding that they would lose this raid.
It wasn’t a matter of pride. The magical girls had simply taken on sponsors, and the fight was going to be a showcase for the ads. That was all.
But that conversation had stayed between her and Eve. It wasn’t something she could share with Dusick.
“Dusick.”
“Yes, Unni.”
“Print me out a map of Itaewon. I can’t make sense of anything from a screen. Paper’s easier.”
At the request to print the map on paper, Dusick’s face went blank with disbelief.
She understood. At twenty-three—right around college-graduation age—being this bad with a smartphone did look strange.
She had her reasons, though.
Back when she had still been a man, working full tilt as a salesman at her old company, smartphones had exploded into everyday life, and plenty of people in the sales department had picked one up.
She had bought one too, and for a while she had gone around entering client addresses and swaggering about “using the map on her phone.”
Then the section chief had called her in and said this:
“Assistant Manager Lee, there is something I would like to advise you on. Nothing else—do not put too much faith in the smartaphone. Where there is convenience, danger increases. The smartaphone is handy and fine, but there are times when analog is better. For maps and the like, the ones we have used for years are often more accurate than a smartaphone that only chases the newest thing.”
After that, smartphone map searches had been banned in the sales department.
Once the habit set in, anything that wasn’t a paper map became hard to read.
Thinking about it now, it was ridiculous.
“Here you go, Unni. I printed it.”
Dusick sat down beside her and spread the map out. Printed across several sheets of A4 and taped end to end, it made a full map of Itaewon.
Now that was easier on the eyes.
“We can designate the starting point, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay… hmm. Let’s see, then.”
Her staying in the rear was a given.
She had learned it in the last simulation: the mere fact of her being deployed put a buff on the Mains’ combat power.
In other words, keeping herself on the field for as long as possible was the better play.
Not that this was a battle that called for any grand strategy.
“Oh, right, Unni.”
“Hm?”
“What about Kabe? Is Kabe waiting at the hotel?”
Coldly speaking, Kabe had to come to the fight.
Kabe was a Main she had summoned herself. She had been treating her like a daughter and keeping her close all this time—but she couldn’t keep doing that forever.
Keru was supposedly looking into what Kabe really was, but true to that mangy mutt’s usual pace, there were still no clear results.
If she took Kabe onto the battlefield, she would at least find out what kind of role the girl could fill.
So of course she should bring her—
“What if she gets hurt? She’s still a kid.”
—except her mouth refused to cooperate.
“Unni, you have to judge this coldly. Strictly speaking, Kabe isn’t even your real daughter. If you take her into this fight, you’ll get to see what she can actually do.”
“Yeah… you’re right, Dusick.”
She scratched her head.
She had to be cold about it.
“But if she gets hurt…”
“Unni.”
“I know. I know, okay.”
Under Dusick’s stern stare, she nodded.
“Nothing at all… huh.”
She flipped slowly through the few sheets of paper she had taken from Yoran, checking the contents.
Most of the pages were blank.
“I used every practical—well. Every available means of investigation. There is not a single remaining record of this woman’s prior identity.”
“Is that even possible?”
“Birth records, of course—and compulsory education, every kind of insurance, pensions, all of it. Nothing came up.”
Was that really possible?
More than that—had there been a reason to wipe a trail this thoroughly?
In a country like Korea, where you couldn’t live a normal life without proof of identity, had there been a need to erase someone’s past this completely?
“So this is only a theory, but…”
“Hm?”
“I tried making an assumption.”
Eve sank back into her chair.
“The case of someone whose past must not come to light.”
“Must not come to light? What does that mean?”
Yoran formed a mudra with her hands.
Eve seemed to recall it was meant to burn away the karmic weight of whatever was about to be said. What was she about to claim?
“The case of someone who was treated as less than human.”
“Less than human?”
“Do you remember the experiments that were carried out when magical girls first appeared?”
“Ugh…”
Poking at a sore memory.
A sudden headache pressed in, and she dug her fingers into the space between her brows.
The arrival of magical girls had been a shock in more ways than one.
Beings who could stand against the Mains of Mogumogu-dan, who held power no human firearm could match—
and who took a stance friendly toward humanity.
Eve herself, burning with a sense of justice about protecting people, had actively agreed to the humans’ requests for experiments.
Later on, it had gone further and further past the line…
“What if—just if—she was captured by human hands and forcibly remade into a magical girl.”
“Impossible.”
“But Association President, if that isn’t it, a prior identity vanishing this completely doesn’t make sense. For there to be nothing at all like this, there would have to be intervention at the government level.”
Put that way, there was nothing left to say.
There weren’t many countries that maintained an identity-management system as thorough and as powerful as Korea’s.
Inside that system, for someone like Yeonwoo to appear as if she had simply dropped out of the sky made no sense.
“So then… Yoran. You’re saying—”
“I believe this hypothesis is viable. Namely: a magical girl awakened, and before we noticed—before she even realized her own power as a magical girl—a government agency captured her. At the state level they wiped every record of her clean, made her a person who had never existed in the world, and forced through human experimentation…”
“And Keru secured custody of her by chance?”
“Yes. And something I heard while looking into the materials—her magic capacity is also said to be highly abnormal.”
That much was true.
Cyclone, the first boss of Mogumogu, had only had around 30,000 liters of magic power. Eve herself had a little under four times that—110,000 liters.
But Yeonwoo’s capacity far outstripped even that.
She had shaped raw magic itself into a shield and blocked Frilly’s aura cannon, hadn’t she?
The sheer volume of magic it took to use power as-is, without converting it into a magic formula—an insane stunt.
Definitely abnormal.
“And you’re saying that’s the product of human bio-experiments.”
“At present, that is the most likely possibility. Even I have never seen a prior identity erased this thoroughly, Association President.”
Good heavens.
So that was why she had been able to take Kabe in as a daughter so easily.
Wanting the family she didn’t have—the thing she had never been able to hold in her hands—was only natural.
“And that daughter, Kabe, as well—during the experiments she was probably subjected to harsh sexual—”
“Th-that’s—!”
“Pardon?”
“No. It’s nothing…”
That part, at least, really wasn’t true.
But if she said so now, the problem became how she knew.
Most people were aware she had unofficial dealings with Mogumogu-dan, but even the branch leaders didn’t know she openly came and went from Mogumogu-dan’s base.
In other words, Yoran didn’t know.
She didn’t know that Eve knew exactly how Kabe had been born—or that Kabe called her Dad.
So there was no need to volunteer it.
“Those humans… even so, she was a woman, and they did that kind of thing… O Buddha… are You still asleep…?”
Watching Yoran grind her teeth, Eve still couldn’t say a word.
“Anyway. Got it. Good work.”
“Shall I dig further?”
Further investigation—was there anything left to dig? Prior identity, fully deleted. As for becoming a woman and all the rest…
“Yoran. Is it possible that memory manipulation, or some aftereffect of the experiments, scrambled her memories—or that her sexual identity was altered… that sort of thing?”
“Hmm…”
Yoran sank into thought for a moment.
She handled a lot of under-the-table investigations in the ordinary course of things, so she heard more than most. She would know better than Eve.
“From the shock of sexual experimentation, she might have come to deny the fact that she was a woman… or tried to escape her own gender. That much is possible.”
So it was possible, then.
“All right. You can go.”
Then Eve picked up the wad of receipts tucked in among the papers.
“And these meal expenses are seriously out of line. How do you even eat two hundred thirty thousand won worth of yukhoe for lunch? I never told you to go that f— Where did you go?!”
The Association President’s office was empty except for her.
She sighed, stood from the chair, and walked to the window to look outside.
A woman who had lost even her identity to humanity’s cruel experiments.
A woman who had lived denying even the fact that she was a woman.
An unbelievable reality.
They said reality was harsher than fiction. It really was.
Did she not even have a family?
Was that why she had been able to accept Kabe as family so quickly?
Haa…
She was going to have to look after her a little better…
“So you all ride together.”
Twenty-four Mains in total.
Add Dusick, Keru, Kabe, and herself, and that made twenty-seven—plus one animal.
“Itaewon’s pretty far, Unni. Will you be all right?”
“It’ll be fine.”
She loaded the Mains onto the minibus.
Originally, Mother was supposed to open a Dimension Gate or something and move everyone to the operation zone together—but she couldn’t use magic.
And since it was a transmitted spell only Mother could cast, Keru couldn’t do it for her either.
So they had no choice but to charter a bus. A full-size rental hadn’t been available, so they had gotten a minibus instead—and now there weren’t enough seats.
“Kabe and I will take the subway. Nothing’s going to happen. When you get there, stay on the bus and wait. Don’t get off.”
“It starts at six, so if it looks like you’ll be late, take a taxi, Unni. Got it?”
“Stop worrying and go on ahead.”
The bus pulled away, leaving only her and Kabe in front of the hotel.
“Itaewon Station… Line 2, then transfer to Line 6, I think.”
“Mama, are we going to fight?”
“Yeah. Kabe, you have to stay right next to Mama. Okay?”
“Kabe can fight too, though?”
“Well, you can fight, but… today we don’t know how Kabe fights yet. Once the fighting starts in Itaewon, you can show us then. Okay?”
“Okay. Mama, Kabe is super strong!”
“Yes, yes. You’re Mama’s daughter, so of course you’re super strong. Mama knows.”
“Does a kindergartner need a ticket?”
“Ma’am, that is clearly not a kindergartner…”
At the ticket gate, she had tried to stick close to Kabe and go through together, and gotten caught.
“She’s just a little big for her age. She’s in kindergarten…”
The station attendant looked back and forth between her and Kabe, then let out a long sigh and opened the gate.
If they had insisted she buy a ticket, she would have—no, wait. Kabe didn’t even have an exact age yet! She could still be kindergarten age!
She stood by that with full confidence!
“Just this once.”
“Thank you! Come on, Kabe, you say thank you too.”
“Tank you!”
She hurried Kabe through and onto the subway.
About forty minutes from here. Get off at Sindang and transfer to Line 6.
“Mama, the metal lump is moving!”
“Shh. No yelling in here.”
Luckily there were seats. She sat side by side with Kabe, staring blankly out the window, when her phone buzzed in her pocket.
Dusick.
How did she even know? The girl was a ghost. She answered yes, and Dusick sent a link. She opened it, and it took her to some internet site.
This wasn’t some kind of hack, was it?
Her account balance was draining day by day as it was. If she got hacked on top of that, she might actually cry.
But what appeared on her screen wasn’t a hack or anything of the sort. It was something she had never imagined.
She looked around, but no such person was in sight. Everyone had their faces buried in their phones; no one seemed to be watching them.
It wasn’t as if it made her feel bad, either. After causing incidents on broadcast twice already, it made sense that some people would recognize her. What she was curious about was something else.
What on earth was a Gallery Master?