Yoo Serin (1)
"Serin!"
"Serin! Can you hear me? Are you okay?"
"WAAAAAAAH!!"
"Serina, you otay?!"
My head felt stuffed with cotton.
The children's voices and the teacher's urgent cries drifted in at the edge of my hearing.
What was that? That memory just now.
I felt dazed and adrift. I'd just been stacking blocks like always when a light suddenly flickered and flashed before my eyes, and then—
[You have awakened.]
Along with that bizarre message, something enormous came flooding into my head.
...Yuri?
What even was yuri?
What was so great about it?
It... seemed that I had really, really loved something called yuri, apparently.
What kind of person was I, to have loved something this much?
I couldn't recall what the word even meant.
So I dug through the knowledge that had poured into my head, searching hard for anything about yuri.
...Ah. So that's what it is.
Before long, I found the meaning of the word.
Yuri meant a woman and a woman loving each other.
To be more precise, it seemed to describe the most ideal form of love? — the kind where a beautiful person who was a woman fell in love with another beautiful person?
I didn't know what "love" actually was, but anyway.
Hold on — what is this memory? Did I get overwritten by something or what?
Something felt off, so I chewed the situation over carefully. Fortunately, picking apart the word "yuri" came with all sorts of bonus material attached, and it didn't take me very long to piece together what was going on.
First, the certainties: the memories that had entered my head were of my past life. That, unlike my current body, that life had been lived as a man. And that I couldn't remember how old I'd been.
...Welp, intuitively, past-me must have been at least older than I am now.
Seeing as I am currently a kindergartener.
...Hmm. But still. Something's off here...
I tilted my head. How should I put it — something felt strange?
Hum, hum... ah!
...Was I always this good at thinking?
Unlike before, it felt as though something that had been locked in chains had been set free. The stream of thought running through my head had become very, very much faster than it used to be.
Oooh — is this the power of awakening?
So awakening was something incredibly good?
Wait — what even was awakening?
The moment the question formed, information about awakening rose naturally to the surface. There was almost nothing on this world itself: that Mom was an Awakener, that Arin's mom was an Awakener too — and beyond those two facts, nearly everything else was knowledge from fiction.
Remembering that left me a little disappointed. Well, what could I do? I'm a kindergartener, after all.
...But wait, aren't there supposed to be things like spitting flames, or boosted physical abilities, or even SSS-rank mythic skills?
Or were those hidden somewhere?
Would they pop up if I just said the word out loud?
As soon as the thought occurred, a ticklish feeling bloomed — the brain deep inside my skull tingling like something was about to surface, almost but not quite. Come to think of it, there had been a word I'd always wanted to shout out loud at least once, way back when. It lingered on the tip of my tongue.
Yes. Ah, I remembered! It was...!
"Status wi— hurk!"
"Waaah! Serin!!!!!!"
Hurk!
For an instant, I couldn't breathe. My consciousness snapped back to reality — a view of the world tumbling head over heels. Someone had just body-slammed me.
"Hrghk?!"
And as if that weren't enough — WHAM!
A carpet-bombing of sheer mass came crashing down on top of me as I rolled across the floor.
My breath. I couldn't. Breathe.
A flawless combo, executed with zero wasted motion.
"Boo-hoo-hoo!"
"Hrk, hrk... Arina! I... you're... heavy..."
"Waaahhh! Serinaaaa!"
The child pinning me flat was my childhood friend, Arin.
Arin, tears gushing from both eyes, was admittedly adorable with those big steamed-bun cheeks of hers.
But that was that. And this was this.
Urghk.
...Arin was a little heavy.
"S... st-stooooop..."
It hurt! I was dying!! You're heavy!! Somebody save me!
"Waaah! I fink Serini's hurt!!!!"
The moment I started wheezing like that, Arin only cried louder. She shook her body this way and that, and I felt even more like dying.
"Hewp... hewp me..."
"Teacher! Hieeek! Serini's not tawking!!"
"I... I am tawking...!"
"Serin! Are you all right?! Teacher Jeong! Please call someone, hurry!!"
"Is Serin hurt really bad?"
"Serin, don't be ouchie!"
Amid the teacher's flustered voice, the children crowded in around me — and all together, at once, they went heave-ho, heave-ho, shaking my body every which way. It was pandemonium, plain and simple. The whole world rattled like an earthquake had struck.
Something felt like it was rising up from deep inside me.
Urghk.
Stop. Stop it, stop it.
"K-K-Kiiids!! Hrk, hrk! St-stop sh-sh-sh-shaking me, I'm otay!"
Please, stooooop! Stahp iiiit!!!
"I'm getting diiiizzy!!!"
...Thankfully, the situation was smoothed over without further incident.
Putting the story together roughly: while stacking blocks, I had suddenly gone blank, and even when the teacher called my name, even when the children cried, I wasn't doing anything at all — so they'd worried. Apparently the flashing light from my awakening had been visible to me alone.
For now, it was a relief that they weren't rushing me off — sans mother — straight to some facility for testing. I still didn't know what kind of world this was, after all. You never know. Maybe Awakeners get hauled off to some government agency and made to fight from childhood.
Inferring from my long, long six years here, one thing was certain: this world was more dangerous than wherever past-me used to live. Every so often, when the sirens wailed, the kindergarten lights would go out and everyone would hold their breath; a while later, grown-ups I'd never seen before would arrive from outside. And judging by how the teachers' faces eased toward relief afterward...
...my best guess was that these people were without a doubt the beings called Hunters — the very word that had surfaced in my head.
I couldn't swear they were really Hunters. I'd never actually heard the word spoken aloud while I was here.
...But going by my memories as Serin — the feeling that I'd often heard familiar words like goblins and Gates...
...Okay. Let's just call this modern fantasy for now. I mean, I did just awaken, after all. With roughly eighty percent probability, this was definitely a modern fantasy world.
Good. Now that I knew the genre, things got easier. Knowing what kind of story this was — what clichés it might run on — meant I might get to coast along a whole lot more comfortably. And that, right there, was life's second playthrough: the special privilege of having a past life.
Now then — what could I actually do?
I combed through my knowledge for anything useful.
Hmm.
First off, modern fantasy means monsters, right? And apparently there also existed all sorts of human-shaped beings with monster features. And people falling in love with such beings... would that be nonhuman yuri?
Oh? Whoa...
Wow, everyone really did come in every shape and size. There were spider-women, and older sisters with bat wings, and older sisters with long fangs. Though the ones with bunny ears on their heads and fluffy tails — weren't those just plain old humans?
Anyway, this genre didn't seem bad either.
Oh. Hold on, hold on. I don't think I should be digging around in these memories.
No matter how I looked at it, these were dud memories that had nothing to do with my current situation. I decided to rummage through different ones instead.
After all, modern fantasy is all about special abilities — that's the bread and butter...!
I tried recalling various powers. Superhuman strength! Swordsmanship! Mages! Skills! Things like that. And come to think of it, magical girls — my beloveds — arguably counted as modern fantasy too. Since I'd loved Magical Girl Ruru-chan, I decided to check the related memories.
Oh... ohhhhh.
The magical girls were all menhera. Mostly the obsessive types, too. Maybe they had too much protective instinct, because it seemed they'd even lock the person they loved inside the house.
Awawawa.
And then something dawned on me. All this time, I'd thought Top of Iris from the recently aired PriPriPriPa had reformed and become the protagonist's friend, but...
Ah... so that was love, huh...
...A whole new world opened up. I still didn't really understand the word "love," but one thing became clear: what connected those two was, simply, love.
Mm... mm.
But.
Hmm.
...Why is this all that's in my head?
Why is it nothing but yuri in here...!
Getting this far, one thing had started to genuinely trouble me.
No, seriously — what the fuck did past-me even do with his life?
One thing was for sure: past-me had definitely existed. The memories that had appeared in my head were unmistakably mine. And yet, really, almost nothing came back to me. When something connected, memories would surface like links snapping into a chain — kind of like clicking through link after link on a wiki — but in the end, every single chain led to one place and one place only. Yuri.
What kind of person I'd been. What I'd studied. What relationships I'd had.
...Not a clue. Not one.
Did past-me really go and die from doing nothing but gorging himself on yuri? Even for my own past life, that's too much.
I must have been a complete fucking dumbass. You could call this spitting in my own face.
With memories like these, I was no different from plain old six-year-old Serin. Hell, even the knowledge itself seemed to be locked behind something. What was love? And what the heck was this "slug" business supposed to be? Curves meeting curves to form yet another curve, points meeting points and grinding away — what was any of that even supposed to mean? My thoughts couldn't stretch a single step further.
Haaah... not one good thing came out of this.
The breadth of my thinking did feel somewhat wider now, sure. But I was always smart to begin with. Mom always said I was a genius, you know. And now that an adult's mind had been dumped into me like this, I'd lost my one chance to ever prove it.
Ugh. Useless me.
I let out a small sigh.
"Serina, are you ouchie somewhere again?"
Flinch.
That short-tongued voice made me hunch up — because only now did I remember there was someone right beside me. I whipped my gaze to the side.
"Wait, wait...!"
Arin was wobbling her whole body back and forth. The image of a cat staring at me while swaying left and right flashed through my mind, and goosebumps crawled up my arms.
"Again-again, Serini's going spacey."
"No! Arina, I'm otay. I'm, mm-mm, I'm totally otay, so pwease stop...!"
"Weally?"
"Mm-hm! Weally."
"'Kay!"
Phew. Thank goodness.
"I was so worried Serini would be hurt, I tell you!"
Instead of launching herself at me this time, Arin sat down close beside me and pressed herself against my side. My heart went warm and soft.
Come to think of it, doing other things while a friend was worried sick about me was pretty rotten behavior.
"Thank you, Arina."
"Mm! We're fwiends!"
Arin beamed, bright and sunny. I gave her a few gentle pats.
Mm-hm, childhood friends, huh. Childhood friends are nice too. That ticklish sweetness, one step beyond friends blossoming out of a natural relationship — that's the tasty part, no? That delicious awkwardness rising up inside a relationship that's always been familiar...
...Huh?
I got the feeling I'd just had a very strange thought. What was it I'd just been thinking?
I tilted my head. Whatever had surfaced moments ago evaporated on the spot, leaving only a faint, uneasy residue behind.
Oh well. Probably nothing.
And with that thought, I reached out and took Arin's hand in mine.