A Girl in Love Becomes Beautiful
Suddenly Yeonseo’s eyes went pitch black as she stared at me, and a faint chill prickled down my spine.
“What are you even saying all of a sudden?! More importantly, get your hands off me already…! Hah…!”
“Th-this…! You little monster…! How in the world…?! How did you do it!!!”
“I-I said… ugh… what are you talking about!”
A strange sensation was climbing from below my waist under Yeonseo’s hand, so I shoved it away, scrambled off the bed, and leaned against the wall to demand an answer.
“What do you mean…? Obviously I’m talking about those soft, springy breasts of yours.”
What kind of girl just says things like that out loud…!
“I-I don’t need a review! Why are you getting mad in the first place!”
“The first time I hugged you they were the same size as mine… no, they were actually smaller…! So why are they a little bigger than mine this time!”
“How am I supposed to know!!! And why are you making such a fuss over breast size of all things!”
“Of all things?! Did you just say ‘of all things’?! So now that yours are bigger you’re all high and mighty, huh? Huh?!”
Yeonseo crawled across the bed, slid down, and came trudging toward me with drooping shoulders and limp, dangling arms.
When she reached me she planted her face right in front of mine and began firmly kneading and pressing my left breast.
“You little vixen! I liked that we were the same size…! You betrayed me!!”
“Hieut… so why did you decide that all by yourself and then take it out on me!”
She kept groping for a moment, then seemed to notice something else. She pulled her hands away, ran them over my head, and started comparing our heights.
A dark shadow fell across her face again; she sank to the floor and began to sob as she spoke.
“…I’m… shorter than before…”
“What? Speak up a little, I can’t hear you.”
Tears welling in her eyes, she suddenly shouted at me.
“My height! You’ve gotten taller too! You were definitely shorter than me before! Now there’s barely any difference! What the hell is going on! Height and breasts both growing! You monster! What did you do!!”
She had graduated from calling me a vixen to calling me a full-blown monster, and I was left speechless.
How am I supposed to know that…
More importantly—had I really gotten taller? Was that true?
Startled by the unexpected claim, I walked over to the sink and looked at my reflection.
Just as Yeonseo said, the faintly swollen chest that had been there before now had a clear, fuller shape, and my height felt greater than it used to be.
And the biggest change of all…
“My hair… has grown too…? This morning the sides didn’t even cover my ears…
The back only just brushed my neck, but now it’s completely covering it…? What is this… it’s almost scary…”
No matter how hard I thought, I couldn’t figure out why my appearance had changed like this.
All that had happened today was the monster appearing in the shantytown first thing in the morning, going to rescue Ara, and then taking down the ones who attacked the settlement.
I hadn’t eaten or obtained anything that would suddenly make me grow.
Then what on earth… what caused this…
While I was still staring at myself in the sink, Yeonseo, who had been sitting on the floor, came over and clamped her hands down on my shoulders.
“Get smaller again! I said get smaller…!”
“What kind of nonsense is that!? W-wait, that hurts… it hurts…!”
“Ugh, at this rate you might even surpass me! You monster! Don’t grow all by yourself!”
“I don’t know either! Why this happened…”
I turned the Yeonseo who was still pressing on my shoulders around, brought us both back to the bed, and sat down with her.
Since I had no idea myself, I decided to talk it through in case thinking together might turn up a clue.
Of course, Yeonseo was probably helping because she wanted to figure out the method so she could grow too.
“So you really don’t have any guesses? Situations before this where you ‘grew like this,’ I mean.”
“Well… I’ve only been back for a month, so… I don’t really know.”
“Hmm… then have you ever obtained something new?”
I thought carefully. There had been exactly one time.
“When we went to clear that tower! It was like that then!”
“Ah~ that time? Now that you mention it, yeah. You suddenly pulled out another sword besides the one you normally used, right? You said the goddess gave it to you?”
“Yeah. The goddess Partruna—she’s the source of my power.”
“What kind of goddess is she that she can just hand out weapons like that? She must be pretty strong if she can give out sacred arms on a whim.”
“Hmm, I don’t know about strong, but she’s the Goddess of Love and Purification, so maybe defeating monsters and evil people counts as purifying them? Back then it was a wave-type dungeon, so we took down a lot of monsters.”
Yeonseo closed her eyes, crossed her arms, and thought for a moment before opening them again and shaking her head.
“The timing’s weird for that, though, isn’t it? If that were the case she should have given it before Hyeonseok got hurt. You were in danger too, Charlotte.”
Her words brought the memory flooding back. I lightly rubbed my lower abdomen with my left hand as I thought.
The constant lower-belly pain from my first period, the sudden inexplicable headache, the way my body had moved slower than expected once I let my guard down thinking I could finally rest.
If Hyeonseok hadn’t blocked for me I wouldn’t have died, but I would have been hurt pretty badly.
The image of him injured rose up, and a sharp pain stabbed through my heart. The hand that had been rubbing my abdomen rose and clenched the fabric of my clothes.
“What’s wrong? Your face suddenly got all serious.”
“Mm, just remembering that time… If it hadn’t been for Hyeonseok I really would have been hurt badly. Of course, the fact that he got hurt because of me still bothers me a little…”
“You were that worried?”
“Of course I was. He got hurt right in front of me because of me.”
“Hmm, is that really all?”
“Huh? Why, is there something else? Obviously it hurts a little when someone gets hurt because of you, right?”
“Oh dear. Our little vixen still needs a bit more time. Sigh.”
“I don’t know what you mean, but… ah! Besides that time there was something similar. The first time I held Durandal, I think? I had a headache then too.”
“A headache?”
“Yeah! Same thing before I got Curtana—there was a headache, and once I obtained it the headache vanished and the weapon’s information just floated into my head.”
“Anything else? Nothing more? If the headache was just from new information flooding in and your brain reading it, what about the rest?”
The only thing left was the blessing… so I told her about that as well.
We were going to be traveling together from now on, so I figured it would be better for both of us if she knew at least this much, and I spoke without much thought.
Of course I left out the part about turning from a man into a woman and just said my appearance had changed. While I was waiting for her reply—
Yeonseo suddenly bounced closer, closed the distance, and grabbed my shoulders.
“That’s it! The Blessing of Love!”
“Huh…? Why that? That just made my appearance resemble Partruna’s…”
“Come on. From everything you’ve told me so far, do you really think the goddess only did that much? She wouldn’t even need to grant a blessing just for that, would she?”
“I-is that so?”
“Of course! Now listen carefully.”
She planted her right hand on her hip, raised her left index finger, and spoke to me with a triumphant look.
As I listened, the heat of a face that had flushed many times before began to rise again. My body went limp; still sitting in a W-pose, I simply flopped backward onto the bed.
Having satisfied her curiosity, Yeonseo left me lying there, turned off the bedroom light, and disappeared into her own world on her device.
Staying like that would have been uncomfortable for Yeonseo, so I lay down properly, turned my back to her, and faced the other way.
I had showered and eaten, so my body was limp with fatigue, yet my mind kept spinning around Yeonseo’s words and refused to settle.
What she had said was this…
The goddess governs love and purification, right? Purification would be the combat side, helping you fight. But the love part! That’s the important one!
You’ve heard this before, haven’t you? “A girl in love becomes beautiful.” How about that? Doesn’t that mean your appearance is changing because you’ve fallen in love?
So Charlotte fell for Hyeonseok, and that’s why your body started growing afterward! Well? Am I right?!
“What kind of nonsense is that… Why would I fall in love…”
Yeonseo’s theory was, in a way, perfectly reasonable.
If I were an ordinary girl, that is. But I was a girl who used to be a man.
So the idea that I—who had been a man—would fall in love with Hyeonseok, another man, was completely absurd.
Yet for some reason the pounding of my heart kept stopping my thoughts cold.
I wanted to sleep, but the more I turned the idea over, the more awake I stayed. Before I knew it Yeonseo had fallen asleep, and I was left staring at the ceiling until a new thought suddenly struck me.
“That’s it! She changed my body into a girl’s so I could receive love… so I’m changing because I’m receiving love, right?
Yeah, that has to be it. Me liking a guy? As if! Just like Partruna said, I’ve been meeting lots of people and earning their goodwill, and as a result my body is gradually growing.”
This had to be the correct answer. Even if I had become a woman, there was no way a former man like me would fall into that “female corruption” trope people talk about in gender-bender stories.
Fiction was fiction; I was living in reality, so of course it would be different.
The new hypothesis—that I had changed because I was receiving love rather than falling in love—made far more sense.
So I’m not turning into some lovesick girl. Because of this pretty, cute appearance I keep receiving love, and my body is changing so I can receive even more of it.
That had to be it.
Yes—otherwise it simply wouldn’t make sense!
With my mind finally clear, sleep came easily. Listening to the slow, steady sound of Yeonseo’s breathing beside me, I gradually drifted off into dreamland.