Hamburgers and Zero Regrets
"Well, obviously I'd wear them..."
"Is it tasty?"
Nod nod.
"Have some cola too."
Nod nod.
"Yuna, dear. Just how many hamburgers are you planning to eat?"
Nod nod.
"Don't just shake your head at me. Use your words."
Shake shake.
"You can hear every word I say, and you're doing this on purpose, aren't you..."
Nod nod.
"Fine... eat up, then. Your unnie has plenty of money..."
Nod nod.
"Fffffh!" (Hehe.)
It! Is! Delicious!
Thanks to the landlady's generosity, I was getting to taste hamburgers I could never normally afford to touch.
I can't remember the name, but there was one that swapped the bun for a crispy chicken patty. As a card-carrying hamburger fundamentalist (unintentionally), it was the kind of unholy abomination that made me want to launch a Luddite uprising on the spot.
But it's SO good!!
If it's delicious, that's all that matters. It was a little greasy, sure, but meat instead of bread only made it better. Crispy, juicy chicken meeting that sweet-and-savory sauce was a genuinely revolutionary flavor. I wanted to cast magic right then and there to taxidermy this moment for eternity.
Had there been a happier stretch of time since I left home? I could order hamburgers to my heart's content without worrying about money, and the penalty of being unable to speak had been solved too. For the moment, I had nothing to fret over. The only thing left on my plate was doing a proper job of playing Lee Yumin.
Mmm.
From what I could tell, the landlady didn't suspect for a second that Lee Yumin and Lee Yuna were the same person.
Which means my acting is working!
Reassured, I threw myself back into the hamburger.
Chomp chomp chomp.
"Here, eat this too."
While I was inhaling hamburgers with a silly grin plastered across my face, the landlady held a cola up to my lips. Not a Zero — an honest-to-god regular cola.
I'd asked Yumin earlier whether I'd gain weight eating like this without a care, and apparently, the more mana a person has, the more their body shifts toward its ideal form. So that's why every S-rank mage looks like they were exported from another planet. Though there were one or two S-ranks who'd come through a transfer phenomenon and didn't have true Earthling looks...
Anyway. Thanks to the transfer phenomenon, I now carried a portion of Yumin's mana. Apparently, a normal transfer infuses the recipient with every last drop of mana etched into the original body — but if I received all of Yumin's, my body would apparently detonate.
She does sound like an idiot sometimes, but she is a Celestial-rank mage. I'll take her word for it. Apparently something catastrophic happened on the way to Earth and she lost most of her memories — I'm just grateful this particular tidbit survived the trip.
If Yumin hadn't warned me, I'd be a shredded sack of meat by now, innards burst to pieces, oozing thick, bloody sludge.
Uuuu.
Just thinking about it gave me goosebumps. Then again, I would have died in my sleep, so at least it wouldn't have hurt... right?
'Oh, really?'
According to our illustrious Celestial-rank mage, the mana expands the bloodstream until every single blood vessel in your body ruptures at once — and you die feeling all of it.
That's even scarier! I shouldn't have asked. Wait — no, I never asked in the first place!
'This is so unfair...'
Steeping in my newfound sense of injustice, I contented myself with sipping away at the cola the landlady had so kindly held to my lips.
"Fhhhhh..." (Heeeee...)
An indescribably subtle difference in flavor — one no substitute could ever replicate — curled around my tongue and slid down my throat. My eyes darted sideways to another table.
Zero. Zero. Zero.
Zero, guide me to salvation... — no, wait. Every single person around me was drinking Zero cola. Among that sea of Zeros, one lone soul sipping the real thing. And who might that be?
"Mmmph." (Lee Yumin, that's who.)
"Yes, yes, I know it's delicious."
Nod nod.
Maybe I should just quit the naming office and go smack some monsters around instead. Fire off a few chantless spells and I could probably hit S-rank faster than anyone in history.
And then I could drink this cola every single day, basking in the most exquisite, decadent thrill of my life.
'What do you mean, "good idea"?!'
She took the bait! What exactly does she think would happen if people found out I could cast spells without chanting?
S-rank mages, the Association president, and every other organization under the sun would turn absolutely feral trying to drag me off somewhere. Worst case, I'd get captured and become a human lab rat. We're talking a cold operating table, a mad scientist slicing me open while murmuring, "Oh-ho, so THIS is what a chantless mage's heart looks like!" — forced to perform party tricks with my organs until the day I die!
I shuddered violently, cola still pooled in my mouth. Then, to calm my trembling body, I took another bite of hamburger.
CRUNCH.
The crispy chicken standing in for the bun (magic-grown) and the thick beef patty (magic-grown) collided in my mouth in a glorious, chaotic tangle.
Kuuuuhhh!
This is what humans were meant to eat. Why would anyone do drugs when hamburgers exist? One bite and your mood soars, every miserable thought evaporates on the spot.
Anyway, I figured I'd be focusing on the naming office for the foreseeable future.
'But if... and I mean IF...'
If the day ever came when my savings ran dry and hamburgers slipped out of reach — that's when I'd go monster hunting. I'd cast my spells quietly, out of sight, kill the monsters, sneak out with nothing but the by-products, and sell them. My trips through gates would be on record, but there's no recording equipment inside a gate anyway.
They once tried to install CCTV inside gates and drained a full tenth of every Korean's mana doing it — and they still haven't figured out how to observe the inside of one. So they'd apparently given up and just stationed management personnel at the gates instead.
Which means all I'd have to do is slip my spells past the wardens' eyes and loot whatever I liked. Piece of cake.
'An absolutely flawless plan.'
Of course, ideally I'd never go pseudo-bankrupt in the first place. But hey — who can say where life will take them?
Chomp chomp chomp.
I flashed the message shamelessly, my face not carrying a single wrinkle of guilt. She was the one who offered to buy in the first place. All I did was eat what was put in front of me.
"Right. I didn't expect you to put away a good seventy dollars' worth of hamburgers, but... as long as you enjoyed it, that's all that matters. I told you earlier, didn't I? Your unnie has money."
"Of course... I do run a real estate business, after all. Money's no object. If there's anything you want to eat, Yuna, just say the word and I'll buy it."
I carefully studied the landlady's expression. No hostility. I'd just eaten seventy dollars' worth of her hamburgers, and there wasn't the faintest flicker of anger in her face.
Which meant—
"Fwp!" (Gasp!)
I threw my arms around the landlady on the spot.
Isn't a tenant getting this clingy with her landlord a bit much? And hugging someone I met for the first time today? Am I insane?
'Don't know, don't care!'
Every woman I'd ever seen behaved like this. Hugging in public, blowing kisses at each other, the whole nine yards — so this much should be fine, right?
What mattered right now was not attracting a shred of suspicion that Lee Yumin and Lee Yuna were the same person. I needed bold, decisive action that Lee Yumin would never take. So, uncertain whether my behavior fell within the bounds of girl-on-girl normalcy, I consulted a genuine woman — Yumin herself.
'Yumin, what say you? Is this kind of distance between women normal? In the anime and novels I used to watch, it was perfectly ordinary.'
'Why are you stuttering so much? Don't tell me you never had friends?'
It's okay. I don't have any either. Shouldn't have asked. Sorry.
It was too pitiful watching someone friendless herself rack her fragmented memories just to answer my question, so I cut her off and told her to forget it.
Was hugging the landlady wrong, or not wrong? Sadly, neither Lee Yumin nor Yumin Asir possessed the capacity to judge. Which left me with only one option: read the landlady's reaction.
"Hm?"
Her eyes went wide with surprise, but she didn't push me away.
Approach: APPROVED!
Arms wrapped around her, I awkwardly draped my hands over the landlady's shoulders. Her skin was impossibly soft and yielding, the warmth of it soaking through into mine. Curiously, a bright citrus scent wafted off her.
Yumin was the same way — did everyone with that much mana just naturally smell wonderful?
"Fffffffffh." (Snnnnnnfff.)
Nestled in the landlady's embrace, I drank in her plush softness and that fresh citrus fragrance to my heart's content.
"Eep?!"
The moment I buried my face into her chest and started sniffing, she let out a startled little breath. And yet she didn't shove me off — if anything, she pulled me in closer!
Pat, pat.
"Fwp!" (Hup!)
"So this is the kind of person you are, Yuna?"
The hand slowly patting my back drifted up to my head and began to stroke it, gentle and unhurried. I lifted my face from her chest and looked up at her.
The landlady — no, Kim Soyeon — gazed quietly back down at me. It was a soft smile, soothing and warm, yet touched somewhere deep with something that felt almost like pity.
Hypnotized by that smile, I could only stare blankly up at her.
Boop.
"What are you staring at like that?"
She gave the tip of my nose a little tap and gently peeled me out of her arms. Then Kim Soyeon turned on the spot and made for the office door, waving to me over her shoulder as she walked.
"Yuna, I know it's a hassle, but you can't go wandering around outside without even underwear on. Am I right?"
"Fhp!!" (Ah!!)
"I'll be off, then. See you later."
"Fhphph!!" (Aah!!)
And just like that, Kim Soyeon vanished like smoke.
I stood frozen, eyes locked on the spot where she'd disappeared, my hands trembling uncontrollably. My face had flared scarlet — I could feel a mysterious heat radiating off my cheeks.
I wasn't angry. Just deeply, catastrophically embarrassed.
'I want to die.'
"Mmph! Mmmph. Mmm-mph!" (Good idea. Let's buy clothes. Right now.)
I unclenched my bloodless, deathly pale hands and trudged over to my laptop.