Chapter 33
Time really did move fast.
The moment you thought, oh, right, it was already far away.
It had been a month since the fire.
And if she thought back to the first time she met Lee Seo-ah, then nearly three months had already slipped by.
The season was turning, the worst of the summer heat finally beginning to break. Which made it all the more irritating that she was stuck in a room, on the phone with some sleazy-looking man.
"No."
She rejected him at once, and Kim Su-hyun's annoyingly handsome face on the Device hologram visibly sagged with relief.
"Are you insane?"
Had this glasses-wearing bastard finally gone soft in the late heat or something? She stared at him with a baffled look, and he pushed his glasses back into place before explaining.
So that was it. The fellow who had always been so proper had gotten rough around the edges when she wasn't looking.
He must have been under a ridiculous amount of stress.
In other words, it had all been for show.
"I sort of get what you're saying. But there are people above you?"
It was a little surprising, so she asked, and Kim Su-hyun let out a small sigh.
"Didn't you say you were in charge of this city?"
Oh, right.
He added that in the political and administrative branches, ordinary people actually outnumbered awakened ones.
"So the ones throwing a fit were those guys?"
Good. Then she might as well go wipe them all out.
"You learned mind reading too?"
"Then what's the problem?"
He sighed again before continuing.
"What if they found out about me?"
"If it looks like it'll work out, they'll come looking for me."
At that, she reflexively turned her head.
Beyond the open doorway, she could see the familiars and the children. Seo-ah too, laughing and chatting happily.
She couldn't let that face be shadowed again.
"Fine. I give up."
She erased the massacre plan from her head and focused on the call again.
"Got it. Forget that. Tell me about the investigation instead."
That had been the reason for the call in the first place.
She watched him expectantly, and Kim Su-hyun pushed his glasses up again.
"Oh?"
She had thought he was useless through and through, but apparently he could do something when he needed to.
"...Hey. Where are those bastards? Can I come to you right now?"
Kim Su-hyun looked flustered and tried to stop her, so she forced her fidgeting body back down into place.
"Talk."
She listened in silence as he went on.
There had been four arsonists in total, all of them ordinary people. They had worked in pairs, disabling the security systems at each facility before drawing a magic circle and setting the place on fire with mana stones.
And the four of them could not remember committing the crime.
Under Hypnosis, a person became like a doll moving according to commands that had already been planted inside them.
Even without any knowledge of magic, it seemed possible to draw a basic magic circle or temporarily shut down the equipment of a high-risk mana defender.
Awakened people were less likely to be affected by Hypnosis, but ordinary people who knew nothing about mana were helpless before it.
In a way, it was a power with a flavor somewhat similar to her own charm.
They had assumed the culprit was an awakened person, so they had missed it.
One of the investigators had eventually used spirit arts on a whim, reading the earth's memory, and that was how they had identified the arsonists.
When a mana crime occurred, the culprit usually erased their traces. They had unconsciously ruled out the very method that was normally used in ordinary criminal investigations, and that had been the mistake.
"Then we just need to find the guy with Hypnosis, right?"
If the trait user was a returnee, then the true culprit was one of them.
Unless they were a villain, all of the city's current special-class awakened had already been identified, and none of them possessed Hypnosis.
"Do you want your other eye eaten too?"
He flinched so visibly that it was almost funny, then averted his eyes and cleared his throat before getting back to the point.
Then he brought up something else.
The child disappearances had happened alongside the fire incident.
It had begun when Seo-ah's school burned down, and the students enrolled there vanished with it. A month later, now even the missing students' siblings were disappearing.
And the shocking truth behind it was that the culprits turned out to be the parents of the missing children.
They had personally sent their children off somewhere with their own hands, then forgotten all about it and gone around filing missing-person reports themselves.
"So there's no way to solve it at all?"
The transport vehicles were hard to trace, but not impossible.
He said they might have a new lead, or even solve the case itself, as soon as today.
"If you find the culprit, tell me."
"Don't worry. I'm not going to kill them right away or anything."
There was no need to rush. She could learn what she needed, play with them a little, and then finish them off. So what if they made her would-be daughter cry? Let them show themselves. She wouldn't give them a pretty death like the Eraser got.
Kim Su-hyun nodded, looking a little uneasy.
"Good. Are we done talking now?"
"Yeah, yeah. I don't really need interim reports on that anyway, so just tell me when you've got an actual result. Other than that, we're done, right? I'm hanging up."
Kim Su-hyun's slightly dumbfounded face disappeared along with the hologram.
"Wutyaaa."
"Don't fuss, you brat."
Ma Yu-ri's youngest baby was clutching at her shirt and hanging off her. He had been whining like that ever since the call started because he wanted food.
He ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then kept eating in between. Were all babies this much of gluttons?
She got up, grumbling, and headed for the kitchen. There should have been some baby food she'd bought yesterday.
Biiip, biiip.
"Huh?"
She tilted her head at the strange sound.
Then she realized it was the doorbell.
Stretching her senses outward, she found someone standing outside the house. An ordinary person.
Since she was close to the front door anyway, and it felt awkward to send one of the kids or a familiar, she went herself and opened it.
"Oh. It's you."
"Ah, hello."
The face standing at the door was a little unexpected.
It was Ma Yu-ri's mother, whom she had seen once before. The woman looked at her with a somewhat uneasy expression.
"Are my children still here, by any chance?"
Wasn't that a strange question?
She quickly looked the woman over.
She was trembling with worry, but her attitude was far more human than the last time they'd met.
Even her clothes were neat now, and the foul smell was mostly gone.
What had happened over the past few days?
She had changed so much it was hard to believe the same person could look this different.
"They're inside. Come in first."
"T-thank you. Excuse me for a moment."
The moment the mother stepped inside, the two siblings came running up with shocked faces.
"Mom!"
"Mooom!"
"Ah, you two."
Only when Ma Yu-ri and her younger brother threw themselves at her did their mother finally seem to relax, pulling both children into her arms.
She stepped back a little and watched the scene, and then a familiar came out of her room holding the baby before placing him into the mother's arms.
"Grrk. Take him."
"Ah, um. Thank you."
She seemed a little startled by the familiar's appearance, but she soon accepted the youngest baby and thanked her sincerely.
Then she listened to her children babble about everything that had happened, smiling peacefully all the while.
"She's changed."
"Right?"
She agreed with the familiar, who had come up beside her, and then Lee Seo-ah walked over.
"Yuri missed her mother a lot. She was very worried, too."
"Really?"
Maybe because she hadn't paid much attention, but Seo-ah hadn't looked like that at all. It was unexpected.
Seo-ah wore a faint smile, the kind that truly celebrated her friend's happiness.
So this child could make that kind of expression too.
She had really become much brighter over the past few days.
"Thank you so much for taking care of our children, Seo-ah's mother."
She jolted.
Her body gave a small tremor at the mother's words, spoken while she was still talking with the children.
Seo-ah's mother.
No matter how often she heard it, the phrase always had a pleasant ring to it.
She grinned uncontrollably.
"Grrk. Severe case."
The familiar beside her shook her head like this was beyond saving. She could step on her later.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
After that, time passed and Ma Yu-ri's family went home.
The house felt strange now that it had gone quiet after being so noisy.
"Master."
"Hm?"
Late at night, close to dawn, after putting Seo-ah to sleep and coming back out of the room, the familiar approached and held something out.
It was a wallet she hadn't seen before.
"Grrk. I found it while cleaning."
Whose was it? Had Ma Yu-ri left it behind?
She opened the wallet to check.
"It's Yuri's mom's wallet."
There was an ID card inside. The face in the photo was Ma Yu-ri's mother.
Come to think of it, the kids had been hanging all over her.
It must have fallen out of a pocket somewhere.
"Shin So-ra?"
She murmured the mother's name from the ID card under her breath.
Then she tilted her head.
"Huh?"
It was definitely a name she was learning for the first time.
So why did it feel so familiar?
It felt like she'd seen it somewhere before. Like when she had first heard Ma Yu-ri's name....
"...Ah. Ahhh!!"
"Grrk. Why are you shouting all of a sudden? You'll wake Seo-ah."
Ignoring the familiar's frown and warning, she opened her inventory.
Inside was an old notebook. She pulled it out at once and flipped it open.
- The Earth is ruined.
Not that one.
Flip, flip. She turned pages in chunks, her eyes darting back and forth without pause.
- Shin So-ra. How could you do this to me? We loved each other. We got through that hard time and became husband and wife. Why? Why did you leave me?
- Ahh. My daughter. Yuri. I miss your smile, the one that was always so bright. Dad will come find you soon. Wait for me.
"Holy shit."
"Grrk?"
She couldn't hide the stunned look on her face.
So that was why the name had felt familiar.
"I'm screwed."
Ma Yu-ri, Seo-ah's friend. And Shin So-ra, her mother.
They were the family of the man she'd accidentally killed right after coming to Earth.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
The next morning, after learning that truly absurd and ridiculous truth, she left the house and entrusted Seo-ah to the familiar.
The excuse was to return the wallet.
She also meant to hand over the notebook she had kept, along with the news of her husband's death.
Of course, she'd hide the fact that she was the one who killed him.
Ma Yu-ri's friendship destroyed because of her? Then she'd be sad? And then she'd even come to hate her as the cause?
Just imagining it felt like her heart was being torn apart. Let's keep that as a secret known only to her for the rest of her life. Yes, that was right.
It was fine that she came all the way to Ma Yu-ri's house, but...
"What?"
She tore open the front door, which was steeped in a sudden, vile smell of blood, and stepped inside.
She moved through the house, which held no trace of life, and then stopped dead.
In one corner of the bedroom lay a badly mutilated corpse.
"What the fuck is this now?"
Ma Yu-ri's mother, who had been speaking so warmly with her just yesterday.
The corpse was Shin So-ra.