Sun's Bare Face

From that day on, peace settled over the apartment.

The stomping from upstairs that had pounded so relentlessly was cured by a mirror treatment courtesy of the Floor Noise Woofer Speaker. The cat problem was settled by a single thunderous scolding from the hero of our age—Shorts Uncle.

An idle afternoon with no monsters in sight. Lying in bed and swimming the seas of the internet had become my whole routine. Even ordinary mobile games weren't really an option.

The moment I tried to open an app store, it demanded a login, then asked for parental information if I was under fourteen. Dead end, right there.

So all I could really do was wander the web.

Still, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it wasn't all that boring. Barely a day went by without something that made you go, wait, that actually happened? And mixed steadily in among it all were the Magical Girl updates. Strip those out, and this world wasn't so different from the one I'd left when I died.

"Mari, check this out."

"Hm?"

Siyeon spun her chair around and tipped her monitor toward me. If I was the one glued to a phone, she was the one glued to a computer—especially Magical Girl anime. She'd loop the same clips over and over, and whenever something ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠fun came up, she'd call me over to watch.

"Magical, Explosion—!"

The voice actress's full-throated delivery blared from the speakers. Magical Explosion, if you translated it straight. Even a name that sounded kind of lame in Korean managed to sound halfway cool once you put it in English.

That aside—why was she showing me this?

"How about this as a new technique?"

"What, one of mine?"

"Yeah!"

Siyeon's eyes sparkled ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠as she asked. I glanced back at the screen. Reds, blacks, oranges, and yellows tangled into a riot of an explosion sequence. Definitely past anything Siyeon's magic could reproduce—so she meant it for me. Still, what did any of that have to do with actual magic?

Real explosions didn't make cute little ka-boom noises. Animation or not, I wanted a little more realism. Actual Magical Girls might be watching and taking notes.

Explosion, huh…

Never mind the name. The city was getting wrecked either way—what was one or two more detonations? If several monsters showed up at once, it'd be pretty efficient, wouldn't it? It hadn't happened yet, but having a contingency ready couldn't hurt.

"Mmm. I'll think about it."

"Got it—!"

The moment I said I'd consider it, Siyeon swung back to her screen. Technique name… yeah. Something like Blow Up and Die! would do.

The news I'd been scrolling had started to feel samey, so I flipped through the extra tabs I'd left open. Magical Girl Gallery. What kind of nonsense had they cooked up today?

…Huh?

The gallery felt restless. If the main board looked like this, something had definitely gone down.

The post sitting at the very top couldn't help but snag my attention. There was only one reason a mask would come up in Magical Girl Gallery.

A little uneasy, I opened the recommended posts. Everything recent was about the same thing—and among them was the clear culprit.

The comment count and upvotes crushed every other post. Somehow I was scared to click. Bare face?

Where had I been photographed? Not near this apartment, right? A Magical Girl whose identity got blown in this half-baked world—and that Magical Girl was me?

Don't even joke about that. Seriously.

Even from the tone of the post, the writer looked high on pure adrenaline. The photos seemed to be from the Magical Girl gathering a few days back—a distant shot of a whole crowd of us, including me and Siyeon.

At a place where most of the Magical Girls had assembled, someone had managed to catch me standing next to Siyeon without my mask on.

Ah. At least it wasn't me pre-transformation…

I let out a short sigh of relief and looked back at the gallery the way you'd look at animals in a zoo. The comments…

Cursing out the blurry resolution. Sympathy for the werewolf monster. Looks critiques. Whatever else you wanted to say about it, the gallery users had clearly taken a hit. All this fuss over one shot of me without the mask. Talk about overreacting.

Whether the face under the mask got out or not didn't actually matter much to me.

As long as my real bare face stays hidden, I'm fine.

Leave it alone and the whole thing would go cold in about three days. Before long some other Magical Girl story would heat up the board.

…Or so I'd thought.

I was browsing recommended posts at school when I saw it—my own face, blurry as hell, decorating the nine o'clock news.

Why, though.

Watching them made me feel weird. Plenty of other Magical Girls walked around with their faces out in the open, didn't they?

Why is this even news?

Curiosity got the better of me. I followed a link from the comments and watched the segment. It opened on some professor-looking guy mid-interview, hairline already in full retreat, answering a reporter's questions.

"Sun is a relatively recent Magical Girl, you see. So even though she can't be very old, this violent disposition of hers may well stem from the violent games so popular among children these days…"

"Oh, give me a break."

The low, venomous curse slipped out before I could stop it, and the boy next to me glanced over. What was he gonna do about it?

Some old man dragging video games he couldn't even play. Want me to just say my hobbies are violent golf and fishing? And on the days those two don't go well, this is how I blow off steam—want me to stoke a little generational warfare while I'm at it?

"Ugh."

I cooled the pointless anger, flipped my phone face-down on the desk, and started customizing my textbook cover with a utility knife. Today's project: turning the Korean language cover into a starving-language cover. I focused on the soft scrape of the blade—then a thought floated up.

More importantly… monsters have been pretty quiet lately, haven't they?

While someone was busy scraping a textbook with that thought in mind, elsewhere there were those sunk deep into a dilemma she couldn't have imagined.

They wore bizarre forms—human shapes fused with sea creatures, or with things of the forest. Monsters, fiends, beasts; the names varied and so did the appearances. What they shared was a uniformly vicious look, and right now, a single shared problem.

An executive-class fiend—a muscular, man-shaped creature with eight arms and no eyes—spoke, knowing full well that if they simply sat still, nothing would ever begin.

"…So? What are you all going to do? You have to decide."

"Hmph. Just send the ones that can't talk, no?"

The lion-faced monster with arms like twin shields answered the impatient question. That was it. They were selecting which monsters and beasts to throw at the Magical Girls. And the ones chosen now would be sent into Sun and Moon's jurisdiction.

Even sending speechless monsters was still using them as sacrifices. At the lion-faced monster's casual reply, the eight-armed fiend pointed into a corner with a hand sprouting from the second arm on his right side.

"…You don't see that?"

"Haaaaaaahk—! Haaaaaaahk—!"

There sat the cat monster whose head Sun had split open in a single blow not long ago. It glared daggers at the pointing arm, bristling with open hostility. Thwack! A classic feline front-paw threat slapped the hard floor. Speechless beast or not, it had a pretty solid guess what that pointing arm meant.

"……"

Even the shield-armed lion monster had nothing to say to that. A living creature's instinct, so strong even a mute animal refused to go back. Beneath the fierce hissing, silence stretched between the two of them.

"Looks like we'll be sending rookies again."

"About that crazy bitch—let's not tell them anything."

"Yes. Let's do that."

Tell them nothing about Sun. That was the unspoken rule among the monster executives.