Nuclear Launch Detected
After spelling out the full address for the taxi driver, we finally made it home.
I'd spent the whole time in Sokcho cycling through rest and food, and yet the moment I stepped through the door, exhaustion hit me all at once. Of course it did. The place that truly settles the heart is never too big or too small — just our house, sized just right.
I shut the door tight and turned on the air conditioner in a room that had become a little steam box while we were gone. Feeling the cool air begin to seep outward, I hovered near the unit and waited for the room to drop even a little faster.
Opening ceremony was only a few days away. This easy stretch of living didn't have much time left.
I dragged my dust-coated bag out of the corner and stuffed in the vacation homework I'd finished ages ago.
"Siyeon, what homework do you still have left?"
"Diary!"
I was the kind of person who always left vacation homework until the last two days. And now here I was, finished early, looking over someone else's. The feeling was strangely new — and under my breath I muttered that I never thought I'd be doing this kind of thing again.
Siyeon filled out the last remaining pages of her diary. On the picture-diary pages she scrawled wobbly drawings of fried shrimp, fried red snow crab, and honeycomb ice cream. The memories were still so sharp they almost made the money I'd spent feel justified. Watching her put them down in crayon, I found myself smiling without meaning to.
I'd gotten scammed by a few tourist traps, sure — but it hadn't been a total waste.
"The part that says 'went' — that bottom consonant is a double s."
I corrected her still-clumsy spelling from beside her, and just like that, Siyeon's last piece of vacation homework was done.
Three days still remained until school started. That night, in the small hours.
I'd gone to bed early the way elementary school kids do, nothing out of the ordinary — until something shook me awake right as I was slipping under. With a bleary gaze I quietly pushed myself up.
"Hwaaahm."
An unstoppable yawn. My mouth stretched wide, packed itself full of air, and let out a useless breath.
I grabbed the phone from the head of the bed and checked the time. Three in the morning.
By now we didn't even need to talk. The little bear that had climbed onto the bed was already heading down the stairs; I followed, sliding off the mattress without a sound.
The black mask had waited in Sokcho for its owner's hands. Blinking my half-closed eyes open and shut, I walked the unlit upstairs hallway, opened the rooftop door, and spoke the transformation chant.
"Sun."
I jammed my long orange hair into the back of the mask, felt the damp midsummer humidity, and launched myself into the sky. Irritated complaints spilled out of me along with another string of yawns, perfectly matched to the discomfort index.
"Showing up in the middle of the night, what a pain — yawn."
Following the little bear's fluid arm signals, I arrived at a spot about five subway stops from home. At that hour the streets were empty of people — and, for some reason, empty of monsters too. A barren stretch of road.
I drifted down and looked around. With not even a person in sight, the silence was almost eerie. I could only tilt my head.
I'm already dying of sleep, and this idiot must've misread the signal again after Sokcho.
Annoyance spiked hard. With the hand that wasn't holding my staff, I grabbed the little bear by the throat, hauled it up to eye level, and said,
"What the hell? There's nothing here. You bullshitting me?"
"No, that can't be right… the signal is definitely here."
The little bear was still cocking its head when its eyes went wide. The arm I'd been gripping twisted with urgency.
"Behind you! Behind!"
"Huh?"
From the empty space behind me came soft, padding footsteps. I reflexively threw myself aside — and something pale cut through the air with a whoosh, slicing down from above through the spot where I'd been. An instant later, the shape that had parted the wind vanished into the dark.
"Monsters using cloaking now? Shit…"
A monster that had arrived fully invisible. A pale silhouette — assassin type. The same feel as a unit I'd seen in some interstellar RTS. They were aliens too, so maybe they were related?
Where are you scurrying off to…
I stared hard in the direction it had disappeared. It didn't seem fully transparent, so I locked an entire zone into my field of vision and stood there like a scarecrow, eyes only, rolling them back and forth, focusing into the dark.
Wriggle, wriggle.
Like hunting for a mosquito that had sucked blood and fled into the night, my darting vision snagged on a dark knight floating in empty air. Just like in the game — once you found its position, chasing it down and wrecking it was nothing.
I drove the ball of my foot into the asphalt hard enough to leave a shallow dent and shot forward in a straight line. The wriggling shape startled so hard I could see it even as a form and tried to dodge — but it couldn't keep up with the speed. My fingers closed around living flesh, joints locked tight.
I slammed the monster into the ground.
"Ghk! H-how—?!"
Painful groans mixed with pure shock. Don't ignore eyes trained on pixel-thin translucency. It would be weirder not to notice a body that size wriggling around.
"Do I look that stupid to you? You're calling that cloaking?"
"Cl…?"
I climbed onto the alien shape hanging in midair and prodded at what I figured was its face. Where a normal creature's mouth should have been, there was nothing but smooth surface. A transparent monster with no orifice at all.
"Wow, is this bastard actually related to the Protoss? No mouth either."
I started revising my usual plan of ramming a heated staff into someone's jaws.
"Pro…?"
The monster clearly couldn't parse the flood of proper nouns. Its body was strangely ice-cold, so sitting on top of it didn't feel half bad.
The difference between an RTS and reality: you didn't need a detector to wreck a cloaked unit.
The heart ornament on my staff — glowing like the red blip of a nuclear strike — drifted closer to the pale form, leaving a red point of light.
Beep-beep-beep…
A red point announcing the start of the end. The monster probably had no idea what the words meant — but it was about to learn.
The heated ornament on the staff descended slowly from above, the way a nuke falls to earth in the game, and settled toward its body. The instant the glowing decoration touched the monster's flesh—
"Boom."
"What? What are you— K-KRAAAAAAAGH—!!"
Sun's mouth-made explosion sound rang out, and a pitiful scream tore through the night. Flesh cooked, blackened as if burning, then the sensation of melting under extreme heat.
This was not a monster used to pain and torture. It was a coward that always stalked from the dark, the type that watched its colleagues limp back into the recovery room and thought them pathetic. It had never fought anyone head-on, so its stamina and strength were nothing next to other monsters — which meant it had no way out of the overwhelming force crushing it into agony.
But that same pathetic stamina, strength, and lack of grit…?
No. Thanks to it, the monster escaped Sun's torture quickly — by dying of shock.
"Low HP, same as the game."
Watching the monster start dissolving into magic dust far too early, Sun muttered as if disappointed.
And then — the recovery device in the recovery room. Clutching the nape of its own neck, where the memory of the pain it had entered with was still etched, the monster jolted awake.
"Ghk!"
"Ah, you're back. How was the fight with Saturn?"
As always, the one greeting a monster that had woken from the recovery device was Medic Tentacle. In a recovery room where monsters losing had long since become routine, the transparent monster heard Medic Tentacle's voice and immediately threw the question back.
"Is that masked magical girl's name Saturn?"
"…Hm? Masked? No, that can't be right. The magical girl you faced — wasn't she the one with the long pale-yellow hair?"
The symbol of terror among the monsters. The black-and-white mask. That was Sun's alone. Magical girls from other regions had never been seen wearing anything like it, so it had effectively become her trademark. The monsters analyzing the mask had even started to guess it was some kind of honor granted only to the strongest magical girl.
And now a magical girl wearing that mask had suddenly reappeared in the original zone?
"No. Her eyes were orange."
"O-orange? No, no, that's impossible. She's not supposed to return for another two Setre…"
"I'm certain. They were orange."
Medic Tentacle's thoughts spun. The transfer room had clearly been told to swap the Black Zone with that location for two Setre—
No, no. Memory reached further back. The words Fish Monster Quelpirret had used, taken at face value.
'Two weeks' is a local unit? On Earth, that's the time it takes for night and day to switch thirteen times and a little more!
The realization flashed through Medic Tentacle. He bolted out of the recovery room in a panic to get the information to the transfer room.
"Gate Keeper! Stop all transfers to the former Black Zone immediately!"
"Medic Tentacle? What? What's going on? You come charging in like that—"
Gate Keeper, the transfer-room executive with electricity crackling between both hands, stared in surprise at the sudden intrusion. He had been mid-stream sending monsters to fill the ship's energy quota.
"The information needs correcting! The Black Zone swap isn't after two Setre — it's two weeks. Earth standard: the day night and day have switched thirteen times!"
"Whaaat?"
"Y-you… you didn't send any more, did you?"
"Uh… we still had energy left, so I just sent one more."
Medic Tentacle stared at the transfer device, which still held only the trace of someone who had already gone through. His arms hung limp. His hollow mutter spread through the transfer room.
"We're fucked."