How My Masochistic Girlfriends Got Their Superpowers
I caught my breath.
With a cigarette between my lips, I exhaled lightly and surveyed the surroundings with eyes that were in better shape than usual.
Why the hell does this warehouse have a fridge, a TV — even a bed…?
These weren't things someone had dumped here to abandon. The warehouse itself looked like something out of a hardware store catalog, large enough to fit at least two cargo trucks, yet every corner of it was steeped in the lived-in feel of daily life. A mosquito net hung over the bed. The TV and desk were set up right beside it, arranged to minimize the walking distance. In one corner sat a heavy boxing ring and a sandbag — clearly a place for someone to indulge a hobby — and next to that, a simple shower stall rigged up from a hose dragged in through the window.
"…Is something strange?"
Hyeon, having just finished a shower right out in the open as if she owned the place, straightened her back with a pride that flaunted her height. She was a touch taller than me — a genuine long-limbed beauty. For someone who'd been sobbing and gasping just moments ago, she had completely returned to her usual expression, and she jingled the rings piercing her clitoris and nipples with open pride.
"You live here, right?"
"Yes. As you can see. It's obvious at a glance."
I was asking because I didn't know.
"And next door?"
"That's where my parents live. I told you before what they do, didn't I?"
Right… a cult.
That was why she'd said she never wanted to invite me home.
"How long have you been living out here?"
"Ever since I first fell for you, Lord. Continuously."
That still didn't answer when.
"Facing my parents is a hassle in all sorts of ways. They were already busy running their little cult out of a cramped house, and having a room for me made them uncomfortable — so our interests aligned perfectly. As you can see, my father used to be a welder, and there were leftover materials, so I taught myself how to build whatever I needed."
She clearly knew what I was actually asking and had zero intention of answering it. More than that — was she just showing off her handiwork out of nowhere?
Boxing and welding. For a girl, she had a lot of hobbies that didn't fit the mold. The bell she'd used earlier, the tools scattered everywhere — if she'd made those herself too, that only drove the point home harder. I already knew her parents weren't normal, but making her build her own shower stall? What kind of story was that?
"No, forget that. There's something else I need to ask you right now."
"About the hypnosis, you mean?"
"Yes! Exactly! You need to tell me why I'm walking around perfectly fine! I was dead certain you'd just match my sexual preferences like the other girls and play along — but my memories didn't vanish, and here I am, completely lucid."
"Aren't you misunderstanding something?"
"Like what?"
"If you think about it logically, there was never any need to put you under hypnosis in the first place. …Right?"
……Well. That was true.
Thinking back, the whole pattern had started when Harin followed me into the Club Room, got hit with hypnosis on the spot, and ended up living with Cash. Looking at it that way, Hyeon was right — there really hadn't been any need for her to hypnotize me at all. The closest thing I had to an excuse was that I'd received Harin's memories and had been unconsciously mirroring how I'd lived back then without any sense of dissonance. But Hyeon, apparently, wanted none of that.
"I do have some desire to live with you the way we used to… the way Cash and Yuna did, by drawing out your personality from back then and tailoring things to my own preferences. However…"
"…However?"
"In my case, my parents' lives would be in danger. They're garbage that can't even be recycled, but they're still my blood, and I don't want to watch you commit murder — so the moment the hypnosis was about to take hold, I stopped time, put you on my motorcycle, and brought you here."
Hold on, hold on — she just casually dropped another bizarre piece of information.
So if I recreated the memories of being with Hyeon, her parents would be in danger… And this girl, on top of welding and boxing, also knew how to ride a motorcycle…
"Your tastes are seriously weird."
"…I hear that a lot."
"And why are you talking like me killing your parents is a given?"
"I released the hypnosis and called you here precisely to talk about that. Lust is fine and all, but leaving those four to drown in a whirlpool of desire without any help is just too pitiful."
Pitiful?
"You said you were neutral."
"I am neutral. For me, the top priority is your safety, Lord. Next is the well-being of my friends. I claimed neutrality because if I didn't, they'd try to shut me out. I don't think they'd actually do that since we're friends — but in the absolute worst case, even lives could be at risk."
Hyeon stepped closer.
Then she touched my eyes, my arm, and my leg.
"…?!"
"How does it feel?"
"Oh…"
I could see…
My leg moved. My left arm, too…!!
Come to think of it, this girl had said that on top of her time-stop ability, superpowers didn't work on her!
"You should've done this from the start~!"
"I would have if I could. Right now, something critical has been taken from your body, Lord. Even if I restore you like this, it breaks down again before long."
"With your power, you could give me my memories back for a little while too, right?"
"I could, but I'm deliberately not doing it. Whether it's your brain or your heart — either way, you're caught in some kind of scheme. Let's say I erase the strange ability clinging to your body and restore your memories. In the process of breaking down again afterward, even the memories you've barely managed to recover now might get wiped out with them. I can't touch it carelessly."
"I have no idea what you're talking about. The only superpower stuff I've ever watched is shonen manga."
"In other words… it's like wiping poison off a surface with a tissue, but never quite reaching the infected area underneath. Even if I use the antidote I have — my ability — the infected part remains, and it spreads again. Think of it that way."
"Ah."
That made it easier to understand.
I sounded like some kind of infected patient.
"Something like the hypnosis Harin cast can be undone if I touch it. But even if I touch someone whose personality Cash has expelled, the personality doesn't come back. The bodies Yuna has thoroughly warped and ruined can't be restored either. And Euna's invisibility only lifts for a moment while I'm touching her — the second I let go, she turns invisible again."
So if it was a continuously sustained type, or something that had already transformed irreversibly, there was nothing she could do.
I suddenly felt like I'd become the protagonist of a shonen manga.
"So who do you think did this to my body?"
"I believe all four of them are the culprits."
"……………"
…What?
"That's why I brought you here. This place is beyond anyone's eyes."
After giving my body a temporary fix, she moved around the warehouse, blinking from spot to spot to check the windows.
Time-stop again…
She needed her power just to check the windows?
"Why?"
"No one is spying. Normally there are so many eyes watching you, Lord, that opportunities for a one-on-one conversation like this are almost nonexistent."
"You make it sound like I'm under surveillance."
"That's because you are."
What the hell was this now?
"You hadn't noticed, I take it."
"When you talk, say everything at once. What the hell is going on?"
"There have always been people watching you. The group of college students Harin brainwashed. The private detectives Cash hired. Surveillance through Yuna's body-alteration ability and her clones. And Euna herself seems to have visited you quite frequently using her invisibility. A perfect stealth ability that doesn't even make a sound — of all of them, she's the one I least want as an enemy. On top of that, they freely use things like wiretaps, so even countering with time-stop is difficult."
In other words — all four of them?
"Have you never found anything strange?"
"Now that you mention it… maybe there was…"
First, there was Euna appearing at the perfect moment when the Class President picked a fight with me.
"Hello… I'm not a weird girl… so don't run away… hngh… sniff… I've been walking around all day and my feet hurt… sniff…"
"Don't treat people like psychopaths~! J-Juwon was just trying to save you… That crazy bitch just now… that crazy bitch hit you… She said weird things, slapped your face, tried to pin a false crime on you… Th-that fucking bitch… that fucking bitchhhhh~! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!"
Euna had been completely unable to calm down, probably because I'd disappeared. As for the Class President who'd tried to hurt me — I didn't know what had become of her, but she'd clearly been badly injured. Euna's tongue had been even more twisted back then; after reuniting with me, both her speech and her behavior had gradually been corrected. But at the moment she first appeared, she'd looked like nothing short of a lunatic.
…Thinking about it, the timing really had been off.
Then there were the lines Cash had said when she left the onahole and vibrator at my place…
"But Euna really is a problem. That habit of getting excited and lunging in to bite people — you might want to fix that someday. I hired detectives and had people watching you constantly, and yet she still made direct contact… Thanks to that, the whole plan fell apart."
I hadn't thought much of it at the time, but looking back now — the disguise, too — she must have had Yuna's help.
They'd been suspicious of each other, so they weren't exactly in cahoots… but it still meant all four of them had been surveilling me.
"So… all four of them…… each took something? For that reason?"
"That's not a reason. That's evidence you were being watched. Different topic."
Right. Yeah.
The sunlight after so long was throwing me off; my head wasn't working properly. For the sake of a smoother conversation, I took off my sunglasses and looked up at the sunlight beyond the window, collecting myself.
"Okay, so I get that I was being watched, and it seems like there's evidence for that. So let me ask you straight — is there separate evidence that the four of them wrecked my body? And also, this whole thing about me killing your parents — how does that connect?"
"May I speak bluntly?"
"I just said it, didn't I? If you're going to talk, spit it all out in one go. Don't drag it out."
"Then I'll tell you."
Hyeon coughed. Still naked and apparently cold, she threw on a simple bathrobe, cleared her throat, and answered.
"It was around the start of high school, I suppose… We all had good grades and good looks, so to put it crudely, we were the popular group. But it was a rather closed-off circle — a group of girls gathered around you, Lord — so we turned down every invitation from guys to hang out, and we got jealousy from other girls, which meant we never really formed good relationships with anyone else."
"So you were outcasts."
"No. No one bullied us. At most, there was some gossip behind our backs… and your personality back then was as sharp as ever, Lord. Even so, you should still have some high school memories left — you don't remember living cowed and beaten down, do you?"
"After my arm and eyes got wrecked, yeah, I got pretty deflated."
"And before that?"
"Before that was the same as always. No reason to feel small. Grades were decent enough… I don't remember clearly, but I think I had normal friends…?"
"You didn't have friends. But that's exactly it. Really — we received so much help back then. We kept saying we were happy just as we were, but every time someone stuck their nose in, you solved it physically, Lord. You nearly got suspended for it."
I had no memory of any such incident.
Probably because it was tied to Harin and the others — and those memories were gone.
"Our group became famous because of it. A guy walking around with five girls in the thick of puberty didn't exactly look good to people. So we figured we'd just keep going like this forever, just the six of us… but by the middle of our first year, that confidence started to crack. Everyone began feeling restless. Myself included."
This seemed to be the main point.
Both Hyeon and I had gone serious.
"About what."
"The future. We gave up on marriage. Obviously. If one of us got married, she'd be betraying the rest… So we set that aside first, but there were still so many practical difficulties. Where we'd live afterward, talk of jobs, college applications, convincing our parents, and personal circumstances on top of that…… No matter how you looked at it, the wall of reality was just too high. It felt like the world itself didn't want us to be happy with you, Lord."
A harem sounded nice in theory, but drag it into the real world and the problems weren't one or two. I was creampieing them without a second thought, but if anyone actually got pregnant, things would explode. In that sense, high school freshmen fretting over this kind of thing was… pretty early.
……Precocious, I guess?
Which meant my girlfriends had been dead serious about it.
"We figured money would work itself out somehow. We had the numbers. The real problems were convincing our parents and dealing with personal circumstances — and that's where you stepped in, Lord. Each of us had one personal issue that was a problem… and you smashed every single one of them head-on."
Before I could even tell her to elaborate, she launched straight into an example.
"We all have our personal stories, but may I start by laying out mine?"
I nodded.
Honestly, I was curious.
What kind of circumstances this blunt girlfriend of mine had been through, and what exactly I'd done…
But I realized, too late, that this was a Pandora's box.
"My personal circumstances…… well, it's nothing much. From middle school through the mid-to-late first year of high school, I was sexually assaulted by my family. That's about it."
"…………………"
……Holy shit. Did this crazy girl not have the concept of pacing?
"Sexually assaulted? By who? Wait — family?"
"Yes. Something about needing to receive a divine possession. They restrained me and tormented me. Most of the bondage gear in this warehouse was made by my father and mother, and my sexual preferences originated there. So… around high school, I didn't even talk like this. I was much more depressed."
"……Ah."
So that was why she'd said I'd kill them.
Those pieces of trash — I had said I'd kill them.
"I can tell just from your expression. But you half-killed them once. After that, neither my father nor my mother ever laid a hand on me again, and we lived without even seeing each other's faces. Now that I have superpowers I'm not afraid, but after what they went through, they truly never touched so much as a hair on my head."
"Hey… wait, this isn't something you just casually—"
"No. It's a story from the past. So… now you understand why I revere you as Lord and cherish you, don't you?"
In just a few short words, the weight of Hyeon's love hit me like a brick.
Unlike Cash or Yuna, she never showed it, so I hadn't known…
It was too heavy…!!
"The others are the same. They each had similar personal circumstances, and once you smashed those head-on, no other man even registered in their eyes. So one day, the five of us gathered somewhere without you and ended up having this conversation."
"……What conversation?"
"'If Juwon couldn't move… we could take care of him…'"
……A chill ran down my spine.
"Of course we didn't act on it. We didn't have the ability to back then, either. We were all powerless."
"So something happened that gave you the means."
"Yes. Having heard this much, you already know what it was, don't you?"
Of course…
"……College."
"Yes."
Hyeon clapped her hands.
"If we went on to college like that, we'd all scatter in different directions… and we all had a premonition that this miraculous connection would end because of it… So… at the moment when our anxiety reached its peak, a miracle descended upon us…"
That miracle was superpowers.
And that was the story of how everyday life — for me and for them — had changed forever.