I'm Going to Change the Genre of This Novel - 1
"Hyunwoo, you have to live a good life."
"…Sorry, what?"
He'd tossed it out casually while working in the auto shop my father ran.
I was a middle schooler helping out with my dad's business, sorting boxes and supplies that had just come in from the factory. I'd finished organizing the storeroom and come back, and out of nowhere, he started in on this.
"If you live kindly, it all comes back to you in the end."
"……."
I was a middle schooler at peak hormonal sensitivity, a stupid fool steeped in paranoia.
And so I said the one thing you should never say to your father.
"Mr. Kim, that regular you always give freebies to, got drunk behind the wheel and totaled our car, remember?"
…And Mom, too.
I couldn't bring myself to say that part out loud, but maybe my father knew anyway.
"……."
His face clouded over for a long moment.
And what he said next, I still remember to this day.
"……."
A smelly little girl was bawling her eyes out in front of me.
When a person's crying truly erupts — from misery, from overwhelming emotion — snot and hiccups choke the throat, the face crumples, and the sound that comes out is a genuinely beastly thing.
The girl weeping before me was putting on a textbook performance of beastly sobbing.
The three of us had thrown off the police with illusions, blinked from spot to spot with short-range teleportation, and made it somewhere safe to catch our breath — when suddenly the floodgates burst.
"She looks like an ugly doll!"
"Hana-chan! Shh!"
I clapped a hand lightly over Sato Hana's mouth as she cheerfully showered everyone with unfiltered facts.
I'm glad I went along when the Satos asked me to.
Sato Hana had recently taken a shine to her walks, wandering farther and farther from home each time, and it was weighing heavily on the Sato couple, both of whom worked full-time.
Back when Hana's condition was at its worst, they'd both worked themselves to the bone to save up for surgery from a famous specialist in Europe who had cured patients of lower-body paralysis. But once her condition improved, they'd redirected the saved surgery money into living expenses and school fees, and things had gotten a little easier.
"We're never around except when Hana-chan goes out for her weekend walks, so I'm planning to quit my job over this. Hoho."
Laughing brightly, Mrs. Sato (the wife) had asked me to keep an eye on Hana on her walks and make sure she didn't stray too far, saying she'd wrap things up at work as quickly as she could.
…And the result was the ugly doll sitting in front of me.
"Um, I think it's about time we talked."
"Eep! Hihk! Y-yes ma'am!"
The type to always be lurking in the back row of every class.
A petite girl who looked like she spent lunch periods buried in a comic book lifted her grimy, unkempt face.
"S-so, you see, what happened was…"
According to her story, she'd awakened as a Magical Girl at the exact same time as the delinquent who'd been bullying her for ages. Haruko, who'd long nursed a grudge against her tormentor, had been cornered when the delinquent tried to overpower her and steal her star.
Then, remembering something she'd seen on the news — Magical Girls are durable. — she'd grabbed a brick and smashed it over the girl's head. And when the delinquent's boyfriend came running and tried to call the police, she'd instinctively used her psychokinesis to knock him flat.
Truly, one could only marvel at her capacity for decisive action.
Back in my day, the greatest act of rebellion I could manage was hiding in the library reading dark novels, sneering at the world from behind the shelves.
Haruko had cracked a skull.
"What about the other side? Are they dead?"
"N-no, ma'am! While we were running I snuck past the school, and they told me both of them just blacked out and woke up the same day."
Astoundingly enough, even mid-flight, she'd gathered intel — checking on her victims from a safe distance to assess the situation.
This kid's instincts were, without exception, recklessly bold.
"Haa…"
I took a moment to sort through the situation, and honestly, for all its impact, this incident was remarkably low on the severity scale.
Yes, smashing someone over the head with a brick was a serious violent crime, indefensible under any circumstances.
But the victims had known full well they were attacking a Magical Girl, and had been the first to commit violence — attempting to rob Haruko of her physical freedom.
Given that Haruko was thirteen, this was a juvenile matter, something that would end up in family court at most.
There'd be guardian interviews and a settlement, sure, but it was hardly the kind of case that warranted squads of armed police swarming the streets.
Which means this whole violent incident is probably just a pretext… the real goal is locking this girl up in a research facility.
In the original story, even before the plan officially began, girls whose stars had failed to bloom were being rounded up and detained by state institutions under any number of convenient justifications.
I let my guard down because there's still so much time before the Magical Girl of [Guardianship] blooms… I never imagined these signs would show up behind the scenes this early.
The shadow of the original story had arrived far faster than I'd imagined.
"Wh-what am I supposed to tell my mom?"
"Your mother is alive?"
"Don't say it like that! Why have you both been… this whole time…"
The moment she said "mother," something twisted in the depths of my chest, and the question slipped out of me on pure reflex.
"……."
Listening to Haruko's account, it turned out that from the day of the incident she'd thrown her own phone into an alley to dodge tracking, stopped using her transit card, and fled entirely on foot — which was why she'd been unable to reach her parents.
Well then.
I could pretend I hadn't heard any of this, knock her out for a little while, and hand her over to the police. But if I did, there was a chance that Haruko, once in custody, would talk — about me, someone who was unmistakably a Magical Girl.
The image of me the police had seen, veiled behind illusions.
Of all the days, I had to show up in full waitress uniform because I was watching Hana.
I'd left the cafe's apron behind, so the shop's name appeared nowhere on the uniform itself.
Even so, if they cross-referenced every cafe in the neighborhood, it wouldn't be that hard to track down the one where a silver-haired girl worked.
And even if I'd just stood back and watched, Hana could have gotten tangled up in the arrest.
Sato Hana, having apparently grown bored of the grown-up talk at some point, had plopped down on a nearby bench and was staring blankly at the sky.
"For now… let's go to my place."
I told Master I was leaving work early.
"Sure. Go on, take care."
I walked Hana home, then brought Haruko back to my place, hidden under a curtain of illusions.
"……."
The Magical Girl Supernatural Weaponization Project
It was this project that split the Magical Girls into factions, set them at each other's throats to steal one another's starlight, and plunged the world into war.
And against the backdrop of that conflict came the Second Red Broadcast.
It was here that every character in the original story finally realized something had gone terribly wrong.
The first broadcast had clearly proclaimed, Bear ever more starlight and reach evolution. Yet only a single method had ever been spelled out in precise terms: Absorb the starlight of others.
They hadn't failed to notice — other meanings had just been quietly tucked between the lines.
Honestly, this part was practically a semantics game.
The clause stating that a star holds within it the potential for evolution — the truly malicious part was that it should have been read as: you can evolve without fighting anyone, so long as you meet the conditions on your own.
And the worst sentence of all was the final line: Approach your fate with careful deliberation.
After the Second Red Broadcast, the Magical Girls understood.
Anyone who had absorbed power from another Magical Girl even once could never gain strength any other way again.
The power obtainable through combat was far, far too small a quantity for the Magical Girl population as a whole.
They had been herded into a zero-sum war over survival resources — a struggle for the fittest, all to outlast the annihilation descending upon them.
Had it been a contract in the real world, a judge would have leapt out of his chair and slammed a gavel into someone's skull. But this world itself was oriented toward senseless misfortune and cruel fate.
A world ensnared by a trash destiny.
I was lost in those thoughts when Haruko suddenly spoke up.
"U-um, may I go to the bathroom?"
"You don't need permission for that."
"I-I don't know where it is."
"Go out and turn left at the end of the hall."
"I-I'll be right back!"
Haruko scurried out, and ten minutes later she scurried back in, just as skittery as before.
"I-I'm back."
"Why are you so tense all the time?"
"B-because you look so… so noble, it makes me shrink."
"……."
"I-I'm sorry."
Come to think of it, there was one more thing the Red Broadcast had explained in deliberately twisted fashion.
"Boo-sijima-yang. Let me see your star for a second."
"Eeeh?!"
"I'm just going to look."
Haruko, reminded of the incident that had her hunted, trembled like a frightened hamster — but before long, she fumbled out her Glass Star and held it up. Within her earth-colored star, a single mote of light glimmered.
"Uuu. Th-that girl tried to take mine, too."
"Even if she'd succeeded, it would've been a waste of effort. The power you get from absorption is smaller than you'd think."
"Huh? H-how do you know that?"
"Here goes."
Thinking of absorption, I tapped my Glass Star lightly against hers — and the energy drained out of Haruko's earth-colored star, flowing into mine.
"KYAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!"
"Oh, so that's how it works."
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!"
Then I tapped the Glass Stars together again, and the energy flowed back out of my star, returning Haruko's earth-colored star to exactly as it had been.
"Eeeh?!"
The starlight of others can be absorbed to increase your own — and it can also be given back.
The broadcast never once said the process was irreversible.
This was the Red Broadcast: every explanation maliciously, carefully left out.