A Sister's Resolve
For Cheon Se-ah, the figure of her Oppa had always been bound to nightmares. Not that he was the nightmare himself — it was that no matter how many years slipped past, he was the one thing that kept resurfacing in their company, again and again. Vivid traces of pain and of wounds that time could never dull. Her Oppa, Cheon Yujin.
Within the memories of her childhood, there was no telling the story of her Oppa apart from moments of happiness. He'd been a frail weakling, hopeless in a fight — yet the instant his little siblings were bullied, he always came running. He worked every part-time job a student's schedule allowed and split the earnings into allowances for them, so that they never went without. Se-ah had tried, clumsily, to pitch in herself, but it was her Oppa who settled every last one of the household's hardships. To young Cheon Se-ah, Cheon Yujin had been something more than an Oppa.
A father, and a mother besides — the eldest son who took on even the parts their parents should have played. He wasn't living for himself. He was a fool who only ever wanted to carry somebody else's load. Not having what other people had — the ordinary pair of parents, grandparents... relatives... — had been fine. Because Cheon Se-ah had an Oppa who could stand in for all of it.
But then the first Gate opened. At the time, Cheon Se-ah had been nothing more than a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. At just seventeen, she learned war; she learned the deaths of friends; she learned how to scrub blood from her hands. And amid the carnage and the claw-and-fang fight to survive, the blood on Cheon Se-ah's hands had not been monster's blood alone.
With hands this filthy... how am I ever supposed to take my Oppa's hand again?
That dread kept her lying awake night after night — until, with grim irony, she found she no longer needed to worry about it at all. For a different reason entirely. News arrived that the unit her Oppa belonged to had been wiped out to the last man. It was the disappearance of the one being who had filled most of her short life, and it was the moment Cheon Se-ah came to live on nothing but duty and the thirst for vengeance.
From the day she believed she had lost him, Cheon Se-ah went hollow. Vengeance — a vow to slaughter every last monster that had killed her Oppa. Duty — the conviction that she now had to stand where he had stood. And then the nightmares, repeating on an endless loop: her Oppa torn apart, devoured, dying, turning on her to demand why she wasn't helping. Nightmares in which she had finally gained the strength to hold him up — only for the one she'd hold to have vanished altogether.
"...Se-ah? Cheon Se-ah?"
Cheon Yujin's voice.
"Se-ah, what are you doing...?"
Not the voice she remembered — thin, yes, but still a young man's low register. This was the unripened voice of a little girl.
"Guhh... my... my head... it huuurts... Y-you said... you'd brush it nicely... said you would..."
"...Huh?"
"You said you'd brush it... so it wouldn't hurt... Argh, seriously, this stupid body...!!!"
Murmuring it half to herself, her voice thick with tears, Cheon Yujin spoke — and Cheon Se-ah blinked, staring down at the long black hair she'd been running a brush through.
Time had slipped by, and before anyone noticed, the first day of school was upon them. Se-ah had gotten the uniform on her just fine, but the hair was still left loose and untamed; she'd meant to set it right and make it pretty. At some point, though, strands had snagged in the teeth of the brush, and Se-ah, sunk somewhere far away inside her own head, had simply kept yanking without noticing a thing...!
"...Wh—ah! Sorry, Oppa! I was totally spacing out! Agh, that had to hurt. Hold still, hold still — I'll get it untangled right now."
"Hggk, hgg-yaakyak...! O-ouchie, owie!"
"Ack! I just made it worse...!"
"You... I'm putting you... on my kill list...!!!"
"Over just this?! Are you serious?!"
No, really — was she supposed to be sentenced to death over one badly brushed head of hair?
Cold sweat pouring, Cheon Se-ah hurriedly set Cheon Yujin's tangled hair to rights. Yujin clutched her head with a face on the very edge of bawling. Sniffling away in a schoolgirl's uniform, on that face so perfectly identical to her own, she looked for all the world like a little sister with a wide age gap. Not an Oppa. A little sister. ...The Oppa of the past had never once let his siblings see him cry.
"...Ah."
The thought slipped through her mind unbidden, and Cheon Se-ah shook her head, shaking the fleeting notion straight back out.
Right. Her Oppa had come back. The hollow inside Cheon Se-ah had been refilled for the first time in ten years — though what filled it, in truth, was less joy than a tangle of confusion. Her Oppa had returned, and months on, she still couldn't quite make it feel real. She understood the doctor's verdict well enough in her head, that a wounded mind had left him this way. But everything from his appearance to the personality he showed the world had changed far too much. And it was no longer her Oppa looking after her. She was the one looking after him now.
Swish, swish.
The Oppa she'd once had to look up at just to meet his eyes now had to be looked down on, just so she could brush his hair. And so, reviewing herself honestly, Cheon Se-ah couldn't deny that her treatment of him these past months had been a flailing, topsy-turvy mess. For all that he was her Oppa, she'd spent far more time simply handling him like the child he appeared to be. And for all that she meant to treat him as family come back to her in a child's body, she'd leaned on the lazy comfort of he'll be fine, he's my Oppa — overlaying the brother she remembered onto the one in front of her and leaving him to manage on his own like an adult. She had never once decided how she actually ought to treat him. A complete mess. Completely adrift. Turn it over however she liked, the way she'd acted was nothing short of pathetic.
Still brushing, Cheon Se-ah hesitated, then opened her mouth.
"Oppa, do you remember? The morning of my high school entrance ceremony, you..."
"...brushed your hair for you. Like this, right?"
"Y-you remembered. That's right — braiding was beyond you, but this much you always did well... I missed it, you know?"
And more pathetic still was the sight of herself, forever reaching for fresh proof that this person really was her Oppa. Every single time, self-loathing came bubbling right back up.
The family she'd believed dead had come home after ten years — it was all too foreign, too unreal.
...No. Those are all just excuses.
In the end she'd put her own position first and thought only one step ahead — hadn't she gone and burdened Cheon Yujin with attending high school all over again? And that wasn't all. She couldn't say with any certainty whether the life they now shared was actually helping her Oppa get better at all.
Self-loathing and guilt churning together, Cheon Se-ah opened her mouth to say something—
"Se-ah, give it here."
"Huh...?"
"That thing. The brush."
Cheon Yujin held out a hand, and Cheon Se-ah, nonplussed, could only pass it over.
Pitter-patter. Bouncing along on little legs, Cheon Yujin came around behind Cheon Se-ah and gathered up a fistful of her hair with tiny fingers.
"My hands... they've gotten really small, huh?"
Nothing like the old days, when those hands had run through her hair heavy as a grown man's — there wasn't an ounce of weight in them now. As if to show her exactly that, Cheon Yujin's fingers wriggled, then closed around the tips of Cheon Se-ah's.
She held her hand.
"Oppa..."
"But... even with hands this small... I can still brush your hair... for you."
The brush touched hair left a little crooked from when she'd shaken her head earlier, and Yujin brushed it for her — the way she had when Cheon Se-ah was still small, the way her Oppa had when her Oppa was still her Oppa — as if time itself had turned back. And Cheon Se-ah watched the world before her eyes blur, little by little.
When the brushing was done, Cheon Yujin pointed at the mirror and swept her hair up over Cheon Se-ah's shoulder.
"See? Identical, right?"
A crimson-eyed girl beaming bright, hair draped across her shoulder — and beside her, her own face smiling awkwardly through wet eyes. Just as Cheon Yujin had said: only the color of their eyes was different. Two faces far too alike, wearing the exact same hairstyle.
"...They are, aren't they. Identical. We're family, after all."
"Yep."
...Right. Family. Gripping her Oppa's hand tight, Cheon Se-ah bounced to her feet.
"Okay! Let's get to school, Oppa! For as long as you have to attend, I'll drive you there and pick you up every single day!"
"Wh-what? Then what about your job...?"
"Who cares about that? Driving around with my Oppa comes way first!"
Whether his appearance had changed or his personality had changed — none of it mattered anymore. Cheon Yujin was Cheon Yujin. And no matter how much else changed, one thing never would: the tie that bound them as family. So Cheon Se-ah made her vow. Just as her Oppa had once done for her — from this day on, she, too, would put one person above everything else in the world. Her Oppa, and no one else.
Inside the research institute's autopsy suite, Rachel Lee flung her glasses aside and rubbed blankly at her eyes.
"...To think I'd find the decisive evidence somewhere I never once expected."
During the terror attack on the Indefinite Gate, most of those who had disguised themselves as Martial Reverence League hunters were hunters of unknown identity — and every one of those unidentified hunters shared the same traits: each had slid into a bizarre frenzied state, their physical abilities amplified far beyond human limits. Rachel Lee was a 1st-Generation Hunter herself, once fighting shoulder to shoulder with Cheon Se-ah, and that bond naturally reached her old comrade Kim Jinhu, Guildmaster of Iron Blood, as well. The national research institute, with no grounding in 'magic engineering' to draw on, had been unable to interpret the cause of that frenzy no matter how they studied it — so the request had come full circle through old connections, and the research on the bodies landed in Rachel's lap. Cheon Se-ah and Cheon Yujin had been caught up in that same attack, too; she'd even laughed at what an uncanny coincidence it made.
"Unidentified?"
Rachel laughed, hollow. Well, of course they'd be unidentified — because
there had never been an identity there to find in the first place...!
"Ha..."
The corpses she had autopsied. Crude, clumsy work — yet bodies force-grown, built to be spent as disposable combatants.
"...Homunculus."
Guilt surged up so violently that Rachel barely kept herself from vomiting. Her own research had leaked out into the world — in a form she had never wanted.
Perhaps—
"Oh, that reminds me — how on earth did Cheon Yujin get to the very center of that whole incident? With that body of his, it should have been impossible."
"Oh, that? I only got the gist of it from my Oppa... I can hardly believe it myself."
"Hard to believe, you say?"
"According to him — you know those people, the ones whose state went wrong? He says not one of them could perceive him."
She had brushed it aside at the time. But maybe. Just maybe — what if "they couldn't perceive him" had never truly meant they couldn't perceive him at all? What if it was only because, to them, Cheon Yujin wasn't an 'enemy'... but one of their own?
"Ah... aaah..."
Cheon Yujin, bleeding from the nose, flickered through Rachel's mind. The dungeon where Cheon Yujin had first been found. Aegis Guild still hadn't made a single detail of it public — but through her private information network, Rachel had learned that it was a dungeon built around a laboratory theme. She couldn't be certain yet. But hideouts and research facilities belonging to supernatural criminals, disguised as dungeons, were far from unheard of. And above all, the fact that Aegis Guild had kept that dungeon buried for this long was suspicious beyond belief.
"What... what am I supposed to do with this..."
She had a duty to tell Cheon Se-ah everything she had uncovered — but she no longer had the nerve. How on earth was she supposed to say it? That her Oppa might be nothing but a lab-grown experiment, merely projecting the memories of the Oppa she lost — and that there might not be much time left to him at all...!