The Man Who Asked to Become a Woman for Revenge (2)
"What the hell did you put on social media, for our very first client to walk in talking like that?"
"I didn't do anything special. Senior, you're not the one who stuck some weird line on the poster, are you?"
"It only looks weird. The actual wording is perfectly ordinary."
Dias and I, each suspecting the other, pulled up the social media posts and the posters we'd used to advertise.
I turned on my phone, opened the app, and found her account to see how she'd promoted us. One look, and I understood exactly why the client had shown up spouting nonsense.
"You little shit!! 'Money trouble, missing persons, we handle it all' is fine. 'We also change your gender' is not!!"
"If I don't go that far, the ad doesn't work at all! You said it yourself—ads have to be provocative!"
"They're supposed to be provocative and still based on something that's actually true, you dumbass!!"
I grabbed Dias by the neck and shook her hard over that absurd copy, but there was no way it would do anything to someone who could stop a speeding truck.
I ordered her to fix the ad on the spot, let out a long sigh, and only then noticed the client, who had been standing there watching the whole disaster.
"I'm sorry, sir. Our employee wrote something completely ridiculous, and it gave you the wrong idea."
"Ah... I see. Of course. I'm no god. There's no way anyone could perfectly turn a man into a woman..."
I bowed my head and apologized, and the man in front of me drooped so visibly that even a dog passing in the street could have read his mood.
He had every right to blow up over false advertising, and yet he didn't curse once. That alone told me he was a decent person. He shuffled toward the door like a kid who'd been promised a present, only to realize it wasn't the one he wanted, and in the end I stopped him.
"Wait a moment. At least let me hear you out."
Send our first client away like this, and the agency's reputation would crater the way my stocks already had. I sat him in one of the chairs we'd set out, if only so I could listen. Personally, I was also curious what kind of story made a man like this want to become a woman.
"Dias. Go get us some tea."
"Why do I have to..."
"Your fake ad is the reason we're in this mess. The least you can do is bring tea, don't you think? Want me to dock this month's pay?"
"Fine..."
Threatened with her paycheck, Dias trudged off to the kitchen against her will, and before long she came back with two cups of black tea. The client lifted one to drink, and I reached out and stopped him.
"One second."
"Yes?"
It occurred to me that I had never once seen Dias brew tea. If she had any sense at all, she would have just steeped a tea bag. But the instinct that had kept me alive in this city—always about five minutes from total chaos—was already talking.
The black tea in front of me was poison that only looked respectable on the outside.
China clinked. He took a sip.
"Mm... Dias."
"What is it, Senior?"
"How many tea bags did you put in this?"
"It wasn't tea bags. I steeped loose-leaf black tea."
As she said it, she held up the bag of tea leaves in her hand. From a sack dozens of times the size of a normal tea bag, concentrated black tea was still dripping, drop by drop. She'd packed in so many leaves that the bag had split in places and the leaves were poking out.
"Then how did you get it ready this fast?"
"No matter how much water I poured in, barely anything came out, so I squeezed it by hand."
"...And how many leaves did you use?"
"The whole tin. Isn't that about the right amount?"
"This doesn't taste like black tea. It tastes like somebody stirred ash into the water, you asshole!!"
I forced her mouth open and poured it straight down her throat—not the deep flavor of black tea, but something that tasted like chewing coal. Dias, who had downed an entire tin's worth of concentrate in a single swallow, collapsed to the floor from acute caffeine poisoning. Her phone fell with her. The screen was open to a gallery.
Urgent. Hurry.
"Should I just block them?"
One piece of bait, and a prize catch had swallowed it whole. Even granting that Dias had no common sense about this sort of thing, she was wrong to believe it at face value—but the bastard trolling a post on the questions tab wasn't in his right mind either.
All the same, I threw out the black tea I'd paid good money for, specifically to serve clients, and brought over what few green tea bags we had left.
"Our employee is a little short on common sense. Please bear with us."
"It's all right."
"So. Why do you want to become a woman?"
China clinked. I took a sip.
"To get straight to the point, I got NTR'd."
"Pfft—!!"
The moment the green tea hit my tongue, that apocalyptic word shot out of the client's mouth, and I sprayed the whole mouthful. Luckily I'd ducked before it reached him, so I managed to keep it off his face. The collateral damage was that the clothes I was wearing got a little wet.
"Cough—!! Hack—!!"
"Are you all right?"
"I'm—hack—fine. I was just so surprised for a second..."
"Well. It's not exactly an everyday thing."
I thumped my chest a few times before the coughing finally settled, then drew a deep breath, bracing for whatever catastrophic word might come next. Once the man saw that I was all right, he went on and explained how the incident—with its ruinous ending—had begun.
"Looking back now, there were signs. She used to ask me to hang out all the time, and then at some point the invitations dropped off a cliff."
"You didn't suspect anything?"
"When I asked recently why she wasn't contacting me, she said work had suddenly gotten busy. So I asked what kind of work, and she said it was personal and hard to talk about."
He kept going, and as the feelings from back then seemed to creep up on him again, he drank green tea without pause. Every time his cup emptied, I refilled it from the kettle, a tea bag steeping beside us.
"In the end, it got to where I was lucky to hear from her once a month before I went to see her. Far too late."
"What did you see that made you..."
"Well... you know the scene you always get in dramas? My girlfriend was kissing a man I'd never seen before. Not a simple kiss, either. They were tangled up pretty intimately."
He was softening it as much as he could. Their tongues had been in each other's mouths. The reason he bothered to sanitize it in his own words was probably that he couldn't stand to admit the fact out loud. His hand, clenched so tight the veins stood out, trembled as if the room were in the middle of an earthquake.
"So I told her we should break up. I did it by message. If I'd seen her face, I didn't think I could hold my temper, and I might have hit her."
"So you want revenge?"
"If it had only been that much, I wouldn't have come at this so viciously."
He slipped a hand into his coat and drew out his phone to show me something. A message window filled the screen, and above it the two of them fighting ran on without end. Reading down through the conversation, I found, among the most recent messages, a video sitting there as if it had nothing to do with the chat at all.
Wondering why he was showing me this, I leaned in and looked closely at the thumbnail of the opening frame. The moment I realized what kind of video it was, I cursed the version of me from one second earlier for looking that closely.
To sum the opening image up roughly: at the edge of a bed sat a woman I assumed was the client's girlfriend, and a man. Her face was flushed scarlet, as if the heat had gotten to her, and she was flashing a V-sign at the camera. The man had an arm around her waist and was smiling.
Right. The sort of situation you only see in fiction, where some guy steals another man's woman and sends him the video.
"I can't believe there's actually a bastard out there who does that..."
"I played it thinking there was no way... and yeah. It was that kind of video."
I understood, down to the bone, why people say reality outdoes fiction. The man who'd suggested filming it was plenty insane, and the woman who'd gone along with him didn't seem sane either. Disregard someone and provoke them to this extent, and even if it were only a game you'd go find them and beat them into paste. This wasn't a game. It had happened in real life, and I couldn't begin to guess what the client had felt.
"Please, I'm begging you!! Help me get my revenge!!"
"Then would you wait just a moment?"
Faced with a client begging me to turn him into a woman, I opened my skill window and brought the list of every race up in front of me.
"What are you doing, talking to thin air, Senior?"
"Trying to help this man with his revenge."
Dias, awake again at some point, had come up beside me. She watched me scrolling through the status window and looked thoroughly confused. Whether she was or not, I stared at the lists hard enough to pop an eyeball, searching for a race I could actually use.
"What if you turn him into a snail beastkin and make him lose a fight? With snails, the one who loses becomes the female, right?"
"And where am I supposed to find a snail beastkin willing to throw the match? Even if I did, what he wants is a form as close to human as possible."
"If possible, yes... but if it really can't be done, I'd be fine becoming a snail beastkin."
Dias had offered a pretty good idea, but snail beastkin are nothing like an ordinary human, in looks or in skin. On top of that, finding one whose sex hadn't been decided yet would be difficult, so I rejected it.
I kept scrolling without end, and then one race caught my eye. I wasn't sure it even deserved to be classified as its own race, but if it was on the list, that meant I could transform him into it. So whatever.
"Um... would it be all right if the outfit got a little flashy?"
"Yes! Of course!"
This one would definitely turn him into a woman, but the clothes would get ridiculously flashy, so I'd asked first. He nodded furiously anyway. I set a hand on his shoulder and triggered the ability.
The instant the ability fired, light burst from the client's body, strong enough to blind. Time passed, the light sank away, and sitting in the chair was a magical girl I could not believe was the same person.
The short black hair had turned a fresh yellow-green that called young grass to mind, and grown long enough to reach the waist. The plain black eyes shone as if someone had set a starry night sky into them. The flat chest now announced itself with unmistakable presence, proof that he was a woman. What stood out most, of course, was the outfit. What had been something like a suit had become the gaudy costume that comes to mind the moment anyone says magical girl.
"This is... me?"
"Huh. It worked."
The voice, too, had gone from a low rumble like the inside of a cave to something like a siren singing over the sea. Even I, who hadn't really believed it would work, was impressed.
"Thank you so much!! I'll transfer the money before the day is out!!"
A sick creak. The client seized my hand and shook it wildly—no, the woman I now had to call a magical girl shook it wildly. Magical girls in fiction almost always possess strength far beyond an ordinary human, and my body, still human, couldn't take it. My shoulder popped out of joint. I pretended nothing was wrong and saw her off, waving with the arm that still worked.
"Dias. Mind setting my arm?"
"Sure."
With a sharp crack, and with Dias's help, I popped the twisted shoulder back into place, then pulled on my coat for going out.
"What are you doing?"
"Aren't you curious? This isn't some ordinary revenge. What does revenge look like when you go so far as to turn into a woman to do it?"
"...Fair. But what if another client comes while we're gone?"
"We say we're out. And be honest—even with all that advertising, someone showing up at a place like this was a miracle."
"My paycheck's still fine, right?"
"I've got enough to spare to pay you."
And so Dias and I, curiosity stirred over exactly how this revenge was supposed to go, followed after the client.