The Guy Who Asked to Become a Woman for Revenge (3)
Chasing a client who had become a magical girl, and gained a body to match, was well beyond anything my own strength could manage.
That was why I had dragged Dias into it. Fox beastkin, and canine besides, she could follow the client by scent alone, and her physique was every bit the equal of a magical girl's.
"...Aren't you even a little embarrassed, senior?"
"About what?"
"You're being princess-carried. By a woman."
"What's embarrassing about that? And you're the one who said you're not a woman, you're a female."
"I'm only using your words."
"Besides, I just used my ability. I'm completely drained. I couldn't run if I wanted to."
As Dias's griping made plain, I was traveling cradled in her arms like a princess out of a storybook. Closer to a piece of luggage than a princess, if I was honest—but so long as we moved faster than public transit, I could swallow any amount of shame. In this city, far worse spectacles happened every day. This much I could file under ordinary life and let it pass.
"But is this even the right direction?"
"Are you doubting my nose? I may not look it, but I've tracked a thief who stole something and fled on the subway by scent alone, all the way to the end, and caught him."
"Then why didn't a nose like that notice the black tea smell was way stronger than it should've been?"
"Keep picking at that and I'll drop you on the ground at this speed."
A threat, delivered by Dias as she sprinted at the pace of a car on the highway. Fall from here and my body would end up braided like a cruller, so I quietly shut my mouth.
The place we arrived at was packed so tight it was hard to breathe. Most of the crowd, though, wasn't dressed for an ordinary day out. They were wearing the clothes of characters from games and anime.
A cosplay festival, in other words. And unlike my original world, the crowd here wasn't human only. Every kind of species had turned up. If the character you meant to cosplay happened to be your own kind, a little dressing up and the costume was finished.
"Smart move."
"What do you mean?"
"Think about it. A woman in a magical girl outfit suddenly walks up to you in the middle of the street. What do you figure you'd do?"
"Be on guard, obviously."
People don't see something that should never happen to them and call it a miracle. They get suspicious first. Just as in my example: no matter how pretty she is, a woman in a magical girl outfit that has no business being in the middle of the road comes walking up. A few might grin and enjoy it. Most would be wary.
"So what if she walks up to you here?"
"You'd just think a cosplayer wants a photo... oh."
"That's why I said it was a smart move. Once her species turned into a magical girl, she basically can't change into anything else, so she came here."
Honestly, anyone who would steal another man's woman and send videos like that almost certainly kept his brain in his crotch instead of his skull. Part of me wondered whether a guy like that even warranted this much caution. Still, caution never hurt anyone.
"But if we stay looking this normal, won't we stand out more?"
"Here. A mask, and a recognition-blocking artifact. Sunglasses actually draw the eye and drag the artifact's performance down."
"...Why do you even own something like this?"
"For when a job comes in to find someone, or tail them. I didn't know I'd be using it somewhere like this either."
Originally, it was the sort of artifact idols and celebrities wore when they didn't want to be recognized. Hard as hell to get hold of, so I had begged an acquaintance until my hands were raw before I finally secured one. The effect was strong enough that someone you had been dating for a year could stand right beside you and still fail to recognize you.
Wearing the artifacts, Dias and I kept following the scent, and before long we found the client.
"Thank you for the photo! The quality is incredible!!"
"If you'd like, I can take as many more as you want~ Have a wonderful day~"
There she was, walled in by people, getting her picture taken. Becoming a magical girl had made her prettier, and on top of that she was wearing an actual magical girl's outfit, so her popularity was considerable. Smiling warmly and striking poses, she didn't look anything like someone who had been a man until a short while ago.
Dias and I sat down at a nearby table and watched to see how the client meant to take her revenge. An hour passed, and the man from the video never showed. The longer we waited, the more whatever traces of manhood had remained kept fading away.
"...Was the revenge just an excuse? Did she actually want to be a woman?"
"I'm starting to suspect the video she showed me earlier was something she pulled from somewhere else."
A change of species doesn't rewrite the temperament you were born with. Strictly speaking, temperament does change—but only after a great deal of time, once flesh and mind have synchronized. I knew that better than anyone. I had run the experiment on my own body.
And yet the client in front of me was turning into a perfect woman with every passing minute. Unless the magical girl I had transformed her into this time was some special case, it meant she had wanted to be a woman long before any of this. My thoughts slid, naturally, toward one conclusion: she had played me, and gotten exactly what she wanted.
"What a flat ending. I even closed up the agency to come out here."
"Tell me about it. People really are too easy to trust~"
Looked at squarely, it wasn't much to feel cheated over. It only rankled a little that she had used the fact I had genuinely wanted to help. In the end we closed the case as the client having acted her way into womanhood, and we were just thinking we ought to stop by a good restaurant and clear our heads when—
"Hey, handsome! Take a picture with me!"
The client, who until now had only passively posed for whoever wanted a photo, approached someone else first. I glanced that way without thinking, and the person she was photographing with came into view. The outfit was a little different, but it was the man from the video.
"There's a great mala tang place nearby. Let's go there, senior."
"Save the tang-tang, huru-huru. A whole movie's about to start."
I caught it in an expression that flashed past in an instant. She hadn't truly turned into a woman. She had only been wearing the mask of acting like one. In the face that showed when that mask slipped, for a fraction of a second, there still burned a thick, dark want to tear the person in front of her to pieces.
"God, oppa, you're so my type. Wanna hang out with me today?"
"Well, I wouldn't say no..."
The client pressed her body against the NT guy—the one we simply called Golden Sun—and tempted him without a shred of subtlety. A woman you had never met, coming on that strong, ought to have set off every alarm he had. Golden Sun, brain docked firmly in his pants, went under without a fight.
"Yay! This is gonna be fun. Where should we start?"
"How about we start over there?"
She hammed up every gesture and reaction on purpose, playing the girlfriend out on a date with her actual boyfriend. Golden Sun didn't look entirely pleased with the performance. Even so, he kept going along with her, and the reason was almost certainly the way he had been openly leering at her body since the start. She had to feel that stare on her, sharp and unmistakable, and still she went on playing the innocent girl.
"Wow... revenge really is a terrifying thing."
"Why do you think they say human malice has no bottom?"
"I already knew it was scary enough to turn a man into a woman."
"I kind of want to poke a hole in that, but... yeah. That much is definitely scary."
And so the client and Golden Sun kept up something that passed for a date, while we trailed after them in secret. Time bled away, and around the hour when stars were stitched across the sky, the two of them arrived at a motel. Golden Sun clamped onto the client's hand so she couldn't bolt and hauled her inside by force.
"...Did you see that face just now?"
"Yeah. I'm going to have nightmares."
Golden Sun, going in ahead, wouldn't have seen it. We did. We saw the expression the client wore as he dragged her into the motel: a grin of such pure joy it looked ready to split her face. I learned, in that moment, that the expressions horror games invent just to be frightening are expressions a real person can actually wear.
"Should we head back now?"
"Yeah. It's late. Let's go."
We had the client's contact information anyway. If curiosity won out later, we could simply ask. We got back to Arim's Errand Agency the same way we had come—me in Dias's arms—and each of us went into our own room on the second floor.
"Hm?"
I was killing a little time on the gallery before bed when one post caught my eye.
A pointless shitpost with nothing in it. What snagged my interest was the station named in the title. The motel the client and Golden Sun had gone into was definitely near that station. My hand moved fast. I clicked the title and opened the post.
The comments were a mess, but if you looked only at the post itself, one thing was clear. The client was carrying out her revenge with great diligence. Comforted by the thought that my ability had actually helped someone, I fell asleep in a good mood, and the next day the client came back to the agency.
"Did the revenge go well?"
"Yes! First, while that piece of trash was out cold, I took photos and sent them to every woman saved on his phone. For the girlfriend who dumped me, I used something extra stimulating."
"So he really was an octopus. Figures."
A man with his brain in his crotch was never going to have just one woman in his life. Those must have been towers he had stacked with considerable care, and he had brought the whole thing crashing down by messing with the wrong person.
"Surely that wasn't the end?"
"As if. After we slept together, I told him. That I used to be a man."
"Wow."
"He didn't look convinced, so I showed him the ID I had on me... The face he made then was a real spectacle."
I couldn't even begin to picture the expression Golden Sun had worn when he learned the woman he had just slept with was something beyond transgender. And the client's fixation—going so far as to sleep with someone she wanted to tear apart for the sake of revenge—had crossed over into frightening.
A soft rustle.
Just as I thought that was the end of it, the client drew a fine, well-grown cucumber out from her clothes. The sort you would want to peel on the spot and dip in soybean paste.
"A cucumber? Out of nowhere...?"
"So no one else ends up like me. That thing on the trash who passed out after I only took the pictures... like this!!"
CRACK!!
The cucumber couldn't withstand the grip of a client turned magical girl. It burst apart, and the pieces sprayed through the air. I knew exactly which part the cucumber was standing in for, and the instant it shattered I clamped my thighs together before I could stop myself.
"...He didn't die of shock, did he?"
"I'd already called an ambulance, so they hauled him off right away."
The client drank her black tea with the clear, relieved face of someone whose revenge was finished. At the same time, I swore to myself that I would never, ever give anyone in this city a reason to hate me.
"Oh, and I just transferred the commission. Did you see it?"
"I did. But isn't this too much...?"
"If it hadn't been for this place, I never could have managed a revenge this perfect. Don't treat it like a burden. Please, just take it."
"All right. Then... are you going back to being a man now?"
The revenge was over, so of course I assumed she had come to turn back, and I was already searching out the human species—
"No? Living like this is nicer than I expected."
"...You'll have to build a whole new identity, though...?"
"I already looked into everything! I asked an acquaintance for advice, and they said they'd be glad to help!"
"Then what did you come here for?"
"It'd be boring if I were the only one who knew a story like this! I hope things keep going well for you!!"
With that, the client vanished on the wind.
And once again, I felt it in my bones. There was not one normal person in this city.