Memory Recovery (1)
Memory Recovery (1)
I was just slaughtering monsters, same as always. I kept it to quiet, secluded places because I knew it wasn’t a pretty sight.
So what’s this?
Han Jae-jung’s head was starting to ache.
“So... were you S-rank monsters forming a little club or something?”
“Wait, don’t misunderstand. I have nothing to do with them.”
Uninvited guests had crashed this peaceful, tranquil routine of carnage.
Every single one of them was lethal.
“How cruel. Are we not kindred spirits of a sort?”
One weirdo.
“Fufu, but it is true. We aren’t exactly close yet, after all.”
One even weirder bastard—hard to tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Yeah? Whatever. Doesn’t matter to me.”
And one person who made things weird.
Every one of them disturbed his peace of mind.
“Either way, my job’s the same.”
“Hmm... sorry, but could you take the day off?”
Blue Sirius raised her slender sword. Boötes swung her staff, unwilling to be outdone. In the same instant, leaves and ice surged into motion.
They were like conductors leading an orchestra. When they brandished their long objects—seemingly unrelated to anything—grass and ice heaved.
The vines that had blanketed the back alley like a swarm of insects met the freezing mist and stiffened, lifeless. Part of the alley became the heart of a winter mountain in full snow-bloom.
“You don’t seem inclined to take me up on that.”
Boötes stroked her chin with a troubled gesture. Her hood hid it from clear view.
“Comrade, I have a request to make of you.”
“Jason, quiet for a moment. And miss? We didn’t come here to kill anyone. We just wanted to talk a little...”
“What doesn’t happen today may happen tomorrow. I can’t stand by and allow it.”
“Help me find my purpose!”
“That’s a rather violent way of thinking. You believe you can claim the right to use force solely based on some possible future?”
“I already know you’ve hurt people. Don’t spew sophistry at me.”
“Haha, caught me.”
“Pursuit and accomplishment! On to a glorious adventure!”
Right now, this place resembled the clamor of an evening tavern full of assorted characters. Nonsense and earnest talk all mingled together, and the only result was noise.
It was the decent, solitary small-timer who suffered from that noise. This time was no different.
Han Jae-jung clutched his throbbing head and held back a sigh.
I haven’t even gathered proper starlight yet.
Facing an enemy too powerful to defeat right now and a person too terrifying to face properly, both at the same time—that took serious stamina.
Progress on star activation was slow. Was it because he’d only been killing enemies with weak starlight bit by bit? Or was this the normal pace all along?
After activating one star, he still hadn’t managed to light another.
So naturally, he hadn’t found any fragments of his lost memories either.
Time doesn’t wait for people. People don’t even wait for people. They crash in before you’re ready.
He’d imagined all kinds of scenarios for what he’d say when he met Blue Sirius, but once their eyes actually met, all that remained was guilt, and a discomfort of roughly equal size.
The trouble was that he’d met her as Watcher.
She resented monsters. The chill of her ice was the voice of her feelings right now.
But he couldn’t reveal his identity either.
If he revealed it, this tangled relationship would become simpler—but in exchange, she would only gain a vast amount of discomfort.
This was not the case with Red Vega.
Even now, Han Jae-jung regretted that she had found out his identity.
With a little less luck, he and Red Vega would have remained bitter enemies, and he wouldn’t have been able to walk around with a human face.
Above all, she was still young, and rash. The chance that someone else might find out through her was not small.
Han Jae-jung hoped Blue Sirius still didn’t know who he was. Neither she nor he was ready to accept it.
Most of Blue Sirius’s psychological pain stemmed from Han Jae-jung. Revealing his identity for nothing might only cause her more pain.
But if he endlessly accepted that resentment and later she learned the truth—how was he supposed to handle that? Could he even handle it?
It was a circular question where problems bred problems.
I’m going crazy.
Literally—questions that spun and spun, biting their own tails.
In the end, it was a question of lack. If he had power and memory, he could hold his head higher.
The reunion with Blue Sirius forced him to face reality again: how wretched he was now, and how contradictory his very existence had become.
[Quest appeared.]
It was probably no coincidence that this quest appeared just when he encountered her.
[Flee from Blue Sirius.]
Quests were immediate tasks that reflected the user’s ideals, psychology, and reality.
Right now, that quest was Han Jae-jung’s own heart, clearer than anything.
It was probably the heart Han Jae-jung had carried ever since their parting.
He stood against monsters.
He confronted magical girls and guided their growth.
But she was different.
She was special.
Before Blue Sirius, he could not be Watcher. He was nothing but a frail human with a three-syllable name.
Han Jae-jung felt the urge to run away from Yoon Seol-hwa.
Pathetic. And unfair, too.
It was his own business, but his attitude was detached.
He knew roughly what kind of life he’d lived, but not all of it. He knew the past only as knowledge, not as experience.
He knew the whole and not the parts. He had the frame of the puzzle but none of the pieces.
Even so, the lines imprinted on the puzzle’s frame let him guess what was meant to go inside.
Those lines were emotion.
Without substance, yet the traces were there.
The feelings were there, but the memories were not.
It was horrifying.
Was this what it felt like to look at a debt you’d incurred without knowing why?
He had to avoid another person because of feelings he could hardly call his own.
How pathetic and unfair was that.
He couldn’t even understand why he had so many feelings left for her in the first place.
If they missed each other, there should have been plenty of chances to see each other.
The magnitude of the emotion was far too great to dismiss as mere nostalgia for a beautiful first love.
But there was no way to know.
“...Yeah.”
Han Jae-jung answered the quest’s directive weakly.
He slowly stepped forward. Boötes and Blue Sirius were still locked in a delicate standoff. Boötes defended against her chill with vitality. It looked as if a full-scale fight was about to break out at any moment.
Jason was still spouting grand but empty words.
Of everyone here, he was the one most like him.
A wanderer.
And the one with the most useful power.
“Hey.”
Clap.
He grabbed his shoulder. The hollow rhetoric cut off.
“Doesn’t seem like today’s your day. How about we lose our way?”
Jason ended his long-winded imaginary epic and nodded.
“I like that! To advance down an unknown road—that’s true adventure!”
Jason grasped the long rod on his belt buckle. When he worked it like an oar, the surrounding air shimmered.
“Oh dear.”
“...?!”
Boötes laughed hollowly, as though caught off guard. Blue Sirius looked bewildered—this was new to her.
He couldn’t use Alkaid, but there was a power here that could produce a similar effect.
The shimmering of the air grew more violent. His vision turned hazy, like looking through water after falling in.
The gazes of the four gathered in the dank back alley suffered a shared confusion.
What was in front was no longer in front. The ability to perceive space grew fainter. Instead—
“Ah, then I’ll have to give this to you later.”
Boötes smiled bitterly and waved her hand. In that hand was a belt.
“See you again.”
She came to give him that? Why? Han Jae-jung couldn’t understand.
She was kind, but also suspicious. Kindnesses too dangerous to accept carelessly.
Boötes’s figure vanished.
“Then until we meet again!”
After her, Jason bid farewell and disappeared. And last—Han Jae-jung, his vision heaving like someone with motion sickness, found her and met her eyes.
“I wish you good health.”
“I wish you bad health.”
With that exchange of farewells with Blue Sirius, everyone in the back alley was gone.
**
[Quest complete.]
[Star discovered.]
[Activate?]
Before he could even grasp where he’d ended up, the voice flowed from the Belt. His head swam from the aftereffects of losing his way, and his stomach burned from the aftereffects of the encounter just now.
“Uh... what?”
It wasn’t strange at all to ask again without catching the words.
[Approval received.]
“What did—“
The problem was the Belt, which took this simple mutter as acceptance.
If the reward for a monster-defeating quest was seizing the starlight the monster possessed...
Then the reward for quests that didn’t involve defeating monsters was strengthening the starlight he already possessed.
Starlight gathered, grew sharper, and what had been a mere shimmer of light became fiercer light with form.
That was a star.
By chance, this quest must have been the final key to activating a new star.
That it came right after he’d been thinking how he wanted power and memory—that was luck.
That he was still in mental and physical chaos, utterly unprepared to receive memories—that was misfortune.
Time and people don’t wait for you to be ready.
Neither did mechanical devices.
[Activating star.]
**
“Uh... are you serious?”
The reporter in front of me asked. She was one of the reporters I’d gotten to know reasonably well from writing articles about Blue Sirius often.
“Yes.”
“You’re going to fabricate the incident?”
I answered calmly.
“Hey~ it’s not fabrication! Just added a little seasoning!”
I moved the screen on the smartphone on the desk and showed her the conversation in the mobile messenger.
It was a typical attempt at psychological manipulation, mixing abusive language with reasonably polite speech.
In that messenger conversation, Seol-hwa was the pitiful victim, and I was the perpetrator flaunting my position as her lover while spewing verbal abuse.
With a little more manipulation, that framing would become even more solid.
“Look. This line is here, here, and here. Combine them, and ta-da.”
“We call that fabrication.”
“Rearrangement. They’re not made-up lines, so.”
“There are some completely made-up ones, though. Look, this insult here.”
“That’s a device to heighten immersion in the drama.”
“Do you think this is a joke?”
“I wish it were a joke.”
Some of the records included conversations we’d actually had.
Of course, they’d been devices for documentation—and for driving her feelings away—but that didn’t mean they were entirely insincere.
In recent weeks, I’d fought with Seol-hwa often. Not just Seol-hwa—I’d also fought a lot with the younger sister I was fond of.
Nerves sharpened to the extreme by the incident were more than enough to ignite at the slightest friction.
This wasn’t simply an act to obtain these records; the emotional rift was genuinely raw.
To be precise, I was tired of being stressed by the incident.
Living as a celebrity’s boyfriend had become painful for a while.
Being connected to a magical girl—I was learning day by day just how agonizing that position was.
I needed time to rest.
Time for each of us to think of the other and get a grip on our emotions.
For that, the incident needed to be concluded first.
It had been almost a month since it blew up.
The heat had cooled off reasonably by now. If I dropped this, I could turn public opinion around.
I could clarify responsibility and bring the incident to a close.
“So, aren’t you going to run this? It’s a scoop.”
“Blue Sirius will obviously publish a rebuttal article...”
“She won’t. This is a decision made in consultation with the Association. They’ll probably kill it before it goes out. And surveillance will get tight for a while, too.”
With that, I handed the reporter the final move to end the incident.
I was going to get a lot of hate.
Still, it was fine.
And I had no intention of cutting ties for good.
She probably felt the same way.
Once enough time had passed and the incident had cooled, once the emotional rift had eased, I planned to reach out.
I’d left a letter, too.
Saying I’d live decently for a while and come back. Saying not to worry too much.
That was the plan.
But I couldn’t do it.
So many people kept finding me that I had to move constantly. My phone rang at all hours—I didn’t know where it’d been leaked—so I had to change my number. Even that didn’t stop it.
I’d underestimated it. Out of fandom, amusement, rage, all kinds of reasons, people poured out malice, and I was fully exposed to it.
Old resolutions become helpless in the face of overwhelming malice.
I’d braced myself for it, but it wasn’t as bearable as I’d thought.
Still, it was manageable enough.
If I didn’t look at the internet, that solved the internet. If my phone kept ringing, I could smash it. If people kept showing up at my home, I could abandon the place.
If I compromised just enough and put distance between myself and the world, I could solve everything.
But a problem broke through anyway.
There was one critical oversight: the world had more lunatics than I’d thought.
“Are you Han Jae-jung?”
An intruder with a kitchen knife and tape in one hand.
“You, y-you, you’re the one who bullied my sister, right? B-bad guy... bad guy...”
He was a man who looked more than twice my age.
I couldn’t understand a word he was saying.
Later I heard he was mentally ill. Delusional disorder, or was it autism? I don’t really know.
It wasn’t particularly comforting news. By the time I heard it from the police, I’d already been stabbed in the stomach.
After meeting four or five more people like him, I became a wreck.
**
“Oh you shit...!”
It could’ve given me the Belt’s secrets, or memories of some tender date or something.
Instead it was feeding me things I already knew as knowledge and making them into experience all over again. The terror was so vivid—like it had just happened to me seconds ago—that I broke out in a cold sweat.
“You crazy Belt bastard... of all the things to give me... shit, shit...”
My field of vision narrowed. A common symptom in people facing terror. My breathing was starting to struggle, too. Hyperventilation. Also a common symptom in people suffering from trauma.
Only then did I realize where I was standing. The top of a very, very tall building. A rooftop so high that losing your balance even slightly meant instant death. Not exactly a great place for someone in the grip of fresh trauma.
How far had I lost my way?
I fought to keep my balance, clutching at a body that was slipping further from normal.
I slowly knelt and tried to calm myself. One careless move and I’d die. As my body trembled and I edged closer to unconsciousness from oxygen deprivation, someone descended beside me.
“Jae-jung! W-what’s wrong? Why are you like this? A-are you okay?”
A woman in gossamer garments approached, scattering a pink radiance. So beautiful I wondered if she was a heavenly maiden.
She wasn’t, of course. But she was something endlessly close to it.
“Breathe! Breathe!”
Pink Deneb. The younger sister I was fond of—the one I’d read about in that memory fragment just now.
It was Jo Ah-yoon.