From Monster to Human
The place Bora led me by the hand was the exhibition hall beside the institute. Closing time had already passed, and there were hardly any people left.
I kept feeling eyes flick toward me, so I walked tucked behind Bora's legs. Something about the way they looked at me felt wrong.
"Hello~"
"Bora, it's been a while."
"I know. I've been so busy lately I haven't even—"
"Is the one behind you your niece?"
"Ah... she's a child who lives at our institute."
"Ahh... she's cute."
Everyone working the exhibition hall was a hunter who had retired after years on the front lines. They might no longer have the strength of their prime, but that didn't mean they could be dismissed.
Bora's connections must have been something. Every staff member we passed stopped to greet her, and I watched in a daze as she showed me a side of herself I never saw when it was just the two of us.
We walked a little farther, and a whole wing of the hall came into view, still deep in construction. Equipment crowded the site. Who was all of this being built for?
I turned the question on her with my eyes, and Bora stroked my head as she answered.
"This is where you're going to work, Hana."
"Huh?"
I had been planning on a life of glorious unemployment, and now I had to work? My face said absolutely not, but Bora only wore a look that said there was no helping it, and kept smoothing my hair.
"I wouldn't mind if I were the only one struggling. But if you don't pull your weight too, there's nothing I can do."
There must have been some adult complication she couldn't put into words. I didn't care that my hair was getting mussed. I liked the feel of Bora's hand, so I went loose and let her keep at it.
She told me more. If I wanted to be recognized as a person and not a monster, this was something I had no choice but to do.
As far as I was concerned, if I hadn't run into Starlight Guild inside that gate, I would have ended up as one meal among the monsters living there. In that sense, they were the benefactors who had saved my life. I had no intention, of course, of forgetting the grudge of being led away on a leash.
They had only been following regulations, so I didn't really have a complaint. If someone had told me there was a monster in a gate, I probably would have clapped a restraint on it myself. The monsters I had dealt with before I woke up in this body were the kind that might rampage at any moment.
The first time Bora saw Hana, she hadn't felt much of anything. Oh. A cute little test subject had just come in.
In a way, that was only natural for someone on an institute's staff. A researcher had to look at the monsters inside the gates with a researcher's mind. Plenty of researchers had been hurt, or killed, after letting themselves grow fond of a gate monster for no good reason.
That, too, was only natural. Even animals — gentle, relatively speaking, beside the monsters of the gates — were the same. You could pour a parent's devotion into one from the day it was born, rush it to the animal hospital whenever it fell ill, lavish every kind of care upon it, and it still would not be human.
There was no shortage of cases in which an animal turned around and injured, or killed, the very people who had raised it like parents. Taking in a wild animal that wasn't a dog or a cat and trying to keep it at home seemed, when you thought about it, like a fool's errand.
And yet, after what could fairly be called a long time with Hana, Bora was beginning to understand the researchers who gave their hearts to monsters. Somewhere along the way, she had been steeped in the girl.
Even her childish antics were cute. And unlike the other monsters, Hana knew how to show gratitude. She was nothing like the ones that simply took whatever food was offered and ate.
If she ever had a child, would it feel like this? That was why Bora regretted, at least a little, having been the one to reveal what Hana's hair could do. She regretted how roughly she had treated her at the start, too.
She had wanted Hana all to herself, and instead she had let slip that the girl possessed a special ability. Of course the institute's eyes had turned toward her.
But if that effect had never been discovered, Hana would have had to spend every day in the exhibition hall with the other monsters, like an animal in a zoo. Under government regulations and mountains of paperwork, simply keeping her at the institute cost a great deal of money.
Hair, by comparison, was nothing. There were monsters bound in place all day while their blood and flesh were stripped away. In Hana's case, all anyone had to do was cut her hair. Bora didn't even want to imagine her tied down and used like that.
Fortunately, Hana did have a special ability, and thanks to the endless proposals from the department Bora belonged to, she had escaped a fate of sitting in the exhibition hall from morning to night. She only had to be there for two or three hours on the weekends. Set beside an entire day, the difference was enormous.
And if she was to be accepted not only inside the institute but outside it — not as a test subject, but as a member of society — it would take a great deal of work. People didn't much care about using monster byproducts, or monster abilities. Toward monsters themselves, though, plenty of them carried revulsion and open hostility.
These were people who had lost their homes to monsters when the gates appeared. It was understandable. And yet, watching them make free use of the byproducts without a flicker of disgust, you could also call it hypocrisy.
Bora was a hypocrite herself, so she had nothing much to say about that. She focused on one thing alone: lifting Hana out of a monster's lot in life.
Society, however, had never once accepted a monster as one of its own. Watching them safely on television, or in an exhibition hall, and hunting them with your own hands inside a gate were entirely different things. The law said so. The regulations said so. A monster might change its mind at any moment and harm people, and from the government's point of view there was no particular reason to stick its neck out.
The institute was ready to take Hana in. The government and the public were not. So the first step was to win the public's interest, and its love.
Move the public, and the government moves. Bora was certain that nine people out of ten who laid eyes on Hana would fall for her charm. That was why the girl had to be seen, even a little, by the visitors who came to the exhibition hall on weekends. If she stayed buried inside the institute and never stood in front of anyone, how was she supposed to build any goodwill at all?
Looked at from Starlight Institute rather than the public at large, Department Head Kim Jaeman and the colleagues under him were already fond of Hana. The hunters of Starlight Guild, though — the ones who fought monsters to the death — would obviously look on her with no such warmth. To them, a monster was a threat to humankind.
That was a problem Bora would have to solve one way or another. Fortunately, Hana's appearance was neither horrific nor threatening. Wouldn't that be enough to put the hunters somewhat at ease? Bora thought so as she watched the girl go loose beneath her hand.
If anyone asked why she was going this far, Kim Bora's answer was simple. She had spanked Hana's bottom today, and the guilt made her want to look after the girl. That was all.
For the first time in a long while, Department Head Kim Jaeman laughed out loud.
"This is huge! Huge!! In a single month we sold two billion won's worth of green tea alone!"
After Starlight Green Tea hit the market, the first month's numbers came in. A runaway success. If only the supply had kept up, they could have made even more.
Online, people who had tasted it once were practically wild-eyed, clamoring to get their hands on more, and the hoarding got so bad that a single box was changing hands for thirty or forty thousand won. The reaction out on the street was just as fierce, and the companies were no different. Let Starlight Green Tea appear in an office pantry and it was gone within hours. Taste it once, and you simply could not switch back to any other green tea.
Whether his department was still a research division or had quietly become a sales team was getting hard to say. Then again, it wasn't as if the institute had only one research department.
Lee Haru was just as worked up.
"The response online, the response in person — it's nothing but praise. We had a production line and basically no foundation anywhere else, and we still posted numbers like these. It's a miracle!"
"And we made back the entire advertising budget in a month, didn't we? Honestly, we might not have needed the ads at all. At this rate, I think it all would have sold even if we hadn't promoted a thing."
Kim Jaeman said it while rubbing his smooth scalp. He was a balding man of the classic sort: crown gleaming bare, hair surviving only at the sides. Nothing to be done about it. As the head of a household, he had sacrificed that hair without a second thought to protect his family. This scalp was a medal — proof he hadn't been cut from the company, and that he had kept his home splendidly intact.
In any case, the reason a man like Kim Jaeman could laugh so freely was that he had posted results no one else at this institute had managed. It was thanks to Hana.
"You little treasure. Now where in the world did you come from?"
As it happened, Hana had dropped by the research department to play. Kim Jaeman reached out to ruffle her hair, but she wanted nothing to do with that hand. She shrieked and fled straight to Bora.
She didn't run off because I'm bald... right?