Chapter 29 – Episode 29. A Male Hero Stands Next to a Magical Girl (4)
Episode 29. A male hero stands next to a magical girl (4)
“Ha, I failed.”
I said this after arriving at the lab wearing a flying suit that was concealed using the range invisibility skill.
It was a high-pitched voice, as light as a sigh and as if it could fly, that did not go well with the word ‘failure.’
Thanks to this, other people will be confused as to whether I’m really heartbroken or if I’m just pretending.
Personally, I am very disappointed.
If Jang Hye-ri and Magical Scarlet had been properly sworn with the Star Oath, she wouldn’t have to aggro other magical girls and would only have to target her.
Hye-ri Jang is the leader of the trio of magical girls, but she is just as hot-tempered as her fire symbol.
So, rather than playing with me… It can arouse the urge to hate me and kill me.
Joo Yena, who has become accustomed to the current policy of not killing brainwashers as much as possible through the joint policies of H, UNAA, and the government, will feel aversion to killing someone (in the shape of a human being).
Mayuri also won’t do what she wants.
In any case, the only way to break my possession was to be ‘killed by a magical girl,’ so becoming Jang Hye-ri’s target was the easiest.
It wasn’t that she was desperate enough to die, but she used a lot of invisibility and slow, and was somewhat tired after a long flight.
As I said, I’m not very physically fit.
Fighting with slow speed was essentially nothing more than cutting off her head through hard work, so if you did that a few times, you would be completely exhausted.
“You might be a little tired, right? “I’ll rest.”
Even though we had been together for a while, Choi Song-hee didn’t really talk much, and Song Bo-yoon and I had a bit of an age difference, and the passionate tension felt strangely burdensome to talk about, so I tried to go back to my room.
As expected, I am a perfect introvert according to MBTI and think that I recharge my energy when I am alone.
“Mr. Dojin.”
Still, I have to take a shower. Choi Song-hee called out to me as I took off my flying suit and staggered to the bathroom.
“… Yes?”
“… Those who look into the abyss… Must try not to become the abyss itself.”
“… Is it Nietzsche?”
Choi Song-hee speaks in Chinese calligraphy at strange timing.
She stood tall with mechanical arms and legs covered by a cardigan and long pants, and stared at me for a long time.
… Honestly, I don’t know what this nonsense is.
My whole body feels drowsy, like a drowning person.
Choi Song-hee’s silent look in her eyes was burdensome, so I nodded her head appropriately and walked back to her bathroom.
Seriously, I felt like I was going to die of exhaustion.
I need to take a shower and go to sleep right away.
***
“Obviously, Dojin oppa, you look heartbroken, right?”
Song Bo-yoon came up next to Choi Song-hee, who got off the machine leg and sat on the chair where she usually works, looking at the monitor, and spoke in a low voice.
“… I guess so.”
Choi Song-hee said indifferently, just staring at the screen.
“Hey, sister… Why do you think Dojin oppa is working as Smile Face? “Has he ever lost someone close to him or her to a restorer or brainwasher?”
“… Maybe so. “I haven’t heard anything.”
“…”
“… For now, I think it’s a sense of duty.”
“… A sense of duty, huh?”
Song Bo-yoon pondered those words.
Because the connotation was so grand and sublime, it was a word that would only appear in a great literary work.
It hardly felt real.
“…Do you want to be a hero?”
“I don’t know.”
“… It must be very difficult, right? The expression on your face was so bad just now. His handsome face was dead. Of course, the smiling face is the same… But it looks oddly sad.”
Song Bo-yoon leaned her chin on the elbow rest of Choi Song-hee’s work chair, which had been raised to match the height of her monitor.
“…Why are you helping her brother Dojin?”
“I have no reason to tell you.”
“…”
Song Bo-yoon closed her mouth.
Although she has recently become close, she knows that Choi Song-hee is secretly in love with her, to the point where she is reluctant to show him her mechanical arms and legs.
She doesn’t think she’s at least as close as Kim Do-jin, because she made it clear when she was with him.
Jealousy… I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous.
Since Song Bo-yoon came this far because she was infatuated with Smile Face, it would be shameless to say that she did not care about the strange atmosphere between the two.
If Choi Song-hee had not revealed that she was a woman whose body was unable to conceive, that is, her function as a woman was broken, her vigilance would have lasted longer.
She might never be done.
She gets completely jealous on a girl-on-girl basis.
She might not have stayed here.
Anyway, ever since Choi Song-hee realized that there was no realistic way for her to connect with Kim Do-jin, the good-natured Song Bo-yoon has been trying her best to be helpful to her.
I thought she had achieved some results recently, taking care of tasks such as community and channel management, but she cuts these parts like a knife.
Looks like a robot.
For no reason, Song Bo-yoon thought that way.
Although Choi Song-hee often talks about herself in a self-deprecating manner, she would be disowned immediately if she said these words directly.
She used to tell jokes that were hard for the listener to accept, but she really wouldn’t have covered up if her mechanical arms and legs weren’t so bad.
She thought so.
“I think Dojin oppa is a hotgu.”
Song Bo-yoon said that for no reason.
Far from thinking of him so harshly, she thought he was truly heroic, but she was also frustrated by the way he sacrificed himself for humanity without getting anything in return.
On the other hand, she also had the expectation that if she spoke first, Choi Song-hee would also speak up.
“As you know, I come from a wealthy family, and I have never felt a lack of money since I was young. We were materially rich, but when I saw children starving because they were poor, they seemed like people from another world. But, there was something like that that I didn’t know about. “Everything has a price.”
Song Bo-yun said quietly.
“To put it the other way, maybe I don’t do anything that doesn’t cost me something. I have come to think that people who go beyond simply not doing things and help others by saying idealistic and ethical things are sluts. Probably the influence of growing up in an entrepreneurial family. “We were taught to only do things that benefit us.”
“…”
“To me, who is so worldly, Dojin oppa is a mystery. Even if you go to war with recoveries and brainwashers, you will only be hated by those who oppose it. Still, doing it must be a sense of duty.”
“…”
“Of course, my brother has never directly revealed his true feelings, but I don’t think he has a hero mentality at all. “He is not at all interested in the community’s reaction, and although he always has a smiling face without knowing what’s on his mind, I can feel that he is always thinking.”
“… Is that a sense of duty?”
Finally, Songhee Choi opened her mouth.
“Yes. Me, her mother was murdered by a brainwasher.”
Song Bo-yoon opened his mouth heavily.
“But then the one who remarried her father was a former brainwasher… A so-called ‘recoverer.’ Even my new maternal grandfather was a recovered person… He had a huge fight with my father. How can that be? No matter how much magical girls say that recoveries are good people, how can we who have experienced something like that live with them?”
“…”
“So, I am truly sorry, but when my grandfather died and was murdered by Smile Face, I honestly thought it was a complaint. I didn’t say it out loud, but I often heard that my maternal grandfather, Jo Baek-chan, was doing bad things behind my back, even though I rarely saw him in person. “Of course I didn’t want to comfort her stepmother.”
“…”
“I would have reason to hate recoveries and brainwashers. But I don’t think it’s Dojin oppa.”
Song Bo-yoon said.
“I don’t know if he just didn’t tell me, but if it wasn’t for personal revenge… Could he go this far? No, in the first place, I think that is unreasonable. “If you make a big deal out of personal revenge… How deep is that resentment?”
“… I also helped him out of a personal vendetta.”
Perhaps because Song Bo-yoon told her story first, Choi Song-hee told her story a little later.
“The reason my arms and legs looked like this was all because of Jo Baek-chan and Ahn Byeong-guk. An Byeong-guk took me from the orphanage and handed me over to Jo Baek-chan. Jo Baek-chan was a shameless person, and he was treated badly by him.”
“…I’m sorry.”
Song Bo-yoon covered his mouth.
Even if she wasn’t related by blood, Jo Baek-chan was her official maternal grandfather anyway.
“With Jo Baek-chan and Ahn Byeong-guk being killed by Smile Face, my revenge is essentially over. But… I honestly don’t know what Mr. Dojin is doing this for. As far as I know, he has no personal grudges.”
“… Is it simply a sense of duty as a human being?”
“You can’t say no. But in any case, unless it is for revenge with a ‘target’ like you and me, Mr. Do-jin will have a very difficult time. As a human being, he must be insufferable. Normally he wouldn’t be able to endure smiling like that. “Because I am passing through a tunnel that has no end, and it is questionable whether there is an end in the first place.”
“He is a really difficult person to understand.”
Song Bo-yoon said while laughing for no reason.
The atmosphere has become too serious, and no matter how much the two discuss, no matter how much they want to help, they can’t do anything until Kim Do-jin reveals the darkness lurking within him.
He was a dark knight who fought in solitude.
“… I understand everything else. No, rather than understanding, I would rather say giving up understanding. Have you accepted something you cannot understand? But I don’t know why I’m obsessed with magical girls. Dojin oppa calls himself a villain, and sometimes he wants to be killed by them. “I don’t think it’s just suicidal.”
“…”
As her story came out, unlike Song Bo-yoon, who lightly brushed off her usual doubts, Choi Song-hee kept her mouth shut.
Although she seemed to want to say something, she seemed to be deeply concerned about whether it was right to tell Song Bo-yoon this, which she was not yet sure about.
“… Magical girls have male heroes.”
She opened her mouth heavily.
