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Translator: penny
Chapter: 2
Chapter Title: Stranger from Another World (1)
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"Mr. Kim Siyul, why don't you call it quits already."
"Please, just check one more time."
A weary tone laden with exhaustion ran parallel to a groveling plea.
"Ha."
The police officer across from me grew even more grim-faced at our mismatched conversation.
"How many more times do I have to show you before your Magical obsession is satisfied? I've already shown you over five times."
But I couldn't just accept it lying down either.
"No, honestly, this is weird."
What I had seen and heard so far was utterly incomprehensible by any common sense I knew.
No matter how I thought about it, it didn't add up.
I could barely believe there was an official document saying I'd deserted from the military, but there was something even more outrageous.
"Why is there literally nothing left?"
Not figuratively—literally.
The elementary, middle, and high school I'd graduated from.
The convenience store and shops where I'd worked.
The tiny 30-square-foot studio apartment where I'd lived on my own.
The military base where I'd been discharged from.
And even my parents' whereabouts.
"How could all of that just vanish?"
To be more precise, it wasn't even that traces remained—it was as if no records had ever existed in the first place.
Even if I could somehow swallow the locations disappearing, my parents made no sense at all.
"There has to be something, right?"
Korea is that kind of country, after all. They collect every scrap of data on people's whereabouts like it's their lifeblood.
That's why people say they don't catch criminals because it's too much hassle, not because they can't—and it's not entirely wrong.
Yet there wasn't a single trace of my parents.
Missing? Dead? That would have been far better.
At least there'd be records.
But the results screen showed nothing. Just a message saying it couldn't be found.
As if they had never existed to begin with.
"This doesn't make any sense!"
But.
"Why doesn't it?"
"Pardon?"
The officer responded with bored indifference.
"You think you're the first or second person like this?"
What was new about it? The cop let out a sigh.
His gaze reeked of annoyance and irritation, the look you give a troublesome complainer making a scene.
Fine. Good.
Then I'd become a real pain in the ass complainer.
"I can take a lot, but calling me some orphan bastard is going too far! And then tacking on 'of course he'd say that'?"
I bellowed it out in a near-scream, voice trembling just enough to draw every pair of eyes in the station straight to us.
"W-Wait a second! When did I ever—!"
"Is that any way for a cop to act? You don't badmouth someone's parents! Does the police manual tell you to do that?!"
The results were immediate.
The other officers, buried in their work, furrowed their brows, some shooting openly contemptuous glares.
As if even for an interrogation, he'd crossed a line way too far this time.
"Tch."
Especially the one who looked pretty high-ranking—he clicked his tongue and started jotting something down. Probably for the next performance review.
Thanks to that, I got to witness the priceless sight of the cop across from me turning pale in real time.
Congratulations, you piece of shit.
"N-No! That's not what I—!"
"Then what is it?!"
I kept pressing, riding the momentum.
In a pitiful, watery voice.
But with eyes that weren't sad in the slightest.
My goal was singular.
Drag this bastard's reputation through the mud and ruin his life—
"You know it too, don't you, Mr. Kim Siyul? That most Magical records across all of Korea have vanished!"
"...Pardon?"
For a split second, my mind went blank.
I couldn't even remember what I'd been thinking. No, it didn't matter anymore.
Something far more important had just come out.
"Why... why did the records disappear?"
"You seriously don't know?"
Like I'd ask if I did.
I swallowed the surging impulse and stared the cop down. He eyed me skeptically and asked again.
"You really don't know? Back then, the world ending wouldn't have been surprising at all."
The more I heard, the harder it was to answer.
"I don't know."
In the end, all I could say was that I didn't know.
"The whole world lost its shit over it, and you missed it? Where the hell have you been all this time?"
Ah, this one I could answer confidently.
"Another world."
"Pardon?"
The cop let out a hollow question.
I added a bit more meat to my words.
"I got dragged to another world for ten years and just came back."
"What the. Fuck."
He sighed heavily.
Probably because my explanation was a tad lacking—he wasn't getting it. A little more detail ought to do it.
"I'm serious. Listen. Right after I got discharged ten years ago, I was whisked away to another world."
"Got any proof?"
"Nope."
"...Then what did you do in this other world?"
But contrary to my expectations, his reaction was ice-cold.
"I was a hero."
"..."
"The Hero of the Moon, Kim Siyul."
"..."
He wasn't even responding anymore.
"What a fucking waste of time. Some psycho..."
He just clutched his face, cursing the situation.
But what could I do?
I really had gone to another world and come back.
Sure, all proof was gone, but still.
"Maybe I should quit the force for real."
The cop lamented his plight seriously for a moment before facing me with eyes full of resignation.
"Fine, let's say you went to another world and back. Then you have no idea what's happened in Korea all these years, right?"
He'd neatly summarized my position, at least.
But there was something to correct.
I had to set the record straight.
"No, I really did go and come back. You can't even listen properly. Are you feeling okay?"
"Just! Drop it! Please!"
He did seem genuinely unwell.
A few words from me, and he was venting like that. I almost felt sorry for him.
Might as well offer some comfort.
"Hang in there. I've been a hero, so I get it—public servants have it best in the end. Job security till retirement, and a pension after."
"Argh! For real! Shut! That mouth! I can't even explain!"
Not even accepting my consolation proved he was sick. Pretty bad, too.
Oh well.
What could I do but understand?
I'm a hero, after all.
"So what the hell happened?"
"You know what Magical Girls are?"
I nodded. Even after another world, it wasn't an unfamiliar term.
Magical Girl.
Girls who use magic, mostly from subculture media.
I knew them well. As a major shareholder in top novels and web novels, how could I not know one of subculture's staples?
But why bring up Magical Girls out of nowhere?
"Then who are Magical Girls' enemies?"
The cop tossed out another baffling question.
"Monsters."
I answered faithfully anyway. It wasn't a question I couldn't field.
Monster.
In other words, humanoid beasts.
The antithesis of Magical Girls.
"Right. Monsters, just like you said."
"But why are we suddenly talking about monsters here?"
The cop sighed and slowly continued.
"Because those monsters invaded, and Korea got turned upside down. Basically destroyed. Other countries too."
I heard it clear as day, but wondered if I'd heard right.
While I was in another world, Korea had fallen.
To the enemies of Magical Girls: monsters.
Which meant.
"So the monsters wiped out all of Korea's records?"
"Not entirely Magical records, but most of them, yeah."
Not that it made much difference. He ran a hand through his hair as he added that.
I could guess the rest.
For him to put it that way, it must've been a total catastrophe. A whole country on the brink of collapse—old records surviving intact? Fat chance.
Still, two questions branched off from there.
"Where the hell did those monsters even come from?"
First, their origin.
In Magical Girl stories, monsters pop up suddenly, but not without reason. They always have some backstory.
Varies by work, but the most common is they're born from clumped human negativity.
But in reality? No way.
If something that could topple nations was born from bad vibes, Korea would've been gone ages ago.
Not that Korea was the only...
No, wait.
It wasn't just Korea.
Even before I went to the other world, the world was drowning in negativity.
Hate, despair, loathing, and the like.
Yet no monsters back then. And even without them, plenty of countries were one bad day from collapse anyway.
So where did they really come from?
"The north."
"Oh, so the monsters were from the North?"
Monsters, Magical Girls—unfamiliar terms aside, it boiled down to this.
North Korea had wrecked South Korea.
And the world.