Arriving home after carefully explaining the address to the taxi uncle was quite the feat.
Despite a day of lounging and eating in Sokcho, as soon as I returned home, a wave of fatigue crashed over me.
Indeed, the place that calms my heart is just the right size—not too wide and not too narrow, just our house.
With the door tightly shut, I turned on the air conditioner in the small room that had become a little steamer.
As I felt the chilly air gradually spreading around, I lingered near the air conditioner, wishing the room would cool down as quickly as possible.
In a few days, the school reopening ceremony.
There wasn’t much time left for this comfortable lifestyle.
I dragged out a dusty bag from the corner and pulled out the vacation homework I had finished ages ago.
“What’s left for Siyeon’s homework?”
“Diary!”
I usually did my vacation homework in the last two days, though.
Yet here I was, finishing my homework first and helping someone else with theirs.
I muttered to myself how surreal it was to have to do this again.
Siyeon was filling in the last of the homework diary.
There were shakily drawn pictures of shrimp tempura and red crab tempura, along with honeycomb ice cream.
Memories vividly lingered, enough that it didn’t feel like a waste for the person who bought it.
As I watched those memories, at least in drawing form, a smile naturally crept onto my face.
Even though I had been caught off guard by some shady marketing tactics, I didn’t waste my money.
“That part, there’s a double consonant underneath.”
I corrected her still-clumsy spelling from the side, and just like that, Siyeon’s last vacation homework was completed.
It was the early morning of the day about three days before school opened.
Like any regular elementary school student, I had gone to bed early, just like always.
Just before drifting off, I felt a shaking movement waking me up in a daze and quietly sat up.
“Yawnnn.”
An irresistible yawn escaped as I inhaled deeply through my open mouth, letting out a hollow breath.
I checked the time on my smartphone that lay by my head: three in the morning.
Now, without needing to say anything, the Gomteng that had climbed onto the bed hopped off first, and I followed suit, trying to make no noise.
The black mask that had been waiting for its owner’s touch during my days in Sokcho.
I blinked sleepily, opening and closing my small eyes, then walked through the dark, lightless corridor upstairs, opening the rooftop door and murmuring the transformation incantation.
“Sun.”
I shoved my long orange hair awkwardly into the back of the mask and felt the summer’s dampness as I soared into the sky.
My complaints spilled out with each yawning breath, dictated by my irritation with the circumstances.
“Showing up at night is such a pain in the ass.”
I arrived at a location five subway stops away from my house, led by Gomteng’s guiding arms.
Though there was nobody on the streets at this hour, for some reason, I didn’t see any monsters either in this desolate area.
As I slowly landed and scanned the surroundings, perhaps due to there being no people at all, the place was eerily quiet.
With sleep closing in on me, I wondered if Gomteng had taken the wrong turn after returning from Sokcho.
I felt my annoyance surge, grabbing its neck with the opposite hand holding my staff and bringing it close to my face.
“What the heck, there’s nothing here? Are you pulling my leg?”
“No, there’s no way… It should definitely be signaling here!”
At that moment, Gomteng’s eyes widened in surprise.
The arm that had been gripping tightly wiggled in urgency.
“Behind us, behind!”
“Huh?”
From behind, I heard soft footsteps that were neither too loud nor too quiet.
Reacting instinctively, I dodged, feeling something fuzzy swish down from above, slicing through the air.
In the blink of an eye, that thing, which parted the wind, swiftly vanished into the darkness.
“The monster is using cloaking, how irritating…”
The monster that had completely hidden itself appeared.
A vague shape, an assassin type.
It felt like a unit I had seen from some RTS game set in a galactic war.
Since it was an alien, it could even be a relative, right?
“Where the heck is it sneaking around…”
I kept my gaze fixed on the direction it had vanished.
It didn’t seem completely invisible, so I made sure to keep an entire area within my line of sight, standing there like a scarecrow.
My eyes rolling around, focusing through the darkness.
Wriggling, wriggling.
In the shifty gaze that searched for the mosquito that had sucked my blood and fled into the night, a dark knight caught my eye.
Just like in the game, once I located its position, chasing it down would be a breeze.
I launched forward with quick steps, pushing off enough to create a slight crack in the road.
Seeing that uncertain figure startled, it seemed to want to escape, but…
It didn’t react in time to my speed and was caught tightly by my fingers.
Down it went, crashing into the ground.
“Gack! Wh-what happened?!”
It squealed, confusion mingled with painful groans.
Don’t underestimate the pixelated fuzziness I’ve been dealing with.
It’s not weird that I can’t see that giant’s wriggling.
“Do I look like an idiot? Is that what you call cloaking?”
“Cl…?”
Riding on what seemed to be something in the air, I fiddled with where its face should be.
If it were a normal creature, there would be a mouth in that spot, but this smoothness was all I felt from this transparent monster.
“Wow, is this thing really a relative of that proX? There’s not even a snout.”
I started to reconsider my plan of shoving my heated staff in its mouth.
“Pro…?”
The monster didn’t quite grasp the overflowing native language.
The monster’s body was unnaturally cold like ice, yet it didn’t feel bad being on top of it.
The difference between RTS games and reality was that you could beat a transparent unit without any detectors.
The heart decoration on my staff, resembling a red dot of a nuclear strike, approached the misty form, leaving behind a red spot.
“Didi-didik, Nuclear Launch Detected.”
The red dot announcing the beginning of destruction.
Though the monster probably didn’t understand the meaning of those words, it would come to learn in due time.
As the heated decoration on the staff slowly descended from above, it aimed for the monster’s body, falling like in the game.
The moment that heated decoration touched its body.
“Puhrrr!”
“What? Wh-what… Aaaaargh—!!”
With Sun mimicking explosive sounds, the pitiful monster’s screams echoed into the night.
As its flesh cooked, turning black and burned, the sensation of melting from the high heat set in.
He wasn’t a monster accustomed to pain and torment.
He was a coward lurking in the darkness, waiting for someone’s back.
He had always looked down on fellow monsters who relied on recovery devices to return to the recovery room from the shadows.
Since he had never had to fight someone face-to-face, his stamina and strength weren’t comparable to other creatures, leaving him with no means of escape from torture and pain.
But, was it because his stamina, strength, and persistence were too weak…?
No… thanks to this, he could quickly avoid shock from Sun’s torture.
“Having low health is the same.”
As I watched the monster begin to dissolve into magical particles too early, Sun seemed to mutter in disappointment.
And there he was, back at the recovery device of the recovery room.
Grabbing his own neck, which bore the memories of entering pain, he woke up.
“Gack!”
“Oh, you’ve returned. How was the fight with Saturn?”
As usual, it was Medic Tentacle who greeted the monster awakening from the recovery device.
In a recovery room where it became normal for monsters to lose, the invisible monster immediately turned the question back to Medic Tentacle.
“That masked magical girl’s name is Saturn?”
“…Huh? Masked? No, that can’t be… Wasn’t the magical girl you met the one with long blonde hair?”
The symbol of fear for the monsters.
That black and white mask.
That had become Sun’s unique symbol, and the magical girls in other regions had never seen anyone wearing such a mask, so it was now viewed as a symbol of Sun.
The monsters speculated that the symbolism of the masked creature was something like the glory presented to the strongest magical girl.
So, that masked magical girl appeared back to the original location unexpectedly?
“No, she had orange eyes.”
“O-orange? No, no way, that can’t be? She was supposed to come back after 2..”
“Absolutely sure. It was orange.”
Medic Tentacle grew confused.
Indeed, in the teleportation room, it had been instructed to swap the black area after 2 seconds…
No, wait, the memories flicked back further than that.
The words that the fish creature, Giofirett, had spoken verbatim.
“Two weeks, the unique unit? Are you saying that’s a time when the day and night on Earth have changed 13 times?”
Medic Tentacle’s epiphany passed through.
He hurriedly dashed out of the recovery room to rush this fact to the monster in the teleport room.
“Gate Keeper! Stop the teleport to the old black area immediately!”
“Medic Tentacle? What’s going on? Why are you rushing in like that?”
Electricity crackled from both hands of the Gate Keeper, head of the teleport room.
He was startled by Medic Tentacle charging into the room while he was busy ensuring the energy allocation for the ship by continuing the monster teleportation.
“Correction of information is necessary; the swap for the black area isn’t in 2 seconds but 2 weeks! That’s the day on Earth after night and day have changed 13 times!”
“Whattt?”
“W-wait, how… no more have been sent, right?”
“W-well, there’s some energy left, and one more just got sent.”
Medic Tentacle stared blankly at the teleportation device that bore the trace of something having been sent, arms drooping.
His hollow mumble echoed through the teleport room.
“Crap, we’re screwed.”
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