41. Unreality (3)
To be honest, when I saw Flame being completely consumed by the full-length mirror, I panicked badly.
Panicked?
No.
Actually… I think all kinds of thoughts ran through my head.
At first I had kept my distance, but before I knew it, it seemed that by attending the same school, gradually going through incidents and accidents together, and even sharing secrets, she and I had quietly become quite close.
When I saw Flame being swallowed by the full-length mirror, I…
Yes.
I despaired.
To the point that I wanted to let go of everything.
It felt like I was falling endlessly off the edge of a cliff of utter helplessness.
Even the cheat item Kingfisher Glasses did not explain how to save Flame after she had been consumed by the full-length mirror.
But then, the one that reached out a hand of salvation was none other than the Constellatio Project.
[Baek Yuseol, we wish to assign you a special mission.]
[Jump into the full-length mirror and make Flame realize “reality.”]
What…?
As usual, the Constellatio Project was spectacularly unhelpful and skipped over all the detailed explanations.
To summarize the explanation briefly, the world inside the full-length mirror revolved solely for Flame’s “happiness.”
A perfect world.
A world where there was no pain, no trials, no anxiety or worries, where anything she wanted came true, and everyone praised her even if she made no effort at all.
But as with all worlds like that, once a person was fully consumed by happiness, they could never escape back into reality.
Death in the truest sense.
The collapse of the mind, losing both body and self entirely.
…So I have to make her realize reality.
And so,
I fell into Flame’s world.
It was a familiar place.
The pungent smell of exhaust fumes, the dull sky, forests of towering gray buildings, and the noisy, bustling, hurried modern people.
My hometown.
Earth.
For the first while, I could not move at all, just standing rooted to the spot.
Because the very first thought that came to mind was to go visit home.
There was no point.
I had no family left, and I could not even be sure whether this world was real or fake.
Pull yourself together, Baek Yuseol.
That was all I could tell myself.
My heart had weakened after returning to my hometown, but what I needed to do was clear.
Wake that idiot Flame up.
What would happen if my own resolve weakened before hers did?
There was no guidebook, and no one who could advise me, but somehow I came up with a method.
At first, I abruptly inserted myself into her situation to make her realize how unreal everything was.
“The truth is, this is what I wanted.”
I put on sunglasses, made a flashy entrance like the hero of some nineties action movie, hoisted a motorcycle onto my shoulder, and ran off with it.
It failed.
If anything, all I had done was make Flame stand out even more.
It would have been better not to do it at all.
And by the time I came to my senses again, a full week had already passed.
Time Skip.
What a very convenient function.
But since I had no way of knowing what had happened during that time, it was also extremely troublesome.
Fortunately, I was able to meet Flame again almost immediately.
This time, she was singing.
“Now take my hand~! Say yeeeees!”
Countless cameras, and even a handsome host who looked obviously famous.
No mistake about it.
Once this was over, Flame would become incredibly famous.
“One more song!”
“One more song!”
“Encore! Encore!”
The people were crying out for an encore.
At that instant, by chance, my eyes met Flame’s.
I shook my head.
She ignored me.
Since I had no other choice, I ended up smashing the audio equipment directly, but…
“Yooou~ abandoned alone~ on a rainy street~”
Flame stubbornly finished the song a cappella anyway, and instead received an even hotter reaction.
Damn it…
I slammed my fist down on the ground at the realization that everything I was doing was only dragging her deeper into unreality.
The concrete dented inward, cracks spiderwebbing across it.
And then I realized something.
This place was Earth.
A world where psychic powers, magic, swords, and other races did not exist.
And yet I still retained superhuman abilities.
[Blink]
Even my strongest magic was still usable.
…It looked like there was only one method left now.
“Hey hey hey hey, Flame! Did you see it? Did you see it?!”
A week had passed since the street performance.
She had no memory at all of what had happened in the meantime, yet time had flown by this fast.
She was still only nineteen, but time was such a strange thing.
“What am I supposed to have seen now?”
Flame, writing up her notes, dug at her ear and asked, and Han Choyeon exclaimed in excitement.
“The YoTube video you were in passed ten million views! It’s apparently legendary for a normal-person video. And it’s still spreading all over communities, so they say it’s going to go even higher!”
“So? It’s not like any money’s going into my pocket, so why are you making such a fuss?”
“Don’t you know everyone who blew up for a moment on Kim Baekgwang’s YoTube ended up debuting as singers? Even Choi Gak made it onto Are You a Singer because of a video like this.”
“I said I’m not becoming a singer.”
And she meant that.
Singing was fun, but that was completely different from making being a singer her goal for the future.
Singing was a hobby.
That was exactly where she drew the line.
But…
Even so.
The fact that more views were piling up because people were taking interest in her singing did make her quite happy.
“At this rate, I bet some huge entertainment company is going to come looking for you before long.”
“Ridiculous.”
“I’m serious.”
Flame shook her head, but Han Choyeon’s words sounded surprisingly plausible.
The video had been climbing the [#RealTime Trending Videos] rankings every single day, and at last it had even taken first place!
It was incredibly rare for a video featuring just one ordinary person to have this sort of explosive power, so it was on the verge of becoming an enormous talking point—
And then, on the morning of the fourth day exactly, after coming to school, Flame heard something truly fantastical.
“Flame, look at this!”
“What?”
The video Han Choyeon showed her had the tag [#1 in RealTime Trending Videos] slapped right onto it.
But the title was absurd.
[The Real-Life Modern Superhero? The Appearance of an Unidentified Psychic!]
“What kind of superhero…? That’s so childish……”
Flame had never really liked superhero stories in the first place, so at first she thought it was just some movie promotion and was about to skim through it casually, but something felt off.
For a movie advertisement, the noise in the clip was too distorted, almost drowning out the sound altogether.
The screen shook violently, the focus would not settle, and the image quality was blurry.
And above all, the content of the video.
“What is this……?”
In the footage, some kind of terrorist group was spraying gunfire through the streets.
Given that the setting was South Korea, it was quite shocking, but not literally impossible.
Anyone could get hold of a gun if they really tried.
But then the appearance of a boy in a school uniform shattered all sense of reality.
“Teleportation…? This?”
The boy moved at the speed of a streak of light and cut down the terrorists with a lightsaber.
The moment he looked somewhere, he was already there.
He would deflect bullets with the lightsaber or cut through terrorists, and the sight of it reminded people of a swordmaster from a fantasy novel, so by then he had already been given the absurd nickname “K-Sword Master.”
Absurd nickname aside, the video was real.
Truly.
There really was a psychic in reality.
“And there isn’t just one person who filmed it! Every single real-time trending video right now is footage of that guy!”
“Show me… more.”
Each one was footage of the same incident from a different angle, but Flame burned every last one of them into her mind one by one.
It feels familiar.
His face was hidden behind a mask, but instinctively she knew.
“That… is our school uniform, right?”
Baek Yuseol.
That boy was definitely Baek Yuseol.
The boys’ uniform of Sawol High School consisted of navy pants, a white dress shirt, and a navy blazer.
Yes.
In other words, it was an extremely common school uniform, the kind you could find just about anywhere in Korea.
But did people on the internet fail to trace where a uniform like that came from?
“I heard it’s our school.”
“It’s me, actually.”
“But the build is different.”
“I lose weight while I’m active and then put it back on when it’s over.”
“Idiot.”
By then, the fact that the “K-Sword Master” in the videos was a student at O-wol High School had already spread widely, and it had caused absolute chaos, with reporters storming in from every direction and YouTubers showing up to try and find him.
The boy, nicknamed “K-Soma” for short, did not stop after defeating those terrorists just once.
He began going all around the country, taking down criminals and resolving various incidents, and though only a few days had passed, people had already started calling him a real hero.
[An unidentified psychic—the truth is he’s a high school student?]
[Let’s scientifically analyze the principle behind his high-speed movement]
[What material is the lightsaber made from?]
[What is the relationship between Sawol High School and the boy?]
Every issue in the world was focused on Baek Yuseol.
Not only was he the first psychic ever to appear in the world, but the President of the United States had even mentioned him, and rumor had it that a foreign secret organization had infiltrated Korea in order to recruit him.
Of course, no one knew how much of that was true.
But…
There was exactly one thing people were misunderstanding.
The boy’s high-speed movement was not simply a psychic power.
It was magic.
Why?
Flame understood that fact to the marrow of her bones.
The true identity of that ability was the spell Blink.
The whole thing was awkward, alien, and unpleasant.
Knowledge she had never learned kept circling inside her head.
It felt as though the memories of some other person, not herself, were constantly digging into her.
“What’s wrong, Flame?”
“Nothing.”
On the way home from school, the front gate was in an uproar.
A huge crowd had gathered there again.
Reporters must have come hoping to find the unidentified psychic boy.
Since she had gotten used to it over the past few days, Flame was about to simply go around them, but today something was different.
“Fl-Flame… look over there!”
“Huh?”
Han Choyeon stood there blankly, pointing at something.
Flame looked over without much interest—
And then had no choice but to freeze in shock.
“What the hell?”
Standing there was a handsome man in his early thirties, next to an incredibly flashy foreign luxury car dripping with money, wearing a black tailored suit that practically screamed top-of-the-line.
She was not interested in the entertainment industry, but there was no way she would not recognize that face.
Kim Gapsu, CEO of Daebak Entertainment—the man who created the world’s greatest global stars, Gappa Boys.
He himself had come directly to this school.
“Kyaaaah!”
“Please look this way just once!”
That faceless K-Soma, whatever his current hype, was completely overwhelmed by the sheer force of the father of real global superstars.
Forgetting their original purpose, people screamed toward Kim Gapsu and mashed their camera shutters furiously.
He stood there in a leisurely pose, as though fully enjoying all that attention.
Then he spotted someone and turned his gaze.
Their eyes met.
…Huh.
It felt very much like he had actually looked right at her, but Flame did her best to ignore him.
Yet, as if proving her ominous prediction correct, Kim Gapsu began walking straight toward her.
The crowd split apart to either side like the Red Sea, and Han Choyeon, quick to read the mood, had already leapt backward, leaving the two of them facing each other alone.
“Hello. So you’re Flame.”
“…Ah, yes.”
“I’d like to talk for a moment. Would that be possible?”
In her heart, she wanted to say “No” with confidence, but with all those burning gazes pouring in from every direction, she could not endure it and ended up nodding in a fluster.
Kim Gapsu rewarded her with a satisfied, handsome smile and led her toward his limousine.
“Then, shall we go somewhere quiet?”
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Kim Gapsu took Flame to an upscale café in Cheongdam-dong.
He did not do anything insane like renting out the entire café.
If anything, he deliberately left it full of ordinary people, which seemed to be for the sake of the “buzz” that would spread through social media.
“I’ll get straight to the point. I want to turn you into the next Gappa Boys.”
“Ah… yes……”
Really, “Ah” and “Yes” were the only things she could even think to say.
“You don’t look all that thrilled, hm? I know. I know you’ve turned down all sorts of offers until now. That’s why I’m saying this—I’m willing to guarantee both your studies and your daily life.”
“…Pardon?”
“You don’t want to give up your ordinary life, right? A star’s life is exhausting, after all.”
And with that, he dramatically brushed back his bangs, looking not cool, but painfully childish.
It was ridiculous, but Flame nodded vaguely anyway.
“I’ll respect your entire daily life and all your personal relationships, and I won’t interfere at all. In exchange, you’ll live the life of a star on the opposite side of that daily life.”
What nonsense is he talking about?
“And what exactly would you gain from that, sir?”
“Oh, I’d obviously gain a lot. If you end up liking the life of a star, then you might become one of us completely, couldn’t you?”
“…Excuse me. This isn’t being broadcast live, is it?”
“Hm? Haha, are you already conscious of the cameras? Sadly, no. Though even so, I probably can’t stop all this heated attention.”
If it’s not live, why are you talking like that?
Flame wanted to snap that right back at him, but engraved the word patience into her chest and held back.
She had no idea whether all stars were like this or if only this man was.
“First of all, this is the contract. It guarantees your school life and your double life as a trainee, and also the clause that specifies—”
Without even listening to Kim Gapsu’s explanation to the end, Flame stared hard at the contract.
All she had to do was write her name there.
This was Kim Gapsu.
Kim Gapsu of Daebak Entertainment.
With a single word from him, the life of an ordinary high school girl would end on the spot, and a real star’s life would begin.
“…Why now?”
“Because it’s now, I came to find you in such a hurry.”
At present, all of the public’s attention was focused on Baek Yuseol… on K-Soma.
“Do you know the saying that buzz is contagious? When one thing is explosively drawing attention, and then another huge topic erupts, people’s focus shifts straight over.”
She did not know.
Nor did she want to.
“That’s what I’m aiming for. Kim Gapsu personally meets Flame, the famous high school girl, and debuts her… wouldn’t that be enough to become the next hot issue?”
Sure enough, Kim Gapsu had not come looking for her without a plan.
He was serious.
Truly serious… about making her into a star.
Holding the pen, she thought and thought.
Sign it. Hurry.
Take back the popularity that was stolen from you.
If things had gone the way they were supposed to, the name still circulating through YoTube and every social media site right now would not have been Baek Yuseol’s.
It would have been hers.
Flame.
A real-life superhero?
Yes, he was incredible, and of course he would become a global sensation.
But only to a point.
He had not even revealed his face, and he could not appear on official stages.
The popularity of a world star promoted by the greatest entertainment company in the world, with both face and name made public, was not something a single hero could possibly block.
“Come on, Flame. Become a star with me.”
All she had to do was sign.
There was no need to hesitate.
Hadn’t he promised to respect one of her biggest worries—her ordinary life?
If she signed this contract, she would be given the chance to sing freely before the whole world, the very thing she loved.
Become the greatest star in the world.
Someone whispered it.
Was it Kim Gapsu?
Or was it her own heart?
She did not know.
But before she realized it, Flame’s trembling hand had already reached the edge of the contract.
Tap.
The pen touched the paper, and the moment a single dot was marked—
Don’t give up on yourself.
At the sound of a boy’s voice that seemed to come from somewhere, Flame suddenly came back to herself and dropped the pen.
“…No. I’m not really the kind of person who should become a singer after all. Receiving people’s attention… is too burdensome.”
“What? But……”
Kim Gapsu wore a startled expression and started to say something, but Flame hurriedly stood up.
Because if she listened any longer, she really felt like she might sign it.
And then—
The world flipped sideways.
Ah…?
Glass shards and pieces of brick burst out in every direction.
A deafening explosion.
A violently shaking field of vision.
When she came to her senses, she was sprawled on the floor.
“Ugh…!”
Her whole body was covered in dust.
Concrete had shattered and sprayed powder everywhere, leaving her school uniform in tatters.
Her arms and legs were scraped up all over, blood trickling from them.
She slowly raised her head and looked toward the wall.
A huge hole had been blasted clean through it.
“What in the world… happened……?”
Could it be a bombing attack in broad daylight?
Cautiously, Flame walked out through the hole in the wall.
“Kyaaaah!”
“R-run awayyyy!!”
Boom! Crash!
Screams.
The sound of things exploding and shattering.
Thump, thump.
Her heart pounded.
WAAAAAAAHHHHNG!!
A siren wailed somewhere.
Then she remembered.
She had studied this once before.
That was not just any siren.
It was an air raid warning.
That’s enough.
Fall back.
Hide.
Or run.
She knew very well that any further curiosity would only shorten her life.
And yet—
Why was it that she could not retreat?
One step at a time, Flame slowly moved forward.
And when she finally reached the middle of the road, she saw it.
—Kwooooo!!
A green-skinned monster, roughly the size of a small house, was smashing apart the city while holding traffic lights in both hands.
…A monster?
The boundary between reality and unreality wavered together like heat haze.
I know what that is.
An ogre.
A forest-dwelling monster that, despite its huge frame, possesses very agile movement and can even travel through trees, making it extremely dangerous.
How did she know that?
Before she could even answer that question, the ogre’s eyes met hers.
Thudthudthudthud!!
She could hear dozens of helicopters rushing in from the sky, but it was too late.
Things like that would never stop it.
Boom, boom!
The ogre was approaching her.
And she still stood there frozen, unable even to lift a foot.
Was she scared?
No.
It was not that.
It was simply…
Can’t I just kill it?
She felt no need to run.
Flame did not flee.
When she stretched out her right hand, a staff was already in it.
Its name was Eoga la Echove.
A beautiful crescent-moon-shaped staff.
She did not know where she had gotten it, or why she knew its name.
But did that even matter?
Even now, countless fragments of magical knowledge were swirling inside her head, clamoring to be let out.
“O light.”
It was a simple movement.
She merely spun the staff once, then brought it down against the ground—
Flash—!!
A brilliant golden magic circle burst out and engulfed the ogre.
And just like that, magic was revealed to the world for the very first time.
Flame knew it.
At this very moment, everyone in the world was looking at her.
And something…
Had become irreversible.
She knew that instinctively.
