“Grandma! Please, get a hold of yourself!”
The once-chaotic community service center was filled with screams and shouts in an instant.
People crowded around the old woman who had collapsed clutching her heart.
A staff member from the center rushed over to check her condition, and someone hurriedly pressed a phone to their ear.
‘…A heart attack?’
I stood at a distance and watched the scene unfold.
My mind was cold.
No, I was trying to keep it cold. Honestly, even if I stepped in, what could I do?
I wasn’t a doctor, just a bitch whose body had gotten smaller. Surely there were people here who could perform CPR better than I could.
But.
Vrrr— vrrr—
The halo above my head was giving off a different vibration than before.
As if reacting to the old woman’s fading life force, its faint glow gradually grew more intense.
‘…I think I can do it.’
An unfounded certainty flashed through my mind.
A strange sensation told me that if I poured this unfamiliar, warm energy flowing through my body into that old woman, I could make her failing heart beat again.
“Move aside!”
Before I knew it, my feet were moving.
Even the werewolf over two meters tall was pressed back by my force and opened a path. At the sight of me approaching with pure-white wings spread wide, people instinctively stepped aside.
“An, an… angel?”
I heard someone’s trembling voice, but I ignored it.
I bent my knees and sat down beside the old woman.
Up close, the old woman’s face was already turning blue.
‘…Screw it, I don’t know. If it doesn’t work…….’
I deliberately didn’t think about what came after. I didn’t have the time for that.
Instead, I reached out with a trembling hand and placed it on the old woman’s chest.
At that moment, regardless of my will, the halo burst forth with explosive radiance.
Fwaaaah—!
The entire community service center was dyed in pure-white light.
It was bright enough to blind, yet no one screamed.
Because that light was not an aggressive energy, but a warmth like a boundless sea, brimming with the primordial force of life.
“……!”
The light that began at my fingertips seeped into the old woman’s body.
Her stopped heart began to beat again with a great thump. Her ashen complexion returned in an instant, flushed with color.
“Huuurk, cough!”
The old woman drew in a huge breath and opened her eyes.
At the same time, the intense light enveloping my body slowly subsided.
Silence.
Everyone inside the community service center was staring at me with vacant expressions.
Gasps of awe broke out here and there.
The werewolf was staring at me with her mouth hanging open, and the Christian lady from earlier had outright thrown herself to the floor and begun wailing.
‘…Ah, I’m fucked.’
I’d drawn way too much aggro.
In that instant, everyone’s eyes were focused on me.
They all looked at me with reverent gazes, as if waiting for me to say something.
And I.
Perhaps because this situation was so unusual, so unprecedented, and so burdensome, I suddenly ended up saying something far too harsh.
“What’re you looking at? Lower your damn eyes.”
…What the hell did I just say?
Avoiding the flood of gazes pouring down on me, I shrank into a chair in the corner and sat there.
*
…What on earth was the power I’d just shown?
A superpower I got from becoming a mutant? Yeah, it seemed right to think of it that way.
The problem was that I’d used it openly in front of a crowd of people…….
‘…Whatever. It’ll work out somehow.’
It wasn’t as if I’d done anything wrong.
More importantly, it was time to focus on the problem in front of me.
“Oh dear, I thought this old woman’s time had come and an angel had come to take me away…….”
“…I’m not religious.”
The old woman said that with tears welling in her eyes.
There weren’t many things I could say in response, so I roughly accepted her thanks and brushed it off.
“Even so, you saved this worthless old life of mine. I have to repay you somehow…….”
“…It’s fine. I’m not even sure I was the one who did it.”
After a few rounds of that verbal tug-of-war, I barely managed to send the old woman away.
Of course, there was loot as well. A crumpled fifty-thousand-won bill.
I’d firmly refused, saying I wouldn’t take it, but she forced it on me anyway.
I smoothed out the wrinkled bill, then carefully shoved it into my pocket.
‘…But what the fuck is this? As if my body changing wasn’t enough, now I even have healing powers…….’
Well, there were guys who could shoot fire from their palms, so… I guess healing powers weren’t that strange.
As for the secondary problems this power might bring me… Damn it, I don’t know. For now, good things are good, right? It’s better than not having it. Probably.
Once the old woman left after thanking me until the very end, someone else came over this time.
“Achoo! Um… hello?”
Surprisingly, the werewolf approached me first and spoke.
Her earlier outburst, telling me not to come near her, was still vivid in my mind.
When I glanced at her with a puzzled look, she scratched her head awkwardly.
“I’m sorry about earlier. Back then, how should I put it… my instinctive fear was just too strong…….”
“Are you okay now?”
“…Mm, honestly, no.”
…Then what did she want?
“But after thinking about it carefully, it felt strange. Why am I afraid?”
“…Did you figure out the reason?”
“…No, not that either. But before that, I realized I had no reason to be afraid. So I just tried mustering up some courage.”
From my position, it was hard to understand.
A gigantic werewolf and a petite girl… or rather, an adult man in the form of one.
If anyone here should be feeling instinctive fear, it should obviously be the latter.
‘…Is this somehow related to being an angel too?’
At this point, that was the only way I could think of it.
Just as I was reaching that tentative conclusion, the werewolf spoke again.
“So you’re also… a mutant, right, unnie? Though you seem a little different from the mutants I’ve heard about so far…….”
“I am, but…….”
…Unnie?
For the sake of my dignity, this was something I had to address at least once.
“…How old are you, by any chance?”
“…I just turned twenty.”
“Then, could you maybe call me oppa instead of unnie?”
“Huh? Why…….”
If you ask why, it’s only natural that I answer… but.
I had no proper answer.
Because I was originally a man, so of course I should be called oppa. But now I was a woman? Fuck.
In the end, all that came out was a poor excuse with no real substance.
“…Th-that would be better. In various ways.”
“Ah, aaah. I see. That can happen. I understand…….”
I don’t know why, but she seemed convinced.
…Was this the power of looks?
If a man with hairy legs did it, it was eccentric behavior, but when a beautiful angel did it, it became personality.
“Ah, right. You can speak casually to me…….”
“…Should I?”
I confess, it honestly wasn’t easy to drop the honorifics.
The werewolf’s build was truly enormous.
She was probably well over two meters tall.
For me, whose body had already gotten smaller, it was fairly intimidating.
But well, if she was setting the stage like this.
“Yes, hehe. I’m Shin Ayun.”
“Mm, I’m Han Yujin. But is your allergy okay?”
“Ah, hehe. It’s not that bad. Once I sneeze really hard, I’m fine for a while.”
Mm, that was good news, at least.
If her allergy had been severe, it would have caused enormous difficulties in daily life.
“Op, oppa, how did you end up looking like that?”
“I just woke up, and I was like this.”
“Same for me. Was there anything else, by any chance…?”
“Ah, I had a dream too. It was a bullshit dream, though.”
“I-I had one too, a bullshit dream!”
Shin Ayun shot to her feet and shouted.
I flinched in surprise. With a body that huge, it was scary for no reason.
Trying my best not to show how startled I was, I asked.
“Yeah? What kind of dream was it?”
“It was like I’d met a very, very enormous being. I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember that it was an extremely terrifying existence.”
“…I think I had a similar dream.”
A brief silence passed.
‘…But was it terrifying?’
The being I saw had actually been warm and benevolent.
If I hadn’t realized its identity as the Ministry of National Defense, even someone like me, who had not the slightest shred of faith, would have been fooled.
“So it really is the same…….”
“Hm? Do you know something?”
“Before coming here, I looked up various things. Since this seemed like a serious matter.”
“…Right.”
…Come to think of it, considering the gravity of the situation, I really hadn’t investigated properly.
Honestly, I had no idea what was going on right now.
But mutation or whatever, this had all happened in a single night.
With a hangover piled on top of that, there was no way I had any room to think.
“From what I heard, mutants all had dreams in common. Testimonies from people all over the world match on that.”
“…This shit— no, this incident is happening worldwide?”
“Yes. For now…….”
“Fuck, this is really huge…….”
Well, it would be stranger if a bizarre phenomenon like this were happening only in Korea.
“It seems the entity they met in their dreams differs depending on the form they mutated into… but there’s one thing they all have in common.”
Shin Ayun paused for a moment, then spoke.
“…They are beings that must never mingle with humans.”
There was a strange weight to those words.
“…That’s far too abstract to call a commonality.”
“But that’s what everyone’s testimony says. I think so too.”
But the being I met hadn’t felt like that at all.
‘…Is it related to the fact that I mutated into an angel?’
There was a high chance it was.
At least for now, that seemed to be the case.
“Well, leaving that aside. How many mutants like us are there for them to have statistics like that?”
“There aren’t any exact statistics yet, but… roughly one percent. That’s what people think.”
One percent.
As a ratio, it didn’t look that large, but in terms of absolute numbers, it was by no means negligible.
Our country’s population was fifty million. If you calculated one out of a hundred, that was five hundred thousand people.
If that many people appeared all at once, there was no way the country’s administrative capacity could handle it.
“By the way, that’s strange.”
“What is?”
“Isn’t the government’s response too fast? For something that happened overnight.”
Shin Ayun nodded.
“Right. Everyone on the forums is talking about that too.”
“What are they saying?”
“That it’s fast, like they prepared in advance. But the other strange thing is…….”
She lowered her voice.
“Apparently, mutants like us just get registered, and that’s it.”
“Just registered?”
“Yes. No isolation, no treatment, they just draw some blood, measure your body, and it’s over. Basically, ‘live carefully.’ Of course, they say dangerous people are being isolated separately…….”
They were certainly responding quickly.
But how should I put it? I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being neglected.
Honestly, people had turned into monsters overnight, and yet they were responding with only this much?
When I said as much, Shin Ayun made a meaningful expression.
“There’s a rumor going around the forums that that might actually be true. That the country’s administrative capacity has reached the point of overload, so much so that they can’t possibly pay attention to us…….”
“Why on earth? Until yesterday, the country was perfectly fine… Ah.”
Now that I thought about it, there was one more issue besides the mutants.
Shin Ayun looked around, then spoke carefully.
“The blackout zones.”
“…The ones from the emergency alert?”
“Yes. Around Gangnam and Yongsan… Apparently, things there are really bad.”
“How bad?”
“They say they’re pouring the entire military in. And soldiers who go in are losing contact…….”
Only then did the contents of the emergency alert come back to me.
‘Do not open the door even if you hear a baby crying or strange screams.’
“So there’s something more serious than the mutations.”
“Probably. That’s why I think they don’t have the leeway to pay attention to us.”
Though she said that, Shin Ayun’s expression was dark.
Of course it was. It meant something serious enough was happening that the state had to neglect them.
“But is there no communication from inside? Last time I checked, there were posts proving people were there.”
“That was only at the beginning of the incident… Apparently, now there’s no contact at all.”
What a hopeless piece of news.
Hearing that the situation was serious, I looked around me.
People were still taking number tickets and waiting for their turn.
The Christian lady who had called me an angel with reverence earlier had vanished in a hurry, as if something had come up.
Aside from that, it was hard to find any impatience or anxiety among the people.
They seemed aware that the world had changed, yet felt as though it would not cause them any great harm.
As always.
I, too, hoped nothing would happen.
Just because I’d become an angel didn’t mean I had the slightest intention of going around saving people.
I simply hoped nothing bad would happen to my family and friends.
That was all.