REAPER SCANS

Mr. Magical Girl

[Translator – Kuro]

[Proofreader – ilafy]

Chapter 32: Rest No Longer Than 5 Minutes (2)

After having spent a fun time together, Linshua and I headed back to her workshop.

“Was it tasty, Dad?”

“It was.”

The borscht was very nice. It was oily with lots of meat while maintaining the typical taste and aftertaste I was accustomed to.

Moreover, it was saltier than expected—a perfect accompaniment to the beer I’d ordered. Props to the chefs.

Clack—

Linshua opened the door to her workshop.

“Tsk.” I sensed strong bloodlust directed at us.

“Dad?” she asked, concerned by my reaction.

“Get behind me and hide.”

‘Is it an assassin from the Hero Association? Or are they from another enemy organization?’

The level of bloodlust and killing intent couldn’t be explained otherwise. It was spreading far yet stayed dense, as though we were the ambusher’s mortal enemies.

Clang—

I parried an attack coming down from above with my hammer, but the opponent’s chain of attacks didn’t end there.

Cling—

My eyes caught a red flash which I caught with my hammer—it was a red crowbar.

The crowbar hooked onto my hammer and I felt a powerful tug. My foe was attempting to steal my weapon.

‘Would you look at that? Challenging me to a battle of strength?’

I couldn’t help but smirk at my cocky opponent. I calmed down on the inside, having figured out who the ambusher was.

There was only one possible answer… it was an entity that knew me better than anyone else in the world. Interestingly, that entity had challenged me to a deathmatch.

‘How entertaining.’

“Go on, have a look at it.” As soon as I unexpectedly let go of the hammer, I heard a surprised mutter.

“Eh?”

The golden hammer flew through the air alongside the crowbar before landing in the hands of the astonished ambusher.

I stood still, observing my opponent. It clenched the hammer handle in its mud-black hands. Knowing how powerful the weapon it held was, it leaped at me—a smirk on its face.

“Die!”

It sent a wild swing at my head, yet I stood still, analyzing my opponent with no intentions to dodge.

Its movements weren’t bad. It made good use of the hammer’s rotation and centrifugal force in its attack, unlike Sihyeon Baek.

I felt the strong urge it emitted—the urge to murder its enemy at all costs, but it was expecting me to counter its attack. Its weak wrists showed the monster wasn’t using its full strength so that it wouldn’t be stunned during the physical clash.

It was far better than Sihyeon Baek already. I didn’t expect my knowledge and experience alone to create such a big gap in combat prowess, but it was still clumsy.

Clink—

A pair of gauntlets materialized and covered my hands.

“Did you really expect the hammer to be enough to close the gap in our strength?” I asked.

I trusted my… clone? Offspring? Whatever it was, I trusted it was smart enough to know it wasn’t enough.

Clang— Krrr—

The hammer struck one gauntlet and proceeded to scrape up the metal toward my head again.

‘Now.’ I whipped my arm up, flinging the powerful hammer into the air. It flew above my head, missing its mark.

My ambusher was left open. All things considered, it hadn’t made a big mistake.

It was normal to be wary since I had let my hammer go too easily, but one thing it hadn’t considered was who it was facing—the hero who stood above all heroes.

“You should only worry about counters when facing someone of your caliber.”

I couldn’t be beaten, even if it used its full strength. Holding its strength back in a swing was just giving me an opening to take advantage of.

With no way of defending itself since its hammer and arms were flung high, I casually dug my right fist into the monster’s abdomen.

Smash—

The hardened mud covering the monster shattered away, and its true appearance was finally revealed.

Black hair, black irises, and a black dress… It looked just like me when I was holding my crowbar.

“Keuk…” My monster clone groaned in pain and spat blood before I swiftly grabbed it by the neck.

It was quite a bizarre situation. I never imagined I’d be punching myself in the gut, after all.

It was slightly unpleasant to watch myself writhing in pain, so I just pinned it to the ground.

Boom—

“Me…” The monster muttered something as it kept puking blood beneath me.

“What was that? Speak up.”

“Kill me.”

“Why’s a baby that’s not even a day old asking for death?” Had I made a mistake when creating it?

“No fighting, Dad! Be nice to each other! You too! Bad girl!” Even though we were fighting with our lives on the line, my daughter seemed to see it as merely a bunch of bickering.

“Look. Even Linshua’s saying that, so let’s be nice, all right?”

“Kill me.”

It wouldn’t matter if I killed the monster, but Linshua would most definitely get upset.

My plans for it would also be scrapped. I had to figure out why it was acting that way.

“Why do you keep begging for death? What are you so upset about?”

A pair of black eyes filled with hatred and despair stared right at me. “Why did you create me? Why did you bring me into this world? Why are you tormenting me?”

I couldn’t figure out why the monster felt so much despair about its own existence.

“Linshua, did any of your friends regret being born?”

My daughter shook her head and replied, “Everyone thanked me! No one said stuff like that!”

Then what was wrong with that one in particular?

“Talk. What’s so agonizing about living? You’ve barely even lived a single day. Let’s hear it.” I sat down next to the monster and propped my chin with my hand, ready to listen to its story.

“Are you the owner of my memories?” it asked.

“That’s right. I pretty much just gave you whatever memories I could think of.” I had given it everything I could give, with a few exceptions.

“Then how are you alive? How can you keep living with these memories?”

“…”

‘I see now.’ It must’ve been agonizing for a weak, newly-born monster to endure my past. It was already burdened with my past before its ego and mind fully formed.

I wasn’t trying to copy and paste myself into the monster. I was simply using my experience to attempt to create a similar personality to mine, and the result of that was the complete collapse of its psyche.

It spoke. “You already know. You saw it, after all. The clones dying in the dark research lab… The origin of you heroes…”

“Enough about that. I don’t want to hear it either.” If those memories were also passed on, then there was no wonder it wanted to die.

Those events had happened 15 years prior for me, but that baby had experienced it all in a span of seconds after its birth.

“Sorry. I didn’t expect this to happen.” Even I ended up feeling melancholic just from thinking of the past for a few moments. How much more of a shock would it have been to a newborn mind?

Feeling regretful, I reached out a tender hand to pat the monster on the head.

Smack—

“Don’t apologize.” It slapped my hand away. “Now that you know, kill me. End this misery.”

Hm. How could I reason with the child? How could I make it find its will to live again?

The monster was simply denying reality. Its mind had shattered from the terrible memories that plagued it from the moment it woke up.

I turned to Linshua, who was watching us in a daze.

She clearly looked confused.

‘Let’s go with this.’

“What do you think of Linshua?” I asked.

The hatred in the monster’s eyes dimmed at my words. “I’m grateful to her since I know what emotions she poured into me as my creator.”

“What emotions were they?”

“The joy of helping her father. Her happy past with him. Anticipating the exciting future with him.”

My daughter was too good for me, truly.

“And you’re saying that all those feelings got swept away by the memories I gave you?”

“That’s right.”

In the end, it was all about resenting me. I figured it out.

“Do you have my memories of Linshua then?”

“I do.”

I was unsure how many of my memories it had received, so I didn’t know whether I could successfully convince it, but I had to give it a shot. “Recall those memories. I ask you, are all my memories truly such a curse?”

‘The day she first called me ‘Dad’, the day she held my bloody hands. I’m sure you’d know better than anyone else what I felt during those times.’

“That’s not enough. In the end, you were just feeling self-satisfaction from your actions.” This newborn punk sure was fussy.

“Do you remember the contract I made with you?” I asked.

“Those twelve clauses? It was fucking hard getting through all of them.”

“Those are the reasons you should live. Think carefully.”

“What’s that supposed to mean…?”

I ignored the question and headed to the workshop door. As I walked past Linshua, I quietly whispered, “Could you console it for a bit, Linshua? It’s a bit confused since it just woke up.”

“Okay!” She ran up to the monster while I closed the door and left the workshop.

I took out the white stick in my pocket and bit it. Looking out the glass window, I saw the city lights under the moonlight.

The monster’s question kept ringing in my ears.

“Then how are you alive? How can you keep living?”

It wanted to know why I kept living in suffering.

At first, it was for justice; then, it was for humanity; then, it was for Awakeners; then, it was my sense of duty; finally, all that was left was Linshua.

In the end, there was nothing left at all—I was just an empty shell that survived based on the rules I’d set.

The only time the embers in my soul sparked again was when someone died, and those were merely flames of anger.

“How am I supposed to answer when I don’t even know myself? Dumbass.” After a single day of living, the monster was asking for an answer I hadn’t found in 30 years.

I leaned against the cold glass window and soothed my aching heart with the chill of the night.

* * *

Reaper Scans

Translator - KuroHaruto

Proofreader - ilafy

Join our discord for updates on releases!!

https://discord.gg/reaperscans

* * *

“You’ll come again soon, Dad?”

“I will.”

It had been a few hours since I left New York after saying goodbye to Linshua.

We were running through a desert in the center of North America.

“Do we have to rush so much?”

“I want to get back to Korea by Monday. You can take your time if you want.”

The monster was sprinting through the arid desert too, diligently following me.

“What if we used magic?”

“We’d have to pay a hefty price. You shouldn’t use it willy-nilly.”

“Hmm…”  The monster pondered for a while.

“Go through my memories, dude. You’ll see how big a price I had to pay.”

“I don’t want to go through your memories and step on a landmine.”

‘It’s treating my memories like a minefield? Well, that’s understandable.’

“By the way, I’m a girl,” the monster said.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

‘Why would you be a girl? I’m not a girl.’

“Well, I have a female body and received the psyche of a girl, so I’m a girl.”

“Huh… Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.” The more the Black Marauder differed from me, the better. Whether she was a girl or not didn’t matter to me. “That’s fine when you’re the Black Marauder, but make sure to act like a guy when you’re pretending to be me. Otherwise, people will notice the change.”

“…” She didn’t reply for a while, as though disgruntled about it.

‘Well, I’m sure she’ll figure things out.’ 

Time passed as we crossed the Rocky Mountains, exchanging questions and answers to get to know each other better. It started with the topic of imitating me and then gradually developed into our ways of thinking, our behavior, our habits, etc.

Her thought process was overall similar to mine, but there were a few topics on which we greatly diverged. Our thoughts on the Hero Association, humanity, the Otherworld, and on Linshua had various levels of differences.

Eventually, I asked a final question…

“Do you have a name?”

It was the final topic to separate us, to turn her into an independent entity from me.

“Haram Lee.”

“That’s my name. What about your name as a monster?”

“Don’t have one.”

I would’ve used the one Linshua wanted for her, but my daughter didn’t name the monster—she’d intended to put the monster in my total care.

Having expected the answer, I verbalized a name I came up with during our journey together. “Yoomil.”

“What?”

“Your name is Yoomil. Remember it since I’ll be calling you that from now on.”

Taken aback by my words, Yoomil unintentionally started slowing down. “Yoomil… Yoomil.” She muttered repeatedly as if trying to memorize it.

I also slowed down to wait for her and maintain our distance.

“Okay. My name is Yoomil.”

“Glad to see you like it.”

For the first time ever, her lips curled into a beautiful, happy smile—the same smile Linshua had sculpted for her.

I turned away. That was meant to be her real face, her real personality, and I’d taken it away from her. I’d destroyed her from the inside.

* * *

“How will we cross the ocean?”

Having dashed across the entire North American continent, we eventually reached a sandy beach opening into the Pacific Ocean.

“We’ll run across it.”

“Common sense I received from Lady Linshua tells me that’s impossible.”

“Look into my memories if you don’t believe me.” I turned away and pounded my legs with mana to get ready.

Only weaklings crossed the ocean with mana barriers beneath their feet or by riding a broomstick.

Martial artists would even learn so-called “advanced techniques” and ride the ocean currents to their destination, but that was unnecessary… We could simply use brute force.

I clenched all the muscles in my legs and leaped forward, shooting off of the sandy beach in a streak of light.

A heavy foot descended toward the sea water, but I wasn’t concerned about sinking. The next moment, I was running on water.

It wasn’t some weird technique like lifting one foot before the other could sink. No, my technique was simply hitting the water’s surface with an absurd amount of strength to generate enough upward force to lift my body.

Thump thump thump—

Like drums to a beat, I rhythmically slammed the ocean surface with my feet and ran ahead.

“If you don’t want to go through my memories, get on a boat on your own.” Knowing how similar Yoomil’s personality was to mine, I purposefully taunted her.

Thud thud thud—

As I thought, she started following me again.

In fact, she ran past me—leaving pillars of rising water in her wake.

‘See? Told you we could run across the ocean.’

Sprinting ahead of me, Yoomil suddenly started sinking for a moment after losing her balance, but it was nothing to get concerned about. It was just a question of getting used to the new sense of balance of walking on water. She’d figure it out and get back up eventually.

“On your left.”

“Hold on, wait for m—”

I ignored the sinking Yoomil and scurried onward.

____

Join our discord for updates on releases!!

https://discord.gg/reaperscans

____