Oppa, We're Never Going To Be Apart Again, Not Ever.

My lovely girlfriend Sia died a year ago.

And yet.

A Gate had opened, and what came out of it wasn’t a monster but a suspicious woman insisting to my face that she was my dead girlfriend.

How many people in this world would take a woman like that at her word in a moment like this? For now, at least, I wasn’t one of them. If anything, the thought that someone was trying to con me on Sia’s death anniversary made my blood boil. This was desecration, against Sia’s memory and against me.

The woman who claimed to be Sia was trying to throw her arms around me, and I put some distance between us. Everything in me wanted to curse her out for impersonating my dead Sia and tell her to get out of my sight this instant. But she had come out of a Gate, after all, and I judged it wiser not to provoke her carelessly. The first thing to do was try talking to her calmly.

“Who exactly are you, that you know me — and know the woman I love?”

Holding my personal feelings down as hard as I could, I put the question to her. But the instant my flat, toneless words reached her, the woman… started sniffling.

She’s crying?

I hadn’t anticipated this turn in the slightest. It was some small relief that she still hadn’t turned hostile toward me, but the situation was getting strange.

An unknown being fresh out of a Gate, and I was the only one here who could fight.

Stay calm. I have to stay calm.

First I had to find out how she knew my name and Sia’s, and why she was trying to pass herself off as the dead Sia. I was still calmly arranging my next words in my head when she spoke.

“Well, my appearance has changed a lot, so of course Oppa would think that. Still, I kept worrying about what I’d do if Oppa had forgotten me — thank goodness. I’m sorry. I’m an idiot for doubting Oppa. Oppa even brought tteokbokki and gimbap because he was thinking of me. Right, there’s no way Oppa forgot me. I knew it — there’s no way Oppa would leave me and go see another woman. That’s right. I was the one in the wrong. I’m an idiot for doubting a man like Oppa.”

After muttering all that to herself, the woman paused to steady her breathing and slowly looked around. Then she stretched one hand high toward the sky and began murmuring in a language I couldn’t understand.

Her murmuring had barely ended when an enormous quantity of mana began to wrap itself around the area.

“There’s nobody around here, but you never know.”

Magic?

And she’d cast it with just a chant, without working out any spell formula?

In that moment, instinct told me that however hard I screamed and threw myself at her, she could put me down without lifting a finger. She was a monster. My legs shook as though they would give out and drop me on the spot, and my heart hammered so madly it felt ready to burst.

“Oppa, Oppa, what’s wrong all of a sudden? Are you not feeling well? You’re fine, aren’t you? Right? Pull yourself together, Oppa!”
“W-who on earth are you…”

The overwhelming gap in power left me short of breath. She, if anything, looked thoroughly flustered to see me struggling for air.

“Where does it hurt, Oppa? Or is it — are you scared of me? Oppa, calm down. Breathe in deep, then let it out. I’m Oppa’s girlfriend, so why would I ever hurt Oppa? Calm down. No, wait — I’ll make it easier for you.”

Then the woman murmured something again and cast a spell on me. I couldn’t make out exactly what she said, but this time too she chanted it in a single pass, with no formula calculation.

“How’s that, do you feel a little better now?”
“…I’m all right now.”
“Phew. What a relief.”

Only seconds earlier my heart had been pounding hard enough to burst, and now, as if it had all been a lie, my pulse was right back where it belonged. That was exactly what frightened me more. I’d never even heard of a spell that could settle someone’s mind.

“Okay, so I understand Oppa can’t believe that I’m Sia, and I’ll admit the situation doesn’t leave you any choice. Fine — then I just have to prove I’m Oppa’s girlfriend, right?”

The woman calmly began reciting it all: the first time Sia and I met, what Sia said to me when she confessed, where we had our first kiss, the first birthday present she ever gave me, the songs I always sang whenever the two of us went to karaoke… Every last one was something no one but Sia herself could have known.

Then… that woman really was Sia?

None of it made sense, but on the off chance, I decided to ask one more question.

“Then what’s my favorite drink?”
“It’s a stretch to call it a drink, but Oppa loves coffee milk.¹ That’s why I was always asking if you were addicted to coffee milk.”

That answer settled it. I had no idea why she’d come out of a Gate, or why she looked nothing at all like the Sia I knew, but the woman standing in front of me was, without a doubt, my beloved girlfriend Sia.

“And then Oppa said this — sure, I’m addicted to coffee milk, but the thing I’m more addicted to is you, Sia… and I told you never to say anything like that again because it gave me goosebumps. When was that? It was when I was twenty-one, so—”
“Sia.”

Before she could finish, I pulled her tight into my arms.

“Sia. Sia. Sia.”

There was so much I wanted to say, that this couldn’t be a dream, that I’d missed her so much all this time, that I loved her, but none of it would come out. All I could do was call Sia’s name, over and over.

Only then did she finally seem to relax. Sia broke into a bright smile and said my name in return.

“Minjun-oppa.”
“Yeah. Sia.”

Instead of asking how the other had been all this time, the two of us held each other in silence for a long while. Her face, her voice, her height were all different, but with my arms around her there was no doubting it was Sia, because Sia was the only one who loved being in my arms this much.

After we’d held each other like that for a long, long while, I wiped away my tears and asked her.

“Sia, what on earth happened to you all this time?”

Even as she was engulfed in flames too strong to resist inside the Gate, her whole body burning away, Jeong Sia never lost hope of surviving.

I’m not going to die. There is no way I’m dying. For my own sake, and for the sake of Minjun-oppa, whom I love, I’m going to survive to the very end, whatever it takes.

Sadly, her resolve was only half fulfilled. She did come back to life, only in a dimension entirely unlike Earth.

And as a dragon, the mightiest living creature there was.

Right after her reincarnation she couldn’t believe what had happened to her, but bit by bit she adapted and came to happily enjoy her dragon life.² That didn’t last long, though.

Something’s missing.

Reborn as a dragon, she could have anything she wanted and do anything she wished, and her kind new parents lavished affection on her as well. Even so, she couldn’t be satisfied.

I can’t see Minjun-oppa, can I.

She had everything there was to have, yet the boyfriend she loved wasn’t at her side. She had loved Minjun enough to think of him as the other half of her soul, and she missed that other half with an ache that went to the bone.

Then one day, as the emptiness left by her longing for Minjun tormented her, she finally resolved to go and meet him herself. There was exactly one way to do it: develop a dimensional-travel spell that transcended space and time. From then on, she began planning how to make it real.

Before she became an adult dragon, she trained and trained again until her power far outstripped that of other hatchlings her age. In every spare moment she pulled magic books from her father’s study and read them, building up her knowledge. Then, once she was an adult dragon, she threw herself into dimensional-travel magic research and nothing else, like a madwoman.

Her fellow dragons tried to lure her away, too. Dimensional-travel magic can’t exist in this world, at least in theory, so come play with us instead. She never wavered, and buried herself in developing it.

Creating a new magic alone, with no guarantee of success, was anything but easy. When she started, she’d thought that if it meant she could meet Minjun, she wouldn’t care if it took a few thousand years. But as time dragged on and on, she began to feel as though she was going mad, and the thought of letting everything go kept circling in her head. Whenever that happened, she carved Minjun’s face into a stone and pulled herself back together.

Get it together, you bitch. Are you going to give up here? With Minjun-oppa waiting for you? You spineless bitch.
Oppa is bound to miss me exactly as much as I miss him.
There’s nothing Oppa can do about it right now, so I’m the one who has to work at getting to him.
Minjun-oppa, Minjun-oppa, Minjun-oppa, Minjun-oppa.
Wait for me. I’ll come to you, I promise.

And so a hundred years passed, then two hundred… A thousand years went by, and then a little over two thousand.

At last, her effort bore fruit.

The existing dimensional-travel magic couldn’t set the coordinates of the destination dimension or time, and it demanded the caster’s life as collateral. Hers was groundbreaking, able to take her to the time she wanted in the dimension she wanted. Granted, the time coordinate carried a slight margin of error. It also consumed such a staggering amount of mana that no one knew what side effects it might have, but she was confident she could bear all of them. Going to meet Minjun was more than worth risks like those.

“Finally. The day’s here.”

The moment she finished checking over the formula, she cast the dimensional-travel magic without hesitation.

“Wait just a little longer, Oppa.”

“Originally I was going to move to the day right after I died, but once I’d cast the spell I remembered I’d slipped for a second on the last calculation.”

Sia admitted she’d set the time value to one year instead of one day.

“The second I spotted the mistake I tried to correct the formula, but the spell was already active and I couldn’t change it. If only I hadn’t slipped back then, Oppa could have met me a little sooner.”

And with that, Sia’s long story came to an end.

Honestly, taking the story purely on its own terms, I couldn’t help wondering whether it was complete nonsense. In the several decades since Gates first appeared, all kinds of monsters had been discovered, yet not once had anyone observed a dragon among them. Above all, I’d thought reincarnation was something that existed only in novels.

But with Sia miraculously back alive in front of me, what was left that I couldn’t believe? Dragon or anything else, the only thing that mattered was that she had come back to me.

“Our Sia, you must have been through so much. Two thousand years is easy enough to say, but how long is that really…”

Before I could finish, Sia flung her arms around me, exactly the way I had a moment earlier.

“Oppa.”

Then, catching me completely off guard, she pressed her cherry-red lips deep against mine.

“I’m awfully late, aren’t I. I’m sorry. I wanted to come sooner — I wanted to, and I couldn’t.”
“Sia.”
“We’re never going to be apart again. Not ever.”

Her lips were sweet enough to send a shiver over my skin. She must have missed me terribly all that time, because Sia showed no intention of pulling away, and only when I started choking for air did she finally let me go.

“Are you okay…?”
“Uh, yeah. I was just startled for a second.”

At this point, I still had no idea at all.

No idea what my reunion with Sia was going to do to me.