Seraph Squad Gender-Bender Panic! ~The Day My Girlfriend Became My Boyfriend~
One morning, Cadet Karen wakes up to find the world has turned upside down.
She looks in the mirror and screams. The face staring back is sharper, with a faint stubble on the chin. In a panic, she checks under her shirt—her chest is flat. And there's something extra down below. "Wait, does this mean... I'm a guy?!"
Out in the hallway, the entire military dormitory is in chaos. The cool female instructor Yui has become a muscle-bound man, and the gentle senior Ryo is now a cute girl. Boys are g
Seraph Squad Gender-Bender Panic! ~The Day My Girlfriend Became My Boyfriend~ - Piercing Guidance! The True Feelings Found at the Park
Saturday afternoon.
The search had been going on for nearly four hours now.
"Reporting in! Shion Hill observation deck, nothing unusual!"
"No sign of anyone on the east side of Evergreen Woods, either!"
The cadets' voices crackled through the radio one after another.
All of them, dead ends.
Yui stood in the command center's communications room, glaring at the map of Fort Mirage pinned to the wall.
Bulging muscles rippled beneath their instructor's uniform.
"Still haven't found them?! If they've fled the base, it's either toward Tachibana City or the North Gate surveillance post! Contact both immediately!"
"Y-Yes, sir!"
The young soldier at the comms scrambled to work the equipment.
Yui's glare was nothing short of demonic.
But.
A faint sheen of cold sweat glistened at their temple.
The inspection team had left the base just an hour ago.
They'd managed to fudge the paperwork somehow, but Operations Director Shimada had left with an icy parting shot: "A formal investigation report will follow at a later date."
(Ryou, you absolute idiot...!)
Yui crushed the sheet of letter paper in their hand into a crumpled ball.
That farewell note.
It's all my responsibility.
Just one line.
As if that could settle everything — that's not something a seventeen-year-old kid gets to decide.
But.
(That child... has always been like that.)
Yui clenched their back teeth.
Ryou, whose father had been gravely wounded in the North Gate defense battle, carried an abnormally strong sense of responsibility.
And that sense of responsibility had sent them running off alone.
"What about Karen?"
"Um... for a while now, their movement has been..."
Yui looked at the monitor the comms officer was pointing at.
The location tracking system for the communicators carried by base personnel.
The point of light representing Karen was shooting out from the base's main gate, further and further outside, at a terrifying speed.
"What the hell is that idiot doing?!"
Yui's roar shook the walls of the communications room.
The road to Tachibana City was a long, gentle downhill slope.
Karen's lungs had given out long ago, and the taste of iron spread through their mouth with every breath.
"Haaah... haaah...!"
They pressed a hand against their side, but kept running.
Every kick against the asphalt made their legs feel heavier.
This is why I hate having a guy's body, some part of their brain thought.
In their original body, they felt like they could have run so much more lightly.
The words they'd hurled last night kept echoing deep in their ears.
— I don't care anymore! I hate you, Ryou!
"...No, that's not it!"
Even shouting that it wasn't true couldn't make those spoken words disappear.
The star-shaped earring left behind in Ryou's room swayed inside Karen's chest pocket.
Their breathing was ragged.
Their heart felt like it was about to explode.
Sweat blurred their vision.
But they couldn't stop.
I don't want to lose Ryou.
On the day they'd entered the dorm, frozen stiff with nerves, Ryou had spoken to them so gently.
They'd gotten covered in mud during a rainy day run and been yelled at by Instructor Yui together.
Every time Karen felt down, Ryou was always there beside them.
"Lover" wasn't enough to cover it.
"Best friend" wasn't enough either.
But Karen still didn't know what the right word was.
Just.
"...If you're not here, Ryou, I... I can't manage anything at all."
They reached the city.
At the entrance to Komachi Shopping Street stretched an arcade over two hundred meters long.
On weekends, this town was overflowing with cadets on leave from the base.
But right now, everything just felt unbearably loud.
First, they pushed open the door to Café Porto Blanc.
That quiet café where Ryou used to read books every weekend.
But Ryou's usual seat was occupied by a young woman they didn't recognize.
"E-Excuse me, manager! Has a kid named Ryou come in today?! Long black hair, a girl, really quiet type!"
"Ah... sorry. Haven't seen them today yet."
The manager's brow furrowed apologetically.
Next, they rushed into Tsubaki-dou, the used bookstore.
Inside the shop, thick with the scent of old paper and ink, the elderly owner Tsubaki looked up from a heavy book.
"Young Ryou hasn't shown their face here for two or three days now. Did something happen?"
"Something happened" didn't even begin to cover it.
But there was no time to explain.
They ran to Tachibana Port.
The sea breeze ruffled their hair, plastered down with sweat.
Maintenance cranes stretched their arms toward the unreliable sky.
No place looked like it could hold Ryou.
They went to Central Station, too.
They stood on the platform, watching the waves of people passing by.
Students in uniform, mothers carrying shopping bags, salarymen in suits.
But Ryou wasn't among them.
"...Haaah."
They'd run too much. Their lungs burned.
People passing by glanced at Karen — gasping, sprinting — as if looking at something strange.
Before they knew it, they'd collapsed into a back alley.
The time was already evening.
No, closer to night.
The sky above the alley was just dark, like a long, narrow strip of cut cloth, and a building's emergency light bled red onto the wet asphalt.
"...They're nowhere."
They buried their face in their knees.
Squeezed their eyes shut.
Now that the inspection team was gone, if Ryou turned themself in, they'd really be stripped of their cadet qualification, and in the worst case, face a court-martial.
"Why... why would you go alone...? If I don't have you, Ryou..."
A tear fell onto the back of their hand.
Ryou was the strongest best friend.
For Karen.
And surely, for everyone else, too.
So how did it come to this?
That's when.
— Beep...
A faint electronic sound sliced through the silence.
They strained their ears.
— Beep... beep...
The sound was coming from their own ear.
Karen's head snapped up as if jolted by electricity.
With trembling fingers, they touched their left ear.
The star earring.
The charm Ryou had given them on the day they entered the dorm.
— It's a charm. I wear the same one.
Back then, Ryou had definitely said that.
The earring was definitely vibrating.
Karen pulled the other earring — the one Ryou had left behind — out of their chest pocket and placed it on their palm.
Then, the earring on their ear and the earring in their palm began to vibrate simultaneously.
The vibration pulled the earring in their palm in a specific direction, almost like a magnet.
"...No way. This thing, could it be..."
It detects the other one when it's nearby.
They'd never been told it had that kind of mechanism.
But right now, the fact was, the earring was searching for Ryou.
"Ryou... you're nearby, aren't you!"
The traces of wiped-away tears felt cold.
They ran.
The force of kicking off the asphalt sent water splashing from a puddle in the alley.
They left the shopping street behind, cutting through an old residential area.
Slipping between apartment buildings where laundry fluttered in the wind, dodging a rusty bicycle, they ran full-speed in the direction the earring pointed.
A road on the outskirts of town, where streetlights were few and far between.
Eventually, they stumbled upon a small park.
Midorigaoka Park.
Even in Tachibana City, it was an old, worn-out park that even children seemed to have forgotten.
An abandoned sandbox, rusted swings, a faded slide.
And in the corner of the park, a single wooden bench.
Under a streetlight, on that bench, they saw a figure.
"...Ryou."
The name slipped from Karen's lips unbidden.
Waist-length black hair swayed in the night breeze.
Ryou was looking down, gripping something silver — a communicator — tightly in their hand.
Even from a distance, Karen could see their fingers were clenched so hard they'd turned white.
"Wait!"
The voice was already out.
Ryou's head snapped up.
Their large, dark eyes caught sight of Karen.
In an instant, Ryou's expression crumbled into shock.
"Kare...n? How did you find this—"
Karen barreled into Ryou at full speed before they could finish.
They crashed straight into them from the front and snatched the communicator out of their hand.
"Stop it, give it back!"
"Shut up!"
They slammed it against the ground with all their strength.
The hard metal case bounced off the pavement with a loud crash.
The antenna snapped, the battery flew out, and the communicator fell silent after one last muffled beep.
"Why... why would you go alone?! Don't... don't leave me behind!"
Karen grabbed Ryou's shoulders roughly and screamed at the top of their lungs.
Their face was a mess of tears and sweat.
"Responsibility this, protecting people that — you carry it all by yourself, and then if you're gone, what am I supposed to do?! I can't... I can't manage anything at all, can I?!"
The words were a jumbled mess, choked with tears, barely distinguishable from shouting.
Ryou stared at Karen, stunned.
From those large eyes, a single tear quietly spilled over.
"...But... because of me, I caused trouble for you, for everyone... and besides, I was scared to show you any more of my weakness."
"Like I care! Even if you opened the box, that's not your fault! And your weak side — I've known all about that for ages!"
Karen thrust out the earring they'd been clutching — Ryou's earring.
"Here! This! It's your treasure, right?! You've been protecting it all this time... protecting me, and this earring too!"
Ryou gasped and touched their own left ear.
The earring they were sure they'd been wearing was still there.
"...They were resonating."
"That's right! This earring you gave me — it led me straight to you!"
Ryou's face crumpled.
"...You've been protecting me all along, haven't you."
Their voice trembled.
And then, Ryou took a step forward.
Karen took a step forward, too.
Beside the bench, the two of them held each other tight.
Arms wrapped around each other's backs, holding on hard, so hard.
"I'm sorry... for going off on my own..."
"I'm the one who said awful things... 'I hate you' — that was a lie. I've been thinking about you this whole time."
Their tears soaked into each other's shoulders.
— In that moment.
In Karen's chest pocket and on Ryou's left ear, the two star earrings began to emit a golden light at the same time.
"Wh-What is this...?"
"They're glowing... and warm."
The light intertwined like words, gently enveloping both of their bodies.
Karen began to feel a change in their own body.
They felt the stubble on their chin smoothly fade away.
Their height dropped a few centimeters, their hands becoming slender and fine.
Their shoulder width narrowed, and a gentle warmth spread through their chest area.
The same was happening to Ryou.
Their delicate shoulders broadened slightly, their height increasing.
The waist-length black hair began to shorten from the roots.
But.
"...Huh?"
The change stopped there.
They hadn't completely returned to their original forms.
Karen's body hovered somewhere right between male and female, flickering unsteadily like an image being processed.
"So we still can't fully return. 'When hearts meet, a rain of kisses falls,' huh. Maybe just connecting heart-to-heart isn't enough."
Ryou spoke in a voice that had partially returned — low, but somehow gentle.
"...Maybe... we have to properly tell each other. With words."
Karen became aware of an emotion welling up from the very pit of their stomach.
Ryou let out a long breath, then took Karen's hand.
"Karen, I'm... really weak. Back then, too, after what happened with my dad, I was so desperate, thinking I had to protect someone. The truth is, I wanted you to protect me. But I was scared to show you my weakness."
Ryou looked straight into Karen's eyes.
"But... that's no good, is it. You coming all the way here made me realize that."
Karen squeezed Ryou's hand back.
Tightly — with a grip that said they would never let go again.
"I was always right next to you, but I never noticed what you wer
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