Runaway Girl (3)
"What a mess."
And it was, in every sense of the word. A mess. A madhouse. Hell on earth.
Even in the dead of night, there was barely room to set foot between the police, the paramedics, and the civilians who'd come out to rubberneck. Keeping a perfectly straight face, I slipped through the crush of bodies and made my way toward the scene.
"W-weren't you going to run away at once?"
"Idiot. You pull this much aggro, of course someone's going to respond. You think I'd just leave the victims hanging? I'll slip in with them and hitch a ride somewhere decent."
I had a plan of my own, more or less. Wander around haphazardly in a world this cold, and there wasn't going to be a single decent person who'd pick up a girl with nowhere to go.
"Jin-ah..."
"What. What's going on?"
I wiped my expression clean, put on a face like I was about to faint from shock, and hurried over to Kim Su-jeong. One of the officers wrapping a blanket around her stared at me with round eyes.
"You know her?"
"I stepped outside for a moment. I heard a loud noise from the house, so I came back."
I played it perfectly innocent. I actually had said I had a quick errand outside when I left, after all.
"I-I see. Come this way. Something terrible's happened. Don't go back to the house. You'll see something ugly."
The officer didn't seem particularly suspicious, and wrapped a blanket around me as well. I hadn't been especially worried about being suspected in the first place. The Connector on my hand was the only evidence, but like Ren hovering beside me, it was invisible to ordinary eyes.
"You okay?"
"Y-yeah... but..."
What worried me more was Kim Su-jeong's condition. She nodded, trembling. Then again, she hadn't seen it herself.
The sight of a pig being filleted alive, sliced into sashimi while he was still breathing.
"So-hyun unnie seems really shaken."
Jeon So-hyun, though — the one who'd covered the kid's eyes and ears — was another story. I walked over to where she sat a little ways ahead, staring blankly into space.
"You."
She jabbed a finger at me without warning. The tip of it was shaking violently. And her eyes? They looked like a violent earthquake was going off behind them.
"Count yourself lucky. If you'd been there too, I... I couldn't have covered everyone's ears."
"Who's helping who, here? How about you get a grip on yourself first. Un.nie."
"...What?"
"Putting on that tough act is a waste of time. I can see right through you — you're soft on the inside. You've got a warrior's potential, but if you can't get past that, you'll end up eaten alive by it."
She stared at me, stunned speechless, her face gone slack. From where I stood, she was someone I found myself slightly concerned about — almost as much as Kim Su-jeong. She'd even had the gall to rap me on the head, after all.
"Anyway, it's over. Forget everything you saw and heard today. Dump it all out of your head."
I shared a bit of know-how, in my own way. It was one of the methods I'd used to temper my own mind, back when I was adapting to the Demon Realm. You just forgot the whole thing. When you considered the countless incidents still waiting to explode down the road, holding onto it and turning it over in your mind only hurt you.
"What did you say to unnie?"
"Just told her to hang in there."
I headed back and gave a wry little smile to Kim Su-jeong, who seemed to have pulled herself together somewhat.
"Management Bureau! Make way!"
"Over here!"
Right then, they arrived on the scene, kicking up a noisy racket.
"So Takilas ignored the warning and continued killing."
"That's right. We tried to talk her down peacefully, you know?!"
"...You said the moment you saw her face, she pulled her Armament and attacked."
"Anyway! We're out of here! We definitely cooperated, okay?"
The magical girls, their injuries treated, took their leave. The person who'd been speaking with them was a young woman — an employee of the Management Bureau. From what I'd overheard, some kind of section chief.
"No matter how rough that child is, she's still a magical girl. Magical girls can never lay a hand on anyone who isn't evil."
A man who looked like a high-ranking police official shook his head at her sighing words.
"But Section Chief Oh. You know as well as I do that the definition of evil magical girls operate on doesn't match our common sense or conventional wisdom."
I watched the whole spectacle with keen interest, sipping the hot chocolate a civilian had brought me.
"This has gone beyond Code Red. We haven't finished investigating, but the murdered woman was just an ordinary runaway student from the runaway fam..."
"Chief! Chief! There's another body!"
A commotion rose from somewhere nearby — only then, it seemed, had they discovered Kim Gwanghun's corpse dumped in the alley. Naturally, another uproar broke out. Watching it all, I took a moment to read the room, then made up my mind.
"Wh-what? Why that look?"
"What's wrong with my face?"
"That's the expression you wore when you were sneaking into a criminal organization's ship, going on about how interesting it was."
Ren had read my face and jumped the gun. The wind taken out of my sails, I kicked the little pest, then walked over to that woman with the glasses — Section Chief Oh, or Woo, or whatever her name was.
"What's the matter?"
She stopped the officer who tried to block me and smiled. I lifted the corners of my mouth in a faint smile of my own. From her, I couldn't sense even the faint trace of malice that was universally present in ordinary people like Kim Su-jeong or Jeon So-hyun. In other words, she was a genuinely good person. Someone I could trust.
"There's a man named Kim Gwanghun who ran this runaway fam."
"Huh...?"
"He regularly made us move strange packages, and in return he gave us food and a place to sleep. Those packages were white powder, wrapped in tape and newspaper."
"...Is that true?"
"Yes. It is."
I spilled every last fact. Or rather — I snitched. I had two reasons. One was to keep things from dragging on longer than they had to. The other was a bit of image management, in my own way. If they'd been professionals running drugs rather than an ordinary runaway fam, the nature of the crime got a whole lot uglier.
"A-am I going to get arrested too?"
I'm under the age of criminal responsibility. There's no way they'd arrest me. Of course, I put on a frightened act and covered my mouth as if I'd said something I shouldn't have.
"N-no. That won't happen. What's your name?"
"Lee Jin-ah. That's Kim Su-jeong."
She waved her hands in a fluster. So far, everything was going according to plan. Now the focus would shift away from Takilas — the Code Red magical girl who'd carried out a massacre — and onto digging into the runaway fam that had been operating as a criminal organization.
"What were you talking about with that person?"
"Beats me. We didn't do anything wrong, right?"
I headed back to Kim Su-jeong's side and smirked. All that was left now was to get some rest and watch how things played out.
"Come this way. Everyone — rest for today. We'll talk starting tomorrow."
As the hour grew later, the police began gathering the runaway girls, myself included, and leading us off. I climbed into a police car with Kim Su-jeong, who had glued herself to my side, and Jeon So-hyun.
Kim Su-jeong fell asleep without a care in the world. Jeon So-hyun's face, though, was dark. Victim or not, the fact remained that they'd run away from home — and from the looks of it, what they'd been doing up until now hadn't been particularly clean either.
"So what you're saying is that Takilas was simply doing her job?"
"I only stated the facts. Drug trafficking, child abuse, operating a criminal organization, and so on. All crimes that magical girls count as high-tier merit."
Oh Yun-seo, who had stayed up through the night, nodded with an exhausted face. The people meeting with her were high-ranking officials, the police commissioner among them. They sighed in various corners of the room, clearly less than pleased with her answer.
"Regardless, we have to catch Takilas. The number of people she's killed so far is over twenty. She kills even in situations where she doesn't have to, doesn't she?"
"That's true, but..."
"Then tell me, Deputy Chief Park — how exactly do you propose we catch that kid? Her estimated rank is S or higher!"
The meeting erupted into noise. Oh Yun-seo, representing the Management Bureau, heard out the police position in full, then dragged her exhausted body outside. The hollows under her eyes were dark enough to see.
"...Eun-seo."
"I heard everything."
A high school girl was standing in front of her as she stepped out of police headquarters. A magical girl who cooperated with the Management Bureau, operating under the name Aria — Ha Eun-seo. She held out the coffee in her hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
"No. Don't."
"She's a raving lunatic!"
Oh Yun-seo shook her head, and Ha Eun-seo bristled. But the older woman's voice stayed even.
"You'd be in danger. More than anything — those arms you twisted and shattered. She recovered them in an instant and showed up again. She might not even be alone."
"...If she's not alone, I'll kill the bastards behind her too."
Oh Yun-seo smiled, bitter. She had never liked the magical girl system in the first place — a system that drove young girls onto the battlefield.
"She seems lost. That's why she's so desperate for merit. Why she comes at everything so rough and violent."
"...No matter how young and pitiful she is, if she has power, she has to take responsibility."
"I'm sure I can set her straight."
She forced a smile. Knowing that personality of hers, Aria — Ha Eun-seo — couldn't push any further.
"Where are you going?"
"I met some kids yesterday. They had direct contact with a magical girl, too... I was thinking of examining them, counseling them, and if it comes to it, sending them to a facility under the Management Bureau. Want to come along and see? Those kids might even end up as your family."
"You know I already live on my own."
She said that — and then, in the end, Ha Eun-seo climbed into the car with her anyway.
The car cut across the roads and headed straight for the Management Bureau. Several girls were there, transferred from the police — the ones who'd been caught up in yesterday's incident. The Management Bureau, which researched and handled all things related to magical girls, had determined there was surely something to be drawn out of them as well.