Questions (3)
Truly astonishing—so astonishing, in other words, that even I couldn't believe it—
my circuit had been spinning like mad ever since the moment Hayun called me 'Lily.'
Honestly, it's a little embarrassing.
How is the name 'Happy Lily' even a thing?
I don't know much about English names. I have no idea which ones sound sophisticated, which ones seem odd, or which ones read as a bit dated, so I had no clue where a name like Lily stood among English names.
But judging it as a Korean, at least—frankly, Lily feels like the kind of name little kids would love.
A flower-themed magical girl, and one that sounds like it should belong to an elementary school girl, not a protagonist who's a high schooler like me.
Well, if I'm being picky, none of the other names are much better, but Lily somehow feels especially childish. Rose, at least, could pass for a name you'd give something moderately dignified.
And yet, even while thinking all that, I seemed to be rather fond of the name Hayun had given me.
There was probably exactly one reason for that.
Ever since I was little, I'd wanted to become a magical girl too. Just like Hayun.
"Hah."
I let out a hollow laugh as I brushed the dust from my hair.
The dust didn't come off easily. Somewhere in the wreck of that car, oil must have leaked, because it clung stickily to my hair and the dirt had caked right on.
So annoying. And my hair was long, too. I couldn't remember ever taking especially good care of it, but it would still hurt if the middle snapped or the ends split.
Or rather—Jihye would be the one hurting. When we lived together, she was always the one running her hands through my hair.
Even though she keeps her own shorter than mine, of all things.
My white dress was smudged here and there with dust and oil stains, gone patchy and dark in places.
Still, this was better than the hair. A battle-worn look was preferable to the pristine white outfit of what could only be a bride's dress, anyway.
…Anyway. So, magical girls, huh.
People had already called me the 'Black Magical Girl' or the 'Fifth Magical Girl' before, but only now did it feel like I'd received real recognition.
No, wait. Strictly speaking, it wasn't exactly 'official'… well, feelings are feelings, whatever you call it.
Besides, even if it had been official, none of this warmth would exist if the other magical girls hadn't accepted me in turn.
"Ptui."
After spitting out whatever had gotten into my mouth, I gripped the hammer tight in both hands.
And I leapt forward with everything I had.
Brilliant white light poured from my furiously spinning circuit, and at the same time the striking head of the hammer flared white-hot.
Strangely, I felt no thrust at all. Had my 'thinking' gone and changed the rocket's propulsion method too?
I flipped the hammer upside down in my grip.
I pushed the white light forward, shaping it into something like a blade. The way Hayun did.
Looking at the edge at the end—spread a little wider than the hammer's head… well, calling this a sword would be a stretch.
More of an axe, I suppose.
It was true that what kept coming to mind were tool shapes, but what could I do about that? In my head, 'reliable yet dangerous things' had always been tools and nothing else.
I'd never actually chopped down a tree, but—
Whoom.
The monster reached out a hand to grab the hammer as it swung toward it.
Was that an instinctive reaction?
Or maybe it was because my edge wasn't as keen as Hayun's. At a glance, the white light did look rather blunt at the tip.
But an axe is dangerous for more reasons than just having a sharp edge.
The sheer weight of that thick, heavy head itself.
What's more, my hammer had propulsion units mounted on both sides. Forcibly repurposed by my blazing 'hope,' the hammer's front thrusters were now functioning as rear thrusters.
The thrust wasn't as great as one massive booster would have been, but—
KRA-KOOM!
It was more than enough weight and propulsion to bury itself in the monster's brutish hand.
"…!"
The monster's eyes went wide.
"Scary, isn't it?"
The words slipped out before I could stop them.
"It scared me too, being a magical girl."
The pink blade of mana, or the beams that came screaming in at a speed no one could dodge.
The fist-sized clumps of mana, or the monstrous meteors that scorched everything around them white when they detonated.
The mana-wreathed gauntlets scared me too. Rose's effects were a mix of white and red, which made them even more vicious—from a slight distance, it looked like blood spraying off her fists with every punch.
I tightened my grip on the hammer's haft and swung sideways with all my strength, batting the monster away.
CRASH!
The monster sprawled across the ground, shattering the concrete beneath it. A few parked cars were shoved aside, but thankfully, most of the civilians had already scrambled out of their vehicles and fled at the sight of us fighting.
Thank goodness the monster couldn't think rationally.
If it had taken a hostage like the combatants did, or grabbed any random bystander the way the monsters I'd encountered before had, my movements would have been severely restricted.
"GRAAAH!"
The monster sprang straight up from where it lay and launched itself at me. Its legs extended like coiled springs as it came flying in—a little cartoonish, almost laughable, but I couldn't afford to let my guard down.
I held the hammer—no, the axe—sideways, raising the body that had once been the hammer's head to block the fist hurtling toward my face.
TWANG.
It was solid metal through and through, and the sound it made deflecting that fist gave me a small fright.
I skidded backward, and the monster advanced on me, throwing left and right punches in rapid succession.
Somewhere along the way, black blades had risen above its knuckles.
Which begs the question.
It has no reason, no intellect—so how does it wield something like that so skillfully? Perhaps the circuit reacts to the monster's instincts and moves on its own.
I kicked the monster's knee, flipped the axe head back around, and brought it down. The distance was too short for a perfect strike, but at least the edge posed a threat to it now.
When the monster ducked sideways to dodge, a little space opened up again. I swung the hammer wide one more time to knock it away from me, then sprang backward with all my strength, retreating to secure the distance.
And then—
"Hah!"
I hurled myself straight up.
The monster recovered its stance and lifted its head to search for me, but I was already bringing the axe down from midair.
Light streamed brilliantly off the white edge, and the thrusters at the back strained and spat flame.
Heat radiated from both sources of light.
The monster felt it too—it crossed its arms above its head, shielding itself with the blades—but—
KRA-GACK!
It was a collision you'd never believe was light meeting light.
A ferocious shriek like metal grinding on metal rang out, and
crunch.
a crack split the edge of the black blade.
That's right. In this kind of fight, mass is king. A sword only cuts as well as its edge is sharp.
CRACK!
The black blade split apart. The fragment that had flown upward like a shard of metal rather than light, deprived of its circuit's support, vanished without a trace almost immediately.
And beneath it was the monster's head.
No, I didn't hear the sound of a blade actually biting into a person's skull.
The monster's body was protected by its circuit's energy in its own right. The blade had shattered, but in blocking the tip of my axe even once, it had done its job. It had slowed my descent.
But the kinetic energy of that massive hunk of metal still remained.
It wasn't a direct hit to the monster's head, but when I brought the hardened black mana crashing down, that mass of energy drove straight through into the head beneath it.
It wasn't enough to knock the thing unconscious outright, but it was plenty to break its stance.
"…!"
The monster staggered.
As its balance collapsed backward, both hands flailed, grasping for anything to catch.
I leaned back out of reach of those grasping hands, planted my feet slightly apart to steady myself, and heaved the axe high above my head.
Then I brought it straight down.
KRA-KOOM!
The white axe blade buried itself in the monster's chest.
Into the circuit.
My circuit-empowered strength, the added force of the original boosters, and the momentary lapse in the monster's focus—all of it compounded, and the circuit split clean in two.
Ssshhk.
Black smoke poured from the ruined circuit.
And that was the end of it.
Thud.
The monster's hands dropped. Confirming it wasn't moving, I crouched down and held a hand beneath its nose.
…It was still breathing.
No, more than that—there wasn't a single serious wound on the monster's body. At least from external injuries, it didn't look like it would die.
And I'm hardly one to talk, having torn a car apart, burst out of it, and gone on a rampage swinging a hammer taller than myself. The whole thing is just insufferable.
Looking around, I could see people hiding at a distance, all of them watching me with terror-stricken faces.
"…"
Sirens were wailing somewhere far off.
With the circuit destroyed, even non-magical girls ought to be able to restrain it.
That was my judgment, and leaving the fallen monster where it lay, I rose into the sky.
The area was a disaster zone. As it always was when I fought monsters in the middle of the street—the asphalt was split and gouged everywhere, and quite a few cars had been smashed up in this round's collisions.
Were there any injured? I didn't think I'd be able to check right now.
Below me, the police arrived and bound the fallen monster. It was the wire-based restraint device they used on other kaijin.
For some reason, someone down there was looking up at me and waving both arms wide, and judging by the expression, it seemed to mean 'leave this to us.'
…I did just insult the police wholesale a little while ago, though.
Well, I was in a hurry, so it couldn't be helped.
I turned and flew back the way I had come.
"Is everyone okay?"
[We're fine, Lily. The kaijin's down.]
The first to answer was Hayun.
Whether deliberately or not, she kept calling me… my codename? Nickname? Stage name? Whatever it was—'Lily'—which made it pretty clear how much she loved the name she'd given me.
Come to think of it, maybe Hayun, just like I did, genuinely took pleasure in the fact that I had truly joined the magical girls.
[Ours is down too. Things got a bit messy around here, but the police showed up and are handling it.]
That was Rose's voice.
[Mine's down as well.]
[Same here.]
[…I've finished restraining mine, as well.]
Did that mean they could each handle one-on-one takedowns now? Or perhaps the monsters had simply been scattered apart. Last time, I had still been running my Despair Circuit, and its influence might have made them stronger then.
I decided to puzzle through the details later, and spoke.
"So what now? Operation number one is a failure. Did the Chairman show up?"
[No, not yet. My guess is he has no intention of appearing for the rest of the day.]
Cherry said.
[And he's got a convenient excuse, you see. The magical girls went on an unlawful rampage, so he was unable to attend. Well, legally speaking, that's not even a lie.]
"And whose fault is it that things ended up like this?"
Though if you actually asked 'whose fault is it,' the answer was us. We were the ones who went berserk smashing everything in sight.
Trace it back far enough, and it was the result of the Federation, the government, and the Company all entangling in vague half-measures while each pursued their own interests. It was a bit like international politics, really. In how everyone loathes and resents everyone else, yet the markets are so deeply intertwined that no one can pull out freely.
Fixing a situation like that was never our job in the first place.
The priority right now was crushing Noir Corporation—an outfit so obviously planning immoral schemes with human beings as its tools. They were the ones who'd joined hands with the government to plant their headquarters on this soil in the first place, so a trial would be pointless regardless.
Even within the government, opinions would split. What about this world's government, this country's government? No—what were the other governments of this world's Earth thinking?
Wouldn't some government somewhere show very definite interest in 'energy extracted from modified human beings'?
I didn't get the sense that Noir Corporation was simply doing as it pleased without a care. I had no way of knowing how the investigation into the Earthling kaijin was proceeding, but if those 'Earthlings' really were manufactured, then surely—surely—there existed a government willing to approve the technology, provided they somehow altered human genes enough to claim the results 'weren't human'?
"…Well, even that would just be a pretext in the end."
That's right.
I wasn't particularly a righteous person.
Frankly, I'd rather cut all ties with politics, keep my distance, and live out my days leisurely reading manga. Who wouldn't? A life with money, comfort, and nothing in particular to do.
All I wanted was to convince myself that what I was doing wasn't an evil thing.
[Hm? Lily, did you say something?]
"Nothing, Blossom."
I shook off the thought and answered Hayun.
"We planned for this, remember. If we can't catch the Chairman, he'll head straight somewhere safe and start condemning us."
And it wouldn't happen right away, either. It could be hours from now, or days.
At the very least, any investigation of the Chairman would be postponed for the moment.
[But it does mean he's lost the government's protection.]
Rose stressed.
Right. Once he was detained as a criminal suspect, that would be the moment he fell under the government's protection.
The only reason magical girls could operate in that gray legal zone was that we'd never openly made an enemy of the state. As long as the government left us alone, provoking them first was something to be avoided at all costs.
[So we start from there. Any chance we could figure out where he'd run?]
[Not at the moment. Honestly, we have almost no basis to go on. He may never have set out in the first place.]
That was James.
"Then let's start by turning the Chairman's office at headquarters into a disaster zone."
I proposed.
[Rose, Dahlia, and Delphinium will take that one.]
Rose said. There was already wind rushing through her voice.
"The rest of us will sweep the area. Keep comms open—Hayun… sorry, Blossom, Iris, stick with me."
[Okay!]
[Understood.]
It felt odd, having said it. Considering Rose was the one who'd suggested this particular split, maybe she'd engineered it on purpose.
If I simply wanted a warp-capable partner for emergencies, Iris would have been the better choice over Dahlia or Delphinium.
…Then again, in a pinch, I could always just warp straight to Noir Corporation headquarters myself.
Somehow I could picture Hayun beaming with strange delight at the arrangement, and I shook my head quickly to shake the image loose.
Plan B was hitting the headquarters.
But I didn't believe the Chairman—already aware we were on his trail—would still be holed up there, so the plan was to verify only the most crucial parts and pull out immediately.
And in the meantime, the other team would head for the orphanage where I'd grown up.
Whether this counted as lucky or not, I hardly had any exploitable weak points.
No family, no friends, no lover.
Well—there was Jihye and the orphanage family, if you counted them. Family in spirit, certainly, but not family by blood, or by any legal definition either.
Which meant, through an enemy's eyes, the means to threaten me were perfectly obvious. Worse, I'd laid bare exactly how much Jihye and the orphanage meant to me back when I worked for the Company. Every last bit of it.
Whether the Chairman, who had pulled a stunt like this once before, would do the same thing again, I couldn't know.
But if he did head that way, I had no intention of just taking it lying down this time. Turning it into an opening for a counterattack would be the right call.
…Not that personal feelings weren't mixed in, of course.
It goes without saying, but if Jihye counted as family, she was the only family I had in this world.
If we'd only ever fought and never cherished each other, there would have been no reason to think of each other as family at all.
Last time, Jihye had been right in the middle of a government facility. And I had run away and abandoned her. Again.
I never even properly found out how she'd been since. I'd offered this excuse and that, but if I'd truly wanted to find out, couldn't I have managed it?
With all these tangled emotions churned together, Jihye had always been the person I owed an apology to.
The distance would have taken thirty or forty minutes even by car, but flying in a straight line didn't take nearly that long.
"Is that…?"
Iris, sharpest-eyed of all of us, looked toward the orphanage and murmured in surprise.
I saw it too.
The area around the orphanage was already thick with police.
My heart lurched, and I picked up speed, flying there as fast as I possibly could.
"…What's going on here?"
As I descended, my voice thick with personal feeling, a few of the officers guarding the orphanage entrance quickly stepped aside.
"This location was attacked last time, so we received orders to protect it."
The officer answered my question without a moment's hesitation, as if he'd rehearsed it.
"…"
Protection… huh.
Surely even in the government's eyes, Jihye had her uses. I had made it painfully obvious, every single time I looked at her, just how much she meant to me.
"Mind if we go in?"
"Of course! Please, go right ahead!"
At my words, the officers cleared a path.
Two of us descended in the back.
I walked toward the orphanage and carefully opened the door.
Inside was quiet.
They couldn't be asleep. It was still morning. The school-age kids would all have left for school, but the teachers and the preschoolers should still be here.
They were holding their breath.
…Was it because of what happened last time?
The thought made my chest tighten like a vise.
The moment I stepped out of my shoes, they reverted to their pre-transformation form.
Leaving them at the entrance, I stepped carefully inside.
Whether she heard my footsteps or not, only then did the teacher poke just her head out from the back and glance my way.
"Jieun!"
The teacher came straight out, calling my name.
And the instant that name rang out, there came the sound of footsteps sprinting toward me in a frantic hurry.
"Jieun!?"
The one who shouted that and slammed full-tilt into the hallway wall was—of course—Jihye.