Chapter 17: Questions (5)
I had confirmed that Jihye was safe. Truthfully, my own selfish motives were part of why I'd come here in the first place, so beyond checking on her, there was nothing else for me to do.
Which was why I'd planned to linger a few minutes and then head out.
If the Chairman wasn't at headquarters either, tracking him down ourselves was next to impossible. It would be nice if we actually managed it—I had more than a few things I wanted to ask him, and if I could throw in a punch or two while I was at it, so much the better.
For now, though, the point was to put the fear of us into the Chairman—to pull Noir Corporation's forces off other tasks and pin them on protecting his precious skin. There was a reason we were deliberately showing no interest in the Complex, our real target. Besides, there was no telling how far the government would go covering for him, but either way, we were making a show of hunting him down.
If the Chairman started gathering his troops in one place for his own safety, that in itself might begin to give him away. He could always bolt out into space, I suppose—but if he fled and never came back, I'd be only too glad to never spare him another thought. If it meant he could never pull anything on Earth again, wouldn't that be enough?
...I've drifted off track. Anyway, that's why I hadn't originally planned to stay here anywhere near this long.
But.
"...Jihye."
I spoke carefully to Jihye, who was still holding me in her arms. Her face was a mess of tears.
And it wasn't only tears. She'd come straight here without wiping off the oil and blood she'd picked up fighting the kaijin and smashing cars to pieces. The blood, maybe—but nowhere near enough time had passed for the oil to dry. Naturally, it had transferred onto her clothes too, leaving them a wreck.
"You're getting oil on me. Hold on—"
But even when I took her by the shoulders and tried to gently push her back, Jihye only wrapped her arms around my waist again. Like a child acting spoiled.
No—acting spoiled couldn't begin to describe what she was feeling. Because I thought of Jihye as family, and she thought of me exactly the same way. She had already seen me off twice, but when partings like that keep repeating, all that accumulates is worry.
...
In that warmth, I realized it all over again. The belief that I had nothing had been nothing more than my own delusion. In truth, I already held things too precious to ever lose. Jihye. Hayun.
The emotion I ought to be feeling was guilt. Finding joy in a moment like this was immoral—or so my head insisted. But even as I thought it, my circuit was already spinning at full tilt. At the very least, Hayun and Jua, standing behind me, knew exactly what that meant. I was, quite literally, laying my heart bare for everyone around me to see.
Jihye held me for another two minutes or so before finally stepping back. Soot had already smudged onto her face, and her white shirt was caked with blotches of red, yellow, and black grime. Jihye herself looked completely unbothered, but all I felt was sorry.
...Truly.
Did I really have to hide myself away this thoroughly? Couldn't I have dropped by, even briefly, just to see her face before going? Hadn't I simply decided on my own to vanish into that abandoned house, only to make her worry twice as hard?
It was pointless to agonize over it now.
"...Would it really be so terrible to rest a moment before you go?"
Perhaps sensing something as she watched the two of us, the teacher asked hesitantly.
"Ah, well..."
I faltered. Rose, Dahlia, and Delphinium were already headed for Noir Corporation headquarters. Judging by the lack of any word from them, nothing unusual had come up—but even so, we couldn't be the only ones taking it easy while a situation like this was unfolding. Honestly, even standing here like this was hard to justify. Objectively speaking, it was no different from lazing around while everyone else did the work.
But.
Jihye took my hand.
She clasped my right hand in both of hers and drew it gently toward herself. It wasn't enough force to pull my body along—just enough to tug at my arm. A small strength, one I could shake off in an instant if I wanted to.
And yet it wasn't something that could be summed up as simply holding on.
It was, perhaps, a plea. Because she believed she had no right to hold me—and still, she wished I wouldn't go.
...
I looked back, toward where Hayun and Jua stood. Both of them wore complicated expressions.
Jua's was hard to read. It was close to her usual blank mask, but the angle of her brows had shifted slightly. With the outer edges dipping just a touch, what she felt was probably closest to sympathy. My story was old news to the other magical girls, after all—though they couldn't have known just how much Jihye and I meant to each other.
Hayun's expression was a whole level more tangled than that. To put it more precisely, it was the face of someone who had no idea which expression she was supposed to be wearing. An awkward smile—thinking they needed to rejoin the others as soon as possible, yet unable to bring herself to tell someone in this state to hurry up and move.
"...It's okay."
In the end, only after our eyes met did Hayun carefully offer her opinion.
"Nothing dangerous is happening right now... and there are police outside, too."
Right. These weren't the sort of people who'd suddenly storm the building to capture me, so for the moment, things were fine.
Really?
I wasn't just rationalizing to myself, was I?
"Jihye, I—"
I turned my head toward Jihye to tell her—
BOOM!
A sound like that tore through the air.
For an instant, I wondered if the people outside had changed their minds. They were the only ones capable of attacking us right now. But something was different. This wasn't the sound of someone battering at a door. It was unmistakably the sound of something detonating—a sound I'd heard plenty of times before. Louder than gunfire.
A beat later, the orphanage's windows rattled. It wasn't the violent energy of an earthquake, but it was unquestionably the aftershock of something enormous.
"Jieun!"
Hayun shouted. Even as she yelled, her body was already lunging forward. Jua was the same—nothing like the hesitant pair of mere moments before.
I turned to follow—
"Ah."
—and my hand slipped free of Jihye's.
When I glanced back despite myself, all there was to see was Jihye, hands left hovering in empty air, standing there at a loss.
My heart pounded like mad. Yes—to be honest, Jihye's expression frightened me more than the explosion outside. She wasn't angry. Jihye understood the situation perfectly well; she knew I had to go. But her face was different from those two partings before. Almost pleading.
Yet that look crossed her face for only an instant before she lowered her hands and clasped them firmly over her stomach. A smile rose to her face. The same smile she'd worn at each of our last two partings.
"...Ah..."
And seeing that face, a groan escaped me before I could stop it.
So that was it. Jihye hadn't wanted to let me go, either. She must have worn that other expression first—the pleading one—before this one. She simply hadn't wanted to show it in front of me. Didn't want to become an obstacle to my escape. Because Jihye, too, knew that she was my only family.
...
I clenched my teeth.
I'd thought everything was slowly falling into place. I'd had plenty of misgivings about becoming a magical girl, but I'd considered it a meaningful option for untangling my situation—and in practice, it had worked. But the more I made that choice, the further I drifted from where 'Jeong Jieun' used to stand. And naturally, I would keep drifting from every bond built around that girl, too.
As the magical girl 'Lily,' I might go a very long time without seeing Jihye at all. And even when I did, it would only be in fleeting moments like this one. Maybe that's how it would be once we were adults—but by then, the relationship would already have settled into place: friends who met up now and then for the rest of their lives and enjoyed each other's company.
But right now...
We were still high schoolers. It had been barely two months since second year began. Plenty of kids had left the orphanage before the two of us, and most of them couldn't even keep in touch consistently—because the bond broke before it ever truly became family. Wouldn't Jihye and I end up the same way?
That thought terrified me.
It was a strange thing. Could human hearts really hold two contradictory feelings at once? Because even then, in some corner of my chest, I felt joy—that Jihye would wait for me like this, that she cherished me.
Pathetic.
It was the most contemptible I had felt about myself since becoming Jeong Jieun in this world. ...In a way, even more than when I'd felt those doubled feelings toward Hayun.
All I could do was curse everything that had backed me into this corner. And I was included in that everything.
"I-I'll be right back. I promise."
That was what I said. It was, in effect, a lie. Not that there was no sincerity in it at all—
"Okay. I'll wait."
Jihye replied. Her voice was far flatter than before.
And hearing it, my heart felt like it had dropped to the floor and gone rolling away. Gritting my teeth, eyes squeezed shut, I turned my back on her. And leapt.
Whatever was behind that explosion out there, I wouldn't feel right until I'd beaten its source to a pulp. ...Though I doubted even that would settle my blood.
Soaring up to get a look, I found the explosion had come from a private home. And at the sight of it, every hair on my body stood on end.
I knew that direction.
"Jieun!?"
The moment I confirmed the bearing, I dropped toward it without a word, and Hayun cried out in alarm. But I had no room in me to answer. There was something—someone—I absolutely had to check on over there first.
Human lives? That might have been part of it. Not entirely wrong. Even someone like me knows the bare minimum duty owed as a human being. But by my standards—which couldn't exactly be called virtuous—that duty ranked second. What mattered more was the sight of a certain someone who should have been in the direction of that blast.
The explosion had come from the place where I'd been sheltering before I fell in with the magical girls.
Pangpang's home.
Out of an inward reluctance to speak her real name, I'd taken to calling my acquaintance there by the absurd nickname 'Jigu-ppa'—Earth-fan—one she'd probably have snapped at me for if she'd ever heard it. Black smoke was rising from that place.
Why? Why now of all times?
Had the Chairman caught on? That this was where Pangpang lived—the one who'd helped me without demanding a single condition? How? Had someone at my workplace seen past the visor and recognized my face? Had someone watched me swing that hammer, known it for mine, and reported it to the Chairman? Or failing that, had they combed through CCTV or whatever else to track down the people closest to me?
...
This was different from the situation with Jihye. Jihye and Hayun were alike in being dragged into my mess and suffering for it—but Jihye wasn't someone I could have made a different choice about. She was, quite simply, family.
Hayun... well, she could look after herself. She was a magical girl, after all. Rich words, coming from me, I know—but Hayun could certainly subdue any enemy that appeared in front of her. And if that enemy happened to be a villain, she could settle it without a shred of guilt.
But Pangpang...
Wasn't she just a girl who loved Earth? Someone who had looked at the passion of the Earthlings preserved aboard the Voyager—the passion of only a tiny sliver of humanity—and decided from that alone that Earth was a beautiful place? She'd helped me for no reason other than that I was close to her. If she ended up paying a price for that...
I could feel the color draining from my face.
Why did this have to happen while I was here? No—if it was the Chairman, he might have deliberately kept tabs and aimed for exactly this timing. Chart my patterns of movement, study how the government had responded, and anyone could quickly identify the people who counted as my weaknesses—
"Pangpang—!"
I opened my mouth and called that name.
Smoke already hung thick in the air. It wasn't the black of a serious house fire, but the acrid reek of gunpowder and the haze made it plain the blast had been sizable. The entrance to Pangpang's place wasn't exactly roomy—it was the semi-basement unit of a villa that had to be thirty years old if it was a day. Rubber basins and tubs were piled around the entrance, making it hard enough to get in—
And above all, there were police here too.
It wasn't the same situation as with Jihye. Only two officers had gathered here—a number that hardly deserved the word gathered. A single patrol car stood nearby; probably officers off their rounds, all wearing the bewildered look of people who'd arrived mere moments ago.
Fire trucks... had they even set out? Until just now, they'd had six kaijin to subdue. Flying here, the distance hadn't felt far to the three of us—but in reality, this was a different district altogether. How many officers did this area even have? Could fire trucks and ambulances be so short that support had been diverted there instead? If so, the vehicles must be stretched dangerously thin—
"Ah, over there...!"
As I passed right over the officers' heads and dropped straight toward the smoke-veiled entrance of Pangpang's home, one of them shouted, but my head was too much of a jumble to even think about listening. I wanted to call Pangpang's name again, but the smoke was so acrid that breathing itself was a struggle.
The door appeared to have been blasted inward from outside.
This badly?
Looking again, it wasn't just the door—there were traces of all manner of objects having been blown apart. Splinters of wood lay scattered everywhere inside, along with scraps of cloth. Had someone stacked up barricades in front of the door? If people had come to seize Pangpang, and she had piled those things up to hold them back—and then whoever ran short on time had simply blown the door open and forced their way in—the story made a grim kind of sense—
"Jieun!"
Just as I was about to step inside, Hayun yanked me back. I toppled sideways.
An ear-splitting crack followed, and something powerful came flying into the spot I'd been about to enter, reducing the basement entrance to wreckage.
A booby trap.
And no simple one. What I'd heard was unmistakably a gunshot.
Jua hurried past my dumbstruck self, leveled her gun into the depths, and squeezed off a few rounds. Something exploded deeper inside the house, and Jua cautiously poked her head out to survey the interior.
"...I'll go in first."
Only after Jua said that and carefully stepped inside did Hayun finally release me. I scrambled unsteadily upright.
"How did you know?"
"A hunch."
Hayun answered.
...
I had no comeback for that. Hayun was... the protagonist, after all. Even in the webtoon, she'd occasionally solved problems in exactly this fashion. There was no time to ponder the mechanics of it. I got up quickly and followed Jua carefully inside.
Smoke swallowed every direction and cut my visibility badly, but I could still piece together the state of the place.
...It was very different from the last time I'd seen it.
Shattered belongings lay strewn about. Pangpang hadn't owned all that much, but she was an Earth-fan through and through, and she'd accumulated this and that all the same. A globe sat on the low table tucked in the corner, and posters hung on the walls. Every last one of them had been torn to ribbons. It looked less like deliberate vandalism and more like the traces of someone's desperate resistance.
My breath grew ragged. It wasn't only the choking smoke.
"...Is this someone you know?"
Hayun asked, and I nodded.
What... what on earth had I been thinking?
Convinced there was no one left to help me, I'd come to the home of the only person who would. And that person had taken me in without hesitation. But I had given her nothing in return. I'd simply lived there like it was owed to me, doing this and that terrible thing.
The first time I raided the Company, I'd been staying here. This was where weapons had been built from the Generator. This was where I'd been living while I went up against magical girls.
Why had I assumed I wouldn't be found out? Had I truly believed that all I had to do was walk away at the end, and everything would turn out fine?
...
On top of everything I'd felt looking at Jihye, darker feelings came creeping up again. The hum from my circuit had dwindled to a noticeable murmur. After being granted the name 'Lily'—after believing, mere moments ago, that I was overflowing with hope.
In the deepest part of the room, positioned where it could watch the door, stood a turret. Jua had shot it to pieces, but one glance was enough to tell it belonged to Noir Corporation. Had they known I would come here? Or had the police been the intended targets?
I couldn't tell.
...All I knew was that, all this time, I had been full of myself.