Chapter 17: Question (6)
If someone who had helped me ended up paying a price for it — for no reason other than that they knew me — what should the first feeling be?
Obviously, guilt.
Helping someone at personal risk was already grounds for an apology; if she had been dragged into violence on my account besides, then of course shame was the proper response. I was at least capable of feeling that much.
But I wasn't the sort of person you'd call fine and upstanding.
Because the very next thought to surface was: I just want to run away.
That was how my feelings had run these past few months. Something kept setting me on a line and pushing, pulling from either side — as if running an experiment to see which way I would tip.
Why was I holding out? Wouldn't it be easier to just give everything up? If I ran somewhere thoughtless — somewhere I wouldn't need to think at all — wouldn't none of it be my problem anymore?
"…Hnngh."
But I spat out a breath and shook my head. Smack. Both palms struck my cheeks.
In the end, the one perched on that line was none other than me.
If. Just suppose, for a moment.
If I had never felt something like jealousy toward Hayun. If I hadn't gone and become a combatant on the opposite side over some pointless inferiority complex, none of this would ever have happened in the first place.
I would have lived out my days as one of the faceless extras sketched into the background around Hayun, no great highs or lows to my life, just scraping by. I'd never have needed to get famous, never have risen to a magical girl's place, never have caught anyone's eye — and Hayun and Pangpang could have gone on living ordinary, untroubled lives.
Whatever Noir Corporation got up to, the magical girls would have dealt with it anyway.
Yes. In the end, it was all because of me.
All of it.
Which meant I was the one who had to fix it.
"J-Jieun…"
Hayun, who had been calling me Lily until moments ago, called me by name. Some of the strength seemed to have drained out of her voice.
I looked down at my clothes. Slowly, they were staining black. The light of my circuit was guttering out along with them.
What drove a circuit was the intensity of human emotion. And with feelings that swung to the extremes — hardly ever in a good way, only bad — I was, in that sense, apparently ideal circuit material.
Despair and hope were, at bottom, the same thing: human emotion. A circuit that only ran so long as you never gave up, whether you despaired or hoped.
It wasn't that I refused to give up. I simply couldn't.
When would this situation ever end? When, at long last, would I be allowed to give up on everything and just live?
…
No one was there to tell me it would be all right. Not that such comfort would have landed — I'd only have snapped something sharp back. It wasn't even their fault.
How stupid, that I'd been feeling hope right up until a moment ago.
I looked around the room again. There had been hardly anything in it worth breaking, which made the sheer scale of the wreckage almost impressive.
Then I saw the poster on the wall, and lost my words all over again.
This country could hardly be called at peace. Somewhere, at this very moment, a murder was happening; perhaps a robbery, perhaps a sexual assault.
Neither could this Earth. By global standards, the stretches of history with a war burning somewhere had always far outnumbered the stretches of true peace.
If anything, people said it was the aliens' arrival that had solved so many of our problems.
Warring nations, they said, had been brought into the Federation in the name of peacekeeping. There had been failures, plenty of them, just like the interventions other powers had attempted before — but they kept troops stationed without withdrawing, and they genuinely treated member states as members. The claim held water.
This world's environmental crisis had begun turning around the instant the aliens arrived. Convinced that humanity was killing the very planet it lived on, they had devised — and put into practice — several ways to restore Earth's environment completely.
And brandishing those achievements, the aliens had boasted to us: hurry up and join the Federation. Become part of this proud collective.
…
Could they still say that, having watched something like this?
The Federation would plead ignorance, probably. Nothing to do with them — it was all Noir Corporation's doing. Even to us, who had watched them toy with human beings like dolls, they would likely say exactly that. Or perhaps they had a shred of shame after all; at the very least, they had shown no willingness to approach us openly so far.
"James."
I called out to the drone that had been circling in silence all this while. Naturally, James was riding inside it.
"Do you think our location got exposed while we were staying here?"
"I don't believe so."
James answered without a moment's hesitation.
"If you had truly been found out, they would have struck this place first — before you ever ran."
"Then it was coincidence? They storm this place, wreck it top to bottom, abduct Pangpang, and even rig a trap inside — and the one they grabbed to bait us just happened to be Pangpang?"
"First of all, I never took much interest in your personal relationships. Connections within the Company are an intensely private matter; one can investigate them, but they rarely lead to results significant enough to bother with. Combatants are a high-turnover position. With wages that barely climb no matter how many years you put in, a few years of service isn't enough to test anyone's loyalty."
"But alien combatants…"
"If anything, I'd expect them to be even more money-driven — offered somewhere a little riskier that paid better, they'd move. Besides, that Pangpang woman was a special case. Working for the Company was never her goal; staying on Earth was."
"…So if some other job on Earth had paid better, she'd have jumped ship."
"Or to wherever she could watch the magical girls from closer, and more safely. Not that I investigated any of this back when I was an executive — it's information I picked up living alongside you. In any case, my point is that sharing an employer rarely forges bonds that deep. Who on earth keeps risking their life at a job because a coworker was taken hostage?"
Now that I heard it laid out, I thought I understood why James had never gone out of his way to take Pangpang hostage and threaten me with her.
"There would have been no way of knowing the woman was hiding you, so 'they abducted her because of you' doesn't hold together. If the goal were drawing eyes and buying time, staging a terror attack would work far better than singling out one specific person for this."
…
I stared in silence at the wrecked turret.
"Why would anyone install something like this?"
"It may be a stretch to assume they carried it in from the start. A bomb you can carry in a bag, but a machine gun this size is rather difficult to smuggle around hidden. There's a drive mechanism underneath for automatically acquiring and firing on targets, too. Installation would have taken time. At the very least, they couldn't have set it up in the window between the explosion and our arrival."
"Then what — Pangpang set it up herself? Before anyone came in from outside?"
Did Pangpang even have that kind of skill? If James and I had still been living here, it might have been possible — the trap could run off my circuit, and James could have built something gun-like and simply set it in place. But when we had left this house, we had erased every trace of ourselves. And those traces had naturally included the components of that human-shaped robot James piloted.
Even granting Pangpang some engineering talent… months had passed. If she had wanted to prepare for something, she could have prepared.
"…Prepared because she knew being connected to me was dangerous?"
"Even so, I can't quite picture a civilian acquiring military hardware like this all on her own."
Jua, who had been listening, nodded along at James's words and spoke up.
"It varies by country, but in places with gun control like ours, energy-based weapons are illegal too."
For someone making that argument, Jua handled firearms awfully casually — and technically every other magical girl's weapon, gun-shaped or not, fell under the 'energy-based weapon' category as well — but I decided to let that slide.
"I've heard of cases overseas where hobbyists collected parts at home and built these things and got into trouble for it. Did the person living here happen to have a hobby like that?"
"No. Almost certainly not."
Why else did you think I called Pangpang an Earth-boo?
There had been little in the room, but what little there was had all been Earth-related. From her usual chatter I'd assumed her interests stopped at idols, movies, and magical girls, but there were real traces of serious study — a few books and general-knowledge volumes that could fairly be called Earth classics. Not expert level. But still.
I'd heard of history buffs tumbling down the military-otaku rabbit hole, but it was hard to imagine Pangpang becoming enough of a fanatic to build a working gun. And if she had built one, it would have been modeled on an Earth firearm — and it would not have been for any 'practical purpose' like this.
"Then there is only one answer."
"…Only one?"
"Someone supplied it. In working order. Come to think of it, that Pangpang woman may not have known how to operate the weapon at all. She was abducted in the end, and the thing only activated after we arrived."
"Who, though?"
At James's words, not only me, Jua, and Hayun but even the police over by the door pricked up their ears. Fire engines and more patrol cars had apparently arrived; sirens wailed outside.
"Presumably… someone who foresaw an event like this."
"Which is who, exactly? Who remembered a connection even the Company never thought of — between Pangpang and me — and prepared in advance? From Pangpang's side of things, no less?"
…
James fell silent. From the way the drone drifted, he seemed to be minding the police.
"One thing is certain: this machine gun is Noir Corporation property. Not a live-ammunition weapon but an energy weapon, running on a circuit. Not your circuit, of course — it burns fuel imported from an alien planet…"
Something liquid was indeed seeping from the ruined gun turret.
Most mana came from alien lifeforms. Among them, apparently, were creatures whose corpses — bodies that had carried mana in life — decayed into something not unlike petroleum.
Far more eco-friendly than burning actual oil, of course; the process simply recycled what was already there, drawing off only the mana. Had an engine running on gasoline been turning inside this house, the toxic fumes alone might have killed someone.
"You can't tell who cooperated with them from here? Or…"
James's drone swung back toward me.
And when it said nothing at all, I concluded it wasn't staying quiet by choice — it simply couldn't speak. I couldn't see James's expression, but this sudden surge of cooperativeness meant something was up.
"What do we do?"
Hayun asked, her expression grave. Not a trace remained of that faintly cheerful look from in front of the building.
"We—"
"W-wait, just a moment!"
Before I could answer, a voice rang out loudly from the entrance of the house.
I turned. A woman in a business suit stood there, breathing hard.
I had no real basis for it, but something told me this was the 'woman in the suit' Jihye had mentioned.
"Before you go — please, just hear me out!"
…
I frowned.
"…Hear you out."
My last conversation with a public official had been anything but pleasant. They had tried to leverage Jihye, too, which had made it worse. If this was that same woman, my mood — already at rock bottom — might just punch clean through into the basement.
But before I could voice a refusal, the woman bent at the waist — a full ninety degrees.
"I'm sorry!"
At the sight, the three of us went blank for a moment. We glanced at one another, then back at the woman.
"…I'm sorry?"
"I apologize that something like this came to pass. Preventing it was supposed to be the police's job…"
…
Fair enough. It was a public-safety matter.
But no police force could wall off every possibility of crime. Most cases were investigated after the fact; criminals were caught after they committed their crimes. That was the law at its core — nothing was a crime until it was committed.
Which was not to say that failing to stop a bomb from going off in the middle of Seoul, or an illegal armed group running wild with dangerous weapons, counted as a job well done. For the record, the illegal group in question meant Noir Corporation. Though strictly speaking, I was out here operating unlawfully myself.
"The person who was staying here — she was… important to you, wasn't she?"
James's drone whipped around toward me. It fixed me with a long stare — he plainly had plenty he wanted to say, but was minding the police presence.
I had no idea how sensitive whatever idea James had landed on might be, but clearly it wasn't meant for police ears. Forcing him to talk here didn't seem wise.
"I won't ask who she is to you."
The woman spoke as if she already knew exactly what I would say. Both hands stretched forward — she seemed afraid I might bolt on the spot.
"We committed a grave discourtesy last time. That was no way to go about persuasion."
"If you can call that persuasion."
At my reply, the woman nodded.
"You're right. It was a threat. I apologize."
"Is that an apology on behalf of the police or the government? Or a personal one? If it's personal, I don't particularly need it."
At that, the woman's mouth closed.
Figured. A public official couldn't apologize on the nation's behalf — and extracting an apology from an entire government was no easy feat either. Apologizing was hard in itself. Justifications and money never settled this easily at the personal level. There was a reason the phrase about lizards dropping their tails existed.
"I—"
"Either apologize the way I want you to, or if you have no intention of apologizing, then at the very least compensate me properly. You didn't call me here to apologize in the first place. You want something, so you're trying to pin me down by any means necessary."
I didn't want money. An apology would be meaningless at this point anyway — things had already gone this far.
All I wanted was for everything to go back where it belonged.
Though with how thoroughly things had tangled, even if the government rolled up both sleeves and threw its full weight into damage control, there was no telling whether it could be fixed.
Strange, that. Perhaps because my emotions had blown clean past their threshold, I was oddly calm. My mind was blank — past white, simply empty — and yet my mouth kept moving like this.
Maybe, right now, I was showing the most honest face I had ever shown in all my time here.
"Of course."
The kind of thing you commit to first and figure out after?
"…So why did you call me here, exactly? Don't tell me it's 'cooperation' again."
"Y-yes! That is where we'd start, but please, just listen for a moment!"
…
"We understand you need certain assets right away. You're fighting Noir Corporation, aren't you? We can help with that."
"And the government can protect us from the Federation?"
Every piece of equipment I used had been stolen from Noir Corporation, and everything the other magical girls used had been stolen from the Federation.
Truthfully, there was more than enough legal pretext to take us in. Everyone was simply holding off for political and image-related reasons.
"Of course. If you… intend to keep operating as magical girls, an official title would make things far smoother."
"In other words: become 'government-affiliated'?"
As I said it, scowling, the woman's face drained of color.
"No, no! Nothing like that! An employment relationship — no, even a simple transaction would be fine!"
Why was the government so desperate to latch onto us?
"Probably the energy issue."
Jua said it quietly.
"Until now, the rights to circuits have been divided almost entirely between the Federation and the Company. Two skilled alien-born engineers, six people who can use Hope Circuits — and one of those six can wield unknown energy besides."
…
And no doubt a heap of political motives stacked on top of that. The filthy reasons of all sorts of exalted personages I couldn't even begin to imagine.
"We can offer surveillance assets," the woman said.
"The crime-prevention CCTV network across Seoul, for instance…"
"That's far too easy to fool."
James and I had strolled right past it, just the two of us.
"But there is more besides. 'Manpower' in particular isn't something you can easily acquire on your own, is it? We can also… see to your friend's protection."
The woman chose her words with care, so that it wouldn't sound like we'll take her hostage.
…
I held my tongue for a moment.
"We can also do our utmost to find out what happened here. In any case, the government does hold the list of aliens who formally entered this country."
How long was I going to keep refusing and dragging things out? Or should I somehow bring this whole affair to a close, quickly?
Cooperating with the government might mean finding Pangpang a little more easily, a little faster. Though if she had already fled beyond Earth, it might all be for nothing.
And even if we did find Pangpang, the government might cling and drag at my ankles all the same.
Either way, the disadvantages outweighed the advantages for me.
But at the same time, I didn't want to give up on Pangpang's life. Ask me whether she was the person most precious to me, and I'd have nothing to say — but in this world… she was my benefactor.
Still—
"Hold on — let me think. This isn't a choice I can make alone."
That was all I could say.
I wasn't alone anymore. I had tangled myself up with so many people that five collaborators already stood around me — plus two aliens.
And I couldn't decide everything by myself.
Thinking that, I looked at Hayun — and found a faint smile playing at the corner of her mouth.
Somehow it felt like a smile that would follow me no matter what I did, and I found myself with no idea how to answer it.