A Certain Emotion (7)
The truck driver, panicked out of his wits by my threat, had scrambled out of the cab and bolted.
The moment the truck stopped, I heard a sound like the kaijin converging on us all at once.
They seemed to be throwing themselves forward, desperate to somehow reach the Warp Point, but of course that wouldn't be easy.
Hayun was out there.
After kissing me to give me her power, she had thrown herself into the fight with everything she had, and there were also plenty of police officers and soldiers drawing the kaijin's attention away.
And then—
"The Warp Point shut down."
Jua, who had gone up through the hole to fire the moment she saw the kaijin charging, shouted toward the opening.
"Good to hear."
I answered as if muttering to myself, then cleared the kaijin clinging to the trailer walls and carefully set them down in a corner. Fortunately, there were only a few specimens whose bodies were loose enough that I could swing my arms.
Maybe the device required all their energy channeled in a single direction in order to function from inside.
Still, just to be safe, I cut the circuits away, then tore out one wall of the trailer with a mana blade drawn from my hammer.
Crunch.
When I bent the badly mangled steel plating outward, an unpleasant shriek of metal rang out.
Sporadic gunfire could still be heard, but the battle was more or less winding down.
For some reason the interior lights of the trailer had barely been working, and I'd only been able to make out the situation by the sunlight pouring in from above—but with one wall ripped away, the inside brightened considerably.
And only then did I see what was actually going on.
My first thought when I heard Jua's report had been simply to pull Pangpang out and carry her away.
Alien tech really was alien tech, huh. If you could put a person into suspended animation, store them that way for ages, and bring them right back to life afterward, then yes—that deserved the name.
Besides, wasn't this a world where everything was curable except for a truly tiny handful of incurable diseases? That was exactly why I'd assumed Pangpang would be fine.
But.
"……"
Weren't there far too many devices for that to be all it was?
Come to think of it, there'd be no reason to haul this many kaijin around purely for protection against magic. Granted, if the shielding was that formidable, it made things that much harder for us—and it did in fact work that well.
But what if, on top of that, the energy was needed for something else?
"No."
Jua, who had come to stand beside me, quickly turned her gaze to the device and spoke.
"It's not a device in any urgent hurry. The Chairman's side must have decided that if this Pangpang person died, it would be troublesome for them in all sorts of ways."
Where Jua pointed stood something like an enormous battery.
"Converted to electricity and stored, most likely. It seems her power was needed for a very 'long' time. And stability was required in the process, too, apparently."
Circuits run on human emotion. Naturally, generating energy on a regular schedule over a long stretch of time poses certain problems.
Even in my own case, the very form of the energy I produced shifted with the rise and fall of my feelings.
"Then……"
"However."
Jua's face had stiffened slightly.
"I don't think we can pull her out right away. For now, the device has to stay as it is."
"……"
I looked at Pangpang again.
Lying in the unidentified liquid, her face looked perfectly at peace.
Well, of course it did. She was, literally, asleep. Which meant there was no way to know whether she was actually in pain or not.
Whatever state she was in, leaving her like this couldn't be called normal.
And the fact that Pangpang had ended up this way was, in part, my fault too.
"Why—to this extent?"
"I suppose they wanted it that badly. That thing called 'the Company.' You see it on Earth all the time, don't you? People so drunk on power or money that they couldn't care less what happens to everyone else. …This would have happened even without you, Jieun."
Jua said it as if to comfort me, but honestly, I found it hard to fully agree.
Even if this incident had been scheduled to happen, it was an easy hypothesis to summon that my very existence had yanked that schedule much closer.
The main story I had read ran up to the point where the kids went to the sea over summer vacation and ran into the enemy. Up until then, Noir Corporation's main villain was generally a cadre like James, and the Chairman never showed his face onscreen.
What's more, the 'Chairman' I remembered was this world's former Chairman. There had never been any event like a coup d'état inside Noir Corporation. If there had been, I'd have made my own preparations, surely.
I would also have known that Pangpang was the former Chairman's granddaughter.
Just how much had my existence changed this world?
Had the current Chairman been afraid that the former Chairman's claims would gain credibility within the Company because of me? Was his thinking to seize everything himself before consolidating it any further?
……All of it was speculation until we actually caught the Chairman.
"Jieun!"
From behind me, I heard Hayun calling my name.
I turned to find Hayun and the other magical girls descending near me. The Chairman's face was nowhere to be seen.
Instead, what they'd caught was—
"……You."
The person Rose had dumped unceremoniously onto the ground was the mohawked man, limbs bound tight.
The cadre who appeared to have claimed the vacant seat after James's purge.
"I—I don't know anything!"
The moment our eyes met, the cadre shouted.
"I don't know where the Chairman went!"
"Looks like your job was hauling the equipment out ahead of everyone else."
"Right! Exactly that!"
"If it had worked, my friend here would have been launched into outer space. And then you'd have waited around for the Chairman to arrive separately, I suppose."
When I put deliberate weight on the word 'friend,' the cadre's face hardened.
"You're acquainted with the former Chairman's granddaughter, aren't you?"
"She's the girl who helped me back when you people were hunting me down, without asking for a single thing in return."
"……"
"So, anyway—other than this, what other equipment is there? Even if you don't know where the Chairman is, you'd know at least that much, wouldn't you?"
"I, I don't……!"
"You'd better."
As I lunged suddenly toward him, the cadre's mouth snapped shut for good.
My clothes were slowly staining black again. Perhaps he sensed the pressure radiating off me, because the cadre began squirming, wriggling across the ground to put as much distance between us as possible.
"Hold on, Jieun."
Hayun stepped in front of me, hand outstretched to hold me back.
"This kind of thing is better left to someone who knows how to ask questions."
"Who? The police?"
"No."
Hayun smiled faintly, as if she understood perfectly well that I didn't entirely trust the police either.
"You know who I mean. Someone with more than enough grudge against this man, someone with the technical skill, and someone rational enough not to botch the job."
"……Ah."
At her words, I nodded.
Of course. There was James.
And if James alone worried me even a little, I could always attach Cherry to him as a safeguard.
I still wasn't sure where this man should be kept, though.
"For now…… for right now, let's be satisfied that we got your friend out. We'll take our time and solve things one at a time."
"That's right."
Jua added, as if backing Hayun up.
She was right.
Try to fix everything in one stroke and things tend to go wrong instead.
But—
"……"
Even so, I couldn't help wanting to land just one punch.
I had to fight with everything I had to swallow that feeling down.
In the end, Pangpang was moved to the university hospital near the orphanage.
Whether it was because my existence was being taken seriously or not, even that place—functionally a state-level national hospital—pledged to do its utmost for her care.
There was no way to extract Pangpang at the moment. If it had been an ordinary machine, the standard procedures would have worked; but this machine had layers upon layers of complicated devices built over it.
Just as I'd suspected, it seemed the Chairman intended to keep Pangpang around and use her for a long, long time.
"Locks that use genetic information are actually pretty common."
James answered when I voiced my suspicions.
"And yes, if it's the Chairwoman we're talking about, she would have had devices like that installed all over the place. What's more, she didn't sweep away every single person who once served her. Even if she turned a blind eye to their betrayal at first, some of them may well have had a change of heart as time went on. Which is why the existence of the true bloodline is valuable to her."
"So she was planning to brainwash her later or something?"
"Well, as long as the girl stays alive, any genetic locks we find can be opened one by one. The brainwashing would be a problem for after that."
"……"
Come to think of it, even without Pangpang herself saying anything, there were probably plenty of documents that could serve as proof she had properly inherited the chairmanship.
"So it's not the kind of thing that opens with just a fingerprint or a strand of hair?"
"If it opened that easily, it would have been opened long ago. The Company's 'headquarters' is in this country now, but Noir Corporation was originally a galaxy-scale enterprise—it only moved its headquarters here for tax avoidance and research convenience. They say you can travel by Warp Point, but even so, a galaxy is vast. If you want to hide something somewhere else, it's far more comfortable to set it so that only you yourself—or someone you personally authorize—can open it."
Which meant that Pangpang was among those 'authorized persons.'
If that was the case, it would have been simpler just to take Pangpang and run.
……No, actually.
Pangpang had a surprisingly stubborn streak. If the Chairman had truly made the Company's most vital information accessible even to Pangpang, then he cherished his granddaughter a great deal.
Maybe that was the weakness. Maybe he'd balked at the idea of having his granddaughter forcibly taken somewhere.
Whatever the case, the fact remained that all of it came back to Noir Corporation.
"Now that we have that man in custody, I'll interrogate him as you suggested. Don't worry. Cherry will be right there beside me. I doubt I'll end up killing him or anything of the sort."
"……Fine. Do as you see fit."
"I'll report to you the moment anything turns up."
For the record, the cadre had been confined in one of the remaining houses nearby.
In shantytowns like this one, houses were surprisingly often left empty. There was hardly any talk of redevelopment anymore, but plenty of properties had been snapped up decades ago on nothing but rumors of redevelopment to come and then simply abandoned. Apparently the police had borrowed one of those houses.
I'd heard that the Federation was also moving, spurred by the near-miss at the Warp Point, but I had no real idea what sort of action they intended to take. Honestly? As long as they left me and the people around me alone, I had no interest in them whatsoever.
Though if they wanted to smash Noir Corporation to pieces while they were at it, I wouldn't complain.
"……Jieun."
"……I'm going to get some air."
Hayun had called out to me, but I said that, rose from my seat, and walked out.
She didn't follow this time. Probably because my mood was very different from how it had been back at the abandoned house.
I stepped outside into the still-chilly night wind.
The police presence around the orphanage had thinned out quite a bit. Fair enough—they couldn't just park every officer here forever with local security to think of.
Two officers still stood at the entrance, and there were patrols circling the grounds, but it hardly registered as a bother anymore.
Even cramped as it was, the orphanage had its own small playground. A pair of swings, a slide, a pair of seesaws, and—what would you call them—spring riders, animals mounted on thick springs fixed to the ground that you could climb up and straddle. A horse and a dog, as it happened.
I sat down on one of the swings.
It was sized for small children, so unless I stretched my legs straight out, it was hard to sit on properly.
Back when I was little, even this had seemed so big.
As I sat there radiating gloom, another child came out of the orphanage building.
It wasn't Hayun or Jua.
"Jieun."
It was Jihye.
Jihye approached carefully, then settled onto the empty swing beside me, stretching her legs out just as rigidly as mine.
For a while, neither of us said anything. We just looked up at the sky.
The clouds were nearly gone, unseasonable for spring, but this was still Seoul, and not many stars made it through.
Gazing up quietly, I could make out a few faint lights peeking out here and there, though I couldn't tell whether they were stars or spaceships. Even living in a world that could fairly be called a space opera, I'd never taken much interest in the stars.
"That Pangpang person."
Jihye said carefully.
"She sounds like she was a good person."
"……She is a good person."
That was how I answered.
The truth was, I had never once thought to look into her life.
I'd simply filed her away as an oddball with a weird love of caffeine who was hopelessly steeped in Earth culture. I'd never wondered what kind of life she'd lived, or what worries she'd carried and what choices she'd made before ever arriving on this planet.
Even after receiving all that help from her.
Come to think of it, she'd been one of the precious few friends I had in this world.
"Later,"
Jihye said.
"When things get better—let's talk then. Properly."
"Hm?"
"Even after knowing you this long, there's so much about you I don't know."
"……"
"And I don't think I've really told you much about myself, either. It's like we've been living in different worlds."
At those words, I gave a small, silent nod.
"……Yeah. When things get better."
"Mm."
That was all Jihye said. She didn't try to fill the silence with more.
She simply looked up at the sky beside me, the same way I was doing.
……What was it.
What kind of emotion had I carried toward this world, all this time?
Even while thinking I hated it, I found things I'd come to like. Even while resenting school, resenting my circumstances, I'd come to treasure Jihye, whom I met at the orphanage, and come to treasure Hayun, whom I met at school.
If I had truly, purely hated this world—if I had genuinely believed I was completely sick of it—could I have held feelings like these?
Could I have left this world without a second thought, the moment I was told to go?
I'd never once had anything resembling a conversation with the Author. I'd never even gotten into a fight with them through comments and replies.
So I couldn't begin to guess what the Author had been thinking when they put me here.
Was this some kind of test—to see whether I could still hate this world even after being thrown into it?
"……"
If this world had never contained aliens, I might have been able to believe the Author was watching me from somewhere beyond the sky.
But this world had far too many intelligent beings past that horizon for even that thought to take root.
I belonged to neither side, never fully fitting into either one. Perhaps that, too, was because I could never bring myself to decide.
Maybe that was why the children had been driven into such a desperate situation.
If you were going to despair, you should have despaired without limit; if you were going to carry hope, you should have marched forward with real stubbornness and conviction. I had failed to be either one.
What emotion was I supposed to hold toward this world?
There was probably no one in this world who could answer that for me.
"……"
"……"
After Jieun and Jihye went outside, an awkward silence settled over the room.
It wasn't the sharp, skin-flaying kind of tension, nor the bone-deep, frozen-chill kind either. Which was precisely why it counted as 'awkward,' really.
And that awkward current was thickest around Hayun and Jua.
Under normal circumstances, Rose would have made some remark teasing one of them—or both. Magical girls weren't famously close with one another, but neither were they viciously hostile, and above all, they'd been living packed together for a while now, and had gotten reasonably friendly.
Besides, even if Jua wasn't, Hayun was on good terms with Rose.
But right now, the mood for that just wasn't there.
The 'atmosphere' itself was nearly the same as usual. It was that Rose, and Dahlia, and Delphinium had all watched today's events with their own eyes.
Had seen Hayun and Jieun kiss.
Hayun had kissed Jieun 'to give her strength,' but among the magical girls, the only one who truly understood what that meant was—well, counting Jihye too, it was still only Jieun herself.
The whole thing gave off the air of a wall erected around the very concept of romance.
No—that might be a little unkind to say. Magical girls as a rule had no prejudice in that direction, so they could imagine it easily enough; but among ordinary people, there were plenty who simply couldn't conceive of romance between two women at all. Or more precisely, plenty who couldn't grasp that they themselves might be one of the parties involved.
Even if they did have some interest in that direction.
Which was why Hayun was all the more pitiable. To them, she wasn't a romantic prospect in the first place.
Though the way she kept doing her best anyway was very like her.
The real problem was—
Rose stole a glance at Jua.
Jua wore a somewhat dazed expression. Her face was flushed, and she seemed to be replaying something that had happened today, over and over.
That is to say—the 'kiss,' of course.
Yes. One person loving one person? Entirely possible. No—positively ordinary.
Two people loving the same one person? Still possible. Whether it was ordinary, Rose couldn't say, having never been in love herself—but it certainly wasn't impossible.
Then what about the beloved person kissing two other women, both of them her?
……Not impossible either, but, well.
The relationship between Hayun and Jua didn't look likely to change overnight. But neither could anyone reasonably hope that nothing would change at all.
And then, adding Jihye to the mix—whose feelings weren't entirely clear yet, but who somehow gave off a faint whiff of that same air—
Rose decided to put as much distance as possible between herself and the whole affair. Judging by the look of them, Dahlia and Delphinium had reached the same conclusion.
She simply, quietly rooted for Jieun in her heart.