Position (4)
What... what on earth had happened?
I'd heard there were explosives.
Why they would be inside a pillar, I had no idea. All I'd been told was that researchers were working inside that pillar.
These were people with alien technology, after all. Carving a concealed room into a pillar would be child's play for them. Frankly, that much could be managed without any alien tech at all.
A pillar bearing one entire axis of the enormous Complex—thick enough that you'd believe a small research facility was nestled inside it.
Pack that hollow interior chock-full of explosives, and how much would it hold?
And what would happen if a pillar of this massive Complex were detonated?
The whole Complex wouldn't come down just because one pillar collapsed. There would be repercussions, certainly.
But what if the pillar exploded?
Collapsing and exploding are two different things. Shrapnel sprays in every direction; shockwaves ripple outward. That blast would hammer the neighboring pillars, the walls, the ceiling.
And what if those explosives hadn't been sitting in just one pillar?
BWEE-BWEE-BWEE-BWEE-BWEE——!
It felt like my ears were being shredded. That was the sound of my Circuit spinning into the red. Was it about to overflow again?
I tried to push myself up and collapsed right back down. I blinked a few times. My vision was red. Blood was streaming down over one eye.
That was the number in the despair-readout of my HUD. Ten percent? Had I blacked out or something? It was possible. Dust blanketed everything, and the view was so hazy with it that I could barely see.
Someone was screaming.
I managed to stagger upright and grabbed my hammer first of all. It hardly seemed like a situation for fighting or anything else—but still.
I lurched outside.
People were sprinting every which way. The building that had stood dark was now blazing with light. The glow bleeding through the smoke had an almost dreamlike quality.
So did the orange firelight flickering beyond it.
My ears hurt like they would split open, but come to think of it, the noise I was hearing wasn't coming from my helmet alone.
The entire Complex was wailing. The fixtures overhead flashed brilliantly and wheeled round and round. They weren't decorative lights. They were fire alarms.
Soon water came pouring down from the sky. With a sound like a sudden cloudburst, the smoke began sinking fast.
What met my eyes was carnage. That thick pillar had snapped from its base and lay strewn wildly in every direction. Fires had caught here and there, though the flames themselves weren't yet widespread.
What really mattered was that the pillar beside it had fallen too—and the one beside that.
Part of the ceiling had caved inward. In places, gaping holes opened onto the sky.
Krrrk... kriiik. An ominous groan shivered through the air.
"Everyone, get clear!"
I heard someone shout.
I turned to look. Blossom was shepherding people to safety. I could see Iris, too, pulling fallen combatants out of the wreckage. She was going to each one in turn and casting her warp technique—not the combat kind, but Iris's own personal specialty.
Dahlia and Delphinium were heaving aside shattered debris to dig out the people pinned beneath it. Rose was doing much the same—lifting chunks of rubble, setting them aside, and gathering the wounded in one place.
Everyone looked frantically busy.
As if the battle had been utterly forgotten, they were all in motion. Combatants and magical girls alike, running themselves ragged to save people.
"Ngh..."
A groan drifted over from nearby.
I glanced back. A combatant with a cracked helmet had his leg pinned under wreckage.
I ran to him.
I hoisted the rubble and wedged the head of my hammer underneath to hold it up.
When I hauled the poor guy out, it was Jigupa.
"Owe you another one."
"...Hold still."
I took Jigupa's arm, draped it over my shoulder, straightened up, and started toward the magical girls.
"Wha—hey...! Wait!"
At that, Jigupa panicked and shouted.
"Your leg's in better shape than it looks."
I said it because I assumed the pain was what had him riled up. In truth, it did not look fine at all. The part that had been pinned was bent at a wrong angle.
But this much would mend quickly enough at the Treatment Center. That was a place that reassembled limbs that had been pulverized flat; a clean break was nothing. It would simply take longer than the other wounds, that was all.
It wasn't as if this was Jigupa's first rodeo, either.
"No, that's not it!"
But as I tried to drag him along regardless, Jigupa twisted himself free, shouting. He was bound to topple over sideways again like that.
"The wounded—"
"That's not the problem! Your face—it's your face!"
My face?
The display still showed that same number.
Ten percent—no.
Just... ten. That was all it said.
Whatever came after was gone.
"...Huh?"
Before I knew it, I had raised a hand to touch the spot.
Ordinarily I would have felt the hard shell of the helmet before my fingers ever reached my face. Instead, my hand slipped straight in.
And touched my face. A face smeared with blood.
"Ah... ah..."
The helmet... was broken.
The entire upper right of my face lay bare.
I spun around in a hurry, but Jigupa was still hanging off my arm. I couldn't just toss an injured man aside. If something went truly wrong with him, that would be a catastrophe.
He didn't see... right?
Sure, I'd drifted closer to the magical girls hauling Jigupa over, but still—
...
That hope shattered on the spot.
Iris was looking at me.
Iris had sharp eyes. Of course she did—her specialty was putting precise rounds through distant targets.
Iris, who had been warping out the combatants Rose had carried over and laid down, one by one, had gone still. She was staring at me, eyes stretched wide.
BWEE-BWEE-BWEE-BWEE—
An alarm shrieked at my ear.
So that's it.
If I'd truly been sitting at ten percent, no alarm would ever have sounded. It hadn't been dangerous enough to warrant a warning.
My left wrist was shuddering. The Circuit was turning so fast it seemed unable to bear its own speed.
Seeing Iris freeze, Blossom turned this way.
Our eyes met. No—did they? I threw a hand up to cover the broken part of my helmet, but I couldn't be sure whether Hayun had seen or not.
Jigupa shoved me away and toppled over sideways.
I staggered back a few steps.
My head was pure chaos. My stomach heaved like I might be sick at any moment.
Crick, crack—sparks spat from the Circuit.
I covered my face with both hands. I wanted to run, somehow, to anywhere—but my legs wouldn't take the weight.
Ten.
It wasn't ten.
It was one hundred.
The segment that should have displayed the final zero was shattered clean through. With blood sheeting down over my right eye, my field of view was narrowed, and my head was too scrambled to notice something like that.
It was hard to breathe.
"Stop! What do you think you're doing over there!?"
Someone who didn't grasp the situation was shouting. Whose voice was it? A woman's, I thought—one of the magical girls, then, surely.
Did she think I was about to start another fight?
Black substance was dripping from my body.
"Urk."
I gagged up black sludge. Wearing the helmet was agony.
But I couldn't take it off. There was no way I could.
Black liquid came gushing out even past the parts I'd clamped my hands over.
And it was reshaping the stuff around my body. With a deep grinding groan, the plating sheathing my arms began to crawl, slowly sharpening itself into spikes.
No.
I wasn't trying to fight.
I was,
I was—
...
What, in the world, had I... been trying to do?
I'd come all this way for a reason. I wasn't supposed to get caught. I was going to wind down the fight with the magical girls as cleanly as I could, then slip back into hiding.
I looked around.
People who had come out onto other floors were watching me. A few of them looked to be holding up smartphones.
But that composure didn't last long.
CRASH!
The building began to come down.
The ceiling, already buckled inward, gave way. People scattered, screaming.
Whose doing could this possibly be?
Even for Noir Corporation, this seemed like a line they wouldn't cross.
Smashing their own Complex to pieces, throwing the minors inside into mortal danger. The Company had its amoral streak, but it still would have wanted to keep up the barest image management.
Planning to pin it on the magical girls?
I couldn't say.
One thing I did know for certain:
whatever I'd set out to do, it had all just ended. Right here.
I heard someone sprinting toward me.
I felt a hand settle on my shoulder.
I raised my gaze with the one eye that wasn't covered.
Through the broken helmet, I saw Blossom's face.
It was white as ash.
Blossom spoke, her voice shaking.
"Jieun...?"
"Ah..."
"Why?"
Her expression was pure bewilderment.
Why was I here? Why was I dressed like this? Why had I been fighting her?
Every last one of those questions was packed into her face.
The "10" that had clung precariously to my helmet display vanished.
With a thunderous boom, my Circuit detonated.
And then—
"Blossom! Take that thing down!"
"Huh? Why?"
"What do you mean, why—look at what's standing right in front of you!"
"Wait, wait, wait—no, no, Rose!"
Blossom tried to stop her.
Krak. The sound came from beside my head, followed by something snapping.
My view launched into the air, then plunged straight down.
Thud.
So I'd been hit from the side and sent flying.
"...!"
Blossom's scream rang out. A scream that never made it into words.
The percentage still wasn't showing.
Despair.
If I had truly given up on everything, it shouldn't have climbed back up. So why was that liquid swallowing my vision?
This was—
Ah. Could this be... despair about me?
Over nothing—out of pathetic, petty pride, because I wanted to beat a girl so much better than me. Was this the harvest of a choice made with a warped heart?
Was this what grew from thinking so complacently—that my position didn't matter, that as long as I used it for good things, surely that was enough?
Black seeped into my vision. Blacker. Blacker still.
Something past the reach of reason—raw instinct itself—poured out without end and sheathed my body.
I felt my body rise.
Thinking was becoming impossible.
Just let it all be over already—was the last thought I had.
"Blossom!"
Only when that shout hit her ears did Hayun come back to herself.
When she came to, she was already lunging at Rose—straining to pin both her arms, even swinging her wand.
"What do you think you're doing!?"
It took Rose's palm stopping a hair's breadth from her cheek for Hayun to finally see what was in front of her.
"You know her?"
Rose asked.
Hayun couldn't answer. She had no idea why Jieun had reacted like that.
No—she didn't even know why they had fought this hard to begin with. Only minutes ago, hadn't Jieun been hurling herself at them with everything she had?
Hammer in hand, as if to crush the whole world.
Why?
"Whatever she is to you, that's none of my business. But right now—look over there."
Hayun followed Rose's outstretched hand.
There, a black mass.
"I don't know what that thing is."
Rose said.
"I don't know how dangerous whatever's inside it is, either. But you do get that we can't just leave it sitting there."
She did.
It was an instinctive revulsion.
Nobody knew what energy Noir Corporation drew on. But magical girls could feel it, almost in their bones—that whatever came of using that energy would be nothing good.
"B-but, I..."
"Fine."
Rose said.
"If you can't handle it, sit this one out. Just don't get in the way. We clear that thing, get every last person out safe—then we talk."
Without waiting for Hayun's answer, Rose sprinted toward it.
Iris moved to follow, then glanced back at Hayun.
Their eyes met. Both of them wore the same stricken expression.
But Iris said nothing, turned away, and ran with her gun leveled ahead of her.
Dahlia's and Delphinium's magic came hurtling in.
Several colossal detonations followed.
The black sphere devoured every last spell, ravenous as a starved beast.
The sphere swelled bigger still, and from within it something surfaced—the silhouette of a person, curled in on itself.
"...Everyone, run! Get the people out!"
Delphinium shouted.
"I'll hold it somehow...!"
Even as she said it, Delphinium raised her wand and spread open her grimoire.
Then she began to chant.
"I'm staying."
Iris said.
"Someone has to keep sending the people out until the very end."
And then she soared skyward.
"Blossom."
Rose said.
Blossom looked up at Rose with a blank, hollowed-out face, then nodded.
There were things that simply had to be done.
But Jieun—
Blossom clenched her teeth, and ran.
The people came first. Delphinium and Iris would manage somehow. Blossom's own power would mean nothing at this moment.
No—it might have meant something.
For the first time in her life, Blossom ran away, feeding herself excuses as she went.
Right now, she didn't want to think about anything at all.
Another enormous explosion went off.
Delphinium's magic burst in a blinding white detonation—enough that the black mass, which had been swelling by slow degrees, lost its shape for an instant and had part of it blasted clean away.
Iris did not miss that opening. She fired at the figure visible inside, loading the shot with every ounce of power she could squeeze out.
If any mind had remained in there, it must have hurt beyond words. It would have left wounds, too.
But in that moment, it was the only hope there was.
The hope landed.
Perhaps because the thing inside had already lost consciousness, Iris's shot made warping it away possible.
Maybe because the core was gone, the black sphere sagged and crumbled, slow and limp.
There was no time to examine what it had been.
Whether from yet another shock or something else, the building began collapsing at speed. Had the damage spread through the whole Complex?
Delphinium dropped to one knee, her face drained bone-white.
Iris laid a hand on her shoulder.
The two of them vanished.
What traces remained were buried beneath the Complex as it came down.
...
After the battle.
The surroundings were utter pandemonium.
The enormous Complex had fallen. Not entirely—the central span where the pillars had stood simply pancaked straight down.
But with the middle caved in, the rest of it could hardly come through unscathed.
Miraculously, the death toll was vanishingly small.
Noir Corporation had excellent contingencies in place for exactly this kind of emergency. They had even put the students—who were staying on-site for the first time that very day—through roughly an hour of evacuation drills, and thanks to that the staff reacted fast and got everyone out. As it happened, all the students had been on the outskirts rather than the central section, and they were the first group evacuated.
The injured: numerous. Tally still underway—cases being sorted between minor and severe.
However polished the evacuation manual, the Complex had been packed with employees. People who tripped or slammed into things mid-run turned up in the dozens; and since the fighting had, of all places, been raging inside, many more had been wounded in the battle against the magical girls.
The Treatment Center wasn't nearly large enough to absorb them all at once. So the wounded were admitted to a nearby general hospital first, then transferred back to the Center as room opened, where their wounds were finally healed.
But among them were some whose treatment could not be rushed.
Hayun sat motionless at the bedside where Jieun lay.
At first the other girls had come by, trying to offer comfort. But Hayun only sat there without a single word of reply, and one by one they gave up and filed out.
The only one who stayed and made an attempt at saying something was Iris. In the end, she too walked out without managing a word.
...
Why had she fought? Why had she treated the magical girls as enemies?
Those questions crossed her mind too.
But soon, she stumbled onto a truth far more devastating than any of them.
Hayun had hurt Jieun. Over and over and over.
It had been two years since Hayun became a magical girl. Which meant that among the combatants she had faced, steadily, for two whole years—Jieun had been there.
Subduing combatants meant, naturally, that combatants got hurt.
Sometimes a broken bone showed plainly through the suit. Sometimes blood ran down from under a helmet, trailing from the neck. Sometimes a combat suit tore, and the skin beneath was sliced open.
A warp round from Iris could crack ribs—Iris herself had explained as much.
Dahlia's wand was sturdy. The magic fired from it was, naturally, every bit as powerful.
A hit from Rose's gauntlets did not end at pain.
Delphinium's magic, she'd heard, gave the illusion of your own body burning.
How long had Jieun lived like that? How many times had she crossed paths with Hayun?
...And how many times had Hayun broken Jieun's bones?
Broken. Torn. Crushed.
Blown away. Slammed down. Struck through.
There had even been times she cut her with a blade.
But they were the evil syndicate, weren't they? No one ever actually died. The output was calibrated so that no one would.
One trip to the Treatment Center, and every wound would close up clean, as if it had never been.
—And so, Jieun.
After taking Hayun's blows just the other night, she had gone to the Treatment Center, been patched up, and then—every single time they met at school—smiled at Hayun as though nothing at all had happened.
Her hands shook without pause.
Something sour climbed up her throat.
With a hand clamped over her mouth, Hayun stared at the floor.
Sitting right in front of Jieun, she could not bring herself to look her in the face.
That's right.
Hayun had taken them for the enemy. For the evil syndicate.
Even while wondering whether talking might be possible, in the end she had always chosen the faster path: neutralize them first.
And Jieun had been mixed in among them.
Behind helmets that didn't even show a face, someone she knew could have been there.
No matter how she tried to understand that it couldn't be helped, no matter how she tried to see Noir Corporation as simply evil—
Jieun was lying in that bed right now.
"Why?"
Hayun whispered.
"Jieun... why on earth...?"
But no answer came back.