False Accusation (2)
What was I supposed to do?
While I wasn't exchanging a single word with Jihye, my mind kept churning away.
The circuit was still clutched in my hand beneath the blanket.
I had no idea how powerful it was. Every circuit I'd ever been issued had performed differently, after all.
For now, I shifted my body around and settled it onto my wrist.
From the outside, it looked no different from a smartwatch, so I hoped no one would look at it and immediately recognize it for what it was. Then again, considering I'd identified it at a glance, the odds were good that others would too.
If I kept staying here, was someone eventually going to come for me?
And then what? I was still a minor, so would I be sent somewhere like a juvenile detention center? Or actual prison?
It was unfair.
What I did... was supposed to be *legal*, wasn't it?
Noir Corporation's operations were 'technically' legal, which meant my work as their employee shouldn't have been the kind of thing that got you arrested by the police either.
No, wait—would a terrorist incident really end at something as small as a police arrest?
I'd heard people had died. Several of them, at that. Far more had been injured.
A building had collapsed. One of Noir Corporation's important facilities. That complex was probably unusable unless they rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up—the center had caved straight in.
And it was because I... went berserk?
So what happened then?
Even if it wasn't my intent, if people died, wouldn't that make it a crime with "culpable homicide" tacked onto it?
What if Noir Corporation filed a lawsuit against me? The moment a verdict came down ordering me to compensate even a fraction of those massive losses, I was finished. I could work my whole life and never pay it back.
No, and then there was the problem of this circuit I was holding right now. Where on earth had it come from? Surely James hadn't—
"Jieun."
"Hm?"
"Are you okay?"
Jihye's voice finally cut my spiraling thoughts short.
She was staring at me with wide, startled eyes.
"Your face is dead pale."
"Oh..."
My fingertips were cold.
I was scared.
Scared, and yet I couldn't tell anyone about it. Jihye still didn't know that she'd nearly been dragged into this mess because of me.
What would the news say?
Would they announce that I'd destroyed a building? Flash my picture, or even without that, drop heavy-handed hints about who I was and blame it all on me?
But I didn't do it.
I... wasn't exactly a saint, but I'd never deliberately brought down a building. It was an explosion that had been prepared in advance, to begin with.
Was I going to be condemned for a crime I didn't commit?
Or was this everything I'd done until now coming back around in the worst possible way?
"...I guess you must be really tired."
With that, Jihye rose from her seat.
"Can't blame you, honestly. You were unconscious for that long. You're not feeling well either, are you?"
She spoke while looking down at me, her face full of worry.
Then she came over and rested a hand gently on my shoulder.
"Get some rest. I'll come back tomorrow."
"Ah..."
"I was thinking of sleeping over, but apparently that's not allowed. And it sounds like there's still some of your treatment left to do."
I didn't want to be alone. The moment I was alone, it felt like other people would come looking for me again.
People who would come find me and insist that every last bit of it was my fault.
But I couldn't bring myself to ask Jihye to stay with me, either.
Because Jihye still knew nothing.
She might have known I'd been a combatant. She might even have known that Noir Corporation made regular donations to the orphanage because of it.
But she had no way of knowing what could happen to someone tangled up with me. I didn't even know what was going to happen to me.
"...Yeah. See you tomorrow."
When I answered, the hand on my shoulder tightened just a little.
"Should I call the doctor?"
"No, it's nothing that serious."
"Okay."
Jihye picked up the bag she'd left near the bed, set it down on the mattress, and started pulling things out of it.
"They said it's fine for you to have drinks, at least, so I bought a bunch of these just in case."
I'd only woken up today, yet that bag had been sitting under the bed since before I opened my eyes.
Jihye might have bought something new every single day she visited. Or maybe she'd stepped out briefly just now to ask. Or maybe she'd searched online and only picked out things that were safe to drink right away.
"Thank you."
"..."
Jihye's expression clouded over a little.
"You're really okay, right?"
"Yeah."
"Alright."
Only after my answer did she finally nod.
"Then I'll come again tomorrow. See you then."
I nodded.
I felt like my neck was about to creak audibly, but I still managed to smile as she left.
I watched the door close, then let out a long breath.
Right. Calm down.
None of that was going to happen this very second. James had come to warn me, and I was still laid up in the hospital.
At the very least, I'd have time until I was discharged.
I tried moving my fingers. The joints still creaked and ached like they were being stabbed with needles. Was that a side effect of the circuit? Magical girls never seemed to suffer from anything like that.
...Well, if there was a "good" energy and an "evil" energy, the evil one having side effects was practically a law of nature. It was just irritating that I was living out something the webtoon never even showed.
I lay back against the pillows.
The drinks were still sitting on the bed. Mostly sports drinks—caffeine-free hydration, the responsible kind.
Honestly, so thorough it hurt.
I reached out and pulled one closer. Still faintly cold, probably from having been in the bag.
I was twisting the cap off and bringing it to my lips when a knock sounded at the door of my room.
Before I could even answer, the door opened.
The people who entered were a doctor and a team of nurses.
"Ms. Jeong Jieun."
Hearing that, I screwed the cap back on.
"In truth we should have come the moment you woke, but you seemed to have something urgent on your mind, so we waited a little. Would it be all right if we examined you now?"
I nodded.
I set the drink back down on the table.
"Thank you. Well then... you've been asleep for a very long time, so there may be parts of your body that aren't in good shape. If anything hurts, could you start by telling us about it?"
"Ah, well—"
The doctor and the nurses both wore placid expressions.
Feeling a little reassured, I listed my symptoms.
*
"Hayun! Hayun!"
What woke Hayun from where she'd fallen asleep slumped over her desk was a creature that looked exactly like a giant hamster.
No, actually, it only looked like one—it wasn't a real animal at all. If you had to classify it, it was an "alien." Its lifespan wasn't short like those of other rodents, either.
And setting aside the fact that it could talk, it didn't actually resemble a hamster that much.
Imagine a cat shrunk down to a smaller scale, made a little rounder, and then redesigned to walk upright—that was close. Add in ears and a tail that belonged less to a cat than to a fennec fox, and you'd have it exactly.
"Cherry?"
Hayun rubbed her eyes awake and called the strange creature by name.
The window in front of the desk was open a crack. The still-chilly outside air drifted in, making Hayun shiver slightly.
"What is it?"
Cherry was the "mascot."
Her real name was something else entirely—it was the kind of chittering sound no human mouth could hope to imitate, like a genuine rodent squeaking. Around Cherry's neck hung a collar, rather like the kind you'd put on a pet, and the star-shaped device on it, marked with the symbol of the Galaxy Federation, was her translator.
Without that device, conversation of any kind with her would have been impossible.
Setting aside her appearance and the sounds she made, she came from a planet with extraordinarily advanced engineering—indeed, the circuits used by the magical girls were the work of her species.
And it was suspected that Noir Corporation's circuits were the work of aliens from the same planet as well.
In any case, back when Blossom had first started working as a magical girl, Cherry had tagged along in a support role so often that she'd unintentionally ended up styled as a mascot, though the work she actually did lay in far more specialized territory.
These days, unless Hayun was heading to headquarters, they almost never crossed paths.
...But Cherry's expression now was anything but cheerful for a reunion. If it were merely urgent business, the emergency contact network would have sufficed.
The fact that Cherry had come all this way in person also meant there was something she needed to say where the Federation couldn't hear it.
"It's a disaster. It's a disaster."
Cherry said this while her front paws—no, her hands—kept fidgeting nonstop.
To anyone who didn't know better, it would have looked simply adorable.
But whenever Cherry showed up like this, the people waiting for Blossom had usually been violent criminals that even the Galaxy Federation deemed extremely dangerous.
"What's wrong? Calm down and tell me slowly."
Even after Blossom said that, Cherry paced restlessly for a long while.
She seemed worried about Blossom's reaction—about whether it was even all right to say it here.
"Is it something you can't tell anyone else?"
"No, no, it's not that... it's more that we might end up needing every magical girl's help?"
"I'm listening."
Blossom straightened up in her chair. The cold air seeping through the window was, if anything, helping her keep her head clear.
Several sheets of paper lay spread across the desk. Cherry looked at them and froze solid. Blossom gently picked her up, set her aside, gathered the papers, and shoved them roughly into a drawer.
They were notes she'd written to organize what she wanted to say to Jieun. She'd been afraid that face-to-face, the words would tangle up and spill out of her in a jumble, so she'd been agonizing on paper over what she should say.
She didn't think they were words that could absolutely never be seen by anyone else, but they were still a little embarrassing to display outright.
"...?"
"Cherry?"
But Cherry had stayed frozen ever since she'd glimpsed Blossom's writing.
"Blossom. No—Hayun."
Cherry spoke up.
"Yes?"
"That friend of yours, Jieun—what kind of person is she?"
"Uh... what?"
This time it was Hayun who froze at Cherry's words.
The truth was, Cherry already knew of Jieun's existence. Which was not to say she'd known she was a combatant.
Jieun was simply the friend Hayun saw most often, and so whenever Hayun chatted about school in front of Cherry, Jieun was naturally the name that came up most.
It wasn't as if they'd shared overly personal details, but Cherry would still have a fair sense of what Jieun meant to Hayun.
Only after thinking that far did Hayun realize something was off about Cherry's question.
"Why? Is what you came to say about Jieun?"
"...?"
Cherry looked up at Hayun.
The tip of her nose twitched anxiously.
"Hayun. Don't panic, just listen. We need to think calmly, first of all."
"Okay."
Cherry studied her for a moment longer, then finally opened her mouth.
"Today, that girl Jieun is going to be arrested."
"...Arrested?"
For a moment, Hayun couldn't process what she was hearing.
"Arrested? Why?"
Noir Corporation was evil. But it shrewdly sided with the government and conducted its business in its own legal fashion. She'd heard that when the government wanted to throw a wrench into the Federation's affairs without provoking direct conflict, Noir Corporation was the tool it reached for.
And so, Noir Corporation's combatants were almost never arrested. If mere grunts could be hauled off just for lending a hand to the company's schemes, finding people willing to do the job would become nearly impossible.
Jieun had been a combatant.
"The girl has been named as the cause of the explosion last week. Hayun, you were there, weren't you?"
"I was. And Jieun had nothing to do with that explosion. The explosion happened *before* Jieun went berserk. Delphinium would know that..."
"Exactly. I've read the reports and heard all the testimony, so I know that too."
Cherry looked up at Hayun with grave eyes.
"But there's a problem. There's testimony, but no evidence."
"No evidence? What do you mean?"
"There's no CCTV footage."
"...?"
Hayun frowned.
She'd known they'd be on camera. She'd gone in expecting as much.
But for the company to sit on footage like that.
"There was definitely some kind of arrangement between the Galaxy Federation and Noir Corporation."
"But there's still no proof that Jieun did it."
Even as she said it, Hayun's anxiety grew.
"Right. That's true. And even if they did fabricate evidence, a good portion of it would have to be chalked up to company responsibility. The story is that a flaw in Noir Corporation's circuit caused the whole incident. Everyone involved will probably be forced to resign. And that girl, legally speaking, probably won't face any real consequences. She might not even go to prison."
"Then..."
"She won't go to prison." Cherry's voice dropped low. Her ears trembled violently. Her eyes darted back and forth, as if terrified someone might be listening.
"Then, what are you saying?"
"No one has yet determined what kind of energy Noir Corporation is actually using. The energy held within human emotion on Earth is extraordinarily rich. And if they're using not just one emotion but a blended, compound mixture of several as their power source, reverse-engineering it from our end is extremely difficult. After all, the only thing that comes out of an operating circuit is 'mana energy.'"
"I know that."
"But that girl seems to be connected to something more fundamental. Something similar to the hope you all use."
"...?"
"The Federation has judged it to be a new possibility."
Cherry looked up at Hayun with a face full of fear.
"That energy—no matter how I look at it, it doesn't come from anything positive. It's a colossal amount of power, and the range of what it can do seems enormous, but based on everything I've researched so far, the emotions the combatants felt while fighting were nothing like 'hope.' The company apparently calls it 'courage,' but we all know that's a lie."
She was terrified, and yet she didn't hesitate to speak.
With her huge ears folded down and clutched in her hands, Cherry looked up at Hayun and said:
"Hayun. I don't believe the Galaxy Federation is some bastion of pure justice."
"...?"
"But no matter how I think about it, doing something like that just... doesn't seem right. No matter what the profit is, joining hands with that company to pursue that kind of research—"
Hayun rose from her seat.
She checked the clock. It was late.
"Let's go. Can we tell the others?"
"I honestly don't know. But if you want to, I'll help."
"Thank you, Cherry."
Hayun carefully lifted Cherry onto her shoulder and strapped a circuit onto her wrist.
*
"Another hospital, you said?"
I asked the doctor.
"You said your whole body hurts, right? That means we can't tell what hurts or how. Let's transfer you to a hospital that can run a more precise diagnosis."
"...?"
I looked the people over.
There were... a lot of doctors.
And quite a few of the white-coated figures were rather large. Every nurse was male, too.
I squeezed my hand tight beneath the blanket. A dull ache crept up through every joint of my fingers.
"But this hospital has CT and MRI—"
"It does. But having the equipment and having the expertise are slightly different things."
"This is a Noir Corporation hospital, isn't it? I was told the doctors here were top-tier."
"It's far from where you live, you see. A hospital closer to home would be better."
"...I'd rather just go to the Magical Treatment Center."
"What the Treatment Center can handle is mostly physical trauma. We don't yet have a reliable way to treat things at the microscopic level."
"...?"
I looked around at the people again.
I was scared. Every one of them was staring holes into me.
Sweat beaded in my palms.
"...Okay."
That was what I said, for now.
"You'll be transported while lying in the bed. Is that all right?"
"...Yes."
I nodded with a trembling voice.
The people who'd come to move me showed no sign of intending anything bad right away.
When our eyes even happened to meet, one of them gave me a small smile in my direction.
But I couldn't trust it.
If I hadn't just heard what James told me, maybe I would have thought nothing of it. But this was what James had left me with.
"...By the way, which hospital are we going to?"
For the briefest of moments, they couldn't answer.
I kicked off the bed and stood up.
Maybe that hadn't been the best idea.
Maybe it would have been better to just let myself be taken and face trial. At trial there would be a chance for a defense, and with minimal sentencing guidelines, the penalty might not have amounted to much.
Running like this might only make everything worse.
And yet.
And yet it was *unfair*.
Being treated like this for something I didn't do.
Every combatant helmet had a camera built in. Anyone looking at that footage would see I was innocent.
Or the CCTV inside the building, or...
...Had all of that been cleaned up too? Was the company truly selling me out?
And if so, how could the outcome possibly be anything but terrible?
"Grab her!"
Someone shouted it, and arms wrapped around my waist.
I slammed my elbow into the face of the man holding me from behind, seized one of his fingers, and snapped it outward. A scream sounded behind me and his right arm fell away from my stomach.
I stumbled and slammed my shoulder into the bed. My already-aching body hurt all the more.
A low whirring sound made me glance at my wrist—the circuit was running.
"She's got a circuit!"
Someone cried out.
I shoved the bed forward with all my strength at the people in front of me. The wheels rolled hard, driving two of them straight back. They didn't get pushed far, but it was enough to pin them against the wall.
I heard footsteps charging at me and whipped my body around.
I ducked my head and swung my hand, but my hair was caught.
I drove a fist into someone's solar plexus. The breath wheezed out of the man in the nurse's uniform and he crumpled to his knees.
Someone in a doctor's coat was yelling something into a radio.
I ran.
I spun around and ran as fast as my body would let me.
Even so, I'd only made it as far as the lobby, and I barely managed to sprint the rest of the way to the hospital entrance.
Every part of me hurt, and far behind me, people were already sprinting my way.
They were shouting something. Something about what would happen if I surrendered quietly—
—As if *they* would, in my position.
I refused to be arrested for a crime I never committed.
And something else gnawed at me too. A feeling that something was very, very deeply wrong.
I couldn't tell where the feeling was coming from. But all I knew was that I wanted to run.
My left wrist trembled faintly. A strange vibration pulsed through it, like a smartwatch going off.
The circuit was running. I didn't know exactly what percentage it was at.
...Could I even trust this thing?
What if James had simply lied to me to make me lash out?
My head was a chaotic mess and my body was in agony.
But I had to run. I'd decided to, the moment I got off that bed.