Chapter 6. Framed (3)
Where was I supposed to go? I'd started running all the same, but my head was still a mess.
Perhaps because the sun had already set, the lobby was nearly empty. If other people had been mixed in here and there... though then, just as it would have been hard for them to approach me, it would have been hard for me to slip away, too.
Which side were those people from, anyway? They weren't combatants, so they probably weren't with Noir Corporation.
Noir Corporation's circuit output was nothing like a magical girl's. The Despair Circuit's output was far weaker than a Hope Circuit's. To get any support from that energy, the power spreading out from the circuit needed pathways to carry strength to every corner of the body. That was why we wore the suits.
The circuit I'd been issued had overwhelmingly better output than the ones the other combatants used, but it still couldn't match a circuit running on hope as its fuel — hence the suit that came bundled with it. Well, in one sense its efficiency might actually have been better... Anyway. That was why anyone with no circuit on their wrist and no suit on their body was, at the very least, not a Noir Corporation man. Or else they were disguised to keep the people around them from catching on. Whatever.
The circuit was running like mad. I had no idea how to use it. Every circuit I'd ever operated had been attached to my suit, feeding it energy automatically. Not that it felt that way right now—
Three men cut off my path. They looked a good twenty centimeters taller than me, the kind of men who could knock someone cold with a single committed swing. Maybe out of consideration for the fact that this was a hospital, they didn't come at me with fists flying.
"...Huh?"
But even knowing they fully meant to hit me, everything somehow felt a little slow. Was that because everything that had ever swung a fist at me had been anything but an ordinary person?
I dropped low under a man charging me with his arms spread wide to pin me down. He sank his body too, trying to catch me, but my fist was already in motion. I landed a light blow to the center of his chest. Nothing cracked, but he staggered backward clutching his chest and crashed to the floor. Having dropped the man in the middle, I vaulted clean over him.
My body felt light. The pain that had been with me until moments ago had all but vanished. I didn't know why. Could it be the effect of some drug they'd given me while I was out?
But the moment I let myself hope, I felt my body flag. My breath shortened, strength drained from my legs, and the ache where my soles struck the floor sharpened. Ah — so that's it. It's the circuit. I couldn't begin to guess what principle it ran on, but the circuit was supplying me with energy. Unlike the ones I usually used, this circuit with its digital display was still humming away even now.
The instant I understood that this wasn't down to any ability of my own, strength seeped back into my body — the Despair Circuit was true to its name. You've got to be kidding me. Disappointment and a foul mood were the very heart of its fuel. Terrible taste, as expected. Truly terrible.
Whoosh! They were moving to capture me one way or another, but my goal, through it all, was to get away. They had no suits, and I was no magical girl — I had no intention of hitting them in earnest. I was already drowning in a false accusation; the last thing I wanted was a murder charge on top of it.
In the end, the man who lost patience and swung at me watched his fist meet mine dead-on, then went down clutching his hand.
How much did these people know? Were they coming to seize me knowing nothing, the way I'd once been a combatant who knew nothing? ...But every last one of them wore either medical whites or something like this hospital's security uniform, so I couldn't quite believe they were clueless. Then again, there was no way for me to know.
Bang!
"Gah!?"
A gunshot cracked behind me and a heavy blow slammed into my back. Mid-sprint, I pitched forward and slid a long way across the hospital's polished marble floor. Whether because the circuit could bear the load on my body but not erase the pain entirely, my shot-up back and every point that had scraped the marble screamed.
At least I'd gotten my hands up to shield my face before I went down. Nothing seemed broken— ah. I hastily felt over my stomach and back; nothing seemed to have punched through. My back just hurt like hell.
A rubber bullet? Some less-lethal round for riot suppression? Would ordinary Company people even be allowed to carry something like that? They wielded circuits in broad daylight, so maybe — but even so, actually firing guns felt like a different matter entirely.
"Ah...!"
Somewhere in all that, I felt something coil around my ankle. I twisted to look — a snare of some kind had caught my left ankle. This wasn't the first time I'd seen the equipment. I'd never been on the receiving end, but it resembled what the police used to capture rampaging kaijin: a lasso fired from a gun.
The cord ran back to the weapon like a fishing line to its reel, winding in fully automatically. The moment I worked that out, I was sliding fast across the marble. Just as I'd guessed, the line tethering me to the gun was shortening at speed. I heaved up my upper body, trying to do something about it—
Bzzt.
"Kyaah!?"
The jolt the instant my fingers touched it tore the scream out of me. It wasn't just my hand — the same sensation shot through the leg the line was bound to. My senses went numb for a heartbeat and my spine arched rigid. Electricity? They were really running a live line on me? Ah, right. I did know that function existed. Weren't these things built to take down offworld kaijin far stronger than any human? It was for live capture, so it wouldn't kill me—
I tried to force my body to move. Whether my brain was dumping its every chemical into my blood because of the situation, or whether it was the circuit, I managed to move anyway.
"Ugh... khh...!" Gripping the cord wound around my ankle with both hands, I hauled it side to side with all my strength. The loop loosened bit by bit. A suspicious sizzling came from my palms; I ignored it.
"Ah!" The one holding the line must have judged things urgent, because they yanked harder. Sitting there with the snare in my grip, I was hauled flat onto my front this time. My fingers wouldn't come free of the cord.
I forced my fingers open, let go, and was just struggling to my feet when I was shoved straight back down. The man barreled into me like some rugby tackle and pinned his whole weight on top of me. Several more piled on, seizing my arms and legs.
Why? Why are you doing this to me? Tears came.
I was... yes, I was never a good person. Honestly, I'd been crooked somewhere inside ever since the day I joined Noir Corporation. But even so — even so, I'm not a murderer. I have never killed anyone. I didn't blow up that pillar. Why do I have to be the sacrifice? Why do I have to wear this crime? Worked to the bone by the people above me and then thrown away — is that all I am?
Ah. I see. I hadn't only been used. I was paid. Not with my own hands, but the money went where I wanted it to go. Maybe it was because a nothing of an extra like me — no name, no face that ever properly appeared — went and pulled some pointless stunt. I could have just drifted through the story, gasping in admiration beside the protagonist. Like the beings who never even got names in the original, I could have simply lived like that.
...
No.
I don't want that.
It wasn't that I wanted to be the protagonist. It wasn't that I wanted to be the most important figure in some comic. I just wanted back what I'd lost. The things I'd built for myself in my past life — maybe nothing in anyone else's eyes, but things I had genuinely worked for — all of it, gone.
If comments like that piled up under a comic you'd drawn, of course it would sting. So maybe the Author, as if to refute the claim that I was nothing, had deliberately cast me in this role in his comic. I hadn't wanted to be refuted like that. However aimlessly I drifted through life without any purpose, I didn't want the meaning of my existence denied.
Maybe that was why I'd kept circling Hayun all this time. Maybe it was because I knew she was the protagonist of a magical girl story. Maybe that was why I'd joined the combatants, why I'd started a year before she did. I'd thought if I worked hard in my own way, I could at least become a villain cadre — someone whose face might at least flicker past in the main story. And if I showed up in the main story like that, that alone would be a slap across the Author's face— Was that the greed that did it?
"You..."
I felt filthy. Truly.
"All of you... get off me."
As I heaved myself up, trembling, startled voices rose around me. I pushed off the floor. The two men clinging to my back were shoved backward by the force of it.
"The circuit! Get the circuit off her!" Someone's shout reached me, and a hand darted for my wrist.
"Gwah!?" But the hand recoiled at once. Fools. A circuit runs while holding an enormous charge of energy, and the heat it throws off runs high — naturally. It's built to suppress that well enough that the user doesn't die or get hurt, but grabbing one bare-handed is about like seizing a kettle at a rolling boil. ...Not that I understood why I was fine.
"I said get off!" I screamed it and flung my arm out. Several of the men hanging off me tore away.
Push. That was the sound that came from the circuit. Black smoke was billowing out, but it looked a little different from the circuits that had broken before. Where my old ones had burst outward through the top, this one — built, it seemed, with even this in mind — had its plate raised slightly, venting the smoke in a steady, controlled stream.
"Khk...!" The people clinging to me breathed in that smoke and choked, covering their faces or clutching their throats. Was it the kind of toxic fumes you weren't supposed to take bare-faced? I, for one, was fine. Gritting my teeth, dragging in rough breaths, I pushed through the bodies draped over me and stood.
My body held. I was a little winded, but better than when the circuit hadn't been running. The circuit James had left with me was the real thing. What principle it ran on, I couldn't say — no helmet meant no readouts, none of the numbers that used to display. All there was, was a digitally rendered needle spinning counterclockwise, endlessly. No — honestly, I couldn't even swear to that. Whether the needle's speed had outrun the screen's refresh rate or what, all I saw was a flicker jumping between positions at fixed intervals. ...James, I'm asking you next time we meet. If there is a next time.
More rounds came flying at me, but every one curved off in strange directions before it could touch my body. Sharp cracks rang out as something struck floor and wall. When I looked toward the shooters, the men with the guns had hurriedly ducked behind pillars. Guns trained on a high school girl — and they're the ones scared?
Well, anyone sent to arrest me would have seen that footage, whatever their reasons. They'd have watched me fight a magical girl. Any ordinary civilian in plain clothes caught between us would have been crushed, literally, to death.
I staggered on. I hadn't eaten a thing since waking. Jihye had left a drink on the bed way back there — I should have grabbed it on my way out. Should have eaten something, anything, while we talked. The circuit gave me strength to spend right now; it didn't refill energy my body didn't have... First, get out of here. Go anywhere. Eat something. I set that as my short-term goal and walked.
And the moment I stepped out through the doors—
"...Ah."
A blinding light blasted into my eyes. No — not just light. A sea of headlights had come on, every one of them aimed this way, the people waiting behind them pinning me in their beams.
Just one lone girl — maybe I was far too dangerous to be written off that easily. They must have had the doors beyond the lobby surrounded from the very start. Figures wavered behind the headlights.
The warning, surprisingly, wasn't all that frightening. A woman's voice, one that sounded barely older than me. So they had at least factored in that I was a high school girl.
"If you're here to protect me, why were you all holding guns?" I asked, because I genuinely wanted to know. I didn't mean the people inside that hospital. The figures wavering beyond those lights had something long in their hands too. Guns, probably. And if not guns, then almost certainly some other weapon.
"...I didn't do it," I said. "That explosion back there wasn't my fault."
But no answer came back. Even a lie — anything to let me breathe — might have changed how this went. The person behind that megaphone didn't seem willing to extend even that much. Or else legal trouble was tangled up in it — maybe anything they told me could be held against them in court later?
"I didn't do it!" I shouted, and heard my voice crack.
Infuriatingly, that voice stayed perfectly calm.
"Then where are you taking me!" I shouted. "Planning to throw me in a cell?"
"What hospital!? You dragged this many people out to take down one girl — what hospital!?" Unbelievable. The circuit trembled. The black smoke slowly began to take shape.
Whether they could see it, the voice had grown more urgent.
Like I could stop. This was the only thing protecting my body. Surrounded by people with guns, what choice did I have? What if I took the circuit off and caught a bullet? Something would break — at least one place, guaranteed. I might bleed from the inside. The places I'd been hit while wearing the circuit still hurt. I was done with pain. And they had no intention of listening to me. Then I had nothing left to say either.
The megaphone kept barking something. I ignored it. Gunshots cracked. Rounds came flying from every direction — rubber or not, I decided to stop caring. I ran.
Gunshots rang out in the heart of Seoul. Hayun understood at once what that meant. Maybe — maybe it was Jieun.
"Hayun." Cherry, perched on her shoulder, called out to her, frightened.
"I know." Forcing down her hammering heart, Hayun turned toward the direction of the sound. Please, please, please. Let those gunshots not be the sound of Jieun being shot. She thought it even knowing there was no chance of that.
Positive thoughts turned the circuit. Even with the worst stacked upon the worst, she had to keep thinking positive thoughts for the Hope Circuit to run.
"...Ngh!" Her body dipped in the air. She knew she couldn't afford thoughts like that mid-flight, but the image of Jieun, bleeding, kept surfacing in her mind. Even so, she kept herself from falling and made for the source of the sound.
...And the thought she clung to, just to keep from losing hope through it all, was that the noise might be Jieun fighting back — that she might have a circuit of her own. That was how desperate Hayun was right now.
Crash! I hurled a barricade. Screams went up — whether from the onlookers, I couldn't tell. Bam! Something heavy slammed into the ground, and something like an iron bar bent with a groan. Shouting, then more gunfire.
The bullets couldn't find me. Curved rounds slammed into everything around, sounding vicious. More screams. My left arm was sheathed entirely in black matter — that crustacean arm I'd seen last time. I look just like a kaijin. An unexplained phenomenon that aliens visiting Earth sometimes went through. Usually it didn't cost them their minds, so I'd probably be the same.
I sprinted forward and crushed the gun of the man in front of me in my grip. Another shot cracked somewhere in the meantime, and a scream followed. Glancing back, I saw an officer rolling on the ground — the lines of fire had crossed, and it looked like he'd caught a round. No blood, though. Whatever they were loaded with, it wasn't lead.
I flung the ruined gun away and ran with everything I had. A magical girl would be coming, wouldn't she? I had to be gone before then. As far as I could get. Not that I knew where to go. And then — and then what? What was I supposed to do? Praying, at the very least, that I wouldn't run into Hayun in the meantime, I ran.
Ah — it felt like tears might come. Why did I have to be going through this? Honestly, I wanted to quit it all, even now. Not that saying so now would change a thing. And that made it all the sadder.
Far off, the wail of police sirens swelled louder. Overlapping sirens — they'd sent more people. And far up in the sky, a pink light was flying toward me.
...So we meet after all. Feeling like I could fall apart at any second, I ran again. Because there was nothing else I could do.