Chapter 6: False Accusation (5)
The instant I came to, the first thing my eyes found was a mass of mana hurtling straight at me. That enormous thing—the very one that had brought me pain so many times before. Reaching my hand toward it was pure instinct.
I didn't want to hurt anymore.
Today had already hurt far too much. I couldn't see any reason I had to hurt more on top of it. I just wanted to give up on everything and sleep—to fall asleep and never wake up again.
And yet, even as I wished for that, some part of me still couldn't let go.
In my past life and in this one, I had always been indecisive. I never managed to settle on any goal for my life, and for all my thinking that I wanted to be good, I had never once truly been good. I had worked for Noir Corporation knowing full well what it did; maybe even my donations had been nothing more than a way to comfort myself.
Always gazing upward, always envying anyone better off than me, always desperate to somehow stand among them—and in the end, that was the path I had chosen for myself.
Maybe I'd been telling myself all along that this wasn't something I was doing for me, but for others.
Was the punishment deserved, then? Since I had done wrong, was it only right that I be punished? The Galaxy Federation and this country's government were both powers no one could easily touch—if I had simply kept my head down, I never would have faced punishment at all. So was being punished like this the right thing?
No. I hated it.
For all that I had lived that way, I hated pain. I wanted to run from the condemnation. My brain had whined I want to quit at me forever, and still I could never bring myself to throw my life away.
I didn't want it to end like that.
I didn't want it to end like that...
For some reason, that white sphere never reached me.
Only now did I notice that something was warping the space around me. Was it that black substance—the one that always appeared whenever I drove my circuit to its very limit?
I could see out from inside it, but I had no idea how the outside might be seeing me.
Magic kept flying in. Big blasts and small ones alike. People were fleeing.
The sound of helicopters was fading into the distance.
Ah—had someone gotten a picture of me? Probably. I was floating this high up, after all.
The dimly visible surroundings slowly shrank away into darkness.
The mana that had been the only thing I could feel nearby was slowly, steadily taking on substance. My outstretched arm curled back in.
The mana pressed in around my huddled body, little by little.
Wait—why am I like this, again?
Only moments ago I had been lying on the ground, buried under thick steel wires piled so heavy I could never have gotten up. Had I lost consciousness?
It didn't matter either way.
I was too exhausted to think or to move. I was hungry. I just wanted to collapse and sleep.
From the circuit that had ended up near my ear as I curled up, that dangerous sound was still droning. The circuit was hot, but it couldn't hurt me anymore.
Mana wrapped itself tight around my body. As though it meant to crush me flat.
Like the rubber wound firmly around a copper wire, the mana wound firmly around me—and inside it, I couldn't so much as struggle.
Before I could even begin to grasp the situation, light flooded my eyes.
I saw headlights aimed at me. The world was upside down.
The black mana pressing against my body peeled away, slowly, slowly.
My clothes had changed.
Not the tattered hospital gown that had all but stopped being clothing, but a fluttering dress that looked like something only a magical girl would wear. A dark dress, black at its base.
Haha...
How strange.
I was wearing a magical girl's outfit.
Probably no one heard that laugh. I didn't have the strength left to laugh for real.
I steadied myself in midair and rose. Beams of light came flying at me, but not one of them touched me.
I looked down.
Hayun was there.
The pain and the blur in my vision let me make out little more than her silhouette.
Hayun—and behind her, Rose. She stood as though shielding Rose with her own body.
Or maybe it was some other stance entirely. I didn't have the strength left to judge.
The people below scrambled busily about. The troops that had clustered like ants were all scattering in a panic.
What had I even done?
It was exactly like last time. I hadn't done a single thing, and yet here I was, being treated as something dangerous.
Had I really hurt the magical girls that badly? Far more combatants must have been injured by those soft hands of theirs. I was the one who got hurt far more often. Those people running away down there must have struck me far more times.
...
Did any of it even matter, though? By tomorrow, I'd be a real terrorist anyway.
I didn't want to worry about that. Right now, I just wanted to sleep.
The magical girls below were preparing something, but I had no intention of meeting it head-on.
What was I supposed to do? I wanted to run away.
As if answering my thought, the mana moved.
I couldn't tell exactly what had happened at my back. Only that it had swallowed me and everything around me—not that there had been anything there but dust and air.
At the very least, the world before my eyes had changed completely.
I had succeeded in leaving that place.
A safe place.
Yes—to rest, I needed somewhere safe. So where, for me, right now, was safe?
The orphanage would be the first place the police would go. Hayun didn't know where I lived, and neither did the kids at school—but the police could find out easily enough. A kaijin that resisted arrest, fled the scene, left numerous people injured, and even stood against magical girls? It would be stranger if the police weren't at the orphanage.
Hayun's house? Absolutely not. Her parents worked mediating between the Galaxy Federation and the government. In the worst case, I might end up tangled into all of that.
...And yet, those two places were the only ones in this whole world I could think of as safe.
Though with Hayun's house, it was less that the house itself was safe and more that I simply trusted Hayun.
...
In the end, it seemed that while I was agonizing between the two, I had taken a third path.
When I opened my eyes, what greeted me was not the white, spotless ceiling I'd seen at the hospital.
It was a room with a ceiling gone vaguely stained, black mold creeping up one corner.
I blinked a few times, then pushed myself up a little.
"Ugh..."
I was far better off than I'd been at the hospital, but plenty of me still hurt. Even so, the fresh wounds were gone. Had someone taken me to a treatment center?
Had I collapsed on the street somewhere? If some stranger had carried me here, treated me, and taken me in...
Was I not on a wanted list yet?
I got that far before realizing there was no circuit on my left wrist—and panicked.
I looked around in a hurry and found the circuit sitting neatly removed beside the blanket spread across the floor.
My clothes... were gone.
That alone was enough to turn my face pale. Someone had treated my body and cleaned me up—and yet the clothes I'd been wearing were nowhere to be found.
The thought that this might not be simple goodwill made me try to sit up in a hurry—and a groan escaped through my clenched teeth.
I had improved somewhat, but pain still ran through me everywhere. Every muscle and joint in my body was screaming. Not that expecting to heal right away, after all that, was anything short of absurd.
With an effort, I got my upper body up and looked around.
It was a vaguely familiar room—familiar and not, at the same time. Where had been the last place I'd thought of yesterday? I was certain I had wished for somewhere safe.
While I was still mired in the question, a scraping sound came from the front door of the narrow room.
A key sliding into the lock.
Click. A faint creak accompanied it, and the door swung slowly open.
Standing beyond it was—
"You're awake?"
It was Jigupa, looking mildly surprised.
Ah. Of course.
There were precious few people in this world I could lean on. Not that I'd go so far as to call Jigupa dependable—but if the criteria were "knows where I live" and "lives alone," he was the only one who fit.
I remembered the many times I'd hauled him here, staggering drunk on caffeine.
"Don't move around too much. You were in pretty bad shape when I saw you yesterday. Your wounds did heal strangely fast, though."
Saying that, Jigupa came into the room, rustling a plastic bag in his right hand.
It wasn't the first time I'd seen this room, but I'd hardly ever come all the way inside. Just once—when I'd shoved a green-faced, about-to-lose-his-lunch Jigupa into the bathroom the moment he stepped in and dragged him all the way to the toilet.
Apparently, Jigupa still hadn't turned me in.
"Why..."
"Why are you here? If anything, I was about to ask you that."
Jigupa said it like it was the most absurd thing in the world, then came over and sat cross-legged on the blanket in front of me.
And began laying things out of the black plastic bag. Tangerines and drinks. Cup ramen, coffee...
"The supermarket just out front sells all sorts of stuff. Fruit especially—you can get it pretty cheap depending on the season. The ajumma there has relatives out in the countryside, apparently."
Jigupa was chattering away, but I felt like I was about to start drooling.
Grrowl. My stomach growled.
"Want to start on the tangerines? I'll get the water going for the ramen right now."
"...Can I, really?"
"Well, you've got the face of someone who hasn't eaten since yesterday. And you're broke, aren't you? Remember what state you were in last night?"
I shook my head.
"Heard this big thud, opened the door, and there you were, collapsed against it. In a hospital gown torn clean to ribbons."
"..."
Of course a magical girl's clothes were made of magic.
I had never actually watched a magical girl return to her original state with my own eyes, so I hadn't remembered it properly—but in the webtoon, when a transformation came undone, their clothes went back to whatever state they'd been in before.
Then again, even for a satire, ending up naked would be going too far. If that happened, the very act of being a magical girl would start to look ridiculous.
...Which meant that yesterday, I had made it all the way to the front of this house, my transformation had come undone, and I had collapsed.
While I was lost in that thought, Jigupa reached over and dragged the electric kettle toward himself.
He opened the lid, peered inside, gave it a sniff, then shook it and listened to the water sloshing about. Then he nodded to himself, set the lid back on, and pressed the button.
The button lit up, and a fairly loud rumble of boiling followed.
Noticing that I still hadn't taken a single tangerine, Jigupa picked one up and pressed it into my hand.
Only then did I start peeling it. Only after the feel of it finally registered did I grow a little impatient.
I peeled it in a rush and popped a segment into my mouth. It was delicious.
Whether the tangerine was actually good, or whether I was simply so hungry that a mediocre one tasted wonderful, I couldn't have said. Either way, it was delicious.
Honestly, a few tears slipped out.
...
Jigupa was lost in his own thoughts. He stared hard at the kettle, as if willing the water to boil faster.
Only after finishing a whole tangerine did my brain start turning again. And then I realized that my being here at all was a colossal imposition.
"Um..."
"Hm?"
"Is it okay? Me being here?"
I asked, careful and small.
This was the place I had barely managed to choose while searching for somewhere to run.
If I'd gone off to some nameless mountain where no one would ever look, no one would have found me—but I'd probably have frozen to death before I ever woke up.
Which meant that, in the end, I had sought out—almost on pure instinct, purely to survive—a place where I could stay without being seen.
Not out of goodwill, not out of trust. I had simply picked the spot with the best odds.
It had to be a tremendous burden on Jigupa.
"Ah, well."
But Jigupa only shrugged.
"You've never dumped me on the floor and walked off, after all."
No, I'm pretty sure those two things don't weigh the same.
But faced with that utterly unbothered expression, I couldn't find it in me to argue. The clothes on my back right now were probably his, too.
Click.
Right on cue, the kettle's button popped back with that sound—the water had finished boiling. Steam billowed from the spout.
Jigupa tore open a packet of ramen.
I hurried and tore one open too—then belatedly remembered he hadn't actually said I could. He didn't say anything about it, though.
Water poured into the ramen, and for about three minutes, neither of us said a word.
A delicious smell spread through the room. One tangerine, it turned out, had not been nearly enough.
I wanted to peel another in the meantime, but for some reason I felt too self-conscious, and made myself wait.
Looking again, I realized I'd been lying on an electric heating pad. Probably the only source of warmth in the room—from the looks of things, the boiler went almost entirely unused.
The clothes I had on weren't a t-shirt but practically outdoor wear, and Jigupa hadn't changed either. He'd even pulled off his socks, tossed them carelessly into a corner, and swapped into sleep socks. At most, he'd taken off his jacket.
Him sitting on the blanket, too, was probably just because it was one of the few warm spots in the room.
At some point, Jigupa had also produced a small folding table and set it up between the two of us.
He set the ramen on it, fished the wooden chopsticks out of the wrapper, and handed them over to me.
"...Thank you for the food."
"Yeah."
Even after going this far, Jigupa asked nothing. It left me anxious—and grateful.
I split the chopsticks and looked down at the ramen.
The smell was familiar—and at the same time, overwhelmingly good.
Half out of my mind, I shoveled it into my mouth.
That I didn't spill a drop on my clothes was practically a miracle.
"...Aren't you suspicious?"
"Of what?"
Having finished his ramen, Jigupa had marched right into the blanket beside my feet and settled back against the wall, perfectly at home. Sitting up within reach of the electric heating pad, our legs traced a lopsided T.
I mean, it was his house—of course he could. But if that was how he felt, he could simply have told me to move.
I was still debating whether the slightly less shameless thing to do would be to clear out of his way when the question slipped out of me before I knew it.
"You've seen the news by now, right?"
My eyes went to the smartphone in Jigupa's hand.
I had no idea how much attention Jigupa paid to Earth's news, but this had to have been sensationalized past the point where anyone could ignore it.
However tightly the Federation, the government, and the corporations usually controlled information, with that many witnesses, trying to bury it separately was pointless.
The footage would be on the internet before they could even try.
Which meant it would be far more advantageous for them to move first and spread the ugliest possible version of me.
"Ah, that."
Jigupa laughed, like it was all ridiculous.
"That you're a terrorist?"
"...Yeah."
"I was there too, you know."
Jigupa said it with an exaggerated shrug.
"You're the one who pulled me out after the whole thing blew up, aren't you?"
"Ah..."
That was true, actually.
"And before that, you were out chatting with me. And before that, you were off on a field trip with your school friends."
"..."
Jigupa was, without question, someone who knew my alibi for that day.
But I didn't exactly feel a ray of hope shining down. Evidence could be fabricated as easily as anything, if someone put their mind to it.
Gyeonggi Province was, at most, two hours from Seoul. The road out to the Complex in particular was so well maintained you could commute in from the city. It would be brutal, but doable.
It wasn't impossible to claim I'd taken my time preparing an attack...
Then again—since even Jigupa had heard of it, that story must already be out there. Whatever conspiracy theories might swirl, an official government announcement and articles from the major outlets carried a weight the internet never would.
"...Well, just lie low for a while. Long as you don't set foot outside, I don't think anyone will know."
Jigupa said it while studying my face.
I dragged a hand down it.
"...Thank you."
There was nothing else I could say.
Jigupa opened his mouth, as if to tell me something.
Thud. Thud.
But before he could, that sound came from the front door.
I scrambled up from my spot. The moment the circuit touched my left wrist, I heard it whirring to life.
But mustering real power was beyond me. Even wrapped in energy, my legs still trembled.
Jigupa, tense in his own way, moved toward the door as well.
Then he leaned in to look through the little lens set in the door.
"...Whoa!?"
But the instant Jigupa saw what was on the other side, he cried out like that and flung the door wide open.
One look at what stood beyond it, and I nearly screamed.
It was a person with half his head blown away.
Everything above his right eye was simply gone. Red blood streamed down from his head.
Standing there was—
"...James?"
As I breathed the name, James pitched forward.
Jigupa hastily shut the door.
I staggered over to where James lay.
Lying dead on the floor in a spreading pool of red liquid—dead?
What was leaking from his head was definitely a red liquid, but it smelled, oddly, of oil.
And then, as I drew close, his head popped open with a soft pop.
The shattered upper half swinging back like a lid.
And what came crawling out of it was—an animal that looked exactly like a hamster.
"A Squeakarian!?"
"...Squeak?"
"Ah—that's him talking."
He looked absurdly animal-like for something called a "person"—though then again, among all the "star-people" out there, some looked like nothing more than rocks.
"They can't make any sound but squeaks, so everything they say just comes out sounding like squeaking."
Saying that, Jigupa carefully lifted the unconscious hamster.
"Still—Mr. James being a Squeakarian... Well, no wonder he could build circuits."
"Squeak..."
Well, he did look like a hamster, at that.
...
Ah. There it is. Now that I looked again, I could see it.
A hamster with enormous ears and a big, fluffy tail.
This looked exactly like that mascot from the webtoon.
Though the coloring was completely different.