Chapter 7: Foes in the Same Boat (6)
I felt terrible.
The shame of having shown myself like that — and the bare fact of having crossed paths with Hayun again.
Back when nothing was wrong between us, I had never once thought of Hayun as a burden. I had held bad feelings toward the other magical girls. Choosing that line of work had been my own decision, sure, but no matter how you sliced it, it was hard to feel nothing about getting beaten down. I'm an emotional creature, and no amount of trying to fix that ever seemed to take. Rationally, I knew I was the one in the wrong — but in the end, all that ever reached my eyes was my own field of vision.
……Which was exactly why I was afraid of coming to hate Hayun.
Rationally speaking, whether a person is happy or not isn't decided by money. But emotions are undeniably swayed by it — at the very least, people with money never feel any of the pressures that come from going without. I had watched from right beside her how much weight Hayun carried, how little peace came with the job of magical girl — and I had still been jealous of her.
The wronged party here was obviously me.
Obviously, if I started rampaging, the magical girls would come subdue me. And then I'd be hauled off somewhere.
With everything tangled up this badly, maybe they couldn't use me openly as experimental material anymore. But I didn't want to be locked away for something I never did. I didn't want a trial. None of it should ever have happened in the first place.
……Hayun wouldn't let that happen. Right?
I hated the thought of Hayun seeing me as a villain.
But for that, I would have to explain everything about myself. And in the end, that would mean explaining my feelings, too.
I didn't want that.
I wanted Hayun to stay, just as she was, the best memory I had. If the relationship couldn't be salvaged, then better to leave it like this. Even knowing it couldn't go on forever, that was what I kept telling myself.
When I came to, my surroundings had changed.
"There it is! We're good!"
James shouted from my shoulder.
"So shame works as fuel too! Next time I recalibrate the circuit, I'll be sure to check that properly. Might I suggest you simply go about in somewhat more embarrassing attire? Shame dulls with familiarity, so we can't lean on it too often — but if it aids you in combat, there's no reason to refuse it, is there?"
...
Beside my ear, in that pointlessly pleasant voice, James went on saying things I did not want to hear.
...
I stared hard at him, but he, utterly oblivious, said it once more.
"Would that be possible?"
...
What did rat meat taste like, I wondered. If nutria had turned out more edible than I'd expected, then hamster probably would too.
Seeing my head turn slowly toward my own shoulder, James snapped his mouth shut.
"So. Where are we?"
My mood had already hit rock bottom, and I wanted this over and done with before it drilled straight through the floor.
"This would be... ah."
James laughed.
Only then did I finally take a proper look around.
Even at midnight, the building blazed with light. Well, of course it did. This was a Noir Corporation building — the place housing the receivers that kept the magical girls under constant surveillance. Staff had to be stationed here around the clock. By now, whatever device was tracking me would be pointing at exactly this spot.
The area around me was a disaster zone.
Apparently my black hole wasn't a real black hole. At the very least, no one was dead. They say black holes give off radiation, but I honestly couldn't say whether radiation from one this size could kill a person — and given that nothing much had come of the last incident, this one was probably fine too.
As far as I could tell, my black hole's abilities amounted to sucking things in and spitting them back out, but that was more than enough to wreck a room. Papers whirled everywhere — someone must have had documents stacked up. The desks and chairs near where I'd burst out had been shoved into a chaotic jumble, everything that had been nearby pushed outward in a perfect ring around me.
No people sprawled on the floor, though—
"...Looks like someone was on night duty."
Far across the room, someone had risen from their desk and stood staring at me, mouth hanging open, a mug still in hand. They looked for all the world like they'd been struck by lightning.
No — wait. Had they been?
"Any troops stationed here?"
"There are. Just not on this floor, at least. Finding the right floor on your own, before I could even tell you — you seem to have a talent for this."
...
That's because you were shrieking in my ear and scrambling my brains.
Though honestly, I'd just wanted to get away. I'd wished for somewhere — anywhere — inside this building, and maybe that was why I'd come out almost exactly in the middle.
"The server room is five floors above us."
The words were barely out of his mouth before the alarm on the wall began shrieking and spinning. At a glance it looked like a fire alarm, but the light was red.
The magical girls just had to be on both sides, apparently, and it was throwing them into confusion.
"For reference, most of the garrison is massed on the ground floor and the top floor."
If a magical girl was going to break in, it would be one of those two.
"They can fly, though. Couldn't they come in through the middle?"
"This building's defenses are thorough in every respect. No one is crashing through the glass with their bare body. Short of something tremendously violent, that thick pane is not giving way — and if it did, there'd be hell to pay with the civilians walking below."
Was he saying they'd built it downtown with even that factored in? Some part of me suspected James had had a hand in raising this place, but I decided not to press the matter.
"Where do we go?"
I asked it as the security shutters began to descend, already breaking into a run.
"Eight more floors up should do it. The interior of this building is... rather unusual, you see."
With that, I threw myself under the shutter.
Thud.
With a person still inside, it slammed shut anyway.
"No need to worry. The ventilation is fully equipped, in case anyone has to hold out for an extended period."
Had they built a fortress in the middle of the city?
I swallowed the words as I sprinted down the corridor.
The higher I climbed, the more my nerves frayed.
At first I'd considered making another black hole, or simply punching through the ceiling — but if the black hole spat me back outside, I might come face to face with Hayun again, and I couldn't bear that. Besides, according to James, the building was engineered to perfection against earthquakes. Which meant an obscene amount of rebar ran through it; no single spell was bringing a floor down. So up the stairs it was.
Bang!
And naturally, troops came swarming straight toward me.
Smashing the CCTV would have been pointless — the moment I appeared, the alarms had already given me away. And the people here seemed to have a rough idea of why I'd broken into this building. Well, James was perched on my shoulder.
"You didn't — have — to come up here, you know!?"
I gasped it out after flattening a squad of heavily armed guards, and James lifted his snout high, as if to sniff at the very idea.
"They need to know I am alive. Otherwise they won't stay on their guard."
"Them being on guard is the problem!?"
Chasers are a pain in the neck!
"There is already a mountain of personnel hunting you. If anything, my importance is far below yours. So what harm is there in mildly irritating the enemy? Besides, had you come alone, you would have gotten lost."
Much as I hated it, that was true.
From my floor upward, the elevators were completely sealed off; James had told me as much almost the instant I'd started running. Press the button all you liked — nothing would come. But the cars still ran as far as the troop-transport floors, because central control would see to that. In other words, every floor I gained was a floor higher the troops could ride. A building this size hardly had just one elevator, so somewhere, no doubt, some of them were busily ferrying soldiers toward the roof. Naturally, none would stop on my floor no matter how many times I pressed.
"For the record, the doors are as thick as a bomb shelter's. Cutting through one would take longer than simply running. And you cannot use your full strength right now anyway, can you?"
...Or so said James. And he was right: the blades I conjured couldn't machine through walls as cleanly as Hayun's wand. Thanks to that, I had to climb floor after floor of a maze that seemed deliberately tangled — and what really burned me was that the stairwells weren't stacked along one side for a straight shot up, but scattered across each level as if placed at random. According to James, everything below a certain floor was just an ordinary building. Meaning this was, quite literally, a measure to shield the critical facility.
"...But I definitely cut through every wire they had over me...!"
"The government rarely has occasion to fight magical girls in the first place," James explained as I grumbled mid-sprint, feeling sorely wronged. "They have captured kaijin before, but never a magical girl. Becoming one requires a Hope Circuit, after all."
...
"So their defenses are, across the board, vulnerable to attacks that use a 'circuit.' You and a few combatants can pry open the Federation's thick doors, but the moment a magical girl arrives, you are caught. Which should tell you just how perplexing an existence 'you' are to the Federation."
My mere existence could already defeat most of the facilities the Federation had ever built.
"Then today...?"
"Conversely, if you can breach the Company's facilities, they have no reason to stay hostile forever. Who is to say? One of these days, a hand might reach out offering to negotiate."
God, his brain never stopped turning in the most insufferable directions.
"About three floors left. By the way — do you have anything like a weapon? Magical girls all carry one, you know."
"You never made me one, and now you're asking that?"
"Do magical girls not simply have their weapons in hand the moment they transform?"
...
I had no comeback for that. He had a point — short of engineered hardware like Iris's firearms, their weapons were all pure conjured magic. The grimoire, the gauntlets, the wands, every last one.
Becoming the being you dreamed of being as a child. The webtoon had mocked that very premise — yet even for mockery's sake, it had kept the basic rules more or less intact, and there was something faintly absurd about that.
And me, of all people...
Seriously. What exactly had I been thinking, to transform into this? Had I just vaguely wanted to be a magical girl, and this was the result? Unbelievable. If that was the reason, then the least it could have done was hand me a 'typical' magical girl wand.
"There she is!"
This time the shout came from ahead.
I conjured Energy Blades in both hands.
They looked a little strange. Blades used to seep out of the wide ports on my suit's sleeves; now they simply floated in open air. Not that they spun off in any odd direction.
The gunfire was deafening. Those people had been firing live rounds for a while now — some kind of special ammunition, apparently, because the rounds shattered on impact and left no trace behind. Was it so a ricochet indoors wouldn't have them killing one another?
But shattering rounds still hurt. I raised one arm, warped the blade's shape into a shield, and charged straight through. Curiously, it met no air resistance at all, yet stopped every incoming bullet cold — magic for you.
"Aaagh!"
As I bore down on him in a flash, the operative — who had at least been firing aimed shots — clamped down on the trigger and held it.
Tat-tat-tat-tat!
The ear-splitting roar rolled on and on, and a thin ringing rose in my ears. I swept the blade in my right hand in a rough arc. The rifle in the first man's grip. The rifle in his neighbor's. The helmet on his head. And what looked like a military-issue headset. All of it dropped away, sheared through in one clean line.
Crack!
Then I brought the raised arm down across the operative's skull. He staggered and toppled sideways. A rifle butt flew at my face; I caught it in my palm. The man who'd swung it stared back at me, eyes huge, face drained white. Not a wound on him, though. I had dialed the blades' power down, and the suit's energy had likely offset the rest — the same reason people didn't die to a cut from Hayun's sword. With his suit wrecked, drawing full strength would be hard anyway, and no one here could push a circuit into overflow the way I had.
So I gave his head a measured thump regardless. He didn't black out, but he went down clutching it, and I vaulted clean over him before he could rise.
...
A twinge of guilt stirred. I mean — fine, they had shot at me. But these people were combatants too, weren't they? People who'd held the same job I had. Jigupa wasn't here, but if he'd been nearby, he might have been called up as well. No — probably not. The people here ranked above ordinary combatants.
All Jigupa had ever worn was a skintight suit. He wasn't an Earthling to begin with, so no circuit would sync for him; wearing one would have been meaningless. But every person here was an Earthling — circuits on their wrists, skintight suits on their bodies, leather jumpers over the top. The same outfit I'd worn when James issued me my new circuit. Not one of them wielded a blade, though. Had they decided it was useless against me?
I shoved the operative in front of me hard to the side and ran straight on. The irony wasn't lost on me — I was doing exactly what the magical girls had done, all while nursing all my rage at the magical girls. Ask me whether I had a better option, and I wouldn't have much of an answer.
"Everyone, get out of the way!"
I shouted.
"Block me, and this doesn't end peacefully! Stay out of my path, and I won't lay a hand on you!"
The words must have carried some weight, because a few flinched and stepped aside. Plenty still came at me — but each time my blade skimmed past a body and halved their gear, their will to fight seemed to snap a little more. Of course it did. Fighting real magical girls had been exactly like this. However fine the equipment, however thoroughly the combatants were kitted out as Earthlings, it made no difference. Despair is a fragile emotion — cross the line even slightly, and it curdles into giving up. However thick the doors, however elaborate the installations, nothing could stop a magical girl completely. Given even a sliver of hope, they would generate the energy to see the job done.
"If we do not hurry, this becomes a much bigger problem," James said. "Our objective is to destroy the equipment — not to have it taken from us. Isn't that so?"
What a pain in the ass. Hitching a ride on my shoulder, and he had the nerve to say that?
Then again, he was clinging on remarkably well.
"My people only achieved real civilization a little over ten thousand years ago. Before that, we scurried up and down trees — so we, their descendants, cling to things rather well. Yes, this way. Straight ahead, please. You want the door just there."
...
James had jumped in first, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking; I decided to simply keep my mouth shut.
Thud.
I sank a short punch into the solar plexus of the man emptying his gun at me, left him doubled over, then threw my weight through the door beyond and burst inside. In a place like this, you'd never escape a fire, I grumbled to myself. Just one more item on Noir Corporation's long ledger of crimes—
—so I grumbled inwardly, then stopped, mouth slightly open, staring up at what lay before me.
It was a colossal hall.
Seoul had no shortage of fifty-story buildings — quite the opposite. Even the luxury apartments had plenty that broke fifty. And in this world, ever since first contact with the aliens, there were more still, thrown up on the back of overwhelming alien technology. This was Gangnam, after all, where companies from beyond Earth had stacked their towers one after another. This building looked the part from outside, too — so much so that the tower next door made it seem almost short. From the street it was nothing but a neat rectangular box, like a matchbox stood on end. But here, from the thirty-third floor up, it opened straight through to the sky — as if they had hollowed out the inside of a gigantic rectangular prism.
And at its center stood a single massive spire — big enough to span ten stories of an ordinary building. Nothing like the dish antenna I'd imagined: a sleek, sculptural monolith that belonged in a science fiction film.
"What would you like done about the door?"
James's voice brought me back. I turned to the door I'd broken through and pulled it shut, its handle hanging in pieces. From the other side came the drumming of fists. I stretched a blade long and stabbed furiously at the wall around the door. Just as James had said, the rebar within was packed too dense for the wall to give way entirely — but the thick concrete facing and the marble cladding beside it came crashing down. Once that heap of rubble piled against the door's base, it held on its own, more or less. I trashed the surroundings a little further to bank up the debris, then turned back to face the monolith.
"...And how do I deal with this?"
"I have a plan. A shame your weapon insists on being a blade, but so be it. While the magical girls keep the troops pinned upstairs, we will work through it step by step."
I let out a long breath. Then, hauling my aching body along, I walked toward that structure — the satellite receiver.
Wham!
Crunch.
All she had done was swing her hand the way she always did.
The combatant's arm bent the wrong way. And then came a scream — warped into something grotesque by the helmet, it made Blossom flinch to her very shoulders.
The sensation of striking a human body. The sensation of something hard beneath it snapping.
It could certainly be healed. Magic was remarkable that way — a trip to the Treatment Center and a not-particularly-steep fee could mend a fracture easily enough. But that didn't make it painless.
Blossom's heart slammed against her ribs. Her breathing turned ragged. None of this was so different from any other day—
and from every direction came screams.
Screams that, surely, had been there all along, even in that 'ordinary.' Among those muffled voices, Jieun's must have been mixed in — all this time, unnoticed, over and over.
If she hadn't transformed, could Hayun ever have struck an ordinary person's body like this? If she had been able to see their faces, could she have stayed so indifferent until now?
If she met Jieun today — if she had to face Jieun—
"Blossom!"
Rose's voice cut through.
"Snap out of it!"
Only at those words did her body finally obey, and she dodged the blade sweeping toward her head. But the fear still wouldn't lift.
Only now.
...Only now, it did.
Blossom lifted her eyes to the operatives surging in like a tide. The ones who had been charging at them with everything they had—
abruptly stopped, as if thrown into confusion. Before the magical girls could react at all, the combatants were glancing around at one another, as if trading looks. Then they scrambled about-face and bolted for the building.
"What is this...?"
Iris murmured.
The reason the magical girls fought here without warping was that warp travel devoured no small amount of energy. Iris's mana was plentiful, but the number of jumps she could make had its limits — and a more precise destination cost even more. Had their circuits been 'charged' as usual, they might have risked it — but there was a reason they couldn't.
...They couldn't draw on Hayun's energy the way they normally did. The same held for the rest of the team.
"Move!"
Hayun, on the verge of drowning in her own thoughts, heard Rose's shout and began to run. She didn't know exactly where they were headed. But something was clearly unfolding inside — something that had thrown everything into this chaos. And the cause was more than likely Jieun.
A little while ago, meeting Jieun had felt wonderful. She had thought they might speak again. But the expression Jieun had worn at the sight of Hayun was fear. And right behind it, shame. Nothing like the Jieun she knew. She hadn't been able to hear anything over the roar of Jieun's mana and the peculiar whine of her spinning circuit, but there had been an alien perched on Jieun's shoulder — one that seemed to come from the same planet as Cherry. A black-furred Squeak-seong-in. It had been shrieking something at Jieun, its face twisted viciously.
...
So many thoughts. Nearly all of them uncertain. But one of them, at least, was certain: Jieun was not glad to see her. No — in truth, it might be... far worse than that.
She knew she shouldn't be thinking such things — not now, not in the middle of all this. But she couldn't shake them.
...If she met Jieun — if they had to fight — what was she supposed to do?
Her heart pounded so hard she could barely breathe — and so, reluctant as she was, Hayun ran.