Chapter 8. Weapon (3)

I'd more or less gotten the hang of transforming, and I was slowly starting to get a sense of when my ability actually kicked in.

Though the moment to genuinely put that ability to use was a long time coming.

"We can't be the ones to make the first move every time."

That was James's take on it.

"The more you move, the more likely you are to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠leave a trail. How quickly you respond when trouble breaks out, the direction you appear from—everything becomes a clue. Our objective is 'suddenly, out of nowhere.' When all hell breaks loose, we show up from the one quarter nobody thought to watch."

"We travel by black hole in the first place. How would anyone even work that out? Direction and everything—it might as well be a dice roll."

"......"

James held his silence for a moment at that.

"What, you still see me as one of your grunts or something?"

Believe it or not, the two of us stood on equal footing these days—in the sense that I was a parasite clinging to the one-room flat of some pitiful laborer from an outer backwater planet, a creature as far from power as it was from money.

Which, framed that way, was admittedly a little depressing—but the little guy was doing his best to hide his expression as he spoke.

James's face had twisted into something faintly ferocious, but at the end of the day, he was still a hamster. The worst a bite could do was draw a little blood. And he was hardly a wild one, so there was no chance of some contagion lurking in his mouth.

Even by my own assessment, I was looking down at James on confidence with no basis whatsoever—and James, wearing the expression of a man clamping down hard on something, said:

"In any case, you have yet to actually put this weapon to use, and your handling of your various abilities is not perfect either. Finding a more suitable opponent to practice against while we watch for our opening—that is what matters. The beings we must eventually face are far larger than anything you can imagine."

Whatever the opponent turned out to be, learning to use my ability properly really was important.

That said—

"......You think a chance like that just shows up on schedule?"

I asked, cocking my head.

"Then let me ask you something. Do you make a habit of keeping up with the news?"

James held my gaze for a beat before lobbing the question right back.

The look irritated me, mildly—but picking a fight over every single one of his expressions would obviously have made conversation between us impossible, so I feigned thought for a moment and answered.

"No."

If I were being precise, I picked up more news from Jihye—fiddling with her smartphone and passing along whatever she found—than from any deliberate effort of my own.

Most of it was celebrity gossip. Magical girl stories surfaced now and then, but actors and idols took up far more of the airtime. None of it interested me much, so it usually went in one ear and out the other—and since the 'news' James was asking about was clearly not that kind, I shook my head.

"Do you truly have no interest in how the world runs? If you count a magical girl among your friends, checking the relevant news on a regular basis is the least anyone would expect, is it not?"

......

"Well, fine. Since you appear to have no idea, I suppose the burden of explanation falls to me."

James gave a self-important ahem, straightened up, and declared:

"Our targets are kaijin."

"Kaijin."

"Yes. Kaijin. Individuals with no organization behind them—and yet tremendously difficult for this planet's people to subdue. It isn't that humanity cannot manage it at all, but unless a 'magical girl' handles it, the damage tends to be severe in every sense."

Deaths in the course of subduing a kaijin really were rare.

But rare did not mean nonexistent.

Not creatures born of Earth, but aliens from other worlds who—for whatever reason—lost their minds on this planet and degraded into monsters.

They'd shown up in the webtoon now and then, too. As far as I'd read, their true nature had never been spelled out clearly.

"The intervals are irregular, but we should not have to wait an unreasonably long time. There is a reason this country's government lets the Galaxy Federation's magical girls run loose, you see. Those magical girls are the single most reliable means of putting down the kaijin that inevitably appear, at the lowest possible cost in damage."

Right—that was the setup.

You might think it would be simpler to bar aliens from entering the country altogether, but Earth already had nations that had joined the Galaxy Federation.

The space industry had been turned on its head, and if a country wanted the technology without wounded pride or interference in its internal affairs, turning aliens away entirely wasn't an option. Reel in the headquarters of an alien megacorp, and naturally the people who worked there—and their families—came to live in your country.

Tourists were accepted for much the same reason. No matter that they traveled with their families, aliens on Earth still needed places where they could feel some shred of cultural kinship.

Seoul's busiest commercial districts had more than a few restaurants selling food of the 'inedible for Earthlings, perfectly edible for aliens' variety. That wasn't a question of rights; it was a question of biology.

Some species regarded raw ore as cuisine, and others mixed tetrodotoxin into their drinks.

And from what I was hearing now, the more such aliens there were, the more a fixed percentage of them was guaranteed to become kaijin.

Which tracked—it was the only way magical girls would have a reason to exist at all.

"So we just wait around until something happens?"

"Yes. Then we wait for the magical girls to respond—after which we appear and finish the job in their stead."

"To help the magical girls?"

"That is how it will look to everyone else. In practice, it will be sabotage. The magical girls' power has grown terribly weak of late. If the public watches you repeatedly snatch the work out from under them and handle it yourself, they will lose faith in magical girls as a whole."

For now, let's quietly shelve the inconvenient detail that the clothes on my back were also, technically, magical girl clothes.

"And what exactly do I get out of it?"

"At present, you are being hunted by the Federation, the Company, and the government alike—and conveniently, all three are chasing you for the same reason: until they catch you, they cannot prove themselves capable. So we will prove that you are more capable than any of the three."

James tugged the corner of his mouth upward.

For something that ate nothing but seeds, there were moments—like this one—when his smile put you in mind of a carnivore.

Though he still had the look of a creature that would top out at mealworms.

"The government, at least, will be unable to come after you. The single largest cause of your current situation is the government's own negligence. To put it more simply: they will stay their hand for the same reason they have never once touched the magical girls."

As something that solved your problems for you, so long as you left it alone.

"If our luck holds, one of the other two organizations may even attempt to recruit you. Which is precisely why your 'image' matters. Whether things actually unfold that way is a question for later—at the very least, your image must be strong enough that the people who support you could become an 'organization.'"

"So what you're telling me is, we sit on our hands until something blows up."

I said it with a long, deep sigh.

"Uh...... about that."

Until that moment, Jigupa had been listening from a short distance away, and now he cut in.

"I don't think we'll have to wait nearly that long."

"Hm?"

I turned my head and saw the phone in Jigupa's hand. An older model, but a smartphone kept surprisingly clean and well maintained.

And on its screen, a single message was displayed.

I'd received those myself, once in a while.

Not that I'd ever been caught up in one. Even labeled 'the Chungmuro area,' an incident never swallowed all of Chungmuro. Something on the scale of my own breakout was the true outlier—normally a kaijin was put down before it could properly cut loose.

People turning kaijin collapsed first, seizing in unbearable pain. The moment anyone nearby called 119, it was already being treated as the precursor to 'kaijin mutation,' and paramedics and police were dispatched together.

If they couldn't be secured on the spot, things got genuinely difficult from there—but kaijin quite often reported themselves, so an incident like that had yet, in this country at least, to curdle into 'large-scale terrorism.'

"Splendid."

Hearing James say that, I felt my brows knit.

Honestly—people might be getting hurt while a kaijin ran amok, and his word for it was 'splendid.'

Catching my look, James performed his best impression of a shrug and said:

"Shall we head out? We will observe the situation first, then judge whether to intervene."

Getting to the scene, as it happened, involved a few minor problems.

The first was the question of how to carry the hammer.

'Just tuck it into sub-space,' James said—but I still had no idea how to actually use that ability.

By genuine good fortune, the reason it could remain a 'minor' problem was that James had anticipated even this, in his own way.

The hammer came apart into head and handle.

A deep, heavy screw thread—twist it in all the way, then lock it fast with a locking catch. The handle itself split into three sections, all of them the screw-together sort.

"Won't the joints turn into durability problems like this?"

"Magic will simply have to manage. Try believing that it will not break."

Some answer that was.

He was the one who'd told me to steal the generator in the first place—but honestly, would it have mattered what we stole? Wasn't raising hell for the Company good enough on its own?

Whatever the reason, thanks to all this, the hammer fit into a duffel bag, and out the door I went. With it slung across my back, the strap bit into my shoulder, but with the circuit, it wasn't a real problem.

I had no intention of using the black hole right away.

It didn't spew radiation the way a real black hole would, but there was no helping the noise. Maybe it simply worked differently from the warp points everyone pictured?

And—this was the truly ridiculous part—it was loud going in, but coming out, the noise was nowhere near as bad.

Asking James got me nothing but 'If you don't know it yourself, how would I?' in return, so I'd given up pressing.

......Let's just chalk it up to my subconscious imagination being thin. 'I could picture what unfolded in front of me, but not what lay behind it'—framed that way, it almost sounded plausible.

Heading straight for Chungmuro was, in truth, a fairly dangerous move. However well the mask covered my face, a pattern of me appearing wherever kaijin did—and a black-clad magical girl surfacing every single time—was tailor-made for pinning down my identity.

But there was no getting around this one.

Either get made by the sound of a black hole opening, or let the trail grow long enough to be stepped on. I had simply chosen the lesser evil.

I was starting to understand why James was so keen on building us a 'base' of our own.

They'd said 'the Chungmuro Station area,' so naturally it wasn't the whole of Chungmuro.

Rampages usually played out inside one narrow location.

With the incident unfolding near Chungmuro Station, the station itself was, of course, closed. I'd come by bus anyway, so it wasn't much of an issue.

Even after the twenty-odd minutes the trip had eaten, no text announcing a subjugation had arrived—so the kaijin was apparently still holding its ground.

It stood to reason, but the government also cracked down on people filming whenever a kaijin showed ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠up. If the state could always clean things up neatly, the footage wouldn't matter either way—but things did not always end neatly.

Besides, there were plenty of occasions when they simply had to contain the scene and wait for a magical girl.

And the magical girl...... not here yet, huh.

"Where should I transform?"

I shifted the bag around to my side, eased the zipper partway open, and asked.

In Gangnam, I'd done it on a rooftop. Strictly speaking, that had been risky too. Masked going up, mask off on the roof—but if anyone had pulled the CCTV, the conclusion would have been that I was the one who'd climbed up there.

Naturally, the mask I wore now wasn't the one I wore to work. The clothes were different too. I'd gone out of my way to swap masks somewhere without cameras, so there shouldn't be...... a problem. At the very least, James had always been good at ferreting out precisely those kinds of problems.

"On that front, too, I have made arrangements."

James held something out from inside the bag.

At a glance, it looked like a set of wireless earbuds.

I fished a unit out and fitted it into my ear, and James's voice came through.

"Are you curious how you managed to transform in the middle of Gangnam without ever tripping the CCTV?"

James asked.

"Looking as I do, I am still far superior to Earthlings in at least one field: technology. To pilot a state-of-the-art robot by brainwave, one must be able to put even the faintest radio waves to use. And mercifully, the CCTV of Earth in this era is very often wireless."

Oh.

So he'd hacked the cameras and doctored the footage?

"That said, it is not omnipotent. Wired systems, or cameras built on other planets' technology specifically for security, are beyond even me. But so long as we can converse like this, steering you toward the cameras I can manipulate is a simple matter."

"I see......"

The reason he hadn't bothered telling me any of this until now was, presumably, the pleasure of watching me stew.

As I pressed a hand to my forehead at James for hoarding something this important, he carried on, sounding entirely too delighted:

"Furthermore, Earthlings in this day and age still run their police communications on 'radios.' Frequency Snatching is trivial. From this moment, I shall relay it into that ear of yours, live."

"Why do you sound so excited about it?"

"What does excitement have to do with doing one's job?"

He said it with a perfectly straight face, but something about his voice made him sound guilty as charged.

Come to think of it, that translator of his put far too much effort into transmitting emotion. Though I supposed a flat, emotionless textbook recitation would have been its own kind of unpleasant.

Sitting still seemed likely to make me more conspicuous, not less, so I walked, following James's guidance.

Perhaps because it was a weekday, people were scattered thinly along the street. Not absent, mind—but thin.

"Up a building again, this time."

James's voice said.

The place he'd picked was reasonably tall, but it looked quite old.

Sure enough, police cars were visible off in the distance. I could hear it too—something crashing, people shouting.

A little farther on, the police had their control line, and getting any closer looked like a lost cause. Was that why he'd chosen this building?

There was a guard in the lobby, but he didn't seem to spare me a glance. The building's lower floors had a clinic and restaurants in them, which probably explained it.

I stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the highest floor it served.

Fortunately, no one else boarded on the way up.

A man's voice. One of the officers dispatched down there, maybe.

Was he holding a gun at this very moment? Kaijin often chewed straight through non-lethal rounds. So when it became necessary, the police went to live fire—just as they had when they brought me down.

I rode to the topmost floor, then set off again in search of the stairs.

The corridor was empty. The top floor appeared to sit entirely vacant. Had James known that too, when he steered me into this building?

The roof door was locked, so I tore the lock off and stepped out onto the rooftop. Naturally, I wore gloves for the breaking of it. Anything that might slow the investigation down even a little was worth doing.

We were a fair distance from where everything was happening, so I couldn't make out details, but the head of a massively swollen kaijin did jut up into view.

Where exactly Planet 2 of the Arel Star System was, I couldn't have said. The police probably didn't know either. They would simply prepare as the experts instructed.

Its face was visible, and it wasn't moving—had they already managed to pin it down partway, then?

......

Ah. Right. There was a hostage.

Hm.

For what it was worth, I happened to be a magical girl too.

"Going in now would be a mistake."

James said.

"We need to be seen overpowering a magical girl."

And here I was thinking that settling the whole affair before the magical girls arrived and slipping away might not be a bad play either.

......

"......What?"

The murmur escaped me before I could stop it.

Had the feed not been one-way, that would have been a serious slip.

"Wait—"

Catching my reaction, James opened his mouth at once, but—

"Miss Jeong Jieun. Calm yourself."

James's words circled at the rim of my ear.

"Just give me ten minutes or so—"

"And if something happens in those ten minutes?"

I fired back.

The bag was already on the ground, my hands hauling the zipper open.

"There is a plan. For the optimal outcome, one must also know how to endure."

I'd plucked the earbud out, but James's voice from inside the bag reached me loud and clear regardless.

James was looking up at me, expression edging toward anger.

"If the plan falls apart—"

"A plan only counts as a plan while it profits the both of us. Why exactly should I volunteer to eat the loss all on my own?"

I kept my voice as level as I could manage, but my heart was already slamming against my ribs.

The circuit kept grinding away on its own. In truth, whether I wanted to transform or not, I probably couldn't hold out much longer.

And once I did transform—well, there'd be no taking it back either way.

James had no answer for that.

I started screwing the hammer together as I spoke.

"We deal with this first, then think about the next move. The second the hostage turned out to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠be Jihye, plans stopped mattering. I can't sit through this. Not me."

Was this my fault, too?

I knew better than to think like that. It was probably coincidence. Jihye had simply been out, and had the misfortune to be standing near an alien on the verge of turning.

And yet even telling myself that, I couldn't stop the thought from coiling up in one corner of my skull.

Was it really, though?

Could that kaijin truly have been there 'by chance'?

Jihye almost never came to places like this. Was it genuinely coincidence that she, of all people, had landed in this situation—and that I was here, of all moments?

The circuit whined, spinning faster and faster.

Black haze had already begun to smolder around my wrists.

"......Very well."

That was all James said, in the end.

"Well—better than being unable to transform at all, I suppose. I will have to retune the circuit with contingencies for situations like this in mind."

......

I pretended not to hear that last part.

Because if I let myself believe that the people around me could be used—material leveraged against my activities—I truly didn't think I could hold back.

Black smoke swallowed my vision.

And I felt that weightless drift wash over me again—the one thing I could never, ever get used to.