Chapter 8: Weapon (4)
Even if wandering around searching like this accomplished nothing, Jihye felt she had to do something.
She couldn't have said herself exactly what emotion was driving that thought. Was it the unease of a friend she'd shared a room with for nearly her whole life suddenly vanishing? No—it was something a little different from that. It wasn't simple anxiety. Not that she was entirely free of anxiety, of course.
To Jihye, Jieun was her closest friend, a girl like a sister. They knew a fair amount about each other's private lives. Each knew, roughly, what the other tended to agonize over. They didn't know much about each other's friends, but then, that would be true of anyone with actual siblings, too.
And so, without ever realizing it, Jihye had come to believe something: that she was the one who understood Jieun best.
And that was a kind of arrogance.
Whenever Jieun talked, the name that came up most often was Hayun's. And not simply because they were close—Jieun genuinely didn't have that many friends.
Even at the orphanage, the only person she could truly call close was Jihye, who shared her room. It wasn't that she never spoke with the teachers, but neither did she chat with them the way the other children did.
Watching that girl who always seemed alone in her own little world, young Jihye had grown stubborn about it. She kept talking to the girl who wouldn't spare her a single word despite them sharing a room, and it took quite a long time before that wall finally came down.
But in the end, she had managed it.
Jieun wasn't much of a talker, but that was exactly why the two of them could talk about this worry and that.
Jieun never saw any need to repeat a worry she'd been told, and so Jihye had been able to unburden herself of troubles that would have sounded trivial to anyone else but that she took quite seriously.
Looking back, Jieun had a slightly unusual way of thinking, and a quiet streak—she wouldn't open her mouth unless someone spoke to her first—but maybe underneath it all she was full of worries, just an ordinary girl.
Jihye had never been there to listen to those worries.
At some point, without noticing when, she had simply begun treating Jieun as a comfortable presence she was already close to. She'd assumed she was the person who knew Jieun best, and had leapt to the conclusion that the reason Jieun kept coming home late was simply that she'd gotten a boyfriend, or someone like that.
She should have asked a little more. Jieun surely wouldn't have answered easily, but if she'd kept asking, someday she would have answered.
...Wouldn't she?
And so Jihye had come outside again today. The moment school let out, instead of returning to the orphanage, she had set out to look for Jieun. She knew it would come to nothing, but it felt like something she had to do.
Only then would the guilt ease a little.
She had already been to the bookstore Jieun used to frequent several times, and had come away with nothing.
By any measure of odds they were far poorer bets, but in the end the places Jihye chose were others she had once visited with Jieun. The ones that had stayed in her memory.
Deliberately picking such places was a little strange, even to herself. For all she knew, those "places of memory" had meant nothing special to Jieun at all.
And yet she had stubbornly carried her feet there anyway—ultimately for the excuse she could offer herself.
I tried, too. It's not as if I did nothing.
An excuse fit for a self who had done nothing at all. A hollow excuse.
A few years ago, she and Jieun had gone out on an impulsive trip. She barely remembered why it had to be Chungmuro Station, of all places. Maybe because it was a word that always came up whenever Korean movies did.
It wasn't that long a ride by bus, so one weekend the two of them had pointed themselves there without much thought.
It wasn't that the area had no tourist-style attractions, but they hadn't really gotten the feeling there were as many movie-related spots as they'd imagined.
After browsing a while in front of a shop selling old secondhand cameras, the two of them decided they'd rather just move on somewhere else than keep standing around there.
Then they went into the station, and by chance stumbled upon a gallery inside.
She couldn't tell whether it was run by the city of Seoul or by the district, but there was a gallery there that seemed themed around film.
In one corner was a space where you could borrow DVDs for free and watch them right away on the TVs installed inside.
She thought that was where the two of them had watched a movie. A comedy that wasn't particularly funny, but somehow the situation itself was so absurd, so ridiculous, that they had ended up laughing until they had to muffle the sound.
…
A place she had been to exactly once.
And naturally, Jieun wasn't inside.
What on earth had she been expecting? Had she really imagined Jieun would come here alone to lose herself in memories—a place they had visited exactly once? Just because Jihye had been with her that time?
…
Though if it were Jihye herself, maybe she would have. She had other friends, but Jieun, who had grown up beside her, was different from all of them.
She heaved a deep sigh and headed back up. The subway didn't reach her neighborhood anyway; taking the bus was far faster.
It wasn't yet quitting time for office workers, so the streets were fairly quiet.
Gazing up at the blue sky for the first time in ages, she thought it would actually be nice if Jieun—magical girl now—came dropping right out of it.
It was every bit as absurd as her earlier wish to run into her at the subway station.
She was walking toward the bus stop when—
"Aaah!?"
Someone screamed. She looked over and saw a figure collapsed on the ground. They didn't look like an Earthling.
A few people nearby asked if they were all right, but the fallen figure only let out strange cries and rolled on the pavement. Only after watching the scene for a moment did some of the bystanders seem to grasp how serious it was.
Jihye knew, too. She had heard about it at school any number of times. It was just the first time she had seen it with her own eyes.
She hesitated for a moment.
She had heard the stories, but seeing it in person was another matter—what if that person really had collapsed from illness? Their appearance was so far removed from an Earthling's to begin with that there was no telling what hurt or how, and the sounds they made weren't like any human voice, either.
But the foam at their mouth made the situation look gravely serious indeed.
That was all—just a moment's hesitation. It wasn't as if she had been about to do anything.
And that was the problem.
"Just handle it with magic."
Easy to say.
Even if magic unfolded exactly as I believed or imagined, actually giving it shape was a separate problem entirely. And whether deep-rooted prejudice and stereotype fed into magic itself or not, I still couldn't flit through the sky the way the other magical girls did.
There were workarounds, though. In this world there was a stereotype that magic is convenient. Fair enough—there were aliens who had flown the skies and pioneered space back when they were far less advanced than Earthlings, so the very concept of magic must have been a tremendous shock to the people of this planet.
Thanks to that, I could more or less imitate the everyday uses of magic I saw around me.
Shock absorption, for instance.
BAM!
The ground beneath my slamming legs split with a great crack. And the cracking wasn't only under my feet—it came from the kaijin's arm, too. The creature, it seemed, hadn't managed a rational response to the speed of my abrupt drop from the tall building. That was a genuine mercy. If it had reacted rationally and held out Jihye instead of its own arm, things would have gone very badly for me in more ways than one.
Crrrack. The kaijin's arm was sturdier than I'd expected. Or maybe that was because I had sheathed my legs in magic—my legs had bled off enough energy to keep from shattering, so the impact of the swinging weapon may have been dampened by the same measure. Even so, I could see the crack running through that carapace.
The thing was a kaijin shaped like a giant crayfish. It had probably been seafood from the start; aliens like king crabs in business suits were fairly common on Earth, too—though usually it was only the head that came out that way.
Its arms had blackened and its body gone lumpy like rough stone, and a rag of clothing hung carelessly over the giant crayfish's frame. A garment fitted with half-sleeves for one pair of enormous pincers and four pairs of thin legs—ten sleeves in all—was, honestly, a little funny. Though for its people, that was probably the norm.
CLANG!
It swung its massive pincer and knocked my hammer aside. Its strength was considerable too—natural, for a kaijin.
No. Maybe it wasn't natural at all. If the problem was that I had made the hammer light, then deflecting an ordinary iron hammer—one far lighter than this—should have been something it could do just as easily.
In the moment my stance crumbled, I rebuilt my thinking. Rather than lightening the hammer, it was better to make myself stronger. Yes. Like at my part-time job. I spread my legs wide, brought my right hand up just beneath the hammer's head, and clamped down, widening my grip a little and locking the hammer firm.
Then I drove it upward like an uppercut. The pincer plunging down at me met the hammer with a bang. Crack. Something split once more, and fluid seeped through the gap.
I turned my gaze. Jihye's waist was caught precariously in the pincer.
It really was the Jihye I knew. One of the kids I had genuinely wondered about after I ran—how she was really doing. How much must she have worried? Her expression said she was far from okay. Maybe that was just the situation, but she looked pale, too. The thought that it might be my fault made my heart feel as if it were being wrung out.
Because in this world, if there was anyone I could call family, it was Jihye and no one else.
I clenched my teeth and looked back at the kaijin.
"What... what are you...!" the kaijin roared. "A magical girl...!"
The words wouldn't even string together. Weren't kaijin supposed to be beings that had lost their reason and gone berserk? Talking probably wouldn't settle this. And the police were waiting for a magical girl.
"Urk—!"
A groan spilled from Jihye's lips. The pincer clamped around her waist was squeezing tight.
WHAM!
The instant my eyes were dragged away, something huge and heavy slammed into my side. I went flying sideways, skipping across the ground like a stone over water.
That hurt like hell.
But then—this was a body transformed through Overflow, wasn't it? Maybe because mana had been wrapped around me since earlier, I wasn't left gasping for breath the way I had been the last time something like this happened.
Stay calm. They said a kaijin's reason burned away, but it wasn't incapable of judgment—taking a hostage proved as much. And as long as it held Jihye in one hand, the police couldn't move freely either.
My left wrist grew hot. So did my heart. My blood was racing so fast my head felt like it was spinning. What do I do? How do I get Jihye out of this without anything going wrong?
The hand gripping Jihye's waist loosened slightly. Had it unconsciously clamped down while moving and putting force into its grip? The fact that it had taken a hostage in the first place meant it hadn't forgotten that it would be in danger if that hostage died.
Jihye's legs hung slack, swaying emptily. Her life was still holding on, but if this went on much longer, she could be in truly serious danger.
In one strike? Could I crush its head in a window so short that it couldn't put strength into both hands?
Vreeee—
A sound different from the circuit running on my left wrist. It was the sound of the generator inside the hammer. Right—this was no simple iron hammer. There was definitely some kind of device inside it, whether something that harnessed magic or something that simply put energy to use.
"What's inside this hammer?"
I had been rampaging, having even forgotten James was perched on my shoulder, but when I asked, he finally caught his breath and spoke.
"An ou-output device."
"How do I use it?"
"I configured it to learn from your behavior. Striking an enemy, running. Repeat them enough times, and it will judge for itself which action is required and act accordingly."
"...So what you're telling me is, I can't use it just once."
"It was designed to optimize itself over the course of combat. I was attempting to explain that on the rooftop earlier."
I see. So that's how it is.
I put power into my legs. Then I ran flat out and leapt. Jumping high was the one thing I knew I could do for certain. It had come in handy for making my escape, and I had done it once before, diving off the antenna last time. Like a run-up—one step, two, three—with every bound I rose higher.
And as I brought the lightened hammer down, I simultaneously restored its weight to normal.
BAM!
This time the kaijin threw itself frantically clear—probably because it had realized its arms wouldn't survive blocking a few more blows. A massive crack remained in the ground: the imprint of the hammer's cross-section at its center, and lightning-shaped fissures branching out to either side.
I wrenched the hammer free and looked back at the kaijin. And thrust out in front of me was Jihye. I froze.
Jihye's eyes were open. Her body still hung limp in agony, her face deathly pale—but her eyes were open. Whether meeting my gaze had brought her back to herself, or whether she had simply had the bad luck to meet it at exactly that moment—
"...J-Jieun."
Jihye murmured.
If it were the Jihye of ordinary days, she would have laughed at my outfit. Clutched her belly, rolled on the ground or doubled over, laughing herself sick. Why are you wearing that? Aren't you embarrassed?
But the face Jihye wore now was nothing like that. A face paralyzed with terror, trembling too hard to speak properly.
And that Jihye murmured:
"I'm sorry."
Why was she the one apologizing? If anyone owed an apology, it was me. Because of me, strangers she had never met had come by again and again to hound her. No—not just hound her. They were journalists, so they had probably kept their language polite, but a person shoving a camera and a microphone right in your face while shouting at the top of their lungs would have been frightening, no question.
They had never explained a thing to her. All she had seen was that one evening.
Was this situation, too, my doing? I didn't know. Kaijin appearing at a fixed rate—did that, too, have something behind it? Was it really coincidence that Jihye, of all people, had been taken hostage here—
The thought snapped short.
A scream rang out. Not mine. It was Jihye's voice, crying out as she watched me take a brutal blow to the side and go flying.
This time I hit a wall. Maybe because I hit it vertically, the impact was different from before. From shoulder to toe I was slammed flat into the concrete, leaving a crater the shape of my body.
THUD.
But even so, I didn't fall. Well, I was pinned to a wall—that much was only natural. I hadn't dropped the hammer, either.
"You okay?" I asked James.
"Had you been embedded the other way around, you might have died without even a scream."
Why did he insist on clinging to my body like this? It would be better for him to watch from a little farther off. Maybe he had judged that hiding inside the mana whirling around a magical girl's body was the safest place to be.
"...This is fucking bullshit," I said, wrenching myself upright.
In a situation where nothing pleased me already, everything had just gotten a whole lot worse. Fate, coincidence—I didn't care about any of it. I simply hated, so much, whatever had caused this to happen.
I had thought the years had numbed me considerably. But I hated—truly, unbearably hated—the being who had shoved me into this place and then never said another word. The thing called the Author, perhaps.
What was I supposed to do? I wanted to go find it and do something—scream curses at it, slap it across the face, beat it black and blue until something broke.
But I couldn't, could I. Because if such a being existed, it would be watching me writhe here, watching me suffer, and laughing.
"...Ms. Jeong Jieun?"
As I muttered to myself, James asked carefully.
I didn't bother to answer. The circuit was turning. Its hum had grown grating enough to set my teeth on edge. Even the air around my body felt as though its saturation had dropped a notch. I could feel vibration coming off the hammer. Was the generator inside actually running?
Vreeee—
A nerve-grating sound, like metal scraping metal. Had this, too, been specially engineered to grind down my mind? I couldn't say. Frankly, I didn't care either way.
Hot.
Heat poured from the hammer's entire frame, seeping all the way down to the grip.
Even the kaijin watching me seemed to sense that something had gone wrong. And yet it still held Jihye out in front of itself, which looked idiotic. If it knew something was wrong, then giving her up might have left it a little better off.
Click. A small sound.
"You've force-opened the propulsion unit!?" James shrieked in horror—that trademark third-rate villain voice of his. Now, of all times, he was surprised. After he was the one who told me to imagine whatever I liked.
Gripping the hammer as it strained forward on its own, I took a step.
The giant crayfish flinched. It backed up a step, pushing the deathly pale Jihye toward me.
So that's how you want to play it.
"Wait for me, Jihye."
I murmured it to myself. She wouldn't hear it over the tremendous noise pouring from every part of my body. But somehow, it felt like something I had to say.
"I'm coming to save you now."
I ran. At full power, taking running stride after running stride, I angled the hammer downward.
Only then did I see what state the hammer was in.
The hammer had come apart. Its rear half had disassembled completely, components strewn wildly behind it.
But that didn't seem to be breakage. The individual parts probably weren't working as intended—at the very least, they were certainly not operating the way James had originally designed them.
And yet those components had spread wide open, shaped like the rear section of a booster.
The parts floated apart from one another like superconductors suspended in midair, and yet at the same time they didn't waver in the slightest, as though some unseen component were binding them together.
The generator sat half-exposed at that dismantled rear.
And behind it, blue flames roared.