Chapter 8: Weapon (7)

Had she ever seen Jieun get angry?

Irritation, maybe—she'd seen that much. She'd seen her cry at sad movies. She'd seen her laugh, too.

After so many years living together, it would have been stranger not to glimpse her emotional side.

And yet, even so, she had never once seen Jieun angry.

When they were very small, Jihye had once touched Jieun's things without asking. Back in the days when sharing a room made the very idea of "someone else's" hard to grasp.

Jieun hadn't blown up. She had only worn an expression like she was holding something down, deep inside.

At that age, even that had been a little frightening.

But little by little they had come to know each other, adjusting to one another's edges. The bluntness, the intimidation—that had been nothing but a first impression. Living side by side, Jieun turned out to be a deeply understanding child, mature beyond her years in any number of ways.

Maybe that was why. Jihye had never seen Jieun fly into a rage like this.

She looked like a little kid. Like someone heaving up everything that had ever piled inside her, all in one breath. Like a child who doesn't know how to be angry, and so flails her arms and legs harder than she means to, raging without an ounce of control.

But the results were nothing like a child's tantrum. The ground tore open all around her, explosion after explosion cracked the air, and that sturdily built armored vehicle crumpled like paper.

Jieun's screams sounded like pain itself.

Nothing Jieun had done today could be called a bad deed, no matter how you looked at it. She had rescued Jihye from captivity and fought alongside the magical girls to bring down the rampaging kaijin. She hadn't hurt a single officer. She hadn't shown any real hostility.

If even one of all these people had tried to talk to her, Jieun would gladly have spoken with them. She might seem a little cold on the surface, awkward, without any social polish, blunt—but she was never a bad kid.

CRASH!

One blow from above, and the armored vehicle's spine gave way. A huge fissure split the ground. The vehicle's midsection caved in and drove itself into the earth.

Perhaps they were afraid of her—none of the people ringing her in could bring themselves to attack.

Light streamed down from the sky.

Don't be scared.

Everyone around her was terrified, so Jihye, at least, could not afford to be. That girl over there was Jieun. Whatever shape she took, she was still Jieun—the one Jihye had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wandered so long searching for.

But in the end, her legs gave out and she sank to the ground.

It wasn't purely fear. If she tried to untangle it, a dozen reasons were knotted together. She'd been so tense her legs had gone numb; she couldn't fully grasp what was happening. She had seen a kaijin up close for the first time in her life. It was also the first time she had nearly died.

She had simply run out of strength. She had been through far too much today to bear it all.

The ground boomed, and a monstrous shriek like a wail tore through the air.

"……"

Jieun looked up at the sky. What was she seeing beyond it? What was that black hole, anyway—had Jieun made that too?

After a long while, Jieun turned to look at Jihye.

Nothing remained on her face. Not a single tear. It was an expression utterly hollow, as if she had purged everything inside her and left nothing behind.

Jihye opened her mouth, but no words came. She tried to rise, but her legs wouldn't hold her.

I have to catch her.

If she couldn't catch her here, she might never catch her again.

But Jieun waited for nothing. She simply vanished.

One blink, and no trace of her remained. Not the light streaming from the sky, not the black hole that had seemed ready to swallow the world. Nothing. All that was left was one utterly wrecked armored vehicle and a ground pocked with craters.

"……"

For a long time, no one spoke.

Hayun came to her senses and started running only after Jieun had begun to move.

"Wait!"

She shouted it at her teammates as they charged toward Jieun. Were they going to seize her? To hurt her all over again?

She tried to move fast. But the black hole overhead made that difficult—take flight, and she'd be sucked straight in.

No. It's fine for now.

Her mana was plentiful. Her circuit was still turning properly. She sprinted with everything she had, just about to close the distance—

—and Jieun vanished.

Again?

—No. The black hole was still there. Magic didn't normally vanish the instant its caster did, but Jieun's magic always had.

She's still nearby.

The moment she steadied herself and began to search her surroundings—

CRASH!

The sound rang out hard on the thought's heels. Far away, in the thick of the police, Jieun was moving. It was a Jieun she had never seen before. Raging. Rampaging. Jieun, of all people.

"……Jieun?"

She knew the words couldn't carry from here, but they slipped out of her all the same.

"……Ah."

Of course it would come to this. She must have had so much bottled up inside. She was human—there was no helping it.

She'd been branded a nationally wanted fugitive over something that wasn't even her doing. And not as someone who'd merely caused an accident—as a terrorist who had killed people. The whole world must have seemed deserving of her resentment. And she had held it in, all this time.

A scream rang out. Jieun's scream. A voice drenched in terrible agony.

Hayun's body locked up and would not move.

If only it weren't this situation. If Jieun had attacked first, the story might have been different. Then, perhaps, the justification would have been on their side.

But Jieun had been shot as her reward for pulling people out of danger. Before that, they had thrown a net over her head as if she were some beast to be captured.

Do that to someone who showed you kindness, and—

At some point, the screaming stopped. A brief silence, and then, all at once, everything around them was ordinary again. The black hole that had threatened to devour everything was gone, and so was the light that had streamed across the sky.

Hayun knew it instinctively: Jieun was gone.

She hadn't even managed to say a word to her. She'd finally thought they could talk. It was over before any of that could begin.

"……"

Why? Why—why do they keep getting in the way? Was sharing a single word really such a crime?

Hayun walked slowly toward where the people had gathered. As she approached, they glanced at her and hurriedly edged aside. She followed the path they cleared to the spot where Jieun had stood only moments before.

There sat a single vehicle, hideously wrecked—so mangled it was hard to tell what it had once been.

Every eye turned to Hayun.

Why? Did she look like she wanted to say something? Did they think she was about to dash off after Jieun then and there? Or were they actually hoping Hayun would apprehend that unidentified magical girl for them?

"……Blossom."

Iris spoke up carefully. Hayun looked at her.

Iris looked bewildered. Worried, too. Her lips fluttered as if to say something, but in the end, not a single word came out.

Had she been about to say it wasn't Hayun's fault?

But it was.

She should have thought it through from the very beginning. A magical girl's job was to protect people. Instead, she had sorted humanity into a tidy binary of good and evil and settled everything with brute force. Only now, seeing Jieun caught in the middle as the victim, did she feel remorse—and it was far too late.

……Because things had already come this far.

Hayun turned her gaze back to the ruined armored vehicle and stared at it blankly for a while. Then she looked up again. This time, her eyes met those of a girl sitting on the ground in the far distance—Jihye.

"Jieun?"

The moment I staggered into the room and collapsed, Jigupa rushed over in a panic. Then he saw my bleeding left shoulder, quickly opened the first-aid kit, and pulled out a roll of bandage.

"……"

James climbed down from my shoulder and settled in beside me.

I lay down, half-falling onto the floor. Blood smeared the mat, but there was nothing to be done about it. I truly had no strength left in my body. The pain I'd forgotten in the heat of battle came flooding back, late as ever.

"I…… screwed everything up," I muttered.

I hadn't managed to swoop in behind the magical girls and pull off some dazzling rescue. I'd shown I could cooperate, in my own way, but that was all it amounted to. No one had shown me a shred of trust. I'd even gone and thrown a fit at the cops who shot me—and the armored vehicle, national property, was now beyond any hope of ever being used again.

That stretch of street probably wouldn't be drivable for a long while. I'd smashed it up badly during the fight, then torn it apart all over again when I went berserk at the end. On top of that, the black hole had hurled debris in every direction, doing far more damage than I had managed with my own two hands. Had the windows of the nearby buildings shattered too?

From today onward, the people hunting me would be far more careful. They'd confirmed how dangerous my weapon was, so they'd comb the city with even hungrier eyes. And when they found me, they'd shoot first.

"……Sorry."

I apologized without aiming it at anyone in particular. To Jigupa, who was winding bandages around my shoulder right now—I was freeloading in his home practically for free, and I'd gone and dirtied it yet again. And to James, who had drawn up the plan and built my weapon. Not that I felt purely grateful to him, but this mess was my screwup all the same.

But James didn't say a word of reproach. He simply rested a hand beneath his chin, deep in thought, and then—

"Your weapon is gone," he said.

"……What!?"

I jolted upright in alarm—and immediately lay back down. My shoulder hurt too much. The bullet hadn't gone through, but the impact had been hard enough to draw blood. My circuit was still running, but my clothes had already reverted: not the magical girl's outfit anymore, just the clothes I'd worn heading out.

Had I seriously left it behind?

"No need to worry too much. You most likely stored it in sub-space on instinct," James explained. "I confirmed you still had it in hand until the very last moment."

"……"

Right. Thorough as ever.

But I didn't want to think about that right now. Honestly, I didn't want to think at all. Everything just sucked—every last bit of the situation I was in.

I wanted to cry, truly.

And yet I had done my…… best. It might not have looked that way to anyone else, but I truly had given it everything. Even if the choices themselves might have been wrong.

"……The mood isn't quite right for this conversation. Let's pick it up another time. All things considered, today yielded more results than expected."

He'd cursed me out blue when he nearly took a bullet, and now he was acting like everything was fine?

"Want me to lay out a blanket?" Jigupa asked.

I couldn't bring myself to snap at that. I got up. My left shoulder still throbbed dully, but I couldn't crawl into bed like this. It wasn't even my blanket.

……Wait, no—it was my blanket. I'd bought it with my own part-time wages.

Still, I couldn't sleep caked in dust. Jigupa watched me stagger toward the bathroom with a trace of worry, but a thing had to be done, so I went in and washed up.

I barely managed to get clean, changed out of my clothes-turned-rags, climbed onto the floor mat, and passed out.

What woke me was a delicious smell jabbing at my nose.

"Oh, you're up."

Jigupa set down the ramyeon he'd just lifted with his chopsticks. "There's still water in the kettle. Just boil it and eat."

"……Thanks."

I felt like I was starving to death. I looked toward the window, nearly level with the floor—it was pitch black outside. Apparently I hadn't slept as long as I'd thought.

"How long was I out?" I asked, glancing around for a clock. Jigupa swallowed his mouthful and answered.

"A day and a half."

"……Huh?"

I stared at him.

"Honestly, I was starting to wonder if something was wrong. But when I shook you, you mumbled some kind of answer. So I just left you be."

"I see."

Well, it wasn't as if I could go to a hospital. No wonder I was this hungry.

I touched my left shoulder. The bandage was still wrapped around it, but it didn't hurt the way it had right after the injury. Something magical must have been at work while I slept—my body had healed, at least a little.

I refilled the kettle, and once it came to a rolling boil, poured it over a cup of ramyeon. Even the smell alone was delicious. In the end my patience crumbled; I stirred up the not-quite-cooked noodles and shoved a bite into my mouth. They were still stiff, crackling faintly between my teeth—delicious all the same.

I inhaled the entire cup like I was possessed, then polished off the cold rice Jigupa handed me, sweeping it all into my stomach without leaving a single drop of broth.

I felt a little more alive.

"Phew."

So even I couldn't defy my instincts, huh.

Jigupa, who had been watching me devour the ramyeon like a starved beast, gave a shrug. "Well, you look in one piece. That's a relief."

"……Huh?"

"It was on the news. Not live, but the aftermath of your fight made the broadcasts."

"Ah."

The small happiness of a full stomach snuffed out in an instant.

"What exactly…… did they say?"

"……Nothing good, I'm afraid."

Still, apparently deciding I was better off knowing, Jigupa pulled the article up on his smartphone and held it out to me. I took the phone without a word and read.

That was roughly the gist of it. The photos showed the armored vehicle, shattered past all recognition, and the rifle I had bent in two. There was the road too, smashed to pieces where I had hammered it down again and again in the fight.

Of course, the article wasn't trashing "magical girls" as a whole—I mean the Galaxy Federation's magical girls. The inflammatory headline was surely just bait to squeeze out a few extra clicks. What the article described was me: she fought a kaijin, ignored the police's attempt to take her into custody, and instead turned on them, crushing an armored vehicle like a threat.

"Ha."

The article's slant was so nakedly obvious it wrung a laugh out of me. So this was their declaration: they would hunt me to my dying breath, with "criminal" branded into my name. Talk about a frame job.

Well. A crime was a crime. It was true I'd refused to be taken in. I had torn through the heart of downtown Seoul, blasted aside the officers trying to stop me, and smashed cars and barricades. I'd infiltrated the Company and fled with its most vital component in hand. And when I resurfaced, I'd openly destroyed public property, threatened the police, and run.

And yet not one line about why I had done any of it. Naturally.

"Maybe I should just become a real villain," I murmured.

Should I start killing—human lives be damned? Maybe that was exactly what the Author wanted. After all, if the world I lived in had been spun off into its own series, I'd have more or less finally escaped the ranks of background characters. A righteous protagonist forced to strike down her rampaging, corrupted friend—wasn't that the very picture an author would dream of?

"……"

I tried imagining Hayun killing me. The one in agony would be Hayun, not me. I'd ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠probably be the relieved one……

Ha.

A world where I couldn't even die on my own terms. What a load of shit.

I handed the phone back to Jigupa. Whether because of what I'd just said, he was staring at me with his eyes gone wide.

"……It's not going to happen, so don't worry."

I felt wronged enough to roll on the ground screaming—and if I became a real villain now, that injustice would never be undone. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Then again, in their eyes, I supposed I was already a villain.

I thought of the magical girls charging at me at the end. At least Hayun hadn't been among them.

……Was that a mercy? Honestly, I couldn't tell.

Deep at the very bottom of my heart, something was still seething, bubbling. Even as I knew how unjust it was to be put in this situation, some part of me, at the same time…… thought maybe this was, if anything, a good thing. A thought so absurd it startled even me: now that it had come to this, I wanted to take them all on at once and crush them.

Ridiculous, I know. But wasn't it fair, though?

If this "Author" really existed—if he was the one who had dumped me into this world—then wasn't it only natural to want to shatter the story's very foundations and bring the whole thing crashing down?

"……"

And yet, at the same time, I knew I couldn't.

Hayun's face rose in my mind. She'd wear an expression of sheer anguish, fighting me. The only reason she'd been able to face me until now was the mask. If I fought with my face bared, Hayun would never be able to give me her full strength.

And a fight like that would mean nothing. The Blossom I wanted to defeat was not some weakened, wavering shadow of herself. Winning that way would mean nothing in this world.

Only by defeating Blossom at her absolute peak, with my own strength, could it truly be called a proper revenge.

……Revenge on this world—through Hayun.

"Ha, haha……"

A hollow laugh spilled out of me. Jigupa watched me with a flicker of concern.

I let out a long sigh and glanced around the room. "James is over there."

Sure enough, there was James, fast asleep. If he'd slept on the same mat as me, one careless turn in my sleep and I'd ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠have crushed him flat, so a separate bed had been made up for him. Someone had shaped a nest out of my torn old clothes and tucked a heat pack underneath. Crack one of those open and it stayed warm all day, so all things considered, it was a decent little bed.

James lay curled up on top of it. Beside him sat some half-finished mechanical contraption.

Was that another weapon for me? It seemed small, for a weapon.

I'd have to ask him when he woke up.

I went back over everything that had happened to me. It wasn't all bad, though. The world's eyes on me kept darkening, but I had gained things too.

My potential.

It only happened when I was stressed to the absolute limit, but I could conjure a black hole—one that wrecked everything around it simply by existing. A black hole in the truest sense of the word; it warped even light.

I had gone in and come out the other side, but everything else it swallowed had yet to return. Not even my own weapon.

Wouldn't I be able to pull it back out someday? Maybe there were parts inside that James could put to use.

All of it—let it become my arsenal.

Since it had come to this, I would make myself impossible to ignore. Dangerous enough that they could never again treat me like a cornered rat.

I knew the odds were hopeless. But giving up would gall me far too much.

That was why my circuit kept turning, I supposed.

Maybe that, more than anything, was the most powerful weapon I had.