Chapter 9: What Must Not Be Touched (2)
In many ways, James was a creature whose sensibilities clashed with mine—but for the time being, he was proving surprisingly useful.
For one thing, our top priority happened to be the same.
We were already hounded from every direction as it was; neither of us had the luxury of picking sides. Honestly, I was starting to think even staying put was getting dangerous. The longer we remained in one spot, the greater the odds that our location would be discovered.
When that happened, we could always smash everything and run again—but repeating that routine was a chore in its own right.
"From the few options available to us, I believe 'going on the offensive' is the only real choice."
That was James's proposal.
"Since neither side cares for us regardless, it would be best to draw the initiative in any negotiation toward ourselves. And such initiative is, as a rule, decided by 'force.'"
"I get your point, but."
Arms crossed, I looked down at James and scowled.
"You really think the two of us can pull that off?"
"I have given it some thought over our several encounters with the magical girls."
Saying this, James pressed down on the device sitting in front of him.
To my considerable disgust, it looked like an 'eyeball.' No—it didn't merely look like one; it was an eyeball, plain and simple. Presumably one of the units that had been mounted on the head of James's robot body.
When I'd seen them back then, one had been wrecked beyond use, but this one had apparently survived intact. Detached like this, with its rear housing disassembled, it at least looked mechanical enough not to be utterly revolting.
When James pressed the button, something like a projected screen bloomed across the wall of my studio apartment. Floating on it was something like a video.
I say 'something like' a video because it gave no impression of having actually been shot through a camera.
If pressed for a comparison, it was like an ultrasound—similar to those 3D fetal scans I'd once seen online: colorless, built entirely of polygons, and somehow uncanny.
Even so, each figure's surface had been smoothed cleanly enough that I could tell who was who.
Watching it, I finally understood why James had fought so hard to stay attached to me. He'd wanted to analyze situations like this. And a situation, after all, can't be perfectly reconstructed through after-the-fact analysis alone.
"With sufficient circuit energy, even this becomes possible. It remembers the flow of energy from the moment in question. Something an ordinary combatant's energy could never manage."
Perhaps that was why the recording showed nothing but what could be read as 'energy.' The magical girls, and me. A kaijin, faintly visible. And the black hole I had summoned.
"This one is from when you infiltrated the Company."
The footage from when Hayun had been clutching a man and, the instant she laid eyes on me, dropped helplessly out of the sky. The man himself never appeared, but his presence could be inferred from the movement.
"And this one is from the battle near Chungmuro Station."
James pressed the button once more, and this time the recording showed the moment I had hurled myself at the kaijin for Hayun's sake.
The pink light that had flared from Hayun's 'wand' in the moment after showed up vivid and clear. Had James hand-colored just that one element?
"Viewing the two recordings, does nothing come to mind?"
"...That I'm having some kind of influence on Hayun?"
"Precisely."
Sitting flat on the floor with his arms folded, James went on.
"It appears you are not merely a friendly presence to Blossom. It seems I somewhat underestimated you."
...
Somehow, the assessment rubbed me the wrong way.
I knew perfectly well—and felt perfectly well—that Hayun and I were close. I just didn't need James grading it.
"She is unmistakably being influenced by you. And that influence is an emotional one. Considering the circuit on her wrist, she is projecting 'hope' toward you."
I stared at James in silence.
"Isn't it fascinating? That Blossom—looking at you—both loses hope and finds it. I had assumed a magical girl of her caliber would seek hope in something like 'justice.'"
Truthfully, I'd thought the same.
I'd assumed that for Hayun, hope would come from something more like justice, or the building of a beautiful world.
Because that was how it went in the webtoon.
The webtoon was, at its core, a story devoted to twisting magical girl clichés—but that never meant the protagonist wasn't good.
Every magical girl had her own practical worries, and most of them put self-interest ahead of justice. Hayun alone had been different.
Hope.
In the comic, Hayun was hope itself. The sort of girl who believed that even if she could never be a perfectly righteous person, fighting on for what she believed in would bring her closer to that hope, little by little, without end.
...Of course, in the original, it never occurred to her that the combatants she'd been beating might be ordinary citizens. There was never so much as a scene where a magical girl became aware of it.
Scenes of the combatants chatting among themselves only ever surfaced in the gag panels, a step removed from the main story.
Combatants committing assorted misdeeds while swapping small talk—whose kid was turning how many this year, who was getting married next month—only to be swept away squealing by a magical girl's attack. Then recovering, every single time, to show up in yet another battle and get pounded into paste all over again. Settings that had begun as pure comedy.
Once serialization proper began, those bits were played up so heavily that a meme took hold of magical girls as the real villains, and whether the author became conscious of it or not, the story started flowing far too seriously—until most of that early 'ironic humor' had quietly drained away.
"So I have decided to revise my thinking somewhat. I ask that you focus on Blossom."
"Focus on Hayun?"
"Quite literally. Be good to her each time a battle breaks out."
James looked up at me as he said it.
"Handled well, it could induce a schism among the magical girls."
...
I frowned and held my silence, but James, pretending not to see my expression, carried on.
"With truly good fortune, every last magical girl might turn her back on the Galaxy Federation. Blossom is that central a figure among them."
And it wasn't merely that she was friendly with all of them—Blossom's 'energy' reached into the other magical girls' circuits as well.
James pressed the button again, and this time the image shifted as though shot by a thermal camera.
"A measurement of each circuit's energy volume and range."
My circuit read as a deep blue, as if dropped below freezing. Truthfully, it was a color closer to black. That darkness churned around the black hole I had conjured—and around the spot where I stood.
Hope-driven energy, by contrast, seemed to occupy the 'high heat' end of the thermal spectrum.
The heart of the red blazed so bright it was nearly white.
Hayun—that is, Blossom—burned almost white, and the energy of the magical girls around her linked faintly to one another, as though receiving it.
Hayun was, quite literally, the 'center.' In position, and in energy.
"If one knows the center of this energy, it should be possible to make every magical girl defect."
"...So? What are we supposed to do once they defect?"
"What else would we do?"
James bared his teeth as he spoke.
"We reduce the whole thing to rubble. Sitting quietly only ends with us ruined, does it not? If we show them that we will not sit still when someone provokes us, they will no longer be able to treat us however they please. And if possible, a... close cooperative relationship with the magical girls would not be unwelcome either."
"You make it sound so easy."
"Easy or not, do you see another way? With my plans and your thinking both in disarray, I can conceive of nothing else. Can you?"
Infuriatingly, he had a point.
...
But I didn't want to just say so.
So I elected to keep my mouth shut.
As if he'd expected exactly that, James raised both hands a little, then turned away.
There, sure enough, lay what remained of the human-shaped body James used to pilot.
Only about a quarter of it was left now, and even that was mostly 'frame.'
And from among those remains, he had apparently scraped together every piece of advanced technology into something new.
A 'drone' just the right size for a hamster to ride around in.
A cockpit, fine—I could grant that; there must have been something similar inside the robot. But I had no idea how he'd built the rest of the drone.
Come to that, it didn't seem to have any of the propellers drones usually came with.
"It flies on mana. Much the same principle as the hammer you wield as a weapon. ...Though that 'principle' has been severely distorted by your brutish methods."
...
Apparently the man couldn't get through a single sentence without grinding on my nerves.
"With this, I can shadow you even while somewhat defying aerodynamics. Thanks to my ancestors of several thousand years past, I can cling to your shoulder with miraculous success—but I will confess, the last battle left me feeling a slight threat to my life."
"Fair enough."
I couldn't exactly argue with that one.
Most likely, James trailed me out of sheer paranoia. Analyzing battles to engineer a more favorable position was surely part of it—but the real reason was probably that if he strayed from my side and ended up alone, the odds of him landing in serious danger were high.
Squeakarians were brilliant, but their bodies were dreadfully frail.
"You need not worry about me flying about. I have installed every function that could be installed. So long as it stays near you and draws on your mana alone, it will evade bullets on its own. With sufficient energy, it could manage considerably more than that."
Had he modeled it on the magical girls' circuits?
I gave James a shrug.
I had no intention of admitting it to his face, but honestly, I felt a little relieved.
I didn't want to end up alone on a battlefield.
Even just having someone around to trade insults with meant that, at the very least, I wouldn't be lonely.
Hayun's parents had told her they could arrange a car for her commute, if she needed one.
Of course, that hadn't meant they would drive her themselves. Her parents didn't have time to spare for things like that.
The Galaxy Federation counted countless nations across countless planets among its members. Each planet kept a different standard for the length of a day, and every nation on those planets kept its own hours.
Running time-difference calculations far more tangled than any multinational corporation's world clock, at all hours, was exhausting work.
And the Federation officials arriving on Earth, naturally, observed no day or night. They generally deferred to local time, but to make a good impression, it was better for Earth's side to accommodate them first.
And so Hayun almost always woke at home, alone.
There was a housekeeper. There was a driver, technically.
...
She set her own bowl on the table and poured in the cereal. Added just enough milk, and crunched her way through it.
Right. Those people did work there. But for some reason, Hayun didn't want their help.
She'd had a vague notion since childhood: this must be how Jieun lives.
If Jieun ever heard that, she might snort. She might not even settle for cereal in the mornings.
But still, watching Jieun made her want to become that. Jieun had always seemed like a girl who never cowered, who handled everything on her own.
She had loved walking together every morning. Riding the bus shoulder to shoulder, too.
So today, again, Hayun took the bus instead of the car.
If she rode it enough times, surely one day Jieun would simply be standing there beside her.
Maybe it would turn out that everything until now had been one long nightmare, and when Hayun told her so, Jieun would laugh and ask what nonsense she was talking. She let herself imagine that, too.
But time flowed on, indifferent.
The bitter winter passed, and spring was coming.
Jieun never came back.
"Hi, Hayun."
And in that space, children Hayun barely knew had taken root.
She had never thought she disliked them. But she had never thought she liked them, either.
Children who had never once shown themselves while Jieun was around now appeared in a competitive scramble, as though they'd only been waiting for her to vanish so they could stake their claim on the spot.
"...Hi."
She forced a smile as she greeted them.
Blossom—who had beaten countless people, ordinary people, into hospital beds—couldn't manage a single flicker of irritation at her own classmates' chatter.
Jieun had gone down under those fists more times than she could count.
To the chattering beside her, she offered hollow agreement. Most of it was dull talk about things Hayun knew nothing about.
Their father this. Their mother that. Why were they all so devoted to talking about their parents?
And sure enough, by the end of every one of those stories, those 'parents' turned out to cross paths with Hayun's own.
...
She was trying, at least, to change how she thought.
She knew perfectly well how appallingly shallow it was—reasoning this way only because Jieun had been mixed up among people she'd written off as evil.
But she knew now, and so—
She knew that the people there had simply never had much choice, that in the end they had been doing 'legal work.' So she tried to change.
After her talk with Jihye, she only felt more confused.
If the corporation was evil, then the money it produced had to be money born of evil deeds.
So when good was done with that money, how was she supposed to take it?
If it had been laundering, the story might be different—but the money Jieun earned had gone, never siphoned off anywhere else, purely into the orphanage's operating costs.
Thanks to that money, no child ever had to wear hand-me-downs, no meal ever came up short, and there were snacks to spare.
Whenever part of the building broke, it was repaired properly, so the orphanage children lived in the best circumstances that environment could offer.
However much money the government provided, there were always corners that had to be cut. Noir Corporation's funding meant not one of those corners was ever cut.
To deny all of that would be to declare every corporate donation in the world worthless.
It would render meaningless every one of Jieun's actions—the girl who took no real pay for those donations, and who had been beaten bloody by Hayun's own hands.
Jihye resented Hayun.
Knowing all of that and still not resenting her was probably impossible.
...
Until now, she had fled, again and again.
In truth, maybe she was fleeing even at this very moment.
If she hadn't been this close to Jieun, would finding out that Jieun had been among the combatants ever have led her to think any of this?
No. Without Jieun, she likely never would have become aware of it at all.
She hadn't even been able to contemplate looking into that side of things.
Because the moment she started digging, everything she had refused to think about would come pouring out.
"...Hayun."
"Hm?"
"We have to get off here."
Lost in her thoughts, Hayun nearly missed her stop.
Only after stepping off did she realize that the person who'd spoken to her was Iris—Jua.
"Jua."
"..."
Jua opened her mouth as though she meant to say something to Hayun.
"If you keep standing there like that, you'll be late."
And that was what she said.
But the pause before she spoke made it plain that the words she'd wanted to say were something else entirely.
Hayun nodded and walked after her.
It was only after they passed the school gates that she realized she hadn't greeted Jua.
And that it was the first time she'd ever seen Jua riding the bus to school.
But before she could ask about any of it, Jua had already disappeared into her own classroom.
At lunch, as always, the kids came up to chat with Hayun.
She didn't much care for it.
Because no matter how sweetly they acted, most of the children who talked to her were the same ones who had given testimony against Jieun.
They seemed convinced that the magical girls were utterly hostile to Jieun.
It couldn't be helped.
The truth—that she was a fake terrorist—was not something that could be made public.
This was simply what happened when people blindly trusted the little information they were given.
She was half-listening to their stories, offering vague agreement, when—
"Isn't she just shameless, though?"
At that voice, Hayun's chopsticks stopped midair.
She lifted her gaze and met the eyes of the girl who'd said it.
The girl misread her expression completely.
"I always knew she was that kind of person."
"That kind of person?"
At Hayun's even tone, the girl lit up with excitement.
Perhaps because of the past month and change—Hayun forcing smiles and playing along with their trivial chatter—the kids seemed convinced she had crossed over to their side completely.
"I mean, every time you tried to make a friend, she'd come popping out of nowhere and get in the way. Wasn't that suffocating? I'm sure she did it because she thought it worked out in her favor."
Hayun considered for a moment, then let the corner of her mouth curl up slightly.
She certainly wasn't agreeing.
She only wanted to hear this girl out to the very end.
Why. Why had she thought that way?
Thinking about it now, it was strange. She had known Jieun had no interest in making friends—but how on earth could these kids, after Jieun disappeared, all parrot the exact same words?
"We gave her the hint that many times."
"Right, right."
A few of the kids, completely oblivious, nodded along in agreement.
And a few went pale.
As for Hayun—
Her forced smile simply froze in place.
"You... gave her the hint."
Only after Hayun said that did they seem to realize what mistake they'd made.
"Tell me more about that, won't you?"
Paying their reactions no mind, Hayun asked.