Chapter 10. What I Can Do (3)

After a good week of hard work tidying the place up, it had become somewhere a person could actually live.

Not that it was anything more ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠than meeting the bare "minimum," and it was absolutely not somewhere I could stay long-term.

I tore out every last strip of the moldy wallpaper. The old wall beneath — cement or concrete, I couldn't tell — seemed to have something mold-like on it too, but far less than the wallpaper had.

Thanks to having swept up every last scrap of the wreckage of the robot James had been piloting into sub-space, I was able to put to use the lantern and flashlight I'd bought ahead of time before leaving Pangpang's place, along with a set of wired earphones and a cheap speaker.

I'd even built a radio for listening to the news.

Gas was another matter entirely, so I'd decided to use the old agungi firebox attached to the house. There would be smoke, but that couldn't be helped. All I could do was keep it down to the bare minimum.

Then again, we were deep enough in the mountains that I doubted anyone would notice — who would even bother checking, all the way out here? And James had said he'd see what he could do about that problem anyway.

Good grief. An agungi. Still, thanks to it, the floor stayed warm even without a boiler. If I could keep the inside of the house reasonably warm and dry, I could hold the damp at bay at least a little.

Making the remaining spam last, I turned an ear to the radio James had built me.

Fled overseas, huh.

Well, I'd had the same thought myself. Hiding in some corner of the peninsula was one thing, but the middle of the Amazon, or the vast frozen wastes of Siberia, would be far harder to search.

But that came with its own problems. If the circuit ever broke down beyond repair, or if my emotions settled so thoroughly that the circuit stopped responding to them, I'd be trapped in that wilderness with no way out.

My ultimate goal was to find an ordinary life, not to sever myself from society forever. If that was what I'd wanted, I would have simply walked up to the police at the very start and confessed to a crime they hadn't even arrested me for.

The radio kept right on discussing how they might go about catching me. Deciding there was nothing more worth hearing, I switched it off.

There was no need to worry about batteries. I'd built everything to run off the circuit.

"Should I have grabbed the armor parts those kaijin were wearing, back then?"

"We can consider it next time," James said.

"You think we'll be running into more of those things?"

"I'd call the possibility more than sufficient. Being able to produce that many in the first place means they can produce that many again."

I fell silent for a moment.

"Those kaijin... did the Company make them itself? Do you know something I don't?"

"I don't. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Noir Corporation is an enormous company. The 'Current Chairman' kept a research laboratory under his personal direction, so it would hardly be strange if they'd been produced with company funds."

I didn't answer.

James didn't volunteer anything further either.

The kaijin... in the webtoon, they had appeared as though arising naturally.

That probably wasn't entirely wrong. In all likelihood, most of them really were like that.

But what if someone had uncovered the conditions behind monsterization? What if monsterization could be induced ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠artificially?

Every alien that had become a kaijin had been an ordinary person once. Perhaps an unlucky tourist who ran into trouble on Earth, or perhaps someone who had come here to work and earn a living.

Once something became a kaijin, incapacitating it was unavoidable. If the creature it had been got hurt in the process, that too couldn't be helped.

But if there were people out there manufacturing those kaijin—

And if the place I had worked for was an organization that made them—

Then had I chosen my employer far, far too carelessly?

"...I'm turning in."

I said it while stuffing the tin cans into a plastic bag and cinching it tight.

"An excellent decision. Staying up late never made a situation visibly better."

Honestly, the man simply did not know how to put things nicely.

Tossing the plastic bag carelessly into a corner of the room, I crawled into my one-person tent.

The tent was cramped — just big enough that one more person of my build could have squeezed in, barely. Even so, the ceiling of that narrow tent didn't press down on me the way the room's ceiling had, and I felt just the smallest bit cozy.

Maybe tomorrow I'd try planting a few seeds in the garden.

With that thought, I closed my eyes.

I had no memory of setting any alarm.

I fumbled around until I finally got a hand on the thing shrieking loud enough to scare me half to death. Eyes barely open, I managed to make out what it was.

The pager.

I hit the button to kill the noise and sat up. My heart was pounding hard.

Had Hayun called for me? Or had a magical girl dispatch gone out? Either way, it boded nothing good for Hayun.

The circuits had been confiscated — that was what I'd heard.

I got to my feet.

"James."

"Already aware."

James was already astride the drone. Radio chatter drifted up from its open top.

"Right. Let's go. Can you pull the location off the pager?"

"Yes."

I looked down at the pager. The location glowed on the little screen James had rigged up. It was a place I knew — though I'd only ever been there once.

Kaijin appeared most frequently in Seoul, and most of the rest turned up in the capital region. Tourism, they said — but the places aliens could move about freely in this country were actually quite limited. The government wasn't exactly thrilled about illegal overstayers multiplying, after all. Beyond that, the places kaijin tended to appear were the usual crowd-magnets, your big metropolitan cities.

Was that, too, part of the Company's story?

I closed my eyes.

When I opened my eyes again, a scene of painful familiarity spread out before me.

A giant kaijin on the rampage — and a cordon of police surrounding it, floundering helplessly against that single creature. The magical girls had yet to arrive.

The moment I appeared, every gaze swung my way. The police all lifted their heads to look at me, hanging in the air. At some point, the hammer had found its way into my hand.

I stretched out one arm, and the black substance welling up from the circuit poured over my body. These days, even as it sealed my sight, my mouth, my nose, I felt nothing in particular. It wasn't a pleasant sensation, but it seemed I had already adapted to it, whether I liked it or not.

Even the lovingly drawn transformation scenes in manga tend to get quietly skipped somewhere past the midpoint, replaced with a quick flash of light — maybe it was a feeling like that.

My vision cleared. Fortunately, the kaijin didn't appear to be a flyer; even watching me transform, it held its attack.

"Truly impressive. Had it thrown something at you just then, you would have taken the hit mid-performance."

This man simply could not resist adding one more jab.

Then again, if the day ever came when he complimented me in earnest, that would be a day something was very seriously wrong with the world, so I suppose it hardly mattered.

"Cut me some slack — I came straight here from bed. I'm allowed to get the order of things mixed up once in a while."

I said it as I descended.

"Uuooooh...?"

The kaijin did not attack on sight.

Looking at it, I thought: what an absurd-looking creature.

Among aliens, some — like Pangpang — merely had a different skin color; some resembled animals; and some were composed of material that, by human standards, bordered on the inanimate. The inanimate sort don't even register as living things at a glance, so you rarely find them repulsive; but with the ones resembling some nonhuman creature, you sometimes catch yourself entertaining the rude little thought, how did anything end up shaped like that?

Because... its face looked rather like a crab.

If it had been a person with a crab perched where the head should be, I'd have simply called it comical. But the crab's "body" portion looked exactly like a squishy, boneless mollusk. It technically had the shape of a crab, yes, but it looked like an alien organism in the middle of a clumsy crab impression — there were even half-hearted organs visible inside.

Well. It was an alien lifeform, technically.

I was still wondering why that thing qualified as a kaijin when—

Pss.

The sound came from the kaijin's head. The amorphous part of it shuddered, briefly. Then I saw the "spit" flying at me — an attack that seemed to fuse the two images that word calls to mind: a needle, and a wad of saliva.

I slipped sideways, and felt a faint heat brush past my face.

Thwack!

"Gwaah!?"

I heard a policeman shriek — he'd taken the spit meant for me. I glanced back; the shield he held was melting. Every part of it, metal and plastic alike.

...Since when does acid eat through plastic?

"It would appear to be acid combined with intense heat. That facial region is likely kept at a temperature its own body could never withstand."

"That's a genuinely nasty combination."

I frowned, studying the kaijin. Now that I looked properly, the inside of that amorphous, transparent shell was churning and boiling. The crab's "eyes" were stretched drum-tight, ready to burst at any moment. I'd seen a TV program once about the parasites that live in snail eyestalks — swollen to almost exactly that degree, minus only the brilliantly colored parasite body writhing within.

It looked like it was in agony.

A glance around turned up wires that had already melted clean through. There were lumps like the lead shot it had spat at me scattered nearby, but most of those had melted too.

Which meant this kaijin was nothing like the non-combat types I'd met until now.

How was I supposed to handle this?

Frankly? A terrible matchup for me.

"Will the hammer hold up?"

"It will, provided you do not bury it inside the creature's body. I anticipated this much. You should, however, be prepared for some functions to fail. I recommend against using the main propulsion system."

Figured. Engaging the propulsion system meant the hammer split half open.

I reversed my grip, head facing backward. The auxiliary thrusters worked without opening it.

The kaijin held still through all of it. Apparently not the violently rampaging type. Had it attacked at the start because I'd stepped into its territory?

...Was even framing it that way a form of discrimination? Whatever its reason had evaporated, that thing was still, technically, an alien.

It hardly mattered. I was not on the side of justice. And I wasn't even here to defeat the kaijin, not really — I was here to make the bastards who'd screwed me over regret it.

There was still no sign of the magical girls. It would take them time to have their circuits reissued and get here.

I wanted to watch them admit, publicly, that they had dug their own graves. Of course, the top brass of outfits like that are all hopelessly hard-headed, so it would take time.

In the meantime, I'd smash their facilities bit by bit — and, if I could manage it, find out where the chairman of Noir was hiding.

I had to be capable. Elusive, and strong — enough that they would bitterly regret the way they had treated me.

"All right."

I told myself that, and ran — a clockwise orbit around the kaijin.

It swung toward me and spat, but couldn't land a hit. My physical abilities were, at least for now, at a level where I could go toe-to-toe with every magical girl at once. A kaijin that wasn't even a combat type wasn't going to track me that fast. Swinging its whole body around takes time, after all.

I ran flat out, and when I leapt, I leapt on the diagonal. Its eyes followed me — a beat behind.

He did say not to drive it straight into the head, didn't he. Fine — short strikes, then. Not the head; the shoulders, the arms. Whatever this thing looked like, break all four limbs and it goes down—

Pss.

But I had to revise that plan almost immediately.

"Eek!?"

The spit came spraying at me like a garden hose, and I wrenched my body aside in a panic. My airborne frame twisted, lost its balance, and dropped. My feet barely found the ground. I steadied myself without falling — and another jet came screaming in, aimed dead at me.

Reflexively, I swung the hammer and batted it away—

—and a hissing patch of corrosion bloomed across the hammer's surface.

So magic alone couldn't fully stop this stuff.

I bounded backward and put distance between us.

Now what?

I'd come charging in all high and mighty, but now that I knew what I was dealing with, working out an approach was going to take a minute.

...The magical girls probably would have taken it down without much trouble. When the enemy fights at range, you simply answer at range—

"Hold on."

I turned to stare at the drone bobbing lazily beside me — a reasonably sleek piece of design, all things considered.

"Wh-why are you looking at me like that?"

Sensing something ominous in my gaze, James asked, flustered.

Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. It's just that if I win, you live too. So how about we both try a little cooperation, hm?

When I flashed a grin, the drone began to tremble.

"I'm sorry — what did you just say?"

Hayun asked again, her voice edged with bewilderment.

She was not the only one in the room. Every magical girl who usually fought beside her was there as well, their expressions running the whole gamut — with one thing in common. Not one of them wore anything resembling a positive expression.

"That we... don't need to go?"

"That is not what I said," the government official replied stiffly. "Merely that it would be advisable to deploy at a somewhat more opportune moment."

"And what, precisely, would make the timing opportune?"

Hayun's brow furrowed.

"...Last time, you deployed when the outcome was all but certain. This time—"

"You're instructing us to go later, then."

Jua cut in from the side, her tone dripping with disbelief.

...

But losing her temper here would only deepen the official's misery. This man hadn't even been the one originally assigned to this kind of work. To put it more precisely, this kind of work had never existed in the first place. The post had been conjured into being by force, after the Federation confiscated the circuits.

The Federation warehouses the confiscated circuits and reissues them to the magical girls at the moment of need, helping operations along a little more smoothly. And to ensure the magical girls had no real recourse against that arrangement, they had stationed the single lowest-ranking official at the front of it all.

The people actually responsible sit too high up for anyone's voice to reach. Raging at the official here just sent accountability spinning in circles, never once producing a straight answer.

"Our assessment concludes that the Black Magical Girl cannot handle a kaijin alone. So if you would all simply wait a little longer—"

"So we're to stand by while you capture both the kaijin and the Black Magical Girl."

Hayun cut him off mid-sentence. Her expression was, if anything, far calmer than a moment before — the look of someone whose feelings had surged past some threshold and left her with no idea how to vent them at all.

"And what happens if we refuse to move?"

"If the target has been sufficiently weakened, our side may conceivably manage an apprehension. And even should the attempt fail... she will simply be more cautious next time."

"Meaning you're hoping she gets frightened enough that the next time a kaijin appears, she never comes to help anyone again."

...

Naturally, the official had no authority to answer a question like that. Or perhaps he was simply nudging the responsibility for it up onto the people above him.

"Ha."

Rose, who had been listening in silence, let out a short, incredulous laugh. Every eye in the room turned to her.

"Fine. Let's just wait and see whether things go the way you're expecting."

With that, she trudged over and dropped heavily into an empty chair. Watching Rose cross her legs and square her shoulders, Hayun went and sat down as well. After her, Iris, Dahlia, and Delphinium all did the same.

At the sight of it, the official actually seemed relieved. He exhaled quietly and returned to his duties.

The magical girls said nothing.

Slowly, Hayun felt the worry climbing back up into her chest. Would Jieun hold on until they could get there? Even going unarmed wouldn't help — she would only be in the way. An Earthling without a circuit couldn't use magic at all.

And so, for now, all she could do was wait, and fret.

Cherry, who had come along this far, settled into the seat beside Hayun and looked up at her with anxious eyes.

"Squeak!?"

I noticed it every time I gave James a hard time: whatever couldn't be rendered into an Earth language simply came out as that sound. It didn't seem like a simple scream — probably some spectacularly filthy profanity, the kind his translator couldn't process. Was the thing not a deep-learning translator? Well. A question for another day.

I seized James's drone and hurled it with everything I had, and the kaijin's head swung naturally after it.

Pss, pss.

It spat at high speed, but James — who appeared to harbor no particular desire to die — threw everything into dodging. And while he was at it, he seared the kaijin with the drone's laser. Fair enough, really: the kaijin, seemingly irritated, had begun moving aggressively toward James's side of the field.

"Nice, James! Keep sweeping across that diagonal as long as you can!"

"The second this battle ends, I am going to kill youuuuuu!"

He seemed to have forgotten whose energy was powering that drone. If he wanted a fight, he'd get one — I had a generator to spare on this side.

Crude as his language was, James knew the difference between what had to be done and what mustn't be. Circling and gliding at the very ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠edge of the spit's range, he pinned the kaijin's gaze squarely on himself.

Good.

I bent down and scooped up a few half-melted wires, then crushed them in my grip. Thick steel wire kneads into a ball without much trouble. I flicked the sphere up into the air—

Clang!

—and drove it home with the hammer. Gripping the hammer short like a baseball bat, I sent the steel ball flying.

Shweee!

So that's what it sounds like when a bullet passes close by your ear. The makeshift shell tore through the air like genuine artillery, skimmed past the drone, and slammed into the ground right at the kaijin's feet.

BOOM!

The steel ball — which had contained no explosive whatsoever — detonated. Probably because it had gone soft and malleable after catching the flame of the propellant my hammer vented. Or possibly my common sense had been annihilated yet again, and something faintly fantastical had simply occurred.

Eh. Either way, who's complaining?

The kaijin stared at me with one foot raised, its face frozen in something like alarm. James — who had come within a hair of being flattened into ham by that flying ball of steel — looked my way as well. I could feel him cursing me out even though all I'd done was glance at the drone. Fascinating, really.

Hm.

I bent down again and picked up another length of wire.

Well then. Shall we move straight on to the next pitch?

I flashed a grin at the kaijin — and watched it scramble into sudden, frantic motion.

That's right. Now that the fight's actually started, just standing there would be a bit rude of you, wouldn't it? If I'm going to come zipping around, the least you can do is show some effort too.

Don't go pissing people off.