Chapter 12. The Demands (3)
Well, fine.
I'd worry about robbing the convenience store later. First things first — deal with what was right in front of me.
Fortunately, no other humans tried to attack us today. With the 'robot' the Company had sent, the kaijin, and the magical girls all tangled up together, anyone who waded in would only make the mess worse. Or maybe, just maybe, orders had already come down telling them not to attack us directly.
The footage I'd aired on the broadcast had included clips of police officers firing at me while I was helping people. Public opinion hadn't swung entirely to my side, but thanks to that footage, it had at least fractured enough to matter. People still couldn't quite decide whether I was a terrorist or not — especially now that even the magical girls were standing with me.
In a situation like that, the best way to reassure the public was to show them everything was firmly under control. And to flip public opinion, what they needed most was to show that we were the ones threatening that safety, that stability.
So what did we have to do, given that situation?
Simple.
Show them that, in truth, the other side had no control at all.
Again and again. And again.
I cranked the hammer's output to maximum and ran, driving it forward with all its thrust behind me.
The hammer swung with a sound of cleaving wind. The roar of air burning up behind it was threatening enough that even I, the one swinging it, found it dangerous to hear.
"Kuuurgh!"
Apparently annoyed that I kept getting in its way, the white robot swung an arm at me.
Clang!
Metal struck metal.
"Oh."
A very small sound of admiration escaped me.
Last time, the robots had shed parts with almost every blow I landed. Strike a fingertip or a toe, and it would crumple along with whatever was inside; armor would peel away to expose the workings beneath. Perhaps because they wanted to prove that what they were fielding wasn't a kaijin, the armor this time was far more heavily reinforced.
Hmm.
Didn't that mean it needed more energy to move properly, though?
How exactly were they planning to control it without me?
Well — of course, if they deployed an enormous number of combatants, extracting energy wouldn't be strictly impossible. Maybe that was precisely what they were counting on.
If I dropped out of this situation, the ones in trouble would be the Company and the government. Were they hoping I'd notice that and gracefully step aside?
The kaijin they could catch the old-fashioned way, one way or another, and then advertise to the world: we caught it.
Adjusting the angle of the hammer's head, I doggedly went after the monster's arm.
Bam! Bam!
Every time my hammer came at it, the robot knocked the head head-on and sent it flying back. The 'energy' was definitely being transmitted — it could push my hammer away — but unfortunately for my opponent, rocket-like propulsion kept firing from behind that hammer.
Knocked back or not, the thrust shoved it forward again. Naturally, the impact never reached me, the one gripping the handle — so the longer this dragged on, the worse it got for my opponent alone.
"Kuurgh!"
The robot seemed to catch on too, because at the last moment it stopped parrying and threw itself backward instead. It retreated a good distance in one leap, driving the claws of both feet into the ground to brake its momentum. Some of those alloy claws were already shattered outright. So my blows hadn't been entirely for nothing after all.
Bam!
Robbed of its target, my hammer buried itself in the ground.
Not a problem. All I had to do was change the head's angle before the thing got up and lunged—
But before I could even pivot out of the way on the hammer's thrust, someone was standing in my path.
No — there were two of them.
Rose and Hayun.
Rose, gauntlets on both hands, settled into a defensive stance. And beside her, standing shoulder to shoulder, Hayun with her blade leveled at the enemy.
"……"
While the robot faltered at the sight of the two of them, I picked myself up off the ground and readied my stance.
Then came that air-splitting sound again.
This time, from my left.
Perhaps because it had watched me take on the robot? The kaijin seemed to have judged me the more threatening presence.
Not out of any sense of alliance — simply because eliminating the stronger, more dangerous one first and then subduing the exhausted one afterward was by far the better bargain. Even with its mind half-gone, it appeared capable of that much instinctive arithmetic.
But this time too, before I could even turn my head—
Papapak!
A rather peculiar sound rang out.
Lots of small, hard things — none of them large, but striking with tremendous force.
"Got it!"
At the shout, I glanced sideways and saw Dahlia unleashing magic like a shotgun blast. Unlike before, when she'd hurled one massive pellet after another at high speed, this time she had spread a wide fan of small ones.
And I didn't need to ponder long over where that idea had come from.
Click.
A sound like a mechanism being worked, and something dropping to the ground.
Fuses.
In Iris's hands was a gun even shorter than the one I usually saw her carry. It looked like a shotgun, but its shape hadn't changed — she'd simply cut away the front of her usual rifle, so at a glance it seemed like nothing more than a sawed-off version.
Or maybe it genuinely was one. If it could be adjusted to suit the moment and the situation, there was nothing strange about that at all.
Iris pulled the trigger once more at the kaijin that had frozen for a split second. Its body flew backward, and small, marble-like lumps of mana slammed into it and the ground all around.
Click.
She worked the bolt back, and another fuse dropped out.
Had she brainstormed new applications after our fight?
And before the kaijin could rise, a thin wall surged up around us.
A dome, translucent enough to show what lay beyond it — but not merely transparent. It warped the outside so thoroughly that you couldn't make out what was actually there.
I looked back to find Delphinium swinging her wand, eyes closed. Like an orchestra conductor, her wand hand moved in soft, flowing strokes, as if painting the air; in her other hand she held a thick book, open.
The kaijin sprang up at once and tried to run — and flinched back, badly startled, the instant it touched the wall.
A wall that dealt damage to enemies simply by contact.
Of course, against a magical girl it wouldn't amount to much. Even a kaijin could probably smash through it if it set its mind to it.
But to the kaijin, a magical girl was a foe it had never faced before. It had no idea what that wall was. It didn't have the spare capacity to think it through in any detail in the first place.
Above all, most kaijin behaved as though the concept of retreat simply didn't exist for them.
The kaijin's bearing changed. It twisted away from Iris and Dahlia, toward Delphinium behind them, and dropped into a crouch.
Dahlia and Iris fired at it simultaneously, but as if it had predicted their firing arcs, the kaijin writhed its body this way and that, running in a zigzag and eerily slipping between the shots.
Neither of them had Rose's or Hayun's physical gifts. If the target moved faster than that, their aim, their trigger speed, the speed at which they could fling magic — all of it inevitably turned shaky.
A few of those small pellets did seem to strike home, but smaller rounds meant less power, apparently — they didn't carry enough force to stop the kaijin outright.
Delphinium had less stamina than either of them. Her reflexes, too. And right now her eyes were shut, her whole focus poured into her spell.
...A sight I couldn't even have imagined back when I fought alone.
That composure was something you could only wear because you trusted the ones fighting beside you. Nothing like me, fighting alone.
It wasn't a pleasant thing to admit, but right now I was fighting inside that circle too. We hadn't fully settled things between us. We hadn't reconciled, or anything of the sort.
If I had to put a name to it, it was much like where things stood between me and James. We were joining hands and fighting only because, for the moment, there was no other way.
Still, well — that was why, for now, there was nothing to be done about it.
I swung the hammer around.
...Nothing to be done. Which was exactly why I could fight.
I ran with everything I had.
Charging toward the direction the kaijin was coming from, I swung the hammer with all my strength just before it could reach me.
I don't overestimate my own abilities. If it could dodge the bullets Iris and Dahlia fired, then of course it could dodge the speed of my hammer swing too.
But I was still, technically, a magical girl.
I couldn't conjure things with my magic, or grow plants, or do any of that hopeful business.
But I did know that I could produce a black hole whenever I needed one. And that black substance that wrapped around my body every time I transformed.
Not that I was about to open a black hole here — but wasn't this the perfect situation for that slimy, clinging stuff?
I swung the hammer sideways.
At the same instant, I cut the output. And I focused, straining to recall that sensation from when I transformed.
It wasn't as hard as I'd expected. Much like how, at some point, I'd simply learned to float in the air.
It was a very different shape from firing mana pellets like Dahlia or Delphinium, or conjuring a blade like Hayun — but from the half-open rear of my hammer, the place where the thrust would normally blast out, black matter came pouring forth in a rush. As if all the mana the generator couldn't vent were being converted to energy and released at once.
"Kyaa!?"
At the sight of that tar-like substance, Dahlia shrieked in horror. Iris shot up into the sky with some urgency.
With Delphinium at my back, I poured the substance out in front of me like spreading a coat of paint.
The kaijin, charging straight at me, stepped in it.
"!?"
Squelch.
And the kaijin's foot stuck.
At first, it didn't stop the kaijin. Its feet, carrying that much speed, must have carried that much more energy too — for the first few steps, the black clumps clinging to them tore away helplessly.
But with every stride, as the sticky substance drained its energy, the feet slowed — and the stuff got more and more chances to take hold.
Shlorp. Shlorp.
In the end, the kaijin's feet could no longer pull free right away.
Just once. A single stumble would be enough. After that, the black mana had seized its shins and thighs, its belly and shoulders.
Click.
I closed the rear of the hammer.
Then, hammer in one hand, I walked slowly toward the fallen kaijin.
"……!?"
Seeing me draw near, the kaijin lifted its broad face to look at me.
A grotesque visage — and yet I felt a flicker of pity too. This person hadn't become this way by choice, either.
The mana couldn't hold my feet. It was the same substance that wrapped around my body every time I transformed.
I couldn't know how deeply it permeated the rest of me, but at the very least, my clothes were certainly made of this stuff.
I raised the hammer and struck the kaijin's head with the butt of the handle. I held back my strength. It would be a problem if it died.
The kaijin went limp against the ground.
"……"
Kind of anticlimactic.
If I'd tried to take it down alone, I'd have suffered through a long, ugly fight. So all it took was someone to steer the kaijin's direction, huh.
"Kuuurgh!"
Over there, the kaijin that looked no different from a robot on the outside roared.
Rose and Hayun... weren't exactly struggling.
Swish.
Hayun's magic was strong. The armor the kaijin wore seemed to carry some kind of coating, letting it ward off a fair amount of mana — but that didn't mean her blows did nothing. Judged by mass alone, her blade might actually outperform the hammer I was carrying.
The same went for Rose's fists, mana wreathing her gauntlets as she swung — she was clearly landing solid hits.
But not enough to put the thing down right away.
I watched for a moment, then turned to Delphinium.
"I'd like you to turn this spell off, actually."
"Hm?"
At my words, Delphinium opened her eyes, a little flustered. She seemed more surprised that I'd spoken to her first than by the request itself.
"I've caught the one running all over the place. Bombarding that one over there would do more good now."
"Uh... right."
Of course, she'd fought kaijin far more often than I had, so she hardly needed my advice.
But there was something else I wanted to try.
Iris had reattached the barrel to the front of her rifle. Detachable after all, then.
Dahlia had turned her wand toward the robot and begun casting. Not that she was chanting incantations aloud.
The wall that had been screening our surroundings slowly dissolved.
Hammer in hand, I approached the kaijin wearing the robot's shape, slowly.
Looking the kaijin's armor over carefully, I found it cracked and broken here and there — though not enough to show whether anyone was inside.
But the structure of the broken interior was rather interesting.
"James."
"What is it?"
When I called out to James, who was hovering above us, watching and doing nothing at all, his voice sounded so utterly peaceful that it irritated me a little.
"Can you tell me where the control components are on that thing's armor?"
"Control components, you say?"
"The kind that seize the joints so it can't move."
"Ah."
From my words alone, James put on a look that suggested he had a fair idea what I intended.
I turned back to Delphinium.
"That wall from before — could you make it much thicker and still use it?"
"I could, but... I wouldn't be able to enclose everything the way I did a moment ago."
"That's fine."
In a true emergency, all that mattered was blocking the critical spot.
"Keep it ready to cast if it looks like civilians might get hurt. If it turns dangerous, put it up right away."
"What?"
But without answering, I rose into the sky.
And switched on the propulsion unit.
"First, you'll see joints on either side of the arms and legs, like support braces. Hmm. That is apparently why its movements were somewhat unnatural. With joints clamping from both sides, the range of motion is restricted, you see."
"What about the spine?"
"More concentrated along the flanks, actually. It's difficult to see from up here, but judging from the exposed portions, I would estimate a corset configuration. Not that it cinches the body."
Meaning the waist section was rigidly locked instead.
"There appears to be one near the neck as well, though thanks to Miss Iris it is hanging in tatters. If you intend to proceed 'as you see fit,' you needn't concern yourself with it much."
"Good."
"What are you planning to do?"
Iris asked.
This was Iris, after all — the one who'd always watched me from the sky, even when we fought. Naturally, she could come up to hold a conversation with me too.
"Don't tell me you're planning to let that thing loose?"
"I'm going to let them know that I could."
Obviously, I had no intention of staging any massacre.
If I had, I would have done it long ago.
"And if it really does turn dangerous—"
"And if it doesn't, do you think those people will listen to us? It's not as if we demanded tens of millions of won. We asked for nothing but daily necessities, and they wouldn't even answer."
I spoke while looking toward Iris.
"That's probably how they see it. They figure that once we're starving and too weak to fight, we'll surrender or something like it."
But what if I didn't lose there? I had no intention of that.
There might be no victory waiting at the end of this. Eventually, it might come to that — arrested, put on trial, branded a terrorist, left to rot in prison for the rest of my life.
Or maybe... subjected to live biological experiments, or something of the sort.
The instant that thought formed, my circuit spun taut.
But you know what? I was far too angry to despair over something that small and give up.
If quitting ended in that anyway, and resisting and failing ended the same way, then wasn't the obvious choice to beat the living daylights out of at least one of them?
In negotiation, pressure matters — but it's just as important to show the other side how much better off they'd be if they made the choice that favored me.
The government hadn't shifted its stance this whole time — even with public opinion not entirely on its side. There was an obvious reason for that.
The moment I turned out to be innocent, the government would become either the accomplices of the people who'd branded me a terrorist, or hopelessly incompetent fools who'd tried to hand me over to an outside power.
And I wasn't the type to simply stop. I would push, all the way to the end, to expose everything that had been happening behind the scenes — and once I did, everything the government had planned to do to me would come to light as well.
Which meant this had never been a negotiation in the first place. It was a fight where, one way or another, one side was bound to win or lose — decisively.
"Maybe next I should crack the President's skull open."
"Huh?"
Leaving Iris's flustered voice behind me, I dove toward the kaijin Hayun and Rose were fighting.
Bam!
My strike slammed into the kaijin's shoulder as it fended off the two of them.
"Kuuuurgh!"
The kaijin let out a monstrous cry, like a bear.
Its shoulder had managed to block my attack to some degree.
But my hammer kept driving down, scraping hard along the side of its arm.
Something snagged briefly near the shoulder, then came the sound of breaking. At the elbow, too. James had been right on the mark.
Bam!
My hammer slammed into the ground—
"……!"
With one arm's restraints undone, the kaijin swung its claws at me so naturally that I had to roll across the ground in a hurry.
...Hmm.
Still, maybe it was better to leave at least one leg or one arm restrained.
For a brief moment, I seriously considered revising the plan a little.