Chapter 13. Counterattack (8)

The plan was settled.

Whether it was actually the right call, even I couldn't have said — but there was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠no other way to be found.

Hayun pressed the pager.

We didn't have to wait long for a response.

A voice came through from the other side of the pager.

It was a flawless Earth-human voice — but that, too, was surely not the Squeak-seong-in's own. She had to be wearing a translator at her throat, same as James. Without one, she couldn't so much as mimic a human voice.

"Cherry. There's something I need to ask of you."

Maybe because the situation was so desperate, Hayun skipped the greetings and went straight to the point.

Surprisingly enough, the other party — Cherry, that is — didn't appear especially rattled by Hayun's words.

Had she been expecting our call? No — come to think of it, maybe the real surprise was that we hadn't contacted her until now. Our situation had needed someone's help long before this bomb ever entered the picture. If anything, the miracle was that we'd held out this long without asking anyone for anything.

"……"

For the briefest moment, Hayun's face clouded with hesitation.

Even with the tracker stripped out of the modified pager, 'communication' still meant linking yourself to someone. The location hardly mattered — the police already knew this area inside and out — but there was every possibility that other people were eavesdropping on our conversation.

No, they were definitely listening. They needed information about us just as badly as we needed anything.

They'd be lying in wait for any scrap of hint-worthy intelligence buried in our every word.

"……Wait — could you come here in person? You know where we are, right?"

And in the end, she said nothing about what was actually happening here.

There's a bomb — at first blush, it seemed like a safe thing to say.

This was a civilian district, and as long as she made clear we hadn't planted it — no, even the bare fact that she was calling someone in to 'defuse' the thing meant that piece of information alone couldn't brand us as terrorists.

But our opponents had already stopped at nothing. Which meant the wisest course was not to utter the word 'bomb' at all. There was no telling how they might wield it.

With AI and who-knows-what-else out there, all this caution might be pointless in the end anyway.

Only breathing came through the pager for a moment — trembling slightly, as if on edge.

But the answer came quickly.

All three of us let out a long breath.

James was still inside his drone, so I couldn't see his face. But I was certain it wasn't a pleasant one.

'Cherry' arrived after I had smashed through the floor and hauled the bomb out into the open.

Just to be safe, I scanned our surroundings once more, then dug through the half-ruined desk for the magic I'd found there earlier. Using it to get a rough picture of what lay around the bomb, I traced a wide circle and chipped away at the edges, bit by bit, until the floor was cleared away.

At a glance the floor was thick marble throughout — but that one patch alone was conspicuously thin. Marble was still stone; it wouldn't break easily, though cracking the surface and clearing it out was well within my power.

And then.

"This is……"

Hayun murmured, swallowing hard.

Buried beneath it was an enormous circuit — so large that the ones on my, Hayun's, and Iris's wrists looked almost embarrassing by comparison.

When they'd said bomb, I'd pictured something like an anti-tank mine, but up close the thing looked a good meter across. And the circuit was glowing with an eerie light and vibrating, on top of everything else.

With the stone slab cleared away, that trembling seemed to have grown even stronger.

"……Well?"

I asked James. He said nothing for a moment.

"It's extremely unstable. Shoddily constructed, to an infuriating degree."

Honestly, I couldn't tell just by looking. Apparently Squeak-seong-in had their own standards of judgment. Circuits were their planet's handiwork, after all.

"Can you disarm it?"

"Hard to say."

James's drone descended. Stepping out of it, James stood at the rim of the hole, hand to his chin, lost in thought for a while.

"As I said before — one careless touch during the disarm process, and it detonates."

"……But there's a chance, at least?"

"If we're speaking of pure possibility, it exists at every moment. Whether it amounts to anything, we won't know until we try."

Hayun, Iris, and I looked at one another.

While we sat in that brief silence—

—the outside erupted into commotion. We could hear the police shouting back and forth, bustling about as if to fix something—

—then came a faint squeaking, followed by the same whirring as the drone James rode, and something came flying in through the shattered window.

Almost on instinct, I caught it with my bare hands.

In truth, not the wisest choice. The drone had four spinning propellers, and one slip would have sliced my fingers open.

Fortunately, I managed to grab the 'middle' of it.

"Ugh, uhh…… Wah!?"

Unlike the drone James rode around in, this one had no top cover — and perched on it was a pink-furred hamster who looked strikingly like James.

For a hamster, the ears were remarkably large, and the tail wonderfully fluffy. This Squeak-seong-in had to be the 'Cherry' Hayun had spoken of.

Come to think of it, I had a feeling I'd seen her somewhere before.

"Uh, uh, um……?"

Perhaps because our eyes had met, 'Cherry' looked utterly flustered. She glanced around, met Hayun's eyes, then looked back up at me.

"……"

It felt a little cruel to torment her any further, so I carefully set her down on the floor.

"Wah— uh, th-thank you."

With that, Cherry scurried over to Hayun's feet.

"Cherry!"

"Hazun!"

When Hayun scooped her up into her hands, Cherry cried out to her with unmistakable joy.

"Are you okay!? You're not hurt anywhere, are you?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. What about you — nothing happened to you?"

"Ah, yeah. Thanks to her catching me,……"

"As touching as this reunion clearly is—"

—but the two of them didn't get to chat for long.

There was one more Squeak-seong-in present, after all — a thoroughly ill-natured one who found the sight of people happily catching up after so long utterly repugnant.

"Unless we turn our attention to this thing very soon, it may well explode. None of us wants to die together, I trust?"

"……"

At James's words, Hayun gently set Cherry back down at her feet.

Only then did Cherry seem to notice the circuit we'd exposed through the floor.

"……What is this!?"

Even to Cherry's eyes, the circuit was evidently running in an extremely unstable state.

"It looks like a circuit built to explode in response to my mana. Too much mana and it blows — but cutting off the supply now would be just as bad. Once the stable state breaks, it'll be even further beyond control."

From my words alone, Cherry appeared to grasp exactly what kind of situation this was.

"What on earth is this……?"

Though as for the bomb's true nature, she clearly had no idea.

At the very least, I could tell she'd had no hand in it.

"Well, naturally."

Catching my glance as if reading my mind, James spoke up.

"Weaponizing a circuit is possible, I suppose. But if it were us, we'd have used a far more elegant method than this."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

Cherry's face went stern at his words.

"Elegant method or not, we would never plant a bomb in the middle of an area packed with civilians!"

James looked up at me with an expression of towering displeasure.

"What can I say? We can't leave this place until it's dealt with. And you did say you couldn't manage it alone, didn't you?"

Gritting his teeth, James climbed up onto the bomb all the same.

"Then let's resolve this quickly and be on our way. Will you assist?"

But even at that, Cherry hemmed and hawed.

"What seems to be the problem?"

"……I don't know the first thing about your circuits. I have no idea which emotions do what — what am I supposed to do if I handle it carelessly and make things ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠worse?"

"You need only follow my instructions."

"If following your instructions were enough, you could have managed alone. Isn't that so?"

James had no answer for that.

"……"

I quietly watched the two of them.

"Do we need to be watching this?"

"……"

Once again, James fell silent at my question.

Then, after a moment, he removed the translator from around his neck.

Seeing his reaction, Cherry took hers off as well.

Their conversation dissolved into squeaking rodent chatter. We couldn't understand a single sound of it, so from the outside it looked like nothing more than two hamsters scampering and squeaking over a complicated piece of equipment.

And Hayun was watching the two of them in silence.

Her gaze looked oddly serious.

Maybe it was the circuit. Or maybe it was simply that her friend 'Cherry' was up there.

But somehow, I had a feeling Hayun was thinking about something else entirely.

Rather belatedly, I found myself recalling the conversation James and I had once shared.

I had…… pressed him, demanding, am I supposed to just think positive thoughts or something?

I lifted my eyes a little and looked at Hayun.

Her gaze, fixed on the circuit, had sunk low.

She couldn't…… possibly be thinking about that conversation, could she?

I had been far too careless.

Fortunately, though, Hayun only kept watching the two of them tinker with the circuit, and said nothing more to me.

"……Well, we've settled one thing, at least."

said James, the translator back around his neck.

"Settled? Settled what? The bomb is sitting there exactly like it was."

Cherry fired back at him.

"We did at least buy ourselves time to escape, didn't we?"

"Excuse me?!"

Cherry's jaw dropped in sheer disbelief at James's words.

"Are you seriously telling me we should run off and leave this bomb sitting here? The moment she makes a black hole, it goes off mere minutes later!"

"What do you mean?"

Hayun asked.

"I adjusted the bomb's circuitry. A little."

Cherry answered her right away.

"But reworking something like this, in this little time — something that might blow if you so much as touch it wrong — is no simple task. What we managed wasn't 'make it not explode.' It was 'push back the moment it does.'"

"……And?"

When I asked, this time it was James who answered.

"It means we are past the point where the explosion itself can be prevented. The thing is already so dangerously unstable that a complete fix is impossible. If you insist on a resolution, the only option left is the traditional method of explosive ordnance disposal."

Move everyone back. Let it blow.

Right — surely that was how the 'traditional' way went—

"But if we do that, word will spread that Jieun planted a bomb here."

"And what would you have me do about it?"

James said.

"Either we all die together in one happy blast, or the ones who can live do live and only the bomb goes off. Forced to choose between the two, the latter is obviously better."

"……"

No one had an answer to that.

"Then should we get the police to fall back? While shouting that there's a bomb planted here?"

I asked quietly.

Every gaze turned to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠me.

The circuits were trembling. The one on my wrist — and the one buried beneath the floor.

James took in the state of things and pressed a hand to his forehead.

"……There may not be time for that. It's doubtful the police would simply take our word for it, either. They might try to send specialists in."

"Might there be a way to trigger the circuit remotely, from outside?"

Iris, who had been sunk in thought, raised yet another possibility.

"……"

All of our eyes went to her.

"I mean — suppose we announce that a bomb has been planted, and they…… for whatever reason, refuse to believe it and send people inside. Detonating it at precisely that moment is also an option, is it not?"

"That's……"

James closed his mouth.

"From what we observed, there was no communications equipment to speak of. That said, we haven't turned the underside completely over and examined it, so I cannot say for certain."

At one more possibility dropping onto the pile, I clutched my head.

Both circuits trembled harder.

"H-hey, w-wait, c-calm down……!"

Had she heard about my condition from James? Cherry said it to me, visibly alarmed.

"……Let's work through things in order, simplest first."

Hayun laid out our position.

"First, we should at least talk to them."

"……Should I be the one to go out?"

"……No. I'm sorry."

Hayun shook her head at my question.

"This one's for me or Iris."

Because my own emotions were unstable right now, too.

If my blood pressure spiked halfway through a conversation with the police, the thing could blow with no window to do a single thing about it. Back when it was buried under the floor, at least I couldn't see its state, so the sense of crisis hadn't been this sharp — but now that I could see it, the circuit was reacting to my every shift in feeling.

And if I tried to pull the circuit off my wrist, that very act would probably set it off.

I tried not to picture the Chairman's face. I still couldn't say exactly at what moment despair took hold — but I did know that the darker my thoughts, the greater the danger.

I barely managed a nod to Hayun.

To sum up the results: it worked.

Of course, very little of it was good news for me.

No matter how earnestly Hayun and Iris insisted I hadn't planted the thing, the police were never going to believe them. There had been incidents enough like it already.

Both of them were known to be with me — and no police force on earth takes the word of an accomplice.

The one mercy was that the civilians, police aside, had fled with impressive dedication.

People with that much to lose see to their own skins first, after all.

"……"

And through all of it, I worked to keep my emotions on the tightest leash I could manage.

Even if the circuit had stabilized somewhat — even if it wouldn't detonate the instant I made a black hole — caution was still the order of the day.

Part of me thought it might be better if the others ran far ahead and I escaped afterward, but for some reason, Hayun and Iris wouldn't hear of it.

Because if things went badly wrong and I collapsed, they'd be the ones who'd have to carry me out.

We still didn't know exactly where the three who hadn't followed us were. All we had was my imprecise sense — and a way to travel there and back that relied on it.

So if only to keep everything running smoothly, I had to endure.

Having watched the police withdraw outside, Hayun came back in.

"……They've all pulled back for now. They said a fifty-meter radius, so in practice they'll fall back farther than that. But……"

That hadn't taken long.

It left me a little uneasy. Done by the book, this wouldn't be a simple evacuate-and-done — they'd have to search every single house to make sure no one had been left behind.

Nothing said a wealthy household couldn't include someone who couldn't move on their own. There might be elderly people convalescing indoors right now.

How long would it take to check every last one of them?

And there was no telling whether those wealthy residents would even allow police through their doors. How widely had word of this spread? How many people had managed to slip away while we were kicking up our commotion?

"……"

Hazun seemed to have been thinking along the same lines for a moment.

"Can we move this circuit?"

James and Cherry looked at her at the same time.

"Moving it might be possible. But……"

"Recalling what Iris suggested earlier, that strikes me as a very dangerous option."

Fortunately, the circuit had no separate camera. It had been buried under the floor, set to blow the moment we fled — no camera needed for that.

But even so, there might be a remote detonator of some kind.

Which would make the very attempt to move it a deadly one.

Iris's warp wasn't omnipotent either. It had never been a fully perfected technology to begin with — she could fire her rifle to shift something to a random coordinate, close by and clear of any other object, or move a single person at a time. That was about the extent of it.

Transporting someone to a proper coordinate was a far harder matter. In open space, a ship's movement requires no elaborate calculations — the coordinates are simply fixed.

But Earth rotates even as it revolves around the sun. A warp point running from surface to surface has to track all of that, moving in stable lockstep.

With vast quantities of energy, a large warp point could indeed be built. Commit the budget and the manpower, establish that 'specific coordinate,' calculate for mobility on top of it, design and construct an enormous energy-devouring machine — and there it is.

Iris is the kind of person who could manage all of that alone. That's what makes her a genius.

……If she had 'preparation.' If she had other cutting-edge mana equipment at her disposal.

Here, neither was possible.

"……Weighing every one of those possibilities is a meaningless exercise. You know that, right? If someone could build a device like that, they could just as easily rig it to blow the instant it's moved."

"Which is precisely why it must not be done."

James said, his voice rising.

"If such a thing might exist, then all the more reason not to touch it!"

"……"

So what were we to do?

Weigh the possibility that someone might still be hiding nearby?

Or leave it where it lay, walk away, and watch it blow?

"……I'll do it."

"Huh?"

Hayun said, caught off guard.

"Wh-why? You were planning to?"

I answered like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Explosives aren't something you deal with in the middle of a city. If there were an empty lot around, maybe — but if this thing goes off in a neighborhood like this…… well, you all know."

I looked around as I said it, and no one could meet my eyes.

"I don't even need a black hole. I can…… fly."

And I was strong enough to swing that colossal hammer around like it weighed nothing.

So this was something I had to resolve myself.

"But—"

"Justice or no justice, this thing has to stay near me, doesn't it?"

Truthfully, it was a possibility I'd been weighing from the very beginning.

I had simply…… kept putting the choice off, and putting it off, until now.

But what could I do? If there was no other way……

I walked over, step by heavy step, and took hold of the circuit.

"Wait — Jieun!"

Why?

You said it yourself. You can't just let it explode here.

"A fifty-meter blast radius just means I have to climb higher than fifty meters, right?"

"Wait just a moment."

Iris said.

But I pointedly didn't listen.

……I'm a petty, small-minded wretch who took a job at a company that committed open villainy for no better reason than jealousy of the protagonist. Honestly, even now I couldn't entirely hide my envy of Hayun.

But that didn't mean I wanted to become a murderer. Being treated like one was quite enough already.

At the first explosion, there had been nothing I could have done. I hadn't even known the bomb was there.

Now was different. Completely different from back then.

I knew the bomb existed. I knew that leaving it to detonate might kill someone.

And so, pretending not to know would be no different from murder itself.

I might be a petty, small-time villain, but I had no intention of becoming a true monster. All I had ever wanted was the protagonist's seat.

It was giving up — telling myself I couldn't — that had produced everything up to now.

"If I make a black hole, how long until it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠blows?"

"……Hmm. Three seconds, perhaps? There will be an overload interval."

Three seconds. That was the margin we'd bought.

"But if it absorbs too much mana before then, even I can't predict what happens."

"Excuse me — why are you two calmly discussing this?! Someone ought to be stopping her!"

The circuit in my arms was trembling. Heating up, burning hot, ready to blow at any moment.

Unlike the protagonists, what I felt right then wasn't courage. It was fear.

And helplessness. And despair.

But I had no intention of dying.

If I died, I would die having landed a proper counterattack.

"What about putting it inside the black hole?"

"It would explode the instant it entered. Your black hole is, quite literally, a mass of pure mana. Dampening the blast is impossible. And an explosion in the middle of two spaces joined for a single instant does not simply fail to burst outward."

"Jieun!"

Hayun raced toward me, but I lifted the circuit in front of my chest.

"I'll be back."

"Wait — wait! There has to be another way!"

Iris shouted.

"But there's no time."

Looking at the trembling circuit, I felt it instinctively.

"……There isn't enough time left for this circuit to endure my emotions."

My eyes met Hayun's.

About a second later, Hayun lunged for me.

But I had already turned and was running.

I threw myself out through the shattered window.

I rolled across the ground, came up standing, and shot into the sky with everything I had.

With no spare moment even to glance down, I climbed hard — and the circuit, answering my surging mana, shuddered violently and grew hotter still.

How high had I come? How much longer could the circuit hold?

By the time the air against my skin had turned bitterly cold, I flung the circuit upward with all my strength.

Then I cut the flow of mana.

That sensation from the amusement park — the moment a drop ride lets go and you plummet — flooded through my body.

The circuit soaring high above, and me falling away beneath it.

A fair distance had opened between us — but if you asked whether it was enough to escape the blast, the answer was no.

The circuit flared with brilliant light.

A strangely bright light, for a circuit sinking back into despair—

And then I felt someone seize me, pulling me down from below.

My vision flipped — and there was Hayun.

"Hayun?"

"It's okay."

Hayun flashed a grin,

"Hey, wait—!"

Before I could get a single word out, she pulled me into her arms and whirled us around.

So that her back faced the circuit.

And then the blast swallowed us both.