Chapter 14. Confusion (6)
Something about it was strange.
Even back when Hayun had been able to draw on her full strength, I had never once seen her circuit spin that fiercely. Could it burn that bright only because she had glimpsed hope at the very edge of despair? If Hayun could put out that kind of power for no reason other than being with me, she should have been dispatching enemies with ease ages ago.
Clank.
The sound came from the robot. Its arm — one hand aimed our way — split open with a metallic clack, and from a forearm far too thick to belong to any human emerged what was unmistakably a missile.
Dangerous, I thought. However strong a magical girl's power might be, it could not perfectly stop every piece of modern ordnance. I had bled from gunfire even with mana wrapped around me, and Hayun had once been knocked cold by an explosive. Besides, a missile could still detonate even if you shot it down mid-flight. Sometimes plain, thick physical armor was the more effective shield.
"You don't get why we let you come this far?" Mohican said. "In here, you can rampage all you like. This area's been off-limits to cameras for ages, so nothing's getting uploaded — no video, no photos."
There wasn't a single window to look out of. Air circulation probably ran entirely through the ventilation system.
"So, you're planning to kill us all in here?" Rose asked with an incredulous laugh. "Last time, that whole incident failed because your operation was sloppy, that's all. You're the ones who let the narrative slip — the public opinion you'd controlled so tightly. And your grand fix for it is killing magical girls?"
"Whoa, whoa, easy now. I never said anything like that." Mohican spoke as if offering medicine. "I just want to, you know, persuade you a little."
"Persuade?" The word escaped me before I could stop it. "Persuade? Now, of all times?"
"Fine, if 'persuade' rubs you the wrong way, call it a negotiation. Hey, James."
James didn't see fit to answer. Though the front of the drone tilted up a touch, so he seemed to have made something like a jut of the chin.
"Think it over. This lab is still standing, isn't it? The upper floors got cleared out for the fighting, sure, but downstairs, the equipment you used is sitting there almost exactly as you left it."
"Oh ho." James made the sound of a man genuinely intrigued.
"So if the mood strikes you, you can come back here and pick your research up right where you left off. Company policy has shifted a little, so your work will never be the main focus again — but if you want to keep going, we'll support that."
"So building circuits is harder than you expected." James said, sounding utterly unimpressed. "In that case, you might have opened with 'we'd like to talk.'"
"Hey, we had no way to reach you people. How were we supposed to contact you?"
"We have met before, haven't we? If you had come that time yourself, instead of a kaijin, couldn't you have attempted something resembling a conversation?"
"Want the honest answer? Back then, we thought we had the upper hand."
Public opinion hadn't completely turned yet, after all.
"And after that, you tried to kill us."
"To be precise, we weren't trying to kill you."
Just to bury us socially.
Though of course, if it had been possible, they'd have killed us.
"You do realize every single word you say right now is nonsense, don't you? People who want to negotiate don't usually open talks with missiles aimed at the other party. And they wouldn't have kaijin or combatants stationed upstairs, either."
"We need safety measures too. Having grounds to say you came in here fighting makes it easier to explain ourselves to everyone else, doesn't it?"
"And because you couldn't be sure these girls would accept your 'negotiation.' You can't abandon the war for public opinion entirely, so you still have to drag that terrorist image along. Isn't that right?"
"Yeah, yeah, hey, you're right. So just hear me out. Honestly, that much is easy for you people to shrug off, isn't it? Nobody's even hurt."
And yet, for all that, he kept his missiles trained on us.
Something about Mohican's words left me confused. Offering negotiation while attacking; calling it negotiation while holding a weapon on us. Had the company's line splintered? Was a tangled chain of command behind all this?
Or maybe — the confusion itself was the operation.
Just as I was knitting my brows, Mohican gave a pointed ahem and cleared his throat.
"Hey, you there. Jeong Jieun, was it?"
"You—"
"Hayun."
When Hayun moved to step forward, I edged slightly in front of her and held her back.
"Let's hear him out first. Whatever it is he wants to say."
"Right. Must be all that corporate experience — you actually speak the language."
......
"I want to hire you as a magical girl on our side. If you come over, the others will find it easier to return to the Federation, won't they? Forget everything you've fought until now — we cooperate, everybody wins. Money? Name your price. Well, demanding a hundred percent of the company's shares isn't going to fly, but you've held a job before, so you know how this works, don't you?"
I stared at Mohican's robot for a long moment.
"So you're saying you can give me what I want? As long as it isn't shares?"
"Noir Corporation is, well... by Earth's standards, it's an extrasolar company, isn't it? It's so vast that outfits confined to this one planet can't even begin to compare. Ask for money, and as long as it's within reason, you'll get what you ask for."
Not that they wouldn't haggle if I demanded a national-budget-sized sum.
But I had thought this whole conversation was strange from the very beginning. A company that had shown such a consistent line until now had no reason to suddenly start prattling about negotiating with me. Frankly, if they simply meant to blow this place sky-high and kill us all — no one's watching, just like Mohican said — that would have been the more convincing story.
But, well. They really might be able to give it.
And if this was a genuine negotiation, then I had things I wanted, too.
"Then, there is something I want."
"Oh? What is it? Let's hear it."
"The Chairman's right wrist would be a good start."
......
Silence swallowed the room.
Not just Mohican — every magical girl around me was staring at me, equally thrown.
"Ah — and I get to be the one to bring the hammer down. I'd also prefer there be no legal complications. Might as well do it right here while we're at it. If it's now, I'll settle for the wrist instead of the head."
"......You. Are you serious?"
"Why do you think I'm fighting? If I were literally fighting to cast off injustice and for the sake of justice, I'd have gone knocking on some human rights organization's door from day one."
......
"No? Then I have no intention of negotiating. Weren't you the ones who assumed I'd sit down and talk with people who openly tried to harm people who are family to me? What you tried to do to Jihye — that just becomes nothing, like it never happened?"
"That's......"
"See? You can't even claim you didn't do it. And you come to someone who's already furious out of her mind and say, 'here's money, let's make up'—"
I turned my head to the side, toward Hayun and the other magical girls.
"What about you all?"
"......The part about taking his wrist off, I'll need to think over."
Hayun spoke carefully, choosing each word. "But I agree that the Chairman has to be punished, and punished properly. Jieun isn't fighting just to get paid."
Hayun had softened my demand a little. Well, realistically speaking, that was the best ending anyway. If we could only bring the Former Chairman back, I could probably make the current one regret being alive without killing him — but let's shelve that thought for now.
"Ha, haha."
Mohican laughed.
"Well. So words don't work after all."
"You approached us actually believing it would?"
Rose shot back, genuinely incredulous.
"No, isn't it obvious? If I'd meant to negotiate with you from the start, I'd have stationed people up top... I wouldn't have stalled for time at all!"
The moment Mohican shouted, the ground rumbled faintly.
......!
Every magical girl, myself included, dropped into a stance at once.
The first things launched were Mohican's missiles.
Three in total, all aimed our way—
and one of them took the beam of Iris's returning fire head-on.
"Huh?"
Before Mohican could get a word of reaction out, the missile's position changed.
Its incoming trajectory was the same.
But now it was directly behind the robot Mohican piloted.
BOOM!
Whether the missile had struck the robot and detonated, or gone up from the beam's impact, I couldn't tell — either way, Mohican's robot lurched forward.
It didn't get the chance to fall, though. Rose, closing the distance at a speed all but invisible to the eye, drove an uppercut into the robot's head.
Crunch-crack — it was unmistakably the sound of machinery breaking, yet somehow it raised goosebumps, and the robot involuntarily straightened itself back up.
"They're coming from every direction! Everyone, stay sharp!" Dalia shouted.
And she was right — a section of the ceiling had opened, and small missiles were pouring out of it.
An ordinary person caught in that barrage wouldn't have left enough remains to piece together a skeleton. Nothing but shredded meat and tiny scattered fragments.
But.
Dalia swept her wand, and the small bead-like shots she had hurled at the combatants earlier scattered in every direction. Not a single one scored a clean direct hit, but those little beads burst around the missiles like proximity fuses, pop-pop-pop. Swept up in the blasts, the missiles detonated in midair, scattering into fireworks that never came anywhere near us.
Not a fragment touched us. Transparent walls of mana already stood on every side, and the shrapnel slammed into them and stuck, left hanging in the air like a floating constellation.
Faintly, I thought I caught the smell of gasoline. Less like actual gasoline, more like some gas sprayed into the air — but not a single person here was a valid target for it.
For the magical girls, that was thanks to their circuits roaring at full tilt. Magic was, quite literally, cheating — it sealed off at the source anything that might threaten the wielder's body.
James had boarded his drone, and Cherry was wearing at least her minimal gear, so nobody was passing out from the gas.
"What—what is this?"
Mohican blurted, hurriedly re-setting his stance.
Clank, clank — missile heads peeked out from the robot's arms and legs, and before I could get a single warning out, they were already away.
And Rose snatched one of those missiles clean out of the air.
A missile that had been a hair's breadth from slamming straight into her face was squirming in Rose's grip — well, it only looked that way because of the flames spitting from its thruster, but still. It looked absurdly like she'd caught a fish, strangely free of tension.
Rose turned her hand and let it go.
The missile streaked off in the exact opposite direction and slammed into Mohican's robot. Its white armor scorched black.
Before the missile's smoke had even cleared, Hayun bored through it—
Shff.
With a flawless form, she cut the enemy down.
Tzzt.
Sparks scattered along the path of the brightly glowing blade. A moment later, a small explosion sounded from somewhere deep inside.
"Ugh—!?"
The robot's chest burst open around the split, and Mohican — hair standing straight up and on fire — came scrambling out, only to take Rose's hand and crumple to the floor.
Clank.
And Iris leveled her gun at the fallen Mohican.
"W-w-w-wait! I surrender, I surrender!"
Mohican shouted, both hands shooting up.
"Now, of all times?"
Hayun blinked. "It's a little ironic, hearing that from the man who was just showering us with missiles like he meant to wipe every one of us out."
"No, that's not— look, honestly, that much was necessary to neutralize you."
"Let's just knock him out. He might be trying to stall again."
Rose said, stepping forward.
Mohican shrank back with a sharp hiss of breath — and James's drone moved up in his place.
"Something about this is strange."
James said.
"If the resonance device were being used properly, there would be no need to buy time like this. And it is equally strange that no bomb like last time's has been prepared. Cadre here or not, the current Chairman would gladly have blown this entire interior to kill or neutralize every magical girl inside."
"But then the Federation would......"
"He is not the sort of man to care about such 'relations.' Money first, money second. As long as his theory is proven and the product sells, I imagine he'd consider that quite enough."
"What theory?"
......
To my question, James gave no answer — whether by design or not, I couldn't tell.
"If there is a reason to buy time, then simply launching missiles was not the goal. Moving equipment on that side's energy would not require anywhere near that much."
"Wh-what is that supposed to mean, huh!?"
"It seems you were not properly informed either."
James said, in a voice that was kind — perhaps deliberately so.
"I am saying that there are more than likely plenty of those bombs — the kind that nearly took out the Former Chairman's mansion — here as well."
......
Ah. So that was it. Then some of this actually made sense.
If they had meant to blow all of us up in one go, my energy would need time to send the bombs into overload. And with a cadre stationed inside, we would never suspect such bombs were here.
"You knew that, and you still suggested coming here?"
"I judged the odds to be very low. Besides... hmm, I did assess it as reasonably safe. You do remember that I monitor your circuit at all times, don't you?"
Put that way, I had nothing to say.
In other words — I was safe precisely because I couldn't produce any real power.
A little of the strength drained from my shoulders. It felt... hollow.
"Well, no need to be too disappointed. It is, in the end, a necessary step toward giving the magical girls what they wish for, isn't it?"
"......And you're one to talk? You, who think my circuit is that important?"
"The theoretical foundation exists, and so do you as an existence, so the energy can continue to be researched. Besides, right now the goal is ousting the Chairman and recovering the research assets — you have no need to push yourself that hard. You have other magical girls around you, don't you?"
......
My left wrist trembled, just slightly.
Whether he noticed or not, James let out a small snort.
I stood there without a word for a while. Hayun, whose expression had been bright these past days, took one look at me and apparently decided against saying anything more.
The atmosphere turned heavy in an instant.
Was this my fault, too?
"......Let's, go."
I said, letting out a long sigh. "There's nothing more to gain here."
"It would be lovely if we could take that robot with us."
I stared straight at James.
He knew exactly what he was saying. He knew I didn't have the strength right now to move something that size.
The drone showed no expression, but it was easy to picture James on the other end of it, sneering at me.
I gritted my teeth.
Now that he'd found his possibility, did his first research subject — uncooperative as she was — simply not matter to him? Whether I was useful to a bastard like that or not, I couldn't have cared less, but—
Rrrrumble......
Just then, the floor beneath our feet shuddered once more.
"Huh?"
"You got something hidden down there?"
Rose asked Mohican.
"H-hidden? Hidden what?"
Mohican answered, his face drained white. In other words — he had no idea.
"James."
"At the very least, it is not that circuit of yours causing it, so rest assured."
James answered my call with impeccable politeness.
"It's okay."
Hayun said to me. "Whatever comes out, we'll...... deal with it. For certain."
......
That brimming, confident smile left me momentarily at a loss for words.
What I truly hated was that the trembling in my left hand had stopped. I hated how it surged and ebbed with every single word thrown back and forth.
Because it wouldn't do as I told it.
And in proportion, Hayun's circuit spun all the more fiercely. That low, thrumming whine rose again.
BOOM!
The floor shattered.
Something hammered upward from below — boom, boom — again and again, and what finally broke through the floor was—
A kaijin.
It was a kaijin, all right. But something about it was wrong.
"......It doesn't have, armor?"
"And that appearance......"
An Earthling?
No — was it actually an Earthling? The Earthlings I knew didn't generally grow to three meters.
But for all its monstrous bulk, for all its towering height — I had never seen an alien like that. Even its skin color was one an Earthling could have. And above all — Earthlings couldn't become kaijin... could they?
And embedded in that being's chest was a circuit. The whole thing.
"......Oh ho."
James made the sound, infuriatingly at ease.
"Now I understand. How that side managed to secure so many kaijin."
No one answered.
But everyone was thinking the same thing he was.
This company knew how to manufacture kaijin.
Whether it was the fruit of their own research, or technology bought or stolen from another company, I couldn't say. But one thing was certain: the technical capability to turn Earthlings — Earthlings who could run circuits, Earthlings who on their own power couldn't so much as cast a spell — into 'kaijin' existed here.
Creak, creak.
The sound of broken machinery groaning reached us. The robot that had been down moments ago began slowly rising again.
The girls' eyes turned to me.
"No."
James said at once. "That 'circuit' running — at least here — is not a matter of you, Miss Jeong Jieun."
The floor broke open again, and still more kaijin rose.
Every last one of them had a circuit embedded in its chest. And every one of those circuits was roaring as it spun.
"It appears someone has set out to commercialize Earthlings."
"How are you so calm about this?"
"Because I had already been working from that assumption. Besides, this company was most likely planning to demolish the lab itself and bury the evidence. Let the kaijin hold you off, then detonate the whole place and blow it all away at once."
"If they did that—"
"As long as it turns a proper profit, it is enough. There are still plenty of nations in the galaxy that haven't joined the Federation, aren't there? What was it you said to me, again? Ah, right — I believe you asked how many children a person can give birth to at one time."
......
"Federation technology is far beyond that. If it is merely 'growing them until they are grown,' we can do it in any number. Artificial womb technology is already more than a century old."
"So you're saying......"
"'Manufacture' humans. 'Kaijin-ize' them and sell them. Or else use them as 'material to run circuits.' That would be the plan, I imagine."
The drone turned toward the kaijin.
"How old... they might be, I honestly could not say."
"The Federation—!"
Hayun cried out, but James's drone swayed side to side like a shaking head.
"I told you, didn't I? Quite a few planets still have not joined the Federation. Even short of outright war, they will covet an 'enormous energy source.' And if some power on the Federation's opposite side began building its strength using beings like these? Hmm, well. I imagine the Federation, too, would find itself 'forced' to use them."
Like nuclear weapons.
"More than anything, I would love to know what grounds you have for assuming the Federation never entertained such ideas."
Even this Earth's developed nations had run experiments on human beings, after all.
What if they didn't even consider them their own citizens?
No — what if they didn't even consider them intelligent life?
......
"Well, thanks to you, we survived. If you had truly still possessed 'the same power as before,' we would be buried beneath the ruins of this enormous building by now. Wouldn't we?"
To James's words, I could give no answer at all.