Confusion (8)
Could the Company even control those kaijin? The question answered itself soon enough—because the ones we hadn't managed to put down came boiling out from the depths.
The blast itself must have swallowed our entire floor, but the combatants in the sector where the kaijin fight had been raging apparently came through untouched—I'd snatched up every circuit I could lay eyes on and hurled them bodily toward the wall.
No—"untouched" was putting it a bit too kindly. Shrapnel had buried itself in a few of them, and they were bleeding.
But then, what was the defining trait of a kaijin? Weren't they the kind of creature that came charging right back at you, arm or leg regrown, no matter how many you blew off? They even ran on circuits—in a sense, they shared something with the magical girls. Judged purely on danger, they weren't even in the same category as your average kaijin.
...Though judged by appearance alone, the two were nothing alike.
Fine. So they'd blasted through the wall and come swarming out. But what happened next?
"Was that really something worth risking your life over?"
"Now? Do you seriously need to say that right now?"
There I was, racking my brain in my own way, and James had to go and interrupt from the side. I snapped at him out of sheer irritation—but apparently he was every bit as furious as before.
"I have secured the footage. Of course, they will claim it is doctored, but it should be enough to sow confusion at the very least—"
"Hey."
I glared at James as I cut him off.
"I'm an Earthling."
"I am aware of that, but—"
"No matter how much I hate this world, at the end of the day I still have to live in it. And if there are people out there building weapons out of other human beings, how exactly am I supposed to live in peace?"
It wasn't a righteous reason. If I was being honest with myself, it was closer to a plain urge to beat the living daylights out of anything that got on my nerves.
And yet, at the same time, I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for those things over there.
If, by some chance, I had been the one dragged away. If I'd ended up wedged between the Company and the Federation—wouldn't I have turned into exactly that?
It wasn't easy to guess their sex from looks alone. Never mind the circuits embedded in their chests—tubes of every description snaked across their bodies, hiding so much of them from view. Some were completely bald; others wore black hair grown out in wild, unkempt tangles.
But even weighing every one of those features, the being over there looked like an Earthling. I couldn't tell its sex, couldn't tell its age—an Earthling in unspeakable agony.
I had no idea whether it had been manufactured from scratch, or kidnapped and rebuilt. Call it a sense of shared suffering, if you like—and with my grudge against the Company stacked on top of it, I wanted nothing more than to see the thing restored to what it used to be. And if we could ever get testimony out of it, it would be nothing short of a catastrophe for the Company, too.
"If you're scared, go stand way over there."
I said it while looking up at the kaijin leaping down through the hole. The Company hadn't sent anything else through yet. Were they still agonizing over whether deploying their aliens-turned-monsters here was actually a sound decision?
I didn't wait for James's answer. I just ran.
WHAM! My hammer met the kaijin's fist head-on. Crack. Something snapped over there, but the thing didn't go down.
Then came another sound—close to snapping, but not quite. Nothing had collided.
As if time itself were being rewound, the kaijin's shattered arm knit back into place, and that fist came flying straight at me all over again. A blistering exchange of blows followed.
The hammer had grown heavier again. Burn through enough energy to send a circuit into overdrive, and maybe hope drifted back into view. It felt exactly like the old days fighting as a combatant—like the time I'd fought Iris, finally managed to nurse some hope, and promptly felt the energy drain right out of me.
But this time, there was a different kind of hope mixed in.
When I felt hope, Hayun grew stronger. I had no idea why. Was I carrying enough of it to reach out and touch the magical girls' circuits? In fact, every one of the girls was holding her own against a kaijin or two without giving a single step.
This wasn't like the days of trading blows with combatants. It was like watching Hayun fight the way she used to in the webtoon—stylishly, gorgeously.
A black-and-white comic, drawn in rough pen strokes you couldn't tell were drafts or finals, half the panels smeared past the point of recognition, updating maybe once a month if it was lucky—a comic she serialized on her own blog purely because she loved it. Most scenes were absurdity spiked with nonsense humor, and some of the gags were so stale they just didn't land... but I, reading it all those years ago, loved that comic with all my heart.
Because the Hayun in it—Blossom—fought so beautifully that it was more than okay to adore her.
Just like the "Happy Blossom" before my eyes right now. Always smiling.
WHAM! I was knocked backward. The kaijin swung without so much as a sound, and the force behind those fists only climbed with every exchange.
Its circuit was turning with real vigor. Judging by how my own Despair Circuit's energy was dwindling, there was no way those things were running on my energy.
I lifted my head and looked ahead. Did it move on orders—or without even those, on raw instinct alone? Either way, it made no difference: the face was twisted. The face of an intensive-care patient wracked with agony, yellowed and deathly pale, like someone simply waiting out the days until they died. At the center of that hulking frame sat something pure and simple—a human face, brimming over with despair.
What had they meant to accomplish, creating a thing like this? Combatants? Seed a war zone with them, let them fight until they wiped themselves out, then move in and claim the land? Or had they meant to bind them so they could never move—buried in concrete floors like the ones we'd found—and burn them as fuel for their ships?
Crunch. Gritting my teeth, I hauled myself up.
I was out of breath. Honestly, this circuit those hamsters had cooked up was garbage. Energy that only generated if you despaired without end—that went past bad taste and straight into criminal. And then bolting on a condition that you must never, ever give up? What kind of sick joke was that?
"...Yeah. Even so. I still can't give up."
Wasn't that just too unfair? If I quit here, after holding out this long, it would be unbearably unjust. Ever since I'd come into this world, that one thought was what had carried me through, every single time.
Fzzt, sputter. The generator's energy was nearly spent; the thrust behind my hammer flickered and faded bit by bit. Compared to the weight I was used to swinging, it felt shockingly heavy.
WHAM! But I raised the hammer and blocked it. A moment later, magic came crashing down over our heads, and the kaijin fell back to get out of its way.
So it did understand pain, then.
Overhead, the light was already raining down in earnest again. The black hole I'd made was gone—the one mercy being that it had done its job. At the very least, no one seemed to have died under the falling shrapnel. For now, that was only my guess.
As I staggered—fwump. A sound came, smaller and more deflated than any ordinary gunshot. What came flying right after was wire. The same stuff that had sailed over my head back when I was running for my life.
But this time, it wasn't aimed at my head.
THWACK! Ah. From the outside, that must have sounded gruesome. That heavy wire came whipping in fast and swarmed over the kaijin, layer piling on layer, until—unless you looked closely—you couldn't tell what was buried underneath. Nothing left but a bulging mound of steel.
I turned around. My eyes met those of a handful of cops, pale as sheets. They weren't looking at me, though. They were looking past me.
Had they simply fired at a kaijin that looked dangerous? There was far too much gunfire crackling everywhere for that to be the whole of it—not at the magical girls, at the kaijin. Whenever a magical girl and a kaijin locked into close quarters, the shooting would pause or slow; the moment the two broke apart, it would concentrate on the monsters again. No single round dropped them on the spot, but every hit stacked more damage onto their bodies. Exactly like the bullets that had caught me and put me in the dirt as I ran.
WHAM! One of the kaijin must have decided the police were a nuisance, because it launched itself at them instead of at the magical girls. But Iris had already repositioned in a blink, and her hand was there to stop it. She turned the kaijin's fist aside with her rifle and fell back as if hopping away, and Delphinium blasted the thing clean off its feet with magic. A heartbeat later, a baptism of countless pellets came crashing down over it.
They couldn't have planned it, surely—and yet it was a flawless combination.
Sizzle. "..." A suspicious noise reached me from up ahead, too. I turned my head, and there it was: the base of that bulging steel mound glowing a furious red.
A moment later, a black blade thrust out of it. A blade incomparably longer than anything I'd ever produced back in my combatant days. And it was slicing sideways through the wire—the wire nearly half as thick as my wrist, already wound in layer upon layer—smooth as a knife through pudding.
I heard someone screaming, and more wire piled on top, but the black blade paid it no mind whatsoever. No—if anything, a second one rose. From above, the two blades scored across the mound from the side and the top, tracing a great inverted L.
Crrreak. Fingers sprouted from the corner of that inverted L, melted and fused into the wire-welded plating, seized hold of it, and—with a long groan of metal—wrenched it outward.
THUD. A foot emerged from inside. Somehow, it looked even bigger than it had a moment ago. Don't tell me the thing was actually growing. No. Just my imagination. God, I hoped it was just my imagination.
WHAM! It tore its way out like a steel door flung off its hinges, and it was already soaked in blood. Red and... black fluid ran from everywhere. Honestly, I couldn't have told you which was the true color of what flowed inside it—too many tubes blanketed its body, and too many of them had burst.
The kaijin that had been walking toward me vanished beneath a deluge of light. Dahlia, already locked in combat with two monsters of her own, had turned and poured a magical baptism this way as well. The way she streaked back and forth across the sky—you could have called her a bomber and nobody would have blinked—
But after a few passes of that "humming lightsaber" sound from the movies—that buzzing whine laced with electronic tone—several of those clumps of magic shattered into fragments and winked out. Explosions cracked, the ground was gouged open, and black powder from the shredded asphalt swirled into the sky. There was a smell like something melting.
Thud. Through the smoke, something set its foot down.
"..." All around me, I heard breath catch in throats.
That thing, walking toward us with a black blade bared in each hand... could it really still be called a kai-jin—a mutant "person"? Monster. Abomination. Those were the words that surfaced instead.
It already looked to stand well clear of three meters—roughly twice my height. At that size, an ordinary frame could barely have carried its own weight. And hanging from both of its arms were blades longer than its own arms, black blades that boiled the asphalt wherever they grazed it with every step.
Touch it and you die. I swallowed without meaning to.
Could I... win this with nothing but the circuit running on my wrist?
What was truly maddening was that some corner of my brain genuinely believed that even if I died here, the magical girls would hold the line just fine. The hope I'd already allowed myself had latched onto a corner of my heart like a tumor, and I could neither wipe it away nor tear it out.
Were fear and despair different things, then? But I squeezed down on the hammer with everything I had. Not a single kaijin had gone down yet—which meant the other girls didn't have much slack either. At the very least, they had to shield the police around us. If I, barely able to fly as I was, could pin even one of these things to the ground, that would count for something.
Damn it. That was hope, too.
Did being able to lift the hammer mean my circuit was still turning, however faintly? Or was there some other kind of strength at work? Hadn't my body been at least somewhat remade when I became a magical girl? The other girls had relied on resonance devices at the hideout, but there had always been hints that the girls themselves carried a special power of their own, separate from all that. It wasn't magic, of course.
...Though it might have had something to do with the "Earthling kaijin" in front of me.
My breathing came in shakes—and then—
"Fire! Everything you've got! Bury it!"
Someone bellowed, and they began unloading everything they had into the kaijin. Wire, buckshot, slugs, plain lead rounds—there may even have been rubber bullets and bean bags mixed in. It seemed... like it was actually hurting the thing.
Then the kaijin moved.
That I stopped it at all was dumb luck. A monster almost too fast for the eye, guessing which way it would go—nothing but gut instinct. At least the hammer—or at least the generator inside it—hadn't been sheared by the blade. I forced the hammer's shaft around against it, jamming the edge that had bitten deep. Behind me, a voice cracked with disbelief. Was it really so shocking that I'd put myself between them and it?
Well, of course they couldn't feel good about it. Days ago, we'd been the ones hunting each other down.
A hand popped up right beside my face. It had to be the arm of an officer I'd shoved back with my shoulder as I retreated. There was a gun in it. And that gun was aimed at the kaijin's other arm—the one raised to cave in my skull.
BANG! The round fired and struck home. And it wasn't just that one gun. Gun after gun behind me hammered the kaijin's arm. The bullets didn't bite in, but the arm bent at an unnatural angle as though it had absorbed hundreds of punches in a single instant, and its blade wrenched around the wrong way.
Ha. Swallowing a hollow laugh, I shoved the hammer out with everything left in me. The kaijin swayed, its arm still buried in the head and bent sideways. I hurled myself up and forward and drove my skull straight into the circuit set between its chest.
Someone behind me raised a cheer. Now, of all times? Strange. Had public opinion turned on a dime, after barely a day? The radio had been saying as much. That thanks to the bomb I'd thrown with my life on the line, and the black hole I'd opened in the sky above, no one had been hurt. Not only the elderly who hadn't made it out in time—the many officers below had all walked away unharmed, too. That even after being treated that way, I hadn't killed a soul. That a real terrorist wouldn't have given police lives a second thought.
And now that they said all that, did they think I'd go easy on them? Gritting my teeth, I got back to my feet. This was a temporary alliance and nothing more. Damn it all—now it even sounded like they were cheering me on back there. Was I hearing things?
Those people had no idea what kind of energy I ran on, and frankly, weren't they using me just as much as ever? Well. If I went down, they'd be in danger too. And yet, strangely, no one seemed to be running. They even seemed to be helping—still firing away at the kaijin—
I don't know. The human heart. I honestly don't understand it at all.
I staggered upright. Emotions like these were poison to me. The more of them I felt, the weaker I became. What kind of backwards nonsense was that? Hope—I'd thought I'd thrown every last shred of it away back then. And now look at it, ruining everything.
Revenge, whatever. What filled my head now was Hayun. Across from me, the kaijin was resetting its stance, readying itself to lunge. I thought of Hayun, and of Jihye too. Would they be all right? At the very least, if the world learned I wasn't a terrorist, she'd be fine. I didn't want to die. I had no intention of dying. That I could keep standing while thinking all of this—
WHAM! As if she were absolutely livid about something, Hayun came down out of the sky, striking the ground.
Small wounds marked her body here and there, and she was bleeding a little. Dust clung to her even more thickly, and for some reason something black and greasy, like oil, as well. In one hand she gripped a sword of light, blazing more brilliantly than it ever had. The very sight of it was hope itself—hope that no one, nothing, could ever sully.
Hayun looked back over her shoulder. There was a smile on her face. As if to say, it's all right. As if to say, now that I'm here, everything will be fine.
And that, again, was the strange part. At the beginning of this very year, the sight of Hayun like that had done nothing but frighten me. What felt strange now was that what rose in me wasn't despair.
It was hope.
Hayun turned back toward the enemy. And in that moment, I looked down at my circuit. It was glowing, bright and clear—as if the display had nothing more it could possibly show me. Every last ounce of strength drained out of my body.
"Haha..." In a state like this, I was nothing but a hostage—
"Huh?"
And then, at the tail end of that hollow laugh, my own voice came out. The voice was full of questions. Like someone who'd just seen something no one was supposed to see. No—I had seen it. I'd imagined it before, sure. But this was a scene that should only ever have existed inside a dream.
Light was coming from my circuit. From the circuit that wasn't vibrating. A light bright enough to spill across my face. With trembling fingers, I touched the display and switched it to another mode. Like the combatant circuits I'd used so often before, it showed me the gauge digitally—the needle that normally sat like an hour hand on an analog clock, a compass pointing one way and one way only.
The needle was blinking like mad. As if it were desperately trying to convey that it was spinning at tremendous speed. As always—like the Despair Circuit I'd sent into overflow a hundred times over.
...
But this time, the direction was wrong. It was turning toward a direction entirely, completely different from anything before.