Chapter 16. Intimacy (6)
"Can't you do something about this whole glowing-white thing?"
It was two days before the operation that I asked Cherry that.
Up until then, even with Hayun clinging to my side, she hadn't seemed particularly bothered by my circuit, so I'd been putting up with the shimmer. Hayun's influence on my hope had already been found out, after all—I'd judged that fussing over the glowing part now would be far too late.
But a few days back, a problem had cropped up. Until then, Hayun had been the only one trailing after me and planting herself at my side—but now there was one more girl who came and latched on just the same.
I had no idea how things had come to this, but the problem was that whenever that one extra girl—Jua—settled in beside me, the light of my circuit changed.
"Hope" is a lovely-sounding word. Most people conjure up pleasant images when they hear it. Naturally enough—doesn't the average person picture something untainted and white? A single white beam shining from far off in the darkness. Described in words, it looks like nothing but a good thing.
But people's minds are all different, and so are their circumstances. And since their thoughts differ, the object of their hope can differ too.
Even now, somewhere in the back of my head, part of me still thought of my gender as male. More than ten years had passed in this world, but that was a little too short a time for a belief etched into my mind over twenty-plus years of my past life to simply fade away.
And that masculine part of me took a very positive view of Hayun and Jua drawing close to me. My conscience and the threads of my reason had built up the walls plenty solid, of course, but as human thoughts always go, shutting them out or severing them completely was next to impossible.
The end result—whatever judgment that male self of mine was making—was that my Hope Circuit shone brighter whenever Hayun and Jua were with me at the same time.
Hayun, for her part, seemed very conscious of that light. Did she think it was a matter of differing friendship? And Jua, in her own way, seemed fixated on the light from when she was at my side alone.
So I wanted that function off. I gave it a fair number of tries on my own—tapping the screen with a finger to cycle the display modes, even brainstorming ways to shut it down entirely. The conclusion I reached: impossible, not with my own two hands.
"Could you keep the energy working as is, and just stop the light from coming out?"
"Hmm..."
But Cherry pulled a thoroughly stumped face.
The truth was, I'd already asked James about it before, and after poking around a bit he'd simply said, beats me. The problem was that I had gutted and rebuilt the circuit's structure to an absurd degree.
I mean, I didn't have any knowledge in this field to begin with. I'd never once studied circuits—how on earth did I manage to rewrite what was inside one with my own hands?
"Sorry. Actually, that kind of thing happens fairly often in everyday life, too."
"In everyday life?"
"Yeah. Moving something like a ship inevitably takes a huge amount of energy, so there are places where those energy sources get stockpiled—and every so often, an object with a simple structure gets affected by them and its internal structure changes."
"..."
"By all structural logic, those things shouldn't work—and yet they do, so all we can do is guess that some law we don't understand yet is at play. There are preventive measures for this to a degree, and that technology is applied to circuits too, but..."
Which meant: I had ignored that safeguard and rewritten the contents anyway.
"Even if it works right now, nobody knows what might happen over the long run, so parts like that usually get replaced with something else."
"Then couldn't I just have a new one made and use that?"
"Hmm..."
But at my words, Cherry tilted her head again.
"Why?"
"Did you know Hayun's circuit structure is different from the other girls'?"
"No, that's the first I'm hearing of it."
"I see. Well, I suppose you couldn't have known if nobody told you."
Cherry nodded and went on.
"Hayun's circuit output is in a league of its own compared to the other girls'. Probably worldwide, too. We don't know why, but her circuit was built to withstand that level of output and to vent the energy when too much of it builds up."
So was that why the other girls' circuits reacted to that energy? James's remark that a simple resonance device was easier to build than a full circuit floated back to me.
"And that kind of technology isn't something you can just produce from the ground up. The more functions a circuit has, the harder it is to make."
"So... you're saying another circuit on the level of mine can't be built here?"
"Yep."
At that, my arms went slack.
"Besides, your circuit started out as something built for a completely different purpose and then changed, so we'd have to analyze the changed parts as thoroughly as possible. We don't have equipment like that here, either."
"I see. Got it."
In the end, I had no choice but to give up. When both of the technicians on hand said it couldn't be done, what else was there to do?
"Oh, haven't seen you alone in a while."
That afternoon. Someone tapped me on the back from behind and called out—when I turned around, there stood Rose.
Her face was bright, wearing an all-out smile. The kind of expression I used to see on TV all the time.
Magical girls each built up fanbases of their own. They were all beautiful girls, so it was only natural. Could I have fans of my own now? Apparently I was being treated as just one member of the magical girls these days, so maybe there was at least one person out there rooting for me.
No—of course there was at least "one."
Jihye.
I had no way to reach her at the moment, but every single time Jihye saw me, she always smiled so brightly. How could a person trust someone that completely?
"Yeah, well."
Jua was running yet another inspection of the circuits here. The devices that had once run on my despair were now powered by the exact opposite energy, so their innards had been swapped out wholesale—and every now and then, something refused to work right. Hence the idea: rather than wait for failures, go through the breakdown-prone parts one by one on a schedule and maintain them.
With Cherry and James going over the equipment alongside her, naturally Jua had no time to be glued to my side.
Hayun was cleaning the kitchen. Though at this point, "kitchen" was a generous word for what had all but become a bathroom.
We'd been staying here long enough now that the time had to be counted in months, and dust piled up everywhere if we didn't clean. It was a place we bathed, after all—the cleaner, the better, no? Honestly, it wasn't in a state that demanded such vigorous scrubbing, but when Hayun volunteered, I saw no reason to object.
Normally I'd pitch in at times like that, but every so often I wanted to sit by myself and think. And frankly, our current setup made that kind of solitary time difficult in just about every way.
Had Hayun read my mind? Or was it simply consideration for me? She told me to rest up properly, and I nodded and obediently stepped outside.
And so I was enjoying some rare time alone, when—
"Doesn't look like you're thrilled I came over?"
Rose said it teasingly, and I shook my head with a lukewarm look on my face. It wasn't exactly welcome—but it wasn't unwelcome, either.
I'm a genuinely tiresome creature in a lot of ways: even while thinking, please, just leave me alone, I've got a side that hungers for people's attention. Honestly, "modest" is not a word that describes me.
So I figured being approached in this friendly way beat being ignored outright.
But even as I thought that, some part of me wanted to be left alone—which, by my own assessment, made me one hell of a difficult person.
"Hm."
Reading my expression, Rose tilted her head, the smile never leaving her face.
"...What?"
"Oh, nothing. It's not like I only ever talk to people when I've got some reason. I just happened to have time to spare. Like you."
Rose lowered the hand she'd had propped under her chin as she spoke.
"Come to think of it, I don't think we've ever actually talked, just the two of us. Ah—but don't worry too much. I have zero intention of bringing up anything touchy."
"..."
I looked at Rose.
She was quiet for a moment, lost in thought, then began slowly.
"Hayun and Jua have been spending a lot of time with you lately."
Put that way, I couldn't help but get defensive. It wasn't as if I'd asked them to stay close—they simply came over on their own.
Whether that was a shame or not, I honestly couldn't tell—but in the end, I wound up sleeping outside the tent.
Three people crammed into a tent that barely fit two was a bit much, no matter how you sliced it.
But thanks to that, the other girls got a perfectly unobstructed view of the three of us sleeping pressed skin-tight against one another.
As if shame were a foreign concept to them, Hayun tried to claim the space in front of me as I lay on my side, while Jua tried to claim my back. It was enough to make me wonder just how long they'd been feeling that close to me.
It took a day or two for me to realize that, with that much room to spare, there was really no need to pull Hayun against my chest to sleep.
Sleeping on my back was, if anything, a little easier to bear. Hayun simply wound herself around my right arm, and Jua around my left.
"So?"
In any case, keenly aware of all that, I came out even more guarded.
When I fixed Rose with a harder glare, she held up both hands.
"No, I'm not trying to interfere with how you live. I was just surprised. When Hayun was with us, she kept a certain line. But you two are so natural about it that it got me thinking, all over again, that there was never such a line to begin with."
"..."
"She talks about you a lot normally, too."
"...Does she?"
That, I could believe. For all the ups and downs, Hayun was the person closest to me at school.
"Yeah, well. So I don't think it'd be strange for you two to end up in some kind of relationship?"
It was a remarkably open-minded thing to say, but honestly, from where I was sitting, it was a remark with plenty of places to take issue.
"...So it wouldn't be strange for us to become friends?"
"...Well, no, if that's how you want to take it, sure."
At my question, Rose answered with an expression that was complicated in every sense.
Then she fell into thought for another moment before speaking again.
"All right. Let's say you two become really, really close friends."
Rose plopped down beside me as she said it.
"But then there's Jua. What about her? You two haven't known each other all that long, have you?"
"...The time we've known each other as combatants is long."
"Right, fair. Jua did talk about you a lot, you know. She never dreamed it was you, and most of it was griping, but she did seem to think of you as someone familiar, in her own way. You know how some kids roughhouse with their close friends in class and air their complaints about them in front of everyone? It was like that."
"And?"
"Hm."
Rose looked at me.
Her expression was that of someone wrestling with how to put something into words.
"Did you know... Jua has her own little competitive streak going with Hayun?"
"..."
I did know—but it was also something the me of this world had no way of knowing. I only knew because I'd read the webtoon.
At the very least, Jua never let that trademark inferiority complex of hers show in front of me. Since coming here we'd been busy in all sorts of ways, with plenty of work that demanded cooperation, so she probably couldn't have shown it even if she'd wanted to.
"So, if you two were to become 'especially close friends,' Jua might end up thinking along the same lines. I mean, 'best' means one, above all else. People say you can't rank your friends first or second, but if you become 'especially close'... you follow?"
Rose, clearly doing her best to circle around the point, sent me a meaningful look as she said it.
"If you two insist on that kind of relationship, I'm in no position to object. It's your choice. But you're the one at the center of it."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I simply kept my mouth shut and stayed still.
"Say—just hypothetically—if what Jua feels toward you is only a feeling she has in order to compete, then at some point you may need to draw a line. It's a problem if she's deceiving herself about her own feelings. Once things tangle up too deep, they get so hard to untangle that you might have to cut them clean off—and then the hurt on both sides becomes enormous."
Then Rose gave a little shrug.
"Well, to say it one more time: I have no right to meddle. But... even so, there's a difference between blindly stepping on a landmine and at least having a warning sign posted. I'm just telling you in advance because there seem to be things you don't know."
She was right.
The relationships between magical girls were, in truth, things I had no business knowing—that was how it should have been.
The magical girl relationships shown in the media were nothing but smoothly wrapped packaging, and even in battle, that sort of friction had never felt especially pronounced.
Hayun and Jua's relationship, especially, wasn't friction that showed much on the surface. It was closer to a one-sided admiration that Jua alone harbored toward Hayun.
Which is to say, it was much like the feelings I had once harbored toward Hayun.
And that was knowledge I possessed only because I knew the original work.
"..."
"That's everything I wanted to say. Well... Jua does look pretty happy when she's around you, so I'll leave it there. Just—remember that we used to fight with each other plenty, back in the day."
"...I'll keep it in mind."
I nodded at Rose's words.
Judging by it all, she seemed to have spent quite a long time turning the three of us over in her mind. On the surface she hadn't managed to hold back her laughter—but perhaps, as their senior, she'd had her own thoughts all along.
"Hayun was the one who kept us anchored at the center. Honestly, without her, who knows how awkward things would've been among us. Her bond with you included. And maybe... we wouldn't have been able to help you at all. If that had happened, things would look very different right now."
Rose rose to her feet.
"So let's keep making this work, going forward. We've come this far—it's not like we can split up now, can we?"
That had to be why she'd come to say all this to me.
Hayun was indeed the one who held the magical girls together, but the moment she became entangled with me, she lost her ability to think objectively. If Jua had never come near me, there might have been no real problem—but ever since Hayun had drawn close, I could feel the two of them shifting, little by little.
In two days we would have to stake our lives all over again, and if something went wrong there because of the friction between them, that would be a disaster.
And if I was going to keep living as a magical girl from here on out...
"...It does feel a bit rich, me saying all this when I couldn't control my own feelings at the start, either. Feel free to write it off as nothing but worry talking."
Leaving only those words behind, Rose turned away.
I quietly watched her back for a while.
"Inferiority. Jealousy."
The decisive emotions that had led my affairs astray to this point. The emotions that had left me drowning in despair for so long.
Jua was a magical girl. One who fought on the power of hope.
If Jua ever came face to face with some despair of her own—would she be able to fight properly?
I let out a light sigh and rose to my feet.
Jua's inspection turned up nothing wrong with the equipment.
The food we were growing was fine as well, and the canned goods we'd set aside because we wanted them for a special meal were exactly where we'd left them.
On the day before the operation, we brought out every last bit of that food and ate our fill. Well, viewed objectively, it was a meal that only ambiguously earned the word "feast"—but in the circumstances we'd been given, it counted all the same.
"'Executing the operation'—what is this, a crime movie?"
Dalia said that partway through the meeting, and every one of us burst out laughing in spite of ourselves.
Well, she wasn't wrong.
If you counted up everything we were currently doing that broke existing law, the list would be endless.
Attacking someone summoned for a prosecutorial interrogation—an idea straight out of a mafia drama.
The only difference was that this mafia numbered eight, two of them were hamsters, and the rest wore dresses in every color of the rainbow.
Then again, maybe that was too different?
With the meal finished and our bodies washed clean, we decided to turn in early for the night.
Before bed, I went out for my usual walk.
Jua and Hayun followed along as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
"..."
"Nervous?"
When I fell silent, lost in my own head, Hayun, tucked against my side, asked.
What was I supposed to say?
The truth was, I wasn't nervous at all. If anything, I was looking forward to it—because I wanted the Chairman, the moment he laid eyes on us, to wear the most despair-ridden expression he could manage.
But at the same time, something did worry me.
Jua.
Was it because Rose had told me about Jua's feelings?
Even as I told myself it wouldn't be like that, I couldn't stop the what if from creeping in.
"...I'm a little nervous."
But trying to explain it aloud seemed likely to make a mess of Jua's feelings, so I simply left it at that.
"You don't need to worry too much."
Hayun said.
"Because I'll protect you, Jieun. What happened before won't happen again."
Saying that, Hayun wrapped my right arm in a tight hug.
The warmth of her body reached me plain and simple, and honestly, it put me a little at ease.
And the hand gripping my left sleeve—Jua's—tightened ever so slightly, too.
They were both just friends. That was all.
That was the only way I was allowed to see it.
So why did I keep reading this situation all wrong?
Straining to push the tangle out of my head, I stood there blankly for a long while.