Advent (2)
The voice alone would have been enough, but the radiance pouring off her left no doubt—Radiant White had arrived.
The instant I registered her presence, I kicked the magical girl under my foot toward the sky-blue-haired one and launched myself clear of where I'd been standing.
Radiant White had a truly awful habit of opening every entrance with a beam attack, no questions asked.
Sure enough, less than a tenth of a second after I leapt, a pure-white beam detonated where I'd been standing and melted everything along its path.
…Wow. At that intensity, the girl I'd been stepping on probably hadn't made it either. You yell at me to get my foot off her, White, then fire something she couldn't possibly dodge?
"Like a hero with the light! Radiant White has arrived to drive back the darkness!"
I'd let that go. White must have calibrated the attack so the girl underfoot could take it. Surely she wouldn't fire something that would actually endanger her own ally? Reckless as White could be, she wasn't that far gone.
The moment she landed, Radiant White shouted to the girl who'd been trampled and the sky-blue-haired one who'd caught her by accident that she would handle things here.
"B-but… Senior! Even for you, that's too dangerous! I-I couldn't even see her move…!"
The sky-blue-haired girl was whining, her tension gone—whether from relief at White's appearance or sheer exhaustion.
A magical girl has to be an example to everyone. She can't put on a display like that.
Agreed. White only ever spat out those toxic barbs, sharp enough to make me flinch every time her thoughts reached me—but I had to admit I agreed with her, at least a little.
If a magical girl who was supposed to lead people to safety started sniveling, what would the civilians think? That wouldn't do. No matter how hopeless things looked, you had to be able to say it was going to be okay. Magical girls were human too, so of course they could despair—but despair could wait until after the world had already fallen apart, couldn't it?
"It's all right, Sky. I'm going to win! So you two get the people to safety! If you run into any monsters on the way, take them down!"
Right. Like Radiant White over there. Or at the very least, with the grit of that pink-haired girl I'd been stepping on.
I was so thoroughly unimpressed with the sky-blue-haired girl's endless weak-willed noise that I casually lobbed a blood javelin her way. If I threw it hard and she ducked out of pure fright, the civilians behind her might stop being civilians—so I kept it to something she could reasonably block.
But instead of the sky-blue-haired girl, the sprawled pink one shot up like a ghost, crossed both arms to catch the blow, then collapsed again.
"P-Pink Senior!!!!"
From the way the starlight wreathed around the pink-haired girl was scattering, that single hit had knocked her clean out. I hadn't thrown it that hard. Pretty fragile herself, then. The assessment had barely formed when I twisted my upper body aside and dodged a beam meant to punch straight through me.
"You—who do you think you're attacking right now!!"
Whether because she'd been ignored or because her comrade had been hit, Radiant White was swept up in passion, firing beam after beam from the tip of her wand. With every shot, a gaping hole opened in the building behind me, or a streetlight and traffic signal melted and snapped clean through.
"She was babbling about how weak she was and practically begging to be attacked. How was I supposed to just sit still?"
I was putting on a show of leisure, but the second one of those beams hit me dead-on, that leisure would vanish. Radiant White's magic was about projecting light, after all. That was why "Radiant" was in her magical girl name. She literally shone brilliantly.
Considering that Shining White's magic hardened light into solid form, you could call theirs similar yet different—fitting for sisters. …Of course, that small difference was also the main reason she kept getting compared to Shining White.
Shining White could solidify ambient light into castle walls—excellent magical efficiency and almost no collateral damage. Radiant White, forced to generate the light herself, was rather wasteful by comparison. The secondary damage was considerable, too.
Well, that was that. Time to change venues? Monsters weren't confined to this spot alone, and neither White nor I could go all-out here.
I took to the air with a mocking look on my face, and she rose after me, thoroughly provoked.
"Where do you think you're running!"
No more worrying about buildings or people getting hurt—she began drawing up starlight in earnest, her beams growing even more vicious. She'd started with short, clipped bursts, but now, as if tired of precise aiming, she simply held the beam continuous. From the ground, it must have looked like quite the spectacle.
And why not? Her attacks were light itself. Flashy, yes—but more importantly, impossible to dodge. No matter how fast a monster moved, nothing could outrun light.
But the one firing it was still human—Radiant White. Watch the tip of her wand and her wrist carefully enough to predict the trajectory, and dodging wasn't that hard. The brief window just before each beam, when starlight gathered, helped a great deal too.
"How about you stop shooting for a bit? It isn't working."
I fired a volley of blood bullets that forced her to shoot them down, while flying on a path she couldn't track, closed the distance, and smashed her wand earthward with a blood spear. I was getting tired of dealing with nothing but raw beam spam.
So she cut the beam, formed a sword of starlight atop her wand, and met my spear with it. Even now, she had to keep pouring out starlight just to maintain that blade. Her efficiency really was terrible. Then again, the power was that much greater for it.
My blood spear, locked against her sword, was slowly but surely cracking and crumbling—clear proof of her power. That was how badly she wanted to bring me down. Her face was set in absolute resolve. The expression of someone ready to take me down by any means necessary.
I would have preferred she keep that ironclad conviction—but then her expression twisted into bewilderment.
"You… that face…"
Apparently she'd overlaid Min-a's face onto mine.
Hmm.
Making excuses now would only be stranger, so I simply gathered starlight into my wings, ramped up the output, and shoved her back harder.
"Ugh… kh!"
She'd faltered, her heart shaken for a moment, then locked her stance and tried not to give ground—but a wingless girl had no chance of matching me in the air.
"Hmm? You came at me so fiercely, yet look at you now!"
As I forced her down, I considered where to land, then decided on the nearest place I could sense starlight. I was planning to tour all of Seoul with her anyway. Did it matter where we started?
I kindly waited for Radiant White to recover from the impact of the landing, and looked around. I'd sensed starlight, but it wasn't a special-grade—just magical girls. I'd been privately hoping for a special-grade.
"Something just fell from the sky… a special-grade?! And Radiant White too?! Wh-White! Are you all ri—argh, these things!"
Just like the last place, the situation here looked grim. Plenty of monsters—and just as many refugees, which made it worse. Even the magical girls meant to guide them were too busy dealing with monsters, so the civilians were scattering in every direction in blind panic.
However strong magical girls might be, holding back monsters in the middle of a stampede without any civilians getting hurt was nearly impossible. At this rate, people were going to die by the dozens.
I didn't want that.
I still haven't decided whether they're gems or pebbles, after all.
"Go help them."
"What did you just say…?"
I ordered White, who had just managed to get back into a fighting stance, to go help those magical girls. At that, White scowled at me even harder, looking more baffled than ever.
"Isn't that your job? Go, Guardian. Go cut down those bandits who covet what is mine."
"People's lives aren't things you can own!"
White flared up at my treating people's lives like possessions and tried to form her sword again to charge me—but when I sprayed blood into the air and forged hundreds of spears from it, she hesitated.
"If you don't attack me, I'll stay put. But if you do, know that everyone here will get caught in it."
White stared at me with a face full of distrust. Right—that was the normal reaction. You couldn't trust a word out of a monster's mouth.
"You think I'll believe that?!"
"If I truly wanted the things here dead, I would have done it already. But I have no such intention. What fool in this world destroys what belongs to them?"
White glared at me a moment longer, then finally gritted her teeth and went to help the struggling magical girls.
White might not have been the strongest overall, but her offensive power was first-rate—and once she joined the fight, that horde of monsters was nothing but corpses before long.
While I leisurely drew the blood from the corpses and absorbed it, White did as she had before—asked the magical girls who'd been fighting to take charge of the civilians—then came back to me. She still held her sword of light, but she no longer looked ready to charge me on sight.
"…What are you after?"
She seemed intent on wringing every scrap of information she could out of me instead. A little anticlimactic, but I could live with it. When a special-grade monster—one strong enough that she couldn't subdue it alone, and the first of its kind to appear—took a strangely neutral stance, squeezing it for intel was the right call.
Well, as for schemes…
Keep people from dying too much, banter with you like this, then dump myself at Su-hyeok's house in Incheon the way the original story goes—that was the goal. I couldn't exactly say that straight out…
…Right. How about I try this for now?
"Schemes? I have none. What scheme is there in commanding those who rightly stand beneath me to protect what is mine?"
White looked thoroughly displeased at being treated like a subordinate as a matter of course, but I was in character, so I ignored it and declared my ambition—which I had just invented on the spot.
"Lawless bandits dare try to destroy what is mine, so I have come forth as their rightful master to protect it. That is all."