The Seoul Incident: Finale
Fortunately, no magical girl came after me as I fled.
…The biggest reason, of course, was that a single strike had turned the city into an absolute wasteland.
I had cut the siphoning short before I could scatter and harvest the starlight, but even so I had, for an instant, torn something soul-like and something vital out of every human in range and shoved it back in. If even the magical girls had dropped like cut strings, what chance did ordinary people have?
Drivers would have been hit too. How much damage the city had taken was beyond guessing. Even I, the one who had unleashed the blow, could not tell how far the radius had reached. My best guess was that the effect had stretched farther than anything I could imagine.
…This was the worst possible outcome.
I had only meant to needle Radiant White a little, take a few hits, and run—just enough to make White listen to me a bit more carefully next time. After this, she might not only refuse to listen; she might refuse to meet me at all.
No—worse than that. Because of me, countless people had nearly died. Sky. Nameless magical girls. Nameless civilians.
My heart felt like it had frozen solid. No—it felt as if an ice block had been shoved into the place where a heart should be.
I could have said it was not my fault. Shining White was the one who had driven things that far, the one who had been hiding that monstrous power. I could have rationalized every last scrap of it as her doing.
…But I was the one who had handed my body over because I wanted to live. I was the one who had gathered starlight and swung it to survive. I was the one who had come looking for Radiant White in the first place just to harass her.
If I had simply stayed quiet and kept my head down, everyone would have been fine. My meddling was what had twisted everything into this mess.
Good people had nearly died.
Only then did my body start to shake. All I had wanted was to live. I had never intended this. I had never known an attack like that would come out of me.
If I had known, I would not have done it. If I had known, I would never have—
…Really? Are you that sure? Even if you had known everything, could you have quietly accepted defeat in that situation?
Really?
I could not answer that. I did not have the courage to say yes.
…I wanted to rest. I did not want to do anything. I just wanted to lie down for a while. I was already short on blood as it was.
This… I would not think about it. I must not think about it. Keep going and something inside me would break. Later—after I had rested, when I had room to breathe—I could deal with it then.
Not now. I forced my heart back into some kind of order and dropped onto a ruined building that happened to be in sight.
I was already in downtown Incheon, and there was still plenty of time before sunrise. More than anything, I wanted somewhere I could stretch out and sleep.
“…Haa.”
The moment I lay down, the tension flooded out of my body and a sigh escaped on its own.
Was Sky all right?
Her abdomen had not been physically pierced, so it was not a critical injury—but the fact that Shining White had torn starlight out of her still sat wrong in my gut.
…What happened when a magical girl’s starlight ran dry had never come up in the original story either.
So I could not be sure whether she would make it.
Worrying and praying would change nothing, so maybe it did not matter either way.
I did not need sleep, but the desire for it was swelling up like a tide. Across my previous life and this one, had I ever been this exhausted?
Fine. Just one hour. One hour should be long enough that nothing would bother me. I would just close my eyes for one hour.
The decision and the action came at the same instant. I could not imagine anyone having the guts to attack me or loiter nearby right now.
…But before ten minutes had passed, I learned that some creatures really were that swollen with nerve.
Several sets of footsteps came toward me all at once. I felt the vibration through the rubble I was lying on.
Who dared disturb my rest.
Irritation hit harder than anything else. Another day I might have let it slide. Not today.
Whether they were actual rats or metaphorical ones, their timing could not have been worse.
You should not have touched me right now. You should have left me alone to sleep.
…I knew better than anyone that this was nothing more than lashing out—but nothing better than surrendering to the surge of feeling presented itself.
I formed a spear of blood, already deciding that anyone who walked into my line of sight was going to look excellent skewered, and turned to face the intruders.
“…What are you doing here?”
A face I had never expected to see again appeared, and the poison in me vanished on the spot.
“A child… follows her parent no matter what may come, does she not?”
Ilie had arrived, leading a host of vampires.
Before I could even speak, she dropped to one knee and began apologizing for failing to recognize me sooner.
“What nonsense is that. I am not your parent.”
Strictly speaking, the vampire elder who was their parent was inside me. But he was him, and I was me.
Just because he was one of the components making up my body did not mean I had any desire to claim these creatures as my children.
I already had more than enough trouble cleaning up my own mess.
Even if I somehow found the leisure later, I still would not be inclined to acknowledge them as offspring—but Ilie kept calling me Mother all the same.
“Mother. I know you dwell within. Please—grant us an answer. Why… have you taken such a form?”
How the hell would I know.
I was about to snap at her when my mouth moved on its own.
“I needed a superior body, my daughter.”
…?
What the fuck.
No matter how much we tried to contain it, the chaos showed no end.
People lay unconscious all along the streets. Drivers who had blacked out mid-drive had plowed into other cars or buildings. From subways, from stations, from every kind of place, the unconscious kept pouring out.
Restaurants and factories must have been hit the same way; flames were already climbing here and there among the buildings.
Countless magical girls were fighting with everything they had to get the situation under control, and still nothing improved.
“Aqua Marine, if you’ve put out the fire, come look over here!”
“I—I’m on my way! White, please take care of the people…!”
“Y-yeah!”
Honestly, I was barely holding on by myself and wished she would not leave. But the fire stations were paralyzed by the jammed roads, and I knew how precious Aqua Marine’s water was right now. I had no choice but to send her.
I shouted myself hoarse trying to keep people organized, but the panicked civilians showed no sign of settling.
Are we really going to be okay? What happened? Why did everyone just collapse?
To the desperate questions flung at me by people searching for any scrap of certainty in the chaos, I could only answer like an automated machine—that it was fine, that if they stayed calm it would be resolved.
…If it had been my sister, she would have handled this so much better.
She would have smoothed any chaos away without effort and calmed everyone in an instant.
I was not as strong as she was. I could not earn people’s trust the way she did. So I could not do it.
If my sister had been standing here instead of me. If, back then, she had not taken that attack in my place.
It never would have come to this.
I knew this was no time to sink into gloom, but my thoughts kept sliding toward the dark, and there was nothing I could do about it.
If I had not provoked her, would things have stayed this bad? If I had ignored that vampire’s words, would it all have been different?
I knew the what-ifs were empty. They kept coming anyway.
Maybe. If only. If I had.
And every one of those countless ifs funneled down to a single conclusion.
Hemoregia.
If that monster had never existed, things would never have reached this point. If only that monster had never existed.
Until now I had approached the investigation as a way to learn how she was connected to my sister. From now on…
From now on, it felt like I would have to throw everything I had into killing her.
Even then—if I had fired the beam at her head instead of the hand that had pierced Sky’s stomach—I could have finished her.
But I had hesitated.
Because if I killed her then, I might never get another scrap of information about my sister.
…How stupid.
In the end she was still a monster that harmed society. That truth had never changed.
“…I will never forgive her.”
I swore it to myself—by any means necessary, I would kill her.
“Pardon…?”
A nearby civilian asked what I would never forgive, so I put the smile back on and said I had been talking about the monsters.
No matter how much I hated that creature, right now my duty as a hero was to save the people.