Schemes and the Suppression Choker
Savoring the afterglow of the explosion had been pleasant enough, but a more practical impulse eventually won out, and I returned the lance to blood.
I settled myself somewhere convenient nearby and looked over the researcher's condition.
Hmm. Nothing life-threatening, as far as I could tell.
More than anything, she wasn't whining about how much it hurt, so she was probably fine.
She did look too dazed to complain even if she wanted to, but that wasn't something I needed to factor in.
I reclaimed the ropes that had bound her, then took the bundle she had been clutching like a treasure chest and opened it.
Somehow the thing had come through that chaos completely intact. The researcher who had valued this more than her own life even struck me as faintly admirable.
Ordinarily I would have simply told her to go her own way by this point, but I decided I would make a special exception and escort her as far as the city.
Upgrading my internal evaluation of her a notch, I examined the contents of the bundle.
This was a watch. This was a certificate. And this… whatever. I wasn't particularly curious.
Sorting the important from the unimportant left me with roughly three-quarters of the pile as things I could safely discard.
Looked at generously, even in that frantic scramble she had managed to grab about twenty-five percent useful items.
Documents that appeared to contain information on the Zodiacs, for example—that elite villain organization one could consider a special branch of the Monster Association.
High-grade intelligence I would have been grateful to possess even a single scrap of was scattered all through the rest.
Honestly, I had been at a loss about how I was supposed to live from here on out, but with these in hand I could manage at least middling success no matter what I tried.
…So. What now?
I had only ever thought as far as getting out of the research facility. Considering anything further left me feeling suddenly adrift.
I had no desire whatsoever to live as a monster. My entire way of thinking was wrong for that, to begin with.
Acting as a magical girl was out of the question with a body in this state. And living quietly… that just sounded boring.
I had gone to the trouble of possessing someone; I refused to settle for a bland existence. If the body had been weak, fine—but having reincarnated into something this powerful, living like a dead mouse would be even worse.
The series might have had a bright "I picked up a magical girl" vibe on the surface, but the world itself was thoroughly broken. Surviving as an ordinary powerless civilian would have been a brutal grind.
Put the other way around, that meant anyone with actual power could live remarkably free.
I could hide my strength and drift through life at my leisure, or play dark hero. I could even join the Zodiacs—not that that was ever going to happen.
I had not the slightest intention of throwing in with them.
The biggest reason was that they were the villains, but the real biggest reason was that it simply wouldn't be fun.
If I joined those people the whole game would become one-sided.
A fight only gets interesting when it's desperate and evenly matched. The people actually fighting might prefer a curb-stomp, but that wasn't my problem.
Helping the protagonists' party, on the other hand, felt equally awkward in its own way.
Radiant White had only become connected to the main character because of my body—more precisely, because of Shining White.
Even if almost nothing of Shining White's appearance remained in this form, a magical girl who had been driven by near-obsessive affection for her might still recognize me as the monster created from Shining White just by looking.
If I stayed close and got found out, she might never properly connect with the protagonist.
Considering that possibility, living near them as an ally was out of the question.
If those two never got together, things would get inconvenient in all sorts of ways.
I was still turning over how I ought to live when a thought struck me like lightning.
…Then I just needed to meet them as an enemy, didn't I?
The protagonists were going to get put through the wringer either way. A little extra mischief from me wouldn't change much.
And though I called it mischief, what I actually intended was something closer to sparring—mentor work, almost.
They were going to suffer plenty later on; if they lacked real combat experience it would only make things worse.
So my plan was to thrash them just enough to force them to grow. In my opinion half the tragedies that exploded in the early arcs had been completely unnecessary.
More than anything else: I would test them to see whether they had any worth!
…What was that just now? I felt like I had thought something strange.
Ah well. Didn't matter.
At any rate, I had settled on one thing. I would pretend to fight the main cast while quietly training them up.
The rest of my to-do list could wait until I reached Korea; if I kept turning it over in my head something would come to me.
The place I currently stood was Romania, homeland of the vampires.
Anywhere else and I would have headed for Korea immediately, but Romania changed the calculation. Creatures similar to me lived here in droves.
There was still a comfortable window before the story truly began, more than enough time to learn exactly what vampires were and what traits they possessed.
The reason I bothered researching them at all was simply that I didn't know much.
In the original work vampires had only ever appeared as a lightly treated plot device, so I had never learned what they actually did.
From the little that was shown they didn't seem wildly different from vampires in other media, but there had been a few unusual details.
If they had some weakness I didn't know about, that would be a problem. So I intended to study them and pick up the common knowledge.
…Come to think of it, among the materials I had glanced over and discarded back at the facility there had been some vampire-related files. I should have brought those.
Too late to go back for them. A shame, but that was that.
I soothed myself with the knowledge that what was done was done, and decided to focus on what I could still do.
Head for the nearest city and get my current situation sorted out.
For that I would need a local guide to show me the way.
"Lass. I have a question. Hey—I said I have a question."
I snapped my fingers beside the ear of the researcher, who was still staring blankly into space. Only then did she come back to herself.
"Y-yes?!"
Better. First things first: a name.
"Your name?"
I had a feeling I would be seeing her for quite a while; I couldn't keep calling her "lass" forever.
"Na—Na-rae. It's Na-rae!!"
She was Korean? Her looks were unusual enough that I had assumed she was a foreigner.
"Do you live around here?"
The researcher rolled her eyes around wildly for a moment, then squeezed them shut and explained that she had been planning to stay in the facility's night-duty quarters.
"In other words, you know nothing of the local geography?"
"Yees…"
Well, she hadn't looked like someone who would live out here in the first place.
"Then you can at least speak this country's language to some degree, yes?"
I asked with the hope that she could manage guide work even if she wasn't a local. Instead the researcher only trembled and held up her phone with a translation app open.
"Hah."
So she couldn't even manage guide duty.
"B-but if you give me a chance…!"
The sight of her begging to do anything so long as I spared her life was entertaining enough that I decided to go along with it.
"I have high expectations of you. You understand what that means, yes?"
I said it with a bright little smile. The researcher clutched her head and trembled harder, pleading for her life.
"Hmm? I'm already trying to spare you, aren't I? If you start showing me pathetic faces this early, both of us will be in trouble, you know?"
It was half a joke and half serious. Anyone intelligent enough to work as a researcher had a fairly high ceiling.
She might be short on wisdom, but she would be loaded with knowledge. While I was stuck here I intended to wring every scrap of information out of her that I could.
Weaknesses of monsters, the common sense of this world—things like that.
To the researcher, who looked ready to cry her tear ducts dry, I told her to get treatment first and bound her tightly with rope once more.
I could hardly carry her myself. We weren't that close.
I started sorting through the bundle again, meaning to discard the useless items and keep only the important ones, when something inside caught my eye.
It was a choker-like object set with an ominous red jewel.
The moment I saw it I couldn't help smiling. I already knew exactly what the thing was for.
In the story it had been called, simply, a suppression device.
Unlike the transformation tools of magical girls, which detonated starlight to change forms, this one did the opposite: it suppressed starlight and forcibly locked the wearer into a human shape.
Judging by the size, it had clearly been custom-made for me.
Apparently the claim that they had left the Dragon seat in the Zodiacs open for me hadn't been a joke. Preparing something like this proved it.
…With this, one major headache was gone. I had spent a lot of energy worrying about how I was supposed to live looking like this; turns out the worry had been wasted.
People really ought to live by "punishing the wicked." That was why fortune like this had come my way, right?
Right before I took off, I finally remembered that I was still essentially naked.
Walking into a city like this was out of the question.
If I could form weapons with blood manipulation, I ought to be able to make clothes as well.
With that thought I immediately began shaping blood to cover my body.
It proved less cooperative than expected, and what I ended up with was something a little too crude to really call clothing.
A fair amount of skin still showed, but…
Well, it would do for now.
Whether it was fortune or misfortune, Romania appeared to have no magical girls at all.
Otherwise there was no way I could have flown straight across a city trailing red dust without something happening.
Thanks to that I was able to drop the researcher off near a hospital without any resistance, though the whole experience still felt strangely off.
I had taken magical girls as a given, yet apparently they weren't.
Given that vampires held this place in a tight grip, having magical girls around would have been stranger, but I still hadn't expected zero.
I had been looking forward to it. Wondering what they would actually look like, how radiant they would be…
I memorized the researcher's phone number and wandered the city in search of somewhere to wait out the daylight. That was when the coppery scent of blood wormed its way into my nose.
Curious, I flew toward the source and, sure enough, found an underground passage that looked exactly like the sort of place a vampire would live.
I went inside. A vampire had its fangs buried in a woman's throat and was noisily sucking her blood.
"Haah, how many times do I have to say it? Did losing your mother scramble your brains? This is our territory. The likes of you without even an elder dare to set foot on our family's… eh."
He had been so absorbed in the feeding that his reaction came late; he lifted his head with clear irritation at the interruption and looked at me.
More importantly, we could understand each other.
There was no way these people spoke Korean, and even if vampires had their own language I wouldn't know it, so…
Magic, maybe? I was roughly one-third magical girl, after all.
As long as we could talk it was fine. I could figure out the details later.
"Your territory, you say?"
From the look on his face, he had been expecting someone he knew and was now thoroughly flummoxed that something else had shown up instead.
"…Who the hell are you!"
"You don't need to know."
He clearly had no interest in conversation, so I decided to start by lightly smashing him into the wall.