Machine Gun of Love - 2
"Wh-what?!"
Lena, who had been prostrate on the ground in despair, shot up to her feet, an expression of sheer disbelief written across her face.
Only moments ago, there had been the wreckage of the destruction they themselves had wrought. Now the ruins of Kabukicho, once saturated with screaming and terror, had vanished without a trace, and the street stood exactly as it had before—as if everything those girls had done had been nothing more than a dream.
Passersby were moving along the avenue in orderly fashion, their footsteps drifting toward the roadside.
I approached the girls, who were staring in shock at the scenery that had so abruptly restored itself.
"So, did that help you blow off some steam?"
"……."
"……."
"……."
Still reeling under the weight of their guilt, the three stared at me as though they couldn't tell whether this was real. Their faces, streaked with tears and vacant with shock, looked no different from any ordinary girl's.
"This is reality now. You're just a bunch of foolish kids who threw a tantrum in front of Kabukicho and nothing more."
"Thank… goodness."
—Hup!
Nanami clapped a hand over her own mouth, startled by the words that had slipped out of her. And even as she held it shut, I could see the tears welling up behind her fingers.
It was the truth spilling out from somewhere deep in their unconscious.
I saw it, heard it, felt it.
"Honestly, you three."
Tap.Tap.Tap.
Carrying just the faintest note of reproach, I gave each of their heads a light rap with my staff.
Girls who, unable to conquer their own contradictory rage, had hidden beneath my name and run wild. Perhaps the pain on their scalps finally made reality sink in, because all three shuddered with relief and bowed their heads.
"If you're going to regret it this much, why did you even try?"
"But still…"
Kohane's puffy, swollen eyes shifted about as she fumbled for an excuse—so I gave that bulging forehead of hers one more thump with the staff.
Tap.
"Hnnk?! That actually hurts, you know…"
As I unfurled the dream world around us, I had felt where their hearts were being pulled. It wasn't toward the kind of closure that revenge or destruction brings. Quite the opposite—it was toward a goal, something that would carry them forward. Kabukicho had never been their final destination.
'The moment they gained power, they went on a rampage to vent their grief—but even that anger had been warped over long, long years.'
In the original story, no companion had ever appeared at [Machine Gun]'s side. The girl left all alone—had she simply failed to conquer her own contradictions and clung to someone, anyone, for a purpose to live by?
"So? Have you changed your mind yet?"
"……."
"If you still feel you haven't gotten your fair shake, then by all means—keep going."
"……."
Lena seemed to hesitate, unsure how to answer my question. In that case, it was the duty of an adult to point a wandering soul in the right direction. There was still room left for these girls to change, and the advice I could offer them was…
"So, Leader, what did you do?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, they were ready to burn Kabukicho to the ground, and then suddenly they turned all docile and turned themselves in to the police."
Ichika crossed her legs the other way and waited for my answer. She and Hana had been waiting outside while I pulled Lena, Kohane, and Nanami into the dream barrier, so they hadn't witnessed how everything had played out.
"Does your dream magic come with some kind of mind-rewriting hypnosis feature or something?"
"If something like that existed, I'd be using it on Councilwoman Fujimoto and every criminal in the country."
"Fair point, actually."
"This one was partly my fault, so I just figured I'd take a little more responsibility for it."
"How was any of that your fault…?"
Ichika opened her mouth to say something more, hesitated, then looked away.
"Wow! That's amazing! Hikari-chan, a hypnotist who makes the world a brighter place!"
"Hana-chan, she's a dream mage, not a hypnotist."
"A dream mage!"
On the empty train back to Yokohama, I watched Hana's profile as she clapped her hands and parroted the words back and forth, then turned my gaze to the scenery outside the window.
The sky, dyed crimson by the sunset. Beneath the dusk, the city's lights were flickering to life, one by one. A glittering night skyline emerging slowly from the encroaching dark.
'At least for tonight, the skyline those girls so despised won't be visible to them.'
After witnessing their true dreams within the dream world and wailing their hearts out, the three had turned themselves in to the police, just as they were. Their real wish had never been to destroy the streets—it was to find their families again. What they had truly yearned for was not hatred, but love.
Dreams, distorted beyond recognition by an endless stretch of suffering.
'If I'd been in their situation, I probably would have done the same.'
I was still turning over that hatred of theirs—the kind that refused to feel like someone else's problem—when Hana spoke up, apropos of my tangled state of mind.
"Hikari-chan, are you sad?"
"Hm?"
"Ever since we saw those bad big sisters, your face has been all weird."
"Is it? It's just my usual blank fox-eyes, isn't it?"
At Ichika's indifferent remark, Hana shook her head vigorously.
"When Hikari-chan is really sad sometimes, that's the face you make."
"……."
So this was why adults weren't supposed to let their feelings show in front of the kids.
"It's just… I can't help thinking it was partly my fault."
"How was it your fault, Leader?"
"If I had handled things better as the Magical Girl of [Beginning]—in some other way—they never would have been provoked like that."
Perhaps bringing change to this world demanded the resolve to see it through to the very end. I had flung a wave of change across it without any real accountability, and then vanished—and chaos had erupted right on my heels.
No matter how quickly I had shut it down, there were already people who had been hurt by it. Even if this world had been fated for destruction anyway, the harm I caused had come long before that doom would ever arrive.
If I was going to act at all, to save the people I loved along with the innocent—shouldn't there have been a better way to do it?
Words I had never managed to say out loud churned through my mind.
"I don't think that's true at all. How was any of that your fault?"
Ichika sprang to her feet, pointing straight at me.
"Every bad thing every magical girl does in this world is not on you! And all this digging yourself into a hole over it, that's just—"
She tried to keep going, but the words seemed to slip away from her mid-sentence, and she trailed off, fumbling. All she wanted to do was comfort me, yet she couldn't find a way to say it right, and I could feel her hesitating for fear of wounding me instead.
"Tch. Sorry for yelling. Guess my head got a little hot."
"……."
"I'm gonna go cool it down for a bit. Sorry!"
Clatter. Click!
And then silence settled back over the empty subway car.
The night skyline. The dying sunset. A desolate quiet. And in the middle of it, Hana spoke in a voice soft as a whisper.
"I think Ichika gets angry whenever you hurt yourself, Hikari-chan."
"Yeah. I know."
Sato Hana took my hand and held it tight. As that warm, gentle palm wrapped around mine, I felt the knot in my chest loosening, little by little.
"Hikari-chan."
"Hmm?"
"I was so happy when you asked me to come help people with you today."
"……."
"Mom and Dad, every time I try to do anything, all they do is worry."
Because to the Sato couple, Sato Hana was not some powerful magical girl—she was their precious daughter, who had spent so long unable to walk and only recently risen back to her feet.
Even if the situation had been urgent, a pang of regret washed over me. Hadn't I rushed into a decision that was far too hasty?
Regret.
Sensing the guilt festering in my heart, Hana laced her fingers through mine and gripped my hand even tighter.
"Thanks to you, Hikari-chan, I think I finally figured out what I really want to do."
"What you want to do?"
"Yeah!"
Hana beamed at me. Even without transforming, her hair seemed to glow in the sunset light.
"I want to use a magical girl's power to help people in trouble!"
"……."
"Will you help me?"
"…Yeah."
"Thank you."
This world, it seemed, was not soft enough to be fixed by a single show. Then all the more reason to keep changing it. To help a little more, teach a little more, and make better choices as we went—so that magical girls could find their true dreams on their own. And so that one day, when everything was over, I could return to my mother with a smile on my face.
I would keep trying.
The interrogation room at the Metropolitan Police Department was thick with tension.
The three magical girls who had gone on the rampage only days before had turned themselves in of their own accord.
"So in the end, they had nothing to do with the Magical Girl of [Beginning] at all?"
"All three statements match, and more to the point, they've been confirmed as having been gathered in the plaza at the time of that broadcast, so—"
"Most witnesses, in fact, testify that the Magical Girl of [Beginning] was focused entirely on rescue efforts during the incident."
"……."
"I don't understand it at all."
The Kabukicho Incident. Officially, it was the first case ever instigated by a paranormal with a grudge against society. Because the three perpetrators had staged something closer to an armed demonstration than an actual massacre, there had been property damage, but beyond a handful of injuries, the casualty count was remarkably low. Even so, it served as a sobering lesson in just how helpless official authority could become when paranormals set out to cause chaos in earnest.
At a time when public power had been paralyzed and unable to function, the girls—who had been subdued by a mysterious group of magical girls—had come forward to confess as if possessed by demons.
"That group of magical girls, though. Who on earth…"
"Their statements also agree that it was the Magical Girl of [Beginning] who came to stop them personally."
"The Magical Girl of [Beginning]…"
The being who, in barely two months, made it possible to find magical girls out in society. The being who revealed the workings and the flowering of paranormal ability—principles no one had ever managed to uncover.
"This is practically…"
Was it not the deed of a Prometheus, the first to teach mankind the use of fire?
"Lady Fujimoto seems to have taken a great interest in this [Beginning]."
"Which is why she's come all this way to conduct the interrogation herself."
From behind the one-way mirror, in the interrogation room, Fujimoto Sumire—admitted under the special credentials of a state-affiliated magical girl investigator—was studying the three instigators of the incident.
"…So, in the end, you were merely a group impersonating the name of [Beginning]… is that correct?"
"……."
The sheer presence of the girl in plain black clothes, her eyes sharp as blades. Lena, Kohane, and Nanami pressed their lips tightly together and gave a stiff nod.
"I see."
"……."
"It did strike me as strange. [Beginning] seemed to act according to her own convictions, and then suddenly—a terrorist attack, of all things…"
"…To be honest, we can't tell you anything more than we already have…"
"And with the masks, we could hardly see her face anyway…"
"Is that so."
Sumire gave her businesslike reply, then drew a sheaf of documents from the envelope she had set on the table.
[Paranormal Crime History — Entire Kanto Region]
[Statistics on Paranormals Residing in Tokyo's 23 Wards]
For the moment, the girls' flamboyant rampage was covering it up—but crimes and disturbances committed with paranormal abilities were slowly coming to light, one after another.
"According to [Beginning], paranormal ability—magical girls—are the power of dreams. That is what she said, is it not?"
"…I'm sorry?"
"It is difficult to fathom how she could know what no one else has ever uncovered."
Sumire continued, quietly studying the trio.
"Even if the source of a magical girl's power is a new form of energy that escapes the logic of resources, power that cannot be controlled stagnates—and when it stagnates, it runs rampant. That is simply how such things behave."
Unable to guess what she was driving at, the three could only stare blankly at Sumire.
"We intend to establish an organization—one capable of stabilizing and controlling that power."
"You can't be—!"
"The aftermath of this Kabukicho Incident shall be handled under the Fujimoto name."
Come beneath me.
"In the near future, a series of special laws targeting paranormals will be enacted. Among them is a measure granting reduced sentences to paranormal offenders—those who acted while unable to control themselves—through social service."
Your sins, I shall absolve.
"And if it is true that a magical girl's power grows through dreams and aspirations, then Fujimoto can more than provide a place to hold them."
Your desires, I shall grant.
"……."
Understanding every layered meaning in her words, Lena fell silent for a long moment.
'What is it that you truly want?'
The truth of their own hearts that the Magical Girl of [Beginning] had shown them.
"Our… families. We want to find them again."
"…Understood."
Sumire spoke, her eyes gleaming quietly.
"Welcome to the Magical Girl Alliance."