The Magical Girl of the Waning Moon (1)
There was no sensation below my knees.
Memory-alloy prosthetics had taken the place of my legs.
I hadn't severed them myself. I had never possessed that kind of sadistic taste. During my work as a magical girl, enemies had mauled my legs again and again, and just before retirement they had been crushed outright — so there had been no choice but to cut them away.
Both of them.
Click-clack.
"Your Excellency, we will reach the surface shortly."
"…Thank you."
After my retirement, the Bureau had issued me a top-of-the-line wheelchair. An adjutant who could serve as my hands and feet came as a free bonus. Even fitted with advanced prosthetics, I still found walking unnatural; keeping my center of gravity was difficult. So of late I always moved with the Adjutant's help.
Together with the wheelchair.
"We won't be able to go far today. I'm sorry, but please content yourself with a turn around the immediate area."
"Mm."
The Adjutant smiled a little as he spoke. His ash-grey uniform and long brown hair caught my eye — a figure I had grown reasonably used to by now.
…
We boarded the narrow elevator bound for the surface. Every wall was mirrored. The glass had been installed at the request of the magical girls, who were expected to mind their appearance at all times, anywhere. The sight of mirrors on every side — up, down, left, right — left me faintly uneasy.
White hair looked back at me from the glass. It was long enough to spill past my shoulders and drape over the seat of the wheelchair.
My hair.
It was not dye or bleach. Like someone struck by Marie Antoinette syndrome, it had gone pure white. Given everything the original owner of this body had endured, it was, in a way, only natural.
Pale, bloodless skin; white hair; the cloudy pupil of one eye — all of it filled my vision. My sight itself was unimpaired, but the appearance was grim enough. The pupil looked milky, like a cataract patient on the brink of blindness.
…
As I stared blankly at my own face, my body began to tremble in fine, continuous shivers. Terror, dread, grievance, betrayal, and other strange emotions I could not name welled up from deep inside me.
It was almost instinct.
Skin drained of all color. Hair bleached white by a fear beyond words. Eyes hazed over by torture until they no longer worked as they should.
The longer I looked, the more the memories of this body's true owner rose to the surface.
I shook.
I could not stop the trembling. My nerves sharpened to a razor edge. Every sense wound itself tight. I could not afford to let my guard down for even a second. The eyes in the mirror lost their focus. My body felt as if it were melting away. The sensation was so vile I nearly retched.
"…Your Excellency."
"…"
The Adjutant stroked my hair with a look of quiet pity, then drew a tranquilizer from his breast pocket and drove it into my neck. It was a reinforced dose manufactured specifically for me. As the orange fluid entered my throat, my mind settled and the feeling drained away.
It was hardly the first or second time. Every time I saw a mirror, the seizures came. That was all there was to it.
"Thank you."
"Not at all."
Even with the needle sunk deep into my neck, there was no pain. This body could no longer feel pain at all. Unable to endure the agony any longer, every last pain receptor throughout my body had been severed.
Of course, no one could call this a living body. It was a corpse stitched together like rags and given a clean exterior — nothing more. Modern medicine had forced a body that was already as good as dead to keep going.
A walking carcass. Something close to a living corpse.
And that was the condition of this body's owner — Ian-na.
…Though now it was my condition as well.
Clunk.
The Adjutant held his card to the scanner, and the elevator, which had stopped, began to move again. For secrecy and security, the car halted every three floors. Each time, a passenger had to present an ID card to the scanner.
It was a tedious, inconvenient process.
This place was a bunker sunk roughly a hundred meters underground — about the height of a forty-story apartment building. I lived in the deepest part of it, the control room, so every trip to the surface meant enduring this complicated sequence.
Even so, I could not give up the sight of the outside world.
Around us there was nothing but abandoned houses without owners and the low mountains that ringed the valley. Now and then you might spot illegally dumped trash, or a water deer, or a wild boar. It was an utterly ordinary hillside landscape — and yet to Ian-na it held tremendous meaning.
The peace she and the other magical girls had burned themselves to ash to protect.
The only way to see it with her own eyes was to look out over the ground above the Magical Girl Correction and Surveillance Bureau — the heart and core that commanded every magical girl in the Far East, a hundred meters beneath the earth.
…In truth, it meant nothing much to me personally. Once a month, I simply followed, faithfully, the habit of the Ian-na who had waited with desperate longing for nothing more than a glimpse of the world outside.
The Magical Girl Correction and Surveillance Bureau.
It was the title of this novel, and the name of the agency that gathered the magical girls scattered across the Far East and set them against the enemies that came from beyond the world.
Ian-na had once been called the strongest magical girl of all. She was also the current Director of the Magical Girl Correction and Surveillance Bureau.
Even if she was only an empty shell.
Ian-na's body had already spent its strength. The power unique to magical girls — the thing called a Remegeton — had vanished long ago. Without the Bureau medical staff's constant "post-mortem" care, her life could end at any moment.
Once she had been the object of every magical girl's reverence and awe. No longer. Her renown had faded, and her power was gone completely. Now she was nothing more than a puppet of the Bureau: a corpse kept alive by force, a lightning rod that gathered every magical girl's resentment in one place, a lizard's tail the Bureau could sever whenever the need arose.
That was Ian-na's role in this novel.
The story opened in the aftermath of the Magical Crusade.
The holy war that struck at the heart of the enemy pouring in from beyond the world had ended in the magical girls' victory. The Unknowns still tore open dimensions and entered this world, but their numbers had fallen sharply.
The number of magical girls, however, had not. From those who naturally acquired a Remegeton to those manufactured artificially — everything replaced but brain and spinal cord — their ranks had swollen far past any reasonable limit. Magical girls who could casually shred ordinary humans, who could stand alone against an army, had become far too many.
Worse, their minds were inherently unstable. Drawing power from another dimension warped the psyche; prolonged exposure to outer dimensions often drove them mad.
The Magical Girl Correction and Surveillance Bureau and every other oversight body scattered across the world resolved on a single course of action.
Dispose of the hound once the hunt is done.
They would eliminate the overgrown ranks of magical girls one by one. They would set them against each other so they could never unite.
Like Pest Control, their goal was to reduce the number of magical girls.
And Ian-na, as the Bureau's symbol, was the one who forced impossible orders on those girls and drove them to their deaths — who quietly shoved magical girls who had outlived their usefulness into lethal situations without their ever realizing it. In the mid-novel arc known as The Girls' Rebellion, she was the first extra to be removed, and the villain of the piece.
A scapegoat, in short.
The moment the protagonist erased Ian-na without a trace, the central command would pin every last responsibility for Pest Control on her and open negotiations with the remaining magical girls. Ian-na would meet her end at the hands of the humanity she had once protected — and at the hands of the protagonist — without ever understanding what was happening.
That was the wretched fate awaiting Ian-na in the novel.
But she was not the one issuing the orders. At present, Ian-na's self was constrained. She moved only in limited response to electrical signals received from the center; she was not a body capable of independent judgment. She could not even speak properly. The words that rose in her mind would not come out at once.
The one forcing impossible commands on the magical girls and driving them into death traps was the Deputy Director, who had seized control of the Bureau by propping Ian-na up as a figurehead.
As the novel progressed, Ian-na would gradually become aware of her own condition and protest the deaths of the magical girls to her superiors. Each time, stronger drugs would be pumped into her. Her state would worsen until, by the time the protagonist launched The Girls' Rebellion, she had degenerated into a doll without even a self left.
A villain who smiled to the very end, never knowing why she was dying, and was killed by the protagonist.
That was Ian-na.
…Wow.
The more I thought through the novel's plot, the more tangled my head became. Returning safely to my original world — that was my goal. I would twist every scrap of the story's fixed content, every scrap of that miserable death.
Clunk.
"We've arrived, Director."
"Mm."
The musty smell of dust reached me first, followed by the cries of mountain animals.
Click-clack.
We stepped out of the dilapidated container warehouse that served as the sole entrance, and a sky dense with stars filled my vision.
The sky Ian-na had wanted to protect.
The pre-dawn sky was extraordinarily bright.
…Well. Looking at it like this, it isn't bad.
It felt a little like a convalescent trip, and that was not entirely unpleasant. Above all, the air was clean.
For a while I simply stared up at the sky, thinking of the tomorrow that was coming.