Toward Death (4)
...Why?
Why was Ho-jun coming out of my room?
Every security measure—iris scanners, fingerprint locks, all of it—had been disabled. The double-layered steel doors stood wide open, and Ho-jun strode out of them as if he owned the place.
His black suit cut a sharp figure even from a distance, the tailored fit only amplifying the pressure he carried with him.
And yet.
For all the intimidation in his frame, the look on his face was endlessly gentle—the face of a father gazing at a beloved daughter.
A strange, wrong dissonance crawled over my skin. Instinct made me shrink into myself.
"...Deputy Director."
Our eyes met as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
I tried to speak, but the words died in my throat. Ho-jun and the medical team were already on me, closing in before I could form a single sentence.
Six figures in surgical scrubs filled my field of vision.
They were the specialists who handled Ian-na's routine maintenance. How many times had her belly been opened under those hands?
A tremor.
My whole body began to shake hard. The psychological pressure was crushing.
Isolated and cornered inside the Bureau, Ian-na had been driven to the edge long ago. There was no way she could endure surgery with a sound mind. The endless succession of life-prolonging operations had hollowed her spirit out completely.
"Ugh... hh..."
And now, the mere sight of surgical scrubs was enough to make her gag on reflex.
"D-Director...!"
I forced the rising acid back down and clutched the adjutant's sleeve with everything I had.
He stepped in front of me, his face tight with unease.
"What is the meaning of this? The regular checkup is three days from now. Even if this is Bureau grounds, this is still the Director's private residence. The Deputy Director has no right to enter as he pleases."
"That is none of your concern."
Ho-jun brushed the adjutant's careful objections aside without interest and came right up to my face.
"The medical team found an anomaly in the Director's head. It is quite serious."
"...Deputy Director!"
"Do not raise your voice. Be quiet. Quietly."
Ho-jun leaned on sheer presence until the adjutant, cowed by that massive frame, took a step back.
Then Ho-jun's hand reached for my head again.
"Th-that is..."
"Quiet."
His fingers stroked through white hair and parted it at the crown with a gentle, invasive care.
"Here?"
"Yes, that's correct. The faint residual suture marks make it certain."
Several of the medical staff in their blue scrubs crowded in beside him and studied the top of my skull. One of them pressed a small, unfamiliar device against the spot. A beep answered him, the machine chirping out its confirmation.
"Found it."
"...Thank goodness. Truly, thank goodness. We are not too late."
Ho-jun let out a breath of genuine relief and smoothed my hair once more.
"What... is going on..."
"I will explain as we move. Nearest operating theater. Transfer immediately. Use whatever you need."
"Third Medical Room."
Ho-jun himself took hold of my wheelchair and pushed hard, hurrying us somewhere. The adjutant scrambled after us in short, anxious steps while the medical team pulled ahead by half a stride.
"H-Ho-jun..."
"There has been an irregularity in the Director's brain waves. Analysis points to a malfunction in the memory-assist chip inside her head. The auxiliary chip replaced six months ago has proven defective."
Memory-assist chip?
A euphemism, almost certainly, for the surveillance chip buried in my skull.
His suit hid it, but Ho-jun was wearing the white band on his wrist—the band that let him look into my head whenever he pleased.
Only this time, the headache that always came with it never arrived.
The surveillance chip had to be broken. That was why he was moving with such urgency.
"You are mistaken. The surveillance chip is not broken. The reason you feel no headache is that I have lowered the sensitivity."
"W-what..."
Ho-jun smiled as he said it.
He looked sincerely like a pervert.
"I am honored you think so. That said, it is true that the memory-assist chip in the Director's head has failed. I will stake everything I have on that. Leave it as it is, and it becomes no different from a lump of ordinary silicon hammered into the brain."
"Then..."
"We will move the regular inspection up a little. Something has clearly gone wrong with the Director's body, so we will take our time and examine her thoroughly, from start to finish."
"..."
No answer was required.
Ho-jun already knew exactly what I was thinking.
...
He said nothing either—only smiled.
"H-haha..."
I buried the urge to cry as deep as I could and forced a smile of my own.
Hiss.
Ho-jun's ID card released the heavy steel door, and we arrived in an operating room washed white from floor to ceiling.
Equipment crowded every surface—modern instruments I had only ever seen in movies, dramas, and comics, and stranger machines I had never seen at all.
"H-hey... I..."
My chest was hammering. I felt as if I might wet myself. My body was already overwhelmed by the atmosphere of the room.
In the blink of an eye the medical staff had strapped my limbs to the operating table. Of course, everything below the knees was cleanly gone, so the restraints cinched around my thighs instead.
Pinned flat, under the full glare of the surgical lights, my body was locked in place.
"Strip her."
At a single command the nurses swarmed in. The white dress shirt, the black ribbon necktie, the black skirt the adjutant had given me—all of it was peeled away.
I wore nothing underneath; temperature regulation made undergarments impractical.
I was completely naked.
I glanced around in a hurry.
My eyes met Ho-jun's. He watched me with solemn focus, as if my bare body registered as nothing at all.
The adjutant had not even been allowed inside. He waited beyond the door.
I was naked in front of every medical worker in the room, and somehow the shame never came.
I was used to it.
Ian-na had undergone life-prolonging surgery hundreds of times, if one were willing to exaggerate—and along the way she had been forced to show far worse than bare skin.
Nudity alone no longer had the power to embarrass her.
Not anymore.
"Beginning now."
The table began to rise. Medical staff closed around me, and pipes and machines of unknown purpose started to bite into my body one after another.
...
Around the moment an awl-like instrument was set against the crown of my skull, I realized something was wrong.
Everything was too vivid. My consciousness was not fading.
Which meant—I had not been anesthetized.
"Excuse me..."
I forced the words out.
"Is something the matter?"
"Th-that isn't it... the anesthesia..."
"?"
The moment I said the word, the medical staff looked openly uncomfortable.
"...Director. If we administer anesthetic, some of the organs you had replaced will necrotize."
"W-w-what...?"
"Every procedure proceeds without anesthesia. You already know this, Director."
My eyes went wide.
I tried to turn on Ho-jun and demand an answer, but my neck was clamped in place at once, and a long hose was driven down my throat.
"Nngh— nnhhh—"
"Then we begin."
It had not been a perfect day.
"Deputy Director. The subject is displaying behavioral patterns outside her baseline."
It began with a single report from the Surveillance Room.
Lately, Ian-na had started behaving unlike herself.
Changes in diet: the same Ian-na who had lived on small, vegetable-heavy meals was now confirmed eating meat and convenience food.
Changes in lifestyle: the sleep pattern that had locked her in at eight-thirty every night had grown unstable. Length of snoring, depth of sleep, how often she turned over, sleep-talking—everything looked different from the norm.
Changes in conduct: the Ian-na who had always shunned being seen was now making regular trips to the lounge to talk with agents.
And more. The direction she brushed her teeth. The way she held a stuffed animal. Her speech. Where she set her weight in the wheelchair. The habit of muttering under the covers, abandoned. Less laughter. More household trash. A sharp rise in the amount of candy and chocolate she took from Medical Room One... and so on.
To the man who watched her every move, the dissonance was considerable.
It felt, almost, as if she were not herself.
For about a month he simply observed. Part of him even hoped, with a private thrill, that she might have recovered her memories.
But that was not it.
A simple shift in state of mind...
The adjutant who had arrived a month earlier seemed to be influencing her. Nothing else explained the sudden change.
Closed-circuit cameras ran throughout the Bureau. Everywhere Ian-na was likely to go—even inside her own room—dozens of them were always recording.
Microphones planted in every corner fed her words to the Surveillance Room in real time.
After the cleanup from the incident in Sector 79 was finished, Ho-jun had been watching her as usual, sipping his coffee, when the word gift from Ian-na's mouth landed like a fresh shock.
Until now she had always worn that gloomy face. She had avoided contact with other magical girls as if it burned her.
He did not know why her heart had changed—but that single line snagged his interest hard.
...Perhaps.
Broken as she was, Ian-na was still the magical girl who had stood at the summit for decades.
The one they called a witch, the one pointed at by countless fingers, the one abandoned by everything she had tried to protect—
If she would only...
Ho-jun sipped his coffee in silence.
If Ian-na would only think of him again.
He did not care what form it took. If she would simply remember him—
"The subject's modification is complete. The auxiliary memory chip has been removed, and the program you specified has been successfully installed."
"Tell them well done."
The modification had gone through cleanly. Imagining the sulky look Ian-na would wear for the next few days, Ho-jun smiled quietly to himself.
"...And."
The agent hesitated.
"They report there was no defect in the auxiliary memory chip... only a temporary error caused by jamming from the Magical Girl Illusion..."
"It is already removed. Nothing to be done. Bury it."
"Understood!"
...Ian-na had shown him change.
From where he stood it was nothing more than a ridiculously small flutter of wings.
But she had proven, all the same, that she was no longer a living corpse.
...So her mind has not broken after all.
Ho-jun wore a smile he himself could not name. The corners of his mouth lifted, but his eyes did not laugh with them. It was a thoroughly uncanny look; the Surveillance Room agents paid it no mind.
"The moon. How is it?"
"Sir...?"
"What kind of moon is out tonight?"
Looking baffled, the agent clattered at the keyboard and brought the external surveillance feed up on the monitor.
A clear moonlight lay soft across the frame.
A waning moon.
It was a dawn under the waning moon.
Ho-jun bared his teeth and laughed. To anyone watching it might have looked forced—but he was laughing from the heart. Wider, brighter, than he had in a very long time.
And then—
"...Deputy Director! The Magical Girl of the Star Cluster has returned with the other two!"
"I will meet them at once. Get ready."