Toward Death (6)
…
My consciousness was foggy and dull.
…What was I doing again?
It felt as if whole stretches of memory had been ripped out clean.
For Ian-na, this was practically routine. For me, it was not.
I was still reeling from a surgery I had never experienced in my life.
It wasn’t pain. The pain receptors left in Ian-na’s body were extremely limited.
What remained instead was a strange, all-consuming unpleasantness. As if someone had smeared sticky tar over every inch of my skin. Something clammy seemed to be seeping across my entire body.
I flailed my arms and patted myself down. There was nothing there.
Only faint surgical scars remained.
“…Oh.”
The Adjutant’s voice came through the intercom inside the operating room.
Right. This was the branching point.
Ian-na dies at the hands of those two. More precisely, she is killed by Libra, who slips easily into the Bureau with Illusion’s help.
By Libra’s second Remegeton, she is annihilated so completely that not even a trace remains.
Without ever knowing why she had to die.
I refused that ending. My goal was to survive as long as possible—and, if I could, return to my original world.
To make it through this novel in one piece, I could never turn those two into enemies. And it wasn’t only them. I couldn’t afford to make enemies of any of the other magical girls either.
Ian-na’s body had lost every scrap of a magical girl’s power. Without life-support surgery, she couldn’t even stay alive. In her current state, she couldn’t defeat the weakest first-generation artificial girl—she couldn’t even beat a child.
There was no way she could handle a magical girl.
The Bureau was the same problem.
As long as she had utility, they would not throw her away. Even if they killed her mind, they would keep using her body. To survive, I could not turn the Bureau into an enemy either.
But full cooperation was just as dangerous. I would become exactly what the other magical girls already believed I was: their tool, their hunting dog.
Like it or not, a magical-girl rebellion was inevitable. It was the central theme running through the entire novel.
If I stayed glued to the Bureau, I would almost certainly be killed when that rebellion came. Even without Libra, some other magical girl might rise up—or simply decide she hated me for some petty reason.
So the critical thing was balance. Magical girls on one side, the Bureau on the other. I had to keep my footing between both powers.
Mutual destruction would be neat in theory, but if both sides vanished, there would be nothing left to stop the Unknowns.
The Magical Crusade.
The novel’s opening backdrop. A colossal rift had opened over Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, and every magical girl on Earth had been deployed to assault the deep strata of another dimension. A holy war in the literal sense.
Afterward, Unknown appearances had plummeted—but it was far too early to relax. The deep assault had not wiped them out or dealt any true decisive blow.
Only a fraction had suffered damage. The vast majority had simply hidden, waiting for the magical girls to withdraw.
And then—
They began to take interest. In the magical girls who had invaded their dimension.
In Ian-na’s memories, the number of Unknowns in the deep strata easily exceeded the hundreds of millions.
Exhausted magical girls had fallen one after another, and Ian-na, who had led the expedition, judged that the objective—“assault on the deep strata”—had been achieved, and ordered the retreat.
The result: an enormous number of magical girls were left behind in the deep. Living and dead alike, those who never returned were seized by the Unknowns.
It wasn’t something you could pin on Ian-na. She had fought with everything the Waning Moon could give. From the start, she had believed the expedition impossible and had opposed it with everything she had.
Because of her, as many magical girls as possible had been recovered and brought home, and the expedition was publicly declared a victory. Magical girls who knew the truth had their memories erased under pressure from the coordinating bodies, or simply kept their mouths shut.
Ian-na was not condemned. No one could condemn her.
That was not the problem.
The Unknowns began absorbing the countless corpses of magical girls left in the deep, and with them, power and intelligence. They forced themselves into the chain of evolution with their own hands.
They stopped slaughtering magical girls on sight. They began treating them as useful resources and capturing them alive. Even now, the magical girls seized during the Magical Crusade were almost certainly serving the Unknowns—
In every form imaginable. Using everything.
The Unknowns grew extremely cautious. They did not want humanity to see their evolution. That was why their appearances had thinned so drastically.
They had gained intellect. They had formed groups.
Now they were gauging the strength of magical girls. Even the recent Moltus-class Unknown had been dispatched to test them.
The Great War.
When conflict between the Bureau and the magical girls reached its extreme—
When magical girls who had lost their selves ran rampant and the majority of humanity died—
The final war for the fate of all organic life would begin.
…
Of course, only I knew any of this. I was the only one who had read the novel from beginning to end.
Including the fact that it ended in a bad ending.
My head throbbed.
…What kind of difficulty setting is this?
I closed my eyes and thought it through slowly.
The branching point had changed. The incident that had driven those two to swear they would kill Ian-na had ended with only a single casualty.
No mass death of magical girls. Their deaths had never been laid at Ian-na’s feet.
Their hatred for Ian-na would almost certainly have cooled.
So I had to win them over somehow—make them friendly. Talk a little, share something delicious, and it would work itself out.
That was why I had prepared chocolate.
Honestly, I was a little excited. Illusion had been a junior I’d been rather fond of. I wanted to get close again. Just a little. Even for a moment. I wanted to talk.
Being alone was desolate. Profoundly lonely. It felt like being stranded on an uninhabited island. I needed a friend—someone I could open my heart to, someone precious enough to share real friendship with.
That was… my wish. No—Ian-na’s wish.
I waited for them with my chest full of anticipation. They would come. They were bound to. They would come to apologize—for their rudeness, for their suspicion. And they would thank me. Because of me, they had been able to bring down the Unknown.
Then I would hold out the chocolate and say it was fine. I would smile brightly and reach out to them.
Ian-na’s mind had half regressed into something childlike. I couldn’t come up with a better plan than this.
And if we opened our hearts and became close—
Someday… I would tell them about my situation. Quietly. So the Bureau would never notice.
If I did, they would understand. They would understand what I was—someone clinging to a forced survival, a disposable shield to be thrown away the moment things got inconvenient.
Starting with those two, I would bring countless magical girls to my side. Seizing control of the Bureau was the best path I had to staying alive.
If I could somehow dampen the rebellion, seal every crack of conflict, and keep the magical girls fighting the Unknowns—
Then surviving should be possible.
A hopeful, bright future flickered faintly into view.
A perfect plan……
Even Ian-na’s brain seemed to be impressed.
And to make this grand master plan a reality—
Getting close to those two had to come first.
Of course, I couldn’t meet them right away.
About three days seemed to pass.
I spent that time shut in my room.
Left at room temperature, the chocolate melted. The Adjutant hurried out and bought a fresh batch, and this time we planned to keep it safely in the refrigerator attached to the room.
I waited endlessly for them to recover. A magical girl’s regenerative power far outstripped an ordinary human’s, so they would be fine by the next morning.
…They’ll come. I’m sure of it.
My heart hammered. On the bed, I clutched the white teddy bear I had been so carefully cherishing and practiced all day long. What should we talk about? How should I accept their apology? Who was their favorite singer? I drilled nothing but the kinds of conversations girls might share, day and night without rest.
For those three days there were no summons from Ho-jun or the Bureau, no interruptions of any kind.
“If I say… it was all a misunderstanding…… will they believe me?”
“They will… of course they will. You were all… so close……”
I grabbed the bear’s arms and legs and muttered to myself. One of Ian-na’s habits.
…Someone might be watching, so just in case, I’m acting like the usual Ian-na. It’s not like I actually have a childish hobby like this.
The thought of being seen made my face burn with embarrassment, but the more I held the bear and talked to myself, the calmer I became.
Besides, no one was really watching. And a hobby like this was… fine. Probably.
I was still thrashing my limbs around on the bed when—
“Director? Illusion and Libra have requested an audience.”
“L-let them in…!”
They had come.
I could feel Ian-na’s brain flooding with excitement.
So was I.
…We’ll be friends again. We will. No matter what.