When Despair Closes In (1)
Her chest was trembling.
The last time Ian-na had seen Illusion in person had been years ago — right before the relationship between the two of them had completely collapsed.
After that, she never again met privately with any magical girl she could call a friend. Most of the previous generation she had fought beside were dead or insane, and among the juniors she had become nothing but a target of condemnation.
Even among the artificially mass-produced magical girls — hundreds of them at a time — Ian-na's notoriety was legendary.
She had made enemies of every magical girl in the world, all by herself.
And not by her own will, but through the Bureau's meticulous scheming.
From the Bureau's perspective, it must have seemed like extraordinary luck.
Ian-na, who for decades had stood at the apex of the Twelve Magical Girl Seats — who had saved countless lives and purged countless enemies, who had commanded enormous respect among her peers — was now completely broken.
She had lost her power as a magical girl entirely. Without the Bureau's life-support systems, she could no longer even stay alive. In what had once been an exceptional mind, infantile regression was progressing by the hour.
Ian-na's era had fully set. Just as no moon rises forever, she was dying by inches.
And the ones killing her…
…were the very humans she had spent her whole life trying to protect.
A Grandis-class Unknown.
A colossal entity far larger than a twenty-story apartment block — the kind of Unknown that, once fully manifested, would erase an entire city from existence. Extremely dangerous.
To suppress a Grandis-class required artificial magical girls by the hundred, and at least six of the Twelve Seats.
And Ian-na had poured out every scrap of her power and taken down three of them alone. She had been deployed the way Oksana had been — to buy time — but she had overloaded her Remegeton until her body itself began to fail, and still she had defeated them.
She had done it for the other magical girls who would have died by the dozens against a Grandis-class. To minimize their losses, she had forced her Remegeton's output higher than it should ever have gone.
What she lost for that was both her legs. She had drawn the Remegeton's power past every limit, and her legs simply could not take it. Ian-na had used those legs as bait, lured the Grandis-class in, and annihilated them in a single stroke.
Having spent everything, she collapsed on the spot in a near-death state and lost consciousness.
What waited for her when she opened her eyes again was hell.
The humans she had given everything to protect.
They tortured her just carefully enough not to let her die.
She never understood why. She could not even properly remember their faces. Her brain had deliberately erased the most horrific memories of what she had endured.
I could feel that truth, dimly, myself. Those memories were not ones that should ever be recalled.
A self could shatter in a single instant.
At any rate, Ian-na now clung to life day by day as nothing more than the Bureau's puppet.
In the early days she had still been vaguely aware of her own position — until the constant drug administration clouded her mind beyond recognition.
Ian-na, who had endured even that unspeakable torture.
What she could not endure at all was watching the people she loved turn their backs on her, one by one.
Starting with the magical girls, every relationship she had ever built twisted out of shape.
Ian-na had no particular attachment to her own life. She could have accepted dying on the spot without much difficulty. I was different.
The one thing she clung to was the restoration of those relationships.
Just once.
Even once would be enough — she wanted to stand among other magical girls again. She wanted to put her back against theirs and lean on them. What Ian-na truly wanted was to make friends.
She needed someone she could trust, someone she could depend on, someone she could lean against. After years of isolation, her loneliness was beyond anything anyone could imagine.
It was a warped hunger. Her only wish. A dream she had never managed to fulfill.
…Not anymore, though.
It can be fixed.
That was the phrase her overstimulated brain kept chanting to itself, a kind of self-hypnosis, as if she might stop breathing from sheer excitement.
If she could just face the two of them, clear up the misunderstandings, and for even a single moment… stand with them again.
Even occasional meetings would be fine. She just wanted them to open their hearts to her. Please.
The trembling in her chest would not stop. Like a child refusing to go to bed on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa, her whole body was a furnace of anticipation.
She carefully set down the white teddy bear and fitted on her prosthetic legs.
Clank.
They looked quite different from the ones she had seen in reality. Mechanical fixtures locked them fully onto the stumps of her severed legs.
She rose from her seat with care. Walking was still unfamiliar. If she moved too quickly, she would certainly pitch forward and fall.
"…Yes!"
What greeting should she offer first?
She had seen Illusion often enough, but this would be her first time meeting the Magical Girl of the Scales.
Something like "hello"… should be fine…
She took one deep breath after another.
Right now, she felt she might even be able to look them both straight in the eyes.
Creeeak—
The massive double-locked iron door groaned open, metal grinding against metal.
And then both of their faces entered her field of vision.
She could not control her body. She felt so happy she thought she might spin in place. She was genuinely, deeply grateful that they had come to see her first.
Both of her hands were shaking. Extreme excitement. She carefully stretched those restless palms forward.
"I— I— um……"
Crack—
A bright, sharp sound filled Ian-na's room.
More precisely: the sound of Illusion's open right hand striking Ian-na's cheek with tremendous force.
Ian-na could not absorb the impact and went down hard. Only after her body lurched and she crumpled onto the marble floor did she understand what had just been done to her.
Her cheek burned an endless red. She was utterly stunned. When she touched it with her hand, she could feel how enormously it had already swollen.
The first thought that came was:
Why…?
The shock was so complete she could not form a proper judgment. Sprawled on the floor, her whole body trembling, she looked up at the two of them with an expression of pure disbelief.
Even her pupils were shaking.
For an instant, old trauma surfaced.
It was a situation she had never once imagined. Ian-na was so stupefied she could not get a single word out.
"Get your filthy hands away."
Illusion's icy single sentence drove a knife straight into Ian-na's heart.
"Wh-why……?"
Ian-na asked in a trembling voice, but neither Illusion nor the Scales answered.
They only approached her with blank faces.
"Ghk—"
Illusion seized the fallen Ian-na by the throat and lifted her into the air.
Ian-na began thrashing on pure instinct, and the two prosthetic legs she had only loosely secured clattered to the floor.
There was more force in Illusion's hand than there had ever been. Considering that a magical girl's strength ran tens or hundreds of times beyond an ordinary person's, Illusion was deliberately holding back — so that Ian-na would die slowly.
"Gh— ghk… ghhk……"
Ian-na clung to the arm locked around her throat and struggled with everything she had, but she could not overcome the difference in power.
Color began to return to her pale skin. Blood was rushing to her face, flushing it red.
"I've let it slide until now, but this incident settled it for me. You really are better off dead."
"W-what do you m—"
"Things won't go the way you want. I know all about your plan to purge the magical girls. And about the things you did that you should never have done……"
"Ghhk…"
Ian-na thought Illusion had misunderstood her. She tried somehow to explain, but the hand around her throat only tightened further.
Breathing became difficult. Her consciousness was starting to blur.
In contrast to Illusion's increasingly savage expression, the Magical Girl of the Scales still wore a look of pure indifference, chewing bubble gum as she filmed the two of them on her smartphone.
"Scales. How many died this past year?"
"…Sixty-eight. That's a lot, huh."
Illusion began to clench her fist.
"You heard that, Waning Moon."
"Gh— ghk……"
Ian-na tried to cry something out, but Illusion's fingers were digging deeper and deeper into her neck.
Forgotten pain came flooding back. Fear began to take hold of her.
"Sixty-eight times. Stay still. I'm going to make it hurt."
"Hhk— ghhhk……"
Ian-na thrashed, to no avail. At some point the Magical Girl of the Scales firmly bound the body still twitching in midair.
Illusion kept choking her while closing her right hand into a tight fist.
A white stomach.
Ian-na's pale belly, still faintly marked with surgical scars, lay fully exposed.
And then Illusion—
—began driving her fist into Ian-na's stomach.