The Story That Began (6)
Illusion’s steps out of the solitary cell were remarkably light.
Even Star Cluster could tell that Illusion was buoyant, almost giddy.
Was it relief that the Magical Girl of the Waning Moon, Ian-na, had woken safely?
From where Star Cluster stood, Ian-na had looked hopeless. One glance had been enough to grasp that her organs were a ruin, that the wounds were mortal.
It was no different from having been left fully exposed to the Unknowns’ assault.
She had lost countless comrades that way. She had been certain Ian-na would meet the same kind of death.
Of course, it would only have been just deserts.
Payment for the sly, shadowed Ian-na who had hidden her true nature all this time, who had taken the hand of Han Ho-jun—a man not even worth calling father—just to keep breathing. Payment for stepping forward as the Bureau’s shield and smothering the magical girls’ grievances.
She had tried hard not to care about Ian-na’s death, telling herself as much…
But she could not forget the moment she had lifted Ian-na’s small, fragile body into her arms.
Then, Ian-na’s heartbeat had been vanishingly faint. It would not have been wrong to say it was gone entirely.
Her face had been pale to a terrifying degree. The blood she coughed up had been mixed with a blue fluid—the same fluid that leaked from artificial girls when they died.
A sense of wrongness.
The contrast between the noble magical girl Ian-na had presented all her life and the state she was in now had struck Star Cluster with a deep, nauseating dissonance.
Throughout her confinement she had thought about it without pause.
Ian-na had been nothing less than an idol to every magical girl. Even Star Cluster herself had once admired her.
Ian-na had never, at any moment, spared her own life. She never hung back. Wherever the most dangerous enemy waited, Ian-na always went first.
She had seemed almost serene about dying. Her justice had always been turned toward the weak—toward those maggot-like humans.
Ian-na had always thought of her comrades. She cherished the other magical girls, treated them like blood sisters, never stinted on support. Even the pitiful extermination stipends the Bureau paid out she poured entirely into the other girls.
That was the kind of girl Ian-na had been. A magical girl fit to lead, a girl who could fairly be called a saint.
Every magical girl eventually sinks into madness. It begins with hallucinations, auditory and visual; then they forget every memory of the lives they have lived, or go mad with hunger for power, or fixate on something to a pathological degree.
The symptoms vary. Some are bound up with their Remegeton. Some can still function in daily life; others, like the Magical Girl of Entreaty, end up restrained.
Countless magical girls had displayed every colorful variety of madness.
Ian-na had not.
In those pure, clear eyes—before they clouded—there had not been a scrap of madness to be felt.
Slowly, little by little.
The more one used the power of a Remegeton, the more it felt like sinking into a bottomless mire. That “true nature of a magical girl” that inevitably surfaced in every one of them and ate away at the mind—none of it had ever shown in Ian-na.
Looked at with the most ordinary common sense:
Ian-na, who had walked a single consistent path for decades,
would never have shoved her comrades into the jaws of death.
To claim she had suddenly grown attached to her own life made no sense against everything she had done. Ian-na would never have groveled before the Bureau and obeyed just to survive in that ugly fashion.
That was the conclusion Star Cluster had reached.
And.
What if.
What if Ian-na was not in her right state—what if her body had been remade into that of an artificial girl, what if a cognition-suppression chip had been driven into her brain and she was being controlled by the Bureau, by her own father, Han Ho-jun.
What if that thing wearing Ian-na’s skin was something else entirely.
…
Her instincts thrashed. Her reason was seriously accepting that Ian-na was not whole.
But.
Her heart wanted to deny it. Because that would be giving Ian-na a free pass. Because it would justify everything Star Cluster herself had done until now.
The dead magical girls would not come back. The Bureau’s failures could not be undone. Whether her mind was intact or not, whether she was being controlled or not, whether she was Ian-na or not—
Ian-na still had to answer for it.
“Ugh….”
“What’s wrong?”
“…Nothing.”
It was revolting.
She could not stand the disgust of having thought that way herself. She could not hold back the nausea.
That she had despised a broken Ian-na so thoroughly—that itself was despicable.
That was not justice. If her hypothesis was right, if Ian-na had truly lost mind and body, then holding her responsible was unthinkable.
If Ian-na really was little better than a puppet—
if she was being steered by those insects—
then Star Cluster would make her decision.
She would slaughter the vermin, the insects, down to the last one. She would leave nothing. If they had reduced Ian-na—the idol of the magical girls, the hero who had spent her whole life protecting them—to that state,
then she would finish everything with her own hands.
She no longer wanted to watch those maggots draw breath.
Humans treated magical girls as less than insects. Tools to be used when convenient and thrown away.
A magical girl was not a being bound by some duty to “protect the weak.” All of that was ideology Ian-na herself had planted. Abandoning it would take only a moment.
Magical girls had selves. They had will.
Those people had no idea whose hand held the hilt. Bloated on the peace bought with magical girls’ sacrifices, they had forgotten reality.
Kill them all.
Kill them and kill them again. Every last one, without exception. Leave no seed of revenge behind.
Butcher every human in this world without sparing a single one, and then butcher them again. They were nothing but lumps of impurity. Nothing but cancer cells.
What came after that world was none of her concern. She had no need to care.
And once she had killed them all—
she would save Ian-na. To repay even a fraction of the grace the magical girls had received from her, she would fight for Ian-na until the final moment. She would make Ian-na free. By any means necessary.
“Byeol-hwa, are you all right?”
“…Ah—yes.”
“Let’s hurry. There are things I need to say once I’ve seen Waning Moon’s face.”
Harsa trotted toward the medical wing. Scales stuck close at her side, smartphone in hand.
…Those two.
Was this something she could tell them?
The Magical Girl of Illusion, Harsa, looked normal on the surface, but her heart had long since seeped into the abyss. Having known her face at the Bureau for quite some time, Star Cluster could feel it.
That Ian-na was being controlled, that she was not herself—those were still only guesses, only assumptions.
She could not rule out the possibility that she was wrong.
If, in truth, Ian-na had opened her eyes to human nature—to endless greed and ugliness—and had issued those orders of her own free will,
then Star Cluster would not forgive her.
She would inflict a pain worse than anything those two had ever dealt, the most terrible suffering the world could offer.
She could swear it.
She could not say exactly where Harsa’s heart was pointed.
But it would not be any gentle form of expression. It would be extreme—conduct, words, acts that would drive everything toward catastrophe.
If.
If she casually let her hypothesis about Ian-na’s condition slip to Harsa, and if Harsa—whose mind was already no more sound than Entreaty’s—went berserk,
the fallout would reach Ian-na for certain. Harsa, unable to master her own feelings, would surely poison everyone around her: Scales, Ian-na, the rest.
Illusion’s Remegeton was extremely powerful. A strength that had barely appeared even in history, enough to topple a nation with ease.
She could not begin to predict what Illusion’s rampage would do.
If it were only the filthy vermin and insects being wiped out, she would not care.
But the magical girls would suffer. And in the worst possible form.
For now, she decided to dig a little deeper.
Approach Ian-na, grasp her condition exactly, and only then act.
She would tell the other two nothing.
Illusion, at least, she had faced long enough to know. Scales was another matter. As a newcomer magical girl, Scales was full of factors Star Cluster had not yet measured.
In particular, the vast quantity of ether stored in her body made Star Cluster’s spine crawl.
Anyone who had accumulated ether on that scale inside themselves should already have gone mad or run wild. In Star Cluster’s experience, that was how it worked.
Scales’s eyes were hidden behind her long scarlet hair. She was unmistakably beautiful, yet something about her left an uneasy taste. The exotic school uniform woven from her Remegeton only made Star Cluster more reluctant to approach.
She was smiling, and yet she was not. Star Cluster—who had been avoided since childhood for being “creepy”—could feel the strange current that hung around Scales.
Illusion, who had taken no partner at all since Ian-na, had stepped forward herself to raise Scales. Teaching her every trick, setting her feet on the path of a magical girl.
Even the Remegeton’s ability was bizarre.
The power to kill exactly half of any organic population whose number was even.
Among all the magical girls who had existed since the distant past, not one had possessed a power like that.
It was far too similar to an Unknown.
In that instant a spine-prickling sensation made her hair stand on end—
but she paid it no further mind.
Right now, Ian-na demanded more attention than Scales ever could.
“We’re here.”
[Please enter.]
Hiss—
The medical room door opened,
and they came face to face with Ian-na, trembling in the Adjutant’s arms, and with her father, Han Ho-jun.
Illusion went to Ian-na first.
“…Waning Moon.”
Illusion’s voice was heavy and low.
But her mouth was smiling.