Carrying Hope (2)
“Ugh…….”
The instant the elevator doors opened, the searing midsummer heat crashed over me and swallowed my entire body whole.
The entrance, disguised as a rundown container warehouse, had no proper ventilation to speak of. Breathing was already a struggle.
It felt as though my whole body might melt away.
“Adjutant… um…… will this body… be all right?”
I was worried about how much damage it could take.
Since the last major surgery, my condition had improved considerably. Not to what it once was, but enough that I could move freely around the Bureau.
Of course, “freely” only meant being pushed along in the wheelchair my adjutant was steering.
Even so, an improvement was still an improvement — the constraints on my body had not simply vanished. If I were exposed bare to the blazing midsummer sun outside, my artificial organs might not hold.
If my body temperature crossed the critical threshold, I would die on the spot.
Organs shutting down was a matter of seconds. Illusion had made me feel that truth with merciless clarity. The sensation of soft silicone melting and bursting open inside my gut was still vivid beyond bearing.
And there was more.
When I moved, something felt ever so slightly different from before. As if something extra had been packed into my abdomen.
I assumed more mechanical parts or artificial organs had been fitted in. Outwardly there was no change at all, yet my weight had shifted noticeably. Moving my body had become a little more difficult.
That was also why my bladder gave out whenever I slipped into a panic attack.
If that weren’t the case, it would mean I had done something that shameful while fully conscious.
Ian-na was no child. Her body… well, fine, call it that — but her mind was that of an adult who had weathered every storm life could throw. So was I.
There was no way sheer terror alone could make me wet myself. It had to be the modifications — the added organs pressing down on my bladder until I had no choice. It was never my will. Really. Truly.
Soaking his clothes while he held me, I had wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear. Every time I looked at the adjutant’s face, the memory came flooding back and I could barely stand it. When he would rest a hand against my burning cheeks, I genuinely wanted to die.
And on those rare, truly rare occasions when he teased me with the word “bedwetter,” the shame was so bottomless that tears came. An unbearable humiliation.
A magical girl was meant to be an idol to all.
I did not want to be mocked by my adjutant.
“...”
“You’re fine, Your Excellency. They say they replaced the cooling unit with a new one. The Director’s body can handle this much heat.”
The adjutant spoke with a gentle smile.
I felt oddly embarrassed for nothing.
…More than that — they had swapped out a cooler the way you replace a computer part.
It hit me with a strange, fresh shock.
No wonder digestion had been rough lately…….
…
I deliberately let his words slide past me and rolled out beyond the container.
“Director, you’ll need this. You can’t ignore the UV rays.”
“…Yeah.”
The adjutant took out a straw hat and set it on my head. It was far too large for me, and the brim cast a complete shade that swallowed my whole body.
UV rays, huh…
This was hardly a situation for fretting over that.
I had already felt it clearly enough.
Ian-na’s body was not going to live long.
A human is not a machine. Some people call us biological machines, but a human is nothing like a machine that can run forever with proper maintenance.
I was no different.
Even with enormous sums poured into Ian-na alone, even with excellent medical teams and engineers swarming over her to keep her alive, there were limits. Expensive life-support systems were not meant to last forever.
From the start, this body had been as good as dead. After the Unknown left her critically wounded, Ian-na had received only the barest treatment needed to keep her breathing.
From the very people who had kidnapped her.
And what followed was something every magical girl knew by heart.
Horrible torture.
Reduced to a corpse, a rag, a scrap of wreckage, Ian-na’s body was steadily winding down.
Three years at the absolute most.
By the time the novel ended, Ian-na would be dead.
…Ha.
There was no guarantee that dying would send me back to my original world. Psychologically, I had nearly fused with Ian-na. Even knowing that precious comrades, friends, innocent civilians, and gentle people would be massacred in droves, I did not want to run from it into death.
I wanted to change it.
The adjutant, Illusion, Scales, Star Cluster, Entreaty — even Ho-jun.
I did not want the people I knew to meet irrational ends.
Knowing the future made the weight of responsibility crushing.
It was a road where I could not see a single step ahead, and still I wanted to walk it. Once more. To fulfill my duty as a magical girl.
It might well be the last time.
Slowly. Very slowly.
Creak.
The wheelchair began to move.
There was no open road stretching out forever, and I could not go far — but I could still look around this place. Deep underground, I could still look over the places where the people I treasured lived.
The cry of cicadas reached me. Ordinary sounds came with it — birdsong, the chirping of insects in the grass.
All that filled my vision was green vegetation.
Nothing but greenery, stretching out and out.
The Bureau sat deep in a remote mountain range. The only trace of humanity was the single container that served as an entrance.
The landscape of deep mountain wilderness, untouched by human feet, was breathtakingly beautiful. Personally, that was how I felt.
My heart settled.
No matter how vivid a screen could be, there was a world of difference between seeing something on a monitor and seeing it with your own eyes.
…I won’t give up.
I would hold on, and climb over every trial and hardship.
Pushing through adversity toward salvation, one step at a time.
I did not know how long it would take. I did not know how long this body would hold. I did not know whether I could change a future already locked into a bad ending. Still, I would move forward.
That was what Ian-na desperately wished for.
I wanted to grant it.
Ian-na’s life had been paved far more with darkness than with light. Despite a name that meant grace, she had been treated as a curse from the moment of her birth, condemned by her own mother and father.
As a small child, her only wish had been to receive her mother’s love. Even while being choked, Ian-na had smiled with her whole face. The only way she could feel her mother’s warmth up close was by having her throat crushed.
Her mother had always longed for Ian-na’s death. She had constantly begged, pleaded, and pleaded again for Ian-na to die. Ian-na had wanted, with a joyful heart, to obey her mother’s will. That, after all, was how she made her mother smile.
But.
Blood ties did not sever so easily.
Day after day, countless times, her mother had strangled Ian-na — yet she never snapped her neck, never finished the job. She simply could not.
She could not kill her.
Even with endless opportunities. Even though no one in the world would have cared if Ian-na alone died. Her mother could not kill her. She could not bring herself to do it with her own hands.
Failing to feel maternal love did not mean a human heart had disappeared entirely.
Ian-na managed to grow up. Even when she ate nothing and slipped toward death. Even when her development lagged far behind other children her age. Ian-na did not die.
It was love.
She had been loved by her mother.
That was how Ian-na chose to understand it.
She had been loved, and that was why she had not died.
And so.
She wanted to pour the love she had received out upon everyone. She wanted to stop unreasonable, innocent deaths.
A mad obsession with love had become a reverence for life.
That was the driving force that had kept Ian-na active as a magical girl for decades.
A twisted yet kind heart, and a will of pure steel shot through with obsession — those were what moved her.
Ian-na had never learned how to hate. Even Harsa, who had inflicted such merciless violence upon her — she missed her and feared her, but she did not hate her.
Even now, with the claws of other magical girls stretching toward her for the sole purpose of eliminating her, Ian-na did not hate them.
Ian-na was a being destined for a wretched death. Without even understanding why she was dying, smiling wide with a mind no longer whole. Erased without a trace by Scales, the one Illusion had raised.
After Ian-na’s death, everything plummeted to the worst. Ho-jun died suddenly, and the Bureau — the only halfway functional organization among the oversight bodies — collapsed. Then Entreaty began to run wild.
The existence of magical girls rose to the surface of the world.
Not as heroes who had given their lives to protect the innocent, but as blood-starved monsters slaughtering countless people.
Starting with Entreaty, magical girls began rampaging one after another across the land. Behind it all was the terrorist organization that had kidnapped the half-dead Ian-na and tortured her.
The incompetent oversight bodies, which had done little more than wage civil wars among themselves, fell one by one.
In the midst of that chaos, the only one who stepped forward was Illusion. She gathered the remnants of the old oversight factions under her banner, called together the magical girls who still had their minds intact, and began to hold the line.
Right up to the final moment, the only one who tried to salvage the situation was Illusion.
And what came to light in the process was the truth of what Ian-na really was.
When Illusion finally realized — too late — that Ian-na had already lost her mind and body, she regretted it with a madness that nearly destroyed her. But the water had already been spilled.
Protect the gentle and the weak.
The one who carried on that last wish of Ian-na’s was Illusion — her sister, her disciple, her junior, the person dearest to her. Magical girls began to unite around Illusion in order to protect the innocent.
The result.
Illusion herself took wounds so severe she lost half her body, but she succeeded in eliminating Entreaty.
And then, at the decisive moment, dimensional rifts opened across the world, and Unknowns that had been storing their power descended.
With their intellect intact.
Spent to her last breath, Illusion was captured by them and met a terrible end. Even within this novel, it was the most horrific, most repulsive death imaginable — one you would rather not picture at all.
By comparison, Ian-na’s death almost looked like a peaceful passing.
The protagonist, Scales, simply fled.
In the end….
…
That was the rough outline of the novel, and the bleak future awaiting the magical girls.
…No.
I could not allow that future to unfold. I had to stop it by any means necessary. If it were Ian-na — if it were the Magical Girl of the Waning Moon — she would twist the future even if it cost her life.
I could not stand by and watch innocent people die.
And so. For that reason.
Once more.
This time, without fail.
Even if I lost everything.
I would overturn it.
“Your Excellency, shall we head back?”
“…Yeah.”
I hoped that good people would die smiling, surrounded by their families.
That.
Was Ian-na’s madness.
“...”