The Magical Girl of the Waning Moon (6)
"…Understood."
Ho-jun's answer was not what I had expected.
I couldn't claim that sincerity had gotten through to him. His gaze was still locked on me — with an expression of genuine interest.
There was no way an emotional appeal would land on a psychopath who intended to dispose of magical girls the moment they outlived their usefulness, his own daughter included. Ho-jun had some other angle in mind.
If I took even one more step here… I would draw his suspicion. In the worst case, part of my brain could be excised and I would be reduced to something like a doll.
Ho-jun's personal curiosity had overturned the situation. I had to seize the opening.
The magical girls would not die. Not today, at least.
"Deputy Director?"
"Cancel the recall. Let's place our faith in them."
"…Cancelling."
Ho-jun stared down at me in my wheelchair as if he meant to bore a hole through me. He was looking only at my eyes.
I tried to avert my gaze, but he kept drawing closer.
Very close.
"W-what are you doing…"
"I have no intention of harming you."
He took hold of my body and lifted me into the air. The adjutant, face stricken, moved to stop him, but Ho-jun paid him no mind — he simply raised me high and turned me to face forward.
My feet no longer touched the floor. My prosthetic legs, more precisely.
I was floating. Held aloft in Ho-jun's grip.
"You've grown quite light."
"…Yeah."
Ian-na's height barely reached a hundred and forty centimeters. She had obtained her Remegeton at a rather young age, been chosen as a magical girl, and both aging and growth had stopped for her entirely.
Even her weight fell a little short of what someone of that height ought to weigh. In the course of rebuilding her entire body simply to keep her alive, she had become a person who could no longer properly absorb nutrients.
Only the organs truly essential for survival remained inside her. Nearly everything else had been replaced with biomechanical parts and components.
Ho-jun cradled me gently in one arm, angling my gaze toward the monitors.
"Watch carefully. What choice those two will make… in the end."
Both of our eyes fixed on the screens.
…What is he thinking?
Ho-jun was an unmistakable villain. Despite his large frame and muscular build, he projected an intellectual image, and when he confronted magical girls he relied not on force but on his mind.
After Pest Control failed and the large-scale invasion of the Unknowns began, plunging the entire world into chaos—
—the deputy director who should have been coordinating everything, Ho-jun himself, was found as a cold corpse on a beach. A massive blade had pierced his heart.
No one knew the reason, or the circumstances. For a character of Ho-jun's weight in the novel, his end was far too hollow.
His own daughter.
He met his death at the hands of the Magical Girl of the Star Cluster.
Right up to the final moment, the reader never learned why Ho-jun had been killed. I had the sense the author had left a great deal of room for interpretation — but because of the novel's shocking ending, not a single reader ever dug deep into the matter of Ho-jun's death.
The Unknown's assault grew even more ferocious. The power it had gained by devouring a magical girl's corpse, the strength that kept climbing through endless regeneration, had reached a level that overwhelmed the two magical girls.
The attacks concentrated on Illusion, who was holding the Magical Girl of the Scales. Strikes that had initially gone wide were drawing closer and closer to the two of them.
The wind pressure from the Unknown's swinging fists rose to an extreme. The sheer force of the air was enough to tear open wounds on Illusion's arms. The Unknown threw punches at terrifying speed, and Illusion's arms turned into a bloody mess.
A single solid hit would shatter every bone in the body and rupture every organ. Survival would be impossible. Even through the monitor, the raw power was unmistakable.
Ian-na's mind began to flash with understanding.
If the Unknown brought those two magical girls down, absorbed their power, and manifested in the real world—
It would be a catastrophe.
A vast catastrophe would unfold. Physical attacks that were not the work of a magical girl wielding Gamma Ether would mean nothing. Bullets, of course — missiles, railguns, even nuclear weapons — none of them could inflict meaningful damage on an Unknown.
An entire region would be completely razed. Everywhere the Unknown went, every living organism would be devoured, and in the end not a single life would remain in this world.
Ian-na had witnessed such scenes countless times. She had felt them firsthand.
From the Chernobyl disaster she had heard about from her late mentor and partner, to the Great East Japan Earthquake she had ended herself by defeating a Grandis-class Unknown, to Beirut, where the magical girls of the Western Hemisphere had been slaughtered en masse—
She knew exactly what kind of catastrophe unfolded when an Unknown manifested in reality.
Both of her hands began to tremble.
It was not from fear.
Countless people would die. For Ian-na, the Magical Girl of the Waning Moon, who held human life more precious than anything else, it was a trial she could not endure.
Her mind could break. The most horrific thing for Ian-na was watching people die right in front of her. In vast numbers.
The memories she had carried since childhood were seared into her as trauma. It was also the reason she clung so desperately to her own life.
The mission of a magical girl, engraved deep in her chest, set her entire body vibrating.
Even in this powerless body, where staying alive was all she could do, where she could accomplish nothing else—
She had never forgotten a magical girl's mission: protect people.
"B-Beta Ether levels… breaking fifty-eight point two percent! Additional rifts may open any moment!"
"Correcting the Unknown's threat rating from Medium-class to Multus-class…!! Per protocol, we need magical girl reinforcements!"
The agents reported the situation in trembling voices. Beta Ether levels were climbing at a speed beyond imagination, and the regional map in the corner of the monitor had flooded entirely red.
They had calculated the minimum damage zone.
The Russian Far Eastern Federal District would be wiped out in the literal sense — and Manchuria, northern Korea, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido would all be reduced to scorched earth as well.
"There will be no deployment of other magical girls, including Entreaty."
"B-but…"
"Let's place our faith in them. One more minute. The outcome will be decided by then."
"…Understood."
Everyone watched the monitors with taut, anxious faces.
The Magical Girl of the Scales's Remegeton, blazing with fierce light.
Gamma Ether — magic power condensed and drawn to its absolute limit into her scythe—
With that, they could win.
They had to.
At that moment—
Something glittering green on the map was racing at high speed toward Zone 79, Chumikan.
"Deputy Director! The Magical Girl of the Star Cluster is ignoring orders and heading to the site on her own!"
"Ignore it. Even if she gets caught up in this and dies, it is not our responsibility. We warned her clearly. She is the one who disregarded the order."
"B-but…"
"Enough."
Ho-jun's voice dropped. It was a cold, composed manner I had never seen from him before.
Of course he wouldn't care about his own daughter's life.
Because she was a magical girl.
On the screen, the Unknown ceased its assault on the two of them. It had realized the attacks were not landing.
Instead—
"A-an enormous… Beta Ether reaction…!!! The Unknown is gathering Beta Ether into a single point!"
In the space between dimensions — a space composed of Beta Ether—
the Unknown began drawing that energy into its hand.
In an instant a dark sphere formed above the Unknown's palm. It looked like the sun blanketed in sunspots. As time passed, the sphere gathering above its hand grew smaller and smaller.
It was compressing it. Just as the Magical Girl of the Scales poured every scrap of her magic into her scythe-shaped Remegeton, the Unknown was compressing every trace of Beta Ether in the vicinity and packing it into its hand.
The Unknown smiled a smile that threatened to split its face in half.
Drool poured from its gaping maw. It seemed unable to contain its joy at the prospect of devouring the two of them.
Its shark-like teeth turned toward the pair—
The Magical Girl of the Scales did not wait for the Unknown to finish gathering its Beta Ether.
With the scythe into which she had compressed every last drop of her magic — a blade glittering gold—
she simply, quietly, cut through empty air.
And in that same instant—
"W-what just…"
"This is the power of a magical girl. Their strength has already reached a realm so distant that it cannot even be compared to humanity's. An endlessly vast giant — that is a magical girl. If they ever truly set their minds to it… wiping out the human race would not be a difficult task."
Ho-jun set me carefully back into the wheelchair and removed his glasses as he spoke.
It was a statement that held his philosophy, his thinking, his doctrine. The idea of keeping magical girls of overwhelming force under humanity's control, at the very least.
And in that process, of disposing of the artificial magical girls they had mass-produced in excess — as well as any magical girls whose minds had grown unstable, or who had simply outlived their usefulness.
"…"
Ho-jun looked down at me with a cold gaze.
"Director."
"…Yes."
A strange silence settled over the room.
And then—
In the corner of the monitor, the Beta Ether reading still displayed, indicating that the dimensional rift had not yet closed.
It was an enormous figure, well above seventy percent. Everyone stared at the number in shock.
…Life signs: none.
"…I see."
With a long electronic tone, the life signs of both individuals vanished completely.
That meant only one thing.
Failure.
Ho-jun's icy stare was meant to condemn this failure.
To condemn me for stubbornly insisting, for getting two magical girls who had been exempted from Pest Control killed, and for exposing the residents of a vast region to danger.
To condemn me over and over, to annihilate my authority entirely, and to make me into a scapegoat.
That was the intent.
The operation had failed.
Now someone had to answer for it.
"…It's my fault."
I murmured the words under my breath, then closed my eyes and waited for whatever Ho-jun would say.
I was prepared to endure anything that came.
My heart hammered wildly. I felt as if tears might spill at any second.
And then, in that moment—
Two voices spilled from the speakers.