Red is Three Times Faster: Epilogue
They say strange sounds always echo from the labs of prestigious companies. Sometimes like wailing, sometimes like bells, and other times like sharp screams.
Strangely enough, everyone sent to investigate those sounds ended up keeping their mouths shut, pretending nothing had happened.
No matter the country or era, these sounds all carry the same meaning. The desperate pleas of overworked engineers begging to be put out of their misery.
Overwork hell. Overwork hell.
“D-Doctor…? Are you all right…?”
“……Just kill me.”
Aile had come to the lab looking genuinely worried. I responded by summoning the guillotine in a show of “I’m fine.”
Aile sighed and spoke up anyway.
“I-It’s okay! You may have committed many crimes, but you’ll be out in no time…! I-I almost went to juvenile detention myself, so I know how it feels…!”
“……What does your near-miss with juvenile detention have to do with me?”
“Huh? But you’re a grad student… Don’t university students who commit crimes go to grad school instead of, you know, prison?”
Utterly defeated by middle-school-dropout, hot-tempered, gloomy, asocial Aile, I sank into an abyss of rage and despair. The worst part was that I couldn’t even refute her.
“……Aile. You’ve got quite the talent for getting under people’s skin. You could make a living off that.”
“E-Ehehe— I don’t think I’m that good at it……”
“Sure, sure… Our Aile will have to live like that for the rest of her life……”
After ten minutes of slacking off with Aile, the siren installed inside the lab blared an alarm. While Aile panicked, wondering if something had gone wrong, I simply returned to my research.
“H-Huh—? Doctor…? Did something bad happen?”
“That alarm means break time is over……”
“……Wh-What? Break time? What do you mean?”
“It’s punishment. A reminder that I’m not allowed to move freely.”
“Th-That’s…! It’s because of me…!”
“Then why don’t you stay and study with me?”
Aile froze for a moment, then began fidgeting with her fingers and looking away.
“Ah, um, well…… I-I think punishments should be carried out properly!”
With those words, Aile bolted from the lab. Even if she never had to worry about money, I couldn’t help wondering if she’d be all right living like that.
She was an executive of Evils and a magical girl. With an inexhaustible wallet that never ran dry even by student standards and a secret identity no one knew about, I figured she’d eventually return to high school just to bask in her own sense of superiority.
Surprisingly, Aile did no such thing. Quite the opposite. With money and self-actualization already secured, she showed no interest in attending school at all.
‘School would probably be better for her, though.’
If the “non-powered person” label was the issue, I could fix that easily. I could build a machine that would be mistaken for an esper ability, or ask Regalia to forge the documents—there were plenty of ways.
Still, if she truly had no attachment to high school, I hoped she’d at least consider university. Ending her life as a middle-school-dropout, hot-tempered, gloomy asocial felt like too much of a waste.
‘Aile, you really ought to suffer through grad school at least once……’
The moment the thought crossed my mind, I realized I was having the worst possible idea a human could have. How could I even consider sending an acquaintance to grad school? That wasn’t something a person should do. It was the kind of thing only a heartless monster would do.
I must have been infected by these vicious thoughts because the research was so mind-numbingly tedious. I frowned slightly and turned back to the equipment and documents in front of me.
‘Why won’t this work…… Come on already.’
What the boss had ordered was Aile’s bike. She wanted the anti-gravity and flight devices inside Witchcraft to be “mass-produced using this world’s technology.”
The first part wasn’t difficult. After all, I’d already built both devices by hand. It meant the technological infrastructure here wasn’t completely lacking.
But mass production was another story. It meant creating the machines in a way that the people of this world could understand and replicate, not just using knowledge only I possessed.
‘Ah…… Maybe I should just dump all the knowledge and be done with it.’
The thought crossed my mind because the task was becoming that annoying. But I shook my head, banished the pointless idea, and went back to searching for a way to mass-produce it with local technology.
It was truly a tedious, exhausting, and unrewarding process. In other words, the perfect definition of punishment.
One week later, Regalia received a text message. It was from the scientist, saying his research was complete and he would be taking a vacation.
‘Hmm…… He finished already?’
That was far too fast. At this point, she was starting to suspect he’d just slapped together something vaguely plausible and tried to pass it off as finished, since she knew nothing about science anyway.
Fortunately, while Regalia herself had zero scientific knowledge, the people under her were a different story. Evils Enterprise was a colossal corporation that dominated all of E City, and its research institutes were filled with distinguished master’s and doctoral graduates from renowned universities.
Regalia forwarded the research data she’d received from Eight to those researchers for analysis. The researchers came back to her in shock.
“M-Madam Chairman! Where on earth did this……?”
“Hmm— What’s wrong? Is it some kind of nonsense that can’t be realized?”
“Nonsense? Of course not…! It’s the complete opposite. Madam Chairman! This is knowledge that would sweep up every major award the moment it’s published!”
According to the researchers, this was the kind of work that could win every single ABC Award—in Eight’s terms, the equivalent of sweeping the Nobel Prizes. It could claim not only the Physics Prize but the Chemistry Prize as well.
Whoever created this must have been at least thirty years ahead of modern technology, they said.
“……Thirty years.”
“Yes…! At minimum, thirty years ahead. Of course, if this were commercialized and sold, other companies could reverse-engineer it and produce something similar in ten or twenty years…… But imagining what someone with this level of technology might create ten years from now is terrifying.”
“In short, you’re saying it’s already at a level where commercialization wouldn’t be a problem?”
Regalia, who wasn’t a scientist, paid no attention to talk of ABC Awards or technology thirty years ahead. As a businesswoman, there was only one thing she cared about: profit.
Could it be sold immediately? And did it have room to develop into something even more expensive later?
From that perspective, the technology was extremely suitable. It had both development potential and immediate commercial viability.
“—Yes. Remarkably, it was designed with the assumption that it could be manufactured using the production facilities already in our factories. Madam Chairman, what exactly are you hiding? Do you really have an alien working for you?”
“Not an alien. Just an ordinary human like us.”
“To think you actually had someone like that……!”
The research director stared at the chairman in shock before hurrying back, eager to bring the technology into reality as soon as possible.
After the researchers left, the chairman smiled, the corners of her mouth lifting in genuine surprise.
‘I never expected him to do such a thorough job.’
She had half-expected him to slack off, but he seemed to have taken his punishment seriously. He could have ignored her orders entirely and disappeared if he’d wanted to.
Smiling at the scientist’s satisfactory behavior, Regalia returned to her work, already thinking about what reward to give him. Since she’d already handed over the research data, it wouldn’t be long before others produced the results on their own.
[Evils Enterprise’s newly announced “flying car” already fully booked with reservations……]
[E City’s pride! Evils Enterprise. ABC Award win practically confirmed—]
[Public opinion split between disbelief and “Evils Enterprise wouldn’t lie”……]
The news had been flooded with nothing but stories about Evils Enterprise for days. Just when it seemed there was nothing left to report, I felt relieved that we hadn’t been exposed.
‘I deliberately lowered the performance…… Looks like it went unnoticed.’
Mass-producing anti-gravity devices at the same level as the ones in Aile’s bike would have been impossible, even for me. Well, if I’d been ground down for a few more months, I might have managed it…… but I hadn’t been able to endure that long.
So I’d released a downgraded version instead—one that could be mass-produced with current technology. I’d been anxious it might get caught, but fortunately the boss hadn’t noticed I’d handed over a downgraded model.
‘If she had noticed, I can’t imagine how much she would have nagged me……’
Anyway, having officially completed the punishment the boss had assigned, I quickly escaped the lab. I never wanted to smell that distinctive lab odor again.
After wandering around the Evils headquarters, I spotted Aile, who had been fiddling with her phone on the sofa. She rushed over.
“D-Doctor! You’re out early today……?”
“I finished my homework.”
“Th-Then! Would you like to grab a meal with me? There’s a new restaurant that just opened nearby—”
Since Aile had rarely been the one to suggest a date, I readily agreed and followed her out of headquarters. The three of us—Vira, Aile, and I—headed to the new restaurant in front of Evils Enterprise.
Whether it was because it was newly opened or because it was genuinely good despite appearances, the place was packed even though it was still early for dinner.
“—Welcome!”
After receiving the owner’s energetic greeting, we ordered three servings of what seemed to be the signature dish and waited for the food to arrive.
After waiting for quite a while, Aile suddenly jolted and poked me in the side.
“D-Doctor…!”
“What?”
“O-Over there— Look over there…!”
When I turned my head in the direction Aile indicated, I saw the restaurant owner smiling as he greeted customers. I tilted my head in confusion and looked back at Aile, silently asking what the problem was.
Aile, looking thoroughly exasperated, leaned in and whispered urgently.
“Th-That person…… It’s Mosped…!”
“……What?”
At those words, I turned back to the owner. Because he always drove around in heavily tinted cars, no one knew what Mosped looked like. Besides, Mosped was a villain who moved at over three hundred kilometers per hour—recognizing his face would have been difficult even without the tinting.
But that level of disguise wasn’t enough to escape Aile’s eyes, especially since she had driven at similar speeds as a magical girl. If Aile said that person was Mosped, then it really was Mosped.
“He said he quit being a villain after that……”
To think the speed-obsessed maniac who used to race around in sports cars had opened a slow-food restaurant like this.
They say you never know what life will bring, and it turned out to be true.
I stared at him blankly for a while until our food finally arrived. It looked delicious at first glance. If the appearance was good, the taste was already halfway there. I took a slow bite.
‘Ah……!’
The moment the food hit my tongue, I felt an explosion of seasonings and spices bursting in my mouth and immediately retracted my earlier thought. He hadn’t given up being a speedster—he’d only given up being a villain.
Behold—the rush of flavor in this dish. The speed at which the seasonings assaulted my tongue.
‘……It’s good.’
It was a great restaurant.