Temporary Alliance (Or Not)!
Temporary Alliance (Or Not)!
Confidence in the first step.
Trust that the path I now walk is right.
A single star-ring formed around my leg.
Fury in the second step, fury for the things I have forgotten.
Fury toward my own ignorance, and fury toward everything that brought about this situation.
Over the star-ring, a new ring superimposed itself.
Resolve in the third step.
Resolve to protect everything now standing behind me.
Three steps, three rings.
The fourth step.
Once again, memories came surging—not just recollections, but emotions.
The emotion I felt when I lay against a monster as my wall.
The terror of ordinary human flesh confronting monsters, vision stinging from the water I’d swallowed.
Blood gushed from my stomach like a burst dam, and helplessness gushed with it. The fear every living thing should possess.
The dread of death.
The fifth step.
I chewed on that dread.
The fear of death is sharp as an awl in your pocket and hot as the sun blotting out the stars—even after it has passed, it makes your feet heavy.
The sixth step.
Not the dread of death, but fear of my own power rose.
Is this, in the end, a monster’s strength? Is my will a monster’s will?
What is the true nature of this power, and who am I?
It was also fear of ignorance.
The seventh step.
A step to shake off the fear.
I fixed my eyes on my opponent and steeled my resolve.
Virgo: a joke compared to Contradiction and Libra.
Feeble, measuring her by her fifteen stars.
She might be a nuisance to a magical girl, but not to me.
Seven steps—seven halos overlaid with confidence, fury, resolve, and dread.
Virgo was still suspended, caught in the self-defense mechanism of her transformation.
The seven steps were complete before her body could even fall to the ground.
The long shadow of my leg fell across her head.
BOOOOM!!!
Virgo’s body became a nail driving the floor to pieces. Her body alone couldn’t absorb the full force, so the floor tiles shattered in the pattern of the Big Dipper. The starlight gathered in my leg erupted upward, a tower of radiance. It was like a signal beacon.
“Consider that payback for the hit I took earlier.”
[Seven-Star Step Kick manifested. Replication Rate: 70%.]
Only seven-tenths, even now.
What kind of ideal did Han Jae-jung have, that the replication rate rises from something like this?
No—was this even Han Jae-jung’s ideal in the first place?
Or was the ideal I have to replicate actually my own?
In that case, what was the webtoon I read, and what is this sense of strangeness?
I don’t know.
Anyway, one thing is certain.
“Cough... hngh... How many times are you going to use that technique! In a human body, the strain must be considerable... ah.”
“Human? You just called me a human!”
“Tch....”
I am not a normal monster.
To borrow Contradiction’s words, I am an anomalous being—neither human nor monster nor magical girl.
I do plan to keep living as a human, but once you start splitting hairs over definitions, there’s no end to it.
“As expected... you aren’t certain of it yourself. Whether you are human or monster. Contradiction was right. I am nothing, so what I become is my choice.”
Monsterization and magical-girl transformation had intermingled.
The hallmark of monsterization is losing your memories, and mutating into a form drastically different from your original human appearance.
Both apply to me.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that I am Han Jae-jung’s monsterization.
Even then, there is more than one suspicious factor.
The fact that I keep recalling memories of my human days, and that I can return from this form to a perfectly ordinary human appearance.
Impossible for a standard monsterization.
A monster gradually forgets its human-time memories—not remembers them.
A monster can disguise itself in a semblance of its human form, but that form is never fully human; it will always carry a foreign look.
Contradiction, with a cactus pot growing from his head, is the prime example.
Look at Virgo herself—wings, pupil-less eyes, nonhuman traits.
But I am not like that.
[You have business with me?]
And there’s this stiff-necked mascot.
I transform from a fully human state into a monster.
The most defining feature is the root cause of this feeling that I’m possessing someone—
the fact that I know the contents of the webtoon Magical Girl Golden Age.
With overwhelmingly high probability, that webtoon’s story is truth.
Not only do the characters match, but their powers, personalities, and pasts do as well.
And the future developments hold sufficient plausibility.
Am I Han Jae-jung with a memory erasure? Some sort of reincarnator? A reincarnator who saw the future and went mad?
Truly riveting.
I’ve got mountains of things to figure out.
The ideal I must replicate, my identity, what sort of job this body can even land—and so on.
“I had so many nagging doubts I thought I’d go insane. Thank you. Thanks to you, I’ve been confirmed a mental case. Now I can head to the psychiatric ward without hesitation. You don’t mind if I bill it to you, do you?”
A profoundly riveting life. At least it won’t be boring. Thinking positively, I put a question to Virgo.
“So, I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what your objective was?”
She bit down hard on her teeth, aggrieved—it seemed she thought she’d been betrayed.
In the webtoon, her dilemma was never revealed, so I had no way of knowing.
“You think I’d tell you...?!”
“You look like you’re in pain. Stay still. I have more to say to you.”
Maybe it was because of the surprise attack.
The damage looks significant.
As expected—even if she can deliver an explosive burst of physical power, she struggles to sustain it.
Exactly what I read in that maybe-original webtoon.
“Virgo losing to the Seven Stars—how pathetic.”
“Hnnggh...!”
Even with fifteen stars, their brightness isn’t all equal.
Spica’s brilliance can’t be ignored, but the rest are mediocre at best.
She couldn’t maximize the radiance of all her stars the way Contradiction or Libra did.
And now that she’s become a constellation-class monster, she won’t be able to increase that brightness any further.
It’s one of the differences between monsters and magical girls.
A monster can grow stronger by accumulating stars, but growth ends the moment the constellation is complete.
But a magical girl can endlessly grow by increasing the brightness of her stars.
What use is a multitude of stars if a single brilliant one can blot them all out?
“I haven’t lost ye—....”
“No, you have lost, Virgo.”
At that moment, Libra walked out from behind the wall.
“When you killed all my children, I wondered if you had some grand plan in mind, but re-attempting a previously failed recruitment? As senseless as I thought. Is your mind going back and forth?”
“I’m not stupid! I... my choice....”
“Just sleep. No, you ruined my plan—perhaps death right here would suit you.”
It seemed Virgo acting against his intentions had genuinely displeased him.
Libra erupted in fury, shouting aloud.
“If you interfere again, I’ll beat you to death!”
After shouting, he chuckled, as if his insides had cleared.
As ever, there’s not a shred of camaraderie or solidarity between them.
Their conflict isn’t my concern.
“Hey, Libra. In your eyes, am I a monster?”
“That current form is indeed that of a monster. But your bare face before was unmistakably human.”
“Thanks for the answer.”
At Libra’s reply, Virgo rose up, bristling. Blood was streaming from her forehead, but she only wiped it roughly.
“You crazy bastard. Someone asks, and you just answer?”
“Why should I assist in your self-actualization? I left you to it, thinking you would kill this one. To think you were truly so thoughtless....”
Scathing review.
But accurate.
Did you think making me believe I was a monster would change my actions?
I gained clues to my memories and my identity, so in the end, I’m the only one who came out ahead.
“Then do I just take you down too?”
I pointed at Libra and took my stance.
“No, wait a moment.”
He spread his palm in a stopping gesture.
“I’m curious about something regarding you.”
He closed that palm again, then extended a single index finger, pointing somewhere.
I obligingly turned my head. There stood the bronze monster he had created.
The problem was, the monster wasn’t alone—a young man was there too.
“Kgh... hrrk...!”
The young man, his throat gripped by the bronze monster, couldn’t even scream, only thrashing.
“If we stand by and let that young man die, we will withdraw quietly from here.”
“On whose authority?!”
“My own. I have decided. My standing and power are weightier than yours. Or to put it another way, my existence is weightier. Does a defeated body get to run its mouth?”
“Just one hit doesn’t make it a defeat... I....”
Virgo’s moving body staggered violently. Concussion symptoms. How inconvenient, to be a monster so thoroughly resembling a human body.
“Ghk...!”
“So what will you do? Which will you choose? A young male showing signs of being voted off the reproductive market? Or the humans gathered in that shelter?”
Even calling that ugly, that’s a bit harsh. I stared at that monster, then abruptly realized something and raised a finger to the sky.
“Now that I think about it, I haven’t asked this yet.”
Red starlight flashed.
“Like a red comet into your heart!”
KABOOOOOOM!
Red Vega, having descended in a dazzling display, crushed the bronze monster’s body and snatched the young man from its grip.
She carefully laid the man on the ground, then rose, clenching her fist.
“Red Vega, making her entrance...!”
Her starlight was even more intense than when I last saw it.
This much growth in barely a day....
You’ve been through a lot.
Pity rose in me before pride did.
**
“Red Vega, making her entrance...!”
Even when word came that the Big Dipper Monster had appeared at the university, her duty remained the same.
Red Vega swiftly dealt with the monster at her alma mater, just as she had vowed, and then deployed to this location.
On the way, she heard shouts of encouragement.
-Hang in there!
-So freaking cool, senior!
That sort of cheer. Just as some people deliver blatant disappointment, others deliver open support.
Each time, it made her realize that what she had been doing was not wrong.
So Red Vega arrived, passion blazing in her heart.
‘This is bad....’
She realized the current situation was far from ordinary.
She had appeared boldly, but the situation was hopeless.
[Virgo, Libra, and even the Big Dipper... Guardian, will you be all right?]
‘Still, I have to try!’
Three S-rank monsters were present. But she couldn’t retreat here.
There were people behind her!
Red Vega wrapped her fist in flames, undaunted.
If she could just hold out a few seconds, her seniors would arrive soon.
She was trembling, and cold sweat sprang up, but Red Vega chose to advance.
Because she is a magical girl.
Even knowing she’ll lose, she can’t back down.
“Oh, good timing.”
Just then, the Big Dipper Monster walked up beside her, waving casually.
“I was just having a hard time handling this alone. You evacuate the people in the shelter. I’ll keep these two pinned down as long as I can.”
“...What?”
“What are you waiting for, get ready. You know me. Did you contact Deneb?”
“N-no, you’re also my enemy....”
“Ah, well, I suppose that’s also true.”
The Big Dipper Monster shouted boldly.
“Then it’s a temporary alliance!”
“...What??”
“Tch... the Red one this time. This is going to be troublesome.”
“A dangerous alliance has been born.”
The other two monsters seemed to accept the declaration without objection, not making an issue of it.
Libra even sounded deeply troubled, as if he genuinely believed it.
“The plan has been thoroughly warped... Hmph, I concede. Today is my defeat.”
“Wha-what do you mean?”
“I’ll await the next time. Virgo, we’re moving.”
“Tch....”
Libra opened his hand. A set of scales rose above it. Virgo clicked her tongue.
Thunk.
The scales tipped sharply to one side.
The two of them were veiled in black smoke. The clunking sound of a steam engine and the thick reek of oil.
He had manifested a miracle through his Transaction power.
All the magical girls had succeeded in their protection duties, and the one space that had been lacking, hampered by Han Jae-jung’s interference, had also seen no casualties.
And the Big Dipper Monster, whom she had planned to kill here, had gone and sided with the magical girl.
If this bred an image of “good” for monsters...?
Or conversely, if it bred an image of “evil” for magical girls?
For Libra, both were unacceptable outcomes.
The plan failed.
But Red Vega, unaware of this, was simply bewildered.
The two monsters’ figures vanished. Only Red Vega, Han Jae-jung, and the collapsed civilian remained.
“Looks like they’re gone.”
He looked at Red Vega.
Red Vega stepped backward, taking a combat stance.
“Is it because of when I hit you yesterday? Relax. Yesterday there were circumstances; I won’t attack unless it’s necessary.”
“What is your objective?!”
Red Vega was curious.
Why do you, a monster, act like you’re not one?
Why do you attack monsters, and why do you protect civilians?
Even more....
“Was that yesterday, to protect us from Scutum?!”
“Even us, magical girls?”
“...!”
He smirked.
“...If I say that, can you trust me? Can you protect me, cooperate with me?”
Red Vega could not readily answer.
The history of humans and monsters she had spent all day yesterday reading had always ended in tragedy.
“Right now, if I become the precedent for a ‘safe’ monster, won’t you hesitate, next time and the time after that, to attack monsters? Then how would the citizens see you? A woman sick in the head, playing house with monsters? That would actually be a best-case scenario.”
The flames wreathing Red Vega’s fist gradually dimmed.
“Tell me what you really mean...!”
“And once you know that, what can you really do?”
Han Jae-jung dreamed only of living quietly. He had never intended for the conversation to drag on this long. He had shouted “temporary alliance” in the heat of the moment, but in hindsight, he had done her a disservice. Guilt surged through him.
He tapped his head with a finger.
A sarcastic gesture.
“Think about your position. A magical girl who stirs up public anxiety. Think about your standing, and don’t hand anyone an angle to attack you with. You have a dream, don’t you? Then you should achieve it. Would befriending me here help that dream?”
In other words, if you don’t want to become a crazy magical girl who’s buddy-buddy with monsters, stay still.
These days, people are terrifying—don’t feed them material for baseless slander.
Having said it, he remembered his earlier temporary alliance proposal and felt a pang of guilt.
But he hadn’t wanted to create a situation where Red Vega would have to attack three opponents at once; what could he do? The human heart is complicated by nature.
Before he knew it, his hand was already at the Belt.
“I hope this is our last conversation.”
[ALKAID.]
Like the monsters before him, he scattered with the smoke.