Let's Be Friends (7)
Let’s Be Friends (7)
“The Compass... constellation?”
The thing before my eyes was a monster steeped in brilliant radiance. The arrangement of stars I had glimpsed when it released its disguise was unmistakably a compass.
“Be at ease, comrade! I have arrived!”
Comrade? What a load of crap.
The Pyxis monster danced toward the beast monster in front of me like an idiot.
Black armor, arrow marks pointing in exactly opposite directions on both shoulders, a rhomboid metal piece in the center indicating north and south, characters marking the cardinal directions adorning its entire body—every detail was unmistakably a compass.
A cape reminiscent of a ship’s sail hung from its back.
At its waist was a belt of peculiar design.
A belt of a completely different type from Watcher’s. Judging by how its design resembled the main body, it looked to be a part of the monster’s own anatomy.
Its appearance lay somewhere between a robot, a transforming hero, and a monster. A typical S-rank monster.
Two monsters and one human who would soon become a monster had gathered on the nighttime street.
A passerby would have been horrified. Fortunately, there was no one around.
“Hyaaap!”
With a theatrical, exaggerated cry, Pyxis detached the metal piece on its chest and hurled it like a throwing star.
Next, it grabbed the arrow marks from its shoulders and flung those like throwing stars too.
The skill was abysmal. The projectiles scattered every which way, drifting through the air without even grazing the beast monster.
“What are you doing.”
“Ah! You dodged! What a nimble fiend!”
“Does that look like dodging to you? You just missed.”
“But a hero requires a crisis, does he not?”
Are monsters all just madmen? Well, I suppose that’s why they’re monsters and not humans.
“I shall now overcome that crisis!”
The Pyxis monster seized its belt. To be precise, it placed its hands on the circle at the center and the handle connected to it.
Gripping the handle like an oar, it began a back-and-forth rowing motion.
At once, the compass-magnet-shaped throwing stars that had been circling in the air snapped upright and all faced the same direction.
Their orientation: the beast monster.
The Pyxis monster kept working the belt handle, and as it did, the projectiles’ heading grew more and more locked.
Shiiik!
The throwing stars that had been tearing through empty sky ripped into the beast monster’s hide in an instant. The projectiles, having cut the air once more, returned to the Pyxis monster.
The two arrow marks reattached themselves to its shoulders as before, and it caught the chest piece in its hand.
“This is overcoming! The image of a hero who, even when lost, finds his place again! Trials may shake me for a time, but they shall never make me fall!”
The beast monster wasn’t dead yet. Bleeding heavily, the creature seemed quite angered by the fact that it was injured and roared ferociously.
—Ku-aaaak!!!
“Oh my, did my appearance impress you that much? Please wait a moment. I am not yet....”
“This is madness.”
[ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATION.]
[THE BIG DIPPER.]
[ORIGIN.]
I finished transforming in a flash and turned the dial.
[MERAK.]
The Star of the Gate, Merak.
As Merak’s voice rang out, the center circle rotated, turning the color of copper, and the second star on the Big Dipper-shaped scarf lit up.
On the belt, one star likewise enlarged and shone, and a long rifle called Open Gate appeared in my hand.
I moved my body in concert with the belt’s aim assist and pulled the trigger without hesitation.
The bullet fired with not a hair’s breadth of error.
Bang!
With a crisp report, a torrent of starlight assumed the shape of the Big Dipper and swept the enemies ahead.
“Kurak?!”
“Wh—what are you doing?!”
I let my steps fall lightly as I moved backward. Keeping my aim steady even as the distance widened.
I pulled the trigger again.
The Pyxis monster.
One of the monsters that had attacked that day alongside Virgo, Pegasus, and Gemini.
It was amusing, the thing going on about comrades under those circumstances.
I maintained the gap and continued firing. Who knew if this monster would attack someone else later, as it had once done to me?
It looked pathetic, yet it was strictly an S-rank monster. Hard to handle without Blue Sirius-level power.
Dealing with it here and now was the right move.
My talents were few, and my character wasn’t much either, so this was about the only way I could help.
“Now see here—kuaak—wait!”
Bang! Bang!
As I let those quiet gunshots fill my ears, I realized something.
‘Why do I feel no hesitation pulling the trigger right now?’
A normal person, for whom a sense of compassion was natural, would hesitate even when striking an animal.
Even if it was a defensive act against an attack.
Even after acting on reflex, it was normal to feel resistance.
And this wasn’t even a defensive act against an attack—it was closer to a preemptive strike.
Yet I felt no resistance.
‘I’ve gotten used to it... no, that’s not quite right.’
I feared my own power first, then acted on it.
That process was there, naturally.
Before defining someone as an enemy, there was sufficient consideration.
But once I had defined an opponent as an enemy, I felt no fear in the violence I committed against them.
To put it more broadly.
‘Where purposeful violence is concerned, I feel especially little resistance.’
Just like a monster.
I had identified one of the side effects of transformation.
I was growing desensitized to violence.
I was losing my compunction about using violence as a tool.
That most natural, savage, irrational means—violence—became an easy solution, one I could reach for without hesitation, abandoning the advantages of dialogue.
So that’s why I was able to do such things when transformed.
So that’s why I could come up with the idiotic notion of using my fists to guide someone.
I knew ethically that it was an evil act, but my body felt no particular aversion to it, and I even knew it was a shortcut to my ideal. The reason not to do it vanished.
Come to think of it, things had been strange from the beginning.
The first quest I received after transforming.
‘Defeat the magical girl ahead.’
Could I really strike a child I had never met just because I was afraid of dying?
No chance.
It wasn’t even that far in the past, and I remembered it vividly.
The violence had been far too serene to dismiss as a desperate act committed in a state of terror.
‘To achieve an objective, ethical restraints weaken.’
It was especially so while transformed, and even after powering down, enough of that feeling seemed to linger to let me keep my wits about me.
This time, the resistance must have been unusually strong, so that mental firewall couldn’t block it.
When I thought about it, what I had just done wasn’t much different from what I’d done before.
Considering the purpose of this transformation, it was a kind of mental conditioning that wasn’t entirely bad.
If I felt resistance every time I used violence, it would be a major obstacle to pursuing my ideal.
But I couldn’t see it positively either.
At this rate, it was as clear as day that I would end up just like the monsters who used magical girls for their own ideals.
’...Wait. But why do quests to attack magical girls only appear targeting Red Vega?’
The other magical-girl-related quests had been things like “run away.”
Why only that one protagonist?
In that moment, a possibility flitted through my mind.
Quests are a form of future sight.
That much was certain. Time and again, they had predicted monster locations, magical girl locations, and their actions.
And they were behavioral guidelines for achieving my ideal.
Quests served as a kind of map, guiding what I had to do now to actualize my ideal.
The reason I had used more violence than necessary on Red Vega was to instill fear.
Among the magical girls, she was the one with an especially strong sense of inferiority and pride, the one who had completed at a young age a kind of idolization process that shouldn’t have been finalized in the role of a magical girl, and as a result was uniquely unhesitant about risking her life.
The one who had faced death time and again in the original work, and whose seniors had been forced to sacrifice themselves each time.
The one who, through those many crises and sacrifices, had finally reached the hero she had always wanted to become.
To put it kindly, it was fate. To put it unkindly, it was dumb luck.
If fortune hadn’t been on her side even a little, she would have died.
This world was one where the variable called Watcher had emerged and the movements of many monsters had become completely different from the world I knew.
In other words...
‘In the near future, Red Vega will fall into a life-threatening crisis.’
And into a crisis that Watcher couldn’t reach, at that.
Her seniors probably wouldn’t be able to come either.
A major crisis she would have to handle on her own.
Thinking of it that way, the attack quests concentrated on her gained a certain justification.
Of course, even taking that into account, a quest telling me to beat a kid half to death was not normal.
Does having a reason justify every evil act?
Ridiculous.
‘Like hell I’ll listen to this bastard from now on.’
If anything rubbed me the wrong way even a little, I’d refuse outright. If it wanted to kill me, let it.
I had gone out to clear my head by exterminating monsters, but my head had only gotten more complicated. Guilt continued to well up endlessly.
Gritting my teeth, I worked the trigger hard.
Even as I felt how dangerous it was to take violence for granted, my course of action didn’t change.
I had no compassion to offer where monsters were concerned. What compassion was there for creatures that had already killed and wounded so many? They could go screw themselves.
“W-wait!!”
The beast monster was already dead and had turned to flame, leaving only Pyxis. I kept pulling the trigger.
Open Gate’s attack power was sufficient to leave scratches on the armor of a typical S-rank monster.
At that rank, each individual shot wasn’t overwhelmingly powerful, but accumulated, they packed quite a punch.
And above all, they excelled at breaking an opponent’s balance.
They were useful for keeping a target off-balance before landing a lethal blow.
Rapid fire without starlight concentration shouldn’t cause fatal wounds, though.
“Kuaaaaaa!!!”
It seemed to be causing fatal wounds to that compass monster after all.
He’s weak.
The simple impression surfaced.
Maybe it was because he was a bottom-tier monster even among S-ranks, one who hadn’t even appeared in the original work. Compared to the ones I had faced until now, he was far too weak.
“See here, comrade! Stop this! This prank has grown far too violent—kuaak!”
It felt like I could kill him even without any special techniques.
Once more, a barrage of Big Dipper-shaped shots rained down on him.
Pyxis placed his hands on his belt, just as he had when controlling his throwing stars. As he vigorously worked the handle, the barrage hurtling toward him flew off in random directions.
“It works on more than just your own projectiles...?”
“Indeed. My ability is to make one lose direction. Now do you understand? Put away that dreadful gun and—!”
[DUBHE.]
If an attack aimed at a clear direction wouldn’t work, then all I had to do was drench him in wide-area attacks.
I drew out the star of Dubhe, one of the strongest among the stars I possessed, specialized in wide-area lightning attacks. Open Gate disappeared, and in its place, a pair of claws equipped themselves on my hands.
“What on earth are you so displeased about?! We are comrades! Heek! W-wait—mm.”
Pyxis flinched as I raised the claws. He immediately put on a dignified air and pointed a finger at a belt. Not his own—Watcher’s.
“Th-that belt... is truly magnificent. Yes, most magnificent indeed. Is it in fashion these days?”
The content was too poor to listen to. I gathered lightning within the claws.
But that lightning would never fall.
“I saw Boötes wearing one just like it....”
Because Pyxis’s next words followed and scattered my intent.
“What?”
“Oh, ohh... have you finally decided to converse, comrade?”
“Cut the nonsense. You saw someone with a belt like mine?”
“That is so. Bo... that is to say, I saw that Boötes possesses one.”
The Boötes Monster has a belt identical to this one right now.
That information was enough to extinguish my will to attack and replace it with interest.
“Comrade... was that not too cruel? Attacking me all of a sudden.”
“Cut the crap. Why would I be your comrade?”
“You speak the obvious.”
Pyxis declared confidently.
“Are you not, like me, a monster who has completed his constellation yet holds no purpose?”
He seemed to be under a serious misapprehension.
“Look... you saw me before I transformed, so you know. I’m human. And I have a purpose.”
“...What did you say?”
“Just what I said. If that weren’t the case—“
“No! That cannot be!!”
In an attitude completely different from a moment before, Pyxis shouted.
“The fact that you are human, I can accept... but a purpose? A purpose! You cannot, comrade! If that is not so, then I... I....”
It was sheer despair. Pyxis emitted that negativity unceasingly.
“Then the trouble I went to in making you a monster... what becomes of it....”
In the end, the monster clutched his head and shook it like a madman. At the end of that madness, the words he muttered were beyond pulling out of him by asking.
“You deliberately turned me into a monster? You had some purpose? Hey! Hey!”
“Aah... aah....”
He reeled dizzily, like a compass that had lost its direction.
“Aah... aaaaaa!!!!”
The arrow marks on his body spun like mad. It looked like the rotation of the stars, and also like a lost ship swept up in a turbulent current.
I reached out my hand to stop him.
And my field of vision transformed.
The filthy back alley I had been seeing until moments ago vanished, and I was hurled to some spot in the city center lined with closed shops in this late hour.
In an instant, I had lost my way.
He said his ability made others lose direction. So it could do something like this too.
“...What a pain in the ass.”
The unpleasant news had multiplied.
**
Pressing down her unease, Pink Deneb headed for the hospital room.
It wasn’t the room she shared with Blue Sirius.
She was heading toward the rookie who had just been admitted to the hospital yesterday.
Though they were both in the hospital, she felt unusually worried.
The disaster that had happened yesterday.
Coming back from the brink of death was something any magical girl went through, but suffering such a humiliating defeat was rare.
Pink Deneb had experienced such a shameful loss herself, so she knew she couldn’t offer casual words of comfort.
After agonizing over how to console her, she finally stirred her feet.
“Getting beaten that badly... must be a first for her.”
[Could you not say it a little more nicely?]
“Shut up, sparrow.”
[I’m a swan!]
“Yeah, sparrow.”
She snapped back at her mascot and opened the junior’s hospital room door.
“Hey. You okay.”
The words had been carefully deliberated—delicate concern. The eyes of the girl inside the room turned toward her.
Those eyes were not alone.
“Hgelloh thengyuh!”
“Oh! Onni, you want some too? It’s delicious!”
She saw Red Vega with her mouth crammed full of macaron, and White Dabih, who was unwrapping macarons and placing them into her mouth.
Red Vega appeared to have been trying to say, ‘Senior! You’re here!’
The macaron box emptied, and White Dabih swiftly produced the next dessert box.
“And the next num-nums are~ deluxe white-chocolate-vanilla-strawberry giant scones~~~!!! Our Weaver Girl, let us om-nom-nom-nom. Here, say ahhh~”
“Ahhh~”
She looked a lot more intact than expected. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be shoveling down desserts like that from the morning onward. Gazing at the crumbs showering onto the bed, Pink Deneb was horrified.
“You’re getting crumbs everywhere, you idiots! Use a plate! Are you two going to clean that up?!”
The first skinship she offered was a smack to their backs.