Like a Comet Into Your Heart (3)
Like a Comet Into Your Heart (3)
Red Vega was bewildered.
No matter how she thought about it, there was no justification for her to act like this.
Her motivation was solid, and she had kept her body moving even during breaks.
Freezing up with an enemy right in front of her was inexcusable.
Her conscious mind knew exactly what to do and how to do it.
So why was her unconscious mind sounding every alarm like this?
A shadow fell over the dazed Red Vega.
“Ahahahaha!!”
It was the Testudo.
By the time Red Vega finally snapped back to attention, it was already too late.
Its brutish charge was right in front of her. She wouldn’t die, but she would obviously take considerable damage.
“Vega! Won’t you get a grip?!”
A spear of ice shoved the monster’s body aside. In truth, it was closer to a tower lying on its side than a spear.
Before the violence of that mass, several times larger than a person, even a monster became momentarily powerless.
Red Vega flinched and bowed her head deeply toward Blue Sirius.
“S-sorry!”
“If you’re going to stand there in a daze, then go back! Do you even realize how dangerous that was?!”
“I’m sorry!”
If Blue Sirius hadn’t saved her, she could have been badly wounded.
A replay of what Pink Deneb had once said: coming to help for nothing and only getting hurt and becoming a burden.
Red Vega felt as if her throat were clogged tight with something sticky.
It was stifling, and it was unpleasant.
A thick and hazy emotion, like the stickiness of a summer day.
It was shame.
“Scold her later!”
Golden Aldebaran’s voice rang out. The voice was audible, but her figure was nowhere to be seen.
She had concealed herself with her signature stealth magic.
Following that invisible voice came a sound like wind being torn apart.
“This much....”
Several slashing attacks rained down on the monster that had just broken through the ice spear. They were sharp and precise.
Cr-crack!
A hideous noise followed, like fingernails scraping forcibly against solid rock.
Golden Aldebaran dropped her stealth and clicked her tongue.
“As I thought, it’s too hard! I tried attacking the joints, but it’s useless!”
“How troublesome.”
She had sensed to some degree that her attacks wouldn’t work.
In that brief exchange, Red Vega realized what kind of ability this Testudo possessed.
It was hard enough to ignore all attacks. A power befitting the Testudo nature.
“Hahaha... Use... less...! Your... attacks... are....”
The tone was confident, but it was far too slow. There was no reason to stand there and listen.
Blue Sirius immediately created a Binary Star Clone behind it.
Together with her clone, she circled the monster and generated ice awls.
With a hard swing of her three swords, all of the awls hurtled toward the monster.
Crash!
A sound like shattering glass rang out. Every ice awl shattered the instant it struck, leaving not a scratch on him.
“You can’t... leave a mark... on my body...!”
The monster was still finishing the sentence from moments before.
Blue Sirius was not flustered.
It had never been an attack she expected to work in the first place. It was merely a move to obstruct the monster’s vision.
Moving as though gliding across the sheet of ice, Blue Sirius grabbed Red Vega’s arm.
“Huh...?”
“A-hee, you don’t have to push yourself.”
Pulled away from the monster in an instant, Red Vega let out a puzzled voice.
“We’ll manage somehow. So go back, please.”
Blue Sirius calmly admonished Baek A-hee.
Red Vega refused.
“Wh-what I just showed you might not have been reassuring... b-but! I’m really okay! I was just tired from flying here so fast just now....”
“...A-hee. This is a battlefield. A place where lives are staked. You have no obligation to take part here.”
“I do... have an obligation.”
“A-hee! If you keep being so stubborn....”
Just as Blue Sirius’s voice was rising, Golden Aldebaran shouted again.
“You two! I said discipline can wait! I’ve been shouting this whole time, why won’t anyone listen to me!”
The monster hid its limbs inside its shell-like carapace and began spinning.
Using that centrifugal force, the monster charged again.
A massive tremor was felt behind Sirius’s back. Something ponderous was steadily approaching.
“Ha... I was speaking, you know.”
Crunch!
Her three swords stabbed deep into the ground. A sheet of ice formed beneath the earth where the charging monster ran.
That sheet of ice made the monster’s feet slip—and accelerated it.
The monster now charged even faster.
At that moment, the road it traveled suddenly rose in height. The ice sheet surged high upward, lifting the monster like the ascent of a roller coaster.
It climbed a bridge of ice created in the sky. The monster couldn’t stop due to inertia and was gradually nearing the bridge’s end.
The end of the bridge broke off sharply, and the monster soared through the air. Flying for the first time, it let out a cry of admiration.
“Oh... oh....”
Red Vega, thrashing petulantly, pulled her arm free. At the same time, she compressed her magic into her feet. The compressed magic immediately ignited into flames.
Boom!
The moment the compressed flames were released, Red Vega shot into the sky like a rocket.
Reversing the situation from moments before, a shadow was now cast over the monster.
Red Vega rotated her body and drove her fist downward.
It was a stance where using her legs would have been more comfortable, but there was a reason she deliberately used her fist.
Sky Polaris—because she wanted to be like her, she had even copied minor combat habits like this.
Gravity and flame became one and slammed the monster down.
Shining like a comet, she plummeted downward.
Blue Sirius created ice spikes aimed at the impact point.
The monster’s body, heated severely by friction and flame in midair, met a field of snow.
Falling, the monster shattered the spikes to fragments and left the ground deeply caved in, yet its hard carapace bore not a single wound.
“Filthily tough....”
Golden Aldebaran muttered. Everyone else agreed.
More than tough, it even gave the impression of being untouchable.
They had clearly struck it, yet could leave no evidence of that contact, so it was no different from not being able to touch it at all.
“Ugh... uuu....”
Groaning painfully like someone with motion sickness, the monster rose.
Red Vega’s fist flew toward its head.
“I do have an obligation!”
Thud!
A sound like banging solid iron with a bare hand. It was heat high enough to melt typical steel into molten metal in an instant, yet the shell only grew hot; it didn’t melt.
The monster swung its arm. Red Vega instantly spun through a backflip and dodged the attack.
“Because I’m a magical girl....”
Her voice was trembling. At that paltry declaration, Blue Sirius held back a sigh.
Red Vega decided not to think about it.
About this abnormal behavior, this fear—why any of this was happening to her now.
The more she thought, the more it would devour her, so she decided to simply erase it from her mind.
For now, giving her all to defeat the monster was the only thing. Unnecessary emotions could be ignored.
Had to be ignored.
Mustn’t know.
Baek A-hee averted her eyes, and Red Vega focused on the monster before her.
Cr-crack!
Sparks flew near the monster’s neck. Slashes with no visible source.
It was Golden Aldebaran.
In sync with her, Red Vega ran forward as well.
“A-hee, please!”
“Red Vega is heading into everyone’s hearts!!”
“How about a plan where we concentrate attacks on the spot I am hitting and weaken it?!”
It was practically a collective monologue. With complicated feelings, Blue Sirius raised her three swords and charged.
Scolding a child who had acted recklessly was important, but toppling that monster was the priority right now.
Just as Red Vega had said moments ago, they were magical girls, after all.
Her sigh froze and became a long stream of breath. A pure-white sorrow.
**
“Not going to drink?”
Boötes pointed at the cup placed in front of me and asked. Inside, a milk of unknown animal origin was gently sloshing.
“Rumor has it that’s the milk that turns you into a monster the instant you drink it. Of course I’m not going to drink it.”
“There’s a rumor like that? Hm... but this doesn’t have that kind of effect. Besides, you already have a monster’s body, yet you say such strange things.”
Boötes emptied the contents of her own cup in one go and laughed.
It was smooth. Was it a lie? Or the truth?
Hard to tell for sure.
But it was a fact that one of Boötes’s abilities was transforming ordinary humans into monsters.
Not Monsterization.
Literally, transforming them.
The human vanishes, and only a monster remains in their place.
It erases each person’s individuality, ideology, consciousness, and appearance, replacing them with the uniform appearance of mass-produced monsters.
A terrifying power.
“The magical girls who came before drank it just fine....”
“What?”
“I once helped Libra out, a long time ago. So I faced off against magical girls. Naturally, I invited them here. Then I asked them to drink this cup.”
Boötes smiled wryly, smacking her lips.
“They wailed and made a huge fuss, even leaving things like last wills... so that rumor was the reason. Well, they all ended up drinking it anyway, hahaha.”
“’Drank it just fine’ doesn’t sound like the right phrase.”
“As a result, they drank it just fine. They drank it and got out, so it turned out well.”
Boötes laughed cheerfully and picked up the remaining cup.
“Would you drink it if I added a little honey...?”
“Not necessary. The small talk is dragging on.”
“You’re supposed to become friends by talking like this... don’t you want to be friends with me?”
“If you want to get close to someone, show some goodwill that breaks down the walls around the heart first. This suspicious milk doesn’t strike me as goodwill.”
Boötes crossed her arms and expressed her dilemma with a long, drawn-out “hmm”-like hum.
“Right, this sort of thing usually means the one who’s in a hurry should approach first.”
Boötes uncrossed her arms and smiled.
“Fine, I’ll tell you about the belt.”
She took an object from within her clothes and placed it down. It was a belt designed identically to the one currently wrapped around Watcher’s waist.
“I don’t know the details either. I just received it.”
“Who did you receive it from?”
“Ungnyeo... ah, that’s a nickname. She has another name you’d probably recognize.”
Boötes answered readily.
“Sky Polaris.”
“...!”
I was surprised. But I wasn’t shocked.
Considering the webtoon writer’s name and the parallel worlds the belt had shown me, she had been one of the leading suspects.
“It’s an item she entrusted to me. She made several of them, and I don’t really know why you have one either. Ah, or maybe I did know and just no longer do.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I’ve lost my memories! So I don’t know!”
“This is maddening....”
Boötes laughed, “hehe.” I laughed along. It was an empty laugh.
I thought she might be some great mastermind, but the thought that I might not be able to get as much information as I’d hoped crossed my mind.
I even felt a faint sense of familiarity. An emotion born beneath the surface of my disappointment.
‘That guy might be far closer to being a comrade than Jason.’
Of course, I had absolutely no desire to make him a comrade. I didn’t want to become friends either.
Moreover, the possibility that this was false, not the truth, couldn’t be ruled out.
“So? What is the purpose of this belt, and who made it?”
I immediately asked.
There was no time to idle around here.
“You’re so cold. I went to the trouble of aiming for common ground with the part about losing my memories.”
“People who’ve lost their memories aren’t exactly rare in this world, you know. Everyone who goes from human to monster is like that.”
“It’s annoying because it’s true... anyway, I don’t know who made it. I told you earlier, I received it. Ungnyeo... no, Polaris might have made it, or someone else might have.”
At any rate, it was certain that it was deeply connected to Sky Polaris.
“However! I do know what function the belt has.”
Boötes clapped her hands together and gathered everyone’s attention. Though the only attention to gather here was mine alone.
“This is a device that observes possibilities.”
Her delicate-looking hands carefully lifted the belt as if holding a treasure.
“The ability to observe the many things someone might have experienced, or might experience—that’s the function of this belt, according to what I’ve heard. Regrettably, it can only be used by humans.”
It was a needlessly long-winded explanation, but I got the general idea.
A device that observes possibilities.
If this explanation was true, it accounted for the strange events I had experienced so far.
Quests that instructed me to take precisely the right action at the right moment, as if predicting the future; the parallel-world version of myself I saw when I first touched the belt.
The former would be an observation of things that may happen in the future—the possibility called the future.
The latter would be an observation of the possibility that was myself in a parallel world.
Within the word “possibility,” countless more possibilities were contained.
It could be prediction, it could be prophecy, a passageway to another world, or an illusion.
A machine that sees possibilities... I had gained far more information than I expected.
As if sensing my interest, Boötes smiled confidently. Satisfaction could be felt through the face shaded by the hood.
“In short, it’s a tool that reads multiple possibilities and helps you advance toward the world you desire. Isn’t it amazing? Don’t be needlessly suspicious. Just trust it and follow.”
“...That suddenly sounded like your own ideology got heavily mixed in.”
Unlike what she’d said moments before, that was thoroughly propagandistic.
It was the demeanor of someone preaching something.
“Hm... did it sound that way? If so, my apologies. It’s nothing, really.”
Boötes laughed awkwardly and continued.
“What I wanted to convey was this: even if this belt presents a path you don’t like right now, I hope you’ll faithfully follow it. Since you’re wearing the semblance of a young lamb, I worry for no reason, you see.”
I sensed the atmosphere slowly turning ominous.
The pastoral feeling of the space had at some point taken on a desolate and solemn air.
“You have an ideal, right? Then you should achieve it. I want every young lamb to fulfill their dream. You’ve got a fine tool here, after all? You should use it well. My words may seem doubtful. But don’t doubt them.”
She spoke as if gently admonishing.
“No matter how wrong it feels right now, you’ll understand later. That everything you did was for the sake of your dream.”
It was as if she was trying to wash away her own greatest guilt right then. As if trying to embrace everything and force acceptance.
“Do you know what it is I’m trying to do?”
“I told you, this is a machine that reads possibilities. An unobserved future is ultimately no more than a possibility....”
That was practically the same as answering in the affirmative via a roundabout route.
“Didn’t you say a monster can’t use this?”
“Yes, so I can’t use it now.”
That was the same as saying it had been usable before.
“You... were human.”
Boötes merely grinned, saying nothing.
“This is something that I, who know the future, can guarantee.”
She softly pushed the cup containing the milk toward me, as if urging me again.
“Don’t doubt the actions the belt instructs you to take.”
It was deeply unpleasant.