Like Family (4)
Like Family (4)
The woman who protected me in Dark Matter.
To explain why our relationship is like this, I must go back to our first meeting.
When I first saw Virgo, I couldn’t believe she was a monster.
Her eyes were completely black, with no whites, and her wings were just as dark. Other than those two features, she looked exactly like a human.
I just thought she was a peculiar magical girl.
Since it’s not uncommon for magical girls to gain slightly unusual traits while using magic.
Actually, I found her mysterious.
That slightly inhuman appearance felt otherworldly and haunting rather than unpleasant.
Moreover, the fact that she was a magical girl thought to be dead, and that this place was Dark Matter, doubled that air of mystery.
At that point, to me, she wasn’t Virgo but Red Spica.
Appearance-wise, she hadn’t changed much from her last recorded footage. Her eye color and wings weren’t a ‘major’ change. Those were things you could fake or attach artificially.
The biggest change was her personality.
I never had personal dealings with her, so I don’t know what she was like in private.
But it was clear she wasn’t the type to grab a civilian by the throat and slam them into the ground on sight. If she were, it would have caused a bigger controversy than Seol-hwa’s attitude issues.
Her restraining technique was very clean.
What a personality, slamming someone around without hesitation just seconds after meeting them. It was as memorable as that mysterious appearance.
“Who... are you?”
“Guhk... What?”
“Wh-who are you. Tell me. D-did you come here to... to kill me? Or did you take something? What do you want? What do you want from m-me...?”
She was highly hysterical. Her speech was slurred, her teeth were chattering, and the hand gripping my throat had no strength; it was weak. Still, it was a magical girl’s definition of weak, so it had enough force to twist my neck and strangle me.
“You’re awfully full of yourself...”
I had come here intending to die anyway, so I ran my mouth without a filter. I had nothing to be afraid of. Dying to a monster or dying to an emotionally unstable, missing magical girl was the same to me.
No one would ever know I died the moment I perished in Dark Matter. The cause of death was irrelevant.
“Who... would come here... to see you...! Everyone thinks you’ve passed away... I didn’t come here for you...”
“Th-then! Then what!”
“Because I hate humans...”
Once I said it out loud, it was a pretty embarrassing reason. Fundamental reasons usually are. Amidst such blatant likes and dislikes, there’s no room for dignity, so people who care about saving face naturally find it embarrassing.
I was the same. Even in this situation, I still had some face left to save, and I felt ashamed the moment the words left my mouth. It was the typical statement of a socially inept, antisocial person. But I couldn’t take back what I had already said. I kept going.
“I went through some shitty things in society and developed a hatred for humans... so I came here...”
“The... sh-sh-shitty... oh, come on. Anyway, that crappy thing... what was it.”
So she’s strangling me, but she’s hesitant to swear? What an amusing person.
“Cyberbullying, stalking, and a guy with a knife going berserk.”
“...Oh.”
“Not just me, but my partner got unfairly trashed too...”
“Partner...? Th-this... are you... flexing on me...?!”
“We broke up.”
“Ah.”
Red Spica’s grip on my throat weakened, as if some of her anger had dissolved.
“Did you come to kill yourself because your girlfriend dumped you? Heh heh, you’re so young. The world is so beautiful! You can’t impulsively end your life like that! Tsk!”
As if preaching, she flicked my forehead with her finger. A massive thwack! echoed out from just a slight flick. Was she not aware of her own strength? I felt my skull cracking as I writhed on the ground.
“Oh, oh dear... what do I do? S-sorry! Did it hurt a lot? What do I do... oh! J-just a moment... ahem. Mama’s hand is a healing hand~”
She gently placed her hand on my forehead and started chanting a spell passed down orally for ages.
Was it pure or just childish? In this situation, it was the latter.
“Stop it! I’m not a child!”
“A child? My mom used to do this all the time... ah, no! How about that! Did that... stir up some memories of your mother? Well? Do you feel like going home now?”
“Suddenly?”
She wasn’t just childish, she was extremely childish.
“Yeah! That’s what I was going for! Definitely! I didn’t just give you weird first aid because I panicked!”
“So that was first aid... I see.”
“Huh? You’re going back?”
“No? I’m going deeper in.”
“Whyyyyy! It’s dangerous here! Go back quickly! Don’t you miss your mother’s face?”
Red Spica seemed quite unhappy about me staying here. Was it a sense of duty as a hero? Even now, I think there were a lot of things I didn’t understand about her.
“I can’t see her even if I go back; a monster killed her.”
I still had no memory of my parents. The memories I could recover were relatively recent ones. Most of my childhood memories were lost. But I still knew.
The past me harbored considerable displeasure and anger at the fact that I had lost my parents to monsters.
It was only natural, since it’s an emotion any human would feel. Who could love their parents’ killer?
“Ah... I see.”
Red Spica immediately sank into gloom.
“That’s why I came here instead of killing myself. Nobody knows who I am here, and no one cares if I die. Plus, there are lots of monsters...”
I picked up the steel pipe that had fallen to the ground when Red Spica attacked me.
“I want to kill at least one monster before I die.”
Looking at it now, I was talking complete and utter nonsense. Words of an inexperienced brat. Killing a monster with a civilian’s physical abilities? To her, someone who had killed countless monsters as a magical girl, it must have sounded absurd.
It was probably ridiculous, pathetic, and repulsive.
Even I was skeptical at the time. I didn’t genuinely think I could kill a monster, not even for a second.
I came here to die. I came to die without anyone knowing. I came here so no one would even remember I existed. But since at least I would remember myself, I figured dying after doing something, anything, would put my mind at ease.
So I spouted that nonsense about killing a monster.
“Interesting.”
Fwoosh.
Red Spica lifted a finger. A purple beam emitted from her fingertip, and the steel pipe in my hand melted as simply as ice cream.
“Gah...!”
“How?”
She asked with a grin.
“How are you going to kill one?”
“Through hard work.”
I answered seriously. That was my serious answer.
“Then you’d better work hard. You might die if you slack off even a little.”
Step. She walked toward me. Just one step brought her close enough that we could feel each other’s breath.
“Say, aren’t you curious? Why I’m here, why I’ve ended up like this. What... I am.”
“I don’t know the details, but I can tell you’re a lunatic.”
Red Spica burst into laughter, as if she liked my answer quite a bit.
“Aha! Euhuhu! Ahahahahaha!”
“Wow, is it really that funny?”
“I’m laughing because it’s so absurd... you really did come here to die, didn’t you? You don’t bother reading the room at all, do you?”
She wagged her finger, now with the beam condensed at the tip, telling me to drop any useless thoughts.
“Do you even know how ridiculous it sounds, a civilian saying they’ll kill a monster? It’s like saying you’ll pluck a star from the sky. Utterly preposterous!”
Red Spica heaved a deep sigh and looked me over from head to toe. I showed a bit of displeasure at her appraising gaze, but she ignored it and continued what she was doing.
“Your face is decent, but your brain is totally fried... you’re quite pitiful!”
“And you, with your decent face, what are you doing here?”
“Me? Well, obviously... Oh. I only listened to your story and didn’t share mine, did I? Sorry, sorry.”
She laughed nonchalantly and poked my chest near my heart with her finger.
“I’m similar to you. I came here to rest. I hate people too.”
It was an inappropriate statement for a magical girl. But looking back, since she wasn’t a magical girl anymore, there was no such thing as appropriate or inappropriate.
“Unlike you, I didn’t come here on my own. I don’t even know when I started being here. Or why I ended up like this.”
She was probably already suffering from the Blessing of Oblivion from this point on.
“I miss my mother, and there are things I want to eat... but I don’t want to leave here just for that. I just don’t want to leave, for some reason. It’s just the most comfortable here.”
Her remarks were blatantly contradictory. If it were really comfortable here, she wouldn’t have been curled up, crying and calling for her mother to come back.
“Maybe it’s because you hate people?”
I said it lightly, as if it were no big deal, but it was the heaviest statement of all. The fact that a magical girl, who acquired starlight for the sake of people, had developed a hatred for them, meant it wasn’t a simple dislike.
It must have been an incredibly powerful loathing, strong enough to turn a whole life upside down.
“So you being here is quite troublesome... your circumstances might be pitiful, but I don’t even know if it’s real, right? Most people who come here are garbage criminals, people whose lives have already hit rock bottom... so the chances of you causing a scene are pretty high!”
Heat gradually rose near my heart. There was no excitement. There was only fear. The finger touching my body began to gather heat.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Oh um... should I? But, I changed my mind.”
Red Spica looked at me and grinned.
“Someone like you isn’t the kind of person I hate. No one who hates people is a bad person!”
The enemy of my enemy is a friend.
A person who hated humans felt goodwill upon seeing someone of the same kind. She did, and so did I.
But this statement of hers was also a contradiction.
“You said you didn’t trust me earlier.”
“Did I? Sorry! Anyway, what I’m saying is...”
The beam she had gathered near my heart shot upward.
“I’ll give you one-on-one lessons until you can kill a monster. How about it?”
Monsters nearby flocked toward us. This was the beginning of our strange relationship, where she lured monsters toward me under the guise of “training” me, and repeated the cycle of protecting me.
**
And now, she protected me, unchanged.
The feeling of being protected by a murderer was oddly cozy.
Ah fuck, this is seriously the best.
Virgo’s expression was still unreadable.
“Good morning! Did you sleep well?”
“Very well, thanks to you.”
I was strangled, so there’s no way I slept well. I looked around.
Was this a hideout where Virgo stayed? It was strangely organized for a ruin.
“Yeah? Then let’s sleep more!”
Well, shit.
“Let’s talk for a moment...”
I moved my foot to approach her.
Thud. Something caught on my foot.
I lowered my gaze to see what it was.
It was a lump of machinery.
An intricately crafted piece of machinery that looked out of place here.
I instinctively realized it was an item that attached to the Belt.
And I also realized why I was told to let Virgo live.