Like Family (8)
Like Family (8)
A bird flits down and settles on her shoulder. She begins to sing as if recreating some old cartoon wonderland, but her singing is so dreadful the bird flees.
As I watch the spectacle and let out a laugh, Red Spica scoops up a handful of dirt and hurls it at me peevishly, as though she were gathering up the laughter I had so carelessly spilled.
“Ugh... don’t laugh!”
Red Spica is often sensitive even to little laughs like this. I quickly shut my mouth and ask what she was trying to sing.
“The title iiiis... I forgot! But I remember the lyrics and the melody! Listen closely, you might know it? So... when the forsythia bloom in full~”
I can’t listen any longer. I shake my head and tell her to stop.
“...Tch. One day you’ll hear me sing properly, outside.”
She often speaks of outside. Naturally, she means outside this Dark Matter.
But she never tries to leave.
She could fly through the sky, could cross thousands of paces in a single stride like a shooting star.
She always just deflects with something like, “If I went out, well... it’d be a little awkward, you know...”
Now she’s come up with another excuse.
“Of course~ I do have to see you catch a monster before I go~”
She says this and mocks me. She hates being mocked herself, but she mocks me freely—so, by that evenhanded logic, I mocked her back.
Since the day we first met, she has been helping me. She scoffed at the preposterous goal of killing a monster, yet she never stopped assisting.
“Told you, didn’t I? Catching a monster is like plucking a star from the sky. Now you’ve tried and it’s not easy, right? People really underestimate it. ‘If it were me, I wouldn’t have done that~ At that moment I would have held them off with magic and approached cautiously~’ And so on. Easy to say. Fools and idiots.”
Before I knew it, I had been living with her for well over a month. I doubt anyone else has survived in Dark Matter this long as a civilian rather than a monster’s slave.
“Still, take it easy. Okay? They aren’t the type to be caught easily just because somebody nags you, trust me. Back when I was a magical girl... ah, anyway, it wears down both body and mind. Ah... you already wrecked both, didn’t you? Poor thing.”
Red Spica lets out a playful sigh.
Whenever the conversation touches on magical-girl topics, she changes the subject overtly. She’s always been someone who digresses a lot and forgets what she just said right away, but this is particularly deliberate.
She must have gone through a great deal during her magical-girl days. As we talk, she sometimes broods over abuse she received back then or unloads hardships from her fights against monsters.
She knows the strong must protect the weak, but why don’t the weak offer any reason to be protected? Is even that thought selfish?
Did the strong ever even ask to be strong? If you have a gift, must you absolutely use it?
My pain somehow turned into deceit.
Whenever that happens, I quietly shut my lips and guess, inwardly, why she came to this place. Even why she stopped being a magical girl. Silently.
Always speaking of outside, and yet we never spoke of what we had gone through outside.
So I can only guess.
A guess that comes very close to the truth.
Quietly, the life of a girl who ran forward until she was exhausted, and at last veered onto another road.
I simply never put it into words, but I already know she is no longer a magical girl. And she knows that I know.
But neither of us speaks of it. Because we know we both suffered, even without prying. Because we don’t want to give it shape by turning it into language.
Even the fact that I harbor an anxiety—that one day she might go mad and kill me. We both know it, but we don’t speak.
As long as we kept our mouths shut, everyone was happy.
The fleeing road was a happy road. Nothing was ever resolved, but it felt joyful in the moment. When you keep running away like that, and running, and running again—
Before you know it, the road becomes an endless hell of nothing but repeated running.
Her legs still haven’t found rest.
The bird that had been pecking at a corpse flew away. Virgo shattered a skull with a single kick—the skull of someone who had ended their life here at some unknown point and for some unknown reason—then irritably scattered clouds of dust.
“Don’t laugh.”
With the left side of my vision encroached upon by the past, the her who existed in the reality on my right looked at me exactly as she had back then.
Except her eyes had grown sharper.
“Nobody here looked at you and laughed.”
“No, you laughed!”
Another difference: the finger that had always been aimed at monsters was now aimed at me.
“Because I felt it.”
What those delicate, slender, beautiful fingers unleashed were rays that could easily melt cast iron.
Some flew straight, some curved, some circled far around to strike from behind.
Dozens, hundreds of delicate yet ferocious beams interlaced and filled the sky—a spectacle comparable to the Milky Way streaming overhead.
With half my field of vision obscured, dodging rays that flew at me from all directions was, unsurprisingly, an exceedingly difficult task.
But Ursa Major possesses more than just the power of lightning. Future Sight, achieved by pushing the Belt’s ability to its very limits.
Three seconds at most, but that is enough to be useful on a battlefield where tens of thousands of motions can pass in a single instant.
Amid the half of my vision where reality flows, the future overlapped and projected in advance.
Countless rays surged in to tear me apart, and I could see which ones I needed to address first.
As if parrying a pre-arranged combination, I deflected every one of Virgo’s attacks.
“Hehe, nice! Want some praise? I’ll give you a little.”
In the left side of my vision, Red Spica pats my shoulder in her oddly haughty way. She means it as praise for toppling the monster she had caught and weakened. A monster already halfway to death apparently still looks impressive to her.
Reality, of course, was far more desolate.
“What are you doing!”
Virgo cried out in fury.
“If you keep blocking it, what does that make me! Just get hit and fall over!”
“You ask a lot.”
Her expression in the future three seconds later was identical.
Well, it’s only three seconds.
Enough time to protect myself, but far too little to change anyone else.
Past, present, and future twisted and blended within my vision. Her expressions—radiant, angry, disgruntled—gradually began to unify into one.
“Now just die!“
I couldn’t tell at all whether those words had come from the left or the right.
I pull my foot back. There is a corpse right in front of me. A gruesome corpse that died while its head melted away. Red Spica stands before it. That she is the one who made this corpse is unmistakable.
No false step. Even without a head, the clothes let you guess what sort of person this is.
It does not take much time to realize this corpse had been someone I was conversing with up until just a moment ago.
Dark Matter is not uninhabited. There are quite a few slaves kept to cultivate starlight for monsters, and every day more would-be suicides set foot inside. Most die within an hour of arrival, of course. The same nearly happened to me.
Failing that, they are riffraff like smugglers.
People who care nothing for humanity’s future and only want to line their own pockets right now. They usually collude with monsters to traffic people, buy drugs, or transport something dangerous across great distances overseas through Dark Matter.
Slaves, suicides, riffraff. I don’t know which of the three this corpse is, but the fact that it was a person doesn’t change. Whatever their background, killing a person is murder.
“I-I’m not the bad one!”
If she’d said she didn’t kill him, I would have believed her without question.
This is Dark Matter, inside dark material. A place where no one knows what happens or what takes place. Simultaneously, a place where anything can happen and anything can take place.
Why does she immediately confirm she’s the culprit? I hold back a bitter smile at the hopeless excuse from the outset.
“Th-this guy cursed at me first! He called me a fucking bitch... I-it’s not my fault! He was the one who first...”
Red Spica continues her excuses for a long while after that, and I remain silent.
The person is bound to be one of three types: someone fated to die anyway, someone who came here to die, or someone who deserved to die.
What’s wrong with letting a dead person die?
And so I seal my lips.
When we keep our mouths shut, everyone is happy. Naturally, the dead have nothing to say. They gladly contribute to our happiness.
The problem is, it happens again the next day.
I don’t know whether our luck has been good until now or has turned bad these past few days. We run into people every single day.
From lone wanderers at the fewest to organized groups of over ten.
Every time Red Spica encounters them, without fail, she commits slaughter.
And every time, she defends herself before me with an innocent expression.
“I was just standing still when they came at me first...”
I say nothing.
“They were trying to attack you... I-I had no choice...”
I listen to nothing.
“Ah, ahahaha... Nothing, nothing happened. Okay? Don’t make that face... Let’s go, over there. There’s definitely a monster there you’ll be able to kill.”
I see nothing.
A cloth of pure black wraps around my senses.
A cloth woven from fear, pity, and attachment.
With it, I veil my eyes, stop my mouth, and close my ears.
But you cannot forget everything in a single moment.
With the face of innocence she piles corpse upon corpse, producing a scene like the Hell of No Salvation.
Perhaps it is inevitable that I will grow distant from Red Spica.
Thirty days and then twenty more pass, and on a sweltering summer day that stabs with heat, I can bear it no longer and open my mouth to her.
Why don’t you go outside? Don’t you miss your mother? What were you doing before you ended up here?
I deliver it very passionately, with great metaphor, and gently.
She answers,
“The world’s about to end, so none of that means anything!”
More than her excuses after killing someone, more than the soulless words she always spouts, this—this sounds the most like bullshit.
BOOM!
A massive sound shook my ears.
“Kyahahaha! Is running away all you do? Nothing else? Hyaam~ This is getting boring now~”
It was the aftermath of Virgo’s rays shaking the very axis of the earth. Virgo’s momentary firepower is among the top rank even among monsters.
The three-odd minutes she fights at full strength are survived by only a handful of monsters.
A banquet of rays so extravagant it could alter the color of the sky—dense and savage as a rain shower, they poured down.
“See, I told you...”
The rays I had seen until today were shabby in comparison.
Is it because she’s temperamental that her starlight’s power varies wildly with her mood?
I did not doubt for a moment that this—right now—was her full strength.
“Catching a monster is like plucking a star from the sky!”
Another corpse drops in front of me. This one isn’t a civilian. A fluttering dress is soaked in blood, a brilliant ribbon is burned away, and the beautiful jewels lie shattered to pieces. The girl hits the ground, and what remains of her starlight scatters like fragments into the sky.
A magical girl.
Judging from the fact that I don’t really know her name, she is probably a rookie. Whatever brought her to this Dark Matter, today she meets her end here. A life still full of promise is snatched away and trampled.
Red Spica casually steps on the magical girl’s clothes and says,
“Let’s go now.”
I can’t stay silent.
I confront her.
Is it right to do even this to someone in the same situation as you?
Red Spica grins.
“So? What about it?”
I fall silent. Not because I have too much to say, but because my words are blocked.
“You gonna go out of here on your own? Hey, don’t do that~ You’ll die. You know that, right?”
With a beautiful hand—a red hand soaked in blood—Red Spica strokes my cheek.
“What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me with those eyes? Ah... Are you scared of me? Haah... I’m disappointed. I’d hoped you’d be different from Mom.”
That hand slowly reaches my eye and covers my vision.
“Hey, you know what? At first, Mom followed me obediently too, just like you. But then one day, her attitude flipped completely, and she said she was running away. Said she’d report me. So... after that, probably... I’m not sure. I forgot. I do remember scattering bone powder into the sea. Did I melt her, or did the crematorium melt her? Which do you think it was?”
The innocent voice rattles my ears.
“A fun riddle, right?”
Then her lips seal mine.
“You said it yourself. You came here to kill a monster. Then you can’t leave until you kill one.”
By another’s will, my eyes, my ears, my lips are blocked.
“I told you, killing a monster is as hard as plucking a star from the sky. For~ever! You can stay here just plucking stars. Got it?”
Now I open my own mouth.
“Thank you, Virgo. Thanks to you...”
A lightning bolt compressed to its limit roars from the tip of the axe.
And Virgo’s ray baptism lets up for a moment.
“I can now pluck a star right out of the sky.”
Across the violet sky, a white line was drawn.