Like Family (9)
Like Family (9)
Red Spica.
Real name An Su-chae.
A lovable girl who cherished the colors of evening, gazing at them as she waited to welcome her mother home from work.
She might well have turned rebellious out of loneliness, raised in a single-parent household, but she drew affection from everyone around her with a perpetually innocent and cheerful manner.
A girl with striking looks and a gentle heart.
That such a girl would awaken a special power in a moment of crisis for her mother was not a particularly uncommon story in this era.
The problem was how early it happened.
She became a magical girl at six years old.
It all took place before she’d even entered elementary school.
The media covered it on a massive scale. It was the moment the youngest magical girl in Korean history was born.
“Thank you!”
Stunned as she was, the girl accepted the attention joyfully. Being a magical girl had been something she admired, and she didn’t dislike receiving attention from others. Above all, the thought that she wouldn’t have to cause her mother any more hardship loomed large.
She was still too young to fully grasp money matters, but she knew well enough that her mother struggled greatly because of it.
So the girl was happy for a while. Even though she was so busy with work that she could barely attend elementary school. Even though there were nights when monsters appeared and she couldn’t sleep, working instead.
Others smiled in proportion to her suffering, so the girl was happy.
Her senior magical girls looked after her a great deal.
They kept her away from tasks beyond her capacity as much as possible. They covered for her when reporters threw out malicious, provocative questions, and they shielded her from seeing strange articles or public opinion.
But as her body grew, she came to understand.
Realizing her own shortcomings, feeling the sharp stares of reporters, sensing the jealousy and inferiority complex within some of her classmates’ gazes — Red Spica grasped one truth.
The world was not always favorably disposed toward her.
Of course, the vast majority of ordinary people were well-disposed toward magical girls. But malice is like an awl, punching holes through smooth affection.
One in a hundred is a minority, but when those ones gather together, they become a multitude. The internet, where there is no need to expose one’s identity, was exactly where those minorities congregated. And unfortunately, they possessed an overflowing abundance of time and passion to spend on tearing others down.
Driven mad by inferiority, they transformed an ordinary girl into a cunning little brat greedy for money in an instant.
Naturally, nobody seriously believed this. It was nothing more than a vile game spouted by people who’d fallen behind in real life.
Freedom of expression, the habit of criticism, skepticism — none of these are inherently bad. The problem is the people wielding them can be bad.
For those who considered their own freedom paramount, the fact that the target of their denigration was a child who hadn’t even properly reached puberty was of no importance whatsoever.
Soon a commotion erupted in the online world.
A movement arose to defend Red Spica. To the majority of ethically-minded people, spreading all manner of rumors about an elementary-school girl looked nothing but ugly. As if in defiance, they supported her with wholesome stories and highlight reels of Red Spica.
But with defense always comes backlash. Using the excuse that her fans were being obnoxious, anti-fans of Red Spica swelled in equal measure.
Surprisingly, the girl wasn’t deeply wounded by this incident. She’d learned over the course of her life that crazed bastards inevitably swarmed around celebrities, and she was confident she herself would become one such figure.
At the same time, this was the event that made Red Spica reconsider her perception of people.
‘This isn’t a job I chose because I wanted it.’
She always had to fight with her life on the line, was in the position of not even having the time to spend the money she worked so hard to earn, and had to live apart from her one and only family from a very young age.
Then why did she have to put up with that sort of talk? Why did they, who were protected by her, write such things without a shred of fear?
They must have been certain.
Certain that no harm could come to them.
Because a magical girl is exactly the kind of person who becomes that profession. Supernatural beings choose them and bestow power upon them. The subjects are exclusively women with outstanding looks and gentle natures.
Only a girl with an immense aversion to harming others would be chosen, so they must have felt safe hurling abuse. Besides, even if she did act on it, the immense social repercussions and responsibility would ensure it never happened.
Red Spica was one such person herself. But those words that crossed the line encountered the delicate emotional currents of adolescence and triggered a massive backlash.
“What am I... some kind of slave?”
Next time, I’ll sue. Red Spica made up her mind. And afterward, she actually did press charges against some of the malicious comments, borrowing the name of the Magical Girl Association.
She took plenty of flak for it — a person meant to protect civilians attacking civilians, they said — but she paid it no mind.
If they don’t like it, they can come fight me. Or they can quietly hold their little boycott. Fortunately, the boycott of a few had no impact whatsoever on Red Spica’s influence.
She went to an expensive restaurant with her mother with the settlement money.
The girl was still happy.
Before she knew it, the girl had grown enough that calling her a woman would not have felt out of place. Behind her, too many junior magical girls to count on both hands had appeared.
The girl was no longer the youngest, beloved by all, and commensurate responsibility followed.
And then, a problem arose.
An S-rank monster. An intelligent supernatural phenomenon. A monster on an entirely different plane from anything before. A being that, even for someone who’d been a magical girl for over ten years, was rarely seen. And it appeared, of all times, during a rescue operation she was leading.
The highest rescue rate among current magical girls. That boast became laughable in the face of the number of people who died.
She was met with much ridicule. Much resentment. The abuse she heard from the victims’ families when she visited the memorial altar was never forgotten.
All the nonsense the stragglers were spouting on the internet, as they usually did, no longer sounded like nonsense.
Red Spica was gripped by disillusionment.
’...Could I really be the one in the wrong?’
It seemed that way.
If a magical girl can’t protect people, isn’t she just a woman selling her face for money?
At the same time, it felt unjust. The enemy had been beyond her capacity. What was she supposed to have done? Whatever she did, there would have been casualties, and their families would resent her.
Even doing her very best, the result for someone was the very worst.
’...It would’ve been better if I’d died back then.’
At least it would have been dressed up with the word ‘killed in action’ and she might have received some praise. A magical girl’s best is usually a mad act of rushing in like a moth to a flame, knowing she’ll lose.
She wouldn’t have heard words like negligence or work slowdown.
The girl wanted to forget everything. The people she couldn’t protect, the self-loathing, and even this selfish sense of unfairness.
Before long, the girl received an opportunity to forget it all.
She’d forgotten who had given it to her, but it happened through contact with some kind of machine.
That lens caught the light, tormenting Virgo’s eyes. After a very long time, once again.
The belt fastened around Watcher’s waist. Its shape closely resembled the machine she had last seen in her days as a human.
“Why, of all times...!”
She’d thought she’d been forgetting it so well all this time. Virgo gritted her teeth.
“Don’t make me remember!”
She screamed at the lightning closing in on her every moment. She tried to sound strong, but she couldn’t quite hide the slight tremor at the end of her voice. Virgo was afraid.
No matter how many rays of light she poured out, his advance didn’t stop.
Virgo brought out a move she hadn’t wanted to use.
“Do I look easy to you? I’m telling you! Don’t come near me!”
The power of a binary star. The power to create a twin identical to herself. Every time she used it, Virgo was seized by an intense revulsion. It felt like looking at herself in a mirror. The self she saw objectively was so embarrassing, so hideous.
When she completely loses her mind, it’s not so bad, but it’s difficult when even this much memory remains.
But now there were no moves left. The remaining distance was minuscule, and an instant’s delay would mean immediate decapitation.
The lightning coalesced so quickly she couldn’t even discern the shape of the axe, as if declaring his blade would show not the slightest hesitation.
“You’re just the same! You look down on me! You’ll defile me!”
She feared death. It was a sensation she hadn’t felt in a very long time.
“Why are you resisting so desperately?!”
Virgo lightly paused her hand in the air, then released it. The empty space her hand had just been covering. Behind Watcher, someone with a blurred outline emerged.
It was herself. A girl wearing an artificial, wild grin so forced it triggered vicarious embarrassment. A girl wearing a fluttering black Gothic Lolita-style dress she didn’t even particularly like. Bearing the power to kill at any moment.
“Everyone’s going to die anyway!”
A demon who had, in fact, wielded that power without hesitation and piled up countless corpses. Her black wings unfurled fully. The black sclera surrounding her violet pupils contorted.
The mass of compressed light emanating from her was so intense it even blinded herself.
Even vile, it was beautiful.
A beam of light capable of easily melting a human head was fired.
“The world is going to be destroyed anyway! Everyone will die and become useless anyway!”
The final landscape she had seen as a human, the landscape shown to her when she made contact with that machine, was exactly this. A landscape of destruction. A horrific spectacle of humanity’s twilight, where monsters trampled every city.
The beauty of the four seasons, the brightness of morning, the loneliness of night, the unique charm each person held — all of it vanished, a world painted over in nothing but a murky violet.
Virgo went mad seeing it. She had no choice but to go mad. For it meant that everything she had worked for so far was meaningless, and everything she had loved would vanish.
That was why Virgo forgot everything. It was a kind of defense mechanism. She resolved the wound she would receive from the fading of her love — by erasing that love from her memory.
That beam of light hurtled straight for Watcher’s heart. Even now, if Watcher gave up, she was willing to stop it.
“So, just stop...”
Without even looking back, he split the beam that was flying at him from behind and erased it.
Now only a single step remained.
“Have you.”
Watcher, Han Jae-jung hidden within that lightning, asked her.
“ever seen the stars?”
“...You asked me that a long time ago.”
Virgo clutched the mechanical device she had promised to give Watcher.
“I told you, I’ve already forgotten! Stop! Otherwise, I’ll smash this machine to pieces...!”
“Is that so.”
He approached her without pausing for even a moment.
“Then I’ll make you remember again.”
Crunch!
The axe, filled with lightning, traced a line.
A single motion.
The violet that had ruled the girl was overlaid with white.