Like Family (10)
Like Family (10)
The lightning passed through Virgo. The dial in her hand flew off, unable to withstand the impact.
Virgo collapsed to the ground, limp, and at the spot where she fell, cracks branched out like tree limbs in a jagged pattern.
The dial that had just flown away slipped into a crack, and naturally, the device was shattered.
It was a disaster. Even so, I had no regrets.
“Ughk... *cough*...!”
Even after taking a lightning slash that carved through the ground like tofu, Virgo was alive. Thick blood poured from between her red lips. She seemed to be in severe pain, but mercifully, her life didn’t seem in danger.
She was battered and bruised, her skin—so white as to be pale—stained with soot and blood, but she was alive.
It would have been troublesome otherwise.
The quest to ensure Virgo’s survival was still active for me.
“...Why?”
Red Spica mutters with a genuinely bewildered expression. I smile bitterly and step backward.
The past was still flowing. The two versions of her on my left and right overlapped. It felt like my head would explode.
The Belt’s warning that my brain would melt wasn’t a lie. It hurt as if my eyes were being seared with an iron and my brain was being microwaved.
On top of that, I was being eaten away by starlight.
I let out a ragged breath and glared at Virgo.
Just like her past self, she was staring at me with an uncomprehending expression.
“...What are you doing?”
It felt hopeless.
“Are you mocking me? Doing this to humiliate me? Why won’t you finish it...!”
She tried to rise, somehow forcing her trembling legs to move. Naturally, she couldn’t stand. Even as a monster, her physical structure was fundamentally human.
There was no way she could get up with her muscles locked up after being struck by lightning.
“Kill me! Do it! Stop laughing and just finish it!”
Virgo cried out, her body trembling uncontrollably.
“You ran away from me... and now you pretend to be kind? Don’t make me laugh! You started this. You know that? Either quietly let me kill you... this useless, pathetic mercy....”
Virgo showed a strong obsession toward me.
I couldn’t figure out if she saw me as a replacement for the family she lost, a kind of emotional support pet to keep by her side, a friend, a teacher, a cautionary tale, or what.
I can’t understand her.
Among all the people I’ve met, she is one of the loudest and yet keeps the greatest number of silences.
I could only ever catch glimpses of her heart through guesswork; she never once revealed her true feelings herself.
As long as she kept her mouth shut, she was happy. I wasn’t the only one who kept silent.
She covered her own eyes, blocked her own ears, and shut her own mouth.
That’s why I don’t know her. I don’t know Virgo, Red Spica, someone’s daughter, the unfilial orphan, the murderer.
But I know one thing.
“Virgo.”
“What!”
The fact that she was kind to me.
“I never ran away from you.”
The fact that she treated me like family. Because it wasn’t conjecture; it was a fact that clearly happened.
A massive tremor approaches from afar. The mere act of walking shakes the earth and pushes the clouds from the sky.
Dense starlight I can feel in full, even as a civilian.
It was a walking cataclysm on two legs.
The same presence I felt before, the Lion who paints a picture of hell.
“Run away!”
Red Spica urgently shoves me aside.
The emotion on her face was starkly different from anything before.
Fear. The oldest and most powerful emotion. An alarm bell for survival. She trembles all over, flooded with the sound of that bell.
No frenzy or composure. Red Spica is infinitely agitated. Her eyes dart around anxiously.
“Why is that thing back... why again...!”
She seems to have seen this monster before, gripped by terror yet seething with a deep fury. A thick grudge lies beneath the anxiety dominating her body.
Even then, I only made guesses. That something radiating that menacing energy was one of the beings she’d encountered during her magical girl days.
More than a simple enemy, a nemesis.
To emanate this kind of pressure from so far away you can’t even see it. Even for an S-rank monster, isn’t this too much? The difference with Red Spica was stark, too. At this level, shouldn’t they create an exception class like SSS-rank, not just S?
A great flash goes off in the distance.
That gigantic light is soon approaching this place. Dark Matter. One lovely star is falling into the endless darkness.
Is this what a meteorite falling looks like? A hideously massive lump of light approaches to vaporize this very earth I stand on.
I felt fear, too.
Red Spica smiles and pushes my shoulder.
“...I told you before, didn’t I? Killing a monster is like plucking a star from the sky. It was impossible for you from the start.”
Trapped in a violet bubble in an instant, I am pushed endlessly back as if shoved while weightless.
“Run away like this. And don’t ever come back.”
By the time I was too far away to even return to Red Spica, the bubble surrounding me popped.
Going back would be suicide.
I had no choice but to decide to leave Dark Matter.
In the place I’d come to die, I felt a stronger survival instinct than ever before.
And I made a resolution.
Next time, I would never run away.
The path I took must have been the territory of the Boötes Monster, because on this escape route, I encountered her and had a chase.
And I met another person.
“Oh, are you lost as well?”
I met Jason, and he got me out of that long, long Dark Matter.
Virgo stared up at me blankly.
“Wh, what?!”
“Seems you’ve forgotten quite a lot.”
It was as pathetic as it was pitiful that she couldn’t even remember her own deeds.
“How much have you forgotten?”
“Shut up!”
Virgo suffers from amnesia. According to her, it’s madness; because she’s a crazy bitch, she’s always forgetting as she goes.
Even so, she values memory. She cherished her memories of living with her mother and had a certain obsession with the time she spent with me. She always forgets, and always remembers again.
Virgo resents magical girls. More precisely, she detests that role itself. She was bitter about her past, forced to shoulder the duty of protection against her will.
Yet she tries to be a magical girl. The power she gained as a monster is Four Seasons, One Violet (四季紫一). A power to make the magical girls’ own abilities hers. Despite suffering from being a magical girl, to this day she craves that power.
Virgo calls herself a madwoman. So she thinks she can do anything. Because she doesn’t know what constitutes a bad deed, her hesitation disappears.
Yet she rationalizes her evil deeds. Rationalization is a shield to protect her sanity. If her sanity is already broken, she shouldn’t need to protect it, but she mutters desperately that her actions aren’t wrong.
It’s ironic.
Virgo is an inconsistent monster. Her words and actions are different; her actions and her heart are different. She’s duplicitous.
Just like the star Spica, just like that binary star.
“Virgo, what is your goal?”
“That, obviously, is world destruction....”
“No, it isn’t.”
It was a nature closer to a human than a monster.
“If world destruction were your goal, you had no reason to protect me. Even if we assume you gave up in despair, knowing the world would end, that’s still strange. Because then you’d have no reason to fear death.”
“Y, you think I’m afraid of death?! I’ve been telling you to kill me right now, just earlier....”
“That’s also not true.”
I denied it firmly.
“You say that knowing I won’t kill you. Like a child. Like a child who throws a tantrum and acts stubborn, knowing their parents won’t kick them out. It’s nothing more than screaming in malice and venting your own resentment.”
Right when the lightning was about to cover my eyes as well, I powered down.
My left eye was still replaying my past, and the pain gnawing at my body remained.
“Were you so resentful that I left your side?”
“...Shut up.”
“You know. I didn’t leave you. You made me leave.”
“...Shut up, I said!”
*Fwing.* A beam flew from Virgo, perhaps she still had some power left. It grazed my cheek as it passed.
A streak of blood trickled down my cheek. I felt it.
“You tried to bind me but couldn’t kill me; you made me leave but were lonely and sought me out to make me your comrade again. Though you constantly forget, you couldn’t forget me in the end. You cry out for world destruction, yet you’re making a reason why the world mustn’t be destroyed.”
Was that her last strength? Virgo collapsed onto the ground with a thud. I bent down to her lying form. Maybe all her starlight was exhausted, because the force I felt from her was weaker than a low-rank monster’s.
“Virgo, what could your purpose be?”
“Shut... up...!”
I don’t know Virgo. Because she only ever talks nonsense and can’t properly convey her true heart.
So this too is nothing more than conjecture.
“Virgo, you wanted empathy.”
Four Seasons, One Violet (四季紫一).
All of the girl’s time was tinted violet.
Because all of her time was like dusk.
Because no matter how many days or years passed, she remained stuck in a single day.
Because she tried to stay in that day, even as she forgot her own life over and over.
Because all her life she wandered, chasing only hope and anticipation, just like when she was a little girl waiting for her mother to return from work.
“You wanted someone like family who would accept even your madness, someone who would tell you it wasn’t your fault. That you had every reason to go crazy. You wanted someone who would say that.”
Chasing her duty, she tired and ran away, but couldn’t even finish that escape. In the end, it was the end of a magical girl who collapsed from sheer exhaustion.
“...Th, that’s....”
Virgo panicked and bowed her head. Her face, smeared with mud and dust, was miserable.
“That’s... not....”
Blood spurted from Virgo’s stammering mouth. It soaked my face and fell onto the ground like a withered flower.
My vision, which had been focused on the present, suddenly shifted to the past. I couldn’t help but concentrate on the scene.
In my left eye’s field of view.
The road is on fire. Among the burning cars and streets, ringing in my ears are tinnitus, screams, and noise. The scent of flames overlays the scent of blood. My body in that hellscape is young.
It’s a monster attack. I look around and feel a sense of dissonance. It was the scent of my parents tightly embracing me. A scent of blood stronger than perfume. A coldness stronger than warmth.
I realize how I survived. My parents shielded me with their bodies.
Only moments after that shock sets in, someone’s ferocious pressure weighs on my body and stifles my breath.
It was a monster.
I know that sensation. I felt it on the last day I stayed in Dark Matter.
And I’m feeling it, even now.
The Lion who paints hell has come.
The nemesis of her parents is approaching. Nausea surges up to my throat.
“*Cough*...!”
A huge light flew in from afar and pierced through Virgo’s heart.
And then came the explosion.