Remember the End (5)
Apocalypse.
The meaning packed into those five syllables was vaster than anything I could have imagined. To the me of now, it would not have been strange to call it everything.
"Hmm-hmm~♪ Hmm-hmm-hmm~♬"
"..."
Was the person walking beside me really Apocalypse?
She had introduced herself as Akari, and she never once lost that unhurried, self-contained air of hers. She also talked more than I had expected.
No — that was the problem. She talked far, far too much.
"Um, so what should I call you? I can't exactly go around saying Emerald out where there are people, right?"
"...Please call me Midori."
"Oh, we both end in 'ri,' don't we?"
And on top of that she was a little — no, quite thoroughly — scatterbrained.
I had fully intended to put a mana blast through her face at the first suspicious move, but all she kept showing me was a harmlessness so complete it was almost absurd.
...Don't let your guard down. No matter how she looks, she's still a monster. Show an opening and you'll get blindsided.
There was no scenario in which I had simply mistaken her identity. The arrow in my heart, the resonance of my soul, both insisted that the one beside me was Apocalypse.
"So, Midori. Where are we planning to eat?"
"We'll be there soon."
Was the prospect of a meal really that delightful? The girl who had worn a blank expression from the moment we met was now beaming, and the gap between those two faces left me with a considerable sense of dissonance.
No — more precisely, I simply could not believe that Apocalypse herself was capable of making a face like that.
Maybe it's because I found her earlier than expected.
Apocalypse had first appeared in the year 2206. By that reckoning, I had found her three years before she was supposed to show up.
"We're here."
"...Here?"
In complete contrast to the expressionless figure who had always slaughtered magical girls, her face was almost extravagantly expressive. This time it was a look of thorough disappointment, as if something about the place had already failed to meet her standards.
The change itself was not dramatic, but that very subtlety made it stand out all the more.
"Is it that you can't eat fish?"
"No, it's not that, exactly..."
Perhaps a set-meal restaurant simply wasn't to her taste. With a dark look she hugged one arm against herself, then shook her head as if to say it was nothing.
Maybe she had a fish allergy. I had thought I was bringing her somewhere safe and ordinary. Apparently I had drawn a dud.
...Why am I accommodating Apocalypse's preferences?
The question surfaced unbidden. Did I have any reason to cater to the palate of the creature who was my sworn enemy — the one I could tear apart right now and still not feel it was enough?
"Then it's all right if we eat here?"
"Sure, whatever. I don't mind."
For someone who had just been making faces about the place, she sounded genuinely indifferent. An unreadable person. The unease lingering in a corner of my heart refused to clear precisely because of mannerisms like that.
"Wow."
The moment we stepped inside, Apocalypse's eyes went round as she began taking in the room. She looked for all the world like someone who had just discovered something marvelous. Left alone she seemed ready to wander every last corner of the shop, so I quickly found an empty table and sat her down.
"Is this your first time somewhere like this?"
"I guess so? Honestly, there are a ton of things I've never done in the first place."
Saying so, she casually filled a cup with water and set it in front of me.
...She was extraordinarily well-mannered.
Even with something this simple I kept being startled; I could never predict what she would do next.
"Here we are — the grilled salmon set~"
"Thank you."
"...Thank you."
After offering our thanks for the food that arrived a moment later, I stole a glance at Apocalypse. She was poking the grilled salmon with her chopsticks, wearing an expression of pure reluctance. If I said she looked like a cat batting at a glass bottle on the table, would that be a lie?
"Thank you for the meal."
"...Thank you for the meal."
Her table manners were, well — considering how thoroughly she had been jabbing the salmon, surprisingly good. If Apocalypse had been a life-form created by the Doctor's hand, that kind of behavior would have been impossible. No monster would have taught her human etiquette.
What would have happened if I hadn't found her there?
In the period just before Apocalypse appeared, magical girls had been disappearing with alarming frequency. On a hunch I had flown toward a sudden flare of hope energy — and that, as it turned out, had been the right call. I had never imagined Apocalypse herself would be there as well.
Maybe she really is different.
If I had genuinely rescued her before she could be remade from an ordinary person into Apocalypse, then what was I supposed to do from here? The situation had already diverged completely from my memories, and my head throbbed with the strain of it.
No. No. Think positively. Once I deal with the Doctor, everything ends. This is the most hopeful situation I've been in yet.
"Ugh..."
A retching sound snapped my head up. Apocalypse had clamped a hand over her mouth and was dry-heaving, her face so pale she looked ready to collapse at any moment—
Her stomach has shrunk to an extreme degree — honestly, it's a wonder she can even walk.
Ah.
The doctor's words rose unbidden, and I shoved my chair back and stood. What if the Apocalypse before me was nothing more than an ordinary person the Doctor had abducted and subjected to human experimentation? Then wasn't I being far too cruel to her?
"We're going back. To the hospital."
I took the wrist of Apocalypse — of Akari, whose eyes had filmed over with tears — and pulled her to her feet. She made no move to shake me off, simply following as I led her out. Looking at her, I let out a long, heavy breath.
I needed time to sort out my thoughts.
She said she'd feed me, so I had been looking forward to some delicious despair. Instead Emerald had dragged me into a restaurant for humans and ordered food.
If I had still been an ordinary person, I probably could have enjoyed this stuff just fine.
It feels like staring at animal feed. Or mealworms.
If I had to say which, it did look tasty. Steaming white rice, miso soup, grilled salmon glazed with soy sauce — everything matched the "good meal" stored in my memories. The real tragedy was that I had absolutely no appetite for any of it.
"Mmm..."
I pinched up some rice with my chopsticks and put it in my mouth. No taste at all. I peeled off a bit of salmon and pushed that in too.
Yep. Gross.
Not the kind of gross you got from mint chocolate or cucumber salad — just a total absence of flavor. All my mouth registered was the texture of rice and fish.
Could you enjoy a meal on texture alone? Fair question, and I didn't have a good answer, but once I'd decided the thing in my mouth was basically a mealworm, enjoying it became a fairly tall order.
And why is she leaking hope energy all over the place?
"Urgh..."
The mealworm theory had just become real mealworms. The urge to spit everything out hit hard, but I refused to make that kind of spectacle of myself, so I forced it down, swallow after swallow.
This was food torture.
I vowed never to eat with Emerald again and slowly regulated my breathing.
Magical-girl hope really is on another level.
To make a monster gag in a single instant. Part of me wanted to put a fist through the head of the Emerald who had just force-fed me hope, but I had a feeling I'd be the one ending up on the floor, so I stayed put.
...Someday I would get even. I would pack myself full of despair energy and thrash her for all I was worth.
"We're going back. To the hospital."
She made me eat tasteless mealworms, jammed food waste into my mouth, and now she wanted to go back to the hospital?
Really. An absolutely brilliant decision.
I needed ordinary human despair just to scrub the aftertaste out of my mouth, and she just so happened to suggest returning to the hospital.
What is this, some kind of human — no, monster — baiting game...
I didn't even have the energy to complain. Even less the strength to shake off the hand Emerald had closed around my wrist.
I had come all this way full of anticipation, and the only thing I had managed to eat was a magical girl's hope.
...I'm hungry.
I needed despair. Fresh, dense, magical-girl despair.
Ugh. I really should have snatched that beaker out of the Doctor's hands back then. In the end, all of this was the Doctor's fault for not feeding me on time.
This won't do. If I don't find some kind of solution, I'm going to starve to death like this.
They said a monster that died stuffed full of despair had the prettiest coloring. Even if I had to die someday, I did not want to die hungry.
Part of me wondered whether I should just club Emerald over the back of the head right now, but hunger had sapped my motivation down to almost nothing.
Honestly, I was starting to understand why the original Apocalypse had gone around killing magical girls the way she did. For her it must have been like an automatic despair-delivery food truck — just breathing was enough to fill you up.