Malice (7)
Today's mamma~ is a gourmet tour of the underground world's finest despair spots~
The child nestled in my arms was a little uncomfortable, but her terror of the dark meant despair kept spilling out of her in a steady trickle. A pocket-sized despair battery, if you will.
Still, this underground is enormous...
At first it had been nothing more than a long, unbroken corridor. The deeper I went, though, the more vast chambers kept opening up one after another. And the despair energy only grew thicker with every step.
If the people living in the city above ever learned something like this existed beneath their feet, what kind of faces would they make?
This is front-page news material, no question.
A laboratory fusing monsters and humans, sitting right under a human city? On this scale? It was the kind of discovery that made me wonder why it had never shown up in the original story at all.
...Or had it?
Come to think of it, I vaguely remembered some setting about an organization researching monsters...
Well, that hardly matters right now.
"Greeeaaagh..."
"S-save... me... krrrk, ugkh..."
The sounds monsters made and the sounds humans made had always been different in resonance. If a human was a housecat, a monster was a tiger. These hybrid abominations, though, sounded like a human throat trying to force out a tiger's roar.
"Come now, you're the ones who said you wanted out of here. You've finally tasted freedom—shouldn't you all be off doing whatever it is you actually want?"
"You... krrk, ugkh..."
One of the hybrids looked up at me, asking something. I simply turned my head away. I was going to look or not look as I pleased; no need to answer.
The way they gushed despair energy the moment they saw me was rather pleasant, so I decided not to poke them any further. If any of them had charged me like that hospital specimen, I would have carved them into pieces, of course.
Wiiiiiiing—
Intruder detected in Sector A-1. Intruder detected in Sector A-1. Repeating: Intruder detected in Sector A-1—
Their response time is impressively quick.
I had smashed several tanks already and they were only just now showing up? Footsteps approached from far down the corridor; I gave a small shake of my head. Might as well see the faces of the humans who had created these repulsive things.
I had never cared that much about monsters, but I was at least curious about the reasoning that led them here.
"Hands up! You have illegally entered a Class-One restricted zone! Surrender immediately or we will open fire!"
"Isn't the real crime the fact that you built a place like this?"
"Hands up!!"
Humans armed from head to toe, gun barrels leveled at me. An ordinary person would have been trembling and face-down on the floor by now. I felt no particular urge to do either.
"Ah, that reminds me."
"Grrrk..."
"Don't you want revenge on the humans who turned you into this?"
"Grrk..."
No? No desire for payback at all? They had been captured and reduced to this state, yet charging in recklessly would only get them stuffed back into the tanks. Even after becoming half-monster they were still trying to play at rationality.
Every so often it is good to be honest with your own desires...
No helping it, then.
"Are you going to leave your benefactor to die?"
"Kh...?!"
"If you're still human, shouldn't you at least observe the bare minimum of decency?"
"W-we will... grrrk... do it... grrk..."
This was the fun part. They had fled without looking back, yet the moment I framed it as a life-debt they had to repay, the hybrids forced their barely-functioning bodies upright and somehow managed to put themselves between me and the gun muzzles.
Bang— bang-bang—!! Bang—!!!
"Grrraaaaaagh...!!!"
"S-Sis...!!"
"Shhh... It's all right, it's all right. That's just the sound of the soldier uncles defeating the bad monsters."
I used the child's despair like popcorn while I watched the humans gun down the hybrids. For things mixed with monsters, their durability was surprisingly poor. Taking bullets in the still-human parts seemed to hurt a great deal.
The soldiers clearly knew that; they focused fire exclusively on the human sections.
"Captain, is it all right to kill the specimens like this?"
"Upper command has authorized the elimination of any specimens cooperating with the intruder."
They had been the same species once, yet not a shred of pity remained. The hybrids lasted a while, but simply standing there taking bullets was not much help. They should have been attacking too, shouldn't they?
They mixed with monsters and still go down this pathetically?
Ordinary humans cannot deal meaningful damage to monsters. With that power they could have held out far longer—could even have brought the soldiers down. Yet they were being wiped out so anticlimactically. I had hoped to savor the despair born of a desperate struggle between former humans and current humans, but apparently I had miscalculated.
Still...
"I think this should be enough."
I still did not know what materials they had used to create these hybrids, but I could tell one of the ingredients was a magical girl's hope. They had used residual hope to suppress the rejection reaction when fusing monster and human, or something along those lines. In a few places it even overlapped with the Doctor's research—though the Doctor's work was far more complete. After all, he had produced Apocalypse.
Wooong—
"Despair energy detected from the intruder..."
"What's wrong? Is there a problem?"
"N-no, sir, the meter must be malfunctioning."
My despair circuit began to spin. These hybrids had been built from the leftovers of magical girls, yet the despair they released the moment their lives ended was a flavor that suited my palate perfectly.
I covered the ears of the half-hysterical child—startled by the gunfire—and let the corner of my mouth curl upward.
Beep-beep—! Beep-beep-beep—! Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep—!!!
The devices the humans carried began to shriek with frantic alarms. What had started as intermittent warnings soon filled the entire space; only then did the soldiers seem to realize that something had gone very, very wrong.
I don't particularly want to kill humans, so—
"—I'll keep it simple and just break your arms and legs."
"What are you—"
Despair surged upward. The kind of despair that would drive an ordinary human mad from the mere sight of it.
Despair Rank: Omega. Despair Rank: Omega.
You are strongly advised to end your own lives immediately and take peaceful rest.
Apocalypse had arrived.
You did it, Emerald!
"Hah... hah... haah... hnn..."
My entire body was creaking. It felt like I had forced myself into an all-out sprint while ignoring every warning my body tried to give; my lungs were screaming. None of that mattered, though.
I had saved people. I had brought down a monster. That single fact alone was enough to make me stand again.
No—more importantly...
What exactly is that person?
I swallowed dryly as I stared at the something that stood between the person who had caught the falling victim and the monster. It felt too human to call a monster, yet despair energy still leaked from it in thin streams.
[Emerald, your condition is already bad—if you just walk up to it—]
"If it meant to hurt me, it wouldn't have saved that person, May."
After confirming the child inside the car was unharmed, I began walking slowly toward the hybrid. Overload of the hope circuit had nearly forced my transformation to collapse, but I clung to consciousness and somehow kept the form intact.
"Thank you for helping us."
"...Think nothing of it. I only did what any person should."
"..."
I watched the four legs that had been neatly folded now sprawl limply across the ground, then lifted my gaze. Lower body of a monster, upper body of a human. It was a form that should have set every alarm bell ringing, yet I remembered the humanity still left inside those eyes, and that was enough to let me speak.
"Who... are you? Are you human? Or..."
"I..."
I could not bring myself to finish the question—monster?—while looking into those eyes. My words trailed off. The other seemed just as lost, as if she herself could not decide whether to call herself human or monster.
I never saw anything like this even before I came back to the past...
The idea of forcing a person and a monster into a single body. How could anyone commit something so cruel?
"I... used to be human. Even if I've ended up like this."
She raised a hand with a wistful little smile. My own hand reached out before I could think. It felt like something I had to catch—something so fragile it might vanish the next second—
Thuck—
"...Ah."
In that instant a blade the color of fresh blood punched straight through her heart. As if the world itself refused to tolerate this mixed existence, it drove the steel home without mercy.
And of course—of course—her blood was red.
The same red as any ordinary person's.