Your Gentle Despair (5)
Run, run, run.
If you don't run with everything you've got, the monster will catch you, you know?
I nodded at the monster that kept glancing back at me while I leisurely followed behind.
Yes, yes. You're doing just fine—keep chasing exactly like that.
KRAAAAAAAH—!!!!
"Kyaaaaaaa!!!!"
Honestly, this was no different from a haunted house ride.
Under normal circumstances it would already have turned into a bloodbath, yet the monster herding the humans—perhaps because of my request—kept maintaining a distance that was just out of reach, forever almost touching them.
Pretty deep reserves of patience for a monster. Any other of its kind would have simply sped up and bitten their heads clean off by now.
Not that I'm seriously suggesting this, but that squinty-eyed bastard isn't researching magical girls on the side, is he?
No—forget "maybe." He absolutely was.
When you thought about it, the ones closer to him weren't monsters at all, but magical girls: fellow humans. Factor in his relationship with the Doctor and the possibility wasn't merely high—it was locked in as fact.
Obviously the squinty-eyed guy supplied the Doctor with magical girls, and the Doctor supplied him with monsters in return.
Nothing else could explain this volume of beasts.
Well, whatever the arrangement had been, it had nothing to do with me.
"Ah—the door ahead is blocked!"
"W-what do we do? I-it won't open?"
"It's coming from behind! From behind!"
"It's blocked, so what am I supposed to do?!"
"Why did you even run this way in the first place!? If you just hadn't come here—!"
The moment they were driven into a dead end the humans started tearing into one another. Watching them, the monster licked its chops.
You can't hold back that delicious-looking despair either, can you?
Guess there's no helping it...
Unfortunate for those humans, but once they were cornered in a dead end their odds of living dropped to essentially zero. How exactly were they supposed to escape in front of a monster already savoring the taste of their despair?
I was the one who had ordered the monster to chase them, yet I had honestly been willing to let them go if they simply made it out of the underground. They just had the rotten luck of being herded into a cul-de-sac.
"Oh my, oh my. Could this perhaps be a gift prepared for me?"
"This voice..."
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
From the speaker mounted above the door barring the humans' path came a thoroughly familiar voice—one I had heard so often of late that I was beginning to grow sick of it.
"I was just short one final piece—excellent."
Ziiing—
With the squinty-eyed bastard's voice, the door blocking the humans began to slide open with a soft mechanical glide. Even so, the humans could not bring themselves to step through the now-clear doorway.
The reason? Well. There was no explanation other than that sinister bastard seeming more terrifying than the monster itself.
That's why you should have been nicer to the kids.
A grown adult who couldn't even win over children's hearts. Clever, maybe—but a complete fool. It would have been far more efficient to cultivate their goodwill and use them right up to the bitter end.
"W-what do we do? Go in?"
"...In there? Into the place where that crazy doctor is?"
"B-but there's no other way! Are we just going to stand here and die!? At least that guy won't kill us, right!"
"Kgh...!"
Yes—go on in. I had no idea what the squinty-eyed bastard was plotting, but those humans clearly had some use in whatever scheme he had arranged. I stayed put purely out of curiosity, a faint spark of anticipation about what he might cook up.
Ziiing—
The door closed again just as silently as it had opened. Watching them finally step inside after all that hesitation, it seemed they preferred the squinty-eyed bastard to the monster after all.
You hated them that much? They listen so well and kill so cleanly when they do—good kids, really...
Wouldn't a quick death be better than walking into the hands of a man who treats humans like toys?
I didn't know exactly what fate awaited those humans, but I knew enough to be certain it would not be pleasant. At the same time a question and a pang of loss rose together: the question of why they had gone in there at all, and the loss of the humans who had been feeding me such delicious despair now falling into the hands of that suspicious creature.
...Stealing my despair?
It did not take long for the incomprehensible question—and the sight of a perfectly prepared feast disappearing into an enemy's mouth—to transform into pure anger.
Do you have any idea how hard I acted to manufacture that much despair?!
At least leave me one! No—leave me two!
BANG—!!! BANG—!!!
"Tch..."
Even so, this was too much. I clicked my tongue in frustration at the door that refused to yield no matter how hard I pounded. He had certainly made the thing sturdy—all so he alone could survive.
"I still cannot understand you."
"Do you need to understand me?"
"Even though there is no need to know, interest draws me in—making you an existence I understand even less. You, of all beings."
Ugh—what is this, a confession?
A sensation almost identical to inhaling hope while mid-meal of despair slammed into my lungs.
Disgusting. Wait, let me find a trash can... Ugh, I think I'm going to throw up.
Whether it was the influence of my past life or simply the fact that that human existed, an indescribable revulsion crawled down my spine—like a giant centipede skittering from the nape of my neck all the way to the tip of my tailbone.
"Have you ever considered monsters and magical girls? Why they are born, by what means they generate power—does none of it intrigue you?"
"Not in the slightest. Is there any particular reason I need to know?"
"There is no strict necessity, of course. But if I do not pose such questions to you—a monster wearing the body of a magical girl—then to whom should I pose them?"
A magical girl's body, he said... Maybe the Despair Circuit made him jump to that conclusion.
Or... maybe not?
This body was a creation of the Doctor—a monster whose insanity ranked second to none—so it was entirely possible that was exactly what it was.
"My purpose is to shatter the balance between despair and hope. Should that balance break, the one who sits above in silence may once again turn their gaze upon the world."
"Do you believe God exists?"
Suddenly putting on a serious act that didn't suit him in the slightest—and topping it off with an aggressively philosophical topic that made my hands and feet curl from secondhand embarrassment.
Ugh. There was definitely a guy like this in the original work too. What was his name again—the one the magical girls cleaned up before they ever faced Apocalypse—
"Even if I must become the curse of the world itself, I will see this through."
Ah. I remember now.
The moment he said "curse," one particular character surfaced in my mind.
Curse.
He had been mentioned here and there even before Apocalypse appeared, but his true debut as a character only began once he showed up alongside Apocalypse.
That cool Curse is this squinty-eyed pervert?
The idea that a man who locked up human girls younger than himself and raised them into magical girls tailored to his own tastes could be the same existence as Curse...
Come on. No way.
Even I found the assumption so absurd that laughter burst out of me—not mere laughter, but the kind that shot pure glee all the way to the top of my head.
Who would have thought Curse's origin was human.
To confirm—no, half-confirm—the identity of a character that had been nothing but fertile ground for wild speculation. How the original fans would have lost their minds if they knew.
A monster that learned human behavior. A further-evolved monster. The theory that monsters had always possessed intelligence like humans. All of it wrong. Curse spoke fluent human language simply because he used to be human. Puhah.
"Aha—ahaha—ahahahahaha!!!!"
Laughter tore out of me on pure reflex. I never thought I'd live to see something like this. Honestly, I hadn't even given the character Curse a second thought until now.
"...What is so amusing?"
"Oh, well... More importantly—do you want to become a god or something?"
He did have that sort of vibe. The mastermind controlling monsters from the shadows. Early on, every theory under the sun had floated around: that Curse was the king of the monsters, their god, whatever. Just as the magical girls' partners had a queen, people assumed the monster side must have something equivalent.
"I have no particular desire to become a god. I merely wish to drag God down."
"Kh—khkh... pfft—ah, my stomach—ugh..."
"..."
How on earth did a middle-school-syndrome-afflicted adult like this turn into Curse?
Entertainment this good made losing my despair-soaked humans almost acceptable.
Alright then—what now? Going to transform into Curse right here? Go on, transform. Hurry up!
I wasn't even running properly, yet I could feel my heart pounding crystal-clear in my chest.
"Every single word out of your mouth is truly, genuinely delightful. I mean it."
"...I cannot fathom which part of this has granted you laughter."
"Plenty of things. Almost everything you say, the way you carry yourself, and the fact that I've learned something I never knew. But the biggest reason I'm laughing is, of course—
—because it's so damn fun."
Right now I was riding a high so pure that words could barely contain it. High enough that I could laugh even without eating despair.