Transformation or Death

Like Family (8)  

A bird flies over and lands on her shoulder. She tries to recreate an old cartoon woodland by singing, but her singing voice is so terrible that the bird flees. 

Watching this scene, I let out a laugh, and Virgo irritably gathered some dirt and threw it at me, as if scooping up the carelessly spilled laughter.

“Ugh… Don’t laugh!”

Red Spica is often sensitive even to small laughs like this. Quickly closing my mouth, I asked her what song she was trying to sing.

“I forgot the title… But I remember the lyrics and melody! Listen closely, you’ll probably know it too? So… When the forsythia blossoms open~”

Unable to listen to her singing anymore, I shake my head and tell her to stop.

“…Tch, maybe I’ll let you hear it properly outside later.”

She often mentions going outside. Of course, she means outside of this Dark Matter.

Even though she can fly in the sky, and cross that very sky in tens of thousands of steps in a single stride, like a shooting star.

She always just mumbles something like ‘It would be a bit weird if I went out…’.

Now she’s come up with another excuse.

“Of course~ you’ll have to go out to catch the villain, right~?”

She says this mockingly. Although she dislikes being mocked herself, I laughed at this fair behavior where she mocks me freely.

Ever since we first met, she has continued to help me. Even while deriding my absurd goal of killing villains, she never stopped assisting me.

“I told you, catching a villain is like plucking a star from the sky. Turns out it’s not so easy, huh? People really underestimated it. If it were me, I wouldn’t have done something like that. Back then I would have approached cautiously while keeping them in check with magic and so on. Easy to say. Idiots and morons.”

Before I knew it, over a month had passed since I started living with her. I may be the only civilian, not a villain’s slave, who has survived in the Dark Matter for such a long period. 

“Still, take it easy, got it? Even if someone pesters you to catch them, they’re not the types to be easily caught, back when I was a Magical Girl… Ah, anyway, your body and heart are both hurt. Oh… did you ruin both? Poor you.”

Red Spica lets out a playful sigh.

She blatantly changes the subject whenever the topic of Magical Girls comes up. She frequently changes subjects and forgets what she just said anyway, but this is particularly intentional. 

It seems she suffered quite a bit during her time as a Magical Girl. In our conversations, she sometimes dwells on the insults she received back then, and talks about the many hardships she faced fighting villains.  

The strong are supposed to protect the weak, but why don’t the weak offer anything worth protecting? Is even that thought selfish?

Did I ever want to be strong in the first place?

If I have a talent, must I use it no matter what?

My suffering has somehow become a deception.

Whenever she says things like that, I silently purse my lips and quietly ponder in my mind why she ended up in this place. Including the reason she is no longer a Magical Girl, silently.  

Although she always mentions going outside, we never talk about what happened outside.

So I can only make guesses.

Very accurate guesses about the life of a girl who ran forward until she grew tired, and ultimately veered onto a different path, quietly.

I don’t say it out loud, but I already know she is not a Magical Girl. And she knows that I know.

But neither of us says anything. We don’t need to pry into each other’s pasts, because we both understand the struggle. We don’t want to concretize it into words.

Even the fact that I sometimes worry she might go crazy and kill me. We both know it, but don’t say it.

Keeping quiet made everyone happy.

Running away was the path to happiness. Nothing gets resolved, but it brings momentary joy. So we just keep running back, and running, and running again.

Before long, it had become a path of endless hell where one only repeats running endlessly. 

Her legs still cannot rest.

The bird that was nibbling on the corpse has flown away. Virgo kicked into pieces a skull of someone who had flowed here by some connection and lost their life, and irritably scattered dust.

“Don’t laugh.”

With her left field of vision fragmented into the past, her, existing in the right side presently was looking at me as she was back then. 

Just that, her gaze had grown sharper.

“No one here was mocking you while watching.”

“No, you laughed!”

Another difference was that her finger, which had always pointed at villains, was pointing at me.

“I felt that way.”

What the frail fingers of Seomsseomoksu spewed was rays that could easily melt even iron.

Some straight, some curved, some rays curved around long to aim at my back.

Dozens, hundreds of slender yet ferocious beams of light linked up to fill the sky, making a scene comparable to the Milky Way flowing.

With half my vision blocked, avoiding the rays flying in from all directions was naturally quite a difficult task.

But the Big Dipper doesn’t just have the power of lightning. The ability to foresee the future to the extreme by utilizing the Belt.

3 seconds is the limit, but it can be effectively utilized in a battlefield where tens of thousands of movements flow in an instant.

In the half vision where reality flows, the future overlaps and previews.

Amidst the myriad rays trying to tear me apart, I see which ones I need to deal with first.

As if blocking pre-arranged attacks, I withstood all of Virgo’s attacks.

“Heh, well done! Some praise? I’ll give you some.”

In my left field of vision, the curiously arrogant-sounding Red Spica pats my shoulder. It’s praise for taking down the villain she had caught and weakened. Even a dying villain must have seemed formidable.

Of course, reality is bleak. 

“What are you doing!”

Virgo screamed, enraged.

“If you block that, what will become of me! Get hit and fall down!”

“An unreasonable request.”

Even 3 seconds into the future, her expression was the same.

Well, what could be done in 3 seconds. 

Protecting myself is possible, but not enough time to change others too.

In the distorted, mixed vision of past, present and future, her expressive, angry, and annoyed expressions gradually unified into one.

“Now just die!”

It was impossible to tell whether this came from the left or right side.

I step back. Right in front is a corpse. A gruesome dead corpse with its head melted away. In front of that is Red Spica. It’s clear she’s the culprit who created this corpse.

It’s not stepping over it. Although the head is gone, the clothes can give a clue as to who it was.

It didn’t take long to realize this corpse was the person I was just talking to.

Even if Dark Matter, it’s not inhuman. There’s a sizable population of slaves captured to cultivate the villains’ starlight, with suicide volunteers slipping in daily. Of course, they’re usually dead within an hour’s arrival, like I almost was.

If not that, then some smuggler thug.

People who don’t care about humanity’s future as long as they fill their own bellies right now. They usually collaborate with villains to sell people, bring in drugs through Dark Matter, or transport dangerous things overseas far away.

Slave, suicide seeker, thug. Even if I don’t know which of those three this corpse was, the fact is they were human. Whatever their background, killing a person is murder.

“It, it wasn’t my fault!”

If you’d just said you didn’t kill them, I would have believed you without doubt. 

This is Dark Matter, shadowy material. No one knows what happens here or what happened. Simultaneously, anything can happen and anything could have happened here.

Why admit to being the culprit right away? From the start, I crack a wry smile at the botched excuse.

“This guy insulted me first! Called me a bitch… It’s not my fault! This guy started it first…”

Red Spica went on making excuses after that, and I stayed silent.  

After all, it was obvious they were either bound to die, came to die, or deserved to die.

What’s wrong with letting someone die, who was going to die anyway?

So I stay silent.

Staying silent made everyone happy. Of course, the dead had nothing to say. They happily contributed to our happiness.

The problem appeared again the next day.

“It’s me, I’m the bad one….”

Whether we’d been lucky or unlucky these past few days, we encountered people every day. 

From a single wanderer at the least, to groups of over ten at most.

Red Spica slaughtered them without fail whenever we met them.

And she always defended herself with an innocent expression in front of me.

“I was just standing there when they started it first…”

I don’t say anything.

“They were going to attack you…ah, I had no choice…”

Not listening.  

“Ah, ahahaha….nothing happened, nothing at all happened. Right? Don’t make that face…let’s go over there. There’s definitely some villain there you can kill.”

Not looking.

My senses were wrapped in a jet black cloth.

A cloth woven from fear, pity and affection. 

It covered my eyes, sealed my mouth, closed my ears.

But it’s impossible to forget everything in an instant.  

Piling up countless corpses with an innocent face, creating a hellish scene akin to purgatory.

Perhaps it was inevitable that I would grow distant from the girl Red Spica.

Around the 30th of that scorching summer when the heat pierced through, I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and spoke to her.

Why don’t you go outside, don’t you miss your mother, what brought you to this place?

I conveyed it very emotionally and highly metaphorically, in a measured way.

She answered, “With the destruction of the world approaching, none of that matters!”

More than her excuses after killing people, more than the soulless words she always babbled, this one sounded the most absurd.  

Bang!

A tremendous roar shook my ears.

“Kahahaha! Running away is all you can do? Nothing left to do? Hmm~ I’m getting bored now~”

It was the aftershock of the beams Virgo fired that shook the earth’s axis. Virgo’s instantaneous firepower is top-tier even among villains.

The roughly 3 minutes she goes all-out is a period few villains can survive.  

An extravagant beam show that changed the color of the sky, raining down densely and roughly like a downpour.

“That’s why I told you…”

The beams I had seen until now paled in comparison to these.

Perhaps because she’s fickle, the power of her starlight varies drastically by her whim.

I had no doubt this very moment showed her true power.

“Catching villains is as easy as plucking stars from the sky!”

Once again a corpse falls before me. Not a civilian’s. The fluttering dress is soaked in blood, the colorful ribbons burnt, the once beautiful gems shattered. The girl falls to the ground, and faint starlight scatters from her into the sky.

She was a magical girl.

From the fact I don’t know her name well, she must have been a newcomer. No matter why she came to this Dark Matter, her life ends here today. Her still blossoming life is cut off and trampled here.

Red Spica lightly stomps on the magical girl’s clothes and says:

“Let’s go now.”

I couldn’t stay silent.  

I questioned whether it was right to do this even to someone in the same situation as us.

Red Spica smiles wryly.

“So, what of it?”

I fall silent. Not because I have too much to say, but because I’m at a loss for words.

“You’re going to go out there alone? Oh come on~ You’ll die, you know?”

Red Spica caresses my cheek with her beautiful hand, stained red with blood.

“Why that look? Why are you looking at me like that? Ah…am I scary? Haa…I’m disappointed. I hoped you’d be different from your mom.”

That hand slowly reaches my eye, blocking my vision.

“You know about that, right? Our mom was obedient like you at first? But then one day her attitude changed completely and she ran away. Reported me, she did. So…after that…well, I’m not sure. I forgot. I remember scattering her ashes in the ocean though. Did I dissolve them, or were they dissolved at the crematorium? Which do you think it was?”

Her innocent voice shakes my ears.

“A fun riddle, isn’t it?”

Soon her lips seal my lips.  

“You said it with your own mouth. That you came here to kill villains. So, you can’t leave until you’ve killed them all.”

Forcibly my eyes, ears, lips are sealed.

“I told you, catching villains is as hard as plucking stars from the sky. Your whole life! You’ll just keep plucking stars here. Got it?”

I now open my mouth of my own will.

“Thank you Virgo. Thanks to you…”

Lightning compressed to its limit roars from the axe’s edge.  

Virgo’s beam shower momentarily lets up. 

“I can now pluck the stars from the sky.”

A white line cut across the crimson heavens.

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