Chapter 93
"...Mr. Sejin... You really are a wholesome person..."
Exploring Mr. Sejin's house... no, helping move his belongings... turned out to be surprisingly wholesome.
I couldn't find even a glimpse of the sort of things commonly found in a healthy adult man's room... I was worried enough to start wondering if something was wrong.
-Gulp
'...He's healthy, right...?'
"Ah, no, I mean... not in that sense."
"It's just that Mr. Sejin's appearance is pretty far from what you'd usually call healthy. He often has dark circles under his eyes, his skin is completely pale, and despite being a man, his arms might even be thinner than mine..."
Even without any ulterior motives, I suppose it was only natural to worry.
In fact, I found so many medicine packets while searching his room that he'd practically stockpiled them. Even if some were merely common household medicines, I couldn't help worrying.
"Then why not just search for them yourself, you might ask... but..."
"What if I searched and found something used at a urologist's office or something? How would I ever face Mr. Sejin afterward!"
"That's not why I'm worried about him having a problem!!! It's embarrassing! For both Mr. Sejin and me!"
"I'm prepared to accept Mr. Sejin whether he has a problem or not, and whether he's a man or a woman, but he wouldn't be prepared for that! How embarrassing would it be for him!"
And then a thought suddenly occurred to me.
'...Come to think of it, does Mr. Sejin even see me as a woman?'
We've gone on a few dates. But... they were dates necessitated by circumstances, under the pretense that we were fake lovers, and had little in common with dates between a real couple.
In the first place, even though I'm talking like this now... officially, Mr. Sejin and I aren't anything to each other. If we have any relationship at all... it's just that I know Mr. Sejin's greatest secret... or something like that...
'...That's not exactly a purely good relationship, either...'
It would be different if Mr. Sejin had told me his secret because he'd grown close to me and trusted me... but it was only exposed while he was saving me from a situation where I nearly died because of my own shortcomings. From Mr. Sejin's perspective... I might just be an annoying woman... too.
-Downcast
Once my thoughts reached that point, I suddenly felt depressed.
It reminded me of something I'd seen somewhere... the idea that the fact I liked someone could end up hurting them.
When I thought that a woman like me—pointlessly energetic, and knowing a secret he didn't want known—might be poison to someone with Mr. Sejin's characteristic dislike of anything troublesome, and that he might have stayed by my side only because he had no choice but to accommodate a woman who knew his secret... the strength seemed to drain from the hand rummaging through his desk drawer.
'...Am I being a nuisance, too?'
Actually, when I thought about it, it was only natural.
No matter how nicely I dressed it up as taking care of Senior's valuables before his house passed into someone else's hands, I had broken in without his permission and was rummaging through his belongings. However I put it into words, to anyone else it was one hundred percent theft.
"...Maybe I should stop..."
-Clunk
"Whoa?! W-why did this open..."
The moment I managed to achieve a little self-awareness and started feeling depressed, the hand pressing the drawer suddenly sank inward, and something came out.
-Rattle
"...W-what is this...?"
A small... wooden box.
It was the sort of wooden box I never would have found without pure chance... exactly the same color as the drawer, and stored in a recessed space—as if the drawer had been modified for it—so naturally I had taken it for part of the drawer.
-Gulp
"W-what on earth did you put in here...?"
I desperately wanted to open it... but, as if to prove that it held something truly precious, it had been hidden so securely and still had a lock on it.
Opening a lock like this with a magical girl's strength would be easy... and a wooden box this size was something even an ordinary person could break outright... but how could I do that?
Judging by the sensation from inside... cards? A wallet? Something was rattling, but it didn't seem very large. It didn't feel like there was only one thing inside, either.
'...Whatever it is, it must be important.'
I should take this with me for now.
I had been searching Mr. Sejin's house whenever I had the time. I wasn't a professional thief, and finding valuables in someone else's former home was hardly easy...
In fact, there had even been news reports about people who had lost their homes in this incident and become homeless entering vacant houses and arguing, 'If the owner is dead anyway, can't we live here for a while?' So I had no choice but to search the house I'd thought I'd already gone through one more time.
And now... it had been a week since Senior fell through the Abyss Hole... since he left for the Abyss.
Because of the major incident, all broadcast-related activities had been suspended for the time being, but support-type magical girls have plenty of places to go in times like this. I spent my days helping people wherever my magic could reach, returning to do my other work, and before I knew it, this much time had passed.
By now, the sight of Senior and Miss Black Rose falling hand in hand into the Abyss Hole—though who knows who had seen it—and Senior's...
...the words people were calling his last will and testament, [Alice, I'm off on a business trip!] had also become known to the world. Thanks to that, everything had descended into chaos.
A first-generation magical girl who was still active, once the undisputed number one in her prime and now fourth among the S-ranks... one of the greatest magical girls in the country, whose name everyone living here must have heard at least once and who had helped people both directly and indirectly, had vanished into an Abyss Hole. Naturally, the world was in an uproar over it. Mainstream television was even searching for cases of people returning alive from Abyss Holes in other countries...
For days, people with the title of 'expert' had been using complicated graphs and equations to discuss the odds of returning alive, and the reports wouldn't disappear from television.
Of course, every one of them was predicting the same thing: 'The chances of returning alive are extremely low.'
...Sigh.
It was a frustrating situation for me, too. Rationally, I knew it. No one who had been sucked into an Abyss Hole had ever returned.
The mascots all unanimously said that being sucked into an Abyss Hole was the same as dying. Ah, Angel D was hiding now, watching my reaction. If Angel D had said even one useless thing about Senior, I probably would have had a huge fight with it, but we'd been partners all this time. It knew very well what would help my mood.
From the moment we first made our contract until now... Angel D knew how much I had admired Senior Alice.
* * *
-Vrrrr...
A dark room. The sound of a computer running.
The scene, illuminated only by the dazzling LED lights of the computer, felt somehow chilly, yet not unfamiliar—instead, it was comforting like a cradle.
"...Did I eat lunch today?"
-Beep beep beep.
-Beep?
-Beep.
-Beep!
"Never mind. Since I'm not hungry, I must have eaten."
With Momo gone, and my usual schedule manager absent, I had to handle everything Momo used to do by myself.
Waking up, checking whether I'd eaten, blueprints for the machines to build and repair that day, the operating status of the machines in real time, one keyboard battle a day, and so on. It was incredibly difficult to remember and recreate all the things I should have written down in a notebook in the first place.
"Is there a machine that remembers how many cans of MonXter I drank today? Tell me by the number of beeps."
-Beep
-Beep-beep
-Beep-beep-beep
"There's no way I drank six cans, so it must be another error. Repairs are difficult without Momo."
-Beep?!
-Sizzle
-Gulp gulp
"...Since Momo still can't be summoned, it must definitely be in the Abyss."
-Beep beep beep beep beep beep!
"At least there have been cases of wands being resummoned even after disappearing beyond an Abyss Hole... So even if Momo is a special wand, it shouldn't be an exception. Hmm... But that alone makes it difficult to determine whether Alice is alive. We don't know how Abyss Holes are structured, so it wouldn't be strange if Alice and Momo had been separated."
I expect Alice to survive even in the Abyss, but with no information, all I can do is speculate.
I had so many things I wanted to know about what lies beyond the Abyss, too. She had to go and get there first. Alice is such a cheater.
...Alice. I wonder if she's all right.
She won't be able to get cigarettes in the Abyss, either.
* * *
"...Seriously, I can't?"
[You can't.]
"Not even one?"
[That is how one becomes two, and then ten.]
"...Phew."
I succeeded in finding a cigarette in a pocket I normally never paid any attention to, though I had no idea how long it had been left there.
My nicotine-soaked body reacted immediately, but Momo stopped me.
"You could just put up a barrier."
[We don't know how the Abyssal Ones will react to the smell of artificial chemicals. Even if we put up a barrier.]
"...Phoo. Fuck."
What she said was sound logic, even then, so I couldn't argue.
I carefully wrapped the cigarette I'd finally found in a leaf and stored it away, then continued watching the Abyssal Ones.
They had been making a racket since yesterday about how today was a special day.
Apparently, prey caught by the being called the queen was coming here, so they would drain the blood and butcher the meat for today's party.
'An Abyssal One, right?'
[There is a high probability.]
'If there's a lot left over, should we sneak some away?'
[Not a bad idea. But remember our original plan.]
'Right.'
The plan Momo and I had made for the day of the party.
The behavior of these Abyssal Ones had so far been little different from that of humans. If so, their party probably wouldn't be all that different from an ordinary party, either.
After all, this was a party using meat caught by no less than the queen herself, so the atmosphere would be lively. In that situation, it would take them longer to notice if a few soldiers disappeared. I didn't know whether there was alcohol in the Abyss, but if there was, the situation would be even better.
Today, we planned to kidnap and interrogate a soldier with a Heart rank of five or higher, who knew about the hunts.
<A cart is coming!!>
<Everyone, get out of the way! Unless you want to be run over!!>
And the identity of that meat was...
'...Huh.'
An enormous number of Abyssal Ones loaded onto a giant cart.
Even just judging by the corpses, each one was at least B-rank by Earth's standards, and A-ranks appeared frequently.
There were dozens of those corpses.
And the even more frightening thing was...
'...What kind of weapon did they use?'
[Analyzing.]
Every one of those corpses had a cleanly severed neck, without even a single minor wound anywhere else.
It was almost as if one could feel some kind of obsession.