Ch.147Chapter 24. Love (3)

Pang Pang came back outside after spending some time in the room.

“She’s fallen asleep.”

Well, that was to be expected since she was already halfway there before we left.

Just to be sure, I glanced through the open door one more time, but the heart rate monitor was still properly recording her vitals. When she said “fallen asleep,” she meant it literally.

While I was relieved, my feelings remained complicated.

Creating human clones was, if I remember correctly, illegal. Even before humanity discovered this alien technology. I believe it had been that way since the first cloned sheep and dogs appeared.

Usually, technology that can be applied to animals can also be applied to humans, and my impression was that they banned it before anyone could experiment with it.

The people who prohibited it probably couldn’t have imagined a situation like this, but here we are anyway.

I still don’t know how many Earth people were sacrificed for these experiments. Even if there were no sacrifices, what the chairwoman did was illegal, so she’ll be punished.

The situation has grown too large to be treated leniently.

Would James let it slide?

And what about me?

The question is whether my involvement with the company, even though I didn’t know what was happening, would be overlooked or not.

“…”

And how would Pang Pang take all this?

No matter how she got caught up in this, the chairwoman is her grandmother. She’s practically Pang Pang’s only remaining blood relative, and now she might face trial and go to prison. How would she handle that?

“Phew.”

As I finished checking the room and came back outside, Pang Pang let out a long sigh.

When our eyes met, she gave me a slight smile.

“So… I was a magical girl for a while too, right?”

Even though she fought against us, but still.

When I remained silent, unable to respond, Pang Pang fell into thought briefly before smiling slightly.

“…Thank you.”

Then she said something I never expected to hear.

“…Huh?”

“You brought closure to all of this. If it weren’t for you, I would have ended up being used somehow. You guys were the ones who saved me, right?”

That’s true, but…

What would have happened without me?

Pung Pung would have pushed through with his plan to the end. Since he hadn’t foreseen me as a possibility, he would have moved more slowly but sought a more certain path to victory.

The chairwoman would have made her own moves too.

The magical girls might have eventually stopped them. But it would have taken longer, causing more damage—and most importantly, Pang Pang likely wouldn’t have survived.

These girls probably only learned who Pang Pang really was at the very end, and only as a “target.”

So, well.

I guess I did accomplish something.

“Then… let’s go back,” Pang Pang said with a smile.

“To Earth.”

That statement jolted me fully awake.

It meant Pang Pang remembered what I had said to her.

“…You remember everything?”

“Yeah, I remember it all. My body moved on its own, but I remember everything I saw and heard.”

Pang Pang smiled and patted my shoulder.

“You were kind of like a prince.”

With those words, all the girls’ gazes turned toward me.

First was Hayun’s gaze.

Though she was smiling, I could sense something sticky behind that smile. Her face seemed full of questions she wanted to ask, making me want to make excuses right away. Though I wasn’t quite sure what I needed to excuse myself for.

Jihye was also smiling at me, but somehow her emotions felt similar to Hayun’s.

My feelings about Jihye are complicated. My feelings for Hayun stemmed from admiration, so they weren’t strange to sort out, but Jihye… how should I put it?

From sisterly friendship to something more? Perhaps “affection” slipped in somewhere along the way. Well, childhood friend setups tend to lead in that direction.

…Come to think of it, Hayun is also a childhood friend, but let’s move on.

Ju-a’s expression wasn’t as obvious as Hayun’s or Jihye’s.

But her face still showed plenty of jealousy. I need to slowly and carefully understand Ju-a’s feelings. I’m genuinely curious about their source.

As for the others, well.

Dalia and Delphinium were standing far away with expressions like they were looking at a criminal, making me want to protest my innocence immediately.

Rose was standing even further away with an expression that seemed to be teasing me.

“…Fine.”

I decided to target Rose.

As in, target her for my anger. There was no real reason for this.

In truth, I just wanted to escape this awkward situation as quickly as possible. Rose happened to be standing the farthest away.

Sensing my change in expression and seemingly reading my thoughts, Rose immediately ran away.

I chased after her—

And for some reason, the three girls chased after me.

At that moment, I realized my choice had been extremely unwise.

In any situation, running away from a problem instead of solving it isn’t particularly smart.

*

There were various opinions on how to get back to Earth.

One option was for us to take a spaceship back and then return with people to handle the situation.

But we didn’t know what might happen in the meantime. Of course, if we hurried, we could make the round trip in under an hour, but that’s just travel time.

Bureaucrats are always slow to act, and there was a risk that the critically ill chairwoman might die in the meantime.

Shouldn’t we do our best to treat her and get her testimony?

So our choice was to take the entire station with us.

Well, obvious as it may seem, we couldn’t just teleport it into Earth’s atmosphere. If we made a mistake, this massive space station could get caught in Earth’s gravity and crash.

There were also issues with satellites flying around in the thermosphere and below, plus concerns about spacecraft entering and leaving Earth.

“Let’s put it at a Lagrange point,” Cherry said.

“…Just understand it’s a good spot to place large structures in space,” Ju-a explained, touching the screen.

She drew the sun, then Earth orbiting around it. Then she marked points around Earth, drew a line from Earth to the sun, and marked points 60 degrees away from that line before drawing more lines.

“These are points where gravity and centrifugal force cancel each other out, so anything placed here won’t fall toward the sun. It’s good for long-term observation. And nowadays, this distance is within warp point range.”

Aha!

I didn’t understand at all.

But I nodded as if I did.

Anyway, the plan was to park it somewhere suitable, then take just our ship back to Earth. That would make it easier for Earth to send people too… that was the point.

In the end, since we’d be using warp points either way, there wasn’t much difference between traveling from here or there. But “psychological distance” can’t be ignored.

Earth people are still slowly getting used to the concept of this vast universe.

We returned to the control room at the center of the facility, where I placed the generator I had brought.

“Do you know how to generate energy…?” Cherry asked.

“This time, we’ll need much more energy than ‘hope.’ The difference in size of the facility we need to move is enormous.”

Cherry continued her explanation calmly.

“If we had time to gather energy with the generator, it would be different, but we have reasons to move quickly now.”

“There’s something I should tell you about the generator,” James said, following Cherry’s lead.

“Originally, the generator was supposed to use only despair energy. But you changed it to be able to use hope ‘as well.'”

“So, do I need to change it again this time?”

James shook his head.

“No. Your generator is likely already ‘changed.'”

“Meaning…?”

“It means it has become ‘yours.’ As the original designer of the generator, I’m not entirely pleased, but you’ve always wielded the weapons made from this generator according to your needs. So.”

“If I need it to, it can run on any energy? Got it.”

Already tired from hearing celestial terminology and feeling exhausted, I pretended to understand James’s explanation.

In short, I just need to power it with love.

Love.

It sounded like an impressive word, but strangely, it was energy I could generate just by kissing the girls.

Well, I suppose you need to be in love to kiss in the first place—

I took Jihye’s circuit again and put it on my wrist.

Having received a barrage of kisses not long ago, the transformation happened easily.

This time too, it was white.

The three girls approached me as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

…Love, huh.

At this age, saying “I like you” would be easier than talking about love.

Love is a heavy emotion. Heavy enough to summon both despair and hope. It can be the source of a person’s life, or the cause of their death.

These three people, in that sense, are saying they love me.

Do I deserve that?

Hayun would say I definitely do.

Jihye would say there’s no need to question such qualifications in the first place.

Ju-a… well. She might say we should find out.

I closed my eyes.

What can I do?

The truth is, I still don’t know anything. Even with memories from my past life, that feeling remains uncharted territory. Embarrassingly so.

If that’s the case, I can take more time and learn slowly.

Yes. If you think about it, our lives are really just beginning now.

We’ve already cleared away all the obstacles to love.

With the power of love, that is.

And now with that power—

It’s time to return.

To our home.