The hatch was thick.
Although the metal plate used for the entire antenna was quite thin, the area around it was exceptionally thick, as if only that part was important.
Of course, the blade didn’t pierce through easily.
“Harder! Push it in harder!”
And to make matters worse, James, who was skillfully hanging onto my shoulder, shouted that.
Does he think I’m some kind of heavy machinery that moves based on commands?
He looks like a hamster—actually, he’s quite cute in a way.
When I touched him, he felt soft and squishy like a rice cake.
If he were really my pet hamster, I might have wanted to touch him every day.
But no matter how cute someone looks, if they have no manners, all they do is stir up resentment.
That’s exactly how I felt right now.
And yet, what frustrated me even more was that I couldn’t think of another way to break through.
“Ugh! Why don’t I have any weapons like the other magical girls?! If I’m going to transform, I should at least do it properly!”
Wait a second.
If we’re going to argue like that, didn’t you also fail to properly study my transformation?
Now that I think about it, it’s always been like this.
Even when I was a combatant, they never gave me all the information, citing the risk of intelligence leaks.
Sometimes, they didn’t even have the information to give me in the first place.
Yet, it was always us combatants who had to go out and take the hits.
On top of that, the so-called executives would often show up on the battlefield unnecessarily, claiming they needed to command things personally, which meant I had to fend off attacking magical girls myself.
And a lot of the time, we weren’t fighting because we thought we could win—we were fighting just for the sake of fighting.
Now that I think about it, that really pisses me off.
Does he even realize who’s actually struggling the most right now?
That thought made my blade turn even darker.
It even extended further.
“Yes! That’s it, that’s it!”
I don’t feel happy at all about getting praised by you.
It was the same back at the company.
If we’re being honest, we only teamed up out of necessity.
Neither Shadow nor I had even the slightest intention of trusting each other completely.
I grabbed my right blade with my left hand.
“What are you—”
Before James could finish his sentence, I snapped the blade with my hand.
Why?
Well, it was energy created from my own body, after all.
And considering it could cut through things, that meant it still followed the laws of physics.
Magic is so convenient.
The way it works completely changes depending on how the user thinks about it—how incredible is that?
Gripping the blade tightly with both hands,
BAM!
I slammed it down with all my strength.
Was this how primitive people used stone axes in the Stone Age?
Holding the blade with its sharp end facing down, I struck the hatch’s locking mechanism over and over again with full force.
CLANG! CLANG!
The sound was ridiculously loud and brutish, but finally—
TING!
With a somewhat anticlimactic noise, the blade sank deep inside.
Then, there was the metallic sound of something snapping.
Rather than completely destroying the hatch, it seemed that repeated impacts had broken an important internal component.
I pulled the blade out and casually tossed it aside.
Slowly, its color faded.
Energy that got too far away from my body seemed to dissipate over time.
Without summoning another blade from my right arm, I reached into the hole I had made in the hatch and pulled it open.
Just like in the movies, an absurdly thick steel door swung open, revealing a space inside just big enough to fit a fist.
“Ooooh!”
James, who had kept quiet while I was venting my frustration on the hatch, let out an excited cheer upon seeing what was inside.
“This is it?”
“That’s right!”
“Is it safe to touch?”
“The energy circulating within the device is magical energy, so it won’t harm you. Especially not someone like you.”
I reached out carefully.
Surprisingly, there was no electric shock.
It wasn’t hot either.
I didn’t even get the sense that it was powering anything significant.
It was a slightly complex-looking object—too mechanical to be considered decorative, yet too quiet to feel like a proper machine.
But as soon as I took it out and examined it, I immediately recognized what it was.
“…A generator?”
“How do you know that?”
James asked immediately when I muttered to myself, his eyes full of suspicion.
“…Because I’ve seen a generator before.”
I quickly made up an excuse.
Yeah, I’ve seen one before.
It looked a little different from this and was much bigger, but still.
To be honest, the one I saw wasn’t even really a sphere—it had so many wires connected to the top and bottom that it would have looked like a pillar at first glance.
But my personal opinion didn’t matter.
James wouldn’t know until he had been in my position.
At the very least, one thing was true—this had been recorded by my helmet.
That’s right.
I saw this before, during an operation to infiltrate a Galactic Federation facility.
If only Blossom hadn’t been there, it could have been my first successful mission.
Then again, it would have been strange if a place like that didn’t have a magical girl guarding it, so the whole idea was meaningless anyway.
“You have sharp eyes. Yes, you’re right. Generators fundamentally share the same principles, so they look similar. But this one is far more advanced. Much more than the ones the Federation owns. Their energy output is much larger, which makes controlling them difficult.”
Each magical girl generates energy at a much lower efficiency compared to the company’s combatants.
But that’s exactly where the problem lies.
The more delicate an electronic device is, the more likely it is to break when overloaded.
Of course, if the device is important, it will have safety measures in place, but magical girls output so much energy that the generators end up being massive in size.
On the other hand, this one was different.
Both the minimum and maximum energy outputs were incredibly small.
They had the time to study circuits and slowly build up from small amounts of energy.
And on top of that, they had been harnessing energy for a very long time.
“This is a brilliant achievement of the company’s technology. Our circuit technology may not be as advanced as the Federation’s, but when it comes to generator technology, we are at least half a step—perhaps even several steps—ahead.”
That’s a pretty vague way to describe being ahead.