The Abandoned Mine
"Dimensional rift detected! Teams 3 and 5, standing by at the rift site!"
Deep in the Dimensional Management Bureau's Central Control Room, red warning markers blinked across the wall of oversized monitors while coordinate data refreshed in real time.
At the duty officer's shout, every gaze in the control room snapped toward him at once.
"What's the rank?"
The team leader seated at the command chair asked, adjusting his headset.
"C-Rank energy wavelength. The entity coming through is expected to be an Ogre."
"Keep a running check on that wavelength, and get me the civilian evacuation status along with a damage projection."
"Yes, sir!"
The officer's fingers flew across the keyboard. A radius map of the rift's surroundings bloomed on one side of the screen, a red line tracing out the recommended evacuation zone.
"No residential areas within a 500-meter radius. One national highway does run through it, however, so I've filed a request for traffic control."
"Good. Notify the police."
Scenes like this had long since stopped being special here. This was simply the daily routine.
Dimensional rifts.
A little over a decade ago, rifts began appearing all over the world without a moment's warning. Empty space had fractured and shattered like a pane of glass, and the tears hung floating in midair, showing nothing beyond them but pitch-black darkness.
The phenomenon erupted simultaneously across the globe. Governments clamped down hard on the information, the areas around every rift were sealed off on the spot, and the whole matter passed into the hands of the military and research institutions.
Yet the rifts simply hung there in the air, quiet. No one managed to enter, and nothing ever came out. Research teams from every nation threw themselves into unraveling the rifts' nature, day and night, but that empty fissure refused to give up a single answer.
Then, one day, as the rifts were slowly fading from the public's attention, they all began to react at once.
Something writhing seemed to flicker in the cracked gaps—and then unknown monsters and creatures came pouring out.
And so the world stepped into an entirely new chapter of its history.
The first few years were chaos itself. Conventional military power was useless against the monsters, and the devastation swelled beyond all control. And at the same time, women appeared—women who could wield powers like magic.
As time passed and research piled up, one conclusion was finally established: that power manifested only in a select few women. The world came to call them magical girls.
Nations scrambled to build dedicated agencies to find these women, train them, and send them into combat. This place, the Dimensional Management Bureau, was one of the organizations born that way.
"Teams 3 and 5, deployment ready. Standing by at the staging point, awaiting the signal."
"Confirmed single Ogre? Any other readings?"
At the team leader's question, the analyst answered while flipping to another screen. "A single entity confirmed so far. There are stretches where the wavelength wavers slightly, though, so just to be safe, I'll attach Team 6 as a reserve."
"Do that. Let's be careful about this. We've been seeing more and more cases lately where the rank assessment doesn't match what actually comes out."
At those words, a few faces in the control room stiffened slightly.
It was true—over the past few months, reports had been coming in of cases where the initial wavelength analysis failed to match the monsters' actual threat level. The pattern was too strange to dismiss as simple error, and yet no clear cause had been identified.
"Teams 3 and 5. You are cleared to engage. Safety first."
The team leader's voice carried over the radio. On the monitor, faint glows rose at the marked coordinates as the teams' signal markers began advancing toward the rift site.
Meanwhile, at the mouth of an old mine shaft in Japan.
On a mountainside long abandoned by people, before an entrance where a rusted steel sign leaned at a drunken angle, the shadows of two figures fell across the ground.
One was a small-framed woman with long sky-blue hair spilling down to her waist. A magical girl uniform in white trimmed with blue frills and ribbons, white knee-high socks pulled up past her knees, and a small wand tipped with a blue orb clutched in her hand.
Amamiya Mio. Magical girl name Blue Ripple—a rookie with three months on the job.
"Ugh... every single time I put this outfit on, I honestly feel like I'm going to die of embarrassment."
Mio tugged at the hem of her short skirt, her face going pink. "I still can't wrap my head around the fact that I have to keep wearing this from now on."
The other was a taller, sunnier woman with pink hair in twintails. Her outfit blended pale pink and white, a large ribbon sat at her chest, and in her hand, in place of a weapon, she carried a small, round shield-like item.
Sasaki Hinata. Magical girl name Pink Guardian, five months on the job—and, to Mio, a senior of only a few months' standing.
"What, this? I'm totally in love with mine."
Hinata turned in place to show it off, bubbling with enthusiasm. "I've always wanted to try wearing something like this at least once. It's cute, isn't it?"
"...And just how many hours have you spent wearing yours alone at home, Hinata-senpai?"
"That's a secret."
Hinata flashed a beaming smile and turned toward the mine entrance. "Oh, and one more thing! How about we shoot a Reel out here after the mission? This backdrop has real atmosphere, you know."
"...No."
Mio cut her off flatly. "You know the uniform regulations. We're not allowed to post magical girl work on social media."
"It'd be fine if my face doesn't show, wouldn't it?"
"It would not."
"Aww—"
Hinata pushed out her lip in a pout, but Mio had already shifted her gaze to the tunnel.
"Anyway, let's get this done quickly. They've confirmed the energy wavelength as F-Rank. We scan and head back—one or two goblins at most, and that'll be the whole of it."
"Probably! An F-rank is nothing—this is more than enough for the two of us."
Hinata gave her shield a light spin in her grip and stepped into the mine.
Both of them were rookies who had only just been cleared for live duty. An F-rank was a number treated so lightly that even the branch office had judged it a waste to attach a regular extermination team.
Inside, the mine was darker and quieter than expected. Old rails and corroded support beams stretched away under the faint lighting, and ancient dust lay settled underfoot.
"...It's so quiet."
Mio murmured, eyes down on the radar screen at her wrist. "The readings are faint. It's an F-rank, all right, but the source is deeper in."
"Then we go deeper. Simple as that."
Hinata strode on ahead without a care in the world.
They had just reached the fork at the very back of the tunnel when the readings on the radar screen abruptly began to waver.
"Huh?"
Mio's brow drew tight. "Hinata-senpai, wait. The wavelength's wrong."
"Wrong? How?"
"This isn't an F-rank entity's signature. This is..."
And then it happened.
In the darkness at the far end of the tunnel, a figure lying collapsed on the ground as if dead came into view. And around it, a small dimensional rift, writhing.
"Is that... a person?"
Hinata's voice climbed half an octave. "It must be a civilian!"
A civilian beside a rift meant danger—danger that fell equally on the civilian and on any magical girl who came close.
"Let's report in first."
"This is Sakura Team 3, F-rank rift located. We've found what appears to be an injured civilian just ahead of it."
Hinata reported quickly into her wrist communicator.
"Yes, yes! Understood!"
As if orders had come down from above the moment her report went out, Hinata bobbed her head excitedly and said in a bright voice, "Let's get the civilian out first, then close the rift."
After all, sealing a rift was a problem with a civilian lying right beside it.
Magical girl Mio nodded and started slowly toward the figure.
Mio reached out her hand.
The moment she moved to grip the shoulder and give it a light shake, a damp sensation met her fingertips.
It wasn't blood. It wasn't sweat, either.
Something slick and lukewarm—far too alien to belong to a human body.
As if an alarm were shrieking through her mind, the wrongness turned to outright danger in the space of a heartbeat.
"...!"
Mio hurried to throw herself back.
No—she tried to.
But the thing was a little faster.
Shlurrrrrrrrk.
"Kyaaaaaah!"
"Mio!"
The fallen figure's body melted away like dark-red blood, slithering down onto the floor. And from the middle of that pool, dark-red tentacles surged upward, writhing.
It was an ambush faster than a blink.
Before Mio could so much as react, the tentacles had wound around her entire body.
"Kyaaaaah... l-let go...! Senpai!!!"
"Damn it! Mio!! Hold on—I'll get you out of there right now!"
I shoved my shield forward and charged.
"Energy Shell!"
The translucent pink barrier unfolding ahead of me batted aside the cluster of tentacles that came lashing in behind it.
WHAM!
The shock ran up through the shield and into my wrist. But that impact didn't simply disappear.
Shhhk—
I could feel the force I'd taken being drawn, whole and unchanged, into the heart emblem at the shield's center.
One. Energy stacking.
A power that grew stronger the more I was struck, the more I absorbed.
WHUMP!
The moment I hurled back everything I'd stored, the mass of tentacles before me went flying, entire.
"Get away from Mio!"
Pink energy swirled up around my shield, swelling like a whirlwind. Cloaked in that power, I threw myself toward Mio.
Save her first!
At the edge of my vision, I could see Mio thrashing desperately, every inch of her wound in dark-red tentacle. The ambush had already cost her her wand—it lay rolling across the ground, knocked clean from her hand.
And to keep me from reaching her, three or four thick tentacles rose up to bar my way.
"Move!"
CRASH!
We slammed together head-on. The impact flooded into the shield and, in the same breath—
"Discharge!!"
BANG!
The returned force detonated ahead of me like a bomb, blasting the blocking tentacles away all at once.
The mangled remains strewn across the floor twitched, then slowly went still.
I can do this.