The Unicorn Lives Another Day

Click… click…

Given that this was a world where mana actually existed, I had been hoping the computers might turn out to be different somehow. They weren't. Not really.

The operating system was called Magic Door instead of Windows, and the graphics cards and CPUs had slightly off-kilter naming schemes — that much, at least, was fun to poke around in. If I had dug into the underlying principles I might have found something genuinely distinct, but in my human life a PC or a smartphone had never been anything more or less than a game-and-simulation device, so I had no way of knowing where to even start.

Aside from the trivial names, the thing operated in exactly the same way. The icons, though, were just unfamiliar enough that I had to suffer the humiliation of tapping them one by one just to get online.

Ugh… me, a computer illiterate.

Topaz, it turned out, was the genuine article. The desktop ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was so thoroughly infested with malicious adware that the browser kept hurling itself at home-shopping sites, and I had a miserable time fighting it off. Buried in the wreckage was a site she clearly frequented, and the recently viewed list was absolutely stuffed with adult products.

Just in case, I went digging through her purchase history. She hadn't actually bought anything. She had just sat there on the product pages, conducting a long and serious internal debate over whether or not to pull the trigger.

And the list wasn't packed with horse cocks. It was packed with tentacle-shaped dildos. Extremely encouraging.

The unicorn lives another day.

I was still gloomily mining Topaz's browser history for blackmail material when an alert popped up in the lower-left corner, complete with a link that jumped straight to a livestream.

Wondering if it had anything to do with the sortie Topaz had just flown out on, I clicked the link.

"V!"

The timing was perfect. There she was, beaming that sunnily vacant smile of hers, striking a triumphant victory pose for the cameras.

Besides Topaz, a few other figures who were almost certainly magical girls flickered across the feed — one in pink tones, one in blue. And yet, for some reason, all I got was the impression of a magical girl. Beyond the signature color palette, I couldn't pin down a single concrete detail of their faces or figures.

The original protagonist had perception-impairment magic on her transformation too, didn't she…

The only reason I could recognize Topaz at all was that I already knew both her everyday face and her magical-girl form. I remembered the original game well enough: being an eroge, it had a whole event chain where a civilian catching you mid-transform or mid-dismiss would use your identity as leverage and squeeze you until you squealed.

"Citizens~ Cherry, Aqua, and I will give the monsters inside the barrier a thorough sweeping, so please rest eaaasy~!!"

Unfortunately, it looked like Topaz's homecoming was going to be delayed a little longer. The livestream cut out on the image of Topaz and her companions heading for the barrier, and I turned to my original objective: the community boards.

To my surprise, she actually had an account. I opened the member info, figuring I might as well check her age and birthday while I was in there.

XXXX, month XX, day X…. And it's currently the year XXXX… so Topaz is twenty-three?

The original game had a debt-repayment system complete with daily interest, but it had never bothered specifying a calendar year. The date sitting in the computer's system info was enough to work it out, though.

What I really need to look at is… the magical girls…!

This was purely information-gathering. Contingency planning. For potential dangers. That was all.

Even Topaz, whose bright, bouncy energy made her feel relatively (?) less filthy than the rest, still wore an outfit that was aggressively revealing — so of course I was curious how far the others went, heheh, what kind of oooohhh costumes they were strutting around in. This was absolutely not a lecherous scheme to go hunting for other magical girls' filthy outfits!

The original protagonist had been a nun-type character. Nun in name only. The woman had walked around wearing a pair of breast-curtains that put a streetwalker to shame. A complete degenerate. How was I supposed to not have expectations?

Hrm…

Tap… tap… t-tap…

WHYYYYYY!!!

God is dead.

After that I proceeded to abuse my extraordinary two-digit IQ, punching in every keyword I could think of — lewd, hentai, hots, nudes — and the tragic truth revealed itself: the humans of this world used their communities in a way so crushingly, murderously boring that it made you want to die.

In the middle of that wasteland, I clicked a popular post.

. . .

GRAAAAH!! This is NOT a community!!!

I only understood once I compared the photos of other magical girls to Topaz's. It was the same perception-impairment magic that had kept me from properly registering her teammates on the broadcast.

You could just about make out a person's general impression, or the color of their clothes. How much cleavage they were flashing? Completely unreadable. Impossible to tell!!

And as if that weren't enough, nearly every community on this internet was wholesome to a nauseating degree.

You people live in an eroge!! Why the hell are you so WHOLESOME?!

Looking at those squeaky-clean boards, I felt like I was the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠piece of trash in the room. The internal damage hit harder than a dose of radiation.

As I thought. A body like mine cannot survive in clean spring water.

A small enlightenment in hand, and with nothing better to do anyway, I started circulating mana and turning over the problem of how to punch through Topaz's fortress of a hymen.

How, exactly, was I supposed to take Topaz's virginity?

I had already confirmed that slamming into it like an idiot did not work. Time to get a little more intellectual about this.

I considered ramping up my mana output and coating myself in it like the battle-aura from a wuxia novel, and I ran through a dozen other approaches besides. Every last one of them collapsed into the same conclusion.

The absolute quantity and quality of my mana were insufficient.

First problem: Topaz was a far, faaar more powerful magical girl than I had given her credit for.

A nasty little thought had started to creep in — that she might ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠be only slightly weaker than the original protagonist's final specs. Or possibly equal to them.

It had been strange from the beginning. Sure, I had only just been born, and my mana reserves were tiny, but I had been dissolving tentacles on a near-infinite refill and drinking her dry the entire time. And she had been fine. Dehydration from climaxing, and that was it. Then she had flown out to go murder monsters, and then she had gone and pulled overtime on top of that.

Topaz… you're WAY too strooong!!

Second problem: I had been born drowning in mana, and as a result my actual control was complete garbage.

Topaz was the only mana-using human I had encountered, so I hadn't had a point of comparison. Getting hit with that perception-impairment magic finally showed me just how slapdash my technique had been.

I couldn't claim to understand the precise principles, but the level at which I handled mana was basically elementary-school addition and subtraction.

I learned that the hard way, after a long and bitter struggle to crack the perception-impairment magic just so I could look at photos of milk and honey.

My level is so pathetic I want to die!!

It was that same dizzying despair as hearing you can generate AI porn, going to try it, and finding nothing waiting for you but a wall of incomprehensible programming languages.

In that case, there's nothing for it but training…!

Fortunately, the perception-impairment magic let me observe how the mana was being used just by looking at the photographs. I decided to take it apart piece by piece and analyze it properly.

And last: the quality of my mana.

Thanks to my little rampage, I had absorbed far too much of it. Earlier I had burned through every drop I had swallowed just to stay alive, evaporating it into thin air, and it felt like even the mana I had taken in yesterday had gone up with it.

I was supposed to be digesting what I absorbed. Instead I had been doing the ancient Roman thing — stuffing myself until I was full, immediately vomiting it all back up, and diving in for another round. Of course none of it had actually stuck.

Which meant, in short, that until I grew strong enough to take Topaz's virginity, my pussy privileges were hereby revoked.

This isn't reality!!!

I screamed it in a fine display of denial. Nothing changed.

No matter how I turned it over, I had a genuine sense that if I went back to sucking her off again, my body might actually rupture from mana overload.

Kkhh… there has to be a way…

I glared at the innocent monitor and typed things like "how to increase mana" into the search bar. I dutifully read through pages on meditation and magic circles and tried to put them into practice, but my structure was simply too different from a human's. Impossible.

I swallowed the disappointment. If I sat here in front of the computer any longer I was going to fall into old-life habits and start hunting for worthless shitposts, so I moved to close the browser and shut the machine down — and then I stopped.

Hm? Something about tentacles…?

Wedged between the home-shopping icons that the adware had forcibly installed all over the desktop, as if fate itself had placed it there, a single file caught my eye.

A paper?

I opened it. A research paper on tentacles unfurled across the screen.

Come to think of it, when we had come home yesterday, Topaz had said she had gone digging through papers just to build me a suitable environment.

If it's this…!

A paper might actually have something on the mechanism by which tentacles got stronger. I started reading.

Ohoho. This is actually a pretty fun read.

Given the nature of the experiments, the material was rather stimulating, which did wonders for the reading experience. Over eighty percent of the content was human experimentation, but it seemed they had used convicts under the official pretext of researching the dangers posed by monsters.

A little digging online confirmed it was a sanctioned public project — part of the work of compiling an official monster bestiary.

And because the experiments had been conducted exclusively on prisoners, there was, unfortunately, nothing even remotely resembling a walkthrough for pounding a magical girl's womb into submission, little hearts and all.

There had been experiments conducted on Witches — fallen magical girls among the convict population — but the write-ups just said the subject's entire body had necrotized under the overwhelming mana, and that was the end of it.

Ova. Ova, huh…

What a tentacle needed to grow was a woman's ova. But Topaz was so strong I couldn't even pierce her hymen, let alone reach her womb, which meant I was stuck in the deeply stupid position of needing ova in order to grow strong enough to get the ova. I clutched my head.

Was this the thing where you buy a pair of scissors to open the packaging, only the packaging is so tough you need another pair of scissors to open the scissors?

Still, it hadn't been a total waste. Thanks to the paper, I now had a clear picture of what kinds of compounds most tentacles could produce, and how they actually grew.

Most of it was stuff I had already seen back when this was still a game, but this was an academically written paper. Watching my headcanon get promoted to official setting was a gain all by itself. On top of that, it had detailed explanations and lore the original had never bothered with, which meant I could start sketching out a tech tree of my own.

Not that I had the resource (ova) to actually climb it…

There's no way Topaz doesn't already know this.

This was someone who had gone digging through research papers just to make sure I was comfortable. She might already have a plan…!

Ah, I dunno. Just do it for me. Scratch, scratch…

I had the distinct feeling I was using my brain even more now than I had as a human. I gave up and decided to melt the remaining time by browsing the community while I waited for Topaz to come home.

And in doing so, I made a new discovery: even a clean community has its own clean little brand of shitposts.