School Notices and a Squid Experiment
While the monsters were settling on their next victim...
At the heart of that particular headache was Mari.
She sat through lower-grade elementary school lessons she never imagined she would have to hear again, visibly draining of life with every passing minute.
Meaningless time.
In its own way, it was something that wore magical girls down even more thoroughly than the monsters themselves.
"Alright, pass them back one by one?"
A thick wad of school notices landed in the hands of the students in the front row. Each took a single sheet and passed the rest behind them.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Why do elementary school kids need this many notices anyway?
It's not like anyone's going to read them at home except me.
The pages were crammed with dense text, but most of it was pure filler. After she finished reading them all, she opened her bag and found yesterday's notices still sitting there, giving off that damp, distinctive paper smell.
Trash. All of it, trash.
Her textbooks had long since been left in the cubby and under the desk. All that remained in the bag were the notices, a notebook, and a pencil case.
That reminded her she hadn't taken out the recycling over the weekend. The more they piled up, the harder it would be to haul them out with this body.
Once the notice distribution and end-of-day homeroom wrapped up, it was finally time to go home. Then as now, the moment she escaped the school building was the best part of the day.
Siyeon said she was hanging out with a friend after school.
Recalling what Siyeon had told her during break, she headed home without waiting around.
There was nothing left to do on her phone, so she fired up the computer first. She didn't have any real plans, but she opened YouTube just to see if anything interesting might be on.
The screen filled with bright, cheerful kids' animations. Buried among them were magical girl shows Siyeon probably hadn't even watched. The power of the algorithm, huh?
I've watched a lot of these.
She scrolled the mouse wheel for a long stretch through the video list, failed to find anything worth watching, and finally moved to the search bar. Her fingers hovered over the proper keys for a while, twitching, before they finally typed out her own magical girl name: Sun.
Videos about her filled the list starting from the very top. The top result showed an upload time of "1 hour ago"—it was from a news outlet.
Even though they had blown it up for the thumbnail, her features still weren't especially clear. Curious what this particular outlet had to say, she finally clicked the text and started watching.
"This is a photo leaked from a magical girl community. In the image, you can faintly make out the silhouette of a woman who appears to be a magical girl, along with a monster wearing a wolf's face."
"The photographer stated that he took the shot while playing games despite the evacuation alert, uploading the post with the caption 'Magical girls are having a meetup,' and noting that the studio apartment where the werewolf monster appeared is nearby."
A mosaicked face and a distorted voice. The poster's appearance ended with those few short lines.
"The face of Magical Girl Sun, long known for always wearing a mask, is being revealed for the first time and is drawing significant public attention."
"Meanwhile, ordinary violations of portrait rights may result in claims for damages under Civil Act Articles 750 and 751. This has been reporter Lee XX."
With the two reporters' exchange, the video came to a close.
More importantly, why bring up portrait rights?
Are they telling me to go sue someone right this second or what?
Transformed magical girl appearances were basically just another kind of mask anyway, so she honestly didn't care much whether she got photographed or not. It felt like the news outlet was hoping she would care.
Well, a magical girl suing a civilian? That kind of headline would definitely get attention.
Like I'm going to fall for that.
She gave a clean snort of dismissal and pulled the school notices out of her bag. She began skimming through the scraps she had only glanced at earlier, hunting for anything that mentioned money.
Sure enough, buried among the ones she had breezed past was a notice about school milk service. Teachers got touchy whenever money came up, and refusing meant writing out reasons and dealing with extra hassle, so she simply circled the "agree" section.
Ten thousand six hundred won per person.
Including Siyeon and me...
For two people, that came to twenty-one thousand two hundred won. The thought of her hard-earned money draining away for nothing more than some pale milk cartons made her heart ache, and the knowledge that she would have to go deposit it at the bank soon left her dizzy.
There was no registered parent account for automatic withdrawals, so she had to handle the deposits herself. Frankly, every time money had to leave, it was a massive pain in the ass.
School milk, huh...
While she was at the bank anyway, she thought of the thing that always came to mind with school milk: those stick packs of chocolate, strawberry, and banana powder.
She stood up at once and shut the computer down with the mouse. Stuck without online games because of account issues, there wasn't much point hanging onto the PC for long anyway.
With her short stride she walked all the way to the distant bank, finished the deposit into the school account, then deliberately took a longer route to a big supermarket.
Convenience stores didn't always stock them at every branch, so she bought multipacks containing twenty sticks of each flavor.
Cookie & Choco?
The powder sticks she hadn't seen in ages now included something new besides strawberry, banana, and chocolate. She grabbed that one on impulse as well.
When she finished paying, the ajumma bagged everything and held it out without her having to pack it herself. Being a small girl sometimes came with convenient little perks like that.
Because she was so short, even lowering her hand a little made the bag scrape the ground. That part was extremely inconvenient. Couldn't her height hurry up and grow already?
"Lady Mari..."
The little bear charm stuck to the back of her phone case, pretending to be a decoration, tapped the back of her hand. She really wanted to ignore it, but she already knew what it was about, so she pressed the smartphone to her ear as if taking a call and muttered,
"Monster?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
She asked for the location and stood stock-still in the middle of the street waiting for the answer, already planning to drop her things off at home first if it was farther away.
People always said a sad premonition was never wrong. The fluffy-armed little thing, its arms pressed to its head, immediately gave the answer she least wanted to hear.
"...Closer than home, for now."
"Ah, shit. I didn't even bring my mask."
She raised the hand holding the black plastic bag, scratched the back of her head in irritation, and scanned the surroundings for somewhere secluded enough to avoid eyes.
This was a busy commercial stretch packed with a big mart and convenience stores, and the time was right after midday, so there was nowhere empty of people. In the end she had to go all the way behind the large waste bins near an apartment security office before she could launch herself into the sky.
The sunset staining everything red was pretty enough, but...
"Ah, fuck..."
To someone with no leisure for scenery, it was just an unwanted beam of light. After taking an ocular assault from the glare, she adjusted course and flew toward the reported monster.
Without her mask, the gale whipping across her face and hair felt especially rough.
My face is freezing.
"Kuhehehe! In quite the hurry to run awayyy—!"
A voice that sounded like it was coming from underwater. Before she even landed she could see the distinct triangular head and catch the briny smell of the sea, telling her this one was some kind of seafood.
She banked hard toward the ground, and a belated thought hit her.
Oh crap.
She should have slowed down while still in the air. The realization came too late; the ground was already rushing up to meet her face.
"Eheh... I'm fucked."
A short, hollow mutter. She had been flying at the speed of a twentieth-floor building with all that acceleration still on her. Planting that straight into the ground meant...
With a thunderous crash she slammed into the earth and carved out a massive crater.
"KRAAAAK?!"
Accompanied by a pathetic scream, she saw a squid monster go flying far into the distance. A completely unintentional meteor strike. She approached the squid that had been blasted away by the shockwave up close...
"Y-you bitch..."
In a voice drained of strength, it managed to point one of the squid tentacles growing from its head in her direction. Accident or not, she had finished it without even hearing a single line of dialogue.
Scratching the back of her head, she looked down at the limp, pathetic form of the squid monster.
"Sorry about that, man."
It looked so pitiful she even apologized.
"A-a sneak attack... you cowardly bitch!"
"You guys ambush-spawn too, so let's call it even."
She toyed with her wand, preparing to turn it into magical dust and send it off. Feeling sorry was one thing; work was work.
Squid... a squid, huh.
She had seen this once in some seafood video and never gotten the chance to try it herself—only watched. Now she decided to give it a go. That video had been about squid, too.
If you stabbed the squid's nerves, it suddenly turned white and started twitching...
She twisted the magic wand about four times. The heart ornament split in half, retracted into the shaft, and a short blade sprang out from inside. Crude, but unmistakably a cutting edge.
"What do you think you're—"
"I saw something in a video, okay? You're not that different from a regular squid, right?"
She approached the thing thrashing on the ground, felt around the inside of its shell-like head with her gloved fingers, then traced upward between its eyes.
"Hup..."
"S-stop! I don't know what you're trying to do, but stop—"
The sharp tip of the wand punched through the squid monster's skin and sank cleanly into the spot she had aimed for.
"Ungooooh—?!!"
In an instant the upper part of the monster's head turned pure white. A bizarre scream tore out of it right after.
"Oh, it works, it works."
She let out a sound of pure delight, paying no mind to the monster's screams. Nerve paralysis, was it? She had heard it was a method for making squid chewier when you ate it, and apparently monsters reacted according to their appearance too.
You were supposed to do the top part and then again right between the eyes to paralyze the legs as well, right?
She drove the blade in once more between the eyes with a solid thunk, and the tentacle section turned white in turn.
"Whoa, cool."
The thing that had been lying on the road looking for all the world like a piece of seafood immediately scattered into magical powder.
The hand-feel had been a little unsatisfying. Hope another one shows up soon?