Surviving Sun Wisely
After the school field trip wrapped up in a giant hornet fiasco, one thing kept quietly nagging at Mari.
From Sunday straight through Monday, the monster alerts never rang. Not once. Almost as if someone were carefully reading the mood between the two of them.
Still—no news is good news, she told herself, and let the days slide by without much thought.
Of course, anomalies never happen for no reason.
The story detours, for a moment, to the monsters’ ship.
Inside a room that held not a single bright color, monsters of every size and eccentric shape had gathered, sitting in a miserable circle and radiating an atmosphere thick enough to choke on.
“Well then—this is the one hundred and forty-second session of…”
What topic could possibly make these creatures—who normally settled rank through brawling and blood—put their pitiful heads together with this much seriousness?
The one hundred and forty-second session. By monster standards, a fairly recent institution. The reason it had been founded, and its ultimate purpose—the main subject of every conversation, the core of every agenda—was this:
“We will now convene the Surviving Sun Wisely Society.”
Surviving Sun wisely. More precisely: dying comfortably, without pain. To the monsters, the two meant the same thing.
Roughly three hundred of them filled the cavernous chamber. From that space rose a listless chorus of roars that sounded, somehow, exactly like a school classroom.
“Woooo…”
“Where did !@#% and &&■* go?”
The slug-like monster running the meeting extruded a single apricot-colored tentacle from its body—something that passed for a hand—and pointed at an empty seat. Midway through roll call, it had noticed a place that, unlike last time, was vacant.
The monster sitting beside that empty seat bowed all three of its heads. The middle one kept its mouth clamped shut, as if it preferred not to speak; the left head, thin-voiced and tactless, spat out the truth.
“He… got taken by Sun.”
“No…!”
At that shocking admission from the left head, all three hundred monsters in the room began to stir at once. Those brave fists, that beautifully gleaming hard carapace—they had been an inspiration to everyone present. And now he was an old monster who would never return to that seat.
From the opposite side of the slug-like chairmonster’s body, another tentacle emerged and folded its hands together.
“For the one who served as spear and shield to us all with his heavy fists and shell—may he rest in peace and recover well. Let us observe a moment of silence…”
At the chairmonster’s words, every creature in the room bowed, crouched, or stood with lowered heads according to the customs of their home planets. Any one of them could fill that empty seat next. They meant it.
“Right…”
The chairmonster’s belated short sound brought their heads back up.
“Well then—let us proceed to the intelligence transmitted from Earth…”
On the heels of those words and gestures, a mechanical beep-ri-beep rang through the wide chamber. One wall began to inscribe itself in their language, and Earth’s news reached the monsters as well. Naturally, the bulk of it concerned Magical Girls—and, true to the society’s theme, the items about Sun.
As the new reports etched themselves into the wall, the monsters burned every line into their eyes.
“There was a monster that lasted twenty-seven minutes against that thing…?!”
“Not the mask—her bare face?!”
“I can’t believe it. A face like that, and she commits atrocities that horrible…”
Sun’s unmasked face had already caused an uproar on Earth. And the recent monster subjugation that had taken a full twenty-seven minutes left even the monsters speechless with horror.
After one round of tumult, they put their heads together, traded pre-prepared opinions, and each in turn offered the countermeasures they had at least worked out in theory.
“What about preparing self-destruct measures in advance?”
“Finish yourself off before the pain starts? Hmm… that might not be bad.”
“And who’s stocking all those bombs and detonation switches?”
“Wouldn’t that just hand a weakness to the other Magical Girls, too…?”
“So we only issue them to the ones headed for the Black Zone.”
“I think it’s worth positive consideration. Let’s table it and hear the next opinion.”
Under the chairmonster’s gentle guidance, the exchange of ideas grew lively. Unlike the meetings they were forced to hold at school, the monsters’ jaws were working hard. And why wouldn’t they?
The dread that any one of them might be next for the Black Zone. Until their own turn came to head there—until then, at least—they needed even one usable idea to surface. For the sake of their own skins.
“Then how about this?”
In the middle of it all, one monster thrust a coral-like arm toward the ceiling. A species notorious even among monsters as the dumbest of the lot. The chairmonster did not expect much, but it still counted as a precious opinion; after a brief silence, permission was granted.
“…Go ahead.”
“We save up the teleport energy. Then seven or eight of us all rush the Black Zone at once!”
The coral-like palm clenched tight around that bold proposal. The instant the words finished, the monsters—as if they had only been waiting for the nonsense to end—unloaded a simultaneous barrage of abuse.
“You’ll just die in a group, you idiot!”
“Planning to become a combo platter?!”
“Het species, I swear… Think for once! You’re still trying to beat that crazy bitch?!”
“Now, now—settle down, everyone.”
Objects were starting to fly with the jeers; the chairmonster cooled the overheated room along with the rest of them.
“That, too, was the best idea they could come up with. If all we do is criticize and tear each other down, even the genuinely good suggestions will get buried.”
In the room, excitement finally spent, one of the monsters who had been listening carefully to the Het species’ words was of the Brain species. He found the Het’s suggestion less bad than it first sounded, and inside his head he began replaying the image of monsters bound for the Black Zone.
Why were the humans so fixated on how long it took to subjugate a monster? The reports from Earth said the same thing. On the ship, every time the teleport energy recharged, they sent one monster to Earth. Did it really have to be that way?
He knew organic matter took a great deal of energy to transmit. Even so, they ought to be able to charge enough maximum energy to send two or three at once, at the very least.
His thinking complete, he raised a blue-lit spine toward the ceiling.
“Then what if we send this proposal to the teleport chamber?”
An opinion from the Brain species, known for sharp minds. The chairmonster brightened at the risen spine and urged him on at once.
“Oh—please, go ahead.”
“For a single invasion, we send them in sequence—but each one teleports to a different location inside the Black Zone.”
According to him, for reasons unknown, Earth’s public was obsessed with the time it took to deal with a monster. Once he explained that point, the same monsters who had been ready to heap jeers on him the way they had on the Het species found themselves persuaded instead.
Monsters would head for the Black Zone one after another, in sequence. The Magical Girl would finish the one that appeared and have to rush to the next. After five or six rounds of that, no one would know when the next monster might show—so even the last one in line could die without the torture and the pain.
The more they listened, the more plausible it sounded.
This… might actually work.
Every monster in the room pinned its hopes on that idea—hopes of a hopeful death. A hopeful death. Even the dullest monster among them could not miss how unnatural those two words were, stuck together. And yet, limited to the Black Zone, a death free of torture and pain was something very much like hope.
“Woooooo!! Let’s go with this!”
“Hurry—let’s tell the teleport chamber!”
The one hundred and forty-second session of the Surviving Sun Wisely Society. A few words from the mouth of one stupid monster had grown into a meaningful proposal as welcome as rain after drought.
At the end of it, would the hopeful death the monsters expected be waiting—or the concentrated fury of a Magical Girl sharpening the blade of her revenge?
That remained to be seen.
The story returns to Sun.
“Hwaaaah…”
Days now without a single monster alert. Silence this long was starting to feel unsettling—but the body, in contrast to the mind, was luxuriating in the comfort. Sprawled out flat on the floor of the room, I let a long, lazy yawn roll out of me.
Had they finally given up on sending monsters to this area?
Wouldn’t blame them.
Still lying down, I nodded to myself and sorted my thoughts. The monsters that had burned up in these hands and on this staff—ballpark it, and you were already into three digits.
Anyone with a brain would stay away from here.
“…Lady Mari?”
I should not have thought that. At a voice calling me with the air of someone who wanted something, I slowly pushed my upper body up. And that day, something was different.
“Uh—uhh?”
“What’s wrong?”
Teddy’s voice was shading into panic. Even as I grabbed my mask, I asked why, figuring it couldn’t be anything major. The voice that came after, of course, informed me that it most certainly was something major.
“One, two, three… Lady Mari, I’m getting more than one response.”
“What the fuck?”