The Black Nightmare
Having finished verifying their strategy, the monsters whooped with triumph and poured toward the Black Zone in a single seething mass.
A few days of rest — and then, as if to repay that rest, monsters crashing down all at once. Sleep deprivation born from the constant dread that they might hit at any moment. A cycle that would drive even a healthy adult out of their mind. Mari sat slumped against the wall like a robot with its batteries yanked out, eyes rolling loosely in her head.
The phenomenon she had sworn would never happen again was now on its fourth round. Even the slightest touch while she slept made her snap her eyes wide open, certain it was only her mascot poking her.
"Ugh… uuuuh…"
It was already the fourth day of rest after the last monster swarm. They should be showing up any time now… she thought — but the mascots stayed quiet. Crouched against the wall, she chewed her thumbnail and rolled her eyes, steeling herself for the moment those amoral bastards finally appeared.
"M-Mari-nim…"
"What, y-you up?"
She whipped her head around at Teddy's voice — a voice so welcome it almost felt good. It was trembling now. One glance at his face told her this wasn't about monsters, so she turned her head back to the wall.
"No, it's not that… I'll wake you the second they show up, so please — get even a little sleep."
"No. I'm wrecking these bastards first, then I sleep."
Even on the rare occasion Teddy fretted over her, her answer was iron. She chewed the nail fragments she had bitten free from her thumbnail, then ran her index finger over the rough, torn edge. Purely unconscious habit.
Monster bastards. Just you wait till you show your faces.
Every scrap of rage condensed by sleep deprivation pointed in exactly one direction. One place only.
"Mari-nim, if you keep this up something really bad is going to happen…"
The worried voice buzzed at her ear again. She already knew. Something really bad had basically already happened.
"That's why I'm going to cause something really bad before something really bad happens."
She answered Teddy, flipping her tangled long hair back over her shoulder. How do you stop monsters from flooding out? She had already found the answer — a loophole, sure, but an answer.
"The items?"
"I managed to get them somehow, but… these are originally tools for reformation, you know?"
To her casually tossed question, Teddy held out a jewel-like toy roughly the size of a baseball. It looked like flimsy plastic, yet even dropped hard on the floor it refused to crack. The item's name: Mascot Ball.
Mascots aren't just poofed into existence. Siyeon's sea snake, and this Teddy too — they had originally been monsters. A monster with a good heart, meant for reformation, goes into the ball, gets purified, and so on and so forth… How mascots are made was none of her business. That wasn't what mattered right now.
What mattered was that this toy-like sphere was a prison capable of shrinking filthy huge monsters and locking them away. In short: a portable jail.
"I scraped together about ten from colleagues in the nearby regions, roughly…"
"Well done."
Even through the exhaustion, satisfaction showed on her face as she stroked the precious portable prisons with her small hands. Teddy still looked worried, scratching the back of his head with a paw that couldn't even leave a mark, and voiced the problem on his mind.
"But these aren't as sturdy as you'd think… if the monsters resist, they'll break out pretty fast."
"Speaking from experience?"
"Yes…"
Asked point-blank, Teddy dropped his head in a miserable nod. So it was from experience. She decided to let that part slide and simply stated her certainty.
"It's fine."
When she asserted that his concern would be fine, he looked at her with a face that clearly wanted to know what she was basing that on. Before the next question could fly, she gave him the reason too.
"I'll just make sure they can't move first."
That day, the mascot named Teddy saw it.
Deeply carved into the girl's eyes — an empty universe without a single star. Something he had never witnessed in all his years as a monster, nor in the days since becoming a mascot. He could not dare to measure the hollow, knotted rage engraved in a magical girl's pupils. So even someone that strong could be driven this far by sleep deprivation.
Though he had a body that couldn't even pool dry spit, Teddy made a swallowing motion as he thought:
This is going to be big trouble for the monsters in every way that matters…
Just as Mari had been waiting and waiting, on the fourth day of rest — the monsters appeared.
Six of them this time as well, arriving one after another in sequence, each aiming to harass Sun. They still feared setting foot in the Black Zone, and yet curiosity tugged at them too: just how strong was the magical girl there, really? Convinced their new strategy would leave no aftereffects, they had come with light hearts, as if checking off a must-see stop on a tourist itinerary.
Sun's miserable cycle of monster extermination ended that day.
The monsters who visited the Black Zone on that particular day — did they know a disaster of that scale would fall on their turn? They almost certainly never dreamed of it. What was certain was this: Sun was laughing more joyfully than she ever had before.
In later days, when other mascots asked him about it, Teddy would always answer the same way while recalling that afternoon. Of all of Sun's faces — past, present, or future — it was the most terrifying one he had ever seen.
"Where are you hiding~?"
Crazy. Crazy…!
Plant-type monster Idelty held his breath underground, desperately trying to still his shuddering body deep in an apartment flower bed, and thought:
Coming here was a mistake. Coming here was a mistake!
The Black Zone tours that had started trending among the monsters. When the first group of colleagues went, he had thought they were insane. When the second group went, he had thought, Maybe it's doable? When the third group went, he had decided it was doable. When the fourth group went, he had concluded the strategy must really be working. And then the fifth — his turn.
He had fought magical girls in other parts of Earth before, but the Black Zone was a first. After the initial impression that it wasn't all that different from anywhere else — as if to prove the strategy had just become meaningless — instant death never came.
Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease…
Idelty prayed with everything he had. Please don't find me. Just walk past. Even knowing a magical girl had ways to detect monsters and that the prayer was useless, he kept muttering the empty words.
"Where could you beee~?"
In the dirt where nothing was visible, the chill that would have been merely cool under ordinary circumstances became, in this moment alone, the icy hand of death wrapping his body. He began to feel the fine vibrations in the soil. Please let it be a small bug passing by. Please let it be the wriggle of an earthworm. But as if to deny every hope he had left, a sound from directly above announced the end.
"Here you are…"
"A-aah… no!"
His proud leaves, the ones that had stuck up above the soil. The warm hand that closed around them hauled him out of the dirt as if he weighed nothing. A god of death wearing a child's face and a mask stood before his eyes.
Because of these leaves. Because of these single leaves! Could he ever have imagined a day would come when he would resent the very symbol of his species he had once been so proud of? And before that — today, this very hour — could he have imagined he would thrash so filthy and so miserably?
Meaningless thrashing. And even that thrashing soon… became impossible.
"Guh… uh…"
"One."
One. With the girl's soft count, his consciousness drifted away.
Am I dead? Is this comfort the recovery room?
It hadn't hurt as much as he expected. With just this, the recovery room patients had become unable to stand again? Had the quality of monsters fallen that far? He opened his eyes thinking that.
…Hmm?
But the space he woke into was wrong. Not the ship's recovery room — a bizarre perspective, as if he had become a tiny insect looking down at Earth. In a dreamlike void where no movable body part remained, where he couldn't even thrash, Earth hung in view. He was clearly trapped somewhere.
Could it be — could this only be the beginning?
Beyond that ominous thought, before his labored breath could even catch, he could see outside the confined space through the magical girl's own perspective. Another colleague monster who had ridden the same transfer device down to Earth.
As if sensing the shadow of death closing in, the colleague was fleeing at full power. But from the scenery visible outside, he was already close — far too close. At a distance where a hand that no longer existed might almost have reached him, something like a small boil on the colleague's rear — his reproductive organ — was being slowly torn free.
"KRAAAAAAH—!"
"A-aah… aaah!"
At the voice carved through with overwhelming terror and agony, he screamed in denial of what he was seeing. He wanted to clap his hands over his ears against a scream too horrible to hear — but he no longer had body parts for that. With only the snout remaining, he could only howl as if weeping.
"S-stop it! You evil monster!"
But the howl was swallowed by the dreamlike space around him and never reached the outside. At the horrific sight of his colleague collapsed in complete exhaustion, he could only stare, trembling at how such cruelty was even possible.
"Two."
Two. Her ominous voice rang softly. Watching the remaining four colleagues get violated one after another in turn, he finally lost his grip on a mind that was coming apart. Even the last of them suffered miserably, and then the girl headed somewhere else — a desolate vacant lot where not a single person remained.
"This should be enough, right?"
Sun took the monsters out of the Mascot Balls one by one. In the emptied construction site after work hours, no matter how the monsters screamed, there was no one left to hear them. Probably no one except Sun would ever have predicted it would turn out this way.
Around that same time, in the recovery room of the spaceship, Medic Tentacle was tilting his head.
"Why… is no one coming back?"
Medic Tentacle only learned later what lay behind the delayed return of those six monsters: Sun's full-course torture.
That day, under the name Black Nightmare, a new chapter was carved into monster history.
The first were eight, and they returned with cries of joy.
The second were eight as well, and likewise they raised shouts of gladness.
The third were seven; they were at ease.
The fourth were nine, and they were certain of safety.
The fifth were six monsters.
They did not know the rage knotted behind the sun.
That rage became a terror and a pain like light poured down upon them, and it covered them.
Remember their solemn sacrifice — and fear it…
"Scrap that operation. Understood?"
"Yes…"
From that day on, by Medic Tentacle's iron order, sending multiple combatants to Earth at once was forbidden under ship regulations. A reasonable response to the permanent psychological damage and combat-power loss of six fighters all at the same time.