The Magical Girls' Regular Meeting
The next day, elementary school.
Rattle-rattle.
Someone was jiggling their leg hard enough that the plastic desk—only pretending to be wood—shook unsteadily with every bounce.
If you asked whose anxious leg that was, jittering like they stood on the brink of a once-in-a-lifetime decision… of course, it was mine.
She definitely snitched to her mom.
The obvious, elementary-school-lower-grade line of thinking went like this.
One: the trigger. She’d done something wrong—teased a classmate or done something that invited a fist.
Two: the process. She’d gotten beaten for it.
Three: the result. Whether she’d been in the wrong didn’t matter. Whatever happened, you ran and told your parents first.
Line up a hundred elementary school kids and put them through that sequence, and I guarantee ninety-nine of them would land on the same result.
The anxieties that rode in on the heels of that result were exactly why my legs were shaking so hard right now.
When was the mother of the little brat I’d thrashed yesterday going to show up?
When would she storm into the classroom demanding to know which little witch had hit her son?
Just thinking about it filled my lungs with dark clouds until I could barely breathe.
First period passed.
Second period passed.
Third. Fourth…
Lunchtime. The combination of curry and kimchi was, as always, correct.
Fifth period, and then school was over.
…What?
My endlessly deep fretting turned hollow. Nothing had happened at all.
I’d cooked up about five different response manuals in my head, yet miraculously I never needed a single one of them before it was time to head home.
I let out a breath of pure relief and started the walk back to the apartment, eyes flicking over the news articles scattered haphazardly across my smartphone screen.
No matter the site, the moment anything involved magical girls, people lost their minds racing to get an article out first. The absolute freshest news usually turned up here.
Maybe I should just quit.
My eyes skimmed the articles at speed. The second I saw one blaming magical girls, a flash of pure irritation sent my real thoughts circling in my gut.
There’s a limit to the pot calling the kettle black. How about you try making a world where the monsters don’t show up first?
The kind of people who drag you out of the water and then demand you pay their hospital bill.
It was barely past one when I got back to the apartment, tossed my bag aside, and flopped onto the floor.
The little bear that had been disguised as an accessory dangling from the bag tore its own keychain free and flopped down beside me for good measure.
“Things have been pretty quiet lately.”
“What the hell, you little shit?”
The way he said it made it sound like there should have been more work. What kind of insane talk was that? Still lying down, I lifted my head just enough to shoot him a sideways glare.
Just last night I’d been thrashing bird-brained monsters until the dust flew… and he was calling it quiet?
This bastard was really something.
“No no no, I mean compared to a few years ago!”
He waved both of his fingerless cotton-ball hands frantically in self-defense.
Ah, compared to a few years ago? Yeah, it had definitely dropped off since then.
I sank back into my original position with a flat look and spat out exactly what I’d been thinking.
“I thought you were saying you wanted to get beaten more than usual.”
“….”
In an apartment with no computer, the only real option was the smartphone. These tiny fingers made even typing a struggle. At the very least I needed to get out of the lower grades before I could even think about playing any games.
With nothing better to do I was browsing the magical girl gallery when the bear prodded me in the side with a soft cotton fist.
“Ah, did you hear about that?”
“What.”
If he was about to say something useless I was fully prepared to separate his neck from his body. I turned my head toward him without sitting up, looking up from the floor with a sour expression.
“The magical girls are holding their regular meeting soon.”
Not useless after all.
I hadn’t heard a thing.
In the first place that wasn’t the kind of news you just “heard”—they had to actually tell you.
The more I listened the more absurd it got. I turned off the phone screen I’d been holding and sat up.
“…Hey. I only hear about it if you tell me, you little shit.”
“Ah, right, that’s how it works.”
Watching the face he made like he’d simply forgotten made me want to rip his head off on the spot.
Was he deliberately asking for a beating?
“Haa…”
I let out a long sigh. He flinched, looking briefly terrified. He’d apparently mistaken it for the wind-up to a thrashing.
I still needed the place and time at minimum, so I wasn’t going to do it just yet.
“When and where.”
“Uh… this Saturday at one in the afternoon, the usual Star Cafe…”
“Yeah. Got it.”
Business concluded. Time to twist his neck.
“Gyaaah…?!”
The sudden ambush cut his scream short as the bear plush’s head came clean off its body.
Who the hell in this wide world waits until the day before to mention a meeting the next day?
And then what? “Ah, right, that’s how it works”?
I was a literal saint for not tearing all four limbs off and setting them on fire.
While the headless monster radar was regenerating I kept half an eye out for any monsters that might appear, but…
Just like the little bastard said, the frequency of monster appearances around here had dropped enough you could actually feel it compared to a few years ago.
A peaceful day with zero monsters for once.
That peace carried all the way through the night and delivered me, in fine spirits, straight into the holiday.
“Leave today to me!”
Being a magical girl was work in its own way. When you left for another region someone had to fill the empty slot. So magical girls from areas with a little more breathing room would occasionally come cover like this when someone had to step out.
Her transformed appearance was an eternally young elementary schooler, but the magical girl standing in front of us was actually around middle-school age.
“Then we’ll leave it in your hands.”
“Pwease take care of it.”
“Yep! Have a good trip!”
We bowed politely and, for the moment, dumped our empty posts on her.
Siyeon and I boarded a bus that would take us more than ten stops.
If you asked why we didn’t just transform and fly, the answer was simple: the café sat right in the middle of a commercial district. Flying straight there would get us spotted for sure.
No matter how slapdash this world was with its universal face-blindness, there were still lines you weren’t allowed to cross.
I held out my transit card as we climbed aboard.
“Two children.”
Beep, beep, beep.
The driver tapped at the fare machine. I touched the card to the reader at the long electronic chime and a familiar woman’s voice answered with a cheerful double beep.
“Multiple passengers.”
“Sit down already.”
I hurried Siyeon into a seat so she wouldn’t tip over when the bus lurched into motion.
The privilege of being tiny kids. We could dash for the unnaturally empty seats with the pink covers and no one would say a word.
The bus rolled on and on. Around the tenth stop I stretched my arm toward a stop button I couldn’t quite reach… and one of the blank-faced men pressed it for me without changing expression.
“Thank you.”
I made sure the gratitude left my mouth. No answer came back. A small smile and a glance in our direction said he’d already answered—he’d simply done the obvious thing.
Star Cafe sat right in the heart of the shopping district.
Lunch rush had just started to thin out. Siyeon and I had come all this way without filling our stomachs first.
Why hold a magical girl regular meeting in a café smack in the middle of a commercial street? Because—
“Welcome, you two… Sun and Moon, right?”
“Yes.”
“Yes!”
The former magical girl with the long straight hair that suited her so well: Seo Hyeon-ah.
In other words, the café had been opened by someone who had hung up her magical girl hat and retired. That was why.
An environment so terrible you couldn’t risk your identity being exposed and couldn’t even call each other by real names. A proper adult who understood that perfectly had simply handed the entire shop over to us for the regular meetings.
Siyeon’s bold reply turned heads among the other magical girls who had already arrived.
Everyone looked like elementary schoolers in their transformed forms, but in reality they ranged from actual elementary schoolers through high schoolers, with fully grown adults mixed in as well.
The official purpose of these meetings was sharing countermeasures, responses, and every other scrap of know-how about the monsters… but—
“I’m saying I can’t even date freely.”
“Ugh, real talk. Just when the mood’s getting good the monster alert goes off and kills it.”
“And holidays? The looks you get. Nobody’s free, and there are always empty seats…”
—it was really just a place where people who understood one another’s circumstances could safely vent.
A genuine elementary schooler sitting in on a gathering like this didn’t have much to contribute. You just filled your belly in peace and went home. That was enough.
“I’ll add honey bread and hot chocolate—”
These were the kinds of things I almost never bought with my own money. When the adults offered to treat, you ordered fast and ordered big.
I was shoveling sweet desserts into my face like someone who hadn’t eaten in days when the magical girl sitting across from us—Stella—asked a question.
“Moon, is magical girl life hard on you?”
“I’m fine! It’s work that can bring smiles to people!”
Siyeon delivered the line like she’d just stepped straight out of an anime.
“Haa— I used to be like that too… How about you, Sun?”
The question that had been aimed at Moon transferred straight to me.
Was magical girl life hard?
Of course it was hard. I had zero loyalty to pretend otherwise the way Siyeon had.
“I stick it out for the money.”
The sudden crash landing from anime dialogue into cold reality left the senior magical girls quiet and solemn.
They probably all understood.
“Sometimes she really doesn’t seem like an elementary schooler, right?”
“Capitalism is this dangerous, huh.”