The Last Promise
It was raining.
Even on the day the world ended, the sky drizzled on like any other day. That stung a little. Shouldn't the heavens at least make an effort on a day like this?
I was standing on a collapsed overpass. Or, to be precise, trying to stand.
My left leg had gone numb. Three ribs were broken, and the splintered ends were digging into something — every breath brought something hot rising up to my throat. Rainwater seeped in through the wound running from my shoulder down to my elbow.
It was cold.
Being cold was a mercy. It meant the sensation was still there.
"...Seorin."
A small voice came from inside my coat.
My mascot. Poco.
The palm-sized creature was curled up as tight as he could be, clinging to the hem of my clothes with both paws. His white fur was soaked a dark, dull red. I didn't bother checking whether the rain was responsible.
"It's okay. It's not over yet."
It was a lie.
My magical staff was already half shattered. The crystal at its core was spiderwebbed with cracks, and every time I forced mana into it, something inside my grip crackled like breaking glass. The staff knew before I did that the next shot would be the last.
My parents, I had lost far longer ago.
Two years ago, Senior Yuha died on Christmas Eve. Maybe that was where it all began.
My best friend died in spring. My junior died in summer. A classmate died last winter, right in front of me, and until the very end she never stopped talking about her little sister.
I didn't count the civilians. If I'd started counting, I wouldn't have been able to stay standing.
I went to exactly three funerals. From the fourth on, there was no one left to go with, so I stopped. At the end, I was the one doing the burying. There was no special coffin for magical girls. Once the transformation wore off, we were just girls in school uniforms, and the adults always made the same face.
I never wanted to see that face again — and I never wanted them to wear it over me, either.
And then, at the end of all the days I'd somehow survived.
The thing responsible for all of it was standing in front of me now.
The Calamity.
Less a name than a phenomenon. It wore the shape of a person, but its outline kept shifting, and staring at it too long made my eyes ache. I had already cleaned up every cadre that stood in my way. Cut down on sleep, thrown my body into the grind, and left not one of them standing.
Now only that thing remained.
"If it were up to me, I'd kill you a hundred times."
My voice came out cracked.
"It feels unfair that I only get to kill you once."
It must have heard me, but it didn't answer. It never had. Not once.
It hadn't killed anyone because it wanted something. It killed the way a storm rains — simply because that was its nature.
That was why I couldn't forgive it.
The Calamity raised its hand.
Came the sound of air being sucked away. For an instant the rain seemed to freeze mid-fall. The light gathering at its fingertip was beautiful. The filthiest thing in the world, firing the most beautiful light in the world — I still couldn't understand it.
The light lashed out.
The asphalt split open as the beam came for me. I had to dodge.
My body wouldn't move.
My mind knew what to do. Right foot, half a step back. That was all it would take. But my legs were frozen as if they belonged to someone else. I could hear my broken bones screaming from the inside.
Ah. So this is it, then.
"—Seorin!"
Poco let go of my clothes.
He leapt out in front of me, that tiny body swelling to a size I had never seen in all the time I'd known him. His white fur turned to light. It was light that burned every last drop of mana he had left — truly, without sparing a single drop.
"No—"
"Promise me."
He said it.
"You have to be happy. You have to."
A transmutation circle sketched itself beneath my feet. Hastily drawn, the lines wobbling crooked — a mess of a circle, so unlike Poco.
"Answer me, Seorin. Just say—"
The light swallowed Poco.
There was no sound. That somehow made it worse. If there had been a sound — something bursting, something shattering — maybe I would have understood, even a beat too late, that it was over.
A fistful of wet fur scattered into the rain.
I stayed where I was. The transmutation circle, robbed of its light, erased itself on the spot — forever unfinished.
Poco, who had given everything, couldn't send me off in his final moment. Never got to hear the answer he wanted.
—!
Something snapped inside me.
Grief came first, then rage. What surged up after that had no names. Malice, hatred, bloodlust, and things that lived even deeper down. Everything I had spent years holding down came rising all at once.
Everything except despair.
I couldn't afford despair. Despair, and I couldn't kill that thing.
The color drained out of my hair from the tips, white creeping up my scalp at the edge of my vision. My pink costume bled black. The ribbons melted away, and the frills rewove themselves into hard, angular lines.
The shattered staff reconstructed itself in my hand. Black, long, and utterly bare of ornament.
My ribs stayed broken. My leg stayed ruined. Not one ounce of the pain had lessened — it had simply stopped mattering.
My costume used to change shape with the situation at hand. Short for close combat, long for artillery duels. I'd liked how convenient it was.
Now it wouldn't change at all. It had locked into that single black form, and no matter how hard I pushed from inside, it didn't so much as flinch.
A problem for later.
I raised my staff.
"Magical—"
⟨ Death Beam ⟩
For the first time, the Calamity recoiled.
Black shots tore out, eighteen layered over a nineteenth.
There was no light, no sound. Things simply ceased to be where they had been. Together with the three buildings beyond the overpass, the Calamity was shredded into a scattered ruin.
I let out one long breath.
It was over.
Late, but over.
And then the scattered remains drew themselves back into a single point.
Ah.
Its last convulsion — the kind that refused to leave a whole world behind to the one who had finally beaten it. Self-destruction.
"Magical Barrier."
I raised black walls, three layers deep.
Two of them tore away like paper.
As the third held, I thought: so this is how I die. It didn't matter if I did. But it did bother me that I'd never answered the promise.
Then came the white light.
***
Something cold touched my face.
I opened my eyes.
The sky was dark. Not black — dark, the deep blue of a city's glow staining the underside of the clouds orange. A sky where people were still living.
I was lying in the middle of a narrow alley.
When I tried to push myself up, my arm buckled and I fell flat again. The breaks were still breaks. The pain was still pain. Apparently I wasn't dead.
Bracing against the wall, I stood and looked out beyond the alley.
There were people.
Dozens. No — hundreds. Couples with linked arms walked past, laughing. Every shop was strung with lights. Carols drifted from somewhere down the block. The tree standing by the roadside wore a star on top.
I couldn't breathe.
In the city I knew, there were no people. Every inch of it should have been ash.
"...Where am I?"
No voice came out. Instead, a crack ran up the wall at the back of the alley.
I shut my mouth.
Stumbling, I made my way out to the main street. No one looked at me. A blood-soaked figure in black with white hair came walking out, and everyone kept on going. Recognition-inhibition was still active, apparently.
My reflection caught in a shop window.
I stared for a long time without realizing it was me.
White hair down to my waist, wet and clinging to my face. The black clothes were torn open from the shoulders down, and from the skin beneath, mana was rising like black smoke. My eyes were the strangest part. There was no light in them. A person's eyes usually catch and glint with something — mine held nothing at all.
What would Poco have said, if he'd seen me?
I stopped thinking.
Then I noticed the flyer pasted beside the window.
Special Hours — Christmas Eve.
I read the small date printed beneath it.
Once. Then again.
Two years ago.
I stopped dead where I stood.
Something in my head calculated at blinding speed. Ten years of memory swept past in a single rush — and caught on a single page.
Two years ago. Christmas Eve.
Eight forty in the evening.
The plaza in front of the abandoned station.
The night Senior Yuha died fighting a cadre.
I looked up. The time glowed on the display board across the street.
Eight twenty-six.
Fourteen minutes left.
Someone in my head tried to stop me. Don't touch the past. This could be a dream, a hallucination. The two-years-ago you know might not be the real two-years-ago.
I knew whose voice that was. The voice of the girl who spent ten years obeying the rules and saved no one.
I told it to shut up.
I ran.
My leg was broken, my ribs were grinding into my lungs, the world kept doubling in front of my eyes. Every three steps I had to catch myself against a wall, and every place I touched left a black handprint. A passing man seemed to sense something wrong, glanced back — saw nothing, and kept walking.
Three kilometers to the abandoned station.
I still had the plaza's layout memorized. The north staircase, the broken clock tower, the west flowerbed. The spot where Senior Yuha fell, and the amount of snow that drifted down over her, and the hours I spent kneeling there the next morning. All of it.
Two years, and not a single day had I forgotten.
Senior Yuha hasn't died yet.
My breath turned to the taste of blood in my throat. All feeling left my leg. It didn't matter.
This leg was no longer for running away.
There's still time.