It Did Not Miss
It hadn't missed.
The abandoned station plaza was exactly as I remembered it. Descending the northern staircase brought you to the western flowerbed, where everything that had once been planted there was already dead, as though something had passed through, and a thin layer of snow lay over it all.
Needing to pinpoint the cadre's location, I gripped the steel framework behind the clock tower and climbed. My fingers kept losing their hold and I slipped again and again before I finally hauled myself up.
I managed one breath, then looked down over the plaza.
There it was. The cadre.
Six arms, each ending in a blunt, ring-like loop. Anything that touched those loops—flesh or concrete—was carved out in a perfect circle. I knew that power well. It was the same power that had turned a senior of mine into a donut before she walked out of my life for good.
Three magical girls stood before the cadre.
One knelt on her right knee, holding up a barrier. Another had fallen back a step.
And stepping forward in front of them both, shielding them—
A neatly kept blue bob. A transformation costume over fair skin. A saber in her hand.
It was Han Yuha.
The sight of her stopped my breath for an instant.
She was alive.
She was… alive.
Her eyes never left the advancing kaijin as she steadied her breathing. Her shoulders rose and fell with each exhale, and her costume's hem swayed with every step she took to manage the distance. Even her old habit of touching her right leg before a dodge was exactly the same—the habit I'd tried a hundred times to break her of, and never succeeded.
"Seorin's not here, is she? I don't see Seorin."
"They sent her to Sector B on urgent dispatch. She'll be gone at least a day."
"I see. That's a relief."
Even standing in danger herself, her voice worried about me.
Magical girls didn't exist on paper, so if one of us died, the government would simply deny we'd ever existed—and erase every trace with it. That was why not even the usual recordings remained. Maybe that was why I'd worked so tirelessly to keep her voice from fading. Watching my memory of it blur felt like a weight I couldn't bear, so whenever I was alone, I repeated it to myself, over and over.
And now that I actually heard it, I realized all that effort had been for nothing.
Her real voice was a little higher than the one I remembered. A little younger, too.
Of course it was. While I'd aged two years, she had stayed exactly where she was.
That's why I want her to stay a senior like this, forever.
I gripped the clock tower railing. The steel crumpled into my handprint, blackening where it scorched.
Eight thirty-six.
I counted time by feel. Close enough.
According to the original timeline, in four minutes my senior would collapse with a perfect donut-shaped hole punched through her chest. Her sacrifice would let the other two survive. I would hear the news the next morning and sink to my knees on this very spot.
So—four minutes. That was my window to set it right.
I took stock of my body. No sensation in the left leg. Three cracked ribs. The right arm could be raised, but I couldn't say how long it would hold.
Close combat was out of the question in this state. The instant I leapt between those six loops, I'd be carved apart before she was.
That left one option: sniping from here.
I raised my magic wand—black, long, utterly unadorned—and held it like a rifle.
I took aim.
The center of the cadre's torso. The junction where all six arms branched out. Punch through there, and it would collapse before it could regenerate.
The angle was good, the distance manageable. The problem was the trajectory the magical round would have to travel.
On the line between my crosshairs and the cadre—and along its extension—stood my senior.
I just needed her to move one step to the side. No—she always dodged right, so if I fired on the next exchange—
My hand trembled.
…Why.
I pushed mana into the wand to compensate for the shake, only for it to waver again.
I told myself it was fatigue. I'd fought the Calamity right before tripping here, and its aftermath still clung to every inch of me.
But the true reason came quickly enough.
Because at the end of my barrel stood a living, breathing senior. Because the person I'd thought was dead stood right there in plain sight—and I was about to fire toward her.
I threw away this habit of hesitating. I threw it away, remember?
I exhaled everything, all the way down. My ribs scraped against my lungs. Using that pain as a baseline, I locked my arm in place. Even this hurt less than what I'd already endured.
The trembling stopped.
The cadre moved, extending three of its six arms at once. The first two were feints; the last was real. I knew this pattern—but the Yuha of that time didn't.
Sensing the attack, she dodged right.
Now.
Magical round.
A black line shot forward, silent.
The cadre, robbed of its central torso, sagged—its six arms drooping before falling to the ground one by one.
"…Huh?"
Han Yuha's left shoulder had been pierced. A black hole gaped above her pale violet costume. She glanced down at it once, and the weapon slipped from her grip; the clang of the saber against the stone floor rang out across the plaza.
No—why.
Not one step. Half a step?
Any senior I knew would have dodged a full step without fail, but today's Yuha had moved a little less.
Oh. Don't tell me.
Had she seen through the cadre's feint and deliberately cut her movement short to counterattack immediately?
Yes—that would be just like her. Hers was a style of trusting her instincts on the battlefield, adapting moment to moment to ever-shifting variables.
It had been a miscalculation.
"Senior!"
The magical girl holding the barrier dropped it and sprinted over—Hayeon, their tank.
"It's just her shoulder, only her shoulder! It's a through-and-through, but healing magic should cover it at this size. Let me stop the bleeding, quick—!"
"Hayeon. Before that…"
I had saved my senior. She wasn't going to die.
True, I'd wounded her, but it was nothing life-threatening. Once their healer got to work—
"Hey. Over by the clock tower."
At Yuha's words, every gaze snapped to a single point.
***
Atop the clock tower, a woman in black with white hair spilling to her waist lowered her wand, easing out of her firing stance. A black aura rose from her shoulders and coiled around her like a swarm, and her downcast gaze was not one that could be met easily.
"…What is that?"
Overwhelmed by a presence none of them had ever felt before, Hayeon's voice shook.
As an outstretched hand reached faintly toward the magical girls, Hayeon threw up her barrier at once. Without so much as acknowledging it, the woman withdrew her hand, brought it to her lips, and murmured something. A wave of mana pulsed out from behind her covered mouth, rippling outward from the clock tower.
Crack—
The clock tower she'd been using as her footing began to split. The beam that held the bell snapped in two and plummeted down. Amid billowing dust, the plaza's stone floor split in every direction.
The magical girls retreated, supporting one another.
"But there's something off here."
The healer spoke up to Hayeon.
"She was aiming… at the cadre."
"She shot her own side?"
Hayeon tilted her head, as if demanding an interpretation of that statement.
"No."
Han Yuha said.
"Her line of fire had me on it too. A dead-straight line, straight through to me."
"And that means…?"
"Exactly. I was her bait."
Having finished her analysis in seconds, Yuha relayed her reasoning to the team.
"She used the cadre to pin our feet, then took her shot from far away—somewhere completely safe."
"Wow… that's beyond cold, even for a villain. Shooting her own ally?"
"The kind of person who could do that…"
Yuha stared up at the clock tower.
"Is higher up the chain."
She clenched both fists.
"A Highest-Ranking Executive."
I popped a smoke screen.
What I'd actually meant to say was something else entirely.
—Senior, it's me.
But what came out instead of the words I needed was a spell.
—Senior, I missed you so much.
—You… Seorin? Is that really you, Seorin?
—Yes. It's me. There hasn't been a single day I forgot you…
I wanted to face the face I'd longed for, to feel their warmth, to press against their skin.
And then what the hell is this.
While black smoke swallowed the clock tower, I slipped into an alley and hid. Only after the familiar footsteps chasing me faded into the distance did the voice that had been stuck in my throat finally come out.
"No—why, of all things…"
If the price of this power was being unable to speak, then I simply needed another way around it.
I could release the transformation.
The moment I dropped it, I'd shed the white hair and the black clothes and become a young boy again. All I had to do was show that form to them.
I closed my eyes and pushed the mana condensed inside my body out past its boundaries.
"Hah!"
The transformation didn't release.
"Again."
I concentrated until beads of sweat dotted my forehead and the space above my lip, then shoved my magic out all at once.
"Hah—hah!"
Nothing.
…Oh.
I had always been the flexible type. A boy normally, a magical girl when transformed. My battle costume had adapted to that trait, reshaping itself to suit the situation. It paired perfectly with my ability to grow stronger by absorbing my enemy's power the longer I fought.
But right now, I was simply, permanently, a girl.
"……"
I pressed my forehead against the wall and racked my brain for a long while. Then an idea flashed through my mind.
Wait. Right now—somewhere in this time, there was a me two years younger.
Where that me would be, where she would go on this particular day—that much ran on autopilot. I didn't need to ask.
The past me wouldn't know what I looked like now. And back then, I had been hopelessly obsessed with girls.
Hmm… This might actually go smoother than I'd expected.