Meeting Myself
Before that, though, I needed to patch this body up.
In the wake of the magical girls' departure, the cadre's remains still lay where they had fallen.
Executed cadres incinerated themselves naturally into the air, so there was no real need to worry about them. The six arms scattered across the ground were slowly turning to ash.
I stretched my hand toward the shapes as they lost their form.
Magical Sucking.
Darkly blooming steam was drawn into my palm, and something inside me filled back up.
Sensation returned to my left leg first.
I took a step. It wobbled, but I could walk. Two steps, three. I might even be able to run now.
The ribs were another matter. When I breathed in deeply, heat still climbed all the way up my throat. I could lift my arms, but not for long.
This much will do.
If one cadre recovered me this far, it wasn't bad at all.
"Whew…."
I returned to the shaded alley and leaned my back against the wall.
My head was stuffed full of storm clouds, so I decided to sort things out one by one.
One: I had come back two years in time.
Two: my senior was alive.
Three: somewhere along the way, I'd been called a Highest-Ranking Cadre.
What part of me looked like a Highest-Ranking Cadre? One glance and anyone could tell I was a magical girl.
Anyway, I needed to clear up the misunderstanding. The solution wasn't hard. Just go over and talk.
—I know I look like this, but I'm Seorin. Oh, and I'm from two years in the future…. Um… that is… I came to keep everyone from dying.
The problem was that I hadn't even managed to seize the chance to say any of it.
The moment I'd opened my mouth at the clock tower, a spell had gone off instead. Maybe that had only happened the once. I decided to test it again.
"Um, it's me, Seorin."
Magical Spark.
A fist-sized hole punched clean through the wall across the alley. Something beyond it shattered with a crash.
"……."
So names were out, for a start.
"It's me."
Magical Chain.
A black iron chain erupted from the ground, coiled around an air conditioning unit, and ripped it clean off the wall. The hovering unit sailed in a graceful arc into the recycling pile.
No, why?
This time I covered my mouth with one hand and tried writing my name with a finger.
Magical Arrow.
Mana streaming from my hand gouged a deep scar into an innocent, undeserving wall.
So this method was out too, then. And while we're at it — I'd turned to the dark side, so why were my spells still Magical-something? There were plenty of classier options. Darkness this, Umbra that, take your pick.
The ribbon that had once been the very symbol of a magical girl had fallen away, and the frills that used to flutter so softly now stood jagged, like they could stab.
Poco….
My mascot, who had protected me to the very end. Naming all those countless skills — absorbed and synthesized and created and erased, too many to count — that, Poco had said, was his job. Well, except Magical Death Beam. That one I'd named myself.
But anyway… this was no small problem.
My emotions were flowing straight into my spells. The more desperate I got, the more urgent, the more earnest — the bigger the magic that came out.
Which meant that if I stood in front of my senior and explained myself with everything I had.
My senior would be deleted.
Wait a moment.
I could just write it down.
Truly, I am the kind of person I am. That wonderful kind of person whose ideas come storming in without rest.
Let's see… paper. Right — that flyer I saw earlier. Vmmm. Target acquired.
"Heh heh heh."
Magical Burn.
Fire bloomed in my hand.
"……."
Ash drifted down between my fingers. I decided to change course.
The wall. Yes, the wall! Walls don't burn.
"Heh heh heh. I am, truly, a genius."
I raised my index finger and pressed it to the wall. The instant I drew the first stroke — Seo — the wall cracked wide open. Fissures spiderwebbed along the path of my finger, and the character was swallowed whole by the splitting stone.
I tried a second character. The cracks spread wider.
I stepped back about three paces to survey my handiwork.
Two deep gouges were carved into the wall. Depending on the angle, they looked like something razor-sharp had raked across it twice — once diagonally, once straight across.
Honestly speaking, it looked like a threat.
…This is a bit much.
I pressed my palm against the neighboring wall to smooth out the scratches, and the entire wall came down.
One thing was now certain: whatever I did, it would remain in the form of something broken.
Perhaps that was because the act of dragging up every last emotion to destroy the Calamity had been, at its core, an act meant to destroy.
Which meant that this body could only break things — and that if I didn't want to break something, I had to do nothing at all.
After all the trouble of finally getting a chance… because I didn't want it to end that way, the solution I arrived at was this:
"Hold on… there is a way, isn't there?"
If I couldn't move myself, I just needed a proxy. Someone who would think exactly as I did.
Sector B sat on the eastern outskirts of the city.
A cluster of logistics warehouses, the kind of place where the occasional strange mana reading would flare up — and where most of those readings turned out to be false alarms. Which was why the freshest jobs went to the freshest rookies.
Our team had only just been formed, and we were desperate — desperately desperate — for government support. Which meant that even chores this trivial had to be accepted without a word of complaint.
As the team's rookie, drafted for the government's little publicity stunt, I had spent that night pacing back and forth between the warehouses, countless times, killing the clock.
Naturally, nothing was found. And the next day, my senior died.
Go there, and he'll be there.
That overeager me — so drunk on having just awakened, so eager to prove myself I'd charge at anything.
Beside the patrol zone, under a streetlight, there was a convenience store. Through the window I could see a boy sitting with the store's light glowing at his back.
Slurp, slurp. Padding thrown over his school uniform, he was huffing and blowing at his ramen, the cup's torn lid propped up as a tray.
I stopped, and I observed myself.
The height, shorter than mine now. The bowl-cut hair I'd hacked off myself, thanks to the awkward length it always grew to whenever my transformation came undone. And the bandage above his eyebrow — the medal of honor from that ferocious battle where my body had a very frank conversation with Senior Yuha.
Every detail came back, vivid and sharp.
The boy gave a short, happy slurp, then broke into a coughing fit and quietly dabbed at his eyes like something had caught in his throat.
Look at him. He's basically already somebody's wife.
Watching the back of a boy draining even the sodium-drowned broth, I steeled my resolve.
That boy had lost nothing.
Poco was alive. My senior was alive. His best friend, his juniors, his teammates — all of them, alive. He'd never been to a funeral. He'd never had to bury a coffin with his own hands. And he'd never lain awake at night, night after night, repeating names under his breath — terrified that if he forgot even one, it would be gone forever.
Right. Your biggest worry right now is probably just how to get through one more tedious day.
My throat burned, all at once. Mana leaked out through the fingertips pressed over my mouth, and the streetlight flickered once.
Get a grip.
I was here to use that boy.
Me, using myself. Surely there's no problem with that.
And so I approached myself — the me who had once been hopelessly, pathologically obsessed with women.
The light spilling from the store traced the curves of a woman walking closer.
Rich volume, a cinched waist, hips that practically had wolf-whistles bursting out of them on their own. The overall line was drawn bold and delicious.
The boy looked up and hurriedly wiped his lips with his collar.
"Huh?"
Both hands busy smoothing his hair, he produced — from who knows where — a spray, and went pssh, into his wide-open mouth. A breath freshener.
"Miss, you're really, really pretty."
A slight, knowing nod. Having committed the woman to memory, the boy was in his mind already cradling his grandchildren, and completed a single elegant theorem.
This was destiny.
"Ah, I'm normally not like this, it's just… you're really so pretty…."
This time there was no answer. Instead, the woman tilted her head — only the tiniest bit. White hair slid across her shoulder, baring her collarbone.
The boy barely smothered his hammering heart as a single mistake dawned on him: he'd carelessly assumed that the person in front of him could, of course, speak.
"C-could it be that you… can't talk? Oh, I'm so sorry! Please forget everything I just said."
The woman, who had nodded with devastating allure, sat down across from him. At a distance so close her breath might reach him at any moment, questions came firing out — who are you, what do you do.
"I, um… this is a secret, but I'm actually with the government. Not that I'm bragging or anything, but a little while ago I took down a monster all by mysel—"
The woman turned her head and let out a sigh.
Oh no, did I come on too strong? Honestly, what is wrong with me.
"No wait, I mean, not all by myself. My senior did cut off both its arms for me, but I was the one who finished i—"
The woman slowly shook her head side to side. Clearly, the answer produced at this critical juncture had struck her as dubious.
This wouldn't do. Decisive measures were needed — something to flip the situation on its head.
That was when I noticed her body trembling, ever so slightly.
"You're cold, aren't you, Miss? Oh, hold on, I've got a heat pack."
Pretty enough, and she was a noona, plain and simple. This heat pack was vital resources for surviving night patrol, but what did that matter.
"I've got a spare. You can have mine, use it all you want."
It was my entire net worth. I was going to freeze to death. And yet I was glad.
Because she smiled.
"Huh? Huh?"
Her upper body leaned in close. The streetlight crackled and flickered. Her breath brushed his lips, his cheek.
Arriving at his ear, her mouth opened.
"…You."
Wait. This person can talk after all?
And yet that voice — so bewitching, so utterly decadent — was very hard to refuse.
"Y-yes, n-noona…."
"I find you, quite simply, delightful."
"......."
Her breath curled deep into his ear.
"There's a small favor I'd like to ask you, noona's favor."
In place of a boy who had already lost every last thread of his reason, his body answered on its own.
"Yes. What is it?"
"That senior of yours — could you pass along one little message for me?"