"Grandmother Is Still Alive." - 2
Every catastrophe in the original story boiled down to a single word: ignorance.
No one knew that a magical girl's power could grow through the pursuit of her own dreams.
No one knew what magical girls were meant to exist for.
And so they coveted one another's strength through theft, devouring girls in senseless, merciless ways.
Society before the first Blooming magical girl appeared was a spectacle to behold. For the sake of starlight that granted only a few extra casts of Basic Magic, the alliance led by the Fujimoto Group sorted girls into two piles — those who would become fertilizer, and those who would become their army.
Then came the Blooming of a Natural 2-Star, the Magical Girl of [Protection].
Girls with genuine talent among the Natural 2-Stars, like Ichika, reacted strongly to destiny and achieved their Blooming in the thick of battle. But by then, the atmosphere of a society that treated magical girls as nothing more than a resource had already passed the point of no return.
Magical girls who complied with the existing order were beloved idols on television programs, worshipped as miracle-working girls who wielded the power of healing. Behind that glittering facade, however, girls were sacrificed to fuel the corporate arms race — the competition to hoard magical girls and refine their quality.
It was, quite literally, a war.
"Oh, this is way comfier than I expected?"
"It suits you, Ichika."
Ichika's Bloomed magical girl outfit was a white sailor uniform so antiquated it evoked the Showa era. The top was cut to show off sharply defined abs, a huge green ribbon hung at her throat, and the hem was frayed and ragged — so even though it was a feminine outfit, it radiated a rough, feral energy.
Struggle.
The two characters stitched across the green assault vest draped over Ichika's shoulders seemed to pulse with the fighting spirit of a tiger's stripes — the raw will to fight and win.
Over it all, her ponytail whipped wildly in the wind. A brimming, confident smile and eyes that burned like fire.
One look at that commanding presence, and you could understand why the girls who had once been test subjects followed Ichika as their leader. Granted, her deeply responsible nature played its part too.
"Waaaah! Boss, you look so cool!"
"Invincible, sir, that's what you are, sir!"
"We all failed, but you pulled it off on your very first try, Boss."
Unfortunately, aside from Kyoko, none of the other 1-Star magical girls had managed to find the key to Blooming even within their mental worlds. Even Kyoko had only gotten as far as a vague sense of *something* before waking up — and in the end, she too had failed.
"I-It took me forever, and you succeeded this fast?!"
"Haha, thanks."
Haruko, for instance, was a case of someone who had forgotten a dream she once knew — and it was through recovering it that she achieved her Blooming. Even so, Ichika had beaten her to it, finding her key faster than anyone.
Ichika, who had been grinning with confidence, rubbed her nose with a flick of her hand.
"Never thought it'd be a place I only saw once as a kid."
It was her seventh year growing up in the orphanage. On a field trip with everyone from the orphanage, she had happened to spot a punching machine.
Ichika had tugged on the supervising caregiver's sleeve and begged:
"Teacher! Me! Me! I wanna try that!"
"No. The other children are already on the bus."
Clutching the teacher's hand, she had glanced back wistfully as the punching machine dwindled away beyond the bus window.
That image had become the primordial picture of the concept called freedom in Ichika's unconscious. And this time, she had leapt off the bus, sprinted to the punching machine, and thrust her fist at it with everything she had.
Green light blazed up from that full-force punch, and her Blooming was achieved.
"Funny — now that I look like this, all those vague, foggy things feel crystal clear."
The signature skill of the Magical Girl of [Freedom]:
Fighting Instinct.
Wuuuung—!
"Wha—?!"
"Eek…!"
"Kyaa?!"
The instant green energy coiled around Ichika's entire body, the atmosphere of the apartment courtyard changed in a heartbeat. The trees trembled, the buildings shook, and every cell in the body began screaming warnings: this is a battlefield. The surging aura widened like a storm devouring everything in its path, spreading further and further.
"Whoops — that's about far enough."
The aura, which had seemed bound to expand forever, faltered for a moment, then contracted again — shrinking down until it did no more than wrap around Ichika and me.
Green light gleamed in her eyes.
"Shirogane, about what we were talking about earlier."
"Fujimoto? Or the stars?"
"Nah — the fighting part. I figure I can teach you that if we throw hands once."
Thud—
Ichika knocked her fists together with a heavy sound, and grinned.
A beast's smile, teeth bared. A smile as bright and refreshing as a sunflower blooming in midsummer.
"Oh, and no other abilities. Use those, and I'm actually dead."
"…I'll go easy on you. Still — if you think you're going to get hurt, you have to tell me?"
"You're starting to see the problem already, huh."
Pop!
Muttering to herself, Ichika blinked once — and vanished from my field of vision.
Where is she?
My body froze with panic. And then — killing intent.
An icy, needle-like chill bored toward the right side of my face, and I raised my arm on pure instinct to block it.
WHAM!
With a sound like knuckles rapping a wall, a fist slammed home, heavy and solid.
The force behind that fist, shimmering with green energy, was something I could endure — but the shock of a fight erupting out of nowhere had thrown me so badly that I poured every ounce of focus into simply stopping it.
"Ngh?!"
"Whoa, you're seriously sturdy."
Ichika confirmed that my attention had locked onto her fist, then twisted her body with fluid grace and snapped out a roundhouse kick.
Whuum—
Her foot traced an enormous arc through the air. Like a hammer throw, the centrifugal force gathered momentum — but for all the power packed into it, the attack was comparatively slow to arrive.
This time I reacted properly, unfurling a barrier across its incoming path.
Tung!
The roundhouse kick that had wormed in from my blind spot was stopped — but Ichika converted her rotational momentum directly into another twist of her body and drove a fist down at me from midair.
Whuum.
Tung!
On and on it went — the whistle of wind, the endless chains of rotation and strikes. Alternating between kicks and punches with her whole body, she moved like a living storm. Every time I deflected another heavy blow from that green-streaked tempest closing in on me, I felt myself sinking deeper into it.
Whuum.
Tung!
Several exchanges passed, and then came an attack that entered squarely within my sight. Reading the path of the fist as it stretched toward me in what felt like slow motion, I leaned my body back and dodged.
Shff!
The sharp hiss of parted air. Because I had evaded rather than blocked, Ichika's balance wavered.
For the first time, she failed to chain her attacks together and her form broke apart.
An opening!
If I struck there, Ichika would be badly hurt.
Flinch!
In that instant, the thought snagged my ankle like a trap, and I couldn't take the shot.
"Heh."
Ichika smiled as if she'd known all along. As if the opening had been nothing but a lie, the fist wrapped in green energy cut through the air, growing fiercer with every blow.
The storm returned — an unrelenting cascade of strikes. Paralyzed by the terror of having completely lost control of the flow, I could do nothing but throw up barrier after barrier in a desperate scramble to defend.
Nothing but defense.
"Found it!"
Instead of striking my barrier head-on, Ichika kicked off it like a Roman legionary vaulting his shield, launching herself two meters overhead. Mid-air, she twisted into a somersault and drove her heel down at me like a guillotine.
KRRRUMBLE!
With a crack of thunder, the kick packed with green energy shot down like a lance, spitting explosive force.
KAANG!
I barely managed to haul my barrier up into the air — and in the same breath, Ichika flung her body backward, dropped low, and thrust a fist up at me from beneath.
The fist.
The fist was right in front of my eyes.
I watched it close in on my face, inch by inch, and braced myself.
Too late!
But defense that late was worthless, and I steeled myself for the pain to follow.
"That's enough… you."
Ichika let the power drain from her fist and spoke quietly.
"You've never really fought, have you? You don't want to hurt anyone, but you don't know how hard you can hit without hurting them. And I can feel it — you don't know how much you can afford to take without it hurting, either."
"……."
She had struck the target dead center.
Ichika gave a little "heh" of a laugh and went on.
"Ever since I Bloomed, there's something I can see. I get a rough sense of how strong someone is, and how they ought to fight."
"I see."
"The way I see it, you're a tiger who's so scared of getting scratched by ants that she's retracted her claws and is fighting with nothing but her tail."
She wasn't wrong.
With large-scale illusion magic alone, I had confidence — two years of practice had seen to that. But there had never been a single opportunity to train for small, close-quarters engagements like the escape had been.
I don't want to hurt anyone.
That feeling acted as a brake, preventing me from using my capabilities to their full extent. At the same time, there was the quiet assurance that as a 3-Star magical girl, I almost never got hurt. Together, they had forged a heavy shackle in a corner of my heart — one that let me absorb blows but blocked every path toward taking the offensive.
Preparing for an apocalypse of mutual slaughter while hating to hurt anyone — I really am a walking contradiction.
Ichika declared, brimming with confidence:
"I'll teach you. How to hit without hurting, and how to be hit without pain."
"…Thank you, Ichika."
"Aw, it's nothing. It's what a leader's supposed to do."
"…I'm not a leader."
Maybe this flaw of mine would have come back as a fatal mistake if I'd been left alone with it. That Ichika's salvation let me shore it up — perhaps that's what you'd call luck.
"Thank you."
"What you saved me from is way more than this could ever repay, you know."
"Which is exactly why I never agreed to be a leader."
And with that, we threw ourselves into training for hours on end, losing all track of time as we traded blows.
"Aaagh!"
Finally spent, Ichika flopped down onto the courtyard ground, folded her legs under her, and let out a weak groan. All those hours of sparring, and she had never once skimped on advice about technique.
"You pick things up this fast after just a little coaching — why were you so timid about it?"
"Because there was nobody to tell me where to hit to knock someone out, or how to actually subdue them."
The ground around the courtyard where Ichika and I had been hammering away at each other for hours was pocked with small craters — the residue of failed power control and stray, off-target attacks.
The astonishing physical specs of a 3-Star magical girl. I used them the way a character in a game learns a skill the instant the skill book is opened — mirroring Ichika's demonstrations, spoken and shown, and absorbing technique after technique at a blistering pace.
If this had been real combat, how many skulls would I have cracked by now?
Even so, I still couldn't fully contain the terrifying power bursting out of this body, and like a marksman failing to zero a gun, my shots kept landing as craters with a pop-pop of bursting balloons.
Fortunately, Ichika was the toughest of all the Natural 2-Star magical girls mentioned in the original story — a bona fide martial artist — so she absorbed even those attacks with room to spare and kept the training going.
Thank goodness none of that leaked onto the fences or the apartment building.
A paper wolf, backlit by the setting sun, handed Ichika a cup ramen.
"Oh, thanks!"
"It's already dinnertime, huh."
By the time Ichika and I had finished our long bout, the sun was hanging low in the sky.
The eleven girls besides the two of us found eating in the cramped little room too much of a squeeze, so they had settled into a circle at one corner of the courtyard, eating together.
At some point, the wolf had fetched hot water, and it handed me a cup ramen too.
"Thanks."
Taking the cup, I stole a glance over at Haruko.
Haruko was deep in animated conversation with the magical girl among them who loved manga.
Even as she talked, her right hand kept scratching away with a quill pen — dispatching the paper wolves on trivial errands, while the paper sheep and pigs circled the area on lookout duty. It was thanks to that distributed multitasking that Ichika and I had been able to brawl without a single sound escaping the illusion barrier wrapped around the apartment.
"……."
I had always lived under the assumption that I could survive the apocalypse on my own. And yet, when I actually thought about it — from two years ago up to this very moment, I had been getting by on someone's help, leaning on someone, the entire time.
"*Slurp* — hey, Shirogane."
"Don't talk with your mouth full, Ichika."
"*Slurp* — that Odaiba broadcast thing. When are we doing it?"
"Hmm. Ideally we'd aim for a live broadcast with the highest possible visibility."
"A-as far as I-I know, th-they're planning to gather magical girls together soon for a t-talk show!"
I blinked at the out-of-nowhere remark and turned to Haruko.
"A talk show?"
"Yes… a f-famous idol agency has s-specifically formed a magical girl group."
"……."
Come to think of it, a magical girl who hadn't Bloomed was just an ordinary person who happened to wield a strange power. Treating them as girls with a neat little trick wasn't hard to believe.
But every time I saw this modest, casual treatment of magical girls — in a world where magical girls had functioned as the colossal force driving a society toward collapse — I found I still couldn't get used to it.
And this, too, ultimately comes from the world not understanding what a magical girl's power truly means.
To change this world's ignorance-driven drift toward the apocalypse, I had no choice but to link the fates of the stars — and force magical girls to Bloom before everyone's eyes.
The gravity of destiny.
What separated Natural 1-Stars from Natural 2-Stars came down to a single thing: whether or not one possessed that gravitational pull. A girl who had already awakened to a dream that bordered on destiny held the makings of a 2-Star magical girl.
Natural 1-Star girls could, through relentless effort, Bloom and attain great power as well — but they could never rival the vast star of destiny carried by a Natural 2-Star.
Destiny.
Dreams that walked hand in hand with something connected to the world itself exerted a powerful mutual attraction upon one another — shifting, changing, evolving.
The power granted to a hundred girls who will live out their epithets made flesh.
The Blooming of the Natural 2-Star [Protection], and the war in which 2-Star magical girls threw themselves fully into the fray — those had bent destiny's course toward the apocalypse. But if I, bearing the power of a 3-Star said to carry the strength to move the world, could exert a different gravity upon these 2-Star girls…
If the world witnessed what the Blooming of these girls — born before the war — truly looked like, the public's perception would change.
We needed as many 2-Star girls as possible watching — so that the key to Blooming their dreams could reach them.
And the name of this operation:
"We're executing Operation Odaiba Magic Show."
"……."
"……."
"……."
The whole cozy circle of diners went dead silent, even as I was still mid-thought.
"Wow, that's lame."