Change #1
"I'll do it!! I'll keep chasing them myself!!"
"Yamashita, you're crossing the line."
"We've let them slip through our fingers twice now! Just give me one chance to make it right!"
"Yamashita."
At the sheer stubbornness of it, Department Director Mori's anger drained away, replaced by a long, heavy sigh.
He was an insolent young pup, no question about it, but within the Metropolitan Police Department, whenever talk turned to naming candidates for the next generation of senior posts, his name was always the first one out of anyone's mouth. Watching a man like that throw away every shred of masculine pride to whine like a child — well, it stirred something almost pitiable in him, too.
"Pretend the last operation never happened. Everyone forgets. As far as we're concerned, it was never our business."
"Ghh…"
"It's how we've always survived, hasn't it? Flowing like water with public opinion, bending with circumstance."
"Please… I'm begging you…!"
Yamashita bowed so deeply that the crown of his head vanished from view entirely.
"The Superintendent himself has ordered us to clamp down. The magical girls, the Boss-zima incident — forget all of it."
"……"
"The man at the center of it, Councilor Fujimoto, is willing to let it pass quietly. So what in the world are you chasing?"
Only recently, Yamashita had basked in the Superintendent's favor, serving as his personal courier. But somewhere along the line, the information had simply stopped flowing.
A discarded messenger.
Tap.
Department Director Mori reached out with a hand of sympathy toward the subordinate who had behaved more rudely toward him than anyone ever had.
"Take a few days off. Then come back."
"……"
Mori walked straight past him, and the corridor of Investigation Division 1 was left to Yamashita alone, still bent at the waist. And in a shadowed corner of that corridor, a five-colored afterimage flickered, faint and iridescent.
July 18th
"If you!! With your greed!! Sacrifice!! The! Girls!!!—"
"I! Will never! Wake! The stars! Hidden! In darkness!! Into mere! Dreams!!!—"
"Frrm… grrh… hss… jih…!!"
I honestly couldn't tell how many more times they planned to torment me over that one moment of overwrought emotion.
It had been two weeks since the "Débutante of the Girls." Early summer, with its occasional cooling breeze, had crossed some invisible threshold at the first cicada song and arrived in full force, dragging the oppressive heat of real summer along behind it.
It had all begun with Sato Hana's simple walk. From there, events had rolled and tumbled over one another until they evolved into a confrontation of [Fujimoto VS Me].
Because of my decision, society was changing. The future of the original story I knew seemed to be quietly dissolving away. And at the same time, something deep in my chest felt gloriously unburdened.
Even while preparing for a world that was fated to become an apocalypse, I had never managed to shake off the bonds I'd formed — the Sato family, Master. Even holding the overwhelming advantage of a born 3-Star magical girl, what I truly wanted, deep down, was not to harm anyone, but to save them.
Contradiction. Absurdity. Fear.
These past two years of my life had been nothing but a deception I inflicted on myself, and it had hurt the whole way through.
The blooming magical girls who weren't supposed to appear until December of this year were now being sighted all over society in mid-July. And the leader of Flag — the girl who should have painted her whole body in blood, screaming for revenge — had shown up at my workplace and was lounging around, cheekily enjoying the peace.
"Heh! You're such a greedy-guts, Fujimoto!"
"Give your blessings to the magical girls, you must not!"
"……"
It was a bit of playacting that would have looked outright dangerous coming from anyone else. Fortunately, Master was out buying a new batch of coffee beans, so the two of them had the place to themselves — leaving the cafe occupied by nothing but two beggars who'd ordered a single espresso (200 yen) two hours ago and had been loitering ever since.
With their group down from thirteen to three, it really is quiet around here.
Just before our final escape, I'd learned the name of the police chief who came storming in on us, so I had secretly planted one of my clones as a stakeout inside the Metropolitan Police Department to keep track of the situation.
Fujimoto, who I'd expected to fly into a raging fury after the incident, had stayed silent. In fact, she had signaled her intention to quietly sweep the psychic-weaponization project under the rug.
After that, the Fujimoto Group's spokesperson refused to answer a single question from the reporters, whose shouting grew more incensed with each passing day.
A mistake made in a single moment — and the mountain of responsibilities that came rushing in behind it. And yet Haruko had smiled brightly, beaming, determined to shoulder every last one of them herself.
Just as Miss Shirogane said — I want to try doing it on my own.
Right before she went home, those were the last words she offered me, along with her thanks. And so, three weeks after the day she ran away, Haruko returned to the place she had come from.
Oh my, really? Well, of course I'll help you~
Mrs. Sato, it turned out, had been agonizing over whether to quit her job at the small family-run workshop in the countryside where she'd always worked — there was no one left to hand her duties over to, and Hana was the reason she'd considered leaving at all. But when four magical girls in a row declared their willingness to work there, the elderly widowed proprietress welcomed them so warmly she reportedly told all four of them to come in as her daughters.
"Ask that social worker you know."
Master said it gruffly, without looking up — and he never once asked where those three orphaned magical girls had come from, or why I was so concerned with finding them a place in the world. The very next day, he drove a van over from the Christian welfare center and ferried them all the way to the neighborhood where the cafe stood.
"Boss! Me and Nene were gonna go back to our old orphanage anyway."
"I talked to the director on the phone. She said she searched everywhere for us."
The two of them learned that the director of their original orphanage had been worried enough to put out a nationwide search for them. They contacted her in Hokkaido, and that very day the director was on a plane down to fetch them — the girls left that evening, together with her, for Hokkaido.
"Boss. No — Ichika-chan! *Sob*… Thank you for protecting us all this time. You take care of yourself, okay?!"
"Heh, why're you two bawling? You're going somewhere good."
And so the gathering ended in parting. These were girls whose fate should have begun with the tragedy of becoming experimental subjects and ended in war. Instead, in this new flow of time, they had gone off in search of their own lives.
The day everyone had left, the three of us — me, Kyoko, and Ichika — lay down to sleep. Ichika, soft-hearted as she was, seemed to be crying quietly, muffling her sobs in the dark.
Naturally, Kyoko and I pretended not to notice.
Setting aside how the media tiptoes around Fujimoto, the public reaction has been surprisingly muted, too.
Maybe we'd rescued them too early, and the whole thing simply lacked impact. Not a week goes by without some short news item about a young office worker at a black company choosing to end their own life, beaten down by office politics and endless abuse. A world where young people literally work themselves to death doesn't even make headlines.
The exploitation of teenage magical girls — with zero casualties — apparently lacked the impact to rise above the gossip columns.
"……"
"Ahh, bo-ring. Leader, they've all gotten used to it. Nobody reacts anymore."
"Boss! There's something new posted on Witch Talk!"
"Oh — looks like Shizuku invented a new magical bread."
"Bread that shrinks in your stomach via psychic power so you can eat twice as much?"
"I-isn't that basically cheating?!"
Corporations wary of colliding with Fujimoto had retreated in a hurry. The magical girl group project itself had collapsed — but the girls who had learned to awaken their own dreams were out in the world, showing off their magic as living expressions of those dreams, each in her own way.
Peace.
With just a single performance, the fate of the magical girls had begun walking, step by step, toward peace.
I murmured it aloud, letting the satisfaction and the lightness wash through me.
"Peace is a good thing…"
"Right? Peace is a good thing."
"That's right!"
"…So why aren't you two going anywhere?"
Ichika and Kyoko froze at my question, suddenly flustered.
"The hell are you on about?"
"That night in Odaiba — did we not become comrades, or did we not?! I demand an answer!"
"That's right! We said 'let's work together' and everything!!"
"…Is that what that was supposed to mean?"
"So?"
"I was utterly defeated."
"I see."
Kaede lay prostrate, feeling the still-mending collarbone rattle loosely with every breath. It had taken her two full weeks to rise from where that fight had left her.
A 2-Star magical girl's natural, overwhelming regeneration. Even that extraordinary recovery had needed a fortnight just to lift her off the ground.
"So even among psychics, the gap between the bloomed and the unbloomed is considerable."
"……"
"Considerable enough that an ordinary girl put a nameless band of kunoichi in a full-body fracture."
"…Please deliver my punishment."
"The judgment is mine to make, Kaede."
"Yes, Elder."
Fujimoto Eiji was neither furious nor rattled. He had been ignorant of psychic power; his opponent had not. He had been ignorant of his opponent's level; his opponent had not. That was simply all there was to it.
What had been expended merely needed replenishing.
"I took you for a bandit seeking to defile the Fujimoto name — and it turns out you were panning for gold, having glimpsed the real thing."
"……"
"I nearly committed the folly of spending warriors as if they were common foot soldiers."
"……"
"All the better. Now I can furnish Sumire with finer blades."
"……"
Without a trace of attachment, Fujimoto Eiji left the darkened room. He had no further interest in a litmus test already spent — not when finer blades awaited.
"From this day forward, you will attend Sumire."
"Yes, Elder."
Even as she answered from the floor, Kaede couldn't stop worrying at the loose rattle in her collarbone. More precisely, she couldn't stop thinking about the person who had put that wound there.
An orphan, just like her. And yet — free.
Beneath those fists, Kaede had collapsed without any hope of standing. Everything she had clenched her teeth and trained for, her whole life long, had crumbled.
"A hunting dog with no will of its own? You put it down — that's all!"
She envied that free girl.
Creak.
"Someday… I swear it…"
And without her noticing, a single feeling — one that a ninja was supposed to abandon — had begun to take root in Kaede's heart.