The Colorless Magical Girl — 1
A shabby little room in a forgotten corner of the city.
Today, once again, I woke in my bleak, barren room without a single stick of furniture.
"Aaah—hm. Hm. One, two, three."
Every morning I loosened up my sleep-stiff neck, and every morning for two years now, the same thin voice had come out of it. By now I was used to it.
The rough, cheap blanket spread across the floor. The women's training clothes hanging on the wall. The pale, slender fingers in front of my eyes. And the date blinking on the screen of an outdated flip phone the moment I flipped it open.
June 6, 2011.
Exactly twelve years before the day I died at twenty-seven.
Or, to put it precisely, I had returned to the past of "the Japan inside a novel" that I'd read back in middle school.
This was not reality. It was the world of a light novel.
The place where I had spent the last two years.
…….
A light novel—often shortened to "ranobe"—is a genre of subculture fiction, typically printed in a smaller format than ordinary novels and illustrated in a cute, girlish art style. Among them, the one I had read in middle school and now found myself living inside, Magical Girl HAZARD, belonged to the bleakest of them all: the so-called "grimdark" magical girl genre.
Magical girl.
A word that made the hearts of children everywhere flutter. The word that sent throngs of wide-eyed kids stampeding toward their televisions like zombies every Sunday morning, just to sit before their hero. Those mischievous pranksters of a bygone era, flaunting their rainbow-colored hair, leading the children glued to their screens away to a land of dreams and hope—the shy first loves of an entire generation.
But one day, that perception changed completely.
An anime that appeared like a comet, delighting fans who held the pure innocence of the magical girl genre dear, with its gorgeous animation and lavish action sequences.
Magical Girl Sakura Blossom.
(Mahou Shoujo Sakura Blossom)
Officially abbreviated as MSB, this series contained a single episode that utterly rewrote the meaning of the words "magical girl."
—Sis Haruka?
—Kyaaaaagh!
Haruka, the dependable senior character who had been cheerfully battling storybook-styled monsters, let her guard down mid-fight—and was decapitated on the spot.
The shocking truth came to light.
—What are you talking about? You're seeds of witches. "Magical girls" is the more accurate name for what you really are.
[Magical girls rise from the despair they were granted in exchange for their wishes—and fight back against fate itself!]
MSB's daring gambit—injecting despair into a genre overflowing with dreams and hope—swept up a storm of popularity. To be sure, the original MSB dragged its characters through wretched circumstances only to celebrate the triumph of the human spirit.
But the works that imitated MSB's success afterward were, without exception, grimdark for grimdark's sake. Stories where characters suffered not to overcome anything, but simply to suffer. Misery manufactured for misery's own sake.
The Magical Girl HAZARD that I had read was a child of that very trend.
Nothing more than an imitation stitched together from scraps of a masterpiece.
The story of characters who existed only to become unhappy.
A punishing tale in which the protagonist, armed with a righteous heart, strove against absurd and unreasonable circumstances—only to be crushed, in the end, by a despairing finale.
Through the efforts of a publisher famous for translating nothing but trash, it had even been translated and published in Korea.
"And I'm the one who read it."
And then I woke up inside that world.
Rustle.
As I rose from the floor, silver hair brushed ticklishly against the nape of my neck.
When I'd first opened my eyes in this world as a silver-haired girl out of nowhere, I had been utterly, completely lost.
"……"
I took the Glass Star I'd carried in my pocket for the past two years and gazed at it.
A transparent glass star, within which starlight of every color swirled and raged like a rainbow caught in a storm.
The moment I first saw it, I had no choice but to despair.
If this were simply the past of the world I'd lived in, I would have clawed my way back to my mother no matter what it took. But in the world of Magical Girl HAZARD, where this Glass Star existed, there was only one way out.
An early summer day, just beginning to turn warm.
Tokyo's Shibuya Scramble Crossing was packed solid with people waiting for the light to change.
The same unchanging daily routine. The countless crowds that gathered there.
Office workers, weary from a Monday morning's drudgery, were eyeballing the restaurants across the street, agonizing over what to eat for lunch to quiet their growling stomachs.
Ugh, I'm starving.
What should I have for lunch today?
College girls out shopping chatted among themselves as they eyed the 109 department store visible on the far side of the crossing.
My makeup's starting to slide. Should I fix it in the bathroom?
Which store was having the sale again? I can't remember.
A perfectly ordinary scene, no different from any other day.
Twelve o'clock, exactly.
The sky turned red.
"Huh? What is this?"
"A movie shoot or something?"
"What...the...?"
Along with a massive, bone-deep resonance, a somewhat weary woman's voice rolled out across the crossing. At the same instant, every monitor, television, and phone screen in the entire world flushed red, all of them emitting the very same broadcast.
An unmistakable anomaly.
"Ugh... hrrk..."
"Gaaaagh!!"
The moment the woman spoke her own name, the people in the street began clutching their heads or retching. And beneath the wall of shrieking static, her name was drowned out entirely—unheard.
The woman's listless voice carried, somewhere within it, a faint but unmistakable flicker of anger.
And then her explanation began again.
One girl waiting at the crossing found, at some point, a glowing Glass Star sitting in her pocket, and shrieked.
"Wha—?! When did this get in here?!"
"I—I didn't get one!"
Girls who had been proudly flaunting their stars in the street heard those words and hid them inside their clothes in a panic.
People who, until that very moment, hadn't given each other a second glance now began regarding one another with suspicion.
One last remark, appended in a very, very small voice.
"……"
The scenery returned to normal.
That day, the whole world burned white-hot over the incident.
The original story had finally begun.
To be precise, "that incident" about a year from now would mark the true contents of volume one—but from this point forward, I could consider myself woven into the current of the story.
I was secretly breaking out in a cold sweat amid the crowd.
Because I knew what was coming after this.
Because I knew that nothing ahead of us would ever be peaceful again.
"What on earth was that?"
"Hmm... well, nothing actually happened, so aren't we fine?"
"Probably some promo event for a movie or a game."
Murmur, murmur.
Barely minutes had passed since the sky above the entire world had bled red and some incomprehensible entity had handed out objects to every person on Earth in a language they could all understand.
And still, people wanted to go back to their ordinary lives.
Because they believed it had nothing to do with them.
"……"
I quietly raised my Glass Star and looked at it.
Inside the transparent star, three brilliant lights arranged themselves in a triangle, blazing with enormous starlight.
It was because of this colorless Glass Star.
Because of it, I had learned this world was a fictional story—and despaired.
And because it granted me the power to escape this world, I had found hope.
Three lights.
A power called an "innate three-star"—equal in magnitude to that of the four strongest survivors who outlasted the original story to its very end.
It was my strength to endure the countless battles steeped in senseless cruelty, and my final hope of borrowing this world's colossal power to return to my own.
"Mother."
I cradled this last hope carefully against my chest and murmured.
"I will make it back. I swear it."
My previous life.
Shim Hyunwoo closed his eyes one cold winter's day in 2023, in a frozen back alley. And in another world, he awoke again as Shirogane Hikari.
"……"
Pressing down the sadness that rose again at the thought of my mother, I looked up at the sky.
A humid early summer's day, June 2011.
An apocalypse story in which most of humanity perishes in the fighting and only a handful of magical girls survive. On this day, the day of the first incident in Magical Girl HAZARD, the sky had returned to its usual, ordinary blue.
"So... what should I have for lunch?"
"Mm, let's just grab a burger or something."
"How about a katsudon?"
Watching the crowd hurry back from the extraordinary to the ordinary mere minutes after the anomaly, I slipped the Glass Star carefully against my breast and turned for home.
Afraid that the tragedy of Magical Girl HAZARD might come crashing down on me at any moment.
"That girl who just walked by got a Glass Star too, didn't she?"
"Really? She was gorgeous."
"Was her hair dyed, you think?"
I was terrified that the lamp of hope I'd received in this unfamiliar world might go out.
I was terrified of everything the future would bring.
I was afraid of it all.