The Colorless Magical Girl - 3
Starlight wrapped around my body, and the figure it revealed was, in a word, a magician.
A white blouse above black suit pants that clung to my legs. A black cape glittering as if soaked in starlight. A black staff in one hand, a black silk top hat in the other. I was dressed exactly as one might picture when someone said the word magician.
"If only it weren't quite so tight in the crotch, this would be perfect."
It was the inevitable drawback of an outfit tailored to emphasize the chest in contrast with a slender waist. My costume was, simply put, a business suit reinterpreted through the lens of subculture—meaning it was a suit that flaunted the striking figure of the woman I had become.
Crack!
I slammed the black staff into the ground, and rainbow-colored sparks scattered across the concrete. Watching them dance, I elegantly settled the silk top hat—my chosen personal armament—onto my head, and the three star ornaments adorning my cape glittered in the moonlight.
Because a magical girl's power reflects the dream held within her starlight, her abilities brim with individuality. Some breathe fire, rain down lightning, or blast water—the most primal of elemental concepts. Others raise unbreakable walls, summon transforming robots, or call machine guns into their hands.
But beyond these wildly unique powers, there existed three Basic Magic spells shared by all magical girls.
The first was Psychokinesis.
Telekinesis, of all things, was provided as a basic ability. This was the spell magical girls used most often, and the level one could reach with it varied enormously depending on skill and talent. But when wielded by the hands of a natural 3-Star like me—one of the strongest four—even this basic magic could rival the unique privileges of other magical girls.
Just gotta control the force carefully.
It hadn't been long since I bloomed. For quite a while, I couldn't restrain my strength at all and simply crushed everything I touched. It took two years of steady practice before I finally managed to lift and move a structure without shattering it.
Maybe the reason I can't use this power properly is because I pried into fate when I wasn't meant to.
Crack!
As that thought crossed my mind, I tapped the staff sharply against the ground. Light of every color poured out of my colorless star, swirling around the rundown apartment's empty lot until it formed a hemispherical barrier that sealed off all sound from the outside world.
A unique domain.
The magic of a true magical girl—one who has completed her bloom and mastered transformation—carries the dream and destiny written in her star, manifesting with its own distinct attribute. In my case, it warped into illusion magic bearing the destiny of [Deception], granting every spell I cast the ever-shifting quality of a phantasm woven through it.
If I draped a curtain of illusions over the apartment lot and rewrote the scenery there, I could practice large-scale magic without anyone noticing. Of course, in a place packed with people, someone might sense the wrongness of it—but not here.
Screeeeee—
With an unpleasant groan, the shipping container used as a storage shed rose from the center of the lot, drifting upward bit by bit until it hovered ten meters in the air. The whole process looked like a scene from a cosmic horror film. Would this be what it looked like if some enormous invisible giant had seized the container and lifted it in its fist?
The amount of starlight a 3-Star magical girl possessed by default was truly monstrous. Even putting on a performance of this scale, I felt no fatigue whatsoever. I could sustain it for quite a while yet, even while running other training on the side.
So I moved straight on to the second Basic Magic.
The second Basic Magic was Blink.
Short-range warping was, for a magical girl, a basic movement skill.
Whoosh!
I swept the cape that fluttered over my blouse up with one hand, drawing it across my body like a curtain—and for a moment I felt myself peel away from this world, suspended in empty space. All that remained was to set my destination, and I could travel to any point I desired in a single step.
But I went further than that. I split my consciousness.
Whoosh—
On the third floor of the apartment, one 'me' successfully arrived at the room where I lived. In a corner of the empty lot, another 'me' completed a short-range jump. Somewhere in the shadow of the storage shed, yet another 'me' rose successfully into being.
This repeated six times in all, and the 'mes' gathering one by one in the apartment lot numbered seven in total.
The illusions of [Deception] had added the ability to split into copies on top of teleportation.
And the illusions of [Deception] had transformed the third spell as well—Causal Healing.
But that power was of no use at the moment, so I decided to end my training there.
Snap!
The sound of a fingersnap rang out, and every scene vanished as if it had all been a lie, returning the world to the silent stillness of the apartment lot.
Training done, I wiped myself down at the water tap, returned to my room, and flopped onto my bed. Ever since I had awakened the power of a magical girl, I had practiced magic alone—and somehow, it always felt like banging my head against a wall.
If I remember right, the first spells 1-Star magical girls learn to cast on their own are Psychokinesis and Healing.
The story never went into detail about exactly how they used them, but shortly after the magical girls first appeared, people across all of Japan began manifesting psychic abilities of their own.
The healing power magical girls wielded in this world didn't accelerate cells to amplify regeneration. It was magic that, quite literally and causally, made illness or injury into something that had never existed at all. It couldn't restore a severed limb or cure a congenital disability—but even so, the utility of this power was beyond all words.
And so, the moment 1-Star magical girls learned Psychokinesis and Healing, society went half-mad trying to bring the magical girls under its control.
Their value as magical girls skyrocketed with the basic magic alone, but the true revolution was the magical girls' 'Bloom.'
Headhunting for 1-Star magical girls capable of Basic Magic kicked off in earnest, and beneath the surface, research into ability blooming was underway through human experimentation on magical girls with no family to miss them.
Then the experimental subjects—who had realized that the Fujimoto Group was behind it all—rose up in rebellion against the state and the corporations. But the daughter of the Fujimoto family head bloomed as a natural 2-Star, was granted the destiny of [Protection], and repelled every magical girl who stormed in to join the uprising.
From that point on, the magical girls came to understand their own power, and began competing and forming factions as a more 'evolved' breed of humanity.
"......"
Amid the greater chaos that followed, the magical girls wielded absolute social power and began tearing down the existing order.
The beginning of everything. The Shinjuku Incident, unleashed by the Magical Girl of War. The tragedy of Shikishima Yuki, the protagonist caught up in its wake. The society of magical girls in a world broken and remade.
Drifting through those memories, I slipped slowly into sleep—imagining myself enduring it all and returning home to my mother.
"Hah... hah..."
Busujima Haruko—she who had been an 'ordinary middle school girl'—was no longer in her right mind.
Because she had brought a brick down on Yahara, the delinquent girl who tormented her, and knocked her out cold.
The childish taunts mocking her surname, Busujima—especially the emphasis on busu (ugly)—had been only the beginning. Yahara had torn her beloved manga, the stories she cherished most, into shreds and plastered the classroom chalkboard with them. She had rallied the other girls to drive her away from every place where she might have eaten her lunch in peace. And from the day she had been chased out of the bathroom in a barrage of water, forced to eat her meals beside the garbage incinerator—
Haruko had felt something like gunpowder quietly piling up, brick by brick, somewhere deep in her heart.
'Y-you have to put other people down to prove you're... special... or you can't even live, can you!'
After the Red Broadcast, when she was chosen as a magical girl and received proof that she was special, she became certain of it: her way of thinking had been vindicated all along.
'See? I'm the one who's more... than someone like you...!'
But then she heard the rumor that Yahara—the girl who bullied her—had become a magical girl too.
Haruko felt her mind go dizzy and faint.
'Ken-chan! I'm special now, too!'
The day after she watched Yahara bragging to her boyfriend, Yahara had called her out and demanded something of her—and Haruko had felt like she was cornered at the edge of a cliff.
'Hey, a bottom-feeder like you doesn't need those at all, so hand 'em over, got it?'
'N-no! I won't!!'
When she watched Yahara—declaring that more stars would make her all the more special—pin down her small-framed body and forcibly strip her stars away, Haruko felt something heavy and solid press into her hand.
[A magical girl from Arakawa Ward was struck by a steel beam while passing a construction site—and walked away unharmed.]
[This incident has confirmed that magical girls are physically stronger than ordinary people...]
["Compared to a civilian, it's like a magical girl is always wearing protective gear."]
["And these changes are only accelerating."]
That violence—the violence her conscience would have stopped, any other time—was triggered by the news she'd heard that very morning, in the middle of it all.
It wouldn't be a problem. None at all.
Haruko swung what was clenched in her hand, and Yahara dropped where she stood.
"……"
Ah.
I did it.
Haruko was trembling from the shock of the violence, the gunpowder in her heart finally detonated—and into her ears came the sound of a man's voice.
"Hey! What do you think you're doing over there?"
"Hiih!?"
Yahara's boyfriend must have found it strange that the two of them had gone into an alley to 'talk things out' and never come back out. A tanned boy with a sleazy sort of face was approaching, brow furrowed. Then he spotted Yahara, collapsed and quivering.
"Yan-chan? Is that Yan-chan lying over there?!"
"A...aaaaaaaah...!"
What do I do.
I did it.
I hit someone. I actually hit someone.
If she got taken in by the police now, suspension or expulsion was a given, and her parents would be contacted too.
'Whatdoidowhatdoidowhatdoidowhatdoido—'
In the grip of blinding panic, Haruko watched the boy pounding on his phone, dialing for help—
and pointed her finger at him.
Without even knowing what it was she could do.