The Colorless Magical Girl - 4
"Good morning, everyone. It's time for Yamada's Morning Stroll."
"Today we have a very special guest — someone chosen as a Mag-i-cal Girl!"
"G-good morning! I'm Shizuku, from Narita City in Chiba Prefecture!"
"Haha, no need to be nervous, Shizuku."
"Your show is always on at Mama... um, my mom's shop, so I never dreamed I'd end up on it myself."
"Shizuku, do you call your mother 'Mama'?"
"Ah! Th-that is, well, you see..."
The girl flustered at the childish name that had slipped out of her mouth all on its own, letting out an awwuuu of embarrassment as her face went crimson. The audience only melted at the sound, their laughter warm and fond, and the studio filled with a cozy, good-natured glow.
I turned off the radio without staying to hear Shizuku finish the morning traffic report.
So it's finally beginning.
A week had passed since the opening declaration — the broadcast some were already calling the Red Broadcast. When Monday rolled back around, an undercurrent ran through the air that hadn't been there before.
Changes were being detected in the girls who had received their stars.
Negative ones, no. If they had been, the mood wouldn't have merely shifted — parents across the country would have been screaming in collective alarm and kicking down hospital doors by the dozen.
The change was introduced to the world through vivid, first-hand testimony, splashed across every news program and weekly magazine.
Barely a week earlier, these girls had been utterly ordinary. But from the moment they received their Glass Stars, the kinks and distortions of growing up — crooked teeth, failing eyesight — had simply corrected themselves, and through a dozen small miracles their bodies had reshaped toward some ideal form.
In just seven days, they had changed beyond all comparison with their former selves.
Those who witnessed it began to buzz with something like festival excitement. Most were still dazed, bewildered by a reality that had shifted overnight, but the electric thrill shared beneath the surface of consciousness spread through the whole country like a current. People yearned to watch these girls undergo a metamorphosis as dramatic as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, and delighted in their transformation as if it were their own.
Magical Girls = Salvation
A New Species of Humanity for a New Era?
The Front Line of Human Evolution.
Witnessing Their Transformation.
The girls of this sudden new age became the nation's pride — and its newest idols.
Entertainment companies, sniffing out the feverish longing of the public in a mere three days, spent the weekend burning up the phone lines, all to forge those girls into true icons.
The prediction — that higher ratings would flow to whichever networks scooped up the most magical girls — hardened into certainty.
And so came that fateful Monday.
Girls stepped out as surprise guests on every regular program on every network, each one living proof that magic had chosen her. And the viewers who watched them bombarded them with every manner of prying personal question, eager to consume them as entertainment.
In barely a week, the memory of that ominous broadcast had been scrubbed away, and the public poured itself into whatever spectacle was in front of its eyes.
In seven days flat, the magical girls were being carefully gift-wrapped, one by one, into products. A whole tide of near-madness was spreading through society itself.
This was the last step before the world slid toward true tragedy.
One final footstep.
"..."
I left it all behind and stepped out onto the street.
Bing-bong. Bing-bong. Bing-bong.
What had made me realize I was in Japan the instant I reincarnated into this world wasn't the Japanese that flowed from my mouth like water, or even the student ID written in Japanese script — it was this crossing signal.
In my past life I'd lived in a provincial Korean city where waiting for a walk signal was considered a luxury, where drivers and pedestrians waged a constant, heated war of glances at every intersection. That was why each tiny unfamiliar detail of the scenery left me feeling strange and unmoored.
Had I been someone who delighted in travel, maybe even this atmosphere would have struck me as a kind of romance.
I couldn't feel that way.
All that remained was the loneliness of a stranger. A foreign object fallen, alone, into this world. The ache of wanting to go home. The bewilderment at a body that had changed. The shards of feeling that crumbled loose in my heart scattered through every corner of daily life, needling me without mercy.
"Is she a model? Unusual face, huh."
"Looks like she's from abroad."
"Whoa. Boobs."
I folded away every thought and glared at the mutterer who had just said boobs.
And what kind of guy is this.
The one waiting beside the crosswalk, the moment our eyes met, bowed his head deeply and pretended to browse the web on his smartphone.
"Whoa... that's a real heartbreaker of a story."
"..."
My narrowed, upturned eyes had a way of exerting their power when it counted. Anyway.
Appearance-wise, my face read as closer to white than Japanese. A squint so slight that even the faintest smile nearly swallowed it whole. Glints of red showing through the gap between my eyelids. And despite my young look, a chest that ran considerably on the large side...
"...Sigh."
I was slowly getting used to the stares and the murmurs that came every time I stood still by the roadside for even a moment, all thanks to these unusual looks — but this time the fresh wave of discomfort hit me all over again.
If a silver-haired girl strode around openly like this, even past-life me would probably have stared.
Watching people gawk at my strange appearance, I suddenly recalled the advice Master had once given me.
"You've got a good face on you, so instead of getting angry, you're better off pressing people with a smile."
"With a smile? How, exactly? Master, why don't you show me?"
"Ha. Like that, huh — sly and sidelong like some old geezer."
"I'm not an old geezer."
Master chortled, then turned serious.
"You live long enough, and you learn that flying off the handle is a losing move far more often than not."
"If I don't get angry, won't people look down on me?"
"You can get angry. Just don't scream and lash out. Put your spirit into it, and press down on the other person quietly, powerfully."
"You're saying that suits me?"
"I am. Your heart isn't the weak, delicate thing an ordinary girl's is — is it?"
Back then, Master had gazed at me quietly over the rim of his glasses.
"Strong, and calm, with your spirit behind it. That suits you very well."
"I see."
Wisdom from someone who had lived life first — not knowledge trotted out for the sake of boasting. Adding my past life's years to this one made me twenty-nine, and even so, I'd received many a lesson I could genuinely call an enlightenment.
Thanks to that, I could hold my own without being underestimated by the rude rabble like that guy just now.
Bing-bong. Bing-bong. Bing-bong.
At the sound of the majesty of law halting drivers and shielding timid pedestrians, my brooding untangled itself, and I set off walking. On the way toward the convenience store, I passed a newsstand piled high with papers.
Everywhere I looked, the talk was all magical girls. Their treatment hovered somewhere between idol hopefuls and aspiring athletes. In it, one could read the unconscious yearning for superior bloodlines, the longing for an idol made perfect down to the gene to become flesh at last.
The gaze of consumers eyeing a product.
It also meant, for now, that the girls' abilities were not yet regarded as anything capable of overturning society. According to the original story, it wouldn't be long before that perception flipped — from well-bred darling of the moment to the nation's most critical human resource, in a single bound. This was the beginning of the tragedy of the magical girl society's early days, so casually hinted at in the original work.
The Magical Girl Supernatural Weaponization Project.
The plan — which failed after costing far too many sacrifices — would plant the seed of strife alongside the true blooming of the magical girls.
The founding of Flag, the terrorist organization made up of magical girls who had grown suspicious of the state and the social order.
Flag versus the Corporate Coalition. Magical girls versus the nation.
Days unlike the peaceful two years that had come before were approaching. Within six months, corporations and states that had grasped the value of Basic Magic would form a coalition. In step, Flag would rise in opposition to the coalition's Magical Girl Supernatural Weaponization Project. At the same time, the first 2-Star magical girl would begin her Blooming.
And then, in the calamity wrought by the Magical Girl of War, all of Japan — Shinjuku included — would become lawless wasteland.
I let out a sigh and put down the newspaper.
"Inspector Oshima. Orders have come down from above."
"Who's the assignee?"
"Superintendent Yamashita, so..."
"I see. Directly under the Superintendent General, then."
Oshima, ambling toward the cafeteria through the lunch hour, carefully opened the file his subordinate handed over.
This report concerns the supernatural abilities documented at the crime scene of Subject B, a suspected magical girl, as well as at various other locations where such abilities were deployed...
...In short, these are believed to be unique abilities manifested by the girls collectively referred to as "magical girls."
Prior to full-scale research, the environment may be shaped by public opinion in such a way that the program comes under attack.
Therefore, the department intends to gather specimens in a condition that allows their persons to be restrained without noise or commotion, for the purpose of study.
"..."
"Headquarters has instructed that it be carried out as quietly as possible."
"Understood."