The Colorless Magical Girl — 6
[Magical Girl Supernatural Weaponization Project]
The gist of the plan was quite simple.
Among magical girls, they would round up those implicated in crime, or those driven to society's margins by circumstances beyond their control—orphans, for instance. Then, through grueling secret experiments and training, they would determine the upper limits of each girl's abilities and use that data to sift out the gems worth employing for the benefit of state and corporation.
In the earliest days of the Awakening, hardliners had argued for dragging in every girl identified as a magical girl, registering her identity, and placing her under sweeping national control. But after the appearance of healing abilities, that changed.
The direction shifted toward a method that maintained public image while exercising control indirectly.
"I know I'm a terrible man who imprisons and beats magical girls, but could you cure my son's illness for me?"
"...I'm sorry, what?"
To prevent awkward situations like that from ever arising, the program publicly rolled out preferential policies for magical girls and gently encouraged their participation in society.
In truth, all they did was 'educate' the magical girls active in public, drawing on data obtained from 'somewhere'. Later, when two hundred experimental girls—the ones subjected to those brutal experiments—rose up in revolt, that 'somewhere' burned to the ground.
In the course of the uprising, a mob of girls armed with firearms and magic marched on the place where Councilman Fujimoto was staying, intent on revenge against the plan's chief architect and mastermind. It became a full-blown riot.
And that advance was brought to a halt by a single magical girl—one who had bloomed the fate of [Protection].
Their leader, the magical girl of [Freedom], bloomed only belatedly, and in the aftermath founded an autonomous organization.
"How pitiful, that they don't even know where to point their own power."
"We're not being chained down by anyone ever again! We're going to raise the 'Flag of Freedom' ourselves!"
The fifty surviving girls, no longer able to trust the state, declared their autonomy.
Flag.
They carried the fight on against corporations and the government alike, and Japan spiraled into chaos. The people of later years would call those six months of upheaval the Fujimoto Uprising.
Only after the main story began did they come to understand that the Fujimoto Uprising was precisely what had made it impossible for Magical Girl HAZARD to ever end happily—and that it had been an irreversible mistake of their own making.
It was a tragedy heralding the dawn of the magical girl era, and at the same time a monumental event announcing, for the very first time, the existence of 'Bloomed' magical girls capable of wielding true transformation.
"So?"
"'So'—what, are you an idiot? Why can't you follow a simple question?"
"That wasn't even a proper question to begin with."
A private room in Tokyo National Hospital.
It was there that a truly capable police officer—one who had graduated from Tokyo's law faculty, thought nothing of grinding through beat-cop work at a powerful regional precinct while piling up results, and had finally, at a remarkably young age, earned a place at Tokyo Metropolitan Headquarters—the greatest elite cop on the planet, an insult to the very concept of god, felt despair for the first time in his life.
"In the end, all you actually saw was the suspect standing there in front of your girlfriend and twitching her hand once. That's it, isn't it?"
"She was a magical girl! Ma-gi-cal girl! This is a real easy question here? Magic! A magical murderer!"
"My question was whether there was anything off about how the magic activated. Any anomalies."
"This is what's wrong with you fake-ass cops... The girl raised her hand and—pow! Whoosh! Bam!"
"...Are you an elementary schooler?"
"Hah? Don't you dare look down on me! I'm a first-year in high school, what're you even saying!"
Japan is finished.
No.
Rubbing the corners of his eyes and gathering himself, Yamashita changed the angle of his questioning.
"C-come to think of it... your girlfriend, this Yamahara girl—she tried to steal the suspect's star, didn't she?"
"Huh? Yeah."
The delinquent boy, who had been ranting and raving from start to finish, wore a cowed expression for the first time.
"Yacchan was so happy the first time she ever got a star that she was bouncing off the walls, and honestly I was feeling pretty great too..."
Scratching his cheek, the boy went on.
"...I guess Yacchan figured that wasn't enough. She got a little greedy, tried to take more, and after that she seemed kinda down about it."
"Yamahara did?"
"C, CT? Don't know what it means, but when they took the scan the doc said her skull was nice and solid, so the spot she got hit was fine—no problem except the star."
"Then why is she so listless?"
"She got smacked around by some kid she always looked down on. She's probably sulking."
"I see."
In the end, it had all been a hollow, simple-minded tale of clueless teenagers. What a waste of my time.
Tsk.
Clicking his tongue, Yamashita stole a glance past the delinquent boy at Yamahara's back, where she lay sprawled and gloomy on her hospital bed.
For a girl like Yamahara, who had whiled away her days in petty delinquency, being chosen as a magical girl must have felt like stepping into a fairy tale and becoming Cinderella herself.
And the stupid Cinderella, in her greed, had apparently tried to steal even the glass slipper belonging to the maid in the next room over—only to get pummeled half to death and end up in a sulk.
Yamashita laughed out loud at the irony.
Now that the nation's highest officials had taken notice of magical girls' supernatural abilities and begun moving to study them, the only happy ending left to a magical girl was submission to power. Nothing else.
That girl doesn't even realize how lucky she is to be treated as the victim here.
The suspect was thirteen, barely scraping under the protection of juvenile law—and with the accidental nature of the act and its urgency recognized, there was even room to argue self-defense on the suspect's side. Yet she was the one facing the prospect of being hauled away over this affair, which made the whole situation a farce.
If she'd simply turned herself in, hired a competent lawyer, and appealed directly to the press—
Even then, the media, ever mindful of the political and financial establishment, would have let it fizzle out quietly, and she would have ended up locked away in a laboratory.
Haruko Busujima was in checkmate.
Just as that thought was crossing his mind, Yamashita's phone began to buzz. He answered it and walked straight out of the room full of idiots.
"This is Oshima at the scene. We've confirmed a sighting of the suspect. She's in the vicinity of Yokohama."
Sato Hana was in a wonderful mood.
There were plenty of reasons for it, but the very best one was the sheer fun of taking brisk walks along the Yokohama seaside on the legs that had, only recently, been set free.
Mid-June had come and gone; early summer was settling in. It was the season when the word hot was just beginning to slip out of people's mouths without their thinking about it, and the sea breeze that ruffled her hair seemed to lift Sato Hana's spirits clear up into the sky.
Clouds drawn in wobbly white crayon across a sheet of blue construction paper. They shone so vividly that it felt as though she could sprint right out and snatch one down.
Come to think of it, couldn't a magical girl grab a cloud with a single jump?
Boing!
...Yeah, no.
Still, Sato Hana wasn't the least bit discouraged. Her freshly healthy legs could do so many more things now, so it didn't matter in the slightest if one or two little plans didn't work out.
"Gentle, gentle sea breeze~ The seagulls go squawk, squawk~"
For a girl who had always spent her days alone at home, song meant nothing more than the children's-music tapes she'd been listening to since she was seven. Other ten-year-olds were at the age of admiring idols with their classmates or comically crooning along to the latest pop hits—but Sato Hana's tastes had stayed frozen exactly where they'd been three years ago, when paralysis had pinned her lower body and kept her shut inside the house.
"The sun goes sparkle, sparkle~ The clouds go floaty, floaty~"
But even that would be all right soon enough. She would be starting elementary school again before long. Maybe she'd even run around an ordinary schoolyard with friends, singing pop songs with the rest of them.
"Hm?"
In a corner of her daily walking route, one of the side streets, a middle school girl was sleeping under a spread of newspaper.
"Ugh, the smell..."
Her hair was a hopelessly matted bird's nest, and an unspeakable stench wafted off her body.
"Mom said not to go near strange people."
Reciting her mother's words, Sato Hana sidled past the sleeping girl in an exaggerated crab-walk—and in the middle of it, the middle schooler began groggily trying to haul herself upright.
"Mmn... ugh... ngh. My head hurts."
"Oh! Good morning!"
Her father had always said that a greeting was absolutely mandatory, whether before sleep or right after waking. So Sato Hana belted out her greeting to the middle school girl at full volume.
"Uh... g-good, good morning?"
"Yep!"
Haruko answered on autopilot, her head still fogged with sleep, and then abruptly panicked.
"......"
"......"
Their eyes met, and Haruko Busujima and Sato Hana fell into a brief silence.
Sato Hana wasn't the type to strike up conversations with strangers—but thanks to her mother's teaching, she also couldn't just look the other way when someone was doing something wrong.
"Miss, why are you sleeping on the street?"
"Huh?"
"Mom says you're supposed to sleep at home!"
"Ah... well, you see..."
The realization that someone had caught her turned Haruko's mind white as paper.
And then, quite suddenly, she felt tired. Utterly, bone-deep tired.
It was the wretched feeling of a person who could not possibly endure one more day unless she told somebody, anybody, about the state she was in.
"I... I did something bad, so... I can't go home. I can't go back home..."
"Miss, don't you have a mom?"
"Waaaah... d-don't say mean things like thaaat..."
From Sato Hana's perspective, if someone was in trouble, the person who ought to look after them was obviously their parents. Her question—isn't there anyone to help you?—had simply come out recast in the idiom of a small child. But to Haruko's ears, it landed as a merciless barb: can you really show your parents the state you're in right now?
And so Haruko suddenly sat slumped where she was, great fat tears spilling from her eyes.
Haruko, sobbing her heart out at the thought of her parents, and Hana, watching her blankly—neither of them noticed that the neighborhood was growing strangely, unmistakably restless around them.
Clang—THUD!
"Kyaaah?!"
"Huh?"
From the far end of the alley came the sound of a black steel barricade slamming shut.
Clang—THUD!
At the remaining end, another barricade sealed shut, and the little lane that doubled as a walking path was, in a single instant, closed off completely.
"Advancing. Advancing. Advancing."
From both ends of the alley, riot police clad head to toe in black clothing and protective armor were closing in, slow and unhurried.
"Hiiik?!"
Black armor. Helmets with no visible eyes. And rifles leveled with terrible deliberateness.
Each of them carried a shield and a firearm in one hand, moving as a single body as they advanced. In the riot police bearing down on them without the slightest hesitation, there was not one flicker of humanity to be seen. They simply aimed their muzzles at Haruko with the detached air of men doing a job.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
The moment the advancing wall of black confirmed Hana standing blankly in its path, Haruko screamed.
"No!"
"Huh?"
"R-run!! Run away!!"
A gnawing dread seized her—that if the girl got tangled up with her any further, this child might be arrested right along with her—and Haruko shouted with everything she had.
What do I do, what do I do, what do I do, what do I do—
Snap!
In that instant, a crisp, cheerful snap of the fingers rang through the alley.
"Wh-what the—?! Did the suspect bolt?! Where'd she go?!"
"Where'd the suspect go?!"
"HQ, requesting response!"
The wind sliced across Haruko's cheeks, and she—along with the little girl beside her—was flying through the open air.
Simply, weightlessly airborne. The ground below had traded places with the sky at some point, and the whole world swung round and round.
And through that endlessly swaying vision, what she saw was a color so clear it might have been the summer sky itself reflected there—
A pure, immaculate silver.
A silver so dazzling it hurt to look at.
And looking down at Haruko, she said:
"Good grief. You reek."