Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 12 - Chapter 4

Trick or Magical Girl

Was it so strange to believe only what she saw with her own eyes, what she experienced personally?

“That’s just antirealism!”

“You’re trying to use a new word you learned in a sentence, aren’t you?”

The free mobile phone game Magical Girl Raising Project turned one in every few ten thousand players into a real magical girl…or so went the rumors kids whispered among themselves. Nobody knew where these rumors had come from, and at first, anyone with common sense had laughed them off as tall tales that only small children would believe.

But then the website compiling info on magical-girl sightings had popped up, and once more eyewitnesses came forward, the situation changed. One girl claimed that she was a magical girl herself; another said she’d saved someone using superhuman feats of strength; one had flown through the sky, another had burrowed through the earth—these stories kept coming and coming, and then when it reached the point where someone brought up that “the costume of that girl who was sighted can be reproduced in Magical Girl Raising Project,” all of N City became awash in magical-girl fervor.

This girl’s lively friend, Sumire, was a bit of a dreamer, and her other friend, Koyuki, had the same tendencies, in a head-in-the-clouds sort of way. The two of them talked about magical girls as if they took it for granted they were real.

And they weren’t the only ones. The hamburger shop the three friends visited on the way home after school was constantly packed with middle school students, all of whom were talking about magical girls.

Yoshiko Yoshinoura might be the only person in N City who wasn’t interested in magical girls. She sighed, then bit into one of her fries. It was already cold, and it was too salty. “There’s obviously no such thing as magical girls.”

“With this many people who say they’ve seen them, then they’ve got to be real,” Sumire retorted.

Yoshiko wasn’t against occult stuff on principle. She was open-minded enough that if some supernatural creature appeared—a spirit or Buddha or yokai or fairy or person with superpowers or chupacabra or Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster or a little green man or magical girl—and told her that it really existed, then she would believe in it. Unlike the first victim in a horror movie, she could believe that monsters were real.

But no such mysterious beings had appeared before Yoshiko. All she ever saw was Sumire and Koyuki talking about magical girls. So there was no need to believe in them. There was something else more important they should be doing.

“Sumi,” said Yoshiko, “shouldn’t you be worrying about finals instead of magical girls?”

“Hey! Don’t bring that up, Yocchan! I’m doing my best to avoid reality here.”

Saying, “I wonder if magical girls have to study for tests, too…,” Koyuki may have been listening, and maybe not.

But Sumire went on passionately: “Magic can solve anything. I saw it in an anime when I was a kid, so it has to be true.”

“I bet the people who believed in the Nostradamus prophecies at the turn of the century were like that, too,” Yoshiko shot back.

“This stuff really is true, okay! You just reject that stuff out of hand, Yocchan. So that makes you low sensitivity and keeps you from having encounters.”

“Um, rude much?”

“I think you must’ve passed by a magical girl before, or something like that. But you’ve been ignoring that stuff without even realizing it. Listen, hasn’t anything strange happened to you?”

“Anything strange, huh…?” When Yoshiko had fallen asleep while playing Magical Girl Raising Project, a magical girl had appeared in her dream. She’d been in pajamas, sprawled out on a fluffy cloud as she said things like, “I don’t wanna do wooooork,” making Yoshiko want to give her a kick. But that had been a dream. Not reality.

She went over all her memories, top to bottom, digging them up. Thinking back on everything she could remember, she came to a conclusion.

Swallowing the fry in her mouth, Yoshiko raised her head. “There’s no such thing as magical girls.”

“Huh? Where’d that come from?” said Sumire.

“The world is actually a pretty boring place. There’s no mysterious happenings or mysterious things. Keeping your feet on the ground and living a decent life is what’ll make you happiest. It’s best to stick with what’s reliable.”

“Don’t tell me boring things like that!”

Sumire whined and griped, and Koyuki gave her a look, too, with this expression like she had something to say.

But still, Yoshiko thought—as long as she never saw one herself, in real life, then they might as well not exist.

Parting ways with her two friends at the hamburger place, Yoshiko took her usual route home. She hurried back. The sun set early in autumn, and she didn’t want to run into any sketchy characters in the lonelier parts of town. Streetlamps lit the way through fields of rice and other crops. The only sound was her own footsteps. It was best to get through places like these quickly.

Maybe you could blame her friends for talking about supernatural stuff, but she was in more of a hurry than usual. She kept imagining nasty things, like something appearing out of the darkness. She picked up her pace a little, and before she even had the time to be startled, she found her foot stuck in a storm drain.

She staggered and almost fell, but her hand touched a wall, and she somehow kept herself up.

Huh? A wall? Since when is there a wall…?

“Are you all right?” At just the perfect moment, that voice called out from behind her, startling her enough to make her jump.

Putting one hand to her pounding heart, Yoshiko turned to see a young woman wearing a coat with many belts.

She looked like she was around high school age. Even in the dim alleyway, her features were startlingly beautiful, so maybe she was a magical girl…but on second glance, no magical girl would walk around in an outfit as ordinary as a coat and scarf. She had a pumpkin pin on her lapel, which reminded Yoshiko, Oh yeah, it’s almost Halloween.

But there was something about her that stuck out more than her beauty. She was holding a wrapped bundle. It was massive—you could probably fit a person in there.

“Oh yes. I’m fine. Nothing to worry about,” said Yoshiko.

“Ah, good.”

Examining the girl’s face again, Yoshiko saw she really was beautiful. Her gaze then turned to the cloth-wrapped bundle. What she could see peeking out from underneath was…a pumpkin. If that whole bundle was a pumpkin, then just how heavy was it? Heavier than a grown man?

The girl seemed to notice Yoshiko’s gaze; she also looked at the bundle in her hands and awkwardly scratched her cheek. “It’s for Halloween.”

“Ah, right. Halloween…”

“And fall is the season of appetites, too. Eating this much will really throw any diet to the wind, though.”

Appetite? She’s gonna eat it? That entire pumpkin?

The woman in the coat trotted away, her footsteps so light that it was hard to imagine the bundle in her arms was heavy. Yoshiko watched her go in a daze, then suddenly remembered that wall. Come to think of it, she wasn’t leaning against anything now. She looked to her right, then to her left, and even behind her, but no such wall existed.

Yoshiko was reminded of what Sumire had said before, but she shook it off. That encounter had felt a little odd, but it wasn’t anything mysterious. It could all be explained. She must’ve only thought her hand had been on a wall, when in fact, she’d just been leaning on the guardrail.

Lost in such thoughts as she made her way through downtown N City, she found there was a Halloween fair going on.

She stopped by the stationery store to buy some lead for her mechanical pencil, and then, when she came out of the shop, there was a witch. Yes, a witch. And a total cookie-cutter one, at that: dressed in all black with a big pointed hat, a broom in her right hand, and golden hair in two braided pigtails.

Yoshiko was momentarily startled before she remembered: Oh, right, it’s for Halloween. She wondered if cosplayers like this witch came here voluntarily, or if she had been hired by the shopping district to come here. If it was the latter, that was a surprising level of financial muscle for this declining shopping district.

The witch was facing away from her, so Yoshiko couldn’t see her face. But her costume was pretty high quality, and she was just like a real witch. Right as Yoshiko passed by her, she heard the witch talking to someone on her phone.

“It’s just like Magicaloid said—even when walkin’ around in the middle of the day, they’ll ignore ya ’cause it’s Halloween. Sister Nana told me even Winterprison’s in her Halloween getup today. You get your butt over here, too, Ripple. Otherwise I’ll come pick ya up.”

What did she mean, they walked around in the middle of the day? Didn’t cosplayers normally do that? Was she saying they were just pretending to be cosplayers as they took advantage of Halloween to go around outside?

Yoshiko hurriedly hid behind a sign at the nearby butcher and watched what the witch was up to. She was still on her phone. A high schooler approached her for a handshake, which the witch returned. She was a far cry from the dark image of the word “witch”—she fit in perfectly at the shopping arcade under the sunset.

The witch’s phone call continued for a while before she eventually finished and tucked her phone in her pocket. Then she looked around the area and ran into an alley. Yoshiko crept after her. She was struck by how the witch had looked all around, seemingly worried that people might see her.

There was something going on. Yoshiko couldn’t lose sight of her. Trying to keep the witch from getting away, Yoshiko pursued her with a little too much haste, and when she leaped into the alley, she nearly collided with the witch as she was bursting out from it. Yoshiko didn’t have time to think about dodging, and she was too shocked to move out of the way. As she just stood there, frozen, the approaching witch’s pretty face pulled into an expression of surprise, and right as they were about to crash, she twisted her body somehow to avoid a direct collision, narrowly avoiding Yoshiko, even in the narrow alley. With a gust of wind, the witch passed her by.

After a pause of almost ten seconds, Yoshiko heaved a deep sigh. She was lifting her right hand to wipe the sweat from her forehead when she noticed something. The bag she thought she’d been holding had vanished.

“Whoops, sorry!”

That voice…had come from above. Yoshiko’s attention turned upward, and right as her head was turning, her schoolbag came down on her. She somehow caught it in both hands. A moment later, she looked up again, but there was nothing above her save the narrow slice of sky sandwiched between two shops.

Why had her bag fallen from above? Had there been some way to move up to the roof in that instant, other than by flying? Could she even say that girl had really been flying? Maybe she’d faked it by using wires or something. Yeah, that had to be it. It was a sleight of hand. A trick. Since she was in a witch costume, she had to at least be able to fake flying. She was just that serious about cosplaying. That was it. It had to be.

As Yoshiko was attempting to somehow gather her thoughts, she must have stopped paying attention to her surroundings. It seemed she’d totally missed her turn, and she’d been walking on and on. By the time she started wondering why she was dragging herself along the path up this hill that wasn’t the way home, she was already far from her destination. And having been confused to begin with, now she was further disconcerted. She took three deep breaths. It’s okay. I know this place. This was Monzenmachi, where there were a lot of temples; she’d just come right up to the top of the hill and was about to hit the national highway. Right now, she was in front of a ruined temple.

A temple…?

She shivered from the cold. Not because the weather was growing chill with the approach of night. This was the chill of an abandoned building, and this was a temple, which made it even worse. Behind her was the hill.

Maybe it was back in elementary school that she’d once heard that the temple atop the hill in Monzenmachi was haunted. The stories said the ghost was an old woman who’d tried to visit a grave here, then fallen from the top of the hill and died. Yoshiko had scoffed at the story, but she couldn’t laugh now. When she looked down on the hill from above, the drop was bigger than she’d thought. If she were to fall from here—

Remembering strange things made her feel particularly cold. She couldn’t stay here too long. The sun had already set, and it was getting dark. She’d go home quickly, via her usual route. Looking toward the path, Yoshiko froze.

Right in the middle of the road was a girl’s severed head.

Wait, no—it wasn’t a severed head. There wasn’t a single drop of blood anywhere. It had to be a mannequin head. This was just a nasty prank. Sure, it was Halloween, but you had to draw the line somewhere. What would the prankster do if such a sight startled a driver and caused an accident?

Despite managing to convince herself of this rationally, Yoshiko still didn’t want to get near that head. She had to go put the head off to the side of the road, at least, but her legs wouldn’t move.

Right as her heart was hammering unbearably hard, the head turned to face Yoshiko.

The girl’s head, which had headphones over its ears, opened its eyes, staring at Yoshiko. Yoshiko could hear a shriek—her own shriek. She hadn’t even been aware she was the one screaming. Now she really had had too much. Her vision was fading into white. Her consciousness grew dim. She tried to run, but her foot knocked into the curb, and she lost her balance.

She was going to fall straight backward. She was going to fall, without even the time to think about catching herself. She was at the top of a hill. She would meet the same fate as the old woman who’d come to visit a grave and had fallen. This was a really steep slope. Even if she was young, she wouldn’t make it out in one piece. She’d be lucky if she just broke a bone or two. Ugh, this is it. She closed her eyes. How much time passed like that? Weird; she wasn’t falling to the ground at all. Still fully arched backward, Yoshiko’s body was defying gravity, unmoving.

When she opened her eyes a crack, she was startled by a couple of faces right in front of her.

Two identical angels were giggling and holding Yoshiko by the arms. Come to think of it, she’d seen something like this before. It came up a lot in reruns of classic anime, like when there was a particularly emotional anime special or whatever. The boy Nello, satisfied at being able to see a Rubens painting, had risen to the heavens with his dog, Patrasche. And there had been a bunch of angels with him…

Wait—am I gonna die?!

Perhaps it was the thought that she didn’t want to die yet, the desire to live on, that got the blood circulating in her hazy mind, and she regained her grasp on reality. She tried to shake the angels off her, but they wouldn’t let go.

“Just in time, huh, lady?”

“Phew, what a relief. I thought this was gonna be a magi-cool disaster.”

The two angels set Yoshiko down on the side of the road, then finally let go of her arms. She was relieved that they’d let go, but also disturbed. What had just happened? She looked every which way, but there was no one else around. Yoshiko was all alone on the road under the light of the streetlamps. The head she thought she’d seen was gone, too.

There was nobody. There were no angels, either. She could hear some girls talking.

“Swim, you idiot! I know I said you could go into town in that outfit, but of course you’ll startle people if you show them your powers! You can’t do just anything you want all because it’s Halloween! Good grief, nothing but trouble…”

“I thought I had to do tricks since it’s Halloween.”

“You don’t have to do that. I’ll give you some treats…”

Their voices grew distant.

What was that all about? Yoshiko didn’t think she was imagining things. The sensation in her arms had been vivid and had clearly felt real. If those angels had actually grabbed her, then had she almost ascended to heaven? When she glanced at her right hand, she was clasping a white feather.

Yoshiko trembled slightly and, hugging her schoolbag, hurried home.

Several days later, Sumire was again insisting that “magical girls are real, okay?!” Yoshiko denied it as usual, but she did add just one thing: “I’m willing to concede that angels are real.”