Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 17 - Chapter 3

Magical Girl vs. Shark

  Magicaloid 44

A single unit—rather, a person in the shape of a robotic-type magical girl—stood on the roof of a multi-tenant building. She, Magicaloid 44, leaned out a bit to look down at the clock tower across from her. The giant clock, which functioned as both the clock shop’s sign and a monument to the hundred-year anniversary since the shop’s founding, popped open, and a number of figures leaped out from within. Moving as smoothly as living things, the figures blew on trumpets and banged on drums as they proceeded around the outer perimeter of the clock. Being that it was nighttime, they made no noise. After watching the figures finish their quiet march and return once more into the clock, Magicaloid looked down at her weapon rack.

Checking for her futuristic magic tool at midnight was Magicaloid’s daily routine. Praying that she would get some dream item—like a pickax that turned wherever she dug into an oilfield or a pen that would turn whatever number she wrote in a bank deposit form into real money—she stuck her hand into her weapon rack. But her dreams had never come true before. Most of what she got, after thinking about how to use them, she’d concluded that she couldn’t. For example, with the insect sex differentiation device and stuff like that, if not for Sister Nana, there never would have been an opportunity to make use of them.

Having never gotten a lucky draw before, she was up to her neck in a sarcastic sense of resignation. I’m never gonna get a lucky draw anyway, she thought, but she still couldn’t abandon the hope that maybe the next one would be it. So that day, as always, she thrust her hand into her weapon rack. This had to be just like those people who got addicted to drops in gacha games. But not knowing how many of my 444,444,444 items are hits has got to be some really illegal gacha, she thought with a sigh as she pulled the item out. The day’s magic item was a dark brown sphere bundled in plastic wrap. It was just a single item, about one inch in diameter. When she tried pressing on it with the pads of her fingers, it bounced back with a soft elasticity.

“Hmm, hmm…”

As for how to use the item—it came to her mind automatically the moment she pulled it out. This was a magic growth-accelerating treat for pets, and by giving it to one, you could make your beloved pet into a unique creature. Like a Caucasus beetle with a superalloy shell, a pygmy marmoset with intelligence like a human’s, or a dachshund who would catch the smell of prey sixty-two miles away. It would strengthen the pet’s abilities to the max and give it absolute love and loyalty to its owner.

“Hmm…”

Magicaloid had no home to call her own. In other words, she didn’t have a pet. She believed pet ownership was a pastime allowed to those with disposable income and not the destitute. If someone had a pet, the odds that they were rich were fairly high, and they might buy this item for a fair price.

Magicaloid sent messages offering to make a deal with all the magical girls of N City, one after another: Calamity Mary, La Pucelle, Top Speed, Ripple, Ruler, the Peaky Angels, Sister Nana, Weiss Winterprison, Nemurin, Cranberry—but she didn’t get a single favorable response. La Pucelle, Winterprison, Cranberry, Nemurin, Top Speed, and Ripple all bluntly refused because they didn’t have pets. Ruler’s reply—How outrageous can you be, trying to take advantage of my subordinates? If this continues any further, then I’m prepared to take legal action.—came with a frightening document that went on and on.

Calamity Mary and Sister Nana, strangely enough, asked Magicaloid the same question: “Can this be used on humans?” When Magicaloid answered that it couldn’t, Mary gave a blunt reply: “Don’t bother me with dumb shit. Get bent.” Sister Nana said, “I don’t have any pets,” which had nothing to do with the question she’d asked, and that felt even more terrifying than Mary’s response.

If you were talking magical girls, then the cliché was that they’d have a mascot character with them, but not a single one of them had a pet. Magicaloid placed her magical phone on the edge of the roof.

“Oh—could it be used on you, Fav?” Magicaloid wondered aloud.

The hologram floated up from her magical phone.

“You’ve got some nerve, treating a sentient digital life-form like Fav as a pet, pon,” was all he said before vanishing. Magicaloid reached out to put her magical phone away, and when she did, the hologram popped up again.

“Selling to other magical girls is a gray area, pon. Don’t forget how generous I’m being, pon. If you try to sell to ordinary people, I’ll strip you of your magical girl status, so keep that in mind, pon.”

“Speaking of selling to ordinary people, I believe there is this one person…”

“Who do you mean, pon? Fav hasn’t gotten any reports about that, pon. If you’re unhappy about something, why not tell that person directly, pon?”

“I am positive that you know about it.”

“Have a nice day, pon.”

Then the hologram really vanished.

Now that she had been told off like that, Magicaloid could not do business with ordinary pet lovers. But none of the magical girls had pets. And she clearly didn’t have enough time to preach to someone about how great pets were and induce them to get one. Magicaloid’s future items were disposable and only good for one day, so if she waffled on how to use them, thinking not this or not that, before she knew it, it would be time up and they’d be garbage. She had promoted this one as a very good deal, since once the item was used, the change it brought about in the animal that ate it was permanent, but nobody had bought it.

Magicaloid swiftly reconsidered and came up with a plan.

Lighting up her boosters, she launched herself off the roof, then landed near a midsize park away from the center of the city. After making sure that there was nobody around, she undid her transformation and returned to being Makoto Andou. The acquaintance she was after often spent his time near this park, but he moved around a lot to evade the authorities; this was not his permanent dwelling. Praying that he would be there that day, she went into the park and spent five minutes searching deep in the underbrush with only the lights of the streetlamps to guide her. She discovered a “dwelling” that made use of tree branches to conceal itself so exquisitely that it could never be identified from a distance.

She knocked on the door part of the basic fold-up house, which was made of a number of sturdy-looking cardboard boxes and blue plastic sheets. There was no reply, so she knocked even harder. When there was still no reply, she barged straight into the dwelling. A warmly dressed middle-aged man wrapped up in a blanket jerked into a sitting position, raising both hands in the darkness to guard his face.

“Wh-what is this, an old-man hunt?!”

“Naw, mister. It’s me—look.”

“Ohhh, Makoto? Why are you here? It’s still dark out.”

“You’re the one who said that when you’re fishing, you can get the most bites between night and morning.”

“Sure, I did say that. But don’t tell me you’re going fishing now?”

“It’s urgent. If all goes well, I’ll make quite a lot of money. And if that happens, I’ll give you a big share, too.”

“Guess I got no choice, then.”

The two of them divided the labor and folded up the folding house. The man put the dwelling on his back along with a backpack, and Makoto took a bucket and fishing rod in each hand as they trudged the thirty-five-minute walk to the port. They came out from a gap between warehouses to emerge in a lumberyard, then walked farther to pass behind a line of cars with numbers from outside the prefecture to emerge at the entrance of the harborside embankment where barbed wire kept intruders out—otherwise known as the inner bank.

The big NO TRESPASSING sign and the barbed wire were not enough to stop these two societal outsiders. Even with all they were carrying, they nimbly avoided the barbs and came down on top of the breakwater. Despite how strictly it prevented entry and the occasional watch that came around, the top of the breakwater was lined with avid anglers and fishing rods.

“Something that, like, makes a strong impression would be nice.”

“A strong impression, huh? So a flounder or a black porgy… Nah, this time of year would be a fat greenling, I guess.”

“I’ve never heard of that fish.”

“You’ll know it when you see it. The look on their faces leaves a real impression.”

If she didn’t have a pet, then she should just make one. With a crow or a sparrow, the odds were high that they would just eat it and run. With an insect, she couldn’t really be sure if it would get attached to her. Stray dogs and cats weren’t just walking around all over the place anymore these days, and it would be a real struggle to capture a wild tanuki or squirrel. She didn’t like mice or cockroaches, and even if she went to the pound to get a cat, she doubted they would give a homeless person anything. And any pet that cost money was out of the question. Since she had no money.

But a fish, though—and she had an acquaintance who would catch one for her. She had seen videos of people giving koi fish treats to get them to do tricks, and if they were smart enough for that, then one should somehow work as a pet for her. She could either make it a spectacle to earn money or sell it to another magical girl as a mystery pet. Worst case, if it wouldn’t work as a pet, she could eat it, at least. The magic power might make it more delicious than a regular fish.

She walked along the embankment for about ten minutes, picking up some of the dried-up scatter bait that the other fishermen had dropped along the way. Peeking into their coolers and buckets, it looked like some were getting bites and others were not. It didn’t seem good or bad overall, but the man said “not bad,” so it had to be okay. He came to a stop.

“Right here,” he said.

He thrust his rod out in the gap between two people, and using the scatter bait they’d picked up, he caught a few small horse mackerel, all around two inches long. The fish were biting immediately whenever they cast, and they were able to nab enough that it was fun.

“Not what you’re looking for, is it?” the man asked.

“Doesn’t have a lot of impact.”

They changed the rod and the tackle, and next they used the little horse mackerel that they’d caught as bait to go for something big.

“All good. I brought a knife and a cutting board so that we can prepare it right here.”

“It’s not for eating, though.”

“Huh? Really?”

“Worst-case scenario, I will eat it, but that’s purely a last resort. If possible, I’d like to use it for something else. That would make me—and, by extension, you—happy.”

“I don’t really get it, but sure. I’ll get ya a big one.”

Makoto had gone fishing with him twice before. She had also borrowed a rod from him and cast it herself. But she’d just felt like this wasn’t her thing, since there was a lot of waiting time. Fisherman types would claim that “the time you spend sitting with your line cast isn’t waiting time,” but the way Makoto saw it, it was none other than wasted time. The waiting time was even longer than if you caught a cold and went to a doctor the morning after senior citizens got their pension payments. In a doctor’s office, waiting didn’t go on forever—but with fishing, you couldn’t be sure there was an end in sight. Sometimes, you just had to be like “No catch today,” with a wry smile as you carefully carried your empty fish basket back.

So Makoto didn’t fish. She would never do things that she didn’t want to do. She drew up some saltwater with a bucket that had a rope tied around it, then sat down on top of her backpack, leaving the rest to him.

“You came all this way, so you should fish, too,” the man said.

“I’m not into it.”

“Fishing is fun.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“The sea is incredible. No matter how we feel like we get it, we haven’t understood even a tenth of its shallows, never mind the depths. That’s why we come to the sea and battle with the fish.”

“Uh-huh, sure.”

The man thrust his rod in the gaps between the breakwater blocks on the embankment and let the fishing line dangle.

“Don’t fall,” said Makoto.

“I’m not gonna fall.”

Preparing for the long haul, Makoto opened up her phone and started reading a web novel. When killing time, a novel was better than manga, since it took time to read it. So now, if he could just catch something while her battery lasted—

“Got a bite!”

“Whoa, that was fast!”

The fish the man pulled off his tackle was just over twelve inches long, brown overall with a whitish belly, with a squashed face, as if it had been pressed from above, and a big mouth. It couldn’t be said to have great style.

“This is a fat greenling?” asked Makoto.

“Yep.”

The man pulled the fish off the hook and dropped it into the bucket with a splash. It didn’t swim around calmly, but sank quietly to the bottom and didn’t really move much.

“Sure, it makes a strong impression, but it’s also ugly,” said Makoto.

“The uglier the fish, the better it tastes.”

“Taste isn’t really the point…but, oh well.”

Makoto pulled the plastic pack out from her pocket and let the spherical treat inside drop into her palm. She shook the treat in her palm a few times, then let it plop into the bucket. The treat let out air bubbles as it sank to the bottom of the bucket, falling in front of the fat greenling’s face—and then moving suddenly and startlingly fast, the fish swallowed the treat down in one gulp.

“What’d you give it?” the man asked Makoto.

“Some food. Hey, are you listening, fat greenling?” Makoto struck the side of the bucket and called out to the fish. “I’m your master. Swear loyalty to me. If you obey me, then I’ll make sure you’re well-fed. Hear that, ya dumb greenling?”

“Would a fat greenling understand human speech?” the man said, exasperated.

Not replying to him, Makoto smacked the side of the bucket again. “Hey, you listening?”

The fat greenling circled the bucket a couple of times, skimming along the bottom. It was clearly moving in a lively manner that was different from its sluggish swimming, before eating the treat. It seemed to have had an effect. Makoto leaned close to the water so she could talk to it again, and the greenling suddenly leaped up, striking her right in the forehead. She let out a brief shriek and landed on her bottom. The greenling, which had leaped in the opposite direction, jumped two or three times over the concrete before vanishing into the ocean, as if it was sucked into the gaps between the breakwater blocks.

“H-hey. You all right?” the man asked Makoto.

“Ah! Ngh, ahh…”

The pet was supposed to become even more loyal, but it seemed that the greenling had not recognized Makoto as its master.

“That…stupid greenling!”

No matter how mad she got, it wasn’t bringing back the fish, and she had no way of chasing it, either. She doubted she could catch the escaped magic greenling. Makoto punched the embankment and cursed the fat greenling for eating and running on her.

Nobody could have anticipated just how much effect Makoto’s cursing had. The escaped fat greenling was unable to live happily and leave behind offspring. It triumphantly set out on its new fishy life as a magic fat greenling, but its inexhaustible supply of might and energy proved to be more than it could handle.

It went past the breakwater block area—its natural habitat—and into the harbor, rushing out into the distant open ocean. The greenling kept on swimming, tasting little fish it had never seen, riding ocean currents it had never been on, searching for seas where it could swim even more freely. But these unfamiliar places had predators beyond the greenling’s wildest imagination.

It was swimming to its heart’s content when it crashed into a massive creature and was sent flying—but this motivated the greenling to challenge the creature to a fight. It lost terribly and, unable to escape, was eaten.

Normally, the greenling never would have challenged an opponent a thousand times its own weight. It would have sensed their presence and simply fled. It was overconfident in the incredible might it had been so suddenly granted, and that false sense of invincibility led to its tragic end.

Just as Makoto had cursed the fat greenling, the greenling cursed Makoto. If she hadn’t done all that, then I’d never have gotten eaten, it thought, understanding—with the intellect unbecoming of a fish—its new powers, who it was now, the enemy about to eat it, and the cause-and-effect relationships between them. It fervently cursed her before being swallowed whole.

The great white shark that ate the fat greenling was unbelievably satisfied from such small prey. An immense heat grew in its stomach as it swam off somewhere different from its usual habitat. Why it was heading there, the shark itself couldn’t even understand. Being simply a fish, the shark had no way of knowing that it was being influenced by the curse of the fat greenling.

  Weiss Winterprison

There were a lot more magical girls in N City now, but there weren’t enough of them to cover the whole area of the city. There were many spots in the city that were home to no one, and for those sorts of “non-magical girl areas,” there was an unspoken understanding that the nearby magical girls would voluntarily do rounds there. But even so, a lot of the girls were like Calamity Mary or the Ruler team and would just stay at home, naturally shifting the burden to those who took their work seriously. For this sort of thing, Winterprison very much thought that they should make the burden fair by stipulating the rules in writing and rectifying things, but people like Sister Nana would gleefully do rounds of the nearby regions without complaint. While quietly burning with anger toward the selfish magical girls who took advantage of Sister Nana’s kindness and generosity—thinking everything was fine so long as their own area was fine—Winterprison accompanied Sister Nana for a walk on the beach that day.

“It’s gotten quite windy,” Winterprison said.

She nonchalantly changed their positions, making it so that she was following Nana diagonally from behind, protecting her from the wind. That a magical girl was strong enough to ignore the wind and rain and that she had to protect Sister Nana from the wind and rain were two completely different things.

“There’s no one around, huh?” said Sister Nana.

“It’s late at night, after all,” Winterprison replied.

“Tee-hee.”

“Was something funny?”

“Oh, no. It’s just that there is this old-fashioned trope about lovers coming to the beach at night.”

“It’s not old-fashioned. But the season being what it is…”

“It is still cold.”

“I doubt it’ll be a bother, in magical girl form …but things are about to heat up.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, just thinking that I’m going to be working in this outfit, even in summer.”

The two of them laughed together. The air remained peaceful as they walked along the beach, but privately, something was on Winterprison’s mind. Standing by Nana’s side in the winter, they were picturesque. But being like this in the summer—you really had to wonder about that. Only perverts or assassins would wear long coats. It would be inexcusable if her standing at Nana’s side caused others to give Nana strange looks—but then, if she were to not stand at her side, she would die from loneliness.

Most magical girls did their work in outfits that would be cold in winter, so Winterprison assumed rationally that there wasn’t any problem with wearing something too hot in the summer, but her feelings for Nana got in the way of that. Hiding her private worries in the peaceful atmosphere as they chatted, she caught some footsteps behind them and turned around.

“Oh…sorry. Am I bothering you?” said the newcomer.

“Ohhh, it’s you, La Pucelle,” said Winterprison.

The magical girl La Pucelle was Sister Nana’s student, Winterprison’s elder peer, so to speak. As La Pucelle bowed her head deeply, her tail moved upward in reaction. Her motif was that of a dragon knight, but her armor was far too skimpy for a knight, and she was extremely exposed below the waist in particular. She looked like she would be cold in the spring season, but La Pucelle was completely unbothered, jumping and leaping across the streets that had lingering snow dirtied black and gray.

Sister Nana smiled gently and waved her hand in front of her face. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not as if this is a private date. We were purely patrolling as magical girls,” she said, easygoing.

La Pucelle’s expression, on the other hand, was tense. “Patrolling… So you heard the rumor?”

“Rumor?”

“Oh, you didn’t know? Apparently, part of the outer bank was destroyed.”

“The outer bank? You mean the breakwater?”

Winterprison’s elegant eyebrows furrowed, and she stroked the area to massage away the wrinkle. She wanted to avoid scowling as much as possible when she was with Sister Nana.

“You mean it broke because of the ocean’s force?”

“Apparently, it wasn’t that sort of break. More like it was demolished.”

La Pucelle looked toward the ocean, drawing Winterprison to look there was well. The outer bank—the outer breakwater that protected the whole harbor—wasn’t like the inner bank. It was an independent structure built in the ocean, so you couldn’t walk to it. To destroy it, you’d have to either swim through the cold spring ocean to get there or use a boat.

“I hear a contractor is coming tomorrow to start repairs,” said La Pucelle.

“Hmm… I wonder why something like that happened?” said Winterprison.

“There have been a lot of rumors going around. The more realistic ones say that a suspicious foreign boat caused an explosion, then fled. They’re also saying a UFO showed up and shot it with a beam weapon, or a giant creature body-slammed it.”

“A giant creature? Like a whale?”

“I’ve never heard of any whales appearing around here.” Sister Nana cocked her head a tad, then added, “That reminds me, I heard sharks used to show up in this area long ago.”

“Sharks…?”

Winterprison pictured a giant man-eating shark—then thinking it’d be scary if it was a bit bigger, that image was replaced with one a size larger.

It wasn’t that she liked sharks. She liked zombies and monster movies. The first time she had invited Nana on a date, they had gone to see a zombie movie. When Winterprison had asked about it afterward, Nana had expressed unhappily, “I’m very sorry, but I couldn’t say what about it was interesting,” and so Winterprison learned that they had very different tastes in movies. So Winterprison had moved away from zombies and monster movies and started watching movies about love and romance, which Nana liked. She was okay with this, since it wasn’t like she needed to see horror so badly that she would make things unpleasant for Nana, but sometimes, she would think back on it.

Winterprison shook off her idle thoughts. “It’s unlikely that just a biggish shark could destroy the breakwater.”

“I doubt it was shark,” La Pucelle replied.

“What do you think it is, La Pucelle?”

“What I’m most worried about, and what also seems the most likely to me is…a magical girl.”

“Ahh…”

“I see. You’re right, a magical girl could destroy the breakwater.”

La Pucelle had said “magical girl,” which was fairly nonspecific, but it was clear that she was referring to someone in particular. Winterprison recalled just two weeks back, when she had fought Calamity Mary in the Kounan district. Since her highest priority had been Sister Nana’s safety, she’d focused on defense the whole time, fighting while running away, until both of them had successfully escaped. But even calling that a success had left Winterprison with feelings of shame. She wondered if she should have beaten down her opponent completely then, and her regrets about it lingered. Mary would certainly regret letting her prey get away, too, and those feelings might well pose danger to Sister Nana at any time. Sister Nana was Sister Nana, and despite how Winterprison told her to cut it out, she had declared in the chat that Winterprison had driven off Calamity Mary like she was some hero. If Mary were to hear about that, she was bound to interpret it as provocation.

Once Winterprison considered that it might be Mary, she started thinking it was definitely Mary; but then she realized, if Mary wanted to do something, wouldn’t it be strange for her to destroy the Kubegahama breakwater? Kubegahama wasn’t Sister Nana’s home turf. Destructive behavior there wouldn’t be a declaration of war against her. Was Mary testing out some new weapon? Even then, would she do it out at the outer bank, where she would have to either swim or use a boat to get there?

Winterprison cracked her neck. “It would be strange for it to be a magical girl, too.”

“You think?” La Pucelle asked.

“Maybe a fishing boat or trawler or something hit it by accident and ran off.”

“Well, whatever it is, I’m thinking I should check first.” La Pucelle then bowed her head and said, “See you” before running off toward the harbor.

Winterprison and Sister Nana nodded and ran after her, quickly catching up.

“We’ll go with you,” said Winterprison.

La Pucelle looked a little surprised. “Thank you very much. But you don’t mind?”

“What do you mean?”

“Um…isn’t this interrupting your date?”

“You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Ohhh, okay. Sorry.”

“What are you two talking about?” Sister Nana cut in.

“Ah, it’s nothing important,” Winterprison told her.

La Pucelle, one of Sister Nana’s prized students, wasn’t a bad girl. But sometimes she could read too much into things.

Besides, all this about a date or whatnot aside, something was bothering Winterprison.

The three magical girls avoided any fishermen by running atop warehouses and behind shipping containers to come to a stop at the entrance to the inner bank, in front of the barbed wire and big iron gate. It was sealed with a sturdy-looking lock.

“Normally, the inner bank is full of fishermen, but…” With an eye to their surroundings, La Pucelle leaped on top of the gates. “Since the outer bank was destroyed, there’s apparently been a patrol coming around every hour. There’s nobody going in or out.”

La Pucelle extended her hand from above, but Winterprison held out a palm and refused the aid, taking Nana in her arms and leaping over the gate to land soundlessly on the other side. La Pucelle crooked her right index finger like a claw and scratched her head, then cleared her throat quietly before leaping down from the gate and running off. Winterprison and Sister Nana ran after her, and in ten seconds, they reached the edge of the inner bank. From there they could see the outer bank over fifty-five yards ahead across the water. Even for a magical girl, it was too far to jump across.

“Um…will you be okay?” La Pucelle asked. “It’s pretty far away.”

“It’s no problem,” Winterprison replied.

“I see. Then I’ll go first.”

La Pucelle held her sword up and leaped into the sea. Before their eyes, the sword grew larger and longer. In midair, she swung down the massive blade, then leaped again like she was doing a pole vault. She shrank her sword small enough to fit in the palm of her hand and landed on the edge of the outer bank.

Winterprison used the inner bank to make a wall. As her wall rose up from it, she made another wall, and then again and again she extended her walls vertically. Eventually, the wall couldn’t take it and fell toward the outer bank. Winterprison took Sister Nana in her arms and raced and leaped over the collapsing wall, landing on top of the outer bank. Behind her, the wall crumbled to pieces, sending up pillars of water as it fell into the brine. Since the walls would vanish once her magic was undone and be no more, it wouldn’t harm the environment.

“Well then, before the patrol comes…,” Winterprison said.

“Yeah.”

Winterprison lowered Nana to the ground and set off running. She had considered that if she was going to scoop up Nana at every occasion, then why not just run holding her in her arms from the start, but Nana surely wouldn’t be into that. Winterprison had only just been getting a little understanding lately of what Nana preferred. If she could deepen her understanding further, then nothing would be better.

The outer bank was only about half the length of the inner bank. They reached the spot in question in under five seconds. It went without saying, but it had been so badly wrecked that it was obvious at a glance, and nobody seeing it would think that it had been worn down by the waves.

“Wow…”

“How…terrible.”

The breakwater blocks had been shattered, and about fifteen feet worth of the upper part of the breakwater had been shaved off. Waves were beating against the broken section, soaking everything. The shattered fragments were scattered, and some of the pieces from the wreck were as large as a human torso. This had definitely not been caused by a boat collision.

Winterprison squatted down and picked up one of the fist-sized fragments that looked like it had been a part of the breakwater. Stroking it, she found its texture was rough. It dirtied her glove with gray powder. The surface of the fragment had been shaved by something like a file.

“Oh!” La Pucelle called out. She had gone down to the caved-in, destroyed section. “It’s here, look.”

Winterprison leaned out from above and looked down. There was something like a blade stuck in the spot where La Pucelle was pointing, on the wrecked area of the destroyed breakwater. Even a magical girl like La Pucelle couldn’t quite move it, and she only finally got it out by rocking it side to side two or three times. It was just over eight inches long, flashing brightly under the light of the moon. It was too rounded to be a blade; it looked like a stone that had been ground down and finished with a metal polishing cloth.

“Whatever could this be?” La Pucelle wondered.

Sister Nana trembled, then muttered quietly, “This rather looks like…a fang.”

Now that she mentioned it, it did kind of look like a fang, but it was too big for that. Winterprison doubted that even an orca or a swordfish would have teeth this big. “This seems more like a—”

She heard splashing sounds, followed by shrieks. Winterprison looked to the ocean to see a fishing boat rocking there. It was swaying wildly right and left, as if it had set off into the middle of a storm, and men clung to the railing of the boat to keep from falling off.

The ocean was calm. The waves were small. But the boat was listing so far, it was about to capsize. At this rate, several people could fall overboard. Winterprison lightly balled her right fist and thrust her left arm in front of Sister Nana, placing her behind her. A sort of shudder ran down her spine from top to bottom. Something incredible was happening. Even knowing that she had to hurry to go save them, something other than logic was keeping Winterprison’s feet glued to the spot.

La Pucelle was about to leap into the ocean, saying “I’m going to go save them,” but before Winterprison could stop her, the surface of the water rose up in a wash of white. There was the sound of water crashing as the wave slammed back down. Sister Nana in her arms, Winterprison rolled to the side, and by the time she looked back, La Pucelle was gone.

The boat gradually steadied, and the men were pointing around them and yelling. When Sister Nana tried to speak, Winterprison put her index finger to her soft lips. Still holding Sister Nana in her arms, in a low stance like she was crawling on the breakwater, she looked around the area. The waves were coming high out of the water. Part of the broken section of the breakwater crumbled off, leaving ripples and white bubbles in the water.

Winterprison sniffed. What she smelled wasn’t fishy so much as beast-like.

Bubbles rose to the water’s surface, increasing in number and size. As the surface of the water rose, a staff-shaped something thrust its face out, still covered in water, only to immediately sink and vanish. The sounds and bubbles disappeared from the water’s surface once more, making just quiet waves. That “staff-shaped something” had been the handle of La Pucelle’s sword. She was fighting something under the water. Was there really a creature that could fight with a magical girl? Even if her opponent had the advantage of being in its territory, the physical abilities of a magical girl were absolute.

Winterprison slowly and reluctantly brought her finger away from Sister Nana’s lips. She brought her own mouth close to Sister Nana’s ear to whisper in a dry, hoarse voice, “I’m going into the water. You go someplace safe.”

Sister Nana’s expression contorted in surprise. Winterprison didn’t wait for a reply, and when Sister Nana tried to stop her, she pushed her aside and leaped into the ocean. The cold stung her skin, but it wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t take it. Magical girls were robust enough to withstand the cold ocean of spring that refused human swimmers, and were able to swim while clothed.

The bubbles surrounding her thinned out. In the ocean at night, with only the moon for light, being a magical girl enabled her to see somewhat underwater. Winterprison scowled, but not because the salty ocean water stung her eyes. Mud swirled close to the ocean floor, blocking her vision. She got occasional glimpses of La Pucelle and something so massive, it couldn’t be hidden, rampaging around—it was a shark.

She wanted to doubt her eyes, but it was definitely a shark. It was twenty feet long, with a large dorsal fin, and its mouth was so wide that it provided the illusion that the teeth themselves were moving. Its shape was so extreme, it was like someone had made a caricature of a shark and then emphasized the shark characteristics of people’s imaginations even further.

La Pucelle had enlarged her wide sword to double her height to use it as a shield and was somehow keeping away from the shark’s teeth, but it seemed like the most she could do just to stay out of the teeth’s reach. One of her breastplate straps was torn off, and her armor was dented in, with one part broken or damaged like it had been filed off. Her hair was frayed and in disarray, and the exposed areas of her arms and legs were all oozing blood, coloring her white skin red.

Winterprison pointed her legs to the sky, jetting downward with a single kick. Making to attack the shark from above, she hastily avoided its tail as it swung at her without looking. Being underwater, she couldn’t move around like she typically did, and she wound up guarding with her arms. It was powerful enough that it shook her to her core. Winterprison looked at her arms, after blocking the tail. Her coat was ripped, and she was bleeding. Her sturdy magical-girl costume had been torn up in that one attack, and her body was injured, too.

Winterprison backed off and tried to attack from behind again, but the shark swung its tail and whipped up mud from the ocean bottom. In attempt to get out of range of the mud, Winterprison tried to back off while circling to the right, drawing back her legs to wind up to leap off a rock—but right then! The shark suddenly appeared from the mud to charge forward, making Winterprison change the direction of her leap ninety degrees to evade, bounding a second time off the shark’s side to spin around in the water. The shark came back with an instant U-turn. It was frighteningly fast. Even taking away the fact that they were in the water, it was abnormal. Winterprison leaped off another rock, lowering her right leg to the ocean floor for a dodge. Feeling a dull pain, she scowled. Her leg was bleeding into the water around her. That was the leg that she’d just used to jump off the shark. Though she was surprised how the shark’s skin had shaved off her boot just from touching it, she didn’t stop moving. The shark sped up. Winterprison put up a wall between herself and the shark. The shark slammed its head into the wall, destroying it in a single blow, but Winterprison had anticipated that. Her magic wall made the shark falter in its body slam just slightly as she leaped to evade it, raising a wall under her feet and then bounding off that to escape from the follow-up attacks from its tail and fins.

The shark stopped attacking, twisting its massive body as it rose to the surface. A beat later, the long sword extended from the mud, but it didn’t reach the shark.

The way the shark rose to the surface, she could only assume that it had anticipated La Pucelle’s attack from the mud.

Winterprison had learned a number of facts about sharks from movies, and this was one of them. The creatures known as sharks had special sensory organs that could sense weak electric currents in the water. They could use these to get an accurate grasp of their prey’s position, even in the deep sea where light didn’t reach—or in roiling mud. That meant in muddy waters, their enemy would know their position, while they didn’t know the enemy’s.

With a beat of its tail and fins, the shark dived downward, and Winterprison evaded it. The shark turned its massive frame at the last moment, skimming the sea floor, sweeping up mud in its wake to block their vision. It planned to blind them so it could toy with them without them fighting back.

As La Pucelle floated up in the mud, Winterprison gave her a sign—pointing her fingers upward, thrusting up twice. La Pucelle seemed to get what she meant, as she nodded back, then thrust her long sword into the ocean floor and extended it in a burst. The long sword pushed La Pucelle upward as it grew, and she rose to the surface of the water.

Winterprison created a wall under her feet, making another wall from that wall, and another and another to connect the walls upward, her face emerging from the water’s surface to take a deep breath. She was so grateful for the long-awaited oxygen, her eyes watered.

Winterprison extended her wall by one more layer to escape from the water, and with a single leap, she returned to the breakwater. Fortunately, there was no follow-up attack from the shark. It seemed the fishing boat had fled, and it was just waves around her—all she could see was the usual ocean, where she would never expect a giant monster to be.

“Are you all right, Winterprison?” asked La Pucelle.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m more worried about you. It seems it got you quite badly.”

“No, I’m okay…”

“What’s wrong? Why are you backing away?”

“Oh, um…your coat’s been ripped quite a lot, and, um, you’re exposed.”

“Ah, true, it is in the way.”

Winterprison took off her torn coat. She noticed that the sweater she wore underneath also had large rips in it, and with quite a bit of skin visible. Winterprison practically tore that off as well. La Pucelle turned her face away and took another step back.

“Ah, what’s the matter?” asked Winterprison.

“Um…don’t mind me.”

Seawater splashed up. A powerful shiver spread from Winterprison’s back through her whole body. It wasn’t simply because she had taken off her costume.

The shark was there. Right in the middle of the black ocean, she could see its giant dorsal fin. The shark’s dorsal fin had not come up on the outside of the breakwater. It was on the inside—in other words, in the harbor.

“No way!” La Pucelle cried.

The shark ignored her sorrowful cry, making its way toward the harbor. Its dorsal fin swaying back and forth like it was showing it off, it swam off far more slowly and boldly, compared to the way it had been moving underwater. Maybe it actually was showing off for them. She felt like she could hear the shark saying, “I don’t want you guys following me.”

“Ridiculous,” Winterprison muttered, rejecting her own fantasy. She doubted that even a dolphin or an orca could sense things about a magical girl and human society—that they were thinking, I don’t want it attacking the harbor and the ordinary people there. No fish had that kind of intellect—or it shouldn’t—but for some reason, it was heading toward the harbor.

The two magical girls raced out. They’d used the same method they had to come to return to the inner bank, running into the harbor, when an impact came up from the ground to heavily resound inside them. The shaking quickly stopped, then was followed by a second shaking, even bigger than the first. It wasn’t an earthquake. The giant unloading crane that was installed in the harbor fell into the ocean, throwing up a spray of water that could be seen from a distance as it collapsed. The shark attacked the base of the crane one more time to shave it off, and when the crane toppled into the water, it bit it, crunching the steel frame.

The shark leaped out of the water as if it were mocking them, and the ground shook three or four more times. Winterprison jumped over a shipping container, beelining it for the place where the crane had been. Passing by people who fled with sheet-white faces, she bounded from an empty truck to the roof of a warehouse, getting a run-up on the roof before using all her strength to leap. Fragments of concrete pattered down along with salty water.

Before her eyes, the harbor was being shaved away. Biting, striking with its tail and fins, and body-slamming, the monster shark expanded its territory, continuing its casual destruction like it was tearing up paper.

“Just what on earth is this? Is this really a shark?!” La Pucelle cried.

“It is. This is my first time fighting one as well, but I know that it’s an extremely powerful creature,” said Winterprison.

“I never thought they were this strong…”

“Watch out. There was an even stronger one in a movie.”

“Huh? A movie?”

“Let’s go!”

Winterprison leaped into the ocean without hesitation, and La Pucelle followed.

Fragments of concrete and the crane wreckage were sinking here and there. The shark wove between these obstacles, accelerating toward Winterprison and La Pucelle. As it swam, Winterprison generated a wall from one of the sinking concrete fragments. The wall struck the shark in its side, and when it flinched, La Pucelle sliced at it. The shark twisted around swiftly, just barely avoiding the swing from the sword, but the sword extended right at the last second. Cut in the back by the extended sword, the shark seemed to flail in pain, swinging its tail wildly and opening its mouth. It seemed to be showing off its teeth. Did it mean to counterattack with those? Then the shark suddenly pursed its lips and spewed out a black liquid.

It’s spitting ink…? Absurd!

La Pucelle hadn’t been anticipating projectile weapons at all, and it sprayed all over her, surrounding her with blinding blackness.

Winterprison avoided getting hit, bouncing off a wall to get out of range of the ink and rising to the surface. But the ink was spreading incredibly rapidly. The shark must have been spitting ink continuously, as the spot dyed all black got bigger and bigger, reaching as far as Winterprison’s feet, but she kicked at the water, jetting away.

As she swam desperately, aiming for the water’s surface, she sensed something approaching her from behind. She could never beat a shark’s speed underwater. She quickly gave up on getting away, turning around to fight back—but right when she got herself ready, the shark passed by close at Winterprison’s side. Wondering just what it was trying to do, she turned around to see where the shark was headed, and there was Sister Nana. She had been worried about Winterprison, who had leaped into the ocean and out of range of her magic, and was peeking off the end of the breakwater and into the ocean. The shark was heading straight for her.

Winterprison blanched. Kicking in a rush at the water, she pursued the shark, but it got farther and farther away.

“Sister Nana!”

She had to stop the shark, even if it meant her life—so she was thinking when something bumped into her back. Surprised, Winterprison turned around. It was La Pucelle. She was standing on the hilt of her sword as she continuously extended the blade even faster than the shark was swimming. La Pucelle gave Winterprison her shoulder, supporting her. They were bearing closer and closer to the shark. The despair that had filled Winterprison turned into burning hot rage. With a heat that burned everything from the inside out, its flames licked at the subject of her anger: the shark.

The shark must have realized that they would catch up before it reached the surface, as it turned itself around. As La Pucelle and Winterprison drew near, it opened its big mouth, and all three parties collided. La Pucelle was flung away, but she kept her attention on her sword, continuing to extend it. Winterprison barely managed to withstand the impact but got bit on the shoulder with its giant jaws as she grabbed its fin and gills at the same time. Using the sword’s hilt as her footing, she grappled with the shark close and face-to-face. Her gloves tore, the shark’s skin scraping her palms and finger pads, sanding them down to the flesh. She could hear the sound of her bones creaking from her bitten shoulder. She was bleeding a lot—a normal person would have died of blood loss by this point.

But as Winterprison was pitting her strength against the shark’s, the sword continued to grow. When the surface of the water grew close, Winterprison’s body brimmed with strength. Sister Nana’s magic had reached her. Flung straight into the air, Winterprison roared, flinging the giant shark into the air. When she threw it, it scraped off the flesh of her shoulder, but with Sister Nana’s divine protection, these wounds were nothing. While spitting mixed blood and seawater from her mouth, Winterprison landed, and a beat later, the shark fell—or so she thought.

Looking up into the sky, Winterprison pressed at her shoulder and sank to her knees. She was witnessing an unbelievable sight. Sister Nana, who was offering prayers atop the breakwater, and La Pucelle, who had come up on land at some point, were both dumbly looking up at it.

The shark was flapping its large white wings as it flew through the air. Opening its mouth, it showed off its rows of teeth. It looked as if it were laughing. A white bird that was caught at the edge of its teeth—most likely a gull—was swallowed with a slurp.

In the water, the shark had spewed ink. Could it be that it’d gained the abilities of whatever it had eaten? Winterprison had assumed that the many incredible sharks she’d seen in movies were nothing but fiction, but if magical girls were real, then it wasn’t odd for there to be magic sharks, too.

The sight was unreal, frightening and somehow sublime. As she bore witness to this, shivers rose through Winterprison’s whole body as fear spread through her. The shivers even reached her fingertips, but it all went away when the shark took a sudden dive for Sister Nana. Winterprison jumped sideways to grab Sister Nana into her arms, rolling to evade the shark. Having missed its prey, the shark flew up into the sky again, then looked down on the ground to confirm its next target. Next, the shark attacked La Pucelle—though La Pucelle blocked the teeth with her sword, the impact sent her flying, and she crashed into the truck that was lying on its side nearby. The shark flew up in the air for a third time.

What was needed when fighting a shark was courage. In movies, wild plot twists and surprise weapons often defeated sharks, but well, it was generally fair to say that courage was needed. Winterprison released Sister Nana, then leaped into the shark’s line of sight to get its attention on her.

The shark attacked from the sky above. Winterprison rolled on the ground as she dodged it, then raced up what barely remained of the crane to secure herself a position higher than the shark, and right before the shark could fly up again, she leaped down to its back.

Even if it had wings, the shark wasn’t moving as freely as it had in the water. Winterprison threw herself into a flying kick, aiming for the shark’s undefended back, but—

“It can’t be!”

The giant crab’s claw that grew from the shark’s torso caught Winterprison’s leg. Agony shot from Winterprison’s leg, making her clench her teeth. She wouldn’t be dominated by pain. Strength was continuing to well within her. Sister Nana was giving her strength once more.

Winterprison twisted her body with all her strength, wrenching the claw pincer around. The carapace made a nasty creaking sound, and the shark lost its balance in midair, swaying. Taking this as her chance, Winterprison kicked at the pincer, and when its grasp relaxed, she kicked it away one more time, escaping from its restraints. Leaping to the shark’s back, she held down the seagull wings as they flapped around. The shark lost control in midair and spiraled downward, its landing making the ground shudder and opening cracks in the concrete before it bounced. Winterprison withstood the pain and shock of impact, then circled in front of the shark’s face where it lay on the ground.

Seeing Winterprison coming in front of it, the shark opened its mouth in a threatening manner—no, it wasn’t a threat. Something white, red, long, and thin leaped out from its mouth and wrapped itself around Winterprison’s body. She whacked it with the back of her hand in an attempt to smack it away, but it stuck to her in a gooey mess and wouldn’t come off. Then it slid around her body, binding her tight. It was the tentacle of an octopus or a squid.

“But…it’s…too late!”

Winterprison created a wall in between herself and the shark. The magical concrete wall ripped off a number of the tentacles as it thrust up to cut off Winterprison from the shark’s mouth. Furthermore, perpendicular to the first wall, she created another wall that went toward the shark’s mouth. A wall that was twelve inches thick and three feet wide smacked its giant jaw, and the raging shark bit into it, holding it in its mouth. It didn’t realize that was exactly what Winterprison wanted.

She extended a new wall out from the top of the wall in its mouth—then another wall, and another, and another. She made more walls inside its mouth and extended them, and the walls that explosively grew inside its mouth assaulted the shark’s body from the inside. The shark writhed and spurted blood, but its movements were already being limited. Cracks ran along its body, and buckets of blood gushed from them.

“It’s over.”

The walls spread in a radial pattern, tearing up the shark from the inside. Teeth flew, bones flew, organs flew, and the giant shark was divided into parts that scattered all over, while the walls, having lost their support, collapsed simultaneously.

Winterprison staggered and was on the verge of collapsing when she was supported from behind.

“Ah, you’re covered in so much blood,” said Nana.

“This is nothing; protecting you was worth it.”

Winterprison kissed Nana’s forehead, and Sister Nana embraced Winterprison—then let out a shriek. Winterprison turned around, eyes widening in shock.

The shark’s body had burst open from the inside, its head, body, and insides scattering everywhere. But, in spite of that, countless tiny crab-like legs had grown from the biggest part, the head part, and it had started moving toward the ocean. It was still alive? Or was it about to revive? Winterprison tried to chase after the broken remains of the shark, but her legs got tangled, and she fell to her knees.

Minor pain continually ran through her right knee, left side, and left upper arm. The tentacles she thought she’d ripped off her were squirming. They now had a striped pattern in a variety of colors—blue, white, black, light brown—biting into her with little teeth. Winterprison’s head instantly sagged.

A sea snake…! So it can change its separated body parts, too!

Swaying on her feet, she laid her hands on her knees. Many types of sea snake were poisonous. Poison shouldn’t work on magical girls, but up against this shark, how far would “because I’m a magical girl” or whatever work? She couldn’t think straight or focus. This wasn’t the time to be pondering this.

At this point, she couldn’t even stand without borrowing strength from Sister Nana. The many-legged shark head hopped off and landed in the water, wildly spawning ten-odd flippers to rapidly zoom away from land.

Winterprison was losing consciousness, but she desperately clung to what little of it remained. They had to defeat it now, or the next time they encountered it, they might well not be able to win. And if that happened, it would be innocent citizens getting hurt—and Nana could well be among them. Clenching her teeth and swallowing blood, she took a step forward.

Suddenly, a shadow fell over them. Winterprison looked up and swallowed. La Pucelle, holding up a giant sword over thirty-three feet, was flying through the air. Sister Nana prayed to La Pucelle, and the sword she held overhead grew so long and big, no one would normally ever be able to carry it—thirty feet, sixty feet, ninety feet. Now this was long enough to reach the shark with its slice.

The shark already looked small in the distance as La Pucelle swung the giant sword down on it, and watching her, Winterprison felt relieved, but also mildly jealous. She visibly pouted.

  La Pucelle

The day after the shark fiasco, Winterprison summoned La Pucelle. La Pucelle had been contacted by Sister Nana pretty frequently before, but it was unusual for an invitation to come from Winterprison. And what’s more, she’d said she wanted to meet without Sister Nana there. Was there something up? Had some new problem occurred? Or, having seen La Pucelle fight so well to get rid of the shark, did she want her to be her new partner…? Nah, Winterprison would never.

In the end, La Pucelle never did figure out what this was about before arriving at the abandoned supermarket where they were to meet—but there was Winterprison, with two slips of paper in her fingers.

“I invited Sister Nana, though I knew she would say no. She doesn’t like the scary ones,” Winterprison said as she showed La Pucelle some movie tickets. Printed on it was the title Rocket Shark vs. Bullet Shark, with a photo of two giant sharks colliding. “How about it? Do you want to go with me?”

“Huh? Uh, but—”

“Fav said he managed to hush up the incident decently enough, but it’s not as if what actually happened has never been. Yes, it really did happen. Don’t you think that’s amazing? The sharks that I assumed existed only in fiction were actually real.”

“Uh, I think sharks were real to begin with, though.”

“I see… I didn’t know. I assumed that everything in monster movies, be they A, B, C, or Z-movies, were all fiction.” Winterprison made a fist, held it up, and swung it down. She was clearly too worked up. It seemed like she hadn’t noticed that they were not really on the same page.

“Please calm down a little. That’s not what I’m trying to get at.”

“La Pucelle. If you knew that sharks were real, then you must be quite a monster fanatic, too.”

“M-monster fanatic?!”

“With a monster friend like you, then it will be easy to prepare for another monster appearing in N City in the future.”

“‘Monster friend’… That kind of sounds like ‘monster-in-law’…”

“Having faced a shark with me, you’ll understand. We must know more about sharks. That’s what this movie is for.”

“H-huh? But are we going to go now? I really can’t, dressed like this.”

“I figure we can just de-transform.”

“W-wait, no, I can’t do that. That’s bad.”

“Then just put on a coat. Come on, let’s go, hurry.”

“Hey, hold on a minute—ah, um, hey, hey, don’t… Someone, help!”