Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 17 - Chapter 4

The Magical Girl in Black and the Lady Knight

  La Pucelle

“Huh? Camping? In this season?” said Snow White.

“Camping isn’t only for summer,” La Pucelle replied.

The two magical girls facing each other atop the steel tower wore contrasting expressions: Snow White looked uneasy, while La Pucelle responded with a confident smile. She was purposely trying to appear confident: She’d been looking forward to the soccer club’s camping trip but was fairly worried about leaving Snow White behind to do magical girl work alone. However, displaying that worry would probably make Snow White feel even more abandoned.

“It’ll be all right. No need for concern,” La Pucelle told her.

“…Do you think?”

Classic overthinking, La Pucelle figured. She wasn’t even going to ask Sister Nana for advice about this. If she did that, she’d just be laughed at or teased—although Sister Nana might actually listen in earnest. But La Pucelle was still embarrassed.

“I know you can be a great magical girl on your own, too, Snow White.”

“Huh?”

“Hmm?”

They now stared at each other, equally baffled.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean? Huh?”

“I was worried that you might get into some trouble or something while you were on your trip, Sou.”

“Huh? Really? I thought we were talking about how you would feel lonely on your own…”

The two of them looked at each other for a while before simultaneously bursting into laughter. La Pucelle was cracking up so hard that she forgot to tell Snow White to stop calling her Sou. Though they both loved magical girls, they were dissimilar in a lot of ways—but it was funny that somehow or other, they’d both been worried about the same thing.

  Hardgore Alice

Late at night on the third day after the game began, Ako Hatoda became a magical girl.

She just about jumped up on the spot, but before she could actually do it, she remembered she was in her room. Jumping, leaping, and making noise would bother her aunt and uncle downstairs. Now in magical girl form, Ako opened the door and sneaked outside, stepping down on the street in front of her house. She raised her right arm up high, and when she leaped up as hard as she could, she jumped high enough to shock herself. Before she knew it, she was looking down on the roof of the second story. She sighed in relief that she hadn’t jumped up while inside, but doing it in a weird position made her lose her balance. She fell onto her shoulder on the asphalt, hitting her whole body hard.

The impact would have been enough to instantly kill a normal human, but she hardly felt a thing. Even greater was the sense of euphoria and accomplishment. She wasn’t even listening to the mascot character Fav that had showed up to explain things, and an hour later, once her excitement had finally settled down, she summoned him again. “I wasn’t listening before,” she told him and asked him to explain once more. The mascot didn’t try to hide his sour mood, but he did more or less explain various things about magical girls.

Saving people in trouble without seeking recompense, solving minor daily problems—Ako was very satisfied to hear that it was exactly like she’d imagined and hoped magical girls were.

She had become a magical girl—the magical girl Hardgore Alice.

Being saved by that magical girl in white had led to Ako becoming a magical girl herself. Just thinking about how she could work side by side with her as a fellow magical girl made her heart leap and her lips break into a smile. If she could get a “Thanks” and a smile for supporting the magical girl in white, that alone would put her on cloud nine.

“What’s with that creepy wiggle, pon?”

“Creepy…?”

“You were moving kinda awkwardly.”

Her joy must have been showing. Clearing her throat quietly, Alice straightened her back. She was only at the starting line of magical-girl-hood, not the finish. She had to get herself focused, or she might fail to keep up. Then she’d never get to be by the magical girl in white’s side.

“But it’s strange, pon. If you admired the magical girl in white, then shouldn’t you have made your own design white, pon? White and black are total opposites, pon.”

“If we’re together…then the black-and-white contrast is pretty…”

“Huh? Really, pon? Is that combo pretty, pon? Aw, if you compliment Fav like that, Fav’ll get all shy, pon.”

Alice decided to not talk to this mascot character so long as it wasn’t necessary.

Alice had been religiously checking the magical girl sightings info aggregate site for anything about the magical girl in white. Some of that could be groundless rumors and empty talk, but Alice still had a vague understanding of what she did. After all, Alice—that is, Ako herself—had been saved by the magical girl in white. Alice’s goal was to help people by that magical girl’s side. So of course, her own work would bring her closer to the magical girl in white.

Over the next four days, Alice raced around the town of Kobiki at night to help people. When she tried to run along power lines, she got shocked. She missed her landing trying to leap from one roof to another. While running along the side of the road, she stepped through a grating and fell into the gutter. That was how she learned the ways her body worked.

Through her many failures, she was able to get a decent grip on the superior physical capabilities of a magical girl, but she was completely lacking where it counted: helping people. There weren’t a lot of people around this area of N City to begin with, and just running around, it wasn’t like she was going to conveniently run into people seeking help one after another. Maybe it would be easier for her to run into trouble if she went outside her assigned area, but Fav had forbidden that: “It’s still kind of like a probation period, pon. It’s too early for you to make contact with other magical girls, pon. Going outside your area comes once you can do your job properly as a magical girl, pon.” So she’d just use her legs to run around and search for people in trouble, learn the skills to solve issues, and become a magical girl worthy of standing at the white magical girl’s side. Even if her opportunities were few, that didn’t mean there were none at all.

So for three days after that, she tirelessly prowled Kobiki late at night, and finally she found her first person in trouble. Hardgore Alice’s momentous first was someone who was pushing their bicycle to try to get it under a streetlamp. Had they popped a tire or had the chain come off? One story about the white magical girl she’d seen on the message boards had been a wonderful episode that described her getting her pure white costume all blackened and dirty fixing someone’s bicycle. This was such an ideal situation, Alice’s heart leaped and fluttered, and she ran in at full speed. She wasn’t even thinking about the fact that she didn’t have the tools, knowledge, or technique to fix a flat tire, let alone a chain.

Since she was in such a hurry, she got herself worked up and forgot that she was in a back alley late at night with bad visibility. As she hadn’t paid attention to how narrow the lane was, she hit her shoulder on the wall of a ruined factory and staged an exceptionally impactful entrance scene: She showed up breaking a block wall with a shoulder tackle, leaving the person she was supposed to save with wide eyes and gaping mouth before they practically fell over themselves running away. Alice was unable to pursue them, with just her right hand thrust out halfway in front of her as she watched this person in need go.

For her second case, she caught sight of an old lady tottering along with a large wrapped bundle over her back. When Alice touched the bundle to carry it for her, the lady yelled “Police!” and ran away. Alice carefully considered why the old lady had yelled that when Alice didn’t look anything like a police officer, and it was the next morning when she realized that the lady had interpreted her silently touching her bundle as a robber and had called for the cops.

The third case went like this: Alice caught sight of someone walking around who looked kind of like they were in trouble, but even after watching them for a while, she couldn’t tell what their problem was. They looked like they were in trouble, but maybe they weren’t actually. But it would be rude to go up and say to them, “Aren’t you in trouble?” But then what if they really were in trouble? As she was waffling about this, she followed them, wondering, What do I do, what do I do? as the man ahead glanced back and sped up. Alice walked faster to match his pace and eventually wound up running, and before you knew it, she was chasing him, and the man shrieked and ran out of Kobiki.

The fourth case was a dramatic one. Seeing a truck that had its wheel fall off in a gutter, she trembled in joy, and then scolded herself. Even if this was her chance now, being glad of someone else’s misfortune was getting her priorities backward. Unlike with the bicycle case five days earlier, she was now discriminating enough to not just rush in and jump on them.

Alice leaped over the block wall, taking care not to knock into it, sneaked up from the truck’s blind spot, and grabbed it by the rear. The tires were spinning as hard as they could, but not grabbing on to anything. It wouldn’t be able to get out of the gutter like this.

Alice lifted the rear of the truck with all her strength. The physical strength of a magical girl made that possible, but she wound up putting a little too much muscle into it. The truck popped up too fast and floated about three feet in the air before bouncing hard on the road.

Alice was surprised herself, but the driver must have been surprised, too. Whatever he thought about it, he went about ten feet forward, then backed up rapidly, laying flat the stunned Alice and crushing her under the tires. The tires spun on top of her, grinding away at her body, and blood spurted out. The mental shock surprised her more than the pain, and she kicked up at the car’s body from below, and then the moment the truck was in the air, she escaped.

From his seat, the driver must also have felt that he was driving on something. The window opened, and the driver timidly poked his face out and looked to the rear of the vehicle. There, he must have gotten a hazy vision of Alice under the light of the old streetlamp: crushed by the truck, her body and clothes ground off by the tires, and dripping blood as she tried to stand.

With a shriek from the driver, the truck raced off, hitting and breaking the cement block wall on the inside of the curve when it turned the corner, but still didn’t stop, fleeing the scene.

Experiencing failure after failure made Alice consider things, in her own way. She wondered if maybe she wasn’t cut out to be a magical girl, but immediately discarded that thought. She couldn’t give up just because she screwed up a bunch of times. And it would probably be weird in the first place if she could immediately do a great job as a magical girl when she’d only just become one.

“Right now is something like your trial period, or your practice period, so it is kind of fine to screw up a little…but the other kids figure out how to be a magical girl pretty quickly, pon. There aren’t many clumsy magical girls like you who do nothing but screw up, pon. Wait, you’re not trying to establish yourself as the clumsy one, or something like that, pon? People won’t like you if you’re deliberately putting it on, pon.”

She decided again that she wouldn’t talk with the mascot.

Maybe it wasn’t that Alice had no talent, but rather that the white magical girl was amazing. She had the most sightings on the aggregate site, and in the popularity polls, she won time after time. She was truly a magical girl among magical girls, someone who could be described as the pinnacle of the genre. An ordinary person like Alice trying to be at that level was naturally going to do nothing but fail. But still, if she leaned on that fact and never made any progress, then her dreams would never come true. She wouldn’t be able to stand by the white magical girl’s side and smile peacefully as they worked together.

What she felt most keenly from her multiple failures was that she was extremely bad at communication. She hadn’t been able to have a decent conversation before she’d become a magical girl, either. Her brain wouldn’t work right, and neither would her tongue, and while she was thinking about what to say next, she’d miss her moment. Magical girls helped people from the shadows, but when helping people there was always some involvement with others, however small. If she couldn’t communicate properly, it would be an impediment to her magical-girl activities.

The cause of her failure was that she was doing something she wasn’t typically familiar with. With this thought, Alice decided to start off with practice. Her first mistake here had been starting with high-difficulty missions: talking to people she’d only just met, with no practice at all. If she actually practiced first before facing the real thing, it was sure to go well. As she imagined her future at the white magical girl’s side, her expression relaxed into a happy smile. She stuck up her index fingers to pull her lips tight into a serious expression. It was too early to smile. That came after things went well.

“Isn’t it thinking simplistically to assume that things will work out with practice, pon? Experience over the long term and inborn disposition are a big part of this sort of thing, pon. If you could fix your social anxiety with just a little bit of practice, then you wouldn’t need psychologists or counselors, pon.”

She tucked her magical phone in the back of the drawer of her study desk, and after locking it, she went outside. Concealed in the darkness in her black costume, she slipped this way and that through the town late at night, completing her usual routine of looking for people in trouble while at the same time, she practiced talking. She used a bunny plush to be the person in trouble, speaking to it as smoothly as possible, while avoiding getting stuck or stuttering.

There were no passersby as Alice’s muttering rang through the late night in Kobiki.

“Good day…no, that’s not right… Good evening… Yeah, since it’s night. It’s night, so good evening… No…maybe it’s better not to talk to you…but I don’t want you being startled…so then good evening… Good evening…good evening…good evening…good evening, and then…today…the weather is nice today, huh…? It’s cloudy… The sky is cloudy today… It’d be nice if we could see the moon tomorrow… Let’s go with that…”

“Hey, is someone there?”

Someone suddenly speaking to her from a spot she’d thought was empty made her leap. A light swung toward her, which she avoided with a jump to the side, and she fell in the darkness, but the light followed her. She glanced over to see a couple of police officers shining their flashlights around. Being local police officers whose job it was to protect the peace, it wasn’t at all strange for them to be walking around late at night.

Police officers weren’t people in trouble. In fact, encountering them made her someone in trouble. If they asked her, “Why are you out late at night walking around in that outfit?” she could only reply, “Because I’m a magical girl,” and then if they said “Okay, then we’re going to talk to your parents,” Alice would really be hopelessly in trouble.

Fortunately, they had yet to find her. She had managed to dodge the light of the flashlight. She trotted along behind a cement block wall and came to the road on the opposite side, but the light continued to follow her. Footsteps were coming toward her, too.

She made sure that a truck was stopped before hiding behind it. The light was still following her. Alice circled around behind the truck, and seeing that the trunk was open, she slid inside and quietly closed it on her from the inside. She heard voices from outside.

“I swear I heard a voice.”

“We did hear it. Hey, you with the truck—you can’t park here.”

“Ah, sorry. My radio isn’t working right, and I was trying to fix it.”

“Parking such a big truck in a residential area in the middle of the night, everyone is going to wonder what’s going on.”

“Gotcha. I’ll move it now.”

With a clack, the door was closed from the outside. It seemed it was now locked. The truck started running, and Alice breathed a sigh of relief. She’d managed to get away from the police officers. Now she just had to wait until the truck stopped, and then escape.

  La Pucelle

Nighttime had been the most fun part of field trips back in elementary school. Going around to temples and shrines during the day was lacking in adventure to Souta Kishibe and his friends at the time, and it was also a little boring. The evening was more fun. It was overflowing with excitement—throwing pillows at each other and prodding each other about who they liked, and the brave ones would have competitive matches with the video games they’d brought.

The campsite this time around wasn’t necessarily fun at night. The teacher and the coach were very strict, and if they made any noise at all, they’d zoom over and scold them. And even once it was night, there weren’t any particular events aside from bathing and eating, and the most they got was a review of the day and an explanation of the next one. And after spending the day running, kicking, and yelling, none of them had the energy for anything but collapsing into bed, exhausted. Having fun over some dirty jokes in the bath like “his is particularly large” and “his is really close to a grown-up’s” was closest to the field trip mood, and since it was a soccer camp, it was all soccer, all day.

But of course. That was just natural. Souta understood that, too.

But they had come all this way, rattling on the bus to a different town, so was it too much to ask to want more of a…like, “trip feeling”? Souta was just as exhausted as his teammates, but he possessed the hidden card that others didn’t—transforming into a magical girl.

Transforming into the magical girl La Pucelle made it possible for him to go without sleep. Slipping out of the campground at night was forbidden, of course, but everyone was sleeping like the dead, so the odds that Souta would be found were very low.

At midnight, after making sure that everyone had fallen asleep, Souta transformed into La Pucelle. With stealthy footsteps, she passed between the rows of futons and gingerly opened the window. She made sure that nobody would notice as she sneaked out to the veranda, then closed the window. Looking up, it was a long way to the rooftop, and looking down, it was a ways below, too. She was in the middle of a ten-story building, at the fifth floor. Leaping off the veranda railing, she jumped up, then grabbed the railing of the floor above to go higher, and repeating this three times, she came to the roof. When she was in magical-girl form, she felt uneasy unless she was somewhere out of sight.

She walked along the roof fence with a bounce in her step, and after doing one circle, she came back to her original spot. The old hotel, built forty years ago, was surrounded by even older buildings, and those buildings were surrounded on all four sides by mountains, and all of them were speckled with snow, pure white and sparkly at the tops. Even if it was just an hour and a half by bus from N City, once it was winter out here, it would be buried in snow, and no one would be able to see anything anymore. The mountain tops were still white, even though this was the season for mountain snow to get muddy. A little closer to winter, and they wouldn’t have been able to use the city grounds, and there would be no camp.

La Pucelle inhaled deeply. The cold woke her up and felt good, stinging wherever it touched when she inhaled. It was cold enough to freeze if she was human, but as a magical girl, it was only cool enough to moderately chill the flush of excitement from her body.

“Right, then…”

There was one thing that she had been wanting to do. This was something that was popular specifically on Magi-magi Cal-cal, the magical girl fan site that’d had the offline meetup she’d gone to before. It was to take a magical girl figure doll, a stuffed animal, or something on a trip with you, and then take a photo with it, with the local scenery in the background, for a “little trip with a magical girl.” At first, they’d just been little joke posts on forums, but these days, they’d become their own independent threads, and the regulars would post photos of their favorite magical girls every day. And things would get particularly busy after long weekends and such—there would be so many images posted, the page so heavy, it was hard to scroll through it.

The hard-cores were particularly enthusiastic, even for regulars of a message board filled with hard-core fans, to the point it seemed to put the casual fans off a little. La Pucelle was, if anything, the type who would watch from afar thinking, “They really go for it, huh?” But she also kind of admired what they did.

She kind of wanted to do it herself, although not so much that she would go through all the preparation to go for a photo trip. This was just a little imitation, a side bonus to the camp—and that was fine. Her only tool for photography was her smartphone, and her subject was a little keychain—that was enough. Trying with something bigger was bound to lead to Souta’s teammates noticing during the camp and cause a major disaster. Just imagining that happening gave her chills.

La Pucelle stretched with a groan and gazed up at the sky. The sky looked like it was in a bad mood. It was all black, like rain or snow would fall at any minute. She bent back even farther, and with her back arched so far she was almost in a bridge, she turned her face to the opposite side. Her horns clunked the floor, and she snapped back into her original position.

It would be a nice idea to walk through the town, after all. She could take a casual stroll, wander around, and check out the town. If she found any interesting sights, she would take a photo there. She figured she would get teased if Fav saw her, so she left her magical phone in her bag at the hotel. She would use her own smartphone to take cute, pretty pictures of her keychain of the first-generation Cutie Healer. Because she’d once gotten two of this keychain, she had given one of them to her childhood friend, who also liked magical girls. Somehow or other, she’d missed her chance to ask if said childhood friend—Koyuki Himekawa—still had it. She had probably forgotten it, but to Souta Kishibe, the item had memories. They didn’t make them anymore, and it was fairly rare now, making it perfect for a commemorative photograph.

La Pucelle ran down the wall of the hotel and landed in the parking lot, racing through it in a few steps to ascend from a cement block wall to the roof of a residential house, and from there she ran along the rooftops.

She immediately found something interesting. There was an old, worn-out, and rusted sign installed over the entrance of a factory. Based on how worn it was, it was probably from the Showa period—about mid-Showa, too. On it, the middle-aged man in glasses holding up a vitamin drink, who looked like a TV entertainer, was one Souta Kishibe didn’t know. There was a nice clash or contrast between that and Cutie Healer, who had come out in the Heisei era. She would take a picture here.

Then there was an eatery that was probably named after the owner or founder that was primitive not just in its name, but in its look. It was plain. Whether it was out of business or still running, it was difficult to tell at this time of day. She would get a shot here, too.

There was a beauty parlor beside another beauty parlor. Looking at the posters, it seemed like they were still putting up new ones, and the sign decorating the shop next door also seemed to be cleaned. In other words, both of them were in business. They had to be in competition, but for some reason, they both stood here. One of them had to have started after the other—that hadn’t caused any problems? It was interesting to think about it more deeply. She’d take a shot here, too.

You could find some fairly interesting stuff walking around a normal town, even if there weren’t any well-known tourist spots. With a decent sense of satisfaction and a few not-so-bad image files in hand, La Pucelle continued her walk. Unlike in N City, she didn’t have to hold back because it was someone else’s territory ahead or whatever, and there was hardly anyone walking around at night. She could go down the street freely and openly.

Walking a little farther, she saw a convenience store. It had a bigger parking lot compared to the convenience stores of N City, probably because it was more rural. Parked in that huge convenience store parking lot was a single large truck. It was almost touching the cement block wall. It was parked carelessly, too, sitting diagonally across the parking spaces. Somewhat curious, La Pucelle sneaked up to the truck and peered inside.

The driver had pulled down the seats and had a weekly magazine well known for gossip over his face as he slept. He didn’t seem to be suffering or writhing around. He was snoring, which she confirmed from the peaceful rise and fall of his chest. La Pucelle was about to move away from the truck when her feet froze. The cargo hatch at the rear of the truck was slightly ajar. La Pucelle glanced toward the convenience store; the clerk was yawning wide at the ceiling, not even trying to hide it. They didn’t seem to notice her.

If the truck drove off, then the cargo could fall out. The driver would be in trouble, and the car behind them might wrench a wheel, trying to avoid the cargo. That would definitely cause a big accident.

La Pucelle approached the four-foot-tall cement block wall, reached out a hand, and closed the truck’s rear hatch. Right when she was thinking she’d lock it, the hatch opened again.

La Pucelle furrowed her eyebrows. She’d closed the hatch decently hard, but now it was open. It had opened pretty hard, too, hitting the cement block wall and making a loud noise. Neither the driver nor the store clerk seemed to have noticed.

She tried closing the hatch again when she realized: Something was pressing against the hatch from the inside of the truck. Her furrowed eyebrows slowly rose. Someone was trying to open the hatch. Were they trapped?

Readying herself in a low stance, La Pucelle reached for the hilt of her sword on her back. Before long, there was a creaking sound, and the hatch opened to the point where it touched the cement block wall. There was someone inside—someone as strong as a magical girl. La Pucelle heard a nasty sound, like something dragging itself along. There was a bump, then something spurting, then a groan—a voice.

La Pucelle’s body reacted to the voice. She clenched her right hand, clasping the hilt of her sword.

It wasn’t just the voice. When she sniffed, her nose was struck with an unpleasant smell that made her feel viscerally revolted. A dripping sound mingled with the voice. She looked down to see a large volume of blood flowing endlessly from the vehicle’s trunk, making her gulp. Something slithered out and splattered into a puddle of blood.

La Pucelle very hesitantly peeked to the other side of the wall to see what had fallen. The moment she grasped what it was, she did three backflips, drew her sword, and readied herself in a battle stance.

It was an arm. Roughly cut from the shoulder, it belonged to a human—probably a child, from a girl of about middle school age. Even without comparing it to the vivid red blood, the color of its skin was white as snow. La Pucelle pressed a hand to her chest. Her heart was pounding, and she was hyperventilating.

Something else fell out. This time, it was a leg. Nausea welled up, and she covered her mouth. The sound of her sword hitting the ground made her realize she’d let go of it, and she hastily picked it up again. Hearing the sound of something else hitting the pool of blood, La Pucelle raised her head, steeled herself, and looked.

Her eyes widened. She didn’t want to see it, but she couldn’t turn away. Lying there was one more leg—before had been the right, and now it was the left—and then the torso of what looked like a girl wearing a black dress. The torso had only the right arm remaining. The left arm, both legs, and the head were gone, and fresh blood spurted from the roughly cut wounds.

She wanted to run away. But she couldn’t do it. La Pucelle painted over her fear with rage. A girl had been killed. The one who had done such a thing was most likely still in the truck. He had taken apart his poor victim inside his truck, and then he had dumped it outside like garbage. This was unforgivable.

La Pucelle leaped over the cement block wall, closing the distance cautiously—one step, two. Destroying the door of the truck would be easy with the strength of a magical girl. La Pucelle swung her sword up, aiming for the door, and there she felt something strange at her ankles. She looked down and froze.

Coming from the puddle of blood and leaving a crawling trail like a slug, the girl’s torso had come to La Pucelle’s feet, its right arm extended to grab her ankle. It clasped her with the strength of a living creature, but she felt no body heat in it at all.

La Pucelle let out a shout and swung up her leg. But the girl’s corpse grabbed her ankle firmly and wouldn’t let go. La Pucelle shook it back and forth, but it refused to let go, and La Pucelle shrieked.

La Pucelle squatted down, peeled off the torso with all her strength, flung it into the pool of blood, and ran off.

She had no clue what had just happened. She was simply scared. Her body told her to run, and so she did, and when she turned back, wondering if she’d gotten away, a bright red lump of flesh was rolling after her with fearsome speed, leaving a bloody trail as it pursued her. A cry that surprised even her leaked out from the back of her throat. She made her sword small and tucked it into her sheath, waving both her hands wildly as she sprinted down the main street with a loud cry somewhere between a shriek and a roar, running up the wall of the second-largest building in the city after the hotel, and landing on both feet on the roof.

It wasn’t like she’d run very far at all, but her shoulders were heaving. She timidly looked out from the top of the building, and when she peeked below…there was nothing there. She sighed with relief from the bottom of her heart, then sat down on the spot. She breathed in and out a few times, and she had just calmed down somewhat when a strange sound struck her ears.

She lifted her face. She had heard this sound before. It was a sickening sound, like crawling or writhing, discomposing the heart of whoever heard it. Getting up, she turned around.

There was something there past the fence on the opposite side from where La Pucelle had come, a hand on the fence, climbing up. Yes, it was a hand. A torso and a leg followed. Though when she had seen it in front of the convenience store, it had been in pieces, now the torso was growing four limbs. But it was moving stiffly, like it was inhuman. Most of all, the head was missing.

There was the drip of blood. A plip, plip followed, dirtying the concrete.

The corpse of the headless girl was about to cross over the iron railing when it swayed to the right, then to the left like it was trying to catch its balance, maintaining a delicate equilibrium as it came down onto the roof. Something cold ran up La Pucelle’s back, and she panicked and drew her sword.

La Pucelle drew her sword right as the corpse approached. What should have been one step forward closed three steps’ distance all at once. The unexpected lurch gave La Pucelle a fright, and she swung her sword without thinking, but then it looked like it would hit the corpse, making her panic even more, and she forced her swing to turn the other way. Instead of a straight swing, the sword’s trajectory bent at an acute angle, skimming the iron fence to hit the roof and send concrete fragments flying. Forcing her swing in the other direction made her hands slip, and she dropped her sword. It rolled along, clanging, to stop at the corpse’s feet.

“Ah, hey…”

The corpse took one heavy step forward. La Pucelle’s sword, touching the corpse’s heel, slid behind the corpse, right to the edge of the iron railing.

“Ah, um, hold on. My sword—”

The corpse took a step forward, and La Pucelle leaped back. The end of her tail touched the iron railing, telling her that there was no space for her on the roof. The corpse took two more thudding steps forward, and La Pucelle leaped down from the roof, landing on a promenade-style lane and dashing off.

Hearing something quickly approaching, La Pucelle sped up without looking back. Nobody could keep up with a magical girl’s legs—but the footsteps followed. She clenched her teeth and sped up more. The sounds still hadn’t left. She moved her legs with all her soul, at the absolute maximum speed. The footsteps kept up with her. When she looked back, thinking, That can’t be, she saw the headless corpse sprinting after her while swinging its arms, and a sound she’d never heard from herself came from the depths of her throat. The corpse was running now as if its earlier jerky movements had never been—with proper arm swings, like a sprinter.

She had to be hallucinating. While running, La Pucelle turned back one more time, and this time she let out a shriek instead of stifling it. A jaw had grown above the neck. A tongue extended from it, and the lower teeth were breaking through flesh in an attempt to grow in.

Whatwhatisthatwhatisthatwhatisthatwhat?! Is that?! What?!

Averting her eyes from the extremely grotesque sight, she bounded off a telephone pole and went over the netting to enter the school courtyard. She cut through the schoolyard, kicking up dust as she went, maintaining her speed as she raced up the school building. The corpse was unflinching in the face of such vertical movement and kept after her. La Pucelle desperately ran over the roof fence, and from there she leaped to a neighboring roof. When she made the jump, she was so desperate she didn’t notice, but in the middle of the jump, it struck her—this was a pretty hard jump, even with a magical girl’s powerful legs.

No—even if it was hard, she had to make it somehow.

At around three feet left, where she just barely couldn’t reach even if she stretched out her arm, she extended her tail to the fence opposite her and grabbed it. She normally didn’t use it, but her tail was about as strong as her other limbs. Supporting her full body weight with only her tail bent the fence, but she still somehow clung on.

The corpse didn’t have a tail.

Arms and legs extended, it slammed into the pavement without breaking its fall. Blood spurted up, rocks cracked, and it flailed its arms twice before suddenly losing strength and collapsing.

From atop the roof, La Pucelle held her breath and looked down. The corpse’s right elbow and waist were twisted at unnatural angles. Even a zombie wouldn’t be able to move in that state…probably.

The corpse jerked upward. The bones that should have been broken had gone back to normal. Its right elbow bent at ninety degrees, its waist twisted, and it put both hands to a window frame to climb up the school building with vim and vigor.

La Pucelle ran off once more. She had tears in her eyes that she couldn’t explain as she sprinted along. It was as if a nightmare she’d had when she was young had come back in the flesh. There was an undead enemy in pursuit, and no matter how she ran and ran, she couldn’t escape. Eyelashes wet with tears, she moved her legs. No way was she going to stop here and get killed.

La Pucelle went for a new route. She left the city center and moved away from the hotel, too. The corpse didn’t care, hot on her heels. La Pucelle gradually quickened her pace, but her pursuer sped up, too. At this rate, it would be the same as before. The faster she ran, the more intently the corpse chased her.

Eventually, she couldn’t go any faster, but the corpse was keeping up with her anyway. And since La Pucelle was concentrating purely on speed, she wasn’t able to avoid obstacles—she kicked over a plastic bucket that had been left behind the eatery, lost her balance, and started falling, but somehow stayed on her feet. The lid of the bucket loudly rolled around as the corpse leaped to evade the fallen bucket and knocked into the sign of a standing-only bar.

La Pucelle didn’t have the presence of mind to notice the disturbance and kept on running. About a minute later, when she realized that it was quiet behind her, La Pucelle checked back out from the corner of her eye, but she couldn’t see the corpse. She relaxed a bit and slowed her pace, then came to a stop, and got a proper look behind her. She let out a deep breath, seeing it somehow looked like she’d managed to shake it off, but when she looked ahead again, she shrieked. The corpse, which should have been behind her, was somehow coming toward her from around the bend ahead. La Pucelle clambered up the traffic sign that was right to her side, getting some recoil out of it to get up to the roof of a small building nearby. The corpse followed La Pucelle and tried to climb the wall.

“Why? Why are you following me?!” La Pucelle cried.

No response. The corpse again steadily and wordlessly pursued her. The regeneration of the corpse’s head had reached underneath its nose, its mouth breathing without issue. It didn’t yell, or moan, or speak—the way it just dispassionately used its mouth for breathing evoked an indescribable fear that sent a shiver down La Pucelle’s spine. Its lips were well-shaped, but pallid, and its skin was a sickly white on which was cast the red of blood and organs.

Each and every thing about it was utterly terrifying. La Pucelle wanted the thing to disappear from her sight as soon as possible, but no matter how much she ran, it followed her everywhere and wouldn’t let her go. La Pucelle cried, wailed, and ran some more.

Knocking down an obstacle on the way—

Will that work?!

—running through a dilapidated spot and making the corpse stumble—

Did I do it?!

—getting a number of obstacles between them—

Yesss!

—but it kept following her anyway, without giving up.

Gyaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

La Pucelle couldn’t take this any longer. She headed from the city center into the mountains.

Going along a road that spiraled upward, she grabbed a tree branch, headed onto an animal trail, and leaped up into the trees. Coniferous trees rustled as snow fell from them, La Pucelle racing through as it scattered all around, kicking snow in her wake as she sped along as fast as she could. The corpse did the same, close at her heels. It used tree branches like a monkey or feral child—which really clashed with its black dress, but that didn’t bother it as it stuck right on La Pucelle’s tail. Its head had already regenerated up to the top of its shapely nose, and it was writhing around in a distorted mess as it tried to form what looked like a brain.

Who knew what would happen if the corpse fully regenerated. La Pucelle was about to reach her limit, body and spirit. She had to come up with some way to escape.

The corpse showed no signs of slowing, either. Its all-black dress—let alone those cute black shoes—really wasn’t suited to the snowy mountains, although La Pucelle’s outfit wasn’t remotely appropriate, either. But the corpse was pursuing La Pucelle faster than a vehicle on a major road.

Souta Kishibe was born in N City, a place fairly famous for the depth of its snow, so he knew quite a bit about snow himself. In a chase through the snow, the pursuer was generally at the advantage. You’d have the advantage in speed going along the trail, as it would be tamped down by the one in the lead, and you wouldn’t use as much energy, either.

The distance between the two of them was closing bit by bit. The enemy extended a hand, the nails at the end of it skimming La Pucelle’s tail. La Pucelle panicked and wrapped her tail around her body. It was definitely catching up. La Pucelle’s breath came out in an endless stream of white puffs. A tireless magical girl was becoming exhausted.

A white rabbit that ran into their chase hastily ran behind a rock. The rabbit’s footsteps dotted the snow—but there were also some fine ski marks in the snow, too. So that meant there was a skier. The trail was still new, and there was no snow on top of it. In a scene that was so pastoral, so slice of life, she had the regenerating dead chasing her from behind.

At this point, I’ll take anything! I have to bet on this!

La Pucelle released her tail, which she had been hugging to her chest. Her tail snapped away again, sweeping aside the whiteness and smacking the enemy with a lump of snow as it scattered flakes all around the area, coloring their field of view white. From there, she took a one step, two step run-up, jumping on her third step, removing the sheath on her back as she twisted around in midair and faced the enemy.

“A-all right! Come at me!”

The snow blind cleared. The shape of the black dress slowly became clear, making a beautiful contrast with the white snow. Yes, it naturally seemed beautiful to her. Even though it was a zombie that was gradually regenerating the skin on top of its exposed skull, it still seemed beautiful.

The corpse stomped down on the snow as it approached La Pucelle. One step, two. La Pucelle desperately played it cool, folding both arms in front of her chest as she stared fixedly at the corpse. The corpse must have been frightened of her gaze, as it faltered a moment, but it still didn’t stop walking. It took another step, and then another, cutting through the snow as it moved forward, and when it took another big step, the snow crumbled.

The corpse reached an arm out forward, but grabbing at crumbling snow wasn’t going to be any support at all. It rolled down into the bottom of the valley along with the scattering snow.

After that, La Pucelle was left alone. She had thrust the sheath of her sword into the side of the cliff and was standing on top of it. At a glance, it would look as if she was standing on snow, but what was supporting her body weight was her sheath, made gigantic. The corpse, unaware of that, had stepped onto the weak overhanging snow, which would crumble with weight, and had fallen to the bottom of the cliff.

But because it was a zombie with such vitality, La Pucelle doubted it was over yet. If she used snow and ice to slow down her pursuer with the low temperature and guided it deeper and deeper into the mountains to freeze it, then even a zombie would be unable to move. That was how the monster had been defeated in the splatter horror movie that Winterprison had dragged her to the other day.

Buried in the snow at the bottom of the cliff, the corpse shouldn’t have been able to move—but La Pucelle furrowed her brow. There was something like white smoke rising from the bottom of the cliff. Was that snow? Leaning out from atop her sheath, she looked down. Snow like white smoke was gradually spreading to swallow up the rocks. It was moving toward the slope with fearsome speed, making the ground rumble—

Is that…an avalanche?!

The mass of white crushed everything in its path. Who knew where it would stop? The ski tracks that La Pucelle had seen on the way rose in her mind, and she raced out. If the avalanche were to keep going, it might hit the unknowing skier. La Pucelle was the one who had caused this avalanche—it would never have happened, originally. She had heard that spring snow could sometimes cause terrible avalanches. How far would this go, and how much would it swallow up?

The avalanche was going faster than a car, but La Pucelle at full speed was even faster. However—her footing was too rough now. She couldn’t go full speed here, like she could on a paved road. Struggling with the deeply rooted snow that pulled at her legs, she kicked it up as she pushed forward, but no matter how she moved her feet, she couldn’t get as fast as she wanted, and she couldn’t get closer to the avalanche—in fact, it was moving farther away.

La Pucelle cried out. She absolutely wouldn’t let someone die, even if it meant her life. She would save them, no matter what. Moving her legs in refusal to give in to the snow, she ran desperately. Things went white in every direction at some point, but she quickly got through it. There was nothing moving. The snow stood still as a lump, and she could see a number of treetops atop it. The avalanche had stopped. Had the coniferous forest acted like a shield and stopped it?

The white smoke gradually cleared, and from the white, a black form appeared. It was the corpse in the black dress, with snow all over, standing on top of the lump of snow that had been rolling down the slope just now. La Pucelle gasped and looked up at the corpse; it raised its right hand and pointed ahead.

There was a ski trail on the slope. It wasn’t the beautiful curve that she had seen earlier. It was twisted and curved, with ski pole holes, messed up enough that she could imagine how panicked they were.

“Were they…able to escape?” La Pucelle asked.

The corpse tilted its head heavily to the front, its long black hair bouncing. Then it immediately straightened up again.

“Did you…just nod?”

The corpse tilted its body in the same way, hair bouncing, then went upright again. Apparently, La Pucelle’s interpretation was correct.

“I see…”

That’s good, La Pucelle thought. She started to feel relieved. But even if this skier was safe, it wasn’t necessarily that there hadn’t been anyone caught in the avalanche. La Pucelle was obligated to make sure that nobody had been caught in it. She used her enlarged sheath as a shovel and stabbed it into the mass of snow, digging it up with her magical girl strength. With a speed no lesser than the speed of heavy machinery, she dug her way through the snow.

Sensing a presence, she looked beside her to see the corpse grabbing the snow mass with its bare hands and tossing it behind it. Seeing her move with such focus, La Pucelle felt something well up inside her and looked up into the dark and cloudy sky. After blinking a few times, she turned back again to look at the dead girl in black one more time.

It seemed the corpse’s regeneration was complete, but it still didn’t look alive. The color of its skin and lips was far from a living person’s, and the deep, dark color of its eyes and the heavy circles underneath them further fostered that impression. Its wavy black hair went down to its waist, so long that it made the dead girl seem even more unreal. But this girl’s corpse, who gave no sense of having the energy of a living creature, was moving with vigor as it silently dug up the snow.

Thinking back on it now, La Pucelle had a feeling like this girl had never actually harmed anything. No—there hadn’t even been once. La Pucelle had just been scared of its frightening appearance. The corpse had simply chased La Pucelle—

“Huh? Now that I think about it, why were you chasing me?” La Pucelle asked.

The corpse placed the lump of snow in its hands on the ground, and from its pocket it pulled out a doll attached to a keychain. That small, cute thing was a prize item, a Chibi first-generation Cutie Healer. Souta Kishibe had one, too. In fact, he’d been taking pictures of it not long ago.

“Wait, that’s mine,” La Pucelle said. “Did I…drop it?”

The corpse leaned forward and then stood back up.

“You picked it up…and tried to give it back?”

The corpse leaned forward and then stood back up.

“Oh…”

Seeing that La Pucelle was not going to say anything further, the corpse returned to its task. It grabbed lumps of snow in its bare hands and tossed them aside. Even with frozen hands, doing something that would certainly cause frostbite for a human, it was no problem for a corpse. It didn’t balk at the cold or chill, silently grabbing snow and tossing it away.

“Hold up.” La Pucelle stopped the corpse and shoved her sheath into its hands. “Use this. I’ll dig with my hands.”

The corpse moved its hands like it was trying to communicate something—most likely, it was trying to say that it didn’t need the sheath—But La Pucelle paid that no mind, wiping the tears on her cheeks off with the back of her hand. She grabbed the snow with her bare hands and tossed it to the side just like the corpse had. Seeing that, the corpse stopped for a while, then eventually it used the sheath like a shovel, as La Pucelle had, and started to dig through the snow.

This simple and icy task was perfect for La Pucelle’s current state of mind. She wanted to punish herself. She was ashamed of her prejudice in assuming purely based on looks that the dead girl was a filthy monster, and felt so bad, she wanted to disappear. The cleanup they were doing now had all been caused by La Pucelle’s own personal failure. And even though there was fundamentally no need for it to help, the corpse was doing this out of its own good-will. It was far more upstanding than La Pucelle, who was a magical girl and a knight.

La Pucelle shut her eyes. It felt as if tears would spill out again if she let them.

“…Sorry,” she managed while still shoveling.

While digging up snow with the sheath, the corpse tilted its body to the right.

“You don’t know what I’m apologizing for?”

The corpse then tilted its body to the left before coming back to the center.

“It’s fine. I was a fool. I did something awful to you. I really…I really am sorry. I did something I should be ashamed of, as a magical girl…”

The corpse released the sheath, clapped its hands, and pointed to itself. “I’m…a magical girl, too.”

“Huh?” The surprise of this dead girl being able to speak and the surprise of her being a magical girl combined to leave La Pucelle shocked, at a loss for words, and confused. “Huh? What? Oh, you’re a magical girl.”

The girl tilted forward, stood back up, then took the sheath again and returned to her task.

“A magical girl… Right,” said La Pucelle. “Huh… So you’re just a magical girl.”

She wasn’t a zombie. While La Pucelle was relieved, she was also angry. She was mad at herself.

Just because she had no head, La Pucelle had assumed the girl was a monster, and even witnessing the supernatural phenomenon of her moving around as a dead body in pieces, she hadn’t even considered that she could be a magical girl. Saying she had been panicking, or she had been flustered were complete excuses. Swallowing a sigh, La Pucelle continued at her task.

  Hardgore Alice

On the way back from the mountains, she found out that she was in D City of the same prefecture. She hadn’t thought that there would be magical girls outside of N City.

The local magical girl, La Pucelle, apologized profusely, bowing her head to Alice many times. She bowed her head so much that Alice wound up remembering the horns growing from the top of her head better than what sort of expression she wore.

“I’m sorry, I really am sorry. This was my fault. I’ve done something awful.”

She had to be talking about how she’d run away. Alice understood her feelings, so she couldn’t really blame her. Alice had tried to get out from the parked truck, and the cement block wall had gotten in the way—the hatch of the trunk refused to open all the way. There hadn’t been enough space for Alice to get out, but then she hadn’t wanted to destroy the truck and cause trouble, either. So then she’d considered what to do and had come up with an idea.

Her body kept getting stuck because she was trying to get out normally. So then what if she chopped her body into five parts to make herself more compact—would she manage to get out all right then? This strategy started off working. But she hadn’t considered how it would look to someone else if they found a person trying to get out like that. If Alice were in La Pucelle’s position, she would certainly have assumed it was a splatter horror monster.

Through repeated experiments, Alice had learned that she would not die from external wounds. Cut, stab, and burn her a little, and she could still move without issue. But it wasn’t as if anyone else shared that information. If they saw her, they’d think she was a monster and treat her like one.

Alice wanted to say all this to make her feel better and tell her it was fine, but as she was thinking about how she should say it, the subject shifted to something else.

Even after they’d finished digging up the snow and made sure there were no victims, La Pucelle continued to apologize the whole time. She deplored her inexperience as a magical girl for making things get this way, saying that her teacher or her partner would have been able to make better decisions. As she was talking about this, gradually the focus of the conversation drifted, and before they knew it, she was bragging about her partner. She said she was kind and pure, and truly a magical girl among magical girls. Then quietly, she added, “And she’s super cute,” blushing of her own accord.

Hardgore Alice wanted to argue. The only one who was “kind and pure and truly a magical girl among magical girls” was the magical girl in white who had saved Ako.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to verbalize this very well. She simply let La Pucelle speak as she pleased and chewed over her frustration, unable to do anything but silently apologize to the magical girl in white: “I’m sorry I’m not able to preach about how wonderful you are.” And so the two of them went down the mountain and returned to the parking lot from whence they’d come.

The area around the truck was as quiet as if nothing had happened, and there was no blood, head, guts, arms, or legs. This was something Alice had learned through her experiments—the severed parts and blood that flowed out from Alice’s body would disappear very quickly. She didn’t know how it worked, but regardless, she was thankful she didn’t have to clean up every time.

“Right. I have to get back,” La Pucelle said with a tired smile, and Alice took her hand to stop her. Since Alice had come here in the truck, she didn’t know how she would get back to N City. Even if it would be a bother to ask to be shown back, she wanted La Pucelle to point her in the right direction, at least.

As she was thinking about how she would broach such a request, La Pucelle interpreted this hand-holding as Alice’s reluctance to part ways. La Pucelle shook her hand and smiled. “Thank you… Looks like you’ve forgiven me. You really are a great magical girl.”

The words “great magical girl” made Alice happy. She squirmed around like she was writhing in agony, shaking her head and muttering under her breath. La Pucelle raised a hand, and with a final “See you,” she raced off. Alice reached out her right arm, but as she was thinking about how to call her to stop, La Pucelle vanished.

Her mouth still open, Alice slowly looked around the area. The night was faintly beginning to dawn. Wondering if there was some kind of sign with directions, she walked down the road a while. Though she found a large sign in front of the park, it was all place names she didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure where she should go or how. And the map was too localized anyway, making Alice feel like she wasn’t able to get the information she wanted.

Noticing that her mouth was still open, Alice slowly closed it.

She made up her mind. She would ask someone for directions.

After all, she was no longer the Ako Hatoda who had avoided getting involved with others—Hardgore Alice was planning to be a magical girl beloved by all, and so she should be able to have a totally normal conversation.

There was nobody around because it was too early in the morning, but that issue would be solved by time. It was around the time of day when a jogger, a person going for a morning walk, or someone like that would be appearing soon. She turned around to come face-to-face with an old man with a dog. The old man was looking at Alice with wide eyes.

Alice remembered her training for improving her communication skills. It was no good to be nervous. She was going to be natural, so natural, as she spoke to him coolly and smoothly.

But she was too far away for that. So Alice raced out to approach the old man, but she dashed out so fast, she ran into a mailbox, lost her balance, and fell diagonally forward, and then got caught on the park’s wire mesh.

The old man’s eyes widened even further. He was shocked. This was no good. She would get the same results as last time. To emphasize that this was really no big deal…oh yeah, she should just smile. The white magical girl had melted Ako Hatoda’s heart with a wonderful smile. La Pucelle had also had a charming smile. So then Hardgore Alice should also be able to make friends with people by smiling.

Alice beamed at him. She had no mirror, so she didn’t exactly know what her face looked like, but she was sure she was smiling sweetly.

The old man’s throat shuddered, and he let out an earsplitting shriek before racing off just as fast as his dog, without looking back. He dropped the scooper and the plastic bag he’d been carrying but kept on running, bolting around a corner and going out of sight.

Alice squatted down and picked up the scoop and the plastic bag. So now she had to deliver these? The work of a magical girl was never-ending. With a brief nod, Alice raced off.