Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 4 - Chapter 1

Nemurin’s Adventure

This story is set around the time when the magical candy competition in Magical Girl Raising Project had just begun.

No one could stop the giant monster’s advance. No power could keep it in check: not the police, not the Japan Self-Defense Forces, not the American military, not law, ethics, or passion. Of course, handguns and machines were useless, and even tank-mounted cannons and missiles did nothing more than sprinkle the monster’s hide with soot. The beast was merciless, even when crushing girls who screamed and cried as they ran this way and that trying to escape.

This monster, this mound of violent impulse, could not stand the presence of the insolent buildings those tiny humans had fussed over making. It tore down the National Diet Building with its black, nobbled forelegs, and with a swing of its tail, it snapped the Tokyo Skytree in half. From its mouth, filled with flashing fangs, it fired a heat ray that blasted the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building into bits in one shot.

A boy was watching the monster from atop a high-rise building.

His knees were trembling, and he couldn’t even stand as he clung to the chain-link fence that circumscribed the building’s roof to stop people from jumping off. The black creature and its unfettered campaign of destruction terrified him more than he could take.

Unable to hide its joy in the mayhem, the monster howled loudly, rattling the glass of all the nearby buildings. But it was so worked up, a howl wasn’t enough to sate its energies. Its red eyes, filled with violent passion, scanned the area until they met those of the trembling boy on the roof.

The monster was over 160 feet tall. Who knows why such a large creature would lock gazes with a boy not even five feet tall? But it did.

The monster’s mouth twisted to bare its fangs. Had it just smiled?

The fiend approached the boy, leaving footprints in the road as its feet slammed down. The boy thought about running, but his legs wouldn’t move. Sensing his inevitable death, he screamed.

“H-heeelp!”

“Leave it to me!”

A girl’s voice responded just as its owner revealed herself. She stood on the chain-link fence in front of the boy, shielding him from the giant. She was wearing pajamas and holding a pillow under her right arm. Her hair, which was longer than she was tall, swayed in the winds blowing high above the ground.

“You’re a vile monster, destroying the city and hurting people! Magical Girl Nemurin is gonna beat you up!” The girl leaped from the chain-link fence and bent over into an acute angle in midair to land a kick between the monster’s eyes. The creature wailed, though it hadn’t even twitched in response to the missiles or tank-mounted cannons. The girl kicked it, punched it, and whacked it with her pillow, and each time, the monster voiced its pain with truly pathetic-sounding cries.

Then it tried to run away, but the girl was hot on its heels, grabbing its tail to swing it around violently and throw it. Crash. The ground pitched. The road caved in, and buildings lurched off center. The monster wasn’t only hurt by the impact of its landing—its eyes were spinning after being swung around and around.

Now that her foe was stunned, the girl touched both her index fingers to her forehead, striking a pose. “Nemurin Beam! Zap, zap, zap, zap!”

Beams shaped like jagged, angular lightning shot out of her forehead to envelop the great monster in golden light. Its black hide turned a pale green color, its horns and fangs shortened, and it shrank down a size.

“The evil heart controlling you has now been purified. Go on, return to the Southern Islands.”

The monster stood up and bobbed its head in a bow to the girl, then strode away with steps that seemed somehow rejuvenated. The girl spent some time watching the monster go, and then she hopped up into the air and disappeared.

The boy stared at the scene, dumbfounded, but before long, he awakened to the sound of his mother yelling, “How long are you going to sleep? You’re going to be late again!”

This place lay on the boundary between dreams and reality.

Fluffy white clouds went on and on, forever and ever. They looked just like cotton candy—and in fact, if someone put some in their mouth, they’d find it tasted a little sweet. There was a canopy, too, made of the same stuff as the clouds, spreading out in four directions, and underneath it sat a sofa and some cushions.

The magical girl Nemurin’s long, long hair dangled to the cloud floor as she sat daintily on the sofa, using her magical phone. A hologram of the mascot character, Fav, floated up from its screen. On the magical phone’s screen was the number 7,530,685,689,921. That was the amount of magical candy Nemurin had.

“Defeating that monster today made my candy count even more ridiculous, huh?”

“That’s what happens when you keep saving Earth and the universe and stuff, pon.”

“Is this number capped?”

“You mean, is there a maximum possible value? There might be a limit in the settings, but…no magical girl has ever actually stored up that much, pon.”

“Huh. Then maybe Nemurin’ll work harder to store up more and become the first magical girl ever to hit the candy limit.”

“You might as well do that in reality, pon.”

“Doing it in reality is sooo exhausting!”

Magical candy earned in dreams was limited to the world of dreams only. Nemurin may have been getting rich in this realm, but in the real world, her candy values were still at zero. She would probably be the first one to be cut under the new rule that had been announced the other day, that whoever had the lowest number of candy would stop being a magical girl.

Fav had been stubbornly insisting, “You should earn candy in the real world, pon,” but Nemurin never listened.

Still holding her magical phone, she flopped over to lie on the sofa.

Nemurin’s power as a magical girl was to traverse between the world of dreams and real life. In dreams, everything was a piece of cake for her, even beating up an evil god or a great monster, but in the physical world, she was bound by the laws of reality.

“Maybe Nemurin can just let the other girls handle the real world,” she muttered.

“You’ve got no initiative, pon.”

“Nemurin’ll work hard in the dream world…”

All of a sudden, the Nemurin Antennae that decorated the ends of her hair cried out, “A MAGICAL GIRL IS DREAMING!” and Nemurin leaped to her feet. It seemed someone she knew was having a dream.

“You’re going to go watch, pon?”

“Of course!”

Nemurin snapped her fingers, and a door rose up from the clouds. The large, thick slab of wood looked old, but there were no nicks or dirt on it. She reached out to the doorknob and turned it. The door was unlocked.

Nemu Sanjou had been a hard-core indoor type ever since she was practically a baby.

She’d had severe asthma that prevented her from playing outside freely, but she had enjoyed listening to her older brother and sister tell her funny stories about what had happened to them: “We had fun doing this today” or “So-and-so told me that.” Nemu was a good listener—or rather, she sincerely enjoyed hearing her siblings talk, and the pleasure she derived from it made them happy, too. So they told her everything: failures, secrets, and all.

Nemu had recovered from her infantile asthma almost entirely by the time she started elementary school, but her nature was basically set in stone by that point. She preferred watching other people do things rather than doing them herself. She didn’t like hard work or conflict.

It wasn’t like she was passive or a poor communicator. She had friends. She just didn’t want to be active. She had more fun listening to people talk about things so she could imagine them rather than experiencing those things for herself.

Even after Nemu graduated from university, she devoted herself to reading and playing video games, with the excuse that she was “helping around the house.” But neither her parents nor her siblings scolded her for it. The Sanjou family had been big property magnates for centuries, and they owned seven apartment buildings in total, large and small. So her family was financially comfortable; plus, they loved the easygoing Nemu, so they spoiled her.

Nemu first started playing the mobile game Magical Girl Raising Project when she heard the rumors of its miraculous power to make one out of every few tens of thousands of players into a real magical girl. And then, even after it turned her into the magical girl Nemurin, nothing changed about her lifestyle. She didn’t like trouble. She didn’t like conflict. If there was going to be a competition between all the girls for candy, then she wouldn’t bother gathering any at all. She accomplished all sorts of things in the dream world, while in the real world, she enjoyed the once-weekly special chat unique to the magical girls.

She listened to the stories of the others who’d gained powers through the game, like Snow White, La Pucelle, and Sister Nana, and she also checked what they were up to via the magical-girl aggregate sites and visits to their dreams.

The world of dreams belonged to Nemurin. When she was at the boundary between dreams and reality, she knew exactly when any acquaintance was dreaming, as long as it was someone she’d met in real life. If one of her colleagues was dreaming, she would immediately rush over to watch, and occasionally, she would participate. It was unusual for a magical girl to dream as her superpowered alter ego, so she always jumped at the opportunity.

Snow White had once debuted as a singing and dancing magical-girl idol. Sister Nana had once been locked in a castle tower and was saved by a prince. Top Speed had won a witches’ broom race at one point.

Nemurin had seen Winterprison flirting with Sister Nana in a room in their apartment. Even Nemurin hadn’t been able to bring herself to watch that. She’d left before it ended.

La Pucelle had fought a dragon once. The dragon had had her on the ropes when Nemurin had swooped down right in the nick of time, throwing a rock at the dragon in an attempt to save her cornered friend. But her aim had been off, and she’d hit the back of La Pucelle’s head instead. Nemurin had panicked and run away, and in the chat the next day, La Pucelle had complained about a big, mysterious lump on her head when she’d woken up that morning. Nemurin had apologized, secretly and silently.

Fav made fun of her, calling her a Peeping Tom and a voyeur and a stalker. It wasn’t like Nemurin was completely shameless about it. But she figured any of the magical girls she knew would probably forgive her if she apologized, so she decided to do so mentally and go see this dream, too.

Nemurin opened the big, creaking door and followed the fluffy road out of the pure-cloud boundary realm between dreams and reality and emerged in the world of dreams, which had anything and everything. The soft billows gave way to hard stone floor, people started to appear, and before she knew it, the area was filled with tightly packed crowds. It was so stuffy, it made her want to gag.

It was a Middle Ages Europe–style town abuzz with some event like a festival. Absolutely everyone was excited, and this whirlpool of wild enthusiasm was centered around something specific. Nemurin leaped up to escape the sweltering air of the crowd and went to sit on the roof of a building with a hanging signboard that seemed to indicate the place was an inn.

There was a line of knights and soldiers, court ladies and jesters, and a band playing a rowdy and boisterous song. And riding the palanquin at its head was a princess.

“Hmm?” Nemurin looked hard at the princess. She seemed familiar. But still, it wasn’t someone she’d ever met in real life. She could swear she had seen this princess in the magical-girl chat, as an avatar. “That’s…Ruler, isn’t it?”

She had only come to the chat once or twice, but Nemurin remembered her. It was definitely Ruler. The crowd was calling her name, too. Great Ruler! Great Ruler!

Nemurin flicked on her magical phone and summoned Fav.

“Yes, yes?”

“Hey, Fav. That princess is Ruler, right?”

“Yes, it is, pon.”

“Doesn’t dream magic only let me see the dreams of people I’ve met in real life? Nemurin doesn’t remember ever having met Ruler face-to-face.”

“Maybe you’ve encountered her someplace before, as a human?”

“Oh, I guess that’s possible… Wait.” Upon closer inspection, Nemurin could see that the outlines of Ruler on the palanquin were faintly blurred. “Ruler isn’t the dreamer. That Ruler is part of the dream.”

Because Nemurin operated in the world of dreams, she could somehow tell the difference between the person who was dreaming and the characters who populated the dream.

This wasn’t Ruler’s. Someone else was dreaming about her.

Nemurin bumped up the sensitivity of her Nemurin Antennae and scanned the area. Her eyes came to a rest on a certain little girl.

She was alone, separate from the crowd, and as she watched Ruler, she had an air about her that differentiated her from the bubbling enthusiasm surrounding her. She must have been about six years old, and she was quite adorable. She was the dreamer. Though the girl appeared human, the Nemurin Antennae indicated that the dreamer was a magical girl, which had to mean she was dreaming in her regular human form.

Nemurin jumped off the roof of the inn and floated down, doing a spin to land beside the girl. The girl completely ignored Nemurin’s sudden descent; she had eyes only for Ruler.

Nemurin observed the little girl’s face. Thinking about it now, she had the feeling she may or may not have seen a kid like this in her neighborhood. Maybe she had said hi to Nemu on her way to or from school? Or maybe not.

The little girl was gazing at Ruler with sparkling eyes filled with admiration.

“Do you love Ruler?” Nemurin asked. The little girl nodded, eyes on Ruler the whole time. “’Cause she’s cute?”

“’Cause she’s cute and she’s cool and she’s a princess.”

“I gotcha. Princesses are really neat, huh?”

“Yeah. When I grow up, I’m gonna be her attendant.”

“‘Attendant’? That’s a real big word.”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm… But what if, instead of becoming her attendant, you became a princess yourself?”

“Huh?” For the first time, the girl tore her eyes away from Ruler. They were wide in surprise, staring at Nemurin.

Nemurin knelt down so she could be at eye level with the little girl. “I’m sure you can become one. All little girls can become princesses.”

“Me…becoming a princess…,” the girl muttered dazedly.

Nemurin patted her head as if to say “Good girl” and leaped up.

The fears and aspirations of small children were so incredibly easy to understand in their dreams. They didn’t try to hide behind shyness or vanity the way adults did. Nemurin’s absolute favorite thing was to watch dreams like that from afar…but on that day, she breathed a large sigh.

Even as she flew toward the boundary between dreams and reality, she couldn’t stop thinking about the girl she’d just seen.

“What’s wrong, pon?” Fav’s tone didn’t indicate any concern. He was purely curious, and that simple desire to know was patently evident.

Nemurin sighed again. “Oh…thinking back on how that girl’s eyes sparkled, you know? It’s like suddenly, I feel kinda dirty. I can’t help feeling this way whenever I see little kids.”

“Well, you are dirty, actually. You’re the only magical girl with a peeping habit, pon.”

“You’re not gonna even try to console me?”

“Nope, pon.”

“Harsh!”

Nemurin’s reason for nonparticipation was that she didn’t want to engage in conflicts. She had basically boycotted candy gathering, implicitly stating her refusal to involve herself in a game to compete for the highest candy score.

But now, she kind of felt like her reasons had changed.

That girl had shown straightforward adoration. Pure feelings. Even when she wasn’t transformed, she was so overwhelmingly a magical girl.

She must have been another magical girl in town. And if she was, she, too, would be forced to gather magical candy. But Nemurin wanted to delay forcing on her the stains and wounds of the candy competition even just a little bit longer. If Nemurin were to do nothing and go back to being a human, then that girl could remain pure that much longer…maybe.

“At this rate, at the weekend chat, you’re gonna be the dropout, pon.”

“Yeah…I guess my fun as a magical girl is over.”

“What’ll you do if you retire, pon?”

“Hmm…” Nemurin tilted her neck left, then right, then sucked in a big lungful of air. The air of the dream world was thick, sweet, and somehow suffocating. She looked at her feet as she flew and saw that her right sock was slipping down. Tugging it up, she murmured, “Maybe I’ll stop being stuck in my house doing nothing and start looking for a job.”

A great sea of clouds, white as far as the eye could see, spread out before her.

I bet I’ll have good dreams today, Nemurin thought.