Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 7 - Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

THE MIRACLE OF MEETING YOU

  Prism Cherry

Once their scheduled training was over, the Pure Elements returned to the briefing room and sat around the table—Tempest on the edge of her chair, Inferno cross-legged on hers. Quake rested one leg on top of the other.

Break time was, in other words, free time. Each of them did what they wanted how they wanted to. Of course, the rule that they should not cause trouble for the others still held.

Quake immersed herself in a handheld game, Inferno read a shounen manga magazine, and Deluge peered over Inferno’s shoulder to catch a glimpse. Tempest set out her math textbook and notebook, while Prism Cherry sat with her to help out.

Tempest folded her arms, looking down at her notebook. Her mouth was pulled tight, lines gathered in her brow. Next to her, Prism Cherry pointed to an equation. “You borrow from the one beside it.”

“Okay, so I borrow ten from here.”

“Ah, close. Not there.”

“Oh, the other way? Right, right, this one.”

“Yup.”

Princess Tempest erased the mistake, then blew the rubber shavings away and smoothly rewrote it. Looking a little confident, she pointed to the new formula with her pencil. “This is it, right?”

“Exactly! That’s correct!”

“Yesss! All right, next one!”

Seeing Tempest charging ahead to the next problem, Prism Cherry smiled. She didn’t have any siblings, but she thought maybe if she’d had a little sister, it would be like this. Even if she wasn’t that great in school, she could help a second grader with her homework.

Quake giggled as she put her game down on the table. “You got yelled at the other day ’cause you forgot your homework, didn’t you? You’ve gotta make sure to remember it next time.”

“Hee-hee-hee,” Tempest giggled. “It’d be real sad if I spent so much time on magical-girl stuff that I couldn’t keep up with school.”

Eyes still on her manga magazine, Inferno’s voice rose in protest. “Yo, Tempest. Why the heck’re you looking at me when you say that?”

“You were just talking about your test grades.”

“Well, yeah, but middle school tests are way worse than elementary school ones,” Deluge offered in support, and Inferno nodded firmly in her direction.

“They’re way harder than the ones they give kids.”

“See, Inferno, you’re always acting like you’re the grown-up.”

“Inferno is a grown-up.”

“Yeah, Quake’s absolutely right. I’m an adult. Totally.”

“It’s so great that you’re so gung ho about taking more tests than everyone else. No kid could do that.”

“That’s right, ’cause kids don’t normally do makeup tests— Wait, hey!”

In this rather quirky room, which surrounded them on all four sides with whiteness and not a speck of dust, the cheerful laughter of the girls rang out.

Tempest laughed for a while, too, and while laughing, she clicked on her mechanical pencil, only to find no lead came out. She tried shaking the pencil up and down but couldn’t hear any lead rattling inside. “Huh?”

“What’s wrong, Tempest?”

“The lead ran out.” Opening up her pencil box, she tilted her head. Then she dug to the bottom of her backpack to look, but all that came out was textbooks, notebooks, erasers, and highlighters. “Ughhh!” Tempest moaned. It seemed no mechanical pencil lead had surfaced. Small things like that tended to get lost, eventually.

“Want me to lend you a pencil?”

“Yours are too dark, Quake. They’ll get my notebook dirty.”

“Someone’s picky.”

“’Kay then,” said Tempest, “I’ll go home and get some. Cherry, will you wait for me till then?”

“Yeah, I’ll wait. Hurry up and go, go.”

“Come back soon, okay?” said Quake. “’Cause our break time’s gonna be over.”

“I know. Then see you in a bit!”

  Lady Proud

Slowly, bit by bit, she followed the scent of blood at a turtle’s pace, taking every precaution so as to not let the trail elude her as she went along, pacifying the easily bored Umbrain along the way. After two full days, Lady Proud arrived at a ruined, closed-down factory. It didn’t look much like a laboratory, but if this was a camouflage hiding some kind of facility, the location seemed decent enough.

“This is where the trail ends,” said Lady Proud.

“We’re finally here? That took way too long.”

If she let Umbrain’s accusatory tone get to her, that issue would never end, so Lady Proud decided to ignore it. The front entrance was firmly locked off with a chain. The lock was rusted, and there was no sign it had been recently opened. A magical girl would be strong enough to rip it open, but this meant that anyone going in and out of the laboratory would be using a different entrance.

Umbrain circled right, while Lady Proud went left to do a half circle around the abandoned factory, and they discovered a tiny back entrance there. The lock had already been broken, and the doors couldn’t be properly closed anymore.

“Maybe they’re using this entrance?” said Umbrain.

“I don’t sense anyone here, but…”

The door creaked unpleasantly as it opened.

There was no one inside. But when Lady Proud slid her fingertip along the floor, she found no dust. It was being cleaned regularly. If the owner had been trying to take care of this abandoned factory, they would have done something about the lock before cleaning the floors. It was unnatural. It was worth investigating.

The walls were covered in papers that said a whole bunch of stuff about the history of the factory. It seemed this place had originally manufactured frozen goods. When the factory had closed down, they must have sold off all the equipment they could, as there wasn’t anything left in the place. The factory wasn’t at all large, either.

The place was small-scale enough that once they’d investigated what was left of the factory floor, the bathroom, break room, and office kitchenette, there were no more places to look, and despite having come with hearts swelled with expectation, quickly they were left without anything else to do. There wasn’t any thing or place in particular that caught the eye.

As for Umbrain, she was gazing at a spiderweb in the corner of the room.

“What are you staring at?” Lady Proud asked her.

“Just thinkin’ about how this spiderweb’s so pretty with all the dew on it.”

“Are you or are you not going to be serious about looking around?”

“Honestly, not really.”

Though Lady Proud hadn’t brought her to help search, she also thought it wouldn’t hurt if she were to do a little more work. But if she were to voice these thoughts too strongly and Umbrain were to say, “Okay then, I’m leaving,” then Lady Proud would be in trouble, since if there was an emergency situation, she would be counting on Umbrain’s presence.

After a once-over through the inside of the factory, Lady Proud searched around one more time, then searched some more. When she was thinking there was nowhere else she could investigate, she looked over at Umbrain, who was still gazing at the spiderweb.

The scent trail did indeed end here. Something had to have been done here—or was being done here. Of course humans wouldn’t pick up on this smell, and even magical girls wouldn’t, unless they were of a special type.

Lady Proud clicked her tongue quietly, then spread her cape on the tatami of the break room and sat down.

She was not at all the sort of magical girl skilled at searching. The ones with those sorts of skills would be on the Inspection Department’s Investigation Team, or those freelance magical girls who specialized in looking for people. But she couldn’t seek help from magical girls with skills like that. The e-mail had demanded the strict observance of secrecy, and most of all, there was a reason Lady Proud wanted the Department of Diplomacy monopolizing the spoils.

Since Umbrain was being uncooperative, Lady Proud had no choice but to do a sweeping investigation of the whole place. With grimly heroic determination in her heart, she was about to stand up to search around one more time when she heard a dragging sound and froze.

When she poked her head out of the break room and into the factory, she saw Umbrain standing on guard, umbrella open. She was facing the crane operation device—and it was slowly sliding aside. “What’s that?”

“Quiet.”

The device stopped. A big square hole was open in the floor. And then someone popped her head out of it.

It was a magical girl.

Her hair was tied in two ponytails and scattered with yellow apple hair decorations. On her back was slung a giant bay laurel ring. With an expression of surprise, the magical girl pointed at Lady Proud. “Ahh!”

Next, she pointed at Umbrain. “They’re here again! And someone else, this time!”

She also pointed at the ceiling. “And even up there!”

Looking in the direction the girl pointed, Lady Proud was startled. Someone was sitting up there on a beam close to the ceiling. It was a jester. A girl dressed like a jester—probably a magical girl—was looking down at them.

“I’m not gonna let you people just do whatever you want!” The girl’s upper body emerged from the hole. In her hand, she held a great bladed weapon.

Lady Proud hastily hid behind Umbrain’s umbrella. “Hold on! Our intention is not to start a quarrel!”

“You’re not gonna fool me!” The girl flung her weapon. Lady Proud was a little surprised that a blade of that size was a projectile. The girl threw it in an unexpected direction, too, sending it slicing through walls and unsold furnishings and equipment as it swept around to pass close to the ceiling.

The jester magical girl hastily dashed out a window, and the weapon’s trajectory turned further, whirring in its spin, and realizing it was coming for them, Umbrain turned around to point her umbrella at the weapon.

Umbrain had a magic umbrella that could gently and fluffily block any kind of attack. It softly blocked the heavy blade that had sliced up the factory interior with such intense power, and the weapon fell to the factory floor with a clang, rolled around, and then disappeared with a whiff.

Lady Proud whipped around to see the girl in the hole was gone. “She got away?”

“She did.”

Lady Proud was concerned about the jester girl, but more important was this hole. Just where did it lead?

  Fal

This was the third day of their search in S City.

Snow White went from the sign of a prep school to the top of a telephone pole, and from there, she went to the roof of the post office, getting a running start to do a three-corner jump from a traffic light, another traffic light, then a high-rise wall, hop-hop-hopping at a brisk tempo.

This late at night, there were far fewer cars driving through the world below. But it wasn’t as if there were no people. The downtown was still filled with cheap brightness, and the men and women who gathered there for similar pursuits enjoyed themselves in a lively manner. There was a drunk salaryman leaning against an electric-light sign, and some young men glaring at each other with an air like they might explode at any minute.

While intervening on such things now and again, Snow White continued to make her way along. Helping people was a magical girl’s duty, but to the local magical girl, this would be an extreme disrespect of her territory. Snow White would let any such objections slide off her like water off a duck’s back, but it would be somewhat troublesome if the issue were taken up the ladder.

But they didn’t encounter any local magical girls. Despite how she was being rather visible and running around quite freely, none pinged on Fal’s radar.

“… Who’s in charge of this area?” Snow White asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Name and magic.”

“Hold on, pon… Name: Prism Cherry. Her magic allows her to freely transform the reflections in her mirror, pon. Her assigned region is S City—the Tanai, Abi, Ainari, and Tonoe districts.”

“Thanks.”

Jumping from building to building, Snow White ran along rooftops. Fal had wondered if Snow White wasn’t worried about the local magical girl. But from the way she’d asked that now, it seemed that was not the case. What concerned her was that despite all her running about, she wasn’t encountering the local magical girl.

While steadily observing the radar for reactions, Fal said to Snow White, “You’re not deliberately being sloppy when you run around, are you, pon?”

“I’m not trying to be sloppy about it.”

“Then should I say bold, pon?”

It would sound nice to say Snow White was seeking to come in contact with the local magical girl, but that would basically mean she was trying to start a quarrel. Snow White’s lips relaxed, and as if to no one in particular, she muttered, “Fal’s been becoming so much less reserved.”

“That’s because there’s a certain princess here who will get up to nothing but recklessness if I’m reserved, pon.” Fal said it like a joke, but internally, he was incredibly anxious. Basically, Snow White was sacrificing herself to lure them in. If the only prey to come were ones Snow White and Fal could manage, that was fine, but they had no idea how long that would continue. It would be nice if this would simply be complaining about fishing for small fry and catching a boot, but some days, you would hook a shark or a whale. The life of the fisherman was on the line.

Snow White was startlingly indifferent about her own safety. No matter what Fal said, she wouldn’t listen. Had Ripple’s disappearance made her so desperate? Fal wanted to ask but felt vague fears about any response he imagined, and just thinking of how much that would hurt her made him hurt, too, and Fal could never come close to asking it.

After getting that e-mail from Ripple’s magical phone, they were acting on the assumption that she was alive. And since the goal was to be able to see Ripple again, of course she would show consideration for her own personal safety—or that was how Fal wanted her to think.

“Let’s take this a little more calmly, pon.” Right as Fal was starting to say that, a simple but grating electronic noise sounded. Fal had deliberately set the noise to be unpleasant and grating on the ears—since if they didn’t notice when the time came, it wouldn’t be a meaningful alert noise. A magical girl had appeared within a two-hundred-yard radius. Right as Fal was about to confirm her precise position, there came the sound of a collision, and then Snow White was turning to face backward, putting the chain-link fence of the roof at her back.

There was a magical girl there. She must have been amused about something, as she had a broad grin on her face. Her overall color scheme was garish, and her head was topped with a vividly colored cosmos flower as big as a crown.

Out of a love for magical girls, Fal’s original master, Keek, had sought out a magical girl who was, in her mind, righteous. All the data on magical girls Keek had accumulated during that process were stored inside Fal—and not simply as a directory or roster of girls, but as a great collection of data that even included personality tendencies and secret jobs.

“Marika Fukuroi,” said Fal. “Formerly a student of the Archfiend Cram School. She was a colleague of Cranberry and Flamey, pon.”

“Oh-ho, a mascot character! Then you’re a magical girl with some real oomph to ya!”

“She makes flowers bloom from her head, pon. It looks silly, but the flowers have mysterious powers, pon. If you underestimate her in a fight, you’ll get hurt, pon.” Fal ignored Marika’s reaction and continued his explanation.

This magical girl, Marika Fukuroi, had suddenly come to attack as soon as she was within the range of Fal’s radar. Judging from her speed, you could tell that as soon as she’d found Snow White there, she’d zoomed straight in at full speed to body-slam her or kick her. In other words, she was an enemy.

And Fal, who was her enemy, had spoken about her. Fal had been deliberately speaking loudly, intending to keep her in check with that explanation, meaning, “We know all about you.” But she didn’t seem at all bothered by the important fact that she was known and smiled gleefully.

Restraining his irritation, Fal continued. “Even within the Archfiend Cram School, where strength is everything and the law of the jungle rules, she’s known as a brute and was expelled for her violence… She’s battle-crazy, and she’s done outrageous things, like go to South America and pick fights with drug-trafficking organizations because she wanted to fight a tank, pon.”

There was also a certain other magical girl right here who had gone to the Middle East to suppress a civil war, but he would leave that aside.

“There aren’t any close enough to catch on my radar, but… she might have allies, pon. She sometimes teams up with other magical girls who share her ideal that isn’t really an ideal—just seeking out fights. Amy and Monako, two younger students at the Archfiend Cram School, are very skilled fighters, like all graduates of the school. Styler Mimi isn’t a member of the school, but she’s known for being a firm supporter of Marika Fukuroi’s, pon. Some people even think she’s the handler who controls the mad dog Marika Fukuroi from the shadows, pon. Of course, she’s also a certifiably excellent fighter, pon.”

Marika Fukuroi casually stepped forward. Behind Snow White’s back was the chain-link fence.

Fal had deliberately made the explanation go on long. In a fight between magical girls, knowing your opponent’s magic was more important than who was stronger or compatibility between the two, and sometimes, it would instantly decide victory or defeat. Information was just that important. Emphasizing “we know this much about you” would wear down her will to fight and make her prepare to flee. Or it should have.

“Watch out, pon. Snow White, she—”

“Snow White? … Oh! The Magical-Girl Hunter!” Marika Fukuroi’s smile was radiant. It looked like she’d start drooling from the corners of her mouth at any moment. “There is such a thing as fate, huh? How was Flamey? Was she satisfying? Or not? I’m a bigger mouthful and tastier. But there’s some poison in me, too.”

Stance slightly forward-leaning, Snow White didn’t make to move. Marika Fukuroi took one more step forward.

The alert noise that had been ringing went a level louder as from behind Marika Fukuroi, Fal saw a shadow fly in like a bullet.

  Styler Mimi

“What are you doing?!” she cried in an affected way, but she could easily guess what Marika was doing. She was starting a fight. As for why Mimi had said that out loud: it was to inform the opponent that she intended to try to stop Marika Fukuroi.

Then she raced in at full speed. She was showing the opponent, “Look at how much effort I’m putting in to try to stop her.” If Marika Fukuroi were to do something stupid despite this, it would mean that Mimi had put in her best effort and still had been unable to stop her. Mimi had to make sure that was how it all worked out.

“Please stop this violence,” said Mimi.

“It hasn’t even gotten violent yet.”

Marika Fukuroi had no qualms about launching surprise attacks. She would nonchalantly pull things like zooming in from behind to strike someone on the back of the head.

Magical girls who were knocked down by these surprise attacks lost their right to fight with Marika Fukuroi, while those strong magical girls who could evade them, withstand them, or strike back would gain the right to fight her—or so that was her excuse. Of course, from this point, she would face the fight fair and square, head-on.

When Mimi pointed out that she had this backward, she was always ignored.

This time was more of the same. Having discovered a magical girl on top of a high-rise roof, Marika had jetted in as per her pet philosophy, and when Mimi had reached out to stop her, her hand had cut through the air in vain, so she had hurried after her, but it seemed Marika’s surprise attack had failed. Unfortunately.

This magical girl was dressed all in white. The main theme was a school uniform fastened together by her armband and flower decorations for emphasis. Elements like how the material of her boots stuck out a little and how the flower bud on her hairband was about to open, were pleasing for people who had an eye for that, but Mimi drove such work-related thoughts to the back of her mind.

The old sack hanging from her waist seemed not to be originally from her costume. That was the one thing that looked really worn. It was probably a magic item. Though from a glance, Mimi wasn’t certain of its use.

The girl’s eyes were fixed on Mimi and Marika, but she was still alert to her surroundings. Though this was also clear from how Marika’s surprise attack had not taken her down, she had a wealth of experience in battle, was physically very capable, and was also a master when it came to magic.

Even a decent veteran would feel panicked and scared if they were suddenly attacked, but this magical girl was so calm and collected, it was unpalatable. Her low fighting stance showed no weaknesses.

“That’s Styler Mimi, pon!”

Mimi was startled. That strange speech quirk, and that synthetic voice, high like that of a child—she’d heard it come from the chest of the magical girl in white. Realizing that it was a digital fairy–type mascot character, internally, she felt disheartened. Magical girls who had mascots either had quite a bit of status or some kind of backing.

There were too many reasons this was not someone Marika should be fighting.

Mimi put her hands up in resignation. “I’m very sorry for that idiot over there.”

“Hey, who are you calling an idiot?”

Ignoring the remark of said idiot, Mimi continued, “Though an unfortunate misunderstanding may have caused her to carelessly crash into you, we don’t want to fight. We’re very sorry.”

“Of course I want to fight her. Here I’ve got the opportunity to meet the Magical-Girl Hunter.”

The Magical-Girl Hunter?

The white school uniform–themed costume, the digital fairy–type mascot character, the old sack, and that charmless attitude. Oh, that made sense. She looked exactly like the rumors said. And being crowned with the title of Magical-Girl Hunter, of course she’d been able to resist Marika’s surprise attack, too.

They said she exposed famous villainous magical girls all on her own, and just hearing her name made outlaws shudder.

Palms still facing the girl, Mimi took three steps back. She’d thought something like this would happen, one day. There was no way Marika could get away with being the sort of tyrannical magical girl who used her knowledge for evil, who had stepped on and broken the bust of her benefactor, who had gotten in a great brawl with her former comrades, forever.

The expression time to pay the piper came to mind. It was an antiquated sort of phrase, but it felt right.

Marika would be hunted now.

She was an incredibly unpleasant person, a rioter who caused trouble for others, the incarnation of violence, a mad dog who snapped at anyone who came near, the black sheep of the Archfiend Cram School, but now that it had come to this, Mimi felt sorry for her. In her heart, she said her farewells: Good-bye, Marika Fukuroi.

She couldn’t know of Mimi’s feelings. Eyes never leaving Snow White, Marika Fukuroi asked Mimi, “What? You’re not stopping us?”

“No, I won’t. I’m not going to stop you.”

“Whoa, you’ve suddenly gotten all understanding. Now stay that way.” Marika slid another half step forward, making the distance between her and Snow White about fifteen feet. Mimi was standing right behind her, which was dangerous in itself. Mimi moved two steps right, and this time, Snow White moved. So finally, the Magical-Girl Hunter would start the hunt?

Snow White straightened from her forward-leaning stance, and then, like Mimi, she turned her palms toward the other two. “I don’t want to fight.”

“Why not?” Marika replied, genuinely confused.

“Huh?” said Mimi, unable to hide her disappointment.

Before Snow White could reply, however, a grating electronic noise sounded out, and Mimi’s eyes turned to the right side of the building.

Suddenly, she felt a presence. It wasn’t that it had been fast. It was there before she’d realized it. A jester was on the other side of the chain-link fence, standing there and shrugging.

  Fal

There were three reasons in total that Fal was rattled.

The first was that the magical girl had appeared simultaneously with the reaction in Fal’s radar. Marika Fukuroi had been terrifyingly fast, but even if it had only taken half a blink, there had been a span of time until her appearance, and there had been an indication of her hard leap in the energy it had generated. This magical girl—most of her face was covered with a mask that had a cartoonish expression painted on it: the right eye closed, with the left open and crying a tear—this jester-like magical girl had appeared suddenly, showing none of the energy necessary for movement.

The second thing was that the jester stood in a place where there was nothing to stand on. The roof of this building was surrounded on all four sides by a chain-link fence, and beyond that, there was nothing.

And the jester was standing there, where there was nothing. There were no few magical girls who could float in the air or fly in the sky, but this jester was not using any of those common methods to be there. She was on stilts. It was like a bad joke.

The third thing was that Snow White was rattled to see the jester. Snow White would get angry, and she would feel glad. But she wouldn’t show those feelings to others—she would keep it inside.

Fal could tell what Snow White was feeling based on small changes in her expression because Ripple had once told him specifically where to look. Now, on the other hand, Snow White was going on guard, trying to back away. But the back of her heel hit the chain-link fence, preventing her retreat, and her head jerked back to look behind her before she faced front again.

Snow White was flustered and recoiling, and she was completely unable to hide it, to boot. This was something that had never happened before.

Marika Fukuroi glared at the intruder, while Styler Mimi was startled, mouth half-open. It seemed the two of them hadn’t anticipated this, and this wasn’t someone they knew.

The jester hopped off her stilts and stood on top of the chain-link fence. She gathered the two stilts to hold them both in her left hand. Being so long, they had to be pretty heavy. The top of the fence warped and bent, but she stood there without losing her balance.

The jester slid the stilts away into the opening of her left sleeve, until eventually, every inch of the super-long stilts, which had to be over twenty yards, disappeared into her costume. Marika Fukuroi whistled. That had to be the jester’s magic.

Fal had never seen or heard of this magical girl before. If she didn’t exist in Keek’s database, then was she a fairly new magical girl? But her movements were too masterful to be those of a newbie. She wasn’t at all flustered in the presence of three serious fighters.

The jester spread her arms, then brought them together all at once. The sound of her clap made the air shudder, and when she drew her hands apart, they were strung with a line of international flags.

“So who are you?” Marika Fukuroi voiced the question that all of them had to be thinking, aside from the jester herself. The jester tilted her head, then hopped off the fence with a light tap, flying through the air. She kicked off the wall of the building next to this one, used the recoil to do a half turn and bounce off the electric sign of a sex industry business, making its light go dark for an instant, then put her hand on the iron railing of the building.

Not only her costume, but also the way she moved, was jester-like. As she jumped and leaped around, she would throw in silly gestures like spreading her hands and shrugging her shoulders, moving like she was dancing as she hopped around, with the stars that could only be dimly seen in the sky as her background.

The jester turned toward them, raised the index finger of her right hand, and pointed behind her. Then with a light, tapping hop, she raced off.

“Hey, you! Wait up!” Marika Fukuroi yelled at her back, which became small and distant in the blink of an eye, but she didn’t stop. Marika raced off, with Mimi following her, saying, “Don’t you cause any more problems!” while Snow White went after her, and the four magical girls raced over the downtown area.

Snow White was back to her usual self: bold, charmless, and never shaken, no matter what. She undertook things with a defiant behavior that would look reckless, even.

What rattled her, then?

“Hey, how does she look, pon?”

“What do you mean?” replied Snow White.

“I have no data on her, pon. Either she just became a magical girl recently, or if not…” Fal arrived at one possibility: If there was a magical girl who didn’t exist in his database, and she moved like a veteran, what sort of magical girl would she be?

“What if she’s the kind of magical girl whose existence can’t be made public, pon?” There had apparently been a magical girl in B City called Rain Pow who had been raised as a specialist to do dirty work. A magical girl who was not in the official records, who was kept hushed up—Fal thought this jester might also be something like that, but…

“I don’t think so.” Snow White immediately rejected that idea.

“Huh? Really, pon? I thought I was really on the mark there, though.”

“That girl doesn’t have a guilty conscience.”

“… Ahh.”

Snow White’s magic was to “hear the thoughts of those in need.” She said she could not only hear when people were in trouble, but she could even pick up when their subconscious said things like, I want to do this (but if that were to happen, I’d be in trouble).

Snow White may also have been using that magic just now when she’d raised her hands to Marika Fukuroi to show that she had no intention of fighting. For Marika Fukuroi, being turned down for a fight must have put her in more trouble than fighting. Though even Fal, who couldn’t read minds, had been able to tell that.

“You heard her thoughts, pon?”

“She’s not a bad girl. But something about her is strange. She’s too pure.”

“… What does that mean, pon?”

“I don’t know. This is the first I’ve ever heard anything like it. She has a goal, but I never got a sense that she’s eager to carry it out.”

  Prism Cherry

“’Cause Quake’s pencils are for drawing,” said Deluge.

“Which reminds me,” added Inferno, “what happened to you saying you were gonna show me those sketches?”

“Nothing’s happened to it. It never went anywhere in the first place,” replied Quake.

“Huh? What sketches?”

“Come on, please, don’t jump on that.”

The bulkhead started to open, and everyone looked over. The only one who could be coming in now would be Tempest, but it was clearly too early for her to come back.

“Bad news, bad news! Real bad news!” She returned all in a panic. She’d flown off saying that she’d run out of mechanical pencil cores, so she was going home to get some, and now for some reason she was back, panicking.

What’s more, she was strangely quick to return.

Even for Princess Tempest, who could boast of being the fastest of the Pure Elements, it was too early for her to be back. And though she’d only gone to get lead for her mechanical pencil, she’d totally lost her head and was in a panic, saying, “It’s awful! This is terrible!” It seemed she couldn’t wait for the bulkhead of the briefing room to open, as she shoved her shoulder at the doors, forcing herself through.

“Why are you in such a rush?” Princess Deluge, who had been discussing manga reading speed with Inferno, tilted her head.

Inferno also lifted her eyes from the manga magazine to turn her face to Tempest. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s a disaster! It’s just bad!”

Then it happened—a loud buzzer rang out through the room, and Prism Cherry’s heart nearly jumped out of her chest. Looking around the area, wondering what was going on, she saw the princesses had all violently knocked over their chairs and were looking at the monitor.

A beat later, Prism Cherry followed them. Peering at the monitor over Quake’s shoulder, she saw the entrance of the laboratory. More than one figure was displayed there.

It was a group of two: one wore a magnificent cape, while the other carried a big umbrella.

Her heart leaped into her throat again. They were magical girls.

“Yeah! There were enemies! There was one like a clown, and one with a cape, and one with a big umbrella coming to attack! It’s true! I’m not lying!”

“Calm down, Tempest. I’m not saying you’re lying.”

“More enemies?”

“They just don’t quit.”

“They’re different from the ones before, right?”

“I’ll fight this time.”

“You’re trying to take all the good stuff for yourself, Inferno.”

“You took all the good stuff last time, Tempest.”

“It’s ladies first.”

“If that’s how it is, then we’re all ladies.”

The princesses spoke lightly, but their expressions were tense and alert.

Prism Cherry pressed her heart. Thinking about what was going to happen now made it clench. She understood what she should do. She’d already decided. Prism Cherry was a member of the Pure Elements. She would do what it took to protect them.

  Fal

Following the jester wasn’t that difficult. Neither Marika Fukuroi nor Styler Mimi interfered and the jester didn’t attack, maintaining a fixed distance as she raced off over the rooftops. In fact, the jester kept glancing back, conscious of who was behind her.

“What do we do, pon?”

“For now, we follow her.”

While running, Marika Fukuroi and Styler Mimi were having some sort of discussion. Styler Mimi’s expression looked grim, while Marika Fukuroi was smirking.

Then Styler Mimi slid over to address Snow White. Her intense look from when she’d been speaking to Marika Fukuroi had already faded, and her expression now looked apologetic, if anything. “Um, Snow White… it’s all right if I call you that?”

While running, Snow White nodded.

“Did you perhaps also come to this town because you got a suspicious e-mail?”

She said “also.” In other words, she acknowledged that she had, too.

“You too, Styler Mimi?”

“Well, I’m more like an extra, you might say, or a chaperone, and I was forced into coming, rather, it wouldn’t be going too far to say I’m one of the victims here, but apparently this did all start with the receipt of a fishy e-mail. That idiot over there got it.” She used her chin to indicate Marika Fukuroi, who was still smirking as she ran. “She told me some nonsense about how there were tough ones out here, so let’s go fight.”

Styler Mimi’s attempt to evade responsibility and point the finger of blame at someone else was, in fact, desirable. Someone whose goal was self-preservation would be easy to control. The runaway-train types who didn’t care about their own destruction were much more of a pain.

So then which type was that jester, racing along thirty feet ahead? Despite how they were talking while running and clearly not going as hard as they could, the jester hadn’t left them behind. In other words, she was deliberately letting them follow.

“Snow White. She’s luring us somewhere, pon.”

“Looks like it. She’s thinking she’ll be in trouble if we don’t follow.”

“Isn’t that bad, pon? It’ll be no joke if we thoughtlessly follow after her and it turns out to be a trap.”

“I’ll be in trouble if the trap isn’t…”

There was a crack as the pointed toes of the jester’s shoes caught on a neon sign, and Snow White swiped aside the broken fragments with her right hand. The jester turned her upper body back to them and bobbed her head.

“… isn’t what she’s thinking.”

“But still.”

Fal’s alarm sounded. There were multiple magical girls. Or it wasn’t that they were there, but rather that the jester was dashing toward them.

“Snow White! There are multiple magical girls where she’s headed, pon!”

Styler Mimi let out a reluctant groan, while Marika Fukuroi yelled out a gleeful “Hya-ha!” Snow White was not at all perturbed, feet taking her after the jester.

Fal expanded his enemy search range to its widest, a radius of two hundred yards. At running speed, whether it was over rooftops or any sort of ground, a magical girl could move a distance of two hundred yards in an instant.

Before Fal could make a serious attempt to stop her, the jester jumped from the top of a building down to the roof of something that looked like a factory and slid inside through a broken window.

The sign with the building’s name on it was covered in red rust, and whatever was written there was no longer legible. All the sheet metal and corrugated plates were equally rusted and worn out.

Perhaps it was her jester motif, which sold itself on agility, that had enabled her to make the perfect landing. For someone who lacked that agility, the corrugated sheets on the roof were too fragile and didn’t have the strength to catch someone coming down from a high place.

Following the jester, the trio of Snow White, Marika Fukuroi, and Styler Mimi did not invade through the broken window; rather, they all burst through the corrugated sheet metal to directly leap into the building.

It was an unexpected accident, but not enough to make a digital fairy panic.

A magical girl who was skilled in combat would be sturdier than a tank and nimbler in her movements than a feline. There was no need to worry about Snow White over something like jumping down from a building to break through a factory roof. And if Marika Fukuroi and Styler Mimi were half the fighters they were rumored to be, they’d be able to break their falls or manage somehow.

Fal had other things to worry about. As a dust of red rust clouded their field of view, Fal restricted the enemy search radius to fifty yards. The magical-girl presences he had only been able to grasp as rough coordinates could now be accurately detected with a margin of error of an inch or two.

Barring the use of some kind of magic, their opponents would also be blinded. So if their own side could grasp their position, that would be a great advantage.

Thinking to this point, Fal realized—in order to tell Snow White their enemies’ position, he would have to speak out loud. But if Fal were to sound his high-pitched, synthetic voice, that would expose Snow White’s position, in the end.

“Calm down, Fal.” Snow White got ahead of him. Red rust still fluttered all around them.

After some hesitation about whether it was okay to talk, Fal replied, “… What do you mean, pon?”

“It’s not enemies here in the first place, and this isn’t a trap.”

It wasn’t enemies. In other words, did that mean that the enemy… or rather, the other party, saw this as an unexpected accident, too? The indicators in Fal’s radar did not change position, staying put in their initial arrangement. It looked as if they were waiting to see what Snow White and the others would do.

Gradually, the red dust cloud cleared. Snow White narrowed her eyes and covered her mouth. Her posture remained upright and still, and she didn’t take out her weapon, Ruler. She wasn’t on guard at all.

Marika Fukuroi and Styler Mimi were standing together, back-to-back. Unlike Snow White, they were wary of their surroundings, their bodies and eyes saying they were ready for a fight to start any time. Styler Mimi held hair-cutting scissors at the ready in her right hand, while in her left, she held Marika Fukuroi by the collar, preventing her from leaping forward. Marika Fukuroi had both her hands held out in front of her chest.

Though they were a little dirtied by the rust, they had nothing that looked like injuries. Fal was relieved that the two of them were safe, as predicted, but then reconsidered, figuring that he wasn’t really obligated to feel relieved about them.

Now they could see the magical girls who had been here first.

There was a magical girl with a dramatic cape reminiscent of bat wings.

A magical girl in a raincoat holding a big umbrella stood in front of her defensively.

The two of them were in Fal’s database.

The bat-wings one was Lady Proud. The big umbrella one was Umbrain. The both of them were from the Department of Diplomacy. They would be in charge of work that couldn’t be made public. There was no doubting that they were both excellent in combat.

Including the trio of Snow White, Styler Mimi, and Marika Fukuroi, everyone here was a violence professional.

It was quite the thing to have gathered this many. Why had they even gathered here in the first place? Were the others’ goals the same as Snow White’s? Snow White had said this wasn’t a trap and that they weren’t enemies. So then what should they do?

Fal hesitated. Normally, at times like these, it was best to just recite their opponents’ names, magics, and affiliations. Telling people that they were known—eccentric types like Marika Fukuroi aside—would prevent them from proactively trying to fight.

But doing that to someone who was not the enemy would seem antagonistic and have the opposite effect. If Fal were to burden Snow White by pulling someone into an unnecessary battle, or worst case, if it turned out to be fatal for Snow White, that would be unbearable.

Fal wanted to talk to Snow White, but that was tricky, too. If Fal were to speak, it would give away that there was a mascot present.

If all these magical girls gathered here were engaged in activities that couldn’t be made official, it would be bad for them to know there was a mascot there, since they were semiofficial creatures. This was because if they were told they couldn’t engage in any illegal activity, they might immediately try to silence Fal.

Fal hesitated, while Styler Mimi held Marika Fukuroi back from charging in, and the other magical girls didn’t even budge, quietly keeping one another in check.

Fal heard a creaking sound from the ceiling. Everyone’s eyes turned up, but they were still alert to their surroundings. Fal’s radar pinged a magical girl. The jester was sitting on a ceiling beam, and she fluttered a hand before jumping down.

In her right hand, she held an armful-sized balloon on a string, and the buoyancy of the balloon seemed to make her float downward for a slow landing. Grabbing the balloon with the other hand, she gently tucked it into her costume, and heedless of the volume of such a large balloon, it disappeared.

While throwing in silly gestures, she walked with bobbing steps toward Snow White and took her hand. Completely startled, Fal thoughtlessly called, “Hey!” and hearing that, all the magical girls around went into fighting stances at once.

But Snow White was unperturbed, and the jester continued her clowning. She grasped Snow White’s hand firmly, shook it up and down, then embraced her around the shoulders.

Next, she approached Styler Mimi and, indifferent to the look on her face, took the hand that still held her styling scissors, and after shaking it up and down, embraced her around the shoulders, too.

She also tried to approach Marika Fukuroi, but upon seeing the way she looked—like if she touched her, she’d bite—she stumbled as if flustered, then shrugged.

The jester pulled a line of cards from her sleeve and began juggling, tossing the cards up and then handing them out to the magical girls.

From the side, Fal peeked at the card Snow White took. It was an extremely simple business card that read, I accept all sorts of requests. Stanczyka. There was nothing else, no contact or e-mail.

Lady Proud breathed out a great, somehow deliberate breath, as if she wanted it to be heard. “You’re Stanczyka?”

The jester gave an exaggerated nod.

“So then you mean to say those three are friends?”

The jester raised a fist with a thumbs-up. Fal felt as if the tense atmosphere suddenly relaxed. Marika Fukuroi clicked her tongue as if she were quite miffed, while Styler Mimi scolded her with a quiet, “Hey.”

  Princess Quake

When they’d first been shown this facility, the most excited of them had been Princess Inferno, and number two had been Princess Tempest. Words like “secret base,” “hideout,” and “underground facility” had gotten her excited, ever since she was small. To Tempest, who was still very young, and Inferno, who though she was in high school still retained that youthful spirit, this place must have seemed incredibly alluring.

And it was actually an interesting place. The five training rooms here were each made to fulfill certain goals, and each one of them had been assigned a unique setting, so that they could train in various kinds of situations. And from the briefing room, you could observe in detail what went on in the training rooms.

Unlike elementary, middle, and high schoolers, when you were in university and not that serious about it, you had flexibility with your time. Whenever Princess Quake—Chiko Satou—had the time, she would visit the lab during her afternoons, not with any particular goal in mind, just going around the training rooms, walking the hallways, and sketching in the briefing room.

Magical girls. Magic. A real, mysterious world that wasn’t fantasy or fiction. This sort of thing really existed. And she herself was a part of it now, having become a magical girl.

The hallways and bulkheads of this base weren’t very befitting of a magical girl. The old woman who had guided them here, who called herself Ms. Tanaka, had called this place a laboratory. She said it had been built to train magical girls to protect the world from invaders called Disrupters, as well as to research the captured Disrupters.

But considering all that, there wasn’t much of anyone around who looked like a researcher. When Quake pointed that out, she had told them, “For safety reasons, the data is sent to researchers who work on it outside the laboratory.”

And hearing it called a laboratory, the place did have the sort of atmosphere that made Quake think that indeed seemed to be the case. Aside from the variety in the training rooms, the place was all white without a speck of dust, and if Chiko were to compare it to places she knew, it would be most like a hospital.

This facility did not require or seek to do anything that did not serve its utility, and put nicely, that made it simple and easy to understand, while put in a less pleasant way, it was cold and lacking in humanity, so gathering gaudy and sparkly magical girls there to go into action was, objectively speaking, pretty surreal.

Chiko Satou wasn’t a dreamer when it came to social groups. Instead, she kept herself firmly grounded in reality.

And when it was a gathering of women, it would only force her eyes closer to reality. Like, even if someone might be a very good partner if it was just the two of you, friend A and yourself, once you gathered together three, four, five, ten, twenty people, not only would the relationships change, there were no few examples of those who would even change their personalities.

It wasn’t as bad at a club or a hobby-related meeting or something, since then you simply had to amicably talk about your interests, but gatherings that were produced by force, like school classes or committees, would never gain a sense of unity, because they had not come together naturally.

A and B would exchange mean gossip about C, and when A wasn’t in the classroom, B and C would be talking dirty about A—Chiko had witnessed such things many times.

There they go, she would think, exasperated but impressed, though she also thought perhaps it was her inability to do such things that disconnected her from all of it.

Being so pessimistic about relationships, if Chiko had been told she would be getting together with three young girls of all different ages to become magical girls, she would have thought sarcastically, Yeah, that’ll go well. She’d come to her own clear solution about that, figuring if it didn’t go well, she could just go out and enjoy sketching by herself, but contrary to her expectations, they were doing surprisingly well.

Both Princess Inferno and Princess Tempest were the type she could say for sure were never two-faced. If they were having fun, they would laugh, and if they were sad, they would cry, and if they didn’t like something, they would complain to someone’s face. They didn’t talk behind your back.

Princess Deluge was a conforming type who would be fastest to pick up on what other people wanted, and that kept their relationships operating smoothly, leaving Ms. Tanaka, in her role as teacher, always with a smile on her face.

Even if she set her self-evaluation on the strict side to ask, Is Princess Quake being useful? She thought the answer was yes. She felt she’d become capable of doing things she couldn’t before becoming a magical girl, too. When something funny happened, like that time when Tempest had tried to fly indoors, slammed her head into the ceiling, and fallen, and then Inferno had gotten caught up in it and their limbs had all gotten tangled up and they’d fallen over, if Quake had still been Chiko Satou, she wouldn’t have been able to laugh about it.

She had a complex about her appearance and envied the way other people looked.

Princess Quake was different. She’d been worried, but then once she’d found out they were okay, she’d been able to laugh right from the gut. She knew she looked cute and lovely and that the other three were the same. There was nothing to be envious or jealous about. She didn’t stubbornly look up at them from one level lower; she was standing at eye level, in the same position, an equal place.

The new member Princess Deluge had brought to them, Prism Cherry, was also a cute magical girl. As the fifth member of the Pure Elements, she came up with poses together with them, and then wrote up as many names for ultimate moves as they could think of on the white board, and then discussed it to make decisions about it. In her whole life so far, Chiko had never had this much fun before.

In her sketchbook, Chiko drew pictures of magical girls smiling and having fun, one after another, and pictures of Princess Quake were among them.

Princess Quake was smiling like she was having the most fun of all.

But then suddenly, intruders had stepped into what was, to Princess Quake, a paradise.

It wasn’t only one or two magical girls who had come to the laboratory. There was a wide variety of them: one had a flower blooming on her head, one was in a white school uniform, one had a big umbrella, one had a cloak, and one was a jester. They had no sense of cohesion, like the Pure Elements.

Inferno and Tempest looked baffled, as if they wondered why there were so many more. Expression concerned, Deluge asked Quake, “What should we do?” and Quake looked over at Prism Cherry. The expression had dropped off her face, and she was trembling a little, eyes locked on the monitor.

Prism Cherry had introduced herself as a magical girl who had been doing her work in another region. The magical girls on the monitor had to be from other regions, too.

“For now, let’s make contact.” First, Quake gave her opinion. Perhaps because her real age was the oldest, Quake had sort of taken on the role of leader. Was seniority age-based in the world of magical girls, too? The realm of dreams and fantasy was surprisingly realistic.

“How should we do that?”

“We go see them and ask them what their goals are. Since no one is supposed to enter this facility without permission, what they’re doing is probably unlawful entry. I think it’s best to tell them somewhat firmly that entry is forbidden.”

“For real?” said Inferno. “Unlawful entry, huh?”

“The teacher said that stuff is bad. And so did my mom,” said Tempest.

This was Quake’s heaven. She wouldn’t let it be stolen from her or be destroyed.

She drew a map of the laboratory in her mind. When you came in from the entrance and proceeded down the hallway, it split into two paths. Go right, and there was training room two, which was crowded with trees, and beyond that was training room one, the rocky one. If you went left, there was training room three, which was like a desert, and beyond was training room four, the watery area. Going past training rooms one and four would take you to the briefing room, and the whole thing was constructed in a perfect circle.

If the intruders had come in through the entrance, that meant the Pure Elements would have to block both routes. If the enemy were to arrive at the briefing room while they were blocking one side, who knew what they would get up to?

“We should have made sure to set a password for the entrance,” said Deluge.

“Going to all the trouble to change the password is a pain, and setting it takes time.”

Quake stood up and gave instructions. “Prism Cherry, remain on standby in the briefing room. Keep an eye on the monitor, and if you see anything, contact us, okay? Inferno and Tempest will go for the west side, while Deluge and I will circle around from the east entrance to make contact—to ask what their goal is. We still don’t know what their intentions are, so avoid getting too close. And shut all the bulkheads.”

She would have liked to contact Ms. Tanaka, but electronic signals couldn’t be sent from underground, for the sake of confidentiality. If they were going to contact her, it would be after they had safely gotten out.

“Safety is priority number one. If anything happens, retreat. You’re not permitted to activate Luxury Mode right now.” Quake thought that for first time she was doing something leader-like. It felt pretty good.

  Fal

Snow White was feared as the Magical-Girl Hunter. If there was a bad magical girl in the west, she would rush over to suppress her, and if there was a bad magical girl in the east, she would head out and kick her down. The Magical-Girl Hunter would never let evil magical girls roam free.

Fal wondered if Snow White hated magical girls in general, or loved them, but had no idea. It didn’t seem she felt partial toward certain ones the way Keek had, or that she thought like Cranberry, who had felt as long as she could fight, that was fine.

For her part, Snow White kept her mouth closed and did not speak. Even Ripple, her partner, didn’t know what was on her mind.

Snow White normally operated solo, but it wasn’t out of place for her to team up with other magical girls like this.

She didn’t object to Lady Proud being the one to give orders, steadily watching Stanczyka walk with comically stiff, robotic movements. Snow White had always been a lone wolf, and ever since Ripple’s disappearance, she’d become completely isolated, so seeing her fitting in fairly well as part of this group was a bit of a comfort to Fal and calmed him.

From the hidden hallway, she descended along the ladder. It had to be about twenty yards underground. At the very least, it wasn’t the sort of basement you would build underneath a factory for legitimate reasons. What’s more, there was no lighting at this depth. There was nothing like a switch, and it wasn’t as if the lights went on automatically, either. A little farther in, and it was pitch-black, and a normal person wouldn’t be able to see an inch ahead. This place probably hadn’t been made for the use of normal people in the first place.

Their party, made up only of magical girls and a mascot, made their way along fine even without light, arriving at the bottom. A large door blocked the way ahead, but then it made a sound like the grinding of a giant stone mortar and began to slide up. It seemed it was an automatic door that sensed body weight.

Snow White looked at her palms. Her white gloves were not dirty. Even when using the ladder, no rust or dust had gotten on them. It wasn’t old—or it was maintained. And the same went for this automatic door. It opened and closed smoothly and was clearly being used on a daily basis.

The hallway beyond the door immediately split into two branches. They were about ten feet wide and tall and made of some unknown substance that resembled linoleum. Snow White tapped her heel on it a few times, but the hallway did not dent, bend, or break. It really was made for the use of magical girls.

“Well then,” said Lady Proud, “let’s split into two. The groups will be just as we discussed above. The A team will take the right-hand path, while the B team will take the left. Keep in close contact.”

“Is it a good idea to divide our combat forces?” asked Styler Mimi.

“It should be no problem if we return immediately upon encountering danger.” Lady Proud cleared her throat quietly and continued. “On the right will be Marika Fukuroi, Styler Mimi, and Stanczyka. On the left will be myself, Umbrain, and Snow White.”

Marika Fukuroi grumbled, “Who cares, let’s get going,” and Styler Mimi chided her. Stanczyka was balancing on a giant ball as she juggled her throwing knives, while Umbrain, watching from behind Lady Proud, gave her a little applause.

Snow White listened to the instructions alone, from a little ways away. Fal reduced his volume to the minimum and said to her, “I can’t contact the outside, pon. I can’t connect to the Internet, either, pon.”

“Since we came underground?”

“No, since we all came in here and the door at the entrance closed, pon.” Once they’d come underground, no matter how many times he tried, Fal couldn’t communicate with aboveground.

“Same here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever since that door came down, I haven’t been able to hear minds outside.”

That would mean it shut out magic, too.

“What do we do, pon? Do we leave for now, pon?”

Snow White didn’t respond to Fal’s question, instead turning her eyes to the entrance. “And once we were out, then what would we do?”

“What would we do? Well…” Contact someone. Like magical-girl acquaintances they thought they could trust, or higher-ups in the Inspection Department, or important figures in the Magical Kingdom. People like that.

The e-mail had told them not to inform anyone of this, and that if they did, their memories would be erased. Fal didn’t know if this was true, but the fact remained that some sort of spell had been cast on that e-mail, and Fal had never been able to analyze it, in the end. If that magic was beyond Fal’s abilities to analyze, then they couldn’t afford to underestimate it.

Snow White started walking off to join the left-side team.

  Filru

The group of three freelancers—Filru, Uttakatta, and Kafuria—ran through the town under cover of darkness. They started with the first abandoned house. This place, which was standing all alone in a field away from any residential areas, may have once been used to store agricultural equipment. Filru pried open the lock with a sewing needle, and then once she was in, she coughed under a terrible assault of dust.

“There’s not a sign of a single soul having entered this house in years, is there?” wondered Uttakatta.

“It’s rotten down to the floorboards,” said Kafuria. “It’s too dangerous to go inside. You can tell that from the outside.”

“If you could tell, then you should’ve said so before we came in…,” Filru grumbled.

“I was just so entranced by how well you removed that lock.”

“It was fine indeed, wasn’t it?” agreed Uttakatta. “You could well make a living as a burglar, with those skills.”

Beating off the dust, Filru left the house. Her costume was mostly white, so dirt stood out. Uttakatta and Kafuria wore mostly black, so shouldn’t they be the ones taking on jobs that would get them dirty? But when she’d suggested that, they had evaded it like slippery eels, and in the end, Filru felt like she’d had the most troublesome role foisted upon her.

Promising herself that at least once things were done, she would insist she got the most credit, they headed to the second location.

This place, an abandoned factory, was also locked off. It was bigger than the first abandoned building, and it was also solidly fastened with a thick chain. So once again, Filru was assigned the job of opening it.

Hoping this one would have less dust, at least, she was about to take the lock in hand when Uttakatta’s hand slid before her to stop her. “Hold on just a minute.”

“What is it?”

Uttakatta squatted down and parted some tall weeds that were still faintly wet with evening dew, exposing the ground. There was a clear mark there of something like a footprint. “This is a footprint, isn’t it?”

Kafuria bent over, then rustled off through the grass and, after a while, returned. “Of boot prints alone, I count at least three or four different sets. One of them might be heavier footwear. And there’s also high heels. All of the prints are from women, and fairly young. Do you think a young woman in high heels would come all the way out to the side of an abandoned factory?”

“A delinquent miss might come here, but… it’s peculiar indeed for not a single gentleman to be present, or to see any motorcycle tire tracks, and have only the footsteps of young ladies alone, isn’t it?”

“So doesn’t that mean we’ve hit on it?” said Kafuria.

“We must be lucky, to land success on only the second location,” Uttakatta agreed.

Filru was privately appreciative—perhaps almost impressed. The pair’s observational skills, and their investigation based on those skills, felt very professional. It seemed she’d finally been witness to how these two had made their living as freelancers.

She had to show them that she’d be useful in this, too.

Using two sewing needles and three marking pins, she inserted, prodded, and twisted until the click of the lock coming undone ran through her needle. It was rusted but opened perfectly.

The door was rusty, too. Even a strong human would have had difficulty opening it alone. Not only was it a large, heavy metal door to begin with, it was covered with thick red rust. The red rust sprinkled down on her as she opened the door—in the end, she’d gotten saddled with the dirty job again.

“Dear.”

“My.”

There were already visitors there: two magical girls.

One of them wore a costume reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, while the other’s costume made you think of the card soldiers from that same book. The Queen of Hearts was reclined on her throne, while the card soldier flustered and fidgeted so much you felt sorry for her. She even had tears in her eyes.

“And just who might you two be?”

“I didn’t anticipate others would come first.” Uttakatta and Kafuria addressed the Wonderland duo. Following after them, Filru checked out her surroundings as she entered the factory.

The interior was a terrible ruin.

It wasn’t a ruin in the vein of everything having been taken away to pay off a debt, or because it had been abandoned for so long that it was piled with dust. Deep gouges ran through the walls like something had sliced through them, glass was scattered over the floor, and the ceiling crane had been cut at the base and was dangling down.

It was too dramatic to be the aftereffects of human violence. It had to have been magical girls.

Following the other two, Filru went inside, and a little ways in, she saw a machine. Uttakatta’s and Kafuria’s eyes were both focused on it. When Filru happened to look over there as well, she was startled. A square hole was open in the floor. Something like a ladder was installed in it, and the hole seemed to lead downward.

“Did you two fine ladies discover this? Oh-ho, that’s quite the achievement.” Uttakatta was beaming, showing no hostility. Filru didn’t know what was going on in her mind. In Filru’s head, this was no trivial manner. She’d come all this way to get some credit, so if someone else had already discovered it, this wasn’t even worth her while.

Still seated on her throne, the Queen of Hearts didn’t even look at them.

“What about the artificial magical girls?” asked Uttakatta.

“Off with her head.”

Filru looked back at her with shock.

Off with…? Huh? What? Off with her head?

The queen’s expression looked serious—rather, she seemed a little irritated and in a foul mood. The card soldier panicked and tried to say something, but Filru couldn’t understand what came out of her mouth. All she could hear was shrill cries like those of a small animal.

Uttakatta took half a step back. There was a tug on Filru’s sleeve, and she looked over to see Uttakatta tugging at it. “We must go discuss, briefly,” Uttakatta told the Queen of Hearts, and then she pulled Filru and Kafuria by the sleeves to take them outside the factory, retreating to a vague line past which the queen may or may not have been able to pick up on the tone of their voices, to whisper, “This isn’t good.”

Matching her tone, Filru asked, “What isn’t good?”

“I believe that may be someone associated with the Magical Kingdom’s Central Authority—from the Information Bureau, too. And the language that card soldier is using, I’ve heard once before from a mage from the Information Bureau. And those runes carved into her throne—I don’t understand their meaning, but they very much resemble those used in the Magical Kingdom’s Information Bureau.”

“How do you know things like that?” Kafuria asked.

“I was permitted to accompany them on just one occasion.”

“The Central Authority’s Information Bureau…,” murmured Filru. “So isn’t she someone important?”

“Of course, she’s someone very important indeed.”

Filru got the feeling that she’d suddenly gone way past her goal point. She’s thought it would be nice if she could make the acquaintance of someone important. And she still thought that. But there was such a thing as limits.

She was fine with some VIP from the Department of Diplomacy or the Inspection Department. The Information Bureau of the Central Authority was too much.

Both the Department of Diplomacy and the Inspection Department were nothing more than agencies allotted a share of work in the singular field that was magical girls in this world. Filru didn’t know the specifics about what sort of work the Information Bureau did, but the Central Authority governed over magical girls and everything else included in this world.

She had once heard an old mage who worked as the chief of a certain department grumbling, “Why did I wind up tossed out here?” For a mage who had been working within the Central Authority, even if they were the chief of a department, being put in charge of magical girls must have been quite the demotion.

And this was that Central Authority. These people were VIPs—people so high up, even if you craned your neck to look into the sky, you wouldn’t even see the bottoms of their feet. This was like thinking you’d like to work in a rural city hall, and then the great galactic imperial guard shows up.

“So what do we do? Leave?” asked Kafuria.

“No way,” said Filru. “Not after we came all this way.”

“I would feel rather peeved if all our efforts thus far were to come to nothing,” said Uttakatta.

“I don’t want to go, either,” Kafuria agreed, “but wouldn’t outmaneuvering them prove difficult?”

“Rather than outmaneuvering them,” suggested Filru, “couldn’t we do this by offering to cooperate?”

“Yes, indeed so.” Uttakatta glanced over at the factory and continued. “Those two don’t seem all that suited to rough work.”

“True,” Kafuria said. “I don’t sense any strength from either of them.”

Despite the sudden appearance of three strange magical girls, the card soldier and the Queen of Hearts had been completely open. They hadn’t shown through body language that they were ready to fight. Filru had gotten no sense that they were trained or experienced in battle.

“However,” said Uttakatta, “if they’re to capture these artificial magical girls, won’t they require a fighting force?”

“I get it,” said Filru. “You’re saying we should sell ourselves as combat personnel to capture the enemy.”

“It doesn’t seem like such a poor plan, but… I’m unsure,” said Kafuria. “If she’s such an important figure, then if she were to steal the credit from us, we’d have no choice but to cry ourselves to sleep, wouldn’t we?”

“Leave negotiations of that sort to me,” said Uttakatta.

“Will that really work out?” said Kafuria.

“Please, don’t you worry.”

Filru considered.

Which would be more effective: setting up this achievement on their own and selling it, or earning themselves a favor by helping someone important to get the credit? If things went well, the latter might be preferable. If a VIP from the Central Authority were to push for her way, then Magical Girl Resources would be unable to complain, and Filru could be hired on as a full-time employee, exactly as she’d planned.

No—maybe she could get something even better, here.

Having seen Filru prove her usefulness, the Queen of Hearts would hire her on at the Central Authority. Then she would jump right over all those magical girls ingratiatingly bowing their heads to become a VIP herself. It would be just like a dream.

“Can you negotiate with her?” Filru asked.

“That I can. I’ll show you,” Uttakatta replied.

“They didn’t seem all that willing to discuss, though,” Kafuria pointed out.

“There’s a trick to it, with such types.”

Together, the three of them went back into the factory. The queen was still reclined on her throne, as before, and the card soldier was pitifully frightened. Uttakatta restrained her usual smirk a little, and keeping it down to a regular smile as much as possible, she approached the two of them.

“Pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am called Uttakatta, and over there are Kafuria and Filru. All of us work for the Magical Kingdom on a freelance basis.”

“Off with her head.”

“Recently, through our independent information networks, we’ve each acquired information regarding a laboratory that produces artificial magical girls. So we’ve been looking into the matter, with the thought that if such a thing does exist, then we must absolutely report it to the Magical Kingdom.”

“Off with her head.”

“And in truth, only yesterday we were blessed with the opportunity to engage in battle with two such artificial magical girls. Though frustratingly, we let them escape at that time, we’ve come here ready and alert to apprehend them.”

“Off with her head.”

“Well, they are rather strong and tenacious, though not so much as us. So though your ladyship and attendant would certainly not lose, you could well be slightly injured.”

“Off with her head.”

“If you might allow us to humbly assist you, there would be no need for you to suffer anything of the sort. You could quite simply and comfortably let us carry out their capture.”

The Queen of Hearts nodded. “Off with her head.”

“We’re most grateful for your kind words. Though our abilities are limited, we will offer you our aid.” Uttakatta bowed deeply, then returned to the others. “We’ve reached an agreement.”

“Uh, have you?” asked Filru.

“This sort of thing is about going with the flow.”

While Uttakatta had been talking with the queen, Kafuria had been having an exchange with that card soldier. She nodded to the girl, who talked with squeaks, consoled her, patted her shoulder, offered her a handkerchief, and wiped away her tears, and after letting her talk for a while, came back. “She says the Queen of Hearts is Grim Heart, while she’s Shufflin.”

“Huh? She told you their names?” said Filru. “How did you talk with her?”

“With this sort of thing, it’s about the flow. Going with the flow.”

Could you communicate with someone who didn’t understand what you said, someone who may not even have the same culture as you, just by going with the flow? Perhaps some technique aside from “flow” had been involved, but neither of them wanted to tell Filru about it, so they were calling it flow. Having made their living as freelancers, they had to guard such techniques zealously. “Then that’s enough for me.”

“What a careless thing to say,” said Kafuria.

“I’m saying it’s enough, so it’s enough.”

Grim Heart lifted up her throne, and Shufflin popped it into the dirty cloth bag hanging from her waist. Though volume-wise, there was no way it could fit, it went in completely naturally, and there was no indication the bag had swelled or increased in weight, either. That had to be just how its magic worked.

Uttakatta blew a soap bubble the size of her fist, while Filru took it from her and ran a thread through it with her needle to make a French knot. Since Filru’s needle and thread did no damage to their targets, the bubble didn’t pop, even when she pierced it and passed a thread through it.

The bubble floated downward, sucked into the hole. The string tied to the bubble slid away from Filru’s hands.

This was one of the techniques they could do together that they’d worked out in the hotel. Combining Uttakatta’s bubbles and Filru’s thread could create something that functioned as a reconnaissance device. If the bubble sensed any vibrations in the air, those would transmit through the string to reach Filru.

They dropped the bubble into the hole first and had it go ahead as Filru, Kafuria, and Uttakatta followed. Shufflin and Grim Heart brought up the rear.

Kafuria brought her mouth close to Filru’s ear. “Since we met Shufflin and Grim Heart just now, the order changed.”

“The order? What order?”

“The good-bye order. Theirs will go good-bye first.”

That reminded Filru that Kafuria had told them that was her magic. Having acquired this rather unpleasant-feeling information, Filru descended the ladder.

  Fal

The two branches of the path each seemed to gently bend outward, and when Snow White turned backward, she couldn’t see the other path anymore. Ahead a little farther, it turned to the right.

At the turning point, Snow White pulled her weapon, Ruler, out of her bag. Lady Proud and Umbrain seemed a little tense. Snow White held her blade out ahead of them, looking in the metal’s reflection to see around the corner. It was more hallway. There was nothing else.

Ruler in one hand, in the lead, Snow White slowly made her way along the stark white hallway. With her magic, she could sense ambushes but not mechanical traps. Fal handled dangers of that nature. He would search the ceiling, floor, and all four directions: walls, ahead of them and behind them, continuously searching for obstacles and traps. Snow White matched her pace to Fal’s sensor speed, setting her feet down more slowly than usual.

The only sound was Lady Proud’s heels clicking on the floor.

Continuing on down the empty hallway, after a while, they hit the wall. Though it wasn’t quite a wall—it was something like a shutter. To its side, there was a panel installed. It seemed by pushing this, you could open the shutter.

Slowly, they started up their march again. A tense air hanging all around them, the group arrived in front of the shutters, but right before Snow White, in the lead, could push the panel on the wall—

The shutter started moving upward.

Before they could push the open button, someone on the other side had. Their forms were revealed starting from the bottom: from ankles to knees, up to their thighs and waist. Of course, their own party could also be seen from the other side, and both groups panicked and jumped back.

Someone cried out instinctively.

Beyond the shutter was not more hallway. It was a room. Inside, trees were growing. It was more than just some indoor plants.

Under their feet was real soil, and tall trees grew in it, with grass, too. It resembled a forest. If you didn’t look at the ceiling, which was white like the hallway, you wouldn’t think you were underground.

Two magical girls stood inside that room.

“Entrance to this facility is forbidden to outsiders!” one of the girls declared loudly, her trident raised. Her costume was like a swimsuit decorated with fish scales. Her vivid blue hair made you think of the sea, and the gem in her tiara sparkled blue.

“If you don’t leave, you’re going to get hurt!” This girl shouldered a ridiculously large hammer. The pointed ends of the hammer had a most spirited lethal aura to them, and she had a reptilian tail. The gem in her tiara sparkled yellow.

Aside from the color of their gems, their tiaras were all of the same design. Maybe this was a characteristic of artificial magical girls?

Face slightly stiff, Lady Proud addressed the two girls. “Are you two artificial magical girls?”

“Artificial magical girls? What’s that?” The trident girl didn’t seem to be acting. Were they not aware that they were artificial magical girls, or were they actually not, in fact, artificial?

The hammer girl thrust her special weapon in the air. “Quit babbling and make up your minds! Are you gonna run or surrender?!”

The trident girl took a step forward. “Like I just said! If you don’t want to get hurt, then do what we say!”

“Wait, please.” That was Snow White. “We don’t want to fight.”

“That’s not true, is it?” This time, Umbrain spoke. Denying Snow White’s statement, she laid her closed umbrella over her shoulder. “Sometimes throwing all the punches you’ve got’ll make you better friends.”

The hammer came down hard, but Umbrain was faster, tossing out her umbrella.

The umbrella was flung into the hammer’s trajectory and was not crushed—but rather gently blocked it. The girl who had swung the hammer seemed confused, as she swept it upward one more time, but Umbrain slid in to grab her umbrella and then dived into the room.

“If you’re going to fight, then I’ll fight back!” The girl swung her trident at Umbrain, and like before, her weapon was softly blocked. But the instant the two weapons made contact, the surface of the umbrella crunched, frozen. Umbrain hurriedly put some distance between them, and when the trident girl tried to give chase, a little bottle filled with red liquid flew toward her.

The trident girl must have been thinking to make it freeze, just like she’d done with Umbrain’s umbrella. She pointed her trident at the little bottle and was about to swing it, but before she could, the bottle burst open.

The liquid contents of the bottle exploded, and when the fluid droplets hit the ground, they became white smoke that wafted up, and the strike of that odor to her nose made the trident girl scrunch her face.

Covering her mouth, the trident girl ran into the trees, while the hammer girl followed after.

Lady Proud went to Umbrain, the one person who had entered the room, while Snow White moved her lips close to her magical phone and whispered, “I’m stopping this.”

Fal reflexively looked at her face. Her expression was blank, but there was strength in her voice.

“Stopping what?”

“I don’t want to fight someone who isn’t an enemy.”

She wasn’t glaring. She wasn’t giving an intimidating look. There was nothing that could be called an expression on her face, but Fal could sense her strong will.

Fal instantly inferred what she wanted of him and moved into action. Raising his volume to maximum, Fal urged caution. “I sense three new magical girls! It’s too many, pon! We should retreat for now and come back later, pon!”

Umbrain and Lady Proud both stopped in their tracks. Before they turned to look at her, Snow White turned back the way she’d come and began running, pushing the operation panel for the shutter.

The Department of Diplomacy were combat experts. If she told them they were outnumbered, they wouldn’t try to force the unreasonable and pursue the enemy. Making sure that Umbrain and Lady Proud had come back, Snow White passed through the shutters and returned to the hallway.

  Princess Inferno

A mysterious group of magical girls had launched a raid. They hadn’t done anything aggressive, but Inferno was calling it a raid—it made things sound more exciting.

Since becoming a magical girl, she’d enjoyed herself by running around as fast as she could, but the Disrupters didn’t make much of a fight, and she’d gotten pretty sick of them. It was right around then when this group of magical girls had broken in. This seemed like it’d get a bit interesting.

Quake had said to prioritize safety. As the leader, she needed to keep everyone in mind, which was why she said things like that. Given her position, there was no way she could tell them to prioritize exciting fights over safety.

Truths like that, which she couldn’t say out loud, had to be properly interpreted and understood by those who followed the leader.

Passing through the watery area that was training room number four, they opened up the bulkhead to go into the hall, then entered training room number three, the desert. It didn’t look like there was anyone there. Heading for the entrance, where the suspicious group of magical girls had been, Inferno addressed Tempest as they walked. “Whatcha think, Tempest?”

“What do I think of what?”

“Don’cha think this seems fun?”

“Fun? How can you have fun in an emergency like this?”

“No, really, you can be honest here. Off the record.”

Tempest closed her mouth, and then, still floating in the air, she did a half turn to face up at the ceiling. Her ponytails twitched twice, and Inferno heard the sound of her quietly sighing. “… Honestly, I think it does seem fun.”

“Right? Doesn’t it?!”

“But I guess it’s kinda scary, too. These are different people from when I fought, y’know? And there’s more of them.”

“What, Tempest, you chicken?”

“I’m not chicken.”

“No worries, they don’t stand a chance against magical girls!”

The desert room was barren compared to the other training rooms. There was some athletic fun to be had in the rocky room, and climbing trees in the forest wasn’t bad, either. The water room was cool, her favorite place in the summer. Unlike a normal desert, this room had a ceiling and no sun. And though it was big, there were walls, too. Temperature adjustment was managed by machines. Overall, it was dull.

There were none of the flora or fauna you’d see in a desert, like cacti or camels or scorpions, and basically there was nothing and nobody right up to the end of it. And the lines of sand dunes meant it didn’t even have a good view—there really was nothing good about it.

The bulkhead behind them closed. All that could be heard was Inferno’s single set of footsteps. She was strangely aware of the sensation of her boots sinking in the sand. It felt as if she couldn’t pull her legs out. It had to be because she was worked up.

“Don’t get too reckless just ’cause you’re having fun,” Tempest chided her.

“You act like such a moralist, even though you’re younger than me. I know you’re enjoying this, too. I haven’t forgotten you bragging about how you did such a great job driving off the enemies.”

“You’re a kid, Inferno, and you being older has nothing to do with it. That’s why I—”

There was the sound of a bulkhead opening. It wasn’t from behind. It was ahead. There was the sound of the barrier closing, and then the sounds of footsteps on sand. Tempest and Inferno looked at each other, then ahead. The footsteps were coming closer. Since the pair were hidden behind a sand dune, they couldn’t see who it was.

Inferno’s pulse accelerated. Despite how she’d known someone was coming and how they’d actually come out for that very reason, she still got excited. Concentrate, she told herself. If her concentration were to break here, her pride as a magical girl would be worthless.

The footsteps didn’t sound in the least bit hesitant. Their unreserved crunching was drawing near. Inferno quieted her breathing and waited. Tempest exhaled. Sensing the tension in that sigh, as if Tempest couldn’t take anymore, Inferno rapped Tempest’s leg with her fist.

Did I do that to relax myself, or put Tempest at ease? she wondered but didn’t really know.

The magical girl who popped up from behind the sand dune was quite different from the ones Tempest had said she’d seen.

She had a big flower on top of her head. It wasn’t an uncommon blossom, but Princess Inferno was not the sort of woman with refined tastes who spent her life remembering the names of flowers—a flower was just a flower to her.

Seeing Inferno and Tempest, the magical girl commented, “Hey,” and smiled. “Oh, if you’re gonna come to us, that makes things faster.”

Following the pleased-looking flower magical girl appeared a stylist and a jester. They were varied in style but lacking in any unity. In her mind, Inferno was triumphant as she thought, We totally win on that front.

“Well, outsiders aren’t allowed in here. Though I don’t know what you guys are after—” Tempest called out, but the flower girl cut her off.

“Never mind all that.” The stylist tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but the flower girl knocked it aside and stepped forward. “Let’s have fun! Come on!”

Stepping aside now really would be a disgrace. Inferno stepped forward, too. She chewed up her anxiety and swallowed it. Trembling like a leaf didn’t suit her. “If that’s what you want, then let’s do it!”

“Awwright!” The flower girl whooped gleefully, and by the time Inferno realized she was coming, the girl was right in front of her eyes. She was faster than her rather comical appearance would suggest.

The stylist followed, and Tempest yelled, “This is exactly why I called you a kid! You big idiot, Inferno!”

“Don’t be so boring, Tempest!”

Inferno thrust out her scimitar, meaning to keep the flower girl in check, but was repelled by the flower on her head. There was a sound like metal clashing with metal, and it felt like that, too. Of course, it was not just a flower.

Inferno backed up a step and sliced out, was repelled, backed up some more, and slashed downward, and that was repelled, too. When she attacked from above, the flower on the girl’s head would guard against it. So then she’d cut up from below.

She backed up and swung down, then turned the blade the other way to slice upward—but her blade was stopped.

The flower magical girl had grabbed the blade with her right hand, while in her left, she gripped its hilt. Inferno strained, trying to shake her off, but the girl wouldn’t budge. Inferno clenched her teeth and put her whole body into it, but she still couldn’t move her blade an inch. She didn’t even know if the largest Disrupters were this strong.

The stylist swiped with her scissors, and the jester unleashed a kick. Both of them moved with agility. Inferno let go of her scimitar, scattered sand around, and rolled to escape backward, somehow managing to avoid them.

“How can you fall for the enemy’s bait?!”

She had a second grader getting mad at her.

“Uhhh… Well, I mean, sometimes you get caught up in the heat of the moment, you know?”

“Don’t make decisions based on the heat of the moment when your own life might be on the line! Geez! You dummy!”

Inferno touched her finger to her Princess Jewel. She summoned her scimitar in her right hand and clasped it. “Luxury Mode: On!”

The enemy moved faster than Disrupters, and that grip that had held her scimitar firm had been stronger than Inferno’s own. It had been arrogant of her to think she could hold back in this fight.

Magical power rushed around her whole body, through her blood vessels. That glow was fragments of magic that couldn’t be suppressed.

She spun her scimitar three times, then pointed it at her opponent, holding it stock-still. She hadn’t done this to be threatening. That was a message to Prism Cherry, in the briefing room.

Inferno yelled as she charged in.

She wasn’t holding back in consideration of her opponent. This strike had all her spirit in it. Nobody could take the full brunt of this swing and come out all right.

The flower magical girl turned aside the attack with the flower on her head, and to follow up, she stepped in, too, before she stilled on the spot. The petal, which was supposed to have turned aside the scimitar’s attack, had cruelly wilted.

Princess Inferno harbored the energy of fire in her body. If she were to fight with her magic on full throttle in Luxury Mode, her scimitar would blaze hot, and every one of her attacks would scorch her enemies. She swung her scimitar again, then a second time, and the flower girl darted out of range.

From the air above, Princess Tempest threw her blade boomerang, and when the jester threw a knife in an attempt to stop it, it was repelled like trash to fall upon the sand. Its trajectory never wavering, the boomerang returned to Tempest’s hand.

Tempest’s body was filled with the energy of wind. The boomerang she threw would strike aside all obstacles and tear them to shreds, always returning to her hand.

What’s more, a black, muddy, sludgy lump oozed out of the ground to take human form. This was Prism Cherry’s work—she’d gotten the signal from Inferno.

Once defeated, Disrupters were retrieved and then reused for the Pure Elements’ training. By operating the facilities from the briefing room, they could make Disrupters appear in the training rooms. Now they were going to use them to fight off the intruders.

“What the heck is that?!” the stylist cried out, leaping back. The Disrupters they used for training could be set to acknowledge anyone as an enemy, and Prism Cherry knew how to do that.

The stylist swiped her scissors, cutting off the Disrupter’s arm—but that wasn’t enough to kill it. In the blink of an eye, the wound sealed over, and it vigorously grabbed at the intruder.

“I shall provide reinforcement!” a voice called from the entrance.

There were a total of three magical girls: one with a bubble straw, one with balls of thread, and one in mourning clothes, just as Deluge and Tempest had described.

Following behind this trio was a card soldier, too. The others hadn’t mentioned this one in their report. As soon as the card soldier’s eyes met with Inferno’s, she started trembling like a leaf and threw herself down on the sand. It made the sand billow up, hiding her.

“It’s you!” cried Tempest. “You still haven’t learned your lesson?”

“My, did you perhaps think you had won?” The girl in mourning clothes showered Tempest with her grating laughter, and Tempest’s face flushed.

“Don’t you move from that spot, you stupid crow! This time for sure, we’re gonna beat you up until you can’t even stand!” Glowing with Luxury Mode, Tempest flew at her, while the mourning-clothes girl barely skimmed the surface of the ground as she flew off at low altitude beyond the peak of the sand dune. It looked as if Tempest had fallen for her provocation, and now, they were going to get separated.

Seriously, Tempest loses her temper so quickly—

The card soldier slid a spear out of the sack hanging from her waist. The end of the spear was pointed and sharp like a spade mark.

Huh? A spade?

Inferno could have sworn that a second ago, that mark had been a heart. She should have had a three of hearts, but now it was a three of spades. The soldier swiped her spade, warding away a Disrupter. She was proficient with a spear and moved like a trained professional. Her movements, her symbol, even her expression was different. When she’d had the heart mark, she’d just been frightened, but now her eyes were focused on the enemy, and her expression was firm.

Inferno didn’t really understand it, but that had to be the kind of magical girl she was. She figured it was some kind of unique magic that wasn’t just energy, like how Prism Cherry could change images in her mirror. Like, with her magic, she could change her battle abilities and other things by changing her suit.

The stylist, the card soldier, and the jester came to fight off the Disrupters. While evading the boomerang, the girl in the mourning clothes ran off, scattering sand and dust as she went, with Tempest hot on her heels.

Inferno’s opponent was the flower magical girl. Even with everything going on around them, her hands never stopped their assault. Three of her flower petals had wilted, now. Her hair, which was greenish like leaves, was burned sooty black in parts, her long eyelashes and the edges of her eyebrows had been burnt short, and her costume was singed here and there.

Avoiding direct hits from Inferno’s attacks wasn’t enough. Proximity alone would make the intense heat burn and blister her horribly. This girl couldn’t afford to only dodge by a hair.

But even so, the flower girl laughed cheerfully.

“I like it! Not bad!” She whooped like she was having a blast, tangling her burnt hairs around her fingers to rip them out. “You’ve got some decent speed and strength, but that magic is nasty. I love it.”

“Thanks for the compliment. So if you’re going to surrender, then hurry it up, please.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to, shit-for-brains? Take a look at your opponent before you advise them to surrender.”

Mindlessly reacting to her words, Inferno swung her scimitar. The flower girl slipped past her horizontal slice at a low dash, getting into her range, but that wouldn’t be enough to get her anywhere. Right when she came for Inferno’s legs, Inferno exerted herself with a grunt.

Flames erupted from her whole body so hard, it was almost an explosion, blowing back the flower girl, sending her to roll over the sand before she quickly readied herself again. She was fast, but Inferno could see she’d taken damage. She was more burnt than she had been before. There were wisps of white smoke trailing above her, and there were fires at the ends of her hair still burning.

“Maybe you shouldn’t push yourself here,” Inferno called out casually with a sweep of her scimitar.

Anything that came close to her would burn. In most games, plant-type monsters were weak to fire. And a flower magical girl had to hate fire, too.

Putting her desire to make this girl just surrender already into it, Inferno thrust and thrust again, slicing at her continuously in an attempt to knock her off her feet, but when she tried to cut upward, the flower girl’s right leg kicked up.

Inferno was outside her range. What the flower girl kicked up was the sand at her feet.

Inferno backstepped, the balls of her feet sinking into the sand. Spraying someone with sand was like some kind of childish harassment, but it was effective enough, as a blinding move.

Before the sand cleared, Inferno circled right to change position, taking a spot high on the sand dune. She squeezed the hilt of her scimitar tightly.

She wouldn’t let the flower girl take her by surprise. As long as Inferno was on guard, the flower girl wouldn’t be able to use that sand spray to catch her unawares. In fact, the narrowing of her opponent’s options would make her movements easier to read.

This was the sort of thing she’d learned from Ms. Tanaka. Inferno was, by nature, bad at studying at a desk, but she had incredible muscle memory.

The dust cloud of sand cleared. The flower magical girl had moved three steps to the left of her original position. Both her palms were open, in a low, beast-like stance, and she was even baring her teeth like one, too.

Ever since she was little, Inferno had had an interest in things like animals and insects, but the sort of creature that would bare its fangs at her was outside the range of her interests. Inferno held her blade out steadily, pointing the tip at her opponent. “So do you feel like surrendering yet?”

“Flamey said stuff like that, too, but in the end, she was crying and going, ‘Save me.’”

Inferno furrowed her brows a bit. The flower on top of the girl’s head was different from before. The flower, which had become pitifully wilted, was now healthy—and not only that. It was a different type, too.

“You’re like Flame Flamey. Like how you’re hot and I can’t get close, and that smug look like you think you rule the world with boring magic like that, and the stupid-sounding way you talk.”

A thick ring of flower petals spread out from the center. Only the ends of the petals were faintly colored purple, while the rest was white. Inferno had never been interested in flowers, so she didn’t know the type or the name. Something like a premonition ran down her spine.

When the girl bowed, facing the top of her head toward her—in other words, when she pointed the flower at her—Inferno moved, too. Raising the scimitar thrust out before her in front of her eyes, she tossed herself backward, to the ground.

The flower shone, and the blade part of the scimitar flew through the air.

A beam?!

Another ray of light shot out. A cloud of sand went up in the place Inferno had been standing a second ago.

All that remained of her scimitar was the handle. It had been cleanly carved out, and the blade was gone. It hadn’t been melted by heat or destroyed by impact. It looked as if it had never been in the first place.

All the Pure Elements’ weapons had been specially made. Their blades would not break, even when swung with the strength of a magical girl. Even in Inferno’s hands, the handle would not scorch and the blade would not melt.

This was nothing so simple as focused light generating destructive energy. She fired a third beam, and a cloud of sand shot into the air.

Being inferior in physical strength had been frustrating. But it hadn’t been enough to break her fighting spirit. Was her spirit broken now, though? Inferno was so confused, she couldn’t manage that kind of self-evaluation.

Since the flower girl hadn’t been able to fight close range, she’d instantly changed tactics. Her magic was simply that flexible. Inferno felt keenly that the enemy had gone a level past her.

And plus, if that beam hit, it would kill her. The flower girl had fired it without hesitation. She saw no problem with killing—and probably with being killed, either. No matter how she was scorched or burned, as long as it didn’t kill her, she’d see it as just a flesh wound, and she never surrendered.

The wind blew away the cloud of sand. Inferno realized the beam had stopped firing and shivered. The vivid image of the enemy crossing over the sand dune and pointing the flower on her head at her rose in her mind, and she scattered the sand clenched in her hands, kicking up more as she got up and ran off as fast as she could.

She tried to kick up as much of it with her toes as possible. That vision of being shot through from behind with a beam bored into her mind and wouldn’t go away, no matter how she tried to dispel it.

When she reached the bulkhead at the training room entrance, she pressed the switch on the open/close panel as she desperately continued to kick up sand, and the instant the bulkhead started opening, she slid under, practically flying through the hallway and training room number four, and by the time she arrived in the briefing room, her breathing was ragged and her heart was killing her, like it was about to explode.

She felt the magic power in her body draining away. Grabbing the medicine from the drawer, she put it in her mouth, then brought her lips underneath the faucet and turned on the water. She’d yanked out the drawer so hard, it and its contents scattered on the floor, but she didn’t care. She loudly gulped down the water for a while before she finally came to her senses.

The medicine steadied her heart. Challenging Disrupters together with the Pure Elements had taken away her timidity and given her courage.

She straightened, pushing herself up with a hand on the table. Prism Cherry was looking at her with a frightened expression. Inferno felt bad. “Sorry, just, a lot of stuff happened. I’m okay now.”

“Um…”

“Yeah?”

“What about Tempest?”

Once she realized what Prism Cherry was trying to say, Inferno rushed off.

  Styler Mimi

Black, humanlike forms writhed before her very eyes. Mimi had seen something similar once before, the thought of which gave her goose bumps. Archfiend Pam’s wings. If these were as strong as those, if they could transform freely like Archfiend Pam’s wings had been able to, then Mimi could see no future other than defeat.

She was nearing despair when she avoided an attack from the enemy, and something like a “whoops” slipped from her lips. This was completely different from Archfiend Pam’s wings.

It was middling in speed and reflexes, at a level that Mimi could fight. The sharp claws that shot out from its thick arms required attention, but it was easy enough to avoid or block those. She sliced with her scissors, got in a kick to get some distance from it, then circled around to strike from behind. She could fight this.

The black humanoid had lost an arm and its back was split open, but it was struggling. Black flesh was generated from the places where it had been cut in an attempt to plug up the wounds. The regeneration was like that of Archfiend Pam’s wings, but these were slower to heal, and it looked as if the more she attacked it, the weaker its regenerative powers became. Compared to the first attack, the wound from her second strike took a few more seconds to heal.

It was best to focus her attacks and beat it down all at once. If she still couldn’t defeat it, then she’d think it over again.

While nimbly dodging attacks, Stanczyka tossed her throwing knives, or kicked and punched, taunting another black humanoid. It seemed she was having a fairly easy time, too. Her movements were silly and jesting. She would somersault for no reason, strangely conscious of an audience.

The card soldier was equal or perhaps a little lesser. Though she was better at attacking than when she had been a heart, she was still struggling with everything she had against the black humanoid opponent.

The thread-ball girl and the bubble girl had teamed up to fight against multiple enemies. The one would blow bubbles like a storm, and with those as their shield, or blindfold, or occasionally stepping-stones, they fought. They seemed pretty strong. They were helping out for now, so they had to be allies. She’d have them fight for her, for now.

In fact, maybe the ones who weren’t having an easy time would be Marika and the mourning-clothes girl, who were probably fighting with magical girls. If Mimi were to butt in on that, Marika would snap at her, so it seemed best to leave her to her own devices, wrap up her own fight quickly, go to support the card girl first, and then go to the girl in mourning clothes.

Mimi called out to Stanczyka. “Let’s focus on offense!”

Stanczyka nodded and pulled a hatchet from her sleeve. She tossed it in the air, pulled out a second and tossed up that one, then a third and a fourth, as she began juggling. The combination of a jester and hatchets reminded Mimi less of the circus and street performers and more of horror movies, and it was a little scary.

Mimi took a giant razor in her left hand, too, and combining it with the scissors in her right, she sliced at the enemy. By occasionally switching targets with Stanczyka, evading the enemy’s claws all the while, they attacked from the enemies’ blind spots, and as they repeated this over and over, the black humanoids collapsed into mud and soaked into the sand. Mimi couldn’t sense anyone else after them. It seemed this meant they were done.

Going two-on-one, they focused their attacks on the remaining humanoid, butchering it before immediately going to help the card soldier, and this time, the three of them ganged up on it to tear it apart.

The card soldier, Stanczyka, and the two who’d beaten down the black humanoids—the bubbler and the thread ball—ran off in the direction the mourning-clothes girl had flown. Her position being what it was, Mimi figured she should check on how Marika Fukuroi was faring, at least, just in case, and when she looked over, Marika was walking toward her.

“She got away.” The flower on her head was wilted. When they’d come, a common cosmos had been blooming there. The wilted one there now was an English daisy. That meant her opponent had been strong enough to either make the cosmos wilt, or make her throw it away and bloom a new daisy. And what’s more, it also wasn’t great that she’d let her get away.

“Was she strong?”

“She was. And I got the impression she still had some kind of trick up her sleeve.”

“It’s unusual for someone to run without ever pulling out their trick.”

“Maybe she couldn’t do it in that situation, or there was some other reason, I don’t know.” Marika narrowed her eyes in annoyance and looked up at the ceiling. “It’s hot as hell in here, for a place with no sun. A fire-user in this heat sucks.”

The atmosphere of the desert was not suited to raising flowers. Flame was not kind to plants. If Marika’s flowers grew slowly, they would bloom for a long time, but if she grew them on the spot, then in exchange for the flower blooming quickly, it would also wilt quickly. A flower forced to bloom while being roasted in the desert would quickly reach the end of its life.

Maybe “let her get away” was “I got away.”

Maybe the truth was that Marika had wanted to fight somewhere else, both so that she could enjoy fighting an opponent who was still holding back with something powerful, and also so she could fight at full strength. In her own mad way, Marika Fukuroi had a sharp nose for victory.

“You guys ate up a bunch of time on those basic demons,” said Marika.

“Demons?”

“Familiars made from magic. Mages will make them as guards or menials. I’ve heard magical girls can create them, too, but that’s rare.”

“How do you know something like that?”

“’Cause I’m well-informed.”

Styler Mimi felt rather repelled. She put her hand to her waist and spat on the sand. “They made me remember Archfiend Pam’s wings, and I freaked out.”

“Well, the Archfiend would control demons.”

“Oh, so that was what it meant.”

“Naw, that’s not at all why. The old woman just liked that kind of stuff. Back when Cranberry first became a magical girl, she beat up a demon—and it was a pretty big one, too. So you guys have got to finish up those little guys a little faster.”

“Please don’t compare me with the Musician of the Forest.”

“How can Marika Fukuroi’s partner be like that? … But anyway.” Marika’s gaze dropped to the sand dune to their left. It was the direction the mourning-clothes girl had headed, and Stanczyka and the card soldier had gone to help. “It’s weirdly quiet, but it seems like they’re done.”

Now that Marika pointed it out, it was quiet. But it wasn’t entirely silent. Mimi heard not the fierce sounds of battle, but the crunching sounds of footsteps on sand.

Eventually, Stanczyka appeared from the other side of the dune, with the card soldier following her. The card soldier was squeaking in an attempt to tell them something, but Mimi didn’t understand what she was saying. Stanczyka was trying to communicate with gestures, but that was just as incomprehensible as the way the card soldier communicated.

“Hmm? The funeral girl is gone?” said Marika.

“How can you understand what they’re trying to say?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

They had been searching for the thread-ball girl and bubbles girl, calling out to them. It seemed they weren’t showing up anywhere.

Though this was a desert, ultimately, they were within an underground room. It may have been a stupidly large, five-hundred-square-foot room, but a room was merely a room, after all. The sand dunes blocked their line of sight, but there was a limit to that. If the six of them were to split up and look, they should have been able to find them immediately, but the mourning-clothes girl did not turn up.

“Was she buried under the sand?” Marika suggested.

“I think she’d be able to get out on her own, since she’s a magical girl,” Mimi replied.

“So that means…”

The bulkhead on the opposite side from the entrance started sliding open, and all of them looked over there. The card soldier trotted over and hid in the shadow of a bubble. At some point, she’d gone back to a three of hearts.

What they saw beyond the bulkhead was that magical girl. With a scimitar and scorpion tail, the ends of her hair were flickering with flame. She didn’t enter the room, looking left, then right, and then when she saw them, she glared at them hatefully. Whatever Marika was thinking, she waved her hand and went “Heeey!” and the magical girl ignored her and closed the bulkhead.

“Hmph,” Marika grumbled to herself, putting her hand on her jaw. “Looks like your friend’s been abducted by the enemy.”

“Seriously…?”

“My, my, this is quite the disaster,” said the bubble girl.

The thread-ball girl’s expression was grave. For some reason, the bubble girl was strangely lighthearted.

“Anyway…,” said Marika. “… Who are you guys?”

“We’re magical girls of virtuous intentions,” replied the bubble girl.

Stanczyka dramatically slapped her hand to her forehead.

  Fal

Not long after they came back to the fork in the passageway, the group met up with the others upon their return. All their own team had to report was an encounter with two magical girls, but the other group’s report included news that was tedious and disheartening.

Styler Mimi was pacifying Marika Fukuroi, who was insisting that they should just go fight. The flower on her head was completely wilted brown. She was saying she’d used up all its energy fighting another magical girl and so it had wilted, but it looked fairly decent, for a wilted flower.

Snow White quietly got up and went toward the bulkhead and held Stanczyka back when she tried to follow. Why had she tried to follow her? Fal got the feeling that Stanczyka was attached to Snow White. The jester dramatically shrugged and sat back down.

“Where might you be going?” asked Uttakatta.

“I have something to discuss with my mascot. I’ll be back in thirty seconds,” Snow White replied, then opened the bulkhead to go into the forest room.

Turning on her magical phone, Fal projected his form into a hologram, ready to converse. “Having a secret conversation is one thing, but frankly I don’t know if it’s a good idea to tell them that, pon.”

“It’s best to be honest. Right now, if one person is going out the bulkhead, there couldn’t be any other reason. Even if I were to lie, they’d figure it out.”

The others aside, Uttakatta could be sharp. Unlike what you might assume from her smirk, she was sensitive to people’s behavior, and just now, too, she’d called out to Snow White when she’d been about to go outside. Uttakatta, and one other, Filru—both of them were in Fal’s data collection.

The magical girl in the overalls was Uttakatta. She was something you’d call a mercenary magical girl, hired for pay when any department needed useful personnel. Of course, she was often used for rough jobs, so it wasn’t a lifestyle the weak would choose.

The thread-ball girl was Filru. Fal didn’t know why someone employed by the magical-girl prison in America would have come to a place like this. Her assignment was security in the case of attacks from outside as well as escapes from within, and she prepared for both. Basically, she was combat personnel.

The two of them said they had come to this town because of e-mails similar to the one Snow White had received. The night before, they had discovered artificial magical girls, and though they’d had a scuffle, they had let them get away. That was when they’d met up with the magical girl in the mourning attire, Kafuria, and the three of them had teamed up and come to this facility.

According to Snow White’s magic, at the very least, these two were not lying.

“Only these two, though,” said Snow White.

“What do you mean, pon?”

“Because I can’t hear Kafuria’s heart.”

In addition to Uttakatta and Filru, there was also the Queen of Hearts, Grim Heart, and the card soldier, Shufflin. These two were not in Fal’s data. Uttakatta said they were probably from the Magical Kingdom’s Central Authority, which would explain how they had escaped Keek’s checks.

The magical girls from the Central Authority were quite the pain in the butt. Snow White was also an honorary resident, but she wasn’t actually living there. And if she said she wanted to, they probably wouldn’t allow her.

Keek had called them all prideful dreamers, and clashes with people like that often pumped the voltage of her anger and built her frustration. Fal thought one of the underlying reasons Keek had caused that incident was due to the character of the Magical Kingdom, and that was not at all just his bias talking.

From her four-dimensional bag, like the one Snow White used, Grim Heart pulled out a throne, canopy, writing desk, bookshelf, a thick carpet with a magic sigil woven in it, and various other miscellaneous goods and furniture, and boldly settled herself in front of the entrance. Shufflin made herself small and trembled there.

“Are those two in trouble about anything, pon?”

Snow White put her middle finger to the end of her jaw and seemed to be thinking for a while. “I can’t hear Grim Heart’s thoughts.”

“Huh? You can’t hear anything.”

“I can’t hear a thing. I can’t tell if that’s what her magic is, or if it’s an item that’s blocking me.”

When they didn’t know if they could trust someone, Snow White’s magic was instantly effective. Of course, that was when her magic was working properly.

“She doesn’t look like she’s thinking very deeply, though…”

It was as impossible to communicate with Grim Heart, who would simply point at something and wail, “Off with her head,” as it was with Shufflin, who couldn’t speak in words.

Filru and Uttakatta said they’d been like this since they’d met. Even Stanczyka, who just used gestures, was on the better side.

“It seems it would be best to be careful of her, pon. What about Shufflin, pon?”

“It’s less that she isn’t thinking and more like it seems she can’t think.”

“Oh… Like a magical girl who was originally an animal, pon?”

“Sort of. For now, I’d say she isn’t thinking anything bad.”

This was already a big family as is, and now there were even more magical girls. Snow White had mostly operated on her own, and she’d never worked with such a large group before. But this part wasn’t so bad. The other report was worse.

The enemy had used demons.

Magical girls didn’t employ such creatures in the first place. The common designation of “demons” referred to all synthetic organisms created by magic and lacking in any sense of “self.” This term was something like an epithet that had come about because of their unsavory nature. The term had stuck because everyone, mage or magical girl, had stopped using the original term, “homunculus.”

As was apparent from that incident in the exam where Cranberry had become a magical girl, when an especially powerful demon had gone on a great rampage, if mistakes were made in their usage, demons were extremely dangerous and could cause great tragedies. In order to make use of them, you needed to get permission by clearing many layers of checks, and there also needed to be mages with the right of supervision present to monitor things and make sure they were being managed properly, as they had been applied for.

It seemed incredibly unlikely that the proper checks of that system of supervision had been carried out within this facility. Even if the Magical Kingdom’s oversight was a sieve, things were different when it came to how they handled demons. There was fundamentally something like mages’ vested interest there, and there was no way they’d want magical girls using them. In other words, this would mean demons were being used without permission.

Simply reporting this matter would be enough excuse for management to come down, but nobody said a word about that. Fal easily surmised that each of them had their own reasons.

They had their own self-interested justifications: making sure their own department benefited most, or that they got the credit. The fact that even Snow White wasn’t doing anything was probably because they had a hostage.

Kafuria had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

From what Uttakatta and Filru had said, Kafuria’s magic was the rather unpleasant “knowledge of who would die next,” and furthermore, they’d said she’d told them herself that she wasn’t worried because she wouldn’t be next.

When she had been with Filru and Uttakatta, too, she’d said she wasn’t going to die next, and when Shufflin and Grim Heart had joined them, she’d apparently told them that “the first in line has changed.”

Fal’s data collection recorded Kafuria’s magic as “knowing who is next to die,” too, and there was no way she would lie that it wasn’t her if the next to die was herself. If it had been, she would have probably made a little more panic and fuss. According to Filru and Uttakatta, she’d actually seemed relieved.

Someone who was not going to die immediately had disappeared while in combat with the enemy. So basically, she’d been captured, hadn’t she? They’d tried searching the desert room, where she’d disappeared, but hadn’t found her. It made Fal uneasy.

If the enemy were to use Kafuria now as a shield to make some kind of demand, the magical girls would probably not do as told. It didn’t look like there were any upstanding types here who would give up their own goals for the sake of someone they had just met that day. Even Uttakatta and Filru, who had called themselves her allies, had only met Kafuria the day before.

The Lady Proud and Umbrain pair were members of the large organization that was the Department of Diplomacy, and they would prioritize the convenience of their institution over kindness. That was the correct course of action for members of that organization.

As for Marika Fukuroi and Styler Mimi, it was dubious in the first place whether they had anything that could be called sympathy. If a wild beast whose joy was in battle were deprived of her fight, wouldn’t she bare her fangs at enemies and allies alike?

Grim Heart, who was nothing but “Off with her head,” wouldn’t do anything. They didn’t know how she might act when something actually happened. Shufflin would simply obey her, so it was the same there.

With Stanczyka, it was less that they didn’t know and more that they didn’t understand what she was thinking. She could hardly be actually fooling around, but there was a limit to nonverbal communication.

When a life was used as a shield, Snow White would prioritize human life. She hated more than anything when lives were disrespected. Fal wanted her to prioritize lives, too. Fal wished all magical girls could be like that, if possible.

But reality wasn’t like that. Once it came to actual negotiation, if everyone but Snow White said, “It’s Kafuria’s own fault she got caught. No room for negotiation,” then what would happen?

Snow White was not the sort of magical girl who would remain silent and let her opinion be quashed. She would complain, take a firm stand, and not let it go.

Magical girls were strong-willed. Keek was not the only one who thought that breaking or compromising was equivalent to defeat.

The discussion hadn’t gotten to that point yet. Fal was filled with trepidation as to when it would.

“They’re not such bad people as you think, Fal.”

“Who are you talking about, pon?”

“Nobody here will abandon Kafuria. But…” Snow White’s eyes turned to the other side of the bulkhead. “I don’t know what Grim Heart is thinking, and I don’t know what Shufflin might do under her orders, either. Let’s just be careful about that.”

Before they’d gone out the bulkhead, Grim Heart had been flipping through a booklet and yawning. She didn’t seem like someone who required that much caution, but since Snow White couldn’t hear her thoughts, it was surely just as she said.

“Also… this isn’t only about the people who are right here.”

“So that means… What does it mean, pon?”

“I mean everyone stuck underground right now.” Magical phone still in hand, Snow White opened up the bulkhead. Grim Heart, who had been sprawled out lazily, was now upright, wailing and red-faced. Shufflin was prostrating herself in front of the sofa, trembling. What had happened?

Unruffled, Snow White went back the other way through the hallway, passing in front of Stanczyka to stand in front of Grim Heart’s sofa—in other words, where everyone was gathered. All the eyes that had been on Grim Heart’s rage and trembling Shufflin now turned to Snow White. Shufflin raised her face to look up at Snow White.

“Let’s negotiate.”

Snow White’s sudden proposal made Marika Fukuroi look on her with deep suspicion. And even if the others weren’t as extreme as Marika, they were much the same.

“My magic allows me to hear people’s thoughts.”

Everyone appeared shocked to some extent—except for Grim Heart, who didn’t look at Snow White at all. Fal’s functions didn’t include changes of expression, but if they had, his eyes and mouth would have been wider than anyone else’s, staring at Snow White.

Magical girls who placed themselves on the battlefield didn’t divulge their magic, since having their magic known was equivalent to being held by the scruff of the neck, and even if someone was an ally, the next day, she could become an enemy.

To say the least, the crowd this time was very much a mishmash of faces, and worst case, never mind tomorrow, it wouldn’t be strange for them to be enemies in ten minutes.

This was the sort of crowd Snow White had revealed her magic to. Saying “I can hear people’s thoughts” was equivalent to declaring, “I know what everyone’s magic is.” And not only their magic—their goals, their knowledge, their most secret skills. She’d told them she knew it all.

Marika Fukuroi laughed shrilly. One wilted petal fell from her shaking head. “Ohhh, I see! This kinda magical girl is real tough! And that makes beating her way more fun! I get that sort of thing!”

Styler Mimi scowled in irritation, while Lady Proud glared at Snow White, and Filru’s cheeks reddened as she looked down. Stanczyka tilted her head, and Uttakatta closed one eye, twisting her mouth in an ironic smile.

“As Miss Fukuroi says, mind reading is a fearsome thing,” Uttakatta said. “So how is your mind-reading ability of relation to this?”

“I can’t read minds. I can hear people’s thoughts.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. So how is hearing others’ thoughts of relation to any of this?”

“The magical girls in this facility—I’ve heard their thoughts.”

“Oh-ho.”

“They’re not looking for a fight with us. There’s room for negotiation.”

Lady Proud’s expression softened. “… Judging from how things have gone, there are matters that should precede negotiation, aren’t there? Have you forgotten they swung a hammer and spear at us?”

“In the first place, they didn’t wind up in a fight because they wanted to,” Snow White continued, ignoring Lady Proud’s question. Fal would rarely see Snow White talk this much when she was in magical-girl form. Snow White was very earnest about this speech. She may have seemed dispassionate, but she was choosing her words carefully.

Why? Because she was trying to avoid an avoidable conflict. Fal restrained the urge to say, “Did you guys see that?”

Snow White hated conflict. Even in Cranberry’s exam, she’d avoided participating in the killing up until the end. It was also because she’d tried to eliminate meaningless conflicts that she had been crowned with the title of the Magical-Girl Hunter, feared and shied away from with distant respect.

Grim Heart straightened and pointed at Snow White. “Off with her head.”

“From where they stand, we’re clearly intruders, and because we were looking for conflict, they responded in kind,” Snow White said.

Styler Mimi nodded. “You have a point. My idiot provoked them, and then they fell for it. I think if not for that, we might have met more peacefully.”

“Hey! What d’you mean, ‘my idiot’?”

“At the very least, if they have Kafuria with them, they might try to negotiate with us,” said Filru.

“True, I got the feeling they weren’t actively trying to fight,” agreed Styler Mimi.

“As did I,” said Uttakatta.

“But… still…”

“Off with her head!”

“Hold on a minute.” Lady Proud thrust her hands forward, her eyes darting every which way. “Where did Umbrain go?”

She had such a big and conspicuous umbrella, there was no way she could be hiding in the hallway when there was hardly any cover in there. Everyone glanced all around, but nobody could find Umbrain.

“Where did Umbrain go?! Did nobody see her?!” Lady Proud yelled, blanching.

“I can’t hear her thoughts…” Snow White was rattled. She was stunned by how she hadn’t even noticed that the number of voices she could hear had changed between when she had gone outside and when she had come back. Fal checked his enemy scanner and confirmed that they were short one, after all. When they’d gone out the bulkhead, Umbrain had been there.

If Snow White was rattled, then Fal would take action. That was his job as a mascot. “Before Snow White went outside, Lady Proud, you and Umbrain were talking, pon.”

With a look like she’d been struck, Lady Proud stared back at Fal. “I… I… That’s right, Umbrain and I were talking. We were discussing what to do next, and if it was best to report this, things of that nature.”

“And then when Snow White came back, Umbrain was gone, pon.”

“That’s… probably true, yes.”

“What happened while Snow White was gone, pon?”

Lady Proud’s eyes turned to Grim Heart and then shifted over to Shufflin. Grim Heart was grumbling complaints to herself as if all this had nothing to do with her, but Shufflin was trembling hard, and she pressed her forehead to the floor and shrank in on herself again.

“Grim Heart… ordered Shufflin to get her a pen.” Lady Proud said each word as if recalling. “Shufflin pulled a pen out of the bag… and before handing it over, she dropped it. The pen rolled along the ground… and she panicked and picked it up, but Grim Heart got angry… and Shufflin threw herself on the ground…”

A pen was lying on the ground. The bag Shufflin had been carrying around had been abandoned farther away. That corresponded with what Lady Proud said.

“That’s basically what happened,” Styler Mimi added with a nod. No one denied it, either.

Keeping his voice quiet, Fal asked Snow White, “Did anyone here do something with Umbrain, pon?”

“No. No one here is thinking that… like if it were discovered they’d done something to her, they’d be in trouble.”

If there was anyone to whom that applied, it could only be Grim Heart, whose heart she couldn’t hear. But if Grim Heart had done something, someone would have noticed. Umbrain had disappeared while Grim Heart had been causing a fuss, and everyone’s attention had been on her.

“So then that means she went alone to open the bulkhead by herself and go outside, pon?”

“She couldn’t have. Because…” Uttakatta gestured to Filru, sitting beside her, with a hand, “Miss Filru here had her strings on both entrances. She figured it would be quite the pickle if there was an attack while we were discussing.”

Being that they hadn’t told anyone about it, the two of them must not have trusted the others. She would have been checking not only for anyone coming in from the outside, but also for anyone leaving from the inside. When Snow White had been about to go outside, the one who had called out to her had been Uttakatta.

As if plucking something, Filru put together her index finger and thumb and held them up. “I connected this thread to the entrances. If they move, I’ll notice them vibrate.”

Umbrain had disappeared suddenly. She hadn’t used a door or gone up the ladder, and nobody had noticed, and what’s more, no one had seen it or been involved.

“Couldn’t Umbrain have done it with her magic?”

“Umbrain’s magic doesn’t do that!” Lady Proud shouted. With the wall at her back, her eyes were seesawing right and left. Her cape, sandwiched between her back and the wall, rustled. “No one did it, and Umbrain couldn’t have disappeared on her own. So then it has to have been them that did it. Forget negotiating. They don’t want to negotiate.”

“But isn’t it strange, pon? If they were going to erase a magical girl like that, they would have come to eliminate the intruders faster, pon.”

“Maybe there’s a condition of sorts… Something… that would trigger it…” Lady Proud was muttering to herself, hand at her mouth, and had clearly lost her calm. She wasn’t reacting well to the shock of Umbrain’s disappearance.

“See, we oughtta resolve this the easy way, after all.” Marika Fukuroi, who had been alone leaning against the wall looking bored as she listened, got a grin on her face. “We don’t need any of that boring stuff like discussion or negotiation. We hit ’em and kick ’em, and whoever’s left standing at the end is the greatest. That’s simple and easy to understand.” She jabbed at the bulkhead behind her with her thumb and finished with, “So then, let’s go.”

Marika Fukuroi’s rationale was similar to Cranberry’s—rather, it was basically the same thing. And it had to make Snow White, who hated the Cranberry-style magical-girl exams and continued to tear them apart, angry. Fal panicked, thinking he had to soothe her somehow, but Snow White was still looking at the floor, making no move to act.

“Fine. We can ask them their reasons after we’ve taken them down.” Heels clicking, Lady Proud headed for the forest room, while Marika Fukuroi followed her like she was raring to go, dragging Styler Mimi along with her.

Grim Heart, who had basically been wailing like background music, yelled, “Why aren’t you going?! Idlers will be beheaded!” and Shufflin hopped up to skitter after them.

Uttakatta slid over to Snow White and asked, “What will you do?”

“I’ll go with you. I won’t let them engage in a pointless conflict.” Her face was blank. Her eyes were fixed on the backs of Lady Proud and the others headed into the forest room. Fal couldn’t see any agitation in her. She was back to being the usual Snow White.

“That’s wonderful. So what do you think we should do?”

“Come with me, please. When the time comes, I’ll need your help to stop them.”

“Very well.” Uttakatta was saying both she and Filru would follow Snow White.

“Are you okay with that, pon?”

“Yes, I think,” Filru said vaguely, but she was basically agreeing.

Uttakatta followed up with, “Though we were discussing this earlier… You may be looking for credit, but as they say, there’s not a thing the dead can win. I also swore I’d work well for money paid, but one cannot buy a life with money, and I’ve no interest in any labor that comes at the risk of that.” She jerked her chin toward Lady Proud. “It seems Miss Proud over there has very much lost her composure. And Miss Fukuroi seems to have lost her cool from her very conception—the trick to survival is to follow whoever is the most composed. So let’s be off, then.”

This time, Filru gave a resolute nod. “I’ll cooperate with you.”

“Thank you,” said Snow White. “I’ll have Fal look and see if there are any available job positions.”

Filru was at a loss for words. She licked her lips, then bowed, and together with Uttakatta, she rushed off at a trot after Lady Proud and the others.

Furious, Fal looked over to Grim Heart, who was reading a booklet, and spoke to Snow White. He didn’t take the consideration of lowering his volume. “Nobody noticed that Umbrain was gone, pon. So there’s no need for you to feel so anxious about it, pon.”

“Why do you think I feel anxious about it?”

“Didn’t you feel a little upset, pon?”

“Why do you think that?”

“Just how long do you think I’ve had my eye on you, pon? My old master made me watch you so much I couldn’t stand it, and I’ve been watching you all this time since then, too, pon. I can figure out how you’re feeling, at least, pon.” Fal had never brought up Keek in front of Snow White, not even occasionally. But now, he chose to.

Snow White let out a soft sigh. “Makes you sound like a stalker.”

“Well, I suppose it’s something similar, pon.” Emergencies enable you to say things you wouldn’t normally be able to. Everything out of Keek’s mouth had been nonsense and delusions, but Fal thought she’d been right about this one thing.

Following Stanczyka, who was going along on a unicycle, Fal and Snow White opened up the bulkhead to the forest room.

  Princess Deluge

Inferno didn’t try to sweep off the sand stuck to her hair and clothes, sitting silently in her chair with her head drooping. Quake was bouncing her left knee.

Prism Cherry was crying. “I’m sorry… If I’d been watching more closely…”

It seemed Princess Tempest had been kidnapped by the enemy. That seemed to be the case because that was the only conclusion the group was able to come to based on the situation.

Princess Tempest should have been fighting with the enemy, but no matter how long they waited, she had not come back. They brought up every nook and cranny of training room number three on the monitor, but Tempest was nowhere to be found. There were the invading magical girls coming in, and then there was nothing.

They could only assume she’d been taken away.

Princess Inferno blamed herself. She regretted that she had failed to withstand the enemy’s fierce attack and had run away alone.

Prism Cherry blamed herself, too. She regretted that she’d been unable to thoroughly observe the situation in the briefing room monitor. Since there was only one monitor, she couldn’t display the whole of the facility and had been switching between the various cameras. It was impossible for her to monitor everything.

Princess Quake was worried, but showing that would be an accusation toward the other two, who blamed themselves even more. Knowing that meant Quake was unable to voice her worries, and so she simply bounced her knee.

Princess Deluge hated herself for analyzing things like this. It wasn’t at all a bad thing for her to be the only calm one. But she couldn’t help feeling that her ability to remain calm could mean her attachment to Tempest was shallow.

Deluge kept an eye on the monitor. If the enemy were to attempt to invade here, they’d have to come through the training rooms. If she set the camera on the training room entrances, she could watch for enemy intrusion—or that was her pretext.

She had to do something, or she couldn’t bear feeling this way. It was better to even pretend to be doing something. Deluge noticed her arms were folded and uncrossed them. She recalled hearing that folded arms were evidence of emotional defensiveness.

She’d thought that here, she could talk openly about anything. But in the end, even here, she was isolated as the one cold person. Even though she knew she should be trying to comfort the others, she didn’t. She was avoiding making the problem bigger.

Inferno’s retreat had been a wise judgment. It would have been the worst of the worst if the both of them had been captured. And after that, she’d immediately headed out to save her, so that hadn’t been the wrong choice.

Prism Cherry had done well, too. She was better at handling the machines in this facility than anyone else, and it had been impossible for her, so it would have been impossible for anyone. The four of them had all been split up and fighting, so there was no way she could have backed up all of them.

Deluge worried that if she were to say something like this out loud, it would be even more of an attack. Even though she should be worrying about Tempest most, her desire to maintain her own position prevented her from acting as she wanted.

She was bound to the point of immobility by chains of self-loathing. It was the same as before she’d become a magical girl.

Deluge pulled the medicine bottle from the drawer and dropped a tablet into her palm.

They had been told that they must not take the pills multiple times in one day. But twice shouldn’t count as “multiple.” When she washed it down the back of her throat with cold water, she could feel the increase in her magical power. Her heart calmed. When she put the bottle down on the table, Inferno and Quake also silently took the medicine.

They had more than just a few things to think about. Turning back to the monitor again, a sound of ah slipped from Deluge’s mouth. The magical girls were invading training room number two.

The magical girl with a flower on top of her head, the one with the big cape, the one with the scissors, and the one like a card soldier were cautiously keeping an eye on their surroundings as they slowly proceeded through the forest.

Kicking down her chair, Inferno stood. “It’s them! Where’s Tempest?!”

Prism Cherry shifted the camera, sliding from one edge of the forest to the other at high speed. But there was nothing there that seemed to be Tempest, nor any sort of bag or box that might have her inside. “I can’t find her. She’s probably been captured in a hallway—or maybe she was taken outside?”

“Those scum… I’ll hit ’em where it hurts and make them spit out where Tempest is!”

“Hold on, Inferno!” Quake’s and Prism Cherry’s eyes met. The both of them looked at Deluge, and she nodded back. They were all thinking the same thing as Inferno. Quake and Deluge stood, and Prism Cherry took position in front of the operation panel.

“Be very careful about how long you use Luxury Mode,” said Quake. “Worst case, two of us can use Ultimate Princess Explosion—as long as we don’t have any friendly fire.”

“… Roger!”

Even as she was crying, her eyes bright red, Prism Cherry was trying to do everything she could. Inferno and Quake were the same. So then Deluge had to do the same. She could brood over things after.

“Okay, let’s go!”

“Yeah!”

“You guys just leave it to me!”