Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 9 - Chapter 4

Rainbow Friendship

She couldn’t avoid the high turn kick.

She couldn’t generate her rainbows. In other words, she couldn’t use a rainbow to block the attack. In desperation, she held her arm up to the side of her face. That wouldn’t be enough to fully stop the strike that meant to slice off her head, and she was flung backward, guard and all.

Her back smashed through a cement-block wall, not stopping even then, and she rolled over the concrete. If she could just deploy a rainbow, she would have been able to guard or strike back. She could have avoided this clumsy rolling around by using a rainbow to support her body. But now, she couldn’t even manage what she was usually able to do so easily.

Come out! Fire! But no matter how many times she silently prayed, the rainbows would not come. In the utter darkness, she couldn’t even see herself. But still, if her rainbows came, she’d know. Of course, she also knew that they weren’t coming.

Sensing a shuddering of the air and a falling sound, she bent her back to curl up.

Something passed by where her head had been until an instant ago, striking the surface of the concrete. Shards scattered, hitting her face. She reached her hand out to the thing that had caused the impact, but it slipped away from her. The presence melted into the darkness. She couldn’t hear a sound, either.

She just felt a gaze. Her opponent was watching her, unseen.

Come at me one more time. Come, and this time for sure, I’ll catch you.

She pushed herself off the ground with deliberate slowness. If the enemy took this as her opportunity for a big attack, her movements would become comparatively easier to read. Rain Pow simply had to catch her. Even completely blinded, if Rain Pow could get her in a grapple, then the odds would be fifty-fifty.

But the enemy must have anticipated that idea of hers, as she made no move. She was experienced. She knew Rain Pow’s magic and the way she fought using her magic. That kind of opponent was the scariest.

As a darkness user, this enemy robbed the area of all light. Magic rainbows couldn’t exist within the darkness, either. To Rain Pow, being unable to generate rainbows was like having both her weapon and her armor stolen away.

Though her opponent wasn’t running away, Rain Pow couldn’t sense her presence at all. She could only feel like she wasn’t there. In the complete darkness, unable to see a thing, there was only one sense she could rely on. She felt as if the darkness was gradually oozing into her skin. Just standing there consumed energy.

Something flew at her. Probably a throwing stone. This, she could avoid. Even if the enemy was a master of battles in darkness, she couldn’t erase the sound of a throwing stone.

Rain Pow dodged it, and then right as she was trying to deduce where it had been thrown from, another stone shot at her from a different direction. She dodged that one, too, then yet another, and when the next two stones came flying at the same time, she avoided them, too—or not.

The two stones were connected by a string…like some kind of wire between them. It was made like a throwing weapon for capturing live animals. The moment after she was distracted by the wire winding around her upper arms and torso, a shrill voice ripped through the darkness.

“Here she comes!”

Before Rain Pow could even think about what that cry meant, her feet moved of their own accord. She imagined the enemy attacking, trying to take advantage of her while she was tangled in the wire. Toko had taught her this lesson brutally well—a magical girl’s weapon is her imagination. Even in the darkness, her imagination was free.

Rain Pow began to picture this difficult opponent’s stance, build, timing, and position along with where and how she should attack.

She took a firm step with her dominant leg, breaking through the concrete, digging into the earth below that with her toes. Then, with all the power in her body and spirit, she thrust a kick straight backward.

The impact hit the enemy’s gut, passing through muscle and organs and penetrating all the way to the spine. All the sensations from the bottom of her foot told Rain Pow that her imagination had made no mistake. She ripped through flesh, broke bones, and tore into organs.

The enemy tried to grab her kicking leg, but she was too weak, now. Blood vomit overflowed from the back of her opponent’s throat, and she slid down on the spot. When Rain Pow heard her collapsing onto the concrete, she finally brought back her leg.

The magical darkness that had filled her vision gradually cleared. When she had been in the darkness, it had been like being at the bottom of an abyss, but now that it was clear, she was in the sort of ordinary nighttime residential neighborhood you’d find anywhere. The little park in front of the apartment building was illuminated by streetlamps so glaringly bright, they were irritating—perhaps to drive off sketchy people.

She ripped off the wires forcefully. The stones on the ends bounced, rolled, hit the curb, and stopped.

With her toe, she nudged the body of a woman facedown in a puddle of blood, turning her over. The woman had detransformed; she was wearing a school uniform, a short skirt, and her light-dyed hair was in disarray. Despite being in uniform, she was wearing makeup. This was probably what you’d call “gal-style.”

It was definitely Rain Pow’s target. Setting her foot over the girl’s neck, she broke it with a stomp.

“That was a close one!”

A tiny creature came spiraling down from atop a streetlamp; she was so small that you could set her in the palm of your hand. The translucent insect wings on her back made her look just like the fairies in old folktales, and her white silk dress and faintly glowing form really drove the whole fairy thing home. “You’d have been a total goner if I hadn’t called out to you, huh?” she said.

“Could you see into the darkness from the outside?”

“Naw, I used a new function on the magical phone, the one where it’ll search for people with magical abilities nearby. It’s not generally supposed to be used like radar or sonar, but hey, that’s how I use it.”

“Oh, huh… But, like, do you think it’s a coincidence that the target’s magic just happened to be the worst match with mine? Think we can chalk it up to bad timing that when I tried to attack while she was human, she actually turned out to be in magical-girl form?”

“Frankly, I think we can’t.”

“Cheers to your honesty. This wasn’t, like, a trap, was it?”

“If it were a trap, then I think it’d be more trap-like, with more people or something, though…” The fairy’s expression went blank for an instant, but her old smile came back right away, and she did a spin in the air. “It might be a good idea to look into that stuff a bit deeper. I’ll ask our financier.”

When Toko had first come to this world, she’d thought magical girls were all nothing but idiots.

But there were actually a lot of clever ones out there. There were many wicked magical girls who earned a little on the side by getting their hands dirty with bribery, leaking information, diverting goods to the black market, and various other bad deeds, and Rain Pow had been undertaking jobs to kill such types.

But Rain Pow was no agent of justice. She was a villain among villains, murdering people for pay in order to protect the interests of a certain department within the Magical Kingdom. Most of the people Rain Pow killed were various villains, but there were a fair number of normal folks in there, too. Plus the occasional stubborn blockhead with a strong sense of justice.

That day, Toko had a new proposal for her.

“This line of work is going well right now, but it won’t necessarily go well forever… I mean, you can understand that well from what happened the other day, huh? It’d be best to get some insurance.”

“Insurance? What kind, specifically?”

“I’m gonna make a bunch of magical girls around here who’ll be your backup. It’s standard for magical girls to fight as a team, right? Of course, we keep our real work a secret. Involving amateurs would just up the danger, after all. I’ll arrange for some allies we can use as a shield and dispose of if the time comes while we get the hell outta here.”

“Sheesh, that’s hella evil, don’cha think? So you’ll be the one searching for these allies, Toko?”

“Yeah, but you have to help out, too, Rain Pow.”

“Sounds like a pain in the ass.” Spreading out both arms, Kaori rolled over on her bed. She was completely exhausted from killing and almost being killed. Even after coming home, she still couldn’t relax.

Kaori wasn’t seeking a relaxed life as a magical girl, but she also didn’t want to live a life of endless tension and thrills, either. She would have fun making money, fooling around, and living a life of pleasure. And she’d work hard to that end. Once middle school was over, she’d stop living in this run-down apartment, and she’d avoid the presence of her older sister whose face she didn’t want to see. Once she was in high school, she’d leave this place and live with Toko to have a more fun life. It wasn’t like Kaori’s sister wanted to see her face, either, so she was sure to be glad about that, too.

Kaori had been given this opportunity to become a magical girl and escape her old shitty life. If her evil deeds were exposed and she got captured by the Magical Kingdom, she’d lose the life she’d made. That was the one thing she absolutely wanted to avoid. She didn’t want to go back to how things were before. Toko’s proposal was very reasonable.

She wasn’t sensitive enough to think, I can’t make my school friends sacrificial pawns! All she had inside her was a hard-boiled magical girl who’d say, The first time I killed someone, maybe I trembled a little; I don’t really remember. Sacrificing others for her own sake was fundamental to Toko’s philosophy, and Kaori thought she was right.

Still sprawled out in her bed, she asked Toko at her pillow, “What do you want me to do?”

“Come on, it’s not gonna be that much of a hassle.”

Folding fingers one by one, Toko counted off. “I saw five people in the school who had some potential. There’s the question of just how enthusiastic they’ll be when I make the offer, but stupid is as stupid does, so that one idiot will gladly help out, and the moron she drags around will get involved regardless. The selfish one’ll see being a magical girl as beneficial to her, so that one’s in the bag. And if we use the students as a shield when asking the teacher, then no prob there, either. And then there’s the last one.”

“What about the last one?”

“She’s the kind of girl who, like, if you invite her with a smile and say, ‘Let’s be magical girls!’ she’ll probably run away.”

“Would a girl like that even have the potential in the first place?”

“Normally, yes. But there’s exceptions to everything.” Toko shifted into a formal kneeling position and faced Kaori, putting her hands together. “And so—emergency mission time! Go make friends with that girl!”

“Huh?”

Toko, the one who had made Kaori into the magical girl Rain Pow, had also taught her all sorts of things. She’d beaten everything into her, even skills she didn’t know when she might ever need: how to fight, how to live, foreign languages, even table manners.

But “how to make friends with someone” hadn’t been among those things.

“Well, y’know, I’ve just never needed friends.”

“Are you a loner, Toko?”

“I’m proudly independent. I’m an independent fairy. I don’t need a posse.”

“But you weren’t invited to your class reunion, right?”

“I’m committed to doing my best, even as I’m subjected to such slander like, ‘If you find any good magical-girl candidates, never ever show them to Toko,’ or ‘Don’t listen to Toko even if she makes you an offer that sounds good,’ or ‘Don’t let Toko come within a fifteen-foot radius of you.’ I don’t let any of that get good ol’ Toko down!”

Kaori didn’t quite get why Toko was looking so self-satisfied. Did she mean to say that she wasn’t an isolated loner but a proudly independent pariah?

“So, Rain Pow, do your best to become friends with her. In the meantime, I’ll be watching the other girls.”

“I dunno about this…”

Kaori had never been taught how to make friends, but she wasn’t incapable of it. By fine-tuning her grades across every subject and settling into a spot within the class hierarchy, she had put herself in a position that upset neither herself nor anyone else—all while avoiding being the target of envy, jealousy, mockery, or laughter but still not completely invisible. When it came to social relationships, Kaori was confident she could pull them off better than her teacher Toko.

“Um, so her name was Tatsuko Sakaki…right?” said Kaori. “And she’s a first-year, yeah? Which class?”

Toko regarded her with an odd look. “I asked you to do this because she’s in your class…”

“Huh? You serious?”

She was serious.

When Kaori looked at the class list, the name Tatsuko Sakaki was right there. And Kaori wasn’t some shut-in who never came to school—she attended all her classes and participated in various events.

Kaori did not scrimp in her efforts to have a comfortable time at school. She had a firm grasp of the social relationships in the classroom, and she’d made friends based on knowing who felt what about whom. So there was no way there could be anyone in the class, boy or girl, whose name she didn’t know…or so she’d thought.

Tatsuko was always alone during break time in class. In middle school, maintaining friends is a lubricant for your lifestyle. If you’re alone, you’ll stick out from the rest, and it’s not unusual for things to escalate into being avoided, shunned, teased, and then bullied.

Tatsuko was alone, and yet she didn’t stick out at all. Whether you were someone like Toko, who was generally loathed, or whether you liked to play the aloof loner, or whether you simply had poor communication skills, being alone would make you stand out. You’d be out of place. Being so mindful of her own position, there was no way Kaori wouldn’t notice something like that.

But even so, the girl hadn’t allowed anyone to notice. Whether she stood out or not wasn’t even in question—she had flat-out erased her presence.

Her appearance was unremarkable. Her hair wasn’t brushed enough, and the elastic she tied it up with was too plain. She was lacking in curves. Her face was missing a smile, so she was devoid of a middle school girl’s charm.

She didn’t particularly excel in academics, nor was she bad at them, either. She didn’t take the lead in gym and music class, but she also didn’t fall behind, instead staying in the middle of the group.

Was she deliberately trying to conceal and bury her true abilities, like Kaori? It was highly unusual for Kaori to not even notice the name of a person in her own class.

In class and during breaks, she found her gaze unwittingly following Tatsuko’s every movement. It’d just be weird if she were to stare too much, but when she tried to act as natural as possible, Tatsuko would quickly disappear from Kaori’s sight. She was a hassle to deal with in every way.

Tatsuko went to the washroom alone. She ate her boxed lunch alone. When the students moved between classrooms, she was alone yet again. It seemed she was often reading in the library during breaks. She was always alone, and nobody saw that as suspicious.

She wasn’t in any clubs, and once she was done with class and cleaning duties, she would head straight home. Kaori tried looking around, wondering if she was friendly with anyone in the class, but there honestly wasn’t a single one.

Even if they weren’t quite friends, the kids sitting beside her had to have comparatively more contact time with her. With that in mind, when Kaori obliquely asked what they thought of Tatsuko, her efforts were in vain; all she got was, “Eh, she’s normal, I guess.” No, she’s not normal, she insisted to herself, having gained nothing from her questioning. Tatsuko’s gym class stretching partner—who’d only been assigned to her because their names were near each other on the roll call list—also said, “Yeah, she’s normal.” The student on cleaning duty with Tatsuko agreed: “Yep, just a normal girl.”

She wasn’t normal, after all. It seemed not a single person was cognizant of Tatsuko as an individual.

When Kaori came back from school, she immediately vented at Toko. “What’s with that girl? Does she have a magic barrier?”

“Naw, nothing magical. I’d be able to tell.”

“So then what’s her deal? She’s just naturally like that?”

“Yeah, I think so… A lot of the girls who become magical girls are pretty weird.”

“Is that a low-key diss?”

“I’m not dissing you. I totally respect you, dude.”

The list of magical-girl candidates Toko had found:

Umi Shibahara. This girl was weird. Definitely weird. Kaori had seen her out on the sports field, running and kicking and punching—that wasn’t a human but another kind of creature.

Kayo Nemura. The fact that she could stand to hang around Umi made her weird, too.

Nozomi Himeno. During the school entrance ceremony, Kaori had been confused by why a student would be standing with the teachers. She was shocked to later learn that Nozomi Himeno was a teacher. Being like a magical girl even before transformation? Weird.

Mine Musubiya. This was the one person Kaori didn’t really know. According to Toko’s investigation, she’d consistently been class rep ever since elementary school, so she was probably a weirdo herself.

And then Tatsuko Sakaki. Kaori thought she’d been more attentive to life at school than anyone, so it was weird that she hadn’t noticed her at all. As someone who was always alone, Tatsuko should have stood out, but she seemed to be the one exception to the rule. Was Kaori completely blind here? That couldn’t be.

Toko shrugged at Kaori, who was on her bed agonizing. Every single one of Toko’s gestures was so irritating. That had to be why she had no friends.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of weirdo she is. Just become her friend!”

“I don’t feel like she’s someone you can just be friends with, though.”

“Well, I’m super-busy with my own stuff, so I can’t help you there, sorry.”

“Screw you, stupid fairy!”

Toko probably really was busy. She had heavy, dark circles under her eyes, and her expression was dull. But still, Kaori wanted a little more help from her. There were things only a fairy could do, like sneak into Tatsuko’s house and plant a listening device or a hidden camera.

Left with no choice, Kaori firmed up her resolve to face this mission alone. Tatsuko had revealed zero weaknesses. She bore no sense of tragic resolve in being alone, and in fact, you didn’t even get any sense of isolation from her—she was living her life without hesitation or faltering, which made it even worse.

Wasn’t there a weakness somewhere? Wasn’t there any good weakness that would be enough for Kaori to pounce on? Her opponent was not a magical girl. Even if she had magical potential, she was a middle schooler. Kaori couldn’t be dithering over someone like this.

That much she was aware of, and yet it was difficult to find a moment to speak with Tatsuko. Every time she went to talk to her, she’d miss her chance at the last second. Tatsuko was calm and self-possessed, and she revealed no openings to take advantage of—almost like whenever Kaori would try to snatch her up, Tatsuko would smoothly avoid it.

Kaori continued to observe her.

Through her continued observation, she learned one thing: Tatsuko Sakaki liked tamagoyaki. Tatsuko ate her boxed lunch dispassionately, but she always saved the tamagoyaki for last. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who left their favorite food for last and those who left their least favorite food for last. Kaori figured Tatsuko was probably the former. Twice, she carried out the pointless gesture of poking her tamagoyaki with her chopsticks—and then the muscles around her mouth moved, if indeed only slightly. That was a smile, wasn’t it? She’d secretly expressed the joy of eating her favorite thing without letting anyone discover.

Tatsuko liked tamagoyaki. If Kaori could lure her with her favorite food during lunchtime, that could be her chance.

Kaori decided to make tamagoyaki for her lunch the next day. The only experience she had with cooking was doing it during home ec, but after a bit of searching online, she found a recipe that looked good and wrote it down.

First, she made the dashi soup stock. She soaked the seaweed in water overnight, and after that, she soaked dried sardines in a pot for thirty minutes, then put it on the stove, and before it came to a boil, she took out the seaweed and put in the fish flakes. Apparently, all this time and effort with the dashi was important, or else the tamagoyaki wouldn’t taste right.

“Why’s a stupid omelet gotta be this much work?” Kaori grumbled.

And then there was the issue of the dashi-to-egg ratio. The more dashi you added, the more flavor you got, but the more you put in, the more the eggs would fall apart and not form an omelet. The best tamagoyaki needed a perfect ratio of the two.

Or so it was supposed to, but for some reason, the result was closer to army rations with a texture like sand and a taste like clay. When Toko taste-tested it, she cursed at her, and Kaori burned the inside of her mouth.

Forget the omelet. The next strategy Kaori came up with involved an umbrella.

How about if Tatsuko came to school with an umbrella on a rainy day, but then on her way home, the umbrella was gone? It’d still be rainy outside, and without an umbrella, she’d be in a real fix. But some random person had gone and taken her umbrella with them. If a classmate were to come along in her moment of need and say, “What’s wrong, Sakaki? Huh? Someone stole your umbrella? Oh no! Here, let’s share mine and walk home together,” surely that would melt even the iciest of hearts, wouldn’t it?

Fortunately, it was the rainy season. Within two days after coming up with this plan, it started to rain on and off, and the scene of the students walking to school was lined with umbrellas of various colors. As everyone commiserated with one another over how depressing the rain was, the only person chuckling to herself was Kaori.

She made sure to come to school at the same time as Tatsuko, then dawdled around the entranceway, taking her time retying her shoes and shaking the rain off her umbrella to time things right. Once she saw Tatsuko arrive, she headed to the classroom. She had made sure to note where in the umbrella stand Tatsuko had stuck her umbrella. Now it was go time.

During class, Kaori raised her hand to say she felt sick, and with the others worrying about her, she left the classroom, making perfectly sure that nobody was watching before she transformed into Rain Pow. Then she ran to the entrance and shoved Tatsuko’s umbrella into a crack in the shoe cubbies, and next, she ran to the nurse’s office, undid her transformation, and then lay down on the bed there for thirty minutes.

The school day came to an end. Certain of her plan’s success, Kaori secretly followed after Tatsuko, who quickly got her things together and then left the classroom. When Tatsuko’s expression revealed her quandary, Kaori would reach out to her. She had simulated this in her mind countless times on the bed in the nurse’s office. This was going to go off without a hitch. For some reason, Kaori’s heart was pounding as hard as it did when she was on a job—maybe even more.

Tatsuko changed her shoes at her cubby and then faced the umbrella stand. She looked once, twice, and then scanned it a third time, confirming that her own umbrella wasn’t there. Yes, this is it, Kaori thought, but right before she could reach out, Tatsuko started to walk into the falling rain.

Had Tatsuko deemed it better to go out in the rain like a drenched rat rather than rely on someone else for help? No, that wasn’t it. Following after Tatsuko, Kaori’s eyes widened.

Her steps were hard to call light, and her movements were, if anything, sluggish. But her goal was clear. There was no hesitation in the way she moved, and she operated with a defensive mastery. She slid smoothly between the kids with umbrellas, preventing the unusualness of her being the one person getting wet in the rain from standing out. Coming out from the school gates, she immediately headed for the eaves of a house, then traced a path from one eave to another. She had managed to secure a route. With the utmost effort, she continued to walk in places where she wouldn’t get wet. This girl was good. Kaori groaned as she continued to tail her.

Tatsuko Sakaki was better than Kaori had thought.

“The gym’s open, so let’s use homeroom period to play dodgeball.”

So the homeroom teacher proposed, and the classroom was filled with joy and cheers. Kids were high-fiving each other and hugging, making an extravagant display of their happiness.

Kaori didn’t miss any of it. Though Tatsuko was clapping along with everyone else, a slight shadow had fallen over her expression. Anyone but Kaori, who had been continuously observing Tatsuko, would certainly have overlooked it.

It seemed Tatsuko didn’t like dodgeball. Indeed, perhaps such an aggressive, high-contact sport was not suited to her. She might lack the skills to play it effectively.

Kaori pumped her fists—but not for the same reasons as her classmates. This was her opportunity.

If she were to help Tatsuko out with this—for example, by blocking a ball thrown at her or passing it to Tatsuko so she could hit an opponent—it would increase her own likability, and after the game was over, they could compliment each other, like, “That was fun, huh?” or “We did it!” And by that point, they could basically consider themselves friends.

Fortunately, Kaori and Tatsuko ended up on the same team.

Normally, Kaori held back in gym class, but she was generally pretty good at sports. No matter how clumsy Tatsuko was, Kaori should be able to back her up.

But she never quite got the chance. The balls flew past each other, and the ones who got hit grinned with embarrassment as they headed to the sidelines. But the one Kaori wanted to help out kept on dodging. Tatsuko never tried to attack or catch the ball—rather than dodging, she was focused on assuming a position, continually moving to a spot where she wouldn’t get hit.

Well, she can’t keep that up forever.

Since it was a big dodgeball game with the whole class participating, once you were out, that was it. No one could jump back in the game if they got hit. With the number of people inside continuing to go down, the people who only ever dodged couldn’t stay there forever. They had a nice back-and-forth going. Soon enough, crisis would visit Tatsuko as well—and the one dashingly saving her from that crisis would be Kaori.

But right as she was lost in that fantasy, her feet momentarily tangled up. She reacted to a ball coming from behind a little late, so right when it was about to crash into her, she threw herself down to avoid it, and while she was getting to her feet, saying “Thanks, thanks,” as the others cheered her, she found Tatsuko had disappeared from the court. She was standing apathetically on the sidelines.

Kaori was confused. Why was Tatsuko on the sidelines? Before Kaori had gone down, they’d both been on the court, so she couldn’t have been hit by the ball just now. There were now few people on the inside on Kaori’s team, and the enemy team was attacking aggressively.

While evading fierce attacks from the enemy, Kaori pondered the situation. No matter how she thought about it, Tatsuko had to have quietly headed to the outside in the moment when the class’s attention had been on Kaori.

To Tatsuko, the inner court would be a painful place to occupy—a place where she stood out, where she was forced to do exercise, and if she got hit, it hurt, and she’d want to get out of there as fast as possible. Fundamentally, in order to go to the sidelines, you had no choice but to pay the price and get hurt, but thanks to Kaori, Tatsuko had acquired the place to be in peace, the outside position, for free. So Kaori had indeed helped Tatsuko, but she hadn’t ever anticipated that she’d do it this way.

Feeling like this game of dodgeball was now meaningless, Kaori continued avoiding the ball, remaining a participant until the bell rang. It was all in vain.

Kaori increased her observation of Tatsuko. She abandoned her naive idea to watch her as inconspicuously and naturally as possible. A little bit of unnaturalness wasn’t a big deal.

Tatsuko seemed to be acting naturally, not particularly enthusiastic. But after observing her for this long, Kaori came to think that this wasn’t true. Tatsuko wasn’t doing this naturally—she occupied this seemingly organic solitude deliberately, through her powers of observation.

The way she looked around, the movements of her eyes—those weren’t mere quirks. She was paying the utmost attention to her surroundings to keep trouble from coming to her. Kaori used to do something similar, but she really didn’t know if she’d actually managed to make herself that invisible.

Don’t underestimate her. And don’t fear her. But she was getting scared. She was overwhelmed by this mysterious opponent who seemed about ready to swallow her up.

Kaori decided to switch tactics. She would just take Tatsuko head-on and overpower her. During their ten-minute break, Tatsuko pulled out a book with a book cover on it. Her seat was at the back of the classroom by the window. Peeking inside would be highly difficult. But if Kaori went with the brute force approach, she could succeed.

While chatting pleasantly with her friends, she lightly pushed the back of a nearby chair and then withdrew. Following the laws of physics, the chair fell over with a loud clatter. The eyes of the students in the classroom gathered on the chair. Now was her moment.

Kaori made a show of looking shocked and swiftly backed up three steps, putting her right behind Tatsuko. Moving only her eyes to check what was in the book, she immediately returned to her original position.

“Sorry, sorry,” Kaori said as she righted the chair, while on the inside, she was chuckling to herself. Kaori knew that manga. It was a fairly popular shonen manga based off a video game… She seemed to recall her sister had it.

When she went back home and checked, it was indeed on her sister’s bookshelf. Figuring she should know what was in it, at least, she pulled the manga off the bookshelf and started reading. There were only three volumes on the shelf, so she finished them quickly and reread them again. She was curious about what happened next, but her sister didn’t have the rest of the series.

Searching online, she confirmed that there were only three volumes out. The fourth was scheduled for release next month. While she was at it, Kaori also went around looking at reader responses. Among the reviews that said “this part was funny,” or “I like this character,” there was one review that caught her attention. The reviewer hypothesized that perhaps the mastermind behind it all was the childhood friend of the main character.

This character appeared at the beginning of the first volume. There was nothing strange about their behavior. But the poster wrote passionately about absence or presence of manga symbols. They pointed out that in the scene where the enemy caught them in a surprise attack, all the other characters had manga sweat drops except for the childhood friend.

When Kaori read over the scene again, indeed, that one character lacked sweat drops. Was this foreshadowing?

It piqued her curiosity. She wanted to talk to someone about it. But none of Kaori’s friends were reading this manga. If she was going to talk about it—yes, Tatsuko. Perhaps this situation now required even more urgency.

After that, she continued to observe every little detail of Tatsuko’s behavior, and if nothing happened, Kaori would cause something to happen herself. She stocked up on information on Tatsuko in her mental database.

This…might just work!

Even at home, she engaged in perfect simulations with her Tatsuko database and Tatsuko library and Tatsuko photo album, and with newfound determination that she’d for sure do it the next day, she went to bed.

This continued for some time.

Toko hadn’t been lying to Rain Pow. She’d probably never worked this hard from the time she’d become a mascot character until now. Having looked around for the other magical-girl candidates besides Tatsuko Sakaki, she’d felt this plan might go off without a hitch.

Now, if Rain Pow would just become friends with Tatsuko Sakaki, then they’d be good.

“Phew.”

She lay down on the pillow. She was tired. Unlike magical girls, mascots needed sleep. I can finally get some rest…, she thought, and was starting to nod off when she was awoken by the sound of the door to the room banging open. Then there was a pattering of footsteps, and when she opened her eyes, she was face-to-face with a tearful Kaori.

“Hey, Toko! Listen! She’s so mean! I’ve tried talking to her a million times, but she pretends she can’t hear me! Honestly, just who does she think she is, toying with my precious emotions like this?!”

Kaori continued to wail on endlessly. Guess I’m not gonna get any sleep now, Toko thought in resignation, then shrugged. “Oh, well… It looks like things are about to be settled for now, on my end. Leave the rest to me. With good ol’ Toko’s conversational skills, a high school girl or two—”

“No!”

“No? Why?”

“I wanna handle this myself, right to the end! You should get that much!”

Swallowing her reply of, I don’t get it at all, Toko breathed a sigh. Magical girls were always so self-centered.

“Anyway, teach me how to make tamagoyaki,” Kaori said.

“Tamagoyaki? …But then you wouldn’t be handling this by yourself, would you?”

“There’s a field trip coming up, so I’m gonna make crazy good omelets for lunch and put her under my spell.”

“This is already weird at the concept stage.”

“Whatever! Just teach me! This field trip is my opportunity, okay! I swear—this time, I’m gonna make her my friend for sure!”