Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 16 - Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

GOING TO THE FESTIVAL

  Tetty Goodgripp

Hearing Kana’s proposal during lunch break was what had made Tetty seriously consider the magical-girl class participating in the Founding Festival. So it was no surprise at all that she was able to get the cooperation of Group Two—rather, of Kana. When Mephis, sullenly and silently pouting, had handed her the signatures of all the members of Group Two, Tetty had thought, Ah, Kana did this. It seemed highly likely to Tetty that Kana had thrown a classy and argumentative tantrum about how much she wanted to participate, and not knowing how to deal with her, Mephis had figured she could just take their signatures and had everyone write them out.

So Tetty had managed to deduce about the cooperation from Group Two. But she was surprised to get signatures from Group Three as well. Still, she could imagine it. Looking at Lightning, who had foisted the signatures on her, saying, “I’m counting on you,” Tetty could envision her going around to every stall in the Founding Festival to cover every type of food, then going for a second round to boot. Normally, the way Lightning went so directly for what she wanted was a little scary, but right now, it was helpful.

Stacking the signatures she’d taken on her desk, next, she checked over Group One’s signatures. Miss Ril’s writing was good. Rappy wrote in a surprisingly mature manner. Snow White’s characters were cute, which was also surprising. Arlie’s and Dory’s characters were energetic. Then Tetty wrote her name very carefully, checking it over three times, before nodding and adding Group One’s signatures to those of Groups Two and Three, and taking them in hand.

“We’re counting on you, student rep!”

“You can do it, Tetty!”

“Shouldn’t I accompany you?”

“Kana, just sit down and be quiet.”

“You don’t have to push it, yeahhh.”

“It’ll be okay. Tetty will do it for us.”

“Counting…on you…”

With her classmates’ encouragement and support—plus some shrieking—sending her off, Tetty left the classroom. She wasn’t headed to the principal’s office. She was going to the courtyard. Even just thinking about handing the signatures straight to the principal gave her a stomachache, but by putting Satou between them, she could mitigate the mental strain.

She headed into the courtyard in high spirits, but Satou wasn’t there. The mage was generally there around this time, but not always. Not being able to meet here was, well, unsurprising, but she kind of felt like the ladder had been pulled out from under her. Tetty sighed.

She’d had the wind taken out of her sails, but if she got discouraged over this, then she wouldn’t be able to come up with an apology for the friends who had helped her. She figured she should just come again the next day.

Tetty returned the way she had come, and on the way, she ran into Calkoro going around a corner in the hallway, drawing an “Ah!” from her. The moment she saw her face, it struck her rather belatedly that if she was going to hand the signatures to someone as a cushion between her and the principal, wouldn’t Calkoro be the first choice? That was what made her go “Ah!”

Calkoro was looking at Tetty curiously. Tetty considered how she should explain herself. The reason she had automatically removed Calkoro as a candidate was, of course, because she wasn’t reliable. Tetty even got the sense that the teacher was intentionally showing her lack of motivation. That, combined with her by-the-textbook classes that consisted of her doing what she was told and how she was told to do it, of course meant that she wouldn’t think of the teacher as reliable.

But she couldn’t just say nothing here. On the other hand, speaking her mind was even more out of the question. Feeling backed into a corner, Tetty immediately decided to hand the signatures to Calkoro. While she regretted having gone and done it, she would explain that the whole class wanted to participate in the Founding Festival. Seeing Calkoro’s expression gradually cloud over and clearly give off the vibe that she found this a hassle, Tetty thought, Agh…, but this was all she could do.

Parting ways with Calkoro, she returned to the classroom with quick steps as she considered. From what she recalled of Calkoro’s expression, she couldn’t help but feel like the chances were incredibly low that those signatures would reach the principal. She had to somehow gather the signatures again—so that she could hand them to Satou this time, for sure.

  Calkoro Culumff

Calkoro had been left with a serious drag of a request and entrusted with an incredible hassle. She plucked the three folded sheets of loose-leaf paper in her fingertips—in other words, she held it like something she didn’t want to touch but was forced to bear. It was fair to say this was a manifestation of her state of mind.

She doubted the principal would be okay with such a proposal. Not only that—Calkoro might get yelled at for having brought her the proposal from the students. No, it was fair to say she would definitely get yelled at. Imagining the flow of rage that would begin with, “Why in the world would you bother bringing something like this to me?” anticipating that it would surely become reality, she already felt dejected.

She considered just crumpling it in her hands right now. One option would be to not hand the signatures she’d received to Halna and tell the students, “I gave them to her, but don’t get your hopes up,” and then just sort of wait for time to pass.

But there was one student in the class with unusual initiative. Kana. It might be dangerous to have time resolve the issue. If Kana asked the principal directly what happened to those signatures, that would spell disaster.

How about telling the students, “I tried to hand over the signatures, but she got angry and said no, and she ripped them up and threw them away on the spot”? But that would also be over if someone spoke to the principal directly. That wouldn’t work, after all.

Calkoro turned around, went back to the staff room, and sat down in a chair. Leaning back in the chair, she stretched her back and realized: So long as the class had an unstable element like Kana, there was nowhere to run. That girl really had no clue about how to show deference to authority. None whatsoever.

If not for Kana, things might have worked out somehow, but Kana wasn’t about to go away. Calkoro clicked her tongue, cursed Kana’s existence, and worked out a different plan.

She would bring the signatures to Halna. But rather than telling her that this was the students’ wish, she would report that there was foolish activity among the students. If she reported to Halna that the students were doing something unsettling while adding in her opinion about how outrageous this was, what a disgrace it was, and how they should give the students a lecture—then Halna might share in her anger, but she wouldn’t yell at her.

All right, she thought, slapping her knee. She’d come up with a decent plan. Kana’s presence wouldn’t be a bottleneck, either.

Standing up, when she looked out the window, it was starting to get dark. Coming up with the optimal idea had taken way too much time.

Calkoro bustled to the entrance of the staff room, put a hand on the door, and stopped there. Her head was giving the order to hurry, but her hand wouldn’t move. She licked her lips. During the homunculus incident, Calkoro had proactively gone to protect the students. Her motive had been self-preservation, of course. If any students ended up injured—to say nothing of if even one died—the blame would fall squarely on Calkoro, and as a mage, she might never recover from that.

In other words, she had gone into the woods for selfish reasons. But after saving them, she felt like she viewed the students somewhat differently, compared to before the incident—and maybe this was her imagination, but they seemed to view her differently, too.

Her students were not her friends—they were just students. Calkoro reporting to Halna wouldn’t count as betraying her friends. She tensed her right hand on the staff room door, then grabbed her wrist with the other hand and tugged. Finally making a crack that one person could slip through, she sidled through it and closed the door.

Calkoro set her right foot forward with determination, making her left foot follow. She headed down the hallway.

In fiction, she had seen plenty of teachers who would risk their lives for their students. She wouldn’t say it was a lie that she’d even thought, That’s really nice, what a great teacher. But when it actually happened to her, there was no way that she could do the same thing—or so she had thought, but seen objectively, wasn’t what Calkoro had done back then in the forest exactly like the teachers in fiction?

It was true—that behavior had felt satisfying. And if she were a great teacher, what should she do now? Calkoro should know that. But her thoughts wouldn’t come together.

She knocked. Hearing the response prompting her to enter, she opened the door and went inside. In between each one of these mundane gestures, she continued to think, but she couldn’t come to a conclusion.

I can’t come to a conclusion?

No. She had. Before her eyes was a large desk, and behind it sat Halna, looking to be in a bad mood like usual. The ends of her pointed ears were twitching—was that some kind of portent? She had to figure out her superior’s state of mind, but she couldn’t get anything more than that she seemed to be in a bad mood.

“These came from the students, you see.”

When Calkoro pulled out the loose-leaf sheets, Halna knitted her eyebrows tightly. That gesture terrified Calkoro—and the next moment, she sensed that something was off. Halna’s expression seemed to speak less of a bad mood and more of the fact that she was baffled by this sight.

Halna placed her right hand on the desk. Under her fingers were some sheets of loose leaf.

Now Calkoro’s eyebrows were furrowing. “Ummm, that’s…”

“The students’ signatures. They say they want to participate in Umemizaki Junior High’s Founding Festival.”

“Ah, yes. I received the same signatures.”

“Why would they submit them twice?”

“Um, I…couldn’t really say.”

Muttering, “What is this? What is the meaning of this?” Halna plucked away the signatures Calkoro had brought and compared the two of them. “I can’t find any particular differences.”

“Oh. Um, so did the students hand those signatures to you directly…?”

“No. There’s no need for you to worry about that.”

Halna snorted and shooed Calkoro out of the room with a wave of her hand. Calkoro hurriedly bowed her head. When she slowly looked up at Halna, the principal was now scrutinizing the two sets of signatures, comparing them.

Calkoro briskly left the room, and under the light of the setting sun, she returned to the staff room, closing the door behind her, after which she leaned on the door and breathed a deep sigh.

She was still terrified. Had they sent in a double copy of the signatures to show the strength of their feelings? It was a shortsighted and childish tactic, though maybe some adults would be moved by that. But it was unreasonable to seek that from Halna.

After waiting for her breathing to settle down, Calkoro sat down in a chair. There was a grating creak as Calkoro felt relieved. But she also had a feeling that she couldn’t express well. There wasn’t really a need to express it, though. She prayed from the bottom of her heart that such a decision wouldn’t come a second or third time.

  Kana

That day, Kana let Mephis go back home first, while Kana returned to the school. Mephis seemed suspicious of her behavior but was busy with something of her own, and she couldn’t watch Kana forever. Before she headed home, Mephis told Kana over and over again to absolutely not get up to any funny business.

Kana had no such intentions, of course. Just as she had explained to Mephis, “Once I see how Umemizaki Junior High is doing, I’ll come home.” This was ultimately just a brief stop, no more than a little idling on the way back, and there was no need to worry. Mephis’s excessive worry had to be out of consideration for Kana, in addition to her serious responsibility as the Group Two leader.

It was evening. Kana zipped from shadow to shadow of the school building, approaching the Umemizaki Junior High field.

She wasn’t planning on breaking the many “Umemizaki rules,” such as that they were not to make contact with the regular students of Umemizaki or not to cause trouble for Umemizaki. Kana had been in prison because she broke laws and rules. If she broke rules at the school as well, she would be seen as unrepentant and might be sent back to prison. She would make sure to stick to the rules when observing Umemizaki.

The magical-girl class’s signatures would have safely been handed to Halna. Tetty had them write out the same signatures twice—even if that didn’t mean double the odds that the signatures would go through, wouldn’t that make it at least one point seven times more likely? And if the odds of it going through were high, that meant, in other words, that they would be participating in the Umemizaki Founding Festival.

That was something to be glad about, but Kana was also uneasy. Having just gotten out of prison, right now Kana had, as they would call in the slang that she had learned from manga, “prison brain”—she was ignorant of the ways of the world from her time in prison. She was behind the other magical girls when it came to the culture of Founding Festivals, cultural festivals, or school festivals. Of course, she had never participated in one, and all she knew about them was from manga or encyclopedias.

At this rate, she might hold the others back. And that was in no shape or form what Kana intended. So then she would observe Umemizaki Junior High to confirm just what this Founding Festival was all about. This would put Kana, who would have been a step or two behind, at the advantage instead by taking the first move. She would leap from being a possible burden to a position in the lead.

Fortunately, preparations for the Founding Festival were being carried out after school. So the time of day would pose no problem. And though it would be difficult even for a magical girl to observe what was going on inside the school, she could steal glances from a distance at what was going on at the school field.

Kana slipped along, approaching the area, then hid herself behind a ginkgo tree planted alongside the field. The goal of her observation was in the center of the field, where they were making something with arms and legs.

Since it was a festival, they had to be putting together a monument. Maybe a juggernaut statue, or a wicker man? There were two objects they were working on, laid down side by side. Her positioning was bad, and there were people around, so even with the vision of a magical girl, she couldn’t see the objects in full.

Kana moved behind different trees and climbed others, coming up with various efforts and ideas to continue her observation, but she just couldn’t get a good view. And as she continued doing this, the number of people around decreased. Once there were only three people left, one student rushed up to them to tell them something, and the four of them hurried away into the school building.

The people were gone from the field. Kana acted without hesitation. She wouldn’t let this opportunity escape her. She ran straight to the middle of the grounds, stood next to the creations, and looked down on them.

Lying there were some strange, mysterious, and very peculiarly shaped statues. They had spherical heads—the left statue was all red, and the right statue all green. Their faces were extremely cartoonish and simplified—in other words, they were manga-like. They gave her the sense that manga culture had permeated everything.

Kana changed positions and changed angles to observe the set of two statues.

They were made of Styrofoam, shaped by carving, adding pieces, painting, and gluing on the outside. It didn’t look like they’d made the outfits but rather reused some regular clothes.

Continuing her observation, Kana concluded that they had made statues with the heads of ume no mi—plums—because the school was called “Umemizaki,” and clapped her hands. What a great idea, she thought. Their craftsmanship was thorough even in the details, and their use of color would outdo a professional. They had also been considerate enough to spread newspaper underneath the statues to keep them from getting dirty. This was beyond student-level.

“Um.”

Someone had just spoken to Kana, startling her. She turned around to see a female student from Umemizaki looking up at her hesitantly. Her glasses and braids reminded Kana of Mephis, but she could sense no hidden ferocity in her.

“You’re from the special advanced course…right?”

She was not alone. Behind the girl with the glasses were two boys and two girls, making a total of five students looking at Kana with expressions filled with the curiosity of that age.

Magical girls had such sharp senses; they would normally never be taken by surprise by regular people. But since a magical girl’s concentration was just as excellent as her senses, her immersion and absorption in a task was superior to that of a human or a mage, and sometimes she would be unexpectedly surprised while she was concentrating.

Right at that moment, Kana was one of those magical girls unexpectedly taken by surprise. She had been so absorbed in observing the two statues, she’d become blind to the world around her, and before she knew it, she was surrounded by students from Umemizaki Junior High.

Kana considered. A mistake was a mistake. But just because she had made a mistake didn’t mean it was over. What to do from here depended on Kana’s skills. It should be possible to recover from this.

She had wound up breaking the rule not to interact with students at Umemizaki Junior High. Well then, should she escape, to keep deepening this wound? Kana considered that a poor move. Running off like this without doing anything would simply make her suspicious and hurt the reputation of the magical-girl class. That would also wind up violating the rule that they weren’t to cause trouble for Umemizaki.

In other words, now she should respond to their questions while exercising her common sense.

Kana nodded. “That’s right,” she replied.

The students shouted in joy.

“Wow! This is the first time I’ve seen one up close!”

“You guys are allowed to wear makeup and stuff, aren’t you?”

“Your fashion is amazing. The teachers don’t get angry at you for that?”

“Wow…so pretty… Amazing… Adorable…”

“There’s someone like an adult, right? Is that person a student? Not a teacher wearing a uniform?”

“Your Japanese is so good. Have you lived here a long time?”

“What sort of things are you studying?”

“You have such a pretty voice…”

Kana could hear all their questions, even the whispers from the rear, so she answered all of them. She couldn’t talk about anything related to magic, so it required the utmost caution and presented some serious mental strain on Kana, but she was still able to enjoy herself. Since there had been hardly any opportunities to come into contact with those outside of the magical-girl class, it was a very fresh experience.

The next day, when going to school, Kana was immediately surrounded.

“Ah heard yesterday you were talkin’ with kids from Umemizaki.”

“Were there any hot guys? Any hotties?”

“I don’t think it’s good to break the rules. So, what were they like?”

“Did you talk about the school lunch?”

“What’d you do?”

“I really wanna know!”

“Stop crowding her! Questions for Kana go through me, the Group Two leader!”

Being showered with questions one after another, Kana thought, It’s about the same everywhere you go.

  Snow White

“There were more than a few magical girls to survive.”

Calkoro wrote on the chalkboard while the more diligent students copied out their notes. The less diligent students weren’t paying attention. Koyuki was pretending to be a diligent student, moving her pencil as she thought about something else.

Despite their petition, Snow White anticipated that they probably wouldn’t be allowed to participate in the Founding Festival. The school could refuse in any number of ways: They could use Kana’s blunder in having made contact with the Umemizaki Junior High students as an excuse or come up with some other reason. But surprisingly, the response from the principal was, “Permission granted, with restrictions.”

They were going to be notified later as to what wouldn’t be allowed for the festival, so it was possible there’d be some outrageous restrictions that would make it functionally like they weren’t in the event, but the signatures had been a success. Everyone in the class was glad to a greater or lesser extent, and Koyuki felt a sort of cheerful air in the classroom, even during their dull lectures.

Koyuki pretended she was happy like everyone else, but she wasn’t glad deep down. While listening to Calkoro’s completely lifeless class, Koyuki pondered some things.

They were so cautious about security, you could say high security was one of the concepts of the magical-girl class. But after the homunculus incident, they’d withdrawn all the security homunculi at once under the pretext of inspecting them, and there were still hardly any alternative security measures. All that protected the safety of the class were security cameras.

In view of their original policy, there was nothing useful about participating in the Founding Festival, and it would only lower their security for no reason. It was all harm and no benefit.

“The answer, Snow White,” the teacher called.

“Cranberry’s children,” Koyuki answered.

“Yes, exactly right.”

Why were they willing to ruin their defensive perimeter like that? Snow White didn’t really think it was to curry favor with the students. And there was no way they were doing it on a whim or as a change of policy. She couldn’t help but feel like there was some goal and that it was a threatening goal.

During their five-minute break, just as Koyuki had directed beforehand in the letter she’d passed her during class, Arlie insisted that she wanted to go to the bathroom, and then the other group members chimed in that they did, too. But Koyuki knew that Tetty had gone to the bathroom during the previous five-minute break. Koyuki said, “There’s something I want you to teach me,” opening up her textbook as she called out to Tetty to hold her back, separating her from the rest of the group very naturally.

Koyuki quickly got through her questions about the schoolwork and then got started. “Oh yeah, we wrote our signatures twice, didn’t we?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry for causing you trouble,” Tetty replied.

“No, it wasn’t trouble at all. But I was wondering why.”

“About that—I handed the initial signatures to Miss Calkoro… And I feel bad saying this about her, but I didn’t think we could really trust her.”

“Ahhh, okay. I mean, I can kind of understand that…though I feel bad saying it.”

The two of them looked at each other and smiled. While smiling, Koyuki was thinking. They had unexpectedly gotten permission to join in the festival. She had assumed that the unusual act of writing out the signatures twice had been related to that, but was that not actually the case?

“Did you take the second set of signatures to the principal?” Koyuki asked.

“Absolutely not. I’d be way too scared to take them directly to the principal. I left it with Mr. Satou…wait, no, um, the janitor? I guess?”

“Mr. Satou?”

“Oh, uh, sorry. I’ve just been calling her ‘Mr. Satou’ in my head.”

“That’s not her real name?”

“Oh no, not at all. She doesn’t look anything like Mr. Satou. Everything about her is different from a Japanese person.”

“Huh? Then why the nickname?”

“Um, well, it’s kind of like…the way she acts, her gestures, and the way she talks and things are a lot like this old man called Mr. Satou who lived next door to me a long time ago… Ahhh, I could never say this to her, though.”

At a glance, they appeared to be having a mild and pleasant conversation, but Snow White’s mind was continuing to work, coldly and quietly.

According to her prior research, there were only two staff in total of the magical-girl class: the principal and the teacher. There was no janitor. Of course, it wouldn’t be strange for there to be someone in charge of maintenance for the class. There was the dead body that had been found during the homunculus incident—just about all blame had been foisted on their poor maintenance. Was Satou some outside cooperator, like a technician from the Lab? If the principal had received the students’ signatures from this person and allowed them to work as the magical-girl class’s janitor, then they must have occupied a position fairly close to the principal.

But Snow White had never heard the thoughts of this Satou, not even once. Was this person never in trouble? Or had Satou never left the courtyard and had just always been there? Just what was being done there?

It seemed like it would be difficult to find out any more about Satou from the voice of Tetty’s heart. Snow White didn’t get to be transformed for long; it wasn’t something Tetty would be in trouble to have known, and Satou wasn’t causing her trouble, either.

She didn’t have enough material to go off. She wished she could have used the fact that some students were in contact with Frederica as a reason to send in the inspectors, but doing that would lead to someone she couldn’t afford to let get away getting away. And some of these students weren’t at fault at all, but they were all essentially constantly exposed to danger—and Snow White still wasn’t able to make her move. It made her want to sigh, but she couldn’t sigh, after all.

Listening for the voices and footsteps of the rest of the group returning, Koyuki ended the conversation.

  Pythie Frederica

Those Frederica had hired, or those she had been about to hire, were frequently being attacked by a mysterious figure. There had been three attacks, and there were seven people missing—she was impressed that they’d done so well in a short period of time. If it became a rumor that getting hired by the Caspar Faction meant you’d be attacked, it would be even more damaging than those numbers.

Frederica stopped canvassing for mercenaries for the moment and subtly changed the type of information that she circulated in the faction, by route. It was a minor enough change that it wouldn’t cause confusion, but it would reliably create a difference. Her plan in doing this was not to start by ascertaining where the information was leaking from, and nab the source—rather, her idea was to use false information to manipulate the enemy to her convenience. But that was ultimately just a hopeful idea on her part, and she didn’t know if it would actually go that well. If they were operating on the orders of Lazuline the First, then they might catch on to Frederica’s behavior. But even that on its own should make it harder for the mysterious attacker to enact violence as they pleased. They wouldn’t be trying to repeatedly use that as a leak route once it had been exposed.

She changed her point of contact for exerting influence on the magical-girl class as well. She cut off her line with Kumi-Kumi. And then she made contact with Mephis and Lillian and decided to directly meet Adelheid as well.

Mephis and Adelheid were safe, but they’d gotten Lillian. She was the same as Kumi-Kumi. She had changed into something different. Two people out of five having been taken away was no laughing matter. At this rate, if she stood by and did nothing, there was no guarantee that the remaining three would stay safe.

She prompted Mephis and Adelheid to be careful and maintained this line, without cutting it off. She would act cautiously until she made major use of it at some point.

Mephis had never quite trusted Frederica until she had proved that she was in a position to give orders. Frederica felt that it wasn’t that she was a highly suspicious person, but rather that she fundamentally hated taking orders from someone. It wasn’t a bad thing to have a strong rebellious spirit.

She had already met with Adelheid. She came off like an assertive person, but she was hiding herself. Though Frederica figured that in the trade of mercenary, you couldn’t expose details about yourself, as her employer, Frederica wanted to have a grasp on her character. Normally, Frederica would have made to know Adelheid through untiring stalking, but right now she didn’t have the time. For that reason, she decided to take the easy way and ask someone she knew.

“What is Adelheid’s personality like?”

“She’s a serious magical girl,” Asmona answered with a truly severe expression—this was coming from one of the top three most serious magical girls that Frederica knew.

Sitting on the sofa with a table in between them, Frederica muttered, “Hmm,” then stretched her back. She looked up at the chandelier, confirmed out of the corner of her eye that Asmona was furrowing her brow in displeasure, and feeling somehow satisfied, she returned to her original position. “By that, you mean…”

“She’s serious at her core. Of course, she will try to reliably complete a mission, and she hates…well, doesn’t really like irrational behavior, irrational magical girls, and irrational events.”

“Why did you just reword ‘hates’ into ‘doesn’t really like’?”

Asmona fell silent for a while. She was probably considering how she should express it. Then she slowly opened her mouth. “This is ultimately only my personal opinion.”

“Yes, yes, I don’t mind that, so please tell me.”

“Adelheid hates irrationality in general, but I sometimes feel like at her core, you can see flashes of that being a sort of self-loathing of her own irrationality. And I would hazard that her own irrational areas are an admiration of irrationality.”

Frederica nodded, thinking about how Adelheid spoke with an accent for some reason even though not only was she not from that region of the country, she’d never even lived there temporarily.

“I see,” said Frederica. “A senior will observe their juniors well.”

“That’s just part of the job. But that’s ultimately only a feeling I get, from my perspective. This personality tendency of hers has never caused her to bungle a mission.”

“Well, that’s fantastic.” Frederica clapped her hands with a modest smile.

Asmona set some papers on the desk seriously and without any reserve, rapping them twice with the back of her hand. “More importantly, regarding the information that they’ve brought…”

“Yes?”

“It says that it’s been decided that they’ll participate in the Founding Festival.”

“Oh, to be young.”

“Combined with how they’re undermanned in security homunculi, I would say that penetration has become even easier.”

Frederica only drew her chin back without making any interjections as she fixed a steady gaze on Asmona.

Asmona touched her index finger to the rim of her glasses and pushed them up, adjusting them. “This almost seems like they’re inviting intrusion.”

“Mm-hmm. I very much agree.”

  Lapis Lazuline the Third

Any site for the Research and Development Department, both at the headquarters and at the branches, would have a “room that should not exist.” What looked like an unassuming door at first glance actually led to a surprisingly large room that could be opened with certain gestures or spells. It wasn’t only the R&D Department that would have such rooms—any Magical Kingdom facility would have one. When you first learned of their existence, you might be excited, but eventually you would become used to it, then sick of it, and you would come to use them normally, just like any ordinary room.

Here, the headquarters training room was such a place. The vast room, at one side a half mile long, far exceeded headquarters itself in volume, but it existed without causing any problems. Before Lazuline had become Lazuline, she’d really run and jumped around a lot in here.

She didn’t use it anymore. Even if she were kind enough to consider training her juniors, time wouldn’t allow that. Her schedule was packed with work, and she had no time off. Despite not wanting to make use of a magical girl’s toughness for something like this, she was working anyway.

This was the first time in a while that she’d come. In the broad space with a pale-blue floor, ceiling, and walls that went on forever, Lapis Lazuline and the magical girl who had abandoned the name of Lazuline, Old Blue, were facing one another.

Her bangs were pinned with a little nemophila flower clip, and she used a hair decoration reminiscent of cat ears to keep the rest of her hair back. Appropriate to the founding Lazuline, she wore lavish amounts of blue: Her hair was bluish gray, her eyes were purplish blue, and the broach at her chest was pale blue while her costume was a deep navy.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you transformed,” said Lazuline.

“It has.”

The two of them came forward. Neither of them assumed a fighting stance. The nemophilas that decorated key points on Old Blue’s costume had a pleasant aroma. Lazuline liked it.

“Are you all right, master? You shouldn’t be too reckless.”

“There’s no need to worry.”

“I don’t want to be pushing you at your age.”

“I’m the only one who can challenge you in sparring.”

“Well, yeah.”

The magical girl before Lazuline wore a smile on her face. Her gentle, kind air may partly have been an expression of her true nature, but it wasn’t everything. Those who mistakenly assumed it was would pay the price.

The heel of Lazuline’s palm made a pleasant sound as it was blocked by her master’s upper arm. She wrapped her fingers around it and went for a grapple, but her teacher shook her off her sleeve and wouldn’t let her. They went through repeated strikes and blocks at short range, gradually getting faster. The First could see everything Lazuline was trying to do, and her master’s feet never moved from the spot as she continued to stave off her attacks.

Her master could see the true nature of everything. When Lazuline used her magic to the maximum with her peak martial arts, enemy attacks would never touch her.

At zero distance, Lazuline fired a knee and an elbow, then turned around for a back leg roundhouse kick from a clinch, but her master immediately pulled away for a kick at her back—Lazuline twisted around to try to catch her leg only to be shaken off.

Landing on both feet, she slid in low to try to catch her master’s leg again, but her master leaped backward, then stopped and came forward again. When her master tried to come in close, Lazuline turned her attack aside and caught it between her hands, but her teacher slid out of her grasp yet again. Lazuline rose to her feet with a kick, then landed on her raised leg and slammed her back into her master, who absorbed the hit, jumping to parry the attack’s momentum.

Her master turned once in the air, added a twist for a second turn, and landed prettily in a way reminiscent of rhythmic gymnastics, then spread both hands at her student and bowed her head saying, “I’ve lost.”

“Huh? It’s over?”

“It’s over. Since I don’t want to continue any further.”

Old Blue raised her palms at her. Some of her nails were broken, her finger bones were cracked, and her metacarpal and ulna were damaged. Lazuline felt somewhat satisfied at these results. She’d known that she was physically stronger, but her opponent had the Lazuline magic, so she couldn’t directly touch her skin; Lazuline had been forced into a battle with restrictions. It was fair to say her strategy of aggressively attacking and making her take damage by blocking had gone decently well.

Her teacher clapped her injured hands, and the color of the room changed from pale blue to cobalt blue. Along with the change in the room, her injured hands went back to how they’d been before, becoming beautiful, sparkling hands once more. In this training room, it was possible to fight safely indefinitely.

Although, that came with the proviso if you ignored exhaustion. When her master said, “Come on, one more,” Lazuline puffed up her cheeks like a child.

“Our match is over, and I won, so listen to what I say, master.”

“We had no rule like that.”

Even if it was a mock battle, you’d think that the student winning would make the teacher either a little meeker or angry instead, but Old Blue seemed no different at all. Lazuline figured this had to mean she saw through this, too.

“If you understand that I’m strong, then isn’t that enough? Now you can be at ease, too, right? Let me go already. I still have work to do—actually, I think it’ll never end. And you’re the one who tossed all that work at me.”

Lazuline understood better than anyone that she was acting childishly. She did act that way around her master, but she was increasingly unsure just how much she leaned on her. Old Blue was her respected teacher, so surely it was all right to lean on her, but she wasn’t really sure.

And surely her teacher saw through that, too.

“I want to see how strong you are now so that you can do your work properly.”

“Come on… Agh, that’s such a hassle.”

“Can you beat all magical girls just because you can beat me? Of course not.”

Old Blue approached her casually, without going into a fighting stance. Seeing her like this, Lazuline had no choice but to strike back. Though she complained, they struck at each other and fired moves off at each other, the two magical girls continuing to fight in the vast training room.

  Princess Deluge

She was making something useless, her gaze vacant.

Perhaps it wasn’t completely useless to Shadow Gale, but since she wouldn’t explain anything, it was just an incomprehensible device, like a machine or an avant-garde art piece or something, with a tangled mess of tubes and cords and several gauges glowing ridiculously, indicating some unknown values—at the very least, that’s how Deluge saw it.

Right now, she was grateful simply that Shadow Gale had something that she was invested in. Deluge didn’t see Shadow Gale as someone very uniquely precious and irreplaceable, but rather as something she’d been entrusted with by another. If something happened to her, Pfle might crawl up from the depths of hell. Even if it was impossible, Pfle seemed capable of it.

Deluge had inherited Pfle’s estate. That was what had enabled her to survive all this time. Shadow Gale was included in the estate. In fact, Shadow Gale was the main item. She couldn’t abandon Shadow Gale.

Pfle’s goal had been freedom from the Magical Kingdom. She’d wanted to sever all the systems involved with magical girls from the Magical Kingdom and seize them herself. Even if a fight came up in the process, she’d believed that was the safest option for Shadow Gale.

Deluge thought that if she’d been in the same position, if she’d been aiming for something that outrageous, if she’d known that reaching that point would mean all her friends would be safe, then surely she would have gone for the same thing. She wouldn’t have been able to write it off as impossible.

While checking on how Shadow Gale was doing out of the corner of her eye, Deluge worked on the task at hand. She was gathering evidence on the magical girls who attended the magical-girl class. She had to strip every one of them bare—to see if their backgrounds were trustworthy, and if they weren’t, to find out their real backgrounds.

The calculating device that Pfle had left behind looked like a joke: It was an old-fashioned monitor reminiscent of a CRT with thick cables connecting it to both a keyboard and an armful-sized metal square. But its functionality was no joke at all.

To search, this calculation device referenced not only official information from records but the private: references on magical-girl social media by personal acquaintances, posts on anonymous message boards by those who seemed like the person concerned, and things like that. You’d set the superficial information, and from there you had the machine derive from that to go deeper and deeper. The search would cover information on the network as well as printed documents, handwritten memos, or even carvings—all texts expressed since recorded history would be included. It was magic in the correct sense.

After inheriting this from Pfle, seeing this stupidly large machine and thick operation manual, Deluge had initially felt overwhelmed. This was so far and away from Catherine and Brenda’s field of expertise, so she had assumed she couldn’t expect any sort of support and she would have to do everything on her own. But when they’d actually started it, the pair had operated Pfle’s machines like it was nothing, firing in strings of characters, which Deluge didn’t even recognize, to do something or other. To Deluge, who had been getting through the work with constant reference to the manual, it was completely magic.

Everything about them, from their manner, language, and looks, had made Deluge assume they were younger and to be cared for, but now she realized that had been a mistake. The way the three sisters communicated in shrieks, chitters, and cries that weren’t words might actually be an exchange of information much harder and denser than it appeared.

After they became able to operate the machine, Deluge stopped treating them like kids for a while. She tried approaching them not with language for younger girls but for people of her grade level. She’d figured if it seemed they didn’t like it, then she would go back to before. But the attitude of the trio didn’t change, and they didn’t touch on the change in Deluge at all. Before long, she went back to before.

In the end, Deluge wondered if maybe she’d been thinking about it too hard. It was something like her inborn nature to worry about relationships, and even if she had made the decision to not stress about the small things in life, she still couldn’t quite fix it. Besides, there was one more thing. Thinking about it now, Deluge had one other magical-girl acquaintance who hated being treated like a child. Even if she thought it in her head—because she was a child—when you treated her like a child, Princess Tempest had gotten into a very apparent bad mood. The way she would puff up her cheeks and pout her lips had indicated most clearly that she was a child, but if you pointed that out, it would just make her angrier, so Quake had consoled her, and when Inferno had tried to tease her, Prism Cherry had stopped her—anyhow, things had always been lively.

Even if it had been unconscious, maybe she had been placing the trio in a Tempest-like role. Deluge didn’t talk about this to anyone, but she reflected and reconsidered as all the while she continued with her task. The profiles of the girls who attended the magical-girl class gradually exposed their public sides, but the hidden areas she most wanted to know wouldn’t quite come up. A clumsy search would stir up trouble. Deluge was ultimately an amateur, and all that she had going for her were the various types of devices she’d inherited from Pfle and her magical girl-level typing speed. She couldn’t get overconfident with this machine when she was using it without even understanding how it worked.

She was slowly inching her way along bit by bit, with progress coming slowly but surely, when one day, a message came to her magical phone. Since she didn’t take messages from anyone but Snow White, of course she assumed it was from her and picked up her phone. Seeing the message, her eyes widened, and when Brenda and Catherine looked over at her with concern, she held them back with a hand. After taking a deep breath, she dropped her eyes to the phone. The text hadn’t changed.

She’d gotten a message from an unfamiliar address claiming to be from “the magical girl who used to be Bluebell Candy.”

  0 Lulu

Lulu rolled over in bed. Being a magical girl, she didn’t need sleep. Taking a break was just a pretext for being lazy. Her entire field of view was filled by cheap wallpaper. Outside her window was just the wall of the next-door building anyway, so in the end, no matter where she looked, it was just walls—a dead end. It was as if nothing was going in the right direction.

Being ordered to accompany Ripple in the first place had just not worked out. This had come from her master, after all. Lulu hadn’t sworn absolute loyalty to her, so maybe the old woman was thinking that if Lulu died due to some mistake, then there was nothing to be done about that.

The further the stages advanced, the more difficult Ripple’s pointless avoidance of killing became. Lulu wished she would just not drag in ordinary people who had nothing to do with her. It was the worst kind of selfishness to say you didn’t want to kill your enemies in a life-and-death situation.

Maybe Ripple’s individual strength had been a small help in carrying out that selfishness. But the reality was that Ripple couldn’t afford to be selfish anymore. It wasn’t about wins or losses—they were no longer able to get a handle on the enemy movements. Of course. Frederica wouldn’t leave everything as is if she had any brains at all.

Lulu rolled over again. She could see Ripple’s back, sleeping on the other bed. Of course, like Lulu, she was still in magical-girl form.

Her attitude hadn’t changed at all. It wasn’t anything so simple as being unable to see any desire to cooperate in Ripple. It fit better to say that she was being forced to work with an enemy. It was very much the tendency of that type of magical girl to be arrogant about her own righteousness, thinking there was no need to speak with those who had a different set of values. Thinking about it made her feel ready to burp. Lulu had thought Ripple had received some mental adjustment from Lazuline the Third—so then she wished she’d done something about this stubbornness.

But right now, Lulu had no options. If it was her job to make nice as much as possible with some crazy ninja girl, then she had no choice but to do the work.

Now she rolled onto her back and opened her palm by her face, fiddling with the little rock she’d been holding in her palm. It was the pale, clear color of the sky, and hit by the outside light that seeped through the windows, it glowed dully.

Apatite. It was a good rock for a worthless kind. It meant bonds. She’d strengthened it with her magic, thinking it would help to get along with Ripple, but really considering it now, the word “bonds” didn’t mean only good bonds, and there were some bonds it was better not to have at all. For example, there was the bond between Ripple and Frederica.

Basically, relationships were all hard and all trouble. How happy would I be if I could avoid getting involved in such things and just live loving beautiful and pretty things, she thought with a sigh as she rolled the apatite in her palm. Ripple, lying beside her, was awake anyway, and though she did feel bad for making her listen to her sighs, she should hear that much, at least.

Lulu stirred. Her magical phone got a notification and vibrated. She picked up her phone and tapped at it, and when she learned the information that had just come in, she sat bolt upright in bed.

It had been decided that the magical-girl class would participate in the Umemizaki Junior High Founding Festival. Frederica’s goal was to invade ruins under the school and steal a relic, so the odds were high that she would see this as a lucky opportunity. Their inclusion in the Founding Festival may have been to influence the transfer student Snow White.

This information probably came from Ranyi. 0 Lulu felt like there were a lot of strangely subjective turns of phrase. She read over the text one more time, and feeling a puff at her ears, she turned around, and there was Ripple’s face, close enough that their lips could touch.

Startled, she cried out and leaped back, but Ripple maintained the distance and followed her, grabbing her lapels. Lulu had learned enough martial arts to avoid embarrassing herself as a Lazuline candidate, but suddenly twisting her arm or pulling away Ripple’s fingers didn’t even come to mind. She was at Ripple’s mercy, strangled by her collar.

Ripple’s expression was frightening enough that even 0 Lulu, who had experienced enough real combat to be sick of it, who had killed and almost been killed, felt overwhelmed. Reflecting the slight light from the outside, her right eye was reminiscent of blazing flame—no, it was more like a ruby—glaring at Lulu as she said with a groan, “What’s going on…?”

“Huh? What, what do you mean?”

“You said Snow White is in the magical-girl class.”

“Huh? You didn’t know?” Lulu responded honestly without thinking. She regretted that, thinking that she could have hidden it or covered it—she could have dealt with it in other ways—but the honesty of her reaction seemed to suddenly ease Ripple’s anger. Her hands on Lulu’s collar relaxed, and she tossed Lulu down on the bed onto her knees. The bed runner wafted up, blocking her vision for a moment.

Ripple turned her back without a word and headed straight for the door—Lulu panicked and grabbed Ripple by the shoulder to stop her. When Ripple turned around, her whole face was ruby red, like a manifestation of her earlier anger, and though Lulu’s heartbeat was thudding in her chest, she didn’t draw back this time, taking that look with comparative calm.

“Where are you going?” Lulu demanded.

“You’re all trash.”

“Huh?”

“Where I go is none of your business.”

“It is my business. Listen, if you went to the magical-girl class now, you would just cause Snow White trouble.”

The rage that had been blazing up in Ripple visibly darkened.

Lulu could tell she was flinching and couldn’t hide it as she continued to press Ripple. “I understand that you’re mad. I’m angry, too. It was important information that you hadn’t heard that Snow White had transferred in, and that was clearly deliberately hidden from me. That I never got the order not to tell you has to mean that.”

Lulu hugged Ripple around the shoulders. She had thought that Ripple might push her away, but Ripple’s shoulders just trembled a bit, and Lulu was privately relieved.

“Let’s both offer what we know. I feel like both of us have gotten to this point based on assumptions of what the other is like. It would be meaningful just to make sure the other person really is like that. For starters, just so you know, I won’t lie. You’re free to lie or not, and you can choose not to believe me, but I’ll just say this—I won’t lie.”

It wasn’t at all a lie that she was angry. Her master had kept certain information from Ripple, and she hadn’t ordered Lulu not to tell these things to Ripple. She most likely would have anticipated a situation like this—in other words, her master had schemed to make it so they had to talk about their true feelings to make them get closer. Lulu felt like she could see her master behind this, chuckling to herself; but getting closer to Ripple was effective, so Lulu simply obeyed. It was vexing.

Ripple glared at Lulu, and seeing Ripple like that, Lulu glared back at her in the same way.

Lulu nonchalantly put her left hand to her chest. Her pulse was still a little fast. Ripple really had made her heart pound so hard she’d thought it would stop just now.