Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 4 - Chapter 7

Wonder Dream

This story is set about a year after the survival game in Magical Girl Raising Project ended, but before the game in Magical Girl Raising Project: Restart began.

The men in black fanned out around a single girl and drew their firearms in unison.

“This is the end for you! Say your prayers!”

“My apologies, but I don’t believe in gods or Buddhas.”

“Then just die! Get her!”

Following their leader’s signal, the lackeys in black opened fire with their machine guns, and the spray of bullets broke open wooden crates, thudded into the concrete walls, shattered window glass, and ricocheted around the thirty-foot-square room until one hit the leader in the thigh.

He screamed, blood gushing from his leg. “Cease fire! Stop! Stop!” he ordered as he crumpled on the ground, clutching his thigh, and his men relaxed their trigger fingers.

The gunpowder smoke gradually cleared to reveal the owner of the hazy silhouette. “I don’t believe in gods or Buddhas, but I do believe in my sense of justice. As long as I, Masked Wonder, am committed to justice, mere bullets can’t kill me.” Standing among the scattered cartridges on the ground was an unyielding woman with a fluttering cape. Not a single wound marked her body.

“G-goddamn it! You’re a monster!”

“Give it up! If you resist, you’re going to get hurt!”

Two and a half seconds after that declaration, she’d already beat down the men who had drawn knives on her. It was an instant KO.

Right as she was piling all the fallen men together in the center of the room and breathing a sigh, she heard the sound of someone clapping. There was a girl outside the window giving furious applause. “Nice! Amazing! Very superhero-like!”

“Thank you very much.”

The girl outside the window gave a few satisfied nods. Konomi—Masked Wonder—nodded, too.

It had already been one month since Konomi’s training had first begun. Compared with how she’d been before, she was like a completely different person.

Before Konomi Mita had started her secret training, she had been a religiously by-the-book sort. And the “book,” in this case, consisted of the optimal methods devised by those who came before—at great pains, through trial and error. While coming up with her own approach would be the more creative choice, putting it into practice necessitated even more trials and hardship than her predecessors suffered. So rather than spending all her time on that, it was best to show her respect to those who had come before by emulating existing procedures.

That was logical. And Konomi liked logic and efficiency.

It was just like how businesses would always run according to rational principles when they were in trouble. Eliminating the unnecessary and placing emphasis on efficiency was the shortcut to success. Everyone respecting and complying with standard operating procedure to reliably get things done was, in Konomi’s mind, logic in its highest form.

When Konomi was in kindergarten, her friends had hardly stuck to the class rules. They hadn’t washed their hands or gargled, and as a result, everyone had gotten sick. It was a big hullabaloo, and the kindergarten had temporarily closed down. Fortunately, nobody had died, and they’d all laughed about it afterward, but to Konomi, who had been tearfully alone while her friends were holding their stomachs and moaning, it hadn’t been funny at all. She had panicked, hesitated, cried, and trembled. The hellish sight of her friends writhing in pain had left a deep impression on her.

It was fair to say the event had formed a foundational part of Konomi’s ego. Because she had been the only one to adhere to the class rules, she’d avoided getting sick and instead was able to relax at home with no stomachache.

You couldn’t go wrong if you just obeyed the rules. So Konomi thoroughly memorized the contents of her textbooks, never forgot a single equation or important date, accepted the rules, and refrained from selfish behavior. She always scored 100 percent on her tests, and her parents and teachers all sang her praises.

Konomi was proud. They had acknowledged that she was right.

She knew that people called her a nerd and a teacher’s pet behind her back, but that didn’t bother her. There were always more and more books for Konomi to learn and follow. Not just textbooks—reference books, workbooks, collections of past exam questions, all sorts of tests—they popped up one after another like bamboo shoots after the rain. She had to carefully learn and memorize each and every thing. She didn’t have the time to get bogged down with her classmates’ backbiting. Konomi didn’t have friends, but she didn’t need them anyway.

Her parents were not particularly strict about scholastic success, but they also didn’t stop their daughter if she wanted to study. They gave her what she wanted without reserve. Many times, they tried to invite her out: “Why don’t we see a movie together?” or “Why don’t you try skating?” or “Should I buy you some manga?” or “You don’t want to play any video games?” or “Why don’t we rent some anime DVDs?” But Konomi refused all of these things, and in the end, her parents stopped trying to force entertainment on her.

Konomi didn’t want entertainment. She wanted to study. New reference books and workbooks were more useful to her.

Both her parents had come from good families and had easygoing personalities, so they took no offense, acknowledging that it was just who she was. Despite their concerns about her report card evaluations describing her as “prefers to be alone, has no close friends,” they let their daughter do as she pleased. They laughed at how this pair of featherbrains had somehow raised a genius.

Konomi moved up to one of the top university-oriented middle schools in the country, but even there, people would call her a nerd behind her back, and she remained unable to make friends, absorbed in her studies.

Konomi wasn’t quite sure what had led her to become a magical girl or the details of how it happened. Since it was the biggest and most important event of her life, it should have been a very emotional time, but for some reason, her memories of it were vague. She couldn’t remember it. Perhaps the shock had simply left her stunned.

Why could she turn into a different person? Why did she have superhuman physical abilities? How was it that she transcended the bounds of physics, the law of conservation of mass?

In response to her questions, Konomi was simply told, “That’s just what magic is.” With only the basic rules of “Keep your identity a secret and go help people,” she felt abandoned. She had no textbooks, no reference material, and not even a teacher. As a by-the-book person who’d had her manual stolen away, she was forced to fumble her way forward.

Quickly, Konomi found herself at an impasse. She couldn’t do it.

She didn’t really understand what magical girls were supposed to be in the first place. She knew there were shows on TV, but the only shows she ever watched were the news, and she always did so with a notepad in hand in case current affairs questions came up on any exams. She didn’t know any tropes or magical-girl standards, and she couldn’t take even a single step forward in her duty. She rented various magical-girl DVDs to watch, but she never understood what to do. There was too much variance from series to series in what the heroines did and could do.

It had been explained to her that her alternate form had been her choice, but Konomi couldn’t help doubting that she herself had actually liked and wanted such a bizarre getup. It seemed to her to be just a physical manifestation of a vague mental image: “Basically this, I guess.”

The mask and cape, the voluminous blond hair, voluptuous bust, and shapely, curving hips all seemed familiar to her, but also somehow unfamiliar. Whether she’d seen it before or not, and despite the fact that it was her own body, it was hard to feel emotionally connected. She sincerely wondered, Did I have to change myself into this?

She sent message after message to the Magical Kingdom asking for instructions, but it was like flinging rocks into a void. She got no replies. The line between what she should and shouldn’t do was so ambiguous, she was left frozen. But still, she couldn’t help feeling like doing nothing would run counter to the instructions she’d been given of going out to “help people.”

As she stayed trapped by her own rigidity, time passed.

Konomi had no friends to ask for advice, and this wasn’t something she could discuss with the teachers at regular school or cram school. When she asked her parents in the most indirect way possible what magical girls were and what they did, her parents were overjoyed. “Have you gotten an interest in that now, Konomi?” they asked, and then the conversation jumped from the magical-girl anime they’d watched long ago to TV dramas and movies. Most of what they talked about wasn’t useful to her and did nothing to resolve her worries.

Konomi considered. She had become a magical girl in her first year of middle school, and she was in her second year now. She’d already begun preparing for high school entrance exams. She would be entering what would probably be the most difficult period of her life. Magical-girl work was a form of community service, really, so it would be best to do it when she was free, between periods of study, right? In other words, once she had passed her high school entrance exams, she should make her debut as a magical girl.

She was aware that she was making excuses to herself, but this rationale seemed convincing in its own way. Konomi swore off transforming for the time being and devoted herself to studying for entrance exams, passing with flying colors to make it into a selective high school.

It was when she stuck her arms through the sleeves of her high school uniform, looking at the new Konomi reflecting back at her, that she remembered it was finally time for her to be a magical girl. She’d been putting it off for so long, but she still couldn’t figure out what she was supposed to do.

Still worrying about her course of action, Konomi curled up in her bed, and before she knew it, exhaustion from studying for the entrance exams had carried her into sound sleep.

The place Konomi visited was very much like a dream. White clouds covered the ground, like a carpet that went on and on forever. Does the line between cloud and sky count as a “horizon,” or would you call it something else? No matter where she looked—ahead or behind, right or left—it was all nothing but clouds.

This is a very dreamlike dream, she thought as it dawned on her that this wasn’t reality. Happening to glance at her feet, she saw a TV and DVD player on the ground, along with a stack of DVDs piled up in a rack.

The TV and DVD player turned on, though Konomi hadn’t touched a thing—or more to the point, she wasn’t even sure where an outlet could be. A DVD case rose up from the rack and popped open, and the disc inserted itself into the player. Clouds fluffed up in front of the TV, forming the shape of a sofa. Did this mean she should sit down?

Konomi sat down on the cloud sofa, and the DVD began to play. She’d been thinking about nothing but magical girls as she’d fallen asleep, so she figured she had to be dreaming about watching magical-girl DVDs, but she was wrong. It was an old special-effects-heavy live-action superhero show, one old enough that it had first aired before her father was born.

In it, a young man was captured by an evil organization, and his body was remade into something stronger. They tried to brainwash him, too, but he escaped it right in the nick of time. With his modified body as his weapon, the man fought back against the organization.

Konomi kept on watching the DVD. Once it was over, the disc switched over to a new one, the final episode came to a close, the credits rolled, and Konomi realized she was crying. Then she woke up.

Afterward, she forgot the dream. All she had left was the vaguest feeling that she must have dreamed something. But still, she somehow remembered something deeply affecting her heart. Then when she went to sleep that night, she found herself in the same place again.

The DVDs showed her anime, special-effect shows, and various other types of media, and Konomi watched it all, kneeling on the sofa. A cyberized human being riding on a motorcycle, scarf fluttering behind him. A unit of fighters, each wearing a different color costume, all battling together. An alien fighting in hand-to-hand combat with a giant monster. Cyborgs fighting black-market weapons dealers. Superheroes in live-action movies based off of American comics who wore skintight suits that resembled Konomi’s magical-girl form.

Konomi had of course been emotionally moved before by her pursuit of knowledge. The joy of accomplishing things you hadn’t been able to do before and learning new things is vital for anyone.

But studying had never brought her to tears. Whether she’d felt frustrated or glad, she had directed those feelings into her next task. She had gotten as far as she had by pushing on and on without ever crying.

So what was it that she felt now?

At every turn, she had remembered her friends who had suffered after ignoring the kindergarten rules, thinking that if she could be efficient and rational, she could have a safe life. But the lives of the protagonists of these stories were far from efficient or rational. They might be the targets of condescension or laughter, but in spite of that, they would go out and do things with the welfare of others in mind. They would risk their lives for intangible things like the smile of someone important to them, calling on courage and guts alone to face opponents far stronger than they.

This was not the way Konomi preferred to live her life. Looking at these ideas with a cold eye and saying, “Do it as far away from me as possible” was how she always operated—or so it should have been. So then what was this excitement in her chest?

Right now, she was a magical girl. She had power. If she were to fight shoulder to shoulder with the heroes of these stories, she would be no lesser than them. She’d gained a rare opportunity.

When the DVD was over, she found she’d unconsciously started clapping. Then she heard another set of hands clapping with her. Turning around, she saw a girl in pajamas who carried a pillow under one arm joining her in the applause.

She was about to ask, “Who are you?” when she stopped. From underneath the girl’s pillow protruded the same sort of heart-shaped magical phone Konomi herself had.

“You put on these DVDs?” Konomi asked.

“Hmm, I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I don’t really remember.” The girl in pajamas scratched her head, and the fluffy decorations on the ends of her hair swayed. “I think something special happened to make things end up like this…but I can’t remember what.” She shook her head from side to side, and this time, all her hair swayed with her. It was moaning, going, “HMM, HMM.” “I can’t go in and out of dreams when I want, which makes me think my magic has to have gotten weaker, and plus, I can’t get out of dreams for some reason, either…but hey. This was something you needed right now, right? Somehow, I understand that.” The girl pointed at the DVD player.

Staring at the girl, Konomi hesitated a little, then shook her head as if to clear her confusion and then gave one last, firm nod.

When Konomi revealed her situation to the girl in pajamas, the girl said, “I don’t really get what’s going on, but I think I can help you.” Though she had no basis for that assertion, she seemed confident about it.

The name of the new magical girl was Masked Wonder. Her true identity was unknown. Her principle was justice. She was a hero among heroes, who brought down great evils and reached out to the weak. She had special, S-level powers to control the gravity of all matter. The prime minister was an old friend of hers and had relied on her on many occasions when the fate of the nation had been in peril. No matter how challenging the mission, the word “impossible” was not in Masked Wonder’s dictionary.

“…Is this character background necessary?”

“Absolutely! Having a character background will be a real plus when the Pentagon or the FBI or the Vatican calls you up!”

When Konomi woke up in the morning, she forgot the whole dream, the character background they’d come up with included. Or she should have, but she found herself unconsciously scribbling the information down in her notebook during class. It’s a really good thing nobody noticed me doing that, Konomi thought, breathing a great sigh of relief.

“I am Masked Wonder, and I’ll take down my enemies.”

“No, no, no! Don’t talk like an English textbook! Be more haughty!”

“I am…Masked Wonder?”

“It’s not a question!”

“I—I am Masked Wonder! Bad guys get no mercy from me!”

“More like American comics!”

“My name is Masked Wonder! You won’t get away with this!”

“Yeah! Like that!”

There were ten men in black total, and all of them had machine guns in hand, muzzles pointed in her direction.

“Um…isn’t this dangerous?”

“Don’t worry. This is a dream, after all.”

“Augh…”

“Once you win this one, I’ll double and triple the numbers. All right, then, everyone! I’ll leave her to you!”

“Yes, ma’am! Leave it to us! You’re dead, Masked Wonder!”

“Don’t mess with us, you bitch.”

“Do you know how much you’ve cost our organization?! Just thinking about it pisses me off!”

“I’m not so sure about this…”

The girl in the ten-gallon hat and revealing cowboy outfit smiled.

“Tee-hee-hee. My name’s Calamity Mary. Howdy, Li’l Miss Wonder.”

“All right!” the pajama girl declared. “Time for mock fight with the beautiful Calamity Mary number thirty thousand!”

“Beautiful…?” said Masked Wonder.

Once, Masked Wonder joined the pajama girl to go observe another magical girl’s dream.

“I should be able to go visit anyone’s dreams whenever I want,” said the girl, “but now, I can only veeeery occasionally see people’s dreams, just in bits and pieces. So if we miss our chance today, I don’t know when we’ll get another one.”

It was super-rare for a magical girl to dream in character, and the pajama girl said that watching this one was sure to get them some useful information. They tiptoed around the dream with quiet footsteps so as not to be noticed.

They were in a forest, and a girl was sitting under a big tree with her eyes closed. With her unique, all-blue outfit and her charming face, if she wasn’t a magical girl, who was? So was she meditating? She came off rather like an ascetic monk.

The magical girl in blue suddenly opened her eyes and saw Masked Wonder hidden in the shadow of the trees. “Huh? Are you a comrade?”

Not at all impeded by the darkness shielding Masked Wonder under the trees, the magical girl approached the one who was trying to shrink away, took her hand, and squeezed it. Masked Wonder looked back, unsure what she should do, but the pajama girl was gone.

“This ain’t a dream, right? You’re a real-life magical girl, ain’cha? My master taught me to train in my dreams, but man, I didn’t think anyone else could do it! We’re kindred spirits! Totally. It kinda sucks that we won’t remember any of this once we wake up, but somethin’ about it always kinda sticks with ya, eh? It’s funny, ain’t it? I guess that’s what they call sleep-learnin’.” She seemed to have formed a particular attachment to Masked Wonder.

Having been caught in the dubious act of peeping, Masked Wonder couldn’t say no to the magical girl in blue and so was compelled to spar with her until she collapsed from exhaustion.

The pajama girl made Masked Wonder polish up her character background and master the conduct of a superhero, trained her in battle, and also had her cast her magic on a variety of items in order to increase her magic’s precision.

Konomi forgot her experiences in the dreams upon awakening. But it wasn’t like they left her entirely. She remembered them in her body and in the depths of her heart. Somehow, she had come to understand what it was magical girls did. She would take care of drunks, clean up garbage, erase graffiti, and more.

Once, she pulled an empty can that hadn’t been separated out of the garbage, held the can on her palm, and by making its elements lighter and heavier with exquisite balance and control, she instantly crushed it into a sphere less than an inch in diameter, in the blink of an eye. She tilted her head, having no memory of learning this skill, and tossed it into the unburnable trash.

The one point of dissatisfaction for her was the absence of an opponent. The heroes in those stories had striven toward a face-off with a nemesis, which didn’t exist in the real world.

Once, just once, she’d had a chance at something like that. She’d found a high school student, probably on the way home from cram school, surrounded by a few nasty-looking youths who were jabbing him in the face. The boy, on the verge of tears, looked familiar to her. He was in Konomi’s class.

First, Masked Wonder climbed on top of a telephone pole so she could jump down from it for a dramatic entrance. She didn’t give the bullies a moment to react—in a split second, she’d knocked them all out with swift punches to the jaw, leaving the boy there standing dumbly as she promptly left the scene. She might have come off like a mugger or a random attacker, but in her head, she was doing a victory pose. Magical girls were supposed to avoid attention as much as possible, but they couldn’t be worrying about that stuff when they had to save someone from an attack.

And then it was the following day. When she went to school as usual, she found a crowd in the classroom. In their center was that boy she’d saved the other day. It looked like he was telling everyone what had happened.

“I ran into this real freaky exhibitionist type.”

Freaky exhibitionist?

“She showed up out of nowhere and then just ran off again.”

“You’re not really making sense, man.”

“She was wearing this crazy getup. It was like, I can’t believe you leave the house wearing that.”

“So was she hot?”

“Oh…I don’t remember. She had massive tits, and I was so busy looking at those, I never even noticed her face.”

“What an idiot!” the boys laughed. “Ewww!” the girls tittered. As everyone else was laughing, Konomi inconspicuously returned to her seat.

No! I’m not a pervert! No way! She trembled with humiliation over how he’d cut out the part about her saving him to make a joke about her unusual outfit. I’m never going to save you again, she declared in her head, and she spent the rest of the day angry.

“Well, that’s not good.” After hearing Masked Wonder’s report, the dream teacher expressed her concern, frowning cutely with folded arms. “It might be best for magical girls to avoid being eroticized as much as possible.”

“Personally, if I could avoid that, I would love to. The size of a superheroine’s chest has nothing to do with anything,” Masked Wonder replied, biting her lip. She was now quite familiar with the process of developing the character of her magical-girl form.

“But, well…”

The pajama girl stared intently at Masked Wonder’s chest. She looked somehow longing.

“They’re very noticeable.”

“I can’t do anything about that.”

“Yeah…hmm…”

They brainstormed a bunch of ideas, like binding her chest with a wrap or changing her costume into something loose-fitting. But one particular idea struck them as the way to go. The pajama girl grinned, and Wonder clapped her hands.

“I am the Masked Wonder! A magical girl, the embodiment of justice and strength!” She struck a pose with her right hand raised above her head and her left bent across her chest, legs spread wide. The proud, cool, majestic, and very heroic pose would leave a deep impression on her audience, and best of all, she could restrain her boob-jiggle in an incredibly natural-looking way.

“I love it! Let’s name your victory pose!”

“Now no one will call me juvenile names like freaky exhibitionist ever again!” Masked Wonder did the pose over and over. The last time, her chest jiggled just a little.

“You didn’t bend your arm quite right on that last one.”

“Hmph! I was careless.”

“You pay less attention when you’re happy about something, so watch out for that.” The girl clapped her hands together. “As long as you can be careful, I just know you can become the greatest magical girl.”

But then a sudden bout of dizziness made Masked Wonder wince, and her vision dimmed. She rubbed her eyes, but nothing changed. The girl before her and the clouds around her wavered and became blurry. “What…?”

“Now it’s time for me to say good-bye.”

“Huh…?”

“Do your best and keep up the good work.” Even her voice was growing distant.

“You still haven’t taught me everything!”

“I’m just sleepy… I’m feeling like I’ve gotten weaker…”

“That can’t be!”

“This kinda feels like a climactic final farewell, but I’ll be in the dream for a little while longer…probably…since I’m kind of like a dream myself now… If you’re ever in trouble again…then…call me in your dreams…”

Konomi woke up. Her right hand was grasping at something in the air. She blew out a breath and lowered her arm. When she rubbed her eyes, she found they were a little wet.

By the time Konomi was up, her parents were already out. Oh yeah, they said they were leaving early.

Exactly one year had passed since her cousin—that would be her parents’ niece—had died. This day was the memorial service for the anniversary of her death.

She had died of a sudden heart attack despite her young age. She and her family lived far away, so Konomi had only met her three or four times, but she recalled she’d been fairly shocked by her death.

Her name was…if she remembered it right…Nemu, from the Sanjou family.

“Well, anyway.”

As Konomi stuffed her cheeks with a sandwich for breakfast, she mused. She felt like she’d just had a really strange dream, but she couldn’t remember it at all. Just what kind of dream had it been?