Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru - Volume 8 - Chapter 3.4

The Magical Girl’s arrogance

Winter in Japan wasn’t colder than it was back home.

Even so, near sundown in January, the cold wind felt like a knife on my cheeks, and I started wanting to zip up my jacket. My usual medicine let me forget cold and heat, as well as pain, but the thought of the side effects I’d have to deal with later was enough to keep me from popping pills.

Besides, I didn’t have to lean on that medicine. Japan had plenty of things that took the edge off the cold. Their twenty-four-hour convenience stores had piping hot oden and steamed meat buns, and I’d just bought a roasted sweet potato from a food stall on the street. It was wrapped in aluminum foil; I broke it in half, and just one mouthful was enough to warm me up from the inside out.

“You want some, too, right?”

At dusk, in an alley, I spoke to the girl who followed a few steps behind me.

“Are you listening, Freya?”

The girl was just a little shorter than me. She was gazing at the sky, her face a perfect blank.

Her subdued red hair and the freckles on her cheeks were the same as they’d always been. The only thing she seemed to have lost somewhere was her smile, with its flash of white teeth.

Even so, Freya was definitely there, restored to life by the vampire’s miracle.

“What foods did you like again?” I murmured, gazing at the two halves of the sweet potato.

I didn’t have many memories of eating with Freya.

We hadn’t been friends—nothing like it. We hadn’t met up on our days off to go places for fun. Now that I thought about it, I really didn’t know much about her.

“Talking to Rill is boring, hm? She suspected as much.”

“…………”

Freya didn’t answer. In the three days since Scarlet had brought her back to life, she hadn’t spoken once.

I’d known it would be like this, though. Scarlet’s “undead” came back with nothing but their strongest instinct from life. I knew Freya wasn’t the same as she used to be. Even so…

“…Say something,” I grumbled at her in spite of myself.

She was still staring at the sky in a daze.

For three days, she’d stayed in my apartment, but she never spoke, ate, or even slept. All she did was gaze out a window at the sky from time to time. I’d tried taking her out for a walk, but it hadn’t changed much.

“Isn’t there anything else you want to do?”

The one thing I knew Freya had liked was Japanese anime, particularly the magical-girl genre. I’d bought some figures two days ago, and we’d watched a DVD together the previous day. It hadn’t gotten any promising reactions from her, though.

“But you liked it so much.”

This wasn’t really a conversation, but I kept rambling anyway.

“You always talked about which scenes in which episodes blew you away. You talked so much, it was annoying. …What’s the point if Rill knows more about it than you?”

Had she lost interest in anime? Didn’t she care about magical girls anymore? Was this conversation boring for her? —Hadn’t she wanted to come back to life?

“Tell me if this is just causing you more trouble.”

I knew she wouldn’t. Even then, I was afraid to see her face, so I turned my back.

“Are you scared?” I asked myself.

That couldn’t be. I’d never felt fear in the first place.

“________ah, ________ah…”

I thought I’d heard a voice.

“Freya?” I turned around.

The sun had almost set. Freya was standing behind me in the alley.

Way beyond her, I saw a large figure.

“It can’t be… You’re—”

Large figure was a simple enough description, but it wasn’t built like a regular human, and it looked nothing like one. It was well over two meters tall with horns like a goat. It also had six arms, and one of those arms held an enormous spear.

“Pride.”

I’d seen him in the resources I’d searched through when I first decided to defeat the Seven Deadly Sins. There was no mistake. This was definitely Pride.

Just then, my phone alerted me to a text. It was from the Men in Black, and it said that the Magical Girl had been ordered to kill the four supernaturals. They were probably relaying a message from Doberman, the Federation Government bureaucrat.

“That was Rill’s plan all along.”

I took my costume out of the bag I’d brought along. Changing into it didn’t even take a few seconds. The Inventor had made this, and like a power suit, I could equip it almost instantly.

I gripped my magic staff.

I’d already been given a weapon optimized for killing supernaturals. I could kill them because I was the Magical Girl. I’d start by putting down the enemy in front of me. But first…

“Running was your forte, wasn’t it? Run for it.”

Freya didn’t respond. She just stood there, expressionless, gazing at my face.

“—! At least get back.”

Taking out a small capsule, I ground it between my molars. There was a light, gritty sound, and a familiar bitter taste filled my mouth. In this fight, I would feel no pain or suffering. That was all it took to create an invincible magical girl.

“And here you have six arms… You’re sure you don’t want to fight with more than a spear?”

If he thought one spear would be enough, this supernatural really was arrogant. Come to think of it, his other name was Lucifer, the name of the capital-D Devil.

“Rill can’t go down in front of her, though.”

Standing in front of Freya, I pointed my staff at Pride, who was slowly walking toward us.

“Magical girls have to keep winning all the way to the ending credits of the final episode.”