Chapter 58: Goodbye, Blue Sky

Glacia Azure was an ordinary magical girl.

A magical girl who could save people, but not humanity.

She was strong enough to defeat the monsters that threatened people, but not strong enough to face the disaster-class monsters that threatened the very existence of human civilization.

She was an ordinary, unremarkable magical girl with a simple ice attribute.

She was barely noticeable until she started her entertainment career, which she hadn’t particularly wanted.

But to Blanc, Glacia seemed so dazzlingly bright.

Because Glacia possessed the ordinary virtues people expected of a magical girl, a warm and gentle heart that had become rare in this shattered, desolate, and withered world.

“To me, who chose the identity of a magical girl before that of a surgeon, the child named Glacia was a truly proud junior.”

Firing into the air, Blanc spoke. Her words, her gaze, seemed to be directed at Sanguine Obsidia, and at someone who was not there.

A single transparent bullet grazed the back of the fallen Sanguine Obsidia, and the crimson wound that spread like fire along a tree branch created a burning pain that flowed through her nerves.

“The courage to face fear, to not shy away from difficult tasks, even when her life was in danger.”

As she fired at the ground, a gash appeared on Sanguine Obsidia’s suit, and Obsidia felt a pain as if her leg had been cut by a sharp piece of glass.

None of the ten magical girls surrounding them saw how the wound was created, nor could they find a causal link between the muzzle flash, the bullet’s movement, and Sanguine Obsidia’s injury.

They could only watch the events unfold in chronological order and hold their breath at Blanc’s magic.

“A warm heart that could soothe the wounded hearts of Alisa, Materia, and the other children, and a sense of responsibility to guide their growth. These are things that even I, and even Jihye, lack.

In that sense, Glacia, though she may have lacked a little in power, was the most like a magical girl.”

As she spoke, Blanc felt her chest tighten with a sense of futility, and her heart felt empty.

She should have given her at least one word of praise while she was alive.

No matter how grand and brilliant the eulogy for the dead, what meaning did it have other than adding another line to a hollow gravestone?

And yet, Blanc could not stop speaking. Because she wished for Sanguine Obsidia to die after understanding even a millionth of the pain Glacia had suffered, and the pain that she, the others, and Alisa were experiencing.

A bullet grazed Sanguine Obsidia’s left ear as she tried to stand up, her senses partially recovered, and Obsidia fell again, feeling the bizarre sensation of the ground and sky flipping and swirling.

“Sometimes her courage was a poison… But she was a child who would eventually overcome and grow.

If only you hadn’t killed her. We can never see that courage, that smile again.

The same goes for the other children you’ve killed so far.

They all had long, sad, and sometimes happy stories and tales, and they had brilliant, noble, and beautiful futures.”

The words poured out.

But her suppressed emotions were blocked by her clenched lips, and gunshots replaced her screams.

Sanguine Obsidia was already unable to move, only letting out shallow moans.

Her clothes and skin were covered in cuts and burns, and her right arm was a mangled mess of flesh, soaked in crimson blood and torn, barely maintaining its shape.

Her method of fighting, using one arm to defend and protect her life, was worthy of high praise, Blanc thought. But,

“If you cherished your own body so much, you should have known that the others you killed cherished their own lives just as much.”

It wasn’t quite torture, but she thought she had inflicted considerable pain by now, and Blanc decided to end it.

The other magical girls were also beginning to relax, and if she dragged it on any longer, she might end up dirtying Yu Ji-hye’s hands.

If someone had to kill Sanguine Obsidia, Blanc herself had to bear that sin, she had decided.

From the moment Yu Ji-hye declared she would capture Sanguine Obsidia.

Her plan was to execute her after making her feel the most definite sign of approaching death, the sensation of falling into darkness as each of her senses—sight, touch, hearing, smell—was cut off one by one.

A death in complete darkness, where the world grows dark as each sense disappears, where she floats in the void having lost her sense of touch, where she loses her sense of reality, unable to even smell the concrete and blood, and where even the surrounding sounds cannot be heard.

This time, Blanc aimed not at the air, but at one of Sanguine Obsidia’s knees. A tangible bullet would take away an intangible sense.

She leveled the unfittingly modern sight on the blunderbuss, aimed it at Sanguine Obsidia, and was about to pull the trigger, when a blade, a crimson blood blade, came flying.

***

The ground, the asphalt, was flying through the sky.

The dark, acrid sky, without a single star, spun beneath her.

I’m dizzy. I can’t keep my balance.

I hear a magical girl chattering about something.

I’m not interested in Glacia Azure’s circumstances, and even if she tells me, I can’t empathize at all.

It would be more accurate to say there’s no reason to empathize. For me, there is only Yujin. But it’s good that she’s talking for a long time. It buys me time to recover.

The lump in my chest, the dark red roots that spread from it and cover my chest like branching trees, pulse madly.

Kill her.

All my bones, my muscles scream to kill that magical girl. My senses return.

The ground returns to the ground, the sky to the sky, and the spinning world stops spinning.

No, it’s a slow rotation. Still dizzy. Horribly dizzy, but I can circulate my magic.

My right arm is a tattered piece of flesh, like a wrung-out rag, barely movable.

The pain from my right arm, the chorus of pain from the countless cuts, burns, and piercing wounds all over my body now sounds sweet.

I channeled magic into the blood that soaked my entire body, the blood that seeped from my wounds. I separate the dried blood from my clothes and forge it into blades.

Dozens of blades. Thin, sharp, painful blades, created just like the one that beheaded Glacia Azure, are launched towards Bistour Blanc’s entire body.

To inflict more pain on me, she slowly aims her gun at me and says something.

I’ll make screams of pain pour out from that small mouth, return the pain I’ve suffered, and escape via spiritualization while the surprised magical girls are left behind.

That was the only way I could see to escape.

And,

with a sound that cut through the wind, dozens of dark red blades flew towards her, and

“I told you, you can’t wound me.”

Bistour Blanc stood calmly.

I cut her. I hacked her to pieces.

Crawling on the ground, pretending my senses hadn’t returned, I gathered my magic, and at the moment Bistour Blanc was off guard, I launched dozens of blood blades simultaneously.

Her white coat should have been stained with dozens of cuts and bloodstains, and the thin, soft skin beneath should have been ruined with even more gruesome wounds, but the blood stopped instantly, and the wounds healed in a moment.

When I launched another blood blade, she caught it with her palm, pulled it out, and threw it away.

As the blade shattered into particles of magic and disappeared, the piercing wound on her palm healed.

Grit.

I bit my lip hard with my front teeth.

Perhaps because my sense of taste had also been dulled by the bullets that drove my senses mad, even the taste of blood was faint.

Even if magical girls have bodies that can regenerate simple wounds with enough magic and time, this, this kind of regenerative ability, is ridiculous.

I stabbed my blade into the asphalt floor and used it as a cane to stand up.

My legs trembled, and my upper body swayed as I supported myself with one left arm, but I managed to get up.

The tumor in my chest pulses, and my heart pounds.

Magic, magic surges out again, and the pain and dizziness recede.

Good.

I wrap the surging magic around my right arm, coat the blade in my left hand, lower my stance, and assume the familiar charging posture.

I can feel the surrounding magical girls, with expressions of surprise, tighten their grip on their weapons and draw up their magic.

But, you’re too late to react.

Whether out of confidence, arrogance, or surprise, Bistour Blanc is not moving at all.

Let’s see if you can still stand like that, if you can still recover, after a blade is lodged in your heart, the flow of your blood is reversed, and your internal organs are torn apart by its wild rampage.

You, I will kill you.

I will repay the pain by killing you, and I will kill you brutally so that the other magical girls who witness your mangled corpse, having lost its healing ability, will be delayed in their movements by suffering for even a second, a minute longer before they can chase me.

I gripped my sword firmly, raised the blade, and was about to amplify the magic around my legs and leap out, when,

Shwiiiiik-

And, the body that was about to leap out was suddenly bound by a pink, glowing whip that flew from behind and restrained my torso.

Somehow, my arms were tightly bound to my body as if I were a prisoner.

“I was going to just watch, but I can’t let you lay a hand on Blanc unni, Sanguine Obsidia.”

Turning around at the cold voice coming from directly behind me, I saw a magical girl with pink hair and mechanical steel wings on her back, pulling on the whip in her hand.

A faint light of anger flickered in her pink eyes, and following her movements, the other magical girls surrounding me seemed to have finished preparing to cast their spells, aiming their spear tips, blades, and staves at me.

Hot.

“Ah, ugh…!”

The whip, the pink light, intensifies, gradually getting hotter, and a tingling sensation, as if an electric current is flowing, is transmitted from the whip to my body.

It hurts. It’s hot.

“Well done, Vera. Now then…”

Looking forward again, Bistour Blanc was still standing straight in her place, her gun aimed at me, at my abdomen.

…There’s no choice now. I have to escape via spiritualization before it’s too late.

Even if I move as far as possible with spiritualization, a few hundred meters is the limit.

The magical girls probably know from experience that it can’t be used consecutively.

To a magical girl, that distance can be covered in an instant, and while I might be able to handle one or two, there’s no way to deal with more than ten of them coming at me.

So, in that single moment, I have to kill a few police officers at the destination, open a void passage, and escape.

The next moment.

“Was I too foolish?”

At the spot where Sanguine Obsidia had vanished into smoke, Blanc muttered as she looked at Vera Bellastra’s whip lying on the floor, having lost its target.

She had decided not to dirty Yu Ji-hye’s hands, to kill Sanguine Obsidia before she had to act.

But she couldn’t resist the urge to avenge the deaths of Glacia Azure and the other magical girls, to return the pain of their deaths, and ended up dragging it out, giving Sanguine Obsidia the leeway to escape.

It’s contradictory, and foolish.

“I hope Alisa gets through this well.”

She thought that she herself had lost her composure due to Glacia Azure’s death and Rosa Alisa’s screams.

It takes time and effort.

Unlike her, who had seen countless deaths over a long time, it would take time for a young girl who had just become a magical girl to overcome the death of someone closest to her, a huge wound.

In any case, Sanguine Obsidia would not be able to return alive, and today’s events would remain as a past incident, so there would be no shortage of that time.

***

A dark green clearing, once a park, but now, after long neglect, the bushes, weeds, and grass had swallowed the walking paths and crevices in the rocks, covered the benches and streetlights, and finally begun to encroach on the surrounding concrete, paving stones, and asphalt.

A cold, damp, and sunken atmosphere, the complete opposite of the park on the hill I had been to with Yujin, covered the park, and only a faint, half-broken, flickering streetlight prevented complete darkness from enveloping the place.

“Gasp.”

After materializing in the shadow of a tree, out of reach of the streetlight’s dim light, I launched a black magic stake.

One police officer, pierced through the neck, collapsed with a gurgling sound.

Neither his riot shield, nor his pistol, nor his bulletproof vest and helmet could protect him.

And with a chain of blood drawn from the officer’s corpse, I killed the remaining two police officers on the spot, piercing their throats, lungs, and faces so they couldn’t even scream.

“Hah, hah, hah… pahaa…”

I gasped for breath. My head ached.

This is a nightmare.

Suddenly, well, it wasn’t sudden.

They had been advertising their plan to catch and kill Sanguine Obsidia for over a month, so I should have expected the magical girls to raid me one day.

But it didn’t have to be today.

It could have been tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that…

I had just started to think I could finally live a normal life, a warm and gentle life of being loved and loving. Leave me alone.

Please.

…Having confirmed there are no more potential obstacles around, it’s time to escape.

I have to open the passage, quickly get in, close the entrance, and return to my beloved, to Yujin’s embrace.

KWAAAAAAAANG-!!!

But, just as it had been ever since I encountered Glacia Azure today, nothing went the way I wanted.

With a deafening roar, the silhouette of a person falling from the sky like a meteor.

A woman in a light gray suit, gray gloves, and enveloped in a brilliant violet magic.

Short, light purple hair, a deep purple right eye, and a yellow left eye that shone with an unusual light.

The head of the Magical Girl Association, Yu Ji-hye.

One of the strongest magical girls, who, eight months ago, had driven me, who dared to challenge her, into a corner where I could barely escape with my life, without allowing me a single counterattack.

She, who appeared as the dust and scattered grass debris settled, was the death sentence handed down to me.