『From [Guide Mascot] to [Raven Silver]. You’re straying too far off course. Can’t you do something about that habit of yours, dawdling?』

The girl —[Sere]— ignored the communicator.
She had no time to respond.
She was running.

“Wait! Thief!!”
“What the hell, you silver-haired bastard! My legs are—”

Approximately 40km east of Magus City Tokyo.
Chiba City, the slums.
The morning sun illuminated the towering illegal structures.
Flipping her white dress, her silver hair trailing behind her, she held down her straw hat with one hand. Sere sprinted through the labyrinthine, Kowloon Walled City-esque blockwork of illegal structures.
Her ice-castle-like, beautiful sapphire eyes fixed on a single child – a street urchin.

Shaggy, soot-covered black hair.
Dust-dampened, African-featured skin.
Barely ten years old, perhaps – a child clad in rags.

　With monkey-like agility, the child darted through the illegal structures. On his back hung a black guitar case… which snagged on the tangled mass of illegally strung wires!

At the last moment.

“Danger!”

Superhuman reflexes.
Sere circled round and scooped up the street child.
Instantly, the guitar case touched the wires, scorching and crackling with a fierce electrical discharge.
　But in that instant, Sere’s karate chop severed the guitar case’s strap… saving the child from electrocution.

“Hya…!?”
“Honestly, just… wait, ah!”

Flames roared.
The guitar case burned to ashes.

“Let go! I said let go!”
“Ah… this is getting messy…”

　The guitar case’s destruction.
Revealed: the wand of the magical cyber deck.
And directly connected to it, the damaged mechanical scabbard housing the Japanese sword.

“…Eh?”
“You! Thief! This is all your fault, you know!?”
“Silver-haired bastard… a magical girl, was it!? Hii!　No way! I’ll be killed! Minced! My neck will be snipped off with scissors!!”
“Hey! Stop thrashing about! Stop crying! You… Ah, for goodness’ sake!”
『From [Guide] to [Raven Silver]… Still popular with the kids, aren’t you? Why not become a nursery school teacher?』
“That’s sarcasm!”

　A child wailing and screaming.
Sere, at a loss how to handle it.

Sere thinks — how did it come to this?

＊

“—No good. Not a peep.”

On the helicopter, immediately after the battle with 【Strawberry Pink】.

『From 【Guide】 to 【Raven Silver】. How’s the 【One and Only Magic Wonder One】 holding up?』
“…No good.”
‘Huh?’
“It’s completely destroyed… By [Strawberry Pink]’s attack, the sheath—”
“…Bloody hell, this is a right mess.”

The Guide’s sharp intake of breath came through the earpiece.
Simultaneously, the silver dress… peeled away from [Raven Silver]’s body, falling to the floor in tatters.

Beneath it lay a white dress.
　A straw hat instead of a mask.
A girl with silver hair and sapphire eyes.

【Célébria Adamov】. With her transformation broken, 【Raven Silver】 wiped the tears welling in her eyes with one hand. It was the arm that had wielded the Japanese sword.

Her pale skin was scorched red.
Her slender fingers were bent at unnatural angles.
　Her bare feet emitted white steam along with heat, looking as if they’d been boiled.
Unbearable agony pierced Sere’s entire body like needles through her skin — yet the girl wiped it away just before the tears spilled over.

“The feedback’s about twice as bad as during training.”
‘Which means the self-defence programme’s completely dead… so the core software’s been wrecked too?’
“Probably.”
‘—Well, getting whacked with a magical cyberdeck staff would do that. Honestly, you really shouldn’t take magical girls seriously.’

Leaving the trembling intercom as it was, Sere smeared the medicinal liquid from the helicopter’s supply onto her skin and plunged a syringe filled with dark blue liquid into the back of her neck.
Filling.
Injecting.
The skin burns subsided.
　Her fingers, twisted in unnatural directions, healed alongside a faint blue phosphorescent glow.
Simultaneously, memory confusion assailed her — M-particle contamination invading her brain. Unbearable, fiery pain. A fireplace. The creak of an armchair. Smiling family members, now nowhere to be found.

Tears streamed down her cheeks.
But Sere ignored them.

“…Drop me off partway.”
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Treatment will be administered at the hideout. Post-combat data too…’
“I’m heading straight to the staff-maker’s.”
‘—Listen.’
“Yeah.”
‘I can’t take responsibility if you get killed, though.’

Sere pokes her head out of the helicopter’s boarding hatch.
The stealth-equipped helicopter, its form completely obscured by deployed M-particles.
　It gazed down upon a circular waterborne city… Magus City Tokyo, twinkling like the stars. Its shadow.

Sprawling illegal structures.
Fires perpetually burning somewhere.
A slum that sent shivers down the spine even from hundreds of metres above.
‘Chiba City’.

“Let’s go. We can’t afford to lose the [One and Only Magic Wonder One] now.”