Episode 18: The Wandmaker
“Message from [Guide Mascot] to [Raven Silver]. You’ve strayed way too far off route. Can’t you do something about that habit of yours, always stopping to mess around?”
The girl, [Sere], ignored the communication device.
She had no time to respond.
She was running.
*
“Stop right there, you thief!”
“Whadda hell, you silver-haired freak! You’re fa—!”
Approximately forty kilometres east of Magus City Tokyo.
Chiba City. The slums.
The morning sun illuminated towering clusters of illegal buildings.
Her white dress fluttering, silver hair streaming behind her, one hand holding down her straw hat, Sere raced through a labyrinthine jumble of illegally constructed buildings, stacked together like some bizarre, nightmarish Kowloon Walled City.
Those beautiful blue-green eyes, clear as a castle made of ice, were fixed on one child, a street urchin.
Matted, soot-black hair.
African skin smeared with dirt and dust.
A child of perhaps ten, dressed in rags.
The child raced through the illegal buildings with the nimble movements of a little monkey. On their back, a black guitar case caught on a tangle of illegally connected electrical cables!
At the last possible moment…
“Look out!”
Moving with superhuman agility, Sere swept around and caught the child street urchin in her arms.
A moment later, the guitar case touched the cables and burst into flames amid the crackling roar of an electrical discharge.
But by then, Sere had already severed its straps with a knife-hand strike…
And the child had escaped electrocution.
“Eep…!?”
“Honestly, honestly… Oh.”
Flames blazed.
The guitar case burned to ashes.
“Let go! I said let go!”
“Ahhh… This has turned into a real pain…”
*
The guitar case was gone.
What it had concealed was now exposed: the staff of a magical cyberdeck.
Directly connected to it was a Japanese sword, housed inside a damaged mechanical scabbard.
“…Huh?”
“You little…! Thief! This is all your fault, you know!?”
“You silver-haired freak… You’re a magical girl!? Eek! No! Don’t kill me! Don’t mince me into little pieces! Don’t snip my head off with scissors!”
“Ahhh! Stop struggling! Stop struggling! And stop crying! You little… Oh, for goodness’ sake!”
“[Guide Mascot] to [Raven Silver]… You’re still as popular with kids as ever, I see. Why not become a nursery-school teacher?”
“Is that sarcasm!?”
The child wailed and screamed.
Sere had no idea how to deal with them.
Sere thought to herself.
How on earth had things come to this?
＊
“No good. It won’t respond at all.”
Immediately after the battle with [Strawberry Pink], aboard the helicopter.
“[Guide Mascot] to [Raven Silver]. How’s [The One and Only Magic: Wonder One] holding up?”
“…Not good.”
“Huh?”
“It’s completely destroyed… The scabbard, I mean. [Strawberry Pink]’s attack…”
“…Damn it. What a nuisance.”
The sound of the Guide Mascot clicking their tongue came through the earpiece.
At the same time, the silver dress began to crumble away from [Raven Silver]’s body, falling off in tatters.
Beneath it was a white dress.
A straw hat in place of the mask.
A silver-haired girl with blue-green eyes.
[Serebryanyi Adamov]. With her transformation undone, [Raven Silver] wiped away the tears pooling in her eyes with one hand. The same arm that had wielded the Japanese sword.
Her white skin was scorched red.
Her slender fingers were bent in unnatural directions.
Heat rose from her bare feet, sending up white vapour; they looked as though they had been boiled.
Agonising pain stabbed through Sere from the skin covering her entire body. Yet just before the tears could spill over, the girl wiped them away.
“The feedback is about twice as bad as it was during training, too.”
“Which means the self-defence programme is completely dead… So the software inside was wrecked as well?”
“Maybe.”
“Getting hit with the staff of a magical cyberdeck would do that, I suppose. Honestly, magical girls are trouble if you try to take them on properly.”
Leaving the trembling earpiece where it was, Sere rubbed medicinal solution from the helicopter’s supplies into her skin, then plunged a syringe filled with a dark bluish-black liquid into the side of her neck.
Refill.
Injection.
The burns on her skin subsided.
Her fingers, bent at unnatural angles, healed amid a faint blue phosphorescence of magic.
At the same time, her memories became confused. Contamination by M-particles invaded her brain. The unbearable pain of flames. The fire in a hearth. The creaking of a rocking chair. The smiling faces of her family, who were no longer anywhere in the world.
Tears ran down her cheeks.
But Sere ignored them.
“…Drop me off on the way.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re treating you at the hideout. And the post-combat data…”
“I’m going straight to the wandmaker.”
“…Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“If you get yourself killed, I can’t take responsibility.”
Sere leaned out of the helicopter’s entrance.
An armed stealth helicopter, rendered completely invisible by its deployed M-particles.
Below it stretched the circular floating city, Magus City Tokyo, glittering like a star-filled sky.
And in its shadow…
An expanse of illegal buildings.
Fires constantly burning somewhere or other.
A slum so dreadful that even at several hundred metres above it, you felt a chill run down your spine.
“Chiba City.”
*
“I’m going. I can’t afford to lose [The One and Only Magic: Wonder One] right now.”