Chapter 14
[Title: Is Black Rose Bertha's Fighting Ability Seriously for Real? My Heart Is Swelling with Pride]
[Author: Anonymous]
(A gray photo of a magical girl with her eyes closed)
It really is something, seeing Aco still unable to do even that after four years.
Anonymous (211.234): Why the fuck are you beating up Aco when she was just sitting there?
Caught you slandering her again.
You again...?
[Title: But Seriously, There's a Huge Talent Gap Even Among Magical Girls]
[Author: Anonymous]
I didn't see much difference between that and what most third- or fourth-year magical girls show on TV. Is she really only a first-year?
Anonymous: If you compare videos of magical girls who were already good at fighting with those who weren't, there was definitely a difference even before. But now that they've made an actual tournament-style program out of it, the gap is obvious even to ordinary people.
I Love Rabbits: Alice used to do that like it was nothing.
ㄴAnonymous (123.624): Please eat something.
[Title: But Why Is Alice So Hard to Catch a Glimpse Of?]
[Author: Anonymous]
Judging by the reports, she seems to go out on deployments often enough, but she doesn't seem to do any fan service, and she only shows her face on TV once in a blue moon. Alice's fans must really be suffering.
Anonymous: Maybe she's just busy with her real life? Quite a few people work a normal office job and do magical-girl work in their spare time.
ㄴAnonymous: Is that so?
ㄴㄴAnonymous: Considering when Alice debuted, she must be in her late twenties by now. Honestly, if I were her, I'd probably feel sick to my stomach appearing on TV and keeping up the act.
ㄴㄴㄴAnonymous: Fuck, did you just call our princess a crazy concept freak who can't act her age and has been keeping the same shtick for ten years?!
* * *
After stopping the accident that had nearly happened at the end, the final concluded safely.
And Alice's intervention would be edited out of the broadcast at Alice's request.
The official reason was...
[Alice doesn't want to show such a dangerous scene to the people who love Alice.]
It was convincing enough for Emerald, my employer, and Alice had nothing to lose by accepting the proposal either.
If they'd aired it as-is, the magical girls assigned as safety personnel would've been subjected to a torrent of abuse.
Her plan to keep Alice in reserve as insurance while teaching the other magical girls to stay alert could be considered a success.
...Though she wouldn't have been able to air it even if she'd tried.
[Huh...? Where did Senior Alice go?]
[She said she had another appointment, so she had to hurry off. She said she was sorry she couldn't stay with you until the end and asked me to wish you all the best going forward.]
[Ah... Y-yeah, I guess it can't be helped...]
And I didn't present the trophy.
Emerald did ask if I could do it, but a trophy presentation would almost certainly result in me being photographed front and center, followed by articles appearing everywhere, so I simply refused.
I had already done enough as a commentator, so the fans thirsting for Alice should be satisfied with that much.
I had originally intended to do nothing but commentate, but both competitors made a huge fuss about being Alice's fans, so as Alice, I couldn't ignore them and stick to nothing but stiff commentary. That's why I ended up talking at such length.
Still, Alice is Alice. No matter how inactive she is, people calling themselves her fans keep appearing. I don't know whether they've been around since the old days or are new ones.
Seeing how the woman who moved in next door had accumulated that much merchandise, she must have been a dedicated fan since Alice's early days... The world may be small, but was this really how we were meant to meet?
Whenever I heard about sasaeng fans, I saw plenty of crazy people who could wring meaningful results out of the tiniest clues, so I couldn't afford to let my guard down either.
When I heard about someone comparing the size of a magical girl with other objects in a photograph, calculating from that clue, and having a ring made in the exact size as a gift, I honestly felt a little sick.
Who knows? I may have spent all this time living with my life on the line to keep my identity hidden, only for someone to have already seen through it.
...I really hope not.
They don't have to give me gifts or anything. I just hope they won't dig up my personal information.
Because it's obvious that all we'd do is hurt each other.
Apparently, digging up the identity of a magical girl who hasn't revealed her true appearance is considered an unspoken taboo among fans, but there are always people in the world who do the very things they're told not to do.
In fact, quite a few magical girls have quit after their identities were forcibly exposed, so how could I possibly relax?
'...I've made a lot of money today, and I took care of an Abyss One on the way home. How about treating myself to some fried chicken for once?'
After I got home, I buried myself under the covers and let the weariness of the day drain away. Then my stomach growled, and that thought occurred to me.
It had been an exhausting day.
Did people know how tiring it was to manage my expression in front of all those cameras, maintain Alice's persona, and keep my voice from wavering?
The filming alone had made for a tiring day, but I had also taken out a couple of C-rank Abyss Ones on the way home, so I'd used up every bit of energy I had for the day.
Even though Alice was a powerful magical girl, when the person inside her was this exhausted, she needed to rest.
After working this hard, surely I wouldn't be punished for splurging on a whole chicken.
I wasn't a big eater, so I couldn't finish a whole chicken by myself, but if there were leftovers, I could just refrigerate them and heat them up again.
At over twenty thousand won per chicken, and over thirty thousand once delivery and one or two side dishes were added, it had long since stopped being a cheap, working-class meal. But surely a person was allowed to splurge a little on days like this.
We do all this to eat and live, so no matter how hard life gets, you still have to eat properly.
"Bunny. If you need to go out on a deployment, could you tell me ahead of time? I'm about to place an order."
[Han Sejin... You know... We can only detect them once the Abyss side opens a rift... Guessing is pointless.]
"Doesn't that pocket watch you carry have a function that predicts when an Abyss One will appear?"
[It's just decoration! And it's not like I carry it because I want to!]
Bunny's origins were supposedly in the rabbit that pounds rice cakes on the moon, but the way it looked resembled a different rabbit.
The rabbit carrying a pocket watch from Alice in Wonderland. It looked exactly like that.
It was almost as if there were a reason the magical girl who contracted with Bunny had chosen Alice as her stage name.
"...It won't show up before the chicken gets here just because I ordered it, will it? They have days off too, right?"
[We still don't have much confirmed information on the Abyss Ones' ecology...]
I ordered it anyway.
Well, it'll work out somehow.
Since I always asked them to leave deliveries outside the door, even if I got called out in the meantime, it wouldn't be a problem.
[...Uh.]
I hope that 'uh' doesn't mean the same thing as all those other times I've heard it.
[Uh... s-sorry. It really has been detected.]
They say rabbit meat is supposed to be delicious. I guess I should try it at least once before I die.
Do these damn Abyss Ones have a detector or something?
They only ever show up at times like this.
I was already exhausted, and just when I decided to lie around and indulge for once, they started wrecking the place as if they'd been waiting for me to say it.
...What rank is it? I just want to smash its stupid head in and rest...
[...A-rank.]
...Hah. Every magical girl in the area will be swarming over here.
I'd previously explained that a B-rank Abyss One could easily collapse a small building and lay waste to an entire neighborhood. This was one rank higher.
...The scale of the damage was a whole city.
That meant it wasn't something even Alice, despite being an S-rank magical girl, could deal with in an instant and leave behind like the low-rank Abyss Ones she usually handled.
I only saw one once or twice a year, and of all times, it had to be year-end... Or did it appear precisely because it was year-end?
One might say it was weaker than the S-rank above it, but S-rank Abyss Ones were national-disaster level.
Abyss Ones normally returned to their original dimension, the Abyss, after gathering enough negative emotions. S-rank ones even surpassed that trait, remaining on Earth unless defeated, continuously causing disasters and gathering negative emotions... They were monsters with enough influence to seriously disrupt a nation's essential functions or even its continued existence.
Not just a country—the entire world. Officially, an S-rank Abyss One had been observed only seven times across the whole Earth.
Compared to the one- or two-per-year frequency of A-rank Abyss Ones observed within the range where I could deploy, the difference was enormous, and so was the danger.
Anyway, an A-rank Abyss One was far weaker than an S-rank one... but that also meant it was the greatest threat short of a national disaster.
In fact, unlike this country, where the high population density packed into its relatively small territory meant there were many magical girls, countries with fewer magical girls couldn't even defeat an A-rank Abyss One. All they could do was watch helplessly as it laid waste to everything and strolled away.
'There goes dinner.'
At this point, the fried chicken I'd ordered was a problem for another country.
The chicken place would close and evacuate, and of course the delivery driver would flee too, so all I could do was hope they at least processed my refund properly.
Not being able to eat a meal on time was part of a magical girl's fate, so it was something I was thoroughly accustomed to.