Chapter 55
"Uh... So... During the First Generation era, the mascots still hadn't adapted well to humans. Back then, your senior's mascot contracted with her thinking she was a woman, is that right?"
"Yes. In short, that's about it."
".........Uh... I suppose that could happen?"
The excuse Tokkaeng and I had prepared was exactly this.
<I contracted with her thinking she was a woman, but it turned out she was a man.>
"Hmm... Your senior, of course, but Mr. Sejin too... No, you're the same person... Hmm... Anyway, Mr. Sejin is quite pretty too. If you dressed up just a little, I could see someone mistaking you for a woman... Oh, you're doing that now."
"You seem confused."
"My head is such a mess right now. Please bear with me. My memories are getting mixed up too, and I think some weird hormones are being released in huge amounts right now, you know?"
No matter how mixed-up her head was, could it really be worse than mine? Who was actually in trouble here?
[How's it going, Tokkaeng? Can you handle it?]
[I've almost got her.]
[...That really works.]
The mascots' taboo. Magical girl contracts must be made exclusively with women.
Apparently, this taboo doesn't work by having mascots recognize, 'I mustn't contract with a man.' Rather, the very idea that they could contract with a man doesn't exist in their minds to begin with.
If they somehow obtain related knowledge or information, only then do they think, 'Oh, we're not supposed to do that?'
This raises another question. If that's the logic, couldn't there be cases like mine, where a mascot contracted with someone as a magical girl without realizing he was a man?
To give the conclusion first, no. It's not merely that the thought never occurs to mascots; when a magical girl contract is first made, if the other party is male, the connection between the mascot and the other party simply fails to form, and the contract falls through. Even if some particularly foolish mascot really did mistake a man for a woman and attempt a contract, there would be no chance of it succeeding.
Mine was the sole exception. There had been an existing magical girl with a genuinely female body named Alice, and after that magical girl disappeared from the world, her mascot—having lost its partner—found someone similar enough to deceive it into carrying on the contract before it could disappear. Only under those circumstances could I somehow become a magical girl in a male body.
Even after sorting it out, it was a dizzying situation, practically a bug in the system. Tokkaeng said it was fair to call it that. If we were lucky, bugs might have occurred elsewhere too, allowing a man like me to operate as a magical girl... but who knows. I think the odds are low.
...The probability of someone being similar enough to fool a contract and also being of a different sex approaches zero, statistically speaking, after all.
Even I had attempted it only because my life was on the line, without knowing whether it would work. It was hard to imagine anyone else trying it. The number of dimensions the mascots had reached was infinite, so maybe there was someone somewhere... But by that logic, nothing in the world would be impossible.
The explanation had been long, but in the end, it meant that my ability to operate as a magical girl while being male and pretending to be Alice could be considered a miracle that had beaten astronomical odds.
...They could have given me some other kind of luck instead of making this sort of miracle happen.
[It was essentially a bug, and no one knows how it happened. The other mascots don't have any way to reproduce it either. Of the mascots that visited Earth during the First Generation era, hardly any are still active. And even if there are some, it's not as though they tried contracting with men, right? Even if contracts with men don't work now, if they worked during the First Generation, the younger ones wouldn't have anything to say.]
[And Alice is S-rank.]
[In the end, the mascots' basic mission is to contract with magical girls and protect their dimensions from the Abyss. Unless it was a deliberate criminal act, if something that normally shouldn't happen occurred by chance because of a bug, and that magical girl was Alice—outwardly one of the most exemplary magical girls of all—they wouldn't risk their lives to intervene.]
It was my first time cleaning up after being discovered, but perhaps because I'd prepared so thoroughly in advance, both Mia and her mascot believed me without much suspicion.
As luck would have it, things also seemed to have wrapped up so easily because the other party was Mia, who loved Alice to death and had her head in the clouds, along with her mascot... Still, getting past that hurdle was certainly something to be relieved about.
"...Ah! Come to think of it, since it's just the two of us here, should I use Mental Cure? Senior, isn't it because of your mental state that you can't use that magic?"
"...What?"
"Last time, you struggled for ages saying you couldn't let yourself become honest, but then I ended up leaving, so we never finished! But now I already know everything, don't I? Isn't it okay for you to become honest now?"
'...Does it work that way?'
Strictly speaking, I hadn't revealed everything, so becoming honest was dangerous... but it wasn't as though Mental Cure would make me spill every last secret. And now that one of my secrets had already been exposed, the burden was considerably lighter.
Besides, Mia already believed I'd revealed my secret. If I refused because I didn't want to become honest now, she'd suspect that I was hiding something else after all...
"...Yeees. Well, let's give it a try, if you're all right with it, Ms. Mia."
"Okay! Th-then... ugh... There's so little room, I can't get into position... Hyup! There!"
Mia somehow made room in the cramped space, reached her arm toward my head, and began creating a warm energy in her hand.
'...Tokkaeng. Just in case, hold on to the other mascot.'
[I'm doing that without you having to tell me.]
I wasn't sure exactly how powerful becoming honest would be... but I did have years of experience operating as a magical girl. I wouldn't let some extremely sensitive secret slip out now.
-Hummm
"That thing I said would make you honest doesn't last very long. About ten minutes?"
Warm energy flowed from Mia's hand and burrowed into my mind.
I felt as though I could resist if I wanted to... but then the treatment would be pointless, so I accepted it obediently.
Along with a sensation blooming in my mind, something that felt similar to taking medicine, yet different...
* * *
"...Senior? How do you feel?"
The final stage of the Mental Cure I'd just received was, in theory, to make the recipient subject to the influence of the person who cast Mental Cure.
In my case, it usually... made me more honest about my emotions, less capable of lying, and a little worse at reading the room... Those sorts of side effects tended to occur.
I'd wondered what you could possibly be hiding that made you resist so fiercely, but thinking about it now, refusing was only natural. Considering how you've acted until now, Senior, you must have worked very hard to keep this hidden. It would have been a disaster if you'd been found out during a single treatment.
If you'd been caught not by someone like me, who had absolutely no intention of harming you, but by someone who had hated you from the start or would toy with you in all sorts of ways using this weakness they'd extracted from you, it would've put you in a terrible bind.
It's a good thing you were caught by me! What would you have done if someone else had found out?!
'...And considering the situation we're in, I'd be a heartless bitch if I didn't protect her.'
If she'd been found out in some other situation, maybe, but this whole situation had happened because Senior Alice had risked her life to save mine, leaving the two of us trapped in a place like this.
If it weren't for me, Senior wouldn't have had any reason to go all the way up to the roof of a building that was already collapsing, and if I hadn't fallen from there, she wouldn't have had to give up her own chance to escape in order to try to rescue me.
In a situation like that, if I got excited about having Alice Senior's weakness in my grasp and thought of blackmailing her with it? There'd be no worse woman in the world. Even ingratitude ought to have its limits.
'It's okay, Senior. I'll help you from now on. We'll go to work together and go home together, and whenever I want to hear your voice, I'll just go to the house next door... Ehehe...'
-Slurp
Ah, I drooled for a moment. Hoping Senior hadn't seen, I quickly swallowed it again.
...But Senior isn't saying anything? Is it not working?
"Senior? You're all right, right? I'm getting a little worried since you aren't saying anything..."
-Clasp
"Huh??? Senior???"
"..."
"You hugged me because you became honest about your feelings! So this wasn't a one-sided crush after all! You like me too, Senior..."
-Sniff
...Huh?
Just as my happy little fantasy was beginning to run, a sound from beside me shattered it in an instant.
"...Senior?"
"..."
I couldn't hear Senior's voice. As she hugged me, with our heads crossing over each other, I couldn't see her expression from my angle, either.
However, the occasional sound of water and the vibrations transmitted through my body were enough for me to guess her current state.
"...It's okay, Senior. I don't know exactly what's wrong, but everything will be all right."
Since Senior was already hugging me tightly, I couldn't pat her on the back or anything, but I comforted her with words.
I guess I'd gotten too excited all by myself. Her secret, which she'd hidden for ten years, had been exposed to someone. No matter how much the other person promised to keep it secret, wouldn't anyone be shaken?
"I said it jokingly, but I really won't tell anyone. It's not like I could ever hurt you, Senior. It's okay, it's okay."
"..."
"...Even if it's not now, if you're ever going through something difficult, you can always rely on me. Even though you're stronger and more perfect than I am, Senior, I can still help you."
Had about fifteen minutes passed? We had no clock, so I couldn't know the exact time, but it seemed to have been roughly that long.
-Sliiide
-Rub rub
"Ahem."
From beside me came the sound of something being rubbed with what sounded like cloth, followed by a throat-clearing. Hearing it like this, I could tell for sure. It really was similar to Mr. Sejin's voice.
Now that I thought about it, there were so many similarities. It was almost strange that I hadn't realized it all this time.
'...But why does he use the same face?'
If he really intended to hide his identity, shouldn't he have used the transformation function allowed for magical girls to make his face feel as different from the original as possible...? But there really wasn't much difference between Mr. Sejin's face and Senior Alice's. If I somehow took photographs and put just the facial portions of the two side by side, I could tell that they were nearly the same face once the difference in atmosphere was accounted for.
"..."
Still, I won't ask. No matter how much of a secret had been exposed, forcing my way into something precious to someone else and dragging it out into the open wouldn't be right.
"...Prepare to escape. We'll be out soon."
"Oh, have you already recovered?"
"Thanks to you. I'm going to sense the surroundings as much as possible and aim for somewhere that seems unlikely to have people... But even Alice can't check the state of the surface from down here. Please be prepared to accept that we might land in the middle of a crowd."
"We're going to land in the middle of a crowd while hugging Senior Alice tightly?!"
"...We'll land separately and move on foot."
"Ugh."
-Flash!
It had been a life-threatening place, so was it just my imagination that I felt a little reluctant to leave for some reason?
Senior and I succeeded in escaping the place where we'd made an unexpected discovery.
And then...
-Flash!
-Flash!
"Eek!"
"Huh! What the—people just appeared out of nowhere!"
"Ugh... Se...nior...?"
When we emerged into the outside world, where I could feel the welcome bright sunlight, the area was packed with civilians.
"...Senior?"
Yet no matter how hard I looked, Senior was nowhere to be seen.
"...Weren't you going to go home with me?!"
It was the moment my dream of giggling with Senior on our way home from work was crushed on the very first day.
Come to think of it, neither Senior nor I had ever said anything about going back together.