Chapter 12: It's Just Child's Play

What kind of being is a magical girl, really?

Magical Girl Red, at this moment, couldn't give a proper answer. Because she wasn't worthy. In her heart, she knew she wasn't worthy of being a magical girl, not worthy of being one of the chosen guardians of the world.

What had she just seen, what had she just felt, within that all-consuming, pitch-black power released from the shattered crystal?

She had seen the struggle of Magical Girl Crystal. The legend.

The one they called the "Prima Materia," the "First." She witnessed, as if through Crystal's own eyes, how, after first gaining the power of a magical girl, she had fought with all her heart to protect this world. How she had battled countless, terrifying fiends. What incredible, soul-crushing hardships she had endured. What profound, agonizing pain she had experienced—and then, finally, how she had been so utterly, so tragically betrayed.

To say she was "betrayed," perhaps, wasn't entirely accurate. It was just… an oversight. A moment of carelessness, born from exhaustion and the fog of war. The organization's oversight, driven by their cold, calculated assessment of the "greater good." And Crystal’s own oversight, born from her own great, overwhelming burden. And in that single, tragic moment of collective carelessness, Magical Girl Crystal's Supporter—the one she loved more than life itself—had died.

A Supporter. Red didn't even have one yet. But she could, through that pitch-black power, feel with a chilling, heartbreaking clarity Crystal’s agony at that moment, her bottomless despair. The person who had always, always been right there behind her, supporting her, believing in her, allowing her to feel safe and secure in a world of monsters… was dead.

So what am I even fighting for?

She heard Crystal’s haunting, soul-deep question echo in the darkness, a question that was now her own.

“I used all my strength, I protected so many people, I helped so many… yet I allowed the one I loved, my most precious person, to fall into danger. In the end, I couldn’t even protect the single person standing closest to me.”

She could hear Crystal’s words, could feel her sorrow, as if they were her own.

“The organization said that as long as I worked hard enough, as long as I defeated every last fiend, then an era of true, lasting peace for all people would finally arrive. But what was the result? The fiends never, ever disappear. They just keep coming, springing up endlessly like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Does my struggle, my sacrifice, even have any meaning? From the day I was born, from the day I first transformed until now, have the number of fiends actually lessened? Has the world truly become any more peaceful? Or have I just been running in place, fighting a losing, pointless war?”

An endless procession of faces flashed before Crystal's—and now Red's—eyes. The faces of the hundreds, even thousands, of fiends she had subjugated throughout her long, bloody career. She had defeated them all without mercy, without hesitation. And yet, true peace had never come. And worse, she had even, in the end, lost her most important, most precious person.

If… if I hadn’t killed all these fiends, if I hadn’t made them my enemies, if I had only ever used my magical girl power for myself, for the one I loved, to protect him… would I… would I not have lost him? Would he still be here?

She had never, ever regretted her initial, noble resolve, her pure-hearted aspiration, so so much. She had never, ever questioned her own meaning, her very purpose for existing, so deeply. And it was here, in this moment of absolute despair, that the soul of Magical Girl Crystal, the very first magical girl, finally, irrevocably cracked, splitting cleanly in two. She was not strong, not really. No matter how much she symbolized hope, no matter how much she symbolized justice, in the end, she was still just a young girl. A lonely, tired girl in love. And the one person who had always supported her, the one who had made her strong, the one who was her reason for fighting… he was dead. And she couldn’t be strong anymore.

Her boundless love for all things, her deep, innate desire for goodness and justice, and her current, all-consuming resentment, her profound, bottomless sorrow—they all clashed violently within the crystalline prism of her soul, that magical core which reflected all things. And in a single, catastrophic instant, it shattered.

Crystal fell into Inversion. Her uncontrolled, untamed power, its mere, passive aftershocks, could cause devastating, apocalyptic damage to everything, and everyone, around her. At this terrifying moment, the power of love and justice, and the power of anger and revenge, there was absolutely no difference between them. They were both, equally, the power of pure, indiscriminate "destruction." A power that would harm the very world she had sworn to protect.

And at this time, perhaps it was Crystal’s own last, deliberate act, perhaps it was a final, desperate shred of goodwill she still held for the world that had so cruelly betrayed her; in the final, cataclysmic instant before she was about to be completely destroyed by her own rampaging power, and by the world’s fearful, desperate response, she found two people. Two kindred souls, adrift in a sea of chaos.

One would later become the beloved hero, Strawberry Sweetheart. The other, the tragic villain, the Darkmoon Queen.

She separated her two conflicting powers, her light and her shadow, and caused them to resonate with two different, unsuspecting individuals. She allowed them to absorb that shattered power, granting both of them, simultaneously, the incredible, terrifying ability to become magical girls. She bestowed upon them both the "Prima Materia," the original seed of her own being.

And after that, with the fall of the Gem Generation, the Dessert Generation began.

The pitch-black power, the legacy of Crystal's despair, it seemed, was not as terrifying, not as malevolent as everyone had always imagined. It didn't corrupt or possess. It just… it just made one experience, exactly as it had been, what Crystal had felt at that time. It made one see, through her very own eyes, the terrible, impossible choices Crystal had been forced to make. It showed everyone present, in stark, unforgiving detail, the inevitable, tragic, and perhaps ultimately meaningless ending of a magical girl.

"An endless battle, against an endless tide of fiends that will never be truly, permanently eradicated. As long as humanity itself exists, good and evil will surely, inevitably exist. As long as humanity and Espers exist, fiends will never disappear. So, does a magical girl's endless struggle, her endless sacrifice, truly have any meaning at all in the grand scheme of things?"

This was the final, haunting question posed by Crystal from within those pitch-black, sorrowful emotions.

For Strawberry Sweetheart, this question was completely meaningless. She had long, long since overcome such childish, existential doubts. She had long since conquered the weakness in her own heart. She had found her own answer.

But for the new generation of magical girls, for those just starting out on this long, painful path, this was the biggest, most terrifying question of all. For Magical Girl Black, who had been born just over a month ago, and for Magical Girl Red, who had been born for just over a week, this was the ultimate, soul-crushing problem—that is, when your struggle, your sacrifice, is proven to be fundamentally meaningless, will you, can you, still continue to fight?

Red didn't know. She honestly, truly didn’t know. She was precisely in that terrifying, vulnerable stage of confusion and doubt. If this was everything the legendary Crystal had experienced, then would she, Red, inevitably experience these same things too? After the Darkmoon Coven is finally, eventually defeated, will other, even more powerful, even more tragic fiends inevitably be born to take her place? And finally, in this constant, grinding, almost certainly endless cycle of violent conflict, will she too, one day, lose everything and everyone she holds dear?

It seemed so. It seemed… inevitable.

After all, the great Strawberry Sweetheart herself had lost all her comrades from her generation. All the magical girls of the Dessert Generation, all her friends, had fallen along the way. Only Strawberry Sweetheart, the strongest, the loneliest, was still alive. It was like… it was like a cosmic, high-stakes poker game. You can keep going all-in, you can keep winning, hand after hand. But as long as your opponent, the house, has more chips than you, as long as you eventually, inevitably lose just once, you will lose everything. Your entire stack. Your entire life.

The fiends, it seemed, were infinite. They would never truly disappear. And no matter how powerful you were, even if you were the undisputed "strongest," under this crushing, relentless "infinity," one day, sooner or later, a fiend more powerful, more cunning, more ruthless than you would inevitably appear. And at that time, when that day finally came, if you lost just once, just a single, solitary battle, you would lose all your beloved ones. Everything you had ever fought for.

This was the inescapable, tragic fate that all magical girls would, sooner or later, inevitably have to face.

So, what was the point? What was the point of being a magical girl anymore?

Red, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and a strange, dawning hunger, reached out her trembling hand. If she just touched it, if she just absorbed this pitch-black power, this legacy of despair, she knew, with an almost intoxicating certainty, that she could instantly become a sufficiently, overwhelmingly powerful magical girl. She was Red, the fire of passion. If she added Crystal’s ancient, sorrowful power to her own, she would surely… she would surely…

“You damn fool,” a gruff, utterly unimpressed voice suddenly cut through her trance. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing, messing around with that angsty crap?”

Just as Red was about to touch that seductive, whispering darkness, all of it, every last shred of it, vanished. It was sucked away, greedily, into a new host.

Red looked up, her expression one of dazed, utter confusion. The pitch-black power, all of it, had flowed directly into Magical Girl Black’s body.

She saw Black standing there, her expression completely unchanged. Her appearance seemed exactly the same. Although, Strawberry Sweetheart, her eyes wide with a new, wary alarm, couldn’t help but take a single, cautious step back, Black herself didn’t seem to care in the slightest.

“Power is just power,” Black grumbled, her voice filled with a profound, world-weary boredom. “You’re just passing on a little bit of leftover power, and you have to spout so much melodramatic, self-pitying nonsense! Honestly. I thought some ancient, world-altering truth was about to be passed on, but in the end, it’s just all this angsty whining about how the things you do are ‘meaningless’? Is that it? Is that seriously all you’ve got?” she scoffed. “Do you have any idea how many completely meaningless jobs I had to do in a single week back in my day? If all work, if all of life, was supposed to have some grand meaning, then what in the seven circles of hell would the lives of us poor, long-suffering corporate drones even be?”

Magical Girl Black was speaking of things, of harsh, mundane realities, that Strawberry Sweetheart and Red, who were still just young, idealistic girls, couldn’t possibly, not yet anyway, fully understand. Even the powerful Darkmoon Queen was stunned where she stood, at a complete loss for words. They, who had never truly been a part of mundane, adult society, didn’t yet know that if you really, truly went to work, if you became a cog in the great, grinding machine, then the vast, overwhelming majority of your work, your efforts, your very life, would be, for all intents and purposes, completely meaningless. In fact, all work, when you really got down to it, was rather meaningless.

If you were to truly, deeply investigate the abstract, philosophical matter of "meaning," you could very easily, and with very little effort, slip into a comfortable, almost liberating nihilism.

For example: "For the vast, indifferent universe, the very existence of humanity itself is fundamentally, statistically meaningless." Or: "In the long, infinite river of history, the brief, insignificant time we experience is but a fleeting, momentary droplet in the vast, cosmic ocean. We only have meaning to other, equally insignificant humans. What meaning do we possibly have to the Earth? To the solar system? To the universe itself?"

Such thoughts, while undeniably very negative, were also, in a strange, twisted way, incredibly effective at helping one let go of the tiresome and ultimately pointless search for "meaning." In short, this was a vital, sacred survival skill that almost every single office worker, sooner or later, would be forced to master. An almost instinctual, evolutionary trait, developed over countless generations of corporate servitude, specifically to cope with the constant brainwashing and meaningless platitudes of their superiors—the simple, liberating mindset that "even if I don't do this pointless work," "even if I completely, catastrophically mess it all up," the sky, in all likelihood, will not actually fall down. It was… profoundly comforting.

Black, now completely unfazed by the existential crisis that had just been unleashed, turned her bored gaze to the stunned Darkmoon Queen. “Magical Girl Crystal’s thoughts, her little teenage angst phase, while I don’t particularly agree with it, are at least, on some level, understandable. But what about you? What’s your excuse? What is it that you truly want?”

That pitch-black feeling, that palpable, almost tangible feeling that was supposed to be enough to make one despair, to break one’s very soul, seemed to have never existed for Magical Girl Black at all. It was as if it were a flavor, a sensation, that she had already tasted, had already grown accustomed to, long, long ago.

At this moment, Magical Girl Black, with a sigh of profound boredom, arrived before the now de-transformed Darkmoon Queen. She was, Black had to admit, a truly beautiful young woman, with long, flowing black hair and a stunning, almost perfect figure.

Black, without a single word, grabbed her by the collar of her tattered dress and lifted her up effortlessly. “You… you are truly disappointing. Your resistance, your so-called ‘will,’ it’s all completely that of a spoiled little girl. Just like my own rebellious, pain-in-the-ass daughter, always thinking that some completely unimportant things are so very, very important. I was, I must confess, originally planning to kill you, to completely annihilate you. But if this, this whole pathetic, melodramatic display, was your grand, master stratagem, then I must say, you have succeeded. In one thing, at least. You have succeeded in making me have absolutely no interest, none whatsoever, in killing you now. Because your resolve, your great ‘despair,’ is only of this pathetic, uninteresting level. A level so utterly uninteresting that I don’t even feel you constitute any kind of genuine, long-term threat anymore. You’re just… boring.”

A flicker of pure, unadulterated fury appeared in the Darkmoon Queen’s eyes. She felt, more keenly than any physical blow, that she had just been deeply, unforgivably insulted by this strange, terrifying magical girl.

Black, seeing that look, just sighed again. And then, with a speed that was almost too fast to see, she delivered a sharp, open-handed slap directly across the Queen’s beautiful face. The crisp, resounding SLAP! echoed throughout the now-silent, devastated warehouse. The fiends, what was left of them, and the other magical girls, all froze in place, their minds completely boggled.

“Black!” Strawberry Sweetheart cried out, a note of shock in her voice.

SLAP!

Black, ignoring her completely, slapped Darkmoon again.

“You… you bastard!!” the Queen shrieked, her voice filled with a mixture of rage and humiliation.

SLAP!

“You—!”

SLAP!

After this was repeated several more times, with a calm, rhythmic efficiency, the Darkmoon Queen’s face was red and swollen. She didn’t dare to say another word, didn’t even dare to meet Magical Girl Black’s cold, dead eyes.

Black, finally satisfied, casually tossed her aside like a discarded doll, then dusted off her hands with a look of profound disappointment. “In the end, she’s just a little brat who suddenly got a hold of some power and then, inevitably, developed a severe, terminal case of chuunibyou. And I… I actually had the genuine intent to kill her for a moment there. As an adult,” she muttered to herself, “I’m not very qualified either, am I? What a truly, truly boring fight. Utterly, completely disappointing.”

Her gaze then fell on the stunned, but secretly quite impressed Strawberry Sweetheart. “She’s all yours now. You can deal with her. I have absolutely no interest in this anymore.”

“…Oh! Right! Of course!”

Black then turned her cold, terrifying gaze to the now-trembling Magical Girl Red. “You, just now,” she said, her voice dangerously quiet, “you wanted to obtain that pathetic, angsty power, didn’t you? You wanted to continue her so-called anger and hatred of Crystal?”

Red immediately, and with a speed born of pure, unadulterated terror, stood at ramrod-straight attention. Her head shook back and forth so violently it looked like it might fly off her neck. “NO! I ABSOLUTELY DID NOT! I HAD NO SUCH INTENTION, MISS BLACK! I SWEAR ON MY LIFE!” She felt as if she were a delinquent, a little yankee, who had just been caught red-handed smoking behind the gym by the scariest, most legendary dean of discipline in the entire school district. No, Black was even more intimidating than her own terrifying homeroom teacher. She didn’t dare to even admit that she had, for a fleeting, foolish moment, harbored such naughty, rebellious thoughts.

Black nodded slightly, her expression unreadable. “That’s good. I knew you were a good kid from the very first glance. Don’t do things like that again. Otherwise,” she added, a hint of a terrifyingly calm menace in her voice, “I will have to personally, and with great enthusiasm, educate you. Do you understand me?”

Red nodded frantically, almost giving herself whiplash.

Black then, satisfied, waved her hand dismissively, indicating she was leaving this whole tedious, disappointing mess behind.

“Black!” Strawberry Sweetheart called out to her, her voice filled with a genuine, heartfelt gratitude. “Thank you!” She was thanking Black, she knew, for taking on the heavy, corrupted power of Crystal herself. And for not killing the pathetic, broken shell of the Darkmoon Queen.

Black let out a soft, almost weary chuckle. “It was just… just educating a naughty child, that’s all. Who in their right mind would get truly serious with a mere child!”

And with a final, valiant, impossibly cool air, she departed, leaving a scene of utter chaos, confusion, and existential bewilderment in her wake.