While the magical girl Silver Feather battled the Thorn Monster, Haibara stayed in the corner of the alley, quietly watching to see how the fight would turn out.
Unsurprisingly, as she was now, the magical girl Silver Feather was no match for the Thorn Monster after it had fused with the Snake crystal.
At this rate, unless another magical girl arrived, Silver Feather was bound to lose.
As she looked on with her arms folded, a somewhat flippant woman’s voice rang out:
“I hear you’re a teacher—yet you’d just stand here and watch your student get hurt?
Isn’t that a bit too scummy?”
Haibara turned around casually and saw a figure that had appeared, at some unnoticed moment, from a dark corner.
It was the figure of a tall, gorgeous woman—though a closer look revealed that wasn’t quite the case.
She didn’t seem to be an ordinary human.
Her whole body was covered in a dark military uniform, yet for a uniform it bared a great deal of skin, clinging tight as if to accentuate the curves of the woman’s figure—seductive and dangerous.
Her skin was a dark gray, wrapped in black tattoos that resembled thorns.
Beneath her pale bangs, the whites of the woman’s eyes were swallowed by pitch black, leaving only a pair of crimson irises.
She was a seductive woman decked out in a military uniform.
In every sense, she had the look of a villainous female officer.
Haibara merely sized her up from head to toe and said offhandedly:
“Whether or not I’m scum doesn’t matter—but she won’t be getting hurt, either.”
She did possess at least a modicum of basic teacher’s ethics.
A wounded student would be a hassle for her too; after all, her goal was to get the student back to class, not lying in a hospital bed.
As for the woman before her, she could roughly guess her identity.
A cadre of the Black Death Cult—an Apostle.
Not a monster, but one of the Demon King’s kin, wielders of the power of Magic Crystals.
“Won’t get hurt?
Isn’t the magical girl Silver Feather already hurt right now?”
The female officer in military garb stroked her own face, asking curiously.
On the battlefield, the magical girl Silver Feather had already been whipped several times.
Her once-sleek, gorgeous silver-white combat outfit was now marred by several tears, exposing skin that oozed with blood.
Haibara said calmly:
“Only the magical girl gets hurt.
The human side of her won’t be harmed.”
She didn’t care whether the magical girl got hurt.
A magical girl was a warrior of love and courage who would never cry.
No matter how timid and frightened her human side might be, once she Transformed into a magical girl she would become a perfect warrior and fulfill her mission to defeat the monsters.
Seeing how cold-blooded Haibara was, the female officer went blank for a moment.
This woman…
How was she even more heartless than the cadres of their own Black Death Cult?
Haibara said nothing more after that, simply continuing to gaze at the female officer—so intently that the officer even grew a little uncomfortable.
Especially the exposed parts of her body, which seemed to have been examined thoroughly.
Even though they were both women, being looked at like this was somewhat unsettling.
The female officer awkwardly covered her chest:
“What are you looking at?”
Haibara shook her head.
“Nothing.
I was just thinking your outfit is rather lewd.”
The female officer’s dark gray face instantly flushed crimson:
“…Huh?”
*
On the battlefield hemmed in by thorns, the magical girl Silver Feather held out through round after round of thorn attacks.
But upon glimpsing Teacher Haibara’s figure in the alley, her heart was suddenly overwhelmed with panic.
A thorn snake lashed against her body while she was distracted, sending her flying yet again.
Her whole body slammed hard against the ground, but then several more thorns shot out, coiling around her limbs, trying to bind her down.
The thorns’ barbs tore through her skin, sinking deep into her flesh, and blood flowed out from the wounds.
The pain brought her back to her senses a little.
She couldn’t keep waiting any longer. This story is hosted at g.com.
Teacher Haibara was still nearby, and she had to deal with this rampaging monster quickly.
Forcibly wrenching herself free of the thorns binding her with sheer strength,
Without hesitation, she took another crystal from her hair ornament.
It was an ash-white crystal—the colorless crystal of a monster still in its budding stage.
This kind of crystal could be set into the sub-slot on the wand’s wings, but it placed a heavy strain on her body, so under normal circumstances she wouldn’t use it.
But now was no time to hesitate.
She slotted the crystal into the wing slot—
“Finisher—”
The key to defeating a monster was to shatter the mask that carried its life and soul.
But now that the mask was covered over, she first had to strip away that outer shell.
Silver-white radiance gathered steadily upon the wand, and as she raised it high, the glow of magic condensed into a keen blade, extending ever upward.
Then she leapt into the air, getting as close to the monster as she could.
Several thorn snakes closed in on her, but were swiftly cut apart and scattered by the radiance of her magic.
At last, she drew near the Thorn Monster.
“—Silver Wing Finale!”
The wand’s radiance shifted into the form of wings, propelling her one step further, and the blade of light slashed down, breaking through layer after layer of thorns until it finally severed every thorn covering the monster.
Even so, it did not harm the monster’s true body—it merely rendered the outer shell temporarily inert, exposing the body beneath.
Upon seeing the Thorn Monster’s true body as it was now, the magical girl Silver Feather froze for a moment.
The once-pale mask was mostly shattered, like a broken, weeping soul, and all that seeped out from within was an ominous black mist and a dense cluster of twisted fangs.
Even for a monster, this was far too bizarre.
And soon the surrounding thorns began to regain their vigor, seeking to cover the monster’s body once more.
“This is…”
Just then, Silver Feather noticed that, in place of the mask, at the very center of the thorns, sat a bizarre dark green crystal.
On instinct, she reached out and thrust her hand into the monster’s chest.
A great gush of black blood spurted out as she touched the dark green crystal that pulsed like a heart.
The instant she made contact, her hand felt as though it had brushed against flames, the searing agony nearly driving her out of her mind.
But she endured the pain and dug the crystal out.
Black blood splattered across her body, staining her white combat outfit.
The thorn snakes around her suddenly lunged at her as if gone mad.
“Let me use this for a moment.”
The ash-white crystal from before had been entirely spent by that finishing move, and now the wing slot was empty once again.
“Confirming—”
She slotted the dark green crystal into place.
The wings took on a dark green glow.
“—Green Lock Dragon Anaconda!”
Green Lock Dragon… Anaconda?
What the heck was this…
It didn’t sound connected to any of the elements among Flower, Bird, Wind, and Moon—could it be a Snake?
“No… now isn’t the time to be worrying about that.”
The magical girl Silver Feather lifted her head, then realized that the magic contained within this Magic Crystal was terrifyingly powerful.
What’s more, though it was a crystal of unknown type, it meshed unexpectedly well with her Bird-type wand.
Silver-white and dark green radiance intertwined, seeming to resonate, and the wand shone as never before, its immense magic surging into a torrent.
Standing before the Thorn Monster, facing the thorn snakes striking at her from every direction, the magical girl Silver Feather pressed down on the wings, preparing to unleash her final blow—
“Finisher—”
It should have been the girlish voice of the Bird-type spirit, yet this voice was quickly tinged with cold and gloom, turning into the low, indifferent, yet somehow familiar voice of a woman.
With no time to think about where she’d heard this voice before, the magical girl Silver Feather raised her wand, the giant sword of magic already aimed at the exposed mask of the Thorn Monster.
With this blow, everything would end.
“Unleash the omnipotent power of God; despair shall shroud the world.”
“—Absolute Power Finale.”
The cold voice declared it calmly.
The sound effect this time also seemed terribly off.
But the strike that heralded the end had already fully coalesced.
She swung the wand down, and the blow of magic met the Thorn Monster’s body, violently splitting the mask—and the entire body along with it—clean in two. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
The magical girl Silver Feather slowly turned away.
“Rrrip…”
The crack spread out from the mask, then began to heat from within.
The next instant, a massive explosion engulfed the entire street.
As the explosion roared, the street—which had only been surface-cracked before—instantly became like something bombed countless times over, reduced to horrifying ruins.
Smoke billowed and flames of war scattered everywhere; the thorn snakes were burned to nothing by the blaze.
And a shattered, already-dimmed crystal tumbled from the pulverized monster’s body; the moment it touched the ground, it crumbled outright into a scattering of debris.
This single blow had destroyed even the crystal inside the monster…
Though she was the one who had unleashed the blow, the magical girl Silver Feather felt her heart pound, awed and afraid of that power.
Turning to look at the street she had wrecked beyond recognition—though she was covered in wounds and utterly spent after the battle—she still reached out her hand and used magic to blanket and restore the whole area.
This kind of magic would cover the entire ruined district, erase the memories of the ordinary people within its range, and put them temporarily to sleep.
This way, a magical girl’s true identity could be kept hidden from others.
It also spared ordinary people from being left with too great a psychological scar.
And this way, Teacher Haibara probably wouldn’t remember anything about what had happened on this street.
After restoring everything, the magical girl Silver Feather’s body swayed unsteadily, on the verge of giving out…
Her eyelids drooped lower and lower, and at last, drained of strength, she collapsed to the ground.
*
Not long after the magical girl Silver Feather fell unconscious, other magical girls arrived and carried Silver Feather away.
Haibara pushed up her glasses and let out a sigh:
“Looks like it failed.
Your Black Death Cult’s monsters really are useless.”
What’s more, she seemed to have just been spotted by her own student, which had made the magical girl abandon her original plan for a delaying battle, leading the Thorn Monster to be dealt with in a flash at the end.
That counted as an unexpected miscalculation on her part.
The female officer blinked, then said with displeasure:
“You’re the one who stuffed some inexplicable crystal into our monster—and what on earth was that power the magical girl Silver Feather just used?”
The magical girl Silver Feather’s final blow, in her eyes, had enough force to even threaten a Complete Form monster.
That was simply not the level of strength a magical girl at this stage should possess.
Faced with the villainous female officer’s interrogation, Haibara merely turned around slowly, looking down at the officer from above.
Even with her boots on, the officer wasn’t as tall as Haibara.
“Mm.
I can tell you’ve got a lot of questions.”
Haibara sized up the female Apostle like this, then reached out a hand, lightly gripped the officer’s collar, and pulled it aside.
Then she drew closer bit by bit, tilting her head down slightly, and through her lenses fixed the officer with hollow, cold, deep-black eyes.
The officer didn’t seem to have grasped what was happening yet, but her throat had somehow gone dry.
Her hand released the collar and slowly slid upward, until her fingertip pressed against the officer’s dark-lipsticked lips.
“…You—?”
The moment she opened her mouth, Haibara took the opening and slipped her finger inside.
The other woman didn’t even register what was happening, and just like that, Haibara was stroking her tongue with her finger.
By the time she came to her senses, the officer’s mind had gone blank—unable to understand why this woman was so bold, or why she herself still hadn’t resisted.
The woman’s finger was rather cold and had no particular taste, but the feel of that foreign object in her mouth was not pleasant.
And yet…
This sensation of being treated roughly—she seemed to… rather like it.
Watching the officer obediently let her toy with her tongue, Haibara nodded in satisfaction:
“Seeing as you’re rather delectable-looking…”
Haibara caught a few strange little “mm” sounds, all while watching the officer’s face slowly turn red.
Face flushed, the officer looked at the woman right in front of her.
For some reason, though the other was just a plain, ordinary-looking passerby of a woman, she felt an inexplicable flicker of anticipation.
Then she saw this cold, bespectacled woman give a faint smile:
“Perhaps we could have a nice little chat?”
PS: Magical Girl Silver Feather
Height: 164cm Weight: 49kg
Punch Force: 15.8t Kick Force: 37.5t
Jump: 45.1m Running Speed: