June 2024
***
“Urgh…”
Minerva was hunched over like she suddenly felt sick, making Rin and Sarina reflexively float away from her.
“What? What’s wrong?” Sarina asked in a concerned voice.
“That was such a cringey first impression! And there was a news crew, too!”
She turned towards the two younger girls, red like a tomato.
“It’s still on the internet! I wish I hadn’t remembered it just now! This will haunt me for weeks like all the other times I recalled it!”
“I think it was a great first impression! Learn to live a little, Seika!”
Rin couldn’t help but let out a little laugh.
“Announcing that you’re going to protect everyone is kind of adorable, though. You must have sounded like a real Magical Girl right out of the TV.”
“Ugh, spare me. Let’s leave that behind. Please!”
“So, you don’t have a mascot?” Rin asked, steering the conversation in another direction.
Minerva shook her head.
“No mascot, no partner. All I have is my crystal. Sometimes it talks to me, but that’s it.”
“That seems lonely.” Sarina observed.
“A little. But I prefer not endangering others while I work, you know?”
The two girls smiled in response as they approached the industrial district of Ukishimacho. On their way they passed by an airplane coming from Haneda airport – the sight of three Magical Girls even caught the attention of some passengers who watched them until the plane’s windows lost sight of them.
Everyone was blissfully unaware of the danger the three were about to face, and that’s just how Minerva preferred it.
The industrial area was stretching out in front of them – large white atmospheric pressure tanks and countless pipes as far as the eye could see. Refineries and factories stood side by side in a maze of metal that one could easily get lost in.
Minerva looked the area over before turning to her two companions.
“So, can you recall where exactly the creature went?”
***
The two girls led her to one of the metallic mazes made out of pipes. There was a distinct petroleum smell in the air as they entered the premises of the refinery. Her magical gem vibrated in response to the familiar presence of a Shadow, even if it was still hiding in its pocket dimension.
“I can shift into its domain, so I will go ahead. You two need to look for an object that appears out of place and touch it to follow me.”
The girls nodded almost synchronously.
“We’ll be right behind you!”
“Can you take it on by yourself?” Sarina asked despite the previous agreement.
“I’ve taken on at least a dozen Shadow Queens by now, don’t you doubt me now, rookie.”
She gave the young girl a playful flick against her forehead.
“Alright then, I’ll be off.”
She waved at the two before she focused and used her ability to traverse dimensions.
“Reality shift!”
The colors around her grew muted and the two younger Magical Girls faded out of existence. It was only her now.
“Well. Time to find our Shadow Queen. I wonder if it’s even hiding in here, or if it will just be somewhere out in the open.”
She turned around and was immediately faced with her opponent.
The Shadow Queen wasn’t a human-animal hybrid like the others she had fought before; this one was a proper monstrosity.
Its body seemed to be made out of the bodies of countless shadows in the shape of women that embraced each other or reached for the outside, faces contorted as if they were screaming. They moved like they were in slow motion, forming a bulbous body together. On top of it a throne had been formed from the arms and bodies of these featureless women – and a single Shadow that looked like a woman dressed in regal garb sat on top of it, reclining as she lazily regarded Minerva with glowing red eyes.
“This is different. Why is it so different?”
The crystal complained as Minerva made sure not to make any sudden moves.
“I think I know why…” She said quietly as a drop of sweat ran down her temple.
“All the Shadow Queens we beat before had swallowed girls with magic potential, right?”
“Yes. They drain magic by stealing their life force which can result in death after a prolonged time.”
“This girl had a magic focus on her that converts magic energy from her emotions.”
“You don’t mean…?”
“We’re dealing with a Shadow Queen with access to exponentially more magic than the others.”
Minerva showed a bitter grin.
“And it might be my fault.”
“A Shadow Empress, then!” The crystal exclaimed with a little too much excitement.
“Don’t give her a title.”
***
The standoff with the creature seemed to last forever – the Empress on her throne made out of women regarded Minerva lazily while swirling some liquid in a wine glass made out of the same shadows as her body while the Magical Girl tried to gauge her strength.
A single bead of sweat dropped from Minerva’s forehead to the ground, serving as the signal to start. Multiple magic circles appeared in the air around the creature. Purple beams shot in Minerva’s direction, forcing her to jump out of the way. The follow-up was fast, making her utilize her own magic to dodge in midair with swift usage of her flight or by kicking herself off barriers. Atmospheric pressure tanks ruptured, and the stench of petroleum filled the air around them before another beam ignited it and doused the entire area in fire.
The Empress let out a screech and elevated her entire orb-shaped body out of the refinery. This momentary stop in her magical barrage was all that Minerva needed.
She leapt at her and clung to the large spherical body, shuddering as the shadowy bodies of women clung to her, grabbing her arms and legs weakly. She could hear faint wailing from them as she grabbed their hands and flung them away from the main body. Separated, they fell into the flames below without motion or making another sound.
She could feel a presence inside, so she kept digging, removing more and more of the bodies as she could hear the Empress on top screeching again.
She had to dig about a meter deep, tossing weak bodies aside as she did to reach a smooth black surface – a core of some kind. It was cold to the touch but behind it she could feel the magical presence of the trapped girl.
“Don’t worry! I’ll get you out of there!” She whispered against the cold surface and turned around. She was face to face with another shadowed body, realizing that the Shadows had simply regenerated behind her and had encased her close to the core.
Hands grew from the core as well, grabbing her neck from behind, trying to strangle her.
Minerva pointed her cane outwards, first casting a shield spell around herself and the exposed parts of the core – then she let loose a fireball at close range.
***
The sphere erupted, with dozens of bodies falling to the ground as Minerva flew out of the destruction, turning around. The Empress was facing her, not particularly bothered by the loss of bodies it seemed, as more and more of them crawled out of the core to repair the tattered sphere.
“At least the trapped girl is a relatively small target.”
“We’ll have to hit it faster than it can regenerate, or…”
Minerva couldn’t finish the sentence as a new barrage of magical beams shot her way. She dodged as well as she could, but the creature seemed to have a near infinite amount of magical energy.
“This doesn’t seem right. If her core is one of Kuma’s girls, she should be running dry thanks to all the despair the girl is going through!”
Minerva had to rely on barriers, deflecting the beams shooting at her while she kept dodging the rest. The sheer volume of shots became unmanageable after a while, forcing Minerva to barrier up entirely, summoning five magic circles to cover all angles on her front.
The Empress on her throne appeared bored, swirling the unknown liquid in her glass again, causing rage to boil up in Minerva.
Just as she heard a crack from one of her barriers and braced herself for impact a blur came shooting in from the side and made contact with the Empress.
It was Sarina, bear paw raised and punching the Shadow in the face. Her delicate-looking body flew out of her throne, looking shattered before it even hit the steel pipes, rupturing them and spilling more incendiary fluids into the surrounding blaze. With the caster gone the magical barrage came to an end.
***
“Were you planning on fighting her alone?!” Rei shouted as she came up next to Minerva, pulling the bolt on her staff to load another magic cartridge.
“It wasn’t on purpose!” Minerva responded in a flustered tone.
“But if things look bad, promise me to get behind me!”
She pointed her cane at the orb and blasted bodies off it with magic beams.
“As the adult here I couldn’t stand if I endangered you kids.”
Rei shook her head and took shots of her own at the bodies covering the core.
“Is Haruna in that sphere at the center?”
“She is. Get those bodies off it so I can extract her!”
At that moment they heard Sarina yelp. She was being launched away from the spherical structure and kept going, crashing all the way into the nearby expressway and making its two-level construction collapse.
“What the- “
Minerva looked back to the sphere as she heard Rei’s exclamation – The growth of bodies had accelerated beyond anything they could blow away, looking like a cancerous growth expanding further and further from its point of origin. What had launched Sarina was an arm, formed out of individual women’s bodies. Another sprouted on the opposite side. Legs formed, then the limbs were pushed away as a woman’s torso materialized. As the head came into being they were greeted by a much larger version of the Empress who regarded them with cold fury – the first time Minerva had seen emotion on a Shadow at all.
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“Go and look for Sarina! I’ll keep it occupied!”
Minerva shouted before dashing away from Rei, shooting a fireball in the direction of the Empresses’ head. Multiple bodies fell off and it looked terribly scarred for a moment. As the cohesive form of the Empress was disturbed, the bodies forming her torso moved, climbing up to fill the hole in her head while more bodies left the core.
“Seriously, how in the world is she generating all that magic?”
Rei was using the moment to fly towards the collapsed expressway as the Empresses’ gaze was fully fixed on Minerva.
“We’re alone now. Come get me!”
She knew the location of the core. She could unleash now. Or so she thought – the giant Empress, about a house tall, flew towards her at a speed comparable to Sarina’s flying punches. With an uppercut it launched Minerva up into the sky and watched her ascend.
“Wait, why is it not following us?”
The Shadow Empress simply watched, floating where she had hit Minerva. She raised a hand, holding her middle finger and thumb together and simply snapped – the Empress and the fire at the refinery vanished, the night lights became as vibrant as they should, and an infernal noise approached from Minerva’s back that she identified too late as the roaring of plane turbines.
***
She turned around just in time to make eye contact with a terrified pilot whose plane had lifted off from Haneda airport – then she crashed into the windshield and rolled along the top of the plane. She heard a crack from the acrylic, and she was very certain that the fuselage was now horribly dented, maybe even torn open – the plane would need to turn back for an emergency landing and report the most bizarre occurrence of ‘bird strike’.
Minerva kept rolling along the top of the plane, groaning in pain before she used her spinning momentum to jump up, landing on her feet to run along the plane’s length and jump off its tail.
“That HURT! What in the world just happened?”
Minerva looked around but couldn’t see the Empress or the two girls. She could feel a warm trickle run down her temple from her scalp where she had just hit a plane head-on.
“It used its control over its domain to banish us in just the right moment to hit that plane. Go back in but be careful!”
“Damn it all… Reality Shift!”
As she entered the Shadow’s domain, she could see the Empress standing near the collapsed expressway, her hand clenched around Rei while Sarina was lying sprawled in the rubble.
Rei was letting out a strained scream.
Minerva had never flown so fast in her life. She unsheathed her cane sword and cut straight through the Empresses’ forearm, making it fall to the ground, and releasing Rei in the process.
“Is Sarina okay?” Minerva shouted as she kept slashing at the ever-regenerating Empress.
“She should be back on her feet after I slap her once or twice.” Rei replied, coughing as she filled her previously squeezed lungs with air again. She floated over to Sarina’s position, slapped her exactly twice across her cheeks and lifted her over her shoulder as the girl groggily woke up.
“I propose a retreat, ma’am.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
image [https://i.imgur.com/CdWLhkc.png]
They flew with the Empress in hot pursuit. Sarina let out a groan as she woke up entirely, her eyes resting on the creature chasing them.
“Uhm… what happened? Why is it so big?”
“It grew as it punched you away.” Was the short answer Rei gave her.
The muted colors of the city lights passed beneath them as they went north, with Minerva lagging a little behind, flying backwards while facing the Empress as she conjured multiple fireballs that hovered in an arc above her head before she fired them off in sequence. The creature’s head exploded just as it was about to go in for a bite, leaving nothing but the stump of her head behind.
The women forming her body however wasted no time to crawl upwards and reshape the head.
“How are we supposed to keep it immobile?” Sarina shouted as she watched the unreal regeneration abilities of their opponent.
“I may have an idea.” Minerva said with exasperation. She looked her companions over. This might be their only shot, considering that these two were operating on limited magical energy, unlike her.
“How good are you at creating magic barriers, Rei?”
***
They arrived at their destination: Shibuya. Buildings at least four stories tall were forming tight canyons, some of them only a single car lane wide. An ideal space to lure an oversized enemy with a ‘fluid’ body into.
The Magical Girls were splitting up, with Minerva being the bait.
“Come here, you ugly piece of work!”
Minerva shouted, shooting multiple beams into the giantesses’ body. Multiple bodies fell to the ground again, but the damage was negligible.
Right afterwards Minerva slipped into one of the single-lane streets between the tall buildings.
The Empress tried to follow her, knocking cement and glass off house corners – but the deeper it wedged itself into the road, the slower it became.
In this moment it simply dissolved its human form, becoming an undefined mass of bodies that came Minerva’s way like a flood.
The Magical Girl stood her ground, blasting approaching waves with fireballs, pinning those crawling on the ground with icicles or even unleashing a chain lightning into the tightly packed crowd, roasting a large number of them at once.
It still didn’t match the unusual regeneration – no matter how many of them Minerva disposed of, there were always more bodies crawling her way, inching closer and closer.
“Are you ready yet?”
She shouted into the street, hoping the two girls heard her. The women’s shadows approached her, clawing for her. Those that reached her ripped parts of her dress and left scratch marks on her exposed skin as she steadily tried to dodge backwards and blasted them away with more magic.
“Ready!” She finally heard from above. Rei was floating in the air above the alley, her staff pointed at the center of the giant mass of bodies where she suspected the core.
Sarina appeared at the entrance to the alley and readied her fist, speeding ahead – at first it looked like she was about to aim for the monster, but instead she hit one of the buildings head- on. She didn’t stop there, propelling herself off the building in an angle to hit the one on the opposite side of the street and repeated the motion again and again and again.
She was like a human pinball, smashing the supporting structures of all the buildings surrounding the Shadow Empress.
The bodies clawing at Minerva stopped and turned as loud cracking sounds filled the street, then they hurried, climbing on top of the core to defend it as buildings on both sides of the street collapsed. Shadow bodies were simply squished into nothing but the sickening fluid that fills their victims’ lungs, barely preventing the rubble from crushing the core. Minerva and Sarina stepped closer to the buried Shadow Empress, blasting away the rubble on either side to reveal parts of the core underneath. Rei followed every reveal with an immediate cast of a magic barrier as close to the core as possible.
Hands appeared out of it and scratched against their magic cage, unable to advance any further.
“Good! Now get the whole thing out so I can extract her!”
Minerva blasted away more rubble in coordination with Sarina, revealing more of the core’s smooth surface while Rei kept them sealed.
Finally, they lifted the sphere out of the rubble and Minerva prepared the extraction.
“This will take a while. She’s pretty deep in there.”
She concentrated her magic, just as the wizard from 16 years ago taught her.
She felt the body slowly floating towards the core’s surface – safely and unharmed.
Then the alleyway exploded.
***
Minerva’s ears were ringing as she forced herself to stand up, entirely disoriented.
What happened?
“That’s what I want to know!”
The Shadow Empresses’ core floated in front of her, covered in bodies like it was during her first encounter. There was no throne this time, instead one of the bodies stood on top. It changed right before Minerva’s eyes, growing its royal clothes out of its body as it looked at the Magical Girl with clear disdain in her eyes.
You’ve got to be kidding me, each of these bodies can be her?
“She must have blasted her way out when we enclosed the sphere in barriers.”
Wait. The girls!
Minerva looked around in a panic, spotting the two members of the Kuma group. They were lying on the ground in their normal outfits – their effort to seal the Empress had drained their last reserves of magical energy.
Guess we’ll have to do this on our own now. Though I have no idea how.
“Let’s lure her away from the kids, first!”
She cursed her current situation with the appropriate number of expletives in her mind as she pointed her cane at the Empress, blasting a fireball at her to hit her and a number of bodies around the core.
The Shadow vanished in the fireball and bodies fell to the ground where they simply turned into nothing more than smoke.
The first new body that crawled out of the core in response donned the guise of Empress and pointed at Minerva – multiple arcane circles appeared in the air around her and Minerva soon had to dodge a literal hail of icicles that smashed into still standing houses, digging deep into walls or obliterating windows outright.
Minerva ascended, her body spinning around its axis and course correcting from side to side in an irregular pattern.
“Is it working?”
The Empress started to move, her face looking quite annoyed now. The sphere lifted off and hovered in the sky above Shibuya.
What now, though?
The two enemies didn’t hold back – Minerva flung fireballs, lightning and icicles at the creature and got the same in return. Magic beams cut through the landscape and buildings below from near misses.
Minerva got more and more banged up from glancing shots hitting her while dodging or when her magical shields broke under the creature’s barrage.
Meanwhile, the Empress didn’t seem to be suffering any wear it couldn’t regenerate.
I’d be fine with this… if only the girls weren’t trapped in here. I can’t take them out of here with Reality Shift.
“Seika. I came up with something. But you won’t like it.” The voice of the crystal’s tone was almost guilty sounding.
“If it guarantees the safety of the girls, I’m all ears.”
image [https://i.imgur.com/CdWLhkc.png]
“No. No way!”
Minerva kept dodging the onslaught of arrowhead shaped rocks, spear-shaped ice and the hail of fireballs, temporarily hiding away in one of the buildings to break the Empresses’ line of sight.
“It’s the only way! I’ve been analyzing this entire time how it came to have this abnormal growth in magic.”
“And what did you come up with that you need me to shoot a child?”
She looked out the window and saw the ever-brighter glow of fireballs approaching at a rapid pace. It was all she could do to escape the building by jumping out of a window on the opposite side before the explosion propelled her away, right through another window.
At least the glass shards were unable to penetrate her magically enhanced skin and clothing.
“Kuma’s girls only generate magic energy when they are experiencing happy emotions, yes? If her experience inside that sphere was anything like yours, she’d have run dry the moment she was swallowed.
“Considering this fact I believe the Shadow is currently feeding her happy illusions. No pain. No feeling of suffocation. She’s locked away in her ‘happy place’.”
“And you want me to hurt her to snap her out of it?”
“As much as it pains me to say it: yes. Listen, if you are conflicted about it, you can give me full control and I’ll deal with it. The responsibility will lie with me.”
Fireballs impacted somewhere near the house. Minerva leaned against the wall with her eyes closed. For a moment the sounds of the Empresses’ magic attacks decimating more of the neighborhood was all one could hear in the room.
“Fine. I’ll do it.”
***
Minerva dashed from her hiding place, shooting a single fireball in the Empresses’ direction while luring her even further away from Sarina and Rei’s unconscious bodies.
Dodging the immediate retaliation she ascended far into the sky, forcing the Empress to abandon her barrage to accelerate and catch up.
Finally, she turned around and pointed her cane at the creature – aiming not for the Empress on top, but for the core itself. She desperately recalled the shape of the trapped girl as she had felt it before as she prepared a magic beam, narrowing it as much as possible. The narrowest she could manage was the size of a 5-yen coin. At this concentration it would be easy to pierce through the orb’s dense defenses and the girl inside.
Her breath came ragged, and her arm started shaking as all the worst-case scenarios went through her head.
What if I hit a major blood vessel?
What if I hit a vital organ?
What if I hit her spine?
What if, What if, What if…
“I’m so sorry.” She whispered, getting the shaking of her arm under control, and then…
image [https://i.imgur.com/CdWLhkc.png]
The sky above them cracked like a pane of glass. Large fissures ran across the muted field of stars, diffracting the light. Both Minerva and the Empress stopped in their tracks, staring at the cracks expanding like a spiderweb.
Then a fist broke through, a sickly grey fist the size of a truck, consisting only of three fingers with suction cups for tips. Another hand followed and together they tore apart the boundary of the pocket dimension, allowing Kuma to enter.
“Where the hell have you been?!”
Minerva was the first to speak up, causing Kuma’s head to turn her way – its featureless face full of jagged teeth did not betray any kind of emotion as it answered, as usual.
“My avatar was my anchor to this world. After its destruction, locating and opening the boundary to this world proved… more difficult than anticipated.”
A hiss came from the Empress and all the bodies on her spherical core stood up, joining in the hissing as they all faced Kuma, who had become the most unsettling sight in this pocket dimension.
“More important than that, Sarina and Rei are back there! You should get them!”
“They are resting in my domain already.”
Minerva let out a sigh of relief.
“Then we can withdraw and plan something new to get Haruna out of- “
“No.”
Minerva blinked in disbelief at the flat refusal.
The giant grey humanoid turned its head her way and for the first time since she knew him that horrifying visage full of jagged teeth looked like it was genuinely grinning.
“I have a plan.”
***
It was essentially a repeat of Minerva’s own plan, with a twist.
She flew out and blasted the bodies off the spherical body, with Kuma following in pursuit, casting barriers on the revealed surface area of the Empresses’ core.
Naturally, using magic started to shrink his physical form, so they had to be swift with their execution.
Minerva once more channeled a magical beam at the tip of her cane, making it as wide as possible before she hit the Shadow Empress – at this configuration the beam didn’t do as much direct damage, but that was not what she was after – instead she needed the force to push back her enemy’s entire body.
The Empress shrieked as she was launched towards the cityscape below, crashing into a roof. Kuma was quick to follow and landed right beside her. As he attempted to grab the orb the Empress changed modes and grabbed him by the wrists with arms that sprouted from the midnight-colored sphere. Her head formed and the rest of her body followed as her and Kuma came to a standstill in a physical power struggle. He managed to push her back little by little, but his form still shrunk subtly as he exerted his energies.
Relief came as Minerva blasted through the creature’s arms with another magic beam, allowing Kuma to bring his hands together around the Empresses’ head and crush it. Before she could regrow any more limbs, he grabbed the orb and bathed it in flames, eradicating any bodies sprouting from its surface without harming the occupant inside. Finally, he created barriers all around it and played his trump card.
No more bodies left the core – the pocket dimension collapsed around them, returning destroyed buildings to their pristine state as colors and the sound of the busy streets returned.
Kuma spent energy by creating barriers around the core, and restored it by draining the Shadow of magic through his touch. He retained his size.
“I’ve got her pinned. Come now and get Haruna out!”