"Are you okay? Your Soul Gem still gets corrupted, you know—don't push yourself so hard." Sayaka extended a hand to Homura.
Getting concern from her of all people was a rare luxury.
Homura didn't refuse the kindness and took her hand. "We have to take down Walpurgisnacht this time."
"This time?" Sayaka didn't quite follow.
"It's nothing." Homura shook her head and took a deep breath.
The arsenal she'd prepared in advance—enough firepower to flip half of Mitakihara—still hadn't been able to halt this thing.
"I keep feeling like our attacks just aren't landing right," Sayaka said, wiping the layer of dust from her cheek. "Sometimes it feels like our punches just sink right into it. Miserable."
Yes—Homura had noticed long ago. The opponent she'd been unable to defeat across countless loops. The Witch that symbolized helplessness and the Fool.
But while it wasn't dramatic, the others' attacks genuinely were having some effect. Perhaps the difference was that she was the only one using stolen and modified conventional weapons.
"Hey, if you all know about it, it must have appeared before, right? How did the Magical Girls back then deal with this thing?!"
"Even if you ask me that..."
"Homura."
"!"
That voice—the one Homura least wanted to hear right now.
"Madoka? What are you doing here?!"
"Don't shout like that—you look like you're suffering." Madoka gazed at her with heartache, then shifted her eyes to Walpurgisnacht, currently being held at bay by Kyoko and Mami. "Is that Kyubey's true form?"
"?"
She might have gotten the wrong idea about something.
"Oh, so that's Kyubey? I knew that suspicious creature was up to no good!" Sayaka, knowing nothing of the truth, stared at Walpurgisnacht suspiciously.
"Now that you mention it, they do look kind of alike."
Kyubey had two cat-like ears; Walpurgisnacht had a hairstyle resembling two horns. Totally reasonable comparison.
"We're almost winning." Homura rose to her feet, her voice slightly cold. "There's no need for you to join in."
"Liar."
Madoka watched Kyoko and Mami.
It was a bit embarrassing to admit, but those two were genuinely mediocre at fighting Witches—yet never pulled their punches when it came to fighting each other. Against ordinary Witches the weakness wasn't obvious, but against Walpurgisnacht it stood out painfully.
Madoka gently rubbed Homura's head. "I'm sorry, Homura. I'm going to become a Magical Girl."
"No!" Homura seized both her hands, watching the outcome begin to mirror every previous iteration. Her tears flowed uncontrollably.
"Do you have any idea what all those loops were for? Only you—only Madoka..."
Unable to understand a word of their exchange, Sayaka stood awkwardly to the side and pointed into the distance. "Well, since you seem fine, I'll go help out over there."
She felt like a third wheel.
"I'm sorry, Homura. I already know everything. Magical Girls all become Witches in the end, right?" Madoka smiled gently. "Sayaka—when you formed your contract, you had to eat a fruit, right?"
"Hold on—Magical Girls becoming Witches, what's that about?!"
Sayaka had barely processed the shock when Madoka grabbed the Lemon and bit into it, skin and all.
"Blech—"
"!"
"Madoka!"
While Homura panicked, the completely lost Sayaka just wanted to pull out her phone and capture Madoka's expression.
Madoka hadn't expected this either. It was supposed to be a Magical Girl contract item—shouldn't it taste sweet? Why was it a genuine, unaltered lemon?
Why? Couldn't Yimi have picked a nicer fruit?!
The sourness brought tears streaming down her face, snot running from her nose, but she didn't dare spit it out. She didn't feel anything happening at all, so she clamped her hand over her mouth, forced it down, and took another bite.
"Uuugh—"
"Madoka!" Homura rushed to support her, desperately wiping her face with her sleeve.
But in that sliver of vulnerability, the oppressive pressure unique to close proximity with Walpurgisnacht materialized behind her. The deepest despair crystallized into something almost tangible, malice seething against the back of the girl's skull.
The instant Madoka appeared, the supposedly brainless creature had sensed a threat and switched targets without hesitation.
"Honestly—having children save the world should stay in anime where it belongs."
An unexpected side kick launched Walpurgisnacht clean out of the district.
Tomohisa walked up to Madoka, patted her shoulder, and gazed into the distance. "That company building—I think it's a competitor of Junko's company. Ah... that's not what I meant by happiness... well, insurance should cover it."
Keeping his whole family happy—a wish so ordinary, so cliché, that you could pull it from practically any children's show birthday episode and nine times out of ten it'd be the same.
The wish was ordinary, but the people it encompassed were not. Under normal karmic logic, he should have been nowhere near capable of realizing it—yet Miracle had responded to him all the same.
In other words, because Yimi herself counted as one of the family members under his protection, he had inadvertently leveraged Yimi's karma to connect with Madoka's.
In terms of raw potential, he probably rated as average at best—maybe not even meeting Kyubey's minimum standards—but the sheer force of his wish had brute-forced his power upward.
"Dad?"
Tomohisa looked down at his daughter. When he saw the tears the sourness had wrung from her face—that expression of a child who'd suffered the world's greatest injustice—he stiffened slightly.
"Madoka..."
He'd nearly forgotten how long it had been since he'd seen that look on her face.
"Did you become a Magical Girl, Dad?" Madoka fought through the sourness in her mouth, forcing a smile—then realized the fact that her father had become a Magical Girl made it impossible to smile, and the lingering sourness added a quiver of tears to her voice.
"A girl... I'm already a middle-aged man. Even if I weren't this age, I still wouldn't qualify as a Magical Girl."
Tomohisa drew his Soul Gem, clenched his fist slightly, and fixed a serious gaze on the returning Walpurgisnacht. "Is that the ugly thing that made my daughter cry? I don't fully understand what's going on, but I'm a little angry."
The name "Magical Girl" existed only because the label made it easier to lure suitable human girls for incubation. The costume and weapons actually manifested according to the contractor's own consciousness—there was nothing stopping a male contractor from being armed to the teeth if that's what his heart conjured.
A belt coiled around his waist.
This had been a boyhood dream, hadn't it? A knockoff version, sure, but since the costume manifested from his heart, it meant that dream was still alive in there, right?
He was long past the age for hot-blooded heroics. But a father's fury at the monster that made his little girl cry? That still burned just fine.
Mimicking the form he'd idolized in his youth, he drew a card from his side holster and pressed it into the belt buckle, snapping it shut. Having rehearsed this alone countless times as a kid, he didn't fumble now.
『KAMENRIDE』
『DECADE』
His wish was protection, and the weapon his wish produced was the transformation device itself—a faithful knockoff, even though its original owner bore the epithet Destroyer of Worlds.
Sayaka's jaw dropped. "It's pink—and he says he's not a Magical Girl!"