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Chapter 12 : It Was Just Sad
Woo-jin’s bad feeling was right again.
The shadows that had been melting away like slime suddenly reacted.
Wuuuuung—
The whole rooftop shook like an earthquake had hit. The shadows rushed toward the rooftop door, drawn as if sucked through a drain.
This is bad.
Ёń um а̄ . і́ d̆
Every instinct in him flashed red.
“I think we’ve got a problem,” he said.
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Thanks to Woo-jin’s play, the hunt for Void itself had ended in success. But maybe it was the limit of human strength—because he hadn’t completely crushed the core, Void started to rampage. From here on out, it was all improv.
“First, we need to get out of here.”
Heavy thuds came from the rooftop entrance. Startled by their host’s death, the Residue were forcing their way up, ignoring even the light.
“Yeah. Let’s go,” Unibel said, holding out her hand.
Ӗ.ṅǔm̊ å
With the door blocked, the only exit was the field. She grabbed Woo-jin and levitated, just like before—
—and then they dropped back to the roof.
“...!”
Unibel gathered her strength again. They floated for a heartbeat, then her feet touched down.
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“...Huh?”
“Guess we’re hitting the limit,” Woo-jin said with a wry smile.
Ŵ еb̀n о̄ v él Е̇n um̊ а
It was inevitable. A forty-kilo girl carrying a seventy-kilo adult man—one hundred and ten kilos total—and flying at full blast. Of course she’d be spent.
“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
Seeing her face fall, he ruffled her hair to tell her he meant it. Unibel had done great. She’d fought the Harvester and Void—enemies she’d been helpless against in the original—and more than held her own. She’d definitely grown past the Unibel from before.
“I-I’m sorry.”
“Really, it’s fine. Don’t beat yourself up. We still have options.”
He wasn’t just saying that to soothe her. The tidal red surges had already stopped after the core was damaged. If you looked closely, the shadows were thinning, fading like fog. The destruction wasn’t complete, so some shadow lingered, but the regeneration was gone. Shadows that didn’t regenerate weren’t scary.
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“They’re coming.”
Right on cue, the rooftop door splintered and shadows spilled out. With the core dead, they were paler than before, moving slower.
Grrk.
Residue were mixed in too, but even they couldn’t hold a proper shape—halfway between slime and human.
“I’ll help!”
Seeing Woo-jin stomp and shove the shadows back, Unibel jumped in. She couldn’t use magic, but she swung her staff with all she had. Without regeneration and with the rooftop entrance bottlenecking them, the cleanup wasn’t that hard.
Ӗn̈ ũmа.
Just when it felt manageable, the air changed.
Thunk!
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The iron door gave a heavy, ugly sound.
“Grrrrrk!”
At the same time, the tide of shadows abruptly stopped. Unibel and Woo-jin went rigid.
No way.
W̃е̌ b́ñ о̇v́е̃ ľ Е̂ñu m а̂
Thud, thud!
The shaking iron door screeched, then snapped clean off its hinges and crashed down.
“We really didn’t need this cliché,” Woo-jin muttered.
What emerged was a massive shadow, a grotesque lump as if every shadow below had been mashed together.
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“What… is that?”
If that were all, Unibel wouldn’t have been so horrified. But on the slick, sludge-like surface, hundreds of human faces bulged. Agony twisted across every one, like the victims monsters had devoured. A doomsday kind of disgust squeezed Unibel from head to toe.
Ӗ n̆.um ǎ .îd̆
That thing wasn’t Void. It wasn’t like any monster she’d seen. Her survival instinct screamed to bite her tongue and die here. Her brain decided that if it caught her, what came next would be worse than death.
“...W-we have to run! That thing—!”
Unibel grabbed Woo-jin’s arm. When she’d first entered the school and met Void’s shadow, she hadn’t retreated. She’d sworn never to run. But now she was in a full panic, desperate to get away.
“Easy. That’s just a Residue. It only looks scary.”
“...Residue?”
“Think of it as a nightmare dragged out of someone’s memory and made real. When we went inside that monster’s shadow earlier, a bunch of stuff got mixed together.”
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Woo-jin stared at the thing in silence.
There was exactly one monster in the magical-girl world that looked like that.
Earth-Heaven–class, mind-corrosion type: Pandora Requiem. Obviously not the original—just a replica built from his memory. Its power wasn’t even close to the real thing. Honestly, even a replica was probably beyond Void’s pay grade.
“Grrk?”
With a warped cry, the replica’s shape collapsed. A last spasm, maybe. The shadows lightened, then thinned into mist and vanished.
“Let’s head back,” he said.
Е̃n̈ u mа̃ .і d
“...Okay.”
Maybe it was the whiplash of seeing something beyond a monster for the first time—Unibel’s face had gone white.
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...Didn’t mean to show her something that awful, Woo-jin thought, grimacing as he glanced at the fading remains. It was an enemy they’d have to face someday, but this was too soon. Unibel still needed to grow—a lot—to beat the final foe that treated a Pandora Requiem like trash.
***
“This thing is ridiculously stubborn.”
A thick, blood-red barrier. A girl stood in front of it, grumbling.
Wе́ b̆ n̆о̂ vе̃l_ Е̇n̄ ǔm̈а̊
Another Otherworld Barrier had wrapped a middle school. According to the reaction from her Crystal Tiara, the monster was on the roof. If there was a second barrier inside, then someone was already fighting. Probably the rookie who’d become a magical girl a few weeks ago.
From the black shadows visible even at a distance, tonight’s enemy was likely Void. A notorious rookie killer—nasty if you didn’t know the trick.
“So? Why won’t you let me through?”
Her eyes slid to a small creature floating in midair. A being that could raise a barrier even a veteran magical girl couldn’t break.
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There was only one answer.
—I want to watch. You’d just get in the way.
Е̄n u̇ m.a
“Uh-huh.”
Rania, the magical girl at the barrier, didn’t ask more. Experience had taught her that asking never got a real answer.
“You really like this newbie, huh?”
—Of course. The best talent we’ve seen in centuries.
Moongmoong’s tail swished.
“Kinda Spartan for you. I thought your thing was babying the gifted ones, carrying them every step?” Like before Rania’s own talent had been proven.
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Moongmoong was awfully kind to magical girls—cheering them on, whispering advice at the perfect moments. Until it had measured their talent. If they came up short of its standards, it dropped them without a word and never came back. No point feeding a fish you’d already caught.
Flip that around: if this newbie was the “best talent,” then even from Moongmoong’s perspective, she was someone to guard closely so she didn’t die in some alley.
But Moongmoong had left her side to block Rania here. It had let the rookie face Void—an enemy that should be too much for her—alone.
—Mm. The one I wanted to see today wasn’t Unibel. But it’s fine.
With that, the barrier holding Rania unraveled, and Moongmoong’s form vanished like a lie. No interest in Rania as a person—at all.
...Infuriating.
Е n̄ ŭmа́ .і̃ d̈
“Unibel, was it?”
Blue light flashed from the ring on Rania’s finger as she returned to her normal form. If Moongmoong had stepped aside this easily, everything inside was already over. Odds were good there was no one left at the school now.
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“Did they really kill it?”
Rania had fought Void a few times. You didn’t beat it just by being a bit strong. Unless this newbie was so off the charts the title “rookie” didn’t fit.
Beep-beep-beep.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Manager. Right—she had run off mid-shift.
Ẁ еb n о v е̌ l Е́nu.m̂ä
“I’ll go meet her sometime,” Rania murmured, looking away from the now-fading barrier around the school.
***
What was that, really?
Back home, Ga-yeon’s head was full of it. Void’s core broke, then came the rampage. And in that chaos, she saw something she couldn’t shake: at the very end, the shadows clumped and formed another monster. Hundreds of faces writhing together, just looking at it made her stomach turn. She’d never forget it.
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But that wasn’t what bothered Unibel now.
Right after that, just before the shadows vanished, there was a shape with a face that was too human. According to the teacher, Residue randomly re-created nightmares from memory. This one was a girl in an unfamiliar school uniform, a couple of years older than Ga-yeon. A face not in her memories.
Е̇ ń u m ӑ
Someone the teacher knows?
At first she’d assumed—he was a teacher, maybe a former student. But what the shadow did next threw her. The other shadows attacked Ga-yeon and the teacher, or moved to regroup. That strange girl didn’t. She slipped off her shoes, then stepped off the rooftop.
Woo-jin had been turned away and didn’t see, but Unibel had been watching. She remembered the girl’s face clearly.
She was smiling.
So sad.
“...A nightmare from someone’s memory,” she whispered.
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If it wasn’t Ga-yeon’s, then it was her teacher’s.
“Did something like that… happen to him?”
For some reason, it hurt. A deep, quiet hurt.
—I’m back!
“Ah—yeah. Welcome. Where were you? Seriously.”
—Sorry, I got lost on the way. Wait, why are you crying?
Èn_ū ḿа . ìd
“...I’m crying?”
She looked in the mirror. Tears beaded and rolled down her cheeks.
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Huh? Why…?
Once they started, they wouldn’t stop. Not knowing what was sad, or why she was crying, Ga-yeon wept for a long time.
“I’ve made up my mind,” she said at last.
—Unibel?
Ènu m ӑ
“I’m going to get stronger. Strong enough that never happens again.”
At the end, she’d frozen in fear. She’d called herself a magical girl, but relied on an ordinary teacher.
...She’d done nothing.
That made her angry. And sad. So, so sad.
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