Magical Girls Exposed!
Author: Qian Huan
Synopsis:
For a full twenty-three years after transmigrating into this world, Fang Ming had lived a peaceful life.
Until a peculiar screen appeared in the sky.
Every week, the screen would play a tokusatsu series called Magical Girl Xiao Qiu, revealing the existence of magical girls to the world.
But when the screen appeared in the sky and began showing the story of the magical girls, Fang Ming was already planning to pack his bags and run.
Why?
Because he was a magical girl.
Volume 1: Magic Autumn, season 1
Chapter 1: Is it still time to run?
(A quick heads-up: all major characters in this story are eighteen or older.)
A screen floated in the sky, playing a video.
It looked as though it hung from the heavens, displaying crystal-clear images that anyone could see.
Was this some sort of advanced technology? Or a peculiar natural phenomenon?
The answer was neither.
It was a supernatural phenomenon no one could explain, one that clearly bore signs of deliberate creation.
The screen had appeared a month ago. A month ago, white screens like this had appeared in skies across the world, visible to anyone who looked up.
Normally, it had no effect on reality, like a layer embedded in the sky with an incorrectly applied texture.
It did not affect the light or temperature, nor did it stop people from enjoying the night sky.
It served only one purpose: every few days... every seven days, to be precise, it would play an episode.
And what it played... was a tokusatsu series.
A tokusatsu series about magical girls.
Most importantly, the contents of that series were connected to the real world.
Yes, within the first week of the screen showing its videos, the existence of magical girls had been confirmed.
The World Government had found these magical girls and offered them exceptionally generous terms, successfully recruiting them as government employees.
Their task was simple, too. Just like on the screen, they were to eliminate "nightmares," which ordinary people could neither understand nor see.
That was the magical girls' only job.
By now, the screen in the sky had shown three episodes of the tokusatsu series, and all three members of the main trio had assembled over those episodes.
The three magical girls in the real world had also been found.
They all came from the same district and city.
Now, the fourth episode was about to play in the sky. The story of Magical Girl Xiao Qiu was about to begin.
And beneath that sky, Fang Ming, an unremarkable freelance worker, was considering whether to make a run for it.
Because, barring any surprises, this fourth episode should involve him.
(Yes! Episode four is out!)
(It's starting, it's starting! Front-row seats!)
(The main trio's all here now. Time to advance the main plot and fight the boss, right?)
The moment the screen began playing, all sorts of scrolling comments drifted across it.
Yes, scrolling comments.
These had appeared along with the videos. They were absent most of the time, but whenever the screen began playing a video, they would appear with it.
And these comments did not come from somewhere beyond this world. They came from this world itself.
Everyone's thoughts, even a remark they happened to blurt out, would be projected onto the screen as long as they wanted it to appear as a scrolling comment.
But not every comment could make it onto the screen.
After a month of observation, people had worked out the following rules.
First, comments containing excessively aggressive language or profanity would not appear.
Second, comments clearly intended to start arguments and provoke conflict between opposing sides would not appear.
Then there were comments deliberately nitpicking or finding fault in ways that spoiled the viewing experience. Those would not appear either.
Comments that cursed at, insulted, or snidely mocked characters in the video would likewise not appear.
In short, no negative comment could ever appear on the screen, no matter how hard you thought it or how loudly you shouted it in real life.
This made watching the series overhead a very pleasant experience. So far, there had not been a single negative comment.
Although plenty of people were unhappy about this and had set up online forums specifically to post negative remarks, none of that affected the screening overhead.
After all, whether you loved it or hated it, it was right there. All you had to do was look up.
The comments drifted past, followed immediately by the opening animation.
(Opening right out of the gate! The protagonist's in danger!)
(Uh-oh, straight into the opening. Something big's happening this episode!)
As the opening began, the number of comments visibly increased.
That was mainly because none of the first three episodes had started directly with the opening. Each had a lead-in that bridged the episodes, recapping earlier events and easing viewers back into the story.
With that lead-in missing now, people naturally found it strange.
Standing among the crowd, Fang Ming watched the comments drift overhead and grew even more silent.
Then he looked back at the opening. When a girl dressed primarily in black and carrying a scythe appeared in its final empty shot, his heart, which had been hanging in suspense, gave up entirely.
The opening of Magical Girl Xiao Qiu had a rather distinctive feature.
At least, that was how Fang Ming saw it.
In the first episode, only the protagonist, Yu Muqiu, appeared in the opening's shots of the main cast. In the second sequence, the spots where the second and third characters should have appeared were empty, showing only flashes of scenery.
Later, when the music reached the chorus, Yu Muqiu was still the only one visible.
Only after the second female lead appeared at the end of episode one did a new figure appear in the second sequence of episode two's opening.
Because of this, people speculated that the three remaining empty shots represented the other three members of the main cast.
With the central trio now assembled, everyone was curious about what kind of character would appear in the fourth empty shot.
And now, that character really had appeared.
The shot had originally shown nothing but an empty high-rise standing in the night. Now, a figure had appeared.
Beneath the full moon, atop the high-rise, stood a silver-haired, red-eyed girl.
He stood at the edge of the rooftop, holding a long scythe with a chain wound around its end, gazing into the distance with eyes so cold they seemed devoid of emotion.
He was beautiful. All the magical girls who had appeared overhead were beautiful, really, but he had an air completely unlike that of the other three girls.
More mature, colder, and... much less like one of the good guys.
When he appeared, the comments exploded again.
(So... so badass!)
(So... so cool!)
(Step on me, queen!!!)
(I can't, I just can't! I hereby declare the new character my favorite from today onward. Forget Xiao Qiu, Xiao Xia, and Xiao Chun. None of them are my type!)
(...You up there, you don't even know the new character's name yet!)
Watching what those comments were saying, Fang Ming fell even further into silence below.
He was speechless. He was miserable. He was fuming.
If he could, Fang Ming would have loved to track down those commenters through their internet connections and kill them one by one!
Why was Fang Ming so worked up?
Could the newly introduced female character overhead be his younger sister?
No. In this life, Fang Ming was all alone, with no parents or relatives-the standard orphan start for a transmigrator. He certainly had no siblings or other immediate blood relatives.
There was only one real reason Fang Ming was miserable and fuming.
That newly introduced magical girl up there was him!!
It was him!!!
He was the fourth magical girl! The one who kept trying to persuade those girls to stop fighting early in the story, looking for all the world like a villain-a magical! Girl!!
He watched the opening finish and the episode proper begin.
Fang Ming hesitated, pondering whether he should run right now.
If I run now... there should still be time, right?
Chapter 2: Oh crap! Too late to run!
First, a brief introduction.
Fang Ming, a transmigrator, twenty-three years old, currently living as a shut-in in Rock City, in the World Federation's Central Continent District.
Sex-male!
As a transmigrator, Fang Ming's first twenty-two years had actually been entirely unremarkable.
Although he did have a little cheat... a progress bar that let him see his learning progress directly and never went backward.
Still, Fang Ming considered himself an ordinary person, with absolutely nothing to do with magical girls.
But an accident three months ago had inadvertently dragged Fang Ming into this world's supernatural side.
Put simply, a magical girl had been fighting a demon formed from a nightmare, and he had gotten caught up in it. With his life hanging in the balance, he had touched a nightmare fragment. His cheat then absorbed that fragment, giving Fang Ming a new ability.
-Magical Girl Transformation!
So why wasn't it a Kamen Rider transformation??
That was what Fang Ming had most wanted to complain about at the time. He was a man. Wasn't becoming a magical girl a bit of a mismatch?
But now that he had this ability, Fang Ming was not the sort to leave a power unused.
Besides, he only became fully female after transforming. His big boy was still there normally, so there was no need to worry too much. At worst, he could simply transform for fights and stay as he was the rest of the time.
And even without transforming, Fang Ming could use his magical girl powers. They were just weakened to the extreme, making them useless in combat.
At first, even after gaining the ability to transform into a magical girl, Fang Ming's life had not changed all that much.
He usually wrote and published his work as normal, occasionally went out to unwind, and helped those magical girls fight when necessary, while trying in his own way to persuade those brats to go back to school instead of doing such dangerous work.
Life seemed uneventful.
Until the Sky Screen appeared overhead a month ago, shattering Fang Ming's peaceful routine.
The Sky Screen appeared without any warning, as though it had always been there.
The appearance of the screen in the sky caused worldwide panic. That fear reached its peak when it began playing "videos."
Then... once people discovered that the screen in the sky did nothing besides play videos, their fear and anxiety gradually faded.
People began focusing their attention on the videos.
They began discussing whether this was some new entertainment device created by the Federal Government, or perhaps something for publicity-a tool the Federal Government used to broadcast some sort of "news."
Only when the screen began showing the magical girl tokusatsu series Magical Girl Xiao Qiu did the public realize that this probably was not the Federal Government's creation.
The Federal Government was not so considerate that it would go out of its way to create a screen covering almost the entire planet just to show an ordinary tokusatsu series.
Especially once the magical girls in the series turned out to have real counterparts in the world.
Before you continue