Commute, Tram, Magical Girl

At dawn, he woke up alone in a double bed.

Lin Yun instinctively reached for the pillow beside him, but found nothing but emptiness.

It was always like this.

He always imagined that everything was just a dream, that the person beside him was still there.

He stared blankly at the ceiling, took a moment to steady himself, then sat up.

She was gone. A new day began as usual.

Washing up, shaving, getting dressed, tidying his appearance—none of it ever changed.

When he stepped out of his room and looked next door, a note reading "Knock first" was still posted on the door to his daughter's room. That, too, never changed.

He took a prepared instant breakfast from the refrigerator, heated it up, and wolfed it down. He left another portion for his daughter, who was probably still asleep, then silently left the house.

Fangting City's morning rush hour was especially outrageous. Driving was practically impossible, so Lin Yun rarely drove to work and preferred squeezing onto the packed trams instead.

They were crowded, but fast, and guaranteed he would reach the office on time.

At the station closest to his house, he waited about three minutes for a tram. Pushed along by the crowd, Lin Yun squeezed into the carriage and found an empty hand strap near the window, clutching it like a flotation board amid raging wind and waves.

Lowering his head, he opened his phone and looked at the supervisor who had been assigning tasks all over the company group chat so early in the morning. He could not help but sigh.

Bored out of his mind, he searched through the group chat's idle chatter for useful information while thinking about how to deal with the tedious work awaiting him today. The more he thought about it, the more disheartened he became. In the end, he simply turned off his phone, cleared his mind, and enjoyed the rare peace afforded by the crowded tram.

Before long, a scream suddenly rang out inside the carriage.

Following that first scream, cries of alarm rose one after another around him.

He followed the sound toward the crowd, then followed the crowd's gazes outside. His eyes swept about before quickly finding the source, and he understood why everyone was crying out.

—On a distant high-rise, a gigantic monster resembling a lump of flesh hung there, flailing its limbs and looking utterly terrifying.

An Aberrant Beast. That was what people called it.

They often appeared suddenly in human cities, indiscriminately destroying and slaughtering without purpose. No one yet knew how they came to be, and they posed a major threat to public safety.

Physical attacks could not harm them. Even the most powerful conventional weapons could not strike them effectively, which made them a tremendous headache.

Still, Aberrant Beast attacks had not been frequent in Fangting City in recent years.

As time passed, knowledge that should have been common sense had become something vague and distant. In their peaceful lives, people had gradually grown accustomed to days without sudden Aberrant Beast attacks.

No wonder they were so panicked by this sudden incident.

The commotion of negative emotions did not last long before it was forcibly cut short.

A pale blue rainbow streaked across the sky and struck the Aberrant Beast between the buildings.

As if responding to the rainbow's provocation, the spherical monster opened its horrifying maw and let out an earth-shaking roar.

Then, as the tram moved farther and farther away, no one could see what happened next.

Some people in the carriage were still shaken, some cursed nonstop, and some cheered excitedly.

Because they all recognized that blue rainbow—it could be nothing else. Without a doubt, it was a Magical Girl.

The appearance of Magical Girls seemed as though it had been meant from the start to keep Aberrant Beasts in check.

No one could verify who had first called them "Magical Girls," nor did anyone know whether the term had formed naturally or come from those common children's cartoons. In any case, Magical Girls had become synonymous with "cleaning up Aberrant Beasts."

Some regarded them as a conspiracy or a scam, while others saw them as modern heroes. But there was no denying that people cared about the existence of Magical Girls. They could not ignore them.

Lin Yun was the same.

"A color I've never seen before. A new Magical Girl... So they still appear."

There was no particular emotion in his words—one could even say there was none at all. Only his tightly furrowed brow revealed that he was not calm.

He knew this day would come sooner or later.

But Aberrant Beasts and Magical Girls were, in the end, matters far removed from ordinary people's lives. As long as one was not accidentally dragged into them, the two would remain parallel lines that never crossed.

He had no reason to keep concerning himself with such matters now.

The tram continued rumbling onward.

Following the flow of people out of the station, he reached the office building where his company was located amid the streams of traffic, and Lin Yun began his day's work.

The company he worked for was an elevator company called Ascend. It mainly manufactured and sold various commercial elevators, and he was the manager of the after-sales department.

As a result, he could not avoid endless wrangling with clients. Whenever something went wrong with even a slightly larger order, it always found its way back to him eventually. The countless trivial matters were enough to make anyone's scalp tingle.

He diligently finished the report meeting, patiently handled business communications, forced himself to complete the task handovers, and drowsily finished filing documents.

Near seven in the evening, Lin Yun politely declined an invitation to dinner. He walked out of the company, faced the darkened sky, and silently set off for home.

Dim yellow streetlights spilled across the road but failed to illuminate his face. Walking through the shadows cast by skyscrapers, Lin Yun wore a lost expression.

He had always felt that life had been rather stifling lately.

His seemingly fixed position at the company was gradually becoming tiresome.

His long-unchanged relationships made his perspective and understanding narrower and narrower.

His family relationships were nearing freezing point, and he did not know how to communicate with his child.

And though he was still in his prime, his body had become increasingly sluggish and prone to minor ailments. His shoulders and the back of his neck ached unbearably.

Thinking further, the turning point for everything seemed to have been that funeral in the rain. When he had stood helplessly before that rain-soaked gravestone, with his daughter's muffled sobs in his ears, all the happiness he had once believed in had seemed to wash away in the rain, leaving behind only suffocating oppression. Since his wife's death, his life had seemed to contain no such thing as happiness.

A car horn blared abruptly from the road, pulling Lin Yun from his inner world back to reality.

Had he been too immersed in the past?

There were too many things he cared about and too many problems that had appeared. He could not find the reason for any of them.

As he slowly walked toward the station, a phone call suddenly interrupted his thoughts.

He picked up his phone and glanced at the name displayed for the incoming call. Lin Yun hesitated for a moment, but ultimately moved his finger to the answer button.

When he answered, a clear ringtone sounded, followed by a woman's voice from the other end of the call:

"Are you off work yet? Want to grab dinner together tonight?"