Magical Girl? I Got Scammed Into It! Chapter 23

Xiphias crouched halfway down and gently stroked Ando Meiko's cheek. Even her movements were restrained; she was like a lamb awaiting slaughter, completely unable to escape another's grasp.

[Master, pull yourself together. There must be some way... there must be...]

Her magic wand had already slipped from her grasp. Though she knew Ruby could fly back on her own, she still couldn't think of any viable solution.

Besides, with her current reserves of magic power, even if she could break free of Steel Ball's restraints, the outcome would remain the same once her magic power ran out and her transformation was undone. The gap in strength was simply too great.

Unless... a miracle happened now.

"Xiphias..." Steel Ball suddenly called Xiphias's name in panic.

Xiphias instantly swung her magic wand. "Steel Ball! Anti-magic reinforcement, anti-magic reinforcement, anti-magic reinforcement!"

As she threw herself over Ando Meiko, she also bestowed three defensive anti-magic enhancements upon Steel Ball, allowing him to shield both of them in his arms.

[Master! There's an intense magic power reaction! Be careful!]

Although she took the chance to retrieve Ruby, she didn't dare make any rash moves after hearing Ruby's warning.

A thick beam of light descended from the sky. It engulfed the entire old dojo, and under the beam's illumination, everything around them was shattered with devastating force.

Now she knew why Steel Ball had protected them, but the situation seemed to have become even worse.

"Steel Ball? Steel Ball! Are you all right, Steel Ball?"

"Xiphias... I'm fine..."

"You're hurt?"

Even with three layers of anti-magic defense stacked on him, Steel Ball's armor had still been destroyed by the beam. The exposed skin on his back was charred black, as though it had been burned by fire.

"Damn it... Heal, heal, heal!"

Three more support spells of the same type were cast at once, but even so, the areas where Steel Ball had suffered the magical impact showed no sign of improving.

"The witch Orbital, of God's Staff... I knew it was you, you bastard."

"Your senses are sharp, Rogue Witch." Appearing in the sight of the two battered girls was a silver-haired magical girl, standing atop the sports field fence with her body balanced on one foot.

"Yeah. Other than your Orbital Weapon System theme, no one could carry out such a powerful and precise wide-area guided barrage bombardment."

"No matter. Since you already know, consider this a greeting."

"You call a gift this huge a greeting? Then it would be rude of me not to return the favor. Steel Ball!"

Steel Ball, who had just been standing beside Ando Meiko, turned into an afterimage and vanished in an instant. A beam of light followed his departing form and poured into him.

That was the magical light of Speed Enhancement.

Steel Ball's attack arrived before her in an instant, but the silver-haired magical girl calmly took out a card and swept it across her magic wand.

As the card turned into particles of light and disappeared, two light bullets formed before her and spiraled toward Steel Ball.

The blade returned to its sheath, then swept out. Steel Ball's Iaijutsu Slash found the perfect angle and sliced both light bullets apart at once.

From Ando Meiko's perspective, she couldn't catch either Steel Ball's or the silver-haired magical girl's movements at all... because everything had happened in less than two seconds.

The exploding light bullets erupted into blinding white flashes, like flashbangs that stung everyone's eyes. But the attack did not continue; the magical girl Xiphias had called Orbital had already vanished.

"Open, Gate to the Mortal World." Taking advantage of the chaos, Ando Meiko opened a gate back to the real world and escaped the Void World before Xiphias could react.

Her mind was focused solely on leaving that place and escaping the hands of those two terrifying magical girls. She didn't even know how long she had walked.

Waves of exhaustion washed over her. Before long, her vision went dark, and she collapsed to the ground.

"Where am I...?"

"Master, you're awake?"

She hadn't expected Ruby to be the first thing she saw when she regained consciousness.

After looking around, she found herself in a space with a rainbow-like mixed-color backdrop, lying on the bed where she had first met Ruby.

All right, so I still haven't woken up.

"It's great that you're awake. I was worried sick, waaah..." Ruby threw herself into Ando Meiko's arms with a wail.

Feeling that Ruby really seemed to have been worried about her, Ando Meiko patted her forehead. "All right, I'm fine."

Fine, really fine... I just have something extra in my stomach... I wonder whether it'll affect me.

"You got kissed by that awful woman! It's unforgivable! No! And Fuko, and Rei too—even if they're only consciousnesses, I want to make it all up with Master here! Entrust your body and soul to me, Master. You'll feel good soon."

Ando Meiko pressed a hand against Ruby's approaching face and said irritably, "Stop messing around. What's going on? Where am I?"

"Mm! Master's body is in the infirmary. Rin found you when you collapsed while she was looking for you."

"Right, my clothes..." In the Void World, Xiphias had torn more than half her clothes off. If she had collapsed like that, wouldn't every passerby have gotten an eyeful?

"Don't worry. I would protect Master's body properly. When you collapsed, I used my last bit of magic power to repair your clothes."

Her last bit of magic power... Is this idiot staff sure I didn't collapse because she drained me dry with that last bit of magic power? Whatever.

She had escaped Xiphias anyway, so she didn't plan to dwell on such details.

Volume One: How I Got Scammed Into Becoming a Magical Girl: Chapter 39: Thoughts and Directions for Battle

"But..."

After Ruby's teasing expression faded, the serious look she gave Ando Meiko made her feel uneasy.

"W-what is it?"

"Master, take off your clothes first."

"I told you, you..." Ando Meiko thought Ruby was trying to take advantage of her again, but seeing how serious she looked, she said nothing more. With a thought in the consciousness space, every piece of clothing covering her body disappeared.

Lying on the bed, she held down her inconvenient breasts and looked at her smooth, slightly raised lower belly. The lines she had seen in the mirror earlier had vanished.

Maybe the release of magic power during her transformation had stopped the process.

"Master, this isn't the time to breathe a sigh of relief."

Under Ando Meiko's startled gaze, Ruby pressed a finger against a palm-sized area below her lower abdomen and injected magic power into it.

"Consciousness and the body are linked, so the body's condition can be reflected through consciousness. As for this, I think it should be Master's current physical state."

As magic power flowed in, the area Ruby's finger stroked went numb in waves, as though shocked by electricity... A heart-shaped pattern made of pink lines emerged with the magic power, repeatedly appearing and fading like a breathing light.

Her luck had run out. Although Ruby's teleportation had been timely, she had still been one step too late.

Before Ando Meiko had transformed, the Magic Mark Xiphias planted in her had already been completed. It was complete, but it still lacked a crucial step, so Xiphias could not directly control her.

"Ruby, it was nice knowing you. If I stop being myself someday, find a way to dissolve the contract, then go find a more suitable master." Ando Meiko was beginning to despair.

She had thought she had escaped with her life, only to discover upon looking back that she was still trapped in danger.

"Master, don't say that. This Magic Mark may be complete, but it hasn't been fully completed."

"What do you mean?"

"Let me explain it in a way Master can easily understand. When Master downloads a game or software, doesn't it need to be unpacked?"

"Yeah."

"Right now, it's like the download finished, but the unpacking suddenly got cut off halfway through."

"Wow, that really is an annoying feeling." Ruby's explanation was much easier for Ando Meiko to understand.

In other words, although the Magic Mark had been completed, it had only loaded some of its functions. So this Magic Mark was actually a half-finished product.

"But whenever you use magic power, your body reacts. Isn't this kind of Magic Mark made to enslave people?" Ruby said through gritted teeth. "That Xiphias is absolutely horrible."

When Xiphias had helped them deal with the Void King Serpent, Ruby had thought she must be a wonderful magical girl. She never expected her to be such a villain.

"This goes far beyond something used to enslave people." Once she calmed down, Ando Meiko began analyzing it rationally. "This is basically..."

No way... Heavens, even I, with all my glorious reputation, got branded with this kind of mark one day... First magic wands, then that little tentacled evil goddess, then Void Creatures, and now even tattoos...

If anyone dared say being a magical girl wasn't a high-risk profession, Ando Meiko would give them a resounding slap, then lecture them properly.

After calming down, she began wondering who exactly the silver-haired magical girl she had seen at the end was.

Xiphias had mentioned that she was Star Tarot, whose theme was the Space-Based Weapon System. It was obvious that she was a Starlight magical girl.

But why orbital weapons? They hadn't even been developed in the real world, had they? What did they have to do with magical girls?

Ando Meiko silently grumbled to herself.

"God's Scepter? The witch Orbital of God's Scepter..."

Witches were not simply another term for magical girls. Ando Meiko remembered Ruby telling her that from the beginning.

The enemy wasn't just Void Creatures. There were also people called Rogue Witches.

At first, she thought Rogue Witches were merely a collective term for different monsters. But unexpectedly, Rogue Witches referred to hostile magical girls.

In that case, it was obvious what God's Scepter was: a Witch Organization.

"This is the first time I've seen how Starlight magical girls fight. Isn't this way too broken? She just swipes a card over her magic wand, and such powerful fixed spells are cast instantly. Unlike me, who has to imagine everything and spend ages charging up."

Especially her strongest current attack, Silver Impact. By the time she finished charging it, grass would probably be growing over her gravestone.

But if magical girls could have themes as vague and intangible as a Space-Based Weapon System, then could she, a Sunstone-type Magical Girl who fought through imagination, perhaps learn something from her opponent's abilities?

If she could also use magic power to guide a concentrated cannon blast down from the sky like the witch Orbital, then whenever she encountered a Void Beast, she could ambush it directly and kill it with a single shot. She wouldn't need to fight at close range with a frying pan anymore.

Of course, that was only Ando Meiko's imagination and speculation. As for whether she truly possessed that ability, even she didn't know.

Sunstone-type Magical Girls were beings capable of creating miracles, because they could materialize the process of releasing magic power through imagination and turn it into their own magic.

This gave the early Ando Meiko a preconceived notion that the Sunstone-type way of fighting was imagination.

But perhaps she didn't need imagination at all.

If the principle was that anything that existed had its reason, then as long as she understood how something worked, she could use magic power to recreate its original laws.

To create pistols and missiles, did she only need to understand their internal structures, use Ruby for Aether conversion, then replace their explosive kinetic or thermal energy with magic power?

If Ando Meiko's line of thought wasn't wrong, then she needed to start studying physics, chemistry, and even weaponry.

Of course, that process would surely be extremely long.

For firearms with simpler structures, Ando Meiko could manage them by herself.

But if she wanted to create complex things like aircraft, tanks, or missiles, her brain capacity probably made that impossible.

Still, now that she had found a direction for battle, it was not a bad thing for Ando Meiko.

At the very least, once she had the ability to fight back, whether she was dragged into the Void World or faced Rogue Witches, even if she couldn't win, she could at least protect herself.

Volume One: How I Got Scammed Into Becoming a Magical Girl: Chapter 40: Inside the Infirmary

"Meizi, you're finally awake. What happened? How did you suddenly collapse in the passage beside the school building? Weren't you following behind us just a moment ago?"

Hearing Fuko's worried voice, Ando Meiko's emotions settled considerably.

What had just happened was truly terrifying, and she had also learned many things she should not have known.

"I don't know either... I suddenly lost consciousness, and I don't know what I went through."

She wasn't entirely lying. After all, she had indeed walked out of the Kendo Club by relying on her consciousness, and she had truly lost consciousness along the way. She didn't even know where she had collapsed.

"How long was I unconscious?"

"More than half a day."

After hearing Fuko say that, Ando Meiko looked out the window. The orange sunlight of dusk shone against her face, making her eyes sting slightly.

The rare school festival had passed just like that. Although it was only the first day, she had spent the entire afternoon asleep. What a waste of time.

"Where's Rin?" Ando Meiko waved her hand, refusing Fuko's support, then propped herself up on the bed and leaned against the pillow. "Why are only you and Nanako here?"

"Rin went back to the classroom to clean up and handle the aftermath. Rei also sent a message saying she was going back to help, so it's just the three of us here."

At that, Ando Meiko suddenly realized that she seemed never to have exchanged contact information with anyone in her class, not even the teacher. Even if they wanted to find her and bring her back, they probably couldn't.

"Eating... delicious... this... is delicious too..." Nanako mumbled in her sleep, drooling so much that she had already soaked the infirmary bedsheet.

Ando Meiko smiled and stroked Nanako's head. The motion seemed to stir her, and she suddenly raised her head, smacking her lips as if she were still chewing something.

"Meizi... How is Meizi doing? Are you feeling better?"