Magical Girl of Light: Starshine

Pink and gold motes of light were still gathering.

They climbed the girl's wrists and wound around her shoulders, loop after loop.

Light swallowed her old jacket, stained with dust and blood. The fabric of her school uniform faded inch by inch into glowing dust and scattered on the night wind.

A short white-and-gold cape fell from her shoulders, its edges dotted with tiny stars.

Two star-shaped pauldrons settled onto her shoulders. Below her waist, her skirt fell in layers, one white and one pink, with a gold line along the outer layer.

Her twin ponytails came loose, then tied themselves up again. Pale gold seeped into her dark brown hair, spreading down its length until it became a lustrous silvery pink.

The old hair clip she had worn for years floated up from her temple and stopped before her forehead.

Light smoothed its rough plastic edges. A point lit up at each of its five tips, and it shrank into a tiny star crown.

She held out her right hand.

Light stretched across her palm and solidified into a short wand.

Its head was a six-pointed star split down the middle, with a core of light set into the cleft. It brightened and dimmed, breathing in and out.

The girl gripped the wand, steadied herself on the air currents above the ruins, and pointed its tip at the night sky as the blood clouds receded. "Magical Girl of Light—Starshine!"

At the sound of her name, the surging Deep Space Particles around her sank as one and settled obediently back onto her.

Ziwei hovered twenty meters away without moving.

She counted the fluctuations in Starshine's power. Three rises, one fall. The Star Core made a full turn without showing any sign of falling apart.

She had crossed the threshold.

"She's stable, Master." Kabi's voice sounded in Ziwei's head. "One-star budding stage, reading around three hundred and eighty, and still climbing!"

Ziwei still did not approach.

Starshine lowered her head and saw the ruins beneath her.

Outside the half-collapsed barbecue restaurant, a man lay with his lower leg pinned beneath a concrete slab, pounding the ground with his fist.

Beside him, a woman held a child. The child cried in bursts, her voice already hoarse.

"Brother... I'm here! Hold on!"

Starshine's eyes reddened at once.

She raised her wand. The core at its head swelled, and white-gold light spilled from its tip in an ever-growing stream. As the light scorched the rubble, its edges glowed red and gave off a burnt smell.

Ziwei saw what was happening.

That Star Core had formed less than a minute ago. If Starshine released a light spell over such a wide area, it would drain what little magic she had in one go.

She would pass out on the spot and fall twenty meters into the rubble.

Ziwei slashed upward with her scythe.

A dark-gold arc swept past the tip of Starshine's nose, severing the runaway stream of light. It broke into sparks and fell among the ruins.

The gust from the blade knocked Starshine backward, and she nearly lost her footing.

"You just got your powers, and you already want to be a Savior?" Ziwei held her scythe across her body. "Learn to control them first. Then you can talk about protecting someone."

Starshine froze in midair.

She looked up and saw her idol, Teacher Ziwei, this close for the first time.

The long violet-gold hair, the massive dark-gold scythe, the black magical tights beneath her skirt, and that face, impossibly beautiful.

In the fan club chat, Starshine had made more than a hundred wallpapers from photos of that face. Now it was right in front of her, with specks of light dust still clinging to her lashes.

Starshine drew the wand back to her chest. She gripped it with both hands and straightened her back.

"Lady Ziwei, I'm sorry...!" Her voice was still nasal from crying. "I know I'm weak right now. But my brother's buried down there. He kicked me into the corner, and he didn't make it out."

She hugged the wand tighter. "My wish was to protect him. I don't want to be the one who can only stand by and wait for someone else to come save us anymore."

Ziwei's fingers tightened around the scythe.

When Starshine made her wish, she had been thinking of the brother buried beneath the rubble.

Lady Ziwei had come second.

Ziwei looked away, toward the pile of ruins. There was nothing beneath it.

"Master, I just finished scanning her Star Core." Kabi lowered his voice. "The color doesn't match. Yours is violet-gold; hers is pale gold. The structure's different too."

"Get to the point."

"Three things are twisted together inside it. Her own wish, the words in that guide, and the faith built up by tens of thousands of people in the fan club." Kabi paused. "At the very bottom, there's a trace of your echo wrapped up in it."

"Mine?"

"The night you first transformed, you chanted the spell from her guide in Room 703. Some of the power that spilled out lingered in the room, and she absorbed a little. But she's already rearranged it. It belongs to her now."

Ziwei was silent for two seconds. "So that guide worked because she made it ridiculous enough?"

"The opposite," Kabi answered at once. "She's read it every night before bed since middle school, until she didn't doubt a word of it. She wore those fantasies into a stable wish shaped by her beliefs. That's what the Will of the World heard."

Ziwei said nothing more.

All those over-the-top lines he had found so annoying for years—she hadn't recited a single one in vain.

"Stay here. Don't go over there."

Ziwei raised the tip of her scythe and pointed toward the edge of the ruins.

Several firefighters had just rushed into the block and were carrying people out on stretchers.

Above their heads was a cracked exterior wall. Pieces were still falling from it. The Stitching Beast's remains lay piled in the middle of the street, its lingering poison bubbling and sending up blasts of air now and then.

"You only have one job right now." Ziwei lowered her scythe. "Block the aftershocks. Leave the rescue to me."

"But my brother..." Starshine started to protest, but a large chunk of rubble fell from above. She instinctively gripped her wand with both hands, and light burst from its head!

Unfortunately, it shattered before it could take shape, landing beside a firefighter's feet and making the young man jump back half a step.

But Starshine quickly got the hang of it. Half a shield of light rose, crooked and trembling at the edges.

A blast of air struck it, and the shield shattered. Starshine swayed, her lips turning pale.

"Again." Ziwei did not move forward.

Starshine bit her lower lip and gripped her wand tighter. In her mind, she recited the protective incantation from the guide's third page over and over. She had copied that page more than a dozen times and could recite it with her eyes closed.

At last, a translucent hexagonal shield of light spread out along the edge of the ruins.

It was too thin, with the rubble beneath visible through its corners. But it covered the entire area around the stretcher.

The exterior wall overhead finally collapsed. A chunk of concrete the size of a millstone crashed onto the shield, bounced off, and rolled into an empty patch nearby.

The firefighters carrying the stretcher stopped and looked up.

Starshine wanted to recite another passage and make the shield thicker. But her knees buckled first, and the street before her blurred.

Ziwei turned her scythe and braced its shaft against Starshine's shoulder.

"Stop."

"I can still..."

"Your magic's almost gone." If not for the role she was playing, Ziwei would have given this troublesome little sister a proper scolding. Instead, she added, "One more line, and your transformation will break. You'll pass out on the spot."

"I..."