Sakura Kinomoto

In the end, Michiko got her doll back. The shop owner even offered her a whole box of toys, but Michiko picked just one.

It was a little bear.

That settled the matter.

"Miss, I hope business goes well!"

"Ah, thank you."

The shop owner was still a little on edge, afraid another incident of "dolls coming home" might happen. But it would never happen again.

Without anyone knowing, Huo Lin quietly withdrew, her work done.

"Anyway, thank you both so much for today!" At the entrance to the Suga residence, Michiko thanked her two classmates.

Without Hayate and Huo Lin, she would never have had the courage to go to the shop alone.

"And this." Michiko handed Huo Lin the black-and-white teddy bear she was holding. It was the shop owner's apology gift.

"For me?"

"Yes. This was the bear you were looking at earlier, right?"

It was. Pink Rabbit had taken up residence in that very black-and-white bear. So Michiko had noticed? She must have thought Huo Lin liked it and accepted the shop owner's apology gift so she could give it to her.

"Thank you."

Huo Lin accepted it. She had no particular feelings about the black-and-white bear, but it was a kind gesture.

"Somehow, you feel like a girl too, Huo Lin."

"Huh?"

"Sorry, I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean boys usually feel a little distant. They say things I don't understand and like all sorts of strange stuff, but you aren't like that. You're really easy to get along with."

Even if Huo Lin was a boy, being friends with her would be nice.

Beside them, Hayate found that a little funny.

After leaving the Suga residence, Hayate stretched. She felt as if she had done a good deed, even though she wasn't the one who had done it. Still, since learning that magic existed, this was the first time she had seen it used to help someone.

Magic really was wonderful.

"Huo Lin, can I really use magic too?"

"Didn't you use it before? The outfit-changing one."

"That just changed me into my school gym uniform! There was nothing magical about it."

She could change clothes herself. If it had at least put her in something like a magical girl outfit, she wouldn't have felt this way.

"Want to give it a try?"

Huo Lin took out the card with "jump" written on it, and the two of them walked into an alley with no one else around.

"You should be able to use it just by feeding it magic power."

In Tomoe Town, Sakura Kinomoto was rollerblading down the street.

She had already eaten dinner, and it was time to do homework, but Kero had said he sensed a Clow Card.

Kero was the guardian beast of the Clow Cards. His true name was Cerberus.

After Sakura accidentally scattered all the Clow Cards across Tokyo, he had stayed by her side in the guise of a stuffed toy, helping her recover them all.

Sakura had used doing homework at Tomoyo's house as an excuse to go out, but she was actually investigating a Clow Card.

"Kero, are you sure it's here? We're almost at Shinjuku."

"Yes, just up ahead. Only a few hundred meters to go."

If a Clow Card stayed hidden, Kero couldn't sense it. But earlier, the card had unleashed its power, letting its magic spread so far that even Kero had sensed it in Tomoe Town, seven or eight kilometers away.

"That's..." Sakura was about to speak when the sensation of magic interrupted her.

It felt like a Clow Card, but slightly different. In an alley beside the road, a girl leaped high into the air, then landed again.

"Huh? What's that?"

"It's a Clow Card. Someone's captured it!" Kero's tone turned serious.

This was bad. Sakura was the master he had chosen. If someone else took the Clow Cards, they would have a real problem.

Sakura, however, hadn't thought that far. She was only capturing the Clow Cards because they would cause trouble in Tokyo. She had no desire to keep them all to herself.

What really interested her was that, if this person could capture Clow Cards, they had to be a magician too.

So she really wasn't the only person who could use magic. That wasn't bad news to her. She felt the joy of finding someone like herself.

Hayate got quite a fright the first time she tried the Jump Card.

Anyone would be frightened after jumping three stories into the air. She had thought she would fall to her death, but fortunately, the card's magic protected her.

The Jump Card could make someone leap, and naturally, it could also let them land safely.

That three-story leap had only been the result of Hayate cautiously testing it without putting much strength into her jump. She felt that if she really tried, she might jump twenty or thirty meters high. That would be practically the same as flying.

Just like the protagonists in anime, leaping from one building to another and bounding across rooftops.

For the first time, Hayate truly felt that magic existed in this world.

"All right, Hayate, someone's coming. We don't want ordinary people seeing this."

Huo Lin stopped Hayate, who had clearly gotten carried away with jumping. There would be plenty of time to explore magic later. Right now, getting home was more important.

Neither of them had eaten dinner yet.

"Ordinary people aren't allowed to see magic? What happens if they do?"

"What happens... I don't know either."

There was actually another way to keep people from seeing it: a barrier. The Book of the Night Sky contained an introduction to Barrier Magic. It was basic magic that almost every Mage knew.

As long as they fought inside a barrier, no matter how much damage they caused, it wouldn't affect reality once the barrier was dispelled.

Ordinary magical experiments could also be conducted inside a barrier.

Huo Lin hadn't needed it before, so she hadn't learned it yet. After all, she wasn't planning to fight anyone. It wasn't too late to learn now. Magic at that level would take one all-nighter, two at most.

As for why she had to stay up all night, she still had school during the day. She would rather pass on the title of "elementary-school-dropout magical girl."

Just then, Huo Lin suddenly realized someone was standing at the mouth of the alley.

It was even a Mage. Their magic power was so weak that she hadn't paid attention before, but now that they were blocking the alley's entrance, she couldn't ignore them.

After traveling seven or eight kilometers, Sakura was panting even with her rollerblades.

She had found the person holding the Clow Card. It was a girl around her age who had been jumping up and down. With her sharp eyes, Sakura had already spotted the Clow Card in her hand.

But the girl wasn't alone. Beside her stood a boy who looked very much like her.

Sakura was a little puzzled. Her memory was hazy, but she thought she had seen that girl somewhere before.

Hayate couldn't quite remember either.

But Huo Lin remembered. They had indeed met, several months ago. While Hayate was picking out clothes for her at the mall, they had encountered a fair-skinned girl with long, straight black hair who had offered advice on matching clothes and bows. The girl in front of them now had been that girl's friend.

She was a Mage?

Huo Lin hadn't sensed anything at the time, but she certainly could now. There was also the little stuffed lion perched on the girl's shoulder. His magic power was much stronger than the girl's.

He was roughly equivalent to two or three pages of the Book of the Night Sky. For now, Huo Lin could only use the Book of the Night Sky as a unit of measurement.

"Hey, little girl. Were you the one who captured the Clow Card?"

The first to speak wasn't Sakura, but Kero. As the self-proclaimed Guardian Beast of the Sun, he had a duty to protect the master he had chosen, and he knew very well which person here was the "monster."

It wasn't the girl still holding the Clow Card. It was the other one beside her.

He couldn't sense any magic power at all, not because there was none, but because it was so densely compressed that it had instead formed a magical vacuum.

He had never encountered a magician of this caliber before, apart from Clow Reed!

She was on an entirely different level from Sakura. Even he had absolutely no chance of defeating her. Only his pride as a guardian kept him from fleeing immediately.

Sakura was a little surprised to see Kero address that boy on his own initiative, but she thought he had made a mistake.

"Kero, that's a boy."

Granted, the boy did look rather delicate. But Sakura couldn't understand why Kero would even mistake a boy for a girl.

"That's disguise magic. She's a girl."

More precisely, it was a disguise created by distorting light on an optical level. It might even fool a Mage, but Kero wasn't human. He was a Sealed Beast, a magical creation, so he didn't observe the world entirely through sight.

That meant purely optical deception had little effect on him.