Part 1 Epilogue

While the Halloween dance was going on, a magical huntsman of high school age was fighting three dog-like magical beasts at a swamp in another part of Halargia, all of whom had horns on their heads and foamed at the mouth. He wielded a large machete and also carried a smaller knife on his waist belt. As he dodged an attack from one of the horned dogs, he slashed another across the back, spilling its blood onto the ground below. When the third tried to jump on him, he threw it back into the dirty and fly-infested swamp water in front of him before slicing the neck of the first horned dog when it tried to attack him again, killing it. He yelled at the beasts, “Oh no, you don’t!”

The beast who had been slashed across the back barked at him several times before charging at him again, forcing him to slice it across the face and kill it. Finally, the third beast jumped up from the water and managed to bite him on his free arm, causing him to scream in intense pain as he panicked and tried to throw the horned dog off to no avail. Realizing he was not going to be able to pull or throw the beast off, he slashed it with the machete, which caused the beast’s grip to weaken before he then cut off its head with one strong blow to the neck.

“Agh… Fuck…” The boy stepped back as he checked out his bitten arm, seeing numerous puncture wounds from the horned dog’s jaws as well as claw marks from earlier in the battle. “Damn it, it’s probably broken.” Trying not to move the arm as much as possible, he pulled his phone out with his uninjured arm and began to take photos of the dead horned dogs for his report to the Agency.

However, he was interrupted when he heard someone running towards him from behind. When he turned around, he saw a girl that was about the same age as him dressed in bright green and carrying a steel pike and shield expressing disappointment and annoyance. “Aw, come on! I came too late! Who the Hell got thi-?!” She then saw that a boy had gotten the kill before her and grew silent.

“Sorry,” he said to her, still in pain from his wounds. “But you’re too late. I killed all three of them.”

“Of course a boy did,” she scoffed at him.

As he tried to walk past her, annoyed at her remark but in too much pain to respond, she grabbed a hold of his injured arm, prompting him to yell, “Hey, what the fuck?! That hurts!”

“Don’t you think you’ve taken enough from us?”

The boy was startled by the sheer amount of contempt the girl had for him when she spoke. “Woah, hey…”

“I can’t believe they’re still recruiting the likes of you,” she grumbled. “This is supposed to be something for us, you know. You get to have everything else.”

Confused, the boy yelled at her, “What the Hell are you talking about?! Who are you anyway?!”

“I’m tired of men barging into our space and thinking they can hunt magical beasts better than us.”

Realizing what the girl was getting at, the boy sighed and replied, “Are you kidding me? Not now, please!”

“Why don’t you just let the people who know what they’re doing take care of this?”

“I’ve literally been a magical huntsman for almost a year! I know what I’m doing!”

The girl did not respond, instead swinging her pike down on him. The boy tried to fight back with his machete, but the pole still smacked against his injured arm, hurting it more as he screamed in pain. When he turned around to try to run away, she thrusted the pike forwards, stabbing him in the chest. “There,” she said to him as he began to die. “Now you’ll stop.” She then pulled the spiked end of the pike out of him, causing him to collapse to the ground and a torrent of blood to spew out of the hole in his body.

Now by herself, she folded up her pike and walked over to his body, stepping on his phone to smash it before pulling out her own phone and taking photos of the area. Once this was done, she began to type up a report, falsifying the events that had transpired.

I entered the swamplands from a portal that opened up in Yokosuka around 19:43. Upon reaching a swamp near the other side of the portal, I encountered a magical huntsman battling three Class Four magical beasts. I offered my assistance, but he instead attacked me, causing a three-way battle that resulted in the deaths of all three Class Four magical beasts and the magical huntsman, who has been identified as Ishihara Yutaka, Badge Number Yokosuka 81354. I was forced to kill him in self-defense once he had killed all three of the Class Four’s, and I was unable to recover his body from the swamp due to terrain and safety issues.

Tsuda Mari

Yokosuka 24462

Mari then looked at the body of Yutaka Ishihara and sighed, telling it, “You may have almost a year under your belt, but I have three.” She then walked towards the original portal she and Yutaka had entered from, having taken care of everything she needed to do and claimed both the credit and the reward money for his work. Once on the outside, she closed her eyes and de-transformed back into a normal fall coat and jeans, looking around to see if anyone had noticed her. She also felt her phone vibrate with a few texts she had received while in Halargia, and checked them to see what they were.

FATHER: Where are you?! You haven’t answered either of my calls or my texts!

FATHER: You need to get home now or else

FATHER: Your mother won’t be too happy either when this is all done

FATHER: Answer my fucking texts

Mari sighed and said to herself, “Not this shit again.” She then texted him back.

MARI: im omw back i got held up dont get mad

FATHER: Too late for that, but thank you

FATHER: Be lucky there’s still food here for you

MARI: ur welcome

As she walked down the street back to her home, Mari looked at a poster for a new mobile game coming out and stared at the scantily-clad girls on it. She then turned her attention to a poster that featured several real-life women dressed as maids, presumably for some kind of maid café nearby. She sighed and muttered to himself, “We really are on our own.”

Mari represented a rather extreme end of a viewpoint that was shared among quite a few magical huntresses: Boys (and men) should not be allowed to hunt magical beasts. Such thoughts largely came from the idea that in a society that was largely dominated by men, a space dominated instead by girls (and women) should be preserved for them. While in the past, magical beast hunting was done exclusively by girls, often of an adolescent age, boys had been accepted into the ranks since the 1980s. Even with almost forty years of magical huntsmen running around, there were still holdouts who opposed their existence, sometimes violently.

In a few years time, Mari and her views would come into conflict with the Fox Knights, whose acceptance of a boy as its second-in-command would put them at odds with her as it had with Kumiko’s old teammates…

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END OF MAD WORLD, PART 1