June 5

June 5, 2026

After school, Hikaru once again met up with Masae and Anju, this time for a proper patrol of the area. As they walked down a street, Masae explained to Hikaru, “Usually once a week, me and Anju-chan will go out on patrol around Katamori to see if we can find any magical beasts or portals before they’re called in.”

Hikaru asked her, “Where can you usually find them?”

“Often, you’ll find them in seedier parts of neighborhoods. It seems like places where there’s human suffering tend to attract magical beasts, at least to some extent.”

“It does get a little dangerous, though,” Anju added. “And not because of magical beasts.”

“I was gonna say,” Hikaru realized. “I imagine going into these poorer areas with more crime tends to cause some… Like, unwanted attention, maybe?”

Masae sighed, recalling incidents they ran into while on patrol. “Yeah, you could say that. We almost got mugged by some drunk a year ago, but we beat him up and sent him on his way. The real issue comes from other drunks who say more… Lewd things.”

“Like catcalling?”

“Yeah… That. The amount of things I’ve heard from men passing us is too high. It’s not like every time we go out we get hit on or something, but it does happen too often. It doesn’t help that some of our travels take us into areas where prostitution occurs, and people mistake us for one of them.”

“Man, that sucks.”

Anju then noticed her ring was beginning to glow more than usual. She looked at the red stone on top of it and remarked, “Well, we’re getting closer to something.”

Masae checked her ring as well and noticed the same thing. “Let’s keep moving. Either we’ll find it, or someone will call it in.”

The three of them began to run towards where they thought the source of the glow was coming from. As they did, Hikaru began to feel like the area they were going to was becoming increasingly familiar. As they rounded a corner, he told them, “Guys, hang on. This is going towards my neighborhood!”

“Wait, what?!”

“Yeah,” he replied to Masae. “We’re only a few blocks from where I live!”

Then, both Masae and Anju heard their phones go off with an alert. All three of them stopped as the two of them pulled them out to read the message they had received. As they read it, Masae’s eyes widened with shock. “Fukuda-san, do you recognize this address?”

Hikaru read the message the Agency had sent Masae. As he did, his heart sank and he shuddered. “Oh my God… That’s my house!”

“We gotta go right now! A magical beast just emerged near your house!”

“Shit, let’s go!” The three of them ran as fast as they could, almost running into several people as they did so. As one man tried to push them out of the way as they passed a convenience store, Hikaru yelled at him, “Out of my damn way!”

The man shouted back, “What’s your problem, man?!”

Hikaru ignored him as Anju shouted back at the man, “Just get out of our way! We have an emergency!”

Within another two minutes, they reached Hikaru’s house, finding the front door having been forced open and off of its hinges. Masae and Anju quickly transformed as Hikaru tried to run inside. As soon as Masae was finished, she raced up to him and grabbed him, holding him back and yelling at him, “You can’t go in!”

“My family’s in there!”

“YOU CAN’T GO IN!” Masae then practically threw him aside as she and Anju ran in. “You’ll only get yourself killed! This is way more dangerous than the one we fought on Tuesday, so stay back!”

“But-!”

“Trust us,” Masae said as she stopped and turned around at the front door. “We got this!” She then headed into the house to face whatever monster had forced its way into the house.

An impatient Hikaru watched from outside as he heard the sounds of a fierce battle break out within the house. As shouting filled the air, several other people on the street began to notice what was going on and gathered nearby. Then, Hikaru heard Anju shout really loudly, “They’re heading in! Don’t let it get away!”

Hikaru looked around and muttered as he ran in, “Screw this!” He then ran through the front doorway and found that his house was a mess, with everything that had been attached to the wall thrown down and broken. On the floor were various shattered objects ranging from kitchenware to electronics. Whatever had gone through the house had rampaged it, and as he ran upstairs to see if he could help, he found that it was even messier. He also found blood splatter on the walls, which made him even more terrified of what had happened as he entered his parent’s bedroom and found a portal where the bed should have been.

He hesitated for a brief moment, wondering if he should have taken Masae’s advice, before he heard an inhuman roar come from the portal. Normally, this would have convinced him to run as fast as he could in the opposite direction, but something about this completely abnormal situation told him to head on in, so he did. As he ran through the portal and crossed into it, he felt an oppressive force inside his head, causing him to close his eyes in intense pain as he fell to the ground and writhed.

When the force suddenly ceased, Hikaru found himself in a dark forest. As he opened his eyes and got up, he heard screaming in the distance and ran towards it, hoping to find someone, anyone from his family, or at least Masae and Anju. He shouted into the woods as he ran, “Anyone there?! Hello?! What’s happening?! Where are you?!”

He then heard a voice that he recognized to be that of his mother. The voice called out to him from the trees, “Hikaru! Hikaru! I’m over here! Help me!” If the voice did belong to his mother, she clearly was in extreme distress based on the tone of her voice.

What perplexed him was that this voice seemingly came from all around him rather than one focused direction. Eventually, however, he decided that just standing around wondering where his mother’s voice was coming from was not enough, and he began to run into the woods in a direction he thought he heard the voice coming from the loudest. However, just as he began to run, he heard another voice call out to him from behind. “Hold it right there!”

Hikaru turned around to find a somewhat battered Masae emerging from the woods, clearly tired out from a battle. “Naru-san?!”

“Don’t listen to that voice,” she told him as she wiped away blood from a cut on her face. “There’s a magical beast with reality-bending powers hiding in this forest. It mimics something its prey cares about to lure them in before stunning them with a loud hum you can hear in your head.” She then demanded of him, "What the Hell are you doing in here anyway?! I told you to stay outside!”

“I wasn’t going to,” Hikaru replied angrily. “Not after what I heard inside the house! I’m not gonna stand by and hear my family get ripped apart!”

“I told you we can take care of it!”

“Then where are my parents, Naru-san?!”

Almost on cue, Anju came running out of the woods with a man Hikaru recognized as his father trailing behind her. On his back was Hikaru’s unconscious mother, who had been knocked out and was bleeding from a wound on her head. Anju exclaimed, “We need to get Fukuda-san’s parents out of here and into our world now! His mother’s hurt really bad!”

Hikaru ran over to them, calling, “Mom! Dad!”

“Hikaru,” his father told him as they caught up to him. “Help me take your mother and let’s get out of here!”

Masae then warned him, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll run the risk of being killed by this beast. Your mother needs you to help her.”

Then, at that moment, a large thundering sound was heard as several trees toppled over. From the forest emerged a large dragon-like creature that roared into the sky so loudly that all of them covered their ears in pain. The magical beast, among its other features, also had a bright red spot on its forehead that began to glow, and as it did, all of them once again heard the voice of Hikaru’s mother. “Hikaru! Hikaru! I’m over here! Help me! Hikaru! Hikaru! I’m over here! Help me!”

Masae quickly tried to wrap both of her chains around the beast’s legs, but only one was successful, with the other being thrown off by the beast. Frustrated, she called out, “Damn it, I sure hope we get some help here!” She then turned back around and yelled to Hikaru, “Go with your parents and leave! We can’t afford to have you here much longer!”

Hikaru demanded out of worry for Masae and Anju, “What about you guys?!”

“I don’t care,” she yelled back. “As long as you three are out of danger, that’s what matters! I knew the risks when I became a magical huntress, and sometimes, those risks are fatal! I hope I won’t have to, but if I must, I’m prepared to die, and so is Anju-chan!”

“But-!”

“But nothing! Now go!” Softening her tone a bit before Hikaru left, she then told him with a faint smile, “I’ll see you on Monday. Got it?”

Hikaru nodded. “Yeah.”

With that, he and his father ran in the direction of the portal back to their world with his mother still passed out on his father’s back. His father asked him as they sprinted through the woods, “Who were those girls? Did you know them from school?”

“I did,” he replied. “They saved my life a few days ago from a monster like the one they’re fighting now. I’ll explain more later.”

As the three of them crossed back into their world and fell over onto the floor of the bedroom the portal had opened up in, another girl, this time bearing a rifle with a bayonet, ran into the room before being stopped by the family crash-landing before her. For a moment, Hikaru and the third girl blinked in surprise before she asked them, “Is the magical beast in there?”

“Yeah,” he replied to her. “And you better hurry. The two magical huntresses already in there are having a rough time.”

“Understood,” she replied with a nod before running into the portal to help. “We got help coming for you guys. Get out of the house and we’ll take care of it!”

…

Hours later, Hikaru and his father were sitting inside a waiting room at a small hospital the Protection and Research Agency owned in Chiba. Both were worried about Hikaru’s mother, while Hikaru was also deeply worried about Masae and Anju. Then, a nurse emerged and looked at them, asking, “Are you the family of Fukuda Michiko?”

“Yes,” Hikaru’s father replied. “I’m her wife, and this is our son. Do you have an update for us?”

“She’s conscious,” replied the nurse. “And we expect her to be released within a few days. We just want to monitor her in case anything comes up, but the doctors don’t expect anything life-threatening to happen.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Hikaru’s father said, “Oh, thank God. Can we see her?”

“Sure thing,” replied the nurse with a nod.

“Hang on,” Hikaru then asks the nurse. “Has there been any word about Naru Masae or Kobayashi Anju?”

The nurse dejectedly replied, “I haven’t heard anything about those two, sadly.”

Then, the front doors to the waiting room opened, and through them emerged an exhausted and battered Masae. She stumbled in, caught herself, and then took a deep breath as she looked up at Hikaru, telling him, “I told you… We’d take care of it.”

Anju then ran in behind her, scolding her by saying, “Masae-chan, hang on! You need to sit down and relax, preferably while getting bandaged up!”

As Masae was helped to a seat, Hikaru breathed a sigh of relief before telling the duo, “I’m glad you guys are okay.”

“Of course we are,” Masae said with a thumbs-up on her right hand as Anju applied a bandage to her left hand. “It kicked our asses a bit, but we came out on top.”

Anju rolled her eyes and replied, “A bit?”

“I’ll talk to you guys later,” Hikaru told them before turning back around to head to his mother’s room with his father. “I gotta go see my mom. She’s getting better.”

As another nurse walked over to check on Masae, Hikaru’s father asked him, “So, uh… Who are those girls again, Hikaru?”

“They’re the girls who saved me,” he replied with a smile. “Or rather, the girls who saved us.”