Sinister Forces Attack! Marina’s Fighting Spirit is Tested

“You have to stop swinging with your arms. Swing with your magic.”

It was the next morning, a Saturday, and Marina had dragged Usami to a field outside of the city for training. Usami had barely been of any help in the fight, and if they were going to be a team, Marina wanted to make sure she could depend on Usami.

Picking the hammer back up, Usami faced the magical shield that Marina had cast, but hesitated. “That’s easy for you to say. Your magic is so much stronger than mine.”

“And it always will be, with that attitude. Magic is all about spirit. It’s about heart. Magic lets us bend the rules of nature. So what if you’re weaker? Cheat reality to become stronger. You just have to visualize it.”

Doing her best to imitate Marina, Usami raised the hammer over her head. The morning sun glinted off of it, but sakura petals, rather than jetfire, burst from the back. She brought the hammer down, harder than she had ever swung before, and thin cracks spread across the shield’s surface, but it did not break.

Ondine clapped her forepaws. “You’re improving, pyon!”

Marina, on the other hand, was not impressed. “You still don’t trust your magic. Give yourself to it.” She repaired the shield and gestured for Usami to try again.

That advice didn’t sit well with Ondine. “Be careful. It’s one thing to believe in yourself, but you should always control your magic, pyon. A good magical girl would never lose control of herself.”

“You worry too much.” Marina let out a loud yawn, and Usami used it as an excuse to take a break.

“Are you tired?”

“I’m fine. I just stayed up a bit too late last night. Couldn’t get the adrenaline out of my system.”

“More like you couldn’t get off social media, pyon. You just kept refreshing the timeline until you passed out.”

“Can you blame me? More and more, the numbers kept going up. Comments coming in too fast to read. It was as if I could feel the entire world thinking about me. It was so, so…”

“Intoxicating, pyon?”

Marina shot Ondine a dirty look, one so scornful that Usami felt that she would shrivel up and die if Marina ever looked at her like that. “I was going to say amazing. Now, enough talking, more swinging.”

Once more, Usami lifted the hammer over her head, she tried to follow Marina’s advice, but she just couldn’t imagine her magic exerting enough force on the hammer to break one of Marina’s shields. She could, however, envision another way to achieve the same goal. The front of the hammer stretched into a sharp point, and this time, when she brought it down, it pierced the shield.

“That’s an improvement.” Marina clapped Usami on the back. Usami beamed with pride, but the smile quickly faded from her face, and Marina noticed. “What’s wrong?”

“They said on the news this morning that the prosecutor won’t bring charges against Mr. Blackburn. Everything we did was for nothing.”

“What? Even after we broadcast his sniveling confession live?”

“That confession was obviously under distress, pyon,” Ondine interjected. “Besides, confessions extracted by magical individuals are inadmissible in court.”

Usami nodded. “That’s what they said on the news. It just doesn’t feel right to be happy when his victims are still suffering.”

“Hold up.” Anger crept into Marina’s voice. “We extract confessions from petty criminals all the time, and they go to prison, right? Or are we running a catch and release program here?”

Both girls turned their heads towards Ondine, who pressed her ears flat against her head. “That’s… uh…” Turning tail, Ondine tried to fly away, but Marina stretched her arm further than she ought to be able to and grabbed her by the scruff of her neck.

“Do the criminals we capture go to prison or not?”

“Ouch! Be gentle, pyon! OK, OK, I’ll talk. They’re not criminals: They’re actors. No one would be stupid enough to commit street crimes when there are so many magical girls around, at least not while they know magical girls are around. That’s why we stage these crimes, so people can see that the magical girls are keeping order. The criminals and the victims are all magical adults. Civilians never get hurt.”

Marina was so shocked by this answer that she dropped Ondine, but Usami snatched her out of the air. “Who’s we?”

Ondine kicked her legs violently, desperate to escape, but Usami held tight, and Marina summoned a knife from thin air with which to threaten the familiar.

“Th—The government, pyon.”

“Politicians,” Marina translated, “and their donors, like Mr. Blackburn. We haven’t been fighting for justice—We’ve been upholding the system. Are they going to come after us for what we did?”

“No,” Ondine assured them. “Well, Mr. Blackburn might, but he doesn’t know your true identities. Everyone else agreed he had gone too far, and needed to be taken down a peg, but I was warned to keep you in line from now on.”

Usami loosened her grip on Ondine. “Why did you let us go after Mr. Blackburn if you were in on this?”

“I did advise you to drop it, but like I said, he needed a warning. None of us ever expected you would beat Magical Princess Posh Puyumi. Everyone was supposed to learn a lesson and chasten their behavior.”

Marina’s brow wrinkled, her mouth stretched into a grimace. She looked like she might blow her top, but with a deep breath, she relaxed. “Well, whatever. Not like we can take on the entire government on our own, and I never really cared about being a guardian of justice in the first place. I’m happy as long as I can use my magic to become famous, but I am done with your lying ass.” She pointed an accusing finger at Ondine. “Go find some other magical girl to leech mana off of.”

Her ears drooped, and Ondine turned to fly back towards the city. “For what it’s worth, I always liked you, Marina. You’ve got spunk.”

The two magical girls remained silent until Ondine was well out of sight. Once she no longer feared being overheard, Usami asked, “Did you really mean that?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. It’s frustrating. I’d love nothing more than to take the fight to them, but they know our true identities. We’d have to give up our own lives, our friends, our families, and live as magical girls at all times. Are you prepared for that?”

“My life isn’t that great.” Usami’s mumbling response was just barely audible. “I don’t have any friends, and my parents…”

“Hey, you got one friend.” Marina pointed to herself with her thumb, “But I’m not ready to throw my life away. Besides, they’ll be watching us closely. For now, let’s go back to playing their game. We can still team up. We’ll need to fight off Mr. Blackburn’s goons, after all.”

“We’re… friends? But we’ve only known each other for a few days.”

“Of course we’re friends.” Marina slapped Usami across the back once more. “I liked you from the moment we met.”

“I like you too.” She knew that her “like” was different from Marina’s “like,” but Marina’s words nevertheless made her happy. “OK, yeah. If I can’t fight for justice, fighting alongside a friend is the next best thing. Let’s do it your way.”

⁂

For a while, doing things Marina's way worked well. Even when stopping the fake criminals, Marina made a habit of casting flashy spells that caught the attention of those around her. They also tried doing various challenges and pranks, but none of them ever got the same engagement as her fight against Magical Princess Posh Puyumi.

That was OK, at first. Marina was satisfied with the attention she was getting. She didn’t need to be the talk of the entire world every single day. But after a few weeks, the numbers started falling. It didn’t matter how big or over the top the spells she cast were. People were growing bored of her.

Until, that is, she and Usami were jumped by a group of five magical girls hired by Mr. Blackburn to get revenge. Against such opponents, Marina didn’t need to hold back, as long as she avoided harming civilians. The magical girls weren’t prepared for her intensity, and were quickly sent fleeing into the night, their hair aflame.

Footage of Marina engulfing the five of them with fireballs went viral, and once again, she felt the dopamine rush of being the center of attention. Every comment, positive, negative, jealous, horny, fearful, or indifferent sent another jolt of excitement through her. She was famous. She was important. People paid attention to her because of the thing she loved most in the world: magic.

“From now on, we only fight other magical girls. It’s the best way to get views.”

Marina’s declaration didn’t exactly catch Usami by surprise. She’d been close to Marina’s side every night, and it didn’t take long for her to clue in on Marina’s unhealthy obsession. At the same time, she believed this obsession was the only thing keeping Marina from retiring as a magical girl, and if she did that, Usami would lose her place at Marina’s side. She would lose her only friend, so she went along with Marina’s wishes.

At her suggestion, however, they didn’t just randomly attack whoever they came across. Behind the scenes, Usami negotiated with other magical girl teams to stage fake fights. If the adults could do it, why couldn’t she? During the late nights, while Marina was tripping on internet fame, Usami weaved ever more dramatic storylines for the magical girls to act out, drawing heavy inspiration from professional wrestling. As it turned out, Marina didn’t particularly care whether she won or lost, as long as her antics allowed her to steal the limelight.

For several months, these false battles over turf fueled Marina’s desire for notoriety. The numbers went up and up, but then they went down just as quickly, eventually leveling off as a community of hardcore fans coalesced around the fights, and the mainstream turned their attention to the next new thing.

The government was not pleased at this turn of events, but for as long as Marina remained popular on social media, they didn’t want to act rashly. Besides, there were benefits to keeping the masses entertained, so long as they didn’t begin to fear that the magical girls were out of control. When Marina’s popularity reached its nadir, however, they swept in, not wanting to miss their chance. A strike team of magical adults ambushed Marina and Usami as they retreated from a mock battle one night.

Unlike the magical girls Mr. Blackburn had hired, the adults went all out from the get-go. Usami managed to land a blow on one of them with her hammer, but she was quickly captured by two others and forced into mana-draining handcuffs. Marina managed to evade capture by bending and contracting her limbs in unnatural ways. With a roundhouse kick to the side of one of the assailants’ heads, she was able to open a gap in their formation just large enough to escape through.

Her plan had been to draw them elsewhere, into a more favorable fight. Dispatch the first to catch up with her, hide, and counterattack, but to Usami, it looked like Marina was running away. Worried that she would never see her crush again, she held her shackled hands up to the sky and shouted.

“Help me, Marina!”

When Marina heard that, she wavered. Everyone knew that she and Usami were a tight team. Many on the internet speculated that they were more than friends, and Marina, eager to foster an audience, had hinted as much in her own social media posts. If she abandoned Usami, it wouldn’t just be a betrayal, it would be a top ten magical girl betrayal.

People would talk about it—about her—for weeks.