Tendou Megu was, of course, familiar with the term "magical girl."
Back before the world became like this, otaku culture had been mainstream in this country.
And within that culture, there was an entire genre built around the concept of magical girls.
Usually, it went like this: a teenage girl runs into some cute familiar. The familiar warns her that the world is in danger, asks her to sign a contract, and promises that if she becomes a magical girl, she'll gain supernatural powers to defeat evil and save the world.
On paper, that sounds like it should be a bloody, violent kind of story, right?
But magical-girl series were rarely portrayed that way. Most of them were kids' shows, meaning the "fights" were more goofy and cute than anything else.
Because they were children's shows. How could they be packed with gore and violence? They were supposed to be "healing," feel-good stories.
That's why kids loved them.
And that brat liked the genre too. The show's name was something like Heaven-Punishment Girls.
Now, though, after hearing Kuroneko explain it, Tendou finally understood just how dark the world of Puella Magi Madoka Magica really was—how it took the magical-girl "profession" and shoved it to the opposite extreme.
It shattered the idea that magical girls were a symbol of comfort and healing, twisting it into something else entirely.
That cute, safe job—the magical girl—became a high-risk occupation.
And that so-called Kyubey… was a nightmare familiar. A demon that exploited and deceived magical girls with surgical cruelty.
A sick, inhuman thing.
This creature called itself Kyubey, but it also had another name: Incubator. In other words, to that Earth, it was an alien life-form.
The Incubators' civilization was extremely advanced. They'd discovered that the universe's entropy was increasing—and if that continued, everything would eventually slide toward heat death.
To prevent that outcome, they needed an enormous amount of energy to "refill" the universe, to keep it from freezing into final silence.
So they developed technology that could convert emotion into energy—an absurd, almost miraculous technology.
But their species didn't have emotions.
So they targeted human girls in puberty, the phase of life when emotions were most intense.
They used those girls' hopeful hearts, harvesting the immense energy released when a soul falls from hope into despair.
And when a girl's hope becomes despair… that's when a magical girl "falls" and becomes a witch.
Kyubey lured girls into becoming magical girls, then sent them to hunt witches—without telling them that witches were what magical girls became in the end.
And once a girl became a magical girl, her soul was pulled out of her body and crystallized into a physical object: a Soul Gem.
Her body and soul were separated.
If the Soul Gem moved too far from the body, the magical girl's body became like a zombie—still moving, but empty.
Not because the body "died," but because the soul was the controller. Past a certain range, the soul couldn't perceive the body anymore, and consciousness fell into darkness.
On top of that, using magic in battle consumed power, and pain, emotional strain, and despair would cause the Soul Gem to become cloudy.
So a magical girl had to regularly cleanse that contamination by using Grief Seeds to draw it out.
And when a Soul Gem became fully polluted—turning pitch-black—it would "birth" a Grief Seed.
That process was the transformation from magical girl to witch.
And when a Soul Gem shattered into a Grief Seed, it released an enormous surge of energy.
Kyubey collected that energy to prevent the universe from sliding toward heat death.
On the surface, it could be described as sacrificing a few for the sake of the many—for the survival of countless species across the cosmos.
In reality, it was simply feeding its own civilization's energy demands, paid for with Earth's girls.
And in the course of harvesting that energy… no one even knew how many girls had been sacrificed.
The shrine maidens and holy maidens in ancient legends, the stories about girls defeating demons—those were all part of Kyubey's machinery.
By the modern era, it had slaughtered who-knew-how-many girls, and in Madoka's generation it created a tragedy that spiraled into infinity: the endless loop.
A magical girl named Akemi Homura, trying to save Madoka, kept rewinding time over and over, attempting every method she could think of to stop Madoka from becoming a magical girl.
In the end, she failed every time.
She could only watch her best friend die in front of her again and again—or fall and become a witch.
And the reason Madoka was chosen in the first place was simple: Kyubey saw that she could produce the largest energy output in history.
In the final loop—this last time—Madoka made a wish unlike any before.
A great wish.
A wish that would save every magical girl who had become a witch in the past, pulling them out of despair and giving them hope again.
But the larger the hope created by that wish, the larger the corresponding despair it should produce—on a cosmic scale.
Because she wished to bear everything. To shoulder it all herself.
Yet this time she didn't fall into despair, because her wish was for everyone's happiness.
For her, that meant there was no room left for despair.
And so she became—
A god.
It looked like ascension. Like a happy ending.
But it was also brutally cruel.
Because she gathered the Soul Gems of countless magical girls across parallel worlds and timelines—restructuring the universe itself to fulfill a wish that exceeded existing order—Madoka's individual existence was erased.
She became a universal law: everywhere, yet unseen, unrecognized, and unremembered.
In the new world, she was gone.
Only Homura—because she had traveled through time—still remembered her.
Madoka was left with an eternal solitude.
That, too, was cruel.
That was the story Kuroneko told them.
And then, in the channel—
Tendou Civilian Security Company: If Homura rewound time countless times and still couldn't stop Madoka from becoming a magical girl, then what are we supposed to do?
Fallen Angel Kuroneko: If this is the start of the main story, then it means Madoka will become a god—but that kind of "godhood" is torture!!!
Mr. Golden Toilet: If becoming a magical girl can't be avoided, then when she's about to sign the contract… we interfere with the contract.
Martian: Mess with the wish?
Dr. Kouzuki: Oh? You mean like exploiting wish logic—like asking a genie for "three more wishes" as your third wish?
Mr. Golden Toilet: Exactly. We bug-abuse it.
Asuna: But if they're the most advanced civilization in that universe, there's no way they'd leave such an obvious loophole. They wouldn't allow that.
Mr. Golden Toilet: Wrong. I believe Kyubey will keep its word and "grant" the wish. I bet other magical girls have tried something like that before and got it granted. But "granted" doesn't mean the bug works. Kyubey will play word games, or engineer an "accident." Maybe you get your three extra wishes—but before you can use them, you die, or turn into a witch. Or something happens that forces you to act fast, leaving you no time to think. You burn those wishes in a panic, and your attempt to chain-bug the third wish fails.
Asuna: Then what if the first wish is "I won't die," and the second is "I won't become a witch"?
Whisperer: Not becoming a witch doesn't mean you won't become something else. If the wish isn't perfectly specified, Kyubey can still twist it.
Dr. Kouzuki: In other words, the wish has to be flawless—so perfect that civilization can't find a single angle to exploit.
Mr. Golden Toilet: Exactly.
Dr. Kouzuki: Interesting. That basically means we're trying to outsmart a civilization that's been developing for who knows how many years.
Relying on the intelligence of a chat group to challenge the strategic sophistication of a civilization with an incomprehensible technological head start…
Was that naïveté?
Was it stupidity?
Or was it ignorance—mixed with courage?
(End of Chapter)
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