Night had already fallen, and the entire city lay under a curtain of darkness.
Nadeshiko and Mawata had flown above the CBD of the New Urban District.
Looking down, the traffic on the expressway seemed like an endless river, and the prosperity of the New Urban District glittered before their eyes.
Looking up, the stars felt close enough to touch.
Nadeshiko felt the city’s night wind and quietly let out a breath.
“It’s so beautiful…”
“The first time I flew between the buildings… I thought it was unbelievable too.”
Mawata answered.
The scene before her was like a dream, and she wanted time to stop at this moment forever.
Most important of all, there was someone at her side sharing the view.
She turned her head toward Nadeshiko.
Nadeshiko’s soft black hair drifted in the wind, and the gentle moonlight laid a thin veil over her.
The ends of her hair melted into the night, and Mawata thought of the eyes of the goddess of night from myth.
With the eyesight strengthened by her transformation, she spotted two points of light among Nadeshiko’s hair, one pink and one gold, coming toward them from the tops of the buildings.
“Nadeshiko… do you see those two points of light?”
She pointed in their direction, wanting to confirm it was not a hallucination.
Nadeshiko had already felt two currents of magic approaching.
Even without transforming, her sense for magic was far better than Mawata’s.
She looked back, and sure enough, two points of light were rushing toward them through the hazy night.
That speed was clearly nothing a human could do.
A guess flashed through Nadeshiko’s mind.
“Mawata! Keep flying forward!”
Hearing the urgency in Nadeshiko’s voice, Mawata did not dare linger and steered Little Sleepy onward.
“Why does she get to fly!?”
Sakuraraku leapt over a drainpipe stretched across their path.
She and Seika had already been sprinting across rooftops for nearly ten minutes.
Dodging obstacles, she felt like the protagonist of a parkour game from the 2000s.
Seika looked far more composed.
She swung between the high-rises on golden threads, looking more and more like a spider.
“Miss Reika, I request drone support capable of carrying two people!”
If this kept up they would lose the target.
In her urgency she thought of the Demon Hunting Division, connected to Reika’s comms, and sent their location.
Just as Mawata was about to carry Nadeshiko out of the urban district, the drone arrived in time and hovered beside Sakuraraku.
Sakuraraku grabbed it, and the drone lifted her into the air.
“Seika—” Sakuraraku shouted toward her.
Seika understood.
A thread wrapped around the tail of the drone, and Seika held the thread tight, trailing behind like a kite that had been let go.
Rather than a drone, it was more like an aircraft.
With its side wings fully spread it was more than three meters long.
The camera mounted on the front had already locked onto Mawata and Nadeshiko flying ahead.
The drone carried them in pursuit like a hunting hawk on the wing.
“What are we supposed to do now…?”
Mawata, who had never encountered anything like this, was trembling.
Nadeshiko glanced back.
They had already flown past the cluster of buildings, yet those two little points of light were still chasing them without letting up.
“They can fly too!” Nadeshiko shouted through the roaring wind. “Mawata, we have to strike first!”
Nadeshiko had a rough idea.
Some nocturnal monster had probably been drawn by Mawata’s magic source.
She had heard former teammates say that some monsters had an instinct like phototaxis and would chase powerful sources of magic.
“I… I’ll try.”
Mawata drew a deep breath, turned the broom around, and stopped a hundred meters in the air.
Several cards flew out of the little cat-shaped card case at her waist and floated naturally in front of her.
Each card was crafted too finely to seem like a product of the human world.
The faces showed no obvious material and glimmered faintly in the pitch-black night.
The reliefs on the cards depicted all kinds of strange magical creatures, most of which Nadeshiko had never seen.
Mawata took one of them and lightly swept it across the white gem at the front of the broom.
The faint glow from the card faded into the surroundings.
Mawata raised her hand and quietly read the language recorded on the card.
“[FIRE]“
The points of light around them were dyed fiery red.
Mawata waved her hand, and as if answering their master’s command, the crimson points gathered into a blazing fireball and flew toward the target.
The fireball streaked across the sky like a meteor, carrying scorching heat toward Sakuraraku and Seika.
The two of them were in midair.
Even with a thousand methods they had nowhere to use them.
The drone was hit and instantly plunged into the forest below.
“Did I just hear a scream…?”
Mawata asked uncertainly.
“Let’s go down and look.”
This might be a good chance for Mawata to learn how to control her magic, Nadeshiko thought.
At the moment Mawata’s mind was mush.
This was her first time going through anything like this, so she could only obediently follow Nadeshiko’s instructions and ride the broom slowly down into the trees.
“Is it here…?”
Mawata saw a stretch of flattened forest and guessed.
“Nadeshiko, hide in the bushes first. I’ll go see what it actually is.”
Mawata steeled herself, lifted the broom, and spoke to Nadeshiko.
She was a magical girl.
In a situation like this, she had to protect Nadeshiko.
Besides, Nadeshiko was her only friend.
Nadeshiko obediently crouched into the bushes.
Her hand was already inside her small bag, closing around the mask.
She had always had the habit of carrying two masks with her.
If Mawata ran into danger she could not handle, it would be Nadeshiko’s turn to act.
Mawata walked toward the fallen trees.
Destruction over such a wide area meant the target’s body had to be enormous, and yet it could fly at high speed.
What kind of terrifying monster would that be…
Mawata swallowed and carefully rose onto her toes so she would not be discovered in the dark.
“Snap.“
Of all times, her foot broke a branch.
An arrow whooshed through the air.
With her post-transformation reflexes Mawata spun and tried to parry it with the broom, but the arrow had never been aimed at her.
It struck a golden thread in the corner of her vision.
A trap?!
There was no time to react.
The world spun.
When Mawata came back to herself, she found she was already hanging upside down, a thread bound around her left ankle.
From her inverted view she saw two girls in pink and yellow walking over.
“The prey took the bait~” Seika clapped her hands, looking as if a great grudge had been repaid.
“Speak. Why did you attack us?”
Sakuraraku stood with her arms folded, looking down at Mawata, clearly still holding a grudge over Nadeshiko.
“Sakuraraku? Seika?”
Mawata swayed a little.
She naturally recognized the two great heroes of the New Urban District.
She just could not understand why the two of them had followed her and Nadeshiko the whole way.
“I’m sorry… I thought you were monsters.”
Mawata chose to take all the blame herself.
Sakuraraku and Seika exchanged a glance, then leaned together and started whispering.
“Honestly, sneaking after someone like this was pretty wrong of us, wasn’t it? She had no idea what we were after.”
Sakuraraku said it a beat late.
She did not know what was wrong with her.
The moment anything involved Nadeshiko, she tended to lose her reason.
“Who told us our stalking technique was so sloppy she noticed? Now we can only apologize properly and explain why we were following her.”
Seika sighed in resignation, feeling for some reason as if they had lost.
“But… why does she know Nadeshiko?”
Sakuraraku was still a little unconvinced.
She glanced at Mawata hanging from the tree.
At that moment Mawata was busy holding down her skirt to keep from flashing anyone.
“Speaking of which… where did Nadeshiko go!?”