“No, no, no! How could something like this possibly be on me? I must be seeing things.”
Jiecheng Yuan wrapped herself in a bath towel, hurried over, and shut the front door, which the wind had been blowing open and closed. Then she went straight into the bathroom. Her legs were still numb, and she had to brace herself with one hand against the mirror above the sink. Her entire appearance was reflected back at her.
Jiecheng Yuan was undeniably a beautiful girl. Now that she had the chance to take a good look, that was even more obvious. If she didn’t have something more important to worry about, she might’ve felt a strange flutter in her heart.
Her smooth, pale body showed no signs of anything excessive having been done to her. What stood out instead were the dark red lines on her skin, woven into a pattern that was impossible to ignore.
In the original game, the pattern that had appeared on Jiecheng Yuan’s body was called the Black Magic Mark. The players had a much cruder name for it.
Corruption, a fall to darkness, a descent into depravity—and even a few terms too embarrassing to say out loud... Whatever you called it, it was an impure mark that only appeared after a Magical Girl’s body and mind had both been corrupted.
The changes caused by corruption were obvious: a changed wand, a different color of magic, an altered magical outfit when the Magical Girl transformed, and so on. Most noticeable of all was the Black Magic Mark branded onto her body, visible only to other Magical Girls.
Corruption changed a person psychologically, too. She usually disliked using a childish, black-and-white word like “evil” to describe someone’s personality. But every corrupted Magical Girl, no matter what she’d been like before, embodied the word “evil” from the very moment the mark was branded onto her.
What she couldn’t understand was that every other character in the game who got a Black Magic Mark underwent a drastic change in personality. Even though the mark had appeared on her body, she didn’t feel any different at all. She couldn’t even sense any of the extreme negative emotions, like a desire to destroy or dominate.
“Could this be a prank? Did someone sneakily draw some weird pattern on me or something?” Refusing to accept reality, Jiecheng Yuan rubbed at the pattern on her stomach, as if she could wipe those embarrassing marks off her body.
But the Black Magic Mark that had appeared on her body didn’t vanish just because she rubbed at it. If anything, it had already become one with her skin.
What was done was done. There wasn’t much point in obsessing over the Black Magic Mark’s effects. She might as well figure out how to put an end to this awkward situation once and for all.
According to the game’s lore, any Magical Girl with a Black Magic Mark was an irredeemable villain. The moment one was discovered, she’d be hunted down with everything they had.
The game did its best to avoid the question of life and death after a battle, but it wasn’t some six o’clock kids’ Magical Girl anime where the fight ended as soon as the enemy got blasted away. The characters weren’t flawless champions of love and justice, either, so the developers came up with some pretty abstract ways of handling a character’s exit.
The defeat CGs for the protagonist team—with Jiecheng Yuan at the center, as in the original—went without saying. And when they beat a corrupted Magical Girl, they’d “execute” her in ways the players loved, making sure she couldn’t get back up again.
To put it bluntly, when Magical Girls fought, the outcome was either topping or getting topped.
She didn’t want to spend her life as a villain, so there was no way she could go around raping every Magical Girl who opposed her. But if she lost, she’d be the one getting raped. She’d do everything she could to avoid even a single replenishing-magic CG. How could she possibly accept that kind of ending?
If the Black Magic Mark on Jiecheng Yuan’s body was discovered, she’d either be taken for a villain and defeated by other Magical Girls, then left in a sorry state, or be treated as an ally by other villains and forced to help them do the same to others.
Neither outcome was something Jiecheng Yuan wanted to see. Hiding away like she was running from the problem would only buy her time. The Black Magic Mark on her body was like a dangerous time bomb. If she didn’t defuse it completely, it could shatter her false peace at any moment.
Maybe she could just find a shop to remove the Black Magic Mark—yeah, right. This was the notorious Black Magic Mark, not some delinquent girl’s tattoo.
Or maybe, whoever came looking for her, she should just take them out first. It was only a game, after all...
The dangerous thought had barely crossed her mind before Jiecheng Yuan rejected it. She didn’t know if she’d simply had a ridiculous brain fart and come up with a wildly out-there plan, or if the Black Magic Mark was already affecting the way she thought.
If this damn Black Magic Mark hadn’t corrupted her, she could’ve relied on her memories of beating the whole game to avoid all the wrong choices and reach the ending she wanted.
The Black Magic Mark?
She realized that not every villain had a Black Magic Mark. Even an ordinary Magical Girl could do bad things and end up opposing the protagonist team. Some even made getting a Black Magic Mark and falling to darkness their goal.
Then, by the same logic, couldn’t she do good deeds as a villain bearing the Black Magic Mark, earn the Magical Girls’ approval, and avoid the bad endings she didn’t want to see?
People were always posting comments like this in the comment sections of other anime: “Can this character get redeemed already?”
If she really could get redeemed, she wouldn’t have to live in constant fear of triggering some terrible ending. She might even find a way to remove the Black Magic Mark.
A rush of enthusiasm alone wouldn’t be enough to get her redeemed. The safest plan Jiecheng Yuan could think of was still to follow the original story route without changing its overall plot.
And while she was at it, it’d be even better if she could avoid the special scenes she didn’t like.
She’d already figured out where to rejoin the original story, too. The whole game was played from Xiwei Li’s perspective, so Li’s influence on the plot went without saying. In this unfamiliar world, getting on good terms with Li was the best way to keep the original story mostly on track despite her corruption. It was better than stumbling around alone and risking getting raped.
Once she’d more or less settled on a plan for the future, Jiecheng Yuan stepped away from the mirror. She pulled on the school uniform she’d left folded in the bathroom to change into. As someone who’d been transported to another world, it took her ages to get dressed in women’s clothes. They were a little wrinkled, but that was still much better than wandering around her room completely naked.
Li’s safety was the next big problem in front of her. If she lost the person who drove the plot forward, all those wonderful ideas she’d just had would turn to nothing.
After all, among every character who appeared in the original, Li was one of the few ordinary people who hadn’t become a Magical Girl.
Jiecheng Yuan hurried back to her room and looked down through the window. The streets were no longer as deserted as they’d been after nightfall. The midday summer sun shone over the bustling streets. The heat had sapped even the cicadas’ strength, and pedestrians passed one another beneath the dappled tree shadows, hurrying off in different directions to escape the hot wind. Not one of them stopped for the oddly dark red patch on the ground.
The patch stood out less than it had when she saw it last night. Time and passing tires had faded its once-bright color, but they couldn’t erase the fact that someone had fallen there.
So what happened last night really had been real!
Li’s fate was still unknown. Given the game’s world, though, there was a better chance Li was still alive.
And when she thought about the silver-haired girl from last night, Jiecheng Yuan couldn’t help connecting the attacks on Li and herself.
Whether she wanted to uncover the truth behind her own corruption or find out what had happened to Li, the silver-haired girl was a link she couldn’t afford to skip.
But when she’d been attacked, she hadn’t even seen the girl’s face. Other than the color of her hair, she had no clues to go on. Trying to find one person in a whole city with so little to work with was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
As Jiecheng Yuan crossed the living room toward the front door, she realized she’d been wrong again. This wasn’t a needle in a haystack. The needle had come right to her.
The silver-haired girl she’d been looking for was sprawled shamelessly on the living-room sofa, legs kicked up. A pair of eyes peeked out from between her sky-blue hoodie with dog ears and the phone almost pressed to her face. She glanced at the stunned Jiecheng Yuan as casually as if nothing were wrong, then looked back at her screen and greeted her with the calm familiarity of an old friend.
“Oh, good morning. How are you feeling now?”
