Yimi's luck hadn't actually failed. The girl who'd stopped to talk to her carried the faint scent of mana—probably residue from a recent fight with a Witch.
"Here, go play with these."
An arcade. The red-haired girl named Kyoko Sakura dropped a handful of arcade tokens into Yimi's hands, then headed off to find a dance machine.
Under normal circumstances she would absolutely never bother with other people. How anyone else lived or died was none of her business. Take the tokens she'd given Yimi—she hadn't spent a single coin on them.
In places like this, you could always find a stray token or two by checking under the machines.
And if you couldn't, it didn't matter. This kind of arcade had no age restrictions for minors, so she could just find some kid younger than her, watch them play badly for a while, then shove them aside to take over, pocketing a few tokens in the process.
Kids Yimi's age were off limits, though—children that small never came alone. They always had adults with them.
Then, armed with that seed capital, she just had to win a few more on the slots or whatever else. Today's luck wasn't half bad—normally her slot machine outings were always a net loss.
Yimi looked down at the tokens in her hand and chased after Kyoko. "Can these buy food?"
"In your dreams. If these could buy things, this wouldn't be an arcade—they'd just call it a casino." Not exactly gentle, even with a little kid.
Then she thought about how this brat had been crying alone on the street just earlier, and softened her tone slightly. "What were you crying about? Mom yell at you? Run away from home?"
Any normal person who found a small child alone and lost after dark would take her to the police. But Kyoko wasn't normal.
"Wasn't crying. Ate lonely sauce." Yimi answered honestly.
"Whatever." Kyoko rolled her eyes and pulled out a pack of Pocky, biting one stick between her lips.
She found herself wondering why she'd even bothered getting involved. This brat didn't remind her of her little sister or anything—at least her sister wouldn't have been bawling on a street corner. ...Probably?
Kyoko noticed Yimi staring intently at the Pocky in her hand and tossed the box to her.
It was the kind of snack you always saw in dramas—thin chopstick-like sticks, one side coated in chocolate. On TV, couples would bite one end and try to lure their partner into biting the other. The chocolate side didn't bother Yimi's palate in human form.
She sat nearby, crunching through stick after stick, watching Kyoko dance.
Then asked point-blank: "Are you a Magical Girl?"
"Hah?" Kyoko leaned against the dance machine railing and craned her head back to look at Yimi. "Sure am. I'm the kind that patrols at night and eats little kids who can't find their way home."
"Eats kids!"
Yimi leapt to her feet and backed up several steps.
She'd had no idea Magical Girls harbored darkness she didn't know about.
"Haha, just messing with you." Kyoko stopped looking at her and started stomping to the arrows on screen.
Remembering that she was actually very strong, Yimi inched back. "Then who did you make your contract with? Kyubey?"
The moment she heard the word "Kyubey," Kyoko finally stopped her footwork. She turned around and gave Yimi a fresh once-over.
"What, has the Magical Girl recruitment drive gotten so aggressive they're signing elementary schoolers now? A career with zero age requirements—really fills me with confidence about the future."
She reached toward Yimi, irritated, as if to take back the tokens she'd given her—but her hand hovered in midair and dropped again.
She draped herself over the dance machine railing, chin propped on one hand. "What did you wish for? Don't tell me you're crying because you regret the wish you made."
At an age where independent thought was barely even on the table, Kyoko wouldn't have been surprised if the kid had wished for a lollipop.
Yimi shook her head. "Didn't wish. Wasn't crying."
Stubborn little thing. She'd been bawling with snot running down her face earlier—Kyoko had been the one wiping it.
"You turned it down? Then you're not crying because you rejected it at the time and now you regret it, right? Throwing yourself into Mommy's arms won't fix that, you know. You'll probably get it by the time you're in middle school."
Kyoko raised her eyebrows and turned back to the dance machine. Her combo had long since broken.
"If one day you do feel like making a wish—whether it's for cake, or immortality, or whatever. Just be selfish about it. That's fine. But never, ever wish for someone else's sake."
She stepped off the dance machine. One hand stuffed in her pocket, the other extended toward Yimi. "Come with me. I'll take you somewhere."
Yimi took her hand but remained wary. "Are you going to eat kids now?"
"..."
A church. Not even a mainstream one. This was Kyoko's temporary home.
"Church" was generous—"abandoned building" was more accurate now. Untended for who knew how long, a visible layer of dust coated everything. Patches of ivy crept through cracks in places. Unfortunately for Yimi, there were no mice to be found.
"This was my father's church. He was a pastor, but he kept preaching things that didn't align with official doctrine. Gradually, people stopped coming to listen. The diocese even sent someone to strip him of his position."
When she spoke about her own past, Kyoko's voice grew noticeably softer.
After that, stripped of income, their family lived like vagrants. Forget eating their fill—being able to eat at all was a stroke of luck.
Kyoko tossed Yimi another apple. "But everything he said made perfect sense. If only people would just calm down and really listen to him—that's what I thought at the time. So I wished for Kyubey to make people listen to what he had to say."
The very next day, crowds suddenly appeared. Her family's life returned to normal—they could finally stop worrying about where their next meal would come from.
If things could have stayed that way, everything would have been fine. But the happiness didn't last. One day a Witch appeared in the church. It wasn't a particularly powerful one, but after defeating it, the still-novice Kyoko forgot to undo her transformation and was seen by her father in full Magical Girl form.
To explain, she confessed everything.
When her father learned that people hadn't come because his words held merit but because of magic, the pastor broke completely. He denounced Kyoko as a Witch who had bewitched people's hearts—then killed himself along with Kyoko's mother and younger sister, destroying their happy family with his own hands.
"Tch, dumping all this dark stuff on a kid your age—you'll have nightmares tonight. But being a Magical Girl was never the beautiful career you see in cartoons. And I don't want another Magical Girl popping up in this city."
That last part was sincere. To grow stronger, Magical Girls could purify their Soul Gems with Grief Seeds—and Grief Seeds only dropped from Witches. If a mere Familiar showed up, wasting magic to save bystanders from it was a losing trade.
So most Magical Girls, when they encountered Familiars, simply looked the other way. Let them eat people, grow into full Witches, then harvest. Kyoko happened to be exactly that kind of person.
She watched Yimi nosing around the church with wide curious eyes. "If you came here full of admiration for the job, I'd suggest you give it up. Magical Girls can't save anyone. If anything, they end up personally contributing to plenty of tragedies."
She had no intention of changing her own ways. But when she herself was already this deep in the dark, seeing a pure-hearted child about to tumble into the same mud—she couldn't help wanting to shove her back out.
"Why?" Yimi looked up at her, puzzled.
"Same as a lot of careers out there, I guess. From the outside looking in, everything seems wonderful. But the moment you're actually in it, you feel how rotten it is—and once you're in, getting out is nearly impossible." Words no fourteen-year-old should have needed to say. "That kind of talk is way too early for you right now."
Kyoko chucked her finished apple core aside and pointed in a direction. "There's a room over there where you can sleep. If you don't have a home to go back to, just pick a spot and crash. The blankets should be clean. If any homeless guys wander in, I'll kick them out."
Yimi didn't move. She raised her small hand in a gimme gesture. "I want to see your Soul Gem."
"You still won't give up, huh?" With a flick of intent, the ring on Kyoko's finger transformed into a red gem shaped just like Mami's. She waved it in front of Yimi but gripped it tight, clearly not about to let go.
"Mm." Yimi gently brushed her fingertips across the gem's surface.
She could feel it. This was an object crafted from the entirety of Kyoko's soul. The underlying principles weren't hard for Yimi to parse—not after she'd already extracted Kyubey's technical knowledge.
Having satisfied the child's curiosity, Kyoko withdrew the gem. "Someone like you who doesn't know anything—if you became a Magical Girl, you'd probably end up the Mami Tomoe type. Either way, it wouldn't end well."
"You know Yellow Person?" Yimi remembered Mami's name, but Mami-nee was too long a name. She couldn't be bothered.
"That's a weird nickname... You've actually met her? She didn't come poking around this city, did she?" Kyoko shot a wary glance toward the church window.
She opened her mouth, then clicked her tongue again. "How's she been lately?"
"How's she been?" Yimi bit her finger, thinking. She didn't know how to answer the question.
But she remembered Blue-Hair discussing this over lunch.
Sayaka, at noon: "That's only natural, right? We didn't know the true nature of Magical Girls until now. Mami-senpai had no choice, but there's no way it should fall on Madoka with her happy family to make that kind of sacrifice."
Yimi looked up at Kyoko. "She got sacrificed."
The little cat only half-understood the word "sacrifice."
"?"
The apple slipped from Kyoko's hand and hit the floor.
Her expression shifted through several changes, and something that might have been grief flashed across her face.
"That so... Guess that's only natural." She covered her face. "She was always the type to waste her magic on Familiars."