I Became a New Magical Girl Priest

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Deep within my heart, a certain emotion began to well up slowly.

Hope… No, it’s a bit different.

Hope is a complicated emotion that can’t just be summed up as one feeling. It could be a small joy within despair, a life’s goal, or perhaps something like love.

Love, huh?

Yeah. Maybe I have that kind of feeling.

It’s a very faint and subtle feeling that I wouldn’t really call romantic, but still, I could say I love them as friends, right?

Affection. Yes, let’s call it affection.

The kids who worry about me every time something happens, the kids who rejoice with pure expressions every time I’m happy, I liked them. So much that I could never give up on them now.

A lot has happened. There were times I almost despaired of reality.

Those kids lifted me up.

My hopes.

“…You can’t just take that hope away on your own, can you?”

A light flowed from my body. The bag I had been carrying on my back was no longer there. Just like how magic defined my form as a magical girl, the immense magical power flowing around my body was the same. The generator dropped from my back and began to hover in the air.

The white light pouring from the generator mixed with the other colors on the palette like paints. White became whatever color it mixed with. It became pink when mixed with Ha-yoon’s pink, and turned green when mixed with Ji-hye’s green.

Red, yellow, purple, blue.

But rather than becoming a dull mix, it layered beautifully.

It was not a mixed color that became muddy in a paint can, but a picture painted on a white canvas.

The color of my hope.

“…”

My already loose clothes became even more flouncy. If the fabric was going to stretch, I wished it would at least cover up some of the exposed skin instead of trailing behind like a fairy.

What I held was a hammer, but it didn’t look like that now. The long handle under the hammer head was now a sword’s grip. The white light extended long from the sides of the hammer’s head, forming something like a nose. The shape that rose high above it resembled a blade.

And around it, colors swirled. The colors of the kids.

The hopes of the children, which breathed life into my colorless life.

“You, you…!”

Looks like words aren’t coming out right anymore.

No need to worry.

I won’t die anyway.

I don’t want to tarnish the hopes of the children with such a petty life of yours.

I lowered that sword.

Pang-pang still didn’t give up until the end. If she were an alien, she might have generated quite a bit of magical power.

But.

As the sword fell, it sliced through the hammer that Pang-pang was raising horizontally. Pang-pang, who had raised the hammer in both hands as if to block the blade, found herself with two broken sticks instead when the hammer snapped in an instant.

Over her head, the blade passed through.

Without leaving a single wound, it slowly began to dismantle the armor that Pang-pang had created.

“Ugh!”

Pang-pang forced her body to move.

Boom. Did she have a cooling system on her shoulder? It burst apart, releasing energy. Her arm below was probably not in great shape either. She might have had some counteracting mechanisms set up to deal with that.

…No.

The arm inside that armor was, surprisingly, fine. If I had to nitpick, it didn’t look like your usual human arm.

It was the arm of an alien.

“I can’t end it like this…!”

Pang-pang shouted, her voice sounding grotesquely distorted.

“Hehe…! Yes, if it’s that…!”

“Whatever it is, this fight is already over.”

I said that as I charged at Pang-pang. The kids did the same.

Each approached the opponent in their own best way.

The armor split in half, revealing Pang-pang inside.

Surprisingly, her outfit was quite ordinary. A white shirt and black pants.

Of course, the state of that ordinary outfit was far from normal. Muscle bulged everywhere, and the fabric was torn all over.

Just like the beings she had used.

“Ugh…!”

Pang-pang swung her arm.

Did our ‘emotions’ have some effect? White magical power surged from Pang-pang’s hands as well. And that magic was burning her skin. As if it didn’t matter, whether it hurt or not, she charged at us, determined to wipe us out.

Boom!

But that magic was interrupted by another magic.

“Ugh!”

Ji-hye’s shield buckled inward. But, it held firm. Ji-hye saw herself and my hope.

The sound of an explosion echoed. It was on the opposite arm from where my sword had struck, a burst happening there. Ha-yoon had smashed one of the swirling cooling systems that had been spinning madly.

The magical power weakened slightly. Not my magical power, but Pang-pang’s.

“Too late!”

“That’s not something you should say.”

“You don’t know anything.”

Checked over my shoulder, Ji-hye’s mother was okay. I frowned.

“What—”

“Keep wondering.”

Pang-pang said that and—her eyes rolled back.

She had completely transformed into an alien. Now, any conversation would be pointless. What was she late for—

“…”

No. Now isn’t the time to think too deeply about that.

I raised my sword and dashed toward the alien with all my might.

The alien also clawed at me, but that was all.

Her magical power had weakened tremendously; her formless hopes couldn’t stop me.

The sword made of magic pierced through the alien’s chest.

The last cooling system shattered entirely, bursting apart.

With that, the alien stopped moving.

*

As soon as my transformation wore off, I collapsed onto the ground, dropping my hammer.

“Ji-eun!?”

Ha-yoon, who was rushing to me, fell over on top of me. Her soft, warm body made me feel a bit strange.

But she wasn’t the only one to cover me like that. All the other kids did the same.

Everyone laid their heads on me.

“…”

What a situation.

Should I say it’s hard, or should I say it feels nice? Even in this situation, they all had such lovely hair.

“…So, what now?”

In the middle of the universe.

Thinking about the amount of magical power I had released while fighting, I felt like we had already surpassed Jupiter.

Jua groaned as she forced herself to sit up. Chae-yeon helped support her from the side. Even though it was hard for her too.

I wanted to help, but honestly, I was a bit too tired to get up.

“No, it seems there’s still some time left.”

“A safety device seems to have activated after detecting the shock during the fight,” Jua said.

“Then again, she’s the one who fired the ship herself.”

I looked at Pang-pang with an incredulous gaze. She didn’t care about other people’s lives, but apparently, her life was so precious.

No, it must be because she thinks that way that she can go to such lengths.

“…How long will it take?”

“About two hours.”

Warping usually gets you there in an instant, doesn’t it? Isn’t it like teleportation? No, wasn’t that word itself already in that context?

“There are so many broken parts inside that it’ll take a while to fix. It seems they may have touched some important parts too.”

I think that was the first time I saw Jua respond so casually. Well, in this situation, it would be bothersome to think about anything else.

Anyway, I decided to just understand that it was broken all over and moving at that slow pace. I didn’t want to think too much about it either.

“…”

So, does that mean we could rest for about two hours?

After all, it’s all over.

Pang-pang was still safely at the Jupiter base, and there was no one left to hinder us.

So this is it.

“Let’s take a little break.”

While I thought that and said it, Jua and Chae-yeon returned to our side.

And boldly, they laid down next to the remaining parts of my body.

Is my body really that cozy? Maybe I’ve gained a little weight.

With my body in tatters and ruined, we fell asleep in that engine room which was now a heap of ruins.

It felt like it had been a long time since I had a good, deep sleep.

The time was short, though.

*

Clunk.

The shock of the spaceship stopping woke me up.

Rubbing my eyes, I slowly got up from my spot. The other kids were already up and preparing.

None of them had transformed.

Separate from hope, we really didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. There’s a limit to stamina, after all.

Wearing our tattered clothes, we looked at each other blankly before bursting out in laughter.

“…Alright. Let’s go.”

I said.

“We need to rescue Pang-pang.”

The kids all nodded energetically.

In a totally different way from how we looked, I couldn’t help but laugh once again.

 

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