Loop 103.
Homura Akemi texted Mami Tomoe to coordinate their dinner date.
They decided they wouldn't go out to a restaurant, although Homura had still taken the preparatory step of robbing a local bank of several hundred thousand yen in case she was asked to pay. (She did not mention that to Mami.) They were both magical girls: They expected to discuss virtually nothing else and preferred to do it away from listening ears.
They would meet in Mami's apartment. Homura strongly preferred this. She had her own apartment, but it was good as a place of retreat and nothing else. Burying its charitable blandness in magical projections and diagrams of
Walpurgisnacht (provided by
Kyubey, of all people, sharing mundane Incubator technology) meant turning it into a white, featureless void. Homura only went there to plan and to brainstorm; it wasn't meant as a real living space.
Mami's apartment felt like home to Homura Akemi. Until last night, she hadn't visited it in so long.
After finishing the witch hunt, accepting Mami's dinner date, and heading home to her apartment, Homura Akemi cried. Like Mami, she'd forgotten what it felt like to fight alongside close friends. This was what had vanished from her life the day she declared she wouldn't rely on anyone anymore. Homura felt alternately silly and foolish. Could she let her heart soften
without looking like a mess?
They wore their school uniforms. Mami Tomoe had prepared
omakase sushi for them, which made Homura's eyes widen. She deeply appreciated the effort, but it was entirely unnecessary, Homura had insisted, and then Mami had broken down into wrenching sobs of her own as if she'd rolled every
nigiri while choking back tears. Mami said she was crying "because I'm not alone anymore."
"They look up to me," Mami cried into Homura's shoulder. "Madoka and Sayaka, they think I'm so
cool. But I'm really not worth looking up to. I only pretend to be cool. I'm really pushing myself hard. Even when I'm scared, or hurting, there's no one I can talk to. All I can do is cry on my own."
She thinks of me as an authority figure, Homura realized.
To her, I'm wiser and more experienced. I'm someone that she can rely on. She thinks that if she falls, I will be the one to catch her.
And it occurred to Homura that Mami might be right. A set of number wheels on the inside of her buckler told her how long it had been chronologically since she had contracted with Kyubey. She had spent more than a
decade in her time loops. She
was a veteran. If Mami had questions, then (perhaps) Homura
was best equipped to answer them.
Everybody needs a backstop, Homura reflected. Whether it be their parents, their teachers, their coaches, their priests. Magical girls were magical
children, and it was by the sheer pragmatic cruelty of the Incubators that they always sought to contract the societally unmoored.
Of course, Mami wanted to cry on Homura's shoulder. Every other shoulder was gone.
"You're not alone anymore, Mami-san," said Homura, not understanding the words as she spoke them. But she had the sense that her presence mattered more than her words.
Mami went on crying for a little while. "You're right," she sniffled. "I'm not alone anymore, am I?"
Mami withdrew from their embrace. Still holding Homura's hands, she locked eyes. "Will you really stand and fight with me from now on? Will you really stay with me?"
"If someone like me will do," said Homura. "Yes. Always."
Loop 103.
"You would receive grief seeds on request, as needed," said Homura. "Were we to separate after the 30th, both of you would receive two-fifths of the grief seeds we'd collected since you joined, less however many of our shared grief seeds you had already used." Homura paused deliberately. "We can also offer a one-time payment of one hundred thousand yen. Kyubey will handle the accounting for the grief seeds and the money."
"Money makes it a tempting offer," Kyouko Sakura began. She leaned back in her chair. "Sounds like you need us more than we need you."
They were meeting in Homura's apartment instead of Mami's: Mami explained that she and Kyouko had baggage that made her apartment a poor meeting place. Sayaka and Madoka were still rubbernecking, as was Yuma Chitose from where she sat next to Kyouko. The seats were single-colored concentric circles that ringed a central stage – still level with the rest of the room – that sat beneath a dizzying flock of diagrams and storm-blurred photographs of the largest witch any of them could ever have seen. The background was a featureless white void.
Homura had set out plates of untoasted white bread on the central table. The symbolism was rather
on the nose, but it was a gesture of good faith that she thought Kyouko would appreciate. Homura had offered a slice to Kyouko as they sat themselves, and they both took a bite. Homura set her leftovers on the table while Kyouko finished her portion in three ravenous gulps.
"We both need each other," said Mami Tomoe. "
Walpurgisnacht arrives on the 30th. Our only hope of beating it is to work as a team. You're a powerful and experienced magical girl. And Yuma's healing power–"
"Yuma's off the table," Kyouko growled. She stabbed a finger at Homura, the rest of the hand still bearing a half-eaten apple. "Like she's
always been, gun nut. You know what I told myself when I took her on? 'Maybe I can't feed her. Maybe I can't send her to school. But the one thing I
can do is to keep her from contracting with Kyubey.'" She took another bite, chewed, swallowed. "And then
you came along–"
"Believe me," said Homura, "I understand your anger and your frustration. I, too, have someone whom I cannot allow to make a contract–"
"Right.
Pinkie, sitting just over there." (Madoka's hand went absently to her pink hair.) "Don't bullshit me. I can sense magical potential like any other
mahou shoujo. You want to beat this witch? Get
her to contract, and leave Yuma
alone."
"But Yuma has already made the contract," said Homura. "And you know as well as I do that her dream is to be someone important, someone strong enough to be
useful. She has healing magic that we don't. If nobody stops it,
Walpurgisnacht wipes Mitakihara City off the map. Helping us defeat it would be the most useful thing Yuma could do."
Yuma nodded along until Kyouko elbowed her (gently) in the ribs.
"You know how we work," said Mami. "You know that we're no pushovers."
"
Right," said Kyouko, with a wolfish grin. "You kill so many witches that if you didn't respect others' territory, there'd be nothing left for me. Just, why bother with the familiars? Why not let them eat enough to become
real witches with
real grief seeds?"
"Because we're
magical girls, and we're here to protect people," Sayaka snarled. "Our grief seeds come from witches, not our neighbors."
(Homura deliberately
hadn't told the others to let her do the talking. She expected and wanted Sayaka to butt in. Homura was still a stranger to the subtleties of romance, but she could tell that Sayaka's sheer bloody guilelessness ingratiated her to Kyouko
strongly.)
Kyouko's mouth quirked. "I'd call you a dope, but it seems you've found a way to make it work."
"It's teamwork and technique," said Mami. "Witches pose some threat to us. Familiars largely don't."
(Homura actually agreed with Kyouko's reasoning and largely didn't bother hunting familiars in her previous loops. She kept a hectic schedule: When she needed grief seeds, she needed a
lot in a
short span of time.)
"Working with us," Homura said, "you will never go hungry, and you will never lack for grief seeds." Homura flipped some of her hair behind her back. "What would it take for you to say 'yes'?"
Kyouko tilted her head, mockingly imitating one of Homura's mannerisms. "A million yen in cash," she began, "right fucking now," she said.
"We could do that," asked Homura.
Kyouko froze in place. She squinted at Homura. "Bullshit. Do you, really?"
"Would you join us and help us defeat
Walpurgisnacht for the other things mentioned, plus one million yen in cash?" asked Homura.
"Sure?" said Kyouko, still squinting.
Homura waved her hand. A
monstrous pile of yen notes summoned to the table in a neat, quadrangular stack.
Kyouko leaned over, grabbing a money bundle still wrapped in a money band. "This is–"
Kyouko transformed into a magical girl and pressed the yen notes into her forehead. "Fucking hell, these are
real?"
"Do you need assistance in transporting these?" said Homura. "I strongly advise
against depositing this money in a bank, as that would trigger a criminal investigation."
"You cocksucker!" shouted Kyouko. "Did you rob a fucking bank?!"
"Yes," said Homura.
Mami Tomoe was laughing.
Loop 103.
Homura did not like the group's name. She was fine with 'the Mitakihara Group' because that's what they were. But 'the
Mahou Shoujo Yunion (MSY)' was taking things too far. They were never supposed to be that large, to be that
bureaucratic. Mami and the others were thrilled by the group's success, but all of this publicity created
entropy (in the figurative sense, not the physical sense meant by Kyubey). Already, Homura had lost the ability to track the timeline's evolution fully – there were too many people to surveil and too many responsibilities to juggle.
It was Sayaka's idea, naturally; Homura had done
too well in mentoring her. Sayaka had asked, they had looked, and then they'd discovered: magical girls in Mitakihara and elsewhere could be found online with minimal effort. Years ago, at the dawn of the Internet, the net-savvy of Kyubey's contractees formed 'role-playing groups' on Internet fora. It became a subgenre. There were badges and flairs for 'real' or 'confirmed' magical girls. Forum threads went on for hundreds of pages as different girls argued about the best ways to find witches, whether magical girls should form teams, and where and how territory could be respected. They posted pictures of themselves that laypeople assumed were very elaborate cosplays.
These fora had rules. To the others' puzzlement and Homura's blind terror, the largest forums always had rules that forbade role-players from claiming that witches come from magical girls. Arguments concerning that subject always became too unruly for moderators to handle.
(They all followed a pattern. A prominent magical girl 'role-player' would win notoriety for themselves on a forum: They would offer well-meant advice and encouragement to newcomers, organize social outings, and even help 'arbitrate' disputes between different groups. Often, they would form groups themselves or else join them when they already existed.)
(Then, one day, they'd lose their minds. It was common for 'witchgaters' (which is an idiomatic translation from Japanese into English) to 'at-mention' the omnipresent 'Kyubey' and then blast them with hateful polemic, all the while insisting that 'Kyubey' had betrayed them and their trust. Sometimes, they would claim that 'Kyubey' had turned them into zombies. The bans came swiftly. Witches came from magical girls? Sure. And for that matter, Soylent Green came from people.)
(It became a 'meme.' To claim that the 'Kyubey' account was a Faustian monster would elicit eye-rolls and groans from the common lurker.)
(Homura had explained this to Kyubey and asked if he had any comment. He stayed quiet for a time, his ears and tail whipping back and forth in what seemed like silent laughter, and confirmed that the 'Kyubey' accounts were all his.)
Regardless, Sayaka's idea was simple. (Madoka had also contributed substantially, Sayaka always made sure to stress. It was
their idea.) The MSY would announce its presence in Mitakihara. They would print QR codes linking to their announcement thread and post them around the city. ("Are you a magical girl? Scan here to learn more about the MSY!") And they would set up an emergency hotline: other magical girls in Mitakihara could private-message the MSY forum account with their phone numbers, and if they found themselves in trouble (during a set of 'business hours' past the end of the school day), they could call the MSY for help.
This would mean splitting the party, Homura had stressed. The five of them working together were unstoppable in any witch's labyrinth: modern machine guns, rifle muskets, gun swords, and fire lances kept witches and familiars at a comfortable distance, and even when they didn't – Sayaka and Kyouko were well-experienced with fighting up close. Mistakes did happen, and Yuma could heal them before the fight was even over. Yuma herself cut the team's grief seed consumption by a factor of two-thirds. Would they send Yuma as part of the rapid response team – her plus Mami and Kyouko, and leave Homura and Sayaka to hunt by themselves? Being a loner meant taking hits that a teammate could have prevented.
But they had a duty, Sayaka had argued. They were magical girls sworn to protect the innocent. They were now powerful enough to protect the ordinary people in their territory. Now, it was time to protect
others like them.
This drove Homura up a wall, which Madoka and Mami thought was endearing and quite funny. But they agreed with Sayaka. Even
Kyouko agreed with Sayaka. Now that Madoka wasn't coming with them – she took the responsibility of managing the MSY's forum accounts – every time they finished a hunt, Sayaka would go home with Kyouko and Yuma, and Homura had secretly bedded with Mami Tomoe enough times to understand what that meant.
They were all strong enough to handle it. Homura was just being a worrywart.
Loop 104.
Homura refused to join the
Mahou Shoujo Yunion, hoping to stop Sayaka and Madoka in their tracks.
Loop 105.
Whenever they split the party, Homura would
always accompany Sayaka.
Loop 106.
Soon after forming their alliance, Homura steered Mami, Sayaka, and Madoka into accepting 'Never split the party' as an inviolable common-sense rule for witch hunting.
Loop 106.
The girls were two first-years named Reina Hirata and Sara Nasu. The call for help came from Reina. Sara was inconsolable. Her soul gem had neared total corruption. She'd just learned something horrible (Reina wouldn't elaborate) and was going to shatter her soul gem, which Kyubey said would kill her. Both had transformed, but Reina didn't want to subdue Sara. Sara would fight back, which would leave her soul gem exhausted.
This wasn't the kind of call to which they were meant to respond, but Sayaka insisted, as she always did.
Loop 106.
After the MSY's arrival, Sara Nasu's soul gem reached full corruption. She didn't shatter it in time. Sara Nasu became a witch: a wingless dragon in a black bridal veil.
Mami and Kyouko harpooned Sara's witch form into the walls of her labyrinth as Reina pled with her to come back as her old self. Kyubey led Madoka to the exit. (Homura had given Madoka a concealed-carry holster to wear beneath her school uniform for these visits, so she was not unarmed.) Homura tasked her Minimis with area denial, perforating any familiar to approach them. Sayaka bifurcated any who escaped the Minimis but kept her attention on Sara in case her witch form needed to be killed immediately. With
Walpurgisnacht, Homura had explained, the plan was to rely on Sayaka to deliver the killing blow.
Homura learned many things from Reina's begging. They were best friends, Sara and Reina. Kyubey had approached them both, and they both contracted together. They wished that their fates would be forever intertwined and that their companionship would last forever. They were rivals with another magical girl in their class. They saw her become a witch.
Sara hadn't wanted that. She hadn't wanted to spend the rest of her days with Reina as a witch, cursing and devouring everything they'd held precious. And yet, Reina had been so lonely before meeting Sara that even a witch's companionship would be meaningful.
Reina's soul gem had gone black. Yuma pressed a grief seed into her palms, but Reina threw it aside.
Reina's soul gem reached full corruption, and she became a witch from
inside the labyrinth. An explosive gust of wind sent the MSY and Sara's familiars tumbling like leaves. The witches Sara and Reina joined together, two dragons sucking each other's tails. Reina's claws ripped the harpoons from Sara's body.
"We need to retreat!" cried Homura. The new double-witch resolutely ignored Homura's machine gun fire.
Sara's witch form disgorged Reina's tail, droplets of magma spraying from its mouth like spittle. It inundated the floor where Mami and Kyouko stood with liquid flame, killing both of them instantly.
"Mami! Kyouko!" Sayaka screamed. She summoned a gun sword with a blade two meters long, readying herself to charge–
Homura reached into her buckler, fingers looping around a tiny brass handle, and yanked. She felt something give – shifting levers
clanked against the inside of the buckler – and Homura felt her soul being ripped backward through time–
Loop 127.
This time, Mami managed to snare Homura with her ribbons. She also managed to gum up the clockwork of Homura's buckler, preventing her from pausing time or aborting into another loop. The last vestige of the labyrinth's distortion blew aside with the wind.
Mami aimed a rifle musket at the soul gem on Homura's left hand. Sayaka cleft the musket's barrel in two with a gun sword while Kyouko pinned Mami's arms behind her back.
"Drop it!" shouted Sayaka. "Stop! Stop, now!"
"You knew!" Mami screamed. "You knew this entire time,
and you never told us?!"
Homura took deep breaths. She knew that it was difficult to answer truthfully. If Homura claimed to be a time traveler, Mami might use a ribbon to crush Homura's left hand.
"Sayaka
and Yuma! You doomed
both of them! Everyone here will turn into a witch, and for
what?!"
"For Madoka," said Homura.
Mami screamed at the sky.
"Mami, I love you, but I need you to let me go," said Homura. "We're a team–"
Mami blasted Kyouko out from behind her with a thunderous kick. Still screaming, she summoned an oversized
Tiro Finale that she aimed at Homura–
"Don't!" screamed Homura.
Sayaka shot Mami in the head with a gun sword, shattering her soul gem. Mami's body collapsed to the floor, her eyes sunken and blank.
"Dammit, Mami," muttered Sayaka. "Fucking, dammit–"
Kyouko launched into a river of profanity. Yuma began to cry. Madoka was at Mami's apartment, but she'd soon learn too.
"Only four," Homura mumbled as her restraints melted away from her body. "Only four against
Walpurgisnacht."
And the other three would have significant trouble trusting her. Their fellowship might well be broken–
Loop 136.
Kyubey explained that the energy generated by every witch transformation to occur in one of Homura's loops was still being carried forward into their new loops to follow. He offered Homura his full cooperation and assistance. On behalf of the Incubators, Kyubey would name Homura a trusted ally.
Homura shot him in the head, then again with the rest of her Beretta's magazine, and then stomped on his corpse, grinding it into the pavement, screaming all the while.
Loop 137.
Sayaka was getting powerful enough that Homura didn't fully trust the rest of her group to kill her in her witch form. She had neared the point where 5.56x45mm NATO did not fully dissuade her. Homura had been resorting to stopping time and clapping cooked frag grenades against Sayaka's witch form's body by the several hundred, which she found more tedious and more logistically unworkable with each loop.
The sensible thing would be to reset the timeline as soon as Sayaka turned witch, but Homura wanted to practice in managing the fallout amongst the others. Managing their newfound anguish and distress was a riddle that she lacked the emotional intelligence to solve.
Homura had tried warning the group of Kyubey's deception immediately after joining them, and they refused to believe her. She'd attempted that as far back as Loop 2, and they hadn't listened; she lacked credibility as a newcomer.
And she couldn't
wait either: If she waited to tell them until after Sayaka had executed her contract, then Sayaka would justifiably hate her. Sometimes Sayaka attacked her for her deception, particularly in loops where she hadn't found Kyouko but where Hitomi Shizuki confessed her feelings to Kyousuke Kamijou.
There had to be a way to break the truth to the group so they knew exactly what they were sacrificing by contracting to fight as magical girls. There had to be a way to tell them of their impending doom without immediately driving them into despair. To let them live in ignorance until they learned that lesson from miserable fate was hideously cruel and entirely unworkable.
And, in any case, it was threatening Homura Akemi with
real death that she could not avoid with her clockwork buckler. Homura was not suicidal – or at least, yet, or anymore – and that meant trying something new.
Loop 137.
Homura asked Madoka to accompany her to the nurse's office, engaging her with polite small talk. She purposely steered the conversation toward making the world a better place. Ever the self-depreciator, Madoka doubted that she would make a meaningful difference.
Only
then did Homura give her the drawing of Kyubey and warn her not to form a contract. And now, she told her not to let Sayaka contract until they could speak further. She made sure to point out the phone number scrawled on the page.
They met, once again, in Mami's apartment.
Loop 137.
It was easy enough to prove that she was a magical girl. From there, believing that Homura wielded time magic was a small leap. She could readily demonstrate her flash step technique indoors to prove that she could stop time and then use that to explain how she had successfully stolen so much military equipment from the JSSDF. From there, she had to convince them she was a time traveler.
She took Mami, Sayaka, and Madoka to go hunt Charlotte the Witch, as Homura had done for the past thirty-four loops. That would establish Homura's
bona fides as a magical girl of power and experience.
She showed them the reading on her clockwork buckler's stopwatch – the literal years she had spent trying to get this month
just right for the sake of those she loved. And then, to prove that she
had relived the days between March 16th and April 30th more than a hundred times, she recounted everything she knew about them.
She told Sayaka about Kyousuke Kamijou, the accident that had hospitalized him and ruined his hand, and how often she visited him. She spoke of things that hadn't happened yet – that Kyousuke hated that Sayaka always brought him classical music to listen to, beautiful compositions that his ruined hand could never perform again. Homura spoke of Sayaka's sense of justice, how she balked at leaving regular people to die at the hands of familiars so they could grow into seed-bearing witches. Homura explained the truth behind the soul gems – that their name was literal, and Sayaka's face turned gray.
Homura told Mami about her ribbon muskets: every single thing that Mami had taught her about manipulating matter through hylekinesis; the specific books that Mami read to understand what she was building; the notes that she had taken on the witches that she'd killed. She told Mami that her coolness was an affectation and that she was miserable without others sharing her emotional burden. She told Mami that they had a lot in common. Mami had often (privately) called Homura 'senpai' in the more recent loops, which made both of them cheerfully uncomfortable. They had both had sex.
And Homura told Madoka the full story of all that had happened since Homura first contracted with Kyubey. She spent extra time on the ninety-ninth loop – the one on which she came up with her current strategy of empowering Sayaka – because that loop felt particularly instructive.
When asked directly, Kyubey confirmed that witches came from magical girls. Mami grabbed him and snapped his neck, twisting his head from his body. Neither piece bled.
"Is that what it's like?" Madoka gasped. "To be a magical girl?"
To Homura's surprise, none of them had broken down crying. They absorbed Homura's words with grave solemnity, as if seeing the warp and weft of their lives being woven out before them.
And here is where my life choices killed me.
"It is," said Homura. "I don't think it has to be. But on my second loop, I swore to spare you that fate. That has been my driving purpose for several years."
"Do you even care about us?" asked Sayaka. "I'm the key to your plan, apparently. Do you care about
me?"
"I don't know how to answer that question. I don't know how I feel," said Homura. "I care about Madoka, and I care about Mami. You grow closer to Kyouko than to me."
Homura sighed. "You're a means to an end, but it helps me if you're strong, happy, and healthy. I'm sorry, Miki-san, that's the most I can say."
Sayaka Miki put her face in her hands. "Fine," she said. "You know what, fine. I'll take it."
She stood from the
chabudai and strode to a nearby window. "I'll… I'll do it," she said, her shoulders sagging. "For Kyousuke. For Madoka. And for Mitakihara. I'll become a magical girl."
Loop 137.
At Sayaka's insistence, they would privately warn every magical girl to contact the
Mahou Shoujo Yunion's forum accounts or hotline that the witchgaters were telling the truth.
Moreover, the MSY began offering grief seed delivery. Kyubey remarked that this would cut their grief seed supply chain at two points and was promptly beaten to death.
The MSY started receiving inquiries from magical girls seeking to join its membership. Madoka announced that the MSY may open itself to new membership, but no sooner than April 30th.
Loop 137.
This girl should not have contracted.
Madoka gave her a grief seed, slipping it into her palm that stretched through a slightly cracked front door, after which she fled back inside without even a 'thank you.' Madoka, Sayaka, and the others were surprised. Their beneficiaries largely weren't warriors down on their luck: They were recluses.
Hikikomori. Those who couldn't support themselves.
(To save time, they flew between delivery stops. Homura had opted to transport Madoka (who insisted on coming along) by holding her in a bridal carry, which Homura (to her unspoken humiliation) found arousing enough that she blushed midflight. The others didn't question the arrangement because it made sense: Homura was most experienced at flight and could stop time if Madoka ever came loose and fell.)
The MSY came to interview her "to understand our clientele better," said Mami. The girl agreed. They met in the alleyway behind her apartment building to avoid encountering her parents.
Her name was Mayu Kitaoka. She was a second-year and an academic disappointment. Homura sympathized, though it had only taken a few loops for her to master the material covered in Class 2A. This girl had barely passed since her first school enrollment, and now, she was doing no better.
She was unattractive, Homura thought. She was overweight. Her mouth was too big; her eyes were too close together. She knew that – she had said, choking back tears – and it didn't change when she transformed.
She became a magical girl a month ago. Her wish, she had explained, was to pass math class that semester.
She had never gone witch hunting. Not once. Kyubey told her to, and she ignored him. She didn't want to be a
fat magical girl, but that wasn't what she'd wished for–
Homura grabbed Madoka and froze time, leading her around the building's corner and outside of the witch transformation's energy blast. Homura returned to where she was standing – in addition to her usual machine guns, she summoned three dozen recoilless rifles – and clicked the crown of her clockwork buckler back to its innermost position. The clock returned to regular operation. Time unfroze, and the five magical girls of the MSY entered the witch's labyrinth–
Loop 137.
"You may be the most effective magical girl team I've encountered," said Kyubey. "This has forced me to change my recruitment strategy in Mitakihara City."
(Mayu Kitaoka left no body, her remains fully consumed by the collapse of her witch's labyrinth. Madoka had returned from around the corner of the building.)
"The mere death of a magical girl yields no energy. Only a magical girl's final transformation from girl to witch helps to defeat entropy. Generally, I don't contract the weak: I need contractees strong enough to survive their battles until their faith is broken.
"But now, any witch that enters your territory will last, at most, days. You are killing witches and their familiars faster than either can be replenished.
"So I changed tacks." Kyubey scratched behind one of his ears with a hind leg. "I'll tell you a short story. Imagine a girl – a potential contractee – whose beloved mother is dying of incurable illness. I appear to the girl, offering her a single wish. What else does the girl wish for than to share one last cheesecake with her dying mother? Only later does she find that she could have wished for her mother to be
cured. What happens to the girl?"
"She turns into a witch immediately," said Homura.
"Just so," said Kyubey. "Now, in Mitakihara, I mostly don't contract those of great karmic destiny. I contract those who will meet
swift ends, finding themselves ultimately in your vast supply of grief seeds–"
Mami shot Kyubey in the head, and he exploded.
"You know, it always used to be me doing that," said Homura.
"I needed to do something," said Mami, her voice funny. "If we were in my apartment, I would have broken my tea set. Thrown it against a wall."
Madoka was crying into Sayaka's shoulder. Kyouko was stomping on some of Kyubey's remains. Yuma's gaze tracked between the four of them. She was smart enough to understand what was happening but young enough that her greatest concern was to see how others were reacting.
"We're just killing people, no matter what we do. No matter what we try," cried Madoka. "I wish– I wish it
weren't like this. I just– I just wanted to
help people–"
"We're fucking
executioners, is what we are," said Kyouko. "For anybody dumb enough to fall for Kyubey's tricks – we're the ones to kill them."
"But that's how it is," Mami whispered. "It was always like this. And we can't stop what we're doing. If we stop killing witches, then the witches will kill even more."
Loop 137.
They posted new signs. "Wondering if you should become a magical girl? Scan here!"
It linked to the same thread announcing the MSY's hotline, but Madoka edited the first post. "If you aren't already a magical girl, don't become one," it said. "Once you are, you can never go back."
A/N: When writing about magical girl and witch population dynamics, I referenced this page from the Puella Magi wiki:
Population dynamics - Puella Magi Wiki
