REAPER SCANS
Mr. Magical Girl
[Translator – goguma & Kuro]
[Proofreader – ilafy]
Chapter 29: The Past
I saw myself reflected in her violet galaxy, those same innocent eyes—there was no negativity, just pure happiness at our reunion, tinged with a trace of longing.
Though we were of different species, I read her emotions as easily as ever—the turmoil within those violet eyes.
“Dad!” The young girl beamed in joy and ran toward me. Such wasn’t how a girl should treat her parent after years of neglect.
Regardless, faced with her affection, I had to act like a loving parent. Spreading my arms, I awaited the running girl.
Soon, Linshua’s soft and warm embrace wrapped around me.
“Hehe.” My daughter—who stood taller than me—displayed the passage of time, yet she was still at an age where she enjoyed being pampered by her father.
Previously, I stroked her horns when she acted in such a way, but thinking I would barely reach them, I simply patted her head.
Did I have the right to receive such a warm embrace? It was all my fault. I had neglected my daughter and left her alone since I couldn’t abandon everything for her sake.
Linshua’s lifestyle was a direct result of my indecision and inaction. I couldn’t live as a hero, but I also couldn’t turn my back on the hero's life.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What for?” Linshua simply smiled. All I saw in her eyes was the joy of reuniting with me. Soon enough, the hug ended as she separated herself and checked me up and down. “Where’s Unho?”
“Unho couldn’t come with me today. I’ll bring him another time.”
“All right!”
I clenched the gift I held for her in my left hand. “I got something for you instead.”
“What is it?”
“Your birthday present. Sorry for being late.” I placed the dark crystal seed in her pure-white hand.
Linshua raised the large crystal toward the ceiling, placing it between the light and her eyes. Her actions were a mystery to me. The light wasn’t passing through the seed into her eyes, nor did it react with the seed to change its color.
“It’s pretty!” However, the girl saw something imperceptible to me.
“That’s a relief.”
“Yeah! I also have something to show you, Dad!” Linshua moved the crystal seed to her left hand and pulled me along by the sleeve with her right—a familiar action I had experienced countless times, whenever she wanted to show me her works of art.
Since she had grown, her movements weren’t exactly the same as before, but I still pretended to be forcefully dragged along.
I soon came face-to-face with a dark statue—the mud sculpture she was working on moments prior. It was the spitting image of me, down to its height and other minute details.
If it weren’t for the color, I could have mistaken it for a clone.
“I worked hard on it since they said you needed it, Dad!”
My heart ached at her words. I promised myself that I would carve Al’Shel’s octopus head into a squid head. ‘How dare he dump his own work onto her, his own organization’s boss AND my daughter!’
He’d taken advantage of her to get by easily and avoid working, huh? As I considered how to carve the bastard’s head into a new shape, Linshua placed her left hand on the sculpture.
The monster seed in her hand slowly sunk into it.
“Are you sure you want to use it on this? You could make a new friend with that seed.” I gently tried to convince Linshua. Talking to her somehow calmed my anger.
“This is my gift to you, Dad, so it’s all right! This isn’t a friend but a monster! The monster uncles told me to call it that.”
“Smart girl.” I purposefully avoided teaching her about the Otherworld and related topics, but it was only a matter of time before she found out—especially since I had left her in the Monster Society’s care.
I couldn’t help it. That was the only way for her to survive after losing her place in the human world.
‘Actually, that’s wrong. If I truly cared about my daughter… If I had the resolve to abandon everything for her…’
Hiding my glum emotions, I gestured to the sculpture. “It’s really well made. Can it transform to look different?”
“Transform? Why would it need that?”
‘She doesn’t know about that request? Al’Shel truly is incompetent. Carving him a squid head isn’t enough of a punishment. I’ll twist it and turn him into a sea cucumber.’ I silently cursed Al’Shel and gripped my crowbar.
Swoosh—
Black particles oozed out of my body—hiding me from her vision—and permeated into my clothes.
After the short transformation, I scattered the particles and showed Linshua my new, darker form. “It needs to be able to transform like this.”
“That’s so cool, Dad!” she exclaimed. Excited and curious about my new appearance, Linshua leaned in toward me, observing the new details. “Your hair color is the same as mine now. It’s black too!”
“Is that so?”
‘Black hair, huh?’ I remembered how Linshua once asked me why she didn’t resemble me.
“Then is it possible for—”
Iwasreflectedinhervioletgalaxygaze.
Whisperinggentlytothestars.
#@&*areyoutherewhatcannotexistinspeechthestatusisitactionofothersreceivethehowdoyouthattothemartialexistencenewtobemustprovenwithenergythatsensecannotwhichpassedthroughrealmthatiswhilethepowercombinedchangewillnottokneeltodestroytherulesyetstillhavethoughtsswallowtheworldtheexistenceofotherworldwillreturntheessenceofcreationcanitbepossibletobeborntoaskoflikethisfateanddestinymanifesttheenergyoflawwithinyourselftimeismoving#*$
Beeeeep—
* * *
Reaper Scans
Translator - goguma & KuroHaruto
Proofreader - ilafy
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My brain shook at the violent ringing in my ears.
“Dad?” she asked.
‘What was that?’ Various half-formed, incomprehensible half-phrases flooded my mind and immediately vanished from my memory.
I stared into Linshua’s gaze, but the incident didn’t occur again. “…It’s nothing. Can you make it transform and change its appearance?”
“Yeah, it’s easy! I just need to fix the clothes since it looks exactly like you!” With a positive reply, Linshua soon got back to work.
Her small hands grazed over the mud sculpture, gradually creating motifs to decorate the clothes and giving it a facial expression.
Eventually, her movement accelerated. Her hands were fixing the face, yet in the blink of an eye, they moved to the clothes, folding wrinkles. As the wrinkles were coming to completion, she created new facial muscles on the sculpture.
‘She’s much faster than before.’ The finishing touches in making a friend… Linshua always got absorbed in her work and put her all into creating new life.
Recalling the old days, I watched my daughter’s work before thinking back on the gibberish that had flooded my brain.
For some reason, I couldn’t remember it properly. Perhaps the bizarre, incomplete, and confusing sentences were to blame?
It’d seemed quite surprised to see me. At least, that’s what I felt from the overall emotions behind the words. Who could’ve evaluated me like that?
That was my first time experiencing anything like it while living with Linshua, so why then, of all days?
Was it because I became a monster? Was it a special kind of brainwashing that only worked on monsters?
Was it meant to prevent Linshua’s creations from rebelling against their creator? That assumption seemed to be the most correct, since Linshua’s eyes were always the first things her creations saw.
Feeling suspicious of some sort of brainwashing, I recited things in my head.
‘Keycode 158426.
Your house is 158426; my house is 158426.
I am 158426; you are 158426.
My actions are 158426; my thoughts are 158426.
Current location is 158426; current time is 158426.’
The self-introspection I’d drilled into my mind seemed accurate. I continued testing and inspecting my mind with other sentences, but the results were the same.
The ability to answer such questions was often affected by brainwashing, so I’d invented and drilled a keycode to always pop up when asked such questions.
If I’d been mentally affected, my answering number should've slightly differed from the keycode—an easy error to catch, but that time around, everything was as usual.
‘Maybe it wasn’t brainwashing.’
Then what could it have been? There was still a fraction of the flood of gibberish left in my memory. The last few words—a phrase with a semblance of meaning.
『Time is moving.』
‘Isn’t that obvious?’ There was no reason for time to stop.
I ended up reuniting with my daughter but only had more questions than before. Perhaps a string of incidents had been lying in wait for me to move, only to rush in altogether and flood my life.
Something was happening… Something I had no clue about. I slowly sank into my trail of thoughts, only to be fished out by my daughter’s comment.
“Dad, move away. You’re distracting.” Those were her first words of annoyance to me. Maybe her rebellious period had finally arrived.
Did she not like how I was just blankly standing next to her?
“Why? Is it distracting when I watch?”
“I don’t mind it. I actually like it.” To my surprise, Linshua grabbed onto my black dress. “I can’t make seeds because of your clothes. They’re a hindrance.”
As usual, I never fully understood what she meant. As two people of different species, our senses and feelings were just different.
“Because of this dress? Do you not like the design?” I asked. Linshua always had a great interest in art—likely due to having the blood of an artist in her veins.
Unho went through some hardships due to her tastes previously, but that’s a story for another time.
Linshua shook her head in denial. “Those clothes keep stealing the Otherworld powers I need to make this.”
‘…What was that?’
I grabbed Linshua’s shoulders and asked again, “Linshua. This is important, and I need you to answer properly. Are these clothes absorbing the Otherworld’s powers surrounding us? Even the ones you’re using?”
As a monster, the girl possessed the power to swallow the surrounding Otherworld power and transform it into a stable seed. She could create Otherworldly life with the seeds. In other words, she was naturally sensitive to the Otherworld’s powers.
If she was sensing a similar power to hers from my clothes…
“Yeah. It’s absorbing everything without care—like my power.”
The power to purify… It was the power to absorb Otherworld powers that humanity had longed for from the start.
“…How’s the rate of collapse in the clothes?” I needed as much information as possible. As someone who had the innate gift to absorb the Otherworld’s powers, Linshua could provide me with much more accurate information than any other scientist or specialist.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“When will the clothes break and release their energy into the area around them?”
“Um… Tomorrow?”
‘You’ve gotta be kiddi—?! The dress is going to explode and unleash the powers tomorrow? Am I a walking timebomb?’
“Uhh… Well, actually, I’m not sure. Why isn’t it breaking? If the dress were like one of my seeds, it should’ve exploded already.”
She tugged at and inspected my dress, voicing her ominous and foreboding questions.
Thinking about it, Unho had actually hinted it to me before, when he mentioned the power of absorption. I’d thought it was only absorbing the Otherworld’s powers my body was emitting, not all the powers in my surroundings…
The more I thought about it, the more questions I had.
‘Should I reveal this power to the public and give up on the Black Marauder’s activities? Could I purify the entire world and even fix the modern population’s sense of justice? What’s the limit on these clothes?’
“Dad?”
“Oh, sorry. Keep doing what you were doing.”
I put away the crowbar and returned to my usual form. Once the hindrance disappeared, Linshua’s swift hands returned to work.
‘Thank goodness I came here today.’ Not only did I reunite with my daughter, but the information I obtained was invaluable.
I changed my mind about Al’Shel’s head—going back to the idea of a squid head rather than a sea cucumber.
After that, I simply enjoyed the situation.
Even though I hadn’t properly apologized to Linshua during our awkward reunion, it was good enough.
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