Prologue
My high school is in Shibuya.
When people hear “Shibuya,” most probably imagine the Scramble Crossing by the station. But the school I attend is near Jingu Stadium—a slightly more settled, quiet area.
Still, there’s no changing the fact that it’s in the heart of the city, and the traffic is quite heavy. Even the time spent waiting for the lights to change feels a bit longer compared to my hometown, Urayasu.
That’s why, while waiting for the signal at the crosswalk right in front of the school, I was completely absorbed in talking with my friend. We’ve been childhood friends since elementary school, so we never run out of things to talk about.
Glancing at the signal, I saw it was just about to turn green.
Thinking the timing was perfect, I was about to step out onto the road when my arm was suddenly gripped tight.
In that instant, a car zoomed right past my eyes.
In the driver’s seat was a young woman, chatting away with a phone in one hand.
She hadn’t even noticed the light was red.
Caught between the terror of a near-miss and anger at such terrible driving manners, I felt a strange swirl of emotions as I turned around to thank the friend who had grabbed my arm.
“Thanks. How did you even notice?”
“Because I’m a mage.”
With that, Sakurako smiled.
Her hand, still gripping mine, was still tense with strength.
Nagumo Sakurako. Her name and her appearance are both a bit old-fashioned.
With her beautiful, long black hair, she looks like a Japanese doll, and she’s tall and slender. Her posture is so perfectly straight that she almost feels a bit like a samurai. Sakurako shot a sharp glance in the direction the car had sped off, then began walking briskly across the crosswalk.
“That car was 100% in the wrong just now, but you should be more careful too, Rin. No matter how much the other person is at fault, you’re the one who ends up hurt and in pain, Rin.”
Sakurako’s words are always logically sound. She’s like this with everyone, so in truth, she isn’t particularly popular with the other girls. After all, what most conversations need is empathy, not “correctness.” Then again, if you asked if she was popular with the boys, the answer would be… complicated.
──That’s because Sakurako is a real, living mage in the modern age.──
Just because she’s a “mage,” boys tend to approach her out of half-hearted curiosity, so Sakurako is a bit wary. To be honest, I was exactly the same at first.
My meeting with Sakurako goes back to when we entered elementary school.
The elementary school entrance ceremony. During the principal’s long speech, I spotted a girl with long, beautiful black hair in the line for my class. She seemed to be glowing all on her own.
It wasn’t so much that she was “cute,” but rather that she looked “sharp.” Naturally, that was Sakurako.
Even my mother, ignoring her own daughter for a moment, couldn’t help but mutter, “Oh, what a cool-looking child.”
On top of that, a kid from my apartment complex told me:
“I heard that girl’s grandmother is a mage.”
After hearing that, I couldn’t help but be curious.
At our local schools, attendance numbers were assigned by birthday, and the initial seating chart followed that order.
Fortunately, I was born just one day earlier than Sakurako, so my seat ended up right in front of hers.
I remember my heart pounding with excitement, wishing the homeroom teacher would just finish talking already. Having exhausted the limited concentration of a first-grader, the moment the talk ended, I spun around and asked:
“Are you able to use magic?”
“I can’t. Only my grandmother can. My dad and mom can’t use it either.”
Sakurako, whose face was as expressionless as a Noh mask, answered in a detached tone that didn’t sound like a child at all. However, a fearless elementary student’s curiosity isn’t dampened by something like that.
“Will you be able to use it someday?”
“…Don’t you know? You can only use magic for exactly ten seconds. That’s why it’s useless.”
At the time, I knew magic existed, but I didn’t know the details. I had imagined a mage like the ones in anime—flying through the sky on a broom or using magic to punish villains.
But real-world mages were different.
In the old days, they were thought to be amazing. But as research into magic progressed in modern times, it was discovered that they couldn’t actually do anything particularly grand.
Even if you desperately chant a long incantation, you might only produce a tiny flame or a bit of water for about ten seconds. These days, when you can get water just by turning a faucet or light a fire easily on a stove, there’s almost no turn for a mage. If anything, magic was often exploited by scammers or new religious cults, giving many people a bad impression of it.
But as a kid who had just started elementary school, I didn’t understand any of that.
“Being able to use it for ten seconds is amazing! Even the 100m dash in the Olympics takes about ten seconds, so ten seconds is a long time!”
Looking back, I was saying things that made no sense.
“Ten seconds is… long?”
Sakurako’s “Noh mask” suddenly softened, and a look of childish bewilderment appeared on her face.
It was so cute and made me so happy that I wanted to see that expression even more. I started nodding my head up and down so hard it looked like I was headbanging.
“It’s long, it’s long! That’s plenty of time!”
When I cheered her on like that, Sakurako looked down.
“But I can’t use magic. To use it, you need long years of training. My dad and mom say it’s more impressive to get better at studying or sports instead of doing something like that.”
“Huh, really? But magic is amazing. Just being able to use it is incredible! It’s just as amazing as being good at sports or studying. Anything is amazing as long as everyone thinks it is! So, the magic that I think is amazing is definitely amazing!”
“…Actually, I think magic is amazing, too.”
Sakurako said it a bit shyly, as if confessing a secret.
“Then, Sakurako-chan, your future is definitely going to be as a mage!”
I irresponsibly declared the future of a classmate I had only just met.
But Sakurako was generous enough to give me a small giggle.
I was so happy about that, I decided right then and there to become her friend.
READ THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATION AT LOCALIZERMEERKAT.GITHUB.IO
Sakurako stood out in many ways.
Her appearance was striking, but she was also good at both sports and schoolwork. She was a total overachiever.
Usually, a kid like that would be popular, but in Sakurako’s case…
“I bet she’s using magic, right?”
That’s what people whispered. It didn’t help that Sakurako’s stiff personality didn’t sit well with the other kids. Heck, even my own mother said something like that.
“Oh, how impressive. I wonder if she’s using magic or something.”
I think they were words without any real malice.
However, I blew my top.
“Sakurako is still a mijukumono (novice), so she can’t use magic yet! Besides, she’s not the kind of girl who would cheat like that!”
I’m not sure if using the word “mijukumono”—which I’d only just learned—really helped my case, but by then, Sakurako had become both my best friend and my “idol.” A feeling of “If I don’t protect her, who will?” had taken root in me.
My mother was so startled by my intensity
“I didn’t mean it that way! It was just so impressive that I couldn’t help but think that…”
that I remember that excuses.
In reality, it had already been proven that you couldn’t use magic to cheat like that.
You can’t use magic to make yourself smarter. And while you can enhance your physical abilities, it requires a considerable amount of time to chant the incantation.
Specifically, about five minutes. Roughly the length of one song.
And the effect only lasts for ten seconds.
Plus, if you don’t chant the incantation clearly, it won’t work.
I remember seeing a variety show on TV where they tested this in a comedic way.
It was a segment titled “Can a mage use magic secretly to take first place in a sporting event?” and it featured a mage competing against a comedian who used to be a high school baseball player.
The man tried to use an incantation to boost his physical ability before a sprint, muttering under his breath. At that point, laughter was already leaking from the studio audience. His opponent, the comedian, snapped at him:
“You! You were just using magic, weren’t you!”
He was called out for a foul and disqualified.
Next, they tried a long-distance race. He tried to chant while running, but he ran out of breath and ended up slowing down instead, losing again.
Watching his pathetic figure on the VTR, the celebrities and the audience were in hysterics. It was proof that modern-day mages were truly sad creatures.
Likely because she had “mage blood,” Sakurako had probably faced that kind of ridicule since she was little, and even when she did something well, people would sneer that it was “thanks to magic.”
I heard from friends other than Sakurako that her grandmother had once appeared on TV with a story about using incredible magic. But things didn’t go well, and it ended with her being laughed at. The girl who went out of her way to tell me that was talking in a way that clearly looked down on them.
I think there was a bit of malice there—since she couldn’t beat Sakurako at anything else, she wanted to drag her down in other ways.
Filled with righteous indignation, I took down every single person who was that unreasonable.
I declared, “I won’t forgive anyone who speaks ill of Sakurako!”
For the record, I wasn’t great at studying, but I was good at sports. If anything, I was stronger than the boys. I was also a fast talker—a typical “neighborhood boss” type of kid.
I was the kind of student where the teacher would write in my communication notebook: “Rin-san cares for her friends, but her words and actions are violent.”
TLNOTE : I’m actually rather hesitant to label this novel as Shoujo Ai, because it’s definitely not a romantic kind of story. But it is absolutely a love story—one that goes far beyond romance.
By the way, this chapter has a lot of setup and foreshadowing, so please pay close attention to the details. The twist in later chapters will definitely blow your mind. The story really is that good, even though before the twist is revealed, it might just seem like a decent enough story about lame magic in the modern world.
So I beg you: please be patient and give this story a chance. I guarantee you won’t regret it.
And yes, this is the kind of story that’s actually better read in one go. So if you’re not very patient, please check out the web novel version—it also has an English fan translation.
Sorry for my slowness, and thank you for understanding.
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