Hope born of solitus

*

"... Uwah..." (Lastia)

There was a female assistant nearby, her brown hair was tied into a ponytail and her body was wrapped neatly in the store's uniform. It was a black button shirt with long cuffed sleeves, as well as a skirt that stretched below the knees and grey tights. It gave off an elegant feeling as if she was attending an official gathering. She eagerly helped to coordinate a fitting set of clothes from this section, and here we are.

She had put on all of it after some minor difficulties. She stared wryly at the mirror in the fitting room, contemplating that it at least wasn't as shameful as going to the lingerie section. It was just... A set of clothes. Her colour was purplish black that seemed to be a little pale, as if it was covered in a layer of dust. Her top was a pale purple button shirt close to pink, lined with a row of frills stretching vertically from the bottom of her chest to the bottom of the shirt, then horizontally from that vertical stretch of frills, forming multiple rings around her back until the bottom of the shirt.

Her skirt consisted of a large waist section that fit a belt with the width of her fist, it had a strenge metal emblem over a layer of leather, the other end of the belt was clipped onto the under side of that leather so it wasn't visible. Her skirt was a shade of dark maroon that complemented her shirt's colours, like agglutinated blood, it weaved stiffly over her legs and gleamed radiantly under the store lights.

Her thighs felt very breezy as the skirt only reached halfway to the top of her knees, and while she wore a pair of thigh highs, the exposed bits of her skin still felt the full force of the chilly night air in the store. The thigh highs were black and opaque, she specifically requested for ones that could help fight off the cold weather. In hindsight she should have chosen tights which cover all the way instead of allowing the assistant to choose.

It wasn't that big of a problem right now, so she could let it go, but if she did want to pick up tights over thigh high... She still needed to know where they were located. In the end, regardless of her attentions, this was the only outcome. They were a little more pricey than casual clothes, fortunately or maybe unfortunately, the store was having a sale so her last bit of resistance to purchasing was quashed. In the end these were clothes, if she put them in the closet, any of the future Lastias would be able to enjoy them, unlike the dinner she had.

With a cardboard bag in hand, she left the shop and continued going deeper into the city. There was a visible drop in the frequency of shops situated around her, the more she stepped into the core of the commercial zone, the more hotels and accommodation services appeared. Here, the main features include massage parlours, karaoke establishments, luxurious fine dining, places a tourist would visit.

It wasn't far from the train station, so it would be one of the more expensive places in the whole city. Train stations were like the true core of civilisation, they offer their names to their otherwise unexceptiomal surroundings. Every residential zone looks the same, save for the infrastructure surrounding and occupying their schools. For commercial zones, their one unique point would be the reality of their train stations.

"... It's getting late, maybe I should head back to the train station first..." (Lastia)

Tomorrow's Lastia's vacation will be the trip back and the pit stops on the way. I purposefully skipped them so the next one will have plenty to explore and experience. I had walked for quite some time, never quite going anywhere. I didn't enter anymore stores, I merely kept observing my surroundings. Across a certain point there was no longer any colour nor were there any living people around.

It was hard to tell when it all started, perhaps it was the very second I left the large clothes retail store. It was too dark to see after all, I only noticed because of the feeling of magic in my blood. The magic in my body isn't relaxing, it feels like it's resisting something vehemently, continuously swirling and swimming violently in my body. That's just how it reacts when you're in someone else's magical territory, it doesn't affect the speed of spell casting or anything.

Another step and my head would be flopped off. I transformed. A surge of heat wraps my organs beginning from my chest, it spreads to my extremities and causes my skin to emit fairly blinding light. To magical girls this amount of light wouldn't even hurt their eyes, to normal humans it was akin to a flashlight directly placed on one's iris. The light shatters like glass before dissolving into the air, splitting into tiny bubbles and vanishing instantly.

My dress appears underneath, it was a dark shade of purplish black, now completely blending into the dark of night. I raise both my arms and cover my face with my forearms, an intense impact bluntly smashes into my delicate looking limbs. Blowing my body back into the air faster than a car. In less than a second, I smashed into the wall of a nearby building. Concrete and bricks were fine, but glass was fragile and one shard had slipped into a newly formed wound.

It was painful, it stung like crazy, felt like a chunk of flesh was being chewed off by a tiger even though it was simple deep cut. If a professional health provider looked at it, they might advice me to seek a larger health service building like a hospital, to have it thoroughly cleaned and then stitched up. However I was a magical girl, just by breathing a few times, the glass shards popped out and began to heal. Even broken bones would only take a few hours, much less surface level wounds like this.

A magical girl's ability to heal wounds not only extend to the speed of recovery, it also amplified the potency of healing. A human normally would not be able to heal a cut this deep and needs external assistance like stitching, but with a higher potency of healing even organs or limbs can be grown back, lest it's the person's head. Beheading would still kill a magical girl instantly.