Gooooood afternoon once again to all you listeners out there living life on this beautiful, sunny Wednesday today!

  The low sputtering hum of a run-down old engine filled every inch of the cab that the radio announcer’s gratingly positive voice didn’t already stake a cim in. The two noises working sadly in tandem to drown out the constant din of interstate traffic running constantly overhead, the shoddy patchwork of a truck shaking as the occasional motes of dust sprinkled down from on high, crowning it in dirt and refuse like the old hunk of junk deserved.

  It’s just about 57 degrees down here in lower Grace City, there’s not a cloud in the sky, and I can hear that birdsong just singing right outside my window here in the station, almost makes me wanna shut up and listen to ‘em a while, haha!

  The driver of the world’s least-maintained vehicle peeked up from a cracked phone screen, the beams of sunlight snaking through towering buildings around indeed implying it was a sunny day outside of the concrete hell they currently found themselves in.

  But enough about that boring ol’ weather, yeah? Let’s get back to the stuff you all ACTUALLY wanna listen to--

  Finally, some music to drown out-

  --That’s right, it’s time for some news updates on the magical girl front!

  A long, loud honk like the sounds of a dying animal echoed through the tightly-packed back road as the driver’s head smmed forwards into the steering wheel, a cloud of birds fluttering past as they were scared off, a groan almost louder than the horn itself following along with it.

  Just up north of here yesterday, everybody’s favorite duo of Burn Free and Bloom Free managed to push back a whole mess of nasty-looking mechanical buggers in East Park after a couple hours straight of fighting. Authorities have yet to announce any kinda source for the things, but did let us know that thanks to those two girls, there were zero reported casualties from the incident, aside from a few lightly scorched windows and a few trees being a bit bigger than before, haha! I know I speak for all of us here when I say “thank you” to these girls for all they’re do-

  The crackly old radio clicked as it was finally shut off, the incessant rambling of the announcer finally making itself more grating than the sounds of unending traffic on all sides, the driver sighing as they were left with no other option but to return their attention back to the road ahead of them.

  Her name was Alice Decaras, and today was her 28th birthday.

  And like any good birthday, she was spending it doing exactly what she loved doing: driving a piece-of-shit delivery truck through the worst traffic you’d find for 40 miles in any direction for her completely dead-end job and her boss who’d never once remembered her name correctly.

  Life really was a dream.

  The car ahead of her, having finally remembered what a green light meant, finally started moving again, letting the part-timer finally resume her arduous journey across town, items rumbling and rattling behind her as the truck was coaxed back into motion despite it’s constant compints.

  Scanning her surroundings as she drove on only found the same old sights she was already abundantly familiar with and hopelessly sick of seeing. Billboards for all sorts of merchandise for people’s favorite magical girls, bumper stickers and window fgs and t-shirts and kid’s costumes and toys and anything else you could conceive of purchasing, a commercialized hell made entirely of empty branding following in the shadow of the local heroines themselves.

  It almost made her as sick as the constant arrhythmic rumbling of her rental truck, all of it feeling like nothing more than just marketing teams weaponizing any good will they could wrap their grubby little fingers around.

  “If magical girls are so great, why can’t they do something worthwhile and get me a job that isn’t ass.”

  Mumbled and grumbled compints, like always, echoed inside the cabin of her truck, falling on wholly deaf ears, the bobblehead of one of them she’d forgotten the name of not even deigning to offer a rebuttal.

  She sighed, leaning forward on the steering wheel once more, taking care not to bre the horn this time as she came to a stop at yet another red light, this time mercifully without any other cars boxing her in.

  “Just… fuck, eight more deliveries still? Thought I was closer to done than that… maybe that burrito pce will still be open by the time I’m off I if I’m lucky.”

  She sat up again restlessly, stretching her legs as far as she could in the cramped compartment she was trapped inside of.

  “Happy birthday to me.”

  “Move…!”

  Jolting up at the sudden yelling, her head naturally jerked up directly towards the light in front of her, finding it was still solidly red.

  Disgruntled, she peeked her head out the window, yelling back towards the person screaming at her.

  “It’s still red, dipshit, you know how a light wo-”

  Annoyance turned to confusion as the man who’d yelled at her had already vacated his vehicle, stumbling as he started running back in the other direction away from her. As she watched him, she noticed several others joining in his hasty retreat, a general air of fear over all of them as they abandoned their cars and fled.

  This of course prompted the inattentive driver to pivot her gaze 180 degrees, quickly finding what had caused the onset of panic.

  Standing at around nine or ten feet tall and covered head-to-toe in some kind of shiny, metallic outer yer, was what appeared to be a robotic praying mantis.

  And perhaps more relevantly to her specifically, it had just lobbed half of a car overhead as it stampeded forwards, sending the bisected sedan hurtling towards her.

  “Shit--!!”

  Instincts took over, and rather than try and dive out of the car or back up through rows and rows of abandoned vehicles, she took the only action she could to get clear: She stomped the gas pedal ft against the floor, and rocketed forwards as fast as the patchwork abomination she was driving would let her.

  The tin can sputtered forward through the red light, several other cars screeching past around her as she narrowly swerved between them, the crash of two separate chunks of car nded around her, forcing her off the road entirely.

  Whatever the creature was, it seemingly paid no attention whatsoever to the targets it had just unched the projectiles towards, still blindly pushing forwards further down the road, massive bded forelimbs reaping back and forth as it tore through parked traffic, lightpoles, and anything else unfortunate enough to be in front of it.

  And opposite of the creature was, presumably, the target it was here for. Cd in an overly frilled outfit of almost exclusively pinks and whites, a magical girl kept her distance, being pushed back as she clearly struggled to nd any kind of good hit on the armored insect.

  “Fucking… keep that shit off public roads, c’mon…!!”

  She hurtled forward in her rattling deathtrap, engine whining loudly as it was pushed harder than it had any right to expect to be, speeding onwards as hers raced for any kind of escape route from the makeshift war zone that did not force her to intersect with that thing’s path of unaware destruction any more than she already had to.

  And after a harried few seconds, she found one unblocked road: the way immediately behind it, already conveniently cleared out by the bug itself as it had presumably fought its way here.

  Alice smmed her foot down as far as it would allow, and rocketed towards the exit road.

  It was a straight shot through a couple yards and sidewalks, not a single barrier blocking her egress whatsoever.

  A clear path, no obstacles, and she was out. She was safe.

  “…mommy…!”

  …Fuck.

  An instinctive turn of her head found the source of the cry, a lone child standing in the pyground nearby, eyes fixed on the monstrosity in front of them as they wept loudly and openly, fixed in pce as the fear of that thing kept them from running away.

  “It’ll be okay, I’ll be right th- ah…!”

  The magical girl opposite of the beast had already seen the stranded kid, her focus turning to them as he turned away from the monster for just a fraction of a second… and her reward for losing focus was a cw smming into her side, unching her sideways, past the child and into the wall of a store, where she groaned in pain as she struggled to stand up again.

  Pursuing their prey with a monolithic attention span, the praying mantis resumed it’s forward march towards the downed combatant, its path now crossing directly overtop of the frozen bystander.

  “Useless little… ugh…!”

  Her own escape was right here in front of her, nothing at all blocking her from getting out of that hellhole.

  …Nothing at all.

  After all, the kid wasn’t her problem, right?

  The groaning of tires spinning on a sharp turn.

  Magical girls were the ones that protected people, right?

  An engine’s pained grinding as it revved, already pushed to the brink of death.

  …

  …She would just get in the way, right?

  …

  ……

  ………

  “...Fuck me…!”

  The truck, already turned 180 degrees away from the only road out of here, unched forward with reckless abandon, every st mote of strength the old girl had left going into that charge.

  Not one soul there was paying any attention to her. Not one soul would have bmed her for just leaving. Not one soul would’ve ever known.

  But still, some muffled voice in the back of her head…

  Thoughts and regrets that had only been given a few seconds to bubble up were quashed as she rushed back to reality, focusing completely now that she was committed to what was most likely the worst idea she’d ever had.

  As the truck jumped upwards over a curb, the driver side door smmed open, Alice diving out of the cabin as the truck kept going, smming with the full force of several tons of rusty metal into one of the thing’s back legs.

  The sound of ripping metal was like sandpaper on the ears, almost as painful as the hard asphalt she smmed into as she leapt from a vehicle running at full tilt.

  She stopped as quickly as she’d started moving, her back striking against a wooden telephone pole hard, the girl spitting up blood on impact as she quickly tried to push herself upright again.

  Adrenaline was carrying her entirely on its back, but even still she could feel how badly she’d nded. A dull ache in one of her legs was definitely something broken, and the blood was almost certainly from a few fractured ribs.

  Her ck of health insurance would be future Alice’s problem, if she even managed to get out of here at all.

  Eventually her vision cleared enough as she stood back up, allowing her to see the results of her rental’s heroic sacrifice. The truck y in tatters, the steel twisted in a heap around what remained of the creature’s back left leg, smoke spewing from the shared wreckage as the mechanical insect clearly had difficulty moving now.

  What it did not have difficulty with, however, was identifying the perpetrator of the surprise attack, the thing’s bnk eyes slowly turning from the wrecked vehicle wrapped around its ankle to the driver id out on the concrete below.

  The two locked eyes for what felt like hours, neither one understanding how to react to the other, until the sounds of one robotic limb lifting prompted her to dive for safety, narrowly avoiding the bded arm that plunged deep into the piece of sidewalk she’d just been ying on, doing her best to sprint on a broken leg to escape that thing’s redirected wrath.

  “Ghhh… I-I… I’ll be…”

  The sounds of the magical girl finally regaining consciousness were only barely audible over the repeated smming of metal into artificial stone, the beast perforating the roadway as it struggled to put down the annoying little pest that had paralyzed it in pce.

  If she was awake, then she could get its attention again… surely she was more of a threat than the heavily wounded and newly unarmed civilian was.

  But… she could also presumably still move, as well.

  She gathered all the air her lungs could still hold.

  “Can you hear me over there, dumbass?!”

  “I can… hear… w-wait, I’ll be right there to sav-”

  “Ignore me, get that kid over there and book it!”

  She almost bit her tongue, another bloody coughing fit starting mid-sentence, the child’s weeping still audible over the ca-chunk, ca-chunk of mechanized limbs moving in rhythm.

  “The kid…? Ah!”

  She hadn’t even noticed the kid until now…?!

  “R-Right, I’ll get you both out of-”

  “Get the kid and leave!”

  “But, you-”

  “Now!!”

  “I can still, b-both of you-”

  “Do your fucking job and save someone!!”

  She was stunned silent by Alice’s ardent refusal, quickly regaining her composure as she made her way to the lone kid in a single, graceful bound, soothing their tears before scooping them up and rushing further down the other end of the road, away from the death machine.

  Despite everything, even as she saw her only remaining way out of here leaving without her, she couldn’t suppress a broken little smile.

  God, it fucking hurt even trying to do that.

  But… maybe those two would make it now.

  Maybe she’d done anything.

  Maybe… maybe she’d been coo-

  The remainders of that thought, and any other thoughts she’d be having, were swiftly and decisively quashed.

  The metal monster smmed a hooked limb down into the road below, unching another wave of debris and rubble at her like the bst of a shotgun.

  A single piece of twisted rebar unched clear through the rest, the metal road burying itself through her right eye socket and through the soft, pink matter behind it as well, punching partially out through the back of her skull before it lost enough momentum to leave itself stuck there, wedged in pce securely.

  Her broken body finally gave up the slow attempt at escape, every muscle going limp as it colpsed on itself, the sack of flesh skidding along the asphalt for a few feet before coming to an inglorious stop right at the thing’s feet.

  It was 1:05 PM on a Wednesday. The sky was clear and the sun was shining, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Alice Decaras, age 28, died alone.