Chapter 68: Heroes Cannot Have Blemishes

After this astonishing revelation spilled from Tao Zizi's lips, Fu Linxing did not react with the intense drama she might have anticipated.

He merely widened his eyes, more bewildered by her action than anything else: "You're just going to tell me something this huge, just like that?"

Even Tao Zizi furrowed her brow in rare perplexity: "You're just going to accept it, just like that?"

She had observed Fu Linxing for a long time, knowing him to be a person who valued friendship deeply and possessed a righteous, kind heart. Confiding these secrets in him was a decision she had reached after careful deliberation. Yet she had not expected that his primary concern would not be the secret itself, but her method of revealing it.

"Exposing your identity is extremely dangerous for a Magical Girl. Even when dealing with friends, you have to hide this secret most of the time." Fu Linxing shook his head with disapproval, "You're being far too reckless."

The fact that Tao Zizi's parents had died due to a Magical Girl losing control certainly came as quite a shock to him. To be honest, though, it was still less shocking than seeing an entire room filled with photographs of himself.

As for the truth of Tao Zizi being a Magical Girl, it largely served to validate suspicions he already held. Having been baptized by various absurd and outlandish events, he was no longer easily shaken by matters of this scale.

He massaged his brow and muttered, "Being sincere with friends is one thing, but you..."

*Why do you always love walking on the edge?*

This time, he didn't have the heart to voice those words. Standing before him was an orphan created by disaster, someone who had already endured an unfortunate childhood. And now, by some twist of fate, she had turned into a Magical Girl—becoming one of the very kind responsible for killing her parents...

Yet she could still stand here calmly and recount all of this; her inner strength was already beyond imagination. Consequently, Fu Linxing couldn't help but wonder how she truly viewed these matters.

"Have you been observing me too?" Tao Zizi suddenly asked.

"Of course not!"

"Then why weren't you surprised at all when I revealed my identity as a Magical Girl?"

"I did consider the possibility that you were a Magical Girl," he sighed. "After coming back yesterday, I looked up a lot of related information, and all of it indicated that whoever repaired the Ferris wheel was most likely a Magical Girl. At the time, you were also exhibiting a lot of bizarre behaviors, especially when you knocked me out at the end. Combining the two, I grew suspicious of you. I just didn't have direct evidence."

Tao Zizi nodded thoughtfully as she listened, then produced a stun gun meant for self-defense.

Startled, Fu Linxing leaped back a few steps, accidentally bumping into the corner of the bed, let out a loud cry of pain, and tumbled backward.

"You... what are you trying to do again?" he asked, staring in terror as Tao Zizi crawled up onto the bed, wondering if he had inadvertently touched upon some forbidden taboo.

*That shouldn't be it, though! She was the one who brought it up first... Saying the wrong thing shouldn't be enough to warrant getting electrocuted!*

Tao Zizi braced one hand on the mattress to loom over him, pressing a button that made the stun gun emit a terrifying crackling sound.

"You said there was a lack of evidence, so I'm showing you the evidence. This is my transformation device," she said.

Then, as if finding the process tedious, she perfunctorily rattled off a high-speed, completely unintelligible transformation chant, transforming amidst a flash of light.

The young girl, clad in an orange-yellow sleeveless minidress and wearing a dashing detective-style black cape, raised three fingers, flashed a glittering gesture near the corner of her eye, and gave a single wink with her left eye:

"Magical Girl Thunder Firefly, reporting for duty!"

Fu Linxing stared blankly at the electrical sparks flickering in her pupils and that bright, radiant smile, completely unable to reconcile this image with the usually expressionless Tao Zizi...

He made an awkward pushing gesture in the air between them: "Alright, alright, I believe you. Can you please get off me first?"

Tao Zizi—no, perhaps she should be called Thunder Firefly now—bounced lightly to the side, settling into a Seiza-adjacent posture neatly on the bed, tossing her waist-length golden single ponytail behind her shoulder, and looking at him with boundless vitality.

Faced with a girl whose personality underwent such an extreme reversal before and after, Fu Linxing couldn't help asking, "...Do you happen to have a split personality?"

*Please don't let it be a trope that cliché,* he prayed inwardly.

Thunder Firefly explained generously, "No. It's just that after transforming, a Magical Girl's personality draws closer to the true essence of her soul. Some people change a lot, while others remain consistent throughout."

Fu Linxing couldn't help recalling a certain short-tempered magical auntie, wondering if she was the same inside and out...

"It feels rather subtle," Thunder Firefly continued. "You know, because I'm an orphan, I used to be somewhat introverted. Transforming feels like examining myself from another angle, yet it helps me understand the changes within my heart."

*That's not introversion; that's being completely out of sync with reality,* Fu Linxing mentally retorted.

"Which side do you like better?" Thunder Firefly asked, tilting her head.

*Fine, both sides are equally giving me a headache...*

Choosing to ignore her question, Fu Linxing pivoted the conversation: "You said earlier that you became a Magical Girl when you were twelve. Does that mean you awakened even before starting middle school?"

Thunder Firefly nodded. "You even know my birthday, and yet you claim you haven't been paying attention to me."

Fu Linxing replied helplessly, "Back in the first year of middle school, when some boy arranged candles on the sports field to celebrate your thirteenth birthday, the whole school knew about it, okay?"

Calculating it this way, she was a year older than him, making her fourteen this year, which meant she would have been two years old back in 2011...

"The accident that claimed your parents' lives—was that before the Three Great Disasters?" Fu Linxing asked in surprise.

"That's right. Back then, the whole world looked up to Magical Girls and treated them as heroes. Occasional incidents of losing control weren't considered worthy of widespread reporting," Thunder Firefly stated the cold reality with an expression as calm as ever.

Fu Linxing opened his mouth, then asked in a low voice, "Was the accident severe?"

"Six people died, and only a few shops were affected. The required compensation was paid, so the matter blew over quickly. At that time, losing control was a very low-probability event. The likelihood of dying in such an incident was about the same as getting struck by lightning."

Sensing that she was trying her utmost to downplay the cruelty of the event, Fu Linxing couldn't help comforting her: "That doesn't mean that as a victim, you aren't allowed to grieve, nor does it mean you can't resent the officials who failed in their duties. You actually... don't need to suppress your own feelings."

Thunder Firefly, however, replied, "I'm not suppressing anything. I was only two when my parents passed away, so I barely have any memories of them. My grandmother always just told me they died in an accident and never once mentioned Magical Girls. It wasn't until she realized her time was running out that she told me the specific details of what happened back then.

"It was at a small street-side shop. That Magical Girl had already shown signs of mental instability before transforming, so when she truly began to transform and lost control, many people nearby fled. Her beams scattered in all directions, piercing through the walls, and my parents happened to be struck down without reason inside another shop."

After the out-of-control incident occurred, the Magical Affairs Bureau had quickly arrived at the scene to handle it, but the official classification given in the end was an accidental mishap rather than intentional harm.

Even though people who had lived in peace for too long often spoke of those past runaway incidents with a nonchalant attitude nowadays, Fu Linxing could still vividly imagine how much terror the Magical Girls of that era had inflicted upon the world, and he genuinely sympathized with victims' families like Tao Zizi.

They had lost their family members, yet they didn't even know whether to treat it as an act of God or a man-made disaster. The handling attitude of the Magical Affairs Bureau at the time was undoubtedly chilling to them.

Especially before the outbreak of the Three Great Disasters, had they publicly expressed their grief, they would have been viciously attacked by people hiding behind computer screens, denounced for spreading rumors and smearing the heroes' image. After all, most people had never experienced that kind of agonizing personal loss, nor did they believe that the Magical Girls of that time could pose such a danger.

Yet, perhaps influenced by the Three Great Disasters, the frequency of runaway incidents had risen considerably after 2012.

The masses were always fickle. With the shift in mainstream attitude, those sporadic incidents that had previously been quietly swept under the rug resurfaced once more.

The families of the victims from back then united once again, joining the torrent of condemnation directed at the Magical Affairs Bureau and the Magical Girls.