"I… suppose I owe the three of you an explanation."
With the Director in police custody and Kagami seemingly indicating that the magical girls wouldn't be operating as usual for a while, we had earned a much needed breather.
But that didn't mean everything would go back to normal. After all, my secret was out.
"Sora Goto is one of many different identities I've been forced to assume in the last eight years." I explained, allowing my voice to drop to its natural masculine tone for the first time in months. "After I went to the police about the murder of my parents, the wealthy people benefitting from the director's research saw a target on my back, including the Director himself. I assumed new identities and moved from place to place in Japan, but no matter where I went, they seemed to be right on my tail."
I paused for a moment to catch my breath. I looked around at my friends, all of whom had expressions that were difficult to read. Mistrust? Hatred, perhaps? No… confusion?
Whatever it was they were feeling, I owed them the full explanation.
"After several failed attempts at escaping them for good, my protective custody agents suggested a more… radical course of action. In the summer break for this academic year, I was pretty much locked away in a facility where no one would find me except the people assigned to my protection. In that time, I grew my hair as long as I could, learned to use makeup, and tried adjusting to women's clothes. I… learned to be a girl. As best as I could, anyway."
It had been a difficult few months. A radical lifestyle alteration, compounded with the constant fear of my own assassination. My level of stress had never been higher.
"Despite learning to appear like a girl outwardly, I knew I would be hopeless at actually being one. I thought I'd have too much trouble fitting in at school. That I would be forced into reclusion. But… well… you guys saved me from that. Even if Saki had to practically drag me into the group kicking and screaming."
I chuckled to lighten the tension, but the other three continued to look at me with that same expression. My fear that I would be ostracised from the people I loved was growing steadily.
"If it hadn't been for you guys, I'd have spent my entire school life stuck as a weird loner with no friends. So… I guess I'm trying to say… I love you all. And I hope you can forgive my betrayal."
I gave them my deepest bow, hoping beyond hope that they would forgive me. For a suffocating moment, I was met with silence. Until…
"Uhh…. What betrayal, dude?" Saki cut the tension with a question that I had never expected her to ask.
"Huh? I mean… not telling you I was a guy. Surely that seems, like, creepy or something, right?"
"Oh, that? I figured it out ages ago." Instead of getting angry at me, Saki looked… almost smug?
"You… what?"
"Oh come on, in the early days you sucked at hiding it. Maybe these two didn't catch on cos they're denser than a neutron star, but everything from your weird voice breaks to you changing clothes separately to everyone else in PE tipped me of that you probably weren't biologically a girl early on."
I… what? Six months of thinking everyone thought I was a girl, and Saki just knew?
Looking over at the other two girls, their expressions give them away.
"You girls knew too?!" Both of them were fidgeting, not exactly hiding the fact.
"I-I found out because of the mind control drug. Y'see, when used on women, it makes them very susceptible to suggestion. But high levels of testosterone make it react and neutralise, albeit causing serious momentary pain. That means it doesn't work on men. The only conclusion I could draw was that you weren't a woman."
So Nao had known since she identified the drug… that was about a fortnight ago. No wonder she kept giving me weird looks.
"I figured out that you were Shin Nomimoto," Mai declared casually with a shrug. "The stories lined up too well. After I did further digging, I found that Shin's account and your own were damn near identical. It only followed that you had to be the same person." Unbelievable. Not only had I failed to keep my sex a secret, but my real identity too. "Plus, I realised your chest was padded after hugging you so many times. I knew you had to be a man because no woman could pad their chest and still be that fla-"
"Oookay I get the idea. So… all of you already of knew I was a man before the Director revealed my identity."
"Yep." The responded in unison.
"And none of you are mad that I've been lying to you this whole time?"
"Don't bother me." Replied Saki nonchalantly.
"I-I don't mind." Added Mai, no more anxious than usual.
"I can work with it." Said Mai, her eyes drifting somewhere they probably shouldn't be.
I couldn't believe my ears. All that fear that the girls would find out my secret and hate me for it, completely pointless.
"Sora- sorry, Shin. We confirmed the existence of God Himself and met actual demons today. Even if we didn't already know, do you really think your gender wound have been all that big of a deal?" Asked Saki, in a tone that may have suggested that I'm a bit of an idiot.
"I guess when you put it like that…" I muttered, realising that I was, in fact, a bit of an idiot.
Eternal war between heaven and hell. Humanity's fate being decided by divine forces. Our powers being a direct link to God. How the hell did I ever expect them to give a damn about me being male?
Idiot.
"Actually, on that subject…" Mai interrupted my self-hatred-fuelled internal monologue. "What do you guys think we should do?"
For how casually it was asked, it was one hell of a question.
"We could fight with the legions of hell, giving everyone true freedom… but we'd lose the bonds that are important to us." Said Saki.
"O-or we could side with God and keep all those wonderful things, but sacrifice our free will completely…" said Sunao.
"Or we can forget this ever happened at all and let them keep waging proxy wars, killing humans for their cause until the end of eternity." Said Mai.
Three choices.
Three terrible choices.
All wrought with a unique brand of suffering.
Do I let go of my the love I have for my friends? Or do I sacrifice my freedom and theirs to protect it? Or should I reserve my spot in the deepest part of hell by maintaining my neutrality?
"What if… what if there's a fourth option?" I heard myself say the words, but even I wasn't sure what had come over me.
"Shin?" Mai looked at me confused, waiting for me to go. I paused for a long moment, trying to organise my thoughts.
"…what if we fight back?" I said. Despite the unsureness of my question, my voice was backed by strong conviction. "What if we rejected heaven and hell? What if told them that Earth needs no Gods or masters, and that humanity is done fighting their wars for them?"
"You mean… rebel against both God and Lucifer? That would mean war with both sides of divinity!" Saki sounded incredulous at the suggestion.
In truth, it was an asinine thing to say. The mortal people of the middle world, whose very existence served no purpose but cannon fodder, rebelling against their creators. It was suicide. But…
"I can't sit back and let everyone I know and love suffer because these high and mighty bastards have decided that our lives have no value. Fuck God. Fuck the Devil. Humans are individuals with lives, and collectives with cultures. If they want to erase that, I say we teach 'em a lesson, with a kick in the teeth!"
I wasn't sure why, but I was fired up. More fired up than I had ever been. Logically, I knew there was practically no chance of success. But in my heart, I well and truly believed that this was the true path for us to walk. And my soul burned with that passion.
"I agree with Shin." It was Mai that broke the resulting silence, her voice more powerful than I had ever heard it. "Hell is the place of individuals, and heaven is the place of the collective. But Earth is the place where those two ideas become one, and humanity treasures that fact. We have to protect it from those who want to harm us. No matter who they are."
Though she was never shy, Mai shone with a confidence I had never seen before. As if she had ascended beyond her humanity in that instant.
"I'm on board too." It was Saki's turn next, and she exuded an aura of determination even more powerful than my own. "Demon. Angel. At the end of the day, they're both bastards who do whatever they want without thinking about us mortal folk. I say to hell with them. We don't need those fuckers." She stopped, and flashed a piece sign at Nao. "And besides, we've got our own guardian Angel right here, don't we?"
The three of us all looked expectantly at our last member, whose usual anxiety was suddenly nowhere to be seen.
"You understand must how dangerous this all is, right?" She said, not stuttering over a single word.
"That mean you're not coming with?" I asked
"It means you're gonna need me to patch you up when things go wrong. So you better not even think about leaving me behind." The cocky smirk suited Nao's face surprisingly well, her desire to see this through with us far outweighing the fear that usually ruled her.
"We would never dream of it." Said Saki, wrapping her arm around Nao's shoulder.
"Just so you all know, this may as well be a suicide mission. We're gonna be fighting against forces we can't even begin to understand. You're all okay with that?"
"Wouldn't miss it for the world."
"Bring on the pain."
"I'll do whatever it takes."
I looked at the faces of my friends, brimming with unwavering resolve and determination. It may sound ridiculous, but I truly felt that we could overcome any problem thrown at us, no matter the scale.
I raised my first above my head, and the responded in kind.
"Let's show those bastards that we mean business! Earth needs no God!"
"Earth needs no masters!"
The chorus of their response felt like it reverberated through the Earth itself, strong enough for heaven and hell to hear it.
This was our new declaration of war.