Villain Mode (OC Corruption)

Hikari's been feeling drained of magic power, at the same time as there's been a surge in both villain activity and vigilante magical girls; when she encounters the cause, a smartphone "game" called MahouGo!, it's creator seems to have decided her "free trial" of magical girl powers has expired...

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Hikari was not having a nice day. Or week for that matter. She was generally lucky with her health, never really getting severely ill, and she generally had a healthy diet and exercised. Rarely did she feel bad because of something wrong with her body. But at the start of the week she found herself feeling a little more drained than usual, a little tired.

She’d assumed it was just from overactivity - training too hard or fighting a villain and not taking a break. But it got worse and worse throughout the week. She had a harder and harder time using her magic, and even Izanami - who was usually quite a persistent voice in her head - was quiet, the magic drain seeming to influence her ability to make herself known. While it was nice that she couldn’t randomly take over the body, Hikari would really have preferred just not being so badly exhausted.

To top it off, the whole affair came at a particularly bad time. The Magical Girl Association was on alert with a record number of random villains - and at the same time, a frankly improbable number of vigilante magical girls not associated with the organization coming out to meet them. They were trying to figure out the spike in both villains and heroines, but it seemed that some amount of identity concealment was a part of their magical girl forms so they could hardly track them down for an interview.

Hikari didn’t want to worry anyone, so she mostly kept the issue to herself. She was mostly fine, or at least she thought she was, and with all the extra magical girls showing up for no apparent reason she hadn’t actually had to fight any villains this week anyway. That meant she was on patrol, and that when her phone buzzed with a notification of a villain active in her area of responsibility, she had to run off to confront them.

By the time Hikari arrived, the villain was out in the open, blasting away at anyone nearby. Even as she transformed, though, some members of the crowd did as well - and not because of the villain’s attacks.

Several people looked down at their phones and pressed something on the screens, and then were enveloped in a burst of light. By the time Hikari could blink the stars from her eyes, four different magical girls were fighting the villain!

Hikari still wanted to help - maybe she could talk to them after. But as she approached, she found she’d somehow become even more drained than she had been just minutes before. When she tried to raise her staff to send off a blast of magic, nothing came out. It was frankly bizarre - being sick shouldn’t have effected her magical capacity so much. While magic manifested differently for everyone, for her it shouldn’t have been so influenced by her health…

While she couldn’t cast anything on her own, she coild still feel the magic being used by the heroines and the villain. She could watch them and learn and… realize something. Something that shouldn’t have been possible, but she was completely confident.

The magical girl's powers felt just like her own.

Not just one of them either. Each combatant had a magical power that felt like Hikari’s own - it was kind of like randomly seeing someone in the street in your favorite clothes, which you’d lost not long before. It was no mere uncanny resemblance either, Hikari could confidently tell that it was, for all intents and purposes, her own magic. “What the heck…?”

The villain tried to beat them, but it was in vain. The magical girls overwhelmed them and knocked them out, before rushing off to transform somewhere private. Hikari felt quite confused, rubbing her forehead and trying to make sense of it. She pulled her phone out to report back, but something interrupted.

“Oh, Hikariii~” A new voice said from behind her, “You’re here~”

Hikari sluggishly turned to see who had approached her. It was one of the magical girls - this one was actually an adult woman. Something was annoyingly familiar about her, but her brain was feeling too sluggish to put it together. “...Hi?” she said. It wasn’t weird for people to recognize her. She didn’t exactly have a costume or hide her looks. Izanami had some kind of illusion she put up when doing her stuff that made it hard to connect her with Hikari, but besides that, she did her magic stuff looking like herself.

“Oh my, you really are quite drained, huh? I suppose that’s what you get for not doing your dailies and playing for free…” she shook her head sadly.

“...Excuse me? Dailies? Free…?” Hikari asked.

The woman smiled and proudly showed her phone. An app was running, a logo declaring it to be “MahouGo!”. It was a fairly simple interface; the phrase “hero mode!” enclosed in a heart symbol was lit up and overtaking much of the display, with a small timer under it, while greyed out to it’s left was the phrase “villain mode!”. “Of course! You’ve been running in Hero mode constantly without refreshing your Energy or getting items to do it! Don’t you know how the game works~?”

Hikari frowned. What the heck…? “It’s not a game…” she grumbled.

“Of course it is! You’re playing right now, aren’t you~?” she giggled. She snatched Hikari’s phone from her hand, and turned it around to Hikari. For some reason, an app that she had not started - or even downloaded - was running, and it was the same one as on the magical girl’s phone. The difference was that her timer was at negative-six days and continuing to tick down.

“...What? When did that get there…?”

“When the game came out, duh.” The woman said. Then she paused. “Oh, you don’t remember? I made it and installed it while you were at the MGA once.”

Hikari squinted at her, something coming to her mind. Last week she’d had some routine tests at the MGA, and the researcher who’d performed them looked a lot like this person… “...Doctor Quill?”

“Ding! Give her a prize!” Doctor Amelia Quill said cheerfully, “I’ve always been a bit of a fan, so it was so cool to research your magic!” Despite her age - the woman was in her early 40s - she looked young like this, and acted like it too. “When I was looking though, I just couldn't stop having ideas for how to use it! I had some magitech on hand, and I wanted to be like you and make more people like you, so I spread it with the app!”

It was pretty nonsense to Hikari, but she didn’t have a great idea of the full range of magitech that the Magical Girl Association had acquired and nor was she at this point willing to call anything impossible when magic was involved. Even with her sluggish thoughts, Hikari managed to piece together that a “fan” of hers had gone nuts and somehow began to leech her power, gifting it to random people using some kind of smartphone game.

“Well… stop it, then! I can barely do anything now.” Hikari grumbled. She didn’t have the energy to snap at her. Was this how being completely drained of magic felt? Hikari had enough of it she never felt lacking no matter how much she used up. “It’s my power so I can take it back, right?”

“Sorry, no can do~ Your free trial of magical girl powers is up, you’ll have to earn more time the same way as everyone else!” Quill laughed.

Still with Hikari’s phone, she swiped to the left side of the screen. “I bet you’ll be cute like this~” she said, as the “villain mode” symbol was highlighted. “To earn time as a Magical Girl, you’ve got to spend some time as a villain. Sorry, I make the rules but I’m not changing them for you~”

Hikari would normally have been able to take it back easily - or heck, to blast the woman and stop her. But right now the artificial magical girl was, well, a magical girl - and Hikari was drained so thoroughly of magic she had less than she normally had even in normal human form. She’d have struggled to retrieve her phone from a particularly rambunctious child, let alone someone actively trying to keep it.

The “magical girl” tapped the confirmation button and then tossed the phone back at Hikari. The moment she touched it - trying to catch it - the magic began.

While the power of the MahouGo app’s magical girls came from Hikari, the power for the villain side came from other sources. Part of it was some of the villains kept locked up by the MGA - and part of it was Izanami’s magic inside of Hikari. That would go a way to explain the “villain” transformation she took on.

It wasn’t quite the same as when Izanami took over; with her magic drained, Izanami was still quite incapable of taking over. But it certainly looked a lot like that, with the way her hair went completely white, growing long and straight as it reached all the way down to her bottom. Her skin got notably paler.

Hikari found herself annoyed. Or even angry. As a general rule of her personality, Hikari did not get angry. She was a positive person who was relatively emotionally stable. These days even being transformed was more of an irritant than truly angering, since she was so used to it. But today she was exhausted and ill, barely upright, and the woman transforming her was supposed to be helping her in the MGA rather than stealing her powers. That would be enough for anyone to have a bad day, and the magical transformation was stoking her negative emotions ever higher.

The magical girl took a deep breath in and out, trying to steady herself, but all the really accomplished was making her notice she wasn’t feeling quite so tired anymore. Magic flowed in - not as much as she usually had but more than she had before - and gave the strength back to her arms and legs. That meant she could do something. “You’ve made a mistake.” she practically growled, her eyes turning red as the magical power increased.

“Huh. This isn’t quite right. You should be starting as a level one vill- glhrk!” Quill’s confusion cut off with a choking noise as Hikari waved her staff and some kind of telekinetic force grabbed her by the neck and hoisted her up.

Hikari grinned a rather concerning smile. “I don’t think you understand how much I’m holding back. Constantly. I don’t like being angry. It’s not fun.” Her clothes had begun to shift as well, casual clothes expanding in some places and tightening in others. Soon it had shifted to a black-and-red bodysuit with a black kimono overtop, not unlike the outfit Izanami had first arrived in the world in. “I prefer having fun, don’t you? But you had to go and make me angry.” The newly minted villainess said.

Quill struggled in the magical grip, but it was a futile effort - Hikari had started at a much higher level than she’d expected, higher than her own magical girl level. Hikari seemed to contemplate what to do with her.

“I think I’m going to be taking my power back. One girl at a time. Starting with you.” she said after a moment. “Izanami always does it like… ah, got it.”

A mask formed in Hikari’s hand, and she pushed it onto Doctor Quill’s face without letting her move to avoid the attack. “Mmph! Mmph!”

“Oh, quiet down. Natsuki enjoys this, so I’m sure you will too.” Hikari sighed, as she let her magic work. On Quill’s phone, the “hero mode! / villain mode!” screen got replaced - a new screen slid down over top of the normal one, declaring her to be entering “minion mode” with a frowning emoticon; the nearest thing the game had to a fail state.

The struggling abruptly ceased at Hikari’s command, the woman going limp as a shiny, latex-like material spread down from the mask and covered her body. The frills and silks of a magical girl outfit covered up and smoothed out, and she dropped her wand, which clattered uselessly to the floor. The skin-tight suit emphasized her figure, and when Hikari let her down, it was impossible to tell who she’d once been unless you made a guess based on her (now black-coated) hair.

The newly made minion wordlessly saluted, awaiting orders. Hikari breathed in a deep sigh as she felt some of her magic power return to her, from forcing her out of “hero mode”. She had a lot of work left to do before she got back to capacity… but she’d certainly enjoy it.