Prologue

As he looks at the hopeless scene in front of him, fourteen-year-old Hideki Nakazawa feels his heart match his surroundings.

"So this is the power of that Walpurgisnacht, huh..."

He brushes the dirt and his sweat-matted brown hair off his face as he kneels on a piece of rubble, watching the battle with the incredibly-powerful witch unfold with a disgusting power difference to one side. Though he said that about Walpurgis with a relaxed tone, he's actually really fucking panicked right now. He's never been in a situation quite this bad, and he's not suited for combat against the godforsaken eldritch abomination that this is.

In front of him in the distance a girl simply appears, in a uniform of some sort with thigh-high boots and long black hair, with a miniature shield or buckler attached to her left hand and a Beretta in her right. She's in the air on a floating piece of debris from one of the high-rise buildings the massive gear-shaped witch tore off its foundations and ripped apart, facing the witch itself with her battered body and unshakable resolve.

Her name is Homura Akemi, and she's something called a magical girl. She's a girl normally shrouded in mystery, an enigmatic individual with indeterminate goals...aside from the protection of a certain pink-haired girl by the name of Madoka Kaname.

Considering that Homura is still out there fighting this seemingly hopeless battle, if her condition versus the witch's condition is anything to go by, Madoka Kaname herself is still somewhere out there, cowering in fear since she herself isn't a magical girl even if she has an opportunity to be one.

Nakazawa switches from kneeling to sitting as he watches, lamenting fact that he can't help. Not because he doesn't have the power to, but because if he expends any more of it he'll be nothing more than another problem that she has to deal with.

You see, Nakazawa is a magical girl counterpart, a magical boy. Officially he shouldn't exist as he is, since the ones that grant the magical girls powers explicitly grant power to only girls, but for every rule there is an exception. One way or another, he has become the world's first magical boy, operating systematically in the same way as a magical girl.

For these girls, when they are granted power a gem is created that contains basically the entire essence of the girl they were, with their body turned into a hardy tool to fight the monsters they protect the public from: witches, like Walpurgisnacht over the river running through the center of the city he lives in, Mitakihara. Putting it simply, the souls are transported into the gem, and the gem becomes the person at that point.

These gems are, however, faced by two threats: breaking and corrupting. If the gem breaks, of course, the vessel is unsealed and its contents are lost, effectively killing the magical girl. Corrupting, however, is a more complicated and debatably worse fate. The gems are both sources of magical power and the essence of its possessor, and that essence can become corrupted in three ways: the passing of time, the usage of magic, and the spoiling of emotions. The first one is self-explanatory, as most things naturally deteriorate over time. The usage of magic, is also rather self-explanatory, as it isn't like there's an unlimited amount of magic available.

However, on the emotion end of things, things get a little more complicated and abstract. Put as simply as possible, negative emotions can corrupt the magic and essence of the contents of the gem, and once it reaches a certain point it degenerates into something horrific and warped beyond recognition and comprehension.

While this is unknown to most magical girls, he at least knows that this corruption leads the magical girl to become a witch. The very things that they're fighting.

This is his problem now. The contents of his soul gem are very, very murky compared to his usual light brown pigmentation. It's damn near black. He won't reach the despair event horizon if he helps a little bit, but he doesn't know how much he'd be able to do before reaching that limit.

He could always find a way to purify his gem, which is through the usage of grief seeds, little egg-like things that witches drop when you kill them. You hold the egg near the gem or touch them together, and all the corruption of the gem goes into it, leaving the gem pristine. However, he doesn't have a gem on hand, and he can't sense any other witches in the city other than Walpurgisnacht.

Though even if there was another one, I wouldn't have enough magic to deal with it and get the seed. All the other magical girls that were in the city before this morning are either dead or missing.

"I really shouldn't have used so much magic earlier..."

Though these words carry no particular tone, Nakazawa feels, in fancy terms, vexed at this situation. He wants to help and do what he was contracted to do, since if this witch goes free it will hurt many more people than he'd like to think about...but at the same time if he goes to help it's possible that he'll become a witch and add to the carnage.

'KRRRRRRR!'

There's an intense creaking noise as the witch makes a sound resembling a human scream, and in response most of the debris floating about and on the promenade near the river is yanked into the air and starts to rotate rapidly around the witch like the rings on a planet on the outer part of our solar system.

It spins fast, so fast that it looks like a blur of solid dark gray, like an object.

Then it all expanded.

"Ah, fuck…"

All the debris explodes outward at nightmarish speeds, every piece of debris ready to blow a hole into a magical individual, not to mention regular people.

As quickly as he can, Nakazawa rises from his position and eyes his surroundings to find a place to take shelter from the onslaught, as he'd like to avoid using his magic for reasons already explained.

A short way to his left, there's an overturned 18-wheeler complete with its trailer that he could possibly use to shield himself, but…

If that much debris hits that, it's gonna explode.

He knows this because this one is still intact, having somehow only been overturned and not damaged outside of that in the battle between Homura Akemi and Walpurgisnacht.

But this situation makes that fact one that makes his heart drop just a little. If he had to choose being obliterated by a storm of debris or being caught in an explosion, he'd definitely choose the explosion if only because it's easier to heal burns and lacerations with magic compared to grievous loss of body matter, but even still he doesn't have any magical reserves he feels comfortable sparing.

Healing isn't exactly cheap.

However, none of the other surrounding debris is large enough or appears sturdy enough for Nakazawa to even consider it.

As such, he has to use the magic of indeterminate-but-undeniably-low levels he has left to survive this.

Pulling a shiny metal-looking bracelet off his wrist, he loops his fingers around two opposite points on the ring and pulls outward, stretching the ring out to as wide as his arms can go, then he sets it on the ground with the top part leaning away from him and the part on the ground closer to him.

There's a crack and a metallic clang, his ring now snapped in half from a well-placed stomp on his tilted weapon, then he throws one of them high up into the air. As it makes its revolutions, the two ends it was broken across start to meet, forming a complete ring in the apex of its flight far above the doom-bringing wave of debris.

With the ring fragment in his hand expanding to become a full one, his evasion preparations are complete.

Dissonantly casual, he drops his ring to the ground and steps forward to drop into it, the wave of debris missing him by inches…

And then he was falling, high above the chaos as the wave of destruction causes chaos on its surroundings. The wall and railing of the riverside promenade were assaulted, and the chunks and metal broken off as a result joined the fray. Vehicles were torn through with the usual squeal of torn metal, and some of them even exploded and added shrapnel to the mix. Trees and plants were obliterated, turned into mulch by the onslaught.

All in all, it was a horrifying sight.

And even more horrifying to think what that would have done to the incredibly fragile human body.

He descends rapidly toward the ground, the air rushing past him whipping his hair and black-and-white clothing into a frenzy, and eventually he's moving fast enough that he can use his power to land safely and easily.

He draws the ring he left behind in the way of the debris storm towards him, extending his hand and willing it to return to him, and after a moment it flies toward him and places itself perfectly in his gloved hand. He then throws the ring to the ground ahead of him, using practiced motions to make it land flat perfectly underneath him.

Once again, he drops through a ring to be released into the air, but this time he flips the direction of the portal within the ring that he through into the air earlier, flying upward toward the sky now feet-first.

Slowly but surely, Nakazawa's ascent is slowed as he reaches the apex of his flight, and this cues him to right himself to have his feet pointed to the ground again. He then calls the ring he was just ejected from up to him and at the same time makes his other ring hover above the ground at about 6 feet, but instead of the first ring flying to his hand, it remains parallel and moves up his body just as he starts to fall again, passing him through the other ring.

With a grunt, he lands on his feet and continues into a crouch, looking ahead of him where Walpurgisnacht is still hovering.

"Akemi-san should be somewhere around here, too. I doubt she would have moved too much to dodge that attack, what with her time-stop…"

Nakazawa looks around for the familiar length of black hair, but can't seem to find her anywhere in the skies riding oil tankers into the witch or falling upside-down while dual-wielding automatic, seemingly self-reloading RPGs, so he grabs his rings and shrinks one back down to bracelet size and ventures to other areas near the promenade to see if he can find her there…

'Click!'

He hears the loud clicking of some mechanism around a newly-formed mountain of settling debris, and as he looks around to investigate he sees a massive chunk of ground missing from the promenade, carved away by the storm of debris released by Walpurgisnacht.

He steps slowly toward the crater, if only to make sure he doesn't mistakenly roll his ankle on some debris and be forced to use more magic, and approaches the edge of it, craning his neck to peer inside the steep new addition to Mitakihara's scenery.

To make a crater this size, one of those skyscrapers had to have been chucked into it or something...jeez, this is massive.

On the edge of the crater, he surveys the various pieces of metal, like steel beams and other various pieces of massive now-shrapnel, shattered window panes, and chunks of concrete, and even a rather large intact piece of a wall, easily as big around as a teacher's desk but at least twice as thick.

He grabs the edge of the ring, careful not to loop his finger around the inside this time, and shrinks the diameter of the inside to be about the width of an eraser head while maintaining the width of the ring as a whole, then he steps off the edge of the crater and places his ring under him and allows himself to land on it on the slope of the crater and slide to flatter ground.

After dodging the various debris in his way on the slope, he reaches ground flat enough that he slides at a significantly slower rate, so he steps off into the dirt and dust, his ring stopping itself against two steel beams protruding from the ground.

In the same silence he's been doing the rest of this aside from occasional grunts, he strides over to retrieve his ring and widens the diameter of the hole he shrunk to its normal size, then slings it over his shoulder and wades through the rubble, trying to find the source of that clicking sound. The sound wasn't exactly loud when he heard it, but it wasn't soft enough for him to be able to pass it off as the settling debris or something similar.

As such, he continues his stride while scanning the area for something that would look like it would be able to make that noise, and before long he happens upon something.

It's not what he's looking for.

But it's definitely something. Something he needs to pay attention to.

Something that—

"Ah…" Nakazawa exhales and turns away, repulsed by the sight in front of him.

In front of him lies the sickeningly mangled body of Madoka Kaname, with concrete, glass, and metal shards embedded deep inside of her body, and that's the least of her issues.

Her torso has massive chunks missing from it, one of them encompassing her shoulder from the way that that area and her left arm—which is lying a couple feet away from her, on the edge of her growing pool of fresh blood—don't seem to fit together if you tried to place them beside each other.

Nakazawa closes his eyes and turns his head, trying to hold back a swarm of emotions and overall disgust at the sight ahead of him. The blood flowing freely from her wounds, the shards of bone covered in blood and scattered across the ground from whatever chunk of debris smashed through her body. He's almost certain he could see her spine, also jolted out of place and disconnected a couple inches below where the ribcage connects to it from the impacts she sustained, and the parts of her entrails that weren't ripped from her body and cast into the ether are embedded with debris like the rest of her body.

But the worst of it is Madoka's head. It can only be called that tentatively, as it has suffered a crippling loss of body matter as well, what with most of the right side of her head looking like someone took a bite out of it. The part of her brain that is left is partially hanging out of her shattered skull, and her left eye is looking rather loose in its socket as a result.

Even after shutting his eyes, this image is burned into his eyes. Due to the nature of Nakazawa's contract and the ability that comes with it, he's seen many, many deaths, and not all of them pretty…but this one possibly tops it all.

"Haa...haa…"

He probably wouldn't be so rattled were it someone he didn't know, but considering Madoka is a classmate of his, someone he sees almost daily…he'd be hard-pressed to not feel anything.

Well, if he didn't feel anything at the death of another, regardless of if he knows them or not, then he'd have to call himself a monster. He has yet to reach that territory, and he does not want to.

He takes a deep breath in an attempt to calm his nerves, then he begins to think about what to do from here. Finding Madoka's body actually gave him the answer to what that metallic click was, if not something to do with the gears on Walpurgisnacht. In fact, he's certain because, with the way he's facing now, the witch is almost perfectly left of him, hovering in the distance over the river.

If Kaname-san is like this, then that means that clicking sound was Akemi-san going back in time. She has no reason to stay here anymore.

He looks around at the destruction and the massive chunk missing from the promenade, the darkness within his soul gem, the mangled body of Madoka Kaname, the powerful witch Walpurgisnacht beginning to turn its doll body upright slowly as it approaches his side of the river...

"Well, to be honest, I don't have much incentive to stay either…"

He has a way to escape, and it has to do with his portals and time travel like Homura's own trademark ability. Simply put, he can set his portals to not only anywhere in space, but anyplace in time as well.

However, that takes a much larger toll on his magic reserves than making portals in space, and his magic reserves are still at an unknown-yet-dangerously low level, making that something he can't afford to do lest he become a witch the second he steps into the next timeline.

Nakazawa sighs and leans on his ringblade, digging it into the ground and flattening out the outside of the ring where he plans to do so, and looks at the various things around home, hoping that there would be something there for him to turn around his situation or at least find a grief seed for him to purify his gem with, even if it's at capacity and about to turn back into a witch. If he can get even a little bit of pollution taken off of him from a grief seed like that, he can make it to a different timeline and figure out what to do from here.

Or I could call up her, and get her to bring me one…

He shakes his head to deny his own suggestion just as quickly as it came up, feeling a pang in his chest at the thought of his best friend and what he did to her just before reaching the riverside, when Homura was doing battle. In fact, she's the reason he's so without magic right now.

Why would I think of that? She's in no state to—

'Clink!'

"…"

Nakazawa can't help but stare at the grief seed that fell to the ground out of the corner of his vision, rolling to the ground and coming to a stop as it bumps against Madoka's detached left arm.

He approaches it and picks it up, feeling numb at the surprise…but then the fact that this just appeared out of nowhere puts him on guard.

Putting the grief seed near his donut-shaped soul gem on his belt buckle, he scours the area and focuses on his surroundings, trying to feel any remote trace of magic other than Walpurgisnacht's in the area, but he finds none. No physical nor magical signs in the area.

"What the hell…?"

Deciding to chalk it up to it falling out of the settling debris (though he is wondering how the hell a grief seed got there in the first place), he plans on what to do next. He knows that he needs to go back if he wants to make any headway, preferably to the same timeline that Homura Akemi went to, but…

I've seen relatively the same things occur countless times, and it all leads to this death and destruction at the end of April and beginning of May.

He positions his hand outstretched in front of him, willing magic into it and calling forth the object where the other half of his power lies.

Since that gem I just found gave me a full cleansing, I should have enough magic to introduce what I need if I want to get anywhere: a mix-up. A new variable or multiple ones. Anything to stir the pot.

He understands that this is a pretty risky move from the standpoint of a time traveler, especially since the number one trait a time-traveler stuck in a loop needs is patience and perseverance, but if you see a dead end in your path that you can't get past no matter what you do, then it's time to seek a different route.

This is what he's planning on doing now.

In a flash of light, a leather-bound black notebook with a light-brown ring inscribed on the cover appears in his hand, and a black, old-fashioned ink pen also materializes and hovers vertically in the center of the ring on it. Wasting no time, he opens the book up to the next available blank page and holds the book in his left hand while he takes the pen and holds it in his right, primed to write what he needs.

Well, I say all of this, but I'm going to be in dire need of a grief seed once I get to the next timeline…

What he's intending on doing is very, very taxing to his magic reserves. Only a fresh grief seed can take the pollution it causes in his gem and not immediately turn into another witch, and if he doesn't use this ability right after a fresh cleanse he's more than likely going to turn into a witch on the spot. At least he will have enough magic left to get to the next timeline.

What is he planning on doing, you ask?

Well, it's a simple thing. Not that hard to explain, yet explaining it simply seems like a crime in comparison to what it does.

But putting it in that simple way, he is rewriting reality. Not on a total scale—that would likely kill him—but on a small scale. He's "introducing a variable" and "stirring the pot", writing something to that effect into his book and causing that to come true.

It's the strongest power he has, the most dangerous, and the most taxing.

And it's something he's willing to use for this end.

So, he lays his book on the flat of his ringblade-turned-stand and writes this: "In the next timeline that I jump to, let there be the introduction of a variable (or variables) to bring me and Homura Akemi out of this stagnating loop and lead me and the others to victory."

He keeps his pen on the page, having a bit of an afterthought.

I won't have enough magic left to search for Akemi-san's signature as well as travel to the timeline that she ended up in…may as well add that here.

"P.S.: Let the timeline that I jump to be the one where the Homura Akemi I know ends up."

If there's one thing he wants to keep constant, it's the only other time traveler he knows, even if she doesn't quite know who he is at the moment.

A low, unnatural humming sound rings out as the words written in the book shine and then return to their normal black color as the silence returns. Instantly, he feels fatigued and he doesn't even have to look to know how cloudy his gem gets.

Opting not to waste time for no reason, he makes the ringblade snap back to its base ring shape, and then tips it over onto the ground, activating a portal and letting the magic from his book focus on the timeline Homura ended up in.

Looking down into the portal, he recognizes his room in the apartment he shares with his uncle, and moves to step forward…

Then he feels a heavy blow hit the back of his head and hears the words "It's my win," and then everything goes black.

Author's Note (A/N): Well, my desire to write has returned, in the form of a complete rewrite of my old The Preventers fanfic. Some of you may have known of The Preventers—Beginnings Arc and The Preventers—Retry Arc, but since they were written so early in my writing days, they felt too bad for me to keep up on the site or anywhere, so I deleted them. I also wanted a kind of fresh start for the fanfiction whose material I'd been thinking of for seven years. I felt it would be a waste for me to not continue with the story, albeit in a different way. I hope this can grow to be something I am proud of and something you all that read this (if anyone does) can enjoy.

This story takes place in some arbitrary timeline(s) after Homura had already went through too many to keep track of. It's also pre-Rebellion, pre-Madoka becoming a goddess and by extension pre-Wraith Arc. Also I may include Oriko Magica's titular Oriko Mikuni and her friend Kirika Kure at some point, if I can find a place for them. Mostly, this story is just going to be ran by our usual quintet, Nakazawa, and his affiliates, with Nakazawa and Homura being the protagonists. There will not be much romance to speak of, if there are any people wishing for that. Notice how there aren't any brackets in the character listings.

Also, there will be OCs. Very relevant OCs. Fun times are ahead.

Oh, and regular italics (Italics) are a characters thoughts. Quoted italics ("Italics") mean telepathic communication between magical individuals and/or Incubator speech.

(Yes I realize I'm rambling) If it feels like this prologue actually started in the middle of something big and has a lot of loose ends...well, that's because I wrote this on a whim with little structure or thought to planning other than what ideas I already have in place based on my old plans for the story.

For those of you that have followed me after reading my main fic, A Certain Land of Illusions: I'm working on the next chapter now. It should be back soon, if this sudden desire to write isn't just a short spurt.

Well, tell me what you think and give me feedback in reviews, and I'll see you all next time.