Prologue 1-3: Kiri Hayashibara

Kiri Hayashibara was a hot-blooded girl. A middle schooler overflowing with vitality. She was in the softball club and had energy to spare. She wouldn’t consider herself manly, but she had been fighting with boys that picked on girls ever since elementary school. She believed that actions spoke louder than words.

Kiri Hayashibara was a man of justice. Or, more accurately, a woman of justice. She hated evil and unnecessary violence. But there wasn’t any particularly profound reason for such hatred; it wasn’t like she had a traumatic past or anything. She just couldn’t stand things like that. That was all there was to it.

Thanks to her simple and straightforward personality, she believed in immediate judgments, immediate decisions, and immediate responses—which was both a good and bad thing. Basically, it was how she’d ended up in her current situation.

“Yaaaaah!”

Kiri landed on the ground with an exceedingly girly shriek. A small crater had formed at her feet from the impact of her landing, but it wasn’t because she was heavy. She had simply fallen from a tremendous height. As for where she fell from...

“GRAAAAAAAAH!”

She had been smacked down by the ridiculously large front legs of the kaiju that had just let out an earsplitting roar. Kaiju. Yes, kaiju. The very dictionary definition of one, no less. It was so typical that it could have crawled directly out of a Sunday morning TV show.

It stood on two thick hind legs, had a long tail, and two short arms attached to its torso below a fat neck that held up an atrocious head. The rough hide all over its body was rock-hard. It stood far taller than any building around, so it went without saying that it simply dwarfed Kiri. Just standing at its feet made her feel like a speck of dust.

“Damn! At this rate, the people of the town will be..!”

As Kiri cursed to no one in particular, a strange creature appeared behind her and called out to her.

“Star Prism! You okay?”

“Yeah! I’m fine... but...”

Kiri a.k.a. Star Prism craned her neck to look up at the kaiju. The longer she looked at it, the more hopeless the situation seemed.

“...”

“You’ve depleted your hero gauge fighting evil too much! You can’t win like this!”

“Yeah, you’re probably right... But I won’t let this year of fighting go to waste!”

It was only a year ago that Kiri had taken up the ridiculous title of hero. It all started when she ran into Starmon on her way home from the softball club. She was startled at first by the strange creature that spoke like a human, but soon warmed up to Starmon’s brash personality. That was all before she’d learned the shocking truth.

Surprise! Earth was on the verge of destruction! And of course it had to be by an evil organization aiming for world domination!

Said evil organization was teeming with villains and spies—far more than the police and military could ever handle. But, Starmon said, if Kiri formed a contract, she’d be able to transform into Star Prism and stop their schemes.

“Okay! I’ll fight!”

Staying true to her usual policy of immediate judgment, immediate decision, and immediate action, she readily agreed to Starmon’s contract.

And so, for the past year, she’d been fighting the evil organization and its underlings. She’d faced all kinds of difficulties and hardships in her fight, but one week ago, she’d finally made her way to the final boss.

However, just before she was able to deal the finishing blow, he went berserk with rage and summoned a space kaiju to destroy Earth in his stead.

“If I cannot have this world, then no one will!” he’d shouted as he was defeated.

And so Kiri was left with one hell of a souvenir. Accordingly, Kiri and Starmon had come to a remote area of Hokkaido on the first day of the second semester in order to face the kaiju from space. And that brings us up to about a minute ago, when Kiri was smacked into the ground by one of the kaiju’s front legs mid-jump. She’d been leaping for its big, stubby head.

“GRAAAAAHH!”

Its thunderous roar reverberated through the air. Each step forward it took shook the ground. Fortunately, there was no risk of innocent bystanders getting hurt in a remote area like this, but there was no telling what kind of damage it would do if it reached the cities. Considering its massive stride, it could reach the closest one in less than an hour.

“So... what should I do?”

This was where Kiri’s policy of immediate judgment, immediate decision, and immediate action came in handy. Even if she was no more than a pesky fly to this kaiju, she knew she needed to distract it and keep it from doing greater damage elsewhere. The best-case scenario would be if someone realized what was going on and evacuated the city before anything could happen. But it wasn’t all good news...

“I don’t think I can defeat it after all...”

This was where the downside to Kiri’s M.O. tended to catch up with her. It was simply too reckless to challenge such an enormous enemy with no plan. Defeat was only inevitable. And unlike in sports, there were no mulligans. Defeat here would mean the end for Kiri, Earth, humanity... Everything.

I can’t even use my special ability in a remote area like this... Starlight Healing can’t purge the evil from a kaiju, either...

The kaiju was moving on instinct. Its natural desire was to feed on others as a carnivore; there was no malicious intent behind it, rendering Kiri’s purifying power “Starlight Healing” useless.

“Oh, well! There’s no point in hesitating now!”

Kiri slapped her cheeks to get herself back in the game. Even if she couldn’t win, she still had a job to do as a distraction. Even if no one noticed the kaiju in time to start evacuations, she could at least buy enough time for the boy and girl she’d just met to get away. She had no idea what they were doing in such a remote area of Hokkaido in the first place. The boy had desperately tried to stop her from challenging the kaiju, telling her to run from the danger.

He was wearing weird clothes, too...

Well, Kiri didn’t really have any room to talk. Appearances aside... If it meant a nice person like that could live in this world for just a little longer, that was reason enough for Kiri to fight. And so Kiri abandoned all thoughts of escape and threw herself into the futile battle at hand.