Madrid Is a Mystery

【The bonus chapters for the neighboring story are finished, so I’ll come back and fill in the gaps here, OxO】 【City Edition Blurb】 On Lucia’s first day in Madrid, she was on the phone with a friend studying in Germany when she happened to look up and see a human-shaped figure fly between the rooftops of her building and the one next door. After hearing Lucia complain about it to her friend, the superhero himself landed and told her that he wasn’t Spider-Man or Superman stationed in Spain for the United States. He was just a passing tennis player. On an utterly ordinary day, Lucia went to the park to sketch and ran into a mini Kakashi, blond version. Behind him was a group of former humans turned into zombies after being brainwashed by the Sharingan. Later, a friend of mini Kakashi explained that the park was a well-known gathering place where thieves in the neighborhood divvied up their loot. A tennis-playing boy, the sort you could find anywhere, had used a “scientific” method to hypnotize them into returning everything. One idle weekend, Lucia took her neighbor’s child to an after-school class. While waiting outside for the class to end, she let her guard down for a moment and someone stole her tablet. Just as Lucia was about to call the police, a little orange ball came hurtling down with pinpoint accuracy, landing right on the young thief’s head! The ball burst, juice splattering everywhere. A young man eating an unpeeled orange accepted Lucia’s thanks. He was the tennis coach at the school. Lucia met a beautiful young woman with elegant, pale pink hair, a playful miniskirt, and incredibly long legs. She smelled lovely and stood over 1.8 meters tall. Her seemingly slender arms held the strength of a sniper rifle, making her feel utterly reassuring. Later, Lucia discovered that the woman was a somewhat successful tennis player. Well, she had begun to suspect as much when she learned that the pretty young woman knew mini Kakashi, but… She had never imagined that the pretty young woman was a man, or that he was younger than her. Invited to watch the Madrid Masters, Lucia found her mind completely at peace as she watched tennis players unleash special effects in the shape of hearts, ride white horses, turn into giants, and hit shots called Za Warudo and the Cosmic Black Hole. She understood. Alien battles like these were just everyday life in Madrid! This place was Gotham by day, Morioh in the West, and tennis players were the Madrid Avengers, the Spanish Ultramen. Then one day, her thesis turned Lucia into a vengeful spirit. She sat outside a shop, disheveled and soaking up the sun, when… a dark-haired young man mistook her for a beggar. Lucia stared in shock at the purple banknote he held out to her. …Unbelievable. There really were normal people in Madrid! TIPS A Chinese student in Spain × a rising star in La Liga A slow-witted PhD student whose worldview has been wrecked by tennis × a footballer who places kill orders on the court every day but leads a pretty normal life off it Theme: May everyone get a happy ending.