Mika Yoshida's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Mika was watching her practice footage for the twelfth time when the notification appeared. Someone had screen-recorded her video from the private forum and posted it to a public feed with the caption 'wannabe magical girl thinks she's the next Stellar Force.' Three hundred comments already. She scrolled through the comments, each one worse than the last. Most mocked her footwork. Some pointed out the jewelry store behind her in the frame—the one with the bright sign and glass windows—and joked that she was auditioning for a commercial. A few recognized the parking garage angle and started posting guesses about where she filmed it. Her chest tightened. She couldn't delete the video. She couldn't stop people from sharing it. But she could control what they thought it meant. She opened the comment section and typed: 'This is day one of documented training. If you're not willing to start somewhere, you're not serious about improvement.' She posted it, then screenshotted her own comment and shared it to her personal account with a link to her analysis post. Within twenty minutes, two of the mocking accounts had gone quiet. A third replied with a question about her hand positioning. She answered it with a reference to episode four of Stellar Force and a timestamp. The comments shifted. Not all of them, but enough. She closed her phone and exhaled. The video was still out there, but now it was hers again.