Magical Girl Gunslinger

death wish segment.

Also seems like review must be 50 words long. What is up with that. I guess it can be justified but still i dont know what i will write to reach the minimum word count of 50 words. Also dont know why I cant write this paragraph below the spoiler tag. Maybe its because I am writing this in mobile.

I'm sure that I am just forgetting or missed it but could some explain why she went to turn on the shield instead of removing the sabotage from the generator?

Okay, so, I'm kind of annoyed at people saying there are plot holes around stuff like this because I don't think that's true so I'm going to knock out a few replies since I see some common ones in this thread.

So sure, here's an explanation. Selene didn't recognize the device or how exactly it was connected to the generator, so she couldn't have guided Mai through removing it safely, because with the Usurpation up she can't request any knowledge from the Gate System that she doesn't already have. You know what's a synonym for "unlicensed electrician"? "Suicide risk." And that's for dealing with the amount of electricity flowing through a residential home. You're talking about literally tampering with something wired directly into the power generator itself. Even if Mai actually had her Astral Shift, even that probably wouldn't be enough to protect someone at her level from literally dying instantly if something went wrong during that process. So assuming it would even be safer for Mai personally is questionable.

But even more pertinently, especially from Mai's own perspective, that's assuming that there was no risk to the generator itself. Which without any info from Selene on how it works or how it's attached is literally impossible for her to determine. And personally I'm really dubious that people as ethically dubious and short-sighted as the people responsible for attaching this thing to the generator in the first place would have taken precautions to make sure it could be easily removed without risking something important in the generator itself getting fried. And if the generator got fried then there's literally no hope at all anymore. Not only could Mai, or anyone else, not go and try turning the shield station on, but even later no one could turn it on until they somehow brought in a whole new power generator.

Or, here's what's probably an even better explanation from the story itself. This is from Chapter 20. This is what they originally thought:

“Where to start… Alright, so this whole time, we thought the shield station went down because of some glitch, right? That the shelters coming online all at once somehow made the generator think it was compromised because of the sudden draw in power. So it did an emergency shutdown, which caused a burst of mana, and that was what knocked the mall’s power offline. That’s what we thought happened, right?”

Or in other words, what they thought was that the generator itself, with its simple software, saw an unexpected surge of power, had the software equivalent of a random brain fart and thought it was being tampered with and shut itself down. And they thought that was the reason the shield station shut down. Meaning that if they got the generator back up there would be no problem, because it wasn't that the shield station had detected tampering and activated its own anti-tamper shutdown, it was just that the shield station wasn't getting any power so once it was, problem solved. But. Also from Chapter 20:

“Kōhai… the reason the lights turned back on was because that mysterious box was leeching power from the mana generator. My guess is it’s a mana converter, turning mana into electricity like the shield station usually does. In other words, the mall was illegally siphoning power from the mana generator. That’s why the generator went down, and also why the shield station didn’t restart when you turned the generator back on. The shield station has the software and equipment to recognize there actually was tampering, so of course it didn’t automatically restart when you turned the generator back on.

Or in other words, the problem was never just that the power station had mistakenly identified tampering because its simple software got confused and the shield station would be okay once its power was restored. The problem was that the shield station itself had also correctly identified actual tampering and activated its own anti-tamper shutdown, and in general safety protocols can have automatic shutdowns but almost always require manual reactivation. Because if something potentially serious enough to trigger a failsafe happens, then you want actual human eyes on the situation to confirm there actually isn't a problem before authorizing a restart.

But my guess is that it's for the same reason that a shield generator meant to do nothing but (constantly) protect against anathema incursions (and power shelters) was designed to shut down when it detected tampering at the power source (despite the only nefarious action an adversary could do with it would be to shut it down - which was its own response to that threat. I get the power source shutting down when it overdraws or detects tampering, but not the mission critical appliance with no failsafe)

That's actually quite far from the worst thing that could possibly happen. And this is, incidentally, why they would prioritize making sure its safe to turn the station back on versus just getting it back up as fast as possible. I think this was touched on briefly earlier but I can't remember exactly where, but basically the explanation was that the shield station is an enormous amount of magical power concentrated into a relatively small space.

And you know what the word for an enormous amount of potential energy in a small package is? Bomb. If a shield station goes critical... well, imagine something like a cross between a few hundred tons of TNT and Chernobyl. So if it detects tampering with the power supply that could cause it to overload, well, shutting down until proper authorization that no everything is actually fine is provided seems pretty sensible with that context IMO.

Actually, I went looking and found the cite from Chapter 19:

“Why is it set to a 80% maximum anyway?” I finally asked.

[Two reasons. First, more than 80% shouldn’t ever be needed to power everything the shielding station is responsible for. 75% is the most it should ever be generating at one time, even with emergency shields in all the shelters activated, but a 5% margin of error is added just in case. Secondly, the 80% serves as a good way to measure if something is wrong. If the shielding station was damaged and attempted to overdraw power, the limit causes a shutdown until the problem can be addressed. Damage to a shielding station, a powerful piece of Zenith technology that actively turns massive amounts of mana into energy could have disastrous consequences. So, the limit is put on all generators to prevent any unfortunate accidents.]

So there you go, an explanation. If the shield station didn't come back up, it would mean that everybody in Shelter 3 would die (because Mr. Toujou is an asshole and a dumbass). If the shield station went critical, it would mean that everybody in the building would die. As in every shelter, on every floor. At least. And then filling the gap in Arcadia's defenses would get a lot more complicated than just punching an authorization code into infrastructure that was already there, because they would have to build or somehow transport in an entire new shield station and probably also a new power generator, all while the area was still vulnerable. Not to mention also devastated by the explosion and tainted by the massive mana spill making the area actively toxic for any non-Guardians.

Shelter system here seem not created by engineers.

I'm just quoting the one sentence to show the post I'm replying to but this is to all of it. Almost all of what you're proposing would take substantially more resources to construct. You have to remember that these are shelters that they need to place not even just in every building (which would already be a monumental commitment), but in literally every single floor of every building of significance. Every skyscraper, every mall, every government building, and so on, and so forth. Every floor, of every single one of them.

Arcadia has a population of fifty million, all of it highly urban by all appearances. The Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area is currently the most populous urban region in the world with a population of only around forty million. To take just one of the categories of building I mentioned - skyscrapers - Tokyo has more than 160 buildings classified as skyscrapers, meaning they have to be at least 492 feet tall and have at least 40 stories. Their tallest skyscrapers have up to 54 stories. Let's average that at 45 stories and round down to 160 skyscrapers even. One of these shelters for every floor of every one of those is 160 * 45 = 7200 shelters. And this is for just one class of major building, in a city with a population 20% smaller than Arcadia, with what I think is less urban density from what I can tell (meaning Arcadia would probably have even more such buildings per capita).

Yes, an engineer with infinite resources will absolutely pile in all the multiple redundancies they can. But in the real world what engineers want to do will almost always be brought up short by budget constraints, and even with all the magic this is still supposed to feel like a real world. The people designing the Floor 3 Shelter didn't know in advance that this was going to be the special shelter that the protagonist of the story we're reading would care about in particular. To them, it was just another shelter like the thousands and thousands of others they needed to scrape together the resources to build all of. Even with hyper-advanced aliens building much of the city for humanity, resources still become finite at some point. The fact that all these shelters exist at all is frankly a staggering commitment of resources, nevermind all the special features they already have.

Anyway, so. That's my rant, sorry if it got a little almost stream-of-consciousness in parts - I did try to format and organize it at least a bit. Hope that didn't come across as too personal towards anyone at any point, it just bugs me to see people nitpicking things that actually have answers if you're paying more attention to what's already been stated in the story or think things through a little more realistically.