A magical girl's power is often related to the wish she makes. It can encompass various concepts, even those that transcend time, as can be seen from Homura's special ability. It was like opening a blind box; before her, not even Kyubey knew that time reversal was possible.
And now, Madoka's situation was similar.
The content of Madoka's wish was to eliminate magical girls before they fall into witchhood. This wish itself contained a temporal attribute.
So, the moment she fired her arrow, it seemed as if only two or three arrows were loosed, striking the magical girls who were about to fall. In truth, many more arrows transcended time, disappearing into its long river.
The magical girls of the present who had not yet fallen would, in the future moment when they were about to be consumed by despair, encounter the arrow Madoka fired at this very instant.
And for the witches of the present who had already fallen, the arrow would travel back to the second before their despair, eliminating them before they were ever born.
As proof, on the stage of Walpurgisnacht, several witches had already vanished without a sound, and almost no one had noticed.
This was an attack across time, more silent and more chilling than a dimensional attack across space.
"It's not enough..."
As a fellow time-based magical girl, Homura was able to know what Madoka was doing. But she understood even better that Madoka's power alone was not enough to fulfill her wish. The reason was simple: a lack of output.
Even with the karma from a hundred loops, even if Madoka's strength was enough to defeat Walpurgisnacht, her magical power was ultimately finite.
Her arrows might be able to trace back a decade or two into the past and future, erasing the witches born within a twenty- or thirty-year span, but she couldn't yet cross hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years to completely erase all witches. Let alone cross into other universes.
No matter how good the wish, it wasn't something one person could achieve alone. The proof was that the Walpurgisnacht before them had not completely disintegrated.
The witches born hundreds or thousands of years ago were not yet affected by Madoka's wish. Madoka's power alone could not do it.
However...
"Big Brother Su Mo..." Homura turned to look at Su Mo, her eyes filled with absolute trust.
She did not doubt the feasibility of the plan, because Su Mo had already said that the key was resonance, the resonance of a collective wish.
And indeed...
VMMMM~
An invisible wave of energy transmitted from all directions, creating a violent resonance that amplified Madoka's power.
Homura found herself in a unique, hyper-dimensional perspective, independent of the world's conventional timeline.
In this perspective, logic, not time, determined the sequence of what she could observe.
And so, she clearly saw Madoka's wish first resonate with and gain the support of the magical girls from fifteen years in the past and fifteen years in the future. This almost encompassed several generations of magical girls, past, present, and future.
Empowered by the collective wish of these magical girls, Madoka's arrows were strengthened. As if relay stations had been established, the arrows used the magical girls of fifteen years ago as a relay, extending their range to the previous fifteen years, that is, thirty years ago.
This instantly leaped the span of Madoka's wish from a thirty-year range to sixty. Then, she once again gained the support of the vast majority of magical girls within that time frame.
These magical girls, on the verge of falling, once again became Madoka's relays, expanding her reach even further.
This time, the expansion was another thirty years.
The chain reaction had begun!
Thirty years, sixty years, one hundred and twenty years, two hundred and forty years... As the number of resonating magical girls grew, the trigger range of Madoka's arrows widened.
Like rolling a snowball, Madoka had only started it, but with the resonance of all magical girls, it had triggered an irreversible avalanche.
Independent of Earth's timeline, a sky full of pink arrows flew, shooting towards one different era after another.
And in Kyoko Sakura's eyes, the Madoka before her didn't even seem to move, yet the witches on Walpurgisnacht's stage began to irreversibly disappear, one after another.
In the end, even the core of Walpurgisnacht, the most powerful super-dreadnought-class witch, vanished into dust without so much as a final word.
What destroyed her was not the Madoka of the present, but a single pink arrow from thousands of years ago, before she had fallen into witchhood, before she had gained her current immense power.
Under a dimensional attack across the timeline, even the strongest witch had no ability to resist.
Homura even suspected that Madoka didn't even consider the Walpurgisnacht before them as a special target that needed to be actively dealt with. It was just an enemy that got caught in the crossfire as she fulfilled her wish.
To destroy you, what business is it of yours?
From this unique perspective, a battle of mythical epic proportions unfolded.
Madoka's arrows were unstoppable, destroying one nascent witch after another.
However, just as all great battles have a turning point, this mythological epic soon encountered an insurmountable wall.
It was a future that could only be seen from a perspective that crossed the timeline, and the final disaster that this world had to overcome.
Walpurgisnacht.
To be precise, it was not the Walpurgisnacht that Madoka had just successfully defeated, but a new version of it.
The Kriemhild Gretchen, the Witch of Salvation form.
As is well known, all magical girls have the potential to fall into witchhood, and Madoka was no exception. And Walpurgisnacht was a title reserved for the strongest witch, one capable of destroying human civilization.
And in the future, at the end of time when all other witches had been defeated by Madoka, the only one qualified to inherit this title was Madoka herself.
In other words, when Madoka herself fell into witchhood, she would become an object of terror far greater than any previous Walpurgisnacht.
This was an ordeal that all magical girls had to face, including Madoka herself.
*BOOM!*
In the cosmos, a jet-black Soul Gem the size of a small planet was hurtling towards Earth at a world-ending speed.
It was a despairing magical power on a scale that far surpassed the previous Walpurgisnacht, capable of not only easily destroying the Earth but also continuously expanding until it destroyed the entire galaxy.
This planet-sized Soul Gem did not belong to the Witch of Salvation, but to a more fundamental existence behind her—the Witch of Despair.
The stronger a magical girl's aptitude, the stronger the witch born from her fall. And Madoka, unprecedentedly, had two witch forms.
Kriemhild Gretchen, the Witch of Salvation, corresponded to the reversal of Madoka's own despair.
The Witch of Despair was a composite form, combining the despair of all magical girls. The latter was an opponent that was nearly unbeatable, except by the combined hope of all magical girls.
Across a long timeline, the newly born magical girl Madoka faced her own witch form from a distance. Then, she drew her bowstring.
That's right. As an existence that transcended the timeline, unlike other magical girls, Madoka could face her own witch form directly.
Before this, Madoka had been using the power she possessed as a magical girl. But at this moment, the energy meant to fulfill her wish finally erupted all at once.
And so...
WHOOSH!
A sharp arrow reached the instant before Madoka's despair.
In that moment, the still-magical-girl Madoka could have reached for this arrow, but she didn't. Instead, she opened her arms and embraced this ending.
In that instant, the logic was successfully completed.
The superficial form of the Witch of Salvation instantly collapsed, and along with it, the Witch of Despair at its core was erased by Madoka's own wish.
As she had declared, Madoka had defeated all witches, including herself.
In the next moment, the chain reaction that had been momentarily paused on the narrative layer of logic erupted once again.
The wishes of magical girls who could see through all timelines, past and future, were almost all enveloped by Madoka's wish.
In resonance, they offered up their power, perfecting the rule that magical girls need not fall into witchhood.
In this world, under the resonance of all magical girls across all timelines, Madoka's soul was sublimated. The scope of her power completely enveloped everything.
The eliminated magical girls gathered under Madoka's banner in a paradise called the Silver Garden. The Law of Cycles directly ruled this universe.
Then, by tracing back Kyubey's existence, a spatial vortex that had appeared countless years ago was captured.
At this moment, among the countless magical girls living in the Silver Garden, one skilled in spatial concepts opened this passage, allowing the rule of the Law of Cycles to, in reverse of Kyubey's arrival, invade and dominate other universes that had magical girls.
One to two, two to four, four to eight... The efficiency of the magical girls in the Silver Garden in conquering other universes was hundreds of times that of Kyubey.
With this exponential growth, soon, the entire multiverse was brought under the dominion of the Law of Cycles.
At this moment, Madoka's wish was truly fulfilled. All worlds, all timelines, all magical girls—the three elements were completely satisfied.
In that instant, Madoka's soul was sublimated once more, leaping from an individual who governed the rules of a single universe to a master of the multiverse.
And also in that instant, Madoka had to pay the price for her wish.
The dilution began.