Clack.
Clackclackclackclack—!
Fingers were crawling around.
To be precise, “fingers.”
Magi Black and Magi White stood back to back, wary of the horrors approaching them.
“What the hell are those…!”
“Be careful, Black!”
The fingers resembled flower crabs. Two hands overlapped broadly, twitching. The fingers moved like a crab’s legs as they drew near.
Individually, they were weak. They could be scattered not with a mana-consuming technique, but with an ordinary kick.
The hand-crab knocked flat by a foot was torn apart, exposing flesh as though its entrails had burst. But then.
The muscle fibers that had made up the hand began to unravel strand by strand. The monstrosity, stretched out long like red skeins of thread, joined with other scattered skeins nearby and began regenerating into a larger form.
It was similar to the hand-tree from before, yet different. Far more tenacious and grotesque. Why did something like this even…!
The two Magilists clenched their teeth.
Saaaaaah—.
In that instant, the army of hands retreated. A blank space spread outward in concentric circles around the Magilists. In the middle of battle, silence arrived without warning.
Na Ihyeon sensed something ominous. The skeins of blood vessels that had been scattered all across the battlefield just moments ago were nowhere to be seen.
Clackclackclackclack.
The sound of the hand-crabs moving. Those things were devouring one another. As they unraveled their own forms, the skeins of blood vessels multiplied.
When the thickly spread blood vessels had begun to look like red moss clinging to the concrete road, they gathered in one place.
A bizarre form, like an anatomical model—one showing only the vascular system—walking upright on two legs by itself. Fingers sprouted from its face, and an eye wriggled in its left breast, keeping watch on its surroundings.
And its hands. The left hand was relatively normal, but a mouth had sprouted in the right palm. It spoke.
[Why do you hinder me?]
“As if we’d stand by and watch you disturb the peace of Hikarious!”
[How truly strange. I have done you no harm. Though my familiars may be somewhat hideous in appearance, they should not attack first….]
The monster—one who was not a monster created by the Ivory Tower, but a monster because he was truly a grotesque human—asked in return.
[Step aside, guardians of this world. I have come to strike down not you, but your enemy.]
It did not direct hostility toward the Magilists, yet its very existence was endlessly ominous. A strange ripple coiled around the monster.
As the vascular monster took one step forward, the Magilists leaned forward. Their centers of gravity shifted. A taut state of tension, as though they might shoot forth at any moment.
“Hah!”
From far above, a confident voice rang out.
“By that enemy, do you mean me, monster!”
[Ah, one of the Four Heavenly Kings.]
A birdman descended, beating the sky with two teal wings.
“Indeed, you are as hideous as Salamandine said! But there is no need to worry.”
Spreading his wings majestically, the birdman cried out with a self-assured look.
“I am Dunamis of the Wind, the fastest warrior of the Ivory Tower who serves Lord Eibon! Before the cutting winds of this body—”
“Hey, you moron!”
Magi Black shouted, desperately restraining the hand that wanted to rise to the back of her neck.
“Hm? No, why! Are you lot about to call me a birdbrain as well? Are Magilists, apostles of justice, truly going to use such a speciesist term!”
“You should have ambushed him! Why are you introducing yourself so conveniently! Are you really an idiot?”
“No! I can understand that Black, but even you, refined White!”
“Hey. What word did you leave out between ‘that’ and ‘Black’?”
“Eeeeyah! This is not the time to quibble over such things, Magilists! Now is the time to defeat that suspicious fellow who has infiltrated Hikarious!”
***
Raban looked at the new member of the Four Heavenly Kings through the eyes of his offshoot.
‘Ah, so that’s the last of the Four Heavenly Kings I hadn’t seen.’
At a glance, he looked fast. He seemed like the type to wield wind, summon typhoons, and stubbornly charge in while shouting, “The storm strikes twice!”
Raban had no intention of fighting seriously to win. In any case, the purpose of these offshoots was to draw the aggression of both the Ivory Tower and the magical girls, so one could say the goal had already been achieved.
However.
Raban’s eyes caught sight of the wind mana that made up Dunamis’s body. As befitting things that resembled spirits, these so-called Four Heavenly Kings seemed to possess mana of considerable purity.
‘Shall I try for some extra income?’
***
[Are you finished introducing yourself?]
“What!?”
At some point, skeins of blood vessels had stretched all the way to Dunamis’s ankles.
“Hmph! With a paltry thing like this!”
The birdman swept his wings. Sharply honed wind sliced through the blood vessels. It severed only the vessels entangling his ankles with precision. A superb skill that left not even the down sprouting from his own body harmed.
However, he could not avoid all the blood that burst from the vessels.
Fingers grew from the bloodstains.
“What?!”
The fingers began crawling up Dunamis’s entire body. They approached his face and coiled around his neck.
“Such petty tricks. You dare play clever before Dunamis of the North Wind!”
Dunamis took flight. It was to shake the fingers off with wind pressure. As if that were a signal, the magical girls also charged in. Raban made use of the vascular monster’s nature.
The fact that it did not have proper skin, but was a mass of blood vessels. When the magical girls’ fists dug in, he opened gaps between the vessels and let the blows slip through, then entangled the hands trying to withdraw.
“Eek, gross!”
Boom! The moment she concentrated mana into her fist, the area around its flank burst apart. It was a terrifying amount of mana.
‘Wow. I should only dodge.’
The vascular monster was the type he had put some effort into regenerating, yet a fifth of its body had been blown away in one strike. What a real monster.
While manipulating the vascular monster, he dealt with Dunamis at the same time. He refined the shape of the fingers clinging to Dunamis. Crunch. The flesh gathered along one axis and mutated into something even harder.
Bone. Fragments of the body, hardened like ribs, tried to skewer Dunamis’s body like hooks.
“What is this filthy mana! Why are you targeting us, you hideous thing!”
[You are beings that violate the laws of nature.]
Raban slowly unfurled the setup he had prepared.
[An abnormal aggregation of mana…. Elemental power that should originally circulate through the planet’s natural world is stagnant in one place. You are enemies who obstruct the great cycle.]
In truth, this was something Raban himself had once been told. When he had tried to gather mana of the four great elements—earth, water, fire, and wind—a legion of a Demon Realm Archduke had attacked him while spouting such nonsense.
No matter how he thought about it, it was not a pretext a Demon Realm Archduke ought to use. It was obvious the archduke had vented a grudge from long ago, when Raban had peeked into his secret vault, in that manner.
Raban had been forced to shed tears and self-destruct the base he was using at the time.
Reminded of the old days, Raban took inspiration from the familiars that Demon Realm Archduke had commanded and differentiated his hands into another form.
Since the only elements he could freely handle were more or less parts of the human body, he could not reproduce the original forms exactly.
A huge eye that looked freshly dug out had two enlarged ears attached to it. The ears, grotesquely stretched, flapped like wings and made the eye float.
‘It looks pretty similar!’
If the Demon Realm Archduke had seen it, he would have shouted, “No, the one I made was an elegant familiar with a crystal eyeball and obsidian wings, while yours is a deranged monstrosity, you lunatic,” but there was no Demon Realm Archduke here to claim copyright infringement.
The vision of the eyeball monsters created in this way was connected to Raban’s perception, just like the vascular monster’s.
Dozens of eyes looked down over the battlefield. Dunamis was screaming, “Graaah! What are these bone hooks! My body is getting hot!” In the distance, flames flashed.
Salamandine. It had to be the Four Heavenly King of flame.
Since ancient times, fire had been a bad match for the human body. Burns were horribly slow to heal and painful. He knew well, having experienced them many times.
‘Even if he’s bound by the rib hooks, I haven’t managed to inflict a proper wound on him. Should I try harvesting mana from the Four Heavenly Kings another time?’
Just as Raban was preparing to withdraw.
“The laws of nature, you say! The ones who have truly departed from nature’s providence are the fairies!”
Dunamis’s voice rang through the air.
Hah! Dunamis shouted and wrapped his own body in wind. Fierce wind pressure peeled the bones away. Mana flowed from the shallow wounds all over his body as though in place of blood, but Dunamis placed even that under his control and made it material for a new spell.
But Raban had no particular interest in Dunamis’s next attack. Right now, that member of the Four Heavenly Kings was testifying to Raban, for the first time, about the “abnormality of the mascots.”
He feigned composure.
[What nonsense are you spouting, you dregs of nature? Do you deny that those Magilists are the guardians of Hikarious?]
“They may well be the guardians of Hikarious. But the fairies are dictators who have warped this world…!”
“Ah. This again, you guys! He’s the enemy right now, so can’t we not bring up something that’ll start a fight and just work together!?”
“But look, Magilist! The truth is important!”
“I’m telling you, that might not be the truth! Papirun is so kind, so how can you say that!”
“Papirun? This has nothing to do with the personal goodness of that old fairy! Their terrifying ‘Mother,’ who rules this Earth, is…!”
Mother. Raban rolled the word around in his mouth. He had expected there to be a great-spirit-class being behind the mascots. It seemed “Mother” was the general term for that existence.
[Dunamis. Why are you so desperate to slander our Queen Mother Gaiaheart, mofu?]
From the air behind the magical girls, a ball of fur resembling cotton candy crawled out. Raban engraved its appearance clearly in his mind.
‘That is a mascot…!’
“It is not slander! Is she not the dictator who exiled our progenitor Eibon!”
[I told you, Eibon was a lunatic who dove into an outer dimension on his own, mofu!]
“You are slandering another’s progenitor right now!”
The argument between the two nonhumans was a fine opportunity. Feeling heat gradually drawing closer, Raban immediately prepared to retreat.