“Ah, run!”
The blood-vessel man’s body was slowly coming apart. It was like watching a scarf knitted from red thread being unraveled again.
[I cannot understand it...]
The blood vessels wriggled like insects as they headed into the darkness. At that grotesque sight, even Dunamis, one of the Four Heavenly Kings, froze for an instant.
The first to move was Magi Black.
“You think I’ll let you get away!”
A spiraling wave of magical power shot from the end of her tightly clenched fist, but it was not enough to erase every last one of the scattering blood vessels. From within the darkness came the shadow magician’s voice.
[You guardians of Hikarious. Consider once more whether you truly have reason to join hands with those who have strayed from the natural order. I have come to guide distorted providence back to where it belongs...]
“Bah! Distorted, you say! Those who doubt Lord Avon have always been none other than mascot imperialists, and—”
‘Huh...?’
Dunamis, who had naturally shouted a denunciation at those who dared doubt the great pioneer, His Excellency Avon, was startled by his own slogan.
An intuition flashed through him: hidden within the words he had reflexively blurted out was a truth that hinted at the identity of that grotesque magician.
“That mode of existence, so obsessed with purification and the natural order! You bastard, were you one of the Ochan clan? Weren’t all of you dealt with by those mascot bastards?!”
***
‘No, what the hell is that supposed to be?’
Raban wanted to tell him right away to stop talking about settings only he knew and explain in detail what he meant.
However, the most important things when pretending to be someone of significance were, first, momentum...
[Ask that thing hiding behind the Magilists in anguish. The one who hid the truth and the lie would know them best.]
—and passing the buck.
The moment Dunamis’s gaze fixed on the mascot named Papirun, Raban dismantled the spell formula that had composed the blood-vessel man.
The farm-raised right hands, now nothing more than piles of blood vessels, would lie hidden throughout the city in the form of red threads, ready to be drawn out and used whenever necessary.
“Phew.”
The hard labor of lying sprawled on the bed in his assigned faculty lodging, controlling a familiar without lifting a finger, was finally over. Raban looked at the clock. It was about time the chicken he had ordered arrived.
He could smell the exhaust from the motorcycle and the scent of chicken drawing nearer. For an ordinary human, smelling the chicken inside the insulated delivery box of a motorcycle that had not even parked yet would have been impossible, but Raban was a dark mage.
To be precise, he was a dirt-poor dark mage. One who had been forced to pay for almost every sacrifice with his own body.
It was an environment that left him no choice but to become proficient in all forms of bodily manipulation, including regeneration and proliferation. Among the bodily manipulation techniques he had half-forcibly mastered was the amplification of his five senses.
Enhanced smell, in particular, was well suited to detecting approaching predators before they arrived. As Raban savored the rapturous aroma of chicken, he thought of the chicken-headed creatures from the other world.
‘Those bastards had five eyeballs each and were insane fighting cocks that fired petrification beams at anything that so much as loitered in front of them.’
How great a thing domestication was!
If he failed to regulate his senses, the smell of people, including sweat, could fill his nasal cavity, but for someone who wished to experience the emotion of chicken more vividly, that was a tolerable—
‘Wait.’
The smell of people.
In other words, body odor.
‘Isn’t this a way to find the magical girls?’
Raban had deduced that the two girls who, with very high probability, transformed into magical girls were at Luxtierra High School. If he had been those mascot bastards, he would have placed the most convenient military force available to him in an environment where it would be easy to observe.
As it happened, students frequently visited the counseling room.
‘Tsk. If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve focused on memorizing their scents.’
It was not only smell. There were many clues one could use to identify a person.
Footwork was one of them. A person’s gait showed considerable differences depending on their skeletal structure and physique. If one could even grasp the differences in pressure applied to each part of the foot the moment it touched the ground, there were few identification methods that could guarantee this much reliability.
If he spread the blood vessels out widely instead of clumping them together, they could serve a role similar to pressure sensors.
‘The next time I go fishing, I’ll have to observe the magical girls in a variety of ways!’
He organized what he had learned. One, Avon’s Ivory Tower had an excessive degree of trust in Avon.
‘If things really, really go sideways, wouldn’t cosplaying as Avon be one option?’
Raban had often imitated other people—more precisely, they had not been humans belonging to Homo sapiens, but for convenience’s sake—in order to deceive his enemies.
Since he could completely alter his body, including his skeleton, if he came to know the appearance of this person called Avon, disguising himself as him and sneaking into the Ivory Tower would be one possible method.
Specifically, as a method to use when the magical girls discovered his identity and he was in mortal danger.
‘No. If I imitate Avon for no reason and end up marked by both sides, that’d be troublesome. Would it be better to model myself after one of the Four Heavenly Kings?’
While contemplating Plan B in preparation for the crisis to come, Raban moved on to the next topic. Mascots, guardian fairies.
He had sensed considerable magical power from the mascot named Papirun. But that magical power was not entirely Papirun’s own.
‘It was connected somewhere and receiving a supply of magical power.’
He had sensed an invisible, intangible line. Papirun seemed to naturally activate and repair the barrier by spreading the magical power supplied from that “line” into the surroundings. It was a terrifyingly intricate spell formula.
Just how mighty an authority did the being called the “Mother Fairy,” who had created that spell formula and distributed magical power, possess?
‘If I observe that fairy thing another three or four times, I might be able to attempt an infiltration of the Mother Fairy’s fortress by following the connecting line.’
The difficulty was the problem. If even an ordinary fairy dispatched to a magical girl had been prepared with such cunning measures, just how strict would the security be in a spirit’s true domain?
But if the assault succeeded, and if he could embezzle the immeasurable magical power the Mother Fairy must be monopolizing, he could complete interdimensional travel magic in one fell swoop...
‘Hah! What am I thinking right now!’
Aiming for a sudden fortune was madness. A dark mage could survive only by being vigilant, then vigilant again, and choosing the safest path.
‘In any case, this isn’t what matters right now. I don’t even have the magical power to use as seed money for an investment in hopes of striking it rich with the Mother Fairy coin.’
Tonight had been fairly satisfactory. He had made the Ivory Tower sufficiently wary, and thanks to that chicken-winged Four Heavenly King’s amusing response at the end, he had also managed to lay down a smoke screen over his identity.
Feeling much lighter, Raban tore into a chicken leg.
‘I’ll figure out what the Ochan clan is by improvising the next time we meet!’
If possible, it would be nice if an appropriate sense of tension formed between the magical girls and the mascot as well, but it was probably impossible for things to proceed quite that conveniently.
After all, he had thrown out those words at random, without any concrete clues. At best, wouldn’t the incident be wrapped up with something like, “This is a scheme by that evil magician to make us doubt each other! Think about all the time we’ve overcome things together!”
***
An ominous silence lingered over the vacant lot after the shadow magician disappeared.
The words “Ochan clan” that Dunamis had brought up, and the shadow magician’s answer to “ask the guardian fairy.” Everyone’s gaze was focused on Papirun.
As if trying to lighten the mood, Magi Black forced out a joke.
“Ochan? Sounds tasty. Were they people who had a good lunch?”
“No, Magi Black. Those who eat filth. That is the Ochan clan.”
Dunamis looked at Papirun with cold eyes. Those whom the guardian fairies had once purged. Was that magician a survivor of them?
“If that shadow magician’s true identity is one of the Ochan, then it makes sense that he’d run wild saying he’ll purify us. They were made for that very purpose. Isn’t that right, Papirun?”
[......]
Papirun was silent. It was an attitude unlike the fairy who had always protected the magical girls’ backs with that cute mohuing tone.
“Papirun, what are the Ochan?”
[They’re fallen... something like guardian fairies, mohu.]
It was a kind tone, but the explanation was vague. Magi White realized that Papirun found this topic extremely difficult to talk about.
“Fallen, is it?”
Hmph. Dunamis snorted as if in contempt.
“Yes. Why they fell, who dealt with them after their fall, and why that great Mother Fairy hides herself on the far side of the world and never appears. You people are always hiding it!”
The Four Heavenly King flapped his enormous wings and soared into the air. Even amid the howling gusts, the words he spat out as if chewing them were clear.
“Magical girls, if you do not wish to meet the same end as the Ochan, then be wary.”
The two magical girls could not easily move from the vacant lot after both the shadow magician and Dunamis of the Four Heavenly Kings had left.
If the being they had believed until now to be wholly on their side was hiding a “secret”...
If they could not even know with what intention that secret had been kept from them...
‘What... are we supposed to do?’