Raban wanted to sigh.
The greater one’s innate amount of magical power, the less easily one was swept away by external magical manipulation. Interfering with the mind of a living weapon that possessed a mountainlike amount of magical power, like a magical girl?
‘If I had that much magical power, I’d use it to charge a dimensional gate battery.’
What would be the point of brainwashing a magical girl? At most, you could threaten her by saying that if she didn’t want a city blown away, she should hand over her magical power.
But behold: those terrifying mascots had prepared for such rebellions by placing the magical girls’ power on a rationing system.
The instant one bared the fangs of rebellion, they would place restrictions on the magical power supply, shut the valve tight, and show merciless iron-fisted sanctions while saying, “How dare a mere subcontracted billboard for public relations?”
In his heart, he wanted to say, “What are you looking at? I didn’t do anything.” But if he did, all the aggro and image he had worked so passionately to gather until now would shatter.
Raban pulled from the reference book in his head the entry for “a guide who sounds as if he has something profound to say, but says nothing of substance.” It contained many phrases he had picked up from games and comics he had seen back on Earth.
Slither, sliiither.
The blood vessels crawled like snakes and gathered together. It was the process of shaping the blood-vessel human he had been using as his avatar since last time. Salamandine spat flames, saying it was disgusting, but he blocked them by swelling other strands of blood vessels located along the flames’ trajectory.
He made his entrance with the fire as backlight, draped around him like a cloak. Raban added one coolness point to his own directing ability.
Then, solemnly, in as low and grave a voice as possible, he asked back with atmosphere.
“What did I say?”
“Until just now! Were you not tempting me to devour those who might become my friends! You said that now was my chance, while they were trapped and neutralized within the red wall!”
“Is that so? Is that how it sounded?”
“How it ‘sounded’? What are you talking about right now!”
“That must be the limit of your understanding.”
Even from this brief exchange alone, Magi White’s blood pressure seemed to show a meaningful upward trend. Seeing the tips of her ears and cheeks redden, quite a bit of anger appeared to have welled up.
It was a truly cost-effective way of speaking.
***
While Magi White was getting heated over the blood-pressure-raising way of speaking, the blood vessels around her quietly regenerated. However, it was not preparation for a surprise attack like the one he had used against Sargasso.
The attack he had launched on Sargasso was the sort of trick that could only work once, when it had not yet been discovered. The reason Raban was regenerating the blood vessels now was to scout the magical girl.
Raban manipulated the mass of blood vessels. Optic nerves sprouted—
“Agh!”
It was not the blood-vessel human, but Raban’s main body, lying in the dormitory and rolling around, that screamed. He had accidentally set the limit wrong.
Dozens of scenes were injected into his brain at once. From an ultra-vivid field of vision containing even wavelengths of color humans could not perceive, to a greenish view resembling that of an infrared camera. When he thoughtlessly created organs whose performance exceeded the limits of the human body all at once, his head screamed.
Normally, this sort of backlash could be offset with magical power and ignored. The problem was that right now, he did not even have the magical power needed to offset the pain.
In the end, the problem was his own magical power-wallet, which had become excessively poor.
‘If only I had magical power…! If only I had magical power!’
With sufficient magical power, he could have commanded an army far beyond tens of thousands and used all of their five senses to wage guerrilla warfare. Now that he had become this poor, there were far too many things he could not do.
Recalling the pleasant old days when he had broken open the vault of a Grand Duke of the Demon Realm and fled, Raban focused his mind once more.
‘To make the beginner mistake of not even properly gauging my own amount of magical power. It’s truly fortunate beyond measure that this isn’t a fight where my life is on the line.’
He aligned his senses again. Through sight, he confirmed that identification was difficult. When he tried to capture her face with his eyes, it was perceived only hazily. A distortion of form through magical power.
‘Those mascot bastards seem to have some expertise in protecting personal information.’
Identifying her through sight failed.
But what if the sense of smell was deployed?
The blood vessels differentiated anew. He sensed the smell of the vacant lot that densely filled his field of vision.
‘The Four Heavenly Kings are no help at all.’
Sargasso’s smell of water and Salamandine’s burnt odor interfered with his sense of smell, but he consciously excluded both. What remained after that should be the magical girl’s body scent.
The blood vessels vibrated, drawing in particles from the air. He slowly analyzed the particles clinging between the bloodstreams.
‘…….’
Raban felt deep bewilderment.
‘Those insane Big Brother mascot bastards.’
Even after excluding the acrid scent drawn by water and fire, he could not detect anything like a human body odor.
The only smells he sensed were lavender or citrus fragrances, even though neither was cultivated in this park.
In other words.
The magical girls’ body scents had all been replaced with the scent of flowers. It seemed to be an effect of their transformation.
‘Just how obsessively did they prepare against tracking?’
The only remaining clue was her footwork. As Raban tried to clearly capture at least her gait within his bundles of optic nerves, he felt a sense of incongruity.
It was a faint incongruity that could only be sensed by mobilizing, in addition to smell and sight, even the tactile sensation of things brushing against the blood-vessel trees.
Something was approaching the lump of negative thoughts he had worked so hard to seize.
It was difficult to discern what it was. If he had to describe it, it had as little presence as an air spirit. It was colorless and odorless, but in the current situation, filled with flames, that very “blank” felt strange.
He gathered the circumstances.
Magi White’s nonsense about a curse. And something creeping closer, insidiously trying to steal another’s daily bread.
That thing was stealthily approaching while Raban was talking with the magical girl. If so, the choice he had to make here was—
***
“Very well. It seems there is no need for further words.”
A pale violet glow of magical power bloomed in Shune’s left hand, forming a magic circle. The magic circle for absorbing turbid energy descended along her arm, and soon engraved itself onto each and every ribbon dangling from her magical girl costume.
Sargasso, who had once been bound by those endlessly extending ribbons and subjected to full-body joint 540-degree grand-rotation correction—how they had bound a body made of water was still something he could not understand even when he thought about it—felt his joints ache despite himself.
She was probably planning to use the ribbons to fell this forest of blood vessels itself.
“I caught you.”
An abrupt remark that did not fit the situation. It was a voice flowing from the mouth in the palm of the blood-vessel monster.
‘Caught what?’
The magical girl and the Four Heavenly Kings swept their gazes over their surroundings. But the blood vessels grown taller than a person showed no sign of approaching them. Papirun, who had been watching the surroundings closely, pointed.
[There, mohu!]
Right before the mass of flesh in which the encroached entity was trapped. Like a spiderweb, stretched-out blood vessels were tangling around something in midair, forming the shape of a small sphere.
The blood-vessel monster approached the palm-sized sphere. Like plucking fruit from an apple tree, pop. He separated the sphere from the web.
“Were you the one who persecuted the guardian of Hikarious?”
No response could be felt from the sphere. Since he was speaking to empty air, claiming to have caught something where there was nothing at all, Salamandine thought madness had seized the blood-vessel monster.
“Do you choose silence? Then so be it.”
Crack. The monster gripped the sphere as though he would burst it.
[…My. Surely not. Truly? You?]
From the center of that ugly scene of crushed flesh, a voice seeped out.
However, whatever it was that resembled an air spirit did not get the chance to recover from its bewilderment and spit out an incantation. That was because Raban compressed the flesh to its limit, crushing and annihilating whatever had been contained within.
‘Whoa, damn. That startled me.’
To think it could suddenly speak. It was a familiar crafted far more elaborately than Raban had expected.
But what he had to do did not change. Since that unidentified something seemed to have been clinging to Magi White, he would have to use it as material to scatter even more chaos.
The wet sound of flesh pressing against flesh flowed through the night air. Amid the slapping dissonance of meat, the intangible magical thoughtform abruptly dispersed like an echo.
However, Raban added dramatic staging to it. He made suspicious black smoke, which all black magicians loved beyond measure, rise from between the flesh, giving the image that “something evil had just vanished.”
“Behold, guardian of Hikarious. This is what emerged from the shadow of your heart.”
***
Shune was bewildered.
No, surely not. With that visual and this kind of magic, he hadn’t cast a single curse?
“Truly…?”
“You are those who fight for the proper order of things. It would be one thing for those products of the unnatural, hiding and trembling beneath your shadow. But why would I think to harm you?”
“Hiding?! Hey, who’s hiding behind whom!”
Raban ignored Salamandine, who was jumping up and down in fury. The fellow was spewing fire in all directions, causing the forest of blood vessels to burn, but that actually worked out well.
Thanks to the smoke, it would be easier to slip away. The lump of negative thoughts had also happened to finish decomposing to a suitable degree.
“I do not speak falsehoods to you.”
It was only natural. A lie was a trump card. Even if one had spoken the truth a hundred times before, the moment one told a single lie, doubt would follow every statement thereafter.
Therefore, a lie had to be used only once, at the moment it was most lethal.
“The greatest foreign substance has been removed. Let us meet again someday.”
Raban began dismantling the blood-vessel monster and prepared to clock out.
‘It’ll be difficult to retrieve the finely decomposed lump of negative thoughts right away.’
He could use the blood-vessel familiar to bring it all the way into the school, but with the temper of those mascots, they would certainly have set up a boundary that would immediately sound an alarm.
‘I’ll hide it somewhere in a corner of Hikarious and come retrieve it on the weekend, when I don’t have to guard the counseling room.’
Come to think of it, the area near that black forest said to be Na I-hyeon’s home was a place where negative thoughts had seeped in. If he hid it nearby, even the mascots would not be able to notice it easily.
It was a perfect plan.
***
In a tranquil room where elegant antique furniture had been harmoniously arranged, a man who had deliberately lit candles instead of mechanical lighting while reading closed his book.
He felt pain.
It was because an avatar to which he had granted a considerable spiritual rank had been shattered in an instant.
It had been quite a large fragment, yet it had broken so easily.
This was high-level magic he had thought he would never see on Earth, ruled as it was by this worn-out system.
“So something like that appeared in Hikarious.”
The corners of the man’s mouth rose.
He had not heard from them in a very long time, but well…
“Perhaps it is about time I went to see my niece.”