Raban shook his head. Surely, though his blood pressure had risen somewhat, he wasn't someone who couldn't compose himself over merely that much emotion. He spoke the real reason he had approached Na Ihyeon.
"…I told you before. The feng shui here is bad?"
"No. Mister, that again? You go around reading counseling books and going on about psychological approaches, but in a place like this you believe in strange superstitions."
"If magical girls actually exist, how could feng shui not have an effect?"
A scene of Na Ihyeon twitching her toes entered Raban's field of vision. What was this? Did she have a hobby of collecting magical girl merchandise or something?
Another possibility existed. That Na Ihyeon herself was a magical girl, and had unconsciously reacted in surprise when the topic of magical girls came up.
But Raban's cold, perfect, and thorough rationality (with a lengthy track record of failed heists on the Demon Realm Archduke's vaults) produced a rational analysis.
Give someone like Na Ihyeon, the greatest lump of negative thoughts in Hikarius, destructive power like that of a magical girl?
Attaching antimatter as a propellant to a time bomb that could go off at any moment?
'Unless the mascot is completely insane, there's no way they'd do something like that.'
Raban lightly erased that possibility from his mind. Those in power were usually not insane, but sly. If one's head worked well enough to run a shadow government, they wouldn't do something so insanely dangerous.
"Anyway."
Raban pieced together the clues that had been mixed in with the self-proclaimed Charles's deception. A scholarship foundation that supported pitiful students around the world.
The numerous buildings he owned, and the rent said to be so cheap that he received thank-you calls whenever he was bored.
If Na Chalsu's 'buildings' were constructed in locations similar to the Black Forest, then one could reach a very. A very unpleasant conclusion.
A truly horrific conclusion.
'Na Ihyeon said she sometimes sleeps over here to look after the mountain cabin.'
It was an act of deliberately exposing his own niece to ominous dark mana. And he had asked her to do such a thing?
A man with that much money?
Well, one could give the common-sense reason that a blood relative was more trustworthy than outside help. And there was the possibility that, as an ordinary person, he didn't know about magic.
But Raban thought of another possibility.
Including this mountain cabin.
Every building that bastard owned was a livestock pen for raising sacrifices.
Factory farms for processing residents into more valuable sacrifices by periodically exposing them to dark mana. Raban shuddered.
'If you sacrifice a person whole, you can't even recycle them.'
For a man of means, his sense of reality was a mess. What was the reason Raban himself was going through the troublesome work of building intimacy to extract only negative thoughts from Na Ihyeon?
First, recycling. A poor black mage had the method of recycling catalysts engrained in his very bones.
Raban had actually cut his own bones to use and then regenerated them for reuse, so this was the literal meaning of the word.
His approach to Na Ihyeon was for a similar reason. The social isolation surrounding her wasn't a problem solved in a day or two, and the more counseling he did, the more negative thoughts would accumulate again due to the gap between ideal and reality.
The intervention of the mascot couldn't be left out either. When people died, the authorities were bound to break out into a sword dance.
'No. Here, would it be a mana dance?'
Imagining the scene where destruction rays fired by a magical girl brought about total annihilation, Raban shook his head. Anyway, what mattered now wasn't the mascot's means of purging.
Before that mad black mage Charles harmed Na Ihyeon, a precious source of negative thoughts, this black mage of justice, Raban, had to step in!
"Ihyeon. No matter how many times I look at it, the feng shui of this house is truly bad. I'd tell you to smash it to pieces if I could, but unless it's truly unavoidable, try to stay somewhere else instead."
***
Na Ihyeon felt a chill run down her spine at the mister's calm voice for no reason.
If she didn't stay here today, only her uncle and the mister would remain. No matter how she looked at it, that mister was on the verge of stabbing someone to make them pay for his lost memories.
Even though he was the uncle who had fled to Hikarius leaving only her behind, she couldn't let him die. She couldn't very well send that pitiful but kind mister to prison, either. Ihyeon shook her head vigorously.
"I get it. I get it. But Uncle came today. It's family duty to stay together for at least a day."
The mister's expression was still extremely awkward. Na Ihyeon sighed and whispered urgently to him.
"Uncle was… a director of the 'company.' But he always fought with the original owner, my eldest uncle. So, uh…."
Her disjointed words ended with a plea to please not hurt himself. Na Ihyeon had never been eloquent to begin with.
After the Naju Pharmaceutical annihilation incident, conversation had been a sharp one-way street directed at herself. If she hadn't had experience as a peer counselor, she wouldn't have been able to utter even such rambling nonsense.
When she finished speaking, the mister was looking at her with a somehow blank expression. Suddenly embarrassed, Ihyeon flushed and shouted loudly for no reason.
"Let me know when the mugwort rice cakes are done! I'm going upstairs!"
"Wait. Ihyeon."
"Huh? Why?"
"Please don't tell Mr. Charles that I lost my memories because of that incident. It'll just get awkward."
The sharp hostility that had been boiling inside the mister faded slightly. Na Ihyeon smiled faintly and nodded.
***
Only one thought surfaced in Raban's mind after hearing Na Ihyeon's words.
'Wow, I'm saved….'
He finally realized why that impudent brat had made such a random comment about him not thinking of stabbing Charles.
Raban's public setting was '(almost certainly) a mana disaster victim who lost his memories due to the Naju Pharmaceutical annihilation incident.'
But for such a wicked black mage, he would surely be able to see through the form of a soul offered as a sacrifice to his own consciousness—there was no physical evidence that Charles had caused the Naju Pharmaceutical annihilation incident, but his gut feeling was certain. That was about average for a black mage, too.
If Na Ihyeon went around blurting out that he was a mana disaster victim in front of Charles, it would invite unnecessary suspicion.
For now, he had to keep her reasonably at bay and focus on extracting negative thoughts from Na Ihyeon before that bastard's plan came to fruition.
'Those mascot bastards, who knows what they're doing while such an evil black mage roams free.'
Black mages were hated by all who weren't black mages, and bourgeois black mages were hated even by other black mages, so Charles shouldn't have a single ally.
That was the black mage average.
'How the hell has he lived so well until now?'
***
["Na Chalsu has arrived in Hikarius, mohu."]
["It is sudden, but he is that kind of human to begin with, mohu. If there are no particular anomalies, you need not report, mohu."]
["He has made contact with Raban, mohu."]
["That evil fiend has finally stepped into the Naju Pharmaceutical calamity! Maximum alert!"]
Na Chalsu. The sole survivor among the highest executives of Naju Pharmaceutical, he was a reliable collaborator of the guardian fairies.
A righteous human who, from the time Naju Pharmaceutical researched ancient magic, had secretly contacted the guardian fairies to stop their rampage.
Despite all those efforts, when the annihilation incident occurred, he had fled Hikarius saying he could no longer endure, but….
Na Chalsu hadn't simply escaped the secular world. He had been assisting the guardian fairies' activities in various ways to prevent such a tragedy from repeating itself.
Purchasing land where remnants of the ancient era remained to personally take charge of sealing and management, and supporting magical girls under the name of a scholarship foundation. Without Na Chalsu's help, dealing with the recently increasing magical beast attacks (a.k.a. Evilings) would have been all the more difficult.
The reason Na Chalsu assisted the fairies so devotedly was that he knew what kind of tragedies ancient magic could bring.
Put differently, he was a being closer to forbidden knowledge than any other human in Hikarius.
["Absolutely! You must never let the fiend face Na Chalsu alone, mohu!"]
The guardian fairy grew conflicted. Internally, the guardian fairy had classified Raban as a suspected fiend, specifically presumed to be under Salamandine's command.
The reason for approaching Na Chalsu was probably due to the Ochan clan that had appeared recently. The Ivory Tower held Eibon's legacy, but it was incomplete.
He must be planning to get his hands on the secret taboo that Naju Pharmaceutical had harbored in order to strike down the Ochan with even greater power.
["He is currently in the Black Forest, so approach is difficult, mohu. Fortunately, Magi Black is in close proximity, but…."]
The fairy let out a sigh of relief. If push came to shove, they could take down the fiend with a Magical Somersault Kick.
It had truly been a tiring day.
***
The man with brown hair directed his gaze toward the boundary between the Black Forest and Hikarius. At the edge where the tree shade reached, guardian fairies hid their bodies and glared at this mansion.
'Truly like fools who seize the throne yet cannot enjoy it.'
He sneered at the guardian fairies' stubbornness and recalled the man named Raban who had just walked out the front gate.
While gathering magical catalysts of the herb variety including mugwort, an eye that seemed to subtly probe him. He had briefly taken interest, wondering if this was the one who had destroyed his clone in a single blow, but.
'When we shook hands, I didn't sense any dark mana.'
To be precise, mana did exist. It was simply too faint to be seen as a mage's mana. Living in a city like Hikarius, even an ordinary person would naturally accumulate that much mana.
He seemed to be a young man with exemplary tastes who simply liked mugwort rice cakes.
"Did you say Raban? I should have tea and refreshments with him sometime. I do hope Ssanghwa tea is to his taste."
"…Uncle. I don't think the mister has such mature tastes?"
He still wasn't used to that form of address. Charles delicately manipulated his muscles to produce a smile and brushed off Na Ihyeon's answer.
***
Raban whistled as he headed toward the dorms.
He carried two black plastic bags filled to the brim. One contained well-boiled mugwort that he truly intended to make into mugwort rice cakes; the other was packed with premium herbs from the Black Forest.
They were specially made herbs that had been rapidly grown using fertilizer made by finely grinding and drying erosion entities.