“Huh…?”
Magi White, real name Schnee Heidel.
In one corner of the park, she witnessed a bizarre hand piercing through a monster’s torso.
***
Schnee had not come to the park with any sense of purpose like, “Let’s find the Ivory Tower’s headquarters!”
To begin with, tracking down the Ivory Tower’s headquarters was Papirun’s role. The magic used by magical girls wasn’t meant for tracking.
They had tried physically following them as well, but after the Four Heavenly Kings had their monster-creation sites discovered a few times, they countered by generating monsters remotely. It felt somewhat like a time bomb.
If Schnee herself had been one of the Four Heavenly Kings, she would have generated monsters simultaneously all over the city. It was fortunate that, for some reason, the Four Heavenly Kings could only make one monster at a time.
Papirun had explained it as “the laws of the world,” but surely things couldn’t really be following some cliché out of a comic book.
Curious and full of scholarly zeal, Schnee hoped to someday uncover the Four Heavenly Kings’ true objective and become friends with them.
The Four Heavenly Kings had done a few strange, eccentric things while creating monsters, but those eccentricities had never crossed into truly evil deeds—crimes like taking school friends or acquaintances hostage, for instance. As villains went, the Ivory Tower’s Four Heavenly Kings were even somewhat clumsy.
It wasn’t as though they had given up on hostage-taking because they couldn’t even guess the Magilists’ identities. After all, there had once been an incident where Salamandine, one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Fire, disguised herself as a transfer student, only to have her identity exposed when the class went on a field trip to the sea.
Even then, however, Salamandine had not offered the students as sacrifices for some evil ritual, nor had she used sinister magic like brainwashing.
She had not stood out in class through suspicious behavior, either. On the contrary, she had been rather popular. Thinking back on the sight of her giggling with the other girls at a dessert café after school, she seemed far more sociable than Magi Black.
The reason Magi White witnessed the monster now, when she had not come looking for traces of the Four Heavenly Kings and it was not her nightly voluntary patrol time, was simple.
This park was on her way home from the academy.
As she was heading home, a wind carrying mana brushed past her ear.
The source was close.
Even in terms of footsteps, it was less than a hundred paces away. It had happened so close that even concealment magic was meaningless. The moment Schnee sensed monster-creation magic being activated, she moved.
Ordinarily, she would have waited for Magi Black to arrive, and the two of them would have struck together. But right now, a monster was being forged right under her nose.
At the same time she sent word that she had found a monster, Schnee completed her transformation into a magical girl.
And then.
She witnessed it.
A twisted hand.
It was warped like an old tree, with fingers as thin as mistletoe. They were stretched so far that, for an instant, she could not even understand that they were fingers.
Something like five long needles had pierced through the monster’s heart and were protruding from it. The blood vessels in those grotesquely elongated fingers bulged and swelled as they sucked something out of the monster.
For a moment, she could not say a word. That thing was different from any opponent Schnee had ever faced.
The Evilpings that other magical girls fought had a somewhat cute appearance, and the monsters, too, had many elements that were somehow cartoonishly deformed. They might be strange, but they were not grotesque.
But that was unmistakably grotesque.
So much so that, for a moment, she even forgot the invocation to gather mana and the distinctive entrance line of a magical girl.
She understood instinctively.
Whatever owned that hand was the cause of the monsters becoming markedly weaker after the ritual to resurrect Eibon.
“Well now.”
It spoke for the first time.
“This is unexpected.”
Magi White immediately took her stance.
“Who are you?”
She thrust out her right hand. The ribbon coiled around her arm lengthened and rushed forward to bind whatever was behind the monster.
“How hasty. Listen to what I have to say.”
The fingers piercing through the monster’s chest jutted upward. As if they themselves were tree branches, their tips split and multiplied. The five fingers became ten in the next instant, and then twenty.
Thus, the fingers, elongated with dozens upon dozens of joints, tore the ribbon apart with their sharp fingertips.
“I do not wish to fight you. Can you not see that I, like you, am fighting monsters?”
The voice of the one who had extended those fingers had no inflection whatsoever. It was an inorganic tone, as if a speech synthesis machine were outputting sentences someone had typed in.
It was chilling. It was like something that imitated the shape of a person, yet was absolutely not human.
As if to drive away her fear, Magi White shouted loudly.
“Then why did you deliberately leave the monsters alive?”
“Oh? To think a magical girl would notice before the Ivory Tower.”
Again, an emotionless voice. A calm confession, as if it had been experimenting on two specimens: the Ivory Tower and the Magilists.
“I was simply afraid of the Ivory Tower.”
“That’s a lie…!”
There was no way this mysterious being, which had subdued a monster with nothing but its fingertips, could fear the Ivory Tower’s Four Heavenly Kings. Just as Magi White, certain of that, was about to argue back—
Creak. A sound like that rang out. The grotesquely stretched hand and arm shrank in an instant, returning to something close to human proportions.
Thud.
The monster, drained of its mana, collapsed. The fallen leaves and dust that made up the monster’s body scattered, covering the area.
The light of the streetlamps illuminating the night park was blocked by the dust rising like fog. Beyond the cloud of dust, she saw a silhouette.
The figure of someone whose fingertips were all she had been able to see because they had been positioned behind the monster.
Unexpectedly, that figure resembled a “wizard.”
A distinctive pointed hat. A staff held in the left hand. It was only a silhouette, so she could not tell exactly what they were wearing, but anyone in Hikarious City would have looked at that shadow and cried out that it was the shadow of a wizard.
Magi White reflexively shot out her ribbon. She was certain that she could not let the shadow wizard go like this.
Squelch. The sensation she felt at the end of the ribbon was bizarre.
It did not feel as though she had bound a person’s hand, but as though it had sunk into a lump of mud.
“I will say it once more. I am not your enemy, so simply forget this.”
The ribbon fell. It was not torn off. The thing bound by the ribbon dropped, and the ribbon merely fell with it.
‘It cut off its own wrist?!’
Magi White faltered, taking one step back. That shadow wizard was different from every enemy she had faced until now. Even Eibon’s Four Heavenly Kings had their own emotions and hearts. From that person, she could feel nothing at all.
“Ah…!”
This was no time for that. She had to hurry and chase after it. Just as Magi White was about to move—
The hand that had fallen to the ground began to grow.
***
“Heh-heh-hoo, Magi Black! This time will be different!”
“Hey, hey, hey. Salamandine! What are you doing?”
“Hmph! I gathered people’s negative thoughts about street smoking and made a monster! The city will be covered in smoke, and irritation and discomfort will pierce the heavens! Then mana for Lord Eibon’s resurrection will gather!”
“The owner of Rabbit Sweets Café has bad bronchial tubes! You go there with your friends all the time!”
“H-he does? …No! Why should I care about some insignificant human like that?”
Magi Black crossed blows with Salamandine, one of Eibon’s Four Heavenly Kings. Seeing how determined she was to block her this time, it seemed she had put quite a bit of effort into making this monster.
Black mana gathered from people’s negative emotions was the source of the Ivory Tower’s power. Certainly, if the entire city were filled with acrid cigarette smoke, it would not be a pleasant feeling. Even so, Magi Black grinned fiercely.
“But too bad for you! White’s already there! Your monsters have been pretty pathetic lately! A cigarette-butt monster? That thing’s gonna be—”
Gooooong!
A thunderous roar rang out. It came from the area near the park where White had found the monster. Salamandine and Magi Black turned their heads at the same time. But the expressions on their faces were quite different.
Salamandine was bewildered, while Magi Black was relaxed. After all, unless Magi White had used her finishing move to purify the monster, there was no reason for such a roar to ring out.
But before long, both of their faces turned pale.
Because the thing that emerged from the park was far too grotesque.
“You… made that?”
“No! Why would I make something that isn’t even cute!”
It was a tree. But from its roots to the tips of its branches, every part of it was made of pale hands. Fingers intertwined with fingers to form patterns like bark, and tiny hands swayed in place of leaves.
A horrible monster unlike anything before. Salamandine and Magi Black once again turned their heads at the same time, this time to look at each other.
“For now.”
“A temporary alliance!”
***
“Ah, damn, that stings.”
Raban was massaging his newly grown right hand. The hand he had cut off and scattered to buy time for his escape had already had its nerves killed before he severed it. Thanks to that, the amputation itself had not hurt much.
But he had to connect the nerves in the restored hand. As bone grew and skin regenerated, an unavoidable stinging pain burrowed in.
Raban reflected on his encounter with Magi White. First, the ribbon. For something so fluttery, it had been tougher than expected.
To test just how much mana it would take to cut it, he had faced the first ribbon she threw head-on, but it had not been an amount of mana he could handle at his current level. Tearing it apart had burned through the mana of three monsters.
That was the reason for his judgment when he was bound the second time. Regeneration was cheaper. He had no choice but to cut off his tail and run like a lizard. In this case, it had been his hand rather than his tail.
The magic he had input into the severed right hand was nothing special, either. Just multiplication and gigantification. For now, if it was big, it would naturally draw attention.
Since it had been granted based on a hand, it might look a little disgusting, but it was all show and no substance. If that Black girl from last time hit it a few times, it would probably burst soon enough.
It was a shame he could not watch the fight to the end this time. The something that handled the magical girls’ aftermath. If he could wrest control of the mana from it, he would be able to recover his mana all at once.
As Raban continued thinking up ideas about magic, his stomach let out a growl.
“…Ah.”
He had consumed calories regenerating his hand. Normally, he could have substituted food with mana, but that was impossible right now.
“I’ve gotten hungry.”
If this place had been the real Earth, he would have immediately looked for an ATM, withdrawn some money, and bought a triangle kimbap or something.
Raban felt a little forlorn.