Dunamis, having witnessed the Flayed Bull walking by using its mane like the tentacles of a mollusk, put away all his earlier frivolity and shouted.
“Move aside!”
Whoosh—Dunamis spread his wings, and at the same moment a fierce wind rose. Mixed into the gale came feathers honed sharp as daggers. The mane rapidly expanding toward Inian was severed. From the cut surface, sticky, coagulated mana dripped down.
The bull turned its eyes.
Its mane adjusted the Flayed Bull’s position. It stood at a right angle in midair. In Dunamis’s two eyes, the underside of the cow’s hoof was reflected with perfect clarity.
Tap. It lightly struck empty air.
Cr-r-r-rack!
In a straight line from the hoof, the waists of trees snapped. The scorched trees, like a reed field swept by the wind, could not withstand the pressure and collapsed.
“…It is strong! Be careful!”
Dunamis had already soared even higher into the sky the instant the cow lifted its hoof. Inian nodded and analyzed the state of the battle.
‘Right now, that bull is focusing its attention on Dunamis.’
The life-force absorption of the tentacle-mane was quite threatening. However, unless more than half the tentacles making up the mane came pouring in, a mere few strands could not harm Inian himself.
Therefore, the most effective attack was the shockwave from its hoof. But the tip of the bull’s hoof was once again being aimed at Dunamis. It was because it sensed no particular threat from Inian himself.
‘Just as calculated.’
Beings capable of handling mana usually used the amount of mana an opponent possessed as their primary measure for assessing threats. If Inian were as he had originally been, an Archduke of the Demon Realm, he would have possessed enough mana to make the bull charge at him with its tongue hanging out this instant.
But the current Inian, just like his contractor Raban, was in a state of mana deficiency.
As an Archduke of the Demon Realm, having an opponent show not the slightest interest in him was a blow to his pride, but from the standpoint of a fighter, it was truly fortunate.
Such carelessness, not even regarding him as an enemy.
Was this not the optimal condition for using the Evil Eye?
***
Papirun very nearly forgot to add mofu to the end of his sentence for the first time in a very long while.
‘This is dangerous, mofu.’
While looking at the trees made of hands and the blood-vessel humans, Papirun had felt uneasy.
Had his old kin truly returned?
Had the Banqueters, who should have vanished with the end of the old era, appeared once more?
That fearful suspicion had tormented the guardian fairy all along.
But now it was different. This was certainty beyond unease or doubt. His compatriot had truly returned.
There was one difference between before and now: the amount of mana.
The blood-vessel human’s abilities themselves were threatening, but its mana was low. It did not even meet the minimum amount of mana required to confirm it as a Banqueter.
Judging by the way it split itself into countless blood vessels, it had likely been a variant developed to bypass a guardian fairy’s detection ability.
But the mana he felt now could not be mistaken. A vast quantity of mana, enough to sweep over the Black Forest. The presence of a compatriot was unmistakable.
[Papirun! I’m heading out!]
[Seriously, what is wrong with our home lately? I’ll meet up with Syune and join her!]
A message from Magi White and Magi Black, both of them. Papirun shouted reflexively.
[It’s dangerous, mofu! What appeared this time affects the mind even more fatally than the previous blood-vessel human, mofu!]
The mana of the old era was like deadly poison to the humans of the present era. A wicked wavelength that gnawed away at dreams and hope. The blood-vessel human had been unable to exert the effects of mental contamination because its mana was far too low, but this individual had surpassed that limit.
He dissuaded the magical girls from sortieing. They had to find another way.
They could not step forward themselves either. For they could not perfectly deal with the mana of the old era. The result of the misjudgment, “We can do it! If it’s us,” had been the birth of the Banqueters.
Entrust it to the Four Heavenly Kings? A poor plan. If they attempted the foolish act of summoning Avon with the murky mana of a faded age, who would bear the aftermath?
No matter how much he agonized, the answer was still the magical girls.
Warriors of dreams and hope, chosen to part ways with the mana of the old era after the guardian fairies’ failure. That was what magical girls were.
If evaluated in principle according to the purpose of their founding, Banqueters, too, were indeed targets for magical girls to deal with.
‘But….’
The Mother Fairy did not want to see the tragedy of children, who should have dreams and hope, being exposed to the darkness of the old era. That was why the Mother had fallen into deep sleep, and why the targets the magical girls now had to deal with had been limited to about Evilpings.
But was it because this place happened to be Hikarius? Far too many exceptional incidents occurred in this city.
The Naju Pharmaceutical incident, and the legacy of Avon that seemed to have reactivated because of it. The remnants of the old era that began newly arriving after Avon’s resurrection ritual.
As the shadow of the old days, from which he had wished to part forever, fell over them, what a fairy could do was…
A sense of helplessness swept over the old fairy. Into his ears flew the voices of the magical girls.
[But Papirun.]
[If not us, then who will fight?]
There was no confidence in the girls’ voices.
Only a sense of duty.
In this moment, in this situation, he could feel only the weight borne like medals by those who knew they were the only ones who could rightfully fight.
To Papirun, who could not give any answer, the magical girls cheerfully murmured.
[Don’t worry! We just have to finish it in a flash before our heads start hurting!]
[The Four Heavenly Kings are on-site, and… you said that Sawa-yo person is there too, right? We will handle it together with our temporary collaborator.]
In the end, there was only one thing the mascot had to do.
Cheer for the magical girls. Do his utmost so that they could continue fighting with dreams and hope.
[…I’m counting on you, mofu!]
***
While the magical girls solemnly resolved to sortie, and while the mascot drew an advance of mana from the Fairy Kingdom’s mana storage for the two of them…
The wicked black mage thought.
‘Can I seize control of this thing? If I can, that’d be huge.’
At a glance, the fellow looked absolutely packed with mana. It had so much mana that it could afford to make the inefficient choice of walking with tentacles on the ground.
Raban could feel his own blood circulating inside the Flayed Bull. On the outside, it looked like a bull, but internally, it resembled the monsters of the Demon Realm more than any creature of Earth.
‘Even among Demon Realm monsters, it’s far from a naturally occurring one. It’s closer to a chimera made by black mages. Does it absorb external black mana and use it as its power source?’
It was a structure crafted with considerable care. Originally, it seemed to have had a separate organ that accumulated black magic and then broke it down, but now it had degenerated, remaining only like a vestigial organ beside the mana core.
It seemed certain that this was the Banqueter the mascot had spoken of.
Then a question arose.
‘Did the Mother Fairy create a chimera like this?’
Just what kind of being was she?
At first, he had taken her for a Spirit King, but she was versed enough in black magic to create an automatic black-mana hunting chimera?
He could not begin to grasp what her essence was.
However, for the moment, he was simply grateful for the Mother Fairy’s ambiguous identity.
A chimera created through black magic was of a similar type to Raban’s blood-vessel familiars. Raban began to analyze, one by one and step by step, the magical formulas that composed the Banqueter’s existence.
So that, at the decisive moment, he could separate the blood that had been absorbed by the Banqueter and devour its mana core.
He did not consider seizing control of the formula itself to dominate the Banqueter. A wise black mage knew how to obtain the greatest results with the minimum intervention at the proper moment.
‘…No, honestly, I did kind of want to try.’
Raban realized that someone had already been registered as the master of the chimera formula composing the Banqueter. Raban predicted that its master was Charles.
His prejudice-laced hostility toward the bourgeoisie played a part in that prediction, but objective analysis accounted for an even greater share.
First, the only black mage confirmed to be active in this world was Charles, and the place where this thing had appeared was also the Black Forest, Charles’s base. Raban’s animal-like intuition continued the inference.
As long as magical girls were stationed in Hikarius, an ending where the chimera was ordinarily killed would be within Charles’s expectations. But if the unexpected situation of its master changing altogether occurred, Charles would become far more deeply wary.
It would be no different from openly issuing a declaration of war. He lacked the mana to bear such a risk.
‘If I could digest just three or four Banqueters of this weight class, it’d be worth trying.’
Raban’s blood entered the Banqueter’s heart—the core that governed the accumulation and distribution of mana. Raban smiled a smile more befitting a black mage than anyone else.
“Thank you for the meal.”
At that very moment, a thought-wave flowed into Raban’s ear.
***
[Raban, I shall use mana. Evil Eye, maximum output deployment.]
[Wait, waitwaitwaitwait! Hold on! I can turn this around, so wait!]
Inian ignored the black mage’s empty promise. One had to filter out a black mage’s bluster by default.
One also had to filter out their exaggerated complaints.
In fact, it was better to filter out everything they said.
[I’m telling you, I can swallow all its mana whole for free!]
[Oh?]
But if it was such a statement, it was worth listening to. This was not a situation where he could scam anyone over mana.
[But if we do not deal with it immediately, the magical girls will come. A mana response strong enough to make the Black Forest tremble is approaching even now.]
[…That’s actually better!]
A brilliant idea occurred to Raban.
A way to plant a seed of suspicion about the Rakshasa Hand in Na I-hyeon.