“Did it go well?”
Today as well, Inian greeted Raban with a question as he returned from around the Black Forest carrying a hoe and a plastic bag full of “medicinal herbs”—or so he claimed, though they were usually the sort of greens one bought, dressed with sesame oil, and ate.
Raban tilted his head for a moment. Went well? Could she not see this bag brimming with greens?
Only after several seconds of thought did Raban realize what Inian was really asking.
“Ah. You mean today’s presentation of alternative facts? It was perfect!”
Seeing him so full of self-efficacy made her instinctively feel that something must have gone wrong. Inian held back the sigh already trying to escape and asked,
“Well, the plan was only to say something along the lines of: live a suitable distance away from the Black Forest, and don’t trust someone too much just because they’re family. If that got ruined, that would be the strange thing.”
“I would appreciate it if you praised this body’s intellect more, for having adjusted things so that no matter how the conversation went, it would produce above-average results.”
Raban’s intellect was not something to be trusted. Seeing the dark mage’s arrogance only made Inian feel unnecessarily uneasy.
“On the off chance that child contacts the mascot of Luxtiera High School and reveals the truth, what will you do?”
“Oh, come on, her? With the mascot? What connection would they even have…”
Raban, who had been waving his hands dismissively, soon stiffened and began analyzing the situation more seriously.
“Hmm. Some of the class presidents and faculty at Luxtiera High School probably do have deep ties to the mascot. But would Na Ihyeon really expose her inner thoughts to others that easily?”
Na Ihyeon was not that sort of person.
More precisely, Raban’s heart felt more at ease if she was not that sort of person. But once dark mages began indulging in gloomy imaginings, they could dig downward without end.
“However! Let’s say that, by some chance, the results of today’s consultation did reach the ears of the mascot folk.”
“That is precisely the part I was worried about. What happens if those mascot bastards go, ‘Oh? So that’s what happened? Then we should tell the magical girls to beat them all down,’ and launch some grand subjugation?”
The death of kin sometimes brings about extremely irrational feelings. For example, suppose there are objectively terrible parents who habitually abuse their child. Even so, children are sometimes deeply shocked by the deaths of such parents.
The death of a parent remains not as a liberating release, but as yet another shadow. What if, by some chance, the mascot went insane and performed a sword dance—no. A magical-girl dance—and Charles ended up dying a violent death?
And what if the sense of betrayal toward Charles that Na Ihyeon had barely managed to harbor simply vanished into thin air, and with it disappeared forever the method to break down the sturdy wall blocking the leakage of negative thoughts?
Raban and Inian would be reduced to clowns sobbing while clutching delisted stocks.
They had focused on Na Ihyeon as an individual and had failed to consider the possible movements of the mascot faction. Cold sweat ran down the back of Raban’s neck. The pessimism unique to dark mages settled over his eyelids.
After several dozen seconds of silence, Raban spoke with even greater confidence.
“…There’s no way that’ll happen!”
“Are you serious?”
“The very fact that you’re here proves it. Those mascot bastards are surprisingly passive until an incident has properly broken out!”
Raban himself had figured out that Dine Ifrit was Salamandine, so would the mascot really not know that fact?
And yet the mascots had not only failed to intercept Salamandine first, they were turning a blind eye to her reconnaissance at the school.
The same went for the appearance of monsters. If they launched a preemptive strike on the Four Heavenly Kings and erased them, there would be no reason for monsters to appear at all. And yet weren’t they deliberately waiting until one of the Four Heavenly Kings appeared, created a monster, and started a fight?
Above all else.
“You.”
“Me?”
“If the mascot had intended to intervene even a little actively, they would have fired off the magical-girl beam that made you like that first and worried about the rest later. Mascots don’t move unless things get quite serious.”
There had to be some “line.” A boundary that made magical girls sortie, and, when even that was not enough, made them fire the beam that turned someone into a magical girl.
But the doubts Raban had instilled in Ihyeon had not even approached that line yet. In both the monster incident and Inian’s case, the mascot had only responded after a clearly defined threat had appeared.
Raban had merely woven together a few pieces of circumstantial evidence to create a conspiracy theory that was persuasive from many angles and, to some extent, irresponsible.
“There’s no way they’ll seriously react to a formless conspiracy theory like this. It’s not as if the mascot’s magic power is truly infinite. They would never! have the manpower to send out just to take down Charles, who even runs a scholarship foundation and toils day and night for the sake of Earth’s humanity!”
***
The next day.
Raban read an emergency news alert stating that one floor of a hotel had exploded the previous night, but that everything had been restored to normal thanks to the efforts of a magical girl.
The only missing person was Reshef.
A director of the Nachal Scholarship Foundation.
“It seems our plan is fucked, does it not?”
“First… we verify the facts…!”
***
The truth of the previous night, which Raban could not make heads or tails of, was as follows.
The two magical girls forced the window open and barged in, then wrapped up the gentleman in the white suit tight before Reshef could respond.
“What is the meaning of this!”
Reshef acted the part of a bewildered ordinary person.
No matter how one looked at him, he seemed like a salaryman who had been working diligently until late at night. Papirun, hearing the scream of a civilian, broke into a sweat.
Charles, who assisted the guardian fairies from the sunny side of society through wealth and manpower, was a person they were grateful to in many ways. Papirun trusted Na Ihyeon, but Charles was also a trustworthy person.
And so the current situation, in which a magical girl had bound and was interrogating an executive of the scholarship foundation where Charles served as chairman…
To put it kindly, it was bewildering.
‘Was Raban really a monster under Salamandine’s command, mohu? Is this a ploy to drive a wedge between the Nachal Scholarship Foundation and the Fairy Kingdom?’
While Papirun tried to think of a way to smooth things over in case, by some chance, things went wrong, Magi Black called out in a cocky voice.
“Don’t try to play dumb. I heard everything worth hearing. You—”
Na Ihyeon mulled over her conversation with Raban. He had definitely mentioned experiments involving the injection of dark magic power.
“The Black Forest. You were trying to continue Naju Pharmaceutical’s research there.”
“Naju Pharmaceutical? What on earth are you talking about! I am merely here to inspect the construction of a branch office and dormitory for the scholarship foundation…”
“Dark magic power injection experiments. Naju Pharmaceutical had already shaped the Black Forest into an environment where dark magic power could easily gather. And you’re gathering people in a place like that?”
Magi Black smiled fiercely.
“That’s basically asking them to suffer acute mana poisoning. Aren’t you looking down on the mascots a little too much?”
“I told you, magic power and all that—I don’t know anything about it!”
Even as Reshef performed his bewilderment, inwardly he remained calm. He did not know how that girl, who was supposed to be his lord’s offering, had obtained such detailed truth.
However, the guardian fairy who should have been the magical girl’s powerful supporter was standing back and watching from behind. If the will of the Mother Fairy had intervened, or if they had come with some degree of certainty, they would have moved far more actively.
‘So there is no physical evidence, only suspicion. It seems the offering was quite anxious.’
The idea was that if they pressured related parties at random, someone would spit something out. The notion of a swift resolution was good, but it was useless when they had no evidence with which to question him.
The foundation Reshef should originally have possessed as a Luncheon was currently separated from him as a shadow.
He had not yet recovered his shadow due to the aftermath of being struck by a magical girl’s finishing move in the past, but that was all the better. No matter how meticulously they searched, they would not be able to discern his nature as a Luncheon.
‘My lord will use my ordeal as an opportunity to extract greater concessions from the guardian fairies. In that case, our plan will become even more…’
While Reshef was thinking of how to use this incident, the ribbon of Magi White, which bound the masked gentleman, slowly began increasing the strength of its restraint.
‘There’s no doubt.’
Schnee Heidel recalled the shadow mage she had already clashed with several times.
From a tree made of hands to a humanoid formed of blood vessels, he had taken forms like chimeras, grotesquely stitching life together.
If there was such a thing as the smallest unit of life, then he was a monstrosity that had crudely sewn those units together at will. As Magi White shook off the shadow mage’s curse, she had realized a new magic that shattered the twisted bonds created by black magic.
And in order to exercise that magic, she first had to be able to clearly perceive the thing called a “twisted bond.”
An ominous sensation traveled from the end of the ribbon. Something that had copied the shape of a human with extreme precision, but was by no means a human itself.
The presence of a black-magic monstrosity, fundamentally similar to the shadow mage.
Magi White raised her magic power.
A secret purification art that severed the twisted bonds composing a Luncheon. If, by some chance, Reshef was truly an ordinary human, it would only make his eyes hurt for a moment.
Warm, pale violet magic power coiled around the ribbon. Using the light of magic as ink and the ribbon as manuscript paper, characters from an ancient era were engraved upon it.
“Graaahhhhh!”
With a brilliant flash, both arms of Reshef, bound by the ribbon, began to collapse!