Truly, it was an absurd coincidence.
First. Schne Heidel had mistakenly believed that she herself had been afflicted with the Curse of the Vascular Human.
The one who had tempted her from within to sever hope for coexistence and pursue power was, naturally, not Raban. Raban did not possess such magical power.
However, Schne had mistakenly believed Raban to be the source of that whisper, and by burning with fighting spirit against the Vascular Human who appeared before her eyes, she was able to shake off the curse.
Second, the fact that as a result of overcoming the curse in such a manner, she obtained a counter-magic that targeted the one who had cast it.
This was a truly unjust point for Raban. He had no idea what he had done, yet Magi White had nonetheless obtained a spell formula that destroyed Raban—or rather, black magical mutants.
Metaphorically speaking, this was a kind of antibody. The magical girl's instinct had crushed the Curse of the Vascular Human—or rather, something she had mistaken for such—and awakened a power to oppose the black magical mutant that was the root of the curse.
Third.
Of all things, Ochanja belonged to that category of black magical mutants.
“Kuaaaaaack!”
Therefore, Ochanja's two arms were shattered to pieces by a purple light. If there was any small mercy, it was perhaps that they had been reverted into magical power rather than disassembled into blood and flesh.
Reshef quickly grasped the situation. He did not know exactly what had happened, but things had gone awry.
A magical girl who had acquired magic specialized against Ochanja? Could it be that Mother Fairy had predicted their uprising in advance?
No. That was a leap in logic. Reshef recalled another dark mage who had shown himself in this city.
That dark mage must have become some sort of catalyst. Mother Fairy must have believed that she had already cleared away most of the remnants of the old era, the threat of dark magical power.
But a new dark mage had appeared. If she had reassessed the threat of the old era because of that and transmitted methods to counter black magic to the enforcers of the current age in advance...!
‘Had I underestimated Mother Fairy's operational capacity too much!’
It was a great anomaly. Reshef resolved to retreat from this place immediately and deliver the news to his lord.
He looked at Papyrun, Mother Fairy's messenger, one last time. He realized the reason it had maintained its silence from behind even while he stood before it.
Ochanja required dark magical power to operate smoothly. In the old era, there had been dark magical power all across the world to devour, so there had been no need for anyone to supply it.
But it was different in this era. In an age where most of the contamination of dark magical power had been removed, Ochanja had to receive dark magical power bestowed from something in order to demonstrate its full authority.
The Guardian Fairy had already discerned this and was calmly continuing its observation to identify the connection between Reshef and the source of magical power.
In other words, Papyrun was a bloodhound searching for Ochanja's lord.
‘Fortunate indeed!’
His lord was one step further ahead than they expected. Even if they captured Reshef now, they would not be able to identify the connecting point to his lord.
But that didn’t mean he could allow himself to be captured obediently. Reshef raised his magical power.
***
Papyrun, meeting the gaze beyond the mask, was shocked. The fact that the opponent had received such a powerful blow from Schne's newly acquired magic meant that the opponent was none other than Ochanja.
A former comrade of the Guardian Fairy had been here.
Ihyeon was similarly shocked. But the direction of the shock differed from Papyrun's. It was the moment a stain of doubt was engraved regarding her only supporter, her last remaining blood relative.
“White! Bind him!”
But her mind was too strong to be buried in shock. Na Ihyeon set aside all pedantic and bothersome details and thought very simply.
Uncle seems to be plotting something bad!
Then I have to stop him, even if I have to beat him up to do it!
A clear two-line logic that surpassed even the syllogism. A refreshingly straightforward way of thinking illuminated the path she had to take.
***
And so, through this very process, an urgent flash report that painted Raban's morning with shock was completed.
However, not even the magical girls knew whether Reshef had succeeded in breaking through the encirclement or had simply evaporated. Reshef had disappeared at some point.
Leaving behind only a black mask, as if it were a shed skin.
It was difficult to judge this as a simple lost article. Reshef's body, having taken a direct hit from Schne's magic, had been repeatedly collapsing. Even while fleeing, his body had been slowly crumbling away.
Perhaps his body had completely vanished, leaving only the mask.
With Papyrun taking the mask—the sole clue—to the Fairy Kingdom for analysis, the previous night's pursuit came to a close.
Having come one step closer to the truth yet having lost the only clue, Na Ihyeon went to school with deep regret.
“...Ihyeon. Come to the counseling room after school.”
And she came face to face with an uncle whose expression was incredibly, tremendously stiff.
***
“What in the world is going on?”
Na Ihyeon played dumb. On the smartphone screen before her, an article covering the magical girls' fierce battle at the hotel last night had come up.
Zoomed in on the paragraph about Reshef, the director of the Charles Scholarship Foundation, listed as the sole missing person.
“Uncle, did you think I went around wearing a mask and robbing hotels last night or something?”
It was absurd. Raban shook his head.
The daily newspaper covering the magical girls' exploits had printed speculation along the lines of “the magical girls fought a fierce battle at a hotel while tracking a monster.”
But to Raban, who knew all there was to know, it looked different. The battle hadn't broken out at a hotel while tracking a monster; the magical girls had sortied against the Charles Scholarship Foundation director who had been staying at the hotel from the beginning.
Missing? That probably meant the mascot had abducted him or he had somehow escaped.
If Na Ihyeon was related to this incident....
‘She's a magical girl?’
A chilling hypothesis. But Raban's (self-proclaimed) rational and notoriously cautious reason rejected that possibility.
Na Ihyeon was merely somewhat mentally tough; she wasn't magical girl material.
For starters, her family was a disqualifying factor. Even Earth's intelligence agencies wouldn't accept someone with a dissident in their family; would those mascot bastards want to hand the immense power of a magical girl to a blood relative of the Na family, who had caused a magical disaster?
Furthermore, Na Ihyeon had an absurdly high amount of buried negative thoughts. She was far too unstable to be used as one of Mother Fairy's weapons of destruction.
Then the question was.
Why had the scholarship foundation director become missing the moment he mentioned his suspicions about Charles to Na Ihyeon?
What reason could Na Ihyeon have for causing such a phenomenon?
Raban chose his words slowly and very carefully.
“...Didn't I tell you before that one of the Four Heavenly Kings was closer to us than we'd thought?”
“I... guess?”
“I think a magical girl might be closer to us than we'd thought, too.”
He recalled the possibility. Most students at Luxtiera High School did not bother to create points of contact with Na Ihyeon. Thus, Na Ihyeon's social isolation had gradually deepened.
“They're called magical ‘girls,’ after all. They might be especially close to kids your age.”
But there was exactly one student who boasted of being Na Ihyeon's closest friend and tried to break through that isolation.
“H-huh?”
From the very beginning, she was an extremely suspicious girl. She had tried to interfere with the grand and precious plan to mine negative thoughts, and as someone with the position of “class president,” she was part of the privileged class assumed to be closely connected to the mascot—the secret ruler of the high school.
“I'm talking about Schne.”
“Why Schne all of a sudden?”
As her nickname “General Class President” suggests, she has the shocking authority to come and go through the entire class as if it were her own home, and no one stops her!
This is decisive evidence implying that she is a backstage force colluding with the mascot!
“Ihyeon. What did I tell you yesterday?”
“...Not to go to the Black Forest because it's dangerous?”
“Hey, look at you changing the subject. After that. You asked me something.”
A question about what she should do if she needed to go somewhere as creepy as a haunted house alone.
Raban had answered nonchalantly at the time.
‘Damn it, I shouldn't have done that!’
“I told you ‘just go with a friend.’ And your friend would be Schne.”
Raban's deduction flowed smoothly onward.
A relationship in which they called each other “best friends” and thus shared their secrets. Na Ihyeon had confided her worries to her friend, and her friend had fully demonstrated her abilities to resolve Ihyeon's concerns.
Ihyeon's secret would be about her family, and Schne's secret was—
“That she's a magical girl, right?”
“N-no, she's not?”
It was certain. Raban nodded his head.
‘To think a limb of the mascot was this close by!’
Raban trembled at his own brilliant intellect.
Like an asset manager who could predict the stock market's rise and fall the next day just by looking at the charts, Raban had identified the identity of one of Hikarias's fearsome duo of destruction weapons with nothing but fragmentary information!
‘Still, this is a great harvest. Even if by coincidence, I've grasped this city's greatest secret.’
Had it not been himself, equipped with wise judgment and rational deductive abilities, but rather some unnamed individual with a petty, narrow-minded generosity far unfit for the position of grand duke, could they have approached the truth as swiftly as he had?
‘Only an honorable dark mage can guess so accurately!’