Thanks to the enemy’s sudden raid, the mascot escaped from Raban’s room. Raban stood there woodenly even after watching the mascot vanish before his eyes, and only after quite some time had passed did he look around.
‘Is it gone?’
Thanks to this close contact with a mascot, he had been able to observe their magic more closely. Raban examined the magical reactions in the vicinity.
He could not sense any pattern resembling the mascot’s.
He immediately sent a thought wave to Inian.
[The mascot inspectors showed up.]
[Were you taken away?]
Inian’s tone was strangely bright. Apparently, if he said he had been taken away, she was preparing to burst into laughter and mock him for well over a century.
[No. But they dumped magical girl maintenance work on me.]
[…Something has gone wrong with the mascots’ heads.]
[Was that a question?]
[A declarative sentence. Entrusting delicate adolescent girls to a black magician is only possible if one has gone mad.]
Raban let the great demon’s habitual disparagement of black magicians pass him by. That one was a bigot who put on tinted glasses the moment she saw a black magician.
[Anyway, that’s how things turned out. I’ll need you to move a little.]
[You want me to show my face to the magical girls?]
Some unidentified someone had set off a flamboyant explosion as though deliberately provoking the mascots, who must already have been on edge after losing Leshef.
And he wanted her to intervene at the scene where that someone and the magical girls were fighting? Inian seriously wondered whether she should simply deliver this black magician to the guardian fairies and propose a plea bargain.
[Of course not. I don’t make requests that unreasonable.]
His tone was smug, as if to say, “Unlike a certain small-to-medium enterprise in the Demon Realm, I know how to cherish my employees.” Inian wanted to go to Raban’s house at once and give him a piledriver, but as a functioning member of society, she endured her anger.
[What is it?]
[Nothing much. Let’s go scatter some flyers around the area.]
***
Raban dressed himself appropriately. Though, in truth, “dressed himself” only meant putting back on the jacket he had briefly taken off.
Then he stepped out of the room. The feeling of heading to school at night was rather unfamiliar.
‘My memory’s getting a little hazy now, but….’
Ordinarily, late at night, one only left school; one did not return to it. Was even this reversed because this was not the real Earth? Savoring the nostalgia, Raban opened the door to the counseling room.
He tidied the inner room. He wiped the table and adjusted the luminosity of the lights. He made the atmosphere suitable for conversation.
‘Good, that’s roughly done.’
Raban brewed tea. It was not the Black Forest blended herbal tea he usually drank, but he had used mugwort from the Black Forest.
Just as Raban took out the mugwort tea and mugwort rice cakes and was transferring sugar into a small dish, a loud crash and clatter slammed into his ears.
“Windows are not entrances.”
“Ahahaha….”
The two magical girls had rolled in under the windowsill in a complete mess. They looked as though they had descended from the sky straight toward the window. It was a wonder they had managed to come in without breaking the glass.
The moment he was about to say something to the two of them as they staggered, Raban felt a sense of incongruity.
‘Hm?’
He could see it.
The face of Magi White, the peerless magical weapon forged by the mascots!
It was bizarre. Before, he had certainly been unable to obtain even a single clue for identifying a person, not with ordinary sight, not with thermal imaging, and not even by resorting to smell.
That was because the mascot’s personal information protection magic had been far too powerful.
‘And now I can see her. What’s the difference this time?’
He turned his gaze to Magi Black beside her.
‘I can’t see this one.’
Even though electrical signals were undoubtedly being transmitted to his optic nerves, her face was strangely perceived as if it had been mosaicked. The personal information protection magic on that side had not yet been lifted.
He turned his gaze back to Magi White. It was a face he could easily recognize.
Just as expected. Schnee Heidel. For some reason, the color of her hair seemed a little more vivid and the durability of her skeletal structure seemed to have been strengthened, but the base was definitely Schnee.
‘…I see. Is the difference whether I know her identity or not?’
His certainty that Schnee was a magical girl seemed to have somewhat weakened the effect of the personal information protection magic. Magic that distorted a person’s perception naturally became less effective if the correct fact had already been recognized.
‘The problem is who Black is….’
He shook his head. There was no need to try to pry more information than necessary out of the magical girls right away and leave them with a bad impression.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, magical girls.”
From here on began the time for verbal sorcery that he had spent roughly fifteen minutes meticulously designing.
***
“I am Raban, appointed by the mascot Paphirun as a counselor for the cultivation of your sound emotional development and psychological health. Please call me Raban.”
For the counseling room man, his tone was unusually stiff. Na Ihyeon felt an unfamiliar strangeness she had never sensed before.
Beneath her disheveled dark blue-black hair, wary eyes flashed.
“Or I could put it this way.”
The sharp rigidity in his eyes softened, and his straightened back bent slightly. His impression became closer not to “Raban,” but to “Teach.”
“I feel like both of you have probably been to the counseling room before. That fluffy friend—Paphirun, was it?—said they couldn’t tell me because of the Personal Information Protection Act. Anyway, if you know me, could you raise your hand?”
The two of them raised their hands in bewilderment.
Raban nodded. With this, the pool of candidates for Magi Black had been reduced by a third.
“Good, good. Then here’s a question.”
Raban left a pause before speaking the next words, and naturally pulled over two counseling room chairs, placing them in front of the pair. He watched closely as they sat up with murmured thanks.
“Do you find the formal attitude from the beginning more comfortable, or do you prefer this looser version, like at school?”
“Uh, is there some kind of difference between the two?”
It was Magi Black’s question. Raban shrugged toward her.
“Different people feel comfortable with different atmospheres. Some people are more comfortable confiding in a friend, while others find peace of mind through conversation with a professional who seems to know what they’re doing.”
“Really? Then when you’re talking to me, please be a bit formal. Not right now, only in the inner room.”
‘She’s putting up a wall.’
Raban nodded, saying he understood. She was fine with his tone being casual, but when it came to the most intimate conversations, she preferred to keep a sense of distance. It was probably a decision she had made because she felt she could not fully trust Raban himself.
‘She’s quite the guarded type. Among the students who visited the counseling room, which ones were reluctant to reveal their personal histories?’
“I’d like you to speak to me as usual.”
For Raban, it was an unexpected choice. If she was the pawn of those bloodless mascots, he had naturally expected her to choose the formal style, as if to say, “Who gave you permission to act familiar with me?”
“Got it, girls. But let me say one thing in advance.”
“Huh? What?”
“I’m not very pleased with the decision your cotton-candy friend made.”
“…Why is that, teacher?”
“It starts right there!”
***
Raban emphasized that since he had amnesia, even if he had once possessed something like a counseling license, his abilities were currently lacking, and that after returning to Hikarious, he had never received proper counseling education, making him extremely ill-suited to the word “teacher.”
“Now, in that situation. Just because I have a rough guess at your identities and seem like I won’t go running my mouth somewhere, do you think I can look positively on this situation, where counseling is suddenly entrusted to a nonprofessional?”
“Uh, isn’t maintaining security extremely important in our case?”
“If so! It would be better to find a proper counseling teacher and ask for their understanding!”
At Magi Black’s objection, Raban let out a deep sigh and continued.
“Yes, yes. I know that too. If someone does this kind of work, the odds of inevitably becoming a target for monster attacks go up, and therefore I, who live in an environment the mascots can control, am the suitable person.”
Oh, so there was that reason? Na Ihyeon was quietly impressed. Certainly, the guardian fairies reacted sensitively to civilian safety. The dormitory, which was Uncle Raban’s lodging, was a place under mascot management and supervision. When it came to securing safety, it was reliable.
“But girls, I’ll say this one last time. When things are truly hard and difficult, you should receive counseling from someone properly qualified.”
Even so, will you receive counseling from me?
At that final question, Schnee and Na Ihyeon turned their heads and met each other’s eyes, then opened their mouths at the same time, as if neither had gone first.
“Yeah!” “Yes.”
***
Inian grumbled.
‘What manner of request is this, even as requests go?’
He wanted her to infiltrate the magical girls’ battlefield and scatter blood-vessel familiars. She did not want to touch these grotesque, hideous things even through gloves.
But that damned lazy black magician had screeched that it was absolutely necessary, so there was nothing she could do.
Inian infiltrated behind the magical girls as they fought the unknown attacker, finely ground up the blood-vessel familiars, and scattered them.
The powdered blood-vessel familiars reacted to the magic in the vicinity and spewed out the black magic power contained within them.
The now denser concentration of black magic power would further increase the burden placed on the magical girls’ mental strength. Their consumption of magic power would be no different from usual, but their mental depletion would be dramatic.
After returning from such an intense battle, a comfortable conversation with an adult who, though not entirely trustworthy, seemed sincere.
This was the groundwork for that staging.
‘At any rate, what an incredibly underhanded black magician.’
How could a human bastard be this petty?