“Then, let’s see….”
Raban looked over the two of them. He had made various efforts to lower their psychological barriers even a little, but he still wasn’t sure whether they had worked properly.
Especially when it came to the operation he had entrusted to Inian to raise the density of black mana in the air. That Demon Realm baron had a habit of slipping up in the strangest places.
‘I need to be careful.’
After debating whom to choose as the first person to counsel, Raban finally made up his mind.
“Then we’ll start with White.”
“Pardon?”
Raban shrugged.
“No particular reason. The white just stands out. Black, you can read a book or look at your phone while you wait.”
In truth, there was a reason.
Unlike Magi Black, whose identity he still did not know, Raban knew who Magi White was. Magi White probably knew that as well, but that was not what mattered right now.
He had grounds on which to judge Magi White. He had already grasped the general disposition, likes, and dislikes of the human named Schnee Heidel.
But Magi Black was an unknown variable. For a more effective approach, it was right to draw information about that variable from White first before speaking to her.
Raban slid open the door to the inner room of the counseling office and glanced back once.
Magi Black, in a somehow familiar posture, sat perched on a counseling-room chair, swinging her legs.
“Now, this way.”
“Yes….”
Tilting her head, Magi White headed into the inner room.
***
“First, I should say this. I’m sorry.”
“Pardon?”
Unlike the puzzled “Yes…?” she had given when entering the inner room, this “Pardon?” carried a firm sense of question.
“The responsibility for black mana accumulating in the Black Forest lies with Naju Pharmaceutical, and I was likely someone connected to Naju Pharmaceutical.”
Raban bowed his head deeply. Schnee flustered and said, “I’m not going to tell someone with no memories to take responsibility for a magical disaster!”
‘Mm, that works well.’
If he was going to handle his original concept in earnest, he had to take care of details even in these minor places.
It was wisdom he had acquired while buried underground for ten days and nights, with truly nothing to do, playing house with his left and right hands.
“Then, once again. I’m not an expert. If this really doesn’t work, it would be better to find someone genuinely qualified.”
Schnee nodded. Raban took a notepad and pencil in hand and asked her.
“There’s something I want to ask first. You said that the closer you come into contact with black mana, the greater the mental burden becomes… but what form does that take, exactly?”
“Form?”
“Mental strength isn’t clearly displayed as a number like in a game. So I’m asking about the symptoms. For example, feeling tired as if you stayed up all night, recalling bad memories from the past, feeling sensations in body parts that don’t exist….”
They were all symptoms Raban had experienced. Raban could list more symptoms of mental exhaustion than he could count on both hands.
Because he had been a black mage. If one wanted to claim they could do black magic, it was only natural to have written a few volumes’ worth of madness-experience journals.
Schnee hesitated, then looked up at Raban. As if he knew what Schnee was thinking, Raban spoke at just the right time.
“Of course, what’s said in here will be kept secret. Even if your friend outside or the mascot asks.”
“…Thank you. I see myself from long ago. From when I was a child.”
“When you were a child?”
Raban suppressed his tongue as it tried to move reflexively. Insults involving parents were useful as provocations, but they were not words that should come out in a counseling situation.
‘But if recalling her childhood chips away at her mental state, it’s usually related to family history.’
Let’s approach carefully, with more dignified vocabulary.
“Is it perhaps connected to your family history?”
Schnee’s hair swayed. She had been about to shake her head, but as if something had occurred to her, the movement stopped midway.
“…In a way, it is family history. Um, I spent most of my childhood in the hospital.”
It was a frailty impossible to infer from her current form as a magical girl who was not just healthy, but downright vicious. It was strange, considering the effects that one’s health during childhood had on growth.
‘Don’t tell me it was those mascot bastards?’
An anime about magical girls that Raban had seen back on Earth flashed through his mind. At some point, a certain cliché had begun trending in magical-girl stories.
A mascot that drove girls into situations where they had no choice but to become magical girls, then arranged a contract. Had they disguised themselves as something like a children’s hospital sponsorship foundation and been selecting magical-girl sprouts?
‘Make a contract with me, and I’ll make you healthy!’
A mascot’s sales pitch—one it had never actually said—flashed through Raban’s mind.
“My family was fairly well-off, but even so, it seems the hospital bills weren’t easy to handle. Back then….”
‘The mascot came! Damn it, when an entity that controls public power decides to fully exercise its capabilities, there’s no catching up in terms of efficiency!’
It was something he had experienced until he was sick of it during the days when he fought Inian. Even with the support of other factions trying to drag Inian down, an all-out war against the archduke had been unfavorable.
“Someone from Naju Pharmaceutical came.”
“Huh?”
“Yes…?”
“Oh, not the mascot?”
“I only met Papirun after I entered high school.”
Raban nodded. Come to think of it, the mascot imperialists were not in a position where they needed to recruit manpower so desperately. They were already the ruling class controlling the world from the shadows.
“The people from Naju Pharmaceutical said that if I let them study my rare disease, they would cover all my treatment expenses and even provide me with a private hospital room. There was no reason to refuse those terms.”
The hospital room was prepared inside the Naju Pharmaceutical research facility, but the condition was that her family could visit her at any time, twenty-four hours a day, if they wished.
“The days in the hospital room were, um. Ordinary. There were more things to do than at a real hospital, though. There were exercise therapies similar to rehabilitation treatment, and they had me do forest bathing too, saying it was to cultivate proper emotions….”
Schnee rambled on about her daily life in the research facility’s hospital room. To Raban, it was an ordinary routine to the point of feeling tedious. Receiving new drugs, exercising, eating….
“Ah. I met a lot of friends too. Maybe it was part of their research topic, but it seemed like they had gathered children with rare diseases like me.”
Thanks to that, Schnee said, she had friends she knew spread throughout every class at Luxtiera High School, and she smiled softly.
“Mom and Dad tried to be by my side every day. The days when both of them came to visit together were usually only on weekends, but even on weekdays, either Mom or Dad always came to see me. They asked if I wasn’t scared being alone.”
Raban tilted his head inwardly. Wasn’t this the harmonious everyday life of an ordinary family? It was enough to make him envious, reminding him of his own family back on Earth.
‘If only that Demon Realm commoner had sent me to a proper Earth, I’d be watching TV with my family and laughing together right now!’
“It was a weekend that day too.”
Her tone changed. If until just a moment ago there had been a certain warmth and wistfulness in it, now there was pain. A memory engraved not as nostalgia but as a nightmare approached.
“When you say that day….”
“Yes. The day Naju Pharmaceutical disappeared.”
Schnee smiled sorrowfully. Raban was horrified.
‘Those mascot lunatics.’
He had not heard the whole story yet, but the conclusion was obvious. During the Naju Pharmaceutical incident, both of her parents, who had come to visit her in the hospital, must have disappeared and still not returned.
The emotion rising from Schnee was guilt because of that. If only I had been healthy, if only my parents hadn’t come to visit me in the hospital room, perhaps they might have survived.
Put another way, to Schnee, Naju Pharmaceutical was the enemy that had taken her parents.
And that meant.
It was likely the same for the many students Schnee had described as her “friends.”
In that situation, there was Na Ihyeon, Naju Pharmaceutical’s sole blood relative.
‘I was wondering how so much negative thought-energy had piled up.’
It was only natural, since not only during high school but throughout her entire previous upbringing, she must have grown up among a peer group that looked at her as though she were the enemy who had killed their parents.
‘I understand that they brought her into Luxtiera High School to keep a dangerous element under close surveillance. It’s easier to manage them if they’re gathered in one place. But still.’
Wasn’t the environment far too harsh? Raban could not help but be appalled at the social isolation that seemed to have been prepared with meticulous thoroughness, as if they were trying to make a pressed extract of negative thoughts.
‘And in the middle of all that.’
Faced with a reality he simply could not understand, Raban looked at Schnee with a stiff expression.
Schnee was about to sense something strange in that expression, but then she recalled the very first words the counselor before her had spoken as soon as he entered the inner room.
“I’m sorry.” Those words. He was someone who felt guilt despite having no memories. It was only natural that he would feel the weight of Naju Pharmaceutical’s karma.
Schnee went on to tell the story exactly as Raban had expected. The story of her parents holding her hand and sending her outside from the research facility as it collapsed—no, rather than collapsed, disappeared.
Her mother’s final words, “Take the child and go first,” and her father, who at the final moment shoved her back and pushed her outside the research facility.
When she looked back, her father’s face was gone. As if someone had erased him with an eraser, only his right arm remained, and before long even that disappeared.
‘…How on earth did this girl become friends with Na Ihyeon?’
Recognizing the fact that Na Ihyeon was not her enemy and emotionally accepting it were two separate things. Despite carrying that kind of trauma, she called herself “Na Ihyeon’s closest friend” and openly displayed their friendship at school?
‘Is she a living saint, or does Na Ihyeon have a hypnosis app?’