Raban drew a few straight lines across the blank sheet of paper.
The lines, drawn in a single unhesitating sweep, interlocked with one another to form a chart: three boxes in one row, two rows in all, six boxes total.
‘I was supposed to write simple shapes inside these, too.’
He rummaged through his memories of Earth. Raban had once read about this Six-Figure psychological test in an encyclopedia of trivia by some ant-loving author.
Whether the contents of the test had ever been verified, or whether Raban himself could accurately reproduce the procedure, did not matter.
What he needed was a procedure that looked like it had something to it, not one that actually did.
He filled the hazy gaps in his memory with some convenient improvisation. In the three boxes on the top row, Raban drew a circle, an inverted triangle, and a square; in the three boxes on the bottom row, he drew a star, a heart, and a cross.
Originally, he had considered drawing a clover or a spade instead of the star and cross, but then it would be too obvious he had taken them from playing cards.
He did not consider the diamond unique to playing cards. It overlapped too much with the square in terms of impression.
If he wanted to spin convincing nonsense later, it would be easier if each shape had clearly distinguishable features he could use as material for fabrication.
“What is this… sir?”
Magi Black tilted her head. It was so simple that, if anything, she couldn’t guess what it was.
“Now, there is quite a lot of blank space in this picture.”
Rather than the shapes being drawn small, it was because he had drawn the boxes large from the start. Raban pieced together lines and settings in his head as he continued his explanation.
“Please use the shapes drawn in each box to create a new picture. If filling in every shape is difficult, you may start by drawing just one.”
Magi Black, who had looked puzzled at the word “picture,” soon picked up the pencil and began coloring in one of the upper boxes.
It was the box with the circle. She shaded the circle with hatching, while repeatedly coloring over the empty space surrounding it in black with a degree of fixation that could almost be felt.
One unusual point was that she drew another circle outside the first. Was she trying to express something like an aura?
A circle wrapped in an aura and surrounded by darkness. It was an exceedingly symbolic element. Anyone would be reminded of a solar eclipse.
Feeling Na Ihyeon’s gaze turn toward him after she set down the pencil, Raban continued speaking in a natural yet firm tone, like a seasoned counselor.
“Then, in the blank space around that box, please write down the feelings that come to mind when you look at this picture.”
“Feelings?”
She seemed to find it rather difficult to understand. Seeing as even the hesitant polite ending she had been tacking on was absent, it was quite literally a reflexive question.
Raban inserted a slight pause before answering Magi Black’s question, a deliberate silence. It was a light test of anxiety and waiting.
‘No particular reaction, huh.’
Even if it was not an extreme delay measured in minutes, silence in a setting where one was expected to reveal one’s innermost thoughts carried a pressure on an entirely different level.
Generally speaking, a counselor’s silence was not a cold lack of response, but closer to a refined form of comfort meant to express support toward a client in a state of intense emotional elevation.
It was a contradictory expression, but one could call it silence for the sake of conversation.
Silence for the sake of conversation required clues such as gestures or facial expressions. However, Raban’s silence was a somewhat severing silence, one that expressed intentional disregard for the client’s question.
Even with that implicit nuance, Magi Black showed no change in expression. It meant that her ability to control her own emotions was better than expected.
With this, Raban could narrow down the magical girl suspects for the third time.
First, those who had visited the counseling room; second, those who had eaten mugwort rice cakes; and lastly, among them, those with excellent emotional control.
If he narrowed it down to the intersection of those three groups—
‘…I have no idea!’
Raban nearly bit his lip.
‘No, when all the high school girls are chattering noisily, going “Teach, Teach!” and giggling, how am I supposed to gauge something like emotional control!’
The gloomy dark mage despaired.
***
Na Ihyeon did not attach any particular meaning to Raban’s silence.
It was thanks to the fact that, while on duty in the counseling room, she had heard that man groaning to himself countless times.
‘I! Never received any professional training! I told them adolescent emotional counseling should be left to the experts!’
And yet, the sight of that man listening to everything the kids had to say, offering the best advice he could in his own way, and grumbling that it was a hassle—though she could not call him reliable, he did feel sincere.
Na Ihyeon also accepted the stiff expression Raban had deliberately put on to seem cold, along with the brief silence, as part of his “unprofessionalism.”
‘He must not be able to think of anything!’
Perhaps because that man had lost his memories, he often forgot even common sense. Hadn’t he been on the ground with his mouth to the earth, eating grass, from the very day they first met?
She could almost hear his inner thoughts: since she had asked for professional counseling, he was doing his best in his own way, but he could not remember properly and was struggling. Na Ihyeon leisurely waited for the pitiful man doing his best.
***
In the end, Raban’s mouth opened only after nearly a minute had passed. It was, by his own judgment, a length of time that could serve as the dividing line between “the time it might take to think of an example” and “a deliberate discourtesy.”
“So, for example, when we look at a photograph of a snowy field, impressions such as ‘cold’ or ‘lonely’ come to mind. But even with the same snowy field, if there is a puppy with its head buried in the snow, it could become ‘cute’ or ‘lively.’”
In that way, he asked her to write a few brief impressions of the picture she had drawn. Magi Black smiled softly.
Raban tensed, unable to understand the intention behind the smile, but from Na Ihyeon’s perspective, it was a reflexive reaction prompted by the unexpected cuteness of the example he had agonized over and finally produced being about a puppy.
“Then it’s this, …sir.”
Above the picture that seemed to imitate a solar eclipse, Magi Black wrote phrases such as “soft and squishy,” “surprisingly sweet,” and “doesn’t look very good on the outside.”
Raban’s nape grew stiff. It was a selection of words he could not understand at all.
‘The sun is squishy…?’
“Uh, normally, you would draw all the pictures first and hear the interpretation afterward. But this time, shall we fill them in one by one and talk about them one by one?”
Magi Black nodded.
“First, what did you draw?”
Obviously, it had to be a solar eclipse.
…It was a solar eclipse, right?
Confident in his wizardly insight, Raban stared at Magi Black. Magi Black murmured calmly.
“Mugwort rice cake.”
“Pardon?”
“So the black part is the table, the hatched part is the mugwort rice cake, and the circle a little bigger than the circle is the bowl.”
‘I really have no idea……’
For the first time in a very long while, Raban felt utterly at a loss. To think his common sense would not work on this opponent at all.
No, in this case, it would be more of a problem if common sense did work.
He was trying to trace the other party’s identity using mugwort rice cakes as a clue, and yet what she had presented as the topic of conversation was a mugwort rice cake.
According to Raban’s otherworldly common sense, this was an elegant threat meaning, “I know all about your foolish antics, so you had better know your place.”
Could she have overheard his conversation with Inian? After a brief consideration, Raban denied the possibility.
The first basis was the mascot’s ability to detect magic.
‘Neither the magical girl nor the mascot noticed my presence on the day I was first summoned to Hikarious. Intercepting my communication with Inian would be far more difficult than that. It’s impossible.’
Second.
Because the gaze of the magical girl looking at him with sparkling eyes, expectant of what he would say next, held an emotion he had become very familiar with recently.
The curiosity and energy unique to spirited high school students in adolescence, and the harmless playfulness of wanting to poke at someone simply as a sign of affection.
They were eyes devoid of the hostility that should naturally be felt in a firm warning. For some reason feeling the strength leave him, Raban opened his mouth.
“A mugwort rice cake, huh. What a coincidence.”
“A coincidence?”
“Usually, a circle signifies an archetype. The original state, with no processing added to it. And an archetype of what, you ask? The archetype of the client themselves.”
The image of oneself that one perceived.
“So this often reflects personal memories. Though I did not expect a mugwort rice cake to appear.”
He continued, explaining that it did not mean her own self-image was literally a mugwort rice cake; rather, the interpretation attached to the symbol of the mugwort rice cake was more important.
“Do you understand why a mugwort rice cake came up, and why you added descriptions such as ‘soft and squishy’ to yourself?”
The moment she heard those words, Na Ihyeon came to see the picture’s triple structure differently.
The black exterior was the gazes of others. Gloomy, depressing, sharp. The society that had approached Na Ihyeon had always been like that.
The other circle separating the hatched circle from society was the image she showed to the outside world. As if she were unaffected by the gloomy darkness at all, she calmly held her head high and crushed the slander around her.
And the hatched circle was a part of her heart, rotting away inside a strong shell.
At this clear and orderly insight, Na Ihyeon found herself looking at Raban anew.
‘Mister…’
You’re actually competent?!