Na Ihyeon clicked her tongue as she looked at that poor mister.
‘Just what kind of story does he have, eating like he’s so desperate?’
Raban noticed Na Ihyeon’s gaze and timidly raised a hand.
“Um… did I eat too much?”
“No? It’s fine. I don’t really eat much at night anyway. If it’s really not enough, I can just go to the convenience store again.”
The black mage had a flexible conscience. Without hesitation, he polished off a high school girl’s daily provisions.
It was thanks to the shamelessness he had acquired after the fact in another world.
“I can’t believe I’m actually eating this again…!”
And thanks to his overwhelming emotion at this product of modern civilization known as a triangle kimbap.
‘MSG really does taste heavenly.’
The things he had been forced to devour in the other world—or, to put it more directly, forced to digest—had been utterly horrific.
The melted remains of magical beasts, or chunks of corpses that had been left buried in mud just long enough to rot. He had hated putting them in his mouth so much that he had learned body-modification magic to split open his stomach and pour them directly into his digestive tract.
At Raban’s tearful monologue, Na Ihyeon’s pity deepened even further.
“Mister. Just what on earth…”
The question—what had he been doing to end up like that?—rose to the tip of her tongue. With the patience befitting a magical girl, Na Ihyeon suppressed it.
“Uh, I got caught up in a magical disaster.”
“Huh?”
Raban watched Na Ihyeon’s expression and began rattling off the excuse he had prepared.
***
In this world, the existence of magical girls was not a secret.
Raban gathered information while using his scant remaining mana as efficiently as possible.
In other words, he found and read newspapers discarded by the roadside, wandered the city until he found the municipal library, then used a computer tucked away in a corner of the reading room to search the catalogue for things like “magical girl.”
It was truly unexpected, but the phenomenon known as “magical girls” seemed to be fairly well known.
‘I have no idea how they ended up with a name like Saak-ping, though.’
A term collectively used for monstrous entities that appeared for unknown reasons but, in any case, had a harmful influence on Earth. Most Saak-ping like that were repelled by magical girls, and the people swept up in the incidents would safely return to their everyday lives.
‘Thanks to that restoration magic I witnessed, no doubt.’
However, once in a while, certain incidents exceeded the abilities of magical girls.
An incident in which a magical girl’s failure left scars upon reality was called a magical disaster.
The most recent magical disaster to occur in Hikarius City was the disappearance of Naju Pharmaceutical.
***
“…You were a researcher at Naju Pharmaceutical?”
Na Ihyeon asked after a brief hesitation. Raban lowered his gaze. The subtle silence created an uncomfortable atmosphere.
Within that thin-ice stillness, Raban’s mind spun at high speed.
‘I didn’t make the setting that detailed.’
But he had at least prepared a Plan B for questions like this. A capable black mage always prepared insurance for when he got scammed in a contract.
Raban, feeling proud of his own preparedness, immediately grew gloomy upon recalling the most recent contract scam he had suffered.
Fortunately, that gloom lent his upcoming excuse even more persuasiveness.
“Sorry, I… don’t remember.”
The easiest and fastest answer to block all questions at the source. The amnesia button.
‘With this one thing, I can handle most questions!’
What’s your name? → I don’t know.
What’s your phone number? → I forgot.
Why do you live like that? → Actually, I have no memories.
It was truly an all-purpose answer. Raban decided to push ahead with the amnesia concept.
“I wandered around some place I couldn’t understand, and when I came to my senses, I was here. I don’t even remember who I am.”
It was common for general social knowledge to remain intact even while suffering from amnesia. There were also, more or less, cases of people getting caught up in magical disasters, isolated in a dimension other than reality, and then returning.
Raban was certain that this answer would satisfy that curiosity-filled student.
Hikarius City was a city that had experienced a magical disaster relatively recently, and if he said all his memories were gone, what more could she pry into?
More than anything, this world had a strangely lax side to it.
The proof was that there was no record of anyone seriously investigating or dissecting magical girls in order to obtain “magic.” It seemed the minds of the people here were a bit more sparkly-cutesy than those on the Earth he had come from.
“I… see. Yeah.”
The silver-haired student nodded with a somewhat blank expression. Raban wiped the corners of his mouth with a tissue and spoke.
“Come to think of it, what’s your name? After receiving your help like this, I still don’t even know your name.”
“Ah, it’s Ihyeon. Na Ihyeon.”
“Hm?”
He had seen it in the newspaper. The surname “Na” belonged to the owner family of Naju Pharmaceutical.
And the moment Na Ihyeon had run into him, she had jokingly asked if he was an industrial spy after Naju Pharmaceutical’s technology.
…On top of that, if she was someone who could freely come and go from the Western-style house in the Black Forest, which was “private property”…
“Oh. A rich young lady.”
Na Ihyeon sighed and shook her head.
“Well. I am connected to the president’s family of Naju Pharmaceutical, but I don’t have money, okay? And this place… I just stop by now and then for odd jobs like cleaning.”
A lie. From the hesitation mixed into Na Ihyeon’s words, Raban noticed that there was a hidden reason. However, it likely was not a lie told because she had some scheme toward Raban himself.
‘There must be some complicated family circumstances.’
According to the knowledge he had mostly acquired from dramas on Earth, chaebol families were bound to have complicated household affairs. Raban, satisfied with his own conclusion, did not dig any further into Ihyeon’s lie.
Instead.
“I still seem to have some feng shui left in my memory.”
“Huh?”
“This plot of land has bad energy.”
He decided to offer her some advice in gratitude for the meal.
***
“If you can help it, it’d be better not to come on the new moon or the full moon.”
Na Ihyeon’s mind came to a halt for a moment.
Because those words were the exact opposite of her uncle’s request that she come specifically on the new moon and full moon.
“What do you mean?”
Raban scratched his head.
This was difficult to explain. It was not proper feng shui knowledge, but something that came from a black mage’s perspective.
Uncontrolled mana was gushing out of the Black Forest. And it was very nutriti—no, very unpleasant mana, close to black mana.
That was why Raban himself had tried to pluck and eat mugwort, wasn’t it?
But it was the way of the world that when mana erupted, that much had to be filled back in.
According to Raban’s rough calculations, every new moon, when the moonlight vanished, this forest would absorb the mana around it. Then, after a process of refinement—or contamination—it would spew it out in a state similar to black mana.
That discharge reached its maximum around the full moon.
By saying not to come on the new moon, he meant that ordinary mana—in other words, a human’s vitality—would be sucked away.
By saying not to come on the full moon, he meant that showering in black mana was not particularly good for one’s health—unless one was a black mage—so she should keep her distance.
‘How do I explain this?’
Wasn’t it far too strange for some ordinary amnesiac homeless mister, not even a magical girl, to say?
If he said it as it was, the best-case scenario was that she would treat him as a strange mister overly immersed in magical girl lore, and if things went poorly, he would be suspected of being a monster.
“My memories are a mess, so I can’t explain it well. But I just have that feeling.”
Raban pulled out his all-purpose solution once more.
Na Ihyeon let out a short laugh.
“Mister. Tomorrow morning, go to Hikarius City Hall.”
She decided to continue treating him as a homeless man.
Raban felt bitter. To think that his lofty advice—once sought by a Grand Duke of the Demon Realm, who had wanted to take him in as a strategist—would be treated like this.
“…Fine.”
But what could he do? The person who had fed him and the owner of the house right now was that silver-haired kid. He had to obey the categorical imperative of the great landlord.
“Thanks for the meal. I’ll be getting up now.”
“Eh? What are you talking about? Mister, if you sleep outside in this weather, your mouth’ll freeze crooked, you know? There are lots of rooms here, so just go into any decent one and sleep for today.”
“Aren’t you way too unguarded around someone you don’t know?”
“This is a pretty expensive house, so every room has security devices. And if you were really a bad person, you wouldn’t ask something like that.”
The greatest reason for her trust was Na Ihyeon’s ability as a magical girl. Magical girls could, to some degree, perceive the negative thoughts or malice contained within people. After all, it was their duty to purify the wicked hearts that served as the source of monsters’ power.
That amnesiac homeless mister might have had some serious stress built up inside him, but she could not see any evil intent. The mister with ink-black hair stroked his chin for a moment, then finally nodded.
“Fine. I’ll borrow your eaves for a while. One thing I’ve learned after sleeping rough for a few days is that I seem to wake up early. Don’t be surprised if I’m gone in the morning.”
“Hmph, you’ve got better lifestyle habits than I expected!”
***
“Huh? Mister, why are you here?”
“Well. It just happened that way.”
Na Ihyeon met the mister again at high school!
***
Raban scratched his head. No matter how he thought about it, something was strange.
He had assumed that the group of people he was tentatively calling the Mascot Gang had their hands in the government as well. Buildings were being smashed every night and road pavement was getting wrecked, yet the government did nothing because it all got magically sparkly-restored?
Didn’t that make no sense?
Until now, he had deliberately avoided approaching City Hall. If that place was the forward base of the dictatorial Mascot Gang controlling Hikarius’s mana, then there could be no deadlier death trap.
What if he tried to infiltrate it for no reason and triggered a barrier?
The merciless magical girls’ storm-like waves of mana would tear his entire body to shreds. The two magical girls looked as though they effectively had infinite mana.
He was confident he could defeat beings close to spirits, like the Four Heavenly Kings, with various tricks of his own, but magical girls who purely erased their opponents with output were a different story.
‘Techniques only work when you’re in the same weight class.’
Every time he saw those two use their finishing moves, his knees nearly gave out. He couldn’t even guess how many pieces his body would be split into if he took one of those.
Seventeen pieces might be too much, but he was confident he could endure up to sixteen; still, there was no need to deliberately test the danger. And so, for the past few days, he had been avoiding City Hall.
But last night, the kind student named Na Ihyeon had given him a hint for approaching City Hall. If he had a pretext such as a rehabilitation program, he could scout the interior fairly openly!
As soon as morning broke, Raban went to City Hall and immediately filled out an application for a rehabilitation program.
When the civil servant saw “no memory due to a magical disaster” written in his personal information, they immediately sent him up to the suspicious third floor. As soon as he went through a strangely halfhearted round of questions and answers with the official in charge at the Magical Disaster Support Office on the third floor—
“They sent me to Lux Tiera High School. As an on-campus sanitation worker and security guard, apparently?”
It was a conclusion he could not understand at all.
***
“Yes, Principal. We sent him there again this time. But is it really all right to keep handling things this way?”
“Of course it is. Originally, most of these sudden appearances of ‘amnesiacs’ and the like are either monsters attempting an infiltration operation to find the magical girls, monsters who actually lost their memories in the process, monsters who later have a change of heart and sacrifice themselves for the magical girls, or people who start in the position of mysterious transfer student and then become new magical girls. That’s what the statistics say.”
In fact, the last mysterious transfer student had been Salamandine, one of the Four Heavenly Kings of the Ivory Tower. With certainty, the person in charge at the school whispered to the person in charge at City Hall.
Mofu mofu.
Soon after, the City Hall official replied as well.
Mofu mofu.
Before long, a new report would be sent up to the Fairy Kingdom, and a mysterious man would be added to the list of persons of interest.