‘My body won’t move…!?’
Schnee looked around.
No, she tried to. She could not even flick her eyes. Among the monsters created by the Four Heavenly Kings, there had been individuals that used similar attacks, but the pressure currently binding her body was on an entirely different level.
Drawing on the experience of her last battle, she derived a countermeasure. Abilities like this that stopped movement were usually released at the very instant the one who activated them made an attack.
After all, in an overly perfect state of stillness, even the impact delivered by an enemy would not take effect. She had to aim for that instant.
Schnee struggled to catch sight of the enemy that would approach within her limited field of vision, but before long she fell into confusion.
The two Diners who had been attacking her until just moments ago—the mechanical arm and the shadow mouth—were frozen just like she was.
‘It isn’t those two?’
Was there a third Diner? The moment her bewilderment completed itself into a chilling premonition—
Black smoke gathered and took form.
“Excellent reasoning.”
A black, murky human shape. And yet, to attach the word “shadow” to it felt somehow wrong. It was because of the texture of the black smoke that made up its body.
It looked as though storm clouds had clumped together to form a human figure. From within its body, a dark violet radiance flashed and vanished.
It called to mind a storm that brought a thunderstorm in its wake. Schnee Heidel recalled the words that thing had just murmured.
‘Excellent reasoning.’
“That is correct.”
‘It can read my mind…?!’
An answer came before the thought had even fully formed. She sensed a chilling intellect unlike the Four Heavenly Kings of the Ivory Tower, and unlike the vicious Diners.
“Once, I existed within you. Regrettably, you drove me out. But some traces remain. That is the secret of the magic I have just shown you.”
It was something Schnee could not understand. Something like that had been inside her?
Charles quietly read Magi White’s inner thoughts. Truly, she could not even begin to guess his identity. Was it because the existence of that junior—the “Shadow Mage” who had opposed the magical girls back then—had been etched too deeply into her mind?
That black mage, who had easily destroyed the spirit fragment he had planted in Schnee. That refined destruction was proof that the Shadow Mage had gained a deep understanding of black magic.
It was a shame, as expected. If only he had not summoned a demon and provoked the Mother Fairy, they might have been able to join hands now.
In any case, Magi White’s usefulness ended here.
The purification technique Magi White had realized was far too fatal to the Diners, and there was a high chance it would considerably interfere with his future moves. The best conclusion was for her to die in ignorance and become nourishment for Na I-hyeon.
From what he had read in her heart, she had not even approached the truth the guardian fairy was hiding. From the standpoint of someone who had tried to use a magical girl to uncover the enemy’s secrets, it was regrettable.
‘As expected, hope lies with fools rather than those who pride themselves on their own wisdom.’
The living thunderstorm extended a hand made of ink-black cloud. The violet lightning circulating within its body concentrated at the tip of its outstretched hand.
To break the survival guaranteed by the Mother Fairy, sufficient magical power was required, but he would be able to harvest more negative thoughts than he expended.
Crackle. The instant sparks flared from the fingertips of the ink-black cloud—
Its right half melted away and vanished.
“…Huh?”
A dazed word rose from Magi White’s throat. Her panic came only after that. The stasis had been released.
What had melted the ink-black cloud away was, at a glance, an extremely dangerous-looking green liquid, bubbling and boiling. It fell from the sky above.
Magi White turned her head. Storm clouds hung in the sky that had been blue until just moments ago.
But she soon realized. Those were not storm clouds. They were dark, damp, and wet, but different from clouds.
What exuded that sticky, unpleasant heat was the palate of some enormous living creature.
She looked down again. The concrete ruins were nowhere to be seen, and flesh filled with a reddish brown hue covered the space. Ivory spires jutted irregularly through the flesh in sharp points. Naturally, they were teeth. The palate now covering the sky must also be densely studded with teeth just like those.
Something like digestive fluid flowed down the teeth and dissolved the living storm.
The darkness deepened. The heat grew even fiercer.
Slowly, the mouth was closing.
The ink-black cloud whose right half had been devoured restored its form in an instant. Then it fired the lightning condensed at its fingertips toward the zenith.
A deep violet radiance seized her vision. A white night—no. The blindness caused by a violet night. Before Magi White’s sight could recover, the roar of thunder split into dozens of branches and shook her eardrums.
When she opened her eyes again, the palate that had covered the sky was no longer visible.
But the sea of flesh and the columns of teeth occupying the concrete ruins had more than doubled from before.
A familiar voice surged into Magi White’s mind.
“Can you hear me properly now?”
The blood-vessel man appeared before her eyes once more.
Chunks of the sea of flesh, charred black by lightning, clumped together and formed a shape more nightmarish than a nightmare as they murmured.
“Why would I tempt a guardian of rightful order down the path of injustice?”
It was not only chunks of flesh that gathered toward the blood-vessel man. Something like the black smoke that had composed the living storm also converged upon him.
However, the blood-vessel man did not drape himself in that cumulonimbus texture as it was. Though it was closer to rags, he wove it into the form of cloth and wore it over his body.
Thus the blood-vessel man once again assumed the appearance of the first Diner Schnee had ever met—the Shadow Mage.
“You are…!”
“Do not waste unnecessary words or time on me. Gaze upon the enemy you now face.”
Rumble—!
Once again, violet lightning struck. Unlike before, when she had been blinded immediately after being freed from paralysis, this time she was able to brace herself properly.
From the sky down to the earth, violet lightning rained in streaks. At its center, the living storm still remained.
‘No….’
The adjective living was inaccurate. The ghostly aura that thing wore seemed to stand at the opposite pole from vitality.
A fiend.
A fiend of the storm.
From within its body of ink-black clouds, radiance burst forth without cease. Amid the dazzling violence that scorched the sea of flesh, the fiend opened its mouth.
[Well, now… I believed you to be one of ours.]
***
Raban immediately understood what Charles was murmuring.
It probably meant something like, ‘What kind of fucking ambush is this, are you even human?’
“I do not think that is the case, is it?”
“Hmph. There is a realm that an ignorant commoner of the Demon Realm cannot understand. The more vulgar Charles’s manner of speech becomes, the more refined the praise truly is!”
Inian and Raban’s location was unchanged from before. What was now confronting Charles was a composite proliferated mass of Raban’s blood-vessel familiars.
Though he had doped it with quite a lot of magical power.
While Charles approached to take Magi White’s head and wasted time with pointless words, Raban poured all of his remaining magical power into the blood-vessel familiars he had gathered in advance.
Using the know-how he had gained while gnawing away at Reshef’s insides, he swallowed the two immobilized Diners whole.
If the Diners had been in a normal state, they would naturally have warned their master, Charles, but most delightfully, Charles had not attached anything like friend-or-foe identification to his spatial paralysis.
Thus Raban was able to obtain sufficient biomass, and above all, magical power. From there, it was time for a black magic reception.
He imitated all manner of gutter-like organisms he had seen in the other world. An apple tree that tore people apart to make its flowers bloom, acidic slime lighter than air that floated through the atmosphere and melted lungs to kill, and a goddamn rabbit whose teeth were steeped in plague, so that even a graze meant one had to cut off a limb.
He reproduced the essence of every foul and disgusting creature in Raban’s memory. It was black magic that covered the surface with more than enough biomass and temporarily transformed the environment itself.
Predatory Ecosystem.
Once, Raban had been confident that even if being divided into seventeen parts was impossible, he could endure being divided into sixteen. The source of that confidence was none other than Predatory Ecosystem.
Once this magic crossed a certain critical point, even if a wide-area annihilation weapon were used to erase fifteen-sixteenths of its total mass, the remaining one-sixteenth could restore its previous mass in an instant. It was an obscene self-repair ability that had been proven in the decisive battle against a certain archduke.
It was a miracle made possible because that ecosystem itself was connected to Raban’s sensory organs, and because every predatory function possessed by the Predatory Ecosystem would, unless special conditions applied, also take effect on the flesh that composed the ecosystem itself.
Self-digestion was, at first glance, a function close to self-destruction.
However, if all the “pain” of that process—tearing oneself apart, devouring oneself, and digesting oneself—was placed in the hands of a black mage, the story changed.
The pain grasped in Raban’s hands was the very source that made the endless regeneration of the Predatory Ecosystem possible; it was one branch of a black magical perpetual motion achieved by offering up one’s own pain.
It had the minor flaw that the instant one reached the critical point of becoming accustomed to one’s own pain, the perpetual motion would be discarded and efficiency would plummet into the abyss, but for now, that did not matter.
Amid the agony of flesh being ripped apart and marrow being melted, Raban rejoiced.
“Mana (Magical Power)!”
“Unlimited mana (Unlimited Magical Power)!”