Charles set to work calmly. In Hikarius, it was impossible for a black magician to overwhelm a magical girl in a frontal war.
There remained the vestiges of old attempts to overcome that limitation—the livestock he had left to graze—but they had now been deployed to block Na Ihyeon.
The Ochanja, having lost their avatars, were incapable of immediate recovery.
Therefore, the only sacrificial chip he could use at once was Charles himself.
Mana began to condense at the core of the storm demon. It was no ordinary scale. The mere inhalation (吸氣) of mana unleashed a roar like a beast’s howl.
Thunder gathered. Along with the violet lightning produced within the demon, white lightning came spearing down from the sky.
A rain of lightning flowed along the ribbons.
Had it been violet lightning of black magic, it would have canceled out against the purification magic engraved into the ribbons. But the white lightning created through nature was fully capable of burning a magical girl’s ribbons.
The most lethal attack that had flown in to sever the demon came to nothing. Schnee once again unfurled and swung her ribbon knots, but she had ended up allowing the demon a margin to act.
The lightning left after burning the ribbons converged upon the demon once more.
Inian frowned. Mana condensed to that degree acted as a kind of barrier in and of itself. Even if she drove in a Ramashtu Javelin, she could not guarantee an instant kill.
If these were signs that he intended to use a finishing move against Magi White, it would be more reasonable to aim for the opening immediately after the attack.
‘But this fight started so Magi White wouldn’t die.’
Was there no choice but to reveal herself and divert his attention?
Faced with that terrifying mana, White instead hardened her resolve. An evil being so wicked that even a shadow mage would oppose it. Here and now, she had to cut it down!
“Uh, don’t tell me?!”
While the magical girl and the Archduke of the Demon Realm were both barking up the wrong tree, only Raban realized what Charles was truly thinking.
***
At Raban’s shout, Inian looked back at the most petty black magician she knew.
“That bastard, don’t tell me he’s trying to use a Black Magic Secret Art!”
“There is a secret art that can overturn this situation?”
Inian became wary of the vile and wicked final spell Charles was preparing. A technique even she, an Archduke of the Demon Realm, could not grasp, and one that Raban would call a “secret art”!
“The Black Magic Secret Art: ‘If I Die, That’s the End of It’…!”
“…What?”
“He fights so damn dirty and cowardly!”
Whether because of Raban’s lavish praise, or because of that utterly insane-sounding secret art, Inian’s expression hardened. Surely Raban was the only black magician who would treat such a technique as a secret art.
“I’m serious. That thing is trying to self-destruct right now!”
“So it is a spell meant to eliminate White even at the cost of consuming that avatar?”
“Huh? No? Why would he do that? The goal is to die.”
For Inian, who lacked black-magic sensibilities, Raban, the number-one instructor in black-magic mindset, began summarizing the key points.
“Now, Charles first spread himself throughout this entire space, and he tried to use that to destroy Magi White.”
But that plan had been ruined by Raban’s intrusion. Then what remained?
“His mana-transformed soul is being torn apart and devoured by the Predatory Ecosystem, and even that storm-cloud man, which is packed densely enough that it can’t be digested right away, will get cut up nicely by White and then I’ll catch and eat it from below.”
Judging by Charles’s state, he did seem to possess quite a number of manipulable spirit bodies. From a black magician’s perspective, it made no sense to throw his entire soul into a terrifying battlefield where one wrong move could make him drop dead from a magical girl’s finishing move.
‘He must have learned some secret art for dividing his soul somewhere.’
Thus, even if they completely devoured Charles’s clone here, it would be difficult to achieve Charles’s eternal annihilation (永滅).
But Raban had known of this possibility from the start, and had prepared to eradicate Charles anyway.
Because if Charles ended up donating every spirit body into which he had poured that level of power to someone else, his main body would take a huge blow as well.
If Raban himself had suffered something similar, it would have been a loss that sent him sobbing in a corner for months.
Less because of the damage he himself had taken, and more because someone else had profited from it.
That was why Charles was preparing If I Die, That’s the End of It.
“To put it in metaphorical terms, it’s like a general withdrawing from war destroying the supplies left behind. There are cases where burning everything is more beneficial to your side than letting the enemy seize and use it.”
“…Since he has other spirit bodies left even if this one is destroyed, he means to enact scorched-earth tactics?”
“That’s too elegant. Hm.”
Having thought of the perfect summary, Raban clapped his hands and shouted.
“This is it. ‘You think you’re going to eat my mana raw?’”
Absolutely! Not happening!
After shouting with all his might, Raban noticed that Inian’s expression had not wavered and voiced his疑 question.
“Hey, shouldn’t you be getting desperate around now? Isn’t this the timing where you urge me to do something before he runs away?”
“When someone like you starts babbling on and on, it is the accepted academic consensus that you are plotting something behind the scenes.”
“Tch, you know me too well. My method is this.”
He says I can’t eat it raw?
Fine. I’ll cook it first.
***
What, in essence, is black magic?
In Raban’s opinion, the essence of black magic was “eating it raw.”
To eat it raw.
Minimize the effort I put in, and maximize the result I take away. That was the way of thinking underlying black magic.
Setting aside extreme exceptions, magic was an act of altering reality in exchange for mana. Black magic was the magical tax evasion of rational economic agents who begrudged even the bare minimum of mana required to change reality.
Therefore, it was only natural that the development of black magic would converge toward “shifting the burden I ought to bear onto others.”
Black magic was often classified according to the methodology of “how, specifically, that transfer of responsibility for the burden is carried out.”
This was also why curses (呪術), or Witchcraft, commonly used by other magicians as well, were classified as black magic. Techniques that used herbs or bizarre rituals to actualize superstitious beliefs.
Their principle was to minimize the resources the magician himself expended by using the power of traditions widely spread among a specific group, along with catalysts. Hence, black magic.
From there, once one reached a mental state of “Ah, picking herbs is a pain, holding rituals is a pain, and looking through old books is even more of a pain,” one tended to put a hand to sorcery (妖術).
Also called Hexes, the totality of ominous and dank spells. The key point of sorcery was the mindset of “I will push off every burden except my own determination to use magic.”
The profound wisdom of human sacrifice, including techniques for obtaining negative thoughts by torturing others, belonged here. If summarized in a single word, it would be sacrifice (祭物).
But from here, Raban came up with an idea that was somewhat unhinged.
‘Finding someone else to torment is a pain too. What do I do?’
‘Aha, then I just have to torment myself!’
It was a spectacular conclusion that contradicted the essence of sorcery, but this petty black magician, who had found even obtaining sacrifices bothersome, tore sorcery apart and revised it until he finally succeeded in completing the bizarre concept of self-immolation as a form of magic.
However, self-immolation was not the only function of the Predatory Ecosystem.
Just as the name “Ecosystem” suggested, he could fashion countless living creatures from Raban himself as material. In other words, he could produce an army of innumerable familiars.
And the appearance and functions of those familiars could be customized based on the countless Demon Realm creatures Raban himself had devoured.
As Raban had once reflected, the Demon Realm was such a vicious place that even the plants were awful. If they grew in truly barren environments, there were even cases where, despite being plants, they grew into stone-eating (食石) creatures that chewed even rocks in pursuit of magic crystals.
Of course, even such creatures preferred humans they could simply snatch with their leaves over magic crystals whose roots they had to grope around to find, but that was not important right now.
The key point was that the function of digesting stones imbued with mana also lay dormant within the Predatory Ecosystem.
And beside Raban stood Inian.
“Pour all the mana you’ve compressed so far into your Evil Eye.”
Charles had resolved to dispose of his mana perfectly. Even if she fired the Ramashtu Javelin Overload she had originally intended to use, he would shout, “Why, thank you,” and use the Ramashtu Javelin as propulsion to accelerate the disposal process even further.
But with the petrifying Evil Eye, the story was different. An archduke’s Evil Eye could interfere with concepts both tangible and intangible.
If the Evil Eye activated at the very moment the storm demon began to collapse, but before that collapse spread through its entire body, Charles would have already abandoned control of the demon and would be unable to clean up afterward.
“Now, if you tell White it’s dangerous and she should fall back, her affection rating toward the mysterious helper will rise at the same time.”
Then, once the situation was perfectly safe, all they had to do was deliciously eat the mana left behind.
Inian was appalled by the thinking of a black magician whose head was filled with nothing but the idea of tearing into a corpse, but soon realized that the “foodstuffs” he had originally eaten in the Demon Realm must have looked far worse than a petrified Charles Hamburg steak, and closed her mouth.
Every single one of those dreadful functions composing the Predatory Ecosystem had originated from living creatures Raban had personally torn into and devoured.
“Now then, let’s get dinner ready!”