“Is this really right?”
Swish, swish. As Raban swept the area with a broom, he thought to himself. Lux Tiera High School’s employee benefits were better than he’d expected.
Specifically, the food was good.
Good enough that, for a moment, he felt the urge to just settle down and live in this world.
The place he had drifted into was quite similar to his original world, aside from the fact that people’s minds were somewhat loose and magical girls existed. He could live while enjoying most of the blessings of modern civilization that he had wanted.
“But the things I wanted aren’t here in their proper form.”
There was the next volume of a novel he still hadn’t read. There was the sequel to a movie he had been looking forward to. Even an old boys’ manga that had ended long ago had magnificently entered its second part. Far too many expectations remained back in his original world.
There were probably similar stories in this world as well. But the very stories Raban himself was waiting for did not exist here.
Raban resolved that, as expected, he would live as quietly as a dead mouse, cling desperately to gathering mana, and force a dimensional transfer.
“That aside.”
This school really was strange.
Pretending not to notice the gazes he felt from every corner of the school, Raban continued cleaning.
***
The fairies, using invisibility magic, watched Raban waving his broom about. As the smile hanging on his lips gradually deepened, one fairy opened his mouth suspiciously.
[Big Brother, that guy’s smiling, mofu. Smiling while working on a weekday afternoon—isn’t he a monster, mofu?]
[It’s because today is Wednesday, mofu. No-leftovers day. When the side dishes are good, his face lights up, and when he sees fried yellow croaker or braised half-dried pollock, he looks like death warmed over, mofu.]
[…Doesn’t our school use a fairly well-vetted company, mofu?]
[The other day, one of the cooks was used as a monster host body, so she’s recuperating, mofu. Until that happened, even the fried yellow croaker came out really well.]
“What the hell is this, seriously…”
Raban’s spine chilled for no reason. He could not catch them with his eyes or hear them with his ears, but there was definitely something formed from an excessive concentration of mana existing all over this school.
If mana had dwelled in some special symbol like an old tree or a giant stone, he might have simply accepted it. But he could sense that these clumps of mana were moving with clear self-awareness.
They always maintained a fixed distance, never leaving a range from which they could observe his every movement.
If this were the other dimension he had drifted into, they would have been a race called something like “spirits.” Suspicious spirits watching him while hiding themselves.
“So they really are mascots?”
Raban had formed various hypotheses about the mascot faction. The one Raban himself considered most persuasive was that the mascots were a type of spirit, and that whatever granted magical girls their power was an existence corresponding to a Spirit King.
The reason was simple. The ability to restore a city’s destruction in an instant, and the barrier spread across the entire city. If there was an existence capable of affecting such a vast range and specializing in regeneration and restoration, it was most likely a spirit.
“Something like the Spirit King dwelling in Hikarious?”
If the true identity of the mascot faction really was a Spirit King and the spirits under its command, then he could lower his guard another notch.
Spirits were, in principle, neutral as long as one did not harm the natural objects they dwelled in…
“But these bastards aren’t neutral anymore, are they?”
He was not talking about them conscripting magical girls to oppose the monsters. Monsters were beings capable of threatening Hikarious, so it was only natural for the spirits to respond.
The reason Raban was bewildered was City Hall.
City Hall had immediately thrown him into Lux Tiera High School, and this high school was a place under the surveillance of the mascot faction.
City Hall’s decision was likely the result of the mascot faction’s desire to screen a suspicious individual.
In other words, the mascot faction had already placed City Hall under its influence. It meant they effectively enjoyed the power to rule the city.
“They’re crazier spirits than I thought.”
A Big Brother Spirit King and his subordinates, controlling the city from the shadows and monitoring dissidents. How terrifying.
Raban pondered a way to recharge his mana while avoiding the mad spirits.
“The safest way really was to suck the monsters dry.”
Perhaps he had been unlucky, but he had been caught by the magical girls. The only one at the scene right then had been Magi White, but considering the nature of the Big Brother mascots, they had probably long since flagged him as a suspicious guy wandering around.
“What should I do?”
He could fool the gazes watching him. After mastering black magic, he had become capable of treating his body as a colony, after all. There was a reason he was confident he could survive even if his body were divided into sixteen pieces.
The problem was that even if he split his body like that and began absorbing mana, if the magical girls caught him…
“Hm? Wait a second.”
The main component of the mana he extracted from monsters was humanity’s negative thoughts. And this was a school.
The seething emotions of adolescence were well suited for producing negative thoughts.
“If it’s a school, there should be something like a counseling office.”
If things went well.
He might be able to simply rest at the school for a few years and then return home!
***
“Salamandine. What are you talking about?”
“I said I have to go back to school!”
Sargasso clutched the back of his neck. He could not even bring himself to speak.
“…Was your identity not already discovered by a magical girl?”
Grata of Earth voiced Sargasso’s question in his stead. During the last school trip, she had unintentionally revealed her identity, fought with a magical girl, and been defeated.
Her identity might not have been discovered by the ordinary people of Lux Tiera High School, but the terrifying sentinels of the “Mother Fairy” hiding in that high school had surely already realized the true identity of Dine, whom Salamandine was disguised as—
“Come to think of it, didn’t you put basically no effort into your alias?”
Flapping her green wings, Dynamis tilted her head. Her tail feathers, resembling a peacock’s plumage, fluttered splendidly.
“Your real name is Salamandine, and your alias is Dine? What is that? You would’ve been better off reading the spelling backward or something.”
“Sometimes I wonder if the Mother Fairy’s minions are idiots. How did they not notice that?”
“See, even Grata, who’s this dense, finds it absurd. What were you thinking when you made that alias?”
“Hey!”
Salamandine’s face reddened as she raised her voice. Her flame-like hair burned even more brilliantly.
“Be serious and listen! I’m telling you, a monstrous entity that even the Magilists and those damned mascots find baffling has appeared!”
“Indeed, that is a serious problem. A parasitic creature that feeds on the mana of the monsters we create… Perhaps an abomination from an outer dimension.”
Sargasso nodded heavily. There had been only one reason recently for such a bizarre creature to enter Hikarious.
The resurrection ritual he had presided over. When that ritual, which had attempted to reach into the outer dimension where Lord Eibon resided, failed, it must have summoned something other than Lord Eibon.
“Exactly. That thing. Magi White called it the shadow mage. Anyway, that thing was after our mana dwelling inside the monsters.”
The mana primarily used by members of the Ivory Tower was not the pure mana that originated from nature. That was the Magilists’ share.
What the Ivory Tower reached for was the dark, hot, dank, and sticky mana that surged from the human heart. And the place where that was easiest to harvest was—
“Lux Tiera High School. The people caught up in the Naju Pharmaceuticals disappearance incident are gathered there.”
“A place where free souls, released from the fairies’ shackles, gather. The land where the greatest supporters of our Lord Eibon have come together.”
Dynamis tilted her head. This half-human, half-bird being, the most cynical of the Four Heavenly Kings and one fond of making cutting remarks, asked Sargasso in return.
“Aren’t they people the fairies gathered there? Rather than wording it like they gathered of their own will, wouldn’t another word, like ‘confined,’ be more appropriate?”
“You… impudent thing. Do not interrupt when your elders are speaking!”
“Ah, Sargasso. Stop talking like an old human geezer. Anyway!”
Bang! Salamandine struck the round table and stood, looking around. Grata flinched for no reason at her force, but—
“If I were that thing, I’d go to Lux Tiera, where it’s easiest to secure negative thoughts in Hikarious. Even if it’s just to find and eliminate the shadow mage, it would be best to infiltrate the high school again.”
“Your argument is reasonable enough, but do you think the Mother Fairy’s wicked subordinates will overlook you?”
“I’ll ask through the Magilist kids. They must have felt it while fighting that tree made of hands. That thing is an abomination neither the Magilists nor the Ivory Tower can tolerate.”
***
For that reason, the transfer student Dine Ifrit returned from several days of leave.
“You’re finally back!”
“We were worried about you!”
The reason for Dine’s absence was said to be aftereffects from falling into the sea during the school trip. The public excuse was that she had suffered from severe pneumonia and had only now been discharged. Dine carefully looked around.
“Hehe, please be at ease. I am healthy now.”
Dine greeted the friends around her in a tone completely opposite to the way she spoke as Salamandine. Originally, it had been a persona she adopted to keep the Magilists from discovering her true identity, but since this was likely the way her friends remembered her, using her original way of speaking felt a little awkward.
If anyone approaching her mentioned the name Salamandine, then those people would be the Magilists.
“Though how they found out a magical girl was selected from this place the fairies are so obsessively protecting, I have no idea.”
But before long, she sighed and gave up. The Magilists were strangely thorough about security in matters like this. Instead, she moved in accordance with the real purpose of returning to school.
“If it were me, I’d have seized control of the counseling office right away. We also used to mark students who frequently visited the counseling office as candidates for monster host bodies.”
The tail end of lunch break. Dine began moving carefully.
If that evil bastard had his way, he might have inserted some grotesque parasite into the brain of the kind and gentle counseling teacher and turned them into his subordinate—
“Eek?!”
“Ah, sorry. It was a corner, so I didn’t see you. Are you all right?”
Raban had encountered an unfamiliar girl with red hair!