After burying Raban underground, Inian stopped by a nearby café, savored a slice of cake and some black tea, then bought a triangle gimbap and returned.
All at once, a hand thrust up from beneath the earth. Had it been accompanied by thunder on a stormy night, the scene would have seemed far more befitting of a black mage, but for now it was a pleasant afternoon, and the sun had not even fully set.
“You goddamn bastard, I thought I was really going to die!”
Raban, who had somehow clawed his way up through the dirt with both arms and legs, brushed himself off and grumbled.
“What nonsense are you spouting? I know full well that if I leave you stuck down there, you’ll recover on your own by devouring microorganisms.”
As soon as Raban’s condition had improved enough for him to start babbling nonsense again, Inian tossed him the triangle gimbap.
“Oh.”
Raban, who had returned from splashing around on the banks of the Sanzu River, crammed the triangle gimbap into his mouth. A ghost who ate before dying had a fine complexion, after all, and a black mage had both the duty and the right to eat properly in order to maintain his dignity.
“There’s no cola. As expected of a grand duke who’s only ever lived being waited on hand and foot. You’ve got no sense for looking after others!”
“Do you wish to die?”
Having casually taken a jab at the Grand Duke of the Demon Realm’s sense of privilege as if it were part of his daily routine, Raban stretched. Today’s work was done.
“We’ll decide our next move after seeing what Charles and those Ochanja bastards do. Let’s rest a bit now. We worked way too much.”
Quite naturally, Raban proposed a temporary disbanding. He knew Inian had gone off to eat dessert at a café while waiting for him to recover, but so much had happened today, so she ought to go rest some more.
“There are weirdly a lot of shops selling sweet things around here, aren’t there? If we go home at the same time, the mascots might get suspicious, so go on a little gourmet tour and come back later.”
The Grand Duke of the Demon Realm did not fall for the black mage’s petty trick.
“Answer me properly. How much mana evaporated when you blew up the predatory ecosystem?”
“...Can I exercise my right to remain silent?”
“Argh, and I entrusted my hopes of returning home to this!”
The moment he heard Inian’s irritation, Raban leapt with all his might. After spinning once in midair, he landed with both arms as a support and planted his face into the ground. Both legs stuck up as if to touch the sky. Feeling a strange sense of disgust at that bizarre deep-bow posture, Inian turned her head away.
“Please wait, Your Grace! This humble servant still has a secret plan!”
“Damn it, what secret plan?”
“Now that things have come to this, Charles will ultimately end up waging all-out war against the magical girls.”
In truth, there were other possibilities. For instance, the route where he might say, “Bah, beating the magical girls of this generation is hopeless!” and attempt to go into hiding. But Raban was not worried.
“Even if Charles avoids battle, I have a scheme to force the two sides into a situation where they have no choice but to fight! If the conflict between them intensifies, Na I-hyeon will have to defeat her uncle with her own hands.”
“Before you left the house, didn’t you say there was still no conclusive proof that Magi Black was Na I-hyeon?”
“Not at all. How could a mere commoner like myself ever keep pace with Your Grace’s true insight? Na I-hyeon is most certainly Magi Black.”
“...Let’s say that’s true. After you make the two of them fight, what will you do?”
Unlike usual, Raban set aside all his various nonsense. It was not because he was cowed by Inian’s anger, but because Raban himself was feeling an immense sense of crisis.
His antagonism with Charles was not a concern. If he used the stratagem of killing with a borrowed knife by properly mobilizing the magical girls, as he had today, he could deal with it easily enough.
The real problem was the theory that even Raban himself could no longer deny: Na I-hyeon equaled Magi Black.
“I trust your plan is not to deepen the darkness in her heart by making her send Charles to his grave with her own hands. You must remember that her mental fortitude is absurdly, ridiculously solid.”
“Of course, I have engraved Your Grace’s advice upon this body. I have not yet abandoned the negative thought mining plan, but it would not do to rely solely on that.”
Raban’s words flowed quite smoothly. If words were pouring out of him this fluently, it meant there was a Plan B in his head to replace the negative thought mining plan that had just gone to ruin.
Raban’s intellect could not be trusted, but the desperate flailing he showed when driven into a corner could be. Inian silently waited for Raban to continue.
“However, for the sake of the new plan as well, we need to improve our trust with the magical girls. More specifically, until we find out the commuting routes used by the mascot faction that controls Luxtierra High School!”
“...?”
At an opening that was the complete opposite of his previous plan, Inian tilted her head. Had Raban not been secretly hiding and continuing his negative thought mining because he did not want to get entangled with the magical girls, or with the mascots who dominated Hikarius from behind them?
“In the current situation, where my identity as an ordinary civilian has inevitably drawn the mascots’ attention, there is a high chance that focusing solely on negative thought mining will look rather suspicious.”
It was only natural. The counseling environment Raban had originally assumed was a one-on-one deathmatch with Na I-hyeon, but the current magical girl counseling was effectively a two-on-one handicap match.
If he tried to shake Na I-hyeon’s mentality with crafty words, he might be caught by the substitute player outside, who would say, “Got you now, you bastard,” expose his suspicious plot, and have him buried underground.
Therefore, he would change his way of thinking.
“Magical girls receive mana through mascots, and that supply is nearly infinite.”
“Is... that so?”
“We build trust until the decisive moment. To the point where the mascots say, ‘Hey, Mr. Ra, we’re going to the Fairy Kingdom, so keep an eye on the school for us!’”
And “trust” was the core of the operation.
“A situation where the magical girls and Charles are locked in an unavoidable decisive battle. The full strength of both sides will be focused on that final confrontation.”
And at that very moment.
“We infiltrate the mascot faction’s stronghold and rob them of their mana!”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“No! I’m perfectly sane!”
Raban answered Inian’s shock with even greater vigor.
“Listen carefully. The possibility of mining negative thoughts has drilled through the bottom of the Demon Realm and kept going down, so we have to gather mana by any means necessary. At the same time, we need to avoid the mascots’ notice. If you combine those two conditions?”
They had to gather the mana needed for dimensional travel in as few attempts as possible. Ideally, they would gather all the mana in a single try.
“And the faction in this world with the most mana is those mascot bastards. We have to aim for an opportunity where, if we succeed just once, just once, we can immediately leave this world!”
“Wasn’t your usual theory that a black mage who aims to get rich quick ends up dead?!”
“Damn it! We’re already one step away from the Sanzu River right now!”
Raban rolled around, saying it was not as if he wanted to be doing this either. At that ugly sight, Inian’s mind snapped into clarity. Before debating the plan’s risks, she first had to examine whether they even had the ability to attempt it.
“First of all, do you have a way to get to the mascot faction’s secret base, this Fairy Kingdom or whatever?”
“Hey. The thing I spent the most time doing after falling into the Demon Realm was searching for dimensional rifts.”
The ripples left behind by demons traveling between worlds for contracts. Whenever Raban saw traces like that, his eyes would roll back and he would rush toward them, wondering if perhaps they contained a clue leading back to his home world.
“I caught on to the fact that the mascots have a connection line to another dimension. If I chat with the magical girls, the mascots will show up too, so if I repeatedly observe them up close, I should be able to find the proper dimensional coordinates.”
Raban’s eyes had gone mad. They were always mad, but the contents were usually resignation and absurdity; right now, they were filled with lunacy. Inian, who could see the larger board, had a duty to stop her contractor’s insane act.
‘...No, actually, I don’t have that duty.’
In ordinary cases, the purpose of a contract presided over by a demon was to incite the contractor’s madness and seize their soul. Naturally, demons possessed secret arts for measuring the mental state of their contractors.
Lamashut Holdings had changed its business direction considerably after Inian’s predecessor got married, but that did not mean the casebooks of incidents and accidents accumulated before then, or their long-standing expertise, had gone anywhere.
In the eyes of Inian, who had inherited studies in kingship, management, human nature, and so on from her predecessor, the current Raban was the very picture of a type of human who dug himself into a hole and perished alone.
‘With the explosive power he has when driven into a corner, he might actually be able to burglarize the Fairy Kingdom while no one’s home, but...!’
Even so, she had to stop him.
In ordinary circumstances, the contractor’s failure would become the demon’s gain, but in this world, Raban and she were bound by the same fate.
“Krururuk... The mascots’ magical slush fund! I can’t resist!”
“The idea is good.”
“Oh!”
“But why are you trying to realize that idea in the most difficult way possible?”
“Huh?”
Raban could not understand Inian’s words. Aside from the Fairy Kingdom, what faction was there whose mana they could rob?
Was this not a world where no one could obtain magic without going through the Big Mascot Mother Fairy, who monopolized magical technology?
“Isn’t there someone in such a world who has obtained magic?”
“...Charles?”
The mana needed to maintain and repair the Ochanja. The overwhelming mana sufficient to maintain soul fragments and use them to cause abnormal weather phenomena.
Without a doubt, Charles had to have a magical slush fund as well.
If there had been a place on the surface of the earth where that much dark mana was concentrated, the mascot faction would have wiped it out, so it must be hidden somewhere well disguised. Considering the convenience of access, it was highly likely to be another world similar to the Fairy Kingdom.
And if the magical girls and Charles fought a decisive battle, the final battlefield would become Charles’s stronghold. If the mascots set their minds to expelling a black mage, they would not try to leave future trouble behind. Charles, in turn, would continue his desperate resistance.
What they had to aim for was the chaos of the final battle.
“The important thing is that we must find out the location of Charles’s stronghold, which we intend to rob.”
This was where the Ivory Tower came in. If Raban induced conflict between Charles and the magical girls, then judging by today’s incident, the Ivory Tower would certainly side with the magical girls. The mascots, too, would not refuse their assistance.
If the Ivory Tower wanted a certain victory, they would ask Inian to fight alongside them. Of course...
“This is only possible if I build enough trust that they believe I will not side with Charles. Judging by the fact that they did not call me in until the very end of today’s battle, it seems I have not built that much trust yet. So this is what we will do from now on.”
Inian would do so in the Ivory Tower. Raban would do so in the counseling room.
Each would build trust with the faction they had infiltrated, until they reached the point where information about the battlefield those people intended to enter would be shared with them.
“So, to the point where they’ll say in front of me, ‘Teach, this might be our final battle. So please watch over us... Transform!’?”
It was an oddly specific line. Since Raban seemed to have understood what she meant, Inian nodded.
“If even one of us builds the necessary trust and obtains information about Charles’s stronghold, which will become the stage of the final battle.”
“We take advantage of the chaos of battle to infiltrate and seize every one of Charles’s nominee accounts...”
It was a plan that used everyone’s trust, but the one who would suffer harm was not those who had built that trust, but Charles.
What a utilitarian result it was.
“Is this not a truly rational strategy?”
This was the Grand Duke’s intrigue.