After hearing Raban’s heartfelt—and, for some reason, almost frantic—consolation, Shune fell silent with an indescribable heaviness in her chest. A moment later, she tilted her head.
‘Huh? Just now…’
“Um. Teacher. What did you just call me…?”
“Ah.”
Raban was flustered. The topic Shune had brought up had made him chew over his past failures, and in the process, a slip of the tongue had popped out unconsciously. Then, while throwing out this and that in an attempt to patch it up, his tongue had once again declared its escape from the management and supervision of his brain.
‘I-It’s fine. I can fix this!’
This was not one of the empty boasts Raban usually made as a form of self-deluding victory. After all, it was clear that Raban himself had regarded Shune as a magical girl.
That was the very reason this “counseling” had begun in the first place. Hadn’t the mascot bitten on the bait he had thrown out—“Ah, Lee Hyeon’s friend is a magical girl!”—and left him in charge of the outsourced human-resources management of magical girls?
In other words, the only thing Raban needed to explain here was how he had realized that White was Shune.
‘There are plenty of ways to talk my way around that!’
At times like this, brazening it out was actually helpful.
“Shall we pretend that conversation just now never happened and start over from one minute ago?”
Raban shrugged with considerable composure. The gesture was exaggerated no matter how one looked at it, and it had the effect of making the situation seem much more farcical.
Shune recalled Ihyeon’s cry from the other day. The noisy, amusing commotion that had begun with, “Mister found out!”
As an extension of that, it wasn’t strange for her own name to come up here. She was merely curious how he had become certain it was her, even if the odds had been one in two.
“How did you know?”
“Tsk. Are you really going to render my efforts to protect a student’s personal affairs meaningless like this?”
Even as Raban shrugged, he pulled out the most useful of the reasons he had prepared.
“First of all, Head Class President.”
“…That isn’t an official position. It’s a nickname. A rather mischievous one.”
“Well. Your friends may have been teasing, but I thought there was respect mixed in too. Anyway.”
Raban pointed toward the door of the inner room. More precisely, it was a gesture toward Na Ihyeon beyond that door.
“As far as I know, there’s only one student at Lux Tiera High School who uses honorific speech even with her friends, and who unfailingly calls someone ‘Teacher’ when everyone else just casually calls him ‘teach’ or ‘mister.’”
Shune turned her head away in embarrassment. Thinking it over, her manner of speech was an exceedingly obvious trait.
Salamandine’s way of thinking was simple to begin with, and when fighting as a magical girl, her tone naturally became much fiercer than when she was meekly acting as class president at school, so she had avoided being found out, but…
‘So it really does stand out this much to someone whose job is watching students.’
A fresh sense of admiration came over Shune. To borrow Ihyeon’s words, he was “the mister who always says everything’s a pain, but is actually the most diligent of all.” It was clear that he really did observe each individual student who came to the counseling room with care.
Seeing Shune’s expression, Raban realized that she had more or less accepted his explanation. Now all he had to do was bury her suspicions completely.
“Don’t worry. I won’t act like I know at school, just like I haven’t until now. Hinting at a secret disclosed by a client goes against a counselor’s professional ethics…. No, I’m not actually a counselor. Anyway, it’s something I shouldn’t do.”
When Shune tried to stop him, saying there was no need to go that far, Raban wrapped up the day’s counseling with a joke: “Come to think of it, you don’t have any reason to meet me in the first place!”
After the two of them left, Raban finished tidying the counseling room and stretched.
At last, he could go home in peace.
***
The school, wrapped in dim night, had a markedly different atmosphere from daytime. As they walked along the dark path leading to the main gate, Shune murmured,
“Teacher was even warmer than I expected.”
“Hm? Mister was?”
Shune nodded. He seemed to watch over each student more attentively than she had thought.
“Ahh. Well, he does give off the impression that he’s really easygoing and kind of lives however he wants, but he has a thoughtful side.”
Na Ihyeon mainly felt that when he handed out mugwort rice cakes. He would bring them divided by the ratio of mugwort they contained and the degree to which their distinctive bitter taste came through, so that the kids could choose according to their preferences.
It had been pretty funny to see him dejected when the kids reacted with, “Huh? Teacher, who eats mugwort rice cakes these days?” Even the kids who said that ended up picking up one or two, then got hooked on dipping them in things like sugar or condensed-milk buttercream.
The next time he steamed mugwort rice cakes and brought them in, the ratio of bitter ones had changed subtly. It was a ratio adjusted to match the number of students who liked bitter flavors and the number who liked sweet ones.
“I wonder what someone like that did at Naju Pharmaceutical….”
This time, it was not a slip of the tongue. Na Ihyeon also knew that Shune had been a victim of Naju Pharmaceutical, and their relationship was not one that would turn awkward over a sentence of this degree.
So Na Ihyeon merely nodded. In truth, she too had been curious for some time. Just what had Mister done at Naju Pharmaceutical?
Had he really been a “bad adult,” as he blamed himself for being?
‘I hope he wasn’t.’
A small wish that the plain, good-natured mister had simply been a kind person.
As the two of them exchanged remarks about Raban, they eventually realized one fact.
“Wait, Shune. Weren’t you in Naju Pharmaceutical’s special management ward…?”
“Ihyeon, you don’t remember seeing Teacher either?”
Given the circumstances, it was clear that Raban had held a key position at Naju Pharmaceutical. He must have been close enough to the Na family to come into contact with Naju Pharmaceutical’s hidden side.
And yet, even if it had been when she was young, Na Ihyeon had no memory of anyone like Raban.
The same was true for Shune. Even though personnel had frequently come and gone from Naju Pharmaceutical’s special management ward, where she had been hospitalized, to check the progress of the experiments.
The two looked at each other with puzzled expressions, and eventually came up with an explanation that was common sense by magical girl standards.
“They say it’s not uncommon for the appearances of people caught up in magical disasters to change. I heard that among magical girls outside Hikarious, there’s even someone who was originally a man, but became a woman after going through a magical disaster.”
“True. There’s no guarantee he looked the same as he does now.”
Their friendlike idle chatter continued until they reached the fork in the road.
With the pleasant premonition that tomorrow would somehow be an even livelier day than today, the two waved goodbye to each other.
***
Papirun could not see the two of them off today.
There was something more urgent at hand.
[What happened to Charles, mofu?]
[We are tracking him based on the Luncheoners’ earlier statement claiming responsibility, but there have been no clear results, mofu.]
[There has also been no additional communication or demands from the Luncheoners’ side, mofu. Judging from Magi Black’s testimony, it is highly likely that the Ivory Tower’s defection from them frustrated the Luncheoners’ grand strategy, mofu.]
[Ah!]
In the midst of repeated meetings on retrieving Charles and countermeasures against the Luncheoners, one guardian fairy let out a cry.
[We’ve picked up Charles’s signal!]
The fairy had forgotten to attach the mofu refrain, but no one reproached them. The matter truly was that urgent.
[Location: the front gate of Lux Tiera High School! His vital signs are in serious danger, mofu…!]
The guardian fairies immediately deployed and secured Charles.
Charles testified that he had “barely escaped by taking advantage of the Luncheoners’ confusion,” and then promptly collapsed.
Traces of pain no ordinary person could endure, including the loss of multiple fingers. The mascots immediately decided to isolate him in the recovery room.
The magical recovery room, which looked like an ordinary infirmary at first glance, was equipped with tools for precise black-magic diagnosis. Whether it was mascots or magical girls, if they were covered in black mana, measures such as quarantine had to be taken.
In other words, if Charles was the black mage who had manipulated the Luncheoners from behind the scenes, this was also the place best equipped to determine it.
As they placed Charles into an isolation capsule meant for observing mascots at risk of going berserk, the mascots hurriedly activated the scanner.
Slowly, the black mana detector began to operate.
***
Charles judged the guardian fairies’ response to be “by the book.” Despite the kidnapping drama he had staged using the Luncheoners, they had not overlooked the possibility that he himself was the true culprit.
But that was precisely the problem. To determine whether he was a black mage, ordinary visual observation would not suffice; a more precise examination was necessary.
And now that Naju Pharmaceutical was gone, the only facility within Hikarious capable of detecting black mana existed at Lux Tiera High School.
Thus, it was essential that Charles’s body be brought inside the high school.
To the place where the door leading to the Fairy Kingdom was located, along the guardian fairies’ commute.
Charles separated his body and soul the moment he finished the testimony he had intended for the fairies to hear. For that reason, his fainting had been perfectly natural.
The eyes of his soul swept over the interior of Lux Tiera High School. The flow of mana within the school, which had been blocked from sight by the barrier outside, now appeared much clearer.
The cunning fairies had hidden the gate to the kingdom with great skill, but Charles was calm.
Most delightfully, the fairies had brought Leshef’s cast-off shell into the kingdom in order to study it.
Using the shell as a landmark, Charles found the door leading to the kingdom. The inactive door, which had not been charged with mana, could for now be sensed only as a small ripple.
If sufficient mana were poured into that ripple, a strange door made only of a shining outline would appear, as though golden thread had embroidered the air.
Step through the inside of that doorframe without a door, and one would arrive in the Fairy Kingdom.
To those unaware of the kingdom’s true nature, its appearance would likely call to mind a fantastical world from a fairy tale, and the mysterious gateway leading to it.
Charles, however, thought not of a fairy tale, but of a sculpture from an old era. A work by Rodin depicting a scene of hell, where The Thinker watched over human figures of ruin and decadence.
With this, the preparations to discern the shadow mage’s identity were complete.
***
“What the hell kind of insane shit did this crazy bastard do during counseling yesterday?”
“No.”
Raban felt wronged.
Why was he being held responsible for Lux Tiera High School turning into a dungeon after lunch?