“What’s with this one now?”
As Raban picked up the pens and other things the flustered student had dropped, he assessed her.
She had an unusually large amount of mana.
Most of the students at Luxtiera High School had a lot of mana. Enough to make one suspect the mascot faction had gathered them here to quickly secure backup magical girls.
But this unfamiliar student had an exceptional amount even among them.
“Um, who are you?”
“The school security guard? The janitor? What was it again? The title written in the city hall guide was odd-job worker for Luxtiera High School.”
Dine looked at the name tag that read “Raban.” It seemed he was a worker newly hired while she had been away.
‘Is he one of the fairies’ lackeys?’
It was obvious that most of Luxtiera High School’s faculty and staff were either fairies in disguise or people touched by fairies, like former magical girls.
‘If so.’
A newly deployed custodian after the appearance of the Shadow Mage. If he was personnel assigned to manage the emergency, he had to be fairly high-ranking among the fairies.
‘Did he deliberately show himself in front of me as a warning?’
The battle records with the magical girls had made it clear that the Ivory Tower had been aiming to create monsters through the students using the counseling room. Now that Dine’s identity had been exposed, this must mean she should give up on approaching the counseling room.
“…That place is dangerous.”
Salamandine decided to set aside, just this once, her hostility toward the fairy faction. Now that they had a common enemy in the Shadow Mage, they needed to share information.
She couldn’t talk openly about magical girls or negative thoughts in the middle of a hallway where ordinary students passed by, so she phrased it indirectly.
Those insidious fairies should be able to understand this much circumlocution easily enough.
***
‘Huh.’
Telling him out of nowhere that the counseling room was dangerous. What was she getting at?
“That place is where people’s resentment gathers. The resentment they spit out should quietly die away, but the one hiding in the shadows will try to drag it out.”
Raban’s head began to grow complicated. She had grabbed a security guard she had never seen before and was reciting lines with some apocalyptic poetic sensibility.
‘Kids these days… No, are all kids in this world like this?’
Since this was a world where magical girls existed, perhaps the average sensibilities of minors here were somewhat unique.
Or.
Maybe that red-haired student was a magical girl.
If she had spotted a suspicious person trying to approach the counseling room and had come to take preemptive action so he wouldn’t come any closer, then her strange words and behavior made sense.
Seeing how swiftly she moved, it seemed the Ivory Tower’s strange four elemental spirits had already once plotted something using students’ negative thoughts.
Raban finally understood the red-haired student’s oddly abundant mana. If she was a magical girl, it wouldn’t be strange for her to have mana of that density.
‘This is troublesome. I’ve already drawn a magical girl’s attention?’
He hadn’t even crossed the threshold of the counseling room, and already this bad event had occurred. Raban lamented his own misfortune.
‘It wouldn’t be wise to provoke a magical girl for no reason.’
Raban imagined the words and actions of an ordinary civilian who had only ever encountered magical girls through news articles.
“Uh, was there a monster like that? I had no idea our school was such a dangerous place.”
***
‘Damn those bastards!’
Dine seethed at the roundabout mockery of those closed-off, sinister fairies.
The question “Was there a monster like that?” was a counterquestion asking whether he could really trust her, an executive of the Ivory Tower, and saying he had not known their school was “such a dangerous place” was sarcasm implying that the fairies’ security system did not look that sloppy.
One might ask in return whether Dine herself, having infiltrated the high school, was not proof of that sloppiness. If so, those fairies would surely answer like this.
‘So, did you figure out who the magical girls were?’
Until Dine Ifrit’s identity as Salamandine was revealed, the Ivory Tower had failed to discover the identities of the two Magirists.
Her teeth nearly ground together of their own accord. Dine pulled up patience from the depths of her heart.
“…I see. Understood.”
She gave a short bow of her head. It was a posture imbued with the elegance of a young noble lady. With that same haughtiness, Dine turned firmly around and left the corridor.
Raban rubbed his chin.
‘Has she stopped suspecting me?’
Whether she still had a trace of suspicion left or had accepted him as just an ordinary odd-job worker, what he had to do now did not change.
While that troublesome magical girl was away, he would infiltrate the counseling room!
With vigorous steps, Raban entered the counseling room. In his hands were a dustpan and broom.
From far away, something resembling cotton candy was watching the two of them.
***
Dine Ifrit was a target of surveillance for the guardian fairies.
Raban, too, was a target of surveillance for the guardian fairies.
The contact between two persons of interest was enough to draw the attention of the guardian fairies assigned to the school.
However, most of the fairies had duties to carry out according to the school day as faculty and staff. Thus, at the time the two made contact, only one fairy was able to check the scene.
The fairy watched the two converse from afar.
Unfortunately, their voices could not be heard. The great senior Papirun was said to have even mastered lip-reading in preparation for situations like this, but for an ordinary fairy, it was already a struggle just to master magic for hiding one’s presence or changing one’s form.
They said the development of eavesdropping magic had been forbidden because of the potential for misuse, which was truly unfortunate. Since it was Mother’s will, there was nothing to be done even if one objected.
‘What are they talking about, mohu?’
There was no reason for a student and a faculty member who had merely bumped into each other while passing by to talk for that long. Even more so considering that Raban was a newcomer who had gotten the job while Salamandine was on leave.
Had there been some point of contact between them from before he entered the school?
The fairy wrote up an honest report, including those questions, and submitted it.
After school. The senior fairy who read the report closely immediately gathered the fairies with free hands and began brainstorming.
[Is there a possibility that Raban came into contact with Salamandine after getting hired, mohu?]
[For the past few days since his hiring, Raban has been staying in the faculty dormitory after work, mohu. He has also had no points of contact with outsiders, mohu.]
The fairies tilted their heads. One of the Four Heavenly Kings of the Ivory Tower was taking an interest in a former homeless man?
Had Raban accumulated enough negative thoughts to make a monster?
[Or could one of the Four Heavenly Kings have been giving work instructions to an infiltrating monster, mohu?]
[Surely not, mohu. Her identity has already been exposed to us, so there’s no way she would do something that clumsy, mohu.]
[But Salamandine forgot she was a fire homunculus and went into the sea, which got her identity exposed, didn’t it, mohu?]
Summarized like this, it was unfair to Salamandine. She had gone into the sea to avoid drawing unnecessary suspicion, and there had also been circumstances behind the germination of the monster seed, which had been the decisive clue that exposed her identity.
But it was also true that the starting point of that whole snowball was that she had gone into the sea to swim with her friends. Thus, among the fairies, Salamandine’s innocence—or, to put it more directly, her stupidity—had spread as accepted theory.
[Damn it, if it were Sargasso, we could be certain she would never make a mistake like this, mohu…]
[But it’s Salamandine, mohu.]
[She’s a dummy, mohu.]
[That’s what makes her cute. I like her too.]
[Who was that just now, mohu?]
The fairies fell into chaos!
***
“Oh, mister. Long time no see!”
A silver-haired girl who was quite familiar waved at Raban. Raban, pretending to be calm, waved back.
Had Na Ihyeon also stopped by for counseling?
‘Her family circumstances did seem somewhat complicated…’
Na Ihyeon’s family was probably the owner family of Naju Pharmaceuticals. Since she was close to the person responsible for the Naju Pharmaceuticals disappearance incident, she must have had plenty built up inside. The resentment of those around her might have been focused on her as well.
In that sense, Na Ihyeon would make an excellent source of negative thoughts.
‘Too dangerous.’
What would happen if he touched the daughter of a chaebol family and caused an unnecessary commotion? The scale of risk was different from that of an ordinary child from an ordinary family.
Even if he could deal with the aftermath using magic, the best option was not to cause a disturbance in the first place.
That was also why he had intended to hide amid the conflict between the Ivory Tower and the magical girls and simply suck up mana. Raban wanted to be very, very safe. He wanted to avoid exposing himself as a dark mage if at all possible.
In a way, it was an occupational disease.
‘Those demon bastards go after true names whenever they get the chance.’
“Ihyeon, by the way, where is the counseling teacher?”
Raban was planning to mobilize what little mana he had left to implant a suggestion in the counseling teacher. It was not a particularly elaborate suggestion. Just something along the lines of not finding it strange even if his cleaning time in the counseling room ran long.
As long as they did not feel anything was off until he secured the counseling records, that would be enough.
Ihyeon’s answer was unexpected.
“Huh? Teacher? She’s probably in the hospital right now.”
“What?”
“She got caught up in a monster incident. So she’s recuperating.”
“No. Then why are you in the counseling room when the counseling teacher isn’t even here? Are you skipping class like a proper delinquent?”
“Who are you calling a delinquent? I’m a peer counselor, you know?”
“What?”
He had heard of it on Earth. Some schools operated peer counselor programs so students could talk about worries that were hard to confide in adults. But.
“…You?”
“Mister. What’s that supposed to mean?”
Raban turned his head away. Even if hair colors in this neighborhood were free-spirited, bright silver hair and golden eyes like hers stood out.
A student who had brass knuckles hanging from her phone like a cute key ring stood out even more.
“No. I just thought you’d be the type to prefer something more active.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. It doesn’t suit me. But what can I do? I got chosen somehow.”
Na Ihyeon shrugged and poured out her complaints. How on the days she was in charge among the peer counselors, the number of counseling cases dropped noticeably, and how she was doing the teacher’s work in their place, but there weren’t any bonuses like reward points at all.
There were also some things she did not say.
For instance, that the counseling teacher herself was a fairy, and that no small number of the peer counselors by grade were former magical girls.
The only active magical girls remaining at Luxtiera were herself and White, but the former magical girls were easing the burden on the current magical girls by comforting, through the counseling room, the hearts of children at risk of becoming monsters.
Though because the fairy who was originally supposed to coordinate their schedules had gone to the Fairy Kingdom to recuperate, the counseling room’s operation at present was rather haphazard.
“So, mister. Are you here to clean?”
Tap, tap. Na Ihyeon stood up, brushing off her skirt, and gave him a playful smile.
“Or maybe counseling? Is someone hazing you?”
Raban sank into thought.