Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 14 - Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

LET’S FIGHT, LET’S STAND UP, LET’S RESIST

  Nephilia

A lot of people were interested in the words of the dead.

All people, to a greater or lesser extent, had experienced loss through death. They would live with thoughts like, There was more I wanted to ask, more I wanted to say, every day until the feelings faded and were eventually forgotten. When they found out about Nephilia’s magic, those feelings that had been lost to memory for a time would come back, and they would beg her, “Is that true?” and “Can you really do that?” And even if they weren’t that tormented, plenty of people had a curiosity about the possibility of a world after death. Some called it fantastical, and some even said, “You could solve the mysteries of history.”

And then once they found out that her magic was actually just to replay the voices emitted before death, about 60 percent would shrug and tell her, “Ahhh, so that’s all it was after all.” About 20 percent would politely add, “I’d like to see it sometime,” and 10 percent would get angry and say something aggressive to Nephilia. And though they were a minority, there were some who, knowing what her magic actually did, still wanted her to use it.

Parents who wanted to hear just one more time the voice of their dear daughter who had passed very young, an inheritance conflict between vying relatives who wanted to know if the deceased had said anything that might put themselves at even the slightest advantage, an extreme magical-girl fan who wanted the live voice of a magical girl who had recently died young so they could get an audio sample and listen to it forever—just handling clients like that got her more business than you could shake a stick at. Nephilia could make enough income to manage as a freelancer.

Since becoming a magical girl when she was little, Nephilia had completed many jobs, accumulating experience and knowledge. She liked knowing things. The world was overflowing with unknowns.

Before she was even two years old, she had pulled a picture book off the shelf and pestered her parents to read it to her, and from doing that over and over, she’d memorized the contents of the book before learning to read and write. Her parents had been surprised to see their daughter doing something so strange as reading aloud from a picture book held upside-down and had had high hopes for her. “Maybe she could be a genius.” “Maybe she’ll become someone great in the future.” But their daughter had not lived up to those hopes—her academics were upper-middling at the most, with no literary or poetic talent to speak of. But she did grow up generally well. So her parents laughed, figuring it was their bias as her parents, and they loved their daughter who had grown up so healthily, even if she was not a genius.

But the reality was entirely different. She was not the wholesome daughter her parents imagined.

The first thing this daughter had become attached to was “the wolf.” The reason she’d read those picture books over and over was to find out if the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf in The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats, and the wolf in Three Little Pigs were ultimately the same wolf or not. She had wanted to know more about this creature known as wolf, made of deception, stealing, and eating. It was not a dreadful villain, nor an activist who fought for the sake of their beliefs, and nor did it have a backstory as a weakling who was forced into their position through oppression—it was just vermin. That made her curious. It made her want to know more. It began with the wolves in those picture books, following which she encountered petty villains and nasty characters who appeared in all sorts of stories, and her feelings deepened. No one else shared her opinion, but nasty people were attractive. They were refreshing and somehow charming, and most of all, she could sympathize with them.

She poured her talent not into her human life but into her magical-girl activities. There was startling variation among magical girls, and they were not only fine people of character. There were also some who hid how nasty they were and those who were blatantly nasty. Nephilia actively sought more connections, using those to find even juicier work, jobs that seemed like even more fun. Work satisfied her curiosity and provided a way to meet people, and it could also get her money. Money was always important.

An acquaintance who was imprisoned after her long years of wicked deeds were exposed, only to soon escape, had said this: “Money isn’t that great, but having it will make things go very smoothly.” Then when she’d talked about how if you’re going to make money, you might as well go for an armed robbery against the Magical Kingdom for the fun of it, Nephilia thought, She really is kind of a hopeless idiot, and decided that she would refrain from associating with her in the future. When the level of nastiness got too high, she’d start thinking of the faces of the victims. That type of nasty wasn’t to Nephilia’s tastes. In everything, moderation is key.

But there was one thing she was forced to agree with. Her remarks about the importance of money had sounded very sincere, and Nephilia had seen many people get in trouble due to a lack of money.

Money was important. Jobs that could get her money were also important, even if she had no way to use that money right now. And Nephilia would of course do her job on important missions. A fun excursion might begin when you started working, but Nephilia had already begun working before this job had started. The starting line was investigating the client’s background.

Prying was always dangerous, though. Knowledge and experience were weapons and sustenance, but they could also become shackles. Those who would try to pry into other people’s business weren’t generally well-liked. Someone who will gloat about having learned things they were better off not knowing would most certainly not be loved. A magical girl who was not liked or loved would have a short life span.

Nephilia saw herself as a magical girl who was occasionally obnoxiously difficult to control, but she didn’t at all hate herself. If an offer came, then she would look into the client, and she would also investigate those around them. When she investigated, she took the greatest care to ensure that her investigation wouldn’t be exposed. She’d done as much research as possible on Agri, Sataborn, and the other relatives Sataborn might have sent that inheritance letter to, and the harvest she had gained from that was more than commensurate to her labor.

“It would be one thing if you were just coming here for a pleasure jaunt, but the kind of hard-core person who would search for cooperators as soon as he came to the island would never not bring the maximum number of magical girls.”

No matter where Nephilia heard Agri, her voice was easy to pick up. It was nothing like her own voice.

Sitting on a rock, Nephilia pressed down her right ear, firmly pushing her earbuds with her fingers. The magical phone Agri had given her had no trouble picking up the sound. She was able to hear the whole conversation between the mages, who were face-to-face in the trees away from the rocky area to keep from being heard. It was a problem that she couldn’t send a signal over to Agri or that it was too far away for her to rush over with Chelsea, but Nephilia would ignore that this once.

But what she couldn’t ignore was a different problem. The audio was a little too loud. Nephilia shoved the earbuds deeper in. Mary and Chelsea were right over there flirting, so if they talked about things the two of them shouldn’t hear and that sound leaked out from her earbuds, it was bound to cause a crisis.

“Well, I’m sure that’s how you imagine it.” Navi Ru’s voice was low and a little hard to hear. It probably wasn’t just because of his natural vocal quality but also the emotions coming out in his voice. Nephilia had missed Navi when doing her research. He was not only an obstinate character but a well-known and accomplished researcher. Sataborn had been working for a ridiculously long time, so many could call themselves his former pupils, but you couldn’t really say Navi was high in the priority ranking. His time as a pupil had been short, and their relationship had been tenuous. Why had Navi been the one invited? Nephilia thought perhaps that he hadn’t been summoned as a pupil. “The Lab” that Navi worked for referred to the nucleus of the Osk Faction. Maybe coming as a former pupil was ultimately a pretense, and they’d actually had a cooperative relationship, a power relationship within the faction. But even if she thought about looking into that, that was beyond what she could uncover in a day or two. And if she screwed up, it could get her killed.

“She was hiding in the pond, wasn’t she?” Agri asked.

The place where they had met Navi had been the edge of the pond. But hadn’t Agri said that Navi looking meaningfully at the pond had been a bluff?

“Oh, I assumed that had to be a bluff, too,” Agri said, perhaps directed less at Navi and more at Ren-Ren, beside her. “But if you’re gonna hide a magical girl you brought, I feel like there would be the best place. There are magical girls who could hide in wait underwater, right? Like a mermaid, frog, or dolphin—well, it doesn’t matter what kind.”

“Huh. I see,” Navi commented. “So then why would she kill Maiya? There’s no reason.”

“That thing that made all the mages collapse and the magical girls’ transformations run out. You weren’t able to predict that, were you? Am I wrong?”

“C’mon, there’s no way I could know that’d happen.”

“Uh-huh. You passed out, too, and Clarissa’s transformation came undone. It didn’t look to me like you were faking being a victim who got caught in it, either. Well, things worked out for you and Clarissa ’cause the rest of us were there.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“But things were totally different for the magical girl A, who you ordered to hide and wait. She had no idea what was going on. And on top of that, if she was at the bottom of the pond, she’d be spewing bubbles and drowning. So she dragged herself out somehow, searched for grayfruit, and transformed again. But then look, even if she may have gotten out of the immediate trouble, it wasn’t like that solved everything. If she went back to the pond and her transformation came undone again, that’d be a disaster. I think she’d wind up thinking all sorts of things, like, Was there an attack? or Did something else cause this? Is it still happening or is it over? timidly trying to probe around the area. And that’s when, unfortunately, she ran into Maiya…and killed her.”

There was a pause. Nephilia heard Navi clear his throat a few times, then sigh deeply. “You’ve got a real imagination, lady.” His voice wasn’t trembling or anything. But it wasn’t a happy-sounding tone. Agri, on the other hand, was chatting away quite cheerily. It even seemed like she was trying to stir things up.

Agri had the tendency to play the villain sometimes and act worse than she really was more than necessary. Nephilia could understand her values, in seeing bad people as cool, but someone who was really bad wouldn’t play at it. The person Agri was talking to was a mage who worked at the notorious lab.

The Osk Faction lab was said to be the final destination for magical girls. An acquaintance of Nephilia’s who was versed in these matters said they dissected innocent magical girls as a matter of course. Even if he looked like just a rugged-looking middle-aged uncle, you had no idea how much nasty work he’d engaged in. Even if it was half rumors, or 99 percent rumors, she should consider him a genuine villain. The more control you had, the more you should avoid stirring things up—was what Nephilia thought, but she had no way to tell that to Agri.

“Well, you can think that if you like. That’s just all what I figure is going on, after all. But I don’t think I’m so far off. You got here by searching for me, didn’t you, old man? Probably using Clarissa’s magic.”

“This is speculation—basically fantasy.”

“You want to end things as peacefully as you can. That’s why you had Clarissa go with that group to see Maiya’s body.”

“Uh-huh?”

“A is still worried she might get attacked. Now she’s like a frightened mouse with crazy-powerful combat abilities, and you don’t know who she might bite. Isn’t that what you were thinking? So then if you or Clarissa was with the group, A would be able to tell that she shouldn’t attack them. That’s why you had Clarissa join the group that got sent to Maiya’s body.”

“That’s some pretty circuitous assumptions of rationale.” There was a derisive tinge in Navi’s voice. “If you keep throwing accusations at me over every little thing, you can make anything sound legit.”

“It was odd—odd that you made the decision to send off Clarissa so casually, when she might be the one person here who’ll protect you, and we had a mysterious killer running around. That’d be different if you knew you weren’t gonna get attacked, though.”

“Uh-huh.”

That “uh-huh” sounded completely apathetic, but that was what made it feel like she’d hit on something. Nobody could offer such an apathetic response to someone right in front of them digging at them with groundless suspicious, arguing doggedly and throwing more inferences at you no matter how much you denied them. This could basically be taken as an implicit acknowledgment that it was somewhat true, and Navi should know that as well.

“I’m not going to demand you admit it,” Agri said. “I’m sure you don’t want to, and I can’t be sure my deductions are correct in the first place anyway. But you know, looking at the situation, I think it’s not that far off… Oh, this isn’t a threat. Since threatening you would be going against our contract.”

What had led Nephilia to becoming a magical girl had naturally been her magic, but be that as it may, she didn’t like to use it. Her reluctance to touch the dead directly with a hand went beyond disgust, and the pleasure of getting to hear the words of someone who couldn’t talk aside, she felt more guilty than curious about making those words public. It was actually through seeking out the most interesting of the jobs that didn’t require magic that Nephilia had learned about the Magical Kingdom, diving into study of contracts between mages, the ceremonies that came with the contracts, and the laws she had to obey with such enthusiasm that people sought her more often for those skills now. She wouldn’t make mistakes when it came to contracts.

“So as long as it’s in the near future, we still have an active contract between us, right?”

Their contract was what Agri was counting on most of all. No matter how crafty Navi might be, if she made the contract her shield, her safety was guaranteed. Each of the clauses had been established in detail, and if Navi violated any of them, he would lose all his assets.

In the first place, there was a difference between Navi and Agri that made it difficult to call the contract fair. It was an equal deal in the sense that they both put their assets on one side of the scales to balance them, but Agri was in destitution, and Navi was in the nucleus of the Osk Faction—their assets were on entirely different levels. It was kind of like someone with just one coin and someone with a hundred coins saying, “Let’s bet all our remaining coins on this game.”

Nephilia had mobilized all her knowledge and experience to insert fake-outs and deception with the finest nuance, making the contract as hard to read as was legally possible. If Navi had skimmed over it or read it wrong, that was proof he was in a hurry to gain allies. Nephilia had been planning to pull out something else should he complain, but in the end, he had voiced no complaints.

“At the very least, you can’t do anything to us,” Agri argued. “So then we’re not gonna get killed. Worst case, even if you had failed to control A completely, then you can say we’re kinda safe if we can be near you.”

Nephilia heard a bitter-sounding throat-clearing sound. Navi was irritated, and he wasn’t trying to hide it. “Look, lady. Everything you’ve been saying this far has just been admit this, give me that, using the contract as a shield to say whatever you want. The contract we made, okay, was a win-win, fifty-fifty contract. You must have something to offer me.”

“I’ve gathered grayfruit. I’ll give you exactly half.”

Meeting someone halfway also meant getting closer to them. Even if Agri was getting carried away enjoying playing the villain, she had guts. Nephilia couldn’t hear Navi clearing his throat anymore.

“Huh, half…hmm. That depends on how much that is.”

“You can assume the fruit that was stored in the main building has been about doubled.”

“Huh?”

“Dreamy Chelsea and Pastel Mary are working with me, too. Chelsea is a violence specialist, and Mary’s sheep can scout and search for enemies.”

“God damn…you bitch. You were the one who made Pastel Mary steal those?”

Nephilia looked over at the two magical girls who were sitting side by side behind the big rock. Chelsea was pressing closer, while Mary was shaking her head with a troubled expression. The two of them were actually unstable elements: Chelsea could well direct her violence at them at any moment, and Mary couldn’t completely control the sheep she made, but they had no obligation to offer up those details.

“With Nephy, Ren-Ren, Mary, and Chelsea, that’s four. Add with yours, and that’s six people. Clarissa and Miss A are both strong, right? So then we’ve basically got a hold on this island.”

“Uh-huh.” Compared to his earlier “uh-huh,” this had some slightly more positive feeling in it.

“I’ll work with you as much as possible. I’ll get you what you want, too,” Agri said.

“I want the positional information on this island that you guys have.”

“Sure.”

“And show me everything about the contracts you’re planning to use on this island, format and content included. The contracts you made up were really hard to understand. I’m gonna check over them properly.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Don’t lay a hand on old Grampa Ragi or Yol. You can negotiate with them, though.”

“I’m not gonna be violent with anyone, okay? More importantly, if you destroyed the gate, that means you secured an escape route, right? You’ve got to tell me about that.”

“I dunno anything about the destruction of the gates. There was probably some kind of accident… Someone did it on their own judgment. And it goes without saying, but I have no idea who.”

“An accident, done on their own judgment, eh? But still, it’s not like you can’t escape. You don’t look that desperate about it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep trying to read me.”

“I’m used to worrying about what other people are thinking,” Agri said. Her remark was self-deprecating, but there was nothing pitiable about it. The air between the two mages had become a few notches lighter.

“About the gates… We were talking about how they can’t be repaired because they’re missing parts, right. So that means whoever broke the gates has the parts. Though it’s not like I know who broke ’em. If we can get the parts from them and hand those off to Rareko, we should be able to use the gates without a problem.”

“I see. Thank you for the advice.”

The negotiation was complete. “All right,” Nephilia muttered under her breath, clenching her right fist. The reflexive reaction came out more intensely than expected, and she couldn’t help but laugh—she glanced over at Chelsea and Mary, but they were flirting and not looking at her.

The negotiation moved smoothly to a discussion with a peaceful back-and-forth. In other words, it had gone well. Agri had pulled it off.

Nephilia realized belatedly that she was supporting her employer more than she’d been aware. It was easy for her to sympathize with the motive of money for the sake of money, not because she wanted money in order to do something—partially because there weren’t many magical girls like that. Nephilia generally felt favorably about the mages and magical girls on this island, but she especially liked Ren-Ren, and she liked Agri second most.

Agri was trying to rise up in the world. She had a conscience and sense of ethics, but she chose to ignore them to take advantage of the weaknesses of others. Despite her own reluctance, she was acting the villain and pretending she wasn’t bothered about it.

Ren-Ren would seem passive, at a glance. If Agri asked her to do something, she wouldn’t be able to say no, even knowing it was wrong—or so it seemed. But Nephilia thought there was something else going on. Ren-Ren was the type who would lie to herself but still keep her eyes fixed on the prize.

Both of them were just the kind of nasty people Nephilia liked. They were a duo made up of a magical girl who didn’t want to be left behind and a mage who wanted to rise up. They fit like pieces filling in each other’s missing parts, but they were also precarious, like one of them would cause the death of the other. Just one would have been fun on her own, but combining the two made them twice or three times as fun.

Nephilia smothered the laugh welling up from her throat inside her mouth and then flipped through the contract forms and content that she was about to use so she could go over them thoroughly. When she opened her palms, she found she’d left deep nail marks and felt moved in spite of herself for showing such surprisingly strong emotion.

  Navi Ru

Kicking leaves and stepping on broken branches, Navi lumbered along a way with no path, clicking his tongue at the sound of his own footsteps, then making sure to lift and step softly and gently.

While walking, Navi stroked his chin. The sensation of his rough, unshaven beard was even painful on his palm. His beard felt like wire, but he couldn’t be living as inflexibly as his stubble. Pliant and flexible even in the face of accidents was Navi Ru’s modus operandi.

He stroked his chin gently enough that it wouldn’t hurt.

Of Agri, he’d just been thinking it would be enough to make good use of her. He hadn’t even considered her as someone to make a deal with. But it seemed he had to revise his evaluation of her. The deductions she’d expressed to him were off the mark, but they were rational. That had made him groan, thinking, She’s got some sharp ideas.

Her story sounding plausible meant, in other words, that he could use it. Though Navi had panicked a little back there, now he was calculating. He would revise his evaluation of Agri and use her based on that. He wasn’t going to deny her deductions, leaving it up to her what to think. Doing that would enable him to predict her behavior.

It would be a great disadvantage to Agri to believe in inaccurate deductions. Navi had to keep Agri’s disadvantage from becoming his own. She must have arranged for that contract to keep him from doing that. She had some sharp ideas there, too.

This may not just have been her idea, though. She must have discussed it with her magical-girl companions, and the three of them had gotten together to wring out what none of them could have done individually.

If it was a choice between Ren-Ren and Nephilia, it had to be the latter. Take knowledge of law and contracts and add wiliness and cunning, and you’d get her. And that wasn’t such a bad way to use the grayfruit they’d acquired. The part that was “not bad” was how it left room for them to use the excuse “we did it for our own safety” if they were criticized for the ploy after the fact. Agri wasn’t just getting herself cash—her ploy also worked as a stopper, which made it seem justified.

That said…

It was indeed a good stopper, but it wasn’t strong enough to stop Navi. Worst case, he could abandon all his assets to break the contract. Agri would surely see abandoning all assets as equivalent to suicide, but there was something Navi had to do, even if it meant abandoning his wealth. Agri was still young, to base her plans on her own values. Navi had been rather like that at her age.

But that was ultimately the worst-case scenario. He wanted to avoid that if he could.

Still…

Having to do things you don’t want to do where rubber meets the road is just life. Only the privileged can avoid doing things because they don’t want to do them, while just about everyone else does it with a sigh because they don’t have a choice.

Don’t take the shirt off my back, he prayed to Agri, who was laughing in his head.

  Touta Magaoka

Touta wasn’t sure how much point there was in trying to fix the cave by filling the cracks with stones. The trio’s breathing echoed in the small cave, and then things went quiet after a while. Aside from the occasional droplet of water or gust of wind, everything was silent. Touta wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The sweat he’d worked up had grown cold.

They had no more grayfruit. Whether they had any or not didn’t change anything for Touta. But if they continued to wait and do nothing, then Yol would collapse. Rareko wouldn’t be able to transform. If they got attacked right now, there was no magical girl who would protect Touta and Yol. There had been one until now but not anymore.

Navi had said he would come back, but they didn’t know when that would be. Going outside would be dangerous, but if they stayed inside, they’d be waiting for Yol to drop. They were between a rock and a hard place.

Rareko was sitting hugging her knees in front of her. Her shoulders were slumped, and she was looking down. Yol was biting her lip and watching the cave entrance. Touta knew both of them were tired. He was tired, too. He wanted to sleep. If there had been a soft futon here, he surely would have been unable to resist.

What would Marguerite have done? Or actually, wouldn’t Marguerite find them? He couldn’t help but think about leaving everything to others like that. Navi had said he’d come back, but would he be able to? It was too dangerous outside. It was dangerous for Touta, for Rareko, for Yol, and for Navi, too. If having some very confident mage there would make it safe, then nobody would have run away in the first place. They had run because things had been hopeless, even with that many people and all of them mages or magical girls.

Touta wasn’t any good at thinking, but that was all he could do now, so he tried his best. Marguerite would touch her finger to her chin while she pondered things, and that was very cool, but Touta’s chin was more square than Marguerite’s, and it probably wouldn’t be cool to touch his round finger to it. So Touta hugged his legs and stared into the darkness as he thought. Maybe his head would have worked a bit better if his stomach had been full. But if he started getting greedy, there would be no end to it.

Rareko sat there in silence. Touta felt like she was gently rejecting conversation. As a magical girl, she’d been a bit more put together, even if she’d seemed timid and unreliable. Marguerite had said that when a magical girl transformed, it made not just her body but her heart stronger as well. So then did that strong heart go away once she was back in human form? Rareko didn’t encourage Yol or anything, either.

It wasn’t like he was blaming Rareko. This was tough, even for an adult. There were a couple of teachers at school who would lash out at the students about how they were having a tough time. This was much better than something like that. If Touta had the amazing powers of a magical girl and he suddenly couldn’t use them anymore, he figured that would hit him hard, too. He really couldn’t blame Rareko.

Yol was looking up at the ceiling with worry. The ceiling was covered with the magic net she’d made for them. They had repaired it, too. Now it should be okay, if it collapsed—this was what he had assumed, but Yol was looking rather concerned for that to be the case. Maybe it wasn’t absolutely okay. No matter how secure a net you covered it with, maybe there would be no helping it if it wasn’t just the ceiling but the whole cave that came down.

Going outside the cave was dangerous. But staying inside the cave might be dangerous, too. If something came flying at them like before, the cave definitely wouldn’t hold a second time.

“So hey,” Touta began.

Rareko and Yol turned to him. He looked between each of their faces and continued. “Maybe it’s weird to say this right after we fixed the ceiling…but maybe we should leave the cave.”

“Well…” Yol seemed hesitant about how to reply.

But Rareko answered without any trepidation. “We can’t. It’s too dangerous.” She spoke crisply, punctuating every word. “You must stay in the safest place, miss.”

“Yeah, I agree with that. That’s why…,” Touta said.

Yol was a mage. A mage could do all sorts of things. Rareko was a magical girl. If she could just transform, she would be very strong. Both of them would be needed to escape from this island. They’d also be needed to try to find the others. But Touta was a normal kid. It wasn’t like there was anything special about him, compared to magical girls and mages.

“I’m thinking I’ll go alone,” Touta finished.

“That’s even more dangerous.” Yol responded immediately this time.

Rareko’s mouth opened and shut, and she immediately looked down. She’d probably realized that Touta wasn’t very important. Even Yol, who had hastily stopped him, probably realized that, too. When you had one rare and two commons, anyone would realize which was more important. And even if they knew it, neither Yol nor Rareko could say it out loud.

So Touta had to say it himself. That was very scary, and even thinking it made his knees knock, but he couldn’t avoid this if he wanted to do what was best. He stood up. “If anyone is going, I’ll go alone. I think that’s the best—”

He heard something striking a rock. All three of them looked to the entrance. Rareko grabbed a tree branch and crawled in front of Yol, while Touta flinched back. Not knowing how useful it would be, he balled his hands into fists and readied himself. There was that sound again. There were two strikes, like knocking. Maybe it rang out so clearly because it was so quiet in the cave. As they waited still like that, the same knock, knock again.

There was no mistaking it—this wasn’t a naturally occurring sound. Someone had made it. It was a person knocking.

They weren’t attacking without warning, at least. Touta told himself that maybe it wasn’t an enemy. What villain would announce themselves beforehand?

Clenching his teeth, he punched his knees with his balled fists to stop them shaking.

He took a step forward. Getting some momentum, he took another, two, three more steps. Once his feet started moving, they moved on their own regardless of his will. Yol called out, “Wait,” but Touta ignored her and came forward. He sensed motion behind him, but he wasn’t stopped. It was probably Rareko holding back Yol.

Was it Navi? Was it Marguerite? Or was it someone else? Touta cautiously and slowly poked his face out the entrance and narrowed his eyes. It was brighter than he’d expected. It seemed that more time had passed than he’d felt during their repair work. He looked side to side, and when he found someone standing right beside him, he restrained the urge to flinch away. The magical girl before him let out a smothered snicker, and Touta also smiled along with her for some reason.

“Um…you’re…Nephilia…right?” he said.

The big scythe he could see in the dark felt more scary than reliable. Just seeing her bone decorations and stuff made him shiver. That was because Nephilia was smirking. She didn’t look like she’d come to save them or like she was seeking their help, either. She didn’t feel as friendly as the mage Marguerite knew and the magical girl with her, but she didn’t immediately try to hurt him. Touta wasn’t sure how to react. Still with his hand at the entrance, he kept a vague smile on as he waited to see what she would do.

Nephilia put a hand into her hat, pulled a piece of paper out of it, and handed it to Touta. It was brown and different from the notebook paper and printouts he normally used. But it seemed a lot sturdier than draft paper, with characters that weren’t Japanese or the alphabet and very magical-looking figures drawn on it. He didn’t know what it meant.

“What…is this thing…?” Touta asked.

“Contract…,” Nephilia muttered.

“Contract?”

“Sign… Give…fruit…”

“If I sign the contract, you’ll give me fruit?”

Nephilia nodded and pointed to the entrance of the cave. “Someone who can do it…come…”

She was asking for someone who could sign a contract to step forward if Touta couldn’t do the job. Touta’s front teeth bit his lip as he clenched the hand placed over the entrance. It wasn’t that he was shocked to be called useless. Touta was, in fact, useless. But that wasn’t why he was upset. He was shocked that someone was offering a contract for grayfruit—in other words, that she was basically walking around selling them.

Didn’t they all have to work together? Weren’t those who had some grayfruit to spare going to share with the people who had none? Touta stared at Nephilia. She was smirking back at him, not acting guilty at all.

He realized that she wasn’t necessarily on their side. It wasn’t okay to tell her that all their grayfruit were gone, that Rareko’s transformation had come undone, or anything like that. It would be a bad idea to beg her to save them because they were in trouble. Touta thought of his aunt and Marguerite. When he was thinking about adults he could rely on, they were the number one and two people who came to mind.

“I think…we need a little time to consider. This isn’t something I can decide on my own anyway…” Still smiling like he was really unsure, Touta accepted a paper from Nephilia. “That’s okay, right? I have the time to think, right?”

Nephilia narrowed just one eye and, after considering a bit, nodded.

Touta put a hand to his chest and let out a phew before lifting his head again like he’d just remembered something. “O-oh. I’ll tell them about the contract, so add in a little bonus, okay.”

Nephilia cocked her head. Turning back to the cave over and over, Touta said, “It’ll take some time to consider whether we’re going to agree to the contract or not, right? So then we’d be stopping searching for grayfruit during that time. Rareko won’t like that. Just one is enough. If you give us one grayfruit, then Rareko might try considering it.”

He couldn’t let her find out that Rareko couldn’t transform. If someone who was trying to get something out of offering them grayfruit was to find out they had no power to resist, it might wind up like when a burglar finds out the kid is home alone. His aunt had told him that was called a home-alone incident, and they were really nasty. Touta’s story, that Rareko was using her magical-girl strength to make Touta do what she wanted, also told Nephilia that Touta had no hostage value. It was actually safer to tell her that grabbing Touta now or something wouldn’t keep Rareko from fighting her.

“She just told me to go out to look if there was some noise, but she’d be sure to get angry with me if I came back with just a contract and asked her to think about it. If I got a grayfruit and said it’s a deposit…was it called a deposit, again? If I say that, then, um, I’m sure it would put her in a good mood.”

Nephilia’s smirk vanished. She gave Touta a rather serious look he’d never seen before. It felt like she saw right through him, and Touta shook violently. But he figured if he was committing to the story that he was a pitiful boy, it wasn’t wrong to react with violent trembling.

Nephilia nodded deeply, and by the time she’d lifted her face again, her smirk was back. She dropped a grayfruit into his palm, and Touta accepted it with a bow. He felt less grateful to Nephilia and more thankful to the grayfruit.

“Then…see you…half hour…,” she said.

“Yeah. See you then.”

Holding the grayfruit he’d received politely against his chest, Touta was about to return to the cave when he felt his concerns rising more. How had Nephilia known where they were? If she’d heard about it from someone, it could only be from Navi. Was Navi safe now? When he turned back, Nephilia was already gone, and Touta sighed. He’d messed up in the end. He’d meant to keep lots of things in mind, like his aunt and Marguerite did, but he’d forgotten to ask something he should have. He didn’t even know whether he’d done well in the first place. If you told him Nephilia had seen right through him and given him the fruit because she felt sorry for him, he’d just think, Yeah, huh. His head was on the verge of overheating, and he felt feverish. He’d heard that could happen from using your brain too much.

But still, even so, he’d been able to get one grayfruit. Clasping the piece of paper, the grayfruit, and a small sense of accomplishment to his chest, Touta rushed back into the cave.

  Miss Marguerite

The wind blew through, whipping up a cloud of dust. It was Tepsekemei’s magic.

The goddess cut through the curtain of billowing sand and stepped forward with flat feet. Whether it was reflexively or deliberately, her eyes were closed.

Marguerite went through three trees to alternate like a pinball—going from facing the enemy to circling behind her with her rapier at the ready to thrust at the white flash barely visible behind her golden hair, her undefended neck—then twisted her body away the moment before she could hit to dodge the slice of an ax.

The goddess kept her feet flat on the ground, only turning her upper body the other direction to face Marguerite. It was astonishing flexibility, even for a magical girl. From that extremely unnatural stance, bent backward until she was horizontal, she swung her axes at Marguerite.

In the course of the swing, the ax blades transformed, growing one, two sizes bigger, enabling the wielder to come in range without moving her feet. Marguerite never took her eye off the enemy. She smacked the ground with her left hand, using her cape to leap, roll, and dodge the fearsome mass of destruction.

Dark clouds in the sky caught her eye, and she saw Tepsekemei up above. She was blowing air into her hands and compressing it to fire it continuously like a machine gun—you could call it bullets of air.

The goddess’s ax swiped aside the continuous fire of air bullets from above as she turned at the waist in the opposite direction, keeping her left hand pointed at Tepsekemei and her right pointed at Marguerite as she slowly drew up her body. The giant axes were held still at the same angle as before her attack. There wasn’t enough opening to attack even in that lazy movement. But though her stance was perfect, the way she moved was clumsy. When both attacking and defending, she avoided using her legs as much as possible; she was generally flat-footed.

Marguerite didn’t wait to act. She leaped far enough away that even slices from the enlarged axes couldn’t reach, hooking her fingers on tree branches and cracks in bark to clamber up a tree. The goddess stepped forward to attack, slicing at all the nearby trees, but Marguerite had already leaped branch to branch to escape behind her. While in motion, she stripped the bark from trees around, lopping off their branches with swipes of her rapier.

With wood chips raining down around her, the enemy opened her eyes. She was smiling vacantly.

“Was it the gold ax you dropped?” she asked as she repelled air bullets with her ax. She wielded the giant battle-ax with the effort of manipulating a butter knife—and with even greater speed.

Tepsekemei’s bullets were made of air, so they had no color. Innumerable colorless and transparent bullets that were literally fast as the wind were flying toward the goddess. They could be detected only by their sound, but the goddess wasn’t struggling at all to block them with her ax.

“Or is it the silver ax?” the goddess asked.

Tepsekemei cocked her head. She’d shrunk to one-third her size, but she still looked like her original lamp-genie form. The goddess readied her axes, the rough weapons clashing with her vacant smile. The trees that had been flung into the sky fell one after another to bound off the ground. Even as Marguerite sliced at the broken trees that descended upon her head and shoulders, she never took her eyes off the goddess.

The first attack they’d received in their encounter with her had been a response to an attack from Tepsekemei. The attack had been sudden, with no tells or preemptive motion, and completely unlike the intense lethal aura everyone had felt that time at the main building.

Marguerite could no longer hear footsteps or cries from Mana or 7753. Had they safely escaped, or were they in a state where they couldn’t move or talk? There was nothing for it but to pray it was the former. As for Shepherdspie—she hadn’t even had enough time to look at him, let alone protect him. She decided to leave regrets about how they could have secured his safety if they had acted first until later—she wouldn’t think about it now.

A tree trunk big enough to wrap your arms around fell between Marguerite and the goddess, sending up mud. Dark-brown dirt splattered dots over the goddess’s white costume.

Her right ax went red-hot, its outline turning to wavering flame. The left ax, aside from its handle, turned into a pale yellow solid covered in cracks. The blowing of the wind alone caused the substance to scatter as powder. It seemed too fragile to use as an ax. It looked like some kind of crystal, but Marguerite couldn’t know for sure from a glance.

The goddess swung the yellow ax. It was too far. She wouldn’t reach. But Marguerite’s body reacted before her mind did, instantly leaping to the side. Intense flame blazed up from the goddess’s position to lick as far away as where Marguerite had just been.

The goddess repelled the air bullets being fired at her from the opposite direction with her red-hot ax while also kicking dirt over to where Marguerite jumped. Marguerite stepped on a round tree trunk that had fallen to the ground to roll along. It was one of those that she had stripped of its bark and branches. Marguerite’s magic of “bending things that are straight” had a fairly strict definition of “straight.” In order to use it on natural things like trees, she had to process them somewhat. She used her magic to bend the tree that she’d processed to make “straight,” using the recoil to leap upward and grab a tree branch. When she threw the rock she held in her off hand, the goddess avoided it with just a tilt of her head.

Marguerite replayed in her head the goddess’s attack just then. She had changed the matter of the ax into a flammable substance, then ignited it with a flame ax and swung it at her. If Marguerite got hit by that fire, she was highly likely to become a ball of flames. The grass and broken trees all around flickered with persistent flames. Marguerite didn’t know enough to say what that substance was, but it would be best to avoid touching it.

Odds are her magic is to transform her axes.

That was also how her attack had divided Tepsekemei’s gaseous body. You could never do that with an ax that was just strong, no matter how you sliced at her—but if she was to attack using a material that would change the quality of a gas, then even Tepsekemei, who was literally formless, wouldn’t be unscathed.

The goddess had unparalleled physical abilities, highly adaptable weapons, forceful strikes, but it was unclear if she had any intellect, and though she looked like she had to be a magical girl, she really didn’t seem like one. A variety of elements came together to make up the enemy before them.

She seems imbalanced.

She used her magic with speed and accuracy. She was also highly adaptable to the situation. However, despite mastery of her magic, her use of her body was extremely rough. Chelsea also moved in a way that didn’t make sense, but what was different about the goddess was that she seemed like she wasn’t used to moving in the first place.

Marguerite jumped off a branch and landed, stripping off branches and bark as she wove between trees without slowing down at all to get away from the enemy. The swipe that came after her from behind sliced away all the trees around, and the earth with it. Marguerite leaped.

She jumped off the tree that came flying toward her, and the next tree she jumped to—one she’d pruned earlier—she broke with her magic to make it a launchpad that flung her in the other direction to leap toward the enemy. She read the enemy’s movements from her muscle, bone, and skin. Twisting around in midair, Marguerite avoided a turn-around sweep from the goddess that would certainly have killed her if it hit—though it damaged the shoulder of her costume. Marguerite’s surprise attack using her magic threw the enemy’s movements a bit off-kilter, making them deviate slightly. It was a very small shift. Her unassailable stance had changed so minutely, you wouldn’t be able to tell at a glance, but the angle of the blades had changed, with a large opening to her body.

Marguerite rolled on the ground and reached attack range on her knees. Her brain was screaming danger signals as her body’s sense of time grew heavier. This feeling had once been very familiar to her. She touched the fallen tree the enemy was stepping on with her toe and cast her magic on it. The pruned log twisted toward the goddess, striking into her arm to break off and smash to splinters.

Just like a thief picking a lock, Marguerite pushed the deviation of the goddess’s movements. Tepsekemei shot air bullets, and after a slight delay to time it right, Marguerite stepped forward again. The axes had opened even further. It was a chink in her defense. In a low stance with one knee on the ground and stepping in with the other, Marguerite thrust her rapier up from below. The godly quick thrust that even the fiercest of the Inspection Department had called “impossible to defend against” was easily blocked by an ax. It wasn’t that the goddess had done anything with her magic. The goddess’s reflexes were faster than Marguerite had anticipated, that was all.

Marguerite’s body temperature shot up, while her head cooled down instead. The right ax transmuted into a sticky substance like birdlime and caught her rapier.

Now.

The sudden evasive movement had thrown the goddess even further off-kilter. Her body’s axis was off-kilter, too. The deviation that had developed had been reborn as the ultimate opportunity. Marguerite let go of her weapon, matching her breathing with a leap on her knees to come closer.

For the first time, the goddess’s smile faltered. It was too close for her to swing her axes. For a span that wasn’t even half of a half of a half of an instant, she hesitated, and Marguerite’s fingers touched the handle of the left ax.

The ax handle was a straight stick of metal. In other words, she could bend it with her magic. Like a spring mousetrap, the blade snapped up to smack the enemy’s body. A very light sound struck Marguerite’s ears. Without her realizing, the blade of the ax had been turned into a fluffy, cottony material that wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Before she could even confirm the goddess’s next move, Marguerite leaped. She just had to move, or she would die. The goddess swept up a gust with a kick that Marguerite dodged, and then she avoided the goddess’s heel when she raised up her leg to slam it down. Then Marguerite got an assist. The goddess swiped away Tepsekemei’s air bullets, which Marguerite matched to try to backstep away. While blocking the air bullets, the goddess swung a sharp short hook, which Marguerite tried to push aside with the back of her right hand, but she failed to divert its full force, and the fist skimmed her shoulder. While backing away, Marguerite cartwheeled into a tree, touched it with a hand to bend it, and with the recoil, she leaped to the right, landing on another tree to bend that as well and leap to the left.

While fleeing, Marguerite put one hand on her right shoulder and scooped thick fluid. The goddess had gouged into her flesh. There was damage to the bone, as well. It hadn’t been dislocated—it had been shattered. She couldn’t move her right arm.

The goddess blasted away branches and leaves as she tossed Marguerite’s rapier behind her. She looked curiously at the handle of her ax, bent at a right angle, then touched her thumb to the bent part and squeezed it firmly. It left it a little warped, but it mostly returned to how it was before.

Marguerite mentally clicked her tongue. The moment the ax blade had connected, the goddess had turned the blade from metal into cotton to keep it from hurting herself at all. The bending from Marguerite’s magic to “bend straight objects” couldn’t be reacted to on reflex, not by any magical girls Marguerite knew. Even Marguerite, who used it herself, managed to use it by reading ahead of the magic.

Did I show her too much of my magic running up to that? No, if I hadn’t used it that much, it would have been over long before then.

Marguerite focused on evasion. She emerged from the woods into a rocky area. The whole view was filled with the sound of the waves crashing and receding and the clinging smell of salt. The enemy had clumsy footwork. It would hurt to lose the trees, since Marguerite could use them as footing, but it was more worth it to force the enemy to move to a rocky area.

Marguerite turned to face the other direction, switching to running backward, facing her pursuer. She did a little hop and jumped to the side, fluttering her cape as she dodged, dodged, dodged. It was like a full-speed sprint over a tightrope. One wrong step and she would die, but she had capable backup. Tepsekemei continued to trail them from a fixed distance behind where the enemy attacks wouldn’t reach, harassing her with long-range fire. Even if she couldn’t do damage, Marguerite was thankful just for the distraction that decreased the goddess’s number of moves.

Marguerite jumped atop a rock, feinting occasionally to make it look like she was going to attack as she backed up along the coastline.

Stepping right to left, she crouched down and stopped. The goddess swung her ax up over her head. The goddess hadn’t pulled this move before, but Marguerite wasn’t rattled. Before the enemy’s arm could move, Marguerite dropped to her right knee and rolled forward at a diagonal to dodge the throw. The ax whipped toward her in a rapid vertical spin, and Marguerite rose up to race toward the goddess. Perhaps out of impatience, the goddess had chosen to throw away her weapon.

The goddess shuffled her feet to move around the rocky area like she was matching Marguerite’s movements, and Marguerite responded by throwing in small feints as she came closer. The goddess didn’t have the defensive technique to respond instantly to Marguerite’s feints when her left hand was empty. Marguerite twisted her wrist to thrust a spear hand into the slight opening in her guard. The goddess’s remaining ax turned into a black, heavy, and dull-looking metal. But Marguerite would finish this before she could swing it.

Marguerite’s lips twisted slightly. There was some blackish sand stuck to the ax. Though it wasn’t wet, it was covering the surface of the ax in an unnatural way.

“Dodge!”

Before Marguerite could digest that call from Tepsekemei and the information she’d gained with her eyes, she rolled to the right, and a beat later came the sound of a blast of wind. It had missed her by a hair. Her feather decoration, sliced off by the shock wave of the slice, danced in pieces in the air, and Marguerite scattered shattered stones as she ungracefully rolled over the rocky ground. The sound of metal hitting metal and an impact rattled to her through the rock. The black ax had caught the iron-colored ax.

Magnetism!

The goddess had turned the iron ax into the shape of a boomerang and thrown it, then drawn it back with the magnetism of her other ax. So this was how she’d been able to wrench Maiya’s magic steel stick from her grasp.

Without waiting for Marguerite to get up, the goddess bent over. It was a strange gesture that she hadn’t displayed before. She made the ax in her right hand red-hot and on fire and changed the left ax to white crystal. Aside from the stance, Marguerite had seen this pattern before. It was the explosive attack that she’d used earlier. While focusing on the tells, Marguerite backstepped away. The goddess paid no mind to Marguerite, lifting her chin to look up at the sky. Tepsekemei’s air bullets hit the goddess’s shoulder, ripping her toga. The second and third hit her chest and head, making her hair bounce.

Marguerite readied herself in a sideways stance, right hand forward. The goddess didn’t defend herself, continuing to take the air bullets. Marguerite didn’t even have time to wonder why before there was an explosion. The brilliant light hit for only an instant, but it blinded her. She leaped back, but by the time she was ready to attack, the enemy was gone. Marguerite looked up. A call started leaking out from deep in her throat, and she clenched her teeth to smother it. The goddess was doing something unbelievable.

Flashes and blast sounds were generated in continuous succession, launching the goddess with each burst. She used her fuel and fire to generate continuous explosions, taking the blast wave on her body and toga to jet through the air in controlled flight. Her once-white costume was dirtied with soot, and her cheeks and forehead were similarly dirtied. But the smile remained on her face. Tepsekemei showered her with blades of air, but the ax of fire cut them in half.

Marguerite was aware she was being kept out of this fight. The goddess was so resilient that she could fly with a blast wind. Throwing rocks at her from below didn’t seem like it would do any damage. And seeing how she was taking the air bullets, they couldn’t even make the enemy flinch.

Marguerite pulled out the half a grayfruit that she’d been holding on to as reserve and tossed it in her mouth. She was frustrated at herself for just refueling, but still, all she could do on the ground was yell. “Tepsekemei! Come down!”

Marguerite frowned. Something was strange. Her voice wasn’t carrying well. The explosions were also weirdly muffled. Marguerite glared at the goddess racing through the sky above. This situation was familiar to her. It was the magic stone that Mana had also used. Just like that had kept whispered conversations from getting out, this was shutting out the sound of the battle, making it so she couldn’t hear. Now that she was this far away, Marguerite also realized nobody outside of the battle would notice it.

The explosions kept coming in successive blasts. Smoke blocked out the night sky, blotting the fading moon entirely from view. Even if Tepsekemei was the better flier, poor visibility was the enemy’s forte.

“Tepsekemei! Come here!” Marguerite yelled out. There was an intense gust of wind, and the smoke screen was scattered.

Tepsekemei was divided into two bodies, one of which took a direct hit from an ax to be scattered, while the other descended rapidly. Then the ax shone crimson. The goddess threw the shining ax at Tepsekemei, and it shone even brighter, weakening for a moment as if it were condensing, and before Marguerite could confirm the outcome, she spun around and fled. There was a burst of light more intense than any of the earlier ones, and even facing away from it, Marguerite’s eyes were dazzled.

She heard what sounded like both a girl’s dying scream and a gust of wind before they immediately vanished. She couldn’t sense Tepsekemei anymore.

Marguerite wasn’t even able to consider if Tepsekemei was okay. The racing footsteps coming after her from behind captured her ears, and when she turned around, she was shocked to see the goddess’s feet were not flat-footed like they had been only moments before. She was running the way you learned in the Inspection Department, the particular way of a magical girl factoring in body weight.

She…copied me…?

She was far faster than before, when she’d been awkwardly thumping around on her feet. The goddess struck from behind, and Marguerite ducked low to evade it but never slowed in her flight. The goddess was managing to run simply from imitating her. The enemy had learned.

  Nephilia

Nephilia had heard the mage called Sataborn was an eccentric. He’d never catered to political powers or served any particular individual, continuing to maintain his childlike motivation of doing it because he wanted to and making it because he wanted to until his death, until in the end he had died in an experiment. It was probably partly because they felt like they couldn’t speak ill of the dead, but when talking about Sataborn, his acquaintances had seemed somehow envious.

But Agri was the exception. She had to have suffered a lot, having a man who would prioritize research over everything else as her father.

Touta Magaoka was also a relative, but it seemed that he had no particular feelings about it, and certainly no twisted emotions like Agri. He looked like the kind of elementary schooler you might see anywhere. But nevertheless, it seemed he’d inherited the rebellious spirit. Nephilia remembered how Touta had desperately showed her his conversational skills and snickered. Maybe he would have made a good heir if he’d had magical talent, too, but things didn’t work out so easily. Agri, who had no intention at all of being a researcher, had been blessed with magical talent.

Nephilia thought that relatives should get along, but it didn’t seem like it would happen with those two. Agri would try to use Touta, and Marguerite wouldn’t stand idly by if that happened. It might be interesting to place Shepherdspie in between them as a buffer to keep that from happening, then roll Sataborn’s estate or whatever among the three relatives and watch it snowball.

Nephilia came to a stop. Even letting the wings of her imagination fly and pondering on and on about her future as she walked, she wouldn’t lose focus. Keeping a watchful eye around—the treetops and above included—she crouched down, avoiding the densely crawling tree roots to put her palm to the earth.

The ground was shuddering. Not from an earthquake. Something that would make the earth shudder was happening somewhere. She felt that it wasn’t far away. But if it was close, she should be able to hear it. Only the very natural sounds of the forest in early morning reached Nephilia’s ears: the buzzing of insects returning to their nests, the rustling of leaves, the drip of morning dew, and the whoosh of the wind gusting past.

Was there digging going on underground? Or was someone muting the sound of a battle? Whatever it was, for Agri, this was an irregular occurrence. More surprises made things more fun, but when you were wandering around the island with contracts like Nephilia right now, it was not the time for fun.

Reporting this to Agri was more important than the contracts, so Nephilia was about to get up again when she heard a branch break. It wasn’t the sound of a branch falling on its own but the sound of it being snapped under a foot. She put her hand on the ground. Walking. And slowly, too. It seemed like they were dragging a leg. Were they injured?

Combining the information they had obtained from Navi Ru with the information she had now, she had a decent grasp of what was where on the island. Even just signs of someone having been somewhere were fairly valuable. Since everyone was operating cautiously, not many of them would be moving to new positions.

Nephilia stood up and ran. She wasn’t going to let them get away. After a ten-second run through the forest at magical-girl speed, she plunged through a thicket and came out to find a girl. She was different from the last time Nephilia had seen her. Her glasses and scarf were gone; her uniform was cut, ripped, and frayed here and there; she’d lost one of her shoes and walked in a dirty sock; and she was using a long, pointed branch with the end shaved like a spear to walk. Dark-red fluid freshly marked her cheek, the point of the stick, and her skirt. It spoke vividly of what an intense struggle she’d been in.

Clantail—her human form—raised the spear to her waist, and once she saw it was Nephilia, she lowered the point in relief. She had to be frightened. She possessed the skill to cover fear with something else, but she still hadn’t forgotten fear.

“Where are the others…?” the girl asked.

“Right now…we’re separated…” Nephilia leaned her scythe against a nearby tree and spread her hands, showing her palms.

Clantail. Even among “Cranberry’s children,” the group who all had combat skills and experience killing, she was a cut above. As proof, even when Keek had gathered the children to reexamine them, Clantail had not dropped out of the running and had returned alive.

The incident where a magical girl called Keek had defied the Magical Kingdom and then been purged by the Magical-Girl Hunter was fairly well-known, but the details of the incident hadn’t been made public. Nobody knew that Clantail had gotten caught up in it, aside from those involved. Nephilia only knew because she’d been hired to investigate the victims during the incident. In order to find out what had happened during Keek’s scandal, Nephilia had gone around to the homes of the “children”—they’d had comparatively moderate deaths of experiencing heart attacks in their homes—to stroke their bodies or their cremated remains, going all the way back to pick up their voices from the start of the game. Though it had taken an incredible amount of time and effort, it had been worth it.

Nephilia had been personally interested in the incident, too. She was so interested that in order to learn if what the magical girl Pechka had said was true—that Clantail’s human and animal halves were different temperatures—she’d asked to pet Clantail’s body. She’d kept the reason for that private, though.

“Why? Why would everyone split up?” the girl asked.

“Maiya’s killer…attacked…”

“No way… And Ragi…?”

“…Probably…safe… No…fight…” Nephilia pulled out a contract. “Here…”

These had originally been made for mages to make contracts with other mages, but it should be more or less okay between two magical girls, too. Since it wasn’t like they were outside of the knowledge of the Magical Kingdom. But this was uncommon, so if anyone found out, they might complain about it, but Clantail was worth binding in a contract, even if it meant going through those hassles. Clantail had what Agri sought: money.

She was wearing a school uniform with no accessories. Everything on her was just part of her uniform, and she also had no makeup. It didn’t look like she lived a fancy life, and in fact she gave you the sense that she was scrupulous, with her feet on the ground. It didn’t look like she’d thrown away all the cash she’d won in the Keek reexamination.

Nephilia remembered the final words of Nokko, the magical girl who had been made to play the role of the Evil King. She had wished for the prize to be divided into equal parts before killing herself. When Nephilia had touched the body of that little girl gone cold, had the anger she felt then been righteous indignation? She had the emotional thought that perhaps Nokko’s magic had maintained its effects even after her death, and it put a strained smile on her face.

Clantail had won a large sum of money. If she hadn’t wasted it, then she would have a savings account too large for her age, or personal assets, or real estate.

Nephilia explained the contract with her own sort of sincerity. Being a magical girl changed her sense of time, compared to when she was human, and made her try to talk faster, so she more often stuttered to a halt or went hoarse. She stammered in a way that was difficult to hear. It would improve a bit if she concentrated and tried to move her tongue precisely, but she was impatient right now. While restraining her tendency to race on and on, she put the utmost effort into talking. But the further along she got, the more the girl’s expression grew severe, and her caution turned to hostility.

In her mind, Nephilia closed her eyes and looked up at the sky. What Agri was trying to do, what she wanted to do, her sense of values, was not compatible with good people. Touta and this girl might both see her as a tough person to negotiate with, but they would not see her as a reliable ally. It was sad, but there was nothing to be done about it. Attempting to secure profit for yourself even when it was dangerous would inevitably make people hate you. That was the same in any world. Nephilia finished her explanation for the most part and waited for the girl’s response.

Unlike Touta, she took no time to answer, and neither did she demand an extra. She just asked, “Do you know where Ragi is?”

“No…” Nephilia massaged her shoulder with her right hand. While she was impressed that the girl was so dedicated as to be worried about her employer at this point, Nephilia realized this didn’t please her. Maybe her answer to the question if Ragi was safe came out a bit muffled. “More importantly…”

“I understand.”

If that was decided, that made things faster.

When Nephilia proposed the exchange of thirty million yen in cash for ten grayfruit, the girl acquiesced easily. Nephilia saw that as overcharging her and had assumed they would negotiate to lower the price, but it seemed the other party had no such intentions. Nephilia did a basic ceremony through the contract, then dropped the promised fruit into the girl’s hands. As the girl was making to pick up the grayfruit that had spilled from her grasp, Nephilia turned away from her. Since they had made a contract, it was no longer dangerous to turn her back to her.

Once she transformed into Clantail, she would be too strong for Nephilia to manage alone. If Clantail meant to capture her, she could do so, and if she wanted to kill her, Nephilia would die. But there was a clause in the contract that prevented that. Clantail would be unable to attack Nephilia, Agri, or Ren-Ren.

Nephilia was about to walk right off but then stopped. She couldn’t articulate her feelings properly, but she felt uneasy. Something was keeping her from parting ways like this. She was going to say something. But what?

Still without having found the answer, she turned back. “Um…”

“What is it?”

“Those fruit…now…use…faster…pace…care…”

“Understood. I will use them with care.”

Was this what I wanted to say? she asked herself. She heard the answer from somewhere: no. Nephilia thrust her scythe into the ground, leaned against it, and asked the girl, “You…looking?”

The girl didn’t answer. She wasn’t looking any less wary. She wasn’t at all hiding that she was watching to see how Nephilia would act as she looked back at her. It was as if she’d already forgotten that she’d let Nephilia pet her back.

“At…building…were talking…about Keek…”

Clantail’s tail swished. There was no change in her expression. But she didn’t say, “Now’s not the time to be talking about that.” She was waiting for Nephilia to speak.

“Ragi…Management Department…head…” Nephilia’s feelings were pulling a little too far ahead of her. She slowed down. “During Keek’s reexamination…if Ragi…your employer…had given Snow White Keek’s information earlier…the exam would have ended faster.”

The girl’s expression didn’t change, but her eyelids twitched just once. It was like a spasm, but for the slightest instant, and was over in less than a second.

Nephilia turned around and left. She didn’t really know what she had wanted to do in the end. It would sound plausible if she made it so that she’d tried to draw Clantail’s interest, that she’d been jealous that all she was thinking about was Ragi. But Clantail wasn’t a nasty person at all. She wasn’t Nephilia’s type.

Nephilia thought about Keek’s exam one more time. Pechka’s words rose in her mind, and she tried to erase them with her usual laugh, but it wouldn’t come out of her throat.

  Ragi Zwe Nento

Ragi didn’t have the time, the information, or the facilities to deepen his knowledge about the grayfruit. In other words, he had nothing, but if you were speaking about the fruit it seemed the grayfruit had been based on, he knew enough that he could snobbishly lecture a student on them. Sataborn had been a man of pleasure who lived for his hobbies, but he’d been different from the lot who would pose at sophistication through pointless modifications. The temperature of this island as well as the humidity matched the cultivation conditions of the base fruit. If the cultivation conditions were the same or close to the original, there should be thick roots growing near a water source.

It wasn’t like there weren’t any spells for searching for water sources. If you got yourself a couple of formal dowsing rods, then you could find water without an incantation. Ragi had to avoid using magic as much as possible right now. He had recast the camouflage spell as well as the night-vision spell since he’d begun walking. He had to avoid waste. If it was simply finding water, he should just recall the overall layout of the island. There had been a pond in the center. He remembered there was a river flowing from there.

Soon after Ragi set off, he found a little rivulet and followed it upstream. He wasn’t going to go into the flow. He walked alongside the river. He managed to avoid the places where it meandered, pushing the reeds aside with his staff to proceed, but on the way, he reached a cliff three times his own height and came to a halt. It would be exaggerating to call the cliff sheer, but it was too steep for him to cross casually. A waterfall flowed over it, wetting the end of his nose with its spray, and Ragi took a step backward. Having backed up so completely automatically made him angry, and now he definitely couldn’t take a detour.

He temporarily undid the camouflage and night-vision spells and crossed over the waterfall in a single bound. He waffled a bit but chose not to recast the spells. The eastern sky was already growing pale. The night-vision spell was unnecessary now, and in the light, that basic camouflage spell would have no effect at all. Any spells of dubious merit would be omitted wherever possible.

There was no maintained path along the edge of the river, and Ragi had to watch out for even the smallest pebble as he walked. This forced him to look at the ground while walking, and so he was too late to notice the shadows that approached from behind.

“Oh, that’s him! There he is!”

“Um, pardon me.”

Ragi turned around to see two girls scattering grass as they approached, and more bitterness welled within him. Maybe it was just indignation at his own negligence for having been frightened, thinking it was the enemy, but as Ragi saw it, anger was anger, no matter where it came from.

“What in the blazes are you two doing?” he demanded.

Dreamy Chelsea was one of the magical girls employed by Shepherdspie. Ragi recalled that when he’d scolded Shepherdspie for being such a good-for-nothing, she had snapped at him like a wolverine whose territory had been invaded. Ragi would never forget a magical girl who went against him.

The other one was Pastel Mary. She had also been hired by Shepherdspie. She was the one who had brought him his invitation to this island. He had the feeling she’d also pulled something outrageous, but his memories in that area were vague, and he didn’t recall. Even Ragi wasn’t going to scold someone based on vague memories.

It wasn’t at all strange to see those two were paired up. They had to be operating under Shepherdspie’s orders. Shepherdspie was more trustworthy than Navi Ru or his lackey—so Ragi would have said, but Shepherdspie wasn’t reliable enough for that. At least the man had no malice. His utter lack of ambition was disappointing, but that also meant that he wouldn’t set you up or betray you. A mage who was satisfied with his own circumstances would not take needless risks.

“We were looking for you, Gramps.”

There was no need to criticize Chelsea for her rudeness at this point. Or rather, he’d get nowhere if he pointed out every single thing. Worst case, if she snapped at him, then she’d be more trouble than a cougar in heat. The current situation was headed straight for disaster. He would be generous about her attitude and whatnot and let that go.

“What do you mean, looking for me?” Ragi asked.

But before he could continue with, “Was Shepherdspie also trying to find the others?” Chelsea held a piece of paper out to him. She smiled brightly, while Mary’s eyebrows descended in an expression of worry. While he felt something didn’t quite make sense about their manner, he accepted the piece of paper and ran his eyes over it.

As he read along, deep wrinkles carved in his brow, the corners of his eyes rose up, and his back teeth creaked. “What…is this?”

“You don’t understand?” said Chelsea. “You don’t understand, huh. Chelsea doesn’t understand what’s written there, either. See, that’s a contract.”

“You’re telling me this is a contract?”

“That’s what I just said. It’s not like you don’t get what that means, right?” The way Chelsea was puffing her chest out arrogantly poured oil on Ragi’s anger, making it a big, unstoppable fire that blazed inside his heart.

“You lowlife!” Ragi tried to rip it in rage, but the strength of an old mage couldn’t affect the contract at all, and it ended with him stretching it out and making his arms shake. Unable to vent his anger that way, it turned to words that spilled out of his mouth. “That infernal fool Shepherdspie! What in the name is he doing at a time like this?!”

Mary was frightened and hid behind Chelsea, while Chelsea looked confused as she pouted. “Why are you angry at Mr. Pie?”

“How could I not be angry at that imbecile for showing me a sleazy, predatory contract and displaying piss-poor judgment about the situation?! Just what is that Shepherdspie thinking?!”

“Who knows. I have no idea about him.”

“…Huh?” Ragi uncrumpled the contract he’d been crushing in his fists and checked it again. The name on the contract was not Shepherdspie. It was Agri. It recognized as a payment of grayfruit, Ragi would pay in magic gems. Ragi read over it three times, and now sure he was not mistaken, Ragi’s anger exploded. “What is the meaning of this?! Why are you two blithering idiots working for Sataborn’s daughter?!”

“You’ve got it wrong; that’s not what’s going on at all. Dreamy Chelsea is working for her darling May-May. Chelsea is a magical girl who lives for love.” With Chelsea shoving her forward, Mary’s expression suddenly twisted in fear, and she tried to hide behind the other girl, but Chelsea’s strength prevented her. Mary tried to get away from her position right in front of Ragi, but no matter how she struggled and struggled, she couldn’t escape and hide.

Ragi’s anger was not contained or quieted, but this baffling situation and Chelsea’s odd behavior confused him. She had been a strange girl to begin with, but had she ever been the kind of wild eccentric to spew this much incomprehensible rubbish? It was also strange that she was walking around with contracts not for Shepherdspie but for Agri. None of it made sense.

Has she been controlled?

Rather than a lazy lout with plenty of funds to spare, Agri, being the daughter of a mistress, would have a reason to desire property. The fact that it was no place to be doing that in a situation where their lives were on the line, caught on an island on the brink of disaster, was no issue. The people who did that would do it anywhere.

He could use a spell to restore the balance of the mind. But Chelsea or Mary would probably subdue him before he could finish the chant. That was how magical girls were. Right now, Ragi did not have his self-made fortress, otherwise known as the head office of the Management Department.

Ragi digested his own powerlessness but was not crushed by it, instead using it to fuel his anger. Let the vulgar-minded fools do what they wanted. He didn’t have the time to get mixed up with them.

Ragi was too busy to chat with two girls who were being controlled. And that contract was beyond out of the question. He took another bite of the grayfruit and turned upstream again. That was where he had to go.

When Ragi wouldn’t talk to him, Chelsea dogged him. “Hey, hey, what’s wrong?”

He ignored her.

“Don’t you want grayfruit? They’re important, you know?”

He wasn’t even listening.

Chelsea must have realized that he wasn’t going to engage with her, as she started using physical tactics to beg. She touched Ragi’s robe and hat, squarely growing his irritation with the most obnoxious behavior possible. Ragi wasn’t just on the verge of exploding; he was exploding the whole time he was walking, but he sucked it up. When she snatched away his hat, he let it go, and when she grabbed his robe and ripped it, he let that go, too, moving onward with the thought that he had to go upstream, and then he came to a halt. His feet hadn’t stopped because of Chelsea’s meddling. His way was blocked by tree trunks that were lying there diagonally as if they’d been cut by a sharp blade. These were firm-looking trunks about as thick as Ragi’s torso, and they hadn’t been sawed down but severed with one stroke. Only a magical girl could do that.

And beyond that was even worse. Trees uprooted; grass that was overturned, earth and all; fissures running through rock face; all of it the work of magical girls. Mary voiced a little shriek, and Chelsea was saying baseless nonsense: “Don’t worry—I’ll protect you.”

Ragi hesitated a moment. While he was of two minds about it, he opened his mouth. “You two fools…weren’t the ones to do this?”

“No way.”

He wasn’t sure if he should believe that, but there was no reason for them to lie. Standing there, he gazed upon the aftermath of destruction and shook his head. There was no point in standing around here. Ragi started walking again, and Chelsea and Mary followed him like before.

Maybe that was actually a good thing. If the one who had destroyed the forest was ahead, it would be better to have two magical girls there with him rather than being alone. Even if they were being mind-controlled, if there was a clear enemy, the two girls would probably go to them.

The party—though it was extremely unintended on Ragi’s part, they had wound up becoming a party through gradual erosion—stepped over the destruction and made their way along. Before long, they crossed over a small hill to finally look down upon the source of the river: the pond in the center of the island.

“Huh?” Ahead of where Chelsea pointed, you could see a pair of feet. There was someone lying at the edge of the pond. Everything but the feet was hidden by the thick grasses and couldn’t be seen.

Ragi didn’t run toward it, approaching with caution to his surroundings, but Chelsea had no such reservation or consideration as she rushed out to instantly reach the fallen someone.

“Reckless girl,” Ragi cursed as he followed her, Mary trailing behind with fearful steps.

Coming to peer in from behind where Chelsea looked down, Ragi immediately turned his face away. “Horrendous…”

You could only barely tell that it was a mage in a robe. Their upper body was crushed, with nothing decent left. Blood was flowing—or it would be better to say it had splattered. Only the pitiful lower half remained. So then Maiya was not the only casualty.

“Why?” Her voice was trembling. It was Chelsea. Her shoulders were trembling, too.

“Mr. Shepherdspie!” Mary cried, and Ragi realized who it was. Ragi had been so rattled, he’d completely forgotten that only one mage on this island had a frame like his.

Chelsea’s trembling gradually became more violent. Mary tried to throw herself on the body, but on the way, she stumbled and fell in the mud. Chelsea held her head in her hands. A moan slipped from her lips. “Why…how…? Mr. Pie…”

Ragi struck the muddy earth with his right heel. His anger had now reached an utterly hopeless level.