Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 15 - Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

TUMBLIN’ DICE

  Clantail

An intense pain made her whole body cramp up, awakening her with a jolt. Clantail—Nene Ono—moaned and gritted her teeth but somehow relaxed her body again. Choking on the smell of earth, she used her elbows to lift her torso. She clung to a thick tree trunk, and a noise slipped out as she brought her body up only to fall on her bottom and send up dust. She leaned against the trunk and let out a fat breath.

Her entire body hurt. Her head in particular throbbed. She didn’t have her glasses, so her field of view was blurry, her clothes were in tatters, she was smeared with mud, her hair was torn out in places, and blood was flowing down her arms to drip off her fingertips. Nene Ono moaned again, shook her head, then started crying out in pain and smothered that at the back of her throat.

She was digesting the situation, albeit only somewhat. Her head was still working. The pain was a big drawback, but having her wits about her was a plus.

Her memories came back to her. Her power had run out and her transformation had come undone right in front of the goddess. She was hazy about what had happened after that. Unable to keep up with magical-girl speed once she’d gone back to being Nene Ono, she’d gone from a battle participant to just a victim and had been blown away. That normally would have killed her. But someone had helped her out, so she was still alive. When she’d regained consciousness, she’d been lying under a tree. Oh, that was it. Someone had laid her down.

Had it been Miss Marguerite? Nene doubted there had been enough time for that. If she had already defeated the goddess, it wouldn’t have been strange for her to have come here.

Suddenly, the ground rocked. Nene grabbed the tree trunk with her right hand, bearing the pain as she supported her body.

The sound and vibrations continued. The fight wasn’t over yet. Withstanding the pain, she slowly got up by leaning against the tree trunk. She wasn’t going to let it end like this. She had to do it. The fire in her heart hadn’t turned to embers. It was still burning as hot as before. Her soul was still yelling to never let it go out, like hell I’m letting it go out. No way could she let the faces of her old friends—angry faces, smiling faces, frightened faces—become just memories.

But if she went on like this, she would just get blown away again, and it would be over. There was no point in that. If she was going to go, then transformation was vital, and for that she needed grayfruit. But when she searched her pockets, she had none on her person.

Weren’t there any growing anywhere? Hadn’t any fallen anywhere? She looked around the area and finally noticed. She wasn’t the only one who had been laid down here. There was someone else. Sucking up the pain, she bent over and looked closely. It was a woman in a bathrobe.

Though her vision was blurry, she managed to tell who. It was Dreamy Chelsea’s human form. She was unconscious, and for some reason posed weirdly as she lay there. Her bathrobe was speckled with blood—in other words, she was injured.

Nene squatted down and groped along to take Chelsea’s wrist. Her pulse was weak. She opened the chest of the bathrobe. The wound there looked like it was closing, but it was big.

Nene found a color that shouldn’t be there between Chelsea’s breasts and reached out. It was a grayfruit stem. Most of the fruit had been bitten off.

It wasn’t like Nene had an accurate grasp of what medical benefit it might have, but at the very least the grayfruit had been useful when she’d nursed Marguerite. She didn’t know how useful this amount would be, but using it was better than not. She mashed what was left of the fruit up with her fingers and dripped the fruit juice into Chelsea’s mouth. When she brought the crushed flesh of the fruit to her lips, Chelsea’s tongue reached out weakly, and she took it in stem and all to munch on it.

Clantail brought her mouth to Chelsea’s ear and called out encouragingly to her over and over, rubbing her body to warm it and making her drink water from her plastic bottle, then took her pulse. It was stronger and more stable than before. Her body warmth was slight, but seemed better. She still needed proper treatment, but she’d improved a little. Nene let out a sigh, then used the handkerchief in her pocket to wipe Chelsea’s face and body clean.

She didn’t notice that she had used up all the grayfruit Chelsea had, all she possessed, until after she’d arranged her bathrobe and laid her down on the ground with a fallen tree as a pillow. Before Nene could feel regret, she started looking for grayfruit again, but she didn’t find any aside from the one Chelsea’d had.

  Dreamy Chelsea

Her memories and thoughts were hazy, as if she were looking at things through cotton candy. Her physical condition wasn’t great, and her legs were wobbly, as if she were walking atop fleecy clouds.

The sky was gray, clouds spread all over everything. It was dim around her, and she couldn’t tell if it was morning, afternoon, or evening. And there was a river flowing in front of her, filling the air with the smell of water. The river was just as big as the many famous rivers she’d seen in elementary school textbooks, such as the Ganges and the Yellow River. She couldn’t see the opposite shore. Even if she looked upstream, she couldn’t see the end, and when she looked downstream, the river continued to the horizon.

There was no sign of anyone but Chelsea. The river and the beach that paralleled it were incredibly barren, with none of the cuteness that Chelsea liked. If there was any cuteness, it would be on the other side of the river.

Chelsea picked up a few rocks from the beach, gripping them, crushing them, smacking them, hardening them, and forming them into star shapes. She made a star a size bigger than her palm float in the air and rode on top of it. Now it would be possible to cross the river without getting wet in the water, and also she had more cuteness now. It was killing two birds with one stone—she hadn’t used just one stone, but anyway it was two birds with one stone.

She didn’t know where she was, and she couldn’t remember what she’d been doing until now, and everything was vague and hazy aside from the fact that she was the magical girl Dreamy Chelsea. But she didn’t worry about any of those things. All Chelsea needed right now was to fill up on cuteness, and that was what she was crossing the river for. Chelsea struck a pose to say, “Okay, let’s go.” Right after she flew her star to the river, a loud sound hit her ears, and she stopped her star and turned back.

There was a single deer. It looked a little bigger than the kind of cute little deer you’d see in really old anime—basically the point was that it was very cute.

The deer looked up into the sky and cried out, throat vibrating. This cry was the loud sound that had made Chelsea stop. It was as if it were calling her, as if it were encouraging her, saying, “Don’t give in, you can do it.”

The deer flipped around nimbly to point its cute bottom and tail at her, then raced off in the opposite direction from the river onto a vast plain. The cuteness right in front of her was trying to run away. Chelsea panicked and ordered her star to follow the deer. This was no time for crossing the river.

Picking up speed, she caught up to the deer, and once she was close enough that she could almost reach, the deer evaporated like smoke. Before she could be surprised, her field of vision opened and she hurriedly sat up, and she clunked foreheads with the girl who was looking down at her, and both of them cried out, moaned, and writhed in pain, curling up with hands on their foreheads.

  Nephilia

Even once they heard sharp cries and bleating sheep, Marguerite still did not rush. She continued along dispassionately, at the same pace. Nephilia sensed she was not moving on impulse, but by strong will. She was not drunk on emotion. She was doing this because she should do it.

All the disturbing information transmitted to them by sounds quite unsettled Nephilia’s heart, but the way Marguerite moved helped her regain her calm, and they made their way forward at the pace of a three-legged race.

A magical girl was stronger than her human form in both body and mind. Even Nephilia, who normally joked around, was equipped with enough heart to be able to walk to her possible death if the time came. But Marguerite was detransformed. Her heartbeat indicated that her calm was not from acting or a strong front. Nephilia shivered on the inside. Were the pros among the pros like this, even in human form?

Regardless of how Nephilia felt about it, they moved onward, and the powerful sunlight pouring down beyond the trees drew closer. They were at the edge of the forest. Once they passed through here, they would be at the main building. And the sounds were getting louder and louder. As they approached, the sights changed. Fallen trees, dirt, and the corpses of sheep were scattered around. Stepping over the gruesome-looking bodies of the sheep, destroyed almost past recognition and torn into pieces and scattered, they proceeded.

The trees came to an end. They could see the goddess. There were magical girls there, too. Her heartbeat came harder and faster.

It was Pastel Mary. She was grappling with the wounded goddess, and the sheep were gathering around her. The goddess tried to swing her fist at Mary’s back, and 7753 clung to her arm to stop her. Both the girls and the sheep were vaguely glowing—was that a spell from Ragi and Yol?

With the violence of numbers and strengthening magic in addition to the goddess’s wounds, it seemed they had somehow reached a balance.

Sheep corpses, broken trees, and dirt were scattered around, plus random items like cabinets, shelves, books, and medicine bottles. There was a circular translucent thing floating about seven feet from the goddess—was that some kind of magic?

Nephilia really didn’t get everything that was going on, but it was far better than the worst she’d imagined—actually, it was close to the best. Marguerite heaved a particularly large sigh, and Nephilia could kind of sense her relief. She sighed as well. Everyone was doing well, working together.

But Nephilia knew that though 7753’s help had just barely saved Mary’s life, that was just buying time. Even if the goddess was heavily wounded, some grappling from a combat amateur wasn’t enough to pin her down.

At this point, they needed further help—in other words, Nephilia and Marguerite. First, Nephilia carried Marguerite on her back. This was the best idea, with the goddess caught grappling now. Then Nephilia swung up her scythe and leaped out from the forest.

Nephilia came three steps out of the thicket at the edge of the forest where she’d been hiding and brought her scythe down toward the goddess’s neck. The goddess didn’t even bother looking at her, stance low as she yanked the clinging sheep and the two magical girls close to her. In an instant, their positions switched, and before Nephilia’s swing could complete, now Mary’s head was where the goddess’s neck had been. At this rate, she would wind up slicing Mary.

Agh, shit!

It had been a mistake to casually intervene in this brawl. Even if Nephilia had gotten lessons from a specialist, she was far from a master of the scythe, and she couldn’t turn the blade or stop it right before impact. It was the most she could do to slightly change the trajectory, having somewhat anticipated the enemy would evade.

Nephilia tried to adjust the direction of her scythe, but she still sliced into Mary’s back more than shallowly. Pastel Mary’s costume was cut open, blood spurted out, and a cry that was difficult to describe came out of her, but she still did not relax her grip. Pastel Mary was stronger than Nephilia had imagined, and that kept this from causing their loss.

While mentally apologizing, Nephilia slammed her elbow into the goddess’s back, unflinching at the numbness running through her elbow as she struck the gear with a clenched fist. Nephilia’s fist was hurt more than the gear, and it bled. But the goddess didn’t go unscathed, either, and she spurted even more blood than Nephilia.

Nephilia could sense that the enemy was damaged. She swung up her fist for another strike, and the enemy tried to swing her arm to cover it, and then a sheep butted her, shifting the arm’s trajectory slightly off, and Nephilia’s fist reached first. Blood spurted out, and the goddess staggered.

One more shot—this time Nephilia swung up a leg under the cover of a sheep’s body so it wouldn’t be noticed. She grabbed the goddess’s hair and yanked, and with that opening, she swung her fist. 7753 hit the goddess in the chin with a head-butt, and Nephilia struck again.

Nephilia’s right fist was ripped to shreds. The enemy was gushing even more blood than she was, but Nephilia wasn’t sure how well this was working. Even if the goddess was staggering a bit, it looked to Nephilia as if she was inviting an attack. But even if she was, Nephilia was definitely making her focus her attention on the gear.

Nephilia made it look like she was going to take another shot, then sneaked her left hand in—this time, she was reaching out to the sword like a butter knife stuck in the goddess. If she used this, even Nephilia could finish her off.

Right before Nephilia’s hand reached the sword, the goddess grabbed her wrist. With strength like a vise, she tore skin, shattered bone, and crushed flesh, destroying it before Nephilia could even blink.

She had no time to be wailing from pain now. Everything was proceeding according to plan, so smiling was more appropriate than wailing, but she figured it would look more natural to yelp, so she did. It was important to keep the goddess from figuring out what she was after.

Miss Marguerite, detransformed, was on Nephilia’s back. She would be able to reach out to the sword without the goddess catching her. This time for sure they would pierce a weak point, either the brain or the pulsing ax, and then it would be over. Even if the goddess figured out that Nephilia had been trying to make her focus on the gear and now was quietly reaching out to her real goal, the magic sword, the goddess couldn’t perceive Marguerite, and they just had to hide her—their—actual goal.

A human hand reached out from behind that crushed wrist. She was frustratingly slow because she was a human, and also because she was wounded badly enough that it was difficult for her to walk by herself.

Nephilia howled. She was beyond lamenting about how this wasn’t like her. Even the sheep howled loud in excitement, and Pastel Mary followed with a roar just like a sheep. The sheep and Mary had noticed Miss Marguerite’s presence and what she was trying to do, and they were trying to conceal that as much as they could.

The goddess released Nephilia’s crushed wrist, and next she brought her palm toward her face. Nephilia glared at the palm coming for her, shielding herself with her destroyed right arm as the goddess thrust at her face.

But the goddess stopped right before her hand reached Nephilia’s right arm. The goddess’s vaguely smiling face revealed slight shock, expressed by her eyebrows coming together just slightly.

The goddess’s hand suddenly turned a different way, toward her own shoulder—in other words, in the direction in which Miss Marguerite’s hand was reaching. She took Marguerite’s arm without hesitation, and before Nephilia could cry out, she flung Marguerite aside.

Marguerite was thrown into the forest, breaking branches as she flew, and she came to a stop when her back struck a tree and she fell to its roots. You couldn’t even tell if she was alive or dead.

  7753

7753 also understood what Nephilia and Marguerite had been trying to do. After all, she’d also experienced being unable to transform into a magical girl, and so she hadn’t been perceived by the goddess.

The strategy had been going well for a while. Nephilia had distracted the enemy, making the goddess focus on blocking to create space for Marguerite to act. But for some reason, the goddess had detected Marguerite’s presence, and Marguerite had been tossed into the forest.

7753’s goggles were presently operating at full throttle to make up for the time she hadn’t had them. She rapidly switched the display, continuously gathering any information that could be even a little bit useful.

She already knew that Marguerite had been wounded badly enough that it had been difficult for her to stand. Thrown aside with wounds that bad, she might easily have lost her life this time. Normally, 7753 would have had to run straight to her, but the situation wouldn’t allow that.

“Everyone, refuel! The power consumption is going fast!”

She had to deal with things, respond even before she could understand all the information that kept coming and coming. Her head felt like it was about to pop, but it could wait until this was all over for that.

The magical girls were all close to their limits. Any of them could lose her transformation at any moment. By comparison, the goddess still had reserves before her energy bottomed out. 7753 didn’t have the time to look into whether that was due to the goddess having better material to refuel or due to a difference in constitution.

While clinging to the goddess’s arm with one hand, 7753 bit into a bottle of liquid medicine, swallowing the contents along with the glass fragments. Opening the bottle with one hand would take even more time than using both hands, and they couldn’t spare even a second more than they had right now.

Nephilia pulled out a grayfruit and swallowed it whole, and Pastel Mary put one hand in her pocket and rummaged around, then opened her mouth slightly and closed it immediately. She was the only one who had no replenishment.

It would be rather harsh to tell her she should have gotten something beforehand. The attack had been too sudden. But if they lost Mary now, and all the sheep went away, the tides of battle would be decided all at once. Even with the mages backing them up, just 7753 and Tepsekemei alone would be flung away without difficulty.

7753 thrust her hand into her pocket, hoping for something, and when her fingers touched something, she pulled it out. It was a grayfruit.

She’d only had one bottle of the medicine. And she shouldn’t have had a single grayfruit. But still for some reason there was a grayfruit in her pocket. She had no idea why, but right now she didn’t have the time to be digging deep into it. 7753 threw the grayfruit at Mary.

The goddess reached out her hand and snatched the grayfruit from the air. Both 7753’s and Pastel Mary’s mouths froze in the shape of “ah” as the goddess swallowed the stolen grayfruit whole.

This might have been the first time 7753 had seen the goddess eat a grayfruit. It was as if she was imitating Nephilia from a moment ago—even the way she opened her mouth and used her hand was identical.

She tried to think of what to do and found no answers. Despair crept up from below, and she clenched her teeth and resisted it. Even if she didn’t know what to do, she had to do something.

The goddess smiled like it tasted good, and then her expression immediately turned serious. Her eyes widened, her mouth contorted, and she vomited up the whole grayfruit she’d just swallowed with some stomach acids, then put a hand into her clothing with a pained look, as if she was searching for something. 7753’s goggles were telling her the goddess was in a bad state.

The body heat drained from the arm of the goddess 7753 was clinging to. 7753 suddenly remembered, Oh yeah. That was the grayfruit that had been growing on the bog island. Since Tepsekemei’s transformation had come undone after she ate some, 7753 had put one in her pocket and left it there, thinking later she should ask one of the mages what it was.

  Touta Magaoka

Marguerite was flung away. Touta was about to race to her, but he skidded to a stop.

He didn’t stop because he was afraid. It had been way more frightening for Touta to be the one person standing there with nothing to do when Ragi and Yol were chanting spells and the magical girls and sheep were clinging to the goddess. Just what was so scary about circling around the battlefield where everyone was continuing to grapple with a fearsome enemy to go to Marguerite?

When Touta saw the rapier stabbed into the goddess, he thought Marguerite was dead. But she was alive. She was injured, and she’d been flung away, but she was still alive. So then there was nothing to be scared of.

What brought Touta to a halt was that there was something unnatural, strange about the situation.

7753 yelled something. She’d said something, but the words had come out so startlingly fast, Touta had no idea what she said. She yelled and pulled out a medicine bottle and bit into it. Nephilia took a grayfruit out of her pocket and swallowed it.

7753 was wearing her goggles now. She’d said before that stats windows popped up when she looked through them. In other words, 7753 had checked people’s status through the goggles and given everyone a heads-up because their magical-girl power was starting to run out, prompting them to refuel. When he figured out this much, an “Ahh!” slipped out of him.

He basically got what was strange here. He hadn’t understood why Miss Marguerite was in human form. Nephilia had come with her, and she’d been transformed into magical-girl form while Marguerite was human. It wasn’t that they had been left without a choice because there were no grayfruit. Hadn’t Nephilia eaten a grayfruit just now? At this stage of the fight, there was no way they would scrimp on grayfruit and make it so just Marguerite wasn’t transformed, not when this was a final showdown with her life on the line.

As Touta was thinking, the situation was developing frighteningly quickly. The grayfruit that 7753 threw to Pastel Mary was stolen by the goddess, and after the goddess ate that, she seemed kind of strange and groped in her pocket, and when she tried to pull out something, Nephilia hit her and the sheep head-butted her, and fine debris like pills or something scattered everywhere.

The scattered pills fell to the ground, or into the sheep’s wool, or into Pastel Mary’s still-open mouth. Many of them bounced off the goddess, some touching the ax handle stuck in her chest, and then disappeared with a shloop as if they were sucked in.

While the goddess was rummaging for the medicine, the magical girls were pushing, and after the pills were scattered, the goddess’s energy seemed down, and she was moving slower. The pushing and jostling moved from right to left as it came closer to Touta. The sheep bleated pitifully, and 7753 yelled something else rapidly.

Touta didn’t blink. His breathing had stopped. He was just thinking.

Marguerite was strong. Normally there would be no reason to keep her from transforming into a magical girl, to make her fight as a human instead. There had to be some reason she hadn’t transformed. Now that he thought about it, the goddess had been moving in a strange way overall. It seemed like she’d been slow to react to Marguerite compared to the other magical girls.

Touta’s mind leaped from one thought to the next so fast that he didn’t even understand them anymore, going dizzyingly around and around. Touta drew in a big breath and held it, tensing his stomach, and took one step toward the goddess.

  Miss Marguerite

She still had a hold on her consciousness—and her sanity. After being thrown away, even with the tree stopping her descent, her battered body had become even more injured, and the damage to her organs was reaching fatal levels. It was only that her heartbeat and breathing hadn’t stopped, and at this point, her inevitable death was looming.

Mysteriously, her consciousness was clear. Maybe her sense that she had a mission to complete was moving her body and mind. The Inspection Department was generally that sort of place. Swallowing the blood that was overflowing in her mouth, she considered why the goddess had sensed her presence.

The goddess was not able to detect a magical girl who had used up all her power, or a human who didn’t have any magic power to begin with. So she shouldn’t have noticed Marguerite reaching out for the sword—but she had actually noticed Marguerite before she’d touched the blade and had flung her away.

Now the goddess was pushing and shoving against the sheep and the three magical girls. Swallowing the grayfruit stolen from 7753—there must have been poison in it or something—had weakened her, and though she’d been the one pushing before, now they were at about equal force. But this way, things would never end. If they just pushed at each other, it would only continue to wear the magical girls down.

They needed the sword after all. For that, Marguerite needed to think about what had caused her failure.

The sheep struggled and the magical girls strained to push the goddess down, but the goddess bent her knees and resisted. The ones who tried to hold her back got dragged along instead, their feet carving tracks in the ground, and though they tried to dig in, they couldn’t stop her.

Ragi let out a little cry, and Yol took medicine bottles in both hands, bringing her right hand to Ragi and her left to herself to drink some green liquid, and the glow on the magical girls grew stronger.

Marguerite inhaled, planning to ignore all the pain in her lungs, respiratory tract, and mouth. She thought she’d taken a deep breath, but she hardly felt any pain at all. It seemed she was finally close to her time limit.

She basically understood how the goddess had known where she was.

When the goddess had dropped the pill-shaped things that she’d pulled out of her pocket just now, every single person around, sheep and magical girl, had reacted to them—probably medicine—and watched where they went. Marguerite thought that everyone had reacted similarly during her try as well. Either the goddess had seen the reflection of Marguerite in the sheep’s eyes, or she’d seen the sheep’s reactions and used them to anticipate the presence she hadn’t been able to detect herself.

After guessing that it was one of those two, Marguerite drew in another breath. Was she hearing a sound like wind blowing through cracks because she had torn something and her breath was leaking out, or because she couldn’t breathe properly, so her gasps sounded nothing like ordinary ones?

She’d managed to figure out the problem, but a further issue loomed. At this point, never mind walking under her own power, even standing up was difficult. The goddess had managed to refuel, though imperfectly, while on the other hand she didn’t know how much the magical girls had in their reserves. And even if Ragi’s magic had conferred a small amount of energy on them, the question was whether they could maintain it or not.

Swallowing the blood pooling in her mouth, Marguerite moved just her eyes to check the area. None of the group—not Pastel Mary, Ragi, Yol, 7753, or Nephilia—was looking at Marguerite. Just like the trailing black smoke beyond the trees, even if it was important, they saw this as not the time to be giving attention to it. Just like before, the attention wasn’t on her—in other words, this was an opportunity. But her legs did nothing but tremble, and they wouldn’t stand.

Marguerite drew in a breath and blew it out. She felt like she had to focus everything just to breathe, or everything would be taken away from her. Sending oxygen into her lungs, she picked up on the single thing in her awareness she had overlooked. Her eyes locked on Touta Magaoka, who was slowly and cautiously making his way forward.

  Navi Ru

“I believe we should also hurry to the main building,” Mana proposed, but Navi definitely didn’t want to do that.

“No, no. If we went without magical girls guarding us, we’d be nothing but a burden,” he told her.

He anticipated the main building was a scene of carnage right now. Who knew whether you’d live or die there? He couldn’t bring someone he didn’t want dying to a place like that. If Mana died, then her father might get serious, and if that happened, the entire Inspection Department was bound to turn hostile to them, and then if the Caspar Faction or some such played nice guy and started meddling, then things really would be out of control.

Navi wasn’t going to go. Though he could make Francesca settle down comparatively safely if he used the code, using the code where other people could see would make his own involvement obvious. That would make everything he’d done on this island come to nothing, with no guarantee that he could avoid leaving witnesses and keep everyone’s mouth shut. That was exactly why he’d sent Clarissa, but there was still no word from her.

If Clarissa was safe, then there was no need to go, and if she wasn’t safe, then Navi couldn’t take the risk to his life. Heading over to Francesca without using the code was risking his life, and it was a risk with pretty bad odds. If he died, it was over. No matter how a heroic death might be advertised, the dead received no benefit. He could only achieve his goals if he was alive. He didn’t mind losing his fortune. He’d made that contract thinking that he’d be fine giving it all to Agri if he had to. But his life was something else.

It really made him uncomfortable to have to leave things be for now, for the sake of his future. He couldn’t be letting Yol die, he wanted Ragi to be safe, he wanted 7753 to die, and Touta should die—but it would be hard to actualize everything he wanted. Assuming that it would be possible to get rid of people after leaving this island, then the issue was safeguarding Ragi, but Navi might be forced to abandon him. Nephilia, who was supposed to be on his side, had moved the gear without permission, and now he had no more pawns. It was deeply regrettable to abandon Ragi, since he was supposed to have been useful in the future. But when Ragi’s life was compared to his own life, there was nothing for it but to give up on that. Since he was giving up on Ragi and he also couldn’t guarantee Yol’s safety, that made Mana valuable as a surviving witness. That would make it even worse for her to die.

Navi turned away from Mana and glared at the main building as he plucked a leaf his hand happened to touch.

He had no one. At this point, he found himself wondering if bringing only Clarissa to the island had been a mistake. Navi himself had added the proviso that you could bring up to two, so he’d also had the option of bringing two magical girls. But Clarissa was the only one he could trust with everything. If he’d borrowed someone from the faction, he’d never be able to trust her, he didn’t have the funds or the status to own a Shufflin series, and even if he were to hire a mercenary, there was no way he could tell them about everything. The only conspirator he could share it all with was Clarissa.

Navi’s younger sister was, unlike him, a mage of great talent. Even a spawn of the lower classes, the type an aristocrat would snort at, could move up if they had the talent. But his sister had failed to realize that aristocrats would never value such people in the true sense.

Incarnations were the concentrated essence of the technology of the Magical Kingdom. They also made use of materials that couldn’t be made public. The Lab wasn’t the only place where the goals at the job site would transcend ethics. Navi had heard that even the offspring of the upper classes would be made into human sacrifices, if needed. And that was even more likely for someone of low birth who had succeeded on pure talent, someone who would be the target of jealousy.

His sister’s husband was a common mage with a typical sense of values—in other words, he was a coward. Just a workplace with slight benefits and decent conditions had been enough to make him keep his mouth shut about his wife’s whereabouts. No, maybe he would have shut his mouth even without a payment. Ordinary mages were afraid of the Magical Kingdom.

Navi Ru was no ordinary mage—he was far baser and more dastardly. Even if her husband had been satisfied, Navi wasn’t going to just let his only sister get stolen away. Clarissa, who shared the same dastardly genes, sympathized with his thinking, and the two had worked together to ensure they could be involved in the business of developing the incarnation.

If Francesca was out of control, Clarissa was gone, and Navi couldn’t act freely, then this wasn’t the time to be standing around. Navi plucked a new leaf, and, feeling something was off about it, he opened his hand. The leaf was a dull brown and completely dried up.

The thicket around them was dry. When he looked around, he saw other places here and there that had turned brown. He’d thought just a minute ago that the whole forest was annoyingly green.

Navi turned around and looked at Mana. She was also gazing at the brown leaves in bafflement. “They just suddenly lost their color… What does this mean?”

“Dunno. The hell is going on here?”

“Is this…a tree where grayfruit grow?”

Everything about the grayfruit had been unexpected. Navi didn’t understand what was happening, but something was definitely happening. He clenched his right fist behind his back so Mana couldn’t see and muttered, “Who knows, really.”