Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 9 - Chapter 9

The Elf of the Inspection Department

That day, the Inspection Department was in a flurry starting first thing in the morning. They were set to hold an event for visiting audit students—specifically, a seminar on arrest techniques. The entire department staff had been mobilized to peel every single mat out of the dojo, clean the place up, prepare food and drinks, check the program, set up seats for the guests, and various other miscellaneous tasks. They were worked so hard that none of them had a free moment to even sit down.

The event had been launched due to the whims of their superiors, but it hit those on the ground level the hardest. In the Inspection Department, from the department chief down to the lowliest inspectors, no one complained, griped, grumbled, or whined. Keeping any thoughts like Damn them for creating this hassle for us to themselves, they solemnly got everything ready.

Then they received unexpected news.

There was a kidnapping. The culprit was a magical girl. The location was a provincial city in a certain country in South America.

They were already so busy, and now there was a big incident. The Inspection Department had jurisdiction over the investigation of any crime involving magical girls in the human world—independent of the Magical Kingdom’s own authority—including the right of arrest. When crime occurred, they took on a police-like role. The whole department went into a furor from top to bottom, and then they received even more big news.

There was a bank robbery. The culprits were all magical girls. The location was New York.

This was now no time for a seminar on arrest techniques. Though the Inspection Department was called the police of magical-girl society, there was a far lower crime rate among magical girls, so there weren’t all that many dramatic arrests.

This meant all the staff were panicking.

“Split the personnel in two!”

“Hana, you handle the robbery! Apparently, they have a magical girl who called out her move name when firing a beam! There’s a possibility she’s an Archfiend Cram School wannabe!”

“Get us some transport, come on! Get the magic carpets out from the storehouse!”

“Chief, the magic drug inventory is in the storage center!”

In a great uproar like an unseasonal storm, the magical girls and mages in charge of command at the scene leaped out one after another, and only those upper-ranked magical girls, who would normally never be acting as reception, like the department chief and the vice department chief, remained. Following which, the visitors coming for the seminar, who knew nothing of the affairs of the Inspection Department, showed up one after another.

Now the bosses were forced to act as receptionists, something they were quite unused to. Hot-blooded visitors such as students from the Archfiend Cram School and agents of the Department of Diplomacy came to butt in, saying things like, “If you’re having so much trouble, then why don’t I help you out with these incidents?” causing even more hassles.

They scrambled to deal with everyone and send them home, and by the time they were finally all gone, the sun was already directly overhead. Since they had not yet resolved the incidents, the real work was starting now. Having a proper command was what enabled soldiers to fight with all their strength. Once the reception work they were so inexperienced at was finished, the bosses ran off to the office in order to handle miscellaneous tasks such as helping the operators and setting up the headquarters. The Inspection Department was capable of flexible division of labor during emergencies.

Filru, who worked at a magical-girl prison, had two reasons for attending the arrest techniques seminar; one was more of a pretense, and the other was closer to her true intentions.

The former reason was that she wanted to learn arrest techniques to polish her combat skills and become a better jailer. The latter reason, meanwhile, was that if she took the arrest techniques seminar and got the certificate, she would get a five-thousand-yen special skills fee added to her current base pay.

Ostensibly, magical-girl departments wanted to focus functions in one place, which may have been why so many of them were located in the Tokyo area. They said you could find the entrances only through strange and mysterious triggers, like going back and forth between buildings forty-five times or doing a handstand for eleven and a half minutes in a back alley.

The Inspection Department was one such institution, but you didn’t need such troublesome ceremonies if you used their long-distance travel gate, which made it easy to go between divisions.

Though Filru worked in a prison in America, she was from Japan and still lived there. She used the gates frequently to come and go between the two nations, so this was less of a trip than going back to visit her parents—it didn’t even feel like a little outing to her. Guess I might as well buy some gifts for my coworkers at the prison before I go back, she would think whenever she was in Japan.

First, she set her palm on the biometric authentication, then input the password and typed in the number for the Inspection Department, which she’d made a note of, then passed through the magic gate in the prison. At a glance, this gate, developed from the concentration of the best of modern magic technology, appeared to be nothing more than an arch made of rough, ugly concrete, but it could instantly transport you to and from the important bases that dotted each region.

Passing through the gate, she was enveloped in light, and immediately, the light faded. She was in a completely different building from the prison where she’d once stood. But something was off. When she stepped out from the gate and spoke to the front desk right ahead, a pair of receptionist magical girls with an intimidating bearing and look in their eyes insisted, “We’ve never heard of such an event.” They said they’d inquire about it and made her sit down on the sofa, then after being made to wait an hour and a half after that, finally, they answered, “This isn’t Inspection, it’s the Department of Diplomacy.”

Filru was indignant, wondering why she’d been made to wait an hour and a half for them to tell her something so basic, but venting her frustration at the Diplomacy reception wasn’t going to change the situation for the better. Besides, the receptionists were really intimidating—too scary for her to yell at. And anyway, the one who’d screwed up on the gate settings and come to the wrong location had been Filru. There was no one else who could resolve her problem.

With a bit of negotiation, she got to use Diplomacy’s magic gate. She somehow managed to set it up after struggling with the different interface and constantly checking the manual. She went through the gate and emerged in a place nothing like the oppressive Department of Diplomacy. The passersby were like models or celebrities. Filru was impressed. “Wow, this is different from Diplomacy and the prison.” When she explained her situation to the reception, she was told, “This isn’t Inspection. It’s the PR Department.” She stomped her foot but figured that explained why everyone around here looked so glamorous.

Grabbing a mascot character walking around who looked like a ferret, she requested, begged, threw herself at it, and had it help her with the settings, and after making sure to check her destination, she used the magic gate.

Coming out of the gate, she found herself in an aged wooden building like the old-fashioned schools she’d seen in movies. Both the black-painted bare concrete of the Diplomacy interior and the PR Department wall material, coated with a pearl white you could practically see your reflection in, were quite new, compared to this place.

Filru did get a sense of a backbone from it—it was simple and sturdy, practical, or rather, “What’s the point of using money just for looks?!” Gathering herself, Filru passed through the entrance and headed for the reception, but there was nobody there. There was also no call bell.

“Pardon meeee, is anyone heeere?”

No response. She also didn’t get the impression that anyone was coming. There was no bell or buzzer there to call anyone, either. She called out once more, a little louder, but after she’d waited three more minutes, there was still no response. Even after she screamed at the top of her lungs and waited five more minutes—still no one. She was a bit worried but figured that the seminar must already have begun. The whole Inspection Department had to be out for the seminar. That had to be why there was no one here to respond to her call.

Given the situation, it’d probably have been best to give up, but she didn’t want to give up. It would be aggravating to have spent all this time on nothing. Even if it was Filru’s fault that she’d screwed up at the beginning, it was the Department of Diplomacy’s fault that she’d gotten detained there for so long. If she explained that properly, then couldn’t she be allowed to participate in the seminar? It would be really awkward to join in after it had already started, but it would also be quite awkward to report that she’d come back without doing anything because she’d been late.

“Excuse meeee! Is there anyone here?” she called out while walking down an old hallway that reminded her of a high school corridor.

After a little walking, she found something like a handmade information sign posted there. There was a hand drawn on it, with its index finger pointing to the right side of the hallway. Underneath was written Arrest Techniques Seminar, and there was something written there in terribly chaotic characters. Though she could make out as far as due to circumstances today, everything else was so bad, she could barely tell it was Japanese. This wasn’t just someone’s messy scrawl—it was chicken scratch.

Still, if she could basically get where she was supposed to go, that was enough. Following the sign, Filru turned right, and where the “school corridor” came to a dead end, there was a big sliding door open, eight feet high and twice that wide. Calling with a quiet “pardon me,” she went inside. There, finally, was a school gymnasium.

It had wood floors. Mats were piled up on a mountain in the corner. A sort of second floor that you climbed up to via ladder circled the whole area, and from the open windows there, sunlight was coming in.

And there was not a single person there. Filru looked around the area, then looked around one more time. There was nobody.

At another look, the place was a size or two bigger than a middle school or high school gymnasium. It was indeed old, but it was well-made and sturdy. Typically, strengthening magic was cast on this sort of facility so it wouldn’t break, even when they did freestyle matches.

Filru approached the mountain of mats piled up to nearly the ceiling, clapping a hand on it. Every single one of the tatami would have been reinforced, of course. It was essential that they be durable enough to withstand magical girls on top of them running, falling, breaking falls, and crawling. So they would have been quite expensive.

This department seemed like it would have more funds than the prison. Though the two departments were related, practically like siblings, one doing the catching and the other locking up those who were caught, they were different in this respect, after all.

While Filru was having stingy thoughts about money—

“Ohhh, there you are.”

—someone called out to her. Filru turned around went, “Ohhh,” unintentionally reacting the same way as the other person.

It was a magical girl with a police-officer motif, with flashing lights at her waist and big handcuffs hanging from her shoulders. She looked like a cop—in other words, she was using her entire person to emphasize that she was a member of the Inspection Department. Smiling brightly, waving her hand in front of her face, she said to Filru cheerily, “I was really floundering there,” sounding composed, in all actuality.

“Hey there! I’m Patricia.” In contrast with her cop image, her tone was friendly.

“Ahhh, hello. My name is Filru.”

“Man, ha-ha-ha, there was nobody here, so I was wondering what was up.”

“Pardon me—I’m rather at a loss myself here, too. I was wondering why there aren’t any people here.”

“Yeah, that’ll make you feel that way, huh?”

“That’s why, like I said, I don’t know what to do. I came late, and then for some reason, it was empty, and nobody’s here.”

“For real? Same here. I showed up just a little late for this arrest techniques seminar, and then for some reason, the place was empty.”

They both looked at each other. Filru sort of got the idea that their conversation was not on the same page.

The police-style magical girl Patricia gave Filru a baffled look. “…You’re not with the Inspection Department, Miss Fil?”

“No, I’m here to take the seminar. Wait… You’re not from the Inspection Department, either?”

“Nah, I’m taking it, too.”

Filru bottled up what she wanted to say—Isn’t it fraud for you not to be in the Inspection Department, in that getup? This meant that it was just one lost person running into another lost person, and she hadn’t resolved anything. “What should we do? I’m not sure if we should be walking around everywhere, but maybe we should go look and see if there’s anyone else here. I think it’s clearly odd for the department to be this empty.”

Patricia folded her arms and looked down for a while, then suddenly lifted her face and called over Filru’s shoulder in a loud voice that carried well, “Hey! You over there!”

Filru turned around. Over where she’d called was nothing but stacked-up mats.

“You over there, right there. The one hiding behind the mats.”

There was a two-second pause, and then a figure popped out from behind the piled mats, giving Filru quite the shock. When she’d entered the dojo, she’d gotten close enough to that pile of mats that she’d reached out to touch it, but she hadn’t noticed the girl at all.

The one who appeared from the shadow of the mats was a magical girl. The guitar over her back was rough, aggressive, and reminiscent of a battle-ax. She was decked out in so much metal that she jangled whenever she walked—earrings, chains, studs, skulls, a collar, the works. While her costume itself was simple with just a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, it had a decent visual impact.

The guitar magical girl put her right hand behind her head and smiled a little awkwardly. “I wasn’t really hiding. That makes it seem like I’m a bad guy who sneaked into the Inspection Department, huh? But Tot’s a pure and righteous magical girl and not at all thinking bad things.”

Filru didn’t really get it. But this person might be their savior, arriving just when she and this other latecomer were looking at each other going, “Oh, what do we do, what do we do?” Filru restrained her surprise and asked, “You’re from the Inspection Department, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, totes,” said Patricia. “It’s super obvious she’s with the department.”

Was it, though? If Patricia said so, then Filru figured she had to be right. But if anything, the magical girl before them with a guitar on her back was dressed in an antiauthoritarian sort of getup. Once, Filru had seen a detective drama with a story where like, the detective who dealt with organized crime looked more like a yakuza than the real thing, so maybe it was basically something along those lines.

“If you’re from the Inspection Department, then you know what’s going on right now, yes?” asked Filru.

“Yeah, that!” agreed Patricia. “That’s what I wanna know! When I showed up late, for some reason, nobody was around.”

The girl with the guitar brought her hand out from the back to her head to smack herself on the forehead twice. Expelling meaningless sounds like “Uhhh” and “Urghh,” she slowly spun around on her left leg to turn her body to the right, and then at ten times that speed, she spun back the opposite way to face Filru again. “That’s a secret.”

“What? A secret?”

“You guys are those people, right? You came for the thing?”

“Ah, yes, the arrest technique seminar.”

“Yeah, that.”

The guitar girl stuck up the index finger of the hand that had smacked her forehead, then waved it two, three times, thrusting it before them. “You know those emergency drills in elementary school? You don’t tell the students about them beforehand, right? The bell just suddenly rings, and there’s an announcement that there’s a fire somewhere, and then the drill starts.”

“Ohhh, I get it,” said Patricia. “So you mean right now is like the part of an emergency drill where you’re taking the class like normal?”

“Yeah, yeah, you got it.”

“So then, we should act natural.”

“Uh-huh, bingo. Anyways, Tot’s got business to do.”

“Hey, hey!” Patricia grabbed the guitar girl’s shoulder as she was trying to turn around, spinning her back to face her. The guitar magical girl’s knees were trembling slightly, and she was clenching her teeth. Though she was doing everything she could to resist, she was being held there by force.

“Tot’s kinda busy, though…”

“The two of us are gonna be left all alone here again, y’know. We don’t wanna keep on waiting forever and ever. So let’s have a little chat. Just a brief chat’s fine.”

The guitar girl sat down—or rather, was made to sit down, and Patricia took a seat next. I’d rather not get my butt dirty…, thought Filru as she sat down in a triangle with the other two magical girls.

“I’m Patricia. I’m a freelance magical girl. My special skill is punching people.”

“Oh, my name is Filru. I work in a magical-girl prison.”

“Tot is, um…called Keek. I work at the Inspection Department.”

“Keek? You’re not Tot?” Patricia asked.

“Ummm, um… My name’s Tot Keek.”

They made some small talk such as “I wonder what kind of training this is?” or “It’s cold today, huh?” But that was all it took before Tot Keek and Patricia were laughing with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

“Man, Tot, you’re a real blast!”

“I get that a lot!”

Filru didn’t get just what was so funny; she felt left out. While Filru was unable to do anything but offer fake smiles and show she was listening, the two of them had gotten close, so friendly that it was like they’d already forgotten that tense exchange from when they’d first sat down.

Were communication skills necessary in the Inspection Department? Maybe their members sometimes had missions where they had to get a suspect to confess, or maybe they’d do some spy work and infiltrate other organizations. It seemed highly plausible that they had someone on the team with a nickname like “So-and-so the Closer.”

“So then why’d you decide to take the seminar, Filly?” Tot Keek asked.

“Huh?”

Anyone will get flustered if the discussion gets turned toward them at a time when their mind is wandering elsewhere. And when people are flustered, things they probably shouldn’t say will thoughtlessly pop out of their mouths.

“Taking the seminar will bump up my base pay a little.” I’ve gone and said something I shouldn’t have, she thought after it came out of her mouth, but it was too late.

Tot Keek clapped her hands and said with a laugh, “Money’s important, after all!”

Patricia closed her eyes and nodded. “Seriously, no joke. Money is important.”

“Tot’s rich, so Tot doesn’t have to worry about it.”

“Really? Is your salary good?”

“Salary? Nah, Tot got money from a friend. Tot’s friend got super rich, so she shared a little bit with Tot, too.”

“Wow! That’s great! So how much did you get?”

“A million.”

A million! So there were people out there who would slap down a million just because you were a friend. A remark like “You’ve got it nice,” or “I envy you,” or “Introduce that friend to me” almost slipped out, but she hurriedly swallowed it.

“You’ve got it nice!” Lacking any of Filru’s prudence or restraint, Patricia just blurted it out.

“How much do you make, Patty?”

“My last job was about two hundred thousand. But a million? Never ever.”

Two hundred thousand—now that Filru could beat. She felt herself welling up with a slight sense of superiority.

“Two hundred thousand pounds from one job? That’s amazing.”

“Not pounds. I can’t get that much. It’s dollars, dollars.”

Filru coughed hard. She reached around and patted her back a few times and looked up to see Tot Keek and Patricia eyeing her with concern.

“You okay? Are you sick? But magical girls don’t get sick, right?” asked Tot Keek.

“Ah, no, I’m quite fine.”

But Filru wasn’t actually okay. She’d been shaken to her core. She didn’t know how many yen was in a pound, but judging from the way Patricia talked, a pound was higher than a dollar. In other words, a million pounds was higher than a million dollars, and to convert it to Japanese yen—no, in the first place, Patricia’s compensation of two hundred thousand dollars was…

Filru clenched her teeth. If this conversation went on and the subject turned to her own pay, she was really going to feel terrible.

Filru put particular effort into a smile and turned to Tot Keek and Patricia. “I just choked a little. If there were problems with my health, I wouldn’t be coming to an arrest technique seminar in the first place.”

“True.”

“They’re constantly bringing brutal criminals into the prison, after all. You have to be a particularly strong and merciless magical girl, or you’d never be able to handle the job.” Truthfully, the prison wasn’t constantly booking brutal criminals, but Filru made it sound like it was. Telling a white lie would make it easier for her to change the topic.

“It’s gotta be all real strong people working at the prison, huh?” said Tot Keek. “Seems like it’d be really hard to attack.”

“They say they’ve got people imprisoned there who’ve, like, killed tens of thousands of people,” said Patricia.

As expected, that had easily shifted the conversation. Privately relieved, Filru continued. “You always have to be working to get stronger. That’s why I got the idea of taking this seminar, to learn new techniques.”

She ignored how she’d literally just said it was because it would increase her pay. Neither Patricia nor Tot Keek touched on that, nodding and going, “Ohhh,” and “You’re real ambitious!”

At this point, Filru judged that she should keep this going so as to leave far behind the nasty and raw subject of money. “I hear the Inspection Department has a technique they keep secret.”

“Oooh, sounds exciting,” said Tot Keek.

“Huh? But you’re in the Inspection Department, right, Tot?” said Patricia. “Wouldn’t you know any secret department techniques?”

“Naw, not at all. Those guys are kind of in a different section from Tot, see. That’s not something everyone in the department knows. Tot’s like, you know, a desk jockey.”

“Oh, you’re in the office, huh? You don’t see those much.”

“Never mind about Tot. More importantly, what kind of techniques are we talkin’ about?”

“I hear Inspection has a move where you can control your opponent perfectly just by grabbing their ear,” said Patricia.

“Whoaaa! An ear grab! Awesome!”

“C’mon, Tot, they don’t pass down secrets like that in the office?”

“I was taught that if you grab the ear, you immediately rip it off.”

Filru barely stopped herself from blurting out, “What are you, a mobster?” She’d been doing a lot of holding her tongue that day.

“Even if it doesn’t do much actual damage or cause much bleeding, you’re making them lose a body part, and shoving that in their face gets to them mentally…is what Tot’s master said.”

Dirty. Why was it that office workers’ techniques were even crueler? Hiding how she was flinching on the inside, Filru let it go with the thought, Well, some people think that way.

“They’ve got some interesting techniques in Inspection,” said Patricia. “When I grab a person’s ear, I also dig into their eye with my thumb.”

What kind of world of carnage was this?

Filru focused on calming her racing pulse. Tot Keek was a member of the Inspection Department. She was kind of like a hunter who caught armed and sentient wild animals. Compared to that, Filru’s work was like that of a zookeeper. Though there were risks, she wasn’t exactly putting her life on the line day in and day out.

And Patricia in particular was a freelancer. That was certainly a world where a moment’s carelessness would mean your life. If necessary, she would pull moves like crushing an eyeball with her thumb. So it wasn’t strange or anything.

Even though she understood this logically, Filru’s spirit was withering. She was afraid of the two magical girls before her. How to best get through this situation without her own smallness being noticed—?

“Ohhh, you’re still here?”

By the time Filru jumped and turned toward the voice, Patricia and Tot Keek were both already on guard. Filru also scrambled up, about to go into a fighting stance, but since the owner of the voice was a middle-aged man in a well-tailored suit with a cleanly trimmed mustache—if he were a little thinner, he’d be in dandy range—she didn’t, standing to bow instead. Was he a guest? Or an employee of the Inspection Department?

The middle-aged man leaned just half his body into the dojo entrance, not flinching at all in the face of the magical girls’ battle readiness. He actually looked somehow relieved as he said, “What a relief. It’s been one thing after another the whole day.”

“Um, uhhh, what’s this about?”

“Apparently, some magical girls have barricaded themselves in the villa of an official from the Central Authority. He was raging on, telling us to arrest them immediately. But that’s not going to happen when we’re so damn busy right now.”

“Um, so then—,” Filru began.

“Gate number ten’s already set up. I’m leaving this in your hands now.” The man retreated from the door without another word. The sound of leather shoes tapping down the hallway got gradually quieter, then quickly vanished.

Should I follow him? I guess I should, Filru thought. Right as she came to that conclusion and was about to run off, Patricia clapped her hands.

“I get it—so that means the seminar starts now, huh? That’s how it is?”

With the question turned to her, Tot looked left, then right, as if she was confused, then glanced back at Patricia. And then, seeming rather unconfident for some reason, she gave a little nod.

Filru was finally convinced, too. “Is that what’s going on? So in other words, the emergency drill…or rather, the arrest technique seminar is starting?”

“Pretty fanatical of ’em, to be this committed to formatting it like actual combat,” said Patricia. “Who would’ve thought the Inspection Department was this flashy?”

“Yep, the department sure loves theatrics. Anyway, Tot’s gonna get going—”

“So then you’re in charge of us, Tot Keek?” asked Filru.

“Huh? Wha—? Um…well, maybe.”

“Gate number ten, was it?” Patricia confirmed. “Okay, then let’s get going. We were already late to begin with, besides.”

Patricia got Tot Keek to stand up, then pushed her into the lead, and the three of them left the dojo. Filru felt slightly hopeful. Maybe her income was lower than theirs, and her job was less dangerous. But she wasn’t going to let them beat her in the realm of physical skills or combat techniques, which she’d honed in her free time out of boredom. All the pride of the prison staff lay on Filru’s shoulders.

The setting for this seminar scene was England. The employing mage had found fault with the petty errors of the magical girls he’d hired and had scrimped on their wages, and so they’d all abandoned the job together and occupied his estate. When these sorts of incidents occurred, it was time for the Inspection Department to step in.

Given the situation, Filru would rather have joined in with the criminals instead. She had never personally experienced the hardship of wage theft herself, but countless times she had wished she could be paid a little more, and having just heard money talk from people who were particularly blessed, Filru was feeling more on edge than ever.

But this was ultimately a seminar. She wouldn’t get anywhere sympathizing with a scenario made up for the sake of training.

The “mage’s estate,” which was the scene, was on a plot of land that was eighty yards squared and surrounded by a tall stone wall, with multiple arches twined in rose vines covering a stone walk path. It was a fine mansion, like a more expensive version of an old-timey English residence, and the spectacle of it stirred Filru’s irritable heart.

The victim—the mage—was angry and red-faced. “Those ruffians! How dare they stoop to this lowness over such trivial work?!” he yelled as he whacked the wall with his cane. His acting was so realistic, Filru was surprised that the Inspection Department had people talented in such a variety of fields. But the pointed hat and long cape really were rather tasteless for a mage costume, so she subtracted points on that production aspect only.

“Ummm, they’ve said they put up a magic barrier, so we don’t have to worry about being seen from the outside,” said Tot Keek.

“About five magical girls who are good in a fight, and aside from those, just over ten… I see, I see.” Patricia nodded.

All the information they received in advance pointed to it being a hassle, but this was for training, so that was to be expected. The three of them had had a little meeting. Filru wrapped the thread tied to Tot Keek’s belt to her own pinky, while the thread tied to Patricia’s belt went to her thumb. They left behind the staff member still hamming it up as the angry mage and stormed the mansion.

With a roar loud enough to rattle their eardrums, Patricia kicked down the door, barricade and all. From behind, they could hear a shrieking voice telling them not to damage the house, but it was doubtful whether Patricia herself even heard that. Not bothered at all about what she broke or smashed, she jumped over the rattan chair that was thrown at her from inside and destroyed it with a spinning hook kick, using the rotation to back up from the entranceway to the outside, and Filru switched places with her and headed inside.

When she rushed down the stairs, an enemy was running up to her. Filru grabbed the edge of the carpet and yanked with all her strength. The enemy toppled to the ground, and Filru grabbed her once she was down. Filru held her arm, she caught Filru’s leg, and as they were tangled up, Filru was gradually passing her threads through the enemy’s body.

Filru’s motif was that of a seamstress, and the magic thread she used would ignore all resistance of a target to sew anything to them. When she sewed something, it would cause no harm. She just had to pull the thread out and the object would go back to how it was. There was no need to rip off ears or gouge eyes.

Drawing tight the thread she’d sewn to her opponent, she twisted her joints and forced her muscles, pressing her spine down over her knees. Putting the enemy in a lock shaped like an arrow and tying her up, she tossed her at another enemy, who was coming down the stairs, and when she caught her ally, Filru went to grab her, too, and sewing both of them up quickly, she kicked them away.

Patricia was on the outside, Filru in the front, and Tot Keek in the back.

There was a reason Filru had taken the role of “charge through the front,” which would probably be the fiercest battle. She would show them here that she was good and strong, and she would maintain face for all the prison workers. She didn’t get low pay because she was weak or because she was useless. She had simply been designated as cheap labor, and yet she was actually quite competent. She would show them. She wasn’t going to lose to a million pounds or two hundred thousand dollars.

With the sort of invigorated expression she’d never shown once when on duty, Filru briskly checked inside the rooms. When she stepped in from the doorway, the first thing was a great hall. She’d made sure to memorize the floor plan.

As she moved forward, she sewed thread to the floor every three steps. She entered a hallway, going straight ahead to a T-intersection, and passed by a decorative suit of armor. There, she squatted down and yanked on one of her threads. That pulled the helmet part of the armor sewn to the end of a thread and sent it flying through the air to clang into the head of the magical girl who’d jumped out from the T-intersection, about to hit Filru from behind.

Grappling with the staggering magical girl, Filru sewed both her arms, and once she was immobile, Filru picked her up and started throwing her down, but right before she slammed her head into the floor with nothing at all to break the impact, she remembered, Oh, right—this is a training seminar, and threw her on her back instead. That had been close. She carefully sewed up the magical girl, who was curled up and moaning, and rolled her down to a corner of the hallway.

Her threads sent vibrations to her. It was impossible to get Filru from behind in this house. Vibrations were coming along the line she’d sewn to Tot Keek. She had to be fighting, too.

Going down the hall to meet up with her, Filru wrapped her thread around a chest in a room on the way and yanked. The thread squeezed around the chest, crushing it, and from inside she could hear a muffled scream. Thinking to herself, It’s no use trying to catch me from inside there, she tossed the whole chest outside.

A striking sound rang out from behind the door ahead. Filru dashed forward, maintaining momentum to kick open the door and leap into the room. There, a magical girl in a fluttering costume dodged Tot Keek’s guitar swing while also evading Filru’s flying kick from behind. Tot Keek back-stepped away and strummed her guitar.

They had all told one another beforehand about their magic. With a sideways jump, Filru avoided the flying music notes, and the fluttering magical girl slipped and slid through the gaps between the music notes in flowing motions. The dodged music notes struck, broke, and bounced off everywhere on the floor, ceiling, and bed, but with another flutter here and flutter there, she avoided the reflected notes, too.

“She just avoids anything and everything!” Tot Keek said.

Filru withdrew behind Tot Keek, touching her back lightly from behind. “Can you coordinate your attacks with mine?”

“But she can dodge it.”

“Please, one more time.”

“Okay, I’ll give it a try.”

She shot music notes from her guitar once more, and they jumped around, crowding the small room, but the enemy still fluttered away from them all—but now, Filru took action. She tossed threads woven into a net shape at their opponent. Taking the net woven of her threads, she spread it wide to wrap up the enemy. An invisible net spread over such a large area couldn’t be avoided, no matter how you struggled.

Filru set her heel on the net and yanked, and when the fluttering magical girl staggered, a music note hit her. It struck her hard in the side, and she bent forward in a V shape, and then even more music notes flooded toward her. Studded with music notes, the enemy fell.

“…Perhaps we overdid it?” said Filru.

“It’s fine, no worries. At the Inspection Department, our training is basically like real combat.”

If Tot Keek from the Inspection Department said so, then it had to be all right. Filru sewed up the fluttery magical girl, then tossed her out the window.

Feeling the vibrations of many heavy footsteps in the hallway, Filru instructed Tot Keek with a hand sign. The same moment the magical girls leaped into the room, Tot Keek strummed her guitar, beating them down with a rush of music notes and slamming three of the magical girls back into the hallway. Filru punched the one magical girl who slipped through the music notes while simultaneously sewing the top of her collar and passing the thread through a beam in the ceiling. Then she dropped all her body weight on the line with full force, yanking the girl up to the ceiling to strike her head, knocking her out.

Filru stepped out into the hallway, punching, kicking, throwing, sewing up one enemy, then two, then three. She went straight on to race over the railing up to the second floor, kicking up to hit the jaw of the first magical girl she saw there.

“Capitalist dogs!” yelled a magical girl as she sliced down with a long sword from the upper position, which Filru dodged, turned aside, and tangled in her string. She spun the two of them around so that the incoming music notes knocked them to the ground. Even though it was just acting, Filru didn’t like being called a capitalist dog by someone from the Inspection Department.

The next room was packed with about ten black human-shaped somethings. Filru pretended to be overwhelmed by their numbers, backing up one room, and when the group of black human shapes entered, she pulled a thread. The threads she’d strung up inside the room like a magic barrier all came together, gathering the human-shaped foes in the middle. There, Tot Keek showered the foes with music notes, sending them flying. Just then, the magical girl who seemed to be controlling these beings appeared. She swung at Filru in a furious rage—but Filru parried with a thread strung up vertically. She slid down on the ground past the enemy, hooking a circle of thread around the enemy’s foot to hang her upside down and tie her up near the ceiling. Now for the next room, she thought, kicking it open—and saw the bedroom window was broken, the three magical girls on the ground, and Patricia, waiting behind them, was shrugging.

“It was boring doing nothing but wait for you guys. So I just ran up the back wall.”

“You can’t do that,” Filru replied. “We discussed our roles in this.”

“Don’t try and claim all the glory for yourself, Filly.”

“I’m not claiming it for myself! It was a joint effort—right, Tot?” Filru called out, turning around.

But Tot Keek wasn’t there.

“Huh?”

She looked at the thread on her pinky. It had come off without her realizing.

“Was she off fighting somewhere else?” asked Patricia.

“No, we met up inside just before… How strange.”

“This is a massive, unprecedented scandal,” Mana spat bitterly, practically smacking her teacup down on the table. There was so little tea left in it that you could see right to the bottom.

As if filling the pause, Hana picked up the teapot and poured her another cup.

The waiting room they were using as an office-slash-break room was empty except for Mana and Hana, but the both of them still lowered their voices. This wasn’t something they could discuss loudly.

The waiting room was small, surrounded on three of its four sides with magic cabinets. Lined up inside the cabinets were documents relating to past resolved investigations. Was there really among all those documents any scandal as great as this one? They both sighed.

“This is all because they made that old man who can’t even remember the inspectors’ faces an operator…,” grumbled Mana.

“There was a whole string of incidents that day, so things were incredibly busy.”

“Regardless…it’s no good for the seminar attendees to be carrying out an arrest, is it?” Mana gulped down another cup of tea.

Hana immediately poured her another. “So they somehow managed to hide the situation from the guests?”

“Apparently, they made the arrest itself the seminar.”

Hana moistened her throat with precisely half her tea, then gently laid her cup on the tea table. “But you know, it seems something strange happened. Did you hear about it, Mana?”

“Something strange? That’s news to me.”

“Apparently, they had three attendees perform the arrest, but once it was over, there were only two left.”

“What is this, some sort of ghost story?”

“The one who disappeared wasn’t listed among the staff or the seminar attendees. They described her appearance as unique, but there was nobody who met that description.”

“Sis, don’t freak me out like that. You’ve got a creepy look on your face. If you’re gonna tell ghost stories, scare me with something else.”

“Some say that an elf lives in the Inspection Department, and she couldn’t bear to see them in trouble, so she came to save them.”

“This isn’t the elves and the shoemaker, y’know.”