43. Mari the Fighter
43. Mari the Fighter
"What's wrong with your face?"
"Does this child even know the warmth of a home? She needs your warm attention and sponsorship. 000-000. Please sponsor her now."
"What?"
"Pfft!"
Leon didn't catch my nonsense, but thankfully, Nikolai played along.
I almost got even sadder there.
I—wait, her name—
"It’s Ailey."
"..."
I applied a cold compress with the ice Ailey had made as I studied the faces of the club members I hadn't seen in a while.
First, Leon and Karl were unchanged.
No news was good news; if something had happened to a member of the imperial family during such a short break, that would’ve been a problem in itself.
Ailey, on the other hand, had changed a bit.
'Did she get bigger?'
In terms of height and femininity.
Whichever one I was thinking of, both applied.
If her maturity level before vacation was about 75 percent, now she felt like she'd shot up to about 90 percent.
Come to think of it, she'd enrolled early, so she was still at an age to grow...
'...or not???'
At the very least, she was not a minor.
That I could say for certain.
So why had she gotten bigger?
After mulling it over seriously, I just threw out the first thing that came to mind.
"Did you eat a mushroom, by any chance?"
The dangerous-looking kind with a red base and white spots dotted all over.
"Uh... isn't that an Amanita mushroom?"
"Similar, but a little different."
"I don't know what you're talking about, but I don't eat mushrooms."
"Then what..."
As I kept scanning her from head to toe, she snapped her fingers with an "Aha!"
"It’s probably because I stayed up through yesterday working on the research you asked me to do. I’ll be fine once my concentration comes back."
"Why?"
"Pardon?"
Her answer didn't clear up my question—it only deepened it.
And wasn't that only natural?
If she were a three-hundred-year-old witch of a grandmother, that would be one thing, but as it was, she was plenty young.
If she simply looked old for her age, I might've understood, but her original appearance was already more than youthful enough.
She was an adult, but her looks were so youthful you'd believe her if she said she was still in high school.
But to suppress her body shape and face with magic to that degree...
Wasn't that kind of dangerous, in more ways than one?
Given that Nikolai and Leon, who'd been listening beside me, also had question marks floating over their heads, my curiosity was hardly unusual.
But she paid no mind to such gazes and didn't hesitate to assert her own opinion.
"The elders are the ones who taught me to do this!"
I recalled the elders of the Golden Magic Tower that Ailey mentioned.
If you compared a magic tower to a university and a tower master to a dean, then the elders were the professors.
In other words, the proportion of old people was overwhelmingly higher than young people.
Considering there were former tower masters and people who were hundreds of years old, the average age was 95, or if you graciously stripped out the outliers, 71.
It was just a nursing home. (They got mad if I said that.)
And the vast majority of these old-timers living in this nursing home maintained appearances that were much younger.
I didn't know the reason.
Maybe they'd gotten old and wanted to act foolish.
Still, I could understand up to that point.
If that was how they wanted to live their own lives, it wasn't my place to interfere, was it?
But no matter what, teaching such foolishness to a girl in the bloom of youth was a different story, wasn't it?
I placed my hands on both her shoulders, met her eyes seriously, and spoke.
"Forget those old folks' nonsense."
"What? All of a sudden?"
"I think you look prettier the way you are now."
"Wh— wh— wh—?"
Uh-oh.
Ailey had malfunctioned.
Perhaps the Golden Magic Tower's elders could even control their complexions, because Ailey's face cycled through several colors.
'Was that anger, or embarrassment?'
Just as I was starting to wonder if I should file this under another form of poker face, a puff! of smoke erupted, and Ailey reverted to her standard child-sized mode.
"Ahem! My magic’s back to normal now! I appreciate you saying that, but I’m really more comfortable like this."
Considering that she was a wizard, it wasn’t a bad strategic choice.
A larger height and curves also meant a larger hitbox, after all.
A wizard wasn't going to brawl hand-to-hand like I did, and there was no point in extending her limb reach, so maintaining a small stature like that was advantageous in several ways.
...If I didn't explain it away like that, there was no accounting for why she kept insisting on that form, so I rationalized it and let the matter drop.
*
Since Nikolai had spent the entire vacation with me, the remaining members were Celestia and Kylie.
As luck would have it—they'd run into each other on the way over, perhaps—our studio's two magical girls entered the club room side by side.
"Hey!" "Good day."
I quickly scanned their appearances.
Good.
No changes detected.
It was only after I'd gotten the report that our actors had had no particular issues that I could finally relax.
Thankfully, Magical Girl Magical Mari seemed ready for normal operations.
But before long, the moment came to assess the results of their training, and I would come to regret that thought.
*
First, the moment I heard that the actors hadn't kicked up any scandals over the vacation, I took them and headed straight for our dedicated training ground.
With the same spirit as checking the homework of a bunch of schoolkids after the new semester, I told them to show me the fruits of their training. Ceres moved first.
"Hyaht!"
As I received her attacks, I was quietly impressed.
There was real recoil behind her punches.
By bursting mana at the proper moment during a punch, she could deliver an impact that sank in like a pile bunker.
Any reputable fighter could do it as naturally as breathing, and professional heroes like me could use it with little effort.
For a student, however, it was a fairly difficult technique.
And since she was using that technique with ease, there was no doubt she had grown.
But as if betraying my satisfaction, the next technique she showed off, full of enthusiasm, made me rub my brow.
"Here I come!"
She soared high into the air and struck with a Rush far more powerful than anything she had shown moments earlier.
But it wasn't a meaningless flurry; each individual strike carried clear intent.
It seemed she had reviewed her battle with Scapul and reinterpreted his techniques in her own way.
Unlike Scapul, she knew she couldn’t match his lung capacity, so she continued the combination by landing each blow cleanly and using the impacts to make me stagger.
Of course, an opponent of a certain caliber could ignore the stiffness, disregard her attacks, and land a single decisive counter, but even then, she'd be able to land a hit on their vitals.
"Stop!"
Carrying on like this would make it less a spar and more a fight to the death, so I halted her and shared my honest impressions.
"That's enough. You worked hard over the vacation."
She cracked a little "hehe" laugh and turned away.
In that instant, my eyes caught something that should not have been there.
'A demon?'
There was no mistaking it.
A demon had settled into her back.
'Why?'
I had her stand still for a moment and called for Nicol.
By the time I'd called him over, the demon on her back had already disappeared.
"Boss, what's this about all of a sudden? You sure you didn't just see something wrong?"
God, I hoped he was right.
But reality didn't change just because I denied it, and reality ignored was sure to come charging back at me someday, with interest.
With the mindset of a soldier who always assumed the worst, I ordered her to perform the rush again.
"Hyaht!"
The moment the second rush ended, I ignored my numbed, stinging forearms that had blocked it twice and moved behind her.
The demon was unmistakably lodged there.
I could now see details I’d been too shocked to notice the first time, including her forearms and upper arms.
This time, Nicol saw the whole scene too.
"Boss. Is this..."
"Exactly what you think it is."
It was often said that the back muscles were crucial for throwing a punch.
It wasn't that someone with developed back muscles would always throw a painful punch, but if someone who knew how to punch had developed their back muscles to a point by throwing punches, then that was going to hurt like hell.
So, if a martial artist built that kind of muscle, both the fighter and their coach would be thrilled.
The problem was, Ceres was a magical girl.
What business did a magical girl have with demon-possessed back muscles?
Riiip!
As if to hammer a nail into my complicated feelings, her top, unable to endure the two consecutive rushes, tore at the perfect dramatic moment.
And of all places, only the back had ripped.
"...Hey. You know how to do muscle compression, right?"
"Huh? Oh."
All close-combat warriors could use mana to control the volume of their muscles.
The principle was similar to how Ailey adjusted her height—maintaining only the muscle's performance while minimizing its volume with magic.
It was usually used for cosmetic purposes, but it also had surprising tactical value.
As I'd said before, volume translated directly into hitbox, so this technique, which didn't affect the reach of the limbs, was practically a required skill for the warrior class.
The swollen muscles contracted.
Thankfully, Ceres seemed to have learned it as well.
Her physique shrank back to that of an ordinary woman.
Relieved once more, I told her to maintain that form and perform the rush again.
And so the rush struck for the third time that day.
Fortunately, this time the power was preserved while the state of the muscles remained unchanged.
Nikolai and I had just sighed in relief when she spoke again.
Riiip!
"..."
"We're fucked..."
"We’re really fucked."
It was the greatest crisis since the premiere of Magical Girl Magical Mari.