The Butterfly Effect of Careless Words (5)
Raban wanted to sigh. The higher one's innate mana reserves, the less susceptible they are to external magical manipulation. Interfering with the mind of a combat weapon like a magical girl, who wielded mana reserves as vast as a mountain? 'If I had that kind of mana, I'd be recharging the dimensional gate battery instead.'
What would be the point of brainwashing a magical girl? At best, if you didn't want her blowing up a city, you'd threaten to squeeze some mana out of her. But look, those terrifying mascots had implemented a rationing system for the magical girls' mana precisely to counter any rebellion like that. The moment any fang of revolt showed itself, they'd clamp down on the mana supply like a valve slamming shut and deliver merciless iron-fist discipline with a sneer of, 'A mere subcontracted billboard for PR dares to?'
He wanted to say, 'What are you looking at? I didn't do anything,' but that would shatter all the aggro and image he'd painstakingly built up with blood, sweat, and tears. Raban pulled out the 'mysterious but ultimately empty guide who spouts ominous lines' from his mental reference library. It was packed with lines cribbed from games and comics he'd seen back on Earth.
Slither, slither slither. The veins wriggled like snakes, coiling together into a mass. The process of shaping the vein-man avatar he'd been using lately. Salamandine spat flames in disgust, but he swelled other vein tendrils in the path of the fire to block it. Cloaked in the backlight of the inferno like a mantle, he made his entrance. Raban awarded himself an extra point for style points on his directorial flair.
And then, solemnly, in the lowest, most grave voice he could muster, he asked dramatically:
"What did I say?"
"Just moments ago! You tempted me to devour those who might become my friends! You said now's the chance while they're trapped and powerless in that red wall!"
"Is that so? That's how it sounded to you."
"'Sounded'? What are you even talking about!"
"That must be your limit."
Even in this brief exchange, Magi White's blood pressure seemed to spike noticeably. Her ear tips and cheeks flushed red—she was clearly seething. What a cost-effective way to rile someone up.
While Magi White fumed over his blood-pressure-raising rhetoric, the veins around her quietly regenerated. But not for a sneak attack like he'd pulled on Sargasso—that had been a one-shot trick viable only if undetected. The reason Raban was regenerating the veins now was to scout the magical girls.
He manipulated the vein cluster. Optic nerves sprouted—
"Gah!"
Not the vein-man, but Raban's true body, rolling around in the dormitory, let out a scream. He'd botched the limit settings. Dozens of visual feeds flooded his brain at once. From hyper-vivid spectra capturing wavelengths beyond human perception to green-tinted infrared views like a thermal camera. Crafting organs that surpassed human flesh limits without thinking had made his head scream.
Normally, he'd offset backlash like this with mana. The problem? He had no mana left even for pain relief. In the end, his impoverished mana—his empty wallet—was the issue.
'Mana...! If only I had mana!'
With sufficient mana, he could've fielded an army tens of thousands strong, utilizing all their senses for guerrilla warfare. But penniless as he was, there were just too many things he couldn't do. Recalling the fun old days raiding the demon archduke's vault and fleeing, Raban refocused.
'To make such a rookie mistake, misjudging my own mana reserves. Lucky this isn't a do-or-die fight.'
He realigned the senses. Visual confirmation proved tricky. Faces blurred when he tried to capture them. Distortion via mana.
'The mascots have some chops at privacy protection, huh.'
Visual ID failed. But what about smell? The veins branched anew. The scent of the open plaza flooded his senses.
'The Heavenly Kings are no help.'
Sargasso's watery tang and Salamandine's sooty char interfered, but he consciously filtered them out. What remained should be the magical girls' body scents. The veins vibrated, drawing in airborne particles. He analyzed the bits clinging between the tendrils.
'......'
Raban felt deep bewilderment.
'These mascot Big Brother psychos.'
Even filtering out the acrid water and fire scents, no human body odor registered. Just lavender and citrus notes you wouldn't find growing in this park. In other words, the magical girls' scents had been entirely replaced with floral ones. A transformation effect, apparently.
'How paranoid do you have to be about tracking?'
The last clue was gait. Raban tried to etch their steps firmly into his nerve bundles, but a sense of incongruity hit him. Something only detectable by mobilizing touch across the vein trees, on top of sight and smell—an faint wrongness. Something was approaching the clump of negative thoughts he'd carefully corralled.
Hard to pinpoint. Like an air spirit, low presence. Colorless, odorless, but in this blaze-filled scene, the 'void' stood out as alien.
He pieced it together. Magi White's curse nonsense. And this slinking thing creeping in to steal someone else's daily bread. It had snuck close while he chatted with the magical girl.
So, the choice here was.
"Fine. No more words needed."
A pale purple mana glow bloomed in Schne's left hand, constructing a magic circle. The stagnation absorption array flowed down her arm, imprinting on every ribbon dangling from her magical girl costume.
Sargasso—who'd once been bound in endless ribbons forcing his watery body into 540-degree joint corrections (how they'd restrained fluid flesh was a mystery)—winced instinctively. She probably planned to log the entire vein forest with those ribbons.
"Got it."
An out-of-place remark. The voice oozed from the palm-mouth of the vein monster.
'Got what?'
The magical girls and Heavenly Kings scanned around. But the veins towering higher than a person showed no sign of approaching.
Papirun, watching intently, pointed.
"[Over there, mohu!]"
Right in front of the flesh pile trapping the erosion entity. Veins stretched like spider silk, crudely entwining something in midair into a small sphere. The vein monster approached the hand-sized orb. Like plucking fruit from an apple tree, pop. He detached the sphere from the web.
"Did you torment Hikarius City's guardian?"
No reaction from the orb. Talking to empty air like he'd grabbed something, Salamandine figured the vein freak had lost it.
"Choosing silence? Very well."
Crunch. The monster squeezed as if to burst it.
[...What. No way, really? You?]
From the midst of the grotesque flesh-mashing, a voice seeped out. But the air-spirit thing didn't recover or chant—it was gone. Raban had compressed the flesh to extremes, crushing and erasing whatever lurked inside.
'Whoa, that startled me.'
To speak out of nowhere. A familiar more intricately crafted than Raban expected. But the job stayed the same. Since this mystery thing had clung to Magi White, time to scatter some extra chaos with it as material.
Squelching flesh-on-flesh filled the night air. Amid the discordant meat symphony, the formless mana-thought entity scattered like an echo.
But Raban added dramatic flair. Black smoke—beloved by all black mages—billowed from the flesh, imprinting the image of 'something evil just vanished.'
"Behold, guardian of Hikarius. This emerged from the shadows of your heart."
Schne was dumbfounded. No way. Using visuals like that without laying a single curse?
"Really...?"
"You fight for the proper order. It wouldn't harm you—only the unnatural spawn cowering in your shadows."
"Cowering?! Hey, who's hiding behind who!"
Raban ignored Salamandine's tantrum. Her flames scorching the vein forest everywhere? Perfect. The smoke would cover his escape. And the negative-thought clump was nicely pulverized too.
"I speak no lies to you."
Of course. Lies were a trump card. Even after a hundred truths, one lie tainted everything after. Thus, lies must be used once, at the most lethal moment.
"The greatest intruder is gone. Until we meet again."
Raban dismantled the vein monster, prepping to clock out.
'Hard to grab the finely minced negative-thought bits right now.'
He could ferry it to school via vein familiar, but the mascots would've rigged instant alarms given their paranoia.
'Stash it in some Hikarius corner and retrieve over the weekend when I'm not guarding the counseling room.'
Come to think of it, that Black Forest near Nai Hyun's place reeked of negative thoughts. Hiding it nearby, even a mascot wouldn't sniff it out easily. Perfect plan.
A serene room with elegantly arranged antique furniture. A man reading by candlelight instead of electric lamps closed his book. Pain hit. A clone imbued with considerable spiritual rank had shattered in an instant. A fairly large fragment, broken so easily. Advanced magic he thought impossible in this decrepit Earth regime.
"Something like that appeared in Hikarius, huh."
The man's lips curved up. He hadn't heard it in ages, but... whatever.
"Guess it's about time to visit my niece."