The Black Mage Hates Contract Scams (2)
Raban stood there blankly for a long while. It was the aftermath of a contract scam worse than anything he'd endured even as a total newbie just starting out in black magic.
"Damn devil bastard…."
So clingy and vicious right up until the contract ended. Then, the moment she'd sucked him dry, she tossed him aside like trash. Raban spat curses at the devil as he yanked out a single strand of his hair. In that instant, his mind grew calm. It was a spell that gathered his boiling emotions into a body part and forcibly extracted them—less serenity than dead silence. Raban slipped the hair he'd pulled into the catalyst pouch inside his robe. A black mage's body parts, infused with intense emotion, made for rare magical catalysts. Especially when they held real feelings, not faked or crocodile tears.
Only after channeling his rage into the hair did it hit him.
"My god."
His mana was genuinely depleted. Even a simple mental spell to contain emotions felt like a chore. All because he'd scraped the bottom of the barrel and handed every last drop to that devil in hopes of getting home.
His hand twitched up habitually toward the webbing between his fingers on his left hand, but he forced it back down. Calling the devil again now would only make things worse. If she ignored the comms, or if the spell fizzled incomplete and just burned mana without connecting? Better than nothing. The real problem was if she picked up—and footed the bill for the mana as the recipient, completing the spell.
She'd definitely slap that mana usage on me as debt and squeeze me for it.
Becoming the devil's debtor again? Hard pass.
Raban ground his teeth and scanned his surroundings.
Those magical girl brats were slinging mana around like it was nothing.
Enviable, sure—but their skills were laughably sloppy too. Mana that hadn't properly coalesced was scattered all over the battlefield. If he extracted it from the magical afterglow, he could recharge, slow but steady.
He was sketching a magic circle for mana recovery and heading toward the clash's epicenter when—
"Huh?"
Regeneration had begun. Mana seeped into the cityscape everywhere. Scorched walls cleaned themselves, upheaved earth smoothed over. Even the traces of the magical girls' finishing blows—the ones that had razed whole blocks—vanished. As the landscape spotlessened in inverse proportion, the lingering mana in the air dissipated.
"No, hey! Hold up!"
Raban screamed into the void. He bolted toward the mana's core. Even after the city's repairs finished, some mana remained.
A pittance, but better than zilch!
The moment he reached out to absorb it—
A pink flash erupted.
As the glow faded, not a speck of mana was left.
"…Heh."
Raban felt two emotions at once. First: utter deflation. Goddamn it. Should've started recovery sooner.
Second: curiosity. That 'restoration magic' he'd just witnessed was exquisitely precise. Too refined for the mana-spraying magical girls who'd been sloshing it everywhere. So what had handled their cleanup?
Raban rummaged through his Earth memories. Magical girls always had mascots—intermediaries who brokered contracts, granting girls the power.
"They've got this kind of ability and still outsource the grunt work?"
Intriguing. He recalled a few magical girl shows from Earth. Plenty had twists where the mascot was the final boss or root of all evil. All he'd witnessed so far was a clash between two magical girls and the Ivory Tower's Heavenly Kings. He hadn't even confirmed the mascots' existence. But a mascot puppeteering everything from the shadows? A tantalizing hypothesis.
A breeze ghosted past the black mage's feet as he amused himself with speculation. The chill night wind snapped him back to reality.
"Sigh…."
Fun, novel magic was great and all. But what good was it without mana to study it? Priority one: gather mana.
The monster struck by the magical girls' finisher dissolved into particles of light.
[Black Mana Reaction: 0! Good job today too-moohu!]
Papirun, the fairy with a look like a deformed bear-rat hybrid—maybe a bear doll, maybe a big-eared cartoon mouse—confirmed the monster's purification. Her bizarre tic of slapping "moohu" on everything went unquestioned, thanks to her adorable appearance.
Magi Black and Magi White finally stretched and released their transformations.
"Whew, after that big brawl last time, are Ebon's monsters all weaklings now~?"
"You almost got us killed being that careless during the Ebon revival ritual too, right?"
"Th-that was then, this is now!"
"Carelessness is Black's bad habit."
The magical girls bickered. The class president and the troublemaker—mismatches on paper—were forging into a proper team through trials and hardships.
Papirun waved them off with a fond smile. The moment the girls vanished into the sunset, her face hardened to ice. Time to return to the fairy kingdom.
'Don't wanna go back….'
Light enveloped Papirun. Next instant, the little fairy stood before a massive round table. Stained glass in rainbow hues and glittering chandeliers evoked a movie palace. But the guardian fairies seated around the table looked nothing like refined courtiers.
[That's what I'm saying! How do you manage your turf that monsters are spilling into ours-moohu? This is dumping-moohu!!]
Dumping. Slang from drug crimes: stashing product in unrelated spots for later pickup, or framing innocents by planting it on them. Here, the fairy meant the latter's extension—shifting their mess elsewhere.
[Your sector exceeded last month's mana request, said you'd ration to save power, so you dumped on our turf-moohu?]
[Where'd you hear that crap-moohu? We agreed upfront to draw mana same day same time, but you backstabbed, grabbed first dibs, and drained our reserves dry— wasn't that you-moohu?]
[Bullshit.]
[No 'moohu'-moohu? Watch your mouth with your sky-high senior.]
[Can't even afford transformation costumes for my girls right now, sky or no sky. Kids are slammed with cram school and tutors these days, dreams and hopes running low, and now this crap—]
Papirun clapped her cute, steamed-bun hands. Clap. A pitifully adorable sound. The table fell silent.
[Let's quiet down-moohu. You'll wake Mother-moohu.]
This was the true face of the guardian fairies serving the dream-and-hope warriors, the Magilists. Papirun, cursed as the first-created to mediate these juniors, wanted to cry.
[O-okay. We'll divvy up the mana from our Ivory Tower cleanup first, so HuHurun, file the request-moohu. Any special reports-moohu?]
The briefly hushed table erupted in chatter. Monster spawns versus last month, skimping Mother's mana tribute to send to the girls, people seeing magical girls not as dream symbols but shady red-flagged creeps—what to do?
[We can only overlook so much pretty fanart fawning!]
[Terirun, first time handling a magical girl-moohu? Route complaints to Grievance straight next time-moohu.]
Papirun dispensed expert advice, then spoke up as tensions eased.
[Briefing on the Ivory Tower's Ebon revival ritual-moohu.]
The fairies sobered, ears perked for the senior fairy's report.
Usually, local magical girls purified Evil Pings—named to suit their sensibilities. Evil Pings popped up like lunar phases, inevitable as nature. That was standard duty.
But Ivory Tower was different.
[Ebon the Exile's four homunculi—the Heavenly Kings—convened for the revival rite-moohu. My Magilist disrupted it, but unsure if fully destroyed-moohu.]
[Mother detected no Ebon mana signature-moohu?]
Papirun nodded at the junior's question, advancing the presentation.
[Here's a chart comparing mana content in Ivory Tower monsters-moohu. Huge gap pre- and post-ritual-moohu.]
Raids on magical girls continued, but the vanguards—the monsters—grew weaker.
[Diverting mana elsewhere-moohu?]
[My hypothesis-moohu.]
An incomplete ritual success: Ebon descended bodiless, now pooling mana for recovery. Nominal raids to distract.
[Extra vigilance if Ivory Tower monsters hit your sectors-moohu. Next item—]
"Hah, this sucks."
Raban grumbled, having sucked mana from a sewer sludge monster made of crumpled leaves and cig butts. Yield was crap.