Chapter 12

Current time: 4:30 PM. The situation was already showing signs of a turnabout.

The invading army probably hadn’t planned for long-term battle to begin with. The only ship at their command was the one disguised as a large cargo vessel, and their coordination with their black ops wasn’t very careful. Central hadn’t even followed up on its attack of one of their original objectives, the Thesis Competition hall, so the only result to this point was some partial damage to the building.

Nevertheless, if the individual invaders had only a police force to go up against, they had more than enough troops to control vital facilities and capture scores of civilians. Unfortunately, the haste with which the Magic Association assembled a volunteer army to resist had been a huge miscalculation on their part.

The Japan Defense Force’s response had also been swift, of course. Not even an hour since mobilization and they’d already supplied significant reinforcements to serve as a shield for the evacuees.

It wouldn’t be long before the enemy’s retreat and the inevitable switch to a mop-up campaign to restore the peace on the home team’s part. The situation had improved to the point where civilians escaping wasn’t even considered necessary.

However, the boys and girls who had placed themselves in the middle of it all had no way of knowing any of that.

“Ms. Kurosawa? …Yep, that’s right… No, not at all. Thanks.”

As Shizuku took the comm unit away from her ear, they heard a helicopter approaching. For some reason, the one she’d been talking to in order to procure this was her family housekeeper. “Saegusa, our rides should be arriving soon.”

Mayumi, who had been giving her information terminal a difficult stare, looked up and gave a fake smile. “Understood. Kitayama, please prioritize gathering women and families with children to yours. Mr. Inagaki, please go on that helicopter and support her. Also, Mr. Inagaki, could you instruct the people on who will evacuate first? Ichihara and I will help you. Mitsui, you keep watch on our surroundings.”

After a crisp series of instructions, Mayumi sighed to herself. The civilians whose evacuation was getting put off wouldn’t be happy, naturally. There were already teens holding the initiative here; quite a few of the adults felt this objectionable. Nobody was acting out at the moment, probably because they wouldn’t be allowed onto a helicopter if they did, but the longer it took for the second helicopter to arrive, the higher tensions were sure to rise.

Having both of them land at the same time would be ideal, but they obviously couldn’t tell the first one to wait around up in the air.

What’s taking them so long?!

For now, the only thing Mayumi could do was try to stem the tide of her irritation.

With the situation getting worse by the minute, the invading army’s commander could no longer hide his dangerous expression. Because this operation was for a single ship to land a force in an enemy nation, their chances for success were dependent on achieving their goals and retreating before the enemy could put together a response. The plan they’d used had gone well up through the first phase.

Though the enemy had answered quickly, that was within their predictions. The civilian troops’ resistance, however, was far stronger than they’d expected. Originally, they would have already been in the retreat phase by now, but while they’d been dealing with the civilian resistance, the enemy had closed an interception force around them.

The route north along the coast was already contained by a force from Tsurumi. It was no longer possible to take any of the evacuees hostage.

“All unmanned recon craft signals lost.”

The commander stopped caring what his subordinates heard and swore to himself. They’d shot down the last scout craft. Now he’d have to command based solely on prior information. Privately cursing Xiangshan Chen, who had gotten behind enemy lines but didn’t bother to contact them, he ordered their north-bearing forces to change course.

Inland—toward the station plaza awaiting helicopters.

As a wheeled armored vehicle turned at an intersection, it lost its grip and slid sideways into a spin.

Thanks to Isori using his Road Extension to overcome the reflecting spell on the vehicle, the armored car crashed into a streetlight and stopped, its wheels still spinning.

“Kanon!”

“Leave it to me!”

As a result of them pushing their point of interception forward, Kanon no longer had to consider the students who had evacuated underground. She activated Mine Origin, synonymous with the Chiyoda family.

Severe tremors thrust up from directly under the armored car, propagating through it as though laughing away the shock absorbers on each wheel and causing vibration fractures at several points. The car, with no damage to its armor up to this point, broke apart beyond usage, its driver’s brain and semicircular canals shaken.

Large machine-gun bullets chipped away at the wall the two of them were hiding behind. It was an attack from a follow-up car.

Kanon yelped, and Isori held her to him as he built up a vector-reversing field along the wall’s surface.

When the reflected bullets made the armored car go silent, Mari, hiding across the street, triggered a spell that decreased oxygen density. But the car was airtight, as though built for anti-biochemical-weapon warfare, so it was too hard for her to alter the air composition inside it. Her spell ended in failure.

Mari tsked and released her influence over the oxygen density information, then sent heated air into the car’s grenade launcher barrel. A grenade, set in the launcher just before she fired, exploded, taking the machine gun along with it.

The armored car, with no more attack power, then fell under assault from Kirihara.

He pierced its armor, his High-Frequency Blade plunged into the driver’s seat.

The car’s back hatch opened, and a soldier with a handgun dodged out.

A short arrow flew at him: After the crossbow bolt shot him through the right shoulder, Kirihara’s blade sliced his throat.

After getting back behind cover, Kirihara asked worriedly, “Mibu, are you okay?” Sayaka had been the one to shoot the soldier going for him. His condition, when she said she wanted to come no matter what, was not to kill anyone with her sword techniques. The only time she would use a sword would be on inanimate objects and for self-defense if it was absolutely called for. Therefore, he’d let Sayaka bring a small, mechanical crossbow armament along with her kodachi.

“I’m fine. This is a battlefield. I’m prepared,” she answered, her face pale but her voice firm.

The ground rumbled again.

This time, it was Kanon’s spell; she’d cast one against the upright tanks coming on the heels of the armored cars.

The tanks quickly backed up and fired grenades from their back line, forcing the students behind cover.

The enemy line was denser now, and they were holding Kanon and the others in place.

Miyuki’s magical influence prevented all enemy magic. Even if it was amplified with a Booster.

Meanwhile, Usuba Kagerou assailed the frozen armored car.

There were twenty-two yards of superthin carbon nanotube sheet stored in the hammerhead-shaped winder. That meant Leo had a blade he could extend and retract freely to a maximum of twenty-two yards.

Still, the longer the sheet got, the more difficult it should have been to use magic to harden it into a blade, but Leo effortlessly created one twenty-two yards long and sliced horizontally through the armored car.

“Incoming on the right! Core’s in the same place!”

Mizuki located an enemy upright tank as it came around from the side, and Mikihiko used his spell-breaking technique on it.

The enemy appeared to slam into an invisible wall, and its arms fell limp to its sides.

Then, with speed too fast to be seen, Erika carved into it with Mountain Tsunami. The Orochi-Maru’s long, slender blade crushed the mechanical soldier that was easily twice her height.

With Mikihiko and Miyuki providing support fire, Leo and Erika worked as a team to destroy one enemy combat vehicle after another.

“Mizuki?”

Mizuki suddenly heard her name called when things had calmed down for a moment, and turned around.

“Can you tell what state Chiyoda’s group is in?” Miyuki asked about the other team. She didn’t know Mari had gone to reinforce them; Mizuki hadn’t had time to tell her yet.

“Umm…it looks like they moved. They’re still engaged.”

The point where their seniors had intercepted the enemy was a little ahead of theirs. They were positioned to block off the two main routes to the station.

“What’s wrong, Miyuki?” asked Erika, the Orochi-Maru on her shoulder, as Miyuki frowned. “What’s there to think so hard about at this point?”

“Doesn’t this seem strange?” answered Miyuki. “Why is the enemy always coming to where we’re waiting for them?”

Erika frowned, too.

“Don’t they have to pass through where we are to get to the station?” asked Mizuki. Indeed, the upperclassman and freshman groups had taken up position based on Suzune’s reading of the map.

But Mizuki’s answer didn’t satisfy the Shiba sister. “That’s only if they’re using main streets, Mizuki. They must have a way to communicate with each other, and there are only ten of us, so you’d think they could easily slip past us.”

“…Maybe they’re holding us here,” said Erika.

At that same moment, Mizuki gave a start.

“They’re here!”

But with the new enemy attack Mikihiko reported, they were forced to leave their guesswork for later.

The double-rotor transport helicopter Kurosawa was flying—amazingly, the housekeeper could pilot helicopters, not just cruisers—appeared in the sky, and as it was lowering its altitude to land, it happened:

Suddenly, a black cloud came flying in. The abrupt appearance, which could only be described as “appearing out of thin air,” was actually a huge swarm of out-of-season locusts.

They may have only been locusts, but they could still clog the engines. And besides, they’d appeared in such an unnatural way that they couldn’t have been an innocent natural phenomenon.

Shizuku, who had gone out to greet the helicopter, made a snap judgment and took her CAD out of her pouch. It was a silver one in the shape of a small handgun.

It was the second of the Silver models she’d bought right after the Nines. The activation sequence installed on it was a loop-cast Phonon Maser.

She pointed it into the air and pulled the trigger.

A sonic heat wave cut down a swarm of locusts.

“So…many…!”

That swarm vanished, as though they’d vaporized rather than burned to death. But that was only one part of a bigger cloud. She activated Phonon Maser again and again, shooting away the locusts nearing the helicopter, but nevertheless, one group got around her and cut in.

Honoka noticed it, too, but her magic wasn’t suited for intercepting enemies like this. Afraid she’d cause a conflict with Shizuku’s spell, she was unable to help.

Then, as the swarm of locusts reached the helicopter…

…a wind of destruction blew in.

The huge black cloud’s outline collapsed as though it were a mirage, and its color thinned until it had disappeared completely.

Shizuku and Honoka looked into the sky.

Mayumi and Suzune, having noticed the emergency later, directed their eyes skyward as well.

They saw a figure wrapped in black floating there, a silver CAD at the ready.

“Tatsuya…?”

Had it been Shizuku or Honoka to mutter that?

A group of other figures in entirely black suits flew in, then took up positions to protect the helicopter.

Once more, the transport helicopter began its descent.

“Compound-form attack prevented. Protecting the helicopter’s descent.”

“Leave its escort to the others, Specialist. Search for the caster and eliminate them,” Yanagi instructed.

“Roger.”

Tatsuya peeled away his gaze, looking for the one who had created the familiar.

He hadn’t dismantled each individual locust when he intercepted the swarm; instead, he’d aimed his dismantling spell at the magic program that had created the compound locust form. Once the spell creating the false body had been dismantled, the matter imitating locusts returned to psionic particles.

During that process, he’d seen where the magic program had come from. At that range and with this much time elapsed, he could easily trace it while maintaining his flight magic.

Over there.

Tatsuya could just go over and eliminate them, but it would be easier to apply his spell if he saw the person directly.

He moved to a spot over the fleeing caster’s head.

A soldier in black holding a large, silver handgun-shaped CAD flew behind a cluster of buildings, as quick as a comet.

His companions, with their rifles, formed a circle in midair as the helicopter inside their ring landed. The sight of the flying soldiers all in black, whose faces were hidden, exuded a certain ominous air.

But nobody, not Honoka, nor Shizuku, nor Mayumi, nor Suzune, felt uneasy about them.

“Who are they, exactly?” asked Inagaki, sounding creeped out.

But he only got a short answer from Mayumi: “They’re allies,” she said with a smile.

They were Tatsuya’s allies, and Fujibayashi’s as well—a unit in the Japan Defense Force.

Mayumi didn’t know any more than that, but it was enough.

They kept a sharp lookout in midair even as the civilians climbed aboard the helicopter.

The soldiers had been floating for over ten minutes now, and yet none of them seemed the least bit exhausted. Clearly, each and every one of them was a high-level magician.

She’d heard rumors before about an experimental unit in the Japan Ground Defense Force made up of rather unique magicians prominent in specific fields.

If you looked at each individual magician’s rank, they wouldn’t seem like all that much. But when this group of combat magicians entered battle, they were a very strong strike force.

Now that she thought about it, those conditions fit him perfectly.

“Reliable reinforcements,” added Mayumi, watching the last few people board the helicopter.

The helicopter that now held Shizuku and Inagaki safely lifted off, and after watching it ascend out of reach of ground sniping, the flying soldiers of the IMB guarding the perimeter scattered to nearby buildings.

A sense of relief settled over the remaining civilians. The strange, unnerving feeling from the strike force remained, but the JDF was keeping watch over their surroundings. Even if they felt it was a much more reliable situation than leaving everything to kids, nobody could have blamed them.

“It’s finally here…”

Despite not having to worry about any panic thanks to the reinforcements, Mayumi still wanted to quickly escape the pressure from the civilians who desperately wanted to escape. When she’d heard the sound of rotors indicating her helicopter’s arrival, she’d gotten impatient. The thought finally was her perfectly truthful impression of the matter.

What arrived was a military twin-engine helicopter. It was a good deal bigger than the one Shizuku had prepared. All the remaining civilians should have been able to board it without a problem.

Plus, more than one helicopter had come. A second one, a combat helicopter, was accompanying it.

“Miss Mayumi, are you safe?”

Upon hearing her ring tone and putting her communication unit to her ear, Mayumi heard the voice of her bodyguard, Nakura. “There are no problems here. Mr. Nakura, which one are you in?”

“I’m currently on board the combat helicopter. The master has bid me to ensure you and the other helicopter escape.”

“…Understood.” Mayumi had been about to say “I’m staying here,” but quickly gave up the idea. Unfortunately, Nakura was a cut above her in close combat. And she couldn’t shoot at a helicopter that came to rescue them, obviously. In many ways, resistance would be pointless.

“In any case, let’s hurry the civilians inside,” she said to Suzune, after her call had ended.

Suzune turned around in response—

And that’s when it happened.

“Don’t move!”

A young man wrapped an arm around Suzune’s neck from behind and used his other hand to point a knife at her.

He had a rifle pointed at him from the top of a building, but another man took a step forward and held a hand grenade out in front of him.

“…I see. Now your opening move makes sense.”

The quiet remark was from Suzune, who had the knife to her neck.

“You’re a quick thinker,” said the guerilla, who was disguised as an evacuating civilian. But he knew something was off; she seemed too calm.

“Drawing our combat forces to the front with your mechanized unit, but even then only securing the target once there were as few people waiting to escape as possible. A very well-thought-out plan,” she continued.

“We didn’t want to let any of you escape to begin with. We just came up with a plan where it wouldn’t hurt if some of you did.”

The man seemed to have been hooked by Suzune’s chatty calm.

“Did you choose me as your target to stabilize your energy supply?”

“Not just that. More importantly, a lot of our friends are behind bars. You’ll be a good hostage to set them free.”

“I won’t be much of a resource by myself, you know.”

“That’s not true… I told you not to move!”

The man sharply picked up on Mayumi trying to secretly use her CAD behind her back, and waved his knife. Mayumi gave up and put her hands in the air.

“Taking you as a hostage will force the Saegusa to act. I bet it’s more effective if their daughter’s friend is taken hostage rather than her.”

“You’re right. After all, Mayumi is too soft.”

Although she felt like she was being unfairly criticized, Mayumi found herself unable to do anything. This was probably why they called her soft, but that didn’t mean the hostage had to be criticizing her, too, did it?

“After that, do you plan to kidnap me and bring me to your country?”

“Yeah.”

“But that wouldn’t make sense for a hostage exchange, would it?”

“Well, we— What did you do?”

Finally, the man noticed that he was talking too much. In fact, he couldn’t believe that he was speaking freely like this among the enemy, even with a hostage.

“Your plan wasn’t a bad one.”

The knife slipped away from Suzune’s face.

“But you chose the wrong target.”

The arm around her neck simply came off.

“I’m only average at using magic with a CAD, but I’m better than both Mayumi and Juumonji at using it with a medium.”

She walked around the man holding the knife, over to in front of the others, and slowly pulled the grenade out of the other man’s hand.

“I paralyzed the motor center controlling your voluntary muscles. You won’t be able to move for a while.”

Just as she said this, though they began to sweat and make slight motions, the men’s arms and legs didn’t make any meaningful movements.

“The spell directly influences your body. Once, this type of magic was forbidden—probably because it required human test subjects.”

As they listened to Suzune, the men desperately tried to regain control over their bodies, but they couldn’t even squirm.

“The difficulty is in how long it takes for the effects to appear, but thankfully you were talkative. Oh, and let me say this—magic wasn’t what made you loosen your tongue. You were simply being imprudent.”

Suzune’s smile was ice-cold.

The Magic Association branch’s attack on the enemy had gotten fiercer. It was the result of the invading army realizing they were nearing the limit of their offensive, and launching a decisive battle instead.

Katsuto was listening to the reports flying in left and right from the association.

The JDF had launched a counterattack from Sakuragi Town and Kannai; and as for Ishikawa Town and Chinatown, the volunteer force with the Magic Association at its center was just barely holding out.

“…Do we have any spare combat clothes?”

A female staff member opened her eyes wide at Katsuto’s question and cried, “You can’t possibly plan on going out there yourself! You mustn’t!”

“We do have one, don’t we?”

But when Katsuto repeated himself to get his point across, the staff member nodded, feeling the pressure. “But the Juumonji family head himself…”

“Please take me to it,” interrupted Katsuto as she hesitated.

Awkwardly, the woman stood.

The other Ten Master Clans member had joined the volunteer force in front of Chinatown. He’d walked alone, right into the middle of where enemies were going back and forth, causing crimson flowers to blossom. Eventually, he’d managed to join up with the group battling the invading army.

Hiding behind cover, he gripped his CAD with the reddish sheen in his left hand, gasping for breath. The protector he wore was something a wounded man had given him.

The exhaustion was from repeatedly firing Burst. Plus, now that the enemy’s attacks had switched from mechanized weapons to magic, that wear and tear had started accumulating twice as fast.

Wraiths approached in a rank. A wraith was neither a metaphor nor the true thing. They were illusions created by old magic.

Instead of using the specialized CAD in his left hand, Masaki used the multipurpose CAD on his right arm.

An emission of interference.

The illusion of the wraith herd disappeared, leaving a single wooden dummy behind.

Having to apply Area Interference over a wide horizontal area to cover the entire rank quickly ate away at his stamina. And anyway, Masaki’s Burst spell vaporized the fluids inside an object. There had to be fluids inside the target or else it wouldn’t work.

The enemy had been quick to react to him, and this was the result. As soon as they saw an entire group of upright tanks crushed by Burst, they’d assembled a force of false wraiths and sent them into battle.

Burst was meaningless against illusions with no form created by old magic. And even without a physical form, the illusions still had attack power. It probably worked under the same logic as hypnotism. If you were cut by an illusion, red scar lines would appear and you would still die. Magicians could nullify the false slashing by covering themselves with Information Boost. However, the non-magician volunteer soldiers couldn’t.

Masaki, fighting alongside those civilian soldiers, desperately continued to search for the enemy magician as he withstood the illusory attacks that had stopped his own advance cold.

The civilians had finished boarding the transport helicopter.

“Rin, I’ll leave them to you.”

“Mayumi, please don’t do anything reckless.”

With this, the first helicopter lifted off.

The soldiers in black followed the helicopter up into the sky and formed a perimeter around it. Once they saw it ascend to a safe altitude, they dispersed, heading toward the coast.

“We should go, too. We’ll pick up Miyuki and Mari’s groups, then make our escape.”

“…Understood.”

Nakura looked like he had something to say about her order, but in the end, he nodded respectfully and went back to the copilot’s seat.

The combat helicopter with Mayumi and Honoka on it lifted off as well.

Meanwhile, Mayumi noticed a single soldier standing on top of a building, seeing her off.

In his right hand was a specialized silver CAD.

Honoka was looking out the other way, so she didn’t notice.

Without letting anyone in the helicopter see, Mayumi stuck out her tongue.

Tatsuya saw Mayumi’s gesture perfectly from behind his smoke visor.

…What a delightful person.

That was the only way he could express it.

Still, to think that Ichihara was one of the Ichihana…

The spell Suzune had used was the reason the Ichihana had their number stripped from their name and made an Extra. While their current name retained the ichi, it was no longer the character for one, but city.

He was pretty sure the spell relied predominantly on her genetics as an Ichihana.

Not only had magic that directly interfered with the human body been forbidden at the time, it was heavily restricted even now outside medical usage. It was dubious whether Suzune understood her circumstances, but he was almost certain she had Ichihana blood in her.

Of course, he thought, my magic deserves the same number-stripping, doesn’t it? He didn’t even give a dry grin for that one, just said it to himself flatly, before flipping the call switch in his helmet. “Mayumi Saegusa has boarded the helicopter. It’s headed toward the coast at a low altitude. It appears they’ll leave the area once they’ve picked up her classmates.”

“Roger. Once you’ve confirmed your escort target has withdrawn from the combat zone, join up with the rest of us.”

“Yes, sir.”

Not much longer now, thought Tatsuya as he cut the line. Yanagi hadn’t said it, but he knew without asking that they’d be going on the counteroffensive.

First, he had to make sure Mayumi and the others escaped safely.

Tatsuya, standing on the edge of a rooftop, pointed his CAD downward and casually pulled the trigger. A flame erupted at the corner of the building, then vanished just as quickly. He saw a missile launcher fall to the ground, but he didn’t pay it any heed. The portable weapon was constructed well enough not to misfire just from that.

He repeated the same action five times.

Once he knew all the ones aiming for the helicopter were gone, he turned around.

One man was there, holding an unsheathed katana.

It looked like the katana was just hanging from his side, but it was a perfectly guarded formless stance.

“…Who are you?”

The man was the one who’d asked. Considering he’d climbed all the way up here—not through normal means but by dashing up the space between buildings, kicking off one wall to another—it was a dull question.

“JDF 101st Brigade, Special Duty Officer of the Independent Magic Battalion, Ryuuya Ooguro.”

“What?”

The man with the katana, Chief Toshikazu, probably hadn’t expected Tatsuya to answer so readily. That took him aback more than the unfamiliar unit name had, creating an opening in his stance.

Tatsuya lightly kicked off the roof.

He didn’t jump for Toshikazu, but away from the building altogether.

With his left hand on his belt buckle, his body released from the fetters of gravity, and with his right-hand CAD still warding off the interloper, Tatsuya blasted off to heights where handgun bullets couldn’t catch him.

The Magic Association’s volunteer army was being forced into a slow retreat.

The enemy ground unit they faced was clearly the main force.

The mixed unit of armored cars and upright tanks that had gone north was, if anything, mainly armored cars, but the force that attacked the association was mainly composed of the special, close-quarters combat upright tanks, further unique because several magicians were with them.

A beast resembling a dog turned into a ball of flame and burst apart. It was an old spell that created a compound form imitating a magical beast known as a Huodou.

No sooner did that happen than a bird resembling a one-legged crane scattered sparks and vanished. It was the same type of spell, this time creating a magical beast known as a Bifang.

Old magic from the mainland assailed the volunteer force.

These were no longer beings of unknown affiliation. Maybe they’d abandoned any pretense of hiding their identities, because unique spells and upright tanks with anti-magic defenses applied were trampling down the volunteers’ lines.

The association’s magicians replied with fast—in other words, less troublesome—modern magic, but eventually they couldn’t hold out against their numbers anymore.

“Urgh. Retreat!”

“Retreat and reform the defensive line!”

The voices didn’t sound like they’d lost the will to fight. But behind their spirit was the fact that they’d gone on the defense.

“Don’t retreat!”

Just then, a voice thundered over the volunteers’ cowardice.

The birdlike compound form shooting fire everywhere slammed into the ground, splintered, and vanished. It was a sight like a giant hammer had come crashing down on it.

“Raise your spirits, all you who use magic. Protect our motherland from these foul invaders!”

A fire-spitting dog, a flame-winged bird, and other old magic familiars modeled after various mythical beasts were crushed to these words, one after another. And then, a large figure stepped out to the front of the volunteer army.

Clad in what looked like medieval armor with a sturdy protector and a helmet was Katsuto. He raised his right hand, then brought it down.

The act didn’t have much force behind it. But as he swung down, one of the enemy’s upright tanks was destroyed.

It was clear to everyone what that meant.

He repeated the same thing again—

—and a mechanized weapon that they thought was protected by magic was smashed like a toy made of paper.

Voices were raised.

They were the whoops of the volunteer soldiers put at a disadvantage, suddenly freed from that burden.

Katsuto shut the lid on the embarrassment in his mind and locked it.

He wasn’t young enough to believe in absolute justice.

He also wasn’t old enough to understand this as a temporary stopgap.

But he knew his role.

It didn’t take very long for the enemy to snap out of its reverie.

They probably still didn’t know what Katsuto had done, but even those with slow wits could tell that the magical attack on them had come from him.

Upright tank machine guns aimed at the youth, and tracks groaned. And not just one but three had formed a line to press the attack, speaking to the skill of the enemy for not over-relying on their equipment.

But in the end, none of them could fire even a shot, nor advance even a yard.

Katsuto stuck out his right palm. That was the only warning he gave.

But that was all it took to turn the upright tanks into scrap.

This was the multilayered barrier spell Phalanx.

Such magic wasn’t only for stopping the enemies; its true value actually lay in this kind of crushing attack.

The Phalanx spell constructed layer upon layer of barriers, so if the barrier in front went down, it would push the next one to the front, then add a new barrier to the back.

Instead of fixing the wall in front of himself, he slammed dozens of them into the enemies at high speed.

This was the true offensive casting of the Phalanx. He could expand an attack barrier simplified down to be opaque only to objects, even if other magic was trading back and forth. The magically created barrier both targeted objects and forbade any other magic with its influence.

Its flaws were that its range was short and that it only worked against physical forms or materialized phenomena. Despite that, this anti-object, anti-magic defense spell that doubled as a planar attack was incredibly potent against close-range combat such as a clustered enemy.

For defense, it deployed multiple barriers with multiple properties simultaneously.

For offense, it fired multiple barriers with a single property with rapidity.

Just as its name suggested, Phalanx was at once an attack spell and a defense spell.

And so in response, flames and lightning assailed Katsuto.

But such old-style magical attacks—ones that couldn’t immediately alter events and only manifested their processes as natural phenomena—were easy opponents for Katsuto to deal with. He constructed heatproof and shockproof walls in midair to protect himself and the volunteers around him.

But it wasn’t just defensive. This act blew away the enemy magicians, along with the foot soldiers escorting them at the front of the line.

With just a single new addition to the battlefield, the situation reversed.

Masaki, his hands full with the illusory attacks, was in the middle of a change of plans.

He stopped looking for the enemy magician and transitioned toward massacring all the enemies at once.

Until now, he’d feared civilian collateral damage, so he’d stuck to using spells that attacked single enemies. But he decided that letting the battle drag on like this would make the civilian damage worse—though he couldn’t deny losing his temper, either.

Masaki aimed for the most focused group of three-man cells spread among the enemies, then designated a square area as an execution ground. Fifty feet to a side. Just to be sure, he left the cube at six and a half feet. (There were no signs of the enemy having made it into the building yet, so this would prevent potential casualties of civilians who were hiding.)

Using the CAD on his left arm, he activated a spell. A force sprang into effect that would alter events even behind cover, regardless of physical obstacles.

The initial change was a small one. The enemy troops would have only felt a slight rise in body temperature. But it would quickly become a stinging heat, then such an intense pain that they would have to roll around on the ground, until finally, after thirty seconds, the agony would turn them into white-eyed corpses.

A spell that heated via fluid particle oscillation, Screaming Inferno.

Dispersion magic that vaporized fluids was the Ichijou magicians’ specialty, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t use other magic, of course.

In reality, though he wouldn’t say it to his friend, Masaki was skeptical of the Cardinal Code hypothesis. He knew through his senses, rather than his mind, that the four families and eight types of magic were seamlessly connected, that they were fundamentally one thing. He felt that the type categorization of magic was nothing more than a convenience.

Screaming Inferno could be called a lesser version of Burst. Rather than instantly vaporizing body fluids, as Burst does, Screaming Inferno would heat them up over time (though that “time” was a little under a minute).

In exchange for its weaker power, the spell’s target expanded from a “thing” to an “area.”

From within the cube he’d summoned the cauldron of hell into, he felt an extreme disturbance.

Screaming Inferno also directly interfered with objects’ interiors and people’s bodies. It wouldn’t work very well against a magician wearing Information Boost.

Which meant anyone still alive in that execution ground was a magician.

Found you!

Enemies still remained, but Masaki’s gut told him that the magician still standing was the illusionist he was searching for.

He jumped out from behind a building and charged straight into what was left of the execution ground, now a blank area in his mind.

His allies’ support fire silenced the guns aimed at him.

Switching his handgun-shaped CAD back to his right hand, he ran up behind the fleeing enemy magician—

And pulled the trigger without waiting for him to turn around.

A crimson flower bloomed.

The enemy magician died at Masaki’s hand with no time to surrender.

Small thunderbolts danced madly across the street, putting a stop to the gun-wielding enemy troops.

Miyuki’s group was encountering the enemy sporadically, and they’d stopped seeing new upright tanks and armored cars. The five soldiers disabled by Mikihiko’s lightning magic all gathered behind a building.

“Saegusa says she’ll come for us in a helicopter,” explained Miyuki, who had received a call. “She’s procured one just for us, aside from the one to evacuate civilians.”

“How magnanimous of her,” Erika admired drily.

“I don’t think it’s generosity, really… I think it was to make sure they got themselves out of here.”

“Still, I’m not gonna complain!”

“You’re right. Thanks to her, we should be able to escape, too.”

Mikihiko, Leo, and Mizuki, respectively, could talk like this because the enemy’s attacks had gone silent.

“Oh, isn’t that it?”

Erika pointed it out, and they all turned to the sound of rotor blades. They’d taken up position only ten minutes’ running distance away. When using a helicopter, other than landing and taking off, long distance travel was trivial. But the helicopter wasn’t showing up. They could hear the sound of cutting winds from directly above them, but there was no shadow, no helicopter, nothing.

A call sign came. Miyuki put her comm unit to her ear.

“Miyuki? Sorry, but it’s a little too narrow for us to land. We’ll lower ropes, so could you grab on to them?”

Without waiting for a reply, five ropes appeared out of thin air and were lowered down to them. The ends wavered like a mirage.

“…Rarefaction— No, I suppose I should call it optical camouflage. Very clever, Honoka,” said Miyuki to herself as she grabbed a rope and placed one foot on the last hold. She gave it a little tug to indicate she was ready, and the rope began to smoothly wind back up.

The other four hastily followed suit.

Once they got into the helicopter, everyone but Miyuki could clearly tell what Honoka was doing.

She was projecting a refracted image of the sky onto a semi-globular screen. Controlling the spell left her no room to speak; if the scenery was more variable than just sky, she wouldn’t have been able to maintain the optical camouflage while moving.

“This is the perfect spell for ambushes, isn’t it?” Mizuki asked.

“It is. I don’t think I could keep up such complex processing, though,” Miyuki stated.

“You think so, too, huh?”

Honoka didn’t appear to hear much of what her friends were saying.

“We’ll arrive soon, but if it’s too hard on you, you can let it go,” encouraged Mayumi.

“I’ll be fine” was all Honoka could muster.

But unfortunately, they couldn’t pick up Mari’s group quickly.

Perhaps one should call it a last-ditch effort. From where Mayumi and the others had an aerial view of the situation, it appeared the center of battle had shifted near Chinatown, and they could tell that not many enemies were left.

However, Mari’s group was currently under a fierce attack from foot soldiers—a number of magicians using rifles and missile launchers as their main weapons. Mayumi and the others hadn’t been informed that Toshikazu was making his way behind the enemy line alone, so they were disturbed by the missing person and immediately moved in to support the five remaining.

Actually, saying “Mayumi and the others” might have been imprecise as well, since Mayumi was firing support spells from the aircraft.

Hailstones rained down on the enemy troops. Not drops of ice but bullets of dry ice—reaching inorganic supersonic speeds—that pierced their defensive clothing.

It was a spell called Magic Bullet.

The enemy troops were caught in a crossfire, with bullets firing at them from above, behind, to the side, and various other angles. One after another went down, unable to locate where the spell was coming from.

An attack from air to ground, aided by the advantage of her invisibility: Like that, Mayumi’s spell took control of the area in less than five minutes.

“Sorry for the wait, Mari. I’ll lower some ropes, so come on up.”

“Great, thanks!”

Feeling unsatisfied by Mayumi’s easy domination of the enemy troops with overwhelming firepower—though she hesitated to call it that—Mari cheerfully called out to her underclassmen.

They walked up in pairs, Isori with Kanon and Kirihara with Sayaka. It would be difficult to blame them for letting their guards down. Until a moment ago, they’d been right in the heat of battle, and now the overhead defense of the helicopter, no longer camouflaged, gave them relief. But the true value of guerilla fighters was surprise attacks in situations like these.

“Watch out!”

Mari was the one who gave the shout.

The first to move was Kirihara. He flung Sayaka to the side and swung his katana. He instantly activated High-Frequency Blade and repelled a bullet headed for his chest, but he could only cover his upper body.

A shot pierced through his right leg.

It tore the leg right from his body.

“Kirihara!” cried Sayaka.

“Kei!”

In another spot, Isori had pushed Kanon to the ground and was now covering her with his body.

Blood flowed from his entire back.

Stab wounds from a frag grenade—and likely fatal.

“Kei! Kei!!”

“Kirihara! Talk to me!!”

The two girls clung to them and cried out.

Mari tried to cast a spell against the ambushing guerillas, but it misfired due to an overwhelming force of influence covering the area.

Hastily, she looked to the side—to where it was coming from.

There, she saw Miyuki, smoothly floating down from the helicopter as though unrestrained by gravity. With a fearsome expression, she landed and lifted her right hand in front of her.

Miyuki had blown a fuse.

To her, Isori and Kirihara were no more than acquaintances. But just the fact that a cowardly ambush had hurt her acquaintances was enough for her to snap.

Even in that state, though, her mind was cool as ice.

It looked like she’d jumped out on reflex, but she had a perfect grasp on the gravity on her body.

She didn’t need a CAD.

The magic area she unleashed completed her special, singular magic.

Miyuki hadn’t only sealed Tatsuya’s power.

She was constantly using half of her magical control to seal his strength.

Her magic’s tendency to run amok was a side effect of having to suppress her brother’s magic.

In releasing Tatsuya’s abilities now, she also released her own.

The Yotsuba, as a family, had no nickname.

Each individual in the family had unique strengths, so you couldn’t place it in one category. However, they were no more exempt to the genetic rules of magic than other families.

Miyuki’s mother had possessed peerless outer magic that could interfere with people’s mental structure. It wouldn’t be strange if the power to inhibit the brain had been passed down to her daughter.

And because she possessed such magic, she could carry out her role of suppressing Tatsuya’s mental strength.

Yes—her freezing magic was a derivative of the magic she’d been born with, changed in form to interfere with the physical world instead.

She held out her right hand.

And then the world froze.

It looked like the world had come to a stop with Miyuki at the middle.

The roads, the building walls—none of it was covered in ice.

The world of awareness was what she’d frozen.

Mari, Kanon, and Sayaka, as well as the wounded Kirihara and Isori, who had come into contact with its waves, were unchanged.

But the enemy soldiers pointing guns and about to toss hand grenades were stiff, unmoving.

And not frozen, but stilled.

It wasn’t their bodies that had been frozen, but their minds.

The outer magic mental interference spell, Cocytus.

Once frozen, the mind would not return.

Once frozen, the mind would not perceive death. Nor would it order the flesh to die.

Once frozen, the bound body could not die, instead transformed into a statue of the last position the mind had willed.

Nobody here could explain what Miyuki had done.

But all of them saw an illusion of the world freezing.

All of them felt in their gut what she had done.

Even without words, they felt the terror of losing their minds.

Miyuki looked to her side, then up, then back down, giving a lonely smile.

But soon her head came back up, and she shouted and waved her arms:

“Tatsuya!”

Everyone present, aside from Kirihara and Isori, looked that way.

They saw a soldier all in black about to make a landing. He came down right next to Miyuki, lifted his visor, and lowered his mask.

Tatsuya’s face was stern as he dashed to Isori’s side.

“Tatsuya, please!” Coming up next to him, Miyuki clung to his hand.

Tatsuya nodded, then took the CAD from his left hip.

“What are you doing?!”

He pointed his silver CAD at Isori.

There was no time to stop him.

All Kanon could do was shout.

The trigger was pulled.

Kanon reflexively shut her eyes.

[Beginning eidos change history trace…]

Tatsuya’s expression didn’t change.

[Reconstruction point confirmed.]

This magic truly needed only a split second.

But Miyuki knew that at that moment, her brother was experiencing a pain that defied imagination.

Miyuki’s eyes keenly picked up on the sweat forming on Tatsuya’s brow.

Unconsciously, she looked away.

But Tatsuya’s eyes, now merely part of a biological robot for using magic, only saw the information he needed.

[Beginning reconstruction…]

The other spell Tatsuya could use freely, Regenerate, triggered.

It traced eidos change history, reconstructed their state before injury, and copied them.

It attached the copied information bodies as a magic program to the eidos, then it overwrote the information recording the injured state with information from before the injury.

Information accompanied events…

…and information altered events.

In accordance with the basic principles of magic, a status alteration on the wounded flesh began. Soon, it was restored to a state in which it wasn’t damaged.

It wasn’t repairing the wounds, but canceling the fact that wounds had been sustained.

The world’s corrective force sprang into action, trying to make the alteration applied to Isori’s flesh make sense.

The grenade fragments were determined not to have struck Isori’s body.

The fragments disappeared from Isori’s body.

Not dismantled, but suddenly scattered about him.

Brrz. Isori’s body appeared to haze over.

And then, a moment later, no wounds were left on his body.

In fact, even the blood staining his clothing had vanished.

[Reconstruction complete.]

Isori’s flesh anchored to the world in which the grenade never wounded him.

Begrudging confirmation of Regeneration’s effect on Isori, Tatsuya pointed his CAD at Kirihara and pulled the trigger.

Visually, one could call his wounds more dramatic.

No sooner than his torn-off leg was dragged back to his thigh and fully connected had Kirihara’s body hazed over with a similar brrz.

A moment later, a boy with all his limbs lay there.

Tatsuya returned his CAD to his left hip, then embraced Miyuki without a word.

“Ah…!”

Miyuki’s eyes widened as Tatsuya brought his hand around her and whispered something in her ear before pulling away.

He took a step back, pulled his mask back on, and lowered his visor.

Tatsuya, now back in his black-clothed form, hit his belt buckle and danced up into the sky.

Mizuki watched him leave in a daze.

In her ears, her brother’s words—You did well—played again and again.

Face dubious, Isori looked down at his own body.

Kanon, who had been staring at him blankly, suddenly embraced him and started crying.

On the other side, Kirihara, seeming confused, jumped a couple of times and stood on one leg while Sayaka watched him with a tearful smile.

Upon hearing the tapping of a light footstep behind her, Miyuki turned around. Erika was there, having jumped off the copter, her taller-than-she-was sword in hand.

“Nice work. That was some crazy magic, huh?”

Miyuki answered Erika, who started talking as usual, with a reserved smile—one that also looked scared. “…Even the Angel of Death would yield the way to my brother,” she said. “But that spell, it was…”

“Hmm? Oh, sure, Tatsuya’s spell was great, too, but I was talking about what you did. That was amazing, taking down the bad guys like that. Guess I should have expected it from you!”

Erika’s expression was neither an act nor a bold front. It just showed pure praise for Miyuki’s skill.

There was no fear in it.

So…

“…Thank you.”

…Miyuki found herself able to answer in her usual tone.

North of the hill the Magic Association branch stood on, the invading army’s offensive had been pushed back, and now its troops had rounded the southern side to attempt one final attack.

They’d already given up on securing hostages.

They didn’t have enough troops to hold territory for long, either.

At this rate, they would have to retreat empty-handed. They resolved to, at the very least, steal some of the modern magic–related data stored at the association and kill as many magicians as possible to whittle away at Japan’s magical military strength.

Getting the retreat timing right would be incredibly difficult, though. Deciding when to pull out when you were at an advantage was hard, too, but without dealing a decisive defeat to the enemy or acquiring anything from the battle, they couldn’t easily get over their regret and leave.

They would hold the enemy’s offensive in place, then strike at the rear. At a glance, it was a very dynamic tactic; the commander leading the diverted unit thought this as well, and felt uplifted by it.

Their detached unit of only armored cars and upright tanks hadn’t encountered the enemy yet. This strategy depended on the prediction that the defenders had no mobile forces, and from one of the armored cars, the commander saw that seemed to be correct.

It was just then that it happened. With his upper body out of the car’s rear hatch, the soldier assigned to keep watch looked up at a black shadow passing overhead.

The soldier wasn’t able to identify it.

And then a bullet, fired from above, pierced through his head.

The invading army’s vehicles frantically started communicating and pointed their machine guns upward.

As if to mock their reaction, the unit in black—the Independent Magic Battalion’s flight corps—descended quickly from the sky. They landed on top of buildings along the road and showered them in a rain of concentrated fire from above.

Their rifle bullets, with strengthened penetration, rained down like a deluge, saturating the invaders’ magical defenses and piercing the upright tanks’ cockpits. Grenades with high explosive power blew away the armored cars’ wheels, and sprayed heated metal powder that lit fire to their fuel.

The invading army wasn’t helpless, either, though. They fired high-explosive shells at one building, turning it into rubble, and then they shaved away at another’s wall with their heavy machine guns. They blasted flying soldiers staring down their barrels.

But the black unit’s firepower didn’t wane in the slightest. In fact, from within the torrential fire in the wreckage, from atop the building with the damaged wall, came an even fiercer salvo.

The invading troops were gripped by fear—fear that their enemies were immortal monsters.

They immediately got an opportunity to see with their own eyes how it happened.

One flying soldier lost his footing and fell on the road.

An upright tank’s machine gun bored a hole into his body.

Thanks to the bulletproof jet-black combat suit, he didn’t die immediately, but it was a fatal wound without a doubt.

However, a demon in black with a silver CAD in either hand descended next to him, and the moment he pointed his left at the soldier, the soldier’s wounds vanished.

Then that man’s right hand aimed at the upright tank targeting him. Noise shot through the armor-protected upright tank, and the twelve-foot machine turned to dust and disappeared.

“…Maheśvara!”

A scream spread over the radio waves.

Some spurred by terror to flee and others spurred by terror to charge collided with one another in waves, throwing the invading army’s battle line into chaos.

This panic ended with their annihilation.

On the camouflaged landing ship’s bridge—in other words, its command center—a grave, tragic air had descended upon them.

“The detached unit is gone…?”

Even as his staff officer cringed with fear under his captain’s—also the invading army’s commander’s—glare, he did his duty: “Estimating from our reports, they appear to have encountered an aerial unit using flight magic and were destroyed without any successes.”

“…”

“…Also—and this is unconfirmed intel, but…”

“What?”

“We heard the word Maheśvara in their radio chatter.”

“Maheśvara?!”

Half of the people on the bridge peeled their eyes wide open.

“Someone who was in the battle three years ago was present in our detached unit.”

“…What does it mean?” asked an adjutant, who was among the other half, to the staff officer who had brought the report.

“…Foul nonsense!”

However, the one to answer him was the commander in chief himself.

Three years ago—that unknown demon who had defeated them at Okinawa.

That awful nickname that had begun to be whispered among the soldiers who had returned after the exchange of captives.

The Great Asian Alliance Army’s higher echelons denied his existence, and their soldiers were forbidden from saying that name aloud.

It was a nightmare they thought they’d buried.

But however much they tried to cry out and deny it, the nightmare was real, and it was baring its fangs at them once more.

Using their mobility, the IMB’s flight corps fell upon the enemies fighting the Magic Association’s volunteer army from the rear.

Forty of their soldiers had been sent to the front lines—no more than a single platoon. The speed of their mobility, however, was contrary to normal battlefield sense, raising their strength by two to three times that number.

And they didn’t have to worry about troop attrition.

The jet-black combat uniforms they wore—MOVAL suits—were completely bulletproof. Every member possessed high-level magic capabilities for combat as well, so their defense against magical interference was just as firm.

Still, that didn’t mean the enemy couldn’t deal them any damage. Anything worn by a person has a limit on weight; failing to match up to tank and warship armor is unavoidable.

Thus, bullets still hit them.

Explosions still wounded them.

Sometimes they even ended up with holes in their chests or guts.

But as long as they didn’t die instantly, they didn’t stop. Soldiers fell, bleeding from gunshot wounds—and a moment later, they stood as though nothing had happened. They had no scars, no traces of blood on their suits. In fact, there weren’t even any holes in those suits.

Every time a tall soldier with a silver CAD in both hands held out his left one, a wounded soldier was revived.

And the soldier, released from death, would fight on even more fiercely.

The invading army’s troops couldn’t believe what was happening before their eyes.

They knew they’d dealt fatal wounds, but it was like none of their attacks ever happened.

They’d had to have stumbled into a daydream.

A dream of the worst kind—a night terror.

Even as it eroded their sense of reality, they realized the causal relationship in what they were seeing.

The silver gun in the left hand was reviving the black-clad soldiers—they didn’t know how it was doing that, but they understood that one fact instinctively, and they pointed their guns at the soldier.

But their bombardment would never reach.

Both bullets and grenades dissipated in midair.

Everything that right hand pointed at vanished into dust.

The Divine Left

Those to whom his left hand extended would return from the jaws of death…

The Demon Right

…and all his right hand pointed to, both man and machine, disappeared.

The two English phrases one soldier from Hong Kong had used three years ago to circumvent the army’s gag order rippled through the ranks of the invaders…

Maheśvara!

…and turned into a huge wave that swallowed up their will to fight until nothing was left.

The enemy’s offensive stopped with unnatural timing. By Katsuto’s intuitive prediction, it should have taken a bit longer for the enemy to turn and flee. Sooner than anticipated though it was, he wasn’t about to let this chance escape.

“The enemy is afraid!”

In the volunteer army, assembled around the Magic Association, he belonged to the youngest echelon. Regardless, he’d taken the reins of command. Not that some with a keen eye didn’t see through his age to his experience. But nobody objected to his innate ability to lead them.

Of course, the fact that his magic power was overwhelming, higher than anyone else’s, helped a lot. Almost nobody misunderstood that—if he hadn’t joined the fight, it would have been them getting pushed back and eventually being forced to retreat.

But it wasn’t only his strength. That was actually a secondary factor. The volunteer troops had acknowledged Katsuto as their general because his commands had driven away their cowardice.

It was true that to win battles, supply was important. Training troops to a higher level was vital as well. Tactics that efficiently used troops, methods of transport, and means of communication were irreplaceable support mechanisms.

But after everything was spent, morale had the final word. A troop’s combative spirit sometimes overcomes every disadvantage to achieve victory. In ground combat, at least, morale continues to be a factor in victory that nobody could ignore.

And it took a rare talent to draw out one’s troops’ spirits—the makings of a general.

“Push them back!”

At Katsuto’s enjoinment, a barrage of magic fired.

A magical salvo made up entirely of weighting-type spells came at them, all attuned to match so that they wouldn’t cancel one another out.

For the invaders, who were already about to flee, it was a decisive blow. Most of the soldiers and magical troops not inside mechanized weapons were mowed down. Half of what few upright tanks still remained fell over. Their remaining forces that had endured the assault—the armored cars, upright tanks, and a handful of soldiers and magical troops—began their defeated retreat.

Smashing his Phalanx into the fallen upright tanks one after the other, Katsuto swung his hand down in a wide arc.

“Forward!”

An order to pursue, to not give them time to regroup—that was how the volunteer soldiers’ morale reached its peak.

Masaki was just as ignorant as Katsuto of the enemy’s back line collapsing from the IMB’s attack. He did, however, simultaneously realize the winds had changed.

Like him, Masaki had fallen into a leader-like position among the volunteer troops, but rather than aggressively issue them orders, his stance was to go to the front line and protect them.

Right now, he stood alone before Genbu-Mon Gate, Yokohama Chinatown’s northern gate. Postwar redevelopment had seen the buildings become walls, preventing entry and exit via all but the four gates at the cardinal directions. Most believed this was planned rather than a spontaneous development feature.

Was it to close themselves in, or close others out?

It was, most likely, the latter.

Right now, the four gates, which were thrown wide open at normal times to handle tourists, were shut tight.

Masaki had no intent of complaining about the fact that they were closed. Personally, he didn’t like the idea of clustering together with one’s own countrymen while living in another country and making that community into a veritable fortress. But right now, he wasn’t standing at the closed northern gate in order to make a fuss about it.

“Open the gate! If you don’t, you will be treated as holding secret communication with the invaders!”

As his words described, he was standing here ready for combat because enemies had fled into said fortress.

He didn’t know when bullets would start flying from the other side.

Maybe what came flying would be grenades, or magic.

There was no assurance that explosives, or spells with enough force to penetrate his own defenses, wouldn’t rain down on him.

Therefore, he had mustered his nerve and stepped up to the gate, ready to cast a spell at the drop of a hat.

Behind his words, Masaki was resolved to break through using force. He’d demanded they open up, but if they’d been willing to let everyone in so easily, then the enemies wouldn’t have fled into town in the first place.

Even if the people in town weren’t secretly communicating with the enemy forces, the first thing the enemy would have done was take control of the gates’ opening and closing. Unarmed townspeople didn’t seem fit to resist that.

And so, when he saw the gate creak open not a moment after his shout, he had to sidestep it, startled and dumbstruck.

A group came out, led by a young man about five or six years Masaki’s elder, and he had a noble air about him.

They had soldiers from the invading army bound up with them.

“I am Gongjin Zhou,” said the man.

“…Gongjin Zhou?”

“It is my real name,” replied the man, appearing used to the reaction. He smiled to himself at Masaki’s confusion.

“I apologize. I’m Masaki Ichijou.”

Considering it would obviously be bad to forego a self-introduction to this older man, Masaki hastily—but evenly—named himself.

The man Zhou gave a bow, purposely lowering himself, then stepped to the side and offered the prisoners behind him (strictly speaking, captives) to Masaki. “We are not connected to the invaders. In fact, we’re victims as well. We’ve taken the liberty of cooperating with you so that you understand that fact.”

With a face that was the very definition of sincere, the young man appealed to his innocence. There wasn’t a single tuft of a cloud in it—at least, not on the surface.

But Masaki found himself unable to believe the charade. For no reason he could name, he knew that’s what this was.

Obviously, the man would insist they’d allowed the invading forces to enter; as a result, the aggressors would drop their guard and be captured more easily. It was a persuasive insistence, and one that made sense.

But how had they captured the armed soldiers to begin with?

He had to be wary.

That was the impression Masaki got from this man Zhou.

But that wasn’t enough to give Masaki the right to investigate a civilian.

In addition, on the surface, one could say their cooperation had put an end to this front of the battle.

Masaki thanked Zhou. Then, aided by other volunteer soldiers, received the captive enemies.

He didn’t realize the process had removed him from the front lines.

Silence filled the helicopter escaping inland from the coast.

For some reason, there was an awkward air inside it, where everybody hesitated to speak.

Enduring the unnatural silence, though, was also something they couldn’t do.

“…It happened to my own body, and yet…I still can’t believe it.”

Isori was the first one to say something.

“…What in the world happened? How and why is this even possible?” Kirihara, the other related party, was the next to offer a confused question to nobody in particular. “If you told me it was all an illusion, maybe I could believe it then…?”

“But it wasn’t,” replied Isori. “I almost died, and your leg came off—that’s the absolute truth.”

Another silence descended on them. The air got even heavier than before, presented with the altogether grave reality.

“…Shiba, just answer me this.”

And, perhaps, at last:

Mari asked the question of the only one here who knew the truth—Miyuki.

“What is it?”

Her response was utterly calm, but she couldn’t entirely hide the stiffness in her face.

Or perhaps she simply wasn’t trying to hide it at all. Maybe she was purposely wearing this hard, crystalline expression to ward them off.

“How long will Tatsuya’s spell’s effect last?”

Magic-based healing was temporary. That was an underlying principle of healing magic. While the effects were active, a medic would reapply it several times, tricking the world several times, until finally the false healing took root in the real world. The shorter the time of the effect, the sooner the medic would need to apply a new healing spell.

“It’s permanent.”

But they didn’t expect the answer they got.

“Continuous treatment will not be necessary, the way it is for normal healing magic.”

Miyuki’s response was based on a 100 percent understanding of Mari’s intent, and made in regards to Isori and Kirihara listening as well.

“There are also no restrictions on exercise. You are able to go about your life exactly as before.”

“…Is that even possible?”

Mari didn’t seem convinced by her answer.

“Do you not believe me?”

“It’s not whether we believe you or not,” said Kanon—Mari wasn’t the only one unconvinced. “I’m grateful he saved Kei…but I’ve never heard of healing magic you can use once to fully heal someone. It goes against the foundation of healing magic. Are they really cured? Then was what he did not healing magic? What the hell did Shiba do?!”

“Kanon, calm down.” After Kanon burst into a heated barrage of questions, Mayumi calmed her down. “Miyuki, please don’t be offended, okay? Kanon is just worried about Isori.”

“I’m aware of that. It doesn’t bother me.” Miyuki answered Mayumi’s follow-up with a reserved smile.

“But I am interested in what he did. If it wasn’t healing magic, then what on earth—?”

“Mari! It’s not courteous to ask about other people’s spells!”

Just as the mood started to soften a bit, Mari destroyed it with her remark, earning a harsh reproof from Mayumi.

“Thank you, Saegusa. But I don’t mind.” Miyuki returned her own gentle rebuke. “I believe it is only natural you would wonder about it. I’m sure my brother would allow me to reveal it, if it was to you.”

That meant they couldn’t tell anyone else. And if they wouldn’t protect the secret, the conversation was over.

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“I’ll keep it to myself.”

Mari and Kanon answered in very quick succession.

The other members also gave their own oaths in turn.

“We’ll keep everything we hear now a secret. That goes for Nakura and the others as well.”

And at the end, Mayumi said that.

“Well, it isn’t actually all that important, but…”

Miyuki gave an unusual dry grin.

Whatever Mayumi promised, it would end up in the other Saegusa’s ears. Miyuki decided that was all right, though. They knew what he could do now, so there wasn’t much point keeping how he did it a secret.

After all, nobody could imitate it anyway.

“The spell my brother used isn’t healing magic.”

Assuming a proper posture, Miyuki began to quietly speak. Everyone listening, without realizing it, straightened up as well.

“The spell’s name is Regenerate. It travels back twenty-four hours through eidos change history, makes a full copy of the eidos before receiving wounds from an external source, then makes them into a magic program with which to overwrite the current eidos. The overwritten target will, in accordance with the information that overwrote it, revert to a state before having received those wounds.”

She paused there a moment, then looked around at everyone’s face in turn.

“Do you all know why magic’s effects don’t last forever?” she asked, then continued without waiting for an answer. “The reason spell effects aren’t perpetual is because of the restorative force of eidos. This restorative force is eidos trying to return to a previous state, before they were overwritten. However, the eidos copied by Regenerate are also none other than eidos, which express the past in and of themselves. A target overwritten with its own information will not revert back to a state of having been wounded, but instead take root in the world in a state where that time passed without those wounds happening. It makes everything like it never happened.”

Mari and Kanon exchanged glances.

Mayumi blinked several times.

Isori froze completely, and Kirihara made a face like he’d been bewitched by a fox.

Though their expressions were different, everyone felt the same thing.

“Then Tatsuya can heal any wound in one go? I can’t believe it. Even for Tatsuya, that’s…”

Mikihiko was the one to actually give voice to that feeling.

“Not in one go, Yoshida,” Miyuki denied with a smile. “In one instant. And the object doesn’t have to be a living creature. Whether it’s a human or a machine, my brother can instantly restore it.”

Mikihiko froze, his jaw on the floor, and Miyuki smiled again, both amused and a little lonely. “This spell is the reason my brother can’t use other magic freely. His magic region is completely taken up by this godlike magic, which doesn’t allow any room for other spells.”

Not a person here doubted the adjective godlike as anything but literal.

Because it wasn’t a boast—it was a miracle.

“…So that’s why Tatsuya is so unbalanced,” murmured Mayumi.

 “Yeah…” muttered Mari. “With a high-level spell like that on standby, it’s no wonder he has trouble with other magic…”

Miyuki had only told them half the truth. She had no intent of revealing the other half. But her upperclassmen misunderstood, conveniently for her, so all she did was wear her lonely smile.

“But that’s amazing, isn’t it? He could cure any wound as long as it happened within twenty-four hours, right?” blurted out Kanon, as if to sweep the depressed air away.

“Yeah. The demand for someone like that during a disaster or in a field hospital would be immeasurable. He could save thousands of lives.” Isori agreed, having understood the full meaning behind it, his voice passionate.

“That’s right! Compared to that, who cares if he can’t use other magic? Why did he keep such an amazing power secret? He could save so many lives with it. He’d be a real hero—not famous for taking lives but for saving them!”

“You’re right… He can make any and all wounds go away like they never happened. Do you think he can use a spell like that without giving anything in exchange?”

In contrast to the excited Kanon, Miyuki was extremely calm, and her face wasn’t very expressive. And then her cold, sharp gaze pierced Kanon.

When they saw it, Kanon, as well as Mari and Mayumi, came to the realization that she was forcing herself to remain calm by freezing her violently raging emotions in ice.

She was weeping, lamenting.

She was berserk with anger.

“He traces eidos change history and makes a full copy of them. To do that, he needs to read in all the information they store.”

Miyuki’s voice was still calm, even businesslike. But Mayumi, and Mari, and Kanon, and Isori, and everyone else listening to it felt a chill run down their spines.

“That, of course, includes the pain the wounded person experienced.”

They heard someone gasp.

“He doesn’t merely retrieve the pain as information. The sensation of pain, the signals created by the nerves of the person’s wounded flesh—it flows into him as direct information. He doesn’t perceive it through the brain, but rather directly through his mind.”

Somebody began to cough. It wasn’t someone trying to clear their throat but rather a biological reaction due to their inability to breathe.

“In addition, it comes to him compressed into a moment. For example…after you were injured, Isori, about thirty seconds passed before my brother used the spell. Compare that to the approximately zero point two seconds he took to read the eidos change history. In that moment of time, my brother’s mind experienced the pain you did, compressed, and one hundred fifty times worse.”

“A hundred and fifty…” moaned Isori. To be honest, he couldn’t imagine what that would be like. But if he’d been exposed to that kind of pain, he wasn’t sure he’d even stay sane.

“The longer the duration of the injury, the more pain is compressed. In order to erase wounds an hour old, he would be required to endure pain of at least ten thousand times the injured.”

Miyuki subtly looked away from Kanon—so that she wouldn’t release her anger on her, on anyone but herself.

“Every time my brother heals someone’s wounds, that’s the kind of price he pays, all right? Are you still going to say he should be using that power for others just because they want it?”

She was quietly raging.

Above all, at herself.

For her selfishness, for desiring her brother not to use Regenerate.

“Captain, our forces have begun retreating!”

“Good.”

Colonel Xiangshan Chen of the GA3’s Special Convert Forces nodded upon hearing his subordinate’s report, no surprise, nor frustration, nor shock to his voice. He hadn’t exactly predicted their forces would have a high chance of successfully retreating, but he’d considered the possibility as part of achieving their strategic objectives. If they did, the tactical victory didn’t matter. That was how he’d built up the position he now held.

“We will now execute plan number two.”

Twenty soldiers followed him. He couldn’t call it very much, but they were all veterans of back-line destruction missions. They had much higher levels of training than the infiltration operatives he’d brought with him at the beginning.

“Captain Lu.”

And though they’d gotten the better of him once, Chen said the name of the subordinate he trusted as combat strength above all the rest.

“You may have personal feelings on the matter, but put revenge out of your mind. Obsessing over a Relic of dubious value was a mistake to begin with.”

“I understand.”

Whatever he may have been thinking, Ganghu Lu answered his superior officer in a perfectly controlled tone. He was clad in his rightful equipment—a suit of spell armor called Baifujia.

“Let’s head out.”

On Chen’s command, his force quietly began to move.

Their destination—Bay Hills Tower, the Magic Association of Japan’s Kanto branch.

The heavy air hanging in the copter with Mayumi and the others suddenly broke when Mizuki blurted out, “Ah?!”

“What’s wrong, Mizuki?” asked the Shiba sister—the cause of the silence weighing down on them—in a gentle voice. She probably thought they couldn’t go on like this, so she’d inquired directly.

“Umm, near the Bay Hills Tower, I thought I saw an aura like a wild beast…”

Even after getting on the helicopter, Mizuki had been taking off her glasses every now and then and looking down at the ground. She’d set about keeping watch spontaneously, saying that it was all she could do, but now it seemed to have borne fruit.

“Like a wild beast? You mean, aggressive and violent?”

Mikihiko, even as he was asking, took out a paper talisman without waiting for an answer. He triggered its spell, then held it out in front of him, looking through it at the Bay Hills Tower, already small in the distance.

“An enemy attack?!” he cried in surprise.

“Are you sure?”

“But the volunteer army should have pushed them back…”

Erika and Kanon expressed their doubts in turn.

Mikihiko gave an affirmative nod to Erika’s question, then shook his head at Kanon. “It’s a surprise attack—a small group from the rear. I sense a terrible magical power. We should go back—the association is in danger.”

The last sentence was directed at Mayumi.

Uncertainty came into her eyes, and she and Mari exchanged glances.

“My lady Mayumi.”

And then came the voice of Nakura, from the copilot seat.

“We’ve received an emergency transmission from the Magic Association over the shared Ten Master Clans line.”

“Give it to me!”

Mayumi snatched the communicator from Nakura’s hands.

What she heard from the receiver was the exact emergency Mikihiko had announced. The enemy was few, but so were the magicians left at the association. They doubted they’d be able to hold out for long.

Mayumi made up her mind so quickly it was like she’d never been unsure at all. “Nakura, bring the helicopter to the association!”

Without waiting for an answer, she connected to someone else on the communicator. She got through right away.

“What’s wrong, Saegusa?”

What came back was Katsuto’s tension-filled voice. Mayumi picked up on his slight impatience and doubt, and knew the association had requested his help as well.

“Juumonji, this group will go to the association offices,” said Mayumi, doing away with any preface. “We’re turning the helicopter back there now, so we won’t be long. You concentrate on eliminating the enemy forces.”

Katsuto didn’t know Mayumi was currently fleeing in a helicopter, and she didn’t know he had taken command on the front lines.

But Mayumi was sure that Katsuto would never be watching the situation unfold from a safe place. And if he had joined the battle at some point, she knew he’d be something their line couldn’t do without.

Even Katsuto couldn’t be in two places at once. He couldn’t take out enemies coming from two different directions at the same time.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

When Mayumi ended the call, the helicopter had already wheeled around.

Chen’s unit’s surprise attack caught the Japanese completely off guard. Not with the attack itself, which had only a few people, but by the fact that the invaders had kept such elites in reserve.

Having invaded from the sea, the army of the GAA—or so it was surmised—was now at a devastating disadvantage. Their Yamate unit had fled from the volunteer army under Katsuto’s command, while the Kannai team had been captured thanks to a betrayal in Chinatown. They’d been completely destroyed in Yamashita Town by a flight corps all in black. The invaders shouldn’t have had any room to conserve military strength.

But in reality, a small, elite unit had launched a raid. Though they were less than a platoon, every individual had incredibly high combat power. One soldier especially, wearing a white, Chinese-style suit of armor, was easily climbing the hill—treating armored-car machine-gun fire like it was nothing and breaking through the many barricades one after another.

Mayumi’s group, after landing at the heliport, saw it happening.

“Is that—?!” cried Mari in shock at seeing the white-armored soldier—or, more accurately, sensing him.

“He’s from before…” said Mayumi, also identifying the man’s face with perception magic. She narrowed her eyes. “Ganghu Lu, was it? He escaped.”

“Ganghu Lu?!”

“Erika, you know him?”

Erika nodded excitedly to Leo’s question. “He’s real strong.”

“Truly.”

But neither Erika’s short reply nor Leo’s grunt had any sign of cowardice. In fact, their eyes were glittering. The sight gave their oldest pair of seniors a headache rather than worry.

Looking down at the enemy unit pressing closer, Miyuki took out her CAD.

“Whoa there, Miyuki!” called Mayumi hastily. She’d been preoccupied with Erika, but she’d noticed just before things got dangerous. “Are you trying to override the association’s magic, too?!”

Miyuki specialized in magic that affected areas. As soon as she cast one spell, any others with a weaker influence would be erased. If she’d been close enough to identify all her allies, she could have defined her spell’s target more precisely to avoid getting in their way, but Mayumi didn’t think she could do something that delicate from this far away—all the people looked like ants.

“It will be fine. I’ll end this with one attack.” Sure enough, Miyuki’s answer was a violent one—she’d quiet both enemy and ally in a single stroke.

The suggestion was an ill fit to her graceful appearance. Mayumi wanted to hold her head in her hands, at the end of her wit. “You can’t. If the worst happens and you miss one, it’ll be your responsibility.”

The Shiba girl thought, I’d never miss any, but she knew Mayumi was saying that out of worry for her, so she obediently put her CAD back in her inside pocket.

“You protect the branch office floor, Miyuki. I know this seems like I’m pushing responsibility on you, but you’re the only one we can leave the final bastion to.”

“Certainly.”

Miyuki saw through Mayumi’s plan of flattery but withdrew without further question.

“Kirihara and Mibu, can I get you to escort Miyuki, and Shibata as well?”

The setup was clearly one made in consideration for Kirihara’s previous wound. Kirihara, though, accepted it anyway, without acting obstinately.

“Isori, Kanon, Yoshida, would you mind putting down the enemy soldiers aside from that white-armored one?”

After saying that, Mayumi looked to Mari. “Mari?”

“Right.” Mari nodded. “We’ll take that man down. Erika, Saijou, you two will help out.” She looked straight at Erika.

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” she said.

Leo said nothing. He simply nodded firmly next to Erika as she gave an aggressive reply.

The Baifujia armor Lu wore was a Chinese magic/Taoist spell armor that amplified his Gang Qigong. It was when he was clad in this light armor, with its surface area not much different from off-road motorcycle protection, that he could display his true abilities as Ganghu Lu, the world’s greatest close-combat magician.

Machine guns from armored cars lined up like a barricade, aimed at Lu, and fired. Their guns had power equal to or surpassing that of high-powered rifles. Lu easily repelled them. Not only with his armored surfaces but also with his uncovered ones. That was what was meant by amplifying Gang Qigong. Furthermore, the element symbolizing Byakko, the white tiger, was metal. This white suit of armor further strengthened the rampart-like defensive spell laid over his body. In the lead, he broke through one barricade after another, and the surprise attack force closed in on the association offices.

Then, in front of the final barricade, Ganghu Lu came to a truly detestable girl. He reveled at the unexpected chance at revenge. He’d agreed to Chen’s commands, but in his chest smoldered a desire for vengeance. Neither his side wound nor his back wound hampered him when he was wearing this armor. He charged at the girl who had humiliated him over two opportunities—Mari.

Mari readied the tri-sectional sword the association had supplied her with—an armament device based on her hidden weapon. Her left hand held it while her right hand hovered above the CAD on her wrist. At her waist were two small-hilted blades, along with various drugs and cylindrical containers packed onto her belt. Her clothing, a woman’s combat suit, was also borrowed from the association. Mari was fully decked out, but how far could she really go against Ganghu Lu bearing his full powers? Mari herself knew the answer better than anyone.

Then, from the side, Erika charged at Ganghu Lu, who had been looking only at Mari.

Mountain Tsunami ensued.

Even for Ganghu Lu, it was moving too fast to avoid. If he’d been watching Erika from the start, he might have been able to, but with his tunnel vision now, he couldn’t dodge.

Lu turned to face the diagonally slashing long sword, then raised both arms to block the Orochi-Maru. The pavement at Lu’s feet peeled up. He’d been driven down by Mountain Tsunami’s force, but Lu’s Gang Qigong had stopped the blade’s deadly pressure.

“Seyyy-yah!”

A roar came from behind Lu.

With a shout, Leo swung the Usuba Kagerou. He aimed for the lower body—a slashing attack to cut down the legs.

If it had been a straight downward swing from in front of the man, he might not have been able to see the virtually zero-thickness blade. But the swing was horizontal, so Lu’s eyes caught the dark shadow of the carbon nanotube band.

The man’s body shot up into the air and sent a cannonball-like flying kick at Leo. Leo switched his horizontal slash to an upward one to follow the man, but he didn’t make it.

“Guoh?!”

A short grunt came from Lu in midair.

In the middle of his flight path toward Leo, Mayumi’s magic had caught him. Each of her individual shots had only a tiny bit of weight, but hundreds of them hitting him at once were enough to send a human body flying. Lu’s kick missed its mark and passed by Leo’s side. The moment after landing, a perfect opportunity to strike came—but not this time.

“Panzer!”

Just after Leo intoned his voice command, Lu thrust both hands into Leo’s chest. It was a tiger fist, unleashed with blinding speed after Lu had gotten up.

Leo’s body flew and crashed into one of the vehicles in the barricade.

“Why, you!” Erika swung down her Orochi-Maru.

This time, Lu brilliantly avoided the head-on downward slash.

The sword was about to slam into the road but didn’t—instead, it bounded up toward Lu’s side. Erika had swung down without restoring the inertia, then restored it right when she made the quick turn. A Mountain Tsunami variation: Mountain Tsunami Tsubame-Gaeshi.

But despite her upswing’s weight, it wasn’t fast enough to cut through Lu’s Gang Qigong. Lu let the blade slide across his side and closed in on Erika.

She took her left hand from the Orochi-Maru and received his palm thrust with her arm.

Erika and her weapon both went flying.

A momentary suspicion flashed through Lu’s face.

For an instant before his strike, he’d felt too little resistance. Had Erika used the Orochi-Maru’s functions to cast an inertia-canceling spell?

But, like Leo, Erika crashed into the barricade, fell to the ground, and stopped moving. If she’d completely nullified inertia, she wouldn’t have been damaged from her collision with it, but it seemed her instantaneous response had been incomplete.

Lu immediately returned his attention to Mari. But that iota of time was a precious one.

When he turned back, Mari’s right hand had already followed through. Between her fingers were three slender cylinders.

Lu stopped breathing. He hadn’t forgotten about the spell that led to his bitter defeat. In a hypoxic situation, simply stopping his breath wasn’t enough; if the air, with its low oxygen concentration, reached his lungs, it would eat away at his body. So Lu controlled the back of his tongue and closed off his respiratory tract, physically stopping his breath.

But Mari didn’t use the same trick this time. Her strengths lay neither in having powerful, unrivaled magic, nor in being able to swiftly cast her spells. Combining a plethora of spells and activating them at the same time to slip through an opponent’s defenses was the combat tactic that defined her. At First High, Hattori had a similar quality, but in terms of pure hand-to-hand combat, Mari had far more variations than he did. In particular, she specialized in magic that used an opponent’s sensory organs already open to the outside world—for example, their hearing or their smell—to diminish their fighting strength. With her technique, she was named one of the “three giants,” a magician good enough to rival the two direct Ten Master Clans descendants, Katsuto and Mayumi.

Lu’s Baifujia was a traditional Chinese suit of armor, so there was no airtight mask on it. This couldn’t be helped, as it was an old-style magic spell armor, and normally he’d never find himself suffering a gas-based attack when already mingled with the enemy, so given the Baifujia’s applications, he didn’t mind.

But what if there was a magician who could launch a gas-based attack, in an abnormal way, from a sword’s range?

Mari’s air-current control sent the three containers’ volatile chemicals scattering and mixing, creating a scent that would induce a feeling of intoxication, and it directly reached the inside of Lu’s nose, where his olfactory organs were.

Lu’s body had been trained to resist poisons, so he quickly overcame the aroma’s effects. But by the time his physical functions were restored, her three-sectioned blade was already at his throat. He saw it trace a black line—the edge of a Pressure Cut—and decided to get out of the way instead of blocking it.

At the same time that he pulled his head back, he did a front kick. It wasn’t a technique, just a brute force attack, but he still had an easy time knocking Mari into the air.

Following up on his evasion of the repulsive blade and his peeling back, he opened his air passage.

Now looking up, he perceived a white mass descending.

As the small, fist-sized clump of dry ice fell slowly enough to be seen, Ganghu Lu struck it with his right palm.

A moment before the dry ice made contact, it reverted to carbon dioxide. The vapor expansion–induced shock wave assailed Lu, and now that his air passage was open, the high concentration of CO2 in the air made it to his lungs.

Mayumi’s trump card for personal combat—Dry Meteor. A four-process spell that converged, condensed, accelerated, and sublimated carbon dioxide. In the end, it was magic that rendered an enemy disabled with a shock wave and CO2 poisoning.

The greatest close-combat magician in the world had been finished off by a teenage girl lauded as the greatest user of long-range precision magic in the world.

“Mari, are you all right?!”

“Erika?! Leo?! Are you okay?!”

Kanon and Mikihiko went running to them. Behind Kanon, one could see Isori’s face, exhaustion starting to show through. He must have been cleaning up other enemy soldiers aside from Ganghu Lu.

“I’m fine,” Mari answered immediately. “Thanks to all this protection.”

“You two don’t look hurt yourselves,” said Mayumi, peeking over the barricade, referring to Kanon and Isori.

“Nothing to see here,” said Leo as well, awkwardly getting to his feet, appealing his healthy condition to Mikihiko. His hardening magic–based armor seemed to have been enough.

“…Same here, somehow.”

And the last one, Erika, responded with an irritated voice, still lying on the ground.

“Erika?!” Mikihiko quickly ran to her side. A look of worry came to Leo’s face as well.

However, as soon as Mari looked in her direction, Erika abruptly rose.

“Erika, should you be up?” asked Isori, who wasn’t speechless at her surprising move like Mikihiko and Leo were.

“I’ll be fine. Minor concussion. I was conscious, anyway,” said Erika, ending with a deep sigh. “Guess I lost.”

Rather than being happy about the defeated enemy, she grumbled about herself having lost. It was so like her that Mikihiko and Leo couldn’t help trading tired grins.

Xiangshan Chen proceeded down the hallway to the Magic Association branch office by himself. He wasn’t moving particularly fast, nor especially quietly. He was walking normally. He eschewed the elevator from the first floor in favor of ascending the stairs, but nobody had challenged him yet.

All their caution would be on his subordinates, who had climbed up from the base of the hill, purposely revealing themselves. He knew that, and he didn’t doubt it. After all, he’d planned it that way. Ganghu Lu, wearing his flashy white suit of armor, would be serving as a suitable decoy.

Qimen Dunjia. A method of telling fortune by direction. Just as ninjutsu was advanced but wore the mask of simple martial arts, the old-style magic Qimen Dunjia had another side.

Magic to control direction. A secret art that guided others’ awareness in a direction of the caster’s wishes.

Anyone whose sense of direction had been muddled couldn’t reach their destination. For example, someone would try to go perfectly straight yet end up circling the same location. To them, their carriage, proceeding at a walk, would appear to be moving at a strange speed, and they would never catch up, no matter how much time passed. So the other face of Qimen Dunjia was a mental interference spell that specialized in directions.

It didn’t have to be a geographical direction based on longitude or latitude, either. One of Qimen Dunjia’s fundamentals was to twist the destination of one’s attention. Thanks to his subordinates’ work, Chen had easily arrived at the Magic Association of Japan’s Kanto branch.

He placed his hand on the door, but it was locked. This was something he’d expected, and without panicking, he removed a terminal from his inside pocket and held it to the door’s key-card panel. The physical contact made the Electron Goldworm, set up to undo locks, take hold over the key system. An alarm rang out that the lock had broken, but Chen didn’t heed it. It would take long enough for staff to return. He set foot into the association’s branch office—and was suddenly arrested by a strange chill.

“Is this Qimen Dunjia? Thank you for the opportunity to learn from it.”

A beautiful voice like a ringing bell sank into Chen’s ears. He wasn’t frozen, and yet he had to work hard to move his body and look at where the voice had come from.

There was a person—one who didn’t seem real, one who was so fleetingly beautiful as to seem like a dream of Shangri-la, a girl he knew well from pictures, staring at him with a cold smile.

“Miyuki Shiba…”

“If you know who I am, then you must have been the one following my brother about like a fly.”

For some reason, there was a hint of relief in Miyuki’s voice.

That made him suspicious, too, but a different question came from Chen’s mouth, a more pressing one. “Why are you here? Did my spell not work…?”

The temperature of Miyuki’s smile rose slightly. That simple action forced Chen to rally all his strength to hold back his own mind. “I received a warning,” she answered. “To take care of my direction.”

Chen’s eyes went wide. That meant they’d predicted this plan.

“To be honest, that wasn’t enough for me to understand, but I figured that if I had to keep an eye on directions, I would get by if I kept my guard up in three hundred sixty degrees—in every direction at once.”

That’s absurd, thought Chen. If that was all it took to break the spell, Qimen Dunjia would have died out long ago. But he changed his mind. The fact was that she had broken it. He felt a different chill than the one from the outside holding his body in check.

“Fortunately, we have a magician who can see the invisible, which is how we spotted you, as you were using a spell in an effort not to be seen.”

Chen wanted to point out, That has nothing to do with keeping your guard up in all directions! but his tongue was unable to get the words out.

“In any case, if you were our little voyeur, then having you leave the picture will be a relief for a while.”

Miyuki gave a happy, and even more beautiful, smile.

That smile made Chen realize what his fate was.

It had taken this long to figure it out—that his body temperature had dropped abnormally low.

“Please, take a nice rest. I’ve improved in many ways myself, so you shouldn’t be asleep forever.”

That was the last thing Chen heard before his mind was shut away into the darkness.

Meanwhile, as Miyuki captured Xiangshan Chen, Tatsuya had neared the enemy’s throat with Yanagi’s team.

Katsuto had fiercely expelled the invading army with the volunteer soldiers he had taken control of, but they generally moved on foot, while Tatsuya’s group had more mobility. They used the revolutionary troop application brought about by their flight devices—which let each individual soldier fly—to its fullest as the Independent Magic Battalion drove through the enemy’s rear and flank.

Originally, the IMB had been an experimental force that applied brand-new magic technology for military affairs.

Their high-mobility combat, made possible by their MOVAL suits, could be called their true ability on display.

The trend of offensive weaponry eclipsing defensive weaponry had continued into the modern day. Under a technological system involving portable infantry missile launchers for breaking through heavy tank armor, ground forces had to take up extended formations. And if the situation was such that their opponents were spread out, they could use their mobility and striking power to effectively eliminate whole groups at a time.

Not eliminating an entire unit at once, but eliminating the spread-out groups of soldiers within that unit, individually.

Their MOVAL suits’ mobility and armament devices’ striking power made this tactic possible, and the Independent Magic Battalion destroyed the enemy army.

Rifles with upgraded piercing ability.

Portable fuel-vaporizing, explosive-loaded missiles with restricted-combustion gas-diffusion direction.

Powder rail guns that fired high-heat metal powder using electromagnetic force.

All the weapons with material-based and construction-based problems, weapons impossible to use with only non-magic technology—the battalion was wielding them to their full extent.

They made ample use of magic itself, too, of course. The most stand-out ones included Captain Yanagi’s Floor Flip and Tatsuya’s Mist Dispersion.

The sight of steel hunks weighing several tons rolling across the road was a thrilling sight indeed. But no matter how flashy it may have been, Yanagi’s Floor Flip was a support spell; on its own, it wouldn’t finish the enemies off.

In contrast, Mist Dispersion could be called a plain, quiet magic. It had no sound or light. And, since he upped its dismantling level to avoid getting caught in gunpowder or fuel explosions, no flammable materials combusted or produced flame.

They just disappeared.

They turned into dust, then into vapor, then dispersed—and then it was over.

With only that, enemy vehicles and enemy soldiers both stopped existing.

The sight of such a cruel spell, which wouldn’t even let them leave a corpse behind, uprooted any last semblance of fighting spirit among the enemies.

Fifteen minutes after contact.

That was the enemy’s limit.

Unable to overcome troop attrition—and, more importantly, the loss of morale—the invading army broke rank and began to flee.