Ninety-seven years earlier, the starting point of modern magic, abnormal abilities were first observed in what was then the United States of America. It had been about eighty since mankind had shifted from the development of magical abilities toward the development of magicians and human alteration.

In this short time—even shorter, in fact, clocking in at only about fifty years past—mankind had created bloodlines that could stably supply magicians with powerful-enough abilities to warrant the term magician elites. If one thought about it carefully, this was a shocking development. A new race called magicians had been successfully manufactured in a mere half century.

Of course, behind it all was a fierce research race between the developed nations of the world, all pouring in enough scientific technology and financial resources to make such advances possible. The drying up of energy reserves, settling like a dark shadow in the minds of the people—at least for those who resided in the most advanced countries—was a curse upon the future that had been hanging over their heads since the latter half of the previous century. Ever since magical research began in earnest, many had hoped that magic would be a technology to solve the imminent energy crisis. This—combined with the Earth’s rapid cooling, which had begun to manifest around the 2030s, and the food shortages that had come along with it—was what triggered World War III, which accelerated magician development enormously, and it also kept respect for magicians’ fundamental human rights strictly secondary.

Even prior to the twenty-year-long war, human selective breeding and human crossing experiments had been conducted partially in the open throughout the world, with everyone vying to be the first to develop a race of people called magicians. The fact that magic ability was genetic had been discovered back when magic was still considered a supernatural power. It was both natural and necessary that magic development would eventually become the development of superior bloodlines.

During those human selective breeding trials, the most advanced countries had very skillfully trodden upon human dignity.

The development of artificial wombs had been the first thing those nations achieved.

Less accomplished countries wickedly engaged in the forced mating of those with magical ability—in other words, nationally endorsed rape—but richer nations more efficiently advanced magician development through the replication of unfertilized eggs and nonsurgical sperm retrieval methods such as ejaculation stimulants. Genetic engineering was actually an unpopular method—instead, magician development in these countries involved the birth of—or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the manufacturing of—large numbers of test tube babies that hadn’t been genetically modified.

Fortunately—though it was controversial to say so—the children born from these replicated eggs, for whatever reason, died early deaths. Not many of them had the chance to worry about their own descent. According to available statistics reported in Japan, their average life span was seven years. But it wasn’t a high rate of newborn deaths that was the biggest reason for the average being so low; the life spans of these children were really just short. The ones who lived the longest only ever reached seventeen years of age at most. None of them had rapidly aged, either—they died of natural causes while still young. The engineered children born from original eggs were universally without this flaw of a short life span, so experts believed it was an issue with reproductive cell replication technology.

However, it was possible to measure latent magic capacity at the age of three. Because of the children’s sacrifices, scientists discovered the proper combination of egg and sperm. The impact on the second and third generations was something they could address with genome map simulations. Now all these nations had to do was arrange formal marriage meetings to induce people to voluntarily marry.

And from that process came the families called modern magic elites.

Representative among them were Japan’s Ten Master Clans.

Japan had been able to create these distinguished magician families more cleanly than anywhere else in the world because of a cultural background that made these types of marital relationships easier.

And thus, inhumane technological development was ultimately influenced by cultural factors, something that would be called ironic by some, and a stubborn last stand of people’s “humanity” by others.

But in the end, it would be up to historians to pass judgment on the practice.

The village was in a narrow basin surrounded by mountains in old Yamanashi Prefecture, close to the border with old Nagano Prefecture. It had no name, and because of that, it wasn’t on any maps. The term village didn’t denote any sort of modern administrative distinction, but it wasn’t a natural enclave that had been settled in premodern times, either. But in the end, there was, in fact, a settlement there, and people lived in it.

Aside from its lack of a name, the village was normal. One might even say it had everything it needed besides a name. It had a town office, a police station, a fire station, electricity, and running water. Its roads were paved like any other village’s, and it even had a school—only one, a combined school.

Snow had been falling from the thick, heavy February clouds, and the village was currently covered with white. Outside, it was gravely silent, the villagers all cooped up in their houses.

It was hard to spot anyone. In fact, other than one group of ten people heading down the street, nobody was on the roads. The lone exception was headed for the school, which had its back to the skirts of the mountains that stood on the village fringes.

Snow covered the walkers like camo, including the uniformly designed knapsacks hanging from their backs and the assault rifles dangling from their shoulders.

A girl in a sailor school uniform was watching the dangerous group approach from a second-story classroom. She rose from her seat and moved to the window, continuing to watch them.

She was the only one in the classroom. Actually, she was the only person in the school building at all.

But today wasn’t a weekend or a holiday, nor was it part of a long school vacation. Perhaps the other students had learned of the armed group’s approach and evacuated. That, however, meant the girl didn’t have a reason to be there. Everyone had evacuated—not only the students, but the faculty, too. Under any normal circumstance, the odds that a middle school girl would stay behind were low.

The armed band came to the school gate as she watched on, then shrugged their weapons from their shoulders. Keeping the small firearms at waist height, they scattered left and right along the inside of the school walls. Three to the right and three to the left. Four remained in front, of whom two advanced with guns at the ready. The other two behind them lowered their knapsacks and took something out.

Meanwhile, the girl removed a long and slender device from her skirt pocket. It highly resembled something people a century ago had called a cell phone—an information terminal mainly for voice communication—and it had a straight shape with a keypad, which would have earned it the old classification of feature phone. She pressed the power button above the keypad to awaken the small device from sleep mode, then let psions flow into it.

The device in her hands was an information terminal–shaped CAD. And the girl was a magician.

The two people visible in the rear of the forward group aimed at the school building rifles that appeared to have rockets attached.

As they did, her fingers danced over her CAD, and her spell activated.

What the two people at the rear of the group in front of the school had taken out of their knapsacks was a pair of rifle grenades. Short and stocky, the projectiles were meant to inflict death via shrapnel rather than penetrative power.

After exiting the muzzles, the grenades traveled in a lazy arc through the air toward the classroom the girl was in. The combination of this particular type of grenade and rifle had an effective firing range of two hundred meters, so with the distance from the school gate to the building being at most one-fifth of that, she was easily within acceptable range.

However, the grenades never reached her classroom.

They made it to within ten meters of the window she stood behind, then exploded. The flames licked along a transparent wall, and the blast rebounded toward the armed group. The metal shards that had been encased in the grenades rained down upon the squatters. The pieces had lost most of their momentum by then, so it didn’t wound any of them, but it was enough to whet their hostility and caution.

The two in front dropped their bags and affixed grenades to their muzzles as well, while the men who had fired the first shots also loaded their next.

They knew magic had caused that phenomenon. The windowpane was free of cracks even after the grenades exploded, because the barrier that had been erected in midair possessed properties that repelled at least heat, sound, and matter. However, if the magical barrier took an attack that exceeded its tolerance, it would become ineffective. The men knew that, too.

Four grenades were fired in a single volley. There was no sign that the attackers had made any particular signals, but their coordination was perfect. If one shot couldn’t get through the barrier, then maybe, they thought, four exploding all at once would oversaturate it with heat and force and thus disable it. Even if they failed to disable the spell, the rebounded fragments and shock waves wouldn’t hurt them. They’d just seen proof of that.

Once again, their grenades exploded in midair. Four grenades’ worth of flames licked across an invisible wall, just as they had the first time. This time, though, the grenades exploded in a different position.

The barrier wasn’t ten meters from the school building—but five meters away from them. Precisely speaking, it had been reconstructed five meters from them the moment they pulled their triggers. The blast bounced back at extremely close range, and the hail of shrapnel peppered them. They had goggles, but the rest of their faces were exposed below the helmet. Without any time to react, the shards tore at their faces. By the time the blast slammed them into the ground, all four had already lost consciousness.

After verifying that the four who had fallen were no longer moving, the girl turned around and left the window. Right when she reached the center of the classroom, the door in the back clattered open. Her fingers danced over the keypad, a boon from her training that had been ingrained until it was reflex. The spell activated a moment before an attacker stepped inside. The one who tried to enter ran into a transparent wall, lost his balance, and then stumbled to the floor.

Within less than a second, the classroom’s front door opened. But the result was the same: They couldn’t enter. As the man who had rammed into it with his shoulder stood helplessly stuck to the invisible wall like a mime, the frosted glass separating the classroom from the hallway cracked with a loud noise.

However, the glass fragments didn’t fall into the classroom, instead raining down on the three outside who had broken the glass. The barriers she’d created hadn’t only blocked the doors—she’d covered the entire area separating this room from the hallway.

As the girl sighed in relief at preventing the miscreants from entering, she realized something. She’d spotted a ten-person armed group. Four of them had remained at the front entrance, and the other six had split into two groups of three. She’d disabled the four in front with their own weapons, and she’d stopped three others in the hallway with her spell just now. So where were the remaining three?

The glass behind her exploded. Three men came crashing inward, hanging from the roof by ropes. They’d kicked off the walls above and used themselves as pendulum weights to breach the building.

The girl turned around as she threw herself to the floor in a twist that flipped her skirt wide open, but she knew this wasn’t the time to worry about that—because as she fell, she saw her adversaries out of the corner of her eye, readying their rifles as they jumped inside.

A moment later, the sound of gunfire followed by the appearance of bullet holes in the blackboard and some of the lockers proved her judgment correct.

The barrier she’d erected in the hallway vanished. Her attention had been stolen by the new intruders, and she’d stopped updating her magic program. First, the unwilling mime rolled inside. Another man came in from the rear door, and a third jumped through the hallway window into the classroom. She was about to be surrounded by an armed group of six.

A normal middle school girl would have cowered in helpless fear. At most, she’d sit up and hide her fear behind her arms, turning a brave glare on the intruders. But this girl didn’t fall under the category of “normal middle school girl.”

She stood up, then raced for the rear door. One of the attackers was there, readying his gun, but she acted as though he didn’t exist. She barreled straight toward the muzzle, and even her opponent seemed taken aback. By the time he reacted, the distance between them had closed to two meters.

She was too close for him to properly use his rifle. Up against a middle schooler, the chances of him losing in physical combat were close to nil. In the end, however, he decided to attack with his rifle anyway.

The other five made decisions more quickly. When the man at the rear door finally brought his rifle up, the other five already had their fingers on the triggers.

Five gunshots thundered, and one followed them.

A moment later, six screams went up.

Muffled cries of anguish escaped the men’s mouths. She might have been a magician, but all that gunfire was clearly overkill for a single girl—and yet everything had bounced off the anti-object reflection barrier she’d created and hit her attackers instead.

The guns they were holding were high-powered assault rifles meant for fighting magicians. They fired armor-piercing rounds containing improved propellant to break through magical barriers. When such high-powered bullets were sent straight back at them, even their ballistic armor, with high-density carbon plates sewn into it, was no help at all. The impact of the bullets knocked them down, leaving half-conscious bloodied men and a girl looking down at them slightly flustered. She wasn’t sure what to do now.

Then an old man’s voice came to her over a speaker.

“The drill is over. Relief party, please begin treating the adversary team. Minami, please return to the estate. The mistress wishes to speak with you directly.”

The last sentence caused her to straighten. Her voice laced with nervousness, she answered, “Yes, sir”—even though she knew he wasn’t listening anymore.

At first glance, this village was a completely ordinary mountain settlement. One-story, flat-roofed buildings of reinforced concrete without windows were scattered about the village like flat boxes, but these structures were the aboveground portions of air-raid shelters built en masse all across Japan during the time of the third nonnuclear world war. It wasn’t strange that they existed this deep in the mountains—at least not on the surface.

But below the surface, this was more than an ordinary mountain village: It was one massive test site.

In fact, it had been the most secretive and infamous one: the deadly fourth magician factory, known officially as Magic Development Institute Four. This village was where it used to be, and was now the headquarters of the Yotsuba of the Ten Master Clans, who conducted magician improvement and screening here.

And the largest mansion in the area held the Yotsuba family residence. Several houses stood on the vast property, but the biggest of them was the main building, where the Yotsuba’s current leader, Maya Yotsuba, lived.

At the moment, in one of its rooms, a lone girl faced Maya with a tense, drawn-back face.

Her name was Minami Sakurai. A fifteen-year-old girl on the cusp of middle school graduation and of the second generation of the Sakura series of engineered magicians. She had impressive magic power, having been born of engineered parents who had been bestowed with great power artificially, through genetic manipulation.

Neither of those parents still remained in this world, though. Now that death had parted Minami from them, she worked as a live-in maid at the Yotsuba residence and received education to be a future Guardian.

The Sakura series’ main trait was the generation of anti-object, heatproof barriers. It couldn’t match the Juumonji’s Phalanx in application and variety, but when it came to a single barrier, Minami, at fifteen, was already exhibiting talent on the Juumonji family’s level.

“You did very well, my sweet Minami. More than enough for a passing grade.”

“Thank you very much. Your words are too much for someone as inexperienced as I.”

In contrast to Maya, who addressed her amiably, Minami’s tone was nervous and rigid. One couldn’t blame her for that, either: The woman sitting in front of Minami wasn’t only her employer, but a person who reigned at the pinnacle of Japan’s magicians. She was the leader of a particularly powerful family even among the Ten Master Clans, and was known as the strongest magician of her generation, referred to with awe as the Demon of the East.

“Oh, you needn’t be so modest about it. Isn’t that right, Hayama?”

Hayama, who had been waiting behind Maya without speaking or moving a muscle, answered the question solemnly. “Allowing entrance through the window was a negative, but you disabled all ten in the end, so in my humble opinion you have earned passing marks.”

Minami’s eyes widened in a display of surprise. The evaluation hadn’t been too severe—this was the first time, to Minami’s knowledge, that the butler overseeing all the residence’s servants, who hardly ever praised his own family, had said the words passing marks in that order. The fact that he’d directed them at her only doubled her astonishment.

“By the way, Minami?”

“Yes, Mistress?”

She couldn’t let her shock linger, though. She understood without having to think about it that the Yotsuba’s leader wouldn’t have called an apprentice like her just to praise her for the results of an exercise.

“You’ll be graduating middle school soon. What will you do about high school?”

“…I haven’t decided yet, ma’am.”

“Ah, I see you’re worried about it.”

She wasn’t worried—her future school prospects weren’t up to her to decide. The Yotsuba owned her. If she said she wanted to go to high school and Maya or Hayama said there was no need, that was it. “I haven’t decided yet” was synonymous with “I haven’t received instructions yet.” Minami herself wasn’t worrying about it at all.

“Then I’d like you to go to Tokyo.”

For Minami, this order was 30 percent understandable and 70 percent surprising. They’d let her know a year before that she’d eventually become Miyuki’s caretaker. But she’d thought it would be much further down the road, once they’d welcomed Miyuki to the main house. The young mistress’s house in Tokyo was certainly larger than normal, but it was still only a private residence. It would be a slight bit unnatural for Miyuki to have a live-in housekeeper, and Minami thought that housekeeper being a child who’d just graduated middle school would only invite more suspicion.

The questions she had were immediately answered by her mistress.

“I want you to enroll at First High.”

A question rose in Minami’s mind—By First High, does she mean the National Magic University’s First Affiliated High School?—but it stopped there. The order was to go to Tokyo and enroll at First High, so there couldn’t be any other interpretation.

Because applications were online now, she didn’t have to worry about meeting a deadline. The problem was that First High was one of the most difficult schools to get into. She grew considerably anxious—would she be able to pass the entrance exam when she hadn’t done any real studying for it?

“You won’t need to worry about the entrance exam.”

Minami honestly thought that meant Maya would do something shady to pull some strings for her.

“I’ll write the necessary knowledge directly into your brain in the three weeks before the test date.”

But it had been naive of her to think that way. Maya was right—they had a device in this village that applied the principles of brainwashing devices to forcibly record necessary information into a person’s mind. It was a terrible mental drain, however. Once exams were over, she might have to stay in bed for a week.

“Do your best, all right? I’ll allow you a little break once the test is done. And you can have off from your maid duties as well, starting tomorrow.”

As though she’d picked up on Minami’s unease, Maya pronounced gently and heartlessly that there was no getting out of this.

“And Minami?”

“Yes, Mistress?”

Maya’s face, which had seemed amused until now, suddenly grew serious. Minami’s own expression drew back along with it.

“I want you to go to Miyuki. Starting this spring, she will be your mistress.”

“Of course, Mistress.”

That had been her original mission, the one they’d informed her of in advance. With a certain determination even amid her nervousness, Minami accepted Maya Yotsuba’s order.