Chapter 10
After finishing Aleister and sleeping like a log, I woke up to find that although I had gone to bed in the evening, it was still evening.
It seems I slept for an entire day. You really shouldn't pull three all-nighters in a row. I didn't notice while I was working because I was riding a high, but my fingertips, shoulders, and lower back all hurt, and my eyes were bleary.
Still, after getting plenty of sleep, my head was clear. I brewed some instant coffee to wake myself up, had a light meal of canned tuna and corn, and went out to check on the rice paddy. I'd left it unattended for three days. I was worried about it.
Now that I was growing rice myself, I understood perfectly how old men could die in accidents while going to check on their paddies during typhoons. Of course they were worried.
Fortunately, the water level in the paddy had dropped a little, but otherwise nothing was wrong. I adjusted the shutoff valve to slightly increase the water flow, then returned home before the sun had completely set.
They say the food shortage is severe in the city center, but living alone and shut away in Okutama, I don't really feel it. The Blue Witch regularly supplies me with food, and the rice paddy is doing well too. Still, I can't let my guard down, since there'll probably be a fierce battle with pests targeting the rice ears when harvest season arrives.
As I returned home, thinking that I should ask to be taught the improved Fertility Magic once it was complete, the Blue Witch and an unfamiliar girl were standing by my front door with the setting sun behind them.
"Ah! Oori-saaaan! Welcome back! Were you out?"
I didn't recognize the cute girl who waved vigorously at me so familiarly.
However, I recognized her voice.
I also recognized the stoat ears poking out from her short white hair, and the white stoat tail with a black tip.
A girl who looked about twelve years old.
Stoat-like features.
She was holding the staff I'd given Professor Stoat: Aleister.
I trembled from the shock.
Y-you.
No way!
"Thank you so much for Aleister! Thanks to you, I was able to return to this form! I didn't return completely, though... I just had to thank you!"
"Change me back."
I meant to offer Professor Ohinata a polite platitude, but my true feelings slipped out instead.
Why did you turn back into a human, Professor?!
I told you I don't like humans!
No, no, no! I liked you better as a stoat!
Change me back! Turn me back into a stoat!
Damn it!
"...I'm glad you were able to return to human form."
"You sound dissatisfied?!"
Professor Ohinata fidgeted at the congratulatory words I'd forced out.
Just then, I overheard the Blue Witch whispering to her.
"Kei-chan, I think Oori is probably a furry."
"Kemo...?"
"Oori doesn't like humans. He must have a fetish for animals and animals alone."
"I-I see?"
"I can hear you, you human-lovers."
As far as I'm concerned, all of you are abnormal people with a fetish for humans. I fully understand that your side is overwhelmingly in the majority and that I'm the weird one here.
"It's not that I like animals. I just don't like humans."
"I see... Would you like to touch my tail?"
I still felt like the misunderstanding hadn't been completely cleared up, but I did touch the fluffy tail she held out to me.
It was getting dark outside, so I invited the two of them inside for the time being. My house had no useless space called a sitting room, so I brought them into the kitchen and served them the rest of the instant coffee.
"So, how do you like using Aleister?"
"It's wonderful!"
When I asked, Professor Ohinata answered with a beaming smile.
I could tell without asking that it had been quite useful, considering that she'd returned to human form. Still, as its creator, I wanted to hear the details of how it felt to use.
"What about the design?"
"That too is wonderful! Even though I didn't properly ask for it, it's as if my imagination of what kind of wand I'd want if I could have one had taken shape!"
"Good. I based the shaft length on your stoat body, so I'll adjust it."
"No...? It's just right as it is."
Professor Ohinata lightly lifted Aleister and tilted her head.
Hmm. Well, if that's what she said.
I'd planned to give a ridiculously huge weapon to a small animal, but because she'd returned to human form, it had inadvertently become a normal-sized weapon.
"Even so, I thought it would be useful for your research, but I never expected results in a single day. Was it really that capable?"
"Hmm. That's true, but that wasn't the only reason. Until now, there was a risk of magical backfire, so we had to carefully select the experiments we wanted to conduct from our list and narrow the number of experiments down to the bare minimum. We spent more than a year creating the list of experiments itself. This breakthrough let us work through all the experiments that had been stuck in a bottleneck at once... That's what it feels like."
"I see. What did the accident rate fall to?"
"Effectively zero percent. Just as it said in the instruction manual. Even when an accident occurs, it's almost harmless now."
"I tried it too, and compared to magic using unprocessed gremlins, its power was about one one-hundredth to one one-hundred-twentieth as strong."
The Blue Witch supplemented this while turning the lukewarm coffee into iced coffee.
"Controlling the magical power raised its strength a little. Witches and wizards could probably use it for load training."
"Oh, really? Do you want a fractal wand too, Blue Witch?"
"Cyanos alone is enough for me."
Saying that, the Blue Witch tapped her shoulder with Cyanos.
At first, she seemed unaccustomed to it, but it looked like she had already gotten completely comfortable with her new partner.
I looked at the two of them sitting across from me again.
A witch in black robes and a mask, holding a beautiful blue wand.
A white-haired beastkin girl holding a geometric wand.
You'd think this was some kind of cosplay, but it wasn't. It felt completely detached from reality.
The generation born after the Gremlin Disaster would go on living in a world where strange magic wands and witches like these naturally existed.
It was strange. To me, this was an exciting fantasy, but to the children of the new generation, it would simply be an ordinary thing that had existed since they were born.
So this was how generation gaps came into being.
"I'm glad there haven't been any problems using it. The structure is pretty delicate, so let me know if anything goes wrong and I'll maintain it. Still, it's reinforced with resin, so it shouldn't just chip off if you use it normally."
"Yes. It's incredibly comfortable to use so far, but I'll rely on you if anything happens!"
"Please do. Anyway, what happened with Fertility Magic? Does it look like your research is progressing?"
"Oh, I finished it."
"...What?"
"I improved Fertility Magic. It's finished."
"...!?"
The shock was so great that my brain took time to catch up.
No way! It was only yesterday!
Had the horrific future scenario that would go down in Japanese history—the future in which Japan was struck by an unprecedented famine—really been overturned in a single day?!
On top of undoing her transformation, she'd improved Fertility Magic in one day?!
A-amazing. Absolutely amazing!
It's amazing, but it's scary!
I'm really scared now!
Professor Ohinata was such a genius that it had gone all the way around to being frightening!
"Professor Ohinata, you really are an incredible person. I'm deeply impressed."
"Um, please don't be so formal. Like I said earlier, I didn't do all of it in a single day, you know? My father, his colleagues, and the Ohinata research team left behind a great deal of research data, and all I did this time was provide the final push based on that data. About ninety-five percent of the research was already finished. Oori-san advanced the remaining five percent by 4.9 percent, and I completed the last 0.1 percent."
"Ah, I see. That's what happened. Of course. You scared me there. But you're the one who properly absorbed that ninety-five percent of research data into your mind and made it part of you. Professor Ohinata, you worked incredibly hard, and I honestly think you're amazing. This is unmistakably the work of a genius. And I should know—I'm a genius myself."
"Is that so? Thank you very much."
"Your father must be proud of you from beyond the grave. His beloved daughter and all that."
"..."
The moment I casually let those words slip out, Professor Ohinata's smiling face changed.
She quickly covered her face with her hands and lowered her head.
While I was panicking, wondering what had suddenly happened, I heard a small sob.
Oh no. I'd made her cry.
Had I stepped on a land mine by bringing up her dead father to a daddy's girl?
Damn it. This was exactly why I hated talking to people. With written correspondence, I had time to reread and check everything before sending it, so I could avoid saying something careless. Human conversation was too difficult.
"S-sorry. That was insensitive of me."
As I apologized nervously, my stomach hurting, the Blue Witch answered in Professor Ohinata's place while gently rubbing her back. Professor Ohinata was trying to respond, but no voice came out.
"It's all right. Oori sometimes shakes people's hearts without realizing it—in a good way. It's true that he's almost always insensitive, but Kei-chan and I both understand that that's the kind of person Oori is. And yet he gives you, as if by surprise attack, exactly what you truly wanted, exactly the words you truly wanted to hear..."
"...?"
"Heh. In short, it's a request for Oori to stay exactly as he is."
The Blue Witch gave a small laugh and summed it up in a way even I could understand.
Huh. Is that so...? Professor Ohinata was still crying, but she nodded at the Blue Witch's words, so I suppose that's what she meant.
I didn't understand it at all.
Well, whatever.
She had told me to stay as I was, so I would stay as I was.
I pulled myself together and continued the conversation. Professor Ohinata seemed to have mostly stopped crying too.
"Anyway, getting back to what we were talking about, if you've improved Fertility Magic, could you teach it to me too? It's a spell even I can chant, right? I want to increase my rice harvest."
"...Sniff, yes, of course. That's right, we needed someone to perform the final test before reporting to Foresight-san. How about I teach it to you as part of that test?"
"So I just have to be the spell tester? Sure, I'll do it."
Permission was granted so easily that, while the Blue Witch used the kitchen to prepare dinner, Professor Ohinata began teaching me the improved Fertility Magic.
It was an important spell on the level of a state secret, so I'd asked on the off chance that she might refuse to teach me. But when I thought about it, they were going to spread it across all of Japan on a massive scale soon anyway.
There was probably no harm in me learning it a little ahead of everyone else.
"Um, then... Would you like to just memorize the incantation? Or are you interested in how the incantation was created too?"
"I'm interested in how it was created."
In the previous lecture, I'd only been taught the fundamentals of the magical language.
As someone just beginning to study the magical language, I was interested in hearing how the workaround incantation for Fertility Magic—the culmination of magical-language research—had come into existence.
"Then I'll explain. Don't worry; I won't talk about anything beyond what Oori-san currently knows.
First of all, Fertility Magic is a spell belonging to the Flower Witch, who manages the area stretching from Arakawa Ward to Taito Ward in Tokyo.
Foresight-san paid the price to learn it from her, and then I learned it from Foresight-san."
The original incantation is 'The season of crystals comes around. May there be blessings from the Otherworldly Predator,' and humans can't pronounce it.
"So the 'blah blah' part is a sound you can't chant?"
"That's right. Have you ever heard the sound of trees rustling in the wind in a forest? It's like that."
I tried to make the sound as instructed, but gave up immediately. There was no way I could pronounce that.
"Every spell has something called a core word. To put it simply, it's the basic spell. In the Blue Witch's case, that would be Freeze. Every incantation for every spell the Blue Witch uses necessarily contains Freeze."
"When modifying a magical incantation, the core word can't be changed. It's fixed. Fortunately, the Flower Witch's core word is May there be blessings, which humans can pronounce."
"Are there core words that can't be pronounced? I've heard that the more advanced the spell, the more unpronounceable sounds it has. If that theory is true, then the core word of a basic spell would have to be a lowest-level spell, right?"
"Excellent question."
Professor Ohinata answered enthusiastically, making a motion as if she were adjusting nonexistent glasses.
"In some cases, the core word itself is an advanced spell, such as Foresight-san's 'Grant revelation.' Witches and wizards who use magical systems with core words like these tend to suffer feedback damage from magical-power backflow or lose control of their magic and cause secondary disasters."
"Ohhh! That makes sense. Even the simplest form of future prediction seems like an advanced spell, doesn't it?"
I was convinced by her explanation.
Even being able to see one second into the future would make someone invincible in sports or martial arts. Of course it was advanced.
So, in terms of magical linguistics, no amount of clever tricks could let an ordinary human use Foresight Magic. It was a spell exclusively for witches and wizards. How unfair.
"Of the original incantation, 'The season of crystals comes around. May there be blessings from the Otherworldly Predator,' the first part can be pronounced, and the phrase is already separated, so it doesn't need to be changed. The core word can't be changed, so May there be blessings is fixed too. That means we only need to replace Otherworldly Predator with sounds humans can pronounce, but that's difficult. Oori-san, do you know what an Otherworldly Predator is?"
"What? I don't."
When I answered immediately, Professor Ohinata nodded thoughtfully.
"Exactly. I don't know either. No one in this world knows what the word means. Since it's called a predator, I assume it's probably a living creature, but you know how hurricanes in America are given women's names? Unless we know what kind of culture and values the civilization that used the magical language had, we can't accurately determine what Otherworldly Predator means. We can only make predictions.
Based on those predictions, we extracted words that might work as substitutes from the seventy-two spells known to the research team, combined them effectively, and created fifteen workaround chants reconstructed entirely from words that contain no unpronounceable sounds."
"And then you tested those fifteen versions using Aleister?"
"That's right. Among the fifteen prototype chants, the only one confirmed to produce the same effect as the original is this:
'The season of crystals comes around. O you, may there be blessings from one who is not edible, from a world different from the one reflected in your eyes.'"
"That's long!!"
"It's a workaround chant, after all."
Whew. No wonder they'd had so much trouble with the research.
It was like having to conduct a business conversation while forbidden from using katakana and limited to vocabulary that even kindergarteners knew. It was amazing that they'd managed to fabricate a workaround chant at all. Of course it had become so wordy.
"Do I have to memorize something this long? Yikes."
"It's a little easier to memorize if you understand the sentence structure. Memorizing should be easy for you, Oori-san.
All right! Let's practice the pronunciation. Since it's long, we'll divide it into phrases and do it little by little. Now, repeat after me, and don't forget the safe sounds. The season of crystals comes around."
"Glista Hiajiwi."
"Ooh! Glista is good. The first half is perfect! Wonderful. The first half is flawless, but the second half is close. The final sound isn't 'joo, ee' but 'zee.' You know how the letter Z is pronounced 'zee'? Base it on that sound, and while opening your mouth, move your tongue like this..."
After that, I spent the entire time until midnight receiving pronunciation lessons from a sixth-grade girl, sometimes with her sticking a finger into my mouth to hold my tongue down, until I somehow learned to pronounce the workaround Fertility Magic. I also filled a sheet of paper with notes on every pronunciation point so I wouldn't forget.
While we were learning the incantation, the Blue Witch made not only dinner but a late-night snack as well without saying a word. She was a (conveniently) good woman. She saved me.
Though, rather than making it for me, she had probably prepared more than half of it to help Professor Ohinata grow up healthy. The curry was mild, after all.
By the time Professor Ohinata gave me the OK, it was already the dead of night.
Professor Ohinata naturally had the nerve to ask, "Could I borrow a sofa or something?" and casually tried to stay the night, but of course I dumped her on the Blue Witch.
No way. With the Blue Witch acting as her escort, there was no danger whether she was walking home at night or across a battlefield. I sincerely wanted her gone.
Professor Ohinata stood by the entrance, holding the Blue Witch's hand obediently despite looking a little dissatisfied. Before going outside, she turned around and fidgeted.
"Um, may I come visit again...?"
"No."
"Oori, you bastard!"
"Oh, it's fine! It's fine! Really, it's all right. Maybe it was just the way you phrased it?
Um, I'd like to continue our technical exchange. After all, this time we were able to create the regular dodecahedral fractal magic wand using my knowledge as a starting point, right? Thanks to Aleister, I was able to complete the workaround Fertility Magic, and I even returned to being human... Well, ninety percent human. You could say that technological innovation occurred thanks to our exchange. I think meeting regularly from now on to talk and exchange technology would be good stimulation for both of us. What do you think?"
"No. I never want to see you again."
She logically explained the advantages of continuing to meet in the future, but I flatly refused.
I would have welcomed stoat mode, but beast-eared mode was out of the question.
Though still a child, Professor Ohinata was a good kid. She was interesting to talk to.
However, her extremely sociable and cheerful personality made my instincts reject her. Even if she hid her face behind a mask like the Blue Witch, my body probably wouldn't accept her.
The Blue Witch bristled with murderous intent at my all-out refusal to a child, so I hurriedly offered a compromise before I was turned into an ice statue.
"I absolutely don't want to meet, but written correspondence is more than welcome. Let's be pen pals."
"Huh. Correspondence...?"
"Right. I don't want to meet, but I do want to exchange technical knowledge, and I enjoy listening to you talk, Professor."
"I see. I'd be delighted. Let's exchange letters! Great, somehow I'm getting excited. I'll write to you as soon as I get home!"
Delighted by my socially inept, full-throttle proposal, Professor Ohinata waved vigorously and kept turning back to flash a beaming smile as she left with the Blue Witch accompanying her.
After seeing them off, I wiped the sweat from my brow, mixed with cold sweat. Whew, that was exhausting.
If she's like that at twelve, who knows what she'll be like when she grows up.
I wouldn't be surprised if she started speaking bird language or fish language someday too.
I'll quietly keep an eye on Professor Ohinata's future from here on out.