Chapter 123
Hiyori is the world's strongest witch.
Stronger than a kaiju. Ridiculously strong.
However, her heart is not the strongest in the world.
She gets hurt, feels anxious, and becomes depressed just like anyone else.
There was even a time when she became a shut-in with hedgehog spines covering her entire body, carrying around the crushing trauma of an entire town.
I casually waited for Hiyori, who had gone off to seal the second Iruma.
Hiyori is the strongest. She has already killed that vicious, super-fast-evolving monster Iruma twice. This is effectively the third time, so of course she'll win.
If anything, I was more worried that the Witch of Hell accompanying her might get killed as collateral damage.
However, Hiyori herself was filled with anxiety.
The first Iruma had massacred all the residents of Ome City.
The second Iruma had put me in a situation where Hiyori had to kill me with her own hands.
Who will die this time? Even if we manage to seal him, will someone else important to us die again...?
The day before her departure, Hiyori spent the entire night sniffling and sniveling about those worries.
I listened seriously for the first ten minutes, but once I realized she was going in circles, I kept responding sleepily, half-asleep myself.
People die when they die, so there isn't much point worrying about it. Even if you make a proper plan and give it your all, if someone dies, well, them's the breaks.
In the end, Hiyori still looked anxious right up until she left, but she eventually transformed into a dragon and flew south.
Right after Hiyori Dragon took off, I went straight back inside and slept soundly, making up for the whole night I'd spent listening to her worries.
I could understand being anxious when the opponent was Iruma's successor, but I knew Hiyori's strength surpassed Iruma's.
There was no way the strongest witch, equipped with my strongest Kyanos, could lose to him! Use your common sense!
And so, after waiting five days for her return while sleeping soundly every night without a worry,
Hiyori came back with Return Magic.
In broad daylight, golden light poured down from the sky into the backyard, and dancing particles of light swirled together to form Hiyori's figure.
Mamono-kun happened to be receiving a new statue of the Eyeball Witch, and Hiyori's sudden appearance startled him so badly that he nearly got crushed beneath the statue.
When the light faded, Hiyori had returned from her business trip. The moment she spotted me, she hugged me with an expression of relief.
"I'm home, Oori."
"Oh. It just occurred to me that Return Magic lets you ignore immigration inspections, doesn't it? What's the deal with that?"
"Shut up. At least say 'Welcome home.'"
"Welcome home."
Hiyori completely ignored Mamono-kun, while Mamono-kun himself kept bracing the statue of the Eyeball Witch as it leaned toward him and desperately tried to erase his presence. Sorry about that, Mamono-kun.
The tension gradually left Hiyori's shoulders as she pressed her face into my chest and leaned all her weight against me. I absentmindedly put an arm around her waist and spun her around in a little dance, making her laugh happily. Cute.
"Dancing with you like this wouldn't be bad, but I'm going to go inhale Kei-chan, too."
"Wait, was I being inhaled just now?"
"Don't worry about it."
Hiyori pulled away from me, waved her hand, and ran off like the wind at super speed.
What a busy person. This was less animal therapy after a business trip and more a desperate desire to see for herself that nothing strange had happened while she was away.
She'd had a rough time of it before. When I was protected, the Professor was attacked—the Arataki Group incident—and when the Professor was protected, I was attacked—the zombie panic. Eighty years ago, during the period of upheaval, death had been far more familiar than it is now.
"...Ah! Sorry, Mamono-kun! I'll help you now."
"I'm glad you remembered. Could you stand the statue up for me first? I brought a Fukuro-suzume, so I'd appreciate your help stowing it."
Mamono-kun said this with a wry smile, and I apologized as I helped him force the statue into the Fukuro-suzume's belly pouch. Sorry about that little mishap during the inspection.
Receiving the statue had been the only thing on Mamono-kun's agenda, but he mentioned that he hadn't eaten lunch yet, so he ended up having a meal in the living room.
I turned the leftover rice from breakfast into ochazuke, quickly whipped up a simple lunch with takuan, umeboshi, and rolled dashi omelet on the side, and served it. Mamono-kun gratefully picked up his chopsticks.
"Thank you. Ahh, it's been a long time since I last ate a warm meal. This really hits the spot..."
"Are you that busy?"
"That is part of it, but I don't cook for myself very often. I do keep cucumber pickles on hand, though."
Mamono-kun said something very kappa-like while stuffing rolled dashi omelet into his beak.
As expected, a weirdo who stubbornly refuses to remove his kappa mask even when sleeping or being summoned to the Diet has some unusual things to say.
Then again, Mamono-kun is a kappa, so it's not as though he can take off his mask, right? Mamono-kun is a kappa, and a kappa is Mamono-kun. That's simply how things are.
While I listened to him talk over lunch, I learned that Mamono-kun had already begun raising a herd of Otsu-1 ghost monsters called Specters at the newly established monster ranch in the Chichibu mountains.
There are records of raising a Specter individually, but raising them in a herd is unprecedented.
Specters are monsters that normally attack humans, drain their life force, and kill them, but like Gazer-kun, they are docile when their bellies are full.
He had also received advice from Professor Oohinata about the language of monster cries, and apparently he was somehow controlling them through communication using food and their cries.
So far, the only death in the course of building up his monster-rearing know-how had been Mamono-kun's. He had quietly died and come back to life once without my noticing. That's terrifying.
"Once Specter rearing has stabilized, I plan to select one of the Kou-3 ghost monsters whose ecology is similar to the Specter's and raise it individually. After that, I'll raise multiple Kou-3 monsters together, conduct breeding experiments, and then finally move on to mass-producing Ghost Gremlins. Still, at some point we'll probably need to go into the field to observe ghost monsters breeding or emerging in the wild."
"Ohh. You can actually see the path all the way to the goal."
Even if you can see the path, that doesn't mean you'll necessarily make it to the end.
Still, being able to clearly see the path you ought to take is impressive in itself. Well done. You can have some senbei after lunch, too.
"Mamono-kun, you're really working yourself to death."
"Not at all. I've only been able to do this with the help of many people. I am especially indebted to Kei-san."
"Oh? Oh."
Kei-san.
Kei-san, huh.
I started calling Hiyori by her first name when we became best friends.
If Mamono-kun was calling the Professor by her first name, did that mean the two of them had become best friends?
No, though.
Hiyori and the Professor had also said that the definition of friendship differed from person to person.
Maybe they were friends rather than best friends. Or perhaps they were merely helping each other because of the circumstances of their work, without being particularly close in private.
Hmm. I couldn't tell.
As I thought about it while using my chopsticks to pick the seed out of an umeboshi, Mamono-kun straightened his posture, cleared his throat, and spoke.
"Oori-san, you're close with Kei-san, aren't you?"
"We're friends."
"Do you know what Kei-san likes? Things that would make her happy if you gave them to her, or things that would make her happy if you did them?"
"Her preferences? The Professor likes it when you rub her butt."
"!!!???"
Mamono-kun dropped his chopsticks and fell silent, but he quickly came to his senses.
"Ah! Okojo! You mean when she's in Okojo form, right!?"
"What else could I mean?"
Rubbing the human-form Professor's butt would be blatant sexual harassment, and it wouldn't even be funny.
The most fun thing was rubbing the soft, fluffy butt wrapped in Okojo's plush fur. Hiyori was probably getting her fix of the Professor's fluff and feeling happy right now, too. Maybe I should have gone along.
When I gave Mamono-kun a lecture on how to pet the Professor in a way that would make her happy, he took proper notes despite wearing a rather complicated expression.
"...I see. Thank you. I'll keep that in mind."
"Oh. What, are you going to thank the Professor or something?"
"Something like that."
"Friends? Best friends?"
"You mean Kei-san and me? Ah, friends. For now."
"I'm of the school that doesn't consider a friend's friend my friend. Mamono-kun isn't my friend, so don't get any ideas.
If a friend's friend were a friend of mine, then all of the Professor's friends would become my friends. That would mean people whose faces I don't even know would become my friends. And then all the friends of those faceless friends would become my friends, too. Isn't that ridiculous? It could end with all of humanity being considered my friends. Therefore, to prevent such a bizarre situation, I choose my friends for myself."
You're even more of a theoretician than I'd heard. Especially about matters like this.
When I laid out my airtight theory of friendship, Mamono-kun laughed and poured his after-meal tea into his beak.
"So, rather than seeing me as Kei-san's friend, Mamono-kun, if you look at me simply as Mamono-kun, am I your friend?"
"Huh?"
"I already thought of us as friends."
"Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... You're my friend, I guess."
It was easy to spend time with him without feeling stressed. We had improved his kappa mask together, played board games, given each other advice, and done all sorts of other things. It was fun.
I could bring myself to be kind to Mamono-kun even if it cost me a little, and I knew I'd feel awful if I betrayed or abandoned him.
There were plenty of times when I thought, Is this guy all right? But I couldn't imagine Mamono-kun intentionally harming someone. Accidental harm, maybe, but not deliberate.
Therefore, Mamono-kun was a good guy and my friend. Yep.
"I made a male friend for the first time in my life. Let's get along, Mamono-kun."
"I'm your first? Hmm. If you'd like, I could introduce you to some of my male friends."
"I'll snap your beak off, you idiot. That's what idiots who think having more friends is always better say."
"Oh my. Your language is rather violent."
Mamono-kun gave a wry smile, stood up, and carried his empty dishes to the kitchen sink.
That's exactly the sort of thing I mean, Mamono-kun. The mismatch between his appearance as a total weirdo and the seriousness of his behavior is extreme. Why is he like this?
Wait, does illegally raising a Kou-1 monster and casually dying and coming back to life mean his strange appearance and strange behavior actually do match? I'm getting confused again.
Mamono-kun really was busy. After lunch, he didn't even take a break and immediately mounted a tiger monster and returned to Chichibu. What a restless man.
Resurrection Magic that overturns death requires Ghost Gremlins, and a stable supply of Ghost Gremlins requires Mamono-kun. Someone doing work that carries humanity's dreams could hardly have time to relax.
Even so, since he occasionally comes to Okutama to play or meets up with the Professor to go somewhere together, it seems unlikely that he'll die from overwork, even if he might die in an accident. That was reassuring.
...Ah, right.
Next time Mamono-kun comes over, I'll ask him for advice about the engagement ring I plan to give Hiyori.
Mamono-kun has been through an engagement that was broken off, so he was sure to have some good advice.