Chapter 27
By evening, I arrived at Bunkyo Ward Office on a bicycle towing a handcart with the Blue Witch aboard.
In front of the ward office, the security team had built a barricade and stood watch with wands and crossbows at the ready. There were no bodies in front of it, but bloodstains that could never be completely wiped away remained, and the strong smell of blood and burning conveyed memories of a fierce battle.
I hesitated, wondering if they might kill me as soon as I approached, but inside the barricade, near the ward office entrance, I spotted a woman being guarded by security personnel. She was anxiously looking around while holding a sign that read, “The person from 09:33.”
Pretty obvious. Apparently, I was supposed to hand it to her.
I got off the bicycle and approached the woman holding the sign, carrying the bucket with me. The security team immediately aimed their wands and crossbows at me and demanded to know who I was.
“Who goes there? State your name and business!”
The sharp, hostile voice made my stomach clench.
Too frightened to speak, I pointed at the sign with my trembling hand. The woman holding it made the security team lower their weapons and beckoned me over.
When I approached and tried to hand her the bucket filled with the Flower Witch’s miracle cure, the woman asked in a voice mingling anxiety and hope,
“I’m terribly sorry, but please let me confirm something. Can you tell me the addressee on the letter?”
“To whoever is standing at the Blue Witch’s front door at 09:33 on February 8, 2028.”
“!! Ah, thank you! Thank goodness, we made it in time... Sergeant Sasaki, get this to Future-Sight-sama immediately! Hurry! We absolutely cannot let that person die!”
“Understood!”
The bucket I handed the woman was immediately passed to a burly man. He gave me a splendid salute, then jogged into the ward office and disappeared from sight.
“Is Professor Ohinata alive?”
When I asked anxiously, the woman nodded emphatically.
“He’s in the same intensive care unit as Future-Sight-sama. Thank you so much. If it had taken until tonight, we surely wouldn’t have made it in time. If, if that had happened...”
The woman’s voice turned tearful halfway through, and she crumpled to the floor before starting to sob.
The security team looked at one another. Some of them even started crying along with her.
I’d had a rough time, but apparently things had been rough on their end too.
Well, judging by the place, a mob had stormed it at least two or three times. Good work, everyone.
At any rate, my mission was complete.
They said Future-Sight and Professor Ohinata were safe, so Professor Handa was probably all right too.
My work was done. From here on, I could leave things to them.
As I turned to leave, someone called out to me from behind.
“Wait! What’s your name!?”
Naturally, I didn’t answer. I pulled my hood farther down over my eyes, silently mounted the bicycle, and left the place with the handcart in tow.
The fewer conversations I had, the easier it was on my stomach.
I returned to Ome with the Blue Witch and began nursing her at her home.
Even though the parasitic mushrooms had died, she had only just returned from the brink of death. She was extremely weak, and it took a full day for her to wake up.
I made porridge for the Blue Witch, who was lying dazed in bed, and blew on each spoonful to cool it before feeding it to her. She ate half the porridge with painfully slow movements, then seemed to exhaust all her strength just moving her mouth and fell asleep again.
Another full day passed, and when she woke up next, her mind was clear.
I entered the room carrying an ice bag I’d made with freezing magic. The Blue Witch had propped herself halfway up and said grumpily,
“Why aren’t you in the room?”
“Huh? But you were asleep.”
“Weren’t you taking care of me? I wondered where you’d gone.”
“Do I really need to stay in here the whole time? You were asleep, so it makes no difference where I was.”
If she was sleeping, she wouldn’t know whether I was in the room or not. So I wished she wouldn’t make such an unreasonable demand as telling me to stay there the whole time.
I had to sleep, eat, use the toilet, take baths, read manga, and pop the bubble wrap I’d found in the closet. I had all sorts of things I needed to do, you know.
I’d made a perfectly reasonable point, but the Blue Witch still looked dissatisfied.
“That’s not the point. Dairi, you’re so cold... Ah, no. I haven’t thanked you yet.”
“Huh?”
“You saved me, didn’t you? Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. You’re always helping me, after all.”
As I spoke, I laid the Blue Witch back down and replaced the ice bag on her forehead.
The Blue Witch narrowed her eyes contentedly, but then suddenly touched her face with one hand, looking puzzled.
Realizing what was wrong, I apologized.
“Sorry. I wasn’t wearing my mask.”
“Oh, good, you remembered. Still, you can go without it until you’re better. It must be hard to breathe with it on.”
“Really? Honestly, that’s a relief.”
The Blue Witch smiled weakly.
It felt strange seeing the Blue Witch so weakened. More than that, seeing her bare face made me uneasy. I’d gotten too used to the mask.
I took a long look at her uncovered face, the first time in a while.
She really was ridiculously good-looking. Even her pale, wan, sickly face looked like that of a tragic beauty. It was practically cheating. You could even call it underhanded. Her features were so perfect that they put people on edge.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking you’ve got quite a face.”
“... Dairi, you’re good-looking too.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. I’ll go make some food. You’re hungry, right?”
When I tried to move away from the bed, the Blue Witch reached out, so I took her hand and tucked it beneath the blanket.
Daddy’s going to make you some porridge! Stay warm and be a good girl in bed! You’re not a child anymore, so you can stay in your room alone, right!? Honestly!
Nursing the Blue Witch continued for another week.
Even the extraordinarily sturdy body of a witch took a week before she could run around outside. That really showed how nasty the fulminant mushroom disease had been.
She had stubbornly gone to the toilet and taken baths by herself from the first day she properly woke up, so it felt more like a matter of willpower. Still, if you need that much determination just to use the toilet or take a bath, that’s a serious problem.
In any case, once she could run around again, she was fine. She had regained control of her magic power and could even use magic again. There didn’t seem to be any lasting effects.
Originally, I’d only come to the Blue Witch’s house to visit. I hadn’t planned to stay overnight and nurse her. I tidied up the house, which I’d managed to make a little messy, and prepared to return to Okutama.
I was worried that the yamame in the fish pen had been eaten by wild animals or monsters. I had a feeling I hadn’t secured the net very well, either.
Once all my preparations were complete, I was putting on my shoes in the entryway when the Blue Witch poked her head out of the living room.
“Are you leaving?”
“Hmm? Not exactly—I’m going home. You’re better now, aren’t you?”
“... Cough, cough.”
“!? Hey, are you all right?”
The Blue Witch suddenly began coughing and staggered, so I hurried over and supported her.
I’d thought she had fully recovered, but could it have returned?
I took the Blue Witch by the hand and led her to the bed. She obediently lay down.
Her complexion looked fine, but it seemed she still couldn’t exert herself. Maybe running around yesterday had actually made things worse.
“You weren’t coughing before. Did you catch another cold while you were weakened? Do you have a fever? ...No, you don’t.”
“My body feels sluggish. Even standing is hard. Cough, cough.”
“Uh, hmm. Maybe I should stay a little longer?”
When I asked, the Blue Witch nodded, looking somewhat pleased.
But the next instant, she looked out the window and her expression changed.
An eyeball familiar perched on the windowsill outside—not mine—was staring fixedly at us.
“Y-you!”
The Blue Witch sprang nimbly out of bed and ran to the window. She flung it open and smashed her fist into the eyeball with such tremendous force that it was pulverized into pieces.
Hey.
Hey!
“You sure look healthy!”
“Ugh. No, this is... It’s just that the Eyeball Witch...”
“You took advantage of me and made me do all the housework. I’m going home now! Take care!”
I pressed the mask onto the flustered Blue Witch’s face, put on my shoes, and left the house for good this time.
Geez, seriously. That shameless woman pretended to be weak so she could make me do all the housework. Being waited on hand and foot must have been awfully nice, huh!?
Well, she’d nearly died, so I suppose a little was fine. But I had no intention of taking care of her forever.
Starting today, it was back to business as usual.
You can handle all the negotiations with outsiders. I’m going to focus on my hobbies. I came up with all sorts of ideas while I was nursing you.
When I returned to Okutama, the fish pen had been raided, just as I’d feared. The net covering the artificial pond had been pushed aside, and all the yamame I’d released as winter food were gone. I flew into a rage. I couldn’t forgive this. Those damned beasts...!
The fog magic the Blue Witch had cast over Okutama was meant to make intruders lose their way, but it couldn’t shut them out completely. On rare occasions, an animal would wander through the fog long enough to accidentally find my house.
While complaining to the Blue Witch about it over eyeball communication, I heard from one of the Eyeball Witch’s familiars that the pandemic was nearing its end.
The miracle cure I had delivered to Bunkyo Ward Office was properly diluted, then quickly transported throughout Tokyo and sprayed. Future-Sight and Professor Ohinata both survived. Professor Handa had apparently only suffered a mild case to begin with, as the Department of Gremlin Engineering had a relatively high number of mild cases.
Because the infection was expected to have spread to other survivor communities around the country through the relocation of Fertility Magic instructors, the Dragon Witch undertook to deliver miracle cures to each region, receiving the giant monster-sized gremlin at the Magic University as payment.
Outside Tokyo, magic was less widespread among ordinary people than within it, so there were probably fewer people who developed severe cases. Even so, the miracle cures delivered by the Dragon Witch must have saved many people.
Some people couldn’t be saved.
The Itabashi Witch, the Sumida Witch, the Hachioji Witch, an assistant professor in the Department of Magical Linguistics, and a professor in the Department of Mutation died before treatment could reach them.
The Tobacco Witch herself barely survived, but all of her trusted subordinates died, and apparently she was lashing out. Many other prominent figures had died as well.
In Shinagawa and Setagaya Wards, powerful monsters appeared while the security teams and witches were incapacitated, taking advantage of the opportunity and causing an enormous number of deaths.
A week had passed since the miracle cure distribution began. Although the vast majority of patients who had developed severe cases had either been treated or died, the cure still hadn’t reached everyone, and a small number were still developing symptoms later.
One characteristic of mushroom disease was that its onset spread in a chain reaction. When mushrooms sprouted from one person’s head, more and more people around them would begin showing symptoms, even if they had only recently been infected. That was why the pandemic had erupted all at once, but the wave of chain-reaction outbreaks had still not completely passed. Strict vigilance would be necessary for some time yet.
The authorities were in disarray and not functioning adequately, but based on the information gathered so far, the final death toll from this pandemic was expected to reach 500,000 to 700,000 in Tokyo alone.
Before the pandemic, Tokyo’s population had been approximately 2.8 million. That meant a single disease had killed one-fifth of the total population in less than two weeks. Terrifying.
It was callous, but I couldn’t help feeling glad that neither I nor anyone I knew had been among that one-fifth.
In terms of the scale of the damage, the plague, said to be humanity’s worst disease, had probably been worse. The notorious plague, the Black Death, had killed tens of millions in a single outbreak. But that had happened over the course of one or two years, across vast regions with huge populations, such as Europe and China.
Considering that mushroom disease had inflicted comparable damage in the confined area of Tokyo over such a short period of two weeks, its destructive power rivaled that of the plague. And even that was the result of a transcendent mage who could see the future suppressing the damage. If Future-Sight and the Flower Witch hadn’t been there, Japan, which still hadn’t fully recovered from the Gremlin disaster, would have been dealt a final blow, and civilization might have regressed all the way to a hunter-gatherer existence. It wouldn’t have been strange if more than ninety percent of the population had died.
Tokyo’s recovery, which had finally begun to gather momentum, had been punched squarely in the nose and knocked far backward.
Some people had struggled up from the depths of the Gremlin disaster, only to have everything they had painstakingly built destroyed and stolen from them, leaving them without the will to go on.
But the Eyeball Witch said,
It was true that humanity had been set far back.
However, not everything we had built had been lost.
Even if we had been pushed two steps back, we had still advanced three steps.
We had no choice but to keep moving forward, no matter how many steps back we took.
The true end would come when we stopped moving.
Saying something nice wouldn’t bring back the lives that had been lost, but it was comforting.
The Eyeball Witch, famous around here for being sociable, certainly knew how to talk.
I was moved too. Self-help books never really clicked with me, but the words of a witch desperately struggling in a genuinely ruined world hit a little closer to home.
That’s right. Let’s keep moving forward.
As far as I was concerned, fortunately I hadn’t lost anything this time. Getting back up from where I fell was easy enough.
And when I fell, I wouldn’t get up empty-handed.
Let’s try making something that puts what I learned from this pandemic to use, so I can say I gained something from it too.