Chapter 55
For several days after the Arataki Group was repelled, Tokyo was busy dealing with the aftermath.
I thought I would be placed under Hiyori's direct supervision for a while as punishment for escaping, but to my surprise, Hiyori merely ordered Fuyo to prevent me from fleeing and spent her own time flying all over Tokyo.
Other than visiting me and the bedridden Professor Ohinata once a day, she did not even return to Ome City, instead helping with the aftermath here and there.
What caused this change of heart? She seems a little brighter. I don't really get it, but if my best friend is happy, then I'm happy-happy-happy too.
After several days, the confusion was brought mostly under control, and the state of emergency was lifted.
That was when we learned that the number of deaths caused by the Arataki Group was surprisingly low despite the extent of their rampage. The investigation is not yet complete, but even with the damage estimated as high as possible, the number of victims is under one hundred. That's still a lot, but considering these were people attacked by ten Transcendents, the number is miraculously small.
This was because of the Arataki Group leader's magic.
The Arataki Group favored a strategy of suppressing hostile forces, taking prisoners, subjugating them with magic, and incorporating them into their ranks.
It is far more efficient to turn an enemy into an ally than to defeat them. It was the best strategy in theory, but nearly impossible in practice. The leader had actually made it possible.
It was the worst kind of magic, one that could turn allies against you, but thanks to it, the casualties were low.
A blessing in disguise.
The Arataki Group's attack began in the morning and ended in the evening.
If it had taken longer, there was a good chance the captured witches would have broken under torture, agreed to the contract magic, and become enemies. Terrifying. It was a good thing we managed a short, decisive battle.
Judging from the information gathered from the low-ranking Arataki Group members whom the unharmed witches captured while patrolling all over Tokyo, the Lake Biwa Accord and Arataki Group's home city of Fukuoka seem to be in much the same state.
In other words, south of Tokyo, there are quite a lot of people who were forcibly made to submit to the leader.
And with the leader's death, every one of them has been freed.
During the Arataki Group's suppression of the Lake Biwa Accord, one witch died in a mutual defeat with an Arataki witch, but everyone else survived.
The Lake Biwa Accord's forces have been weakened and its political structure destroyed. The magic drug that the doves had hidden away as too dangerous has spread widely among the public, and public safety has deteriorated terribly.
But now that the restraints imposed by the contract magic are gone, they will probably begin rebuilding little by little. It was an organization that already had factional conflicts within it, so they will not exactly be united in purpose.
As for Fukuoka, the Arataki Group's home base, it is practically empty, since every witch and mage went to Tokyo aiming to conquer the entire country (!?).
Apparently, two mages from the Lake Biwa Accord had been sent to Fukuoka to guard it while the Arataki Group was away, but now that the leader's contract has vanished, I doubt they will dutifully keep protecting the home base of their archenemy. They will probably hurry back to Lake Biwa.
That would leave Fukuoka without a single witch or mage.
The city's four hundred thousand residents would be unable to resist at all if even one Kō-type monster appeared, and would be trampled. They might not even stand a chance against an Otsu-type monster.
...But there is not much the Tokyo Witches' Assembly can do about it.
Tokyo itself is short on witches and mages. The Iruma coup, the giant-monster invasion, and the mushroom pandemic have continuously reduced the number of Transcendents. The habitable zone just keeps shrinking.
Minato Ward has barely been recaptured from the monsters and maintained, but every time a plan is drawn up to reclaim another district, an accident occurs and it gets postponed again. None of those plans has been realized.
Even a little technical or material support would do nothing for Fukuoka, which has no Transcendent to serve as the core of its habitable-zone defense. The monsters would simply crush them all. Besides, Tokyo and Kyushu are so far apart that sending people and supplies alone would be a tremendous ordeal.
I'm sorry to the four hundred thousand people, but they will have to manage somehow on their own.
Namu~.
The Arataki Group's idiotic ambition and foolish actions left every region with enormous damage.
Still, they did not leave nothing behind.
There are four main things they left behind.
The first is the Arataki Group's low-ranking members.
The Arataki Group's core consisted of ten witches and mages, all of whom are dead.
However, the nearly five hundred underlings who came along as errand boys and foot soldiers were hunted down by the witches and are now locked up.
According to Hiyori, who took part in hunting the underlings scattered throughout Tokyo, "If the top is trash, the bottom is trash too."
Since there is no saving them, the plan is apparently to put every one of them to good use somehow.
Human experimentation, probably. Namu~.
The second is the mana drug.
The mana drug was a dangerous medicine originally kept hidden by the Lake Biwa Accord. Taking it restores mana beyond one's maximum capacity, but reduces one's maximum mana in exchange.
The amount restored is around 10K.
The reduction to the maximum is 0.2K.
For an ordinary person, using it just five times would reduce their mana capacity to zero, causing their body to turn to dust and vanish from this world.
It even comes with the worthless bonus of increasing dependency and addiction the less mana the user possesses.
It is ridiculously poor value. Total garbage.
It should restore at least 100K. What the hell is 10K? Don't screw with me. It can't even serve as a trump card.
Still, it is technically a mana-recovery potion.
It is an intriguing drug whose effects were completely unknown in Tokyo.
The mana drugs held by the underlings, as well as those that had flowed into Tokyo's underworld, have been collected and are scheduled to be studied at Tokyo Magic University.
Magical potions are outside my area of expertise, so I do not intend to get involved, but it would be huge if they could create a new drug that removed all the drawbacks and retained only the mana-recovery effect. I look forward to future research.
The third is magic.
The Arataki Group had chanted spells all over Tokyo. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of magic knows how important incantations are. The witches and citizens are beginning an effort to collect the spells they remember hearing in different places, reconcile errors and omissions, and reconstruct them.
Spells have to be pronounced with incredible precision. Unless you have perfect pitch, it is unreasonable to expect to remember one after hearing it only a few times.
However, if the memories of many people are combined, it is not impossible.
The Arataki Group used several useful spells, so it would be a great help if even one or two could be salvaged.
And the fourth is the biggest prize of all.
The ten magic stones possessed by the ten dead members of the Arataki Group.
Hiyori collected most of the magic stones while hunting down the remnants.
The Dragon Witch had tried, shamelessly, to secretly pilfer a couple of them (the stone held by the witch Hiyori defeated while on guard duty, and the one held by the mage who was escorting the Chōfu Witch), but she confessed when Hiyori threatened her. What a truly pathetic dragon.
However, the Dragon Witch had defeated one of the enemy's main fighters this time. Since it seemed only fair that she receive the stone belonging to the one she had defeated, she was allowed to keep one magic stone and was delighted.
Then she suggested exchanging her one stone for the remaining nine, but Hiyori silenced her with a slap, and she reportedly slunk back to her lair. Greedy dragon, go home.
Now, when you talk about magic stones, you are talking about one of the precious resources that represent the world after the Gremlin Disaster.
They can become powerful wands or Monster Shears. They are top-class materials that surely have countless other uses still waiting to be discovered.
Since we had acquired ten of them, we had to be careful about where and how to use them.
Fortunately for me, their primary use would be as wand materials.
The number of Kō-type monsters with Black Gremlins capable of time acceleration has been gradually increasing, and the witches are having trouble with them. If magic-stone wands were placed in the witches' hands, the balance of power would be restored and they would once again gain the advantage over the monsters.
The Arataki Group was garbage, but the fact that they brought magic stones to Tokyo alone made them a godsend.
One of the ten had already been processed into a wand and given to the Spider Witch.
That left nine.
Hiyori killed almost every member of the Arataki Group, so she owned seven of the nine. She had certainly done enough to deserve that much, and it was probably also because it would be difficult to argue if the Blue Witch-sama claimed ownership.
One belonged to the Dragon Witch, who had defeated an enemy on her own.
Another belonged to the Flower Witch, who had dragged an enemy into a muddy war of attrition and held them there.
As for the remaining seven, Hiyori collected them and brought every one of them straight to me, on the condition that I process them into wands.
Hmm, is she a goddess?
I was going to make seven wands from the seven magic stones, but Hiyori decided who they would be made for.
I had no objection to the decision of our PR and negotiations representative.
Every witch wants a magic-stone wand.
However, the Zombie Witch was excluded first because she already possessed a magic stone and her personality was suspect.
The Mermaid Witch is a good witch, but unfortunately her intelligence is questionable. The risk that she would leave the wand somewhere or give it to someone was extremely high, so she was excluded.
The Pebble Witch had done nothing this time, and there was no reason to expect any future contributions from her, so she was excluded.
The Setagaya Witch was untrustworthy, so she was excluded.
The Firekeeper Witch declined, saying, "I already have the Firekeeper's Staff."
Among the remaining members of the Witches' Assembly, Hiyori first selected the Eyeball Witch, the Foresight Mage, and the Night Witch. I don't know about the Night Witch, but I often hear good things about the Eyeball Witch and the Foresight Mage, so those were solid choices.
The Tobacco Witch, who had been suspected of being a drug lord because of her drug addiction, was also selected after proving herself trustworthy during the Arataki Group's invasion.
The remaining three magic stones would be processed into wands and handed over to the Lake Biwa Accord.
The Lake Biwa Accord apparently originally had five magic stones (according to the Dragon Witch. Is that true?), but the Tokyo Witches' Assembly would take two as payment for disposing of the Arataki Group.
The decision was that if we processed the three into wands and returned them, they would have no grounds to complain in the future.
The Lake Biwa Accord seems to be having a rough time, after all. I think this is fair. I also want to spread the fame of my brand of magic-stone wands throughout the Lake Biwa Accord.
Of the seven wands, six would be multi-layered wands with three to five layers.
This was partly because the Blue Witch did not want to increase the number of Kyanos, destructive weapons equivalent to nuclear bombs, and partly because amplifying the power too much makes control difficult and can cause magical rampages. Even with a backflow-prevention mechanism, a seven-layer Kyanos is extremely difficult to handle.
The consensus was that it would be best to keep them to three to five layers according to the user's skill with mana control. All the wands for the Lake Biwa Accord would be standardized at four layers.
I am a wandmaker, so formally speaking, the Witches' Assembly had commissioned me to process the seven wands.
The payment was 150 million new yen per wand, in newly minted coins issued only six months ago. For all seven, they gave me a slight discount, bringing the total to one billion new yen (ten billion old yen).
My sense of money just broke! Is inflation hitting me alone this hard?
However, this payment was not excessive in the least.
In the old era, ballistic missiles were worth three hundred million to one billion old yen apiece. Assuming each three-to-five-layer wand was worth roughly that much, then taking into account that they were not single-use and that only a limited number of people could wield them, this was apparently a reasonable price.
Incidentally, there is no doubt that a single Kyanos was worth more than thirty billion old yen (the reference price being a nuclear bomb).
I really did make something insane, didn't I?
Once a price was attached, I could understand Hiyori's alarm when she learned the value of Kyanos. I had been doing something incomprehensible, even to myself. I still am.
Paying my one billion new yen in coins would require two million coins.
The new currency was still not circulating in large quantities, so paying that much cash to one person would affect the economy. I took only one hundred million yen and asked for the rest to be deposited through a bank into the metal-processing factory in Shinagawa Ward that I had left untouched ever since receiving it from Tsugibi.
Take that! An investment from your owner in name only! I am never setting foot in the factory, so do whatever you want! Also, a one-million-yen bonus for every employee!
And so the uses for the magic stones were decided, the orders were placed, and the payments were made.
All that remained was for me to make the magic wands.
I started by making the three for the Lake Biwa Accord.
They had four-layer cores with backflow-prevention mechanisms and built-in mana meters made from structural-color Gremlins. Just holding the wand made the gauge move and accurately display the remaining mana.
Witches and mages can tell how much mana they have left without a mana meter, but they cannot know it precisely down to the nearest 1K. There would surely be situations where knowing the exact amount of mana remaining would be useful.
More than anything, I wanted to load them with useful functions and show off to the Lake Biwa Accord. My wands are amazing, right?
After spending a month completing the three wands, with roughly eighty percent of the time going into making the mana-meter components, I sent them to the Lake Biwa Accord. Around then, restoration of the university buildings was completed. Professor Ohinata woke up, recovered, and was discharged. They said his weakened body would return to normal if he continued rehabilitation. University classes also resumed.
Hiyori then moved her base from Ome City to Tokyo Magic University.
She skillfully controlled a weakened version of the Great Glacier spell, building a three-hundred-meter tower of ice that would not melt. She would live at the top and monitor any enemies trying to approach Tokyo Magic University and Professor Ohinata, as well as Tokyo itself.
Freed from the shackles of Ome City, Hiyori looked bright and cheerful.
I hated that my friend had moved so far away, making it harder to hang out with her, but there was no way I could tell her, "Don't move," just for my own convenience.
Even after moving, Hiyori came to visit the grave at her old home in Ome City and came to play at my house, so I was relieved that our friendship did not seem likely to end.
She said our promise to play in the river together during summer was still valid. We also promised to use the Eyeball Witch's familiar to play a late-night TRPG with the three of us, this time including Professor Ohinata. I am still debating whether to invite the Spider Witch.
Once I finished the three for the Lake Biwa Accord and took a breather, I moved on to the remaining four for the Witches' Assembly.
The wands for the Eyeball Witch and the Night Witch each had five-layer cores, mana backflow-prevention mechanisms, and mana meters.
Their names were Witch of Gaze and Nyx Cane. The Night Witch had specified her wand's name. Apparently, it was a name her husband had come up with. She had apparently wavered between that and a hellish name with the couple's names enclosed beneath a shared umbrella, so I was relieved that she chose Nyx Cane.
I felt as though I had narrowly avoided giving my child a ridiculous sparkly name. Why had I been put through such a close call?
For the Foresight Mage's wand, the request was to prioritize reducing backflow and controlling mana, so I kept it to a three-layer structure and added a mana backflow-prevention mechanism. I was told a mana-remaining meter was unnecessary, so I did not add one (apparently, his head would go crazy before he ran out of mana anyway).
This was something he had also requested when I sent him the Gremlin wand last time, but he wanted an extremely high-performance mana backflow-prevention mechanism. So I obtained all of the late Professor Handa's old papers and completed the best mechanism that could be made according to the latest theories, with the highest possible precision.
He said he did not need a name, so I put only a salamander logo on it.
The Foresight bro could stand to have a little more playfulness. Though he does not seem to have the mental room for that sort of thing.
Still, for about two weeks after waking up following the Arataki Group's attack, he apparently rested on a secret vacation after his secretary begged him to take one, so I will believe there is no future in which the Foresight Mage works himself to death.
The last wand belonged to the Tobacco Witch, who had requested, "Make me an interesting wand," so I was grateful for the chance to prioritize fun over practicality.
Specifically, I made it an experimental new wand that enclosed a regular dodecahedral fractal structure in a spherical shell.
The regular dodecahedral fractal structure in this wand's core has fewer repetitions than Professor Ohinata's Aleister. In other words, it was easier to process. The bottle-ship construction, in which tools had to be inserted through a small opening in the spherical shell, made complex processing impossible.
Because of that, and because it was covered by a spherical shell, the spell's power was reduced to roughly one-tenth.
It would be stupid if a witch who frequently fought monsters had her magic reduced to one-tenth, so I embedded another two-layer magic-stone core in the base of the wand, allowing it to switch between one-tenth power and normal amplification.
The interesting thing about this wand is that it allows two spells to be used simultaneously, in a sense.
When a spell is chanted using the regular dodecahedral fractal core, the spell does not activate. Instead, the core blinks and enters standby mode. When another spell is chanted, the spell in standby activates.
However, witches and mages can release the spell in standby through mana control without speaking.
In other words:
① Chant a spell and place it on standby in the fractal core
② While chanting another spell, release the spell on standby through mana control
③ Both spells activate simultaneously
That makes it possible to use two spells at the same time.
Of course, once a spell enters standby, its power drops to one-tenth, so its power is extremely unreliable. Since I am not a combatant, I have no idea how practical it would be in an actual battle.
Still, there is no other wand this fun. I mean, it is pseudo-chantless magic! You can play around with it in all sorts of ways.
At the Tobacco Witch's request, the wand's name was "Gushiken Stakes." It has absolutely nothing to do with either wands or tobacco.
Stakes was a horse-racing term, right...?
Combined with the Tobacco Witch's epithet, it gives you a pretty good idea of what kind of person she is. She must be sad that the power is out and she can no longer go to the pachinko parlor.
And so I finished making all seven wands and shipped them out.
Before I knew it, it was late July, and the mountain cicadas had begun to grow noisy. I had spent nearly two months making wands.
Thirty percent of the large quantity of thin flakes produced as wand-making scraps were sent to Tokyo Magic University for research, and ten percent became mine. The remaining sixty percent would be processed into Monster Shears over time.
Sealing rounds were easier to use and more powerful, but the Witches' Assembly had no witch experienced with shooting guns. Taking into account the risk of lost or misused bullets, Hiyori told me to make Monster Shears instead.
Well, she had a point. It was a little boring, but it could not be helped.
While growing watermelons for the day I would play in the river with Hiyori, I leisurely began making Monster Shears.
More than two months had passed since the Arataki Group's attack, and Tokyo was steadily and resiliently returning to normal.
No major incidents had occurred since then.
However, one day at the end of July, shocking news raced across Tokyo.
The research team in the Department of Mutant Studies at Tokyo Magic University had discovered and announced a mana-training method!
History was on the move.
At last, the era had arrived in which people could train and increase their mana capacity, something that had previously been possible only to reduce, never increase!