It Spoke!?

Over the course of a month, I advanced the disassembly of Demon King Gremlin by eight percent.

The road ahead is still a long one. However, I gained a great deal of knowledge.

Taking apart 48,000 parts confirmed my theory: Demon King Gremlin is the pinnacle of geometry and bioengineering in magical civilization.

For example, "High-Strength Gremlin" was a high-purity version of the material used for the Spider Witch's decoy.

When I compared the shavings produced while carving the Spider Witch's decoy with the High-Strength Gremlin from Demon King Gremlin, their properties were so similar that it couldn't possibly be a coincidence.

However, the material from Demon King Gremlin is more uniform and stable. You could also say that it contains no impurities. It was artificially synthesized and refined, eliminating every trace of the impurities and unevenness commonly found in natural materials.

"Invisible Gremlin" is the same way.

Ghost-type monsters completely nullify physical attacks. The Gremlins possessed by such monsters are invisible. However, they become visible when the monster dies.

Invisible Gremlins were also used in Demon King Gremlin's component parts, but despite the Demon King unquestionably being dead, they remained invisible.

They say the Demon King completely nullified physical attacks, so it shares the same traits as ghost-type monsters. Even so, some Gremlin parts retain their invisibility after death.

They are a complete superior version of the Invisible Gremlins possessed by ghosts.

The "multilayered structure" is the same way.

I had a Gremlin wholesaler obtain a Dragon-Furnace Gremlin from a wild dragon so I could compare them, and once again, although it shared similar characteristics, it turned out to have a more advanced structure, refined through ingenuity—or perhaps sophistication.

Components that had elevated biological structures derived from monsters, along with geometric structures possessing beautiful consistency, were arranged with purpose and unity, like circuitry or blood vessels converging on a heart.

It was highly artistic. It was perfectly normal for multiple geometric solid components to come together and form a larger geometric figure.

I can continue disassembling Demon King Gremlin without any trouble. I hadn't made a single disassembly error by the time I reached eight percent, and I was confident I wouldn't make one before the end, either.

However, analyzing how it works will be extremely difficult.

Without a doubt, Demon King Gremlin was constructed according to extraordinarily advanced magical theory.

Just going by feel, if the current level of magical studies on Earth were a toddler playing with building blocks, Demon King Gremlin would be a space station.

Some parts of Demon King Gremlin that look completely identical were used for clearly different purposes. I couldn't tell them apart; whatever the difference was, it was beyond me.

Parts that provided a foothold for understanding, such as "This is probably made from a material similar to the Spider Witch's decoy" or "This structure is based on a Dragon-Furnace Gremlin," were an overwhelming minority. I could understand absolutely nothing about the other ninety-nine percent.

Could a weakling who had only just managed single-digit addition and was delighted to learn addition with carrying understand the advanced mathematical theories proposed by a mathematics professor at a top university? Of course not.

But figuring that out somehow is the true joy of reverse engineering.

After all, Demon King Gremlin is estimated to have 600,000 parts in total. Even if I don't understand the theory behind its construction, I have an enormous number of samples showing the results of that construction.

Just as a baby who doesn't know any words can learn to speak without understanding Japanese grammar by listening to enormous amounts of Japanese, as if being immersed in a flood of it.

Just as you can watch a Hollywood movie without subtitles and infer the meaning of the dialogue from the characters' expressions and the flow of the scenes.

Even without understanding the reasoning, it's possible to work backward from a huge number of samples and deduce it.

The more mysterious Demon King Gremlin is, and the farther it is from my understanding, the greater the reward will be when I finally understand it. The knowledge gained from something that can be analyzed in no time is limited, after all.

Just imagining the advanced technology I might be able to extract from Demon King Gremlin makes my motivation surge. I feel like I could keep disassembling and analyzing it for hundreds of days without stopping.

But I'm not a mage, so my stamina is ordinary. This is going to be a long, long task. My stamina can't keep up with my motivation.

After immersing myself in disassembly work for a month, I finally took a day off. It was my first full day off since the day I played in the river with Hiyori.

When I told Hiyori, who had come to visit, that I was taking the day off, she happily invited me to go for a walk. It wasn't a bad suggestion, so I nodded.

If the electricity were still working, I'd spend the day relaxing while watching an anime movie online, but with the electricity dead, indoor entertainment had decreased dramatically. I hadn't gone outside for the past month except to tend the rice paddies, so taking a walk around Okutama for the first time in a while didn't sound bad either.

As I put on my shoes by the entrance, Mokutan heard the signs that we were going out, poked its head into the hallway, and came hurrying over to my feet while mewing. It seemed to want to come along on our walk. Are you cuteness incarnate or what?

"Mii."

"There, there. Good little one. Hiyori's coming along on the walk too, is that okay?"

"Mii!"

When I crouched down and stroked Mokutan's head with my fingertip, Mokutan looked up at the Blue Witch, wagged its tail, and chirped energetically. It didn't look particularly happy, but it wasn't objecting, either. It had the air of saying, "Permission granted."

"Come on, Mokutan. Let's give you some food."

"Mi."

Hiyori crouched down, took out a piece of charcoal from her robe pocket, placed it on her palm, and held it out. Mokutan approached cautiously, then swiftly snatched the charcoal in its mouth and backed away.

Hiyori had really gotten used to the fire lizard at my place. Mokutan in particular was the most people-friendly of the three, so it had gotten to the point where it would take food from her hand. Well, she came to my house four or five days a week. If you saw someone that often, you'd get used to them whether you wanted to or not.

When the two of us and one fire lizard set out for our walk, the sky was lightly overcast, with the sun pleasantly hidden and the weather easy to bear. We wandered through Okutama, where a thin, disorienting mist had spread.

The season had fully turned toward autumn. The katsura trees growing in the well-ventilated shade along the mountainsides had begun shedding their leaves, and the yellow and brown leaves spread across the ground gave off a sweet scent like caramel.

"Oh, the osmanthus is blooming. Is that... a pumpkin? Come to think of it, I feel like I threw some seeds over there last year or the year before."

"Nature is tenacious. Want to take some with us? Halloween is coming up."

"Seriously? Already? A year goes by fast! Around this time last year was when the Class-A monsters migrated, right?"

Last year, Demon King-kun had been rampaging with boundless energy and plunging the world into the depths of terror. Now he was being subjected to the humiliation of having his core taken apart piece by piece. The world changed quickly.

Mokutan fidgeted and stamped its feet, looking like it wanted to keep walking, but Hiyori and I decided to harvest several small pumpkins.

As we gathered up the pumpkins' thick, sturdy vines and tore them apart with our bare hands, Hiyori started a conversation.

"Oori, aren't you interested in Halloween?"

"It's not that I'm uninterested. I look forward to the Halloween sweets the professor gives me every year."

"No, you're the one who's supposed to give out sweets. You're an adult."

"What's wrong with taking them if someone's giving them to me? What about you, Hiyori?"

"I... I only go along with Kei-chan after the Gremlin disaster. Oh, right. Apparently, cosplay costumes based on me are selling in town this year."

"Huh? Why?"

"Why else? I'm a witch. Halloween is an event where people dress up as witches and vampires, isn't it?"

Her explanation made perfect sense.

That's right!

So the event where people dressed up as fictional monsters had become an actual cosplay event. Of course it had.

Cosplaying as the Blue Witch and saying, "Trick or treat!" would be pretty terrifying. Did "trick" mean freezing an entire house in ice? Real witches were scary.

"Mii. Mim!"

"Wait, wait, Mokutan. Don't pull on my shoelaces. We'll get back to walking after we harvest the pumpkins the bugs haven't eaten. What do you think, Hiyori? You're going to have to watch cosplayers of yourself stroll through town. Aren't you embarrassed?"

"No? Have you forgotten my former career? I was a model."

"Ahh... a job where you put on clothes, become an advertising billboard, and have people cosplay you. I guess you threw away any sense of shame a long time ago."

"I don't like the way you put that... but yes, that's more or less it. Oori, what about the pumpkins over there? They have a nice color."

We had been keeping the bored Mokutan waiting while we busied ourselves harvesting pumpkins, but as we fussed over their colors and sizes, the small fire lizard finally lost patience and began calling out loudly.

"Mii! Mim, mimimi! Mi... Mii-mi... Oori!"

"!?"

Amid the cries, my name suddenly came out in a young girl's voice. The two of us listened in disbelief and dropped the pumpkins we were holding.

"It spoke...!?"

"Hiyori, you heard that too!? Hey, Mokutan, say it again. Say it one more time."

"Mimi?"

"Not 'Mimi.' You just said 'Oori,' didn't you? Come on, say it again. Oori!"

"Mii-mi."

"Close. Oori!"

"Oori."

"Woooooooo! It talked! Good, good, good, good! You're amazing, Mokutan!"

"Oori!"

When I gently patted its head, Mokutan chirped happily.

Hmm. When I first started keeping them, I was worried about what I'd do if they suddenly started speaking like humans. But now that it had actually happened, my excitement won out. It was just like hearing a parrot I'd kept speak human words for the first time.

Good, good. Mokutan is so smart! At this rate, Tsubaki and Sekitan might start talking too. For all I know, they might already be talking and I just haven't noticed.

I was delightedly entertaining Mokutan with my fingertips, but Hiyori looked intensely suspicious. In fact, she backed away and openly put herself on guard.

"Hey. Doesn't that strike you as strange? It spoke."

"That's right. Pretty smart, huh?"

"No. Monsters don't talk. That thing is a witch."

"Oh..."

Her words made me freeze.

I felt cold sweat trickling down my side.

Oh crap. That's right. Until now, Hiyori had thought the fire lizards were ordinary monsters, but if they could talk, that changed everything.

This could expose our complicated parent-child relationship one discovery at a time.

Wh-what do I do?

"I-I mean, couldn't it just be a smart monster? Look, it has a Gremlin right here on its stomach, doesn't it? Witches don't have Gremlins."

"Hmm. True... Wait a minute. Fuyou had a Gremlin, didn't she? If Fuyou, the Flower Witch's daughter, was a witch's child, she would have a Gremlin and be able to talk. Could the fire lizard also be a witch's child?"

"H-how should I know?"

"Oori."

Hiyori looked down at Mokutan, who was sprawled on its back in total relaxation after I had rolled it over, and began thinking with one hand on her chin.

Detective Hiyori, stop right there! If you continue your deductions, you'll uncover a family relationship messier than any daytime soap opera!

"If a witch's child takes after its parent, like Fuyou does... was there ever a witch who was a fire lizard? A Dragon Witch...? No, that's not right. That witch only transforms into a dragon. In its natural form, it should be indistinguishable from a human."

"W-well, there are witches you don't know about. Maybe it's the child of a wizard."

"That's true. When I think of fire, Tsugibi comes to mind. No, that's not right. She's humanoid. She's serious and diligent, and she's not the sort of person who would have a secret child. Or maybe the Firebird Witch from Kanagawa? She died ages ago, though... Hmm. A bird and a lizard are far too different."

Hiyori looked puzzled.

Safe! Well, there was no way she'd figure it out if she didn't know about Tsugibi's perverted yuri-and-arson fetish.

Tsugibi had said she'd kept her fetish hidden and maintained her reputation as the serious, straight-laced Tsugibi Witch.

Hiyori might have considered the possibility that this was Tsugibi the Witch's child, but the possibility that Hiyori and Tsugibi had a child was completely outside her realm of thought. Of course it was. Who could possibly figure that out?

...No.

Should I just tell her while I had the chance? If my guess was right, and the fire lizards would eventually become humanoid, like caterpillars becoming butterflies after passing through the chrysalis stage, then their parentage would eventually be exposed. They'd probably look like their parents once they became humanoid, too.

"Oori, Oori. Mimimi, Oori!"

However, when I watched the fire lizard sweetly nibble my finger, I felt like there was no need to reveal the truth here and set off the Hiyori bomb.

Mokutan, Sekitan, and Tsubaki were all my children. There was no need to thoughtlessly start a custody dispute.

All right. I'd change the subject and bluff my way out of this.

Mokutan, you don't have to worry about anything, okay? You're a member of the Oori household. An employee of the Wand Workshop. I won't hand you over to Hiyori or Tsugibi.

"Maybe it's the child of a witch who died suddenly right after the Gremlin disaster and had never appeared in public. An orphan. Just an orphan."

"Is that so...? Hmm. Considering when the fire lizard appeared in Okutama and how big it was when I first met it, it must have been born..."

"H-hey, Hiyori! Witches can have children, but can wizards have children too?"

"Hm? Yes, they can. Iruma conducted human experiments involving that."

Hiyori's mood soured instantly as she said it. Magical power began leaking out of her, and the air grew heavy and cold. Damn, it felt like I'd avoided one landmine only to step on another.

"Let's not talk about that scumbag. Just thinking about him makes me sick. Oh, right, there's a good example. I heard that the Rabbit and Wolf in Tohoku had their first daughter last year. She inherited traits from both parents and supposedly has a Gremlin. The Tokyo Witches' Gathering sent a joint congratulatory gift."

"Huh. It's kind of rare for a transcendent being to have a family, isn't it?"

"Not really. Still, it's unusual for people to start families or have children after the Gremlin disaster."

"The Night Witch has two daughters, and her husband is still alive. Their family gets along so well it's almost enviable. The Eyeball Witch has two sons as well. One should be an adult by now... I also remember that the Mermaid Witch had either an older or younger brother. The North Witch's father is still alive, too."

"There are so many?"

Apparently, more people had families than I expected.

The Gremlin disaster wiped out more than eighty percent of the population even in the Tokyo area, where the number of survivors was exceptionally high. In a family of four consisting of two parents and two children, the question was whether even one person would survive. There had to be plenty of people who were the sole survivor of their family.

On the other hand, it was true that having a transcendent being among your relatives made it easier to survive. Families could also have their lives derailed and fall apart because of the disaster, like Hiyori's, so being the family of a witch didn't guarantee survival.

Before Hiyori could turn her attention back to the fire lizard, I shoved a pumpkin into her arms and hurried us back to our walk. Mokutan followed behind us in a good mood, mewing happily. Hiyori seemed to have conveniently shelved her doubts about Mokutan's origins and started chattering about her worries that the North Witch was avoiding her.

Children grew up so quickly. More than six years had passed since the disaster, and it was hard to believe that a generation that knew nothing of the previous era was already entering its first year of elementary school.

It made sense that I was getting older. I didn't really feel that old, though.

The Demon King had been defeated, the danger predictions from future sight were gone, and the string of god-awful major incidents had finally settled down.

From now on, it would be a peaceful era. The opportunities for magic wands to shine would probably decrease, too.

I wasn't about to consider that a shame. As long as there were people, there would always be demand for magic wands. "A second or third Demon King appears!" was a classic anime plot, after all. It was the sort of thing you saw all the time in manga padding out their stories.

Still, if a Demon King ever revived, Hiyori would surely defeat the Demon King with the ultimate wand—something like a Cuanos Ver. 100 super-enhanced using the reverse-engineering technology of Demon King Gremlin.

To prepare for the day that might come, I had to steadily continue taking it apart.