Prototype Satan Wand Reficle

Autumn deepened, and the disassembly of Demon King Gremlin had advanced to seventeen percent. The stacks of memo sheets covered with structural sketches, component classifications, and observations grew thicker by the day, so I built a new dedicated bookcase in the workshop.

Today, I invited the Blue Witch-sama, a master of magical-power control, to help me determine the magical behavior of the disassembled parts.

This time, I sternly ordered her not to blow away and lose any components with her breath before bringing her into the workshop, but Hiyori stopped me, saying she had something to discuss.

"Oori. Actually, Future Sight has applied to relocate to Okutama."

"Huh? No way."

What was he thinking? Of course not.

Hiyori must have known my answer was obvious, but she went on.

"Well, hear him out first. It seems he's applying even though he doesn't expect to be accepted."

"If he doesn't expect to be accepted, then the answer's no."

"That's why I said to hear him out. Don't be so hostile. He's someone to whom we owe the courtesy of at least hearing what he has to say, don't you think?"

Chastened, I nodded reluctantly.

Even if I planned to refuse, it wouldn't be right to reject him without even hearing him out. This was a request from that future-seeing wizard, after all.

I had no memory of being directly helped by him personally, but without his instructions, both Hiyori and Professor Dainichinata would have died. He had saved the lives of my best friend and my friend, so surely I should at least hear him out.

When I heard him out, I learned that Future Sight had become exhausted from working too hard and wanted to retire after getting married.

He had set his sights on Okutama as a place to move so he could pursue his longtime dream of a slow life in the countryside.

Okutama had mountains, rivers, no people, no monsters, and witch children. It was an excellent area. Although the old Ome Line was in ruins, a road still ran along it all the way to the city, so transportation wasn't bad, either.

He said the edge of Okutama would be fine and listed all sorts of favorable conditions. After hearing everything, I nodded and answered:

"No."

"Well, I figured that would be your answer."

"If you want a slow life, it doesn't have to be Okutama. There must be plenty of good land left in Hokkaido, right?"

"Yes. Tohoku was the second choice, and Hokkaido the third, I think. Okutama is probably the only community that would reject Future Sight's relocation request. He'll be welcomed wherever he goes... Oh, this hasn't been officially announced yet. Don't tell anyone."

"I don't have anyone to tell."

He must have already seen the future of the negotiations. That was an absurdly long shot.

Still, Okutama was probably the best place in Japan for a fully equipped slow-life lifestyle, so I could understand why he wanted to apply despite knowing it was a long shot.

In spring, you could gather mountain vegetables and go fishing.

In summer, you could catch bugs and play in the river.

In autumn, you could harvest rice and hunt for matsutake mushrooms.

In winter, you could enjoy the snowy scenery, and if you went a little farther, there were hot springs, too.

There was also homemade miso, a rice-bran pickle crock, waterwheels, wells, and flawless security. There was nowhere else in this post-apocalyptic world where you could enjoy such a leisurely slow life.

But sorry, Okutama was mine alone. Now that I'd grown completely accustomed to living by myself, the mere thought of someone living somewhere in Okutama made me feel increasingly unsettled.

Future Sight would have to develop another safe haven for himself. I wished him luck with his second life.

Hiyori's business was finished, so now I had her accompany me on mine.

I led her into the workshop and explained everything in front of the disassembled parts laid out in neat rows across a huge worktable.

"Run magical power through each of these components one at a time. Vary the strength, change the angle at which you send it in, and do it at least four times per component. I'll observe them while touching the parts and check for changes, so tell me if you sense any unusual reactions, Hiyori."

"Uh... So, for example, with this long, narrow part, I send a weak pulse through it once and a strong pulse once from this end, then a weak pulse once and a strong pulse once from the opposite end. Is that right?"

"Yes, exactly."

"I understand the job. I have a bad feeling about this, though. How many components are there in total?"

"Sixteen thousand."

I couldn't see her expression behind her mask, but I could tell Hiyori was speechless.

"You want me to run magical power through each of these tiny components four times, sixteen thousand times?"

"I'm not ordering you to do it. I'm asking you, please, could you do it? Come on, please. You're the only person I can ask to do this. I'll do anything you want in return."

I pressed my palms together, bowed my head, and begged. Hiyori spoke in a quiet voice that nevertheless carried a certain menace.

"...Anything?"

"Anything."

"Then keep December 25 free this year. You're spending the whole day with me."

"Oh, Christmas? Sure. Since we're at it, let's import a real turkey from America and roast it!"

"Yes. I'm looking forward to Christmas."

I had nothing to do with Christmas, that festival for extroverted partygoers, but I had often relied on discounted cakes and chicken after Christmas. I liked Christmas episodes in anime, too.

If it was going to be a day spent with friends, trying my hand at a homemade Christmas dinner might not be a bad idea... Ah.

"Right. H-Hiyori, is Santa-san still coming to your house?"

"...Hey. Don't tell me..."

I realized my misunderstanding when I heard the astonishment in Hiyori's voice and hurriedly tried to explain.

"That's not what I meant!? I figured out Santa-san's identity when I was eighteen! Don't make fun of me! Hiyori can be surprisingly pure sometimes, so I just thought maybe you hadn't figured it out!"

"Eighteen, huh. Heh heh."

Why was this idiot laughing? I'd gone out of my way to consider whether I ought to prepare her a present in Santa-san's place.

But come to think of it, Hiyori didn't have any parents. It wasn't as if Santa-san could have been visiting her. Asking had been pointless.

Hiyori, now in a good mood, patiently helped me with the painstaking data-collection work after that.

Naturally, testing sixteen thousand components couldn't possibly be finished in a single day. We spent a full seven days checking the parts.

And naturally, gathering the data wasn't the end of the process.

Once the raw data was collected, it was time to analyze it. I compiled the differences in reactions among materials, the differences by weight, length, and shape, and the differences according to strength into statistical data and compared them.

If the statistical data showed any biases or distinctive features, the next step was to form a hypothesis about what they meant.

Then I considered what experiments would confirm whether the hypothesis was correct and conducted verification experiments.

Once I gathered the data from the verification experiments, I compiled it, created statistics, and considered what it meant... and entered the loop all over again.

It was painstaking work that required endless patience. Some days ended with me staring at numbers for the entire day.

Although Hiyori looked as if she understood almost none of what I was doing, she stuck with me through the painstaking work. I was deeply indebted to her.

I also frequently found myself unable to understand what the data I'd obtained meant, so I sent repeated letters of inquiry to Professor Kvant of Tokyo Magic University's Department of Gremlin Engineering. Professor Kvant was deeply knowledgeable about geometry and taught me a tremendous amount about the geometric structures found in Demon King Gremlin and their properties.

In return for his cooperation, he requested some disassembled Demon King Gremlin parts, so I sent him one thousand duplicate components—parts of which there were plenty of identical copies. I lent him the exploded diagrams on the promise that he would return them quickly, since I needed them myself.

Seriously, return them. I'm counting on you! Without the exploded diagrams, I won't be able to put everything back together, and I'll be in trouble.

In the end, I spent nearly two months analyzing the data.

The overall disassembly progress had remained stalled at seventeen percent, making this quite a detour, but the results were substantial.

Four months after beginning the reverse engineering, I could finally make a wand that put the extracted technology to use.

As I hunched over the drafting table in the workshop, drawing the plans for a new wand, Hiyori came in. She carefully checked that no disassembled parts had been placed anywhere my breath could blow them away, then peered at the plans.

"You're drawing another complicated blueprint. Did you figure something out?"

"Yes. Put simply, I discovered that the tensegrity structure acts as a magical-theoretical stabilizer, while Bernard Morin's inverted sphere corresponds to a semiconductor. The inverted sphere is made only from Elastic Gremlin, and I haven't found Elastic Gremlin used in any other components, so it probably has to be that material. All the tensegrity structures have the same design, but there are two material patterns, so they must be used for different purposes somehow. This is a prototype design for a wand incorporating a semi-automatic circuit that combines inverted spheres with structural color."

As I explained while pointing to the blueprint, Hiyori remained silent for a while.

"............Huh? What? What are you talking about?"

"Uh, a tensegrity structure is... Explaining it is a pain. Study it yourself."

Since Hiyori was completely baffled, I shoved a geometry reference book at her.

Demon King Gremlin was a mass of extremely advanced technology. If I used the knowledge gained by reverse engineering it to make something, the result was inevitably going to be advanced and highly specialized.

I realized it even as I explained it: magic wands were about to enter a field where it would be difficult to understand even an explanation of their functions without specialized knowledge.

Sorry for rattling off technical terms. But explaining a mechanism this complicated without technical terms is just too damn hard.

Hiyori obediently began reading the geometry reference book, but gave up partway through and opened a textbook so she could understand the reference book. Then she gave up on the textbook partway through and started reading an introductory book.

Exactly. I'd been down that road myself. Unless you work your way up step by step from the introductory level, a reference book is just a collection of incomprehensible spells.

Hiyori seemed so frustrated at being unable to understand what I was saying that she took the introductory book, textbook, and reference book home with her. They belonged to Professor Kvant, so I'd appreciate it if you returned them while you were at it.

It took me four days to draw the blueprint for a wand using reverse-engineered technology. Manufacturing it took three days.

Unfortunately, there were some materials I couldn't make from scratch, so I reused some components—Elastic Gremlin—from Demon King Gremlin's parts.

Honestly, having to reuse parts from Demon King Gremlin was extremely frustrating. It was like taking components removed from a space station and using them to make a crystal radio. The original was an unbelievably incredible thing, so this was an absurd downgrade.

Someday, I wanted to be able to make materials such as Elastic Gremlins and Ghost Gremlins from scratch, even though I didn't yet know how they were manufactured.

Still, this was the limit of what I could achieve at the present stage as the first step in reverse-engineering technology, and even this was a fine accomplishment.

At first, I considered naming the new wand I made this time Henden Show II, in honor of Henden Show-kun, whom I'd lost during the Arataki Group Incident, but I abandoned the idea because it sounded a little lame.

To begin with, his name had been a slapdash reference to the fact that he used Gremlins obtained from a substation. This time, I wanted to give it a proper name.

That was when I came up with "Prototype Satan Wand Reficle."

Since it was the first crystallization of the reverse-engineering technology derived from Demon King Gremlin, I wanted its name to involve the Demon King.

In the West, Satan is said to be the fallen angel Lucifer.

However, my wand had been born from a Demon King who had nearly destroyed the world, yet it was a being on the side of light that would pioneer wonderful wand technology.

So I defined it as the inverted counterpart of a Demon King and named it by reading Lucifer backward.

Prototype Satan Wand Reficle had a considerably more primitive structure than Demon King Gremlin. However, it also incorporated Structural Color Gremlin, which hadn't been used in Demon King Gremlin, so it could be called my original mechanism rather than merely an inferior imitation of Demon King Gremlin.

The wand looked little different from existing ones.

It had a long wooden handle and a two-layer spherical core at the tip. The chain surrounding the core was, of course, a Kvant-style magical compression ring.

Inside, a backflow-prevention mechanism was built into the area where the core connected to the handle, while Structural Color Gremlin was embedded in the grip so I could see the remaining magical power.

However, despite looking the same, its performance was worlds apart from that of existing wands.

The secret was the wand's core. At first glance, the milky-white spherical core, fifty millimeters in diameter, looked as though it had been carved from a single piece. In reality, it consisted of 255 components precisely fitted together. To keep the components from coming apart, I surrounded and secured them with thin, silver-colored wires made from magical alloy. The wires weren't merely fasteners; I arranged them in artistic patterns to improve the appearance, too.

Making full use of every magical geometric structure I'd discovered so far, including regular dodecahedron fractals and Möbius loops, and combining them with the technology obtained from Demon King Gremlin, I had created Prototype Satan Wand Reficle. It was the culmination of my work as a wandmaker and a prototype that heralded the beginning of a new era.

Once I finished the wand, I was so excited that I called my friends to Okutama.

In front of the three people who had gathered in the backyard—the Spider Witch, the professor, and Hiyori—I bowed and unveiled the wand.

I gripped Prototype Satan Wand Reficle and took aim at the target hanging from a tree branch ten meters away.

The two witches were startled.

"What!?"

"Impossible! Oori, you can control magical power!?"

"Fwahahahaha! Behold! Magic wands have evolved this far!!"

A tiny amount of magical power was drawn from the fingers touching the Structural Color Gremlin in the grip, traveled through the conductors inside the handle, and was sent into the core.

The magical power sent into the core ran through a simple circuit made by combining an inverted sphere with structural color and accumulated in the regular dodecahedron fractal. The instability of the circuit was resolved by passing it through Möbius Loop Gremlin.

Then, the instant it exceeded its storage capacity, it became a black beam-like spell, amplified by the two-layer structure and fired outward.

The black beam spell, about as thick as a pencil, struck the exact center of the target, which trembled slightly as if someone had lightly flicked it on the forehead.

The professor was the first to let out an ecstatic cry when he witnessed that magnificent achievement.

"Incantationless magic!? This isn't a charge-release spell like a scroll, is it!? Wow! Waaaah! A-amazing! This is too amazing, Oori-san! Incantationless magic! An ordinary human using incantationless magic...! An original spell! Oori-san, what have you done!? You're already... already... Waaaaah!"

Overcome with emotion, the stoat came racing across the ground, climbed up my leg, and patted my chest repeatedly with its forepaws to convey its excitement.

Yes, yes. Amazing, isn't it? This level of excitement made the demonstration worth holding.

"But it doesn't make any sound..."

However, there was one unexpected issue, so I tilted my head while examining the wand.

Its effect and power were within the expected range, but it made no sound. That meant there had to be a mistake somewhere in the theory. There was room for improvement.

Ah, it looked like my battle with numbers and theory was about to begin again. Ugh.

When I looked toward the two witches, who had yet to react, their shock outweighed their excitement. They were still stunned and seemed unable to speak.

I couldn't perceive the flow of magical power, but in theory, it must have looked as if I'd constructed and activated a spell using only magical-power control, without chanting an incantation.

Unlike the professor and me, the witches could perceive magical power, so perhaps their shock was greater because they could actually see what had happened.

Eventually, once the wave of astonishment passed, the two of them began whispering to each other.

"H-how did you do that?"

"Blue Witch, could you imitate that control...?"

"Imitate it? Impossible. There's no way I could. The flow of magical power was too fast and too intricate. It even looked like you were processing it in parallel. But could it be possible with the help of that circuit? Or was it a conductor? The storage capacity might be the problem. What do you think, Spider Witch?"

"Ah, I can't. I think I'm even worse at it than the Blue Witch. I'm bad at controlling magical power... Oori took about five or six seconds to charge it, but I wouldn't need even one second. Half a second—no, 0.2 seconds would be enough..."

"That's true. When it comes to charging speed, we're definitely faster. Still, I'm amazed. Is something like this really possible?"

Heh heh heh. Their awed looks felt great.

When I fired another incantationless spell with Reficle to show them, all three of them burst into enthusiastic applause.

"Hah! How about that...!"

In addition to being able to use incantationless magic, Reficle could cast conventional incantation-based spells at 1.0x.

I had found a few flaws in the construction theory, but it was a prototype. Flaws were only to be expected.

I was overjoyed that it had turned out almost exactly as I had envisioned. From now on, I would use Reficle-kun as my beloved wand. Prototypes were cool, after all.

Even the technology I extracted from just seventeen percent of Demon King Gremlin had allowed me to accomplish this much.

How incredible would the technology obtained from disassembling the whole thing be?

I could hardly wait to find out.