There were a great many forests in Misaki Town.
Urban development had already pushed deep into the area, yet the outskirts still held a thick breath of nature.
This forest was one such place.
It had no particular name, sitting right on the dividing line between Misaki Town and Misaki Hill, an isolated patch stranded out past the edge of the city.
The time was exactly midnight.
The air among the trees ran a few degrees colder than outside, the chill creeping up from the knees until it drew a puff of white breath from anyone who lingered.
Bundled in a cold-weather jacket, Ryōgi Minato was not especially sensitive to the shift in temperature—at the very least, far more tolerant of it than the girl beside him, who wore a fluffy white coat and still stamped a foot now and then against the cold.
“Alice, where’s the enemy?”
Aoko rubbed her hands together again and turned, with some impatience, toward the witch dressed all in black.
Honestly, she hadn’t expected to be the one least able to bear the cold of the three of them.
Ryōgi Minato, the literal child of the group, seemed to feel nothing at all—not a single puff of white left his lips.
Yet when she’d brushed the back of his hand, she could clearly feel a faint warmth there, which left Aoko puzzled, unable to make sense of just what kind of constitution the boy had.
“‘They’re’ here.”
After a moment’s silence, Alice finally answered Aoko’s question, her gaze turning toward the depths of the forest.
Minato instinctively looked the same way.
Some dozens of seconds later, two streaks of bloody crimson light flickered to life among the gloomy trees.
By their shape, they were two “smiling” “men.” Only, the smiles fixed on their faces looked as though they had been put through some manufacturing process—locked wide open, oozing a red halo outward.
Their faces bore no further features, just a pair of vivid red eyes that turned mechanically this way and that, as if surveying the surroundings.
Watching the two figures drift slowly toward them, Aoko felt, for reasons she could not name, a sudden wave of cold revulsion crawl over her body.
Things shaped like humans and yet not quite human stirred up an emotion in her she found hard to accept.
“This… is a magus?”
“No.
They’re only watchers.
Still, this is for the best—it seems it would be too soon to set you against a magus directly, Aoko.”
Slender gloved fingers pinched a pair of black dice and a small trinket set with a cat’s-eye stone.
Alice gave a light shake of her head and glanced at the boy beside Aoko, finding that this particular apprentice of hers showed no stress response at all, his expression perfectly calm.
Satisfaction flickered through her once more.
She fixed her eyes on the two figures and went on.
“We didn’t find what we came for this time.
But take it as a warning, and carry it back to whoever’s pulling your strings.”
She tossed the trinket from her hand, and in an instant the thing seemed to dissolve into the night, vanishing without a trace.
The cold mist of the forest, too, began to thicken in that very moment.
Minato understood why such a strange change had come over the forest.
The whole cause was the trinket his teacher had just used—that single-use magical implement called 「Diddle Diddle: Banquet of the Night」.
It was one of his teacher’s foundational workings; its effect, it seemed, was to deepen the night and lay the groundwork for the Ploy Kickshaw to come.
And within the boy’s sight, Alice then lightly cast down the dice in her hand.
But the numbers they showed when they rolled to a stop drew a look of expected disappointment into her eyes.
“Six again…”
She murmured it in a voice no one could hear, her words carrying a trace of vexation.
Yet the moment they left her, the two dice on the ground suddenly began to change—and the next second they had become two little pigs shaped like staplers, floating up to hover at Alice’s side.
Through the white forest, a soft song rang out like the chiming of bells.
As the 「Banquet of the Night」 raised its curtain, Alice pushed down the vexation inside her, resolved to put her true strength on full display and show her apprentice what a real magus was.
So before the two familiars at her side—who had picked up the bad human habit of chattering on without end—could open their mouths, Alice gave her command directly.
“「Tweedle Dee and Dum」.”
The two little pigs, one to her left and one to her right, squealed in excitement:
“Leave it to us, leave it to us!”
“Finally, our turn at last—heave-ho!”
And the next instant they shot toward one of the grinning men.
But that figure, sluggish as a snail until now, abruptly spread its arms from within its coat, fingers slicing through the air like a pair of scissors gone mad as it charged straight at the two little pigs.
“Ah, this’ll probably be over in a blink.”
Knowing her housemate’s strength well, Aoko had grown used to the sight after a little while, and she watched the scene with a sigh of admiration.
Minato, for his part, had kept his eyes on the two manlike figures from start to finish—and sure enough, in the next moment he saw the scissor-handed grinning man bitten clean in the shoulders by the two little pigs.
The pigs’ bodies had split as though sliced open, taking the shape of crocodile jaws that now clamped down on either of the grinning man’s shoulders, robbing it of any freedom to move.
The other grinning man saw all of this and, without so much as turning its head, bolted for the forest’s outer edge, as though meaning to carry whatever it had witnessed back home.
But the young witch would grant it no such chance.
In the dim white world, a giant of wood and stone rose up straight against the night and barred its path.
That was one of the Great Three Ploys the girl had inherited from the first-generation Witch—the 「Thames Troll: Giant of the Bridge」.
The towering figure stood at the edge of a small stream.
The giant swung a heavy fist down at the grinning man below, and—with a thunderous boom—smashed it into powder.
At the same time, from where the other grinning man was pinned by the little pigs, an odd cracking sound began to issue.
Like a piece of candy slowly chewed apart, the grinning man’s body sounded with snapping noises all over, and in moments it was devoured whole by the two little pigs, leaving only a few strange, miscellaneous parts scattered on the ground.
A clean, decisive end to the enemy—and an equally clean, decisive recall of her familiars.
From beginning to end the girl had held to a serene elegance, commanding the whole field like a true witch.
Of course, the thing that softened the corners of Alice’s lips without her noticing had more to do with the worshipful gaze of the boy behind her.
In truth, that was the small private motive behind her decision to bring him out for a “field lesson”—the hope of reclaiming a little of her dignity as a teacher tonight, rather than forever being blindsided by his talent.
“It really was over fast… But, Alice, were you actually planning to teach anything?”
Feeling the girl had been showing off her own strength more than anything, Aoko grew suspicious at once.
The feeling only sharpened when she saw Minato gazing at Alice with respect written across his small face.
“This time was only meant to make the two of you recognize the gap between yourselves and other magi.
Regrettably, it seems we came after the wrong target.”
Looking at the parts left on the ground, Alice knew they were nothing that came from a human body, but some kind of artificial construct.
“So… we just head straight back now?”
Good news though it was, Aoko’s mood felt oddly muddled.
Here she’d already braced herself to face a true human magus as an enemy—and in the end, that was it?
Naturally, given her earlier display, all Alice returned was a chilly look.
But when she turned to the boy, the girl’s eyes softened again somewhat.
“Minato, having watched a magus fight for the first time—what did you think?”
Minato, cradling his blade, was just about to speak when his eyes suddenly turned toward a corner of the forest.
A whirring rush of motion broke out without the slightest warning—no, it would be truer to say it had lain hidden until this very moment before showing itself.
Into the girls’ field of vision, a grinning man whose limbs all seemed dragged on puppet-strings came racing toward them in the posture of a crawling reptile, terrifyingly fast.
Its split mouth opened wider still in that instant, and from deep in its throat extended a weapon like a spear-blade.
With a gathering bound, it lunged in a single thrust toward the three of them.
A third one?
How is that possible…
Doubt rose at the fact before her eyes, but Alice’s body had already made the choice for her on instinct, the pair of black dice once more in her grip.
Yet before she could even cast them, a small, nimble figure had already darted out from beside her.
The golden irises glowed faintly, as if burning.
In that moment, the world in the boy’s eyes turned utterly clear, every inner current of all things mapping itself sharply onto his sight.
The grinning man’s pouncing motion looked, to him, so very slow—and the turning gears and connecting threads inside its body were just as plainly visible…
His heart and mind grew boundlessly still.
The boy gripped the familiar hilt, his expression calm, and… drew the blade from its sheath!