[And now, let’s appraise today’s trending Moonlit-World wildlife clip (Tibetan-fox face)]
[A wild Beo appeared!]
[Souka—it’s that Phantasmal Beast Golden Wolf that hangs around Touko.]
[Oho, two adorable shotas, double the joy—go on, get along, you two!]
[Hold on, doesn’t Beo not even have a gender in canon?
Does that still count as a shota?]
[Welp, here come the gutter-brains.
Holy light, deploy 🔆]
[Such a shaaaame!!!—]
[SHUT it, why did the thread suddenly turn this rancid?!]
The wolf at Touko’s side?
Watching the danmaku flash past his vision, Ryōgi Minato studied the golden-haired boy standing not far before him once more, and did indeed pick up a faint sense of wrongness.
For all that the other wore a child’s shape, the breath of humanity about him was awfully thin—as though he’d simply manifested this shell on purpose, just to present this particular image of himself.
“Hello.
Excuse me, but do you know Aozaki Touko-san?
Do you know where she is now?”
Minato greeted him politely, looking at the golden-haired boy who seemed to be called “Beo,” and asked his question.
“Hm?
That’s the first thing you ask?”
Hearing the name “Touko” from the other did surprise Beo a little, but he’d assumed the boy before him would act far more shocked and guarded.
“Aren’t you even curious why I’d show up here?”
Minato tilted his head, thought about it, and out of courtesy asked the question back, just as the other had framed it.
“Excuse me—why have you shown up here?”
This manner of simply tossing the words right back at him left Beo, a Phantasmal Beast, momentarily blank.
Then he couldn’t help breaking into laughter.
“You—you seem like a pretty interesting one.
You’re not worried I might be in league with that puppet over there?”
His jade-green eyes turned toward Aoko, who’d fallen briefly onto the back foot in the fight, his words pointed.
“The puppet was sent by Aozaki Touko-san, and you seem to know Aozaki Touko-san too—so weren’t the lot of you here together to begin with?”
Not understanding why the other would ask such a self-evident question, Minato blinked in confusion.
“Well, that’s true enough.
But since you already know that much, shouldn’t you be a touch more worried?
If, say, I were to team up with that puppet, the two of you would never walk out of here.”
For the first time, Beo had taken an interest in a human other than Touko.
The boy before him, he felt, might just be more interesting than everything he’d come across in all his travels.
So he’d said all that on purpose, to see how the other would react.
At the same time, his pair of jade-green eyes lit faintly, a small, sharp canine showing beneath the curve of his lips, and the hand he raised slowly sprouted golden fur.
But to his surprise, the boy showed no fear at the change in his body—not even his earlier puzzled look shifted in the slightest.
Minato studied the other’s teeth and the hand turned to a sharp claw, and only now grasped just what the “golden wolf” the danmaku had mentioned really was.
I see—so this is another kind of creature that exists in the world of magecraft…
Not yet having learned anything about Phantasmal Species, the boy instinctively took this for a common phenomenon of the magecraft world.
As for the other’s earlier question, Minato thought it over a moment, then answered:
“You won’t do that.
Because from the very start, you never showed any hostility toward me or Aoko.”
However much the other now bared his claws in threat, the boy truly hadn’t sensed any will to fight from this golden wolf in human shape.
That was precisely why he hadn’t drawn his blade.
“So you’re the type who trusts his intuition, are you?”
Feeling his “teasing” had lost all its point, Beo lost interest in keeping it up at once, and the changes on his body promptly reverted to their original state.
But glancing at the girl in the distance, still pinned down through the fight by the puppet, he smiled again.
“Your read isn’t wrong.
I really don’t plan to lift a finger—if I did, Touko might say I’d gotten in the way of her plans.
Still, even without my help, that human over there’s about to reach her limit, you know.”
From the moment they’d first met, Beo had faintly sensed something special about the boy.
Since the other had come here following Touko’s younger sister, it meant he was likely a magus himself.
In his past travels, Beo had seen no shortage of humans bearing that identity—but the vast majority of them were terribly dull.
So he rather wanted to see just what this small magus before him would reveal at the moment the girl fell into danger.
He was probing, searching for why the depths of his own heart insisted this boy was different.
Minato turned to look back at Aoko in the distance, somewhat the worse for wear.
Because the girl was pouring everything she had into dealing with the enemy, she hadn’t noticed from start to finish that another existence had entered this space.
At this moment, facing that abnormally nimble puppet, Aoko had loosed who knew how many magic bullets, yet only a scant few had landed—and even those struck nothing vital.
To an outsider’s eye, if this dragged on, the girl would sooner or later exhaust her stamina, lose any means of fighting back, and at last be defeated by the puppet.
But after observing Aoko’s movements closely, Minato shook his head at the golden-haired boy.
“Aoko hasn’t given up yet.
And besides—the fight’s about to end.”
Sure enough, no sooner had the words left the boy’s mouth than Aoko, off in the distance, seemed to have finally found her chance, and charged without a shred of hesitation straight at the puppet, its body set with sharp blades.
No fear, no retreat.
Aoko feigned raising her right hand to fire a magic bullet, and in the instant the puppet readied to dodge, she suddenly lifted her left leg and whipped out a kick.
The girl’s slender, finely cut calf burst with unexpected strength, kicking the puppet clean off its feet and slamming it into a row of mirrors.
Only then did Aoko truly extend her right hand toward it, loosing that lethal magic bullet.
Pew—
The puppet’s chest was punched straight through, and then its whole body went up in flames, as if some self-destruct program had been triggered.
Aoko, as though still sunk in the fight just past, stood frozen in place.
A long while later she seemed to come back to herself, let out a long breath, and looked down at her own right hand, a trace of bewilderment in her eyes.
Seeing all this, Beo—who’d assumed Aoko would lose—couldn’t help arching a surprised brow, and the look he then turned on the boy grew all the more curious.
As much as he wanted to ask the boy before him just how he’d reached the conclusion that the puppet would fall, staying any longer would expose him.
And in that case, his current nominal master might get angry.
“It seems you’re even more interesting than I’d imagined.
I hope that next time we meet, we can have a proper chat.
Oh, and—if you want to see Touko, you’ll just have to wait for her to come find you herself.
That person has something rather important to attend to right now.”
Before leaving, having answered the boy’s first question, Beo smiled and gave him a wave in farewell.
Minato was just about to ask more when Aoko’s voice rose behind him.
“Minato, are you all right?”
She looked the boy over, head to toe, and only when she saw he hadn’t been caught up in the fight just now did Aoko let out a breath of relief.
After all, she’d loosed quite a few magic bullets earlier, and this passage opening had been left pocked and pitted by now.
“I’m fine, Aoko.”
“Is that so.
Well, the puppet’s dealt with, so let’s head back up to the amusement park first.
Hm?
What are you looking at, Minato?”
Noticing the boy kept gazing up at the ceiling, Aoko asked in puzzlement.
The boy blinked, fixed his eyes for a while on the air vent up there—the kind of thing that, owing to the lighting, an ordinary person would never notice—then asked a question Aoko found impossible to follow.
“Aoko, do all the wolves in the magecraft world climb through air vents?”
“Huh?”