Human and Demon, as friends, as lord and retainer.
The scene was strange and yet oddly harmonious. After Glück gestured for Macht to rise, Nanoda's brow suddenly creased.
"Macht — you explain to him yourself what happened in Weise. I've just remembered something I need to check on. I'll be back shortly."
With that, Nanoda left nothing behind but a fading afterimage where she had stood — her body already gone, moving at breathtaking speed.
At her words, Macht gave a small nod and bowed shallowly in the direction she had disappeared.
Glück tucked a cigarette between his fingers and settled naturally into the gold-transformed sofa, setting the cigarette case on the table before him with his other hand. His voice was unhurried.
"Then — tell me everything." He tapped the cigarette case, then gestured toward the seat across from him. "Care for one?"
Macht neither accepted nor declined. He simply sat down on the floor at Glück's feet, raised one hand, and let a small tongue of flame flicker to life — lighting Glück's cigarette for him.
Glück glanced at the lit cigarette between his fingers. One eyebrow rose slightly. He took a long, hard drag.
Smoke curled upward. Glück exhaled slowly, watching the expressionless Macht seated before him — and for once, a faint, wry smile crossed his face.
"Still the same as ever, Macht. You really are a dull creature."
"Is that so?"
Macht didn't quite understand Glück's reaction. Glück wasn't a man who wore his feelings openly.
"I can already guess most of it — but I want to hear it from you. Your actions. Your thoughts."
Even after more than ten years encased in gold, Glück remained precisely as composed and measured as he had always been.
His plans had collapsed entirely. Macht, feeling there was no longer anything worth concealing, held nothing back — and told the story, quietly, from beginning to end.
——
Just moments after leaving the lord's manor, Nanoda was racing through the woodlands near Weise.
Wind churned through the undergrowth, tossing grass and leaves in all directions. The forest had long been emptied of birds and animals. She followed the faint traces of residual mana — and the path of destruction that marked the way: toppled trees, craters of earth and stone, one after another.
She broke through a dense canopy of branches — and stopped.
The world before her had been turned inside out.
A vast conical wasteland stretched ahead. It might once have been a forest. Some enormous force had simply unmade it — grinding it down into loose, scattered sand.
There was nothing left here.
An almost terrifying degree of destructive power. Nanoda had never seen magic wreak this kind of wide-area devastation before.
Solitär's residual mana was scattered everywhere across the ground, laced through with traces of Jane's — the chaotic interference of the two made Mana Perception nearly useless. Nanoda could find nothing.
Jane should still be alive. That was what her instincts told her.
She pressed off the ground, lifting herself into the air on mana-flight, and looked down over the ruined landscape below.
The conical wasteland stretched away to a single deepest point — a pit at its furthest tip. A fleck of white nestled at the bottom of that dark hollow, and scattered traces of blood still clung to the earth around its rim.
Wind rustled with a soft rushing sound, stirring white hair faintly dusted with sand and soil. The thick smell of blood that had hung over the place gradually began to thin.
"A bird?"
Jane lay spread-eagled at the bottom of the pit, face turned up toward the sky, utterly blank-faced. The white dress she had worn into battle had long since been torn away and lost. Even the blood-armor she had summoned from her own blood had shattered apart in that final impact.
Pale and bare, Jane lay in the hollow and watched a dark shape pass across the sky above her. Her voice carried just a thread of exhaustion.
"Wrong guess. It's me."
At the sight of Jane — whole and unhurt — Nanoda's expression softened. She crouched down and reached out, poking Jane's cheek with a fingertip — as soft and smooth as a baby's skin.
As that familiar voice sounded, a black cloak drifted down and settled gently over Jane's body.
"Ah… Mother…"
"You did well, Jane. Good girl…" Nanoda stroked her head, then brushed the grit and dust from her face.
"I'm sorry, Mother… Jane couldn't be of any real help…"
Jane pressed the top of her head against the hand that touched her. Those red eyes, flickering faintly, held what looked like guilt.
"You did beautifully. The trail of destruction you left behind on the way here — it really is remarkable."
"But…"
"Can you stand right now?"
"Probably… not yet for a little while… I can't… get my strength together."
Her hair spilling forward, Jane gave a small shake of her head.
"Then don't push yourself."
Nanoda could feel the severe mana depletion inside Jane's body. Eternal Life Magic could sustain Jane's life force to its fullest extent — but after a drain this extreme, maintaining that life would come at the cost of dulling her senses and stripping away her ability to move.
Jane felt the warmth that reached her and went still for a moment, suddenly at a loss.
"Rest a little. I'll carry you back."
Nanoda extended both arms and lifted Jane — cloak and all — up out of the pit in a princess carry, and began walking, step by step, away from the ruined wasteland of the battlefield.
——
Held in her "mother's" arms, Jane pressed her lips together, a faint tension running through her.
For the entire walk, Jane said nothing. A familiar and peculiar feeling drifted through her, filling her chest.
At last, Jane buried her face in Nanoda's arms and let out a small, shy sound — barely more than a murmur.
"It's so strange… it just feels… really warm. My whole body feels tingly."
"Does it?"
"Mother… can you hold me like this again sometime?"
Jane tilted her head back. A faint flush sat on her pale face, and something that had never quite been there before — a small, tentative hope — flickered in those usually quiet eyes.
"Of course. But next time, no more pushing yourself like this. Your safety comes first." Nanoda gave a small nod.
"Mm." Cradled in her arms, Jane curled slightly inward — like a little cat settling in.
Nanoda had not been walking long when Jane seemed to recover some of her strength; the words began to come more easily.
"Mother, could you teach me that amazing magic?"
"Hm? What magic?"
Nanoda wasn't sure what Jane was asking at first.
"This one…"
Jane shifted her arm, and the edge of the black cloak lifted from the inside, peeling back a corner.
Nanoda quickly hooked the cloak back over her and pulled it closed — and only then understood what Jane was pointing to.
"Because Jane always gets hurt in battle, the clothes Mother gives her get ruined so quickly. If Jane had a magic that could conjure clothes, it would be so much easier!"
"Ah — that magic. It's quite simple, actually… I'll teach you when we get back."
"Okay! Mother, does this magic have a name?"
"A name?"
Nanoda realized, all at once, that whether it was Severance Magic, the mana-flight she had learned from Aura, or the Paradox Magic that came to her by instinct — all of those had, in their own way, come to belong to her later.
She had, without ever thinking about it, simply overlooked the very first magic that had truly been her own.
"The same as all those strange little folk magics out there. A magic that conjures a black cloak — let's just call it that."
A magic invented on a passing whim, for a moment of convenience — and it was precisely that kind of magic that spoke most truly to the endless possibility that magic held.
____
👻🔥Seek: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Uchiha Reborn in Jujutsu Kaisen: The System Thinks I'm in Konoha, but I'm Not
Let's hit these goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = 1 extra chapter for the public!