*
A week had passed since we last pledged our allegiance to the Illnoia administration. Or rather, we were forced to. My injuries had worsened since I stopped being transformed for a few hours last week, the anti-magic... It converted magical particles into anti-magical particles, worsening the haemorrhage. My physical abilities had grown weaker, my progress had basically reversed to at least a month prior.
If I were to estimate now, my physical stats like strength and endurance would be at a low D-grade, and the rest would be borderline C-grade. Combat wise, I'll practically be useless for a while. My movements are way too slow, even a low grade magical girl could match up to my speed and overwhelm me with power. Throughout time, magical girls have trained for a large portion of their lives, only to meet a limit. The limit of a low-grade magical girl's stats would be C, followed by B-grade for medium and finally A for high. Anything beyond was not in that simplified system of classifying magical girls. Divine? I think that was the title briefly mentioned by the teacher.
In the present, I suppose we are now affiliated with the Illnoia administration. I can't trust them, especially not if they kidnapped us. It meant that I could possibly be forced to fight the magical girls in my previous home, the sanctuary of the eye god. After a day, they fulfilled their promise and provided basic rooms with beds and a small lamp desk. There wasn't even a chair and proper desk for literacy related activities like reading or writing. Perhaps I was just too used to the comfortable life in the labyrinth. My room was basically like this before I moved into the labyrinth anyway.
Perhaps, I had gotten soft and in over my own head. Ray's defeat was attributed to that other magical girl's final skill, the pinnacle of her power to manipulate probability. Decent chance, it had probably boosted my own power to finish off Ray from the inside of her head.
I'm that weak huh. It would take years of training to go up a grade, like how normal muscles are built with months of a routine schedule and a diet that favours muscle growth. I have unlocked my second skill, that much is for certain. With that alone I could be called a medium-grade magical girl after I recover my strength from this anti-magic pain in the behind. It's been 2 and a half months, maybe more since that time. Why is her attack still having an influence on my body when she is long dead... Just when I nearly recover, my recovery progress gets set back to at least a month...
Another thing I've noticed, this magic makes no sense at all. It isn't like the ones I've read about in fantasy or other-world light novels. Once the magic has activated and the magical particles consumed by it, the phenomenon created through it continues to exist. Usually magic like fireballs or tsunamis would disperse into mana and drift around, lost into the atmosphere. However, the magic I have here is permanent... Otherwise the anti-magic would have been gone once Ray died. Unlike stories, phenomena born from magic stays in reality, they are like mistakes you cannot erase.
If a caster like me is still alive, it's natural that we can send the magic phenomena back into the atmosphere as magical particles. But if someone were to forget, it would lead to catastrophic effects on the environment. If the effect was to "create" instead of "shoot" that is. "Shooting" focuses on the amount of force behind the attack and launches a fixed volume of attack of quantifiable. "Create" is magic that is intent on constantly causing an effect, so it sucks in nearby magical particles and continues like a black hole in a sense, constantly sucking in magical particles and causing deadly phenomena.
If I were made to distinguish between them, what I learned under the Eye God's faction was more theoretical and touches on the bare surface of things like magic and monster characteristics. What the teachings under the Illnoia administration focuses on are the things that lean toward the practical side, giving tips on how to deal with certain abilities of monsters and maybe enemy magical girls.
It made me think, how was the territory under the Eye God so luxurious while even the Illnoia administration, a territory with much more manpower then us, are fighting by their tooth and nail. Going as far as to kidnap us for more military strength. I'm sure they have an amount of military strength far more than they let on, they had absorbed the people displaced by The Great Disaster around the rushiic region. In other words, the high density areas around Russia and Russia itself.
After half a week, we were moved a lot more north using an intricate group of teleportation magic systems. These systems kept us from being detected by the security of the Sanctuary maidens. They were just called a security force or border patrol by the people that lived in the Eye God's sanctuary, but from the outside they had such a name, 'sanctuary maidens'.
Due to how large the rushiic region was, they were able to sustain large numbers of people. Unfortunately not even magic can change the climate unless the magical girl was wasteful of magical particles. This made living conditions rather tough, and so their Western frontier decided to raid the nearby faction for resources. The Gangrea Monarchy. They were the rulers of the europic region.
Due to how The Great Disaster had shifted all the continents into practically one, new names were given. The Gangrea Monarchy was a small region that covered where european countries used to be, they were basically ganged up on by those in the Englandic region, rushiic region and Chuvatre region.
Chuvatre covers the Africa and Middle East, the architecture there made it difficult for magical girls to save people in time, so their much lower surviving population forced them to work together. The Englandic region is a weird one... Discovering why they are their own region or why they have so much military power all of a sudden is opening another can of worms.
In other words, the Gangrea Monarchy is gone. The people defected to other regions or died in battle, their King's fate is another mystery. He united almost all the European countries and amassed immense power, lasting an entire month or two of warfare, taking down many enemy generals with him and brought hope to his subjects. Suffice to say, their ruins have plenty of resources for the other regions to take. From the previous team up, now the Illnoia administration and Grundo alliance from rushiic and chuvatre regions respectively, are eyeing the sanctuary of the Eye God.
The sanctuary of the Eye God, not participating in any war had enjoyed months of peace of productivity. Even research and development beyond what the other countries could imagine. My magical particle regulator was one of those fruits of research, having it save my life and act as an emergency bomb at the same time was really useful. With it, I got used to my internal injuries and could at least live comfortably without pain in my transformed state.
As long as nothing bad happens and I stay as a magical girl, the injuries that 'create anti-magical particles with a punch' should not worsen and heal up eventually. Suffering this long built my resistance to magical attacks up, though that only applies to the surface of my body as the 'will' stat.
As this weak ended, we finally got done giving our superiors the information about the labyrinth to the South. There are others like us from small pockets of other territories from the Eye God's sanctuary. Grundo alliance could only provide military strength, while the Illnoia federation could do everything by itself in this upcoming war. Things like gathering intelligence and advancing weapon development are things the Grundo alliance have too little manpower to do. They're focused more on survival in gathering essentials and developing sustainable ways of food production and such. Due to such a gap in capability, they are looked down on quite a lot by their allied factions.
The Illnoia administration may be larger than russia as they press into territories of where china used to be, swallowing Mongolia entirely.
"... Are you planning to come back." (Kanou)
"... You know, I've seen just a tiny bit of the outside world from this one week. It's amazing for you to find me, and I'm ecstatic I could keep in touch with guide-sama.
But I think I'll stay. "
Her grey bangs swayed to the side as she made a conflicting look. Her cheeks tensed and the ridge between her eyebrows creased together with her forehead. She covers her face with her hand immediately to hide her expression. It's clear, she thought my decision was extremely dumb. That I would only be put in future and be made to fight my previous home. It does sound dumb, but she realises it too. Why I chose to stay.
Taking her face away, her cloak swayed a bit due to her movements. It was still her signature forest green cloak and black leather amour underneath. She was the very same Kanou, after a week she noticed I was gone and found me immediately. Her tracking skills were quite impeccable, or maybe they were a function of her magic skills. Anyway, it was bad for her to stay here. Knowing her, she may destroy the whole thing I've planned. I didn't just defect to an enemy faction, promising them my strength with no end goal in mind. And I need Kanou to understand that most of all.
Using a little banter to lighten the mood. My room could be bugged for all I know, so I'm sorry but I'll have to test your faith.
"haa~. Got it. I'll visit next week to say hi. If you got anything to say then, you can tell me. Well, I doubt you need a conversation partner though... How'd you get the same room with Myuu." (Kanou)
She looked off to the side where Myuu was sleeping peacefully on her own bed, her grey locks bounced as she did so. After we had moved nearer inside the Illnoia administration territory, we were stationed near the border, but not sticking to the border like other stations. This is where we are set to train as soldiers, and I threatened the nearby instructor to set up my room to be shared with Myuu.
It was a military base not a vacation home, there were four of us to each room. Unlike the previous decrepit lodging though, we now had closets and desks to do work on next to our beds. The closets were small and faced the side of the beds, and the the desks were next to the left and right walls. The room was square shaped with the beds in a square formation.
The remaining 2 roommates were Izumi and Vibell. Strangely enough, Izumi had brown hair. But if Vibell could have grey hair at such a young age, brown doesn't seem so weird anymore. Anyway, those colour changes were probably influences from their magical girl transformation. My own hair was plain black after all, no colour change at all, not even a different tone of grey that seems to be popular nowadays. Bright colours aren't favoured that much since they look like they came out of a manga or anime. Most people typically prefer dull colours like mine, so they could walk around in the streets unnoticed.
Not being transformed doesn't feel safe anymore, since the world is currently so dangerous. Monsters had formed nests in unpopulated territories like the ruins of the Gangrea monarchy and countless small pockets between the largest factions. The largest factions being the ones that rule a continent's worth of land, like the sanctuary of the Eye God or Illnoia administration.
For this simple reason, monster nests adopt the name of 'pockets'. The largest one had a war with a nearby faction and got annihilated after the generals were sick of sending soldiers just to die and went in themselves. The second largest on the other hand, one of the monsters had gained intelligence and was making it too much trouble for the pocket to be worth raiding. They are gathering strength somehow, as some people deduced from the monster King's speech, but otherwise nobody sees them as a threat as long as they don't come out of their own territory.
Where monsters come from is still unknown. But they sure are useful training partners. Getting shipped all the way inside Illnoia administration's large territory, just to be used as a dummy for our magic skills. Their corpses get so damaged that they become no longer recognisable. Even low grade magical girls can take care of 60% of the different species of monsters.
Training with Myuu huh, this should be fun for a little wild. But I think I can finally piece together what I should do next. Yes, this will surely be exciting.