Flame, having accepted the deal, lifted her head slightly and looked at Eight.

“So? What do I have to do?”
“It’s simple. Just lend me a spirit.”
“A spirit?”

As if it was no big deal, Flame immediately brought out a spirit that had been hiding in some corner.

─Meow, meow-!? Flame, are you... selling out a comrade!?
“Ordinary people can’t see spirits, can they? That’s…”
“Oh, I can see it just fine, so it’s not an issue.”

And I can touch it too—.
With that, Eight took the spirit from Flame. The spirit squirmed frantically in his grasp, letting out shrieks.

─W-What are you trying to do!?
“It’s just a light experiment.”
─A light experiment…?
“Don’t worry. Even if you die, I can revive you.”
─That’s not comforting at all...

The spirit, unaware that it was now in the presence of the very man who had banished the Fairy Queen and sealed off the spirit realm, had a strong premonition that its future wouldn’t be bright.

Well, hadn’t this man introduced himself as an evil scientist? No one who does that is ever normal. And didn’t he seem far too polite and reasonable to be an actual villain?

The fact that someone so polite was calling himself an evil scientist only meant he was that much more villainous in other ways. Realizing this, the spirit trembled in fear.

And soon enough, it would understand that its fears were justified.

We returned to City E with Flame, which meant back to Eblis Corporation, where my laboratory was located.

Flame hesitated as she looked at the building bustling with people, her expression growing incredulous after learning it was the headquarters of an evil organization.

“Seriously? What kind of villain organization does something so blatant...?”

I could relate. What kind of villain group puts up a skyscraper right in the middle of a city? But there was no proper answer to give, so I just laughed awkwardly and led her into the lab.

Maybe it was the crowd that made her uncomfortable, or perhaps it was the fear of being spotted entering a villain organization as a magical girl, but unlike her bold demeanor back home, Flame was clearly tense and withdrawn.

Fortunately, she relaxed the moment we entered the private confines of the lab, where no one could see her.

“Flame? So, now...”
“Harea. That’s my real name.”
“Sorry?”
“Don’t call me by my magical girl name here. What if someone hears you?”
“Ah, I see. Harea, then.”

Though I learned Flame’s real name, I pretended it was no big deal, but Aile, who was standing nearby, seemed somewhat displeased, glaring back and forth between me and Harea.

Suddenly, she grabbed my sleeve and shouted.

“I-I’m Sangyunie!”
“...?”
“Oh, um... I mean—since Harea is Ha... Rare... I’m, uh, Sang... Unique... No, forget it...”

Ignoring Aile’s strange attempt at a joke, I went ahead and activated the gate I used for experiments with Arima.

A portal, teeming with indescribable energy, began to swirl, and the spirit, seeing it, screamed in terror, trying to escape from Harea’s grasp.

─Meow meow-! Flame! I’ll die! If I go in there, I’ll die!
“Shut up, you idiot. He said even if you die, he’ll revive you.”
─You expect me to believe that!? He’s insane!
“Yeah, that’s right. I’m insane. That’s why I became a magical girl in the first place.”
─Save me-!

Annoyed by the spirit’s frantic squirming, Harea handed it to me. I attached various devices to the spirit’s body, then tossed it straight into the portal.

Almost immediately, a stream of data began pouring in from the equipment attached to the spirit.

“Can you hear me?”
─Meow, meow? What is this...?
“It seems like you can hear me just fine. How does it look over there?”

The monitor displayed the spirit swimming through the spirit realm. It darted around its home realm, but soon, it began to frown in confusion as if sensing something was off.

─Is this really the spirit realm?
“Yes, it is.”
─No, something feels wrong...

The spirit glanced around, taking a deep breath. From my research, I knew that this was how spirits consumed food.

Spirits fed on emotional information, more precisely, information refined by the Fairy Queen from the emotions absorbed by magical girls fighting the world's enemies.

But since the Fairy Queen had disappeared after her true nature was revealed, there was no longer any refined emotional information left in the spirit realm.

─It’s like... like time has stopped... This feels really unsettling...
“You’re surprisingly observant for a spirit.”

─Are you mocking me!? I’ll have you know, I graduated as the top of my class at Spirit Academy—!

I tuned out the spirit’s ramblings and focused on the data coming in on the monitor. It seemed the spirit couldn’t perceive what I was seeing, possibly due to the Fairy Queen’s reality-warping abilities, but the data didn’t lie.

‘The Fairy Queen left days ago... There’s no way everything would still be intact.’

The world is always changing. Just like an abandoned house in the countryside gradually decays, so too would this dimension return to its natural state without artificial maintenance.

A state of pure chaos.

The fact that the spirit hadn’t noticed this suggested that the Fairy Queen’s reality-warping powers were still active, maintaining the illusion of the spirit realm. Or perhaps something else was keeping it going.

‘─Though I can’t see it either.’

Even I couldn’t completely escape the effects of reality-warping. It was impossible for me to determine which part of the information I was receiving had been altered by the Fairy Queen’s powers and which hadn’t.

If reality-warping was still at play, even the data I received could be subconsciously filtered. In other words, even I couldn’t entirely bypass the Fairy Queen’s abilities.

However, humanity has always been a species that overcomes its limitations with tools. If I couldn’t see it, I’d just use a tool that could.

Beep—!

‘There we go.’

The AI processed the disparity between the spirit’s observations and the data collected by the instruments. It seemed that the reality-warping powers couldn’t alter second-hand data, and soon, I started noticing strange anomalies.

Inputting this data into the computer revealed bizarre images on the monitor that the spirit couldn’t perceive.

The hidden depths of the spirit realm, concealed by the Fairy Queen, were finally revealed.

“...This is...”
“Aile, close your eyes.”
“Y-Yes? O-Okay...”

Harea, trembling, gripped the monitor and leaned in close as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

Telling her it wasn’t necessary, I zoomed in on the parts she was trying to look at. Harea immediately recoiled and began vomiting on the floor.

“Ugh, blergh, uueegh—!”

As the floor was covered in her red vomit, Aile, startled by the sound of retching, opened her eyes wide.

When she saw the image on the screen—an enemy of the world—Aile flinched in surprise. But unlike Harea, she didn’t react as violently.

Perhaps it was because, unlike Harea, Aile had no personal connection to what was on the screen.

“U-Um... Scientist? That’s...”
─Meow? What’s going on? I’m curious, meow.

Listening to both of them, I continued working on the computer. Soon, the same information was transmitted to the spirit’s optical nerves.

And the moment the spirit saw the grotesque, fused forms of the world’s enemies and the magical girls—creatures that could no longer be called human—it gasped in recognition.

─A-Aqua? Leaf? What... What happened...?

“What happened is simple. The Fairy Queen gave magical girls such great power for a reason.”

I frowned slightly as I looked at the screaming magical girls. Or rather, at the half-magical girl, half-world-enemy hybrids—if there was even a word for such a thing.

─Save us &@$@!#@!
─I want to die...

This was the secret the Fairy Queen had desperately tried to hide.

The final fate of the dead magical girls.

The reason the world’s enemies never truly disappeared, no matter how many magical girls defeated them.