I prepared a box—a small, square box just large enough to hold with both hands.
After placing some random object inside, I closed the box. Once sealed, the contents could no longer be retrieved until the lid was opened.

Holding out the box, I said:

“Here, try to take out the item inside this box. But you can’t touch the box.”
“Huh? Huhhh... Is this some kind of riddle...?”

Aile tilted her head in confusion and used magic to move the box. It seemed she assumed that using magic would suffice since I said not to touch it with her hands.

I drew a big “X” with my hands and let out a sound to signal she was wrong.

“Wrong. When I said not to touch it, I meant don’t interfere with it at all.”
“Don’t interfere? Then how am I supposed to take it out?”
“Well, you see…”

“—Like this, obviously.”

Just as I was about to give Aile the correct answer, Arima appeared out of nowhere, reached into thin air, and pulled out the object from inside the box. Spatial magic. It seemed she hadn’t earned her title of “Grand Mage” through luck; she demonstrated it effortlessly.

“Arima, I’m in the middle of teaching... Don’t interfere.”
“Ahaha♤ Sorry? But isn’t this the right answer?”
“Well, I guess it is.”

After taking the phone back from Arima, I turned to Aile once more. Aile looked at me with a slightly flustered expression, as if wondering whether she was supposed to do the same thing.

Needless to say, I wasn’t asking Aile to perform spatial magic like Arima.

“What do you think the principle behind this is, Aile?”
“Huh? Well… Connecting space, maybe?”
“That’s correct, but... you only get 30 points.”
“Ehh... Then what’s a 100-point answer?”
“You’d have to explain how it was connected, too.”

Aile looked at me with a face that seemed to ask how she was supposed to know something she hadn’t even learned. But honestly, I’d be disappointed if she didn’t figure it out. After all, I didn’t raise her to be a knowledge-filled, outdated computer. I’d trained her to think for herself and apply what she learned.

Sure enough, after closing her eyes and thinking deeply for a moment, Aile soon came up with a 70-point answer.

“So, Arima must have connected the space in front of her to the space inside the box, right? Using magic, I mean. So... it’s kind of like something higher-dimensional, not part of our normal reality…”
“Good. I’ll accept that.”
“Accept it, you say...”
“The correct answer is a connection to a higher dimension.”

On the whiteboard, I drew a circle. Then, inside the circle, I drew a square. I asked how to remove the square without touching the circle from the outside.

It was the exact same problem as before. The only difference was that it had been lowered by one dimension. Since this version was far more intuitive, Aile quickly figured out the answer.

“Ah...! So you could remove it like this?”

Using her sleeve, Aile casually erased the square and smiled as if she’d finally understood the correct answer. As she realized, the way to remove an object from a sealed box without touching the box was to grab it from one dimension higher.

Of course, this only seemed simple because we exist in a three-dimensional coordinate system and were dealing with the two-dimensional problem. In reality, interfering with the fourth dimension—let alone perceiving such a world—was extraordinarily difficult.

‘Who would’ve thought my hobby of making tesseracts in middle school would come in handy?’

I never imagined that implementing a four-dimensional regular polytope, something I learned from watching YouTube videos, would be useful now. Thanks to that, I could consciously perceive the world of the fourth dimension, even if just faintly.

I taught Aile the same method and had her practice constructing four-dimensional shapes in her mind. She looked at me in disbelief as I explained.

“Is something like that even possible…?”
“Possible or not, there’s someone standing right here who’s done it, isn’t there?”
“Hmm, well, I’m not exactly a scientist like you…”
“You have to try. This isn’t something I can do for you.”
“Wh-why? Is something wrong?”
“Should I say there is? Or isn’t?”

I smirked bitterly and stared into the distance, recalling the saint who had visited the lab. Upon realizing I wasn’t an assassin, she had released me from her restraints, offered a formal apology, and promised to come back to apologize properly later.

But that didn’t mean I could afford to sit idly by and let my guard down. I needed to gain enough power to stand against the saint if necessary.

“There’s a chance we might end up fighting beings from the fourth dimension, let’s put it that way.”
“F-fight? With the fourth dimension? That sounds like something out of a magical girl movie…”
“Well, it’s not certain.”

I smiled slightly as I said that, but my response seemed to make Aile even more anxious. Watching her rack her brain and focus on the exercises I’d given her, I couldn’t help but feel a little amused.

In reality, if we’re talking probabilities, there’s a much greater chance we won’t have to fight at all. But leaving Aile to her practice, I began working on a weapon capable of attacking four-dimensional beings. After all, knowing what you’re up against means there’s always a solution.

After all, an invisible blade is always the most terrifying.

*****

The next day.
The Saint kept her promise.

[The Saint’s First Pilgrimage Begins in E City!]
[Come and Witness a Miracle for Yourselves!]

The Saint rented out a church in E City and held a pilgrimage event there. Naturally, the followers who usually trailed after her were present as well.

E City was thrown into chaos by an influx of unexpected tourists. The city wasn’t a place people typically visited for leisure, so there simply weren’t enough stores to feed or lodgings to accommodate the tens, no, hundreds of thousands of followers who had suddenly arrived.

But there was no way they could build new hotels just for this one-time, temporary boom. The Saint’s followers spread out and filled the entire city.

“Crazy woman.”

I couldn’t hold back a hollow laugh as I watched the scene unfold.
She claimed she was coming to apologize officially, but is this what she meant? Did she come to declare war instead? Why bring all her followers with her?

Of course, she probably hadn’t brought the followers herself. As a Saint, she couldn’t exactly hide her own events, and those who heard about her location had simply followed her of their own accord. The resulting damage was something E City had to bear alone.

And considering that our Evilus Corporation essentially ruled over E City, this could very well be seen as an attack against our corporation...

“What are you thinking about—?”
“...Just wondering how that person plans to get to our building.”
“Ahaha— Yeah, you’ve got a point there.”

Six, who had returned from a reconnaissance trip to the church where the Saint’s pilgrimage was being held, nodded quietly, realizing the absurdity of the situation herself.

If she’d come quietly like last time, maybe she could’ve pulled it off, but could the Saint really get into this building unnoticed under these circumstances? Did such a probability even exist?

I decided to wait and see if she’d come, as if testing the limits of her abilities. But contrary to her claim that she would come to apologize officially, the Saint never showed up herself.

Instead, I received a text message.

< I deeply apologize for my behavior last time. >
< As a gesture of atonement, I have decided to hold a prayer service for the citizens of E City. >
< Oh, it’s the Saint, by the way. >

I stared at the sudden message in disbelief. Holding a prayer service for the citizens of E City as a gesture of apology to me? That alone was ridiculous, but what baffled me even more was the fact that I had never given her my contact information.

< How did you get my number? >
《 I guessed? 》

After reading her reply, I was at a loss for words and stopped typing mid-response. “Guessed,” she said. It wasn’t theoretically impossible. The real issue was that she’d managed to get it right in a single attempt, despite the astronomical odds.

Surely the Saint hadn’t manually input every number from 0000 to 9999 to send texts to everyone. If she had, everyone would have ended up with her phone number, and no system even allowed for that many messages to be sent simultaneously.

‘So it’s not just about using her power simply...’

Realizing I’d learned something more about the Saint’s abilities, I pulled out the binoculars I’d been working on for a while. In the distance, the church where the Saint was holding her service came into view. It was easy to spot because of the massive crowd of people lined up around it.

I aimed the binoculars at where the Saint was supposed to be, raised my perception by one dimension, and in that instant—

「　」made eye contact with me.

“...!!”

It was—
It was something with the most hideous form a human mind could possibly conceive.
The moment it met my gaze, it started trembling uncontrollably, like a bug that had just noticed fire.

Thrashing about wildly in the four-dimensional space, it suddenly stretched a hand toward the Saint far below.

“—Shit.”

The next moment.
The Saint’s body, touched by it, began to swell grotesquely.