“Stella, hand me the thing,” Ivory said, raising her left hand and waiting for Stella to place the item into her palm.
“Just a moment, I’m looking for it.”
Stella unzipped her shoulder bag and rummaged through it, pulling out a chip entwined with vines, which she then handed to Ivory.
Ivory took the chip, glanced at it, and then passed it to Miri Dreamwell and Eve Nightburn for them to examine as well.
“You should recognize this, right?”
Huh?
Eve Nightburn didn’t immediately grasp what Ivory was saying.
Such a Cthulhu-esque thing… had she seen it before?
“Senior, are you referring to that vine-covered doll rabbit?” Miri quickly recalled the giant doll rabbit she had encountered at the mall during the winter break.
Though the vines weren’t as thick as back then, their essence was undeniably similar.
“Mm,” Ivory didn’t deny it. “This is the true form of that Calamity. As for the rest, they’re merely embellishments.”
“This thing was actually this small?”
Eve stared at the chip, recalling the two to three-meter-tall pink doll rabbit from before, completely unable to connect the two in her mind.
Ivory didn’t answer Eve’s question, instead walking over to the young girl who lay there with her eyes closed, seemingly asleep.
Ivory stopped in her tracks, then looked at Eve. “Please move away from here. Make sure it doesn’t notice you.”
As she spoke, Ivory pointed at the purple-haired girl beside her, signaling for Eve to keep her distance.
“Why can’t Eve watch?” Miri found it strange. Was there some trick to it?
“No,” Ivory corrected Miri’s assumption. “I meant the machine shouldn’t detect Eve, not that Eve can’t watch the machine.”
“Alright…”
Eve felt a bit disappointed upon hearing this, the antennae on her head drooping down sadly.
Though Eve also wanted to watch, since it wasn’t allowed, she had to stay aside, after all, she was just hitching a ride.
She could only go along with what the team said.
Seeing that Eve had moved a sufficient distance away, Ivory unplugged all the wires from the girl’s body. Holding the chip in her hand, she smiled and posed a question to the three girls around her.
“I’d like to know, how do you all perceive the concept of life?”
“Is it the intertwining of blood and flesh?”
“Is it the awakening of wisdom?”
“Is it the need for sustenance and reproduction?”
“Or… is it the desire to live?”
Ivory didn’t give them time to answer. After speaking, she inserted the chip into the slot at the back of the girl’s neck.
In the next moment, the girl, who had been lying with her eyes closed, opened them.
“Ah!!!”
The girl’s first act upon waking was to let out a piercing scream!
“It hurts… it’s terrifying…”
Clutching her body, the girl was lost in the horrors of her memories.
She vaguely remembered the sensation of being pierced by something.
But back then, she couldn’t see anything.
After hearing some incomprehensible words, everything else became a blur.
“No, no, just now… there was something big… something huge…”
The girl recalled that long wave.
She felt as though, in that moment, the entire world’s force had crashed down upon her.
Vowing to erase her completely.
The girl curled up, feeling as though she had already died, that even thinking about being alive was wrong.
“That’s enough, stop fussing. You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
Ivory yanked the girl’s head up from her curled position, forcing her to take in her surroundings.
When the girl was compelled to see the colorful and tangible environment, she was struck with even greater fear!
“Ah!!!”
The girl’s body coiled even tighter. This place was far too strange, strange to the point where she couldn’t comprehend it at all.
How could the world have form?
How could things have color?
Shouldn’t this world just be a pitch-black void?
In the next instant, a mass of vines burst through the girl’s steel body, spreading out from her back.
Seeing these vines, a folding fan immediately fell out from Ivory’s sleeve. Opening it, Ivory waved it, sending out a blade of wind that severed the vines.
“Ah!!!”
The sensation of being cut once again reached the girl’s consciousness. The intense pain caused her to collapse to her knees.
“Blood… I need blood…”
As the girl spoke, the vines from her back attempted to extend once more. This time, Ivory didn’t give her another chance. She forcibly pulled out the chip that had just been inserted into the girl’s body, and in the next moment, the vines attached to the chip lost their vitality, becoming listless once more.
“See,” Ivory looked at Miri Dreamwell and Quinn Feathers, gauging their reactions.
“That thing was scared…” Miri understood the situation clearly. Without a doubt, that Calamity had displayed fear.
“Uh…”
Quinn didn’t have much to say, only feeling that what had just transpired felt somewhat like animal abuse.
Even feeling like abuse was an understatement—it was more like an outright slaughter! It was comparable to… well, a butcher slaughtering a pig.
Actually, that comparison wasn’t entirely accurate, because slaughtering pigs is just for the sake of slaughtering pigs, while this was more like using it and then discarding it as trash.
Is this the proficiency of veteran Magical Girls?
“Scared?” Ivory still wore a smile, gracefully tucking her folding fan back into her sleeve.
Looking at Ivory’s smile, Miri and Quinn shook their heads repeatedly. While they themselves weren’t exactly scared, the senior’s smile was genuinely terrifying.
“Stella,” Ivory turned to Stella. “Didn’t you tell me before? That this Calamity would play ‘Für Elise’ and repeat ‘Welcome to the Happy Paradise’?”
Stella nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”
“Then tell me, why did this thing just say so many emotionally charged words?”
After speaking, Ivory toyed with the chip in her hand, waiting for a response. The answer wasn’t intended for herself, of course.
“It’s simple,” Stella explained. “The amp within the doll rabbit only had a limited set of phrases, making it impossible for it to utter more complex statements.”
“Whereas Emov’s vocabulary includes all human language phrases.”
“If Chinese is set as the primary language, it naturally uses Chinese to speak.”
After Stella’s explanation, Ivory nodded and said, “Call Eve over. The next stage of the experiment requires her as a variable.”
“I’ll go get my sister,” Miri said, dashing out of the small room to fetch Eve.
Stepping out through the rolling shutter, Miri looked around and noticed that Eve had simply found a park bench and gone to sleep.
“Sigh~” Miri sighed. This habit of sleeping on any random bench was really bad!
If she wasn’t careful, she could easily be snatched away by bad people!
“I’ll have to properly teach my sister about this later!”
