"Although I am not quite sure what is happening, is the situation really that terrible?"
The old Ford car glided through the night sky, plunging headfirst into the cloud layer.
The clouds were sliced open by the front of the car; the white mist dispersed to both sides of the windshield and quickly closed back up.
The car headlights suddenly flared up, the beam of light drawing a narrow pathway ahead—was this perhaps the so-called T... Ty... Tyndall effect?
The car body vibrated gently every now and then, the suspension emitting faint, creaking echoes, as if reminding Asakura that it was an old skeleton that had debuted in 1959 and had long been out of print—even so, at this moment the old Ford car was still advancing at a high speed exceeding two hundred kilometers per hour.
The pinpoint stars in the distance flickered dimly, obscured by cloud shadows and then revealed again.
Suddenly, like a whale breaching the water's surface, it burst out from the cloud layer; the field of vision instantly opened up, and the night sky became clear and profound.
"It's terrible to the extreme."
Asakura steadied the steering wheel, feeling that the old Ford car's mood hadn't been very good lately—probably caused by having sent it to its death before, compounded by working consecutive night shifts.
"Even so, I think your driving movements had still better be a little more gentle," said the Sorting Hat, sticking its head out from inside the backpack at some unknown point (if that counted as a head): "If this continues, this junk car feels like it could disintegrate at any moment—I am just a hat, not a parachute; spare me from skydiving at over a thousand feet."
"It doesn't matter, when the time comes I will turn you into a snake."
"No, no, no, isn't this answer completely meaningless? As a hat, if my luck is good I can still maintain my original state, at most being blown to some strange place, but falling down from that high as a snake would actually be worse, right?"
"Didn't you know? Some snakes can glide." Asakura replied.
"...Magical creatures?" The Sorting Hat didn't quite believe it.
"No, just ordinary snakes that learned to glide through long biological evolution." Asakura said: "By means of flaring out their own ribs."
"What a bizarre and horrifying method, just thinking about it is frightening—even though I don't have ribs."
"So if you don't want to experience the feeling of having your ribs flared out, shut your mouth for me."
Asakura threatened.
"Your heart is in disarray," the Sorting Hat said.
"Your art style is in disarray," Asakura criticized.
As a mystical item from the wizarding world, don't speak in such a martial arts style tone!
"Normally you would be calmer; is it because there is someone you care about over there?" The Sorting Hat ignored Asakura's criticism and continued.
"...Ruri is still over there."
Asakura originally wanted to say 'Speaking to me in this kind of tone, do you have no one you care about', but thinking about it, this thing really didn't seem to have anyone it could call a cared-for person, so he simply swallowed his words.
"Oh, that child... quite talented. However, originally I just said it casually, but looking at it now, your connection to this world has already become much tighter than I thought."
"What kind of ghost story nonsense are you talking?" Asakura furrowed his brows.
"Because in the past, didn't you often drift outside of daily life, coldly watching everything in this world like a bystander?" the Sorting Hat said.
"Why make it sound like I'm some kind of psychopath."
"Honestly, it would be safer if you were a psychopath."
"..."
Asakura glanced at the hat, deciding that when he got the chance, he would send it to a dry cleaner and instruct the manager to wash this guy thoroughly from the inside out.
Presumably sensing Asakura's malice, the Sorting Hat gave a cough.
But as a hat, it originally had only a mouth left, so it did not back down because of this, but instead continued: "A fellow like you were back then, acting as a bystander or even placing yourself in a higher dimension to look down upon the world, is the most dangerous kind. Because in their eyes, the world has already lost its color, becoming merely a sort of toy that can be toyed with at will. No matter how wicked an action they commit, mentally they won't feel even a single shred of guilt—at most, it's just a feeling on the level of 'tearing a few pages out of a book'."
Asakura felt a sudden realization.
Isn't what this fellow is talking about the "Fourth Calamity" player trope?
Recalling carefully, at the very beginning he indeed was incompatible with this world, completely unable to integrate into it, and due to the hardships of life, he had actually developed some negative views toward this world.
"So that's how it is... is that why it's 'Azkaban'?" Asakura then murmured to himself.
"Of course there is a certain element of a joke," the Sorting Hat said, "If I were the Minister for Magic at that time, I wouldn't really have thrown you into Azkaban."
Asakura raised his eyebrows, feeling that the Sorting Hat had finally chickened out.
Just as he wanted to play a meme, the Sorting Hat continued: "To deal with this kind of fellow, I would directly give you a kiss."
"Nobody would like a kiss full of the smell of hair oil."
"It's not mine, it's a Dementor's Kiss."
It's decided, tonight it goes to the dry cleaner.
"But you are much better now; you have the scent of a true human, rather than being like before, resembling a ghost... no, it should be said a Peeves? More ethereal than a ghost, and the existence itself is even more bizarre..."
"Thank you for the compliment."
"You're welcome."
The old Ford car continued to travel through the night, from time to time emitting creaking noises that made one's heart skip a beat.
Wonder if adding some lubricant to it later would make it a bit better, Asakura muttered in his heart.
"So, what exactly happened to make you so restless? That child, hasn't she already mastered a terrifying magic spell, becoming as powerful as a god to the vast majority of mortals?"
The Sorting Hat presumably wanted to divert its own attention and stop listening to the irritating creaking noise, so it continued to converse with Asakura.
"The situation this time... the thing that needs to be resolved, if I am not guessing wrong, should be the fog."
Asakura fell silent for a moment.
Even for everyday scenes, once enveloped by fog, everything becomes hazy, reality is sliced apart, as if sinking down into a fantasy.
Therefore, a place enveloped by fog can also barely be called a 'Demon Realm'.
Asakura wasn't clear why monsters like Siren Head would pop out, but since they didn't show up openly all over the world, it means the fog is a necessity for them.
It could even be said that they themselves can only appear within a 'Demon Realm' that carries fog.
In other words, as long as the fog is resolved and the 'Demon Realm' is broken, this incident can be resolved.
"But magic spells themselves actually have affinity compatibility."
Asakura continued.
Although there was no absolute necessity to explain things to a hat, just like how some programmers specifically buy a little yellow duck and comb through their thoughts by explaining their own code to it, at this moment Asakura also treated the hat as a trash can, casually dumping out his somewhat cluttered thoughts.
"For an intangible, substanceless thing like fog, my [Candle] spell deals with it quite effortlessly. But conversely, [Snake] and Ruri's [Beast] would find it very difficult to face this kind of situation—"
Under normal circumstances, even if one unleashed [Snake] directly at the fog in front of them, at most it would merely stir up a snake-shaped airflow in mid-air. Once the entity wriggled around aimlessly in the atmosphere for a brief while, it would simply dissipate again.
Ruri's [Beast] spell would presumably result in the exact same situation. After all, a thing like fog is incredibly difficult to target.
"Unless the consumption of the spell is completely unrestricted, with an infinite output, directly treating the heavy fog as a single whole to perform a magical transformation... but if things go that way..." Asakura said in a heavy voice.
"Magical energy, right?"
The Sorting Hat understood his meaning as well.
Exactly, magical energy would fall short.
Ruri's magical energy was considered relatively high among the witches of the Ministry of Magic, but she was by no means number one, and there wasn't a generational gap between her and the few below her—except for Yukino, who stood as a completely flat horizontal line on the X-axis with zero fluctuations.
If she truly treated the entirety of the heavy fog as a single whole to unleash a spell.
A failed activation would already be the absolute best outcome.
Even if the spell backfired, resulting in the girl turning into some kind of animal herself, that could still be counted within the scope of manageable risks.
The scenario with the absolute biggest problem was a successful activation.
At that time, even if the issue of the fog was resolved, not only would her own magical energy be entirely drained, but she would likely end up just like Asagumo, being forced into a massive deficit of magical energy, ultimately paying with her life as the price.
"Right now, the only thing worth being glad about is that Ruri isn't a particularly smart child—"
Granted, she played games very well, and her academic performance was quite decent—considering this was achieved while she had to take care of her two younger sisters at home, shoulder the majority of the housework, and make her own cosplay outfits, her talent could already be considered top-tier among ordinary people.
But even so, in the past when Asakura explained some of his own insights regarding magic spells to her, although the young girl would always put on an act of 'Ah, I see, I understand, got it, got it,' judging by the clear, foolish light in her eyes that screamed 'I didn't understand a single thing'—resembling a university student—she clearly had not understood at all.
This implied that the young girl's inherent talent in regards to magic spells was not actually that high.
This wasn't looking down on her intelligence; rather, this kind of thing has absolutely nothing to do with IQ. It is just like how some people can look at mathematical formulas and see aesthetic beauty, while others get a headache just looking at cumbersome, dense numbers and symbols. Even if two people have completely identical IQs and put in the exact same amount of hard work, the efficiency of the former in learning mathematics will invariably be several times that of the latter.
Therefore, going by a normal person's logic, she ought to ignore the fog and choose to deal with the monsters popping out from inside it.
Considering that Siren Head belongs to the category with the absolute highest name recognition within Trevor Henderson's monster mythos, according to the rules of urban legends that 'the higher the name recognition, the stronger the supernatural enhancement,' this contraption rightfully should be among the strongest batch of monsters.
Yet even so, it could still be completely instantly killed by the young girl's [Beast] spell. This simply proved that the monsters within Trevor Henderson's monster mythos do not possess high supernatural resistance; they are purely physical-type monsters commonly seen in American horror—the kind that could perhaps be taken out by someone using an American Iaijutsu. Thus, even if the remaining individual monsters are colossal in body size, they shouldn't be a match for the young girl at all.
However, for some unknown reason, an inexplicable trace of unease still lingered in Asakura's heart.
"Hopefully there's still time..."
Right at this moment, Asakura's phone rang.
He pulled out his phone and discovered that the person calling him was actually Yui.
It looked like at this point, the campsite over there already knew he had left.
[Hello, is that Takuma-tan? Yukinon told me what happened!]
"How are things on Hiratsuka-sensei's end?"
[She started watching Jackie Chan movies, and while saying 'next time I'll definitely beat him up,' she began training while copying the style in the movie.]
"?"
Well, it looked like Hiratsuka wasn't genuinely angry.
...
Yeah, she shouldn't be angry, right?
[In short, Takuma-tan is treating us too much like outsiders! I want to go help out Ruri-chan too! No matter how you look at it, I'm a witch myself, so I can definitely be of help!]
"The situation over on the Osaka side is currently unclear..."
A rustling sound came from the other side of the receiver.
"Hold on, is there someone else next to you?" Asakura couldn't help but ask.
[Don't worry, I understand completely. Right now there's only Yukinon next to me... Huh? Yukinon, how did you shrink?]
[...I am Tsurumi.]
It looked like it was Tsurumi Rumi.
[Ah-wa-wa... Rumi-chan, big sister is actually talking about anime with big brother~ Big sister is a magical girl, see~]
A bizarre voice came through the receiver. Asakura figured Yuigahama must be clumsily striking a magical girl pose, trying to use that method to fool Tsurumi Rumi.
He could even picture that exact scene, which felt entirely like a public humiliation play.
[It's fine, I know Asakura-nii's secret,] Tsurumi Rumi said calmly.
[Ehhh, you actually know?!] Yui's shocked voice rang out.
[Besides, that pose of yours isn't a magical girl, it's Pretty Cure.]
[Aren't those two the same thing?]
[They're different. Plus, I even received a ring from Asakura-nii.]
[Ehhh, there's even a ring?!]
"Didn't you already see the ring yesterday?" Asakura couldn't help but criticize and complain.
[Oh right, that did happen.]
Yui realized.
[Setting aside this kind of pointless public humiliation play, there is an even more important matter right now.]
At this moment, the real Yukino's voice rang out, and Yui's tragic cry of "It's not a public humiliation play!" could be faintly heard in the background.
"What's the matter? I'm currently on my way rushing to Osaka."
Asakura also replied with a look of gravity: "I estimate it will still take a bit of time..."
[The situation is a bit complicated... First of all, right while Yui was performing her public humiliation play, the communications over on the Osaka side were restored.]
"Really?" Asakura asked in surprise, his heart sinking at the same time.
[It's true, I have already verified it. In addition, there is another issue.]
"What is it? Did your sister say something to you? How is Ruri doing right now?"
[All the calls I've placed over there are busy, but setting that aside, the remarks made by the citizens of Osaka online have already stirred up a massive storm.]
"Are they saying they saw monsters?" Asakura asked.
After all, with a scene of this scale, a supernatural disaster would be exceptionally difficult to keep under wraps no matter what.
[It is even more unbelievable than that,] Yukino's voice sounded a bit subtle as well.
She said:
[They are saying that Godzilla suddenly appeared, and after defeating the monsters that invaded Osaka, it went back into the sea from Osaka Bay.]
Asakura: "?"
What on earth did you say appeared?