Kays Translations

Chapter 81: Prototype Demon King Staff: Reficule

Autumn had deepened, and the disassembly of the Demon Lord Gremlin had reached 17%. The stack of memos — containing structural sketches, parts classifications, and my observations — was growing thicker by the day, so I built a dedicated bookshelf for them in the workshop.

Today, I invited the Blue Witch, a master of mana control, to check the magic behavior of the dismantled parts.

This time, I strictly warned Hiyori not to blow the parts away by accident, and was about to escort her to the workshop, but she stopped me, saying she had something to discuss.

“Hiroshi, actually… the Seer Mage wants to apply to move to Okutama.”

“What? No way.”

What the hell is she saying? There’s no way I’d agree.

I thought my answer was obvious, but Hiyori pressed on.

“Just hear me out. He knows it’s a long shot, but…”

“If it’s a long shot, the answer is no.”

“Still, just listen. Don’t be so dismissive. The least you can do is hear him out — you owe him that much, don’t you?”

Chided, I nodded reluctantly.

Even if I was going to refuse, flat-out shutting him down without listening wouldn’t sit right. He’s the one who saved Hiyori and Professor Ohinata’s lives. Even if I never directly owed him myself, anyone who saved my best friend and a friend’s life deserves at least that courtesy.

Turns out, Future Sight is worn out from overwork and wants to retire — get married and live a quiet life.

Apparently, he’s always dreamed of a slow life in the countryside, and he set his sights on Okutama for that.

Okutama’s pretty much ideal: mountains, rivers, no humans, no monsters, and a few witch kids around. Even though the old Ome Line’s in ruins, the roads still connect to the city, so it’s not too inconvenient.

He said even just a corner of Okutama would do, and lined up all sorts of tempting conditions, but after hearing him out, I gave my answer.

“Nope.”

“Yeah, figured.”

“If it’s a slow life he wants, it doesn’t have to be Okutama. Isn’t there plenty of land up in Hokkaido?”

“True, his second choice was Tohoku, and third was Hokkaido. Pretty sure Okutama’s the only community that would turn him down. Anywhere else, they’d welcome him with open arms… Oh, and this isn’t official yet, so don’t tell anyone.”

“Who would I even tell?”

He probably already foresaw the outcome of the negotiation. This really was a shot in the dark.

But I get it — Okutama is probably the best place in all of Japan for a slow, cozy life. Anyone would want to try their luck.

Spring meant foraging wild vegetables and fishing.

Summer was bug-catching and swimming in the rivers.

Autumn was for rice harvesting and matsutake mushroom hunting.

Winter offered snowy scenery, and if you stretched your legs, hot springs too.

Homemade miso, pickling beds, water wheels, wells — everything for the self-sufficient lifestyle was here. Security, too, was ironclad.

In a post-apocalyptic world, there’s nowhere else you could enjoy such a laid-back slow life.

But still — sorry, Okutama is mine. I’ve grown too used to living alone out here. Just knowing someone else might be living somewhere nearby would gnaw at me.

The Seer Mage will have to find his own piece of paradise. I wish him luck with his second life.

With Hiyori’s business done, it was time for mine.

I took her to the workshop, and led her in front of the dismantled parts laid out neatly on the big workbench.

“I need you to channel magic power through each of these parts, one by one. Vary the strength, change the angle, and do it at least four times for each part. I’ll be touching the parts and observing the changes, so if you sense anything unusual, tell me.”

“Hmm… so for example, with this long, thin part, I’d channel magic power weakly from this end once, then strongly once. Then flip it and do the same from the other end — weak once, strong once. That about right?”

“Exactly.”

“Alright, I get the job. But… how many parts are we talking about here?”

“16,000.”

Even though her face was hidden behind her mask, I could feel Hiyori go speechless.

“You want me to repeat this process — four times per part — for sixteen thousand parts?”

“I’m not telling you to do it, I’m asking you. Please, you’re the only one I can count on for this. I’ll owe you — name anything, and I’ll make it happen.”

I clasped my hands together, lowered my head, and begged. After a quiet pause, Hiyori spoke in a soft but oddly intimidating voice.

“…Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Then clear your schedule for December 25th. You’re spending the whole day with me.”

“Oh, Christmas? Sure, sounds fun. If we’re going all out, let’s import a real American turkey and roast it properly!”

“Yeah. I’m looking forward to Christmas.”

I’ve never had much to do with the whole “Christmas for extroverts” scene, but I’ve always appreciated the discounted cakes and chicken the day after. I even like anime Christmas episodes.

If I’m spending the day with a friend, making a proper Christmas dinner for once might actually be fun.

…Ah.

“Hey, uh… does Santa still come to your place, Hiyori?”

“…Wait. Don’t tell me.”

The sharp surprise in her voice made me realize how badly my words had come off, and I scrambled to clarify.

“No, that’s not what I meant! I figured out who Santa was when I was eighteen, alright? I’m not that dumb! I just thought… you’re kind of pure sometimes, so maybe you hadn’t caught on yet.”

“Eighteen, huh. Heh.”

What’s she laughing at? I was actually being considerate, wondering if I should prepare a present in Santa’s place, and this is the thanks I get.

But thinking about it, Hiyori doesn’t have parents. There’s no way Santa would’ve ever come to her house. Asking was pointless.

Once her mood improved, Hiyori patiently helped me with the long, steady work of collecting data.

Of course, there was no way testing all 16,000 parts would be done in a single day — it ended up taking us a full seven days to check them all.

And naturally, collecting the data was just the beginning.

Once we’d gathered the raw data, it was time to analyze it: comparing the differences in reaction by material, by weight, length, and shape, and observing how the responses varied with different intensities. All of this needed to be compiled as statistical data.

If the statistics showed a clear bias or a distinct pattern, the next step was to hypothesize what that might mean.

Then I had to think about what kind of experiments could confirm or disprove that hypothesis — and run those experiments.

Once the validation data was in, it was back to compiling, analyzing, and hypothesizing… looping through that process over and over.

It was the kind of long, painstaking work that could have me staring at numbers for an entire day.

Hiyori stuck it out with me, even though from the look on her face, she probably didn’t understand ninety percent of what I was doing. I owe her a lot for that.

And on my end, there were plenty of times I couldn’t fully grasp what the data meant either. I sent question after question to Professor Kvant, from the Tokyo University of Magic’s Gremlin Engineering Department.

Professor Kvant, who was deeply versed in geometry, shared with me a ton of knowledge about the geometric structures and properties seen in the Demon King Gremlin.

In return for his help, he asked for some of the dismantled Gremlin parts, so I sent him a thousand of the duplicate components we had. As for the anatomical diagrams, I still needed them for myself, so I lent them to him on the condition he’d return them quickly.

Seriously, please give them back. I’m counting on you! Without those diagrams, I can’t put the thing back together, and I’d be in trouble.

In the end, I ended up spending nearly two months on data analysis.

The overall dismantling progress stalled at 17%, so it was quite the detour — but the results were worth it.

By the fourth month since starting the reverse engineering, I finally reached the point where it looked like I could create a staff that utilized the extracted technology.

One day, as I was hunched over the drafting table in the workshop, drawing up blueprints for the prototype staff, Hiyori came in, carefully checking to make sure none of the disassembled parts were left in a spot where they could be blown away by a stray breath, and then leaned over to peek at the drawings.

“You’re drawing another one of your complicated blueprints. Did you figure something out?”

“Yeah. To put it simply, I realized the tensegrity structure serves as a kind of magic stabilizer, and the inverted spherical surface, based on Bernard Morin’s model, functions similarly to a semiconductor.

The inverted spherical surface seems to only work when made from elastic Gremlin material, and since elastic Gremlin isn’t used in any of the other components, it’s probably the only viable material for that part.

As for the tensegrity structure, while the geometry is always the same, there are two types of materials used, so I’m guessing there’s a specific reason for that.

This here is the prototype blueprint for a staff that incorporates a semi-automatic circuit, combining the inverted spherical surface and structural coloration.”

I pointed at the diagram as I explained, but Hiyori just fell silent for a while.

“…Huh? Wait, what? What are you even saying?”

“Ah — well, tensegrity structures are… you know what, it’s a pain to explain. Go look it up yourself.”

I handed her a geometry reference book, since the whole thing clearly went over her head.

The Demon King Gremlin was a masterpiece of advanced engineering. Any attempt to reverse engineer it and apply its technology would inevitably lead into complex, highly specialized territory.

Even I realized as I was explaining it — magic staffs were heading into an era where you’d need specialized knowledge just to understand the basics of how they worked.

Sorry for throwing a bunch of technical jargon at you. But trying to explain something this complex without using any would be impossible.

Hiyori obediently started flipping through the reference book, but quickly gave up, switched to a textbook to understand the reference book, and when that also proved too much, she reached for an introductory guide.

Yeah, I’d been there myself. If you don’t start at the beginner level and work your way up, reference books might as well be spellbooks written in gibberish.

She must’ve been pretty frustrated that she couldn’t follow what I’d said, because she ended up borrowing the whole stack — the intro guide, the textbook, and the reference book — and took them home.

Since those were Professor Kvant’s books anyway, it’d actually help if she returned them for me when she was done.

It took me four days to finish drawing the blueprints for the staff that utilized the reverse-engineered technology.

The actual construction took three.

Unfortunately, there were some components I couldn’t fabricate from scratch, so I had to reuse parts (elastic Gremlin) from the original Demon King Gremlin.

Honestly, it was a pretty bitter pill to swallow, having to reuse parts like that.

It felt like dismantling a space station to scavenge components, just to build a crystal radio set — the original was so unbelievably advanced, and here I was downgrading it into something so basic. It was kind of depressing.

Someday, I want to be able to manufacture even the parts whose production methods are still unknown, like elastic Gremlin or ghost Gremlin, entirely from scratch.

But for now, as a first step in mastering reverse-engineering, this was probably the best I could do. And even this was an achievement worth being proud of.

I was originally thinking of naming the newly crafted staff “Hendensho II” in honor of Hendensho-kun, the staff I lost during the Aratake-gang incident, but… honestly, it sounded a little lame, so I dropped the idea.

I mean, the name came from a pretty half-baked origin to begin with—“because it used a gremlin harvested from a substation.” This time, I wanted to give it a name worthy of its status.

That’s when I came up with: “Prototype Demon King Staff— Staff Reficule.”

Since it’s the first crystallization of the reverse-engineering techniques I’ve extracted from the Demon King Gremlin, I wanted the name to reference the Demon King. In the West, the term “Demon King” often refers to Lucifer, the fallen angel.

But this wand, born from a Demon King that once nearly destroyed the world, will stand on the side of light as a pioneer of superior magic wand technology.

So I defined it as the “inverted form” of the Demon King and named it by reversing Lucifer—hence, Reficule.

The Prototype Demon King Staff Reficule is, compared to the Demon King Gremlin, structurally primitive. However, I’ve also incorporated Structural Color Gremlins, which weren’t used in the original Demon King Gremlin. So it’s not just a poor imitation—it has original mechanisms unique to my design.

Visually, the staff doesn’t look all that different from existing ones.
A long wooden shaft, a spherical two-layer core at the tip, and the chain wrapped around the core is, of course, a Kvant-style Magic Compression Ring.

Inside, the joint between the core and the shaft contains a backflow prevention mechanism. Embedded in the grip is a Structural Color Gremlin that shows the remaining magic power.

But while it might look like any other staff, the difference in performance is worlds apart.

The secret lies in the core. At first glance, the 50mm milky-white spherical core looks like it was carved from a single piece, but it’s actually a precisely assembled combination of 255 individual parts. The whole assembly is held together by thin, silver magic-alloy wires—not just for structural integrity, but arranged artistically into a pattern for visual appeal.

I incorporated every magic geometric structure I’ve discovered so far—fractal dodecahedrons, Möbius strip gremlins, and the knowledge obtained from the Demon King Gremlin—to create this prototype wand. The Prototype Demon King Staff Reficule is the culmination of all my experience as a staff craftsman, and marks the dawn of a new era.

When I finally finished the wand, I was so hyped I immediately called my friends out to Okutama.

The Spider Witch, Professor Ohinata, and Hiyori all gathered in the backyard, and I bowed before unveiling my new creation.

I gripped Reficule, aimed at a target hanging from a tree branch 10 meters away, and readied myself.

The two witches instantly stiffened in shock.

“What!?”

“Impossible! Dairi, are you controlling your magic power!?”

“Fuhahahaha! Behold—the evolution of magic staff!!”

A faint trickle of magic power was drawn from my fingers where they touched the Structural Color Gremlin embedded in the handle. The energy ran through conductors inside the shaft and into the core.

Inside, the magic power flowed through a simple circuit formed by the Inverted Sphere and Structural Color combo, accumulating inside the Fractal Dodecahedron. Any circuit instability was smoothed out by the Möbius Strip Gremlin.

And the moment the stored magic surpassed its capacity limit, it transformed into a black beam-like spell, amplified by the core’s dual-layer structure, and fired.

A pencil-thin black beam shot straight into the center of the target, making it sway slightly, as if lightly flicked.

It was Professor Ohinata who first burst into excited screams at the sight of this success.

“Silent-casting magic!? This isn’t like a scroll-based charge and release, right!? Oh wow! Oh my god—Dairi, this is incredible! An ordinary human, casting original magic, without incantation! This is… this is… w-wow!!”

The overjoyed stoat scrambled over to me, climbed up my chest, and tapped my shirt with its tiny paws in excited delight.

Yes, yes. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Seeing everyone this hyped made all the work worthwhile.

“…But no sound, huh.”

However, there was one unexpected aspect. As I examined the staff, tilting my head in thought, I realized the effect and power were both within expectations, but the spell was completely silent. That suggests there’s a gap somewhere in the theory—room for improvement.

Ah… looks like another long battle with numbers and formulas is about to begin. Ugh.

When I glanced at the two witches, they still hadn’t said a word. They were too stunned for speech, their shock overwhelming any excitement.

Unlike me or the professor, who couldn’t perceive magic flow at all, the witches could actually see the magic. So for them, the impact of witnessing magic being built and fired without a single incantation must have been even greater.

Eventually, the shock passed, and the two of them began whispering to each other.

“How did he even do that…?”

“Blue Witch, could you mimic that control?”

“Mimic? No way. There’s no way I could. The flow was too fast, too precise… it even looked like it was processing multiple streams in parallel. But… if I used the help of that circuit? That conductor? Maybe… though the magic accumulation seems like the real bottleneck. What about you, Spider Witch?”

“Oh, I couldn’t do it either. I’m probably even worse at magic control than you. Though… Dairi took about five or six seconds to charge up, right? For me, I wouldn’t even need a second. Maybe 0.5, or even 0.2 seconds.”

“Yeah, when it comes to charging speed, we’re way faster. But still, who would’ve thought this was even possible.”

Heh heh heh. I could feel their respectful gazes, and man, did it feel good.

When I fired the silent-cast magic once more, the three of them broke into hearty applause.

Oh yeah, bask in it!

Besides its silent-casting capability, Reficule can also perform traditional incantation-based magic at standard (1.0x) efficiency.

I did find some minor theoretical flaws, but it’s a prototype—imperfections are expected.

Even so, it turned out almost exactly as I’d hoped. I’m beyond proud of this. From now on, Reficule will be my personal beloved staff. Prototypes are just so cool.

And to think… I achieved all this with only 17% of the Demon King Gremlin disassembled.

I can only imagine what kind of marvels will be possible once I’ve fully broken it down and absorbed all of its technology.

I can’t wait.

Previous chapter | TOC | Next chapter