Magic Mix

Stories

## Illustrations

## Prologue

——"What kind of place is that?"

When someone is asked that question, no word exists within the system of human language that can serve as a direct answer.

"Well then, everyone—let us begin the meeting."

Language is, at its root, a kind of sign that exists for the sake of shared understanding.

And so... things for which there is no need are never given words. Just as people who spend their whole lives among scorching gravel and stone have no need for words such as "sea" or "snow," or as those who live out their lives on a frozen waste can never grasp the concepts of "drought" or "grassland."

What cannot be spoken has no need to be spoken, and what cannot be known has no need to be known.

Ordinary humans can never reach that place. They cannot even perceive that it exists.

Thus, for the overwhelming majority of humankind—ordinary people—that place is the same as if it did not exist. And so, for a place that cannot be perceived, humanity cannot give it a name.

In every sense of the word, it is an extraordinary place.

And—if one were to indicate that place with language as it now exists, its outline could not be drawn unless several words were used at once.

Knowing full well that any description would be only a fragment, if one were forced to find the single closest word—

"The ninth—regular liaison meeting of the Chaos Committee is now in session."

—First of all, the place is very much like "the cosmos."

There is no "up." There is no "down."

And there is no "forward," no...

## Chapter 1: Academy City

Suo Senri. Fifteen years old. Male.

He had always considered himself a reasonably sensible, well-behaved child.

For certain reasons, he had tasted every kind of hardship since he was small. It was almost as if someone had told him that one ought to suffer while young—he did not like it, but a hard environment does tend to make a person more optimistic. He was an adolescent boy now, yet in some situations he already had no choice but to face things the way an adult would.

In any case...

When his father said he would be transferred abroad to work alone, Senri did not particularly object.

While Senri was still in elementary school, his mother divorced his father—and so Senri lived alone in the family home, and passed three years of middle school that way, during which nothing especially remarkable happened. His grades were decent enough. His temper was a little short and he got into arguments easily, but aside from that, compared with other junior-high students, there was nothing about him that stood out.

For certain reasons, Senri had always been careful not to stand out too much.

And—

When his father, returned from overseas, told Senri that he intended to remarry a woman he had met while working abroad, Senri did not particularly object. Even when he heard that the woman would be bringing a child with her into the marriage, he did not change his mind.

A great many things had happened. More than five years had passed since the parting from his wife.

If one exercised even a little imagination and thought about the life that would follow once a son became independent, wanting to seek a new partner was only natural—so Senri thought. Whether or not the other person came with baggage in tow...

## Chapter 2: The Adaptation Assistant

The student dormitory.

Hearing that word—or seeing it written—what impression does it leave on most people?

A twenty-year-old wooden building with a shared bath and toilet?

A small reinforced-concrete apartment block?

As the times change, impressions like these change with them.

The era when "student" meant "poverty" is long past. These days, with income from regular employment shrinking, many people choose to live as part-time workers. The age when not only baths and toilets but even the telephone were shared is long gone—student dormitories fitted with auto-locking doors, internet access, and other complete high-tech amenities are no longer rare.

But—

Senri stood blankly before the door of the room assigned to him.

Should he call it unexpected, or something else?

He had not expected the dormitory building itself to be so thoroughly conventional—or rather, so "ordinary."

From the outside it looked like a medieval European boarding house: a brick Western-style residence, three stories in all, thirty rooms. Given the size of the building, that number of rooms seemed a little low... but perhaps the dining hall and other common facilities took up a good deal of the space.

At a glance, in any case, there was nothing surprising about it.

So far, everything was fine. So far.

Senri walked straight to the room assigned to him. Room 209, on the second floor.

But—

"...My room."

Senri murmured under his breath.

The door—of this room he had come to.

There was a face on the door.

Stiff and rigid—perhaps it had been...

## Afterword

—For various reasons, "Magic Mix" opens here.

Broadly speaking, I have used the worldview and characters of "Magic Garden"—that is, "Magic Academy"—but I wrote this with the feeling of a new work. Whether you have read "Magic Academy" or not, I ask for your kind regard.

Speaking of what is shared, it is not only "Magic Academy"... (several lines omitted below).

I have mentioned this in an afterword before—"Magic Academy" was never meant to run so long, so the timeline falls out of step in many places. Especially around the fourth volume. The first and second volumes are set in winter, while the scenes of the third volume are already in summer—so why, from the fourth volume on, does it keep talking about the end of the year and New Year's? (lol)

I hold a strange conviction: "The protagonist of a light-novel comedy absolutely has to be a high school student!" So when I write protagonists who have become university students, I often feel a resistance. Put correctly, though, it was those university-student protagonists who allowed "Magic Academy" to go on.

Even so, I had long been thinking, "I have to shape a new protagonist."

Right around then—Famitsu happened to say they were founding a new magazine and asked whether I could serialize something. "Then I'll write a new work, or open another new series, or something of the sort." And so the project "Magic Mix, Magic Academy, Experiment" got underway.

Later, for various reasons, the magazine project stalled, and the work came to be published irregularly in "FBSP."

"It was supposed to be a serialization—what am I supposed to do, I've already written it with a serialization structure...