Chapter 14: Probably a Review Session

The vehicle pulled into the underground parking garage of the Special Investigation Bureau.
As soon as the isolation gate opened, Kexin stood up and gestured for the four civilians to get off first.

Waiting for them there was a fully armed tactical team and several Bureau officers in uniform.
By the time Kexin stepped down from the vehicle, she saw that the four civilians had already been surrounded and escorted away.

Qisi had been a magical girl far longer than Kexin.
After so many missions, she had seen scenes like this plenty of times—
and every single time, she wanted to complain.

It’s just a few civilians who accidentally got caught in a monster attack, she thought.
Why make it look like a hostage transfer?

The Bureau’s tactical teams looked almost identical to SWAT units on the outside,
but in reality, their equipment was very different—
even their ammunition was specially designed to fight monsters.

Ordinary bullets still had some effect when fired at a monster’s physical host.
Lower-tier monsters usually needed to inhabit some form of physical material to exist,
so destroying the body was enough to eliminate them.

But the high-level monsters—those rich in magical energy and capable of regenerating their forms—were a different story.
Once they reached the “mutant” stage, they could use magic to reconstruct or repair their bodies at will in physical space.

Some could even dematerialize mid-attack, letting bullets pass harmlessly through them.

“Hey,” Qisi muttered, “should we tell them to tone it down a bit next time? This is kind of overkill.”

“This counts as standard protocol,” Kexin replied. “Better safe than sorry.”

The two stepped into the elevator reserved for magical girls.
It went directly to their training facilities—complete with rest areas and briefing rooms.

Freelance magical girls could go home immediately after their missions.
Once the Bureau confirmed the results, the payment would automatically be transferred to their accounts.

But for Bureau-affiliated magical girls like Kexin and Qisi, things weren’t that simple.
Even after a successful mission, they had to submit reports and attend post-operation reviews.

That was what awaited them now.
The only silver lining was that they didn’t have to write the actual paperwork—
that task fell entirely to Agent Guan Mengyao,
the Bureau’s sole official liaison.

“You’re back.”

Hearing footsteps at the door, Agent Guan looked up to see two girls—one tall, one short—each with unusually colored hair, walking in.

“Good work out there,” she said warmly.

“Not really,” Qisi replied, flopping onto the sofa. “This time the monster barely gave me a chance to act. Easiest mission ever.”

There were two glasses of chilled watermelon juice on the coffee table.

“That one’s not for you,” Guan said, smoothly sliding the tray with both glasses over to Kexin just as Qisi reached for one.

“Hey! I worked too, you know!”

“Too late. You had one chance.”

“How could you! I’m filing a complaint with the Director!”

Kexin sighed at the sight of nearly 1.7-meter-tall Qisi pouting and rolling around on the couch like a kid.
She picked up her own glass, took a sip, and felt the cool sweetness spread through her whole body.

Setting the glass down, Kexin spoke once Qisi had finally calmed a bit.

“This time, I still didn’t control my power well.
If it hadn’t been for Qisi, those four civilians might’ve been seriously hurt.”

“Knew it,” Qisi said smugly.

“But there’s something else that’s been bothering me,” Kexin continued.
“The monster was only detected as Beta-class, but its combat ability far exceeded the average for that level.
It doesn’t feel right.
And its outer shell was… unexpected.”

“Oh? How so?” Guan leaned forward.
She’d been stationed near the scene but hadn’t been able to watch the battle directly,
so she had to rely on the girls’ debriefing for the details.

Even Qisi perked up.
She’d been the first to rush toward the detected magic disturbance,
found the four civilians in the building,
and listened to their panicked descriptions of the thing chasing them.

The problem was—each of them had described it differently.

If Kexin hadn’t said over the comms that it was a “giant scorpion,”
Qisi might’ve thought it was some kind of abstract shapeless creature.

In truth, she hadn’t even seen it herself.
Just keeping the four civilians calm had eaten up nearly all her focus—
to the point her head had nearly overheated from the effort.

“My primary weapon, in basic power mode, can usually take out a Beta-class monster with one shot,” Kexin explained.
“But this one seemed to resist magic amplification almost entirely.
In game terms, you could say it had ridiculously high magic resistance.”

The battle hadn’t lasted long.
After channeling an excessive amount of mana, Kexin had erased the monster completely—
but the abnormal resistance still lingered in her mind.

“Ever run into something like that before?” she asked Qisi.

Qisi thought for a while.
“Delta-class monsters can generate energy shields, sure.
But using a physical shell to block magical damage?
Never heard of that.”

She mentally ran through every case she knew—no match.
Even Delta-class monsters were rare.

Gamma-class ones were the most troublesome: intelligent enough to act on their own,
dangerous to civilians, and resistant to conventional weapons.
Whenever one appeared, the Bureau always treated it as a top-priority threat.

But even among all the Gamma-level monsters she’d faced,
none had behaved like the one today.

And Beta-class monsters were weak specifically because of their low mana capacity.
They didn’t have enough energy to maintain defensive spells for long—
especially under continuous attack.

Without a steady mana flow, their shields would collapse.

Fortunately, magical girls didn’t need to micromanage that process.
Their transformation devices automatically handled mana control—
like the flight control system in a modern jet.

“I see,” Guan said, jotting down notes.
“I’ll include this in the report. The research division can look into it.
Anything else to add?”

Kexin went on to describe the fight:
how the monster’s projectiles had the destructive force of electromagnetic spikes—
and that if the battle hadn’t taken place inside a barrier,
those attacks could’ve caused catastrophic damage in the city.

“By the way, did the cleanup team find its core?” Guan asked.

The monster was gone, but the residential area was still cordoned off.
Officially, the Bureau was “collecting evidence.”
In truth, they were making sure no trace of the supernatural remained.

“No,” Guan continued. “You didn’t recover it?”

Kexin shook her head.
“The situation got out of control. The barrier destabilized before we could do it.”

There had been similar incidents in the past.
An early-generation magical girl once vanished when her barrier collapsed mid-battle—
to this day, her fate remained unknown.

“That’s troublesome,” Guan muttered. “I’ll tell the field team to search again.
Anyway, if there’s nothing else, you two can head home.
You’ve got classes tomorrow, remember?”

“Agent Guan,” Kexin called out as Guan turned to leave,
“about those four civilians—what’s going to happen to them?
I doubt they’ll cooperate easily.”

Especially that Zhang Ruolin girl.
Kexin could sense the strong obsession in her heart—
now that she’d witnessed the truth herself,
it wouldn’t be easy to make her pretend nothing had happened.

She’d already used a memory-suppression spell on Ruolin once.
A second attempt would only weaken the effect,
leaving flickering fragments that could drive her to seek answers again.

“That’s not my department,” Guan replied. “But I’ll ask around if I get the chance.
For now, I can tell you they’ll probably be taking a few days off.”

“Figures.”

After all, Crescent Academy itself was funded by the Bureau.
Its campuses nationwide secretly doubled as operational bases for magical girls.
So if a student needed to “take time off,”
the paperwork could be done in minutes—
especially since Guan herself was their homeroom teacher.

With a convincing excuse,
it wasn’t hard to keep parents from asking questions.

“It’s getting late,” Guan said finally. “You two should head back as well.”

She left the rest area at a brisk pace.

“Dreamyao-jie looks especially busy lately,” Qisi remarked,
immediately snatching up the other glass of watermelon juice the moment Guan was gone.

She might look carefree and cheerful,
but she was far from oblivious—
always quietly watching the people around her.

“Yeah, I can tell,” Kexin agreed.

It was something that puzzled her deeply.
Monsters were an existential threat to humanity,
and yet the Bureau worked tirelessly both to destroy them and to conceal the truth.

They treated the phenomenon seriously,
but from what Kexin had seen,
the actual resources devoted to it were surprisingly limited.

For example—this very facility.

The Bureau had about thirty affiliated magical girls on paper,
yet it was rare to see anyone else around.
If not for official briefings,
Kexin could almost believe the Bureau only had two active magical girls.

“The other liaison officers are all out on missions with their squads,” Qisi said,
hearing Kexin’s unspoken thought.
“I heard there’s a monster swarm somewhere.”

“Monster swarm?”

Kexin’s curiosity lit up immediately. She’d never heard that term before.

“Yeah. I only heard it from a friend, but apparently,
it’s when a large number of low-level monsters appear at once.
None of them are strong individually,
but there are so many that local magical girls can’t keep up.
They call that a ‘monster tide.’”

“I see…”

Still, something didn’t add up.

Why were there so few magical girls in a city as massive as Mutsuzhou?
With tens of millions of people,
shouldn’t the Bureau be expanding their numbers, not holding back?

It didn’t make sense.

Kexin frowned slightly.

“Forget it,” she sighed after a moment. “Let’s go home.”