Mahouka Koukou No Rettousei Magian Company - Volume 1 Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Insubstantial Offense & Defense
May 2, 8:30 a.m. Tatsuya and Miyuki received a phone call at their secondary residence.
[Good morning, Miyuki-san. How are you feeling today?]
The person who appeared on the monitor was Ayako, dressed seamlessly despite the fact that it was early Sunday morning.
“Good morning, Ayako. I’m feeling great. Ayako-san as well, you don’t look any different.”
[Thank you very much. It’s thanks to all of you]
“So, what happened this early in the morning? Is there a pressing matter for me to address?”
Also dressed immaculately, Miyuki asks Ayako about the information she wants to share.
[It’s not really urgent, but there’s something I would like to tell you as soon as possible]
“Is that for Tatsuya-sama?”
[To both of you. I’d like to visit you today, but I’m not sure if it’s convenient]
“Good morning, Ayako.”
Tatsuya, who has been listening to their conversation, stands in front of the camera and joins the conversation.
[Good morning, Tatsuya-san. Thank you for your hard work yesterday]
“You too, Ayako, thank you for your efforts. I’m sorry leaving you on the outside in charge of the vigilance”
[No, please don’t worry about it]
He had placed Ayako on alert with Fumiya last night for any approaching suspicious persons, just to make sure the guests were safe.
[I probably should have helped entertain the guests, but that kind of party is a bit……. So I was grateful to be sent to the outside instead. I don’t dislike the party itself, though]
While both are considered to be high-class beautiful women, there is a big difference between Ayako and Miyuki. Ayako has a strong tendency to attract the lustful gaze of men. Although, not so much in the case of men within the same age group, it is more prominent in the case of older men.
They have what would be called a strong sex appeal. In Ayako’s case, even if she doesn’t expose herself too much, she still attracts that kind of attention. Whereas with Miyuki, it’s more likely that men would lose their nerve in her presence, so she doesn’t have to deal with that kind of overt gaze.
Ayako is an excellent combat magician. She does not feel physically threatened by the eyes of the opposite sex, even if they can’t hide their ulterior motives. But the discomfort is undeniable. She hadn’t yet reached the stage where she felt a sense of superiority over such gazes.
“That’s why there is no need to worry about it. So,??”
Knowing that Ayako suffers from a sort of gaze aversion, Tatsuya brought the conversation back to the main topic in order to avoid dragging this subject on.
“??I understand that you have an urgent report to make.?”
[Yeah. I think the sooner I report the better]
Ayako seemed a little relieved when the subject changed.
“We can do this now.”
They are talking via vidiphone, but Ayako and Fumiya are staying one floor down in this same building.
[Are you sure?]
In the monitor, Ayako’s eyes turn to Miyuki.
“Yeah, I don’t mind.”
Tatsuya said it was fine. There was no way Miyuki could refuse.
[I will be right there]
Ayako bowed politely on the monitor.
In that state, the vidiphone’s monitor went dark.

“Tookami Ryousuke is a pawn of the FEHR’s leader, Rena Fehr.”
This was Ayako’s report.
“……Um, perhaps you were aware of this?”
Seeing the subtle expressions on Tatsuya and Miyuki and also on Lina’s face, Ayako asked hesitantly.
“……Sorry. I had Stars check that out already.”
“Hah, the Stars….”
Ayako’s shoulders slump in response to Lina’s answer. As expected, she can’t hide her disappointment.
“So, did you also know that the thieves who broke into the plant were ‘Janus’……?”
“Janus? No, that’s the first I’ve heard of it. I guess it’s true that there was an intruder, isn’t it?”
But this response from Tatsuya brings Ayako back to life.
“Is Janus a person’s name?”
“I’ve never heard of it, either. Is it a code name of some kind?”
Following Miyuki, Lina asks Ayako.
“As Lina-san suggested, the name Janus is a code name in the American underworld for a pair of magical criminals.”
At Miyuki and Lina’s question, Ayako exerts in eloquence with a prideful look on her face.
“They only became famous in the last two years or so. Before that, it seems that their activities were in Eastern Europe.”
“Two years ago……. No wonder I didn’t know that.”
Lina muttered a seeming excuse. She came to Japan three years ago. If it has been in the last two years, it’s no wonder she didn’t know.
“Why do you think it was Janus doing? There were no clues left at the scene, though.”
“Tatsuya-san, actually, it wasn’t me who deduced that the bandit who broke into the Stellar Reactor building was Janus.”
Ayako’s expression changed, she took out a voice recorder and placed it on the dining room table.
“In the early hours of yesterday, Tookami Ryousuke was making a call via satellite phone at the harbor in the northeast area.”
“And you intercepted it.”
“Yes. The receiver was Rena Fehr.”
Ayako has two signature spells. One is Mock Teleportation, a combination of weight, convergence and movement types of magic. The other is a convergence type magic ‘Polar Difusion [17] ‘.
The latter magic aims to make the distribution of any gas, liquid, or physical energy within a specified area averaged out and indistinguishable. It mixes reflected light waves with waves from a large area causing them to blend together and disappear, diffusing sound waves and combining them with other sounds to turn them into a faint noise that cannot be discerned, thus rendering the sound inaudible.
As a matter of fact, Ayako can also reverse this process. Picking up sounds that are about to be diffused over a large space and returning them to a meaningful audio signal. She’s not so good at this as to make them from inaudible noise, but she can restore whispers to a recordable condition at a distance of a few dozen meters.
With this magic, she managed to eavesdrop on Ryousuke and Rena’s satellite phone call.
“It’s going to be a bit long, I’ll play it back from the beginning. Please listen.”
The voices of Ryousuke and of a girl started to come out of the voice recorder. Their conversation was in English, but there was no one here who needed an interpreter.
“Unless they noticed Ayako’s eavesdropping and were acting out…….”
“I guess that means Tookami-san is innocent of the incident the night before last.”
Picking up from Tatsuya’s line, Miyuki concludes.
“Hold on. He might have been clean in that one case, though.”
But soon after, Lina countered.
“You’ve just confirmed that he’s an undercover agent of the FEHR. Are you sure you want to keep him in the Magian Company as it is?”
“Both of you. I think we should address the Janus issue right now.”
Miyuki and Lina held their tongues with an taken aback expression at Ayako’s point.
“By the way, Tatsuya-san,”
Ayako shifts her attention to Tatsuya.
“What?”
“Assuming that the intruder is Janus, as Rena Fehr guessed……”
Tatsuya didn’t contest that assumption.
“What is Janus aiming for?”
“Janus has been selling the stolen data on the black market for profit. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes. From what we’ve been able to find out, it is. I can’t be certain that their objective is only financial gain.”
“Regardless of the form of their reward, the most valuable data related to Stellar Reactor would be the manufacturing method for the Artificial Relics.”
Tatsuya answered Ayako’s question without hesitation.
Not only limited to the Stellar Reactor, in a Nuclear Fusion Reactor, the fusion reaction itself will stop if its control is stopped. The Stellar Reactor ??Thermonuclear Reactor via Gravity Control-type Magic will stop its operation if the magic ceases to be activated.
At the moment, it’ s not a problem even if power is not being generated continuously, since the electricity generated is only used to produce hydrogen. But if the plant is going to be used to supply power to the public infrastructure, it must be able to operate continuously 24 hours a day, That means the magic must be used continuously to keep the Stellar Reactor running.
Without Artificial Relics with its effect of preserving Magic Sequences, a magician needs to stay next to the reactor for as long as the Stellar Reactor is in operation. If it’s a 24-hour operation, it’s a continuous 24-hour operation.
That would make the magician as good as a part of the Stellar Reactor.
Of course, if it were to be twenty-four hours in a row, it would be in shifts, but it would still mean the same, in which the magicians would be integrated into the power generation system called Stellar Reactor. Just like the lineman caricaturized in the classic movie of the silent films era ‘Modern Times’.
That would only change their role from weapons to power generators. And a magician??a Mageist could not escape the fate of being a tool. The trump card to solve this problem is Artificial Relics ‘Magistore’, which has the ability to preserve the Magic Sequence. ??By “store” it doesn’t mean as in like a “shop”, but as in “storage place”. The “magi” in “magistore” is an abbreviation for “magic”, but, incidentally, it could also mean “curse” or “cursed charm”.
Using the Magistore with current state-of-the art technologies, it is possible to keep the Stellar Reactor running by simply inputting the Magic Sequence into the Artificial Relics once every six hours. In the future, it is expected that the performance can be increased to once every 12 hours. This would only require the magician running the Stellar Reactor to work once every 12 hours for 20 to 30 minutes, including preparation time. It would require them to be on standby in case of an emergency, but that is also the case in a fully automated plant. In other words, the labor load will be reduced to the same extent as that of production line supervisors in a factory where the entire workforce has been replaced by industrial robots.
Once every six hours ??or maybe once every twelve hours in the future?? is the amount of time that the magic sequence stored in the Magistore can continue to cast magic, not the amount of time that the Magistore can keep storing the magic sequence. Once Magic Sequence is input, it is preserved for several months if you don’t do anything.
There is also a lot of secret know-how on how to output the magic stored in the Magistore. Be that as it may, as far as data that can be stolen, the highest price will be paid for the Magistore’s manufacturing methods.
“So, the aim of the thieves who snuck into the containment room is…….”
“It was probably an attempt to steal the Artificial Relics from the main unit of the Stellar Reactor.”
Tatsuya complements the speculation Miyuki was about to make with his line, affirming it.
“Even if they got the Artificial Relics, they’re not something that can be easily duplicated, though.”
Tatsuya gave a sarcastic chuckle as he remembered how much trouble he’d had duplicating the relic.
“But thanks to Ayako, I’ve got a general idea of what they’re aiming to do next.”
“Really?!?”
“Eh, where is it?!”
At Tatsuya’s confident muttering, Ayako and Lina asked, exposing their surprise.
Miyuki, for her part, had a look on her face that said, “If it’s Tatsuya-sama, that’s only natural.”
“FLT”
Tatsuya answered their questions with a single word.

May 4th. By Tatsuya’s orders, Ryousuke has been in Machida, where Magian Company’s headquarters are located, since yesterday. His moving to the company housing in Izu has been postponed, so he’s staying at the business hotel next door, which is reserved for the staff of the FLT research center.
Ryousuke had just come back from Vancouver. He hasn’t even been able to go out and buy some daily necessities for the company housing yet. He has already prepared a bed, dining room table, chairs, writing desk, and so forth for the company housing, and while he can leave the cooking and cleaning utensils to HAR, he needs to buy his own bedding and tableware. In this regard, he was grateful for Tatsuya’s directive to stay in Machida temporarily, because it gave him more time to make such preparations.
However, there are some aspects he doesn’t agree with.
Ryousuke is determined to stay in the Stellar Reactor Plant to clear himself of the suspicion brought against him. But after getting kicked out of Miyakijima, he doesn’t even have a chance to capture the thieves.
Will I be fired after all?
Such worries lingered in Ryousuke’s mind.
“Good morning, Tookami-san, you’re early this morning too.”
“Good morning”
Ryousuke greets his colleague when he arrives at the office five minutes before the start of the workday in a cheerful voice ??trying to keep his voice cheerful. This bad habit of arriving at the office one hour early has been seemingly overshadowed by the stricter application of labor-related laws.
Ryousuke wasn’t the only one who had been changed from his newly assigned work location.
“Saegusa-san, what shall we do today?”
“I don’t think it’s necessary to go to Izu at the moment. I’ve found out that I can get the data I need here, and I plan to get my hands on the documents I need to file with the authorities.”
Mayumi has been ordered to work at the headquarters for a while, just like Ryousuke.
Tatsuya has appointed Mayumi as Ryousuke’s partner in order to catch the intruders.
The person selected is another thing that Ryousuke can’t agree with.
The temporary suspension of Mayumi’s assignment at the Industrial Magic Academy has also disrupted her moving to the corporate housing in Izu. Now she currently commutes from home.
She has a starting and ending time of work, but Tatsuya told her that she can spend her time at the office as she pleases. But since there is no urgent work to do, Mayumi arrives at the office and leaves it on time.
In other words, she goes home at night. This means that they can’t team up to catch a thief in the first place.
(What the hell is that guy thinking……)
Ryousuke complained about Tatsuya, calling him “that guy” in his head.

Tatsuya was, of course, alert for the invading thieves??’Janus’. It is impossible for him to not take any steps to catch them.
In the Artificial Relics ‘Magistore”s secret production line in the FLT Development Section 3.
Fujibayashi was crammed into the control computer room of the fully automated production line. Today’ s visit was not an occasional one. It was the third day in a row since Sunday. Of course, it was a shift. The manufacturing data of the Artificial Relics stored in the FLT was under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
“……You came, didn’t you?”
Three o’clock in the afternoon.
The monitor on the console where Fujibayashi was on standby showed a clear sign of hacking.
“Tatsuya-kun’s prediction was spot on.”
Fujibayashi let out a soliloquy in the old fashioned way of calling it.
“Since what they want is data, it is only a matter of common sense to deduce that if they failed in the break-in to the building, the next step would be hacking. I don’t think that’ it’s genius or anything if you hit the target.”
Fujibayashi’s soliloquy was subtle enough to be either a compliment or a disparagement to Tatsuya.
“But, well, as long as I’ve spotted you, I’ll deal with it properly.”
Fujibayashi added, drifting into an excited atmosphere.

In the evening of May 2nd, a pair of men, identified as ‘Bahadur Mufid’ and ‘Bahman Mufid’, landed at the Port of Kawasaki, posing as sailors on a cargo ship, they, ‘Janus’, were hiding out in a cheap hotel for foreign workers. Using private notebooks that they had stolen yesterday, they connected into the global net through someone else’s account via a wireless router that they had also stolen, and attempted to break into the FLT’s network.
Hacking is more software than hardware, and more skill than software. Still, the speed of the human input is no match for the speed of the AI’s counterparts, which requires software to support the skill. In order to run advanced software, high-performance hardware is required. No one, no matter how skilled they are, should not be able to break into the networks of high-tech companies that have built robust security with these makeshift tools ??/should/ not.
However.
‘Open, Sesame’
Every time Bahadur sends a thought wave that has been compiled into an incantation form towards the terminal’s display, a firewall is breached.
It was as if the gatekeepers had unlocked the door themselves and invited the thieves in.
Nevertheless Bahadur just stared at the display. He is not touching the keyboard, the pointer, or the stylus pen. It was Bahman, sitting next to him, running his fingers over the other connected device, who was operating the computer terminals.
“Bahman, how far in are you?”
“There’s probably one or two more firewalls left. We’re almost there, Bahadur.”
This is not due to Bahadur being mechanically illiterate. It’s that he devotes all of his mental resources to magically disabling the network’s security, so he doesn’t have the luxury of handling the information terminal.
The unclassifiable magic ‘Arabian Nights’. A magic that interferes with any phenomenon, whether it is a mental or physical phenomenon, that falls under the concept of “opening” or “closing”. In this case, it is opening the gates of a locked network and misleading the system into believing it is legitimate access.
Bahadur and Bahman are BS magicians.” BS” stands for “Born Specialized” magic users. Also known as congenital superpower users or congenital singular magic users.
They, like many BS magicians, can’t use any other magic than their ‘Arabian Nights’. And for that reason, they have been looked down upon by the average magicians. This is another common occurrence for BS magicians.
But compared to other BS magicians, their ‘Arabian Nights’ has a wider range of applications. It wouldn’t be that useful if there was only one of them, but as long as both the ‘open’ and ‘close’ were together, there was a lot that could be done.
But that’s only true for the both of them together. The name ‘Arabian Nights’ was given to ‘Janus”s magic…Bahadur can only use ‘Open, Sesame’ and the only magic Bahman can use is ‘Close, Sesame’. One of them can only open and the other can only close it.
Bahadur and Bahman look exactly like twins, but they are actually from different families. Even the surname ‘Mufid’ is merely a coincidence. As soon as they met, they realized that by teaming up, the two of them would multiply their innate, singular magic use many times over. They then teamed up and began to rebel against the society that had treated them so coldly.
At first it was just a two-man rebellion. No, while they called it “rebellion”, what they were doing was just stealing. But two years ago, they were recruited by their current organization and joined the ranks of a full-fledged rebellion against human society.
Trying to steal the Artificial Relics’ manufacturing process is also at the organization’s behest. The head of the organization plans to use the Artificial Relics ‘Magistore’ to produce magical weapons that can be used by BS magicians and magicians who have not reached the actual combat level.
“Good! Bahadur, we’ve made it.”
Bahman’s words caused Bahadur to exhale heavily.
“Did you have any data on the Artificial Relics?”
In response to Bahadur’s question,
“Wait. Damn it, what’s with this file system. It’s not organized in a tree format……. I’ll have to search the entire storage system on this device’s OS.”
Bahman swears.
“It’s going to take some time, but it’s unavoidable.”
“Yeah”
Bahman starts up the terminal and types in the commands for the search. It’s primitive, but it’s the fastest way to go.
A string of text began to flow over the display Bahman was staring at, indicating that a search was in progress.
But it soon stopped.
“It froze? Cheap thing.”
Bahman swears.
“No, it’s not it.”
However, Bahadur was frowning next to him. His connected terminal was monitoring the performance of the network.
“Bahman, it’s a counter-crack!”
Bahadur shouted and pressed the power button, trying to force the terminal to shut down.
But the terminal did not shut down.
He swore and pulled out the power cord of the wireless router.
The connection to the network should have been lost by this.
And yet, the cracking on their devices continued.
Bahadur immediately understood what was going on.
“from another router…..?”
It’s hard to believe, but the enemy on the other side of the network has hijacked another router near to their hotel to access their devices here.
“Bahman, close it down!”
“Got it!”
‘Close, Sesame’
Bahman’s magic is activated.
The connection between the device and the global net is “closed”.
As they remembered something, the terminal turned off.
“Let’s get out of here, Bahman!”
“All right!”
They may not have been completely identified, but their location was definitely narrowed down to a fairly small area.
The two of them took what they could take and ran away from the cheap hotel.

“And I was just one step away…….”
Fujibayashi complains really frustrated in front of the console.
“Still, this is ‘Arabian Nights’? That’s some very interesting magic.”
But soon, she murmured with the look of a poised professional. She was working with the Yotsuba family on a research project to determine the implications of electronic informational networks in the light of magic. The magic she had just been shown was a sample of how electronic information networks could be affected by magic in the same way as physical phenomena. When this case was over, she would use it for her own research, Fujibayashi thought.
There, she redirected her attention to the situation.
She left the console of the manufacturing line control and sat in front of a dedicated cryptographic communication terminal.
The recipient is Butler Hanabishi, who is in charge of the Yotsuba family’s mercenary force.
The entered text is as follows:
[The location of the thieves’ hiding place is within a 20-meter radius of Kawasaki City’s XX Ward, XX District, XX Block, XX Town, and House number XX. Presumed to be a convenient boarding house]
As Fujibayashi had mentioned, she was one step closer to completely identifying the location where Janus was hiding.
Following the information from Fujibayashi, the Yotsuba family’s investigation team rushed to the site to find out where Janus was hiding. As a result, they found out that they were staying at a budget hotel and got a clue that there were two men of Middle Eastern appearance and probably Persian descent, between 170cm and 175cm tall.
Unfortunately, the hotel’s security camera system was “shutdown” and the image data was not available.