Web of light. Part 1. part 30

Part 30.

You can be awesome at how cool it is to take responsibility for the deeds and actions of your ancestors, make clever multi-way Plans and get ready to reveal the secrets of the universe... But if you're eleven years old and you haven't slept at night, then you'll sleep during the day. Ironically! The daily routine for children is not just invented. In short, I rode the train to Takamiya with Kashi in your arms, sweetly snuffling and dreaming, and continued this fascinating activity for half the time of the train journey, and the other half I listened to the sarcastic comments of the Shizuka-Kuzaki couple practicing wit and yawned sweetly. After each yawn, the verbal pressure gained momentum, which led to an unequivocal conclusion: some people are jealous that I didn't have to drag my feet! And who is to blame? I just sat on the doorstep, waiting for everyone to get out, leaned against the roof support post — and woke up only in the carriage.

It is good that before leaving home, I took care to give instructions to the vassals who passed under my hand from my ancestors. Everything is generally simple: keep a low profile for a week and, if possible, do not leave the house, which is protected by Kai's magic. I killed two hours of time for the brownie herself, explaining why she couldn't leave the house at all. He explained to her like a child that only she could protect her guests, but the fact that the envelope snob and Ginko did not arouse particularly warm feelings in her... I don't know. Have you ever had to explain to a five-year-old child why electricity is just waiting in an outlet to shock a curious person who sticks his fingers in there? Approximately the same process. Zashiki-varashi was the first yokai I met who behaved like a European demon: if you give an order, she will, of course, carry it out... twisting the content and essence to the best of their small brains. He would have, because I didn't give orders... directly. I pressed logic, complimented her, told her that I was counting on her (and it was true), and even asked for advice. It turned out to be easier to corner the girl into her own reasoning — after Grandpa Gene's work, the brownie's consciousness was greatly simplified. But I didn't stop there: I took the girl out into the courtyard, asked the Hawk-Nosed Man (who was successfully admiring the dawn and was immediately plowed in) to bring me a small boulder, steamed a piece of stone to maximum hardness — and the hell! A stone with a diameter of half a meter (small from Shinji's point of view), naturally, crumbled into a pile of dust — the material, acquiring a very high hardness, usually becomes very brittle, and large cracks are enough for the Steam to "fly off". The main thing is to find what to hit and what to put on, a blow with your hand is not enough.

"How's that? You didn't use magic, I felt it!"

"The amulet blocks my magic, but I can use my ancestral ability as well as my grandfather", I explained the meaning of the demonstration directly.

Kaya shuddered, looking into her eyes, and I saw fear and long-standing pain again.

"Understand that I want you to have a normal life, not because I can't force you to follow orders, but because you are my vassal, and I want my people to... The Yokai lived... They didn't exist. I gave you my word, and you have to believe me."

Kaya nodded a little sluggishly. Well, yes. It looks like I'll have to come to Noihara regularly-the brownie is my strongest unit right now, and it's stronger than most of the magicians and spirits in this world within the house. Grandpa did a good job on his experimental project, and now I'm in pain... And I really wanted zashiki-varashi to be able to socialize. After all, half of the associative fields of her brain are working, which means that the task as a whole is solvable. She's not bright, but she won't be a brainless fool like she is now... Okay, we need to take advantage of the situation while the girl is impressed.

"Kaya, tell me, did grandfather keep amulets or blanks for them in the house? Where did he have a Laboratory?" After all, Himari couldn't have brought along a few notebooks... Okay, even the trunks of notebooks, should I take out the entire magical library of the clan? Or could she?

"Laboratory..." Yokai whispered in confusion, "I... I guess Kaya was there... But he doesn't remember..." The brownie's eyes unfocused.

Yeah, and the memory is clean... And it's probably good. I grabbed the girl by the elbow and towed her into the kitchen. He made me drink tea, reliably distracting me with conversation. Very reliable — I asked about my cat.

"When Himari left, what did she say to you? I remember you said that she had gone to guard me. But what exactly did she say? Understand, maybe I can figure out where she is, since she hasn't visited me once in two years... and I think Grandfather Gen knew my address."

"She said, "Something happened to Gennosuke-sama, he should have been back by now. It's my turn to leave, I have to do what I have to do.""

"Hmm, not a word about her coming to protect me, is it, Kaya?"

"Himari-dono since you go... You were taken away, and Gen-sama kept saying that she had to protect you, not stay in the village forever. She even took Yasutsuna with her. She wasn't listening to me at all... Nobody listens to me at all!" Suddenly, the brownie sobbed. "No one needs me, no one wants to talk to me! Just bring it, serve it, or sit and don't get in the way! Only Himari talked to me! And now no one knows where she went! Why am I alone again?!"

Then the brownie just smeared tears on her face, and I had to resort to the good old method of consolation — in other words, hug. By the way, the brownie is quite curvy, and it was very pleasant to hug her — in the last six months my body has been reacting very vividly to the presence of beautiful women, and the further I go, the stronger. Thank kami, yokai either didn't perceive herself as an established girl, or she couldn't even think about such a context in a lord-vassal relationship, or she just wasn't thinking about anything right now... After putting half a pack of napkins on the tear-stained face, I already habitually picked up the girl who fell asleep almost immediately from too tired of her worries and dragged her to the nearest sofa. The issue with the laboratory remained open. Well, let's try asking the others.

Do didn't know about the lab before. She didn't get her hands on any records about magic or clan techniques at all. Ginko squeezed me, licked me, was very upset that I was leaving, was glad that I would take her to the city if she wanted (but not right now, because she couldn't), and when asked about the laboratory, she honestly admitted that she couldn't pronounce such a difficult word. And yes, Gen-sama left home regularly. No, I never followed him, and she never left the neighborhood without permission. No, she didn't find any traces of Gennosuke-sama herself, except on the road and around the house. Thank you, she-wolf (I've clarified the issue of her species identity, finally!) now I know that there is no laboratory in the vicinity of the house. And where is there? The mountains are big... and empty, in terms of population density. I'll think about it...

"Did you find out anything interesting in Noihara while I was working with the archive?" I asked when the bout of venomous wit finally wore off.

"I've been working with the clan library, you know," Shizuka shook her head thoughtfully, "nothing particularly interesting, financial documents, copies of agreements with other clans, species descriptions of Yokai, incomplete... I think you'll be interested in this."

Hm? A4 sheet, where it is copied in perfect snake handwriting... Yes, this is tax information for 1964. And why?.. Oh, I see. Then the payment was charged directly from the bank account. How lovely. The snake rewrote the numbers and kindly deciphered the area: what a decent piece should be obtained. I wonder what is on this earth and where is it? I'll have to contact the bank, since I know which one, let them make a decryption for last year — my grandfather sold something there from the ground...

"Shizuka, you're gold!"

"Actually, I am water, you could have already remembered," She smiled smugly.

"Yuto, tell me," Rinko turned to me a little uncertainly, — this Himari cat, with whom the scandal began, who is she? You said you were a childhood friend, but I've never seen your friends..."

"A good childhood friend, you know," The snake said grumpily, "The Amakawa clan's best assassin, Noihara's Crimson Blade. They said she killed without hesitation, obeying any order from her master... and she was appointed your bodyguard. A babysitter killer, I'd like to see that..."

"I don't know about the murders, she was always in the form of a cat with me... a small white one. We... We were really friends, she was with me all the time... He carried it in his arms..."

Shizuka shuddered from the picture presented.

"A cat, you say?" Rinko drawled.

"Yes, I have not seen her other form... I didn't even know she had one. And about... an ambiguous biography... No one told me."

(Because the manga doesn't have a story, it even has notes, right?)

"So, what are we going to do next, Yuto Amakawa, after what you've learned about your ancestors?"

"The same as always, Shizuka. The same as always!"

Chapter 138.

[1st day after arrival from Noihara]

Why does a person buy a thousand children's rubber balls, not solid, but so that there is air inside? One of two things, either he opens a baby goods store, or he's Naruto. The diagnosis, yes...

[3rd day after arrival from Noihara]

Actually, we all have a kind of time pressure here: Rinko is preparing at a fast pace for competitions that are literally on the nose, Hiroe is frantically figuring out how to stuff a hundred and fifty people into useful activities so that everyone will like it, Kashi is sewing up with the organization of a future water-resource epic, and I'm trying to figure out how to make "blanks, found in Amakawa's house in Noihara." Actually, that's why the balls became the answer to the question — "how to make a "Ferry" to such an unstable environment as air?". Actually, my efforts looked rather idiotic from the outside: to take the ball and hold it in my hand... cut it with a knife / pierce it / heat it / etc. And track the behavior of the volume of the gas mixture with its improved clan ability. Curiously, some variants lasted for quite a long time, even after being extracted from the cut rubber shell. Do you see a ball of air in the air? But he is. I wonder if I redo the entire volume of air piece by piece, will it be possible to breathe it? Research has given me a lot of positive emotions — it's not often that a modern scientist gets into the hands of a problem that needs to be solved almost from scratch, which colleagues or predecessors haven't had time to dig into... but all the cards were confused by the time limit.

A week and a half! And then I'll have to give Kouji-san an answer to the question of whether I found anything by agreement at the Amakawa Estate. And if I say yes, I'm politely asked to do so. And if I say no, then it will become problematic to pursue further mutually beneficial cooperation. And I am very satisfied with the loyalty of the Social Committee in a particular city! Moreover, there will be another advantage from issuing amulets to magicians and "magicians" of the regional branch — in addition to disguising magicians, these same amulets will not allow anything to be felt through them and considered in the range of mana radiation. And only me and my team have glases!

[5th day after arrival from Noihara]

Fortunately, I didn't have the task of copying my complicated and advanced amulet. A rough imitation is also suitable, or even come up with something of your own. As I have seen, there is nothing super-complicated or impossible to copy from what I have seen, which came out from under the hands of my ancestral relatives. And this is logical — Ferry, like human hands, is a universal tool, but there are also well-defined frameworks for a broad-profile instrument, beyond which it is impossible to create something without additional tools. That is, by definition, grandfather could not do something that I cannot repeat "on my knee.".. Okay. If anything, I'll lock up a spool of silk ribbon and, without batting an eye, inform you that this is an old version of the amulet. At the same time, it will be possible to laugh behind the backs of harsh men who tie themselves every thirty centimeters of the body with pink (which I found!) with ribbons! It's okay, as they say, if you want to live, you won't get too excited!

[7th day after arrival from Noihara]

Shizuka, tell me, can you make a mist? Yes, I admit, it sounded a little out of place: we were just returning from school, and Mizuchi and Rinko were discussing something about clothes. Yes, yes! My friends are also people, and even more than that, they are young girls (though not a snake, but is she a schoolgirl? So, young, and age aside!). You can roll your eyes as much as you want and pretend that you're actually thinking about the fate of the world even on the potty... but it's not for us. We do what we do so that we can live a normal life, not for the sake of a heroic process... You know," the Goddess of Rivers said after a moment of silence,

"I can make fog, of course, but not very much... But I can't compare with you!"

"Yes, you said it rather vaguely," Kuzaki giggled, "maybe you'll take your mind off it?"

"I can't," I smiled, "you have competitions in twelve days, and I want to watch them-and so that my head doesn't hurt about the work that hasn't been done."

"A cheating argument, you know!"

[9th day after arrival from Noihara]

"Tighter, tighter... even tighter..."

"A little more, and instead of fog there will be just water... by the volume of our bathroom!"

"You're not going to let it leak anyway."

"The exploiter! Ouch!"

Yes, it was that "ouch" when the Ferry tore out a piece about seventy centimeters in diameter from the magically saturated environment around my hand. And in my hand I had a sandwich made from a dried layer of sakura petals pasted on a piece of paper (sakura flowers are sold as... um, seasoning in the grocery store) and two layers of waterproof fabric. The whole trick here is to steam the medium together with the mediator, to form a single whole from the amulet and the volume of gas... that is, not a gas, but a gas emulsion.

"Shizuka, take the water out of the air.... Great! Someday I'll figure out how it works at the molecular level, and you and I will win the Nobel Prize, colleague!"

"It's very nice to hear that, colleague," Mizuchi adjusted her glasses, looking with interest at the empty space around the sandwich amulet. It was nothing to her, but I was looking at a reinvented "rubber" ferry. Around the amulet, spreading across the floor from below and across the ceiling from above, strands of a web of light fluctuated "in empty air." It's a good thing that the magicians won't see it — it's not a sight for the faint of heart, especially if the amulet is on a person... on the magician. Dandelion boy, damn it!