Chapter 88: Invalid Questions and Answers

While Cangyu was still engaged in a fierce battle with Rosetta, Lingling and Yan Xi were rushing to the scene from a distance.

Yan Xi had already transformed into the Magical Girl “Kouga.” To look after Lingling, she flew close to the rooftops, leading the way slightly ahead of her. Lingling, as usual, used Iron Thorn to maneuver between the buildings.

At the start of their journey, she couldn’t feel anything, but as they approached the target location, she quickly discovered that strange Magic Power reactions were scattered throughout the entire area ahead. One happened to be right on their path.

Lingling followed that magic to find a strange, egg-sized sphere. When she found it, it was clinging to the bottom of a water tank with roots like a plant, and a single eye on the surface of the black sphere was spinning constantly. Without hesitating for even one second, she grabbed the sphere and crushed it in her hand.

The Magic Power dissipating from it caught Yan Xi’s attention. She immediately landed on the roof and turned back to ask Lingling, “What was that just now?”

“I just took care of a ‘Seed of Trouble’ while I was at it. I’ll clean up the rest later.”

Yan Xi didn’t show much surprise at Lingling’s answer and simply praised her. “Good job. It looks like you’ll be able to help us finish today’s mission early.”

This was because “Seeds of Trouble” were all too familiar to any Magical Girl who had encountered a Witch. Characters in the Original Work and other viewers liked to call them “Seeds.” Lingling remembered this clearly, though it was the first time she had seen one with her own eyes since her reincarnation.

Just like the two types of Permanent Magic used by Magical Girls, Witches had corresponding general abilities, which involved generating these Seeds. In the area surrounding a Seed, all ordinary Humans would find it easier to fall into negative emotions. The Magic Power generated by these negative emotions would then be absorbed by the Seed and returned to the Witch.

The reason Lingling could find the Seeds so easily was that her perception was far beyond that of a normal person. If an ordinary Magical Girl wanted to find them all, it would indeed be a laborious task.

After that, she and Yan Xi continued on their way. By the time they arrived near the Underground Passage, they could already hear the sounds of fighting from within, occasionally mixed with booming sounds loud enough to shake the ground.

Meanwhile, inside the Underground Passage, Cangyu was locked in a difficult battle with Rosetta. Earlier, in order to draw out Rosetta’s main body, she had provoked her loudly, “Hiding in those Windows all the time… are you just too afraid to face me head-on?”

To her surprise, Rosetta appeared quickly as requested. Whenever Cangyu tried to destroy a wall, Rosetta used knives and forks as cover, emerging from a Window to strike with her Parasol at the moment Cangyu found it hardest to dodge. Then, she would dive into the next Window, as if the space were a body of water and she was a fish swimming through it. During the process, she didn’t forget to hurl trash talk at Cangyu. “How does it feel to face me head-on?”

“Hitting and running doesn’t count as a head-on fight!” Cangyu complained while smashing the incoming knives and forks.

Her current situation was exactly the same as before, but this time, she intended to use a fake punch toward the wall to trick Rosetta’s main body into appearing. It went exactly as she expected; after she feigned raising her fist, the tip of a Parasol emerged from a Window behind her.

‘Caught you!’ Cangyu thought with secret glee.

However, when she turned around, the Parasol that had emerged was no longer moving. Instead, a rose-colored figure descended gracefully from the direction she had originally been facing, thrusting another Parasol fiercely toward her head. Even against such an assault, Cangyu’s reaction was swift. She instinctively tilted her head to the side, allowing the tip of the Parasol to graze past her cheek.

Rosetta used the momentum of her attack to dive into a Window, just as she had done before, and then continuously opened new Windows to fire knives and forks at Cangyu. Cangyu immediately raised her fists to counter. In that instant, she noticed a strange, cube-shaped object following behind the last of the knives and forks. She smashed the utensils one by one and stepped aside to dodge the strange object.

Perhaps because its trigger had been tripped, the object began to let out an *Agagagagaga!* electronic cackling after hitting the ground. Startled, Cangyu couldn’t help but look back. A palm-sized Jack-in-the-box entered her vision, and the source of the cackling was a toy clown sticking its head out of the box.

“Don’t you think it’s just like you?” Rosetta’s voice came from the other side as she stepped out of a Window with a leisurely pace. She was even willing to forgo a sneak attack opportunity just to take a moment to admire Cangyu’s expression.

‘You must be absolutely furious right now~’ Rosetta thought.

Under her expectant gaze, Cangyu slowly turned her head back. Unfortunately… the expression she wore was completely different from what Rosetta had imagined.

“?? You mean it likes to laugh as much as I do?” She stared at Rosetta with a blank look, clearly failing to understand why Rosetta would ask such a thing.

Rosetta wagged her index finger and maintained her smile as she told her, “…No. Let me kindly remind you that the thing inside that box is a clown.”

Cangyu’s eyes widened, and she took on an expression of sudden realization. “A clown? …I see. So… you mean the kind of person who brings laughter to others?”

Rosetta opened her mouth to interrupt. She had thought Cangyu finally understood her sarcasm, but Cangyu continued, “I think — I don’t know why you’re praising me, but thanks anyway.”

In that instant, the air between the two froze, as did Rosetta’s smile.

“Do you actually have gray matter inside that skull of yours?” She couldn’t help but launch a direct personal attack.

Cangyu responded by saying, “Of course I do, because I’m a Human. But do Badma not have brains?”

That sentence caused Rosetta’s smile to crack with a literal sound. Among Magical Girls, it was a common phenomenon to lump Witches and Badma together. Although she knew Cangyu likely didn’t have the wits to use that fact to mock her intentionally, the fact that the conversation had been steered to this point by Cangyu made her feel like she had lost no matter how she looked at it.

“No more talking. I’m going to slaughter you.” Her face turned as hideous as a demon’s as she spoke.

As Rosetta dove into a Window, her assault became even more fierce than before, and the distinction between her feints and real strikes became harder to discern. She used the tip of her Parasol as bait and managed to trick Cangyu once more. Just when she thought she was about to succeed, the rubble covering the entrance of the passage was shattered by a bolt of Golden Lightning. Seeing the lightning about to surge toward her, she had no choice but to abandon her attack and retreat.

Once the dust settled, a bright yellow Magical Girl and a Doll in a Maid Outfit appeared from behind the rubble.

“Senior Kouga!” Cangyu shouted excitedly toward Yan Xi. Then, she quickly noticed the unfamiliar face standing beside Yan Xi. “And… who’s this?”

The stranger’s eyelashes fluttered slightly, as if she could sense the difference in her attitude. Just like that, Cangyu’s confused gaze and Lingling’s dissatisfied gaze met.