Night fell. Puppet Manor.
"Dad, no! Don't... sob... Illya will listen..."
"Trying to run!"
"Help! Help!"
Suppressed wails drifted intermittently from a dim little room upstairs, mixed with suspicious thudding sounds.
Bang!
Touko Aozaki, who had just returned from completing a job and entered under cover of night, heard the noise downstairs. She decisively removed her glasses, lifted the seal, her gaze sharpening like blades. Then she sprang up to the second floor, raised her right leg coated in reinforcement magecraft, and kicked the closed door open.
"Touko, save me!"
A white-haired little girl, pale with fright and with her clothes in disarray, seized the opening to scream and dart behind her rescuer.
Touko Aozaki saw this and flew into a rage, delivering a righteous judgment upon the demon in the room who had revealed his true nature.
"Illya is still so young, and you could actually lay hands on her? Scum, you're under arre—"
"No! These questions are too hard! I don't want to do them!"
Yet as the little girl tearfully complained, the Crown Puppeteer's furious rebuke abruptly stopped. She stiffly lowered her head to look at Illya, who was tightly clutching her around the waist, then slowly looked into the room.
The dust had settled, and her vision cleared. On the desk beneath the lamp lay three blank test papers, terrifying the little girl like tigers, her eyes brimming with tears.
(As for why there were three papers: there had been five tests, and she had lied about two of them. Two were old papers, while the third was the Test A homework paper they had stolen out today.)
Meanwhile, the parent holding a feather duster stared at the little loach that had escaped his grasp and hidden behind Touko Aozaki. His face darkened like storm clouds,