Magical Girls? There's No Going Back! Chapter 42

The Hunting Mark on Black Cat soon displayed an image. She was sprawled across a piano, asleep, while Yao and Saroye argued in the distance over which songs to perform.

Yao seemed to be getting heated. She drew her long blade and slashed at Saroye, who paid her no mind, continuing to argue even as she was cut. Before the blade had even fully left her body, the wound had already begun to heal.

"That woman will be a major problem too... But it seems like one person is still missing?" Li Xuan rotated the view for a long while, yet never found the tall nun.

The Guitarist Is Running Away!

While Li Xuan was looking around, Felia suddenly kicked open the door and burst in, shouting excitedly, "Sisters! Good news! I've secured a venue for the live show. We can perform next Wednesday!"

"Yay! Just what I'd expect from Felia!" Black Cat raised both hands in celebration from her sleep, then flopped back down as though her battery had run out and she had been forcibly powered off.

"How did your discussion about the setlist go? Did you reach an agreement?" Felia asked.

"The discussion was very harmonious. She slashed me five times, and I fired six shots, but she dodged them all," Saroye said irritably.

"Then it was mostly peaceful, wasn't it? At least nobody died. So, are we writing new songs or using our old ones?" Felia asked with a smile.

"Of course we're writing new songs! We finally came to a new city. How can we show off our rock spirit without new songs?" Yao said firmly.

"Easy for you to say. If we want to perform new songs, I need to write new lyrics, and Felia needs to compose new music. How much time will we have left to rehearse? You don't care about any of that. You really only ever think about yourself, from beginning to end!" Saroye said coldly.

"Huh? Composing is one thing, but doesn't lyric writing just need hands? Don't think everyone has to revolve around you just because you're the lead singer!" Yao said aggressively.

"No fighting." Felia pulled out a heavy machine gun from beneath her skirt and set it up in front of them. She glanced at the sleeping Black Cat, then thoughtfully attached a suppressor to the muzzle.

"Just need hands? Do you think it's like playing with knives? Lyrics need to rhyme, and more importantly, they need to move the audience! A guitarist like you probably wouldn't understand," Saroye said, pulling out a revolver and loading six rounds at a dazzling speed.

"Hmph, I'll prove you wrong today! I'm going to find inspiration right now, and before noon tomorrow, I'll slap perfect lyrics right in your stinking face!" Yao was rather worked up. With the attitude of if I did it, I could do it too, she bypassed Felia and fled the rehearsal room.

"Hey! Get back here! Felia, go after her! The guitarist is running away!" Saroye reached for Yao but grabbed nothing, so she could only turn to Felia for help.

"Let her go. That girl barely knows any words. She'll give up soon enough. It's not like she'll get lost. Once she's done playing around, she'll come home on her own." Unlike when Black Cat had run away, Felia showed no anxiety. She leisurely sat down at the drum set and began improvising.

"Don't forget that there are still hidden monsters in this city. We haven't sensed the other party's aura at all so far. They might be waiting in the shadows to bite us. Isn't it dangerous to let her go out alone at a time like this?" Saroye asked worriedly.

"That arrogant little brat could use some hardship. As for the job, it won't be too late to handle it after the concert. It's only a trivial matter anyway," Felia said indifferently.

"Do you really think it'll be that easy? If it were so simple, why would the Church have come to us?" Saroye felt vaguely worried, but whenever she brought it up, everyone acted unconcerned.

"Don't worry. Heavenly Father will protect us." Felia raised the silver cross necklace on her chest and devoutly kissed it.

Saroye still wanted to persuade Felia, but Black Cat, who had been asleep the whole time, suddenly woke up. Yawning, she came up behind Saroye, tugged at her pants, and softly said, "Saroye, new songs. We need new songs."

"Huh? You're planning to write new songs now too? Are you sure there's enough time?" Saroye asked in confusion.

"Being forced into it is part of rock too. Let's start writing lyrics from scratch! This live show gives us time for three songs. If the new song bombs, we still have two others to salvage the band's image," Felia answered.

"Fine. I'll write the lyrics as quickly as I can. I hope Yao comes back soon. I don't know why, but I have a bad feeling about this," Saroye said worriedly.

Watching them actually arrange a performance without taking him seriously at all, Li Xuan grew annoyed. Pointing at the screen, he said to Qi Mo, "Focus on checking performance bookings for next Wednesday. Leave the image here for you to monitor. I'll go meet that loner."

"Master, please be careful! Call us anytime if something happens!" Qi Mo called after Li Xuan's departing figure with a worried expression.

Since Lilika had already told Li Xuan where the villa was, determining the direction Yao had fled in was not difficult. This time, however, Li Xuan no longer risked peeking personally. Instead, he summoned Wu Yan and Tan Xiang, who were undergoing combat training in the Delusive Badlands.

"You two split up. Pretend you're out shopping and search south of this villa. The target is a short high school girl carrying two swords. She should be conspicuous. Once you find her, don't stare at her. Just follow from a distance nearby. I'll tell you what to do next."

As he spoke, Li Xuan gave each of them a pair of earbuds for remote communication.

The two magical girls soon set off. Naturally, Li Xuan did not expect two high school girls with no tracking training to accomplish a task even he could not manage. His strategy was to place Hunting Marks on them and indirectly confirm Yao's location through the images from those marks.

That way, even if Yao noticed someone watching her, she would not trace it back to the two magical girls. As for Li Xuan's actual body, it was several kilometers away, far beyond Yao's sensory range.

The tactic proved highly effective. Yao, who had run out onto the streets and wandered around aimlessly, soon entered the visible range of Wu Yan's marked view. Li Xuan immediately directed Tan Xiang to move nearby as well, locking onto Yao from two directions. Even if one of them lost her, the other could still find her.

Yao, boiling with anger, had no idea she had become Li Xuan's target. After wandering around the streets without purpose for a while, she plunged into a bar and began drinking cup after cup.

Her alcohol tolerance did not seem particularly good. After drinking too much, she forced the bartender to find her some paper and a pen, then began writing lyrics under the influence of alcohol.

Wu Yan was currently pretending to drink in the bar. Through her mark, Li Xuan curiously zoomed in for a closer look. In crooked handwriting, the paper read:

"Yao is the cutest, Saroye is bad, that unkillable thing is such a pain. Black Cat is cute, Felia is bad, chop them up and sell them as buns..."

There were over a dozen more lines of "lyrics" like that. They mostly expressed her desire to kill everyone, but most were crossed out after one or two lines. It seemed even she was dissatisfied with work that amounted to little more than doggerel.

"Ahhhhhhhhhhh, I want to write dazzling lyrics and go back to slap Saroye in the face! I want to see her kneel and apologize, admiring my invincible talent! By Virgin Mary's tits, if anyone can give me a set of lyrics, I'll do anything!!!!!"

Drunk Yao soon clutched her head and went berserk. Seeing how fierce she looked, the staff did not dare approach to stop her.

Seeing Yao lose her mind, Li Xuan knew his chance had come.

As long as he approached Yao now with a finished set of lyrics, he would have a natural opportunity to get close to her. Not only could he place a Hunting Mark on her, but learning more about her personality and habits would also lay the foundation for the final assault later.

Thinking that, Li Xuan confidently shut off the image and prepared to act. Yet just before setting out, he suddenly realized something awkward:

He could not write lyrics either.

The Taunts of a Bratty Girl

"Ladies, can any of you write lyrics? Urgent, urgent, urgent! Waiting online!" Li Xuan asked in the magical girls' group chat.

Less than a minute later, four identical replies appeared in the group chat: "No." Li Xuan refused to give up and specifically asked Xu Rou, who was excellent at Chinese. Yet she also said she did not know how, producing several doggerel poems that were not much better than Yao's.

At that point, Li Xuan completely gave up—after all, exams did not test lyric writing. Apparently, even the two top students under his command had their limitations.

Thinking of that, Li Xuan felt a pang of regret. Was he really going to miss such a perfect opportunity? He could still go strike up a conversation based on experience, but with Yao's personality, if he did not bring something that interested her, he would inevitably take a few slashes.

Then Li Xuan suddenly slapped his forehead. Wasn't there still a magical girl locked in the wine cellar? Tang Xi was a professional! Writing lyrics should not be a problem for her, right?

Li Xuan hurriedly opened a passageway and went straight to the wine cellar, grabbing the drowsy Tang Xi and hauling her up.

"Master! Don't spank me! I wrote several thousand words today, but I accidentally hit backspace while sleeping and deleted them! You have to believe me!" Seeing Li Xuan's aggressive expression, Tang Xi thought he had come to catch her slacking off. She hurriedly covered her butt and defended herself.

"I'm not spanking you, I'm not spanking you. Let me ask you something: have you ever written lyrics?" Li Xuan soothed her by stroking her head.

"Lyrics? Of course I have. After my novel went on hiatus, I made extra money writing them," Tang Xi said, immediately relieved to hear that he was not there to spank her.

"Do you have any unpublished ones? Give me something good to look at!" Li Xuan asked excitedly, holding out his hand.

"Master needs lyrics? Let me think... There's a discarded draft for a new song I wrote for Bing Rui. We all thought it was pretty good, but it didn't fit her style. Do you want to take a look?" Tang Xi said, opening a folder and showing Li Xuan the document inside.

Li Xuan could not really tell whether it was good or bad, so he simply borrowed Tang Xi's computer. As he prepared to leave, he suddenly remembered that Yao had seen him before. She might not remember his face after that hurried encounter, but it would be troublesome if she recognized him.

So Li Xuan went to Qi Mo's room, borrowed some cosmetics, and altered his face, disguising himself as a weathered middle-aged man. Only then did he return to the area near the bar in satisfaction.

By then, Yao had stopped drinking. Her entire upper body was sprawled across the table, a pen cap clenched between her teeth as she stared blankly at a sheet of white paper—her mind was naturally just as blank.

"Damn it, didn't they say drinking gives you inspiration? Why do I only feel like cutting people after drinking?" Yao finally gave up thinking, tossed aside her pen, and lay sideways on the paper.

"Excuse me, one Tequila Sunrise, with ice."

Knowing the time had come, Li Xuan carried his laptop over, sat elegantly at a table diagonally across from Yao, and gestured for the waiter to take his order.

A brightly colored tequila cocktail was quickly brought over. Li Xuan did not rush to drink it. He merely took an elegant sip, set down the glass, opened his laptop, and pretended to write.

Office workers using laptops in coffee shops were common, but doing it in a bar was rather strange. The lighting was dim and the place crowded and noisy; it was simply not somewhere one could quietly handle serious work.

Sure enough, Li Xuan's strange behavior caught Yao's attention. Leaning on her sword sheath for support, she staggered over to his side.

"Heeey, mister, what are you doing? A bar isn't somewhere a useless corporate drone like you works overtime~ Are you putting on an act to hook women? So gross. Don't tell me you're still a virgin at your age? What a useless scrap from the edge of society," Yao mocked into Li Xuan's ear in an extremely bratty tone.

Under normal circumstances, Li Xuan would have found such classic bratty-girl remarks amusing. But when he saw the long and short blades hanging from Yao's body, he immediately felt as though needles were pricking his back.

As a man, he was confident he could handle the bratty girl before him. But whenever he thought of Yao's lightning-fast slash, he could not help feeling intimidated.

Yet how could a man willing to risk his life to pick up magical girls possibly be scared off by a mere sword?

Li Xuan quickly steadied his emotions and said in a calm yet world-weary tone, "I'm writing lyrics for a band."

"Lyrics? Pfft, don't make me laugh, useless mister. You're probably just writing drunken ramblings, right? Maybe even disgusting virgin dirty jokes—let me see whether your lyrics are normal or not~"

As she spoke, Yao draped half her body over Li Xuan's shoulder. Li Xuan immediately felt something soft brush against him.

Unlike petite girls such as Lilika, Mian Yin, and Black Cat, Yao was short but rather well-endowed. Her Grade C+ figure was a considerable size even among adult women, let alone on a petite girl under one meter sixty, making it even more striking.

"No way? These really are lyrics... The quality is better than mine... no, even better than Saroye's!"

Yao looked at the screen with disdain, but the instant she clearly saw the lyrics, it felt as though every pore on her body opened, and a third of her drunkenness vanished. She could not write lyrics herself, but as a guitarist, she had read plenty of them and could appreciate the quality of wording and how it would feel when sung.

The lyrics before her might not have been top-tier, but they certainly did not feel inferior to Saroye's work!

If she could copy these lyrics and slap them in Saroye's face, wouldn't Saroye have to kneel down and admit she was wrong on the spot?

At the thought of proud Saroye being conquered by her talent, kneeling on the ground and licking her feet while loudly calling her big sister, Yao's brain surged with pleasure as though it had been violently ravaged by an eighteen-centimeter thing. Even her expression became several degrees more frivolous.

Seeing Yao's reaction, a smug smile appeared on Li Xuan's lips. The author he liked really had skill. Just a discarded draft could make the bratty girl react like this. Today's plan was looking solid.

"Ahem, I was only being sarcastic earlier. What you wrote is total garbage, worse than Hajime Isayama's ending. You don't seriously think you can attract me with writing that can be found by the pile in any trash can, do you, useless mister~?" Realizing she had accidentally revealed what she truly thought, Yao hurriedly patched up her earlier words and viciously disparaged the lyrics Li Xuan had brought.

Yet her eyes remained fixed on the screen without blinking, as though she wanted to burn every word into her memory.

Please, I'll Do Anything!

"Everyone has different tastes. If you don't like it, then don't read it." How could Li Xuan fail to notice her intentions? With a snap, he closed the laptop, picked up his tequila, and took a sip.

Yao's plan to secretly memorize the lyrics was ruined, and she immediately grew annoyed. But she did not want to admit that she had been trying to remember them, so she retaliated with a cheap grin. "A useless mister like you still wants to drink? Drink my foot-washing water instead! Heh~"

The moment she finished speaking, Yao took off one shoe and flicked it upward with her toes, accurately landing it in Li Xuan's drink.

Li Xuan frowned. But seeing Yao's expression of triumphant mischief, he knew that getting angry would mean falling into her trap. So he gently set down the glass and calmly said, "Waiter, another one, please."

"No way, mister? You're not angry even after that? Or are you secretly furious inside, but holding it in to maintain your grown-up image? No way, no way. You're not seriously getting worked up over a child's prank, are you? You frowned! You got mad! You must be angry, right? Hahahahahahaha~~~" Yao stared at Li Xuan's face, seemingly trying to provoke his anger.

What was worse than being mocked to your face by a bratty girl? Being mocked to your face by a bratty girl while being unable to beat her up, of course.

Although Yao's manner and words were extremely punchable, Li Xuan had spent several years working like livestock on construction sites in his previous life. With the experience of one and a half lifetimes, his heart was far more steady than that of his peers. He quietly buried his anger, leaving his face as calm as an ancient well.

The waiter soon brought over another tequila cocktail. Li Xuan continued drinking without changing expression. This time, Yao did not toss another shoe into the glass. Instead, she looked at Li Xuan in disbelief and said:

"No way, mister? You really are a spineless coward? Fine, adults are one thing, but you don't even dare get angry when a child bullies you? You're completely and utterly useless. Even fishermen who've caught nothing all day would toss a worthless trash fish like you straight back into the water~ Bleeeh~~~" The more Yao spoke, the more fired up she became. In the end, she simply grabbed Li Xuan's arm and drank the remaining liquor in his glass in a single gulp while holding his hand.

"It seems this young lady hasn't had enough fun. Waiter, I'd like a private room. Bring one glass each of every liquor the manager recommends, plus two portions of snacks to go with them," Li Xuan said with a smile as he stood.

"No problem! Please follow me!" Seeing business arrive, the waiter hurriedly stepped forward with a beaming smile to lead the way.

"Mister... you really aren't angry. Tch~ How boring." Though Yao said it was boring, she shamelessly followed right behind Li Xuan into the private room.

The drinks and snacks soon arrived. Li Xuan closed the door, but instead of drinking, he opened his laptop and pretended to organize files.

"Mister, what exactly do you do for work?" Holding a glass of vodka, Yao deliberately affected a sweet voice and asked.

"Me? I have many identities: host, writer, folk singer, coffee shop owner, rope artist, backpacker, Taiko no Tatsujin player, doctor, Traveler, Trailblazer, Rover, Admiral, Master..." Li Xuan deliberately put on a world-weary expression and rattled off a long list of occupations as though reciting a menu.

"You're full of it. I think you're just a frustrated useless middle-aged man who came to a bar to pick up girls~ Otherwise, why would you come to such a noisy place to write lyrics?" Yao mocked Li Xuan arrogantly while turning her head toward his screen.

Li Xuan knew she wanted to secretly memorize the lyrics, so he intentionally did not open the document and continued pretending to organize files. Yet when he opened the D drive, he suddenly noticed a folder called "Sanguosha Plans." Curiosity drove him to click it, and the screen immediately loaded with videos full of infantry.

Li Xuan was embarrassed. Before Yao could see the contents clearly, he hurriedly shut the laptop, picked up a glass of rum, and clinked it against hers.

"Hey, mister, let me see the lyrics you wrote, okay? They may be as terrible as the second season of Star Cluster, but since you're buying me drinks, I could help revise them for you~"

Seeing Li Xuan close the laptop again, Yao could not help getting anxious. Her memory was not that good to begin with, and alcohol had left her muddled. A few glances were nowhere near enough for her to remember anything.

"It's fine. Being able to buy drinks for such a cute young lady is my honor. You don't need to do anything for me," Li Xuan said unhurriedly.

"Ugh! You useless idiot of a mister, you're driving me crazy! Are you doubting my ability? I'm the singer and guitarist of a famous band! I'm a musical genius who handles lyrics and composition all by myself! You don't believe me? That expression clearly says you don't believe me!"

Yao desperately wanted those lyrics immediately. Seeing Li Xuan's gentle smile, she rushed out of the private room, snatched the guitar of the bar's resident performer, and began improvising on the spot.

Though it happened suddenly, Yao's guitar solo immediately conquered the entire audience. The original owner, who had wanted to take the guitar back, froze where he stood at her dazzling strumming. The overall rhythm was a little rushed, but compared to the dull performance from before, it was like a thunderclap tearing through the sky.

When the song ended, thunderous applause erupted through the bar. Even the bar manager came over to ask Yao whether she wanted to become a resident performer.

Yet Yao completely ignored the manager's invitation. She contemptuously returned the guitar to its owner, who had still not recovered from the shock, then rushed back into the private room in three quick strides and slammed the door shut.

"Did you hear that? The entire audience was cheering for me! I am light, I am electricity! I am the one and only genius musical girl under heaven! You believe me now, right? Hurry up and show me your lyrics!"

Yao ran up to Li Xuan. Her slightly chubby cheeks were still flushed with excitement from the performance.

"Sorry, these are lyrics I wrote for another band. I can't just show them to anyone," Li Xuan said, refusing to indulge her as he leisurely drank from his glass.

"Yaaah! I'm so mad!" Yao's expression changed, and she stomped to her feet in rage. The way she looked at Li Xuan carried several degrees more killing intent.

Li Xuan had long been wary of this move. When he saw her thumb rest on the sword guard, he immediately said in a casual tone:

"Oh, and my computer has encryption. If you enter the wrong password five times, it wipes all the data. So trying to force me won't work."

Yao was practically dying of impatience. Showing off in front of her companions was secondary. More importantly, she had boasted when she left. If she returned with her tail between her legs now, Felia and Saroye would laugh her to death.

"Tell me! What do I have to do for you to give me those lyrics? Please, as long as you give me the lyrics, I'll do anything! Name your price!" Unable to endure any longer, Yao finally asked Li Xuan outright what he wanted.