Alice Kuonji silently watched Aoko Aozaki walk away without a word, then closed the Western-style Mansion's front door.
Today's lessons had run two hours longer than planned, leaving them still having to go out on patrol when everything had already fallen silent.
The witch's insistence on this was not really because she held a grudge over Aoko Aozaki going out for sushi alone... at least, not entirely.
Recently, the probing attacks against the Great Barrier had grown increasingly brazen, even reaching the point of suspicious activity around the Leyline nodes. This had already crossed Alice Kuonji's bottom line.
Besides the Great Barrier used to monitor abnormal fluctuations in magical energy, Misaki City had another barrier: the smaller barrier all Leyline administrators established to channel and utilize the magical energy produced by the land.
This technique could not only eliminate threats such as spiritual disasters in advance, but also greatly strengthen the administrator on their home ground. Tokiomi Tohsaka had once used it to adjust and carefully nurture the land over his Leylines, improving its fortune so that his tenants' businesses flourished, allowing him to collect high rents and recreate something akin to landlordism in the modern age.
Although Alice Kuonji also possessed such techniques, she was entirely different from Tokiomi Tohsaka in both personality and influence, and simply maintained the original arrangement.
That meant relying on five nodes inscribed into the earth to establish an internal circulation, artificially controlling the flow of magical energy and borrowing the Leylines' power to give a mage the same advantages as a Workshop.
The node where magical energy currently converged was the Kuonji residence.
This was also the main reason the reclusive, solitary witch had agreed to become Aoko Aozaki's teacher and allowed her to move into the Western-style Mansion she treasured.
And if