Labyrinth of the Blue Witch (17 page)

“Hiya, kids. Finally caught up to ya. Are you all right?”

Yukina couldn’t hide her bewilderment that her own homeroom teacher had entered the fray.

“Ms. Sasasaki! What are you doing here…?!”

“Natsuki asked me to. She said to help you and the Akatsuki siblings out if she ever went missing. Looks like things got pretty bad while I wasn’t looking?”

Yukina nodded frankly.

“…Yes. Quite.”

Seeing Yukina’s forthright behavior made Misaki break out in a satisfied-looking leer.

“Roger that. Leave Kanase and the others to me and go.”

As she said this, the lady teacher adopted a strange pose. This was one of the so-called animal styles of kung fu, emulating the movements of a particular animal.

She was at once Natsuki Minamiya’s junior and a nationally accredited Attack Mage. She was a female martial artist able to take out gangs single-handedly, split the ground with her bare hand, and release
qi
wave beams from her palm among other things, giving rise to a number of urban legends.

“Ms. Sasasaki, these opponents are corpses. There must be a necromancer mixed in controlling them, but…”

“No problem! I’ll just smack them all down!” As soon as she said it, exactly as promised, Misaki began sending everything wearing a black robe flying. It was a display of amazing brute force, but she was strong in other ways. She beat away the occasional magical attack flying her way with one flash of her
qi
.

As gaps opened up in the black-robed human wall surrounding them, Kojou and Yukina slipped through the ring of tourists around them.

“Ms. Sasasaki, is Natsuki…?!”

“She’s all right. For now, at least.”

As Misaki answered Kojou’s final question, she tossed in a wink for good measure.

After giving her a deep bow of his head, this time Kojou ran forward without looking back.

“Later, then…
Take good care of her
is what I’d like to have said.”

Seeing the students go, Misaki made a small murmur to herself.

Then, she shot the black-robed men a look that burned with her fighting spirit.

The corpse soldiers, surely lacking their own wills, backed off, overpowered by her aura. A ferocious smile came over Misaki’s lips, followed by another “Kishaa!” sound, as if from a monstrous bird. Sounds of admiration echoed among the tourists.

The festival had only just begun.

The girl had been born in the dungeon of an old castle.

She opened her eyes to spell chants in place of lullabies. The ones watching over her birth were homunculus maidservants. In place of her mother’s arms granting her warmth, there was only the cold chemical soup filling the glass vat.

She had no memory prior to the age of six. She had been granted the minimal knowledge required for everyday life and the pact with the devil. That formed all she could remember.

She was born with the body of a six-year-old, in a castle dungeon, alone.

…
Where is my mother?
she asked the homunculus maidservants.

“She is inside the prison barrier.”

That was the maidservants’ answer.

—Prison barrier? What’s that?

“It is a prison in Tokyo Metropolis, Itogami City, the Demon Sanctuary of the Far East. It is a place of eternal exile in a different dimension sealed off from this world. The abominable Witch of the Void betrayed your mother and keeps her captive in the darkness.”

The words of the maidservants came down upon the freshly born little girl like a curse.

“You were born to serve as Mistress Aya’s trump card for escaping her confinement. You are a pure-blooded witch, having formed a pact with a devil at birth. You are the Blue Witch, protected by the Blue Knight.”

The girl understood none of it. All she could grasp was that her mother was shut inside a place far, far away and that her mother needed her in order to escape from that place.

But the girl still had doubts.

If she was born for the sake of a prison escape, what would happen to her once that objective had been fulfilled? Would her own mother need her once no longer captive…?

“Your body is still young. Long years shall be necessary before you grow able to fully employ your demonic energy. Once you reach your sixteenth birthday, the season of darkness shall begin; on the day of the festival of bonfires, you shall go to the Demon Sanctuary and tear the prison barrier asunder.”

The maidservants did not allay her doubts. The only words they repeated over and over were to engrave upon her mind the details of the plan for rescuing her mother.

This, too, was surely a curse her mother had cast upon her. She had been born as a tool, one part of a complex plan for the great spell that would free her.

“There is no need for concern. We of the Library shall support you in every way. All is as your mother desires…”

Just as the maidservants had told her, her thirteenth birthday was the occasion for a great many sorcerers to visit the castle.

They granted her all kinds of knowledge: about the organization called LCO, about the Demon Sanctuary, how to decipher grimoires, how to control her Guardian, how to make use of her powers as a witch—

From birth, her affinity for witchcraft was well beyond the norm; finally, she obtained the title of Librarian from the organization. However, there was still no one who would answer her question.

—Did her existence have any value besides her role in the plan?

She posed her question to the Guardian who stood behind her back.

However, no answer came from the faceless knight. No answer ever came—

Kojou and Yukina escaped the throngs of people on the main thoroughfare and ran down a narrow alley.

It went without saying that Yukina in her apron dress, looking like a refugee from a fairy tale, and Kojou, currently stuck in Yuuma’s body, made quite a sight together. Even in a city full of costumed tourists, the sight of them sprinting together without even a single glance to the side made them really stand out; everyone looked straight at them. But as they emerged from the alley and arrived at a plaza, an even stranger group awaited them.

These were riot cops bearing shields and armored cars built with gray-colored plating. It was an Island Guard barricade.

Kojou ground his back teeth as he looked up at the giant structure looming above them.

“Aw, shit…! They’ve sealed off this way, too!”

The roof of the inverted pyramid building that was Itogami Island’s defining symbol had been taken over by a mass of creepy tentacles that looked like they came from a kraken. It was the monster Yukina had labeled a witch’s Guardian.

The Island Guard’s riot police were engaged in combat with that Guardian. Four combat helicopters were whirling above the building, firing machine guns and purification rockets in a merciless barrage.

Kojou was beside himself as he looked up at the spreading flames.

“Geez, they broke out the heavy artillery…!”

The onslaught had broken fragments from the building that poured down like hail falling from the sky. Ricochets and stray shots seemed to be spreading considerable damage to surrounding buildings. No doubt they’d sealed off the approaches to keep civilians from being harmed by such ferocious combat. But.

“We…can’t get close like this, can we?” mused Yukina.

“Well, this is their job, if anything we should be praising ’em for reacting so quickly, but…”

Yukina and Kojou both murmured in impatient tones. Any way they thought about it, with the Island Guard doing a typically robust job sealing off the area, it was useless to try to break through to get to Keystone Gate. Even if Yukina was a Sword Shaman with all the proper credentials, they’d never let them enter a battlefield with combat choppers buzzing around.

Furthermore, the riot police began bombarding the roof of the building from the ground. It was a barrage of flak guns loaded with anti-demon explosive rounds. Along with the explosions themselves, Silver-Elysium alloy fléchettes with high-purification properties racked the monster’s body. But there was no visible change in the monster’s movements.

“…Not a scratch?!” said Kojou as he gaped.

Yukina analyzed the situation with a composed voice.

“That Guardian has probably been strengthened via magic… It may well be impervious to attack.”

It’d take an amount of magical energy beyond all good sense to enchant a creature of that size, but perhaps it was possible for a witch with the favor of a devil to pull that off.

Having withstood the onslaught with ease, the monster began its counteroffensive.

It extended one of its mottled tentacles like a whip, wrapping it around one of the combat helicopters and snapping it in an instant. The out-of-control helicopter spewed flames as it fell toward the earth. It hit the ground hard, spewing out a huge amount of fumes from the explosion. The eerie shake of the Gigafloat’s ground and the explosion’s echoes between the tall buildings made it seem like they were watching a giant monster movie up close.

Kojou groaned ruefully as a burning smell wafted through the air.

“Ugh…”

The combat helicopter had been unmanned, but there’d been people wounded by the resulting explosion. If combat continued like this, it was only a matter of time before even civilians got wrapped up in it.

Furthermore, the demonic power emitted from the top of the building grew even greater in intensity. Even while Yukina and Kojou found themselves obstructed, Yuuma was getting closer to finishing her magical ritual.

Yukina bit her lip without a word. Her spear could easily rip apart the spell that was strengthening the Guardian’s flesh. In spite of knowing this, the monster was on the roof of a building several hundred meters away, well beyond her reach.

Kojou took out his cell phone to search its map.

“Gotta be a way to slip past ’em…”

In a case like this, he didn’t care if it was a tunnel or a Gigafloat maintenance shaft; if he could only find a way to get to Keystone Gate without getting stopped by the Island Guard—

But Kojou squinted with a feeling of tension as he looked at the photo used as his wallpaper image.

“The heck’s this…?! …Is that Asagi?”

Displayed upon it was the innocently sleeping face of his classmate. She looked more baby faced without makeup, with a slight trace of drool on the corner of her lips, but that only made her cuter. He felt like he was watching a kitten happily basking in the sun.

Yukina icily glared at Kojou, while he stared at the wallpaper image in shock, and asked, “Senpai, where did you get that photo…?”

“N-no! It wasn’t me! Someone uploaded this behind my b… Wait, ah?”

Kojou was desperately shaking his head when it suddenly clicked: An icon he’d never seen before had been added in the corner of the wallpaper image. The icon showed Keystone Gate; the text said, “Route Info.”

“Himeragi, this way!”

“S-s-senpai…?”

Kojou took Yukina’s hand and ran off in a completely unrelated direction. Yukina was still confused by the sudden action as she followed, almost like she was being dragged along. Kojou followed the directions on his navigation screen and plunged into an unfamiliar building.

It wasn’t that he trusted an application someone installed behind his back, but he didn’t have any other leads for breaking through the stalemate. They were screwed anyway; why not give it a shot?

But the resulting phenomenon was far outside Kojou’s expectations. He was assailed by dizziness, an eerie floating feeling, and a slight impact. When his vision stopped shaking, Yukina and Kojou were inside an unfamiliar shopping mall.

“A teleport—?! Senpai, what is this?”

Quickly grasping the situation, Yukina looked up at Kojou in shock. Kojou glared at his phone’s screen and shook his head.

“This nav program says this is the route to get to Keystone Gate. Figure we’ll come out inside the gate after a bunch of more jumps.”