Labyrinth of the Blue Witch

by Gakuto Mikumo

  It was a bit past eight in the morning. He felt like sleeping in late, but he felt fresher than he normally did; perhaps he just felt excited about the morning of the festival.

  “Morning…huh?”

  Kojou remained in bed lying faceup as he murmured absentmindedly.

  He felt like a lot had happened the night before. He’d been caught up in spatial distortions, had a reunion with the Lotharingian Armed Apostle, and he…thought Yuuma had been crawling all over him.

  But his memory was oddly vague right around that point. Kojou hadn’t engaged with Eustach again since his vanishing like an illusion. And Yuuma had been behaving oddly. He’d seen the illusion of a ghastly shadow emerge from her back, too. He didn’t think it had occurred in real life. Indeed, it was far easier to accept as something that he’d thought up in some dream.

  “Guess I saw a…pretty weird dream, huh?”

  So Kojou told himself as he rose up from the bed.

  His sudden sense of unease was likely due to the odd lightness of his body. The chronic morning lethargy and sense of fatigue that had plagued him since becoming a vampire had vanished. It was rare that a morning felt so good.

  “Nagisa’s…still asleep, I guess?”

  Thinking that the apartment was oddly quiet, Kojou went into the living room. But he saw no sight of Nagisa anywhere. He knocked on her bedroom door just to be sure, but no reply came. The bathroom light was off, too. There was only food for one person prepared in the dining room.

  “Did they go out, just the two of ’em…?” Kojou murmured without any special concern. Maybe she’d just gone out for a stroll; it was also possible they’d gone to play in Yukina’s apartment. That surely didn’t merit much thought.

  Since she’d gone through all the trouble, Kojou sat in a chair to help himself to breakfast; that was when he felt something was really off.

  Kojou’s slender, shapely legs stretched beyond the hem of the short skirt.

  “Wha…?”

  What am I wearing girls’ clothes for? thought the shaken Kojou. The little black dress was surely the one Yuuma had worn the night before.

  But Kojou finally realized that it wasn’t just clothes that he’d swapped with her.

  As he raised his hands before him, his fingers were surprisingly thin and delicate. The view down low was obstructed by an unexpected swell of his chest. The curves of his bare legs had baby-like skin, lacking leg hair or any other unsightly marks. He also realized he was ten centimeters or so shorter than he ought to be.

  “Wha…?”

  Kojou flew into the washroom and looked at the mirror within.

  The graceful visage of a girl was reflected by it, paired with somewhat disheveled bobbed hair.

  The eyes displayed within were wide with surprise. The eyelashes were long; the bridge of the nose was delicate. The face within the mirror, reminiscent of what she looked like when she was younger, was that of his old friend, Yuuma Tokoyogi.

  Kojou did pantomime over and over. He confirmed with his own eyes that her body was moving according to his will. He no longer had any room for doubt. Kojou’s mind had been put into Yuuma’s body.

  Kojou and Yuuma had switched bodies.

  And Kojou’s body had vanished somewhere, with Yuuma’s mind in it.

  “What the hellll?!”

  The shout that came out of Kojou’s mouth was in the clear, high-pitched voice of a girl.

  Rushing into the corridor, Kojou headed straight for the entryway to the apartment next door. The doorplate indicated it was room 705. It was the apartment Yukina had moved into some two months before. He couldn’t think of anyone else he could discuss an emergency situation like this with.

  “…So what happened last night wasn’t a dream, then?!”

  Kojou pushed the buzzer and roughly thrust both his hands against the wall.

  He remembered the sight of the giant shadow that had floated up from Yuuma’s back. It was an ominous blue shadow, its body clad in armor like that of a knight. There was no face under its mysterious, skull-like helmet, only a dark, unfathomable void. Perhaps Yuuma had used the power of the blue shadow to swap bodies with him.

  But Kojou didn’t understand why Yuuma had that kind of power. Nor did he understand why it was necessary for her to do such a thing.

  Yukina opened the door halfway and poked her face out of the gap.

  “…Good morning, Yuuma. Has something…happened?”

  She seemed a bit suspicious as to why Yuuma would suddenly visit her all by herself. That fact rocked Kojou all the more.

  So Kojou really did look like Yuuma, even to Yukina’s eyes. Kojou had entertained the possibility that it was just some sort of hypnotic suggestion affecting him alone, but it was not to be.

  “Himeragi. Sorry, it’s me.”

  Kojou spoke while pointing to “his” face. Yukina blinked her eyes as if finding his behavior odd.

  “Ah yes…?”

  “Er, ah, just calm down and hear me out, okay?”

  “Yuuma, I’m sorry… Can you come inside? Here is a little…”

  Yukina gently extended her hand through the gap of the door and led Kojou in. Kojou followed through the entry door, thinking Yukina’s behavior to be unexpectedly friendly of her.

  His eyes went wide as he saw what Yukina was standing there in.

  “Huh?”

  Yukina made her bashful-seeming apology while wearing nothing but a pajama top.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t really have a conversation through the doorway dressed like this.”

  The hem just barely covered her hips, but everything from the top of her thighs on down was completely bare; she’d apparently let her guard down thinking that they were both girls.

  When he looked harder, Kanon and Astarte were changing clothes in the middle of her living room, too.

  “Everyone was trying to pick what costumes to wear for the festival. Nagisa prepared a whole bunch of them, but they’re all quite exposing, you see…”

  “I-I see…”

  Apparently Nagisa had procured costumes not just for herself, but for Yukina and the others, too.

  No doubt she really wanted her friend to fully enjoy her very first Hollow Eve Festival. It was a very meddlesome, Nagisa-like thought.

  Kanon had picked out a nun outfit. It was a trim, adorable design, with frills adorning the collar and sleeves. But it seemed that her hands couldn’t reach the fastener; her back was fully open, with her bare snow-white skin looking extremely exposed through the gap. It was a mix of the solemn and the erotic.

  Taking great pains to pull his eyes from Kanon’s back, Kojou noticed the presence of the other girl in the room. Her presence stood out so much that he hadn’t consciously registered it.

  If he had to describe it, her silhouette was like that of an oversized Buddhist monk.

  The small girl wore a bodysuit with an orange cape coat and a stupidly huge pumpkin on her head. It certainly was cute, but it was the kind of cute where if you got too close, the girl might start bawling like a child.

  “Are you…Astarte?”

  As Kojou very timidly posed his question, the jack-o’-lantern’s two eyes emitted a glittering light in lieu of a nod.

  “Affirmative. I have come to like this outfit.”

  “That so. Well, I suppose it does suit you pretty nicely…”

  Kanon gently posed a question as she pulled her hips back a little and looked at Kojou. “And you are a witch, Yuuma? Very cute.”

  Those words reminded Kojou of how he currently looked. He was in a one-piece minidress with a ribbon tied over his breasts. It was the same witch cosplay outfit Yuuma had been wearing the night before.

  “Er…that’s not it. I don’t know how to explain this, but…Yuuma’s not here. Nagisa’s gone, too!”

  Yukina’s eyes widened as she saw how tense Kojou’s shoulders were. “Uh?”

  No doubt she had no way to process Yuuma herself saying she was gone. Kojou could sympathiz
e.

  Astarte and Kanon hurried over to Yuuma and looked at her with mystified expressions.

  “I mean, I’m Yuuma, but I’m not Yuuma on the inside!” he tried to explain.

  She’d probably picked up on Kojou’s mannerisms and speaking style.

  “…You don’t mean you’re…Akatsuki-senpai?” Yukina asked with her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Leave it to a shrine maiden to have sharp intuition.

  Kojou, spontaneously filled with deep emotion, gripped Yukina’s hand. “Himeragi!”

  He was indeed overwhelmed with relief to have his existence acknowledged no matter how his appearance had changed.

  But Yukina’s expression was still clouded with doubt. “R-really?”

  Kojou whispered into Yukina’s ear so that Kanon and Astarte could not hear. “I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m dead serious. Right…! I know all about ‘I’m really the Fourth Primogenitor,’ and you’re a Sword Shaman from the Lion King Agency here to watch over me.”

  Unconvinced, Yukina murmured back with a cautious demeanor. “…You could have easily unearthed that much yourself. You could also have heard it directly from senpai.”

  Perhaps she suspected that Kojou and Yuuma were working together behind her back to play an elaborate prank on her.

  Yukina suddenly pointed to her guitar case. “Right…do you remember what this little one’s called?”

  There was something small and humanoid-shaped tied to the handle. It was a beckoning cat-style mascot.

  “That’s…Manekin-Kong, right? The one I got for you at the game center.”

  Kojou spoke in a tone full of confidence. Besides Natsuki, who happened to show up at the time, the only ones who knew about that were Kojou and Yukina. Surely that proved Kojou was who he said he was.

  “It’s Nekoma.” Yukina’s lips tapered in a fierce, sullen pout. The sight of her in such a foul mood unnerved Kojou. That was when Kanon politely raised her hand.

  “Ah, where did…Akatsuki and I first meet?”

  “The roof of the middle school building. You were, ah, handing an abandoned cat over to Takashimizu from the soccer club, right?”

  Kojou eagerly replied with the feeling that he’d just been rescued. That moment stood out a lot so he remembered it easily.

  Surely it was a question only someone who’d been there at the time could answer.

  The next question was from Astarte the jack-o’-lantern.

  “Question. Which region produces the black tea my master enjoys?”

  “Natsuki’s favorite, huh…? She said it was tea candy from Ceylon, didn’t she? Said it gave the tea an herbal flavor or something…”

  Kojou was able to smoothly field even a question about his homeroom teacher’s idiosyncrasies. Bad-tasting black tea put Natsuki in an exceptionally bad mood; to a serial student guidance offender like Kojou, knowing her tastes was a matter of life or death.

  “Ding-ding-ding.” Astarte emotionlessly announced that his answer was correct.

  “So why didn’t he remember Nekoma,” Yukina murmured in a pout, her cheeks puffed up.

  In spite of that, the exchange appeared to have convinced Yukina and the others of the truth of Kojou’s assertion.

  “Then you really are senpai…?”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying all along!”

  “So senpai’s mind is inside of Yuuma’s body…? Then where is senpai’s body right now?”

  Yukina raised her eyebrows as she asked. Kojou meekly shook his head.

  “I don’t know! You’d think Yuuma’s walking around in my body, but I haven’t seen her anywhere around here…”

  Yukina’s expression grew graver.

  “Perhaps she…left on her own? But to think she could do such a thing without triggering my surveillance shikigami…”

  Seeing the gravity of her look, Kojou, too, realized what a big problem that was. It was the body of Kojou Akatsuki, the Fourth Primogenitor… In other words, that of the World’s Mightiest Vampire. Yuuma had stolen it, and they had no idea where she’d taken it. It was an emergency situation on the same level as, say, a ballistic nuclear missile submarine being stolen.

  “Why would she do such a thing…?”

  “I don’t know that, either. Last night I met old man Eustach, and when I thought I was gonna buy the farm, the old man vanished. Then when I got back to my apartment, Nagisa was asleep, and Yuuma was waiting for me dressed like this… Right, I lost consciousness right around when she kissed me.”

  Listening to Kojou’s explanation, Yukina’s eyes lowered to half-mast in reproach.

  “…You kissed Yuuma?”

  Kojou subconsciously backed up a step from the glacial tone of her voice.

  “No, no, no! That’s not the problem here!”

  He wondered why she’d responded to that ahead of all sorts of other and surely more crucial bits of information.

  “I mean, right now Yuuma’s got my body, and we switched at that exact moment, so like, we should just say it doesn’t count…”

  Yukina murmured as she pressed down on the hem of her pajama top, having realized something exceedingly important.

  “I see…so right now it’s senpai in Yuuma’s body…”

  Her cheeks reddened before his eyes. Thinking that she was among girls, she was in an indecent state before Kojou, having been caught in the middle of changing clothes. It really wasn’t the time for Kojou to point out that her stripped-off pajama bottom and panties drying out after the wash were on full display in her apartment.

  Kanon, with her back wide open, and Astarte the Jack-o’-Lantern both tensed.

  Reproachful glares from all three girls poured onto Kojou as a single flood. Kojou desperately shook his head.

  “Wait, wait, wait, the problem’s that Yukina led me right in here…! And right now we’re all girls, so it’s not a big deal, right…?”

  Yukina’s pronouncement came as a fierce, burning aura enveloped her.

  “No mercy!”

  Once more, but in an excessively cute voice, Kojou’s scream echoed around the apartment building in the morning—

  3

  Around that time, Sayaka Kirasaka froze in shock on top of an ornate double bed.

  A little seabird perched in a small window was chirping in a cute voice. The bright rays of the morning sun passed through a white lace curtain. Cold sweat poured over Sayaka as her long light brown hair remained scattered around the sheet.

  “How…did this happen…?”

  Sayaka was dressed in her undergarments, but that was hardly of major concern. She’d taken off her clothes before sleep so that they wouldn’t crease. She was unnerved for an entirely different reason.

  Lying right beside Sayaka on the bed was another girl, still asleep, close to her as if they’d been snuggling. Her beautiful silver hair seemed to sparkle in the light. Furthermore, she wasn’t wearing a single stitch of clothing.

  “Mm…”

  The silver-haired girl’s eyes opened, perhaps from having heard Sayaka murmur. Her eyelids, adorned with long eyelashes, opened; her aquamarine-like eyes reflected Sayaka in them. She made a smile and a small giggle that somehow seemed mischievous.

  “Good morning, Sayaka. You were wonderful last night.”

  “Gaaaah!”

  Sayaka thrust off the blanket and sat up with great vigor. She gave her hair, all frumpy from sleep, a hard brush and shouted in a shrill voice.

  “What are you saying?! Would you please not say things that’d give people the wrong idea like that?!”

  The silver-haired girl—La Folia—smiled up at Sayaka, making no move to conceal her beautiful nude body.

  “Oh, my… My maidservants told me that this is how Japanese people greet those sharing the same bed with them… Am I mistaken?”

  “You’re wrong! Er, in one sense, you’re not wrong, but…that’s not a greeting you use for someone who just happened to be sleeping beside… Oh, to hell with it!”

  Sayaka cl
utched her head as she looked around. She had no way to tell if the princess, who happened to be very fluent in Japanese, was just clueless, or perhaps was trolling her on purpose. At any rate, she thought there was something seriously wrong with how the Aldegian royal family selected its maids.

  “What are you so upset about, I wonder?”

  “Why aren’t you wearing any clothes, princess?!”

  La Folia made a mystified tilt of her head as she replied.

  “I do not have a nightgown with me so it could not be helped.”

  It seemed that Sayaka, of the same gender, was the only one who’d seen her clad in nothing but the bedsheet.

  “At any rate, it is quite fortuitous to have awoken safely on top of the bed. In this circumstance, I was resigned to the possibility I would awaken in a completely unknown place this morning.”

  “…You have a point. We’re very fortunate to be safe after all those random teleports over and over again.”

  Sayaka put on a serious face and nodded at the princess’s unexpectedly sensible words.

  The previous morning, they’d been caught in a spatial distortion, cause as yet unknown, warping them from the airport to the sub-float currently being dismantled. Then, when they’d made it back to the city on foot, they were just about to get into a taxi they’d hailed when they were thrown once more to parts unknown.

  Though they’d been in contact with the princess’s knight escorts, and had even succeeded in meeting up with them a number of times, new teleports invariably intervened, so that experiment had ended in failure. Since the teleports occurred completely randomly, at street curbs, the doors of buildings and vehicles, and even the turnstiles of trains, Sayaka and La Folia had been unable to develop a counterstrategy.

  Apparently Sayaka and La Folia weren’t the only ones affected by the mysterious spatial anomalies. Somewhere along the way, they’d lost contact with the knight escorts and the Island Guard. They, too, had been wrapped up in the phenomenon.

  With their cell phone batteries dry and their wits at an end as the sun set, they were finally warped to this hotel room. Then, La Folia had suggested they spend the night there. Sayaka couldn’t help but notice that the interior design wasn’t likely to exist outside of a gaudy hourly hotel; but given that the princess was oddly in love with the room, Sayaka was hardly in a position to refuse.