Labyrinth of the Blue Witch

by Gakuto Mikumo

  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.”

  “So this uses reverse engineering of the spatial distortions? Who on earth…?” “Maybe Asagi did this…?”

  He didn’t know the how or why, but that Kojou could accept.

  Technologically speaking, making use of the momentary instabilities caused by the spatial distortions to get to one’s destination by the shortest route was doable with the support of the network running throughout Itogami City. But it’d take a system administrator of a freakishly high level of skill to make that a reality. So far as Kojou knew, she was the only one who could produce a program like that in one night.

  That said, Kojou didn’t think Asagi had sent that app to his cell phone herself…let alone with the picture of her sleeping face attached. In the first place, she shouldn’t have had any idea he was headed toward Keystone Gate to begin with. Someone was sitting above the stage pulling the strings. Maybe it was the Gigafloat Management Corporation, maybe the Lion King Agency… Someone was using Kojou and Yukina to overcome the impending situation.

  But they didn’t have time to figure out whom.

  “Anyway, gotta play the cards we’ve got. The next one’s a right turn at an intersection two hundred meters this way.”

  “Yes.”

  Yukina faithfully followed Kojou’s directions and ran off. As they rounded the bend, the floating feeling came at them once more. Spatial distortions had caused them both considerable grief since the day before, but by using them, they now had a way to get past the barricades to Keystone Gate. The instant they finished their fourth jump, a familiar steel tower leaped into Kojou and Yukina’s fields of vision. It was the tallest place on Itogami Island. It was a glass-encased viewing hall at the base of a cell tower; in other words, the roof of Keystone Gate.

  Kojou yelled at the top of his lungs as he realized tentacles had surrounded them the instant they’d reached the roof.

  “…That monster’s all the way here?!”

  Now that he was seeing the mottled tentacles up close, they looked even more imposing than he’d imagined. The mucus-covered surface of its hide was eerily gnarled, with the pulsing veins visible, looking like a swarm of snakes.

  The tentacles, their numbers seemingly without end, meshed together in a complex pattern and tried to crush Kojou and Yukina like bugs.

  An intense silver flash sliced them apart.

  “Snowdrift Wolf—!”

  The silver spear Yukina thrust forward sliced through the tentacles, dozens of centimeters thick in diameter, as if they were paper.

  The monster, which thirty-millimeter rounds from helicopter gunships and rockets equipped with demon-purging warheads had failed to even scratch, was being sliced to ribbons by the spear of a defenseless little girl, the pieces vanishing. This was the ability of the Lion King Agency’s secret weapon, the “Schneewaltzer,” in action.

  “—Yuuma!”

  As the wall from the witches’ Guardian was broken, the sight of the ceremony being conducted within had become exposed. It was a magic circle drawn with fresh blood. Two witches stood to the right and left. And in the center of the circle stood a young man dressed in a formal, black suit. It was a tailcoat that just screamed Vampire! at you. It was the outfit that Nagisa had bought Kojou to serve as his costume.

  “You’re early, Kojou.”

  The young man turned his head and called Kojou’s name. It was the mundane face of your everyday, average high schooler. The only thing you could call characteristic of him was how his forelocks looked light in the dark, like moonlight was shining on them—

  There, standing before them, was the physical body of Kojou Akatsuki.

  “You’ve always been like that. You show up at really important places with no clue at all about what’s going on.”

  An agonized expression came over Kojou as he looked at his very own body.

  “Yuuma…you’re…”

  Yuuma was holding some kind of grimoire in her hand. And the enormous magical power trailing from her fingertips kept the grimoire active as it caused space to distort. That fact brought Kojou to despair.

  Until it was staring him in the face, his heart had indeed held the faint hope that Yuuma was just a childhood friend and wasn’t mixed up in this incident, or that if she was, it was purely as a victim.

  But it finally hit him. Yuuma really had hijack
ed Kojou’s body.

  She was the ringleader of this circus.

  A gentle smile came over Yuuma as if she was consoling the agonized Kojou.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll hand this body back soon enough. Won’t you wait just a little longer? I’m going to find her very soon.”

  “Find her…find who…?”

  “My mother. I haven’t met her a single time since I was born, though.”

  Kojou’s confusion grew heavier still.

  “Your…mother…?”

  He vaguely recalled that the young Yuuma had been living away from her mother.

  If Yuuma was a witch, it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume that her mother was a witch, too. The chances of Yuuma’s mother being in the Demon Sanctuary of Itogami Island were pretty high.

  That much Kojou could understand. But that was as far as his understanding reached.

  Surely there was no reason to kick up a huge incident like this just to meet her mother.

  Kojou stepped toward the magic circle, as if trying to force Yuuma to dispel his doubts. As if to stop him from doing so, he suddenly heard a laughing voice. He knew the sarcastic tone all too well.

  “…That’s far enough, Kojou. Could you please not move any closer to her?”

  In abject disbelief, Kojou shifted his gaze in the direction of the voice.

  “?! What the hell are you doing here…?!”

  There stood a blond, blue-eyed youthful aristocrat. Leaning back against the steel tower, he had an excessively eloquent smile on his face.

  “Hiya. Kojou, you’ve become quite a bit cuter since the last time I saw you.” A shudder went through Kojou at Vattler’s tone of voice…and how it sounded like he was licking his chops.

  It wasn’t that he was frightened with an Old Guard vampire standing before him. To Kojou, the youthful aristocrat was, in a sense, a more dangerous opponent than the First Primogenitor, the Lost Warlord, himself; after all, this was the man who’d offered Kojou his love even though Kojou was a man himself. He was too terrified to even think about what he looked like to Vattler now that he was stuck in Yuuma’s body.

  Kojou therefore changed the subject with haste.

  “Don’t tell me you’re in on this whole thing?!”

  “No, no, I am merely biding my time, waiting for the ladies to open the prison barrier.”

  Kojou was dumbfounded as he echoed the unexpected words that Vattler had spoken.

  “Prison barrier…?!”

  Even Kojou had heard the rumors about the prison barrier, a hidden prison within which dangerous sorcerous criminals were sealed away. It was a ghost prison. No one knew where it was or even if it really existed.

  Maybe it was a place where the souls of executed criminals loitered, never able to reach the afterlife; maybe it was another name for a temple to an evil god that had sunk to the bottom of the sea. It was one of Itogami Island’s most enduring urban legends.

  “So that wasn’t just some ghost story…?!”

  “Not at all. The prison barrier is a man-made, otherworldly construct using the ley lines that flow under the Demon Sanctuary. Not even the directors who built it know where it really is, but I assure you that it exists—somewhere here in Itogami City.”

  “I see, these spatial distortions… They’re to find the location of the prison barrier…”

  Yuuma was bending space all over Itogami City to find a place hidden in a bend in space. They were looking for the hidden prison barrier a lot like people used graphite dust to highlight the impressions left on a memo pad.

  “Incidentally, opening the prison barrier’s seal requires an excellent spatial control ritual and a huge amount of magical energy that surpasses the ley lines.”

  As Vattler finished explaining the magician’s trick, Kojou shifted his gaze back to Yuuma, standing there without a word.

  Now he felt he could understand the meaning behind her words.

  Yuuma was a witch specializing in spatial control. However, no matter what favor a devil had granted her, she didn’t have the magical power required to drown out the ley lines. The only one here who had that was a vampire progenitor spoken of in the same breath as one did a natural disaster—in other words, Kojou.

  Having obtained the power of the Fourth Primogenitor in an irregular fashion, Kojou was an incomplete vampire. He was largely bereft of the special abilities that fellow demons possessed, and of the Beast Vassals dwelling within his body, he had only been able to tame three. However, Kojou’s physical body certainly possessed a titanic amount of demonic energy.

  To Kojou, it was worthless demonic energy he had no way to control, but Yuuma, well versed in magical spells, could. That was why she needed Kojou’s body. “So that’s…what this is…”

  Yuuma said she was looking for her mother. That was why she was trying to breach the prison barrier’s seal, because her mother, for whatever reason, was inside the prison barrier.

  A pure-blooded witch born from a mother locked away as a sorcerous criminal… That was the truth behind Yuuma Tokoyogi.

  But Kojou didn’t think a mother forcing her daughter to bust her out of prison was the act of a sane human being. Besides, Yuuma’s mother was unlikely to be the only criminal locked away in the prison barrier.

  “It’s going to be so much fun… All those sorcerous criminals locked away in an other-dimensional labyrinth. And they’ll be unleashed upon the city all at once. Well, you can rest easy—I shall take full responsibility and recapture them.”

  As Vattler murmured in an all-too-pleased tone…

  “Are you a moron—?! I can’t rest easy about that!!”

  Kojou’s veins bulged as he yelled. Now he understood completely well why Vattler was casually watching Yuuma and her compatriots do their work: Vattler, a battle maniac through and through, was waiting for the criminals to be released, purely so that he could fight them.

  Having apparently said all he’d wished to say, Vattler turned into a golden mist and vanished. Unlike Kojou, a complete vampire such as him was able to use such means to move when and where he wished.

  But it was no longer any time or place to be dealing with that troublesome man. Yuuma needed Kojou’s body to break the prison barrier open. Therefore, if Kojou took his own body back, that ought to be enough to stop her—

  The next moment, as Kojou glared at Yuuma with that thought in mind…

  “—Senpai, get down!” Yukina called out to Kojou in a sharp voice.

  As Kojou gasped and looked up, his field of vision was buried in giant tentacles. The witches’ Guardian had been commanded to wrap Kojou up and stop him in his tracks.

  “—?!”

  Yukina mowed down the assaulting tentacles with her spear. However, the tentacles did not stop moving. Replacement tentacles appeared one after another, tightening the pressure on Kojou and Yukina.

  The witches standing to Yuuma’s right and left were controlling the tentacles. Unlike Yuuma’s warm demeanor, violence and havoc made their faces twist in delight. It was they who had brought down the Island Guard’s combat helicopters and inflicted grievous damage upon urban areas.

  Yukina’s brow trembled slightly as she realized what ritual they were employing.

  “Black and scarlet witch sisters…! The ones from the Ashdown Tragedy…?!”

  The witch sisters seemed quite pleased for some reason as they made haughty, high-pitched laughs.

  “I see… So the one who can stand up to our Guardian is a dutiful, well-educated little girl,” mused the black witch.

  The scarlet witch agreed with her sibling as she stroked the grimoire in her hand. “—Some kind of shrine maiden, I suppose? What do you want to do, my sister?”

  The black witch shrugged her shoulders in a large theatrical display.

  “If I could, I’d bind their hands and feet, rip out their bellies, and use them as sacrifices for our ritual, but we cannot treat the body of the Blue Witch so… Let us deal with them in a polite manner until we find wh
at we seek.”

  “What a pity. Such pretty girls, they would make such wonderful corpses—”

  The Guardian attacked with greater ferocity as their grimoires emitted an ominous glow.

  “Ugh?!”

  “—Himeragi?!”

  Unable to withstand the force of the advancing tentacles, Yukina retreated step by step. Yukina’s spear was able to neutralize the Guardian’s defensive ward, but it could not defend against the materialized monster’s sheer mass. Somehow, her incredible spear skills repelled its attacks, but Yukina herself was a small middle school schoolgirl. She diverted and sliced apart the attacking tentacles one by one, but the intense effort required to do so was wearing down her physical endurance.

  And all Kojou could do was stand there and watch.

  If he’d been able to use the Beast Vassals of the Fourth Primogenitor, he could have annihilated the tentacles, root and branch, but Kojou had no way to call them now that he’d been cut off from his physical body. With her knowledge of magical spells, Yuuma could use magic even though she’d been cut off from her own body.

  However, Kojou’s abilities were merely the consequence of having happened to become a vampire. Cut off from his own body, Kojou had no more power than the average person.

  That fact meant Kojou couldn’t even get close to Yuuma, let alone stop her.

  All of the Island Guard’s combat helicopters had already been beaten out of the sky; bombardments from the ground were unable to break the Guardian’s defenses. The entrance to the roof had already been blocked off by the tentacles, so they could not hope for reinforcements from the ground.

  Kojou weakly groaned as he looked all around the area.

  “Shit…! What the hell can I do here…?”

  There was nothing he could use as a weapon. Besides, he couldn’t move out from behind Yukina’s back to begin with. One wrong move, and he’d just get tied up by the tentacles and further add to Yukina’s burden. All Kojou could do was despair at his own powerlessness.

  As if to mock that powerlessness, a new tentacle appeared behind both of them. It shot up through the floor of the roof, circling to attack Yukina from her blind spot. Naturally, even Yukina had no way to fend it off.