Labyrinth of the Blue Witch

by Gakuto Mikumo

  When Kojou raised his face in shock, a girl from a far-off nation was standing there holding a golden gun, her long silver hair flapping in the wind. Then, a tall girl with long hair leaped forward, raising a long silver-colored sword up high.

  “—Lustrous Scale!”

  The silver-colored sword the girl swung down severed the innumerable tentacles without any hint of resistance. This was the first ability of the Lion King Agency’s supreme weapon, Der Freischötz—an effect emulating the severing of space itself.

  “La Folia!”

  “—Sayaka?!”

  Kojou and Yukina were more shocked than elated at the sudden and unexpected arrival of the cavalry.

  The environs of Keystone Gate were still sealed off by the Island Guard, after all, and the corridors leading to the roof were shut tight by tentacles. There shouldn’t have been any way for them to get in.

  Kojou asked the obvious question as he watched Sayaka and La Folia emerge with pinpoint precision.

  “Where the heck did you two come from…?!”

  Sayaka’s long ponytail swayed as she looked back, almost like she’d been waiting for him to ask.

  “We’ve come to save you, Kojou Akatsuki. You really are high maintenance. When I’m not here, you always cause Yukina nothing but trou…”

  Then, her face froze in bewilderment as she noticed Kojou’s appearance as he stood there. Surely it had never occurred to her that it would not be Kojou standing beside Yukina in this situation, but rather, a girl she’d never seen before. “Er… who are you?”

  Kojou awkwardly scratched his face as he beheld Sayaka’s confusion. He belatedly recalled that Sayaka and La Folia still didn’t know Yuuma had swapped bodies with Kojou.

  Yukina spoke while Kojou dithered about what kind of reply to make.

  “Er… This is Akatsuki-senpai at the moment. Long story short, he has become a girl.”

  It was a rather crude explanation, but the fine details weren’t going to change anything.

  La Folia went “Oh my!” as her eyes widened in surprise.

  Sayaka froze as if her mind was somewhere else; then, for some reason, she looked almost ready to cry as she yelled…

  “What the helllllll?!”

  Oddly, it was largely the same cry that had come from Kojou’s own mouth half a day before.

  3

  Island West—Thetis Mall. Motoki Yaze was standing on the roof of the shopping center’s parking lot with his cell phone in hand, about two kilometers away from Keystone Gate.

  He was conversing, not with a human, but with a synthesized voice with an eerily human tone.

  A sullen expression came over Yaze at how the AI’s tone conveyed clear amusement. “Looks like it worked out, huh?”

  “Damn right it worked. We crossed a dangerous bridge to get here.”

  “Heh-heh… Kensei Kanase, huh? You sure get involved with a bad crowd.”

  Yaze turned his eyes toward Keystone Gate as he nodded in silence at Mogwai’s words.

  As Sayaka and La Folia emerged from teleportation, another person stood behind them: a man wearing a black suit like a priest’s habit. Kensei Kanase—ex-royal sorcerous engineer of Aldegia. He had been the one to ferry Sayaka and the princess to the witch sisters.

  Yaze spoke in a careless tone. “Witches don’t hold the patent on spatial control magic. Any high-class sorcerer can teleport and move matter. Easy peasy for the sorcerous engineer of the Aldegian royal court.”

  The cause of the spatial anomalies shrouding Itogami Island was the magical ritual being conducted at Keystone Gate. So, destroy the ritual. Princess La Folia had been the one to suggest it.

  An iron rule of conducting big-time magic rituals was to set up a powerful ward to stop interlopers from intruding. But the LCO witches hadn’t set up a ward that could block spatial control magic. They’d taken advantage of that weakness and launched a surprise attack using teleportation.

  She’d presented two conditions for making this happen.

  The first was that Kensei Kanase, in detention for the Faux-Angel incident practically the other day, be released on bail. The princess, whose own powerful spiritual energy served only to ensure spatial distortions cut off her path, absolutely required a powerful sorcerer capable of using a teleportation spell.

  The other condition was that the Island Guard request that the Aldegian Knights of the Second Coming join in the fighting in the city.

  It was a condition that shouldn’t have been legally permissible, but making it happen would turn the whole battle around. This was a Demon Sanctuary—if you wanted to make an omelet, you had to break a few eggs.

  “And the Knights?”

  “Already deployed. Their spiritual reactors are coming online now. They’ll be active in about ninety seconds.”

  Yaze murmured in apparent satisfaction, but his face didn’t show it.

  “…That so. Looks like we’ve got all our cards ready to play.”

  A Sword Shaman and a Shamanic War Dancer of the Lion King Agency were deployed, plus Princess La Folia, a Spirit Master in her own right. He wondered if the Meyer Sisters could match all that.

  But they weren’t the real threat. The problem was that the body of Kojou Akatsuki, the Fourth Primogenitor, was still in enemy hands. The one who’d stolen his body was the witch who was the ringleader for the entire incident.

  Mogwai made an amused laugh as if mocking Yaze’s anguish. “Real shock that the Fourth Primogenitor guy turned into a chick, though. Who’da thunk it.”

  “Asagi would faint if she found out. Bigger shock than finding out Kojou’s a vamp.” I go through a lot of trouble for you guys, thought Yaze as he sighed. Kojou really needed to get his own body back fast, for his sake and the sakes of his bumbling friends.

  In reality, though, Yaze was just as surprised as anyone.

  Yaze, the real watcher of Kojou Akatsuki, couldn’t make use of his Soundscape because of the Hollow Eve Festival. On top of that, the LCO uproar had been working him to the bone since the day before. Thanks to that, he’d been really slow on the uptake that something had happened to Kojou.

  “Yuuma Tokoyogi, huh?” Yaze mused. “Amazing she just came right in using her real name. An old friend of Kojou Akatsuki, who just happened to get the power of the Fourth Primogenitor half a year ago, and blood descendant of LCO’s Great Librarian… How’s that for a coincidence?”

  Aya Tokoyogi, the Witch of Notalia. She’d been locked away ten years prior with all public records erased, so Itogami City customs hadn’t even run a check on her surname.

  Furthermore, there was no record of Yuuma having been active in sorcerous crime herself. Of course, she wasn’t on the Gigafloat Management Corporation’s radar, but not even the Lion King Agency was wary of her. And so, Yuuma had landed on Itogami Island with all the proper formalities, able to casually go about preparing her ritual.

  However, the idea of someone with no criminal record like Yuuma obtaining a leadership position in LCO was strange. Her history prior to meeting Kojou was unknown, but she hadn’t been involved in any noteworthy incidents until the present one, nor did she have any motive to become a criminal.

  That was it. Yuuma Tokoyogi was a blank. She’d been granted the abilities required to kick up this incident…and nothing more. It felt to him like she existed for the sole reason of preparing to bust Aya Tokoyogi out of prison.

  Yaze looked at the surface of the sea north of Itogami Island as he spoke.

  “I don’t like the feel of it, but there’s no time to look into it all. That’s reaching its limits, too, by the looks of it.”

  The witches’ magical ceremony was shrouding the entirety of Itogami Island in a shimmering spatial distortion. From time to time, you could faintly see something appearing like a mirage.

  The contours of a building hidden in other-dimensional space was becoming visible, just as if they were using graphite dust to make the traces of earlier writing visible.

  “The pr
ison barrier, huh…? The game’ll be up at this rate,” mused the AI.

  “…No choice, then. Gotta crush Yuuma Tokoyogi’s body flat.”

  Nodding at Mogwai’s words, Yaze made an anguished murmur as if spitting the words out.

  It certainly looked like Kojou Akatsuki and Yuuma Tokoyogi’s minds had been swapped, but this was only an illusion on the surface created by Yuuma’s magic spell.

  If he destroyed Yuuma’s body, the source of the spell, Kojou would automatically return to his own body.

  Yukina had similarly reasoned that she could use Snowdrift Wolf to do the same, but that was trickier. Compared to Yukina, who was worried about the aftereffects of the spell harming Yuuma’s body, Yaze planned to harm Yuuma’s body in bad faith, thus breaking the spell.

  Of course, Yuuma would surely perish. But he had no other option for protecting the prison barrier.

  “Long-range shot?”

  “Nah. The sisters’ barrier will stop physical attacks like that. It’s time for my Aerodyne.”

  Yaze took a small pill capsule out of his pocket. It was a drug that temporarily boosted his abilities as a Hyper-Adapter.

  The ward the Meyer Sisters had deployed through use of the grimoire Harmonious Expectations blocked pretty much every kind of spell save spatial control magic. However, there were exceptions: light, gravity, and the air—these existed naturally in the world to begin with, so the casters, failing to see them as any threat, did not have their ward block them.

  All that said, sniping lasers and sending in poison gas were likely to fail, for these were things out of harmony with the natural world. But Yaze’s ability was different.

  Yaze was a Hyper-Adapter—a natural psychic who didn’t rely on magic. And by manipulating the flow of the air that already existed inside of the ward to create a sudden gust, he would blow Yuuma Tokoyogi all the way down to the ground. That was the plan Yaze chose to resolve this.

  “Sorry, Kojou. This is gonna hurt a little—” As Yaze murmured with convenient logic, “You’re used to dying by now anyway,” he tossed a pill into his mouth.

  Consciously averting his eyes, less from the bitterness of the pill he tasted than the anguish Kojou would suffer from losing a friend, Yaze bit down and activated his ability—

  “Oops…time’s run out,” Mogwai cut in.

  “What?!”

  The instant Mogwai reported, a vast, unanticipated amount of demonic energy erupted from Keystone Gate. The incredible gust of wind simultaneously sweeping over the area drowned out Yaze’s ability.

  The border of the huge building, meant to be isolated in another world, was rent asunder, dragging it into normal space. This was the cause of the violent wind.

  “Oh, that’s just great,” murmured Yaze. A small, rocky island had emerged beyond Itogami Island’s northern tip. A stonework cathedral stood at its zenith.

  “The prison barrier…!”

  Yaze moaned as he glared at the cathedral. His voice, pregnant with despair, vanished in the wild, violent wind.

  4

  Even now, just after the appearance of the prison barrier, Sayaka Kirasaka had been unable to recover from her shock.

  “I-is it really Kojou Akatsuki…? Not that I really get all this?!”

  Apparently she’d been just that shaken by the revelation that Kojou had turned into a girl. As she looked at Yukina, face down in deep vexation, she seemed practically in tears.

  Something like this happened before, thought Kojou. Besides her propensity for jumping to conclusions, Sayaka seemed to be surprisingly fragile mentally, something on full display here; it was probably because, as Yukina’s senior, she constantly pushed herself to be calm beyond the bounds of reason.

  Then, she pointed at Yuuma, who stood at the center of the magic circle.

  “So what’s the deal with the ‘you’ standing over there?!”

  “Ahh… Er, how should I put this…?” Kojou stammered.

  “That is a fake,” La Folia declared, somehow very certain. “The real Kojou would not have such a gallant look on his face.”

  “Whoa!” Sayaka nodded with a serious expression, apparently sold. “You’re so right, now that you mention it!”

  “What’s with the ‘whoa’?” complained Kojou in an apparent sulk.

  “Um, that body is technically mine, you know…”

  The princess gave Kojou’s current form a thorough examination, from the top of her head to the tips of her fingernails, her eyes finally resting on the hem of her miniskirt.

  “I must say…this really will not do, Sayaka.”

  “No, it won’t.” Sayaka nodded gravely. Then, realizing what she’d let slip, she hastily shook her head. “Eh?! No, it’s all the same to—!!”

  “I cannot continue the royal line like this.”

  “Huh?! I-I’ll have you know I think I heard something really off the wall just now?!”

  “…”

  I’ll just leave them be for the moment, Kojou resolved in his heart, turning to face Yuuma once more.

  Thanks to La Folia’s and Sayaka’s attacks, the witches’ Guardian had been greatly diminished. Now, he should be able to get close to Yuuma and rip that grimoire right out of her hand.

  But as if reading Kojou’s thoughts, Yuuma looked at him and made a pleasant smile.

  The next instant, demonic energy as thick as lava flowed from her, making the grimoire glow brightly.

  Together with a rumble as if the air itself was creaking, a ferocious gust assaulted them.

  The source of the gust was the surface of the sea at Itogami Island’s northern tip. From there, Kojou suddenly noticed the outline of an island he’d never seen before.

  It was a tiny island like the foot of a large, rocky mountain. The island was not even two hundred meters in diameter. Its height was in the eighty-meter range, but most of that was taken up by a cathedral wrought by human hands.

  It greatly resembled an abbey in Europe known as St. Michael’s Mount. Historically, that abbey had been later used as a fortress, and later still, a prison within which numerous clergymen and political prisoners were held.

  Kojou only realized the man was there upon hearing his sullen voice from behind. “I see… So LCO’s goal is to breach the prison barrier?”

  “Kensei Kanase…?!”

  The speaker was a middle-aged man dressed in a black suit that resembled a priest’s habit. Kojou knew very well who he was.

  Though this was unexpected, it was not surprising. Kensei Kanase, former royal sorcerous engineer of Aldegia, was an acquaintance of La Folia’s. It took no special genius to guess that the princess had used him as her means to get to Keystone Gate.

  “So that’s the prison barrier…?” Kojou asked.

  Kensei nodded. “Apparently they have made the border between this world and that one sway. At this point it is not fully materialized, but—”

  “So the seal hasn’t actually been broken yet?”

  “Correct. It is as if we are looking at a ruin sunken to the bottom of the sea from the water’s surface. Even if you can see it, pulling it up from the seafloor requires greater work by an order of magnitude.”

  Kensei’s words made Kojou go pale.

  Vattler had said that an enormous amount of magical energy was required to materialize the prison barrier.

  But that was something Yuuma already had in the palm of her hand. She merely needed to know its location. If she knew what part of the sea it had sunk into, then— Kojou moaned, suddenly feeling like his right hand was on fire.

  “Urk…?!”

  Yukina turned around in apparent surprise.

  “Senpai?!”

  But when Kojou flexed Yuuma’s light-skinned hand, it was unharmed.

  The wound was borne by Kojou’s physical body—in other words, by the young man standing in the center of the magic circle.

  The grimoire in Yuuma’s hand was burning.

  “Huhhh… Looks like this one’s hit its limits.” />
  Bathed in the enormous magical power of the Fourth Primogenitor, its capacity had finally been exceeded. No longer recognizable, it burned out and turned into ash.

  “Aah,” the black and scarlet witch sisters vainly cried out.

  “No. 539 is…!”

  They were members of a criminal organization established for the purpose of accumulating grimoires. No doubt the witch sisters found the loss of a precious grimoire to be unbearably sad.

  But Yuuma, a leader of that very same organization, tossed the burned grimoire away without a second thought.

  “This grimoire has already served its purpose. Sorry, but I must be off.”

  The scene before Yuuma’s eyes gently warped. Space bent, much like a ripple spreading across the water’s surface. She’d opened a teleportation gate.

  “Wait—Blue Witch!” the black witch called out to Yuuma in haste. However, Yuuma didn’t even look back.

  “You two stay here and hold them off.”

  This said, she seemed to melt into the void and vanished.

  Kojou stood where he was, powerless as he gazed at a point on the surface of the sea.

  “Yuuma…!”

  He couldn’t stop Yuuma from moving by teleportation, but he did know where she was headed. She was on her way to the prison ward so that she could completely breach the seal.

  La Folia turned to the sorcerous engineer in black.

  “Kensei, can you follow her?”

  Kensei calmly shook his head.

  “Unfortunately I cannot.”

  Unlike a witch who could control space at a subconscious level, spatial control spells like Kensei employed required careful calculation of coordinates before a jump. The method simply wasn’t flexible enough to be used to follow someone.

  “However, I can open a gate near the prison ward.”

  “Understood. Do that, then.”

  The silver-haired princess turned a pleasant, bewitching smile toward Kojou and Yukina.

  “Kojou. Please take Yukina and go. We shall deal with the witches over there. But La Folia…”

  Kojou hesitated to move, resisting the idea of abandoning them in the face of the enemy. However, the princess shook her head with a brave look.