Labyrinth of the Blue Witch (12 page)

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 sympathize.

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—

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 clutched 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.

“It’s pleasant to have such a big bed, too. I was surprised how the lighting in the room is pink and how there’s glass around the tub… Is this part of the hot spring culture peculiar to Japan?”

“No, that’s
definitely
not the case…” Sayaka decisively rebutted the princess’s words to uphold the good name of hot spring culture.

“Did your cell phone finish charging?”

“Ah yes, it did.” Prompted by La Folia’s question, Sayaka picked up the recharged cell phone.

The suite came equipped with its own cell phone charger. This was another reason Sayaka did not reject the princess staying the night here.

“There’s an e-mail addressed to you, princess. It seems that we’re able to request aid from the Aldegian knights and the Island Guard using current GPS data, but…”

La Folia bluntly shook her head. “No, it is no doubt futile to do so. Even if they rendezvoused with us, it is nigh impossible that we could safely depart from Itogami Island. No doubt we alone would be thrown somewhere else yet again. Also, I doubt the Island Guard has any spare personnel to dispatch to come to our aid.”

Sayaka agreed with the princess’s opinion. “I suppose not. You certainly have a point there.”

Though nothing had been announced to the general public, the spatial distortions seemed to be occurring across nearly all of Itogami Island. Though no incidents had resulted in actual fatalities, traffic within the city was heavily affected nonetheless. It hadn’t become a public concern thanks to the Gigafloat Management Corporation’s public relations management and the arrival of a large number of guests for the Hollow Eve Festival day, meaning a large amount of congestion was inevitable to begin with.

“It would seem that these spatial anomalies are not directed specifically at us,” La Folia continued. “After all, if the objective was to capture us, we would have surely come under direct assault long ago.”

The princess’s calm analysis might have been mistaken for extravagance by some, but appearances notwithstanding, she possessed an incredibly sharp intellect.

“There’s way too many of them, though,” replied Sayaka. “Enough that we got wrapped up in it and teleported left and right.”

“Quite correct, Sayaka.” La Folia smiled pleasantly as she fielded Sayaka’s rebuttal. “But I was thinking…perhaps the magical and spiritual power that we possess attracts the phenomenon to us?”

Sayaka sank into thought with a serious look on her face.

“In other words, space bends in response to strong spiritual power?”

The princess’s hypothesis seemed a wild one at first, but certainly, that could explain why Sayaka and La Folia in particular had been heavily affected by it.

Sayaka the Shamanic War Dancer had the attributes of an excellent shrine maiden, but La Folia, from the Aldegian royal family, was a spiritual medium of even greater, truly exceptional power. In the first place, they had been in the presence of Dimitrie Vattler when the first instance of the phenomenon occurred. He was an aristocrat from the Warlord’s Empire, a pureblood vampire descended from the First Primogenitor; there was no doubting he had enormous magical power.