Labyrinth of the Blue Witch (2 page)

The air was stiflingly hot and stagnant.

The surface of the Pacific Ocean loomed large outside the window of the Itogami City municipal monorail train car; there was nothing to obstruct the rays of the sun as the cab ran across an elevated track alongside the seaside cliffs. The brutal rays of the sun felt more appropriate to the height of summer as they mercilessly roasted the passengers inside the car.

Kojou Akatsuki looked like he was pressing his face into the aluminum door as he groaned weakly. “Aw, crap…so hot…”

He was a teenage boy with a languid expression wearing a parka over his high school uniform.

He bore the ridiculous title of the World’s Mightiest Vampire, but even the lofty abilities of the Fourth Primogenitor were of little aid in this instance. With the train car full with passengers, he couldn’t even move; all he could do was let out an anguished voice as the dazzling rays of the sun poured in from the window.

The cab gently rocked as the monorail hit a curve, with centrifugal force sending the passengers tilting. The girl next to him suppressed a yelp as his silent pressure pressed down upon her.

“Yeek…?!”

This was Yukina Himeragi, Sword Shaman of the Lion King Agency.

She had unadorned black hair and big black eyes. There was a bit of a childish look about her, but the girl had a lovely face. Her body was slender but without giving any impression of fragility. She had the symmetry, functional beauty, and resilience of a sword forged by a master.

Officially, Yukina was Kojou’s junior, attending middle school at the same school—Saikai Academy—he attended, but her actual mission was to watch over the Fourth Primogenitor. Yukina had been granted the authority to eliminate Kojou if she judged independently that circumstances warranted it.

As proof of this, the bass guitar case she always carried with her contained a weapon built with cutting-edge sorcerous technology. It was a demon-purging Schneewaltzer spear for anti-demonic combat, able to neutralize any magical energy and said to be able to destroy even a vampire primogenitor.

However, even the finest of divine arms was nothing but dead weight inside a monorail during rush hour.

Tossing the Lion King Agency’s prized secret weapon onto the roof rack to keep it from bothering other passengers, Yukina was pressed against Kojou, her surveillance target, tighter than she had ever been before.

Surrounded on all sides by a door, the back of a seat, and the passengers packed like sardines, their entire bodies were pressed firmly against each other’s.

Kojou whispered in low voice as he sensed the refreshing scent of Yukina’s hair and a dangerous dryness in his throat.

“S-sorry. You okay there, Himeragi…?”

Kojou had tried to hold Yukina up to keep her from getting squished, but unable to resist the pressure of the passengers, he’d ended up holding her in his arms from behind. A third party might find it to be an enviable pose to be in, but by this point, Kojou’s right hand had long since gone numb.

“Yes…but, ah…”

“Sorry. It ain’t like I did this on purpose here…!”

“I know that. It is the same for me. It—it’s an act of God, so…!”

The reason Yukina’s face was red was that her left arm, still holding her bag, was buried right between Kojou’s legs. Yukina wanted to pull her bag away from him somehow, but in this tight spot, that apparently wasn’t going to happen. When combined with the monorail’s shaking, the odd stimulation was giving Kojou a pretty rough time.

“It’s even worse than usual today,” Yukina murmured in a casual tone, perhaps in an effort to take her mind off things.

Certainly, there was always a mix of large numbers of students and commuters at this time in the morning. However, the crowds were rarely so bad. It was close to double the usual amount of passengers.

“Tourists from off the island probably. Festival’s gonna start soon.”

“The Hollow Eve Festival…is it? It’s been a frequent topic among middle school students, too.”

“Ah, that’s right. You’ve never seen one before, Himeragi?”

Yukina nodded at Kojou’s words.

On special orders from the Lion King Agency, Yukina had begun monitoring Kojou just before the end of summer break.

It hadn’t even been two months since she’d come to Itogami Island, and Kojou was unhappily aware that in that short time, they had faced death together several times over.

“I knew that the event existed, but I didn’t think it was a festival on such a huge scale.”

“They go all out. All the businesses on the island close for the day. It gets way easier for people to get permission to come to Itogami Island, too, so we’ve got tons of tourists.”

As Kojou spoke, he looked up at an advertisement hanging inside the train car.

The Hollow Eve Festival, opening in the last week of October every year, was Itogami Island’s biggest festival. There were fireworks displays, outdoor concerts, float parades, and all sorts of other events; the commotion filled the whole island. At this time of year, over two hundred thousand tourists came to visit Itogami Island—a shocking number when you considered the distance of the island from the Japanese mainland.

There was a reason behind those numbers. Normally, no one besides people related to the corporations and research organizations of the Demon Sanctuary of Itogami Island were permitted to enter. If you were a tourist or journalist who wanted to visit, or you wanted to do business with the corporations in the Demon Sanctuary, festival time was your golden opportunity to get into the city in style.

At any rate, posters for the Hollow Eve Festival had been plastered all over Itogami City for several days. There were TV specials complete with opportunistically targeted commercials, and so forth; there was no mistaking the festive mood stirring throughout the entire island.

“So it’s based on Halloween, then?” Yukina asked as she gazed at the jack-o’-lantern drawn on the poster.

“I guess, yeah. Dunno why they picked Halloween, though,” said Kojou in a quietly dubious voice, as though it were somebody else’s problem.

Itogami Island didn’t have any native people to start with. But a festival, an event that didn’t happen every day, was very effective at pleasing the masses—and stimulating the economy. So, in the name of administrative service, the Gigafloat Management Corporation created the Hollow Eve Festival based on Halloween.

Put another way, they didn’t have any reason
not
to base it on Halloween. For all Kojou cared, they could’ve based it on Valentine’s Day or the Star Festival of
Tanabata
.

But Yukina replied in an unexpectedly overserious tone. “Halloween was originally a ceremony for driving off evil, after all. I believe it is an event well suited to a demon sanctuary.”

“Huh…that’s what you figure?”

“Yes. In the ancient Celtic religion, it was believed the approach of the winter season was a time when paths formed between this world and the world of spirits, making the way for the arrival of spirits and witches. They wore disguises and lit bonfires to protect themselves from monsters, and thus began Halloween.”

“Mmm,” murmured Kojou, accepting her explanation at face value. It hadn’t even been a year since Kojou had—absurdly—become the so-called Fourth Primogenitor. His ordinary high school–level knowledge of superstition, witchcraft, and the occult had proved pretty much useless. He had no intention of pitting his knowledge against Yukina’s, who’d received special education as a Lion King Organization Attack Mage.

“So that’s where Halloween disguises and jack-o’-lanterns come from, huh?”

“Yes. Besides, the Halloween tradition itself is certainly not without basis. After all, it is scientific fact that spatial connections become unstable more easily at this time of year. There are documented instances of encounters with ‘visitors’ from other times and ‘uninvited’ from other worlds.”

“…Gimme a break. I don’t wanna deal with guys like that.”

Kojou’s disagreeable look was in complete seriousness. This was a Demon Sanctuary, after all. You’d never catch him saying it wasn’t possible to meet whacked-out things like that. Even without guys like that, he was already thoroughly fed up from bumping into super-rare stuff like Nalakuvera and Faux-Angels.

And yet, Yukina stared at him with a serious expression. “Yes, senpai, so please do be careful,” she pleaded.

“Huh?” Kojou looked back at Yukina in bewilderment. “Er…be careful, you say. Is my attitude gonna do any good to invaders from another world or whatever?”

More than that, Kojou was shocked by the reality that Yukina seemed to think he
liked
being a magnet for trouble. No student yearned for a peaceful life more than Kojou. And yet…

“Wha…?” Yukina blinked, her eyes looking even more surprised than his. “I mean, you
are
the source of the island’s least stable, most dangerous magical energy, senpai. Please do not let your Beast Vassals run wild and warp an already unstable space. In particular, be on your guard for vampiric ur—”

Before Yukina could finish her line, the monorail began to slow as it approached the station. Obeying the law of inertia, the passengers pitched forward; Kojou, his balance thrown off, found his left hand fondling Yukina’s breast.

“Senpai…!”

“W-wait! That was a totally unforeseeable circumstance!!”

“No, I don’t mean that—
her
…!”

Yukina’s sharp gaze was trained not on Kojou but on a commuting schoolgirl a short distance away. She wore a Saikai Academy school uniform, but she was even smaller than Yukina. Her long, glossy black hair and unusually pale flesh stood out quite a bit.

“A high school student? Feels like a dangerous spot there.”

Kojou raised his eyebrows as he watched the girl buried in the crowd. She was standing right in a packed corridor with nowhere to run. As the girl bashfully hung her head, a middle-aged man was behaving suspiciously right behind her back.

“Yes. Perhaps that man standing behind her is—”

“A molester?! That bastard—!”

“Wha—?!”

Kojou began charging toward the man with a vigor that caught Yukina completely unprepared. It wasn’t that Kojou had an overinflated sense of justice, but this was still inexcusable evil to him. To Kojou, who had an adolescent little sister, molestation was at the top of his list of unforgivable crimes. If he
ever
caught anyone making sport of Nagisa on her way to school, he’d never be satisfied with just catching him and dragging him to the police.

“Please, senpai, wait! Senpai! We have to be sure before…!”

Yukina tried to keep up as Kojou pushed his way through the passengers. That moment, Kojou confirmed that the man, already at the little schoolgirl’s side, was extending his hand toward the girl’s thigh. Kojou extended his own hand to grab his—and the next moment, the stopped monorail’s door opened wide.

Having spent all that time packed to their limits, the passengers rushed onto the platform as one, catching Kojou in their wake. With all his might, he extended his fingertips forward and ended up touching the small girl’s butt.

That instant, a different hand reached in from the side and firmly caught Kojou’s wrist.

“Huh?”

“—Why hello, Mr. Molester. I’ve caught you in the act,” an oddly energetic voice whispered into Kojou’s ear. The voice came from a young woman with red hair worn in a twin bun style. She was wearing a Chinese-style shirt and miniskirt. The outfit seemed sporty enough to play actual sports in, and her posture was very good. He felt like he’d seen her face somewhere before.

“H…hey, let go! I’m not a molester, I was just trying to help that girl out…!”

Kojou desperately resisted as he was dragged onto the station platform, but the red-haired woman did not release her firm hold on his wrist. Kojou’s bones creaked from the inhuman power of her grip.

“From that uniform, don’t tell me you’re one of our students? Wait, Akatsuki’s big brother?”

“…Eh?!”

Having finally caught up to Kojou, Yukina stopped and called out in surprise.

“Ms. Sasasaki!”

The red-haired woman raised her eyebrows in mild surprise. Seeing this, Kojou finally remembered who she was.

This was Saikai Academy’s middle school physical education teacher, Misaki Sasasaki—Yukina and Nagisa’s homeroom teacher.

“And you were with him, too, Himeragi? You need to take proper care of your own man.”

“It—it’s not like that. H-he’s not mine, nor is he a molester.”

“Is that so?”

With Yukina vouching for Kojou, Misaki finally released his wrist. Kojou, in danger of being falsely accused of molesting a girl, took a very deep breath as sweat rolled down his brow.

Behind Kojou and the others, he heard a lisping but strangely threatening voice.

“The real molester is over here, you dumb mutt.”

They heard a man make a pathetic cry. Turning around on reflex, Kojou and the others saw the middle-aged fellow, shaking in terror, his entire body wrapped in chains. Dragging him along was the schoolgirl with long, dark hair who had nearly been a molestation victim but a few moments earlier. Kojou finally realized who she really was.

“Huh?”

“…Ms. Minamiya?”

Kojou and Yukina’s voices were totally bewildered.

It was Natsuki Minamiya standing there in a school uniform. Saikai Academy’s high school English teacher’s self-proclaimed age was twenty-six. However, based on her face, her silhouette, and the details of her body, the term
teenager
fit better, if not
little girl
.

“Wait, you’re Natsuki? Why are you dressed like that?”

“On patrol. A lot of students have been molested on trains lately.”

“…Why a high school uniform?”

“We can’t be using students as decoys for a molester investigation, so I’m in disguise. I realize it’s pushing it.”

“Now I see,” said Kojou in acceptance. She might have looked young, but Natsuki was an incredibly skilled Attack Mage. She was so accomplished that her
side job
was working as an instructor for the Island Guard. Many demons knew and feared her by her nickname, the “Witch of the Void.” Assigning her to draw out a mere molester was titanic overkill. And there weren’t very many teachers who would look so convincing in a school uniform.