Free Labyrinth of the Blue Witch by Gakuto Mikumo Page A

the apartment beside us. Total coincidence.”
    Of course, Kojou couldn’t tell her the truth—that he was a vampire and she was always keeping an eye on him—so he spun a tense excuse. Yuuma made a strained smile, not in doubt of him but finding added meaning in his words.
    “Hmm. Coincidence, huh?”
    “What?”
    “Nothing, I was just thinking that you haven’t changed any.”
    “That ain’t so.”
    Kojou sighed at his own expense as Yuuma’s casual words made him really feel the sarcastic whims of destiny.
    It’d been four years since he last met her. Things had been extremely stormy during that time. First there was Nagisa’s incident where she was on death’s door, their parents divorced, and Kojou himself had obtained the absurd physical characteristics of the Fourth Primogenitor. He thought of the opportunity to reunite with an old friend like this as a miraculous piece of good fortune.
    “I’m relieved you haven’t changed any yourself, Yuuma.”
    Kojou said it in a fervent tone, but this time it was Yuuma’s turn to slump her shoulders in letdown.
    “…Well that hurts. I’ve been trying to act a lot more feminine.”
    Hearing Yuuma murmur in a voice almost too soft to hear, Kojou had a mystified look on him as he glanced back.
    “Huh?”
    “It’s nothing. Anyway, what an awesome view. So this is the city you live in, Kojou.”
    Yuuma spoke as she pressed her forehead to the glass window like a little girl.
    Below her eyes, she could see the tightly packed quarters of Itogami City. Beyond, the deep blue sea continued all the way to the horizon. It was a first for Kojou’s eyes, too. The island looked all alone in the world.
    Kojou mumbled while squinting from the dazzling rays reflecting off the water’s surface.
    “It’s a small island any way you slice it, huh?”
    Yuuma shook her head, making her hair swish and flutter.
    “It’s interesting, though. It’s like the whole island’s one big theme park. It really is a Demon Sanctuary.”
    “It’s usually a lot plainer than this. This is ’cause it’s right before a festival.”
    “Right before a festival…truly it is.”
    Yuuma made a little mumble and smiled pleasantly. An airplane circling around the city’s airspace to announce the events for that night’s festivities was passing at that exact moment. The festival was finally set to begin in earnest.
    Kojou absentmindedly gazed at the teenage girl–idol group depicted on the plane’s fuselage when the cell phone in his parka’s pocket began to ring.
    Kojou moved away from Yuuma and took the phone out of his pocket; his eyebrows scowled when he saw the name displayed on the LCD. The caller seemed vaguely like an ill omen.
    “…Kirasaka, huh? Rare for you to call at a time like this. I’m kinda in the middle of something right now…”
    Kojou’s face grimaced as he said so to her. Sayaka Kirasaka was an Attack Mage from the Lion King Agency, just like Yukina. Kojou had met her in the middle of a large-scale terrorist incident in Itogami City just the month before.
    For some reason, she’d been calling Kojou quite often since then. Since Yukina didn’t have a cell phone, she seemed to be calling so that she could ask how Yukina was doing and nothing specifically to do with him. Sayaka was Yukina’s former roommate and fawned over the girl like some overprotective big sister even now.
    Kojou meant to dismiss it by saying she was just calling about Yukina again, but unexpectedly, the voice he heard through the phone’s speaker was not Sayaka’s at all.
    “Tee-hee-hee. It is I.”
    “Huh?” Kojou raised his voice, caught completely by surprise. “That voice… La Folia, huh? That phone has Sayaka’s number though?”
    “I saw this number in Sayaka’s address book under ‘Favorites,’ so I thought I’d give it a try… Ah, what are you trying to do, Sayaka?”
    “—I-is this Kojou Akatsuki?”
    It sounded like the phone had been snatched away as the call