The intermittent rumbling continued.
The shaking was strong enough to cause aftershocks even on the Star of Bethlehem floating in the heavens. Kamijou was too afraid to even imagine what was going on down on the ground.
“…We’re going higher up,” murmured Kamijou while running down a stone-built passage, glancing toward the evenly spaced windows.
With nothing but sky outside, it was hard to tell how high they were. Still, the clouds’ height was fixed, and seeing them falling away hinted that the Star of Bethlehem was ascending.
“Answer one. The Star of Bethlehem was originally a heavenly body that a prophet witnessed. By this star’s light, the prophet became confident of the Son of God’s birth.”
“A star floating from artificial methods, huh? That’s got a really ominous sound to it. We’ll just have to pray we don’t go all the way to satellite orbit and that we don’t help cause another ice age like a giant meteorite.”
Even as they spoke, the passage was creaking and cracking, changing form. But the temporary explosive expansion was gone. It was like a newborn star had cooled and stabilized.
Its size was about forty kilometers in radius.
The spot Kamijou had been in at first was, on the whole, close to the back. The ritual site Sasha told him about, though, was on the edge of the right part, which was longer than the others. As long as Fiamma wasn’t after a different destination, he’d be near to it. To stop the archangel Misha rampaging even now, it seemed they’d have to head for the ritual site where Fiamma probably was, but some random high school kid wouldn’t be able to run the entire distance on foot.
…But Sasha had escaped from the ritual site at the rightmost part and gotten all the way to where I was.
It would be one thing if she had incredible running abilities, but otherwise, that meant some other method had been prepared for traveling through the Star of Bethlehem at a high speed.
“Answer two. Personally, the option of returning to where I came from after managing to distance myself from it doesn’t seem very beneficial.”
“Then you can wait here if you want, Sasha.”
“Answer three. If I could, I wouldn’t be in this trouble.”
“I guess not…No way to escape this place without finding a parachute or something. I’ll have to really think about that once I beat that asshole’s face in.”
As he spoke, Kamijou continued through the expansive fortress, guided by Sasha.
“This fortress goes on for miles. It’s practically a full marathon. We’ll run out of steam just running around, won’t we?”
“Answer four. I don’t have that much confidence in my stamina, either. I have a method of transportation here.”
Eventually, they found it: a monorail. Only one—maybe it really was just for getting around. It looked more like a relative of a car than a train.
And naturally, it wasn’t magical.
As Kamijou gaped, Sasha tilted her head. “Question one. Aren’t you getting on?”
“Yeah, sure. It’s just…The place is like a big rolled-up ball of historical ruins. Why would there be a monorail here?”
“Answer five. Please don’t ask me.”
Now that he thought about it, there were furnishings that looked historical and footholds and scaffolding used for construction strung along inside Fiamma’s base, too. Had he put it together specifically for this sort of design?
…Lesser said there are over two hundred Russian sorcerers. Did they need to repair the existing infrastructure, too, in order to make the place more efficient?
Kamijou and Sasha boarded the monorail.
He didn’t know how to control it or anything, but apparently neither did Sasha. It seemed like they only needed to enter a destination, and then the machine would move on its own. Maybe it was more like an elevator than anything else.
For a while, the monorail trailed through the fortress, but eventually it left the proverbial tunnel and came out in the middle of the sky. It looked like they were going on a rail running underneath the fortress.
A view of the sky.
And that sky was dark, without any stars, painted completely over in black.
“The Star of Bethlehem…,” murmured Sasha, staring at the purposely constructed darkness. “Opinion one…The star announced Jesus’s birth. Is the one known as Fiamma trying to re-create that using only man-made objects?”
The clouds below were dense, but gaps existed in places. Through them, he noticed flashes of red light. That was no nighttime scenery; it was probably flames. He recalled the time when he’d been watching a TV program and they were showing a satellite view of the Amazon. The regions that were doing slash-and-burn farming had glowed red then.
Krrk…Kamijou softly clenched his teeth.
And then it happened. From near the red glow on the earth’s surface spurted some kind of water vapor–like stuff. The clouds passed over it a moment later, taking it out of sight, but then suddenly that thick cloud was torn apart. From inside, a dully shining cylindrical object flew out.
“A surface-to-air missile…?!”
And not just one or two, either. Fifty, even a hundred flames blew a wind hole in the night’s darkness.
Whoever fired the missiles might have meant them as a last-ditch effort, but some of them were headed straight for the part of the fortress’s underside that the monorail car carrying Kamijou and Sasha was traveling along. If they kept going, they’d land a direct hit. And even if the missiles didn’t hit the vehicle, as long as they destroyed the rail, there was a good chance Kamijou and Sasha might fall along with it.
But at this point, they had no way to avoid it.
There was nowhere to run in the cramped, boxy monorail car.
An explosion went off.
The monorail car’s glass all shattered at once. Fierce winds blew inside. Kamijou tried to cover his ears and curl up, but then he noticed something.
The missiles hadn’t hit them directly.
If they had, the monorail car would have been a crushed empty can right now. He and Sasha would have died instantly, too.
The missiles had been shot down—by something.
Kamijou looked.
And then, on the inside of the below-freezing car, he caught his breath.