ONE fine afternoon, Ichi and Azusa were enjoying teatime at a quaint table set outside the mansion as the spring breeze caressed their cheeks and played with their hair.
“Kouya has it rough being summoned again today,” Azusa remarked, taking a sip of her jasmine tea.
“It seems he is supposed to go there every Wednesday. If I recall, the last time he was away was a Wednesday too?”
“Oh, you’re right. I’ve lost my sense of time lately. I don’t have school to remind me what day it is anymore.” Azusa stretched her arms over her head. Her back popped in several places.
Two months quickly passed since she arrived at the mansion. She was getting perturbed by the monotony of each day. The only change as of late would be Kouya’s participation in their teatime.
Even Ichi, whose man-hating habits kicked into full-bloom with repugnance over Kouya’s presence at first, grew used to it with the passing days and eventually accepted him. However, her sharp-tongued attitude toward him never changed.
Those were the only changes—every day passed by blandly following the same pattern. Azusa frankly longed for change.
“Do you want to attend school, Azusa?”
“I guess so. It would be a lie if I said I didn’t want to.”
Truth be told, Azusa had given up on the idea. As someone not allowed to step foot outside alone, school was but a dream inside a dream. A troubled smile crossed her face.
“I’m sorry, Azusa,” Ichi apologized upon seeing her smile.
“It’s fine…really. Besides, it’s not your fault! Plus, I was dumb!”
“Azusa—” Ichi was cut off by the rapid banging of a bell reverberating through the mansion.
The bell warned of a crisis—Azusa instantly figured out. Ichi’s head jolted toward the sound. With amazing strength she picked Azusa up and leapt to the mansion’s second-story window.
“Please don’t move from this spot until I say it is okay!”
“Okay.”
Ichi went through the open window and placed Azusa in the room before rushing up to the rooftop to get an understanding of the situation from above. In less than a minute, she returned with an alarmed look.
“Azusa, the Blue Coven is attacking us with a legion of animal familiars! We need to run. Please follow me!”
Azusa took the hand offered to her. Ichi picked her up in the same manner she had before.
“Ahhh!”
“We are going to bounce around a bit. Please be careful not to bite your tongue.”
Ichi leapt out of the window in one giant stride. She landed on a thick tree branch sixty-five feet away and jumped again to another branch and then another, covering large gaps of space in a quick amount of time.
“Um! Can you fly—agh!”
“You mean what Kouya does? I would need to drink a large amount of blood from Subaru if I want to use such a risky skill and fight.”
“Fight?”
“We need to keep that in mind as a pos…sib…ility…” Ichi’s words gradually spaced out like someone losing consciousness. Azusa realized the strangeness of it, but the endless rollercoaster-like upward and downward movement hindered her from saying anything without risking biting her tongue off.
“Ichi! Are...you…okay?”
“Yes. I am without problem,” she answered sounding stiffer and more robotic than usual.
✦ ✦ ✦
THEY continued traveling through large leaps for another twenty minutes. Finally, they stopped in the middle of a dense forest. Ichi abruptly placed Azusa on the ground.
“Ichi, where are we?”
“……”
Ichi stood dead-still since she put Azusa down. Her eyes vacantly stared into the distance. Azusa got a terribly bad feeling.
“Ichi! Are you okay? Please answer me!”
“……”
Azusa frantically shook Ichi, but she didn’t answer her. Cold sweat trailed Azusa’s back and hands.
“You are torturing the poor thing with all your shaking. After all, my poison is keeping her consciousness locked in an inescapable cage,” interjected an icy voice.
Azusa warily looked in the direction of the voice to find a tall man with long hair standing in the middle of the forest with her. Half his translucent silver hair was pulled up, but it still held an eerie enough length to reach his calf. A blue glimmer came from his narrow, slit eyes. No doubt he was from the Blue Coven.
“Who are you?” Azusa cautiously questioned. The man bowed with frightening formality.
“I have come to retrieve you, Miss Azusa. You understand not resisting is in your best interest, yes?” he crooned and held up his long fingers to display the spiders and centipedes crawling on them. Apparently, he controlled bugs.
“What is going to happen to Ichi?! Will you remove the poison from her if I go with you?” Azusa asked at once. He said he poisoned her. Azusa was more worried about Ichi than anything else.
The man smirked and casually answered her, “Do not concern yourself with her. The poison will leave her system naturally within two days. It is not a life-threatening toxin in the first place. My goal was to control her psyche after all.”
“Control her psyche?”
“Why do you believe she left you completely alone the day you fell from a normal kitchen into the forest?”
“…! Don’t tell me you…”
Azusa recalled the day she exited the kitchen door and landed in a forest. She believed she had earned Ichi’s trust, but apparently she was wrong. A blue butterfly appeared just before the incident—a bug.
“Indeed. I poisoned her then, but I had not expected it to take so long to gain this much control over her mind. Wasn’t that butterfly gorgeous? I dare say my finest work yet. I gave the butterfly three objectives: to poison this woman, show you an illusion, and to use its body to create a door with transference magic embedded in it,” he trilled, a look of pure bliss on his face, as he continued, “Guess what? She is the one who told me the Akaoni would not be with you today.”
“No way…”
“It was a simple feat to create time for her to be unconscious with how deeply the poison has invaded her system,” the man blissfully cackled. All the hair on Azusa’s body stood on end. “As you have already conjectured, I am skilled at manipulating bugs and poisons. Controlling bugs allows me to even do things like this.”
He snapped his fingers. Two pairs of glimmering lights appeared around him. The pairs of light rapidly increased, becoming uncountable in less than ten seconds. The oddly colored glowing embers approached, forming into the eyes of wild dogs. An exceedingly large pack made up of small to wolf-sized wild dogs growled at Azusa from behind the man. She nearly screamed and fell to her knees, but she endured the impulse to do either.
Now isn’t the time to quiver in fear. Kouya should be able to find me if I drag things out here like this, Azusa assured herself.
“Fleas can be used in this way. Isn’t it just marvelous?”
“……”
This had to be a part of the legion of animal familiars Ichi mentioned earlier.
“And the most amusing part of all is that I have given a single order to a pack a hundred times the size of the one behind me. What do you think it was?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“I ordered them to ‘Kill Kouya Doumeki’. Isn’t that just fabulous?”
“…!”
The man’s lips curled in an arc and his long tongue brushed over his teeth in a twisted mockery of a smile. He ridiculed her with his snake-like expression.
“How unfortunate for you—your prince won’t come for you no matter how long you wait.”