Around the same time the two new opponents faced off against Kyoya, Sayaka went looking for the masked lord of the manor. She intended to have him put a stop to the violence once and for all.
Scanning her surroundings, she spotted a door off in the distance, and something glittering moving toward it. Only after she set off in pursuit, without really thinking about what she was doing, did she become aware of something odd going on.
He was walking. She was running. And yet she couldn’t close the distance between them. She heard the heavy sound of the door closing behind her, it didn’t occur to her to turn around. Driven by an impulse she didn’t even understand, Sayaka ran after the walking man.
Imposing statues rose up on her left and right—she seemed to be moving down a kind of corridor—she seemed to be moving past a lake brimming with mysterious blue water.
Finally, exhausted in body and mind, having closed the distance between them not at all, she stopped. She was surrounded by a blue light. Breathing ragged breaths, Sayaka looked curiously at the shadow stretching out on the marble beneath her feet. The feelings were hard to describe—emotions that in such a situation should have hardly come to mind.
“Are you tired?” asked a teasing voice.
Sayaka raised her head. In front of her, no closer than before, she could see the back of the lord of the manor. In the same direction, deeper within the blue light, wavered a stone staircase.
Without any logical reason, Sayaka thought of climbing it.
“Are you tired, Semiramis?”
“No,” Sayaka answered. “Not at all.” Then it struck her: Semiramis? Who was that? He’d posed the question to somebody else, and yet she had answered.
“What strength and spirit. There is a terrace perfect for viewing the moon just ahead. There is a divan there for you, and plum wine.”
Sayaka was all the more confused by the man in the mask. A terrace for moon viewing? It was still daylight outside, past three in the afternoon. And a divan for her?
“You still don’t remember, Semiramis?” His voice was suffused with a sorrow that made her want to cover her ears.
“I believe you are mistaken,” Sayaka said. “I’m—that name—”
“I understand. All is as you say. But all is also as I say.”
“No,” Sayaka said, trying to dispel the dark clouds gathering in her chest.
“Very well. The time has not yet come. But behold your shadow.”
Sayaka reflexively looked down at the ground. She saw her shadow. Her hair appeared to be adorned with ribbons of fine fabric. A sleeveless dress reached to her ankles.
“What in the world—”
She blinked several times. And then with a prayer in her heart, peered down again. Her long hair swayed about her waist. Her own hair. Her shoulders slumped in disappointment. Relief mingled with a curious kind of pathos in her heart, which she did her best to ignore.
“No matter, you must come, Miss Sayaka Rama. I will show you alone what no one has ever seen.”
“I have to get back. We should go back.”
“And why is that?”
“You must stop that gladiator bout in the arena.”
A vain request, to be sure. Without a backwards glance, the lord of the manor house said, “If my calculations are correct, the thing has already been settled, after a most unexpected fashion.”
“How could you—” Sayaka began to retreat.
“Please excuse me.”
Courteous to the end, he bowed and turned around.
“Wait.”
The plea faded into the distance. The air shook above her head, followed by a strange screeching sound. She looked up. A creature with bat-like wings dropped down on her. A gremlin!
Sayaka felt a pinch in her shoulders as she rose into the air. The carrying capacity of these legendary creatures could be attested to by the spies and agents among the invited guests who’d been disposed of earlier.
She considered using the paralyzer setting in her laser ring, but her body was already a good fifteen feet in the air and rising fast. A fall from this distance would break a bone or two. So she resigned herself to going wherever the gremlin was going.
Kyoya-san should be okay. There’s no way he’d lose to those armored creatures. That’s what she believed. She gave less thought to what would happen to herself after this.
The gremlin soared elegantly through the air and reached the top of the staircase. They were headed in the wrong direction, and there was nothing she could do about it, but Sayaka couldn’t help thinking this wasn’t a bad way to get around.
At the very top of the staircase was an enormous pool, in which bobbed a number of pretty boats festooned with bronze flower petals.
Sayaka and the gremlin turned to the right and rushed toward a great glass door. Just before colliding with the door, it opened wide. Sayaka was drawn into the invigorating air. She was startled not just by its cool taste, but by the great blackness that reached out and out before her.
Stars twinkled above. The heavens were full of stars that looked ready to pour down out of the Milky Way. Lights twinkled below. When the darkness crystallized, it must glitter like this as well.
The endless points of light took hold of Sayaka’s youthful aesthetic. Standing on the green-covered terrace, she was intoxicated by the dreamlike spectacle. And yet her nervous system was definitely not asleep.
Hearing footsteps behind her, she spun like a lithesome top to face the man in the golden mask.
“I thought you should see this,” said the lord of Babylon, with a word of apology. He pointed at the amalgam of light and dark and looked at Sayaka. “The stars of the night, the lights of the earth, are yours and mine—no, yours alone, if you so choose.”
“I don’t understand what you are saying,” Sayaka answered forthrightly. “You mean you will pull the stars down from the sky and steal the lights from off the earth for me?”
“That is correct.”
“Well, that’s nice. But not scientifically possible.”
“That is also correct.”
The lord’s face twitched in a smile beneath the mask. “But the day is still the day, and this is all an illusion.”
“I know that,” said Sayaka, though she hadn’t actually known that.
“Do you remember?” asked the mask, ignoring the bands of light.
“Remember what?”
“Remember that you once stood at this terrace with me and looked at the moon and the stars and the world below.”
“Pull yourself together. You’ve obviously got a fevered brain.” Sayaka slowly backed away.
The mask followed. “You have forgotten why I built this garden in the sky?”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t meet whatever expectations you had of me.”
“Well, we have all the time in the world. It will come to you eventually. For now, let us drink the night away.”
“It’s still daytime.”
“You needn’t take everything so literally.”