- Location
- The word mines
Oh fuck yes.
Magical Detective Yue (Negima)
- Thread starter Dragontrapper
- Start date
-
- Tags
- negima
DB_Explorer
Purveyor of alternate realities.
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Drinking habits, drinking habits never change.
wait... think Yue has expanded to odd liquors?
Sonoda: ... that had a scorpion in it.
Yue: ... yep
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
She was in the magical world for a few years so she probably picked up on some weird eating habits.
- Location
- The word mines
Nodoka: Why are your chops flickering?
Yue: Lightning lizard steaks, actually. Tastes like you're licking a battery, but the mana charge is something else. Burns out hangovers too *chomp* *ZZZT* Oooh... spicy.
DB_Explorer
Purveyor of alternate realities.
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sonoda: .... cool
Yue and Nodoka: ... > . > !!!!
Yue: We're going to get turned into ermine.
Nodoka: not if we erase his memory.
Yue: I'll grab a pan.
Dragontrapper
Homeless Draconis
- Location
- A Tower in the middle of nowhere
New chapter - now with 20% more Nodoka
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"Why are we visiting a bookstore?" Sonoda asked as they stepped out of the front door of the Special District Office. Overhead, the sun was even lower on the horizon then Yue had suspected. The visit to the station had eaten most of the day.
"Not a bookstore." Yue corrected. "The bookstore. She's an old friend and an archaeological expert. She should be able to tell us where this piece probably came from." Yue patted on the front coat pocket where the piece was resting, checking to make sure it hadn't gone anywhere before starting down the street.
"Why an archaeologist?" Sonoda asked as he adjusted his coat against a stiff breeze that cut down the street.
"The piece looks old." Yue replied. "Very old. She'll be able to tell us where it came from and she knows most of the trade routes stuff like this follows. She should be able to tell us where it was bought or traded." Off on the horizon, the sun was casting a golden tinge over the cityscape as the massive form of the world tree cast a long shadow over a large portion of Mahora.
As locals, neither Sonoda or Yue found the sight particularly impressive. To almost anybody else though it would have been an impressive scene. Instead, Yue's gaze flicked about as she navigated though the late afternoon crowds – a combination of students just released from late classes and workers freed to their own agendas for the remainder of the day. All of them mingled up and down the sidewalks, gazing through storefront windows at the wares on display, slipping into street-side cafes for a bite to eat or simply laughing as they walked along with their friends, chatting away as they enjoyed a late afternoon stroll in good company.
After a block and a half, they turned a corner and left the crowds behind as they started heading toward one of the university districts. "So," Sonoda asked as they stepped out of the the side street and into the wide open courtyard of a university quad. "What exactly does your friend do to get this sort of technical expertise?"
"She's an assistant professor in the school archeology department." Yue replied as she followed a side path toward one of the lesser buildings lining the courtyard. "She also does her own field work – though she hasn't had time for that in a while." Which was a shame – she'd gone with Nodoka for the last little excursion. A short one week trip to Indonesia hunting down some early mundus magicus artifacts. Thing's had gone slightly pear-shaped, but it made for a good story to share over some drinks.
"So, what?" Sonoda replied as they stopped briefly at the front door as Yue hit a small button to one side and they waited to be buzzed in. "You're telling me you know Indiana Jones?"
"Don't be ridiculous." Yue replied as the door buzzed and she pulled it open. "She doesn't own a whip." Yue led the two of them down the wide first-floor hall and then up a flight of stairs, finally emerging onto a narrow, nondescript hall on the fourth floor. Past a series of completely identical doors and a few turns and Sonoda found himself thoroughly turned around as they stopped in front of a pair of double doors, on which a small placard read 'Preservation and Restoration'.
Yue paused at the doors before turning around to face the Inspector. "You should wait out here."
"What?" Sonoda raised an eyebrow. "Why?"
Yue gave him what she hoped was a sympathetic shrug. "A lot of what she works with is really delicate, and there's also the fact that she's never..."
Whatever Yue was about to say was cut off as one of the door's behind her swung open part way, allowing a young woman to lean out into the hall. She looked to be about Yue's height, if not a touch taller. Her hair was almost the same shade as Yue's, but cut far shorter, most of it tied back in a short ponytail. Bright blue eyes were magnified to truly impressive sizes by the strange set of jeweler's glasses she was wearing, but shrank to a far more normal size as she lifted them up, the curiosity on her face being replaced with a smile as she recognized who was outside her door. "Yue! What are you doing here? I thought you were still moving into you new apartment..." Her gaze slid slightly to one side as she noticed who else was there. "And why are you with Inspector Sonoda?"
"You know him Nodoka?" Yue asked, surprised, as she jerked a thumb in Sonoda's direction.
"Only a little." Nodoka replied as she stepped out into the hall, dusting a few bits of what looked like fine gravel from her lab coat. "I consulted on a case he had a few months back – some sort of smuggling case, I think?"
Sonoda nodded. "Our suspect claimed they were swapping out pieces from private collections with forgeries, and nobody in the Office's lab's had the right expertise to actually tell the fakes from the genuine articles." He turned to Yue. "You didn't tell me your contact was Professor Miyazaki."
Nodoka blushed slightly. "I'm just an adjunct! I'm not a real professor, really." It seemed like a minor distinction to Yue, but she wasn't going to to argue it right now. "So," Nodoka continued. "What can I do for you?"
"Miss Ayase is assisting us with a case at the moment," Sonoda explained. "She seems to think you can tell us something about...whatever it is she found at the scene."
"A case?" Nodoka arched an eyebrow slightly as she glanced toward Yue. "That seems...unexpected."
"Kuzunoha insisted." Yue replied with a shrug. "Her people seem to think I'm the most qualified for the job." Nodoka didn't miss the slight emphasis Yue had put on the first two words, a look of understanding crossing her face after a moment.
"Oh," Nodoka nodded. "Must be, uh, unusual if she thought you could help."
"If you would classify somebody getting charbroiled alive in a square 'unusual'," Sonoda shrugged. "Then yeah."
Nodoka paled slightly, but covered it well as she pulled the door to the lab open. "Well then, you should probably show me this piece you found." She turned to Sonoda. "Inspector, would it be alright if you stayed out here? Some of the set-ups we have at the moment are quite delicate and you haven't been trained on any of these things like Yue..."
"Unless you want me to wait out here with you?" Yue asked half-mockingly. "I could just give her the piece of you don't want to be lonely..."
"Yeah – I think I'll be good." Sonoda replied flatly. "At least one of us can be in there and ask a question or two."
The two girls gave him a little wave as they slipped behind the doors, waiting until they were well out of earshot before either of them said anything. "What is going on?" Nodoka asked in a raised whisper despite their distance from the door. "Did somebody really die?"
"You didn't see the light show this morning?" Yue asked. "I saw it from my apartment."
Nodoka shook her head. "If you saw it from your window, I couldn't have seen it – my lab's window face's the wrong way. But the only reason I can think Kuzunoha would have brought you on..."
"Is if magic is involved." Yue nodded as they wormed their way through the aisles. "Somebody or something summoned a fire vortex in the middle of a public square during the morning rush and fried somebody before vanishing." To that Nodoka didn't reply, slipping into thought or simply too shocked to comment, as they worked their way further into the laboratory. The room was the size of a large classroom, with almost every inch of floor space occupied by tall sets of stainless steel workbenches and shelves, save for the narrow aisles left between them for the boffins to squeeze through. The only space not covered in shelving was the stretch of floor to ceiling windows, instead occasionally blocked by a lower set of benches that still let a good deal of light though.
"Nice view." Yue quipped, and it was – the wide bank of windows gave a panoramic view of Mahora, stretching out all the way to the towering World Tree off in the distance, framed by the setting sun. It looked like a piece from a postcard, and Yue as pretty sure that an image like that in fact was.
"Not that I have much time to enjoy it." Nodoka replied as she sat down at a well-worn desk tucked into a corner and began clearing away some of the clutter into its drawers.. "So, what do you have for me?" Yue pulled the small bag out of her pocket, handing it to her friend who proceeded to crack the small seal and extracted the bauble with a pair of delicate looking tweezers. "You found this at the scene?"
"We think our perpetrator dropped it." Yue replied as Nodoka began to look over the piece, first unaided and then with what looked like a jewelers lens.
"The one who managed to get away from you?" Nodoka replied. "How did he manage that anyway?"
"No idea." Yue shrugged. "He kept managing to dodge my attacks."
"Precognition?" Nodoka asked.
"Or something close." Yue replied. "The only thing I've ever seen that was even close to that is your Pactio."
"...Perhaps..." Nodoka studied the item a little closer before pulling open one of the lower drawers of the desk. Inside was a stack of worn, leather-bound books that Nodoka dug through before pulling out one. "This might be an artifice."
"You mean like a pactio artifact?" Yue replied.
"Similar, but not quite." Nodoka replied. "This is more along the lines of...those magic weapons from mahorafest when we were in school." Yue recalled that particular festival quite well – as did most other former students of Mahora around her age. But they likely remembered it for different reasons. For most, it was an epic battle against Martians. For her and her friends, it was the opening moves in what turned into what many described as a small-scale war that shaped the futures of two worlds. "Depending on the design and construction, it could have any number of effects – increased speed, telekinesis..."
"Teleportation?" Yue suggested.
"Possibly," Nodoka nodded. "It might not be a Pactio, but it should still have a maker's mark."
"A what?" Yue arched an eyebrow.
"A maker's mark." Nodoka replied as she started flipping through pages of her book. "You see them on older firearms and on swords in this world too. When a craftsman made a weapon – or artifice in this case – for somebody, usually a government or kingdom, it would have to be tested to make sure it wasn't faulty. For fire arms, this usually meant over-packing it with powder and firing it to make sure it wouldn't explode. For an artifice, it would be channeling a large amount of magic through it. If it passed, then it was stamped with a maker's mark to show that it had been checked and was within regulations. Your Pactio likely has something similar somewhere. Newer pactios usually have a serial number instead but the principle is the same."
"So, how does this help us?" Yue asked.
"A maker's mark is unique." Nodoka explained. "It tells you who made it, when and who tested it." she patted the book in front of her lightly. "Dealers would use reference guides like this to cross-check marks to identify anything that came across their tables. Not unlike what we're doing now...ah!"
Yue leaned over her friend's shoulder. "Find it?"
"Found it." You could almost hear the smile in Nodoka's voice. "Looks like its from an old Ostian maker – very old. This dates back over a century – and if I understand this right, this craftsman only catered to Ostian royalty."
"Fancy stuff." Yue quipped. "any idea where it would have come from?"
Nodoka shrugged. "Sorry – all I can help with is where it started. How it got here is up to you."
Yue sighed. "Well, its a lot more then I started with – my pactio should make finding the rest easy..."
Nodoka glanced at her friend as she began to stow her equipment. "I'm sensing a 'but' here."
"But," Yue continued. "I can't do the research now and if I do it later, the Inspector out there will want to know how I found it."
"You sure he'd care?" Nodoka asked.
Yue gave her friend a small grin. "He's a cop – he wouldn't be much of one if he didn't."
"You can't just tell him I told you?" Nodoka suggested.
"I still have to do the research, and a search like this could take a long time." Yue groaned. "This is such a pain. I doubt he'd be willing to stay sideline on his own investigation again, and I really don't need a nosy cop getting me turned into an ermine."
"But you would look so good in fur!" Nodoka teased, but Yue was not amused. "Well, I'm sure you'll think of something. You always do."
"Not always what I need though." Yue sighed as outside the sun slipped further behind the horizon. "When was the last time you talked to Negi?"
"That's a bit sudden," Nodoka said, suddenly caught off-guard by the question. "I think it was… A few weeks ago? Chisame at leasts calls to complain about her agent and ask if I know of a remote dig site she could hide at. The only one who is as scarce as him is Asakura - I haven't seen her since you did...whatever it is you were doing with her. Even Eva-chan shows up for tea now and then. Why do you ask?"
"Just suddenly wishing I could ask for some help." Yue walked up to the window, her gaze drifting down to a spot at the base of the tree. "He always did have a way of getting us all out of trouble..."
"Or into it," Nodoka said with a small giggle. "Though he sometimes had some help. Remember when Asuna forced that confession out of him?"
Yue shrugged. "Probably better then instead of later when somebody could have gotten hurt. At least all that got hurt that time was our dignity." She let out a sigh. "I still wonder what Asuna was thinking - ten years old is a little young for true love."
"And what about now?" Nodoka gave her a knowing grin. If there was one thing that the years since middle school had given Nodoka Miyazaki, it was some self-confidence. As a side-effect, she was also it seemed a little more willing to show her more...'Paru-like' tendencies, even if only in jest. "I hear he's still single you know – and of all the girls I always thought you two got along soooo well..." Case in point.
"Pretty sure he's still busy saving the world." Yue replied as she retrieved the bauble and slipped it back into its bag . "Well, I have a murder to help solve – we can discuss our former teacher's dating prospects some other time."
"Tomorrow over lunch sound good?" Nodoka replied, her innocent tone only slightly betrayed by the small smile across her face.
Yue simply gave her friend a languid wave as she walked out. "Later, Nodoka."
"Until next time, Yue!" Nodoka yelled back before turning back to her own work.
Back out in the hall the Inspector had settled himself into one of the few chairs in the hall, seated outside what looked like a professor's office, and was idly flipping through an archeology magazine that looked to be old enough to qualify as a study piece itself. He looked up from the ancient periodical as the lab doors swung open and Yue stepped out. "So?"
"She identified it." Yue replied. She had been thinking of a cover story the entire walk out and while thirty-odd seconds wasn't a lot of time, she felt she had a solid plan. "Looks like our suspect was smuggling artifacts."
"Could she tell you where it came from?" Sonoda asked, getting back to his feet. "There can't be too many digs going on right now if we can narrow it down enough."
"It's...European." Yue replied slowly as she pulled her lie together. "Welsh. Late Medieval period based on the markings."
"So, all we need to do is find if any welsh digs in the last year or two have lost anything." Sonoda concluded. "Any idea how we can do that?"
"Maybe." Yue replied. "Library Island tends to keep archive copies of a lot of dig site reports – it's one of the few places with enough room. It would be a lot of work, but we could be able to find what we are looking for there."
The Inspector readily accepted the explanation. It was, at least, partially true. The library did, in fact keep logs of various other institute's expeditions. And finding what they were looking for would indeed be quite a bit of work. She just didn't bother mentioning that these two things did not in fact have any bearing on each other. What the Inspector didn't know though didn't get her turned into an ermine. "Alright then. Tomorrow at the library, nice and early. Know what time they open tomorrow?"
"They don't." Yue replied. "Tomorrow's set aside for maintenance and cleaning. Shouldn't be a problem though – I can get them to let us in."
Sonoda arched an eyebrow. "How?"
"Perk of being a former member of the Library Exploration Club." Yue replied as they started their way out of the school. "The Library trusts you far more than it really should."
"You saying you've done stuff the library wouldn't...." Sonoda paused for a moment as he tried to think of the right word. "Approve of?"
Yue shrugged. "The legacy of a misspent youth." A youth that involved raiding their basement for a secret tome of knowledge and accidentally pissing off a dragon, among other things. You glanced at the Inspector as the neared the front door. "Nothing you need to worry about."
Sonoda gave Yue a small grin before opening the door for her. "Of course its not." Outside, the air was quickly cooling as the sun sank lower and lower below the horizon, only the last few rays of daylight peaking through the buildings of the academy. "Well, I think that's all we can do today."
"Tomorrow at the library then?" Yue asked, resisting the urge to shiver as a cool evening breeze blew down the road. She was really regretting rushing out her door as fast as she did – she had forgotten her coat. She wasn't even sure if she had remembered to lock the place up.
"The Library." Sonoda nodded. "Which way is your place?"
Yue tilted her head in the appropriate direction. "I think I can manage, thanks."
Sonoda blinked owlishly as Yue started down the path. "I didn't say anything."
"Well, I know your type." Yue gave him a languid wave. "Until tomorrow, Inspector Sonoda."
The walk home was not completely miserable, but it was certainly not pleasant. So she was very happy when she found herself outside her new - and still locked - front door. A brief minute of fumbling for the key before she all but fell through the doorway into the blessed warmth of the single-floor apartment. She was so preoccupied with getting the feeling back in her fingers that she didn't at first notice that her empty apartment was no longer quite so empty.
A large chunk of the main room was now stuffed full of boxes and the odd wooden chest. Only a few pieces of furniture were actually visible – a table, a couch, a couple of chairs, and a desk with its chair tucked into one corner. All of them were laden with yet more boxes. Well, Yue thought, at least the moving company managed while she was gone. The menagerie of boxes before her represented the sum total of her personal possessions. The only things that remained in Mundus Magicus were some assets in a bank account – no point in transferring currency that couldn't convert – and some files that were no good to her anyway. Her original plan was to spend most of the day getting started with her unpacking. Now she was looking like she might be able to start moving in sometime next month thanks to this case.
Well, at least it was a job – and a well-paying one, to boot. Still, Yue couldn't repress the groan that came unbidden at the thought of trying to dig out her futon. Screw it, she decided, she could just sleep on the couch. The hellish day was catching up with her and at this point she was fairly sure she could lay down on the roof and still sleep like a log.
She made sure her hat, her coat and her staff were where she had left them – they were - before dragging herself over to the couch and promptly collapsing. Sleep was looking so nice right then…
But something was bugging her. As long as her day had been, it took her sleep-deprived brain a moment to pinpoint what it was, exactly.
Nodoka had mentioned that their bauble had probably been an artifice – and that was how their cloaked friend had managed to pull off some of the things he had. Some part of her brain, despite how tired she was, was still wondering – could she do the same thing?
Yue tried to banish the thought, telling herself she would look into it tomorrow after the library. Alas, sleep would not come and the question continued to gnaw at her from the corner of her mind. With one final groan, and a some ineffectual pounding of her head against a nearby pillow, Yue dragged herself back to her feet before slowly making her way over to her desk. Her curiosity almost folded at the sight of the mess piled on her work surface, but it held. She begrudgingly began to clear off the desk, occasionally popping open some of the smaller boxes and setting aside the ones that had things she thought she might need later. By the time she had the desk cleared, she had managed to find about a third of what she figured she'd need. That meant digging through even more of the boxes before she could even begin. Yue let out another grumble as she pulled down the nearest box and began to long process of sorting through boxes.
It was the better part of an hour after she had finally dug out her research texts, her reagents and her various beakers, flasks, and burners. She was no artificer, but she was a fair hand at potions – it should, theoretically, be possible to get the same or at least similar results. Magical theory was consistent like that. Unfortunately she didn't know which theory her bauble had been using. All that left was trying to replicate the results.
She set a base mixture brewing as she started flipping through her texts. She would start with the enhancement effect he had seemed to have been using – that, at the least, wasn't trying to monitor and process external effects or variables. Potions were bad and creating logic routines anyway.
Yue started sifting through her ingredients, cross-checking her texts before measuring out the portions and setting them to boil or distill. The array of texts around her would have seemed, to many who knew her, superfluous. After all, she had an artifact that gave ever access to every magical database in...well, not this world, but a world. But her pactio tended to display information in semi-distracting magic holographic displays. Worked wonderfully when you were doing research, but got real distracting when you needed whatever you were reading so you could do something else – like, say, creating a new potion from scratch. Hence the normal books.
The biggest issue with something like this would be magical toxicity. At its most basic, magical enhancement was just dumping more magic into a body. A body, however, could only take so much – you could get clever and try and mess around with where you put it, try and work it into the spaces and the cracks, but even there was a limit. Magic toxicity was never fun. At best, you end up with symptom not unlike acute radiation sickness. At worst, you find yourself magically mutated or your organs alphabetized. So, dosage was key.
Yue worked her way through the alchemical processes, combining and recombining reagents. She quickly decided that trying to replicate all of the effects she had seen would have been the better part of impossible. Potions tended to be pretty bad at imparting disparate effects unless you started getting into more complex suspensions and encapsulation techniques and that was frankly more work than she was willing to put into this little project. So, she narrowed it down to the one effect she was actually sure of – a strength boost. She had theories on how he had pulled off some of the other tricks, but nothing she could be sure of. A booster, on the other hand, should at least be fairly straight forward.
Well, 'straight forward' was a relative term – such spells and potions were common enough, but none worked on the scale of what she had seen. her only real advantage, she mused as she pulled out one other tome, was she had seen something like it before. The tome was newer than most of her other books. Most of them were several times older than her at least, and usually older by an order of magnitude. This one, however, was less than a decade old – in fact, it was written in her own hand. She flipped through pages of her own looping script, nearly as much of it in Latin as it was in Japanese, sifting through her early attempts at research until she finally found what she was looking for.
Notes were intermingled with diagrams, indecipherable to to anybody but a mage well versed in theoretical magic, documenting everything a younger her had been able to learn or work out about a technique created over a decade by one of the most feared vampires in history.
Magia Erebea – Dark Magic, or so McDowell had called it. Deceptively simple in proposition, exceedingly complex in execution and quite possibly lethal in utilization. The theory was simple enough – absorb an offensive spell, gaining the properties of the spell in the process. Of course, to pull it off required the caster fuse the spell onto their soul, which could be problematic in the long term for all but the most powerful of mages. Of course, McDowell had never really intended to teach it to anyone else and she wasn't exactly worried about dying – any negative effects were more or less irrelevant.
Yue, however, was not an immortal vampire mage. Or even her student. If she tried to cast that spell as it was originally written, at best nothing would happen since she just wouldn't be able to power it. At worst, she'd explode. She was fairly sure that would cost her the deposit. Luckily, she wasn't planning on casting the spell – she just needed its guts.
McDowell had never been one to share the secrets of her works, but she had told her student and Negi had been more than willing to share. Yue had written down every single word, even the ones she had no understanding of at the time – especially the ones she had no understanding of. Years later, she had the closest thing available to one of the most powerful spells ever designed – and she was about to rip it off.
What she was most interested in was how the spell got around the issue of user rejection – how it made sure the body could actually use the absorbed power without failing catastrophically. Negi had suggested it was related to how the spell was powered - feeding off the user's soul, but in retrospect that seemed unlikely. Powering the spell was pointless if it made the user's limbs exploded or something. Even Negi, as powerful as he was, couldn't have handled the sort of power – there was a trick buried inside that technique - somewhere in that text was the key to her little enigma, and she was going to find it, even if it took her all night.
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"Why are we visiting a bookstore?" Sonoda asked as they stepped out of the front door of the Special District Office. Overhead, the sun was even lower on the horizon then Yue had suspected. The visit to the station had eaten most of the day.
"Not a bookstore." Yue corrected. "The bookstore. She's an old friend and an archaeological expert. She should be able to tell us where this piece probably came from." Yue patted on the front coat pocket where the piece was resting, checking to make sure it hadn't gone anywhere before starting down the street.
"Why an archaeologist?" Sonoda asked as he adjusted his coat against a stiff breeze that cut down the street.
"The piece looks old." Yue replied. "Very old. She'll be able to tell us where it came from and she knows most of the trade routes stuff like this follows. She should be able to tell us where it was bought or traded." Off on the horizon, the sun was casting a golden tinge over the cityscape as the massive form of the world tree cast a long shadow over a large portion of Mahora.
As locals, neither Sonoda or Yue found the sight particularly impressive. To almost anybody else though it would have been an impressive scene. Instead, Yue's gaze flicked about as she navigated though the late afternoon crowds – a combination of students just released from late classes and workers freed to their own agendas for the remainder of the day. All of them mingled up and down the sidewalks, gazing through storefront windows at the wares on display, slipping into street-side cafes for a bite to eat or simply laughing as they walked along with their friends, chatting away as they enjoyed a late afternoon stroll in good company.
After a block and a half, they turned a corner and left the crowds behind as they started heading toward one of the university districts. "So," Sonoda asked as they stepped out of the the side street and into the wide open courtyard of a university quad. "What exactly does your friend do to get this sort of technical expertise?"
"She's an assistant professor in the school archeology department." Yue replied as she followed a side path toward one of the lesser buildings lining the courtyard. "She also does her own field work – though she hasn't had time for that in a while." Which was a shame – she'd gone with Nodoka for the last little excursion. A short one week trip to Indonesia hunting down some early mundus magicus artifacts. Thing's had gone slightly pear-shaped, but it made for a good story to share over some drinks.
"So, what?" Sonoda replied as they stopped briefly at the front door as Yue hit a small button to one side and they waited to be buzzed in. "You're telling me you know Indiana Jones?"
"Don't be ridiculous." Yue replied as the door buzzed and she pulled it open. "She doesn't own a whip." Yue led the two of them down the wide first-floor hall and then up a flight of stairs, finally emerging onto a narrow, nondescript hall on the fourth floor. Past a series of completely identical doors and a few turns and Sonoda found himself thoroughly turned around as they stopped in front of a pair of double doors, on which a small placard read 'Preservation and Restoration'.
Yue paused at the doors before turning around to face the Inspector. "You should wait out here."
"What?" Sonoda raised an eyebrow. "Why?"
Yue gave him what she hoped was a sympathetic shrug. "A lot of what she works with is really delicate, and there's also the fact that she's never..."
Whatever Yue was about to say was cut off as one of the door's behind her swung open part way, allowing a young woman to lean out into the hall. She looked to be about Yue's height, if not a touch taller. Her hair was almost the same shade as Yue's, but cut far shorter, most of it tied back in a short ponytail. Bright blue eyes were magnified to truly impressive sizes by the strange set of jeweler's glasses she was wearing, but shrank to a far more normal size as she lifted them up, the curiosity on her face being replaced with a smile as she recognized who was outside her door. "Yue! What are you doing here? I thought you were still moving into you new apartment..." Her gaze slid slightly to one side as she noticed who else was there. "And why are you with Inspector Sonoda?"
"You know him Nodoka?" Yue asked, surprised, as she jerked a thumb in Sonoda's direction.
"Only a little." Nodoka replied as she stepped out into the hall, dusting a few bits of what looked like fine gravel from her lab coat. "I consulted on a case he had a few months back – some sort of smuggling case, I think?"
Sonoda nodded. "Our suspect claimed they were swapping out pieces from private collections with forgeries, and nobody in the Office's lab's had the right expertise to actually tell the fakes from the genuine articles." He turned to Yue. "You didn't tell me your contact was Professor Miyazaki."
Nodoka blushed slightly. "I'm just an adjunct! I'm not a real professor, really." It seemed like a minor distinction to Yue, but she wasn't going to to argue it right now. "So," Nodoka continued. "What can I do for you?"
"Miss Ayase is assisting us with a case at the moment," Sonoda explained. "She seems to think you can tell us something about...whatever it is she found at the scene."
"A case?" Nodoka arched an eyebrow slightly as she glanced toward Yue. "That seems...unexpected."
"Kuzunoha insisted." Yue replied with a shrug. "Her people seem to think I'm the most qualified for the job." Nodoka didn't miss the slight emphasis Yue had put on the first two words, a look of understanding crossing her face after a moment.
"Oh," Nodoka nodded. "Must be, uh, unusual if she thought you could help."
"If you would classify somebody getting charbroiled alive in a square 'unusual'," Sonoda shrugged. "Then yeah."
Nodoka paled slightly, but covered it well as she pulled the door to the lab open. "Well then, you should probably show me this piece you found." She turned to Sonoda. "Inspector, would it be alright if you stayed out here? Some of the set-ups we have at the moment are quite delicate and you haven't been trained on any of these things like Yue..."
"Unless you want me to wait out here with you?" Yue asked half-mockingly. "I could just give her the piece of you don't want to be lonely..."
"Yeah – I think I'll be good." Sonoda replied flatly. "At least one of us can be in there and ask a question or two."
The two girls gave him a little wave as they slipped behind the doors, waiting until they were well out of earshot before either of them said anything. "What is going on?" Nodoka asked in a raised whisper despite their distance from the door. "Did somebody really die?"
"You didn't see the light show this morning?" Yue asked. "I saw it from my apartment."
Nodoka shook her head. "If you saw it from your window, I couldn't have seen it – my lab's window face's the wrong way. But the only reason I can think Kuzunoha would have brought you on..."
"Is if magic is involved." Yue nodded as they wormed their way through the aisles. "Somebody or something summoned a fire vortex in the middle of a public square during the morning rush and fried somebody before vanishing." To that Nodoka didn't reply, slipping into thought or simply too shocked to comment, as they worked their way further into the laboratory. The room was the size of a large classroom, with almost every inch of floor space occupied by tall sets of stainless steel workbenches and shelves, save for the narrow aisles left between them for the boffins to squeeze through. The only space not covered in shelving was the stretch of floor to ceiling windows, instead occasionally blocked by a lower set of benches that still let a good deal of light though.
"Nice view." Yue quipped, and it was – the wide bank of windows gave a panoramic view of Mahora, stretching out all the way to the towering World Tree off in the distance, framed by the setting sun. It looked like a piece from a postcard, and Yue as pretty sure that an image like that in fact was.
"Not that I have much time to enjoy it." Nodoka replied as she sat down at a well-worn desk tucked into a corner and began clearing away some of the clutter into its drawers.. "So, what do you have for me?" Yue pulled the small bag out of her pocket, handing it to her friend who proceeded to crack the small seal and extracted the bauble with a pair of delicate looking tweezers. "You found this at the scene?"
"We think our perpetrator dropped it." Yue replied as Nodoka began to look over the piece, first unaided and then with what looked like a jewelers lens.
"The one who managed to get away from you?" Nodoka replied. "How did he manage that anyway?"
"No idea." Yue shrugged. "He kept managing to dodge my attacks."
"Precognition?" Nodoka asked.
"Or something close." Yue replied. "The only thing I've ever seen that was even close to that is your Pactio."
"...Perhaps..." Nodoka studied the item a little closer before pulling open one of the lower drawers of the desk. Inside was a stack of worn, leather-bound books that Nodoka dug through before pulling out one. "This might be an artifice."
"You mean like a pactio artifact?" Yue replied.
"Similar, but not quite." Nodoka replied. "This is more along the lines of...those magic weapons from mahorafest when we were in school." Yue recalled that particular festival quite well – as did most other former students of Mahora around her age. But they likely remembered it for different reasons. For most, it was an epic battle against Martians. For her and her friends, it was the opening moves in what turned into what many described as a small-scale war that shaped the futures of two worlds. "Depending on the design and construction, it could have any number of effects – increased speed, telekinesis..."
"Teleportation?" Yue suggested.
"Possibly," Nodoka nodded. "It might not be a Pactio, but it should still have a maker's mark."
"A what?" Yue arched an eyebrow.
"A maker's mark." Nodoka replied as she started flipping through pages of her book. "You see them on older firearms and on swords in this world too. When a craftsman made a weapon – or artifice in this case – for somebody, usually a government or kingdom, it would have to be tested to make sure it wasn't faulty. For fire arms, this usually meant over-packing it with powder and firing it to make sure it wouldn't explode. For an artifice, it would be channeling a large amount of magic through it. If it passed, then it was stamped with a maker's mark to show that it had been checked and was within regulations. Your Pactio likely has something similar somewhere. Newer pactios usually have a serial number instead but the principle is the same."
"So, how does this help us?" Yue asked.
"A maker's mark is unique." Nodoka explained. "It tells you who made it, when and who tested it." she patted the book in front of her lightly. "Dealers would use reference guides like this to cross-check marks to identify anything that came across their tables. Not unlike what we're doing now...ah!"
Yue leaned over her friend's shoulder. "Find it?"
"Found it." You could almost hear the smile in Nodoka's voice. "Looks like its from an old Ostian maker – very old. This dates back over a century – and if I understand this right, this craftsman only catered to Ostian royalty."
"Fancy stuff." Yue quipped. "any idea where it would have come from?"
Nodoka shrugged. "Sorry – all I can help with is where it started. How it got here is up to you."
Yue sighed. "Well, its a lot more then I started with – my pactio should make finding the rest easy..."
Nodoka glanced at her friend as she began to stow her equipment. "I'm sensing a 'but' here."
"But," Yue continued. "I can't do the research now and if I do it later, the Inspector out there will want to know how I found it."
"You sure he'd care?" Nodoka asked.
Yue gave her friend a small grin. "He's a cop – he wouldn't be much of one if he didn't."
"You can't just tell him I told you?" Nodoka suggested.
"I still have to do the research, and a search like this could take a long time." Yue groaned. "This is such a pain. I doubt he'd be willing to stay sideline on his own investigation again, and I really don't need a nosy cop getting me turned into an ermine."
"But you would look so good in fur!" Nodoka teased, but Yue was not amused. "Well, I'm sure you'll think of something. You always do."
"Not always what I need though." Yue sighed as outside the sun slipped further behind the horizon. "When was the last time you talked to Negi?"
"That's a bit sudden," Nodoka said, suddenly caught off-guard by the question. "I think it was… A few weeks ago? Chisame at leasts calls to complain about her agent and ask if I know of a remote dig site she could hide at. The only one who is as scarce as him is Asakura - I haven't seen her since you did...whatever it is you were doing with her. Even Eva-chan shows up for tea now and then. Why do you ask?"
"Just suddenly wishing I could ask for some help." Yue walked up to the window, her gaze drifting down to a spot at the base of the tree. "He always did have a way of getting us all out of trouble..."
"Or into it," Nodoka said with a small giggle. "Though he sometimes had some help. Remember when Asuna forced that confession out of him?"
Yue shrugged. "Probably better then instead of later when somebody could have gotten hurt. At least all that got hurt that time was our dignity." She let out a sigh. "I still wonder what Asuna was thinking - ten years old is a little young for true love."
"And what about now?" Nodoka gave her a knowing grin. If there was one thing that the years since middle school had given Nodoka Miyazaki, it was some self-confidence. As a side-effect, she was also it seemed a little more willing to show her more...'Paru-like' tendencies, even if only in jest. "I hear he's still single you know – and of all the girls I always thought you two got along soooo well..." Case in point.
"Pretty sure he's still busy saving the world." Yue replied as she retrieved the bauble and slipped it back into its bag . "Well, I have a murder to help solve – we can discuss our former teacher's dating prospects some other time."
"Tomorrow over lunch sound good?" Nodoka replied, her innocent tone only slightly betrayed by the small smile across her face.
Yue simply gave her friend a languid wave as she walked out. "Later, Nodoka."
"Until next time, Yue!" Nodoka yelled back before turning back to her own work.
Back out in the hall the Inspector had settled himself into one of the few chairs in the hall, seated outside what looked like a professor's office, and was idly flipping through an archeology magazine that looked to be old enough to qualify as a study piece itself. He looked up from the ancient periodical as the lab doors swung open and Yue stepped out. "So?"
"She identified it." Yue replied. She had been thinking of a cover story the entire walk out and while thirty-odd seconds wasn't a lot of time, she felt she had a solid plan. "Looks like our suspect was smuggling artifacts."
"Could she tell you where it came from?" Sonoda asked, getting back to his feet. "There can't be too many digs going on right now if we can narrow it down enough."
"It's...European." Yue replied slowly as she pulled her lie together. "Welsh. Late Medieval period based on the markings."
"So, all we need to do is find if any welsh digs in the last year or two have lost anything." Sonoda concluded. "Any idea how we can do that?"
"Maybe." Yue replied. "Library Island tends to keep archive copies of a lot of dig site reports – it's one of the few places with enough room. It would be a lot of work, but we could be able to find what we are looking for there."
The Inspector readily accepted the explanation. It was, at least, partially true. The library did, in fact keep logs of various other institute's expeditions. And finding what they were looking for would indeed be quite a bit of work. She just didn't bother mentioning that these two things did not in fact have any bearing on each other. What the Inspector didn't know though didn't get her turned into an ermine. "Alright then. Tomorrow at the library, nice and early. Know what time they open tomorrow?"
"They don't." Yue replied. "Tomorrow's set aside for maintenance and cleaning. Shouldn't be a problem though – I can get them to let us in."
Sonoda arched an eyebrow. "How?"
"Perk of being a former member of the Library Exploration Club." Yue replied as they started their way out of the school. "The Library trusts you far more than it really should."
"You saying you've done stuff the library wouldn't...." Sonoda paused for a moment as he tried to think of the right word. "Approve of?"
Yue shrugged. "The legacy of a misspent youth." A youth that involved raiding their basement for a secret tome of knowledge and accidentally pissing off a dragon, among other things. You glanced at the Inspector as the neared the front door. "Nothing you need to worry about."
Sonoda gave Yue a small grin before opening the door for her. "Of course its not." Outside, the air was quickly cooling as the sun sank lower and lower below the horizon, only the last few rays of daylight peaking through the buildings of the academy. "Well, I think that's all we can do today."
"Tomorrow at the library then?" Yue asked, resisting the urge to shiver as a cool evening breeze blew down the road. She was really regretting rushing out her door as fast as she did – she had forgotten her coat. She wasn't even sure if she had remembered to lock the place up.
"The Library." Sonoda nodded. "Which way is your place?"
Yue tilted her head in the appropriate direction. "I think I can manage, thanks."
Sonoda blinked owlishly as Yue started down the path. "I didn't say anything."
"Well, I know your type." Yue gave him a languid wave. "Until tomorrow, Inspector Sonoda."
The walk home was not completely miserable, but it was certainly not pleasant. So she was very happy when she found herself outside her new - and still locked - front door. A brief minute of fumbling for the key before she all but fell through the doorway into the blessed warmth of the single-floor apartment. She was so preoccupied with getting the feeling back in her fingers that she didn't at first notice that her empty apartment was no longer quite so empty.
A large chunk of the main room was now stuffed full of boxes and the odd wooden chest. Only a few pieces of furniture were actually visible – a table, a couch, a couple of chairs, and a desk with its chair tucked into one corner. All of them were laden with yet more boxes. Well, Yue thought, at least the moving company managed while she was gone. The menagerie of boxes before her represented the sum total of her personal possessions. The only things that remained in Mundus Magicus were some assets in a bank account – no point in transferring currency that couldn't convert – and some files that were no good to her anyway. Her original plan was to spend most of the day getting started with her unpacking. Now she was looking like she might be able to start moving in sometime next month thanks to this case.
Well, at least it was a job – and a well-paying one, to boot. Still, Yue couldn't repress the groan that came unbidden at the thought of trying to dig out her futon. Screw it, she decided, she could just sleep on the couch. The hellish day was catching up with her and at this point she was fairly sure she could lay down on the roof and still sleep like a log.
She made sure her hat, her coat and her staff were where she had left them – they were - before dragging herself over to the couch and promptly collapsing. Sleep was looking so nice right then…
But something was bugging her. As long as her day had been, it took her sleep-deprived brain a moment to pinpoint what it was, exactly.
Nodoka had mentioned that their bauble had probably been an artifice – and that was how their cloaked friend had managed to pull off some of the things he had. Some part of her brain, despite how tired she was, was still wondering – could she do the same thing?
Yue tried to banish the thought, telling herself she would look into it tomorrow after the library. Alas, sleep would not come and the question continued to gnaw at her from the corner of her mind. With one final groan, and a some ineffectual pounding of her head against a nearby pillow, Yue dragged herself back to her feet before slowly making her way over to her desk. Her curiosity almost folded at the sight of the mess piled on her work surface, but it held. She begrudgingly began to clear off the desk, occasionally popping open some of the smaller boxes and setting aside the ones that had things she thought she might need later. By the time she had the desk cleared, she had managed to find about a third of what she figured she'd need. That meant digging through even more of the boxes before she could even begin. Yue let out another grumble as she pulled down the nearest box and began to long process of sorting through boxes.
It was the better part of an hour after she had finally dug out her research texts, her reagents and her various beakers, flasks, and burners. She was no artificer, but she was a fair hand at potions – it should, theoretically, be possible to get the same or at least similar results. Magical theory was consistent like that. Unfortunately she didn't know which theory her bauble had been using. All that left was trying to replicate the results.
She set a base mixture brewing as she started flipping through her texts. She would start with the enhancement effect he had seemed to have been using – that, at the least, wasn't trying to monitor and process external effects or variables. Potions were bad and creating logic routines anyway.
Yue started sifting through her ingredients, cross-checking her texts before measuring out the portions and setting them to boil or distill. The array of texts around her would have seemed, to many who knew her, superfluous. After all, she had an artifact that gave ever access to every magical database in...well, not this world, but a world. But her pactio tended to display information in semi-distracting magic holographic displays. Worked wonderfully when you were doing research, but got real distracting when you needed whatever you were reading so you could do something else – like, say, creating a new potion from scratch. Hence the normal books.
The biggest issue with something like this would be magical toxicity. At its most basic, magical enhancement was just dumping more magic into a body. A body, however, could only take so much – you could get clever and try and mess around with where you put it, try and work it into the spaces and the cracks, but even there was a limit. Magic toxicity was never fun. At best, you end up with symptom not unlike acute radiation sickness. At worst, you find yourself magically mutated or your organs alphabetized. So, dosage was key.
Yue worked her way through the alchemical processes, combining and recombining reagents. She quickly decided that trying to replicate all of the effects she had seen would have been the better part of impossible. Potions tended to be pretty bad at imparting disparate effects unless you started getting into more complex suspensions and encapsulation techniques and that was frankly more work than she was willing to put into this little project. So, she narrowed it down to the one effect she was actually sure of – a strength boost. She had theories on how he had pulled off some of the other tricks, but nothing she could be sure of. A booster, on the other hand, should at least be fairly straight forward.
Well, 'straight forward' was a relative term – such spells and potions were common enough, but none worked on the scale of what she had seen. her only real advantage, she mused as she pulled out one other tome, was she had seen something like it before. The tome was newer than most of her other books. Most of them were several times older than her at least, and usually older by an order of magnitude. This one, however, was less than a decade old – in fact, it was written in her own hand. She flipped through pages of her own looping script, nearly as much of it in Latin as it was in Japanese, sifting through her early attempts at research until she finally found what she was looking for.
Notes were intermingled with diagrams, indecipherable to to anybody but a mage well versed in theoretical magic, documenting everything a younger her had been able to learn or work out about a technique created over a decade by one of the most feared vampires in history.
Magia Erebea – Dark Magic, or so McDowell had called it. Deceptively simple in proposition, exceedingly complex in execution and quite possibly lethal in utilization. The theory was simple enough – absorb an offensive spell, gaining the properties of the spell in the process. Of course, to pull it off required the caster fuse the spell onto their soul, which could be problematic in the long term for all but the most powerful of mages. Of course, McDowell had never really intended to teach it to anyone else and she wasn't exactly worried about dying – any negative effects were more or less irrelevant.
Yue, however, was not an immortal vampire mage. Or even her student. If she tried to cast that spell as it was originally written, at best nothing would happen since she just wouldn't be able to power it. At worst, she'd explode. She was fairly sure that would cost her the deposit. Luckily, she wasn't planning on casting the spell – she just needed its guts.
McDowell had never been one to share the secrets of her works, but she had told her student and Negi had been more than willing to share. Yue had written down every single word, even the ones she had no understanding of at the time – especially the ones she had no understanding of. Years later, she had the closest thing available to one of the most powerful spells ever designed – and she was about to rip it off.
What she was most interested in was how the spell got around the issue of user rejection – how it made sure the body could actually use the absorbed power without failing catastrophically. Negi had suggested it was related to how the spell was powered - feeding off the user's soul, but in retrospect that seemed unlikely. Powering the spell was pointless if it made the user's limbs exploded or something. Even Negi, as powerful as he was, couldn't have handled the sort of power – there was a trick buried inside that technique - somewhere in that text was the key to her little enigma, and she was going to find it, even if it took her all night.
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Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
Ahh how I enjoy this story so much and look forward to the library trip!! After all we'll have a tired Yue which will make things interesting.
- Location
- The word mines
Cool update. Nodoka seems to have landed on her feet! 
Some typos:
Some typos:Most of the official art shows Nodoka's eyes as dark blue (or brown in Negima!?), it's Ako's eyes that are red: Example 1; Example 2, bottom left
Hmm, this is implying that he knew she was lying and accepted it anyway. What I think you meant was, "The Inspector readily accepted the explanation."
DB_Explorer
Purveyor of alternate realities.
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I hope Yue does not follow in Harry's footsteps when it comes to leaving buildings on fire..
I doubt Nodoka would like it if the library gets burned down.
I doubt Nodoka would like it if the library gets burned down.
Dragontrapper
Homeless Draconis
- Location
- A Tower in the middle of nowhere
Edits made - danke.
Nah - between her drinking habits and Sonoda seemingly knowing everyone, I've got plenty of running gags.
Coming up next - our dynamic duo make a mess and semi-automagic.
Nah - between her drinking habits and Sonoda seemingly knowing everyone, I've got plenty of running gags.
Coming up next - our dynamic duo make a mess and semi-automagic.
DB_Explorer
Purveyor of alternate realities.
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
fixed....
Great to see this back!
My one quibble would be that the inspector seemed to accept staying outside the library too easily.
My one quibble would be that the inspector seemed to accept staying outside the library too easily.
Dragontrapper
Homeless Draconis
- Location
- A Tower in the middle of nowhere
fecal matter, meet Aperture science rotating air oscillator
-------
Knock, Knock
Yue jolted awake at the sudden sound, squinting at the beam of light that was impudent enough to find the one gap in the curtains to land straight on her face. She let out a groan, running one hand over her face as she took a quick look around. Her potion from last night was still decanting over a small burner, disparate mixtures flowing though the delicate glass-work into their assigned flasks. In front of her, one of her own notebooks was splayed open, a quill to one side from when she had been documenting her work. She had been in the middle of recording the results of the initial decanting, a small pool of drool resting where a decimal place should have been. She drowsily tried to wipe it off as she rose to her feet with a groan, her back protesting the sudden change in position. "Stupid all nighters..." Yue grumbled as the knocking returned. "Yes, Yes – One moment." Yue yelled back as she picked her way back over to the front door.
She pulled the door open to see the dark-haired visage of Inspector Sonoda staring back, once again wearing his police windbreaker. Whatever storm system that had been about yesterday had decided to stick around. "Morning." He gave by way of a greeting. "Uh, sleep well?"
"Well enough." Yue shrugged. "I thought we were going to meet at the library."
"Sure," Sonoda replied. "But then I realized we hadn't actually set a time."
"Morning is a time." Yue pointed out as a hand came up to rub at her temples. She really hated mornings. "So, what? You got impatient and decided to stop by my house? How did you get my address?"
"It was in your paperwork for the badge." Sonoda explained. "So, ready to go?"
"Need to check on a few things," Yue replied. "You know, get ready. Just give me a minute."
"Speaking of checking a few thing," Sonoda began as he leaned to one side to peer around Yue. "Are you cooking something?"
Yue blinked. "Why?"
"Because something is smoking in there." Sonoda pointed behind Yue, who turned around and began to curse as she saw the think tendrils of blueish-black smoke rolling off of her brewing equipment. Sonoda followed her into the apartment, and Yue was too busy dealing with her smoking experimental work to bother trying to shoo him out. "So," Sonoda started as he stared around the space at the stacks of boxes. "Just move in?"
"Yesterday." Yue replied as she finished turning down her burners and twisting various and assorted knobs. "I would have been unpacked yesterday but your case came up."
"Decent looking place." Sonoda quipped. "Nice view and everything. Beats the hell out of my apartment."
"Yeah, well." Yue replied as she poured a small beaker into a sports bottle before throwing it into her pocket. "Its supposedly haunted despite being about as old as I am." She grabbed her coat off of a nearby chair, through it around herself before picking up her hat and staff. "Ready to go?"
Sonoda raised an eyebrow. "You're going out looking like that?"
"If you have a problem with how I dress, find somebody else to work with." Yue shrugged. "I know a few people from the library who should be open in a week or two."
"Alright, alright." Sonoda held his hands up placatingly. "No need to get your staff in a knot. Just saying – you stick out even by this town's standards."
Yue shrugged. "Just means I'm harder to lose in the crowd." Besides, she had seen way too much to really care if people thought she dressed odd. "To the library?"
Sonoda gestured to the door. "after you, Madam Wizard."
Yue let out an unlady-like snort but stepped out the door. Sonoda probably thought it was just a sign of annoyance. He didn't realize how accurate the statement was.
The smaller metal baubles of Yue's staff jingled softly as she walked, and around her the rest of the crowd gave her and Sonoda a decent berth. She wasn't sure if it was because she was walking down the street in a trench coat and wizards hat with a staff, or that Sonoda had his revolver in its holster completely visible underneath his police-issue jacket. Japan wasn't comfortable with guns, in her experience – but then again, they weren't comfortable with anything outside whatever level of weird they were accustomed to in whatever area you happened to be in.
"I think we're making people nervous." Sonoda commented. So, Yue thought, he'd noticed it too.
"Well we aren't exactly the usual morning traffic are we?" Yue replied as she led them around a corner. "They'd probably be less nervous if your piece wasn't quite so obvious."
Sonoda glanced down at his holstered weapon and shrugged. "I'm not going to get caught off-guard like I was yesterday." Yue nodded. She could understand the feeling. "So, where exactly are we going? From what I understand our library isn't exactly the most methodically laid-out of places."
"The University archives are a relatively regularly accessed area." Yue replied. "So they shouldn't be as hazardous as some of the deeper sections or wings."
"Do I even want to know what qualifies as 'Hazardous' in a library?" Sonoda asked.
Yue shrugged. "Fall hazards, waterfalls, tight spaces. The occasional booby trap." And giant magic golemns, but that was only if you went really deep. "Just stick close and you should be fine – I used to help map the deeper and more out-of-the-way sections when I was younger."
"Oh, you were on the Library Exploration club?" Sonoda replied as they crossed a street and suddenly found themselves leaving the shopping area as the gentle breeze carried the smell of the lake with it. "And I thought the biathalon club was impressive."
Yue gave a small shrug as she led them across the street. Ahead of them, spanning from the shore to the small island ahead of them, the bridge to the library was relatively unoccupied at this hour, only a few university students on the way back from studying making there way back toward Mahora proper. Even less people were traveling in the same direction as Yue and the Inspector. "It was a lot of paperwork most of the time – updating maps, renewing the library catalogs, that sort of thing. The spelunking is just the one part everybody tends to hear about."
Once across the bridge, they found themselves in the large entry room of the library itself – layer after layer of books were stacked up for floor after floor above them, a labyrinth of stairwells and causeways running across and between them. Sonoda let out a low whistle as he took in the sight. "I really need to come in here more often."
Yue gave another shrug. "You get used to it after awhile. Come on – the University keeps its archaeological archives this way." She led them down a side staircase, and soon the glass-tinted sunlight was replaced with the steady glow of humming incandescents seated in re-purposed lamp sconces. The stairwell temporarily closed in around them before emerging again on the far end of a space that would have been, anywhere else, impressively large. By the Library Island's standards though it was modest. The space had the feeling of a converted church, with gothic arches crossing overhead and decorated columns lining the sides. Dim light faded in through stained glass windows along the back wall and the sides, each depicting a different scene from various mythologies. Yue continued down the stairs a few steps before realizing Sonoda wasn't following her. She turned to see him standing near the top of the stairs, staring at the space.
"One," Sonoda finally said. "Why are we inside a church and two, why are their windows underground?"
"For the second, they have shafts and reflectors – they also help with ventilation." Yue explained as she started back down the stairs. "As for the first, the Library tends to let the architecture students from the universities design their expansions or renovations. Part of why we have such a bizarre mash-up of styles in here."
The pair reached the bottom of the stairs and Sonoda took a look around at the shelves around him. "Welcome," Yue announced. "to the main wing of Mahora Island Library's field expedition archives. Any time a university sends anyone afield, the a copy of the records end up here. Botanical surveys in the Amazon basin, historical excavations along side Boston's big dig, recovering bones from the Mongolian steps – you name it."
"Tell me its sorted by subject." Sonoda asked, but he already expected the answer.
"Nope, chronologically." Yue replied. "Not that such a fact helps us – our piece could be from anywhere." Yue patted him on the shoulder. "Look on the bright side – if its not in here, there are only two other wings like this one to check!"
Sonoda groaned. "I'll take this stack then." he pointed vaguely off to the right before heading off with the look of the doomed – or at least thoroughly annoyed.
"I'll start over here then." Yue replied as she watched him head off, waiting until he had round a corner and headed down one of the aisles before she darted down an aisle to the left. She quickly made her way through the rows of books until she find herself a nice dead-end all to herself. Satisfied that she was alone, she reached into her coat and pulled out a card. It was larger than a normal playing card, and far taller. The designs across the back shined in the low light of the archive, and text across the front did much the same as she flipped it over. The front of the card looked like some sort of strange game card, or perhaps a tarot card to those unfamiliar with such things. What nobody would fail to notice was that the visage adorning the card was that of Yue herself.
She held the card out before herself before uttering, as soft as a whisper, a single word. "Adeat."
A gentle gust of wind began to tug at the hem of her coat, spiraling around her in a small cyclone as it began to pick up motes of dust. Even as the wind began to pick up, a gentle glow began to suffuse the space as it filled with the gentle thrum of magic. It was less dramatic than it had been the first time she had used it, all of those years ago – courtesy almost as much time training as a mage.
The ethereal lights began to dim as they coalesced as she stretched out her other hand. The lights began to take shape in her free hand before, with the final dying of the light, solidifying into a heavy tome in her outstretched grasp. Yue sighed as she pocketed the card. "Always so dramatic..." She turned her attention to the tome. "Alright then – time to get to work." She pulled her hand away from the book, leaving it floating in the air in front of her before flipping it open.
As soon as the large leather-bound volume opened, a small sea of floating, translucent screens fanned out around Yue. At least one of her friends, on seeing the artifact in action, had described it as 'very scifi'. Yue conceded that the analogy was apt. "First thing first – show me all records of archaeological works in and around Old Ostia." The screens promptly responded, lines of text and scores of pictures scrolling across the screens. She didn't actually have to say the commands out-loud – typing them or even just thinking them worked just as well – but she found saying them out loud helped her to organize her thoughts. It also made it easier on anybody she was working with on such occasions where she wasn't worried about her backup finding out about magic.
Yue scanned over the displays and frowned. "Focus on artifact inventory." She announced. "Imagery only." The text fell away as more stills filled the screens and began to slowly scroll by. Plates and staffs, busts and goblets filled Yue's vision as she glanced over the screens. "Too many – need to narrow my results." If she was the archaeologist who had found it, what would she have called it in her report? "Focus on jewelry – rings primarily."
Most of the images fell away as they were replaced with pictures of various rings. The vast majority that appeared were of the decorative type – bands of wrought gold or silver, placements for stone left long sense empty on most of them. The search was vague enough that other things cropped up among the imagery as well – bracelets, bangles and various baubles that had once likely been strung together as a necklace. With the string long since lost to the ravages of time, all that was left were tiny rings that might have been wearable by a pixie.
She tried adding another parameter – the makers mark Nodoka had shown her. No luck – as soon as she reran the search everything disappeared. Yue let out a sigh as she reverted back to the previous search. It seemed that whoever had dug up her bauble hadn't noted the mark.
Yue was left instead to sift through the long list of results manually, dismissing the ones that were obviously not what she was looking for and taking a moment to read through the more promising ones before dismissing them as well. It was slow, dull, tedious work – much like what she had often done back in Ariadne – but after a couple of hours Yue finally found what she was looking for.
It was a report from a dig in the shadow of the floating city of New Ostia, deep inside the field of shattered stone that was what remained of the old city. Listed in amongst the items found was a small ring, covered in engravings. The ring didn't even get a whole page, just a couple of paragraphs specifying where it had been found. "Found in what was most likely the old armory..." Yue read softly to herself. "Markings indicate possible use as specialize foci for fire manipulation. Further research required." Well, Yue thought, that definitely lined up with the few facts they had for this case.
"Show any police or criminal reports related to this dig." Yue commanded her pactio and the tome was quick to reply as news clippings materialized around her. Many of them were about bandits in the digs operation area, but they were two or three years old. "Show only incidents from the last six weeks." The list narrowed down drastically. "Show only those related to robbery." All but one of the clippings vanished, and Yue brought the sole survivor to the center of her attention. There had been a break-in at a university in New Ostia five weeks ago, and whoever had broken in had made off with a wide assortment of archaeological artifacts. The article speculated that they were going to be sold on the black market. It seemed her suspect had had different plans.
Yue was about to perform another cross-reference when a sharp thud echoed through the book stacks to her. Her head snapped around the stare in the direction of the sound as she dismissed her pactio, the book dissolving into motes of light before re-coalescing into card form. She slipped the card into a coat pocket as she slowly started down the aisle toward the corner even as silence re-exerted its reign over the library. One hand slipped into her pocket as she neared the corner, wrapping around the wand the rested there. She was three steps from the corner when a figure suddenly came around it.
Both of them jumped back half a step as Yue found herself looking down the barrel of Sonoda's revolver, the inspector staring at her for a moment before lowering his gun and re holstering it with a sigh. "Sorry – thought you were somebody else."
"We are the only two people down here, Inspector." Yue replied, pulling her hand from her pocket to gesture around. "Who else would it be?"
"Whoever made that thud?" Sonoda suggested. Yue was about to reply when another sharp thud echoed down the stacks. "Or that one." Sonoda added. Yue's hand made its way back into her pocket as Sonoda's drifted back into his jacket where his revolver had just vanished to. Both were scanning the stacks of books around them, slowly backing up until they were standing back to back. "Could just be another patron." Sonoda suggested.
"Library is closed to the general public today." Yue replied. "Besides, if you think its just some bookworm, why the gun?"
"I've got a bad feeling." Sonoda replied. "Not very scientific, but quite persuasive." Yue nodded, even if Sonoda couldn't see it. She was familiar enough with unscientific methods at this point.
"If its stupid and it works," Yue replied. "It's not stupid. Lets just try not to blow away some poor librarian by mistake. You want to lead or should I?"
"You find what we were looking for?" Sonoda asked, and Yue replied with a nod. "Then lead on – I have no idea where we are right now."
Yue took a quick glance around to gain her bearings before pointing down an aisle to the left. "That way, then your second right. Should dump us out into one of the reading lounges." Sonoda nodded and started down the aisles, Yue falling a step behind. As they made their way down the rows and rows of books, the strange thuds seemed to grow closer, slowly becoming something more recognizable. "It sounds like foot falls."
"Sure," Sonoda replied. "If somebody was jumping between bookcases. You think ninja's broke into the library?" Yue gave him a brief look and Sonoda sighed. "Right, forgot where we were for a moment. Any reason to think ninja's would be after us?"
"The dead man in your morgue?" Yue suggested as they reached the second right and made their turn. The thuds had been joined by a lighter pitter-patter of rapid footfalls, coming from somewhere on top of the stacks and from seemingly every direction courtesy the rooms bizarre acoustics. "Somebody might not like us poking around."
"Hence the gun." Sonoda replied. He scanned the surroundings, the shadows of the book stacks taking on a sinister tint with the new unseen arrival. "Stupid acoustics," the inspector grumbled. "this place is throwing sounds all over the place."
"It's not the place." Yue replied slowly as her hand came out of her pocket, a small wand palmed in her hand. "It's our guests. They're messing with the acoustics."
"Ventriloquism does not work like this!" Sonoda replied, glancing at Yue.
"Not ventriloquism." Yue answered before she started a soft incantation under her breath. "For so Kratika Socratia..." Yue whispered a short string of greek, channeling power through the focus in her hand. As she finished, the wand slowly began to pull to one side, as if drawn by a magnet. "There that way." She said as she pointed past one of the countless shelves.
"How on earth could you possibly know that?" Sonoda asked.
"Trust me." Yue replied as she took the lead and led them down another row. "I've done this before." The pair continued on until they found themselves in a semi-circular clearing, an eight-sided space surrounded with bookcases and filled with an assortment of chairs, couches and tables.
They were three steps in when all sound abruptly ceased.
Not just the until then insistent echoes of foot falls, but all sounds. The low hum of the air conditioning systems, the creaks and groans of settling stacks of shelves, the low hum of the lights – even there own breathing suddenly became inaudible, leaving only the sound of her own heartbeat hammering in Yue's ears. "What the..." Sonoda started to say behind her, but even that seemed muted. It sounded like he was at the end of a tunnel.
"I don't..." Yue replied, trailing off as the strange effect vanished, her voice no longer distorted by the strange effect. No other sounds returned though. "....like this." She finished.
A sudden burst of giggling echoed around them, seemingly from everywhere at once. "Okay, that was creepy." Sonoda said as he scanned the shelves. Had the lights dimmed? The shadows seemed darker then Yue remembered.
"A lost little girl and a little toy soldier," a voice echoed about as the giggling trailed off. "Wandering around in the dark, scary woods." The voice sounded feminine, and young – almost saccharine sweet. "Didn't your parents ever warn you about monsters?"
"Lady," Sonoda said back, raising his voice to make sure it carried. "I hunt monsters for a living. Try again."
The silence returned for a moment before the girl spoke again, and when her voice returned any hint of sweetness had vanished into thin air. "Boy, you have not seen monsters."
"And I don't imagine you will have much of a chance to change that once we are through with you." The pair spun around at the second voice, and this one was much closer than the first. All they found though was empty space in the middle of the reading lounge.
"They're messing with us." Yue concluded.
"You think?" Sonoda replied flatly. The pair slowly backed their way to the middle of the lounge, back-to-back as they scanned the shadows. "Really could use a perimeter right now."
"I don't have a strike team on standby," Yue replied. "You?"
Sonoda held up his phone belatedly. "No signal. Guess my carrier doesn't cover underground libraries."
"Figures." Yue's grip tightened on her wand out of Sonoda's sight. "Think we can take them?"
"I wouldn't suggest it." The disembodied voice taunted. "You are not Springfield...and we are not simple grave robbers."
Yue arched an eyebrow. "You know who I am?"
"You are useless without our names." The other voice taunted. "Without our faces. You cannot fight what you cannot see." a nearly silent whistle was the only warning before a knife sliced through the air, grazing Yue's arm before embedding in the floor. "You, however, are quite visible, Ministra Negi."
"So," Yue said with a wince as she tried to ignore the cut on her arm. It felt shallow, and these people wanted a reaction – she wasn't going to give it to them. "How did you find me?"
"We tracked your toy soldier," one of the voice's said with undisguised amusement. "His little phone made it trivial. Then we just had to wait for him to walk out with you."
"And you got my phone info how...?" Sonoda asked warily.
"You called from the site." the voice replied calmly. "You have drafted the Ministra Negi to help with your case. Now both of you are going to pay for your curiosity."
"Did they just start monologuing?" Sonoda asked with a whisper. "Really?"
"Let them." Yue replied. "I think they'll be in for a nasty surprise."
Sonoda started to say something but was cut off as a figure in black dropped down from above with nary a sound and proceeded to try and lob his head off with what looked like a massive machete. Sonoda dodged with a roll, losing a few hairs instead from his head. As he scrambled back to his feet, he finally got a good look at their mystery attackers. A lithe female form wrapped in the tight black fabric of a sort of cat suit, face concealed behind a kabuki mask. "Good reflexes." the masked figure said flatly as she brought up her blade. "I would hate if this was easy."
"I'm sorry," Sonoda replied as he lowered his gun slightly. "But I can't take you seriously - kabuki mask, really?" His gun snapped back up as he cracked off two rounds in Yue's direction.
Yue spun as the assassin behind her juked left, the rounds burying into the wood paneling behind her. "Fool me once," Sonoda muttered.
"And we kill you." the assassin replied. "Why fight when you will only die tired?"
"I have a gun," Sonoda punctuated his statement with a cock of the hammer. "You have over-sized steak knives."
One of the girls gave a small chuckle. "We have far more then that...." She turned to look at Yue. "...But you already guessed that, hadn't you Ministra?" Yue had no time to react as the assassin recited something under her breath before she was enveloped by shadows and melted into the darkness.
"What the..." Sonoda stammered as he stared at where the girl had been standing a moment prior. "...What the hell?"
"Okay," Yue said as she backed up a step. "Things have officially gotten worse. We have to keep moving – these guys are professionals. Make for the door and keep a look out."
"What are you-" Sonoda sputtered as he looked between the now empty spot on the floor and Yue. "That girl just evaporated!"
"Cloaked." Yue corrected as she grabbed the inspector by the arm and started to forcibly drag him down the aisles as fast as she could manage, wand held out in front of her like a blade. "She likely leapt out of range as soon as the concealment was complete. They're shrouds are good enough to conceal them visually and audibly until they attack, so thats our only chance."
"What the hell are you talking about!?" Sonoda shouted as they rounded another corner. "People don't just vanish!"
"Some do." Yue replied levelly. "A few, very exceptional people do just that. That, and so much more."
"What does that even mean?" Sonoda replied. "Because I'd love to play games when people are not trying to kill us. So lets save the word games until-" Sonoda was cut off again as a annoying familiar oversized knife plunged out of the shadows and straight for his throat. Sonoda bit back a curse as he stumbled backward. The second assassin melted out of the darkness behind him as he fell, knife raised and ready to strike before she suddenly leapt back, vanishing again into the shadows as she dodged a kick from Yue. For her part Yue didn't slow down, letting her momentum spin her around until she faced where the first attacker had been, wand at the ready.
But she was already gone. The entire sequence had taken less then a second.
Sonoda, for his part, had no words to add – eyes wide as he stared for a moment at where his would-be killer had just been. "W-Wha..."
"Get up." Yue pulled him back to his feet. "We don't have time for this."
"People are trying to kill us!" Sonoda shouted at her. "Actually, honestly trying to murder us!"
"Your a cop." Yue replied as she started back down the rows, her pace picking up tempo. "You should be use to it."
"Used to thugs with pocket knives and bats or the occasional smuggled pistol." Sonoda replied as he rushed to keep up as the two now ran through the library. "Not trained ninjas!"
"Not ninja's." Yue corrected. "Assassins."
"Does it matter!?" Sonoda shot back. "They are trying to kill us. Why doesn't this bother you?"
"Like I said, I've dealt with this before." Yue replied, eyes darting around as she led them through the maze of books.
"No." Sonoda said. "No, you haven't. Nobody has. Nobody has ever dealt with this sort of bull, not outside of a sound stage."
"Almost nobody." Yue replied as they came to a brief pause at an intersection. "A few people have."
"Those 'exceptional people' you mentioned earlier?" Sonoda asked. Yue gave a nod as she picked a direction and started off again, Sonoda close behind them. "You going to tell me what you mean by that?"
"Once we escape this place." Yue answered. "They won't be able to do anything to us in the public – even if they're working for our murderer they can't afford to be seen in the open."
"You really think these people care about witnesses?" Sonoda replied. "They're assassins! They aren't going to stop chasing us just because of a few people standing around to watch."
"They'll have no choice." Yue replied. "Trust me."
"I'd really rather not." Sonoda replied. "Given that I've known you for only a day and a half and my life is on the line."
"I don't see how you have much of a choice." Yue said. "It's not like you can stop and interrogate me right now." Behind her, Sonoda grumbled something that she didn't catch.
"We're almost out I think." Yue said as they rounded another corner and bolted down the narrow aisle. "Just one last turn and-" Yue stopped dead as she rounded the corner.
It was a wall. Not made of books, but of solid stone. The floor was cracked up around the blockage's base, as if somebody had pushed it up and through the floor. "Okay." Sonoda said as he stared at the wall. "That wasn't here when we came in."
"They created it." Yue said, more to herself then to Sonoda. "They drove us into a corner and boxed us in."
"How could they have created it!?" Sonoda asked, panic quickly growing in his voice. "Its a slab of freaking stone!"
"It's easier than you'd think if you know what you're doing." Yue replied as a series of soft giggles echoed behind them. Sonoda spun and cracked off three shots into the darkness that seemed to be encroaching on them. Yue placed a hand on his wrist and after a moment he lowered his gun. "That isn't the solution to this."
Sonoda looked at Yue for a moment before replying. "Then what is?"
Yue took a deep breath before stepping in front of Sonoda and facing down the hall. Ahead of her, the shadows seemed to grow longer, the lights dimmer as the darkness seemed to simply grow. "ISSDA Directive twenty-seven dash eleven."
Sonoda raised an eyebrow at Yue's comment even as she started chanting something. "What does that mean?"
"It outlines allowances for full disclosure in drastic situations." Yue replied as she raised her wand before herself. The air around her seemed to thrum as electricity seemed to arc around her, static charges dragging her hair up and spreading it around her like a halo. "It means no more running."
-------
Knock, Knock
Yue jolted awake at the sudden sound, squinting at the beam of light that was impudent enough to find the one gap in the curtains to land straight on her face. She let out a groan, running one hand over her face as she took a quick look around. Her potion from last night was still decanting over a small burner, disparate mixtures flowing though the delicate glass-work into their assigned flasks. In front of her, one of her own notebooks was splayed open, a quill to one side from when she had been documenting her work. She had been in the middle of recording the results of the initial decanting, a small pool of drool resting where a decimal place should have been. She drowsily tried to wipe it off as she rose to her feet with a groan, her back protesting the sudden change in position. "Stupid all nighters..." Yue grumbled as the knocking returned. "Yes, Yes – One moment." Yue yelled back as she picked her way back over to the front door.
She pulled the door open to see the dark-haired visage of Inspector Sonoda staring back, once again wearing his police windbreaker. Whatever storm system that had been about yesterday had decided to stick around. "Morning." He gave by way of a greeting. "Uh, sleep well?"
"Well enough." Yue shrugged. "I thought we were going to meet at the library."
"Sure," Sonoda replied. "But then I realized we hadn't actually set a time."
"Morning is a time." Yue pointed out as a hand came up to rub at her temples. She really hated mornings. "So, what? You got impatient and decided to stop by my house? How did you get my address?"
"It was in your paperwork for the badge." Sonoda explained. "So, ready to go?"
"Need to check on a few things," Yue replied. "You know, get ready. Just give me a minute."
"Speaking of checking a few thing," Sonoda began as he leaned to one side to peer around Yue. "Are you cooking something?"
Yue blinked. "Why?"
"Because something is smoking in there." Sonoda pointed behind Yue, who turned around and began to curse as she saw the think tendrils of blueish-black smoke rolling off of her brewing equipment. Sonoda followed her into the apartment, and Yue was too busy dealing with her smoking experimental work to bother trying to shoo him out. "So," Sonoda started as he stared around the space at the stacks of boxes. "Just move in?"
"Yesterday." Yue replied as she finished turning down her burners and twisting various and assorted knobs. "I would have been unpacked yesterday but your case came up."
"Decent looking place." Sonoda quipped. "Nice view and everything. Beats the hell out of my apartment."
"Yeah, well." Yue replied as she poured a small beaker into a sports bottle before throwing it into her pocket. "Its supposedly haunted despite being about as old as I am." She grabbed her coat off of a nearby chair, through it around herself before picking up her hat and staff. "Ready to go?"
Sonoda raised an eyebrow. "You're going out looking like that?"
"If you have a problem with how I dress, find somebody else to work with." Yue shrugged. "I know a few people from the library who should be open in a week or two."
"Alright, alright." Sonoda held his hands up placatingly. "No need to get your staff in a knot. Just saying – you stick out even by this town's standards."
Yue shrugged. "Just means I'm harder to lose in the crowd." Besides, she had seen way too much to really care if people thought she dressed odd. "To the library?"
Sonoda gestured to the door. "after you, Madam Wizard."
Yue let out an unlady-like snort but stepped out the door. Sonoda probably thought it was just a sign of annoyance. He didn't realize how accurate the statement was.
The smaller metal baubles of Yue's staff jingled softly as she walked, and around her the rest of the crowd gave her and Sonoda a decent berth. She wasn't sure if it was because she was walking down the street in a trench coat and wizards hat with a staff, or that Sonoda had his revolver in its holster completely visible underneath his police-issue jacket. Japan wasn't comfortable with guns, in her experience – but then again, they weren't comfortable with anything outside whatever level of weird they were accustomed to in whatever area you happened to be in.
"I think we're making people nervous." Sonoda commented. So, Yue thought, he'd noticed it too.
"Well we aren't exactly the usual morning traffic are we?" Yue replied as she led them around a corner. "They'd probably be less nervous if your piece wasn't quite so obvious."
Sonoda glanced down at his holstered weapon and shrugged. "I'm not going to get caught off-guard like I was yesterday." Yue nodded. She could understand the feeling. "So, where exactly are we going? From what I understand our library isn't exactly the most methodically laid-out of places."
"The University archives are a relatively regularly accessed area." Yue replied. "So they shouldn't be as hazardous as some of the deeper sections or wings."
"Do I even want to know what qualifies as 'Hazardous' in a library?" Sonoda asked.
Yue shrugged. "Fall hazards, waterfalls, tight spaces. The occasional booby trap." And giant magic golemns, but that was only if you went really deep. "Just stick close and you should be fine – I used to help map the deeper and more out-of-the-way sections when I was younger."
"Oh, you were on the Library Exploration club?" Sonoda replied as they crossed a street and suddenly found themselves leaving the shopping area as the gentle breeze carried the smell of the lake with it. "And I thought the biathalon club was impressive."
Yue gave a small shrug as she led them across the street. Ahead of them, spanning from the shore to the small island ahead of them, the bridge to the library was relatively unoccupied at this hour, only a few university students on the way back from studying making there way back toward Mahora proper. Even less people were traveling in the same direction as Yue and the Inspector. "It was a lot of paperwork most of the time – updating maps, renewing the library catalogs, that sort of thing. The spelunking is just the one part everybody tends to hear about."
Once across the bridge, they found themselves in the large entry room of the library itself – layer after layer of books were stacked up for floor after floor above them, a labyrinth of stairwells and causeways running across and between them. Sonoda let out a low whistle as he took in the sight. "I really need to come in here more often."
Yue gave another shrug. "You get used to it after awhile. Come on – the University keeps its archaeological archives this way." She led them down a side staircase, and soon the glass-tinted sunlight was replaced with the steady glow of humming incandescents seated in re-purposed lamp sconces. The stairwell temporarily closed in around them before emerging again on the far end of a space that would have been, anywhere else, impressively large. By the Library Island's standards though it was modest. The space had the feeling of a converted church, with gothic arches crossing overhead and decorated columns lining the sides. Dim light faded in through stained glass windows along the back wall and the sides, each depicting a different scene from various mythologies. Yue continued down the stairs a few steps before realizing Sonoda wasn't following her. She turned to see him standing near the top of the stairs, staring at the space.
"One," Sonoda finally said. "Why are we inside a church and two, why are their windows underground?"
"For the second, they have shafts and reflectors – they also help with ventilation." Yue explained as she started back down the stairs. "As for the first, the Library tends to let the architecture students from the universities design their expansions or renovations. Part of why we have such a bizarre mash-up of styles in here."
The pair reached the bottom of the stairs and Sonoda took a look around at the shelves around him. "Welcome," Yue announced. "to the main wing of Mahora Island Library's field expedition archives. Any time a university sends anyone afield, the a copy of the records end up here. Botanical surveys in the Amazon basin, historical excavations along side Boston's big dig, recovering bones from the Mongolian steps – you name it."
"Tell me its sorted by subject." Sonoda asked, but he already expected the answer.
"Nope, chronologically." Yue replied. "Not that such a fact helps us – our piece could be from anywhere." Yue patted him on the shoulder. "Look on the bright side – if its not in here, there are only two other wings like this one to check!"
Sonoda groaned. "I'll take this stack then." he pointed vaguely off to the right before heading off with the look of the doomed – or at least thoroughly annoyed.
"I'll start over here then." Yue replied as she watched him head off, waiting until he had round a corner and headed down one of the aisles before she darted down an aisle to the left. She quickly made her way through the rows of books until she find herself a nice dead-end all to herself. Satisfied that she was alone, she reached into her coat and pulled out a card. It was larger than a normal playing card, and far taller. The designs across the back shined in the low light of the archive, and text across the front did much the same as she flipped it over. The front of the card looked like some sort of strange game card, or perhaps a tarot card to those unfamiliar with such things. What nobody would fail to notice was that the visage adorning the card was that of Yue herself.
She held the card out before herself before uttering, as soft as a whisper, a single word. "Adeat."
A gentle gust of wind began to tug at the hem of her coat, spiraling around her in a small cyclone as it began to pick up motes of dust. Even as the wind began to pick up, a gentle glow began to suffuse the space as it filled with the gentle thrum of magic. It was less dramatic than it had been the first time she had used it, all of those years ago – courtesy almost as much time training as a mage.
The ethereal lights began to dim as they coalesced as she stretched out her other hand. The lights began to take shape in her free hand before, with the final dying of the light, solidifying into a heavy tome in her outstretched grasp. Yue sighed as she pocketed the card. "Always so dramatic..." She turned her attention to the tome. "Alright then – time to get to work." She pulled her hand away from the book, leaving it floating in the air in front of her before flipping it open.
As soon as the large leather-bound volume opened, a small sea of floating, translucent screens fanned out around Yue. At least one of her friends, on seeing the artifact in action, had described it as 'very scifi'. Yue conceded that the analogy was apt. "First thing first – show me all records of archaeological works in and around Old Ostia." The screens promptly responded, lines of text and scores of pictures scrolling across the screens. She didn't actually have to say the commands out-loud – typing them or even just thinking them worked just as well – but she found saying them out loud helped her to organize her thoughts. It also made it easier on anybody she was working with on such occasions where she wasn't worried about her backup finding out about magic.
Yue scanned over the displays and frowned. "Focus on artifact inventory." She announced. "Imagery only." The text fell away as more stills filled the screens and began to slowly scroll by. Plates and staffs, busts and goblets filled Yue's vision as she glanced over the screens. "Too many – need to narrow my results." If she was the archaeologist who had found it, what would she have called it in her report? "Focus on jewelry – rings primarily."
Most of the images fell away as they were replaced with pictures of various rings. The vast majority that appeared were of the decorative type – bands of wrought gold or silver, placements for stone left long sense empty on most of them. The search was vague enough that other things cropped up among the imagery as well – bracelets, bangles and various baubles that had once likely been strung together as a necklace. With the string long since lost to the ravages of time, all that was left were tiny rings that might have been wearable by a pixie.
She tried adding another parameter – the makers mark Nodoka had shown her. No luck – as soon as she reran the search everything disappeared. Yue let out a sigh as she reverted back to the previous search. It seemed that whoever had dug up her bauble hadn't noted the mark.
Yue was left instead to sift through the long list of results manually, dismissing the ones that were obviously not what she was looking for and taking a moment to read through the more promising ones before dismissing them as well. It was slow, dull, tedious work – much like what she had often done back in Ariadne – but after a couple of hours Yue finally found what she was looking for.
It was a report from a dig in the shadow of the floating city of New Ostia, deep inside the field of shattered stone that was what remained of the old city. Listed in amongst the items found was a small ring, covered in engravings. The ring didn't even get a whole page, just a couple of paragraphs specifying where it had been found. "Found in what was most likely the old armory..." Yue read softly to herself. "Markings indicate possible use as specialize foci for fire manipulation. Further research required." Well, Yue thought, that definitely lined up with the few facts they had for this case.
"Show any police or criminal reports related to this dig." Yue commanded her pactio and the tome was quick to reply as news clippings materialized around her. Many of them were about bandits in the digs operation area, but they were two or three years old. "Show only incidents from the last six weeks." The list narrowed down drastically. "Show only those related to robbery." All but one of the clippings vanished, and Yue brought the sole survivor to the center of her attention. There had been a break-in at a university in New Ostia five weeks ago, and whoever had broken in had made off with a wide assortment of archaeological artifacts. The article speculated that they were going to be sold on the black market. It seemed her suspect had had different plans.
Yue was about to perform another cross-reference when a sharp thud echoed through the book stacks to her. Her head snapped around the stare in the direction of the sound as she dismissed her pactio, the book dissolving into motes of light before re-coalescing into card form. She slipped the card into a coat pocket as she slowly started down the aisle toward the corner even as silence re-exerted its reign over the library. One hand slipped into her pocket as she neared the corner, wrapping around the wand the rested there. She was three steps from the corner when a figure suddenly came around it.
Both of them jumped back half a step as Yue found herself looking down the barrel of Sonoda's revolver, the inspector staring at her for a moment before lowering his gun and re holstering it with a sigh. "Sorry – thought you were somebody else."
"We are the only two people down here, Inspector." Yue replied, pulling her hand from her pocket to gesture around. "Who else would it be?"
"Whoever made that thud?" Sonoda suggested. Yue was about to reply when another sharp thud echoed down the stacks. "Or that one." Sonoda added. Yue's hand made its way back into her pocket as Sonoda's drifted back into his jacket where his revolver had just vanished to. Both were scanning the stacks of books around them, slowly backing up until they were standing back to back. "Could just be another patron." Sonoda suggested.
"Library is closed to the general public today." Yue replied. "Besides, if you think its just some bookworm, why the gun?"
"I've got a bad feeling." Sonoda replied. "Not very scientific, but quite persuasive." Yue nodded, even if Sonoda couldn't see it. She was familiar enough with unscientific methods at this point.
"If its stupid and it works," Yue replied. "It's not stupid. Lets just try not to blow away some poor librarian by mistake. You want to lead or should I?"
"You find what we were looking for?" Sonoda asked, and Yue replied with a nod. "Then lead on – I have no idea where we are right now."
Yue took a quick glance around to gain her bearings before pointing down an aisle to the left. "That way, then your second right. Should dump us out into one of the reading lounges." Sonoda nodded and started down the aisles, Yue falling a step behind. As they made their way down the rows and rows of books, the strange thuds seemed to grow closer, slowly becoming something more recognizable. "It sounds like foot falls."
"Sure," Sonoda replied. "If somebody was jumping between bookcases. You think ninja's broke into the library?" Yue gave him a brief look and Sonoda sighed. "Right, forgot where we were for a moment. Any reason to think ninja's would be after us?"
"The dead man in your morgue?" Yue suggested as they reached the second right and made their turn. The thuds had been joined by a lighter pitter-patter of rapid footfalls, coming from somewhere on top of the stacks and from seemingly every direction courtesy the rooms bizarre acoustics. "Somebody might not like us poking around."
"Hence the gun." Sonoda replied. He scanned the surroundings, the shadows of the book stacks taking on a sinister tint with the new unseen arrival. "Stupid acoustics," the inspector grumbled. "this place is throwing sounds all over the place."
"It's not the place." Yue replied slowly as her hand came out of her pocket, a small wand palmed in her hand. "It's our guests. They're messing with the acoustics."
"Ventriloquism does not work like this!" Sonoda replied, glancing at Yue.
"Not ventriloquism." Yue answered before she started a soft incantation under her breath. "For so Kratika Socratia..." Yue whispered a short string of greek, channeling power through the focus in her hand. As she finished, the wand slowly began to pull to one side, as if drawn by a magnet. "There that way." She said as she pointed past one of the countless shelves.
"How on earth could you possibly know that?" Sonoda asked.
"Trust me." Yue replied as she took the lead and led them down another row. "I've done this before." The pair continued on until they found themselves in a semi-circular clearing, an eight-sided space surrounded with bookcases and filled with an assortment of chairs, couches and tables.
They were three steps in when all sound abruptly ceased.
Not just the until then insistent echoes of foot falls, but all sounds. The low hum of the air conditioning systems, the creaks and groans of settling stacks of shelves, the low hum of the lights – even there own breathing suddenly became inaudible, leaving only the sound of her own heartbeat hammering in Yue's ears. "What the..." Sonoda started to say behind her, but even that seemed muted. It sounded like he was at the end of a tunnel.
"I don't..." Yue replied, trailing off as the strange effect vanished, her voice no longer distorted by the strange effect. No other sounds returned though. "....like this." She finished.
A sudden burst of giggling echoed around them, seemingly from everywhere at once. "Okay, that was creepy." Sonoda said as he scanned the shelves. Had the lights dimmed? The shadows seemed darker then Yue remembered.
"A lost little girl and a little toy soldier," a voice echoed about as the giggling trailed off. "Wandering around in the dark, scary woods." The voice sounded feminine, and young – almost saccharine sweet. "Didn't your parents ever warn you about monsters?"
"Lady," Sonoda said back, raising his voice to make sure it carried. "I hunt monsters for a living. Try again."
The silence returned for a moment before the girl spoke again, and when her voice returned any hint of sweetness had vanished into thin air. "Boy, you have not seen monsters."
"And I don't imagine you will have much of a chance to change that once we are through with you." The pair spun around at the second voice, and this one was much closer than the first. All they found though was empty space in the middle of the reading lounge.
"They're messing with us." Yue concluded.
"You think?" Sonoda replied flatly. The pair slowly backed their way to the middle of the lounge, back-to-back as they scanned the shadows. "Really could use a perimeter right now."
"I don't have a strike team on standby," Yue replied. "You?"
Sonoda held up his phone belatedly. "No signal. Guess my carrier doesn't cover underground libraries."
"Figures." Yue's grip tightened on her wand out of Sonoda's sight. "Think we can take them?"
"I wouldn't suggest it." The disembodied voice taunted. "You are not Springfield...and we are not simple grave robbers."
Yue arched an eyebrow. "You know who I am?"
"You are useless without our names." The other voice taunted. "Without our faces. You cannot fight what you cannot see." a nearly silent whistle was the only warning before a knife sliced through the air, grazing Yue's arm before embedding in the floor. "You, however, are quite visible, Ministra Negi."
"So," Yue said with a wince as she tried to ignore the cut on her arm. It felt shallow, and these people wanted a reaction – she wasn't going to give it to them. "How did you find me?"
"We tracked your toy soldier," one of the voice's said with undisguised amusement. "His little phone made it trivial. Then we just had to wait for him to walk out with you."
"And you got my phone info how...?" Sonoda asked warily.
"You called from the site." the voice replied calmly. "You have drafted the Ministra Negi to help with your case. Now both of you are going to pay for your curiosity."
"Did they just start monologuing?" Sonoda asked with a whisper. "Really?"
"Let them." Yue replied. "I think they'll be in for a nasty surprise."
Sonoda started to say something but was cut off as a figure in black dropped down from above with nary a sound and proceeded to try and lob his head off with what looked like a massive machete. Sonoda dodged with a roll, losing a few hairs instead from his head. As he scrambled back to his feet, he finally got a good look at their mystery attackers. A lithe female form wrapped in the tight black fabric of a sort of cat suit, face concealed behind a kabuki mask. "Good reflexes." the masked figure said flatly as she brought up her blade. "I would hate if this was easy."
"I'm sorry," Sonoda replied as he lowered his gun slightly. "But I can't take you seriously - kabuki mask, really?" His gun snapped back up as he cracked off two rounds in Yue's direction.
Yue spun as the assassin behind her juked left, the rounds burying into the wood paneling behind her. "Fool me once," Sonoda muttered.
"And we kill you." the assassin replied. "Why fight when you will only die tired?"
"I have a gun," Sonoda punctuated his statement with a cock of the hammer. "You have over-sized steak knives."
One of the girls gave a small chuckle. "We have far more then that...." She turned to look at Yue. "...But you already guessed that, hadn't you Ministra?" Yue had no time to react as the assassin recited something under her breath before she was enveloped by shadows and melted into the darkness.
"What the..." Sonoda stammered as he stared at where the girl had been standing a moment prior. "...What the hell?"
"Okay," Yue said as she backed up a step. "Things have officially gotten worse. We have to keep moving – these guys are professionals. Make for the door and keep a look out."
"What are you-" Sonoda sputtered as he looked between the now empty spot on the floor and Yue. "That girl just evaporated!"
"Cloaked." Yue corrected as she grabbed the inspector by the arm and started to forcibly drag him down the aisles as fast as she could manage, wand held out in front of her like a blade. "She likely leapt out of range as soon as the concealment was complete. They're shrouds are good enough to conceal them visually and audibly until they attack, so thats our only chance."
"What the hell are you talking about!?" Sonoda shouted as they rounded another corner. "People don't just vanish!"
"Some do." Yue replied levelly. "A few, very exceptional people do just that. That, and so much more."
"What does that even mean?" Sonoda replied. "Because I'd love to play games when people are not trying to kill us. So lets save the word games until-" Sonoda was cut off again as a annoying familiar oversized knife plunged out of the shadows and straight for his throat. Sonoda bit back a curse as he stumbled backward. The second assassin melted out of the darkness behind him as he fell, knife raised and ready to strike before she suddenly leapt back, vanishing again into the shadows as she dodged a kick from Yue. For her part Yue didn't slow down, letting her momentum spin her around until she faced where the first attacker had been, wand at the ready.
But she was already gone. The entire sequence had taken less then a second.
Sonoda, for his part, had no words to add – eyes wide as he stared for a moment at where his would-be killer had just been. "W-Wha..."
"Get up." Yue pulled him back to his feet. "We don't have time for this."
"People are trying to kill us!" Sonoda shouted at her. "Actually, honestly trying to murder us!"
"Your a cop." Yue replied as she started back down the rows, her pace picking up tempo. "You should be use to it."
"Used to thugs with pocket knives and bats or the occasional smuggled pistol." Sonoda replied as he rushed to keep up as the two now ran through the library. "Not trained ninjas!"
"Not ninja's." Yue corrected. "Assassins."
"Does it matter!?" Sonoda shot back. "They are trying to kill us. Why doesn't this bother you?"
"Like I said, I've dealt with this before." Yue replied, eyes darting around as she led them through the maze of books.
"No." Sonoda said. "No, you haven't. Nobody has. Nobody has ever dealt with this sort of bull, not outside of a sound stage."
"Almost nobody." Yue replied as they came to a brief pause at an intersection. "A few people have."
"Those 'exceptional people' you mentioned earlier?" Sonoda asked. Yue gave a nod as she picked a direction and started off again, Sonoda close behind them. "You going to tell me what you mean by that?"
"Once we escape this place." Yue answered. "They won't be able to do anything to us in the public – even if they're working for our murderer they can't afford to be seen in the open."
"You really think these people care about witnesses?" Sonoda replied. "They're assassins! They aren't going to stop chasing us just because of a few people standing around to watch."
"They'll have no choice." Yue replied. "Trust me."
"I'd really rather not." Sonoda replied. "Given that I've known you for only a day and a half and my life is on the line."
"I don't see how you have much of a choice." Yue said. "It's not like you can stop and interrogate me right now." Behind her, Sonoda grumbled something that she didn't catch.
"We're almost out I think." Yue said as they rounded another corner and bolted down the narrow aisle. "Just one last turn and-" Yue stopped dead as she rounded the corner.
It was a wall. Not made of books, but of solid stone. The floor was cracked up around the blockage's base, as if somebody had pushed it up and through the floor. "Okay." Sonoda said as he stared at the wall. "That wasn't here when we came in."
"They created it." Yue said, more to herself then to Sonoda. "They drove us into a corner and boxed us in."
"How could they have created it!?" Sonoda asked, panic quickly growing in his voice. "Its a slab of freaking stone!"
"It's easier than you'd think if you know what you're doing." Yue replied as a series of soft giggles echoed behind them. Sonoda spun and cracked off three shots into the darkness that seemed to be encroaching on them. Yue placed a hand on his wrist and after a moment he lowered his gun. "That isn't the solution to this."
Sonoda looked at Yue for a moment before replying. "Then what is?"
Yue took a deep breath before stepping in front of Sonoda and facing down the hall. Ahead of her, the shadows seemed to grow longer, the lights dimmer as the darkness seemed to simply grow. "ISSDA Directive twenty-seven dash eleven."
Sonoda raised an eyebrow at Yue's comment even as she started chanting something. "What does that mean?"
"It outlines allowances for full disclosure in drastic situations." Yue replied as she raised her wand before herself. The air around her seemed to thrum as electricity seemed to arc around her, static charges dragging her hair up and spreading it around her like a halo. "It means no more running."
Dun-dun Duuuuuuuuuunnn!
But good chapter. It's good that the Inspector will finally be getting a heads-up.
But good chapter. It's good that the Inspector will finally be getting a heads-up.
Dragontrapper
Homeless Draconis
- Location
- A Tower in the middle of nowhere
Dun-dun Duuuuuuuuuunnn!
But good chapter. It's good that the Inspector will finally be getting a heads-up.
I have literally been waiting THREE YEARS to get to the next chapter
Up next on Magical Detective Yue - Semi-Auto Magic.
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
Yue is about to show these Assassins that while they have her outnumbered she has them out classed.
At least Yui hopes she does.
Dragontrapper
Homeless Draconis
- Location
- A Tower in the middle of nowhere
New chapter!
-------
"Okay." Sonoda said flatly as he watched the lightning crackle and arc from Yue. "I've officially given up on figuring anything out."
"You're probably better off that way." Yue replied before she hurled a bolt of lightning into the shadows. The bolt jumped from her outstretched wand and cut through the inky blackness. Blue-white light burned away at the dark as a harsh hissing scream as whatever spell they had thrown over the space began to crack under the onslaught. "That's right, girlies!" Yue shouted into the darkness as a sharp grin found its way onto her face. "No more rules holding me back! Still think you can take me?" Gloating wasn't usually her style, but a few years around Evangeline had rubbed off on her – and it was amazingly cathartic.
Yue lobbed a few more bolts of lightning into the black and the artificial darkness fell further and further back each time. The shadow-spell collapsed completely a split-second before Yue heard the low-pitched hum. "For so Kratika Socratia..." Yue quickly chanted, magic flaring back to life around her as she raised her wand defensively. "Deflexio!" Yue sliced her focus through the air as a shimmering wall of translucent energy appeared to her right, angled to the side. "Deflexio!" she chanted again as she swung her wand in and upward slash and a second barrier appeared to her left in an exact mirror of its neighbor to create a shimmering wedge of light a split second before the attack hit. A swirling mass of pure darkness collided with the the tip of the shield wedge, detonating in a thundering crash and cloud of smoke as most of the blast diverted to the sides as the shields shattered. Yue already had her wand at the ready, giving its a tight whirl before thrusting it forward. "Septem Spiritus Fulguralis!"
Seven bolts of electricity arced out of her wand before twisting mid-air and shooting forward like a barrage of arrows. There was a split-second where Yue could just make out one of the assassins dodging her barrage, leaping skyward as the shelf behind her simply exploded under the impact of the lightning spell. "Taking them down isn't going to get us out – we need to find another way through." Yue said as she pulled Sonoda back to his feet. "They're fast, but not bullet-proof. Think you can cover my back?"
"Cover your..." Sonoda echoed before managing to reply. "You just threw lightning! Actual freaking lightning! Who the hell are you?"
"That is an excellent question." one of the assassins voices purred from somewhere in the remaining shadows. "You are not the mindreader." A familiar looking lithe, black-clad masked figure seemed to grow out of a pool of shadows, only now her knife had been exchanged for a pure black sword longer than Yue's arm. "Tell me who you are, Ministra Negi, before I kill you."
Yue replied by simply raising her wand again and repeating her chant. "For so Kratika Socratia..." What had previously been small swirling of dust about her feet before was replaced with a roaring whirlwind, her coat flapping around her wildly in the indoor maelstrom. "I am Yue Ayase, Captain of the Second Squadron, 24th Special Investigation Division, Ariadne Mage Knight Valkyrie Corps." The assassin actually took a step back as Yue stretched both arms out in front of her. "Me Armet!" Light shimmered around her empty hand, steadily growing brighter before a form began to coalesce into her waiting palm, solidifying into a hilt that soon grew before the last of the light finally dispersed, leaving Yue with a simply massive blade that was nearly as tall as she was. She gave it a quick twirl, dismissing the whirlwind around her in one final gust, before leveling it at the assassin. "Now get out of my library."
Her attacker simply cackled. "How grand! My luck is even better than I had hoped!" She crouched low as she brought her own blade up. "Sister, take care of the toy soldier. The knight is mine!"
Yue nearly missed her kick-off and nearly lost her head– one moment she was at the end of the aisle, the next she was a hairs-breadth in front of her. With no room behind her to back up, All she could do was brace and take the hit. Sparks flew as black blade met silver, and Yue could swear she could see grin through the gaps in the mask. "Come now, Valkyrie." the assassin taunted – she definitely sounded like she was grinning, if that was a thing. "Is this the best you can offer?"
"Save your breath." Yue replied before pushing her back and breaking the locked swords apart. "You're going to need it." There was another thrum of power through the air, but compared to the sharp crack or whirling howl of her prior magic, this was more like an inferno.
Yue didn't give her would-be killer a chance to react as she kicked off, the floor under her rear foot cracking as she surged forward sword-first. The assassin parried and sent Yue's sword sliding past her. Yue rolled with her redirected momentum, rolling forward as she swung her sword back up across her side, blocking a blow that would have cleaved her in two.
She turned on her feet as she skidded to a stop before charging back in with an upward strike. The assassin back-stepped as they locked blades again, but Yue kept the pressure on. They were assassins – they depended on their speed and their spells to let them score their kills before their target to react. In a straight-on fight, they should shatter like glass.
That was the theory, at least. Yue just hoped that it held up in reality.
The black-clad killer deflected the blow upward, but Yue simply flowed with the change in direction, smoothly around to attack from the other side. Another parry, to the side this time. Yue rolled with it again and rebounded with a low strike. All she had to do was keep up the pressure until she made a mistake.
"You can't keep this up forever." The assassin taunted as she parried another swing. "You will tire."
Yue replied with another strike. The parry that left both of them wide open. Neither of them had a second weapon.
Yue nailed her with a left hook.
There was the sharp crack of porcelain as the assassin reeled from the magic-enhanced blow. A crack ran up one side of the mask as she touched the side of her head. Her fingers came back red. "Impressive." the assassin said with a chuckle. "But is your toy soldier as skilled?"
There was a crack of gunfire and Yue risked a quick glance behind her. Sonoda was staring down one of the assassins, clutching at his hand. His gun lay on the ground several feet away. Despite being now disarmed, the assassin hadn't closed in to end it yet. Foolish for her, lucky for Sonoda.
That luck wasn't going to hold forever though. The assassin was already tensing to charge, and Sonoda had no hope of reacting in time.
Yue didn't have time to think - she muttered a quick spell and sent a concussive blast of wind at her own opponent before turning to Sonoda. "Catch!"
The other assassin charged as Sonoda looked toward Yue to see her sword flying through the air at him. To Yue's surprise, the Inspector caught the blade and dropped into a defensive stance a split-second before the Assassin's knife would have plunged into his gut. "Do I even want to know?" Yue asked as the Inspector swung the blade with far more familiarity than she had expected.
"College," Sonoda managed to reply as he shielded himself from another strike. "Don't you need this?"
Across from Yue, her own opponent was staggering to her feet. "I think I can manage." Yue took a single deep breath before she focused her magic again. "Vestio."
There was a swirling of lights around her as the magic reached across space. Her coat was subsumed by light as it was replaced with the long sleeves of a doublet. Metal plates materialized and settled into place across her chest, the curved silver and white metal almost aerodynamic in design. Heavy pauldrons settled across her shoulders, gauntlets following close behind. Grieves and steel boots entombed her legs from toe to thigh, metal joints shifting with barely a whisper as she shifted her stance. One hand still held her wand, but the other was soon to be just as occupied. The motes of light light condensed into a heavy, streamlined lance that she held with the assuredness of long experience. A helm materialized next, long and streamlined with a heavy visor and small, feather-like flourishes near the ears that were soon joined by similar touches near the collar.
With a final burst of light, great white and feathered wings burst from her back and banished the last of the summoning magic. The wings ached up behind Yue before furling themselves closer to her back. Now fully equipped, Yue leveled a steely gaze at the one who had been trying to kill her all morning before sliding her visor shuck with a heavy clack.
"So," The assassin hissed. "Decided to pull out all the stops? Very well. I shall enjoy killing you." The assassin charged with another of her lightning charges, and this time Yue didn't bother moving. Her only reaction was to brace as the black-clad killer hit her at the speed of a car.
Yue's metal-clad feet skid back a few inches as the blade tried to bite into her breastplate. A few inches though was all she gave, and the blade found no crack in the armor. Any surprise the assassin might have shown was hidden behind her mask as she stared at the blade. She had no time to withdraw as a gauntlet-clad hand took a vice-like grip of her blade. "My turn." The lance in Yue's other hand swung in from one side and hit the assassin with bone-jarring force and sent her careening across the small space and into a nearby bookcase, a small avalanche of tomes following after.
The assassin stirred after a moment, chuckling as she dug herself out of the pile of books. "Your armor has strength enhancements. Impressive, but unsustainable."
"I'll last longer than you at this rate." Yue replied as she fell into a ready stance before looking back toward Sonoda. "You doing alright?"
"Considering I'm fighting some sort of magic ninja?" Sonoda yelled back over the sound of clashing blades. "I'd say I'm doing pretty well."
"Sister, kill the fool already!" The assassin hissed at Sonoda's opponent.
"I am trying!" Sonoda's opponent replied with evident surprise in her voice. "He is better than we suspected."
The assassin finished digging herself out of the books. "Enough games. We finish this." She charged again, and Yue prepared to parry her next sword strike. Unlike the last time Yue was expecting the strike with feet planted, but in the instant before their blades met the assassin fell to the floor in a slide. Yue shifted her grip as fast as she could but met only air as her opponent kicked back up to her feet and continued her headlong charge without so much as a pause.
They're targeting Sonoda she realized with some choice curses picked up in Ariadne.
It made sense – he was, without a doubt, far squishier than she was. There was no way he could take both of them on at the same time, and she needed time to close – her Valkyrie armor made her stronger, and though she was by no means slow, these assassins had her beat for speed hands down.
Then she noticed the gun near her feet.
"Sonoda!" She yelled, with hardly a second thought. They only had one chance at this before the assassin was on him. Yue channeled a wind spell through her lance, the weaponized focus taking aim at the gun even as she started after the assassin. She didn't waste any time in firing the spell. The firearm was scooped up by a focused ribbon of wind, sending it flying toward the inspector just as his head turned. He had a split second to process both the gun and the killer ninja flying towards him to react.
With surprising ease he tossed the sword into his other hand as his first opponent's blade closed in only to find unyielding Ariadne Steel. Fingers closed around the revolver's grip as it was brought down a split second before the second assassin finished closing the distance.
A shot rang out as the black blade gouged silver gunmetal. Whatever her blade was made of, the gun was harder. Both assassins stared at the gun for a moment in apparent surprise before leaping back.
In the case of one, back into path of a charging Yue.
For the second time in less than a minute, the assassin found herself being physically thrown through the air as Yue's lance found its way under her and a blast of wind magic sent her crashing into her partner.
Yue skidded to a halt at Sonoda's side. Sonoda for his part just stared at her for a moment. "Holy crap. I'm in a manga."
"Less joking, more not dying." Yue replied as she pointed over toward where the assassins had landed. They were gone.
"O-Okay." Sonoda replied as he slowly circled until his back was to Yue's. One hand reached into his coat and began to fish out a handful new rounds and fed them into the revolver. "Now what?"
"Now?" Yue replied. "Now we don't die."
The assassins struck in perfect unison, knives and swords gleaming in what dim light there still was. One came at Yue low while the other went high. Yue and Sonoda were forced apart as Yue had to sidestep even as she blocked a sword swing that would have taken her just above the knees, even as the other assassin sailed past her head and straight at Sonoda as the detective fell back a few steps before halting his attackers advance.
Sonoda was more prepared this time, and the assassin was forced to bring her sword back in order to not be skewered alive by the detective's borrowed blade. The pair fell back rather then press their attacks, one using sonoda's own blade as a launching board for her flip while her partner continued her roll past Yue. The assassins now stood back to back as Sonoda and Yue faced them from either side, their positions reversed from where they had been moments before.
There was a soft click from Sonoda's revolver as he aimed it one-handed at the nearest assassin. "You're under arrest."
The assassin simply tilted her head for an instant before both leapt back into the attack. A shot rang out only to glance harmlessly off a black blade as the the other spun around her sister, launching a flying kick that only found steel as Yue brought her lance down. Undisturbed, the assassin rolled back with Yue's guard and rolling over her own sister's back as she switched targets to Sonoda. Lacking a lance of his own the detective rolled to the side allowing the assassin to overreach, her recovery sending her rolling into a leap that took her into the bookcases. Behind them, electricity crackled as the remaining assailant was sent leaping back in mirror of her sister as Yue's attack cratered the floor.
Sonoda and Yue spun on their feet as they tried to track their respective targets, Paper flying everywhere as an onslaught of bullets, wind and lightning tore into the shelves. The assassins circled the small space before crossing paths, launching off the side of the shelves in a sudden change in direction. Sonoda found himself in front, ducking low as the first assassin skipped off the floor and straight at him while the second one went high and was met with Yue's lance. One hand alighted on the lance's tip as she pushed off, flipping over Yue's head and forcing Yue to turn on her feet to follow as her sister rolled to the side to dodge another of Sonoda's shots at near point-blank range, the Inspector trying to take advantage of their locked blades.
The assassin's melted back into the shadows, and Sonoda took the brief pause to catch his breath and turn to Yue. "So, now what?"
"Now they get desperate." Yue replied. "Think you can cover me for a few minutes?"
"Why?" Sonoda asked as he loaded his revolver again. "You have a plan?"
"I need time to cast this next spell." Yue replied. "Can you do it?"
"Cast a...." Sonoda sighed as he readied his weapons and turned to face the inky blackness that the assassins had disappeared into. "Right. Okay – hold off two killer ninja girls. No problem."
Yue watched him for a moment before nodding to herself and planting her feet. Sonoda took one last look over his shoulder as she planted her lance into the floor and started to chant. " For so Kratika Socratia..." The two assassin dropped down out of the shadows as Yue started, the first making a beeline for Sonoda while the second headed straight for Yue. Yue made no indication that she had even noticed, And Sonoda cursed as he moved to react. He slid himself in front of the second as he dodged the first, putting himself between them and Yue. "Hey! I was in line first." Sonoda pushed her back with his borrowed sword. "Want to fight? Fight me."
"Your death will be quick, mortal." The assassin taunted.
Sonoda grinned. "You haven't killed me yet." He lowered his sword and charged even as the second assassin leapt back to her feet, Sonoda taking advantage of a brief pause between sword clashes to crack off a pair of shots as he got too close to Yue.
"...ad decimum! Area Constet!" Yue continued to chant. "Intus se premant spiritus ad pressuram criticalem!" She broke her chanting for a moment as the wind around her picked up, forcing her to yell over its howling. "Sonoda! Try and keep them in one spot!"
"Should you be talking in the middle of your spell ritual thing?" Sonoda asked as he deflected another sword before ducking a dagger strike to his head.
"Just do it!" Yue yelled back. "And make it fast – I think I only have one shot at this."
"Shot at what!?" Sonoda yelled back before turning his attention back two the two women trying to kill him instead of the one that wasn't.
"Tribus, Duobus, Modo!" Yue continued to chant. "Sonoda, now!"
"Working on it!" He yelled back as he sidestepped another sword strike. They approached him from both sides now, and he was running out of steam and they knew it. He took one last look before he braced himself as they charged him.
"Now!" He yelled as he jumped, pouring every last dredge of his remaining energy into his legs. The two assassins skidded to a stop a moment before they collided with each other, watching for a moment as the detective lept and rolled to the side.
That brief moment was all that Yue needed.
"...fortissime emittam!!" Yue finished her chant as she threw one hand out in front of her at the pair. A stream of lightning that looked more akin to a bolt of plasma poured out of her palm, the beam diffusing to occupy nearly the entire width of the aisle as he bared down on the assassins.
Sonoda didn't get to see if it actually hit them, occupied as he was making sure that his corneas weren't burned out of his eye sockets. After a few moments he lowered his arm from his face and finally had a chance to survey the damage. "Holy-" There was a hole punched through at least three rows of bookcases, though hole was a bit of an understatement – he could have walked through them without ducking. He couldn't tell if the hole went any further since a fine cloud of incinerated books had turned into a dense cloud that killed visibility. "You were worried about them damaging the library?"
"I just wanted them out." Yue replied as she pulled her lance free. She managed one step forward before dropping to one knee.
"Woah." Sonoda quickly made his way to Yue's side. "You alright?"
"Just tired." Yue replied. "That spell isn't exactly my usual fare. Shame it wasn't as powerful as I was hoping."
Sonoda looked over her shoulder at where the blockade had been standing. The massive slab of stone was now blasted into rubble. "You know, I think that was sufficient."
Yue glanced over her shoulder and managed a small grin. "Heh. Guess my control wasn't as good as I thought. Well, at least we can get out now." Yue climbed back to her feet, staggering until Sonoda slipped an arm around her to keep her from toppling over.
"Slow down!" Sonoda demanded as he felt Yue lean into the support. "I don't know what you just did, but should you really be moving right now?"
Behind them, there was a heavy crash as one of the remains of a bookcase toppled over. From over its top, a black clad hand clawed its way out of the rubble. Sonoda leaned closer to Yue. "Think you can take them again?"
Yue shook her head. "I'm tapped. And I'm guessing you're running low on ammo."
"Alright then." Sonoda shifted until one of Yue's arms was over his shoulder. "Run and live it is." The pair staggered through the hole and into the aisle of books on the other side as the sound of shifting rubble echoed behind them.
"Wait." Yue ordered as she pulled her wand out from whatever pocket she had squirreled it away. "I need to seal the breach."
"No time!" Sonoda replied as he reached out and forced her arm down. "You said you were tapped out anyway. Plus, they put it up – they can probably take it down."
Yue looked at him for a moment before nodding. "Help me get my armor off while we move."
"Can we just leave it behind?" Sonoda asked even as he began to help remove her bracers. "And where did your lance go?"
"They'll go back by themselves." Yue replied as she pulled her helm off and dropped it to the ground. It began to dissolve away after a few steps. Her hair was matted with sweat and clung to the sides of her face. "Its something of a feature."
"Well," Sonoda said as he shrugged. "That's convenient."
"Quite." Yue replied. "Lets just hope we remember how to get out of here."
"Easy. Keep walking until you hit a wall." Sonoda replied. Next to him, there was a heavy thud as her breastplate clattered to the ground. "Then just follow the wall until you hit your exit. Piece of cake."
"And if we run into a dead end?" Yue asked.
Sonoda shrugged. "We get lost inside a library for all eternity?"
"Or we ask the ninja's how to get out." Yue suggested.
"Because they have been sooo helpful so far." Sonoda said sarcastically as he led them around a corner. "Come on – the left side looks closer." Sonoda risked another glance behind them. "Think you got at least one of them?"
"I really do hope so." Yue replied. With all of her armor gone, it was obvious that she was haggard. Her skin had lost a good deal of color, and Sonoda could feel that he was starting to lean on him more and more as they went. "We aren't in good shape to take on both of them again."
"We could take them if we didn't have to follow any rules." Sonoda replied with a shrug. "Or if you weren't having to worry about my squishy ass."
"You don't have any experience fighting ninja." Yue replied with a weak smile. "But you seem to be a quick study."
"Tell that to my boss." Sonoda replied. "So – that information you needed to look up here. You didn't need to actually do it here, did you?"
Yue shook her head. "I just needed a plausible reason I could have learned it. I wasn't expecting you to invite yourself to come along."
"Sorry." Sonoda said sheepishly. "So, how did you look it up?"
"Pactio." Yu replied.
"Pacti-what?" Sonoda asked.
"Its a magic artifact." Yue explained as they finally reached the far wall and took another left. "You get it by making a contract with a mage."
"So, what?" Sonoda asked. "I could make this contract thing with you and get some sort of power up?"
"Heh," Yue chuckled. "I couldn't set up a Pactio ritual at the moment if I wanted to – too drained." She turned and gave Sonoda a little smirk. "Besides – you have to seal it with a kiss."
Sonoda very quickly averted his gaze from the woman leaning against him. "Y-You're cute, but we've just met and you did sort of got me involved with killer ninja's."
"Do I know how to show a guy a good time or what?" Yue joked as the detoured around a bookcase.
"You know, my last girlfriend didn't cause collateral damage on our dates." Sonoda pointed out.
"Well, its a good thing we aren't dating then." Yue replied as she pointed to their right. "That way."
"Yeah, yeah...." Sonoda started down the aisle before there was a heavy crash somewhere behind them. "So, what if one of them does catch up with us?"
"You still have my sword?" Yue asked.
"Yeah...no." Sonoda replied.
Yue shrugged. "Okay – you shoot her. Repeatedly."
"Good plan." Sonoda replied as they started back down the aisle. "Simple, straight-forward, easy to remember. I like it. What happens when it doesn't work?"
"Run like hell." Yue replied without a hint of sarcasm.
"Even simpler." Sonoda said. "Always important for a fall-back plan."
The pair continued to stagger through the library, glancing back on occasion as they followed the wall. The staircase was finally in sight, appearing every now and again from behind the bookcases. "Those ominous footfalls sound different to you now," Sonoda asked. "Or is it just me?"
Yue shook her head. "No. They sound different. In fact, they sound like..."
"They're down a pair of legs." Sonoda said as he finished for her. "Guess you did manage to take one of them out."
"Would have preferred both." Yue replied. "Given how much I dumped into that spell."
"Always a pessimist." Sonoda rolled his eyes as they rounded another corner. "Look on the bright side – we reached the staircase." Yue looked up at the steep flight of stone steps as they approached. "Think you can make it?"
Yue replied by removing Sonoda's arm from around her and settling onto her own feet with only a slight wobble. "I think I can manage."
"Alright then." Sonoda pulled out his revolver and gave it a quick once over. "After you. Give me a shout once you reach the top. I really don't want to be down here too long."
Yue rolled her eyes as she started up the stairs. "My hero. Just don't die, okay?"
"Not planning too." Sonoda replied without taking his eyes from the aisle ahead of him. "Now move." The steady sound of footfalls behind him as Yue started up the stairs. "Easy, Sonoda." He muttered to himself. "Easy." Yeah, easy to say – his heartbeat was so loud in his ears he'd be lucky to hear a marching band trying to sneak up on him.
There was a heavy footfall straight ahead of him, and Sonoda had to fight the urge to simply fire blind. "Save your ammo, dumb ass." He was running low on bullets as it was – no point wasting them on terror-induced panic shots.
"Come on, already!" Sonoda shouted at seemingly nothing. "You want to kill me, here I am!"
"Not the strategy I would have used, Sonoda." Yue shouted from half-way up the steps.
"Not now Ayase!" Sonoda shouted back just before a shadowy figure staggered out of the shadows. Her sword was broken about half way up, and she was leaning heavily on one leg. "Wow." Sonoda said after a moment. "And I thought we looked bad."
"You will die for this!" the ninja shrieked before charging. No fancy acrobatics, no shadow magic, no crazy sword moves. Just a straight charge straight at Sonoda's heart.
Sonoda was already lining the shot up before she had finished her sentence. The gun cracked and the bullet hit a split second later, punching through her left shoulder with a spray of crimson. The injury, however, didn't seem to faze her as she just kept coming. "Sonofa-" Sonoda cursed as he took another shot, and then another. She still didn't slow down.
"Die!" She shouted as she drew her sword back and sprinted the last few yards.
Sonoda adjusted his aim. "You first."
The round punched through her leg a moment before she dropped her full weight onto it, and a sickening crack echoed through the room as the limb gave out. The momentum of her magically-powered charge sent her tumbling and skidding across the hard floor until she finally rolled to a stop a few steps in front of Sonoda.
He stepped forward and looked down at her. Her mask was missing large pieces, revealing patches of pale skin beneath. Her suit was ripped and stained with her own blood, especially around her now ruined knee. "How..." she managed to gasp between pained breathes. "How...is this..."
"First rule of a fight." Sonoda replied as he holstered his revolver. "Never assume you're going to win." A quick kick to the head and she went limp. Sonoda took a moment to lean over and check her pulse before rising back to his feet, turning around, and starting up the stair
Yue didn't say anything until he had caught up with her on the stairs. "Nice shot."
"Not really." Sonoda replied as he continued up the stairs. "I was aiming for her head."
-------
"Okay." Sonoda said flatly as he watched the lightning crackle and arc from Yue. "I've officially given up on figuring anything out."
"You're probably better off that way." Yue replied before she hurled a bolt of lightning into the shadows. The bolt jumped from her outstretched wand and cut through the inky blackness. Blue-white light burned away at the dark as a harsh hissing scream as whatever spell they had thrown over the space began to crack under the onslaught. "That's right, girlies!" Yue shouted into the darkness as a sharp grin found its way onto her face. "No more rules holding me back! Still think you can take me?" Gloating wasn't usually her style, but a few years around Evangeline had rubbed off on her – and it was amazingly cathartic.
Yue lobbed a few more bolts of lightning into the black and the artificial darkness fell further and further back each time. The shadow-spell collapsed completely a split-second before Yue heard the low-pitched hum. "For so Kratika Socratia..." Yue quickly chanted, magic flaring back to life around her as she raised her wand defensively. "Deflexio!" Yue sliced her focus through the air as a shimmering wall of translucent energy appeared to her right, angled to the side. "Deflexio!" she chanted again as she swung her wand in and upward slash and a second barrier appeared to her left in an exact mirror of its neighbor to create a shimmering wedge of light a split second before the attack hit. A swirling mass of pure darkness collided with the the tip of the shield wedge, detonating in a thundering crash and cloud of smoke as most of the blast diverted to the sides as the shields shattered. Yue already had her wand at the ready, giving its a tight whirl before thrusting it forward. "Septem Spiritus Fulguralis!"
Seven bolts of electricity arced out of her wand before twisting mid-air and shooting forward like a barrage of arrows. There was a split-second where Yue could just make out one of the assassins dodging her barrage, leaping skyward as the shelf behind her simply exploded under the impact of the lightning spell. "Taking them down isn't going to get us out – we need to find another way through." Yue said as she pulled Sonoda back to his feet. "They're fast, but not bullet-proof. Think you can cover my back?"
"Cover your..." Sonoda echoed before managing to reply. "You just threw lightning! Actual freaking lightning! Who the hell are you?"
"That is an excellent question." one of the assassins voices purred from somewhere in the remaining shadows. "You are not the mindreader." A familiar looking lithe, black-clad masked figure seemed to grow out of a pool of shadows, only now her knife had been exchanged for a pure black sword longer than Yue's arm. "Tell me who you are, Ministra Negi, before I kill you."
Yue replied by simply raising her wand again and repeating her chant. "For so Kratika Socratia..." What had previously been small swirling of dust about her feet before was replaced with a roaring whirlwind, her coat flapping around her wildly in the indoor maelstrom. "I am Yue Ayase, Captain of the Second Squadron, 24th Special Investigation Division, Ariadne Mage Knight Valkyrie Corps." The assassin actually took a step back as Yue stretched both arms out in front of her. "Me Armet!" Light shimmered around her empty hand, steadily growing brighter before a form began to coalesce into her waiting palm, solidifying into a hilt that soon grew before the last of the light finally dispersed, leaving Yue with a simply massive blade that was nearly as tall as she was. She gave it a quick twirl, dismissing the whirlwind around her in one final gust, before leveling it at the assassin. "Now get out of my library."
Her attacker simply cackled. "How grand! My luck is even better than I had hoped!" She crouched low as she brought her own blade up. "Sister, take care of the toy soldier. The knight is mine!"
Yue nearly missed her kick-off and nearly lost her head– one moment she was at the end of the aisle, the next she was a hairs-breadth in front of her. With no room behind her to back up, All she could do was brace and take the hit. Sparks flew as black blade met silver, and Yue could swear she could see grin through the gaps in the mask. "Come now, Valkyrie." the assassin taunted – she definitely sounded like she was grinning, if that was a thing. "Is this the best you can offer?"
"Save your breath." Yue replied before pushing her back and breaking the locked swords apart. "You're going to need it." There was another thrum of power through the air, but compared to the sharp crack or whirling howl of her prior magic, this was more like an inferno.
Yue didn't give her would-be killer a chance to react as she kicked off, the floor under her rear foot cracking as she surged forward sword-first. The assassin parried and sent Yue's sword sliding past her. Yue rolled with her redirected momentum, rolling forward as she swung her sword back up across her side, blocking a blow that would have cleaved her in two.
She turned on her feet as she skidded to a stop before charging back in with an upward strike. The assassin back-stepped as they locked blades again, but Yue kept the pressure on. They were assassins – they depended on their speed and their spells to let them score their kills before their target to react. In a straight-on fight, they should shatter like glass.
That was the theory, at least. Yue just hoped that it held up in reality.
The black-clad killer deflected the blow upward, but Yue simply flowed with the change in direction, smoothly around to attack from the other side. Another parry, to the side this time. Yue rolled with it again and rebounded with a low strike. All she had to do was keep up the pressure until she made a mistake.
"You can't keep this up forever." The assassin taunted as she parried another swing. "You will tire."
Yue replied with another strike. The parry that left both of them wide open. Neither of them had a second weapon.
Yue nailed her with a left hook.
There was the sharp crack of porcelain as the assassin reeled from the magic-enhanced blow. A crack ran up one side of the mask as she touched the side of her head. Her fingers came back red. "Impressive." the assassin said with a chuckle. "But is your toy soldier as skilled?"
There was a crack of gunfire and Yue risked a quick glance behind her. Sonoda was staring down one of the assassins, clutching at his hand. His gun lay on the ground several feet away. Despite being now disarmed, the assassin hadn't closed in to end it yet. Foolish for her, lucky for Sonoda.
That luck wasn't going to hold forever though. The assassin was already tensing to charge, and Sonoda had no hope of reacting in time.
Yue didn't have time to think - she muttered a quick spell and sent a concussive blast of wind at her own opponent before turning to Sonoda. "Catch!"
The other assassin charged as Sonoda looked toward Yue to see her sword flying through the air at him. To Yue's surprise, the Inspector caught the blade and dropped into a defensive stance a split-second before the Assassin's knife would have plunged into his gut. "Do I even want to know?" Yue asked as the Inspector swung the blade with far more familiarity than she had expected.
"College," Sonoda managed to reply as he shielded himself from another strike. "Don't you need this?"
Across from Yue, her own opponent was staggering to her feet. "I think I can manage." Yue took a single deep breath before she focused her magic again. "Vestio."
There was a swirling of lights around her as the magic reached across space. Her coat was subsumed by light as it was replaced with the long sleeves of a doublet. Metal plates materialized and settled into place across her chest, the curved silver and white metal almost aerodynamic in design. Heavy pauldrons settled across her shoulders, gauntlets following close behind. Grieves and steel boots entombed her legs from toe to thigh, metal joints shifting with barely a whisper as she shifted her stance. One hand still held her wand, but the other was soon to be just as occupied. The motes of light light condensed into a heavy, streamlined lance that she held with the assuredness of long experience. A helm materialized next, long and streamlined with a heavy visor and small, feather-like flourishes near the ears that were soon joined by similar touches near the collar.
With a final burst of light, great white and feathered wings burst from her back and banished the last of the summoning magic. The wings ached up behind Yue before furling themselves closer to her back. Now fully equipped, Yue leveled a steely gaze at the one who had been trying to kill her all morning before sliding her visor shuck with a heavy clack.
"So," The assassin hissed. "Decided to pull out all the stops? Very well. I shall enjoy killing you." The assassin charged with another of her lightning charges, and this time Yue didn't bother moving. Her only reaction was to brace as the black-clad killer hit her at the speed of a car.
Yue's metal-clad feet skid back a few inches as the blade tried to bite into her breastplate. A few inches though was all she gave, and the blade found no crack in the armor. Any surprise the assassin might have shown was hidden behind her mask as she stared at the blade. She had no time to withdraw as a gauntlet-clad hand took a vice-like grip of her blade. "My turn." The lance in Yue's other hand swung in from one side and hit the assassin with bone-jarring force and sent her careening across the small space and into a nearby bookcase, a small avalanche of tomes following after.
The assassin stirred after a moment, chuckling as she dug herself out of the pile of books. "Your armor has strength enhancements. Impressive, but unsustainable."
"I'll last longer than you at this rate." Yue replied as she fell into a ready stance before looking back toward Sonoda. "You doing alright?"
"Considering I'm fighting some sort of magic ninja?" Sonoda yelled back over the sound of clashing blades. "I'd say I'm doing pretty well."
"Sister, kill the fool already!" The assassin hissed at Sonoda's opponent.
"I am trying!" Sonoda's opponent replied with evident surprise in her voice. "He is better than we suspected."
The assassin finished digging herself out of the books. "Enough games. We finish this." She charged again, and Yue prepared to parry her next sword strike. Unlike the last time Yue was expecting the strike with feet planted, but in the instant before their blades met the assassin fell to the floor in a slide. Yue shifted her grip as fast as she could but met only air as her opponent kicked back up to her feet and continued her headlong charge without so much as a pause.
They're targeting Sonoda she realized with some choice curses picked up in Ariadne.
It made sense – he was, without a doubt, far squishier than she was. There was no way he could take both of them on at the same time, and she needed time to close – her Valkyrie armor made her stronger, and though she was by no means slow, these assassins had her beat for speed hands down.
Then she noticed the gun near her feet.
"Sonoda!" She yelled, with hardly a second thought. They only had one chance at this before the assassin was on him. Yue channeled a wind spell through her lance, the weaponized focus taking aim at the gun even as she started after the assassin. She didn't waste any time in firing the spell. The firearm was scooped up by a focused ribbon of wind, sending it flying toward the inspector just as his head turned. He had a split second to process both the gun and the killer ninja flying towards him to react.
With surprising ease he tossed the sword into his other hand as his first opponent's blade closed in only to find unyielding Ariadne Steel. Fingers closed around the revolver's grip as it was brought down a split second before the second assassin finished closing the distance.
A shot rang out as the black blade gouged silver gunmetal. Whatever her blade was made of, the gun was harder. Both assassins stared at the gun for a moment in apparent surprise before leaping back.
In the case of one, back into path of a charging Yue.
For the second time in less than a minute, the assassin found herself being physically thrown through the air as Yue's lance found its way under her and a blast of wind magic sent her crashing into her partner.
Yue skidded to a halt at Sonoda's side. Sonoda for his part just stared at her for a moment. "Holy crap. I'm in a manga."
"Less joking, more not dying." Yue replied as she pointed over toward where the assassins had landed. They were gone.
"O-Okay." Sonoda replied as he slowly circled until his back was to Yue's. One hand reached into his coat and began to fish out a handful new rounds and fed them into the revolver. "Now what?"
"Now?" Yue replied. "Now we don't die."
The assassins struck in perfect unison, knives and swords gleaming in what dim light there still was. One came at Yue low while the other went high. Yue and Sonoda were forced apart as Yue had to sidestep even as she blocked a sword swing that would have taken her just above the knees, even as the other assassin sailed past her head and straight at Sonoda as the detective fell back a few steps before halting his attackers advance.
Sonoda was more prepared this time, and the assassin was forced to bring her sword back in order to not be skewered alive by the detective's borrowed blade. The pair fell back rather then press their attacks, one using sonoda's own blade as a launching board for her flip while her partner continued her roll past Yue. The assassins now stood back to back as Sonoda and Yue faced them from either side, their positions reversed from where they had been moments before.
There was a soft click from Sonoda's revolver as he aimed it one-handed at the nearest assassin. "You're under arrest."
The assassin simply tilted her head for an instant before both leapt back into the attack. A shot rang out only to glance harmlessly off a black blade as the the other spun around her sister, launching a flying kick that only found steel as Yue brought her lance down. Undisturbed, the assassin rolled back with Yue's guard and rolling over her own sister's back as she switched targets to Sonoda. Lacking a lance of his own the detective rolled to the side allowing the assassin to overreach, her recovery sending her rolling into a leap that took her into the bookcases. Behind them, electricity crackled as the remaining assailant was sent leaping back in mirror of her sister as Yue's attack cratered the floor.
Sonoda and Yue spun on their feet as they tried to track their respective targets, Paper flying everywhere as an onslaught of bullets, wind and lightning tore into the shelves. The assassins circled the small space before crossing paths, launching off the side of the shelves in a sudden change in direction. Sonoda found himself in front, ducking low as the first assassin skipped off the floor and straight at him while the second one went high and was met with Yue's lance. One hand alighted on the lance's tip as she pushed off, flipping over Yue's head and forcing Yue to turn on her feet to follow as her sister rolled to the side to dodge another of Sonoda's shots at near point-blank range, the Inspector trying to take advantage of their locked blades.
The assassin's melted back into the shadows, and Sonoda took the brief pause to catch his breath and turn to Yue. "So, now what?"
"Now they get desperate." Yue replied. "Think you can cover me for a few minutes?"
"Why?" Sonoda asked as he loaded his revolver again. "You have a plan?"
"I need time to cast this next spell." Yue replied. "Can you do it?"
"Cast a...." Sonoda sighed as he readied his weapons and turned to face the inky blackness that the assassins had disappeared into. "Right. Okay – hold off two killer ninja girls. No problem."
Yue watched him for a moment before nodding to herself and planting her feet. Sonoda took one last look over his shoulder as she planted her lance into the floor and started to chant. " For so Kratika Socratia..." The two assassin dropped down out of the shadows as Yue started, the first making a beeline for Sonoda while the second headed straight for Yue. Yue made no indication that she had even noticed, And Sonoda cursed as he moved to react. He slid himself in front of the second as he dodged the first, putting himself between them and Yue. "Hey! I was in line first." Sonoda pushed her back with his borrowed sword. "Want to fight? Fight me."
"Your death will be quick, mortal." The assassin taunted.
Sonoda grinned. "You haven't killed me yet." He lowered his sword and charged even as the second assassin leapt back to her feet, Sonoda taking advantage of a brief pause between sword clashes to crack off a pair of shots as he got too close to Yue.
"...ad decimum! Area Constet!" Yue continued to chant. "Intus se premant spiritus ad pressuram criticalem!" She broke her chanting for a moment as the wind around her picked up, forcing her to yell over its howling. "Sonoda! Try and keep them in one spot!"
"Should you be talking in the middle of your spell ritual thing?" Sonoda asked as he deflected another sword before ducking a dagger strike to his head.
"Just do it!" Yue yelled back. "And make it fast – I think I only have one shot at this."
"Shot at what!?" Sonoda yelled back before turning his attention back two the two women trying to kill him instead of the one that wasn't.
"Tribus, Duobus, Modo!" Yue continued to chant. "Sonoda, now!"
"Working on it!" He yelled back as he sidestepped another sword strike. They approached him from both sides now, and he was running out of steam and they knew it. He took one last look before he braced himself as they charged him.
"Now!" He yelled as he jumped, pouring every last dredge of his remaining energy into his legs. The two assassins skidded to a stop a moment before they collided with each other, watching for a moment as the detective lept and rolled to the side.
That brief moment was all that Yue needed.
"...fortissime emittam!!" Yue finished her chant as she threw one hand out in front of her at the pair. A stream of lightning that looked more akin to a bolt of plasma poured out of her palm, the beam diffusing to occupy nearly the entire width of the aisle as he bared down on the assassins.
Sonoda didn't get to see if it actually hit them, occupied as he was making sure that his corneas weren't burned out of his eye sockets. After a few moments he lowered his arm from his face and finally had a chance to survey the damage. "Holy-" There was a hole punched through at least three rows of bookcases, though hole was a bit of an understatement – he could have walked through them without ducking. He couldn't tell if the hole went any further since a fine cloud of incinerated books had turned into a dense cloud that killed visibility. "You were worried about them damaging the library?"
"I just wanted them out." Yue replied as she pulled her lance free. She managed one step forward before dropping to one knee.
"Woah." Sonoda quickly made his way to Yue's side. "You alright?"
"Just tired." Yue replied. "That spell isn't exactly my usual fare. Shame it wasn't as powerful as I was hoping."
Sonoda looked over her shoulder at where the blockade had been standing. The massive slab of stone was now blasted into rubble. "You know, I think that was sufficient."
Yue glanced over her shoulder and managed a small grin. "Heh. Guess my control wasn't as good as I thought. Well, at least we can get out now." Yue climbed back to her feet, staggering until Sonoda slipped an arm around her to keep her from toppling over.
"Slow down!" Sonoda demanded as he felt Yue lean into the support. "I don't know what you just did, but should you really be moving right now?"
Behind them, there was a heavy crash as one of the remains of a bookcase toppled over. From over its top, a black clad hand clawed its way out of the rubble. Sonoda leaned closer to Yue. "Think you can take them again?"
Yue shook her head. "I'm tapped. And I'm guessing you're running low on ammo."
"Alright then." Sonoda shifted until one of Yue's arms was over his shoulder. "Run and live it is." The pair staggered through the hole and into the aisle of books on the other side as the sound of shifting rubble echoed behind them.
"Wait." Yue ordered as she pulled her wand out from whatever pocket she had squirreled it away. "I need to seal the breach."
"No time!" Sonoda replied as he reached out and forced her arm down. "You said you were tapped out anyway. Plus, they put it up – they can probably take it down."
Yue looked at him for a moment before nodding. "Help me get my armor off while we move."
"Can we just leave it behind?" Sonoda asked even as he began to help remove her bracers. "And where did your lance go?"
"They'll go back by themselves." Yue replied as she pulled her helm off and dropped it to the ground. It began to dissolve away after a few steps. Her hair was matted with sweat and clung to the sides of her face. "Its something of a feature."
"Well," Sonoda said as he shrugged. "That's convenient."
"Quite." Yue replied. "Lets just hope we remember how to get out of here."
"Easy. Keep walking until you hit a wall." Sonoda replied. Next to him, there was a heavy thud as her breastplate clattered to the ground. "Then just follow the wall until you hit your exit. Piece of cake."
"And if we run into a dead end?" Yue asked.
Sonoda shrugged. "We get lost inside a library for all eternity?"
"Or we ask the ninja's how to get out." Yue suggested.
"Because they have been sooo helpful so far." Sonoda said sarcastically as he led them around a corner. "Come on – the left side looks closer." Sonoda risked another glance behind them. "Think you got at least one of them?"
"I really do hope so." Yue replied. With all of her armor gone, it was obvious that she was haggard. Her skin had lost a good deal of color, and Sonoda could feel that he was starting to lean on him more and more as they went. "We aren't in good shape to take on both of them again."
"We could take them if we didn't have to follow any rules." Sonoda replied with a shrug. "Or if you weren't having to worry about my squishy ass."
"You don't have any experience fighting ninja." Yue replied with a weak smile. "But you seem to be a quick study."
"Tell that to my boss." Sonoda replied. "So – that information you needed to look up here. You didn't need to actually do it here, did you?"
Yue shook her head. "I just needed a plausible reason I could have learned it. I wasn't expecting you to invite yourself to come along."
"Sorry." Sonoda said sheepishly. "So, how did you look it up?"
"Pactio." Yu replied.
"Pacti-what?" Sonoda asked.
"Its a magic artifact." Yue explained as they finally reached the far wall and took another left. "You get it by making a contract with a mage."
"So, what?" Sonoda asked. "I could make this contract thing with you and get some sort of power up?"
"Heh," Yue chuckled. "I couldn't set up a Pactio ritual at the moment if I wanted to – too drained." She turned and gave Sonoda a little smirk. "Besides – you have to seal it with a kiss."
Sonoda very quickly averted his gaze from the woman leaning against him. "Y-You're cute, but we've just met and you did sort of got me involved with killer ninja's."
"Do I know how to show a guy a good time or what?" Yue joked as the detoured around a bookcase.
"You know, my last girlfriend didn't cause collateral damage on our dates." Sonoda pointed out.
"Well, its a good thing we aren't dating then." Yue replied as she pointed to their right. "That way."
"Yeah, yeah...." Sonoda started down the aisle before there was a heavy crash somewhere behind them. "So, what if one of them does catch up with us?"
"You still have my sword?" Yue asked.
"Yeah...no." Sonoda replied.
Yue shrugged. "Okay – you shoot her. Repeatedly."
"Good plan." Sonoda replied as they started back down the aisle. "Simple, straight-forward, easy to remember. I like it. What happens when it doesn't work?"
"Run like hell." Yue replied without a hint of sarcasm.
"Even simpler." Sonoda said. "Always important for a fall-back plan."
The pair continued to stagger through the library, glancing back on occasion as they followed the wall. The staircase was finally in sight, appearing every now and again from behind the bookcases. "Those ominous footfalls sound different to you now," Sonoda asked. "Or is it just me?"
Yue shook her head. "No. They sound different. In fact, they sound like..."
"They're down a pair of legs." Sonoda said as he finished for her. "Guess you did manage to take one of them out."
"Would have preferred both." Yue replied. "Given how much I dumped into that spell."
"Always a pessimist." Sonoda rolled his eyes as they rounded another corner. "Look on the bright side – we reached the staircase." Yue looked up at the steep flight of stone steps as they approached. "Think you can make it?"
Yue replied by removing Sonoda's arm from around her and settling onto her own feet with only a slight wobble. "I think I can manage."
"Alright then." Sonoda pulled out his revolver and gave it a quick once over. "After you. Give me a shout once you reach the top. I really don't want to be down here too long."
Yue rolled her eyes as she started up the stairs. "My hero. Just don't die, okay?"
"Not planning too." Sonoda replied without taking his eyes from the aisle ahead of him. "Now move." The steady sound of footfalls behind him as Yue started up the stairs. "Easy, Sonoda." He muttered to himself. "Easy." Yeah, easy to say – his heartbeat was so loud in his ears he'd be lucky to hear a marching band trying to sneak up on him.
There was a heavy footfall straight ahead of him, and Sonoda had to fight the urge to simply fire blind. "Save your ammo, dumb ass." He was running low on bullets as it was – no point wasting them on terror-induced panic shots.
"Come on, already!" Sonoda shouted at seemingly nothing. "You want to kill me, here I am!"
"Not the strategy I would have used, Sonoda." Yue shouted from half-way up the steps.
"Not now Ayase!" Sonoda shouted back just before a shadowy figure staggered out of the shadows. Her sword was broken about half way up, and she was leaning heavily on one leg. "Wow." Sonoda said after a moment. "And I thought we looked bad."
"You will die for this!" the ninja shrieked before charging. No fancy acrobatics, no shadow magic, no crazy sword moves. Just a straight charge straight at Sonoda's heart.
Sonoda was already lining the shot up before she had finished her sentence. The gun cracked and the bullet hit a split second later, punching through her left shoulder with a spray of crimson. The injury, however, didn't seem to faze her as she just kept coming. "Sonofa-" Sonoda cursed as he took another shot, and then another. She still didn't slow down.
"Die!" She shouted as she drew her sword back and sprinted the last few yards.
Sonoda adjusted his aim. "You first."
The round punched through her leg a moment before she dropped her full weight onto it, and a sickening crack echoed through the room as the limb gave out. The momentum of her magically-powered charge sent her tumbling and skidding across the hard floor until she finally rolled to a stop a few steps in front of Sonoda.
He stepped forward and looked down at her. Her mask was missing large pieces, revealing patches of pale skin beneath. Her suit was ripped and stained with her own blood, especially around her now ruined knee. "How..." she managed to gasp between pained breathes. "How...is this..."
"First rule of a fight." Sonoda replied as he holstered his revolver. "Never assume you're going to win." A quick kick to the head and she went limp. Sonoda took a moment to lean over and check her pulse before rising back to his feet, turning around, and starting up the stair
Yue didn't say anything until he had caught up with her on the stairs. "Nice shot."
"Not really." Sonoda replied as he continued up the stairs. "I was aiming for her head."
DB_Explorer
Purveyor of alternate realities.
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
the books! THE POOR BOOKS!!! ;______;
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
And now for the awkward explanation to Sonoda about magic and the debriefing with the school officials.
Those Ninja are in for a lot of trouble when the library founds out they caused all this! Maybe.
Though I do wonder if this means both have been defeated then.
Though I do wonder if this means both have been defeated then.
DB_Explorer
Purveyor of alternate realities.
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
Or Yue offers her place while mentioning that she has some booze in one of her alchemy boxes.
DB_Explorer
Purveyor of alternate realities.
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Nodoka: *uses a key Yue gave her to bring donuts on coffee* I heard you had an incident in the... *sees Sonoda and Yue* ... oh my I'll... come back later *takes pictures*
Dragontrapper
Homeless Draconis
- Location
- A Tower in the middle of nowhere
behold - TEXT!! (also, I forgot to update index - fixing!)
-----
"Okay." Sonoda said as the pair slumped into their chairs. They had gotten as far as across the Library Island's bridge before giving up and slumping into seats in front of a cafe looking out onto the island. Neither had bothered to tell the waiter off, so now the pair of them had two small espressos sitting in front of them. "Can we talk about what the hell just happened?"
"We were attacked over the case." Yue summarized.
"I meant more on the fact that you are a freaking magical girl." Sonoda replied.
"I am not a magical girl." Yue shot back was a glare.
"You had a transformation sequence!" Sonoda replied in a burst of energy before slumping back onto the table. "Seriously, this town prepares you for a lot but this is on a whole different level."
"Well," Yue replied. "I can try and explain if you'd like."
"Don't you have some sort of law against that?" Sonoda asked.
Yue shrugged. "You found out for legitimate reasons. Plus, if I claim you as a contact in the Special District Office I can probably defend you knowing everything." She took a sip of her drink before continuing. "interested."
Sonoda stared at her for a moment before sighing. "Sure, why not – worst comes to worst, you'll just erase my memories anyway. So – what can you tell me?"
Yue started simple – basics of magic, who she used to work for, that sort of thing. Then she worked her way out to politics, the nature of Mundus Magicus, and history. It was an explanation that took quite a while, with several pauses along the way whenever she thought a waiter or pedestrian got too close. Then again, after the debacle in the library, neither was interested in staying on their feet.
"So," Sonoda said as she finished her explanation with a discussion of inter-world crime. "You think this guy is some sort of smuggler?"
"Maybe." Yue replied. "But something seems off. Smugglers don't usually kill people."
"Crime bosses do." Sonoda replied. "If only to make a point about failure or something."
"So, what did our grilled friend do to bring down his boss's wrath?" Yue asked.
"Well, whatever it is, they think we've caught on." Sonoda replied. "Given how hard they tried to kill us."
"Might be the magic guns you have in your lab." Yue suggested.
"...magic guns?" Sonoda replied, leveling a stare at Yue before, after a moment, his expression dropped. "Oh gods you're serious."
"Those things your lab tech was working with are a form of focus." Yue explained. "They convert magical energy into pure thermal and kinetic force – no fuss, no muss. Similar sort of technology was used for Mahorefest while I was still in school."
Sonoda blinked owlishly. "You mean that martian invasion thing? The one that you said was an actual martian invasion?"
"The same." Yue nodded before adding. "Though, we thought she was joking about the mars bit at the time. Can you blame us?"
"The time traveling mad scientist mage says she's from Mars." Sonoda deadpanned. "And that last bit is what breaks your suspension of disbelief?"
"I had seen the magic and time travel for myself." Yue replied. "Hadn't seen Mars yet."
"Mars." Sonoda said. "Which has an artificial world grafted onto it thats just out of phase or something."
"Though not quite as out of phase as before." Yue explained. "Think of it as different polarities at the same frequency. It makes travel between world much more straight forward for a lot of groups."
Sonoda stared at Yue again. "I was being sarcastic with that last one, you do realize?"
"Well, it was still a perfectly valid question." Yue ignored Sonoda's head hitting the table with a thud as she continued. "So, if we operate on the assumption that this has to do with those magic weapons, then we can work backward from there. We know that our victim was working with the smugglers, and that he did something to offend our suspect, who we assume was his employer. Any idea's on what that might be?"
"That report said that their contact had had them change where they were sending shipments to, right?" Sonoda said after a moment. "If I was some sort of magic crime boss, I'd be pretty pissed if one of my underlings was selling my goods on the side or something."
"So we work our way backwards." Yue suggested. "Start at the movers and back trace the supply route."
"Except that none of the people we have actually know the rest of the route." Sonoda pointed out. "They just picked up and moved between drop-offs."
"But the middle-men would have known." Yue replied as she leaned back in her chair. "They were in charge of setting the drops so they must have known at least some of the rest of the route."
"The only middleman we have is the roast in the morgue." Sonoda replied.
"Not quite." Yue replied with a small smile. "Remember the new guy they mentioned?"
"The guy with the face tattoos?" Sonoda said with a blink. "We don't even know where he is!"
"We can make a guess." Yue suggested. "He's probably as nervous about being caught by us as getting caught by our killer. I'd bet good money he's at least trying to keep tabs on us."
"You think?" Sonoda asked.
Yue shrugged. "If the first kill was supposed to be a message, then it would make sense he knows who's hunting him. If he knew enough about the smuggling route to be able to start stealing from it, then he was probably involved somehow."
"An inside job." Sonoda summarized.
"Exactly." Yue replied. "Which means that our killer probably knows who he is. I'd wager our tattooed man has also figured the same thing."
"So," Sonoda said as he finished the last of his coffee. "You think this other middleman started stealing from his boss with some help, and ran for it when the boss found out and roasted his partner?"
"Exactly." Yue replied. "And he can't get out of town without getting caught – the trains, bridges and magical gateways out are all easy to keep an eye on."
"So he's trying to stay low and he thinks we're hunting him." Sonoda said. "Great."
"On the other hand," Yue replied. "It's possible he's hunting us."
"So there is an off chance that he's within a thousand yards of us at any given moment." Sonoda said. "How do we find him."
"Easy." Yue replied as she stood from her seat. "We wait for him to come to us. In the mean time, we keep doing our job."
"Still means we need another lead." Sonoda replied as he fished a few bills from his pocket and dropped them onto the table. "That research get you anything?"
"Only that he was using artifacts to enhance his abilities." Yue explained. "That was how he could dodge my spells, and how he disappeared. It was also probably how he killed the victim."
"So that melted ruby glass at the scene was leftover from some sort of magic grenade." Sonoda said as he mulled over the new information. "Well, he has to be getting gear like that from somewhere."
"And my research told us where." Yue replied. "The old Ostian ruins."
"That crashed floating city?" Sonoda replied. "How on earth would he have gotten in there?"
"There's only one way I can think of," Yue replied. "But you aren't going to like it."
Fifteen minutes later, the two of them were standing in one of Mahora's iconic squares and craning their necks back to look up at their target of interest. "You're right." Sonoda said flatly. "I don't like it."
The massive canopy of the World Tree stretched out above them, Its gargantuan trunk casting a shadow across a couple of nearby blocks. A tree that massive could probably affect the local weather, and Yue idly noted she needed to ask a University Meteorology department about that when she had the chance. "The tunnels near its roots are the only possible route in and out of the town that our guy could possibly be using."
"Yeah, I'd agree." Sonoda replied. "If you hadn't explicitly told me about all the monsters down there waiting to eat people."
"Technically only the dragon tried to eat us." Yue corrected. "They could be tapping into the Tree for power."
"Not the point." Sonoda replied. "The point is that by your own word, the Tree only works occasionally. So, why would he be down there?"
"Most likely? He found a route in the tunnels leading out of the city or a way to covertly access the Gate system." Yue replied. "We just have to figure out if that's the case."
"So you want to go running around in the undercity tunnels." Sonoda said with a sigh. "Dammit. I hate it down there."
"Why?" Yue asked as she turned to the Inspector with a grin. "Scared of the dark?"
"Its wet and dark and a gorram maze." Sonoda replied. "I'd rather run around the Paris catacombs blindfolded. At least everything down there is already dead. Doesn't help that you told me there's a dragon somewhere down there."
"So we bring some lights and avoid the dragon." Yue said with a shrug. "Also, I can get us a map."
Sonoda raised an eyebrow. "How?" Yue replied by holding up her pactio card. "Right." Sonoda let out another sigh. "alright – lead the way."
As the pair started across the square, Sonoda took a quick glance around before leaning closer to Yue. "See him yet?" he whispered.
"No." Yue whispered back. "Remember – guy with tattoo's on his face."
"Haven't seen him." Sonoda replied. "You sure he'd be reckless enough to let us see him?"
"He will if he thinks we're looking the other way." Yue replied. "For now, just keep an eye out. If we get close to something, he might panic and make a mistake."
"Something like what?" Sonoda hissed back, but Yue ignored him and continued to lead the way across the square. Sonoda could only grumble as he followed after her, and after a short walk the pair took a turn down a small alley between a bookstore and a coffee shop. "Now what?"
"Now," Yue replied. "I can check the map." She pulled out the card and held it in front of her. "Adeat."
The card glowed and an instant later her book materialized and settled into her waiting outstretched hand. As soon as she cracked it open, the collection of holographic-like screen materialized around her, glowing faintly blue in the darkness of the alley.
"Nice piece of kit." Sonoda said as he poked at one of the screens and watched his finger pass through it like it wasn't even there. "Can it play tetris?"
"No." Yue replied. "But it can get us any piece of documentation on the tunnels if it exists in the magical world." The screen's exploded with a collection of maps and charts as soon as the words had finished leaving her mouth. She smiled as she saw one map in particular. "It seems Negi uploaded his father's map to somewhere – how convenient."
"Negi – that was your english teacher who got you involved in all of this, right?" Sonoda asked. "The genius ten year old?"
"Yes." Yue said as he scanned through the other maps. "Though he's not ten now, obviously."
"I'm surprised he's not thirty given how much you said he used that time-bottle thing." Sonoda replied. "So, McDowell...she's an actual vampire?"
"The most powerful on record." Yue said without looking up from her work. "Why?"
"Might explain a few things." Sonoda replied with a shrug. "I imagine she still needs to feed at least occasionally?"
"I think she might get it from blood banks?" Yue replied, tapping a finger on her cheek as she considered it. "You know, I never really asked her about it."
"Let me get this straight." Sonoda leaned around Yue so he could actually look her in the face as she worked. "You know an actual, honest-to-god vampire, who is a self-admitted villain, and you didn't ask her about where she gets her meals?"
"Pretty much." Yue replied before her display beeped. "Ah, here we are. Looks like the ISSDA did a ground-piercing MIDAR survey about six months ago."
"What's MIDAR?" Sonoda asked.
"Magic Interference, Detection and Ranging." Yue explained. "Lets them get an accurate 3D map even with all the magical interference due to what's down there."
Sonoda just stared at her for a beat. "...okay, now you're just making shit up."
Yue dismissed the displays with a wave of her hand, plucking her pactio card out of her air and returning it to her coat pocket. "Come on. There's an entrance three blocks to the south. The walk underground is a long longer than it is on the surface due to the meandering, but it shouldn't be too bad." She fell back a little until she was in stride with Sonoda. See anything?"
"Would you stop asking?" Sonoda shot back. "I thought mages were supposed to be subtle or something. Trust me – if I see him, you'll be the first to know."
Reluctantly, Yue went back to leading the way to the entrance to the underground. The route took them out of the alley and back into the main square, once again staying the the edges as they avoided the worst of the crowds. As they worked their way through the square, Yue felt a hand on her shoulder as Sonoda stepped up behind her. "I think I spotted him."
Yue resisted the urge to simply start looking around, instead whispering back. "Where?"
"About twenty meters back and to our right." Sonoda replied. "He keeps ducking behind other people and looks flighty as hell."
"We should grab him before he runs." Yue suggested.
Sonoda shook his head. "No dice – we'd never be able to catch up to him. Better bet is to string him along and grab him when he have a better chance."
"A trap it is then." Yue replied. "There should be a good spot once we get closer to the entrance." The two continued on, taking a left onto a small side-street. On such a sparsely populated street, their tail had a much harder time staying hidden, but he managed – ducking between building corners and stacks of crates left out on the back road. No doubt the opposite sides of these buildings were eye-catching storefronts, but this street led you to the back-of-house.
A block and a half down the street and the pair came to a stop before a large pair of metal doors that were built into the side of the street. "Okay," Yue announced. "According to that map, this lift should drop us straight into an unfinished basement. Half these storefronts are built on the remains of old buildings – from there, we can get into the underground proper."
"Great." Sonoda replied. "One problem – these lifts are one way. They only operate from the inside."
Yue replied by pulling out her wand and muttering a quick spell. The door's swung open with a heavy crash. Yue knelt down and hit a switch that brought the lift to life with a shutter and a screech. "Some of these old lifts also have emergency access options. Usually you need a fire department key to get the doors open, but when all you have is a wand..."
"Everything looks like a nail." Sonoda completed. "So, how deep is this exactly?"
Yue shrugged. "About five stories. This is one of the shallower sections."
Sonoda stared at her for a minute before staring down at the ground between his feet. "Tell me again how half this town hasn't collapsed into its own underground?"
"Robust engineering." Yue replied with a shrug. "And maybe a little magic."
"Wonderful." Sonoda replied as his shoulder's slumped. "Now I'm gonna be worried about my apartment building disappearing into a sinkhole or something. Thank you for that."
"No problem." Yue said with a small shrug and a smirk as she gestured to the lift. "Please. After you."
Sonoda leaned over the edge and stared down at the aged metal platform that was the lift sitting a good meter or so below. "Yeah...no. You weigh less. And you can fly. So, ladies first."
Yue muttered something about chicken before hopping down and landing on the platform with a thud. "See?" Yue jumped up and down on the platform. "Perfectly stable. Now can we get going please?"
"Fine, fine..." Sonoda grumbled before he jumped on as well, landing with a slightly heavier thud. After a moment, the lift groaned back to life and the lift began its slow decent, the sound petering out until silence returned to the alley.
A moment later, their jumpy tail poked out of his hiding spot before slowly beginning to edge his way over to the still open lift and peering down into the shadows below. When the lift was raised, it would have risen until it was just below street level. Now however it was gone, leaving the short ladder and small control box hanging in mid-air, along with the small maintenance space just below the street stuffed full of mechanical equipment. "oh no." He muttered. "nononono..."
"NOW!"
The tail gave out a shriek as an arm reached out from inside the shaft, grabbing him by his shirt collar before he could recoil back and dragging him down and hurling him down toward the center of the shaft. He let out another shriek that was cut off as he felt the wind get knocked out of him as his back collided with something hard.
He was nearly hyperventilating as he cracked his eyes open and looked below him, seeing the shimmering semi-transparent floor he was now pinned against before moving upward to the two figures standing in the middle of elevator shaft. His eyes drifted forward to the Inspector who had him pinned to the barrier with one arm. He was grinning. The mage next to him was also grinning. For some reason her grin scared him a lot more than his did.
"So," Sonoda started as he hit the lift button with his other hand, the mechanism groaning to life again as the platform further below began its climb back upward. "What brings you around here?"
The tail sputtered and just stared at the pair with wide eyes. Yue just let out a sigh. "Okay, lets start with something simple. You have a name?"
"Y-Yes!" he finally managed. "I-I h-have a name."
"Care to share it?" Yue asked."
"M-Meegeren." He stammered. "My name is Meegeren."
"Okay, Meegeren." Meegeren's eyes darted to the Inspector has he spoke. "What did you do to piss off your boss so badly? You steal some of his toys?"
"H-He wasn't supposed to find out!" Meegeren sputtered. "How did you?"
"We got some of your wares." Sonoda replied. "One of the guys that came with it mentioned you. And your roasted friend had that nifty little handkerchief with that funny little mark."
"And we put one and one together." Yue replied. "So, who was buying them?"
"And where can we find your boss?" Sonoda added. Before Meegeren could reply the lift crashed to the top below them, dispelling the translucent shield and dropping all of them onto the steel platform.
All three of them paused as the steel beneath them groaned, and the trio stared down at the aged, rusted, rickety lift before, slowly, looking up at each other. "Sonofa-"
Sonoda was cut off as the lift gave out beneath them and plunged downward.
All three of them screamed, Sonoda yelling a steady string of curses in Japanese while Yue opted for Latin and a smattering of Greek. Mr. Meegeren, meanwhile, opted for a nearly continuous high-pitched scream.
Part of Yue's brain – the one not currently occupied by her flight-or-flight response – noted that they seemed to be descending at less than terminal velocity, which was good for their chances of survival once they reached the bottom – which should be momentarily.
Surprisingly, the lift began to slow as they neared the end, sparks shooting from the guide rails before the lift finally came to a crashing, bone-jarring, but thankfully survivable stop at the bottom that left all of them sprawling.
"Okay." Sonoda groaned. "That sucked. Why didn't you magic something?"
"My mistake." Yue replied as she waited for the world to stop spinning. "I was busy being terrified. Where'd our guy go?"
"Uh...Oh." Sonoda replied as he looked down. "I landed on him." Their guy was currently splayed out and quite effectively pinned by the fact that the Inspector was sitting on him.
"Well," Yue replied as she got to her feet with only some minor wobbling, "get off him and make sure he's still breathing."
Sonoda complied, pulling himself off the poor bloke before roughly pulling him up to his feet by his collar. Meegeren gave a little squeak of surprise, flailing for a moment before he was set back down on his feet. The inspector turned back to Yue. "He's good."
"Ugh..." Meegeren groaned. "My head..."
"Okay." Sonoda corrected himself. "Mostly good."
"That's good enough." Yue finished dusting herself off before fishing her wand out of her pocket. A quick muttered spell, and the tip of the focus lit up with a pale blue glow. Yue's visage must have been at least somewhat unsettling, half-shadowed under the eerie light of the wand, since Meegeren gulped nervously as he watched her approach. "So," She asked. "Whats down here?"
"I-I don't know!" he stammered in a panic. "I've never been down here before!"
Yue studied him for a moment, trying to see if he was lying, but that didn't seem to be the case. "Well then, I suggest you stick with us if you don't want to run afoul of some of the nasties running around under her."
"You said there was a dragon down here, right?" Sonoda asked nonchalantly as he checked his revolver. "I would love to see a dragon...assuming it wouldn't eat us."
"I'm more worried about the golems, to be honest." Yue replied. In front of her, Meegeren was losing what little color he had. "The dragon isn't as mobile usually."
"Y-Your bluffing." Meegeren stammered. "There are no monsters down here. I would have heard about it. All those stories are just..."
"Things you heard about." Yue replied.
That made Meegeren draw up short. He froze for a moment before what little color was still in his face fled for the hills. "Please!" He pleaded, dropping to his knees in front of Yue. "I don't wanna die!"
"Oh, grow up." Sonoda cut him off and pulled him back to his feet. "If you cared about your skin that much, you shouldn't have pissed off the warlock you were working for."
"We never did learn where they were getting moved to after you took them." Yue commented as she walked past Sonoda and started examining the tunnel ahead of them. It was roughly cut rock, more akin to a mining shaft then the highly finished areas she had seen in her youth. "So, who was your buyer?"
"He never gave me a name." Meegeren replied as Sonoda walked him forward, keeping one arm pinned behind his back as they followed Yue. "Hell, I never even saw his face. He contacted me via the mail."
"This side or the other side?" Yue asked.
"The other." Meegeren replied. "Megloabresian post. No return address, and nothing I tried could backtrace it."
"Well, they're clever." Yue replied as she paused just long enough to indicate to the pair behind her an over-sized stone sticking out of the ground. "So this letter told you to deliver them around on this side?"
"Right." Meegeren nodded as he stepped over the rock. "I'd drop the goods where the letter told me to, and the next day all that would be there would be the payment and a letter detailing the next order."
"How'd he pay?" Sonoda asked.
Meegeren shrugged nervously. "All sorts of ways – Japanese Yen, gold dust, Ostian coin – one time he paid in diamonds."
"Interesting." Yue said as she mulled it over in her head. "So was it just the weapons?"
"Weapons, foci, potions ingredients." Meegeren listed off the items. "Anything we were smuggling, he wanted some of."
"Sounds like your mystery buyer was stockpiling for something." Yue commented.
"Stockpiling for what?" Sonoda asked.
"Maybe nothing." Yue said with a shrug. "Maybe he's just paranoid."
"Paranoid and rich." Sonoda added. "I mean, who pays with diamonds?"
"Somebody who doesn't want anything to be traceable back to them." Yue replied. "Which could mean anything."
"Well, thats just what we need." Sonoda grumbled. "More freaking mysteries."
"Well, lets focus for now on the immediate one." Yue replied as they rounded a corner. At the far end a glowing oval of light indicated the exit. "Oh, good – we're almost to one of the more built-up areas."
"What does that even mean, anyway?" Sonoda asked as they started up the gentle slope toward the end of the tunnel. "This is all just a bunch of tunnels and..." He trailed off as he stepped out of the tunnel and into the cavern. "...woah."
The chamber was a good ten, maybe fifteen stories tall – the tunnel behind them must have slanted downward for a while before ending. The cavern extended far enough to the left and right that the floor vanished out of sight. Ahead of them the far side of the cavern as even further away, much of the far side lost to view behind columns and larger, temple-like structures. All of the buildings looked Egyptian, or maybe Greek. Large carved stone columns and plinths. One of the further structures looked like it might have been based on the pantheon. "This is has all been down here for...how long?"
Yue shrugged. "Ages. I'm not familiar with this part of the ruins, but from what I understand mages have been building under around around the world tree for a very, very long time. The ruins in here likely date to around the greek period, just going by the designs."
"So..." Sonoda asked as they started forward. There were plants growing down here, watered by the spring that flowed through the cavern and lit from above by lights that Sonoda couldn't identify. "...The greek's visited Japan?"
"Mage's didn't travel by the usual means." Yue replied as she climbed over a fallen column. "Most likely? They accidentally ended up drawn in by the World Tree during one of its cycles and were stranded here. Most of the ruins down here are either from the precursors to the Kanto Magic Association or from Europeans after trade started. Puts something of a bound on how old the ruins can generally be."
"But why build down here?" Sonoda asked. "Trying to hide?"
"Trying to get closer." Yue replied as she pointed out a small stone shrine they were walking past. It was small only compared to the massive temple just across the cavern. It resembled a stone mausoleum with most of the walls removed. In the center of it, a massive root emerged out of the ground, arcing over like the back hump of a sea serpent before disappearing back into the ground. "They're after the tree."
"They worshipped the tree?" Meegeren asked as they walked past the small shrine, curiosity temporarily making him forget to be terrified.
"Some worshipped the tree," Yue replied. "Others were trying to tap into it as a power source."
"So this is where worlds collide..." Sonoda replied. "Well, one of the places. Do you know which way you're going?"
"Not a clue." Yue replied honestly. "The more...I guess you could call them 'well trafficked' tunnels are roughly this way. Once we reach an area I'm more familiar with we'll be able to make more progress."
"What if the guy we're looking for finds us first?" Sonoda asked. Ahead of him, Yue stopped as his words registered before she turned to look at him. Sonoda arced an eyebrow. "Did you really not think of that?"
"I was assuming that he was depending on obscurity for his security." Yue replied before turning to Meegeren. "Where did most of the hand-offs with your boss occur?"
"N-Near the waterfront!" he replied hastily.
"Probably using the drainage system for his main routes then." Sonoda suggested. "They'd be better mapped then the mage tunnels."
"They also feed into the same tunnels the Martians used a long time back." Yue added.
"You know," Sonoda sighed. "The fact that you aren't joking is sort of indicative of how crazy my life is going."
"You don't want crazy?" Yue replied as she led them toward a nearby ruin. "Move out of Mahora."
"Just trying to make conversation." Sonoda replied with a shrug. "You know where we're going yet?"
Yue nodded. "We're heading for the nearest wall. From there, We can grab another tunnel and work our way toward the drainage system."
"So," Sonoda asked. "Why are we hiding."
"Because there's three guys loitering around near that temple." Yue replied calmly.
"What!?" Sonoda clambered up the side of the ruins to where Yue was peering over the edge of the ruins. About a hundred yards from their current location, at the base of a temple that look like a miniature pantheon, if it had been kicked over by an over-sized preschooler and now laid in a collection of pieces that the trio of guards were loitering around.
The guards were nothing special in and of themselves. They looked a lot like the mooks that Sonoda had back at the station in lock-up, looking more like street thugs then guards for some sort of mage crime boss. "They don't look very heavily armed." Sonoda commented. "I see maybe a couple of knives."
"I don't see any foci either." Yue replied. "Looks like our guy's been hiring non-mages."
"Still," Sonoda said as he continued to watch the three. "You'd think they'd have more people down here..."
"They do."
Sonoda and Yue spun around just in time to see the two mooks close on them.
Then, blackness.
-----
"Okay." Sonoda said as the pair slumped into their chairs. They had gotten as far as across the Library Island's bridge before giving up and slumping into seats in front of a cafe looking out onto the island. Neither had bothered to tell the waiter off, so now the pair of them had two small espressos sitting in front of them. "Can we talk about what the hell just happened?"
"We were attacked over the case." Yue summarized.
"I meant more on the fact that you are a freaking magical girl." Sonoda replied.
"I am not a magical girl." Yue shot back was a glare.
"You had a transformation sequence!" Sonoda replied in a burst of energy before slumping back onto the table. "Seriously, this town prepares you for a lot but this is on a whole different level."
"Well," Yue replied. "I can try and explain if you'd like."
"Don't you have some sort of law against that?" Sonoda asked.
Yue shrugged. "You found out for legitimate reasons. Plus, if I claim you as a contact in the Special District Office I can probably defend you knowing everything." She took a sip of her drink before continuing. "interested."
Sonoda stared at her for a moment before sighing. "Sure, why not – worst comes to worst, you'll just erase my memories anyway. So – what can you tell me?"
Yue started simple – basics of magic, who she used to work for, that sort of thing. Then she worked her way out to politics, the nature of Mundus Magicus, and history. It was an explanation that took quite a while, with several pauses along the way whenever she thought a waiter or pedestrian got too close. Then again, after the debacle in the library, neither was interested in staying on their feet.
"So," Sonoda said as she finished her explanation with a discussion of inter-world crime. "You think this guy is some sort of smuggler?"
"Maybe." Yue replied. "But something seems off. Smugglers don't usually kill people."
"Crime bosses do." Sonoda replied. "If only to make a point about failure or something."
"So, what did our grilled friend do to bring down his boss's wrath?" Yue asked.
"Well, whatever it is, they think we've caught on." Sonoda replied. "Given how hard they tried to kill us."
"Might be the magic guns you have in your lab." Yue suggested.
"...magic guns?" Sonoda replied, leveling a stare at Yue before, after a moment, his expression dropped. "Oh gods you're serious."
"Those things your lab tech was working with are a form of focus." Yue explained. "They convert magical energy into pure thermal and kinetic force – no fuss, no muss. Similar sort of technology was used for Mahorefest while I was still in school."
Sonoda blinked owlishly. "You mean that martian invasion thing? The one that you said was an actual martian invasion?"
"The same." Yue nodded before adding. "Though, we thought she was joking about the mars bit at the time. Can you blame us?"
"The time traveling mad scientist mage says she's from Mars." Sonoda deadpanned. "And that last bit is what breaks your suspension of disbelief?"
"I had seen the magic and time travel for myself." Yue replied. "Hadn't seen Mars yet."
"Mars." Sonoda said. "Which has an artificial world grafted onto it thats just out of phase or something."
"Though not quite as out of phase as before." Yue explained. "Think of it as different polarities at the same frequency. It makes travel between world much more straight forward for a lot of groups."
Sonoda stared at Yue again. "I was being sarcastic with that last one, you do realize?"
"Well, it was still a perfectly valid question." Yue ignored Sonoda's head hitting the table with a thud as she continued. "So, if we operate on the assumption that this has to do with those magic weapons, then we can work backward from there. We know that our victim was working with the smugglers, and that he did something to offend our suspect, who we assume was his employer. Any idea's on what that might be?"
"That report said that their contact had had them change where they were sending shipments to, right?" Sonoda said after a moment. "If I was some sort of magic crime boss, I'd be pretty pissed if one of my underlings was selling my goods on the side or something."
"So we work our way backwards." Yue suggested. "Start at the movers and back trace the supply route."
"Except that none of the people we have actually know the rest of the route." Sonoda pointed out. "They just picked up and moved between drop-offs."
"But the middle-men would have known." Yue replied as she leaned back in her chair. "They were in charge of setting the drops so they must have known at least some of the rest of the route."
"The only middleman we have is the roast in the morgue." Sonoda replied.
"Not quite." Yue replied with a small smile. "Remember the new guy they mentioned?"
"The guy with the face tattoos?" Sonoda said with a blink. "We don't even know where he is!"
"We can make a guess." Yue suggested. "He's probably as nervous about being caught by us as getting caught by our killer. I'd bet good money he's at least trying to keep tabs on us."
"You think?" Sonoda asked.
Yue shrugged. "If the first kill was supposed to be a message, then it would make sense he knows who's hunting him. If he knew enough about the smuggling route to be able to start stealing from it, then he was probably involved somehow."
"An inside job." Sonoda summarized.
"Exactly." Yue replied. "Which means that our killer probably knows who he is. I'd wager our tattooed man has also figured the same thing."
"So," Sonoda said as he finished the last of his coffee. "You think this other middleman started stealing from his boss with some help, and ran for it when the boss found out and roasted his partner?"
"Exactly." Yue replied. "And he can't get out of town without getting caught – the trains, bridges and magical gateways out are all easy to keep an eye on."
"So he's trying to stay low and he thinks we're hunting him." Sonoda said. "Great."
"On the other hand," Yue replied. "It's possible he's hunting us."
"So there is an off chance that he's within a thousand yards of us at any given moment." Sonoda said. "How do we find him."
"Easy." Yue replied as she stood from her seat. "We wait for him to come to us. In the mean time, we keep doing our job."
"Still means we need another lead." Sonoda replied as he fished a few bills from his pocket and dropped them onto the table. "That research get you anything?"
"Only that he was using artifacts to enhance his abilities." Yue explained. "That was how he could dodge my spells, and how he disappeared. It was also probably how he killed the victim."
"So that melted ruby glass at the scene was leftover from some sort of magic grenade." Sonoda said as he mulled over the new information. "Well, he has to be getting gear like that from somewhere."
"And my research told us where." Yue replied. "The old Ostian ruins."
"That crashed floating city?" Sonoda replied. "How on earth would he have gotten in there?"
"There's only one way I can think of," Yue replied. "But you aren't going to like it."
Fifteen minutes later, the two of them were standing in one of Mahora's iconic squares and craning their necks back to look up at their target of interest. "You're right." Sonoda said flatly. "I don't like it."
The massive canopy of the World Tree stretched out above them, Its gargantuan trunk casting a shadow across a couple of nearby blocks. A tree that massive could probably affect the local weather, and Yue idly noted she needed to ask a University Meteorology department about that when she had the chance. "The tunnels near its roots are the only possible route in and out of the town that our guy could possibly be using."
"Yeah, I'd agree." Sonoda replied. "If you hadn't explicitly told me about all the monsters down there waiting to eat people."
"Technically only the dragon tried to eat us." Yue corrected. "They could be tapping into the Tree for power."
"Not the point." Sonoda replied. "The point is that by your own word, the Tree only works occasionally. So, why would he be down there?"
"Most likely? He found a route in the tunnels leading out of the city or a way to covertly access the Gate system." Yue replied. "We just have to figure out if that's the case."
"So you want to go running around in the undercity tunnels." Sonoda said with a sigh. "Dammit. I hate it down there."
"Why?" Yue asked as she turned to the Inspector with a grin. "Scared of the dark?"
"Its wet and dark and a gorram maze." Sonoda replied. "I'd rather run around the Paris catacombs blindfolded. At least everything down there is already dead. Doesn't help that you told me there's a dragon somewhere down there."
"So we bring some lights and avoid the dragon." Yue said with a shrug. "Also, I can get us a map."
Sonoda raised an eyebrow. "How?" Yue replied by holding up her pactio card. "Right." Sonoda let out another sigh. "alright – lead the way."
As the pair started across the square, Sonoda took a quick glance around before leaning closer to Yue. "See him yet?" he whispered.
"No." Yue whispered back. "Remember – guy with tattoo's on his face."
"Haven't seen him." Sonoda replied. "You sure he'd be reckless enough to let us see him?"
"He will if he thinks we're looking the other way." Yue replied. "For now, just keep an eye out. If we get close to something, he might panic and make a mistake."
"Something like what?" Sonoda hissed back, but Yue ignored him and continued to lead the way across the square. Sonoda could only grumble as he followed after her, and after a short walk the pair took a turn down a small alley between a bookstore and a coffee shop. "Now what?"
"Now," Yue replied. "I can check the map." She pulled out the card and held it in front of her. "Adeat."
The card glowed and an instant later her book materialized and settled into her waiting outstretched hand. As soon as she cracked it open, the collection of holographic-like screen materialized around her, glowing faintly blue in the darkness of the alley.
"Nice piece of kit." Sonoda said as he poked at one of the screens and watched his finger pass through it like it wasn't even there. "Can it play tetris?"
"No." Yue replied. "But it can get us any piece of documentation on the tunnels if it exists in the magical world." The screen's exploded with a collection of maps and charts as soon as the words had finished leaving her mouth. She smiled as she saw one map in particular. "It seems Negi uploaded his father's map to somewhere – how convenient."
"Negi – that was your english teacher who got you involved in all of this, right?" Sonoda asked. "The genius ten year old?"
"Yes." Yue said as he scanned through the other maps. "Though he's not ten now, obviously."
"I'm surprised he's not thirty given how much you said he used that time-bottle thing." Sonoda replied. "So, McDowell...she's an actual vampire?"
"The most powerful on record." Yue said without looking up from her work. "Why?"
"Might explain a few things." Sonoda replied with a shrug. "I imagine she still needs to feed at least occasionally?"
"I think she might get it from blood banks?" Yue replied, tapping a finger on her cheek as she considered it. "You know, I never really asked her about it."
"Let me get this straight." Sonoda leaned around Yue so he could actually look her in the face as she worked. "You know an actual, honest-to-god vampire, who is a self-admitted villain, and you didn't ask her about where she gets her meals?"
"Pretty much." Yue replied before her display beeped. "Ah, here we are. Looks like the ISSDA did a ground-piercing MIDAR survey about six months ago."
"What's MIDAR?" Sonoda asked.
"Magic Interference, Detection and Ranging." Yue explained. "Lets them get an accurate 3D map even with all the magical interference due to what's down there."
Sonoda just stared at her for a beat. "...okay, now you're just making shit up."
Yue dismissed the displays with a wave of her hand, plucking her pactio card out of her air and returning it to her coat pocket. "Come on. There's an entrance three blocks to the south. The walk underground is a long longer than it is on the surface due to the meandering, but it shouldn't be too bad." She fell back a little until she was in stride with Sonoda. See anything?"
"Would you stop asking?" Sonoda shot back. "I thought mages were supposed to be subtle or something. Trust me – if I see him, you'll be the first to know."
Reluctantly, Yue went back to leading the way to the entrance to the underground. The route took them out of the alley and back into the main square, once again staying the the edges as they avoided the worst of the crowds. As they worked their way through the square, Yue felt a hand on her shoulder as Sonoda stepped up behind her. "I think I spotted him."
Yue resisted the urge to simply start looking around, instead whispering back. "Where?"
"About twenty meters back and to our right." Sonoda replied. "He keeps ducking behind other people and looks flighty as hell."
"We should grab him before he runs." Yue suggested.
Sonoda shook his head. "No dice – we'd never be able to catch up to him. Better bet is to string him along and grab him when he have a better chance."
"A trap it is then." Yue replied. "There should be a good spot once we get closer to the entrance." The two continued on, taking a left onto a small side-street. On such a sparsely populated street, their tail had a much harder time staying hidden, but he managed – ducking between building corners and stacks of crates left out on the back road. No doubt the opposite sides of these buildings were eye-catching storefronts, but this street led you to the back-of-house.
A block and a half down the street and the pair came to a stop before a large pair of metal doors that were built into the side of the street. "Okay," Yue announced. "According to that map, this lift should drop us straight into an unfinished basement. Half these storefronts are built on the remains of old buildings – from there, we can get into the underground proper."
"Great." Sonoda replied. "One problem – these lifts are one way. They only operate from the inside."
Yue replied by pulling out her wand and muttering a quick spell. The door's swung open with a heavy crash. Yue knelt down and hit a switch that brought the lift to life with a shutter and a screech. "Some of these old lifts also have emergency access options. Usually you need a fire department key to get the doors open, but when all you have is a wand..."
"Everything looks like a nail." Sonoda completed. "So, how deep is this exactly?"
Yue shrugged. "About five stories. This is one of the shallower sections."
Sonoda stared at her for a minute before staring down at the ground between his feet. "Tell me again how half this town hasn't collapsed into its own underground?"
"Robust engineering." Yue replied with a shrug. "And maybe a little magic."
"Wonderful." Sonoda replied as his shoulder's slumped. "Now I'm gonna be worried about my apartment building disappearing into a sinkhole or something. Thank you for that."
"No problem." Yue said with a small shrug and a smirk as she gestured to the lift. "Please. After you."
Sonoda leaned over the edge and stared down at the aged metal platform that was the lift sitting a good meter or so below. "Yeah...no. You weigh less. And you can fly. So, ladies first."
Yue muttered something about chicken before hopping down and landing on the platform with a thud. "See?" Yue jumped up and down on the platform. "Perfectly stable. Now can we get going please?"
"Fine, fine..." Sonoda grumbled before he jumped on as well, landing with a slightly heavier thud. After a moment, the lift groaned back to life and the lift began its slow decent, the sound petering out until silence returned to the alley.
A moment later, their jumpy tail poked out of his hiding spot before slowly beginning to edge his way over to the still open lift and peering down into the shadows below. When the lift was raised, it would have risen until it was just below street level. Now however it was gone, leaving the short ladder and small control box hanging in mid-air, along with the small maintenance space just below the street stuffed full of mechanical equipment. "oh no." He muttered. "nononono..."
"NOW!"
The tail gave out a shriek as an arm reached out from inside the shaft, grabbing him by his shirt collar before he could recoil back and dragging him down and hurling him down toward the center of the shaft. He let out another shriek that was cut off as he felt the wind get knocked out of him as his back collided with something hard.
He was nearly hyperventilating as he cracked his eyes open and looked below him, seeing the shimmering semi-transparent floor he was now pinned against before moving upward to the two figures standing in the middle of elevator shaft. His eyes drifted forward to the Inspector who had him pinned to the barrier with one arm. He was grinning. The mage next to him was also grinning. For some reason her grin scared him a lot more than his did.
"So," Sonoda started as he hit the lift button with his other hand, the mechanism groaning to life again as the platform further below began its climb back upward. "What brings you around here?"
The tail sputtered and just stared at the pair with wide eyes. Yue just let out a sigh. "Okay, lets start with something simple. You have a name?"
"Y-Yes!" he finally managed. "I-I h-have a name."
"Care to share it?" Yue asked."
"M-Meegeren." He stammered. "My name is Meegeren."
"Okay, Meegeren." Meegeren's eyes darted to the Inspector has he spoke. "What did you do to piss off your boss so badly? You steal some of his toys?"
"H-He wasn't supposed to find out!" Meegeren sputtered. "How did you?"
"We got some of your wares." Sonoda replied. "One of the guys that came with it mentioned you. And your roasted friend had that nifty little handkerchief with that funny little mark."
"And we put one and one together." Yue replied. "So, who was buying them?"
"And where can we find your boss?" Sonoda added. Before Meegeren could reply the lift crashed to the top below them, dispelling the translucent shield and dropping all of them onto the steel platform.
All three of them paused as the steel beneath them groaned, and the trio stared down at the aged, rusted, rickety lift before, slowly, looking up at each other. "Sonofa-"
Sonoda was cut off as the lift gave out beneath them and plunged downward.
All three of them screamed, Sonoda yelling a steady string of curses in Japanese while Yue opted for Latin and a smattering of Greek. Mr. Meegeren, meanwhile, opted for a nearly continuous high-pitched scream.
Part of Yue's brain – the one not currently occupied by her flight-or-flight response – noted that they seemed to be descending at less than terminal velocity, which was good for their chances of survival once they reached the bottom – which should be momentarily.
Surprisingly, the lift began to slow as they neared the end, sparks shooting from the guide rails before the lift finally came to a crashing, bone-jarring, but thankfully survivable stop at the bottom that left all of them sprawling.
"Okay." Sonoda groaned. "That sucked. Why didn't you magic something?"
"My mistake." Yue replied as she waited for the world to stop spinning. "I was busy being terrified. Where'd our guy go?"
"Uh...Oh." Sonoda replied as he looked down. "I landed on him." Their guy was currently splayed out and quite effectively pinned by the fact that the Inspector was sitting on him.
"Well," Yue replied as she got to her feet with only some minor wobbling, "get off him and make sure he's still breathing."
Sonoda complied, pulling himself off the poor bloke before roughly pulling him up to his feet by his collar. Meegeren gave a little squeak of surprise, flailing for a moment before he was set back down on his feet. The inspector turned back to Yue. "He's good."
"Ugh..." Meegeren groaned. "My head..."
"Okay." Sonoda corrected himself. "Mostly good."
"That's good enough." Yue finished dusting herself off before fishing her wand out of her pocket. A quick muttered spell, and the tip of the focus lit up with a pale blue glow. Yue's visage must have been at least somewhat unsettling, half-shadowed under the eerie light of the wand, since Meegeren gulped nervously as he watched her approach. "So," She asked. "Whats down here?"
"I-I don't know!" he stammered in a panic. "I've never been down here before!"
Yue studied him for a moment, trying to see if he was lying, but that didn't seem to be the case. "Well then, I suggest you stick with us if you don't want to run afoul of some of the nasties running around under her."
"You said there was a dragon down here, right?" Sonoda asked nonchalantly as he checked his revolver. "I would love to see a dragon...assuming it wouldn't eat us."
"I'm more worried about the golems, to be honest." Yue replied. In front of her, Meegeren was losing what little color he had. "The dragon isn't as mobile usually."
"Y-Your bluffing." Meegeren stammered. "There are no monsters down here. I would have heard about it. All those stories are just..."
"Things you heard about." Yue replied.
That made Meegeren draw up short. He froze for a moment before what little color was still in his face fled for the hills. "Please!" He pleaded, dropping to his knees in front of Yue. "I don't wanna die!"
"Oh, grow up." Sonoda cut him off and pulled him back to his feet. "If you cared about your skin that much, you shouldn't have pissed off the warlock you were working for."
"We never did learn where they were getting moved to after you took them." Yue commented as she walked past Sonoda and started examining the tunnel ahead of them. It was roughly cut rock, more akin to a mining shaft then the highly finished areas she had seen in her youth. "So, who was your buyer?"
"He never gave me a name." Meegeren replied as Sonoda walked him forward, keeping one arm pinned behind his back as they followed Yue. "Hell, I never even saw his face. He contacted me via the mail."
"This side or the other side?" Yue asked.
"The other." Meegeren replied. "Megloabresian post. No return address, and nothing I tried could backtrace it."
"Well, they're clever." Yue replied as she paused just long enough to indicate to the pair behind her an over-sized stone sticking out of the ground. "So this letter told you to deliver them around on this side?"
"Right." Meegeren nodded as he stepped over the rock. "I'd drop the goods where the letter told me to, and the next day all that would be there would be the payment and a letter detailing the next order."
"How'd he pay?" Sonoda asked.
Meegeren shrugged nervously. "All sorts of ways – Japanese Yen, gold dust, Ostian coin – one time he paid in diamonds."
"Interesting." Yue said as she mulled it over in her head. "So was it just the weapons?"
"Weapons, foci, potions ingredients." Meegeren listed off the items. "Anything we were smuggling, he wanted some of."
"Sounds like your mystery buyer was stockpiling for something." Yue commented.
"Stockpiling for what?" Sonoda asked.
"Maybe nothing." Yue said with a shrug. "Maybe he's just paranoid."
"Paranoid and rich." Sonoda added. "I mean, who pays with diamonds?"
"Somebody who doesn't want anything to be traceable back to them." Yue replied. "Which could mean anything."
"Well, thats just what we need." Sonoda grumbled. "More freaking mysteries."
"Well, lets focus for now on the immediate one." Yue replied as they rounded a corner. At the far end a glowing oval of light indicated the exit. "Oh, good – we're almost to one of the more built-up areas."
"What does that even mean, anyway?" Sonoda asked as they started up the gentle slope toward the end of the tunnel. "This is all just a bunch of tunnels and..." He trailed off as he stepped out of the tunnel and into the cavern. "...woah."
The chamber was a good ten, maybe fifteen stories tall – the tunnel behind them must have slanted downward for a while before ending. The cavern extended far enough to the left and right that the floor vanished out of sight. Ahead of them the far side of the cavern as even further away, much of the far side lost to view behind columns and larger, temple-like structures. All of the buildings looked Egyptian, or maybe Greek. Large carved stone columns and plinths. One of the further structures looked like it might have been based on the pantheon. "This is has all been down here for...how long?"
Yue shrugged. "Ages. I'm not familiar with this part of the ruins, but from what I understand mages have been building under around around the world tree for a very, very long time. The ruins in here likely date to around the greek period, just going by the designs."
"So..." Sonoda asked as they started forward. There were plants growing down here, watered by the spring that flowed through the cavern and lit from above by lights that Sonoda couldn't identify. "...The greek's visited Japan?"
"Mage's didn't travel by the usual means." Yue replied as she climbed over a fallen column. "Most likely? They accidentally ended up drawn in by the World Tree during one of its cycles and were stranded here. Most of the ruins down here are either from the precursors to the Kanto Magic Association or from Europeans after trade started. Puts something of a bound on how old the ruins can generally be."
"But why build down here?" Sonoda asked. "Trying to hide?"
"Trying to get closer." Yue replied as she pointed out a small stone shrine they were walking past. It was small only compared to the massive temple just across the cavern. It resembled a stone mausoleum with most of the walls removed. In the center of it, a massive root emerged out of the ground, arcing over like the back hump of a sea serpent before disappearing back into the ground. "They're after the tree."
"They worshipped the tree?" Meegeren asked as they walked past the small shrine, curiosity temporarily making him forget to be terrified.
"Some worshipped the tree," Yue replied. "Others were trying to tap into it as a power source."
"So this is where worlds collide..." Sonoda replied. "Well, one of the places. Do you know which way you're going?"
"Not a clue." Yue replied honestly. "The more...I guess you could call them 'well trafficked' tunnels are roughly this way. Once we reach an area I'm more familiar with we'll be able to make more progress."
"What if the guy we're looking for finds us first?" Sonoda asked. Ahead of him, Yue stopped as his words registered before she turned to look at him. Sonoda arced an eyebrow. "Did you really not think of that?"
"I was assuming that he was depending on obscurity for his security." Yue replied before turning to Meegeren. "Where did most of the hand-offs with your boss occur?"
"N-Near the waterfront!" he replied hastily.
"Probably using the drainage system for his main routes then." Sonoda suggested. "They'd be better mapped then the mage tunnels."
"They also feed into the same tunnels the Martians used a long time back." Yue added.
"You know," Sonoda sighed. "The fact that you aren't joking is sort of indicative of how crazy my life is going."
"You don't want crazy?" Yue replied as she led them toward a nearby ruin. "Move out of Mahora."
"Just trying to make conversation." Sonoda replied with a shrug. "You know where we're going yet?"
Yue nodded. "We're heading for the nearest wall. From there, We can grab another tunnel and work our way toward the drainage system."
"So," Sonoda asked. "Why are we hiding."
"Because there's three guys loitering around near that temple." Yue replied calmly.
"What!?" Sonoda clambered up the side of the ruins to where Yue was peering over the edge of the ruins. About a hundred yards from their current location, at the base of a temple that look like a miniature pantheon, if it had been kicked over by an over-sized preschooler and now laid in a collection of pieces that the trio of guards were loitering around.
The guards were nothing special in and of themselves. They looked a lot like the mooks that Sonoda had back at the station in lock-up, looking more like street thugs then guards for some sort of mage crime boss. "They don't look very heavily armed." Sonoda commented. "I see maybe a couple of knives."
"I don't see any foci either." Yue replied. "Looks like our guy's been hiring non-mages."
"Still," Sonoda said as he continued to watch the three. "You'd think they'd have more people down here..."
"They do."
Sonoda and Yue spun around just in time to see the two mooks close on them.
Then, blackness.