by N X Hunter
Chapter 17
Once again, Kitsuna felt her wand in her hand - it had been in her purse, but the purse was gone now - and she was spinning in the air, her vision unclear. She knew as she felt it though, and from Rayna's mildly impressed expression when she was done, that this transformation was better. She looked down at her feet to see what the longer boots, which reached over her knees looked like, and yet was astonished to see that the floor wasn't the cracked, ashy earth she had seen before, but a bizarre mosaic, made up of tiny little tiles of all different deep, rich colors, like wine red and aubergine. Her mouth dropped open and she felt her hair, longer, now, swishing around her shoulders as she looked to take in the rest of this new environment.
They were inside some kind of structure this time. She couldn't see the sky, but the ceiling was incredibly high, like being inside one of those old cathedrals they have in Eastern Europe - things she had only seen in VR and in books. There were little balconies protruding out from the deep red walls, and heavy velvet drapes in those same dark jewel shades as the floor were blowing around in a wind that she couldn't feel.
"What is this place? Where is the desert and the trees and those horrible planets?"
"Oh! Didn't you realize? The domains are like the monsters. They're not real places, or, they are, but we just see crazy different stuff. That last one was a big one, this looks like it's just this one building. Should make it easier to find Courtney, though sometimes with these more limited domain spaces it can be surprisingly tricky to find the core because--"
Kitsuna cut her off with a cry of frightened surprise.
From the balconies and from behind the curtains big, multicolored birds were starting to appear - glowing in neon hues that looked wrong against the dark, lavish tones of the place. The birds were not beautiful - their bald, stringy necks and beady black eyes giving them the appearance of vultures, and their bright coloring speaking more of toxic things and danger than of tropical flowers.
"Hmmm, not seen these before. Well, let's arm up. I'm sure Courts will find us, she must have ended up in one of those side rooms or something..."
Kitsuna hadn't even noticed the small openings that presumably lead to other chambers within this strange bird temple, or whatever the fuck it was meant to be - they looked too tiny to walk through when the scale of the walls and the height of the room were affecting her perception.
"Ruby sword!"
"Platinum gun!"
They both shouted in unison, and for some reason Kitsuna was compelled to look first at Rayna's weapon, even though her own felt different in her hands to how it had before. Between Rayna, Lee and Soren, they had actually come up with a very good artistic impression of the ruby sword, but Kitsuna felt a little sad that neither of them would ever get to see it for real. Even an artist with Lee's eye couldn't possibly have captured the sheer sharpness of the blade - it made Kitsuna afraid just looking at it, creating imaginings of being sliced so cleanly - too cleanly, like a paper cut that had the power to decapitate you. The glow from the massive rubies in the sword's elaborate hilt could only have been magical, and the metal too had a red aura to it, despite being almost white.
So that's a mahou shoujo's weapon at full power... It definitely looks like the stuff of legend. But mine is getting stronger, too.
The platinum gun had changed form completely this time when she'd called upon it. Instead of the pretty but feeble (for a gun) antique pistol she'd conjured the first time, she now felt the weight and robustness of a chunky handgun. It was still the color of platinum, with a magenta grip, but there was nothing girly about its shape and structure - nothing ornamental or inefficient. It felt like a proper hand cannon, a machine designed to punch out rounds and extinguish lives with extreme prejudice. Well, lives or whatever else it was these creatures had.
Rayna looked curiously at the handgun.
"Well, go on, shoot it! I've never had a team mate with a gun before, I want to see what kind of possibilities this shit is opening up for new strategies and fighting styles!"
She was grinning. It was hard not to get swept up in the enthusiasm standing next to Rayna. Kitsuna began to feel like they were just here to play, like the weird toxic-waste-colored birds weren't so unsettling and the shadowy, voluminous cathedral was just a cool set.
She took aim at one of the vulture-like creatures, which was sitting on the railings of a balcony and staring at the two girls, and with a satisfying squeeze of the trigger, blasted out an ultra-fast, pink trailed bullet, which hit it between the eyes with all the precision of a master marksman and caused it to instantly leave this world in a cloud of sickly yellow smoke.
But that was when chaos began.
The rest of the birds let out hideous screeches and there was a loud, brutal clanging coming from high above - like church bells, but out of time, out of tune, creaking painfully as, wherever they were, they swung and swung and rang and rang.
"Shoot more! Just keep shooting! I think maybe the bell sound might be where the core is, I'm going up!" Rayna yelled above the deafening noise of hellish carrion birds and otherworldy tolling bells.
Up? How?
But she didn't watch Rayna to find out, she took aim at the gangs of birds forming on the balconies, realizing that this gun had a much faster fire rate, and that her powers seemed to mean she always hit her target without having to really steady her aim or use her eyes. Which was good, as she had never shot a gun (or even held one) in the real world, and was basing everything she knew about gun fighting on video games.
There were lots of the birds, but for some reason they were just there, watching, letting her shoot them. Eventually she'd be able to kill them all if she had to, and while she was doing that, Rayna could look for the core. It seemed like a fairly easy fight, and finally Kitsuna started to believe what Rayna had said about a lot of the encounters not really being that difficult to beat, let alone survive.
But as she noticed, while shifting her aim to a balcony on the other side of the room, that Rayna was no longer by her side, the birds all at once changed their behavior. Rayna was running fast, and as she left the ground to literally start running up the wall in circles - a feat that in any other moment Kitsuna would have been desperate to try herself to see if her transformation could pull it off - the birds all rose into the air, flying up and up, to the tallest heights of the cathedral. The ceiling was so far above that they just looked like a mass of glowing, radioactive-looking stuff, and this finally gave some visual perspective on just how high up Rayna was going to have to run, if the bells and the core were up there somewhere.
They must be guarding it. I'll take out as many as I can from down here and hopefully Rayna can cut through any that she needs to with her sword once she gets closer. Where the actual fuck is Courtney though? Is she in trouble in another room? If she is, then we just have to try and end things here as fast as possible - it'll be the best way to save her, like they saved me before.
She realized a fraction of a second later that she'd made a big error in judgment, though.
When the mob of birds reached the top of the cathedral, they changed their movement, several of them at a time projecting themselves from the ceiling into a fast, deep dive, which came accompanied by a new and more spine-chilling screech. Kitsuna kept on firing into their midst, but within seconds it became clear that she was their target. She made a dash across the floor, causing the first few diving birds to smash into it, breaking open their skulls and cracking their necks into new and thoroughly disgusting shapes. They didn't vanish in smoke like the ones Kitsuna had killed with her bullets though, which meant they were still alive. She didn't want to look at their acid colored plumage, now matted with dark red blood the same color as the velvet curtains, or their mangled heads. She fired shot after shot into the injured birds, making them vanish, zig-zagging around the area as she did, causing the birds still diving toward her to meet their own end there on the tiled ground. She did not want to find out what being hit fu
ll force by a diving vulture would feel like, let alone being hit by hundreds of them one by one, healing just in time for each new one to destroy her body again.
She had to make huge leaps and acrobatic rolls to get to a new position and still have time to shoot the birds that had crashed into her previous spot, before the next ones managed to change their trajectory to target where she had moved to. There was no way she could have done this using her normal world body, and it was exhilarating to get such a hint at what her transformed form might be able to do. She didn't feel even remotely tired, her body and mind fizzing with energy and the need to move and fight. It was challenging, but everything worked. She lost track of time, as down there on the ground the smoke of dead birds hung in a strange rainbow, punctuated by the pink trails of the magic bullets that had brought them their end. How many had she killed? How high up was Rayna now? What was Courtney facing, wherever she was? She had fleeting moments of wondering about such things, but mostly she just kept of moving and gunning, moving and gunning, until a roll across the tiled floor suddenly failed, and she found herself on her ass under a sky where clouds were parting to reveal the sun up above.
"Well, it wasn't easy to find, I had to go through this hatch in the ceiling up to the roof, find the belltower, and then the core was inside the biggest bell. Stopping it moving was the hardest part, had to jump onto it and... Say, did you see Courtney in there?"
Rayna was standing on the roof of the student accommodation building hopping from one foot to the other where the adrenaline from the storm hadn't fully worn off yet.
Kitsuna climbed to her feet, feeling slow and clunky now in her usual real world body. Their transformations had ended with the storm domain.
"I didn't, no, though I didn't have a chance to look for her, I was shooting those things the whole time."
"I didn't have to fight a single one of them. It's weird, though, right? Illaria and James thought they were lured to you before because you went in feeling... whatever like, dark stuff. But this time your transformation was pretty decent - still on the rookie end, it's gonna get way better - but you looked like a proper mahou shoujo, you know? And you weren't especially freaked out, were you? You almost looked like you were having fun before they all charged you."
"Actually it really wasn't that bad, I found a pattern of moving that made them crash into the ground instead of hitting me and then I just finished them off with my gun. Sure, I'd have been stuck there doing that forever if you hadn't taken out the core, because they were keeping me working, but I wasn't feeling hopeless like before, even the noise from the bells and their screeching didn't do any more than annoy me, the sounds from the creatures in the first domain properly edged away my sanity. I just kinda got on with killing them and trusted you to find the core, so I was, I guess, fine."
"That's the thing, my part in it was easy enough too, but only because I was trusting you to keep the monsters busy. It actually worked out pretty well for us, I just don't get why they still focused on you. It made no sense for them to do that when I was the one threatening the core, but it's like you somehow aggro them and they ignore everything else. Normally, with just two of us, it's a long and hard fight, dealing with monsters just everywhere, it is hard to form any kind of plan as there are just so many of them and everything is so chaotic. The night you got here and passed out, me and Courts fought through waves and waves of them for what was honestly probably days, before we eventually reached the core. If they hadn't left me completely unhindered to go and search for the bells, we would have had a much different experience in there. Not complaining, but, it's weird. If it isn't your emotions drawing them to you after all, what is it? And can we rely on them to always do it, base strategies around it, or is there something about the way you are now that is causing it?"
"It beats me. I guess we could ask Illaria again but she only had that one theory, and it was the same as James's. It might be something we can't figure out until we have more data..."
"Also, if they were just targeting you, where was Courtney? I assumed she was fighting in some other area of the cathedral, but what was keeping her there, if the creatures all just wanted to hurl themselves at you?"
"I guess we won't know that until we talk to her."
Chapter 18
"I didn't want to say it before, but is there any chance Courtney actually wasn't there in the storm domain?" Kitsuna asked, seeing Rayna's concerned frown as her phone announced that Courtney's device was still unreachable. The evening sun was already drying the puddles of rain on the rooftop.
"Noooo, I mean, unless there is something really fucked up going on with the domains that has never happened before, she'd have ended up there no matter where she was or what was going on with her. Even if you're in a coma, you end up there, and your transformation kicks in and heals you - it happened to a girl in Switzerland once, according to the Calibre Academy intranet."
"But, James said that the lab where you all made me transform for the first time is insulated in a way that would stop you ending up in the domain - it's just illegal to actually use it that way. Is there any way she could have been there? That would stop her phone working, too, wouldn't it?"
"Actually there are two places with that kind of insulation on the Academy grounds, but she wouldn't be in either one of them on her own, and anybody with her would have a duty to make her leave as soon as a storm was about to hit. The security on those areas is super hi-tech and designed to make sure mahou shoujo don't end up in one alone and miss a fight, whether by accident or through trying to avoid one."
Kitsuna thought back to what James had said. She couldn't see any way Courtney could have used the room to avoid fighting if what he and Rayna had told her was true. But also, why would Courtney even take the risk, let alone have someone else who was with her risk a life sentence? She was an experienced mahou shoujo and nobody had mentioned her being afraid of fighting before.
Even I wouldn't take that risk or make James do it, and I was fucking terrified and new.
"Then there are only two possibilities. Either she was there, and it's just a coincidence that her phone isn't working and neither of us saw her, despite the fact the domain was small and all the monsters seemed to be attacking just me, or..."
"Or what? It has to be that."
"Or, the other thing you said. Something weird going on with the domains that means they are working differently to normal. I mean, it's not like I fully know how they normally work anyway, seeing as I've only been in two, but we already saw some things being different to what you're used to, right? All the monsters targeting one person? So, what if that's not the only thing changing? What if that isn't even anything to do with me, and is affecting other teams too - just a change in the way the creatures and domains are behaving across the board?"
"Well, I guess, but they've always been the same, even in Illaria's time as a mahou shoujo, which was like a hundred years ago. Even the records we have from way far back like, centuries ago, when the rules were made, don't ever mention the domains and monsters acting any other way to what I've seen."
Kitsuna bit her lip, thinking.
"Time is different in our world though, isn't it? Who is to say that all those centuries to our kind weren't millions of years or like, 20 seconds to them. Maybe something just changed for no reason at all, or maybe their goals changed, we don't even know what they actually want, do we?"
Rayna looked thoughtful and a bit distressed, as the Volocopter on the roof decided that the storm had fully passed and lifted off to return to shuttling nobody from here to the Academy.
Rayna’s phone, still in her hand, suddenly lit up, and began playing an aggressive rap song. Kitsuna looked at her hopefully, but she shook her head. It wasn't Courtney.
"Hey Soren," she said, this time putting the phone to her ear instead of leaving it on loudspeaker. Kitsuna wondered if it was just through habit that she liked to talk more privately with her brother, or whether she particularly didn't
want her to hear what he might say - perhaps sparing her twin's embarrassment if he said anything about Kitsuna without knowing she could hear.
"What the fuck? OK we'll go straight there. Can you tell Lee... I don't know, can you figure that part out? Just, anything so he doesn't suspect anything is up, yeah? Take him to one of those college bars where they never check ID or something if you have to, just kinda, keep him happy."
She was pacing around the rooftop and moving her free hand expressively as she spoke, and although Kitsuna could only hear one side of the conversation she could tell they weren't going to be going to the store for tequila and back home to see Soren's tattoo just yet...
Rayna said goodbye and thrust the phone back into the pocket of her red leather jacket in frustration.
"What is it?"
"Well, we've solved the little mystery of where Courtney was. No changes to the monsters, you were way off. She's in jail," Rayna said, speaking through gritted teeth, her eyes narrow with irritation.
"What the fuck? Jail? Why?"
Rayna sighed wearily, shaking her head fast as if trying to shake away a stress headache.
"I don't know. James called Soren and told him to get in contact with us as soon as he could when the storm ended. He's at the Academy trying to get them to let him speak to her."
"If she's in jail why is he at the Academy?"
"The jail, our jail, is on the Calibre Academy grounds, underneath the west wing. I don't know how much James told you but we kind of deal with our own crimes in our own way. The jail is where people who are at risk of leaking anything about us to the public are kept indefinitely, along with any mahou shoujo who've gone against the rules. When I said there was more than one place at the college with insulation from the storm domains, that's the other one. If it didn't have that, mahou shoujo who were incarcerated would still end up in the domains, where they could potentially harm their former team mates. So that's why Courtney didn't appear. Anyway, Soren is gonna take care of Lee, we gotta get going as soon as the Volocopter comes back."