Chapter 0.4

With each snap, each prospective recruit that failed Reiko’s test blinked out of the training facility.

“Please pardon the theatricality of it,” Reiko chuckled when she saw the horrified looks of the remaining candidates. “I really can’t help myself. I’ve simply sent them upstairs. You are all perfectly safe, I assure you, though the teleportation magic may feel a little… ticklish at first.”

One by one, Reiko witnessed uninspired after uninspired attempts to scratch her protective magic. Everyone seemed convinced of the same unimaginative idea, that surely the next spell, if made larger, grander, and more powerful than the last, would be enough to overpower her defenses.

Several of the interviewees prematurely resigned over this very fallacy, knowing that they could not conjure a spell more potent than the ones that had come before.

What were the academies teaching students these days, Reiko wondered. What sort of novel magical research could one possibly accomplish if sheer force and magnitude were the only tools at their disposal?

And so, before she knew it, almost everyone had been ejected from the training grounds.

Only three other individuals remained.

The first, a young man with tousled black hair and a long, egg white overcoat pushed himself off the wall.

“Guess it’s my turn,” he sighed and stretched his arms. “Finally.”

Mamoru Fujimoto, the second dossier that Kazuo had floated to her. Mamoru possessed mediocre grades from a third rate academy in Yokohama, but his admissions record suggested that he could have picked any of the premium institutes in the greater Tokyo area and been accepted on a generous scholarship.

“Sharpshooter with a personality,” read the personal note Kazuo had left behind on Mamoru’s profile.

“What the fuck does that even mean?” Reiko murmured.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Nakamura,” Mamoru raised his hand. “Before I take my turn, I’d like to draft and sign a waiver, please.”

Reiko blinked at him.

“A waiver?” she asked.

“Yes, a waiver.”

“What for?”

“To absolve me of any responsibility,” Mamoru said, “in case you die.”

At the threat, Reiko howled with mirth.

“Interesting, kid,” she smirked. “Where do you get your arrogance from?”

“Where do you get yours?” Mamoru crossed his arms. “Surely, you don’t think a basic ward is going to fend off anyone who actually knows what they’re doing? This is the kind of interview that gets people like yourself killed.”

“Is that so? Fine,” Reiko grinned. “I’ll give you something even better than a waiver. Incantation. Contract.”

A slip of paper materialized from outside the boundaries of Reiko’s ward. On it, words began to scrawl across the page.

“I hereby assert,” Reiko recited, “that should you, Mamoru Fujimoto, kill me, Reiko Nakamura, during the course of this exam, Mamoru Fujimoto is entitled to full clemency under the law. In addition, any residual assets in Mrs. Nakamura’s name, her pension plan, and any payments from the activation of her government benefits shall be administered to accounts in Mr. Fujimoto’s name.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Mamoru scowled.

“It’s a magic contract, the most binding force there is in this world,” Reiko shrugged. “Or are you no longer certain you have what it takes to kill me?”

“Fuck off,” Mamoru snapped. “Don’t blame me when I retire early off of your life insurance policy. Incantation.”

Mamoru stretched out his right arm. Burgeoning strokes of lightning brewed in the palm of his hand and ricocheted around a mass of gray, amorphous mist.

“Contender,” he incanted.

That word gave shape to the shapeless. From that pulsing, chaotic energy came a solid blue steel frame, a sleek, straight barrel, and a grooved walnut grip that fit perfectly between Mamoru’s fingers.

“A weapon made from pure imaginarium?” Reiko mused. “That’s rather rare.”

Mamoru didn’t reply. He leveled the pistol at Reiko and fired.

Unlike the flashy showmanship of his predecessors, Mamoru’s weapon did not release an exhaustive and wasteful load of energy. Instead, a single bullet, whose tracer glistened with a trail of vivid amber, slammed into Reiko’s ward.

Her shield ignited with violent, glaring red flashes. The geometric sigils that had been circumnavigating the ward buckled, then fragmented into splintered lines. The bullet drilled into the ward at the point of contact, while a shower of sparks, like the pyrotechnics of combusting fireworks, sprayed into the air.

“... The bullet’s still viable. Its Existence Formula must be quite sophisticated,” Reiko murmured, then smiled at her opponent. “But Mamoru, there’s just one tiny problem with your admirable efforts. See? I’m not dead yet.”

From Mamoru’s dumbfounded expression, Reiko could tell that the kid had expected the first shot to cleanly penetrate the ward.

“I’m not finished,” Mamoru snarled and extended his other arm.

“Python!”

A second weapon, this time a silver, six chambered revolver, dropped into Mamoru’s left hand. In rapid succession, he emptied every cartridge with a click and bang, and each tracer arced towards Reiko in a constellation of spectacular hues.

Viridian and gold and indigo coils snaked around her ward, sweeping every layered fractal off its surface. The edges of the ward frayed, and a final drilling effort by all seven separate objects pushed and split the surface apart.

But then, there came a deep groan and a sequence of high frequency, cacophonous crackling. The ward’s outer shell fell away, but a residual energy from its destruction threw each of Mamoru’s bullets into the air and sent them cratering into the roof. They fell, along with a battery of debris, and hit the floor with reverberating metallic clinks.

The dust cleared, and Mamoru watched Reiko emerge unscathed. The ward he believed he had destroyed crackled and shimmered, but remained intact, as if it had only shed its molted skin.

“Excellent work, kid,” Reiko clapped her hands.

“You pass.”

With a begrudging grunt, Mamoru retired to his original spot by the elevator, a rather indignant and disappointed expression plastered across his face.

Then the second individual remaining, Miyuki Kobayashi, stepped forward.

Unlike Mamoru, Miyuki was purportedly a city girl and spent her years studying magic theory in metropolitan Tokyo, but her profile mentioned that she had returned to Sapporo recently to volunteer at a local dojo. Reiko surveyed the saturated pink frills dancing all over Miyuki’s skirt and found the story hard to believe.

Miyuki Kobayashi, Kazuo had written in her dossier. Possesses a mean right hook and a hell of a brain.

“Again, what is he talking about?” Reiko muttered.

“Excuse me, Captain Nakamura?” Miyuki raised her hand. “I have a question.”

“Like I said,” Reiko sighed, “this isn’t a classroom, Mrs. Kobayashi. Speak your mind.”

“Will my exam be judged on the condition of your current ward?” Miyuki asked. “It’s been damaged by the previous candidate.”

“Hmm,” Reiko thought aloud. “Is that a problem, Mrs. Kobayashi?”

“No,” Miyuki shook her head. “I just wished to know the parameters of the test.”

Miyuki Kobayashi stretched out her hands and drew in a deep breath through her mouth. In a set of motions uncharacteristic for someone dressed for ballet, she shuffled her feet from side to side and bent her knees to lower her center of gravity.

“Those are the parameters,” Reiko said. “You may start–”

Miyuki vanished like a wisp of smoke–

“–when ready?”

–and reappeared before Reiko with an unblinking predator’s gaze.

To a normal human eye, that was what it would have appeared like, watching motion blur and two distant key frames smashed together in realtime.

But Reiko spied the physical enchantments that activated beneath Miyuki’s shoes before she dashed, the wards she used to reinforce her bones to brace them from snapping during acceleration, and the assortment of gleaming sigils barreling straight at her from the knuckles on Miyuki’s right fingerless glove.

Oh. I see. A mean right hook.

When Miyuki’s fist connected with Reiko’s ward, it simply shattered. A shockwave rattled the room. It carried in the air a reverberating, thrumming pulse, not unlike a throbbing heartbeat. The ward’s azure frame fractured into a mosaic of crystalline shards, and each shard in turn crumbled into nothing.

Behind her, Mamoru’s face contorted in disbelief. The third and final candidate, a young woman who covered her face with an olive green hoodie, remained silent with her eyes closed.

“How long,” Reiko said. “How long did it take you to analyze the ward’s Existence Formula?”

The knuckles on Miyuki’s fingerless gloves contained muted gemstones. They each absorbed the sigils floating above her hand until they began to glow. Miyuki lowered her stance and exhaled a long breath.

“When you first showed it,” she replied. “It’s a variant of the Galbraith sequence. Tenth volume, third chapter.”

“Quite so,” Reiko smiled. “You pass as well.”

Miyuki blushed, bowed her head, and skipped back to her earlier spot. Mamoru glared at her with bullets in his eyes.

“And then there was one,” Reiko stared at the last candidate and twirled her hands to reconjure her ward. “There we go. Are you ready?”

Fujiko Kazama.

That was her name.

The final dossier was undoubtedly the most baffling of the three. There was very little information about Fujiko on the page. She had grown up in a welfare facility outside Fukuoka and had graduated from Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University with middling grades and a spotty absentee record. The last name, Kazama, ostensibly belonged to her adoptive parents, but the names printed in the family registries had been fabricated.

And if that was not strange enough, Kazuo had left Reiko with his most cryptic note yet.

She has those eyes, Fujiko Kazama.

Fujiko approached the center of the training grounds with her hands folded inside her hoodie pockets, her face pensive, her eyes still closed.

What eyes, Reiko thought.

To answer her question, Fujiko opened one of them.

A wheel of exuberant mauve encircled an ivory white pupil. Wisps of imaginarium emerged from behind her eyelid like fireflies drifting out of a lantern ajar, and settled like glitter on her thin brow.

Above Reiko, Elio’s viridescent visage flickered. Its dimensions at the periphery unraveled into translucent patches as if flaking off of an old painting. Behind Fujiko’s eyes, Reiko gleaned a trail of old photographs spiraling down a winding glass staircase.

Three friends at a bar.

A ritual at midnight.

A black, withering flower carved into her body.

Reiko thought she had burned those pictures, all of them. She had seen them incinerated in her dreams. They were the first memories to go when she offered her possessions to the flames.

“This imaginarium…” Reiko whispered. “It’s just like…”

Fujiko’s lips parted. From between them came just one word. It was spoken with gentle dignity, like a rite performed at the pyre before the body is turned to ash.

“Disappear.”