Chapter 4.4

Reiko watched as a familiar, unnatural storm swirled over Castle Gramarye.

Seeing it reminded Reiko again of that inauspicious night.

Natsuko lay against the wall. The murder weapon was nowhere to be found, and the incision point that had painted the wall with her blood had been sealed close, suggesting magic.

But what mage could have bested Natsuko in combat?

No one, not even an Egregore. This, Reiko believed with all her heart.

Castle Gramarye had not yet arrived, but its imaginarium, like detritus, washed upon the city and lingered all around her.

From where Reiko stood that night, muddled by her own grief, one intractable thought emerged above all others.

If I ascend now, I can save her.

That same desperate drive raged inside her now.

“Kazuo,” she spoke into her radio. “It’s beginning. We have to move in.”

A pause.

“Kazuo!”

“I know,” Kazuo’s stiff voice replied. After another pause, “You’re cleared to go.”

Reiko heels dug into the rooftop. Ringlets ignited beneath her feet and she launched herself into the air with a round of concussive bursts.

“Reiko,” came Kanna’s voice, “I’m close to cutting a deal with the government, but they could use some convincing. Since you’re going to cause one anyway, might I ask that you cause a massive mess while you’re up there?”

“A mess?”

“A massive one. You mages are good at doing things like that, right?”

“You don’t already have enough property damage claims on your hands?”

“Samukawa Group has promised to insure damages up to a half a trillion yen,” Kanna replied. “I need something that’ll kick reality into these fossils, that in this magical world, this country must find a place for itself, carved out of its strength alone.”

“I’ll try,” Reiko whispered, “but the safety of my two juniors come first.”
Reiko landed on polished rock. The path leading to the interior of Castle Gramarye was marked by decaying structures, but the road itself was constructed immaculately from unblemished lime and cobble.

Lady Baba Yaga’s three escorts blinked behind her.

“I assume our collaboration ends if I were to fight your lady?” Reiko asked.

Maria Akhmatova shook her head.

“We would not stop you,” she said. “Before the lady gave her Permission, she asked us to intervene on her behalf.”

“Finally, a chance to get back at that precocious child,” Baba Yaga’s secretary rolled her neck.

“Mind your manners, Natalia,” Maria frowned.

“Captain Reiko Nakamura!” Director Tanaka Arataki’s voice thundered over the clamoring bell towers. “Welcome to Castle Gramarye.”

“Didn’t take you for the Egregore’s butler, Arataki,” Reiko muttered.

Reiko took off, using the light show below the clocktower, gleaming like a sheet of plasma, as her compass. The director was bound to stall, and if he had anything real to say, he could tell Reiko when they stood face to face.

“Are you looking for our candidates?” Arataki asked. “They’re ascending as we speak. I’m sorry, but I cannot let you interrupt Japan’s finest hour.”

An arrow, wreathed in golden lights, pierced Reiko from behind and exploded, sending her hurdling into the nearest dilapidated building. More arrows rained on her from every vantage point among the surrounding ruins. The stone foundations beneath her crumbled. The half exposed roof collapsed on her from above.

A thin red ray burst from a piece of fallen stone, followed by dozens more that carved out rubble and splintered wood. Reiko pulled herself out of the wreckage.

Her eyes scanned the road ahead. Commission Mages positioned themselves in every crevice along the road, barricaded behind potent wards and the natural landscape. But their stations revealed the obvious way forward, a winding path that ended with a grand cathedral.

She sprinted again. A second volley of arrows whistled towards her like an ancient battle. She charged through them, and their golden heads crashed into a battery of fiery wards. The road trembled. Pavement rose from the earth, forming a thick wall blocking the route to the cathedral.

“Out of my way!” Reiko roared.

She bulldozed through the wall. Her hand burst through like the dead rising from their graves and gripped the mage who stood there. She heaved them into the nearest bell tower, where their body struck the rusted bell.

Static crackled around her, and a sphere brimming with purple discharge, not unlike the prison they had used to harbor the Taboo, enveloped her. The cloaks of the Commission flanked her from all sides.

“Freeze her!” one of them ordered.

The temperature inside the sphere plummeted. A white frost accumulated on its surface, and Reiko’s arms and legs struggled to push forward.

“Incant,” she muttered through chattering teeth.

A heatwave whiter than snow roared through the static chamber. The blaze pushed against the sphere. Just one lick of fire was enough for it to fail. Like brittle ice, it shattered, and the flames exploded outward, casting the mages aside.

On the ramparts above, Baba Yaga’s escorts routed the mages firing golden arrows. Maria Akhmatova flung the enemy off the battlements like a whirlwind rolling through, while the pair behind her stunned the stragglers with a range of effortless, elementary incantations.

Reiko dashed alongside, converging on the cathedral from the ground level while Maria’s group leapt onto the roof above. Reiko jumped after them, scrambling and searing the tiled roof as she landed.

Near the clocktower, the Eye of Castle Gramarye spilled out denser magic. The translucent mesh blanketing the below fields turned opaque. From the back of the cathedral, Reiko finally spotted two familiar silhouettes, surrounded by Egregore, Director Arataki, and imaginarium.

Reiko’s eyes froze at the witch standing before Miyuki and Fujiko.

“She’s supposed to be dead,” she whispered.

“Egregore are hard to kill, it seems,” Maria muttered.

Reiko snapped out of her daze. It didn’t matter how Lisa Everest managed to survive. What mattered was that she was there, that all of Reiko’s troubling questions now led back to her, and that an ascension was primed beneath her and Reiko’s juniors.

Reiko and Baba Yaga’s security dropped off the roof and touched down on the plains as the imaginarium sealed the space above in a heavy mist.

“Kobayashi! Kazama!” she bellowed.

Before the two could turn towards her, Reiko felt a different pair of eyes on her.

She almost didn’t detect it, a subtle, concentrated imaginarium that broke her ribs and threw her against the rear of the cathedral. An inescapable gravity glued her to the wall, and Baba Yaga descended from her perch below the castle tower.

“I am sorry,” she said. “By the rights of my Permission, Miss Everest asks that I not allow you near the ascension site.”

A faint gust whispered behind Baba Yaga, and it carried Maria Akhmatova with it. The Egregore’s white-haired guard towered over Baba Yaga at twice her height and threw her entire weight behind her fist.

The skull crushing blow was absorbed by a paper thin cyanic ward embracing Baba Yaga’s forehead, but the impact itself sent the witch sailing and released Reiko from the back wall’s magnetic grip.

Baba Yaga tumbled across the field like rocks skipping on water. Her two other bodyguards flanked her from opposite directions. Natalia muttered an incantation beneath her breath, and her lady’s ward was beset by a bloom of purple gas gnawing at its exterior. The other, a man, who until this moment had not and would continue not uttering a word, leveled his palms at Baba Yaga.

A pillar of moonlight, howling with a sustained, razor scream, pierced the imaginarium above, and Baba Yaga vanished within. The ground beneath Castle Gramarye lurched, its superstructure tilted as the moon’s radiance drilled into bedrock.

Reiko picked herself up and broke again into a sprint. Fujiko and Miyuki were right there, she told herself, less than a soccer field’s worth of running away. Right now, nothing else mattered, not the impossibly alive Lisa Everest, not Director Tanaka Arataki who stood beside them, his hand reaching into his suit.

“My dear Maria,” Baba Yaga sang. “What have I always said? Strike at me with the intent to kill.”

Slender fingers touched the lunar shell, and its light erupted into shards all carrying the visage of Baba Yaga. The witch snapped her fingers and time surrounding the two mages beside her froze before they could utter their next incantations.

Maria blinked before her, but Baba Yaga’s fingers greeted her face with a tap. The bodyguard’s clenched fist slowed to the rate of bullet time, and Baba Yaga sauntered around her. Her eyes centered on Reiko.

Reiko evaluated her chances and found them wanting.

Baba Yaga would reach her before she was halfway across the field.

Arataki guarded Fujiko and Miyuki, now with a hollow steel barrel in his hands. In a direct confrontation, the old man had leverage.

Lisa Everest’s focus remained fixed on the ascension, on the clock tower above her, where the Eye of Castle Gramarye had not yet halted its flow of imaginarium.

What can I do, then Reiko remembered, make a massive mess?

If she ignited herself with enough force, Reiko surmised she could act as a makeshift rocket engine, propelling the superstructure and setting it on a collision course with the city. Dangerously reckless.

“How about that for a mess, Kanna?” she murmured. “Incan–”

But before she could make a mess out of things, someone made it for her.

A gunshot erupted at the ascension site.

“No!” Lisa Everest shrieked. “You’ve ruined it! You’ve ruined everything!”

The imaginarium, which had until that moment hung like an ocean suspended in midair, fell and flooded the plains. It plunged into Lisa, rose and cascaded across trembling wheatgrass, and washed Reiko away.