Month 3, Year 34 of Chief Technocrat Castor’s Rule

  ***

  The alarm which was set off an hour ago kept blaring, which didn’t do much to alleviate Meryl’s headache.

  Her and the other scientists withdrew to one of the shelters – the way to the surface was deemed too unsafe, with mimics hurrying ahead to replace door handles or even entire elevators.

  She could hear gunfire in the distance, mixed with quiet sobbing from the corner of the room, where their newest assistant researcher, Claudia, sat on the ground and hugged her knees. She was hired just last month, and she already witnessed a containment breach, brought upon them by some weird dimension-hopping girl and her evil, palette-swapped counterpart.

  If the other scientists in the room had just listened to Meryl, they could have initiated the extermination protocol inside the containment field, ethics and concerns about ‘killing a child’ be damned. Now many, many other people were going to die, devoured by these shadowy creatures from an unknown dimension.

  “Get yourself together, Claudia! This isn’t our first containment breach. It probably won’t be the last, either. This is just the reality of working with interdimensional hazardous material and creatures.” she barked at the young woman, but the response was just her balling up even further.

  Meryl let out a long groan, then she looked to the door as it opened noisily. Their colleague Stevyn just came back, carrying two crates.

  “Everybody calm down, I have anomaly detectors and disintegrator guns! Protocol thirty-seven has been invoked, giving us green light to arm the science personnel.”

  A relieved murmur went through the huddled collection of scientists – even Claudia got up and hurried to the table on which the tall man put the two boxes down. Meryl didn’t feel relieved by the news at all, though.

  Rookies. That just means we’re in deep enough shit that the extermination squad alone isn’t cutting it.

  “Now, remember your training: Under no circumstances aim these at another human being.”

  The scientists grabbed a detector and a gun one after the other and left the secure room, on their way to assist the extermination squad.

  Only Meryl, Claudia and Stevyn were left.

  “You did basic training, yes?” Stevyn asked the young woman, who nodded meekly.

  “Good. I’ll stay with you, just in case. I’m so sorry that you’re going through this during your trial period of all times.”

  The girl smiled at him and reached for one of the anomaly detectors.

  Those should have been distributed based on a head count, why are there four left?

  Just as Meryl pieced together what was going on she tried to reach out and shouted for the trainee – but Claudia already vanished, leaving behind the fake anomaly detector.

  Stevyn’s eyes widened and his mouth moved as he was unable to vocalize the dread he felt, only able to look on in horror – then he turned his head towards Meryl.

  “We have to get her out of there!”

  “No! I’ll get rid of the threat once and for all.”

  “If you destroy the lure, its pocket dimension will collapse on both her AND the mimic and she will- “

  It was too late, she already closed her hand around the pistol grip of the disintegrator gun – noticing too late that there were four of those, as well.

  ***

  Trapped in a pocket dimension with a mimic, without a gun. The absolute worst-case scenario.

  Meryl pinched the bridge of her nose as she stood entirely still with her eyes closed. Those creatures liked to startle and chase their prey, according to videos they managed to record as they fed some death row inmates who ‘volunteered for science’ to them. The longest times of survival were recorded when the volunteers stood perfectly still – the creature would wait. But eventually its patience would run out and it devoured them regardless.

  This is an empty hope. If I were out there, I’d get rid of the lure and atomize both of us with the dimensional collapse. There’s no benefit to going in here and risking more people just to extract one person.

  She stood still – seconds dragged out to feel like hours as she felt the presence of something closing in.

  She heard a growl and finally opened her eyes – the sound was too fascinating to not get a good look at what was about to eat her before she died.

  She stared at a shadow in the shape of a lion with leathery wings and a scorpion’s tail.

  “A manticore, eh?” she managed to say with a bitter smile – the creature’s tail rushed forwards to impale her – to turn her into a snack it could leisurely chomp into bit by bit.

  ***

  Meryl’s entire body clenched, and she could swear she felt the sharp stab through her chest – but nothing happened. She dared to look down and found herself unharmed – then she saw the scorpion’s stinger scraping against an invisible wall right in front of her. She looked around confused until she saw the person who just saved her life – the very girl who got her into this mess in the first place. Her witch robes were dripping water all over the place and her eyes looked bloodshot. Nonetheless she walked forwards with unmatched confidence, extending her hand with the palm pointed at the creature. The manticore roared and changed targets, trying to swipe at the young witch – but its claws only scraped uselessly against more invisible barriers, merely managing two cracks in them. As they vanished, the witch retaliated with a golden arrow, piercing the creature through the eye. It roared and tried to escape by jumping away – and in that moment it was caught by another spell. A shockwave catapulted the creature into the wall, and judging by the sound it made, it was grievously injured in the process.

  The witch stopped for a moment as if she was gauging something – maybe the distance for a follow-up attack. She turned her head towards Meryl.

  “Get behind me!”

  The scientist didn’t like the prospect of accepting orders from a child, but she obeyed – for now.

  As she was behind the witch, the girl yelled “Fireball!” and one such glowing orb separated from her palm, flying towards the injured creature. It erupted in a giant explosion that threatened to engulf the two of them – if it weren’t for another barrier shielding the witches’ front from the blast.

  ***

  Meryl found herself back in reality, looking around to get her bearings.

  The witch already ignored her and instead talked to Claudia, who she appeared to have saved first, inquiring if she was alright. The girl had a nasty gash on her left arm, but upon further inspection it was a flesh wound.

  “I was just in time, then,” the young girl announced before she turned towards the desk full of interdimensional creature hunting tools.

  “So I can detect where they are with this one?”

  “No, no, that’s the disintegrator gun.” Stevyn replied with a sigh.

  “This one is the anomaly detector.”

  Stevyn handed the girl the precious device and the young witch immediately turned it on. She was still dripping water all over the ground and reeked of rotting seaweed.

  “What in the world even happened to you, girl?” Meryl now managed to ask.

  “I was drowned,” the blue-haired witch replied, already walking out of the safe room – Stevyn and Claudia followed, grabbing guns and detectors – Meryl had to do with only a gun in that case.

  “I need you to guide me through this building. I’ll take care of the monsters.” The witch announced. She showed an uncanny determination, like cleaning up this mess was her life’s mission.

  On their way the detector in the witches’ hand beeped. She looked around, trying to see whatever it was what caused her device to react. After a short while of looking around she found a ball-point pen on the ground. She didn’t even hesitate to reach out for it and vanished.

  An uncomfortable minute passed, with the three researchers exchanging looks – no one was certain if the girl had things under control or not.

  Then the girl reappeared, with the pen disintegrating into flakes of shadowy ash – a woman was by her side, one of the scientists. She was missing her leg, which the witch appeared to have tied off with her belt as a makeshift tourniquet.

  “Is there anyone nearby who can treat her?” the witch asked with an exhausted sounding voice.

  ***

  Radio messages were exchanged and medical personnel confirmed to be en route. The witch waited until they appeared, then she continued to walk with determined steps. The unlikely quartet combed through the entirety of the facility, encountering lure after lure. Most of them had people left to save, but some of them were empty, save for the creatures and the ID cards of the people who were abducted, to never come out again.

  Their extermination of the creatures continued like this for at least five more hours before the containment breach alarm finally died down.

  The final tally was twenty injured, ranging from simple bites and cuts to missing limbs – and five missing entirely, with only their access cards left behind.

  “Finally.” Meryl groaned, then she glared at the young girl, who kept her expression hidden under her hat.

  “That clone of yours sure did a number on us. What are you going to do about it?”

  There was a long silence before the girl answered.

  “True. But without me way more of you would have died, isn’t that right?” She looked directly at Meryl now. Her bloodshot eyes had tears in the corners.

  “You in particular. So, I’d say you owe me, actually.”

  Meryl gritted her teeth and almost wanted to slap the girl – but then she spoke again.

  “We’ll talk about this another time. I have to go.”

  “Oh? Playing the hero in another place where you caused trouble in the first place?” Meryl spat in a mocking tone.

  “No,” the girl replied and opened a portal.

  “School starts in an hour.”

  She left the facility – leaving utterly befuddled scientists behind.

  June 2024

  ***

  Mana didn’t get to sleep that night, and it showed at school. She yawned, she even dozed off during classes and got chewed out for it. Still, she couldn’t allow herself a nap after school was out. She needed to find the park which Marisa teleported her to. The problem was that she didn’t see many identifying features – and trying to recall more details only resulted in her flinching as images of Marisa’s hateful visage flooded her mind – mixed with vivid psychosomatic recreations of the pain from her fracturing bones and bruising muscles as she was hit by Blast over and over again.

  Mana took deep breaths and hugged her own upper body to calm herself down, with sweat running down her temple.

  After a while longer she calmed down enough and opened a map with street-level photographs on her phone. She meticulously inspected every park, trying to find a ‘thin’ one with a mesh fence on one side and a residential road on the other.

  It took her hours, but she finally found something matching her memory in Ota. She didn’t hesitate long and opened a portal to Kyunomikawa Ryokuchi Park to start her search.

  ***

  “Where is it?” Mana mumbled feverishly as she picked through the bushes and the grass. She pocketed the anomaly detector from before, but strangely enough it didn’t pick up anything in the area.

  “Where is it…?” she kept saying, her sleep deprived eyes darting from one side to the other. After what she witnessed in that strange place of steel – after she got caught herself and had to fight her way out – after seeing people’s limbs being bitten off, or people vanishing entirely – she could not let that doll that fell into her world roam free.

  “Mana.”

  She ignored Portal’s voice and kept looking.

  “Mana! Stop it!”

  This time she flinched and looked at the book in her sleeve with tired eyes.

  “What is it? I have to find this thing before it hurts someone.”

  “If it’s not here anymore, then Magical Girls probably took care of it, wouldn’t you think?”

  Mana let her shoulders hang and bit her lower lip – she did that a lot over the course of the day, chewing off enough of its skin that it felt raw and sensitive.

  “But what if they didn’t take care of it…? It could eat someone right now… and it would be my fault.”

  “Mana!” Portal shouted loud enough that she feared others would hear him, so she put a hand in her sleeve and on the book – then she realized that there was no mouth she could even muffle.

  The absurdity of what she just did made her laugh quietly and she sat down on a nearby bench.

  “…it’s because I took the easy way out with Doppelg?nger. Everything is happening because I woke her up.”

  “…”

  There was a long silence from Portal before he spoke again.

  “Catch some sleep first. We’ll think about what we can do about it later.”

  Mana nodded, but she got another idea first.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “…before that… bring me to the coordinates of Doppelg?nger. Two rooms above.”

  “…if you know what you are doing.”

  ***

  Mana quietly stepped outside of her portal and peeked over the railing into the room where she breathed life into her clone some time ago.

  As she assumed, Marisa was here. She wasn’t certain what she expected to see – Marisa was a spell book with a preprogrammed purpose, so she would probably just sit around and stare at the bookshelves until she sensed an opportunity to mess with Mana and further her ambition to merge with her – and remove the so-called ‘homewrecker’, the girl who accompanied her time traveling self into the past.

  At least that’s what Mana assumed about her – what she saw instead broke her heart. Marisa was lying curled up into a ball on the ground, quietly sobbing to herself. She was repeating some words over and over, but Mana couldn’t hear them from where she stood. She slowly descended the stairs to get closer – within earshot of the girl in white.

  “Why does she hate me? It hurts so much when she rejects me.”

  She saw the girl squirming and clutching her chest, where Mana hit her with an arrow just hours prior, as if it she could still feel it.

  “I don’t want to hurt her – I… I love her. Why does it make me hurt her?”

  She kept repeating variations of those same words, crying bitter tears into the carpeted floor of the library.

  Mana stared at the sorry sight with trembling lips before she walked through a portal back home. She hugged her pillow, staring at a spot on the wall – despite missing a whole night of sleep, she was wide awake, horrified by what she had done to this girl – by the pain she inflicted on her with a thoughtless summon, all just so she could take a shortcut to a book.

  “Portal.” She spoke softly.

  “Yes, Mana?”

  “Books aren’t just magic objects that speak, are they? You are… alive. With feelings…”

  “…” there was a long silence, as if Portal pondered whether to expose her young mind to such a fact – but then came the answer.

  “Yes, Mana. I am certain the Broker can tell you more, once you have earned the right to ask another question.”

  Mana furrowed her brow with a determined expression.

  “Then we’ll be hunting more spells starting tomorrow.”

  Spring, Year 203 of the Celestial Ascension Dynasty

  ***

  Right after stumbling out of the portal, Mana took some time to orient herself. To her left she saw a giant temple – its architecture looked Chinese, though with enough alien elements that it could very well be anything else. Straight ahead she saw a raised platform and realized that it was a ring for martial arts. People stood around it and cheered, as muscled men circled each other, assuming stances which Mana didn’t recognize. She looked at her list for this world.

  “’Way of the Stone Fist’ and ‘Way of the Vibration’.” she read out loud. The men on the platforms now attacked each other – at first it looked like the kind of martial arts Mana knew, with punches, palm strikes, jabs with bundled fingers and so on. But as it turned out, this was merely the warm-up. The next strike was caught on blades of ice growing out of one of the martial artists’ blocking arms. A pained groan came from the attacker, who engulfed his injured arm in flames, melting away the defensive spikes. He added kicks to his repertoire of attacks, pulling long trails of fire with every movement of his hands and feet while his opponent did his best do dodge and covered his arms in more ice to block the scorching hits.

  Mana wasn’t particularly interested in watching the fight after confirming that these weren’t the fighting techniques required by the Broker and wandered around a little. No one seemed to notice her, as they were all gathered around the arena, shouting the names of the fighters while holding sheets of paper with writing on them – betting men, no doubt.

  She reached the edge of the rocky plateau the temple and the ring were erected on and gasped – all of it was on the head of a giant statue. She could see its hands below, held together, palms upwards. A waterfall ran from the statue’s open mouth, splashed onto the hands where it formed a large pool, and separated into multiple smaller waterfalls between the stone fingers, rushing down towards a river below, with a large city erected on its shores.

  Mana took a step back from the edge and looked back to the fighting ring.

  Angry shouts and cheers erupted as one of the fighters collapsed – with way more blood on his body than Mana was comfortable with.

  Some helpers came and dragged the defeated man away – and now Mana was certain that she just witnessed a fight to the death.

  “Another sacrifice for the heavens!” a booming voice announced. The helpers dragged the dead man to the edge of the plateau and tossed him in the direction of the waterfall – Mana could see his body make a splash in the collection of water the statue held in its hands – before he floated down one of the smaller waterfalls between the statue’s fingers.

  “Juan’ku is blessed with prosperity by the heavens!”

  The crowd erupted in a cheer and the man with the icicle arts raised his arms, laughing. Mana concluded that the waterfall the sacrifice took towards the river was some kind of divination.

  As the victor withdrew there was a brief pause, and Mana could inspect the people present. Most of them wore colorful silken shirts and pants fastened with sashes, while wearing fancy, wide-brimmed hats for protection from the sun. She definitely got the impression that this was the upper crust of whatever society she landed in.

  “Next up: Lua’un, master of the Way of the Stone Fist and Gen’sa, master of the Way of the Vibration!”

  This was Mana’s cue, making her walk towards the platform, mingling with the betting men who seemed to ignore her presence for the time being.

  “Five hundred gold Guular on Lua’un!”

  “A thousand on Gen’sa!”

  The betting men kept shouting as she watched the stage, pulling out a bracer and two rings.

  The fighters finally walked on the stage – wearing only linen pants fastened by sashes. They eyed each other up before they exchanged a few strange insults.

  “The river wolves shall feast on your kidneys today, Gen’sa!”

  “I would tell you that the birds will feast on your liver, Lua’un, but you know as well as I that you’re such a drunkard that it would kill them.”

  They grimaced at each other and readied themselves.

  Long-standing rivals settling everything in a fight to the death?

  Mana pondered the situation – then the fight started. Again, just like before, the two of them attacked each other with regular martial arts. Mana couldn’t tell which kind, but it sure was made up of punches and kicks.

  That was until the man called Lua’un used his special arts and solid rock formed around his fists. Despite the incredible weight added to his arms, he continued his attacks like he wasn’t feeling it, hitting Gen’sa in the face and making the man spit out two teeth.

  Gen’sa didn’t wait long to respond with his own martial art – Mana recalled the name ‘Vibration’ from her note and could see what the Broker meant by that. The man took a stance and turned blurry, leaving afterimages whenever he moved. Apparently Lua’un had a healthy respect for this martial art, as he suddenly shifted to the defensive, rather than trying to get more hits in.

  A murmur went through the crowd.

  “Hey, the last time their arts clashed, people in the audience died, right?”

  “Yeah, let’s step away.”

  More whispers and murmurs followed, then Gen’sa pushed the attack. Lua’un dodged to the best of his ability, leaning his head to the side to avoid a punch square to the face, jumping over a leg sweep and hopping away to gain some distance. He leaned to the side to avoid a haymaker and landed a hard punch into Gen’sa’s kidney but had to immediately withdraw to avoid getting hit by the retaliatory strike.

  Finally, a hit from Gen’sa connected – to a forearm block protected by solid rock. Lua’un spat a curse and separated himself from the suddenly blurry-looking stony fists before he covered his entire side in rock, facing it towards the now hovering stone fists which turned ever blurrier.

  “What in the- ” Mana started but was interrupted.

  “BARRIER, COVER THE MISTRESS!” Portal shouted in a commanding tone.

  Huh?

  The floating fists exploded, and chunks of rock flew in every direction – it was as if someone pulled the trigger on a shotgun with a 360-degree firing arc. All around the arena careless observers who didn’t move away were mowed down by small, sharp rocks. Most were simply grievously injured by the shrapnel, others died instantly as the rock pierced eyes, skulls and brain stems.

  Five chunks of broken rock were embedded in a barrier in front of Mana’s body, with cracks showing from the force of the impact.

  “Phew, made it in time. Never doubt my loyalty, mistress!”

  Barrier appeared truly chipper that he proved himself useful while Mana’s heart hammered in her chest.

  “Quickly, get their spells before they kill each other and let’s get out of here, Mana!” Portal chimed in.

  Mana nodded and looked at the two combatants – they grinned at each other with mad determination before they started swinging again – with the heavy weight of the rock fists and the instant death sentence from the vibrating punches, none of them dared getting hit by the other, turning the fight into an acrobatic spectacle.

  Mana lifted the rings towards Lua’un and the bracer towards Gen’sa.

  “Trace!” she commanded – and the blue spell covered both of them before returning to her magic items.

  Mana grinned and stowed the items, mentally congratulating herself for a job well done – and only now she noticed that everything around her turned dead silent.

  People were staring at her like she was an alien from outer space.

  “I don’t know what she just did, but one thing is clear…” she heard Lua’un speak.

  “…interrupting the sacred fights is punishable by death.”

  Huh?

  Mana was too stumped to react for a moment – then she saw a rocky fist flying her way. She managed to deflect it with Blast, but now she knew for certain that she would need to get out of here.

  She gave Portal the mental impulse to open a gateway to the library, but in that moment the ground behind her exploded as the man with the rock fists followed up and the shockwave blasted her away.

  While she was spinning in the air she caught a glimpse of the two fighters – despite having been in a fight to the death until moments ago, they were now united in their purpose to kill the one who interrupted their fight.

  Two martial artists ganging up on a helpless little girl... Mana thought as she casually flung a fireball their way.

  It didn’t explode.

  Mana blinked and looked at the hovering fireball, which became blurry and grew slightly in size before it finally burst, momentarily blinding Mana. The man with the vibrating arms rushed for her and she cast a barrier – the punch made her protective pane vibrate and contort itself in weird ways around the point of impact. Mana wanted to run away from it but found herself with her back to the edge of the plateau.

  “Now become a sacrifice!” The imposing man shouted, and Mana’s barrier burst, flinging her off the impossibly tall statue.

  She saw the two men poking their heads over the edge – just the thing she waited for. She pulled down one of her eyelids and blew them a raspberry before she vanished through a portal into the library, rushing upwards, then falling comfortably on her bed through another one as her momentum cancelled itself out.

  “Losers!”

  Moon of the Light Elves, 1067 AR

  ***

  Mana knocked at the door to the hovel, waiting until the men standing guard let her inside. She approached the large desk at the end of the room and sat down in the guest chair before she rang the bell. She pulled out the bracer and the two rings, placing them on the desk in front of her.

  It didn’t take long for the Broker, Nicola, to arrive. She entered through the door at the back. Mana knew by now that there was only a small study with a single bed back there, the same room she woke up in two days ago.

  “My, so fast!” Nicola observed with a chuckle.

  “Did you want to learn my last name that badly?”

  Mana shook her head and produced the crystal tear of the Aranon from her robes.

  “No… I have a more important question after you unlock the next piece, if you don’t mind.”

  The Broker nodded and picked up the rings and bracer, inspecting them.

  “Very good. Thank you, Mana. Any wishes for the piece you want to have unlocked this time?”

  Mana shook her head.

  “Then I will unlock art for you.”

  Again, Nicola transferred the knowledge inside the tear into a smaller gemstone, handing it to the young girl who immediately went on to inspect its contents.

  Unsurprisingly, a semi-aquatic species didn’t have much in the way of paint on canvas – instead the Aranon had a rich culture of fashioning statues – from lifelike depictions of people, to entire dioramas carved into the sides of underwater cliffs. Mana took ten minutes to admire various of these statues, all of them preserved as 3D scans and projected as holograms by the gemstone.

  “So… you have an important question, you said?” Nicola asked as she pulled off her hood, shaking her shoulder-length silvery hair loose. Her blood red eyes pierced Mana expectantly.

  “I want to know if the library’s books are… alive. And what kind of book Doppelg?nger actually is.”

  The beautiful woman looked to the sleeve in which Portal rested, then to Mana.

  “Are you certain? It could prove a little disturbing.”

  The young witch nodded, making the Broker sigh heavily before she told her.

  ***

  “First off, Mana… do you believe in the concept of souls?” Nicola held eye contact after asking her question.

  Mana blinked, looking from side to side as the other woman’s intense gaze made her a little uncomfortable.

  “I, uh… never really thought about it? My mother says dead people’s souls stay around for thirty years before they become kami – and they help the living the entire time.”

  Nicola smiled.

  “Most of the major religions of your world agree on one thing: that a soul exists. And it does. Where they differ is in what they believe happens to it after death. Some believe you go to a place of eternal bliss or torture depending on whether you believed in the right deity or not – or if you were a good person. Then there is what you just told me – and yet another is closer to the truth than the others. They believe that a soul is reborn over and over in an endless cycle of suffering and existence. However, they believe that one could escape this and cease to exist entirely somehow by attaining enlightenment. This is not true from what I observed.”

  Mana tried her best to pay attention and process what she was being told, looking attentively at Nicola. The woman continued.

  “The soul is reborn over and over. In all the different worlds making up our vast multiverse. Those scientists on Thirram you couldn’t save might be reborn in Tokyo as we speak.”

  She then looked at the witches’ sleeve again and her expression turned a bit darker.

  “Or they might be reborn in an existence worse than death – or which would be worse than death if they even knew what they could have been. They could be born as a spell book in the library.”

  ***

  Mana blinked and had a question now.

  “Isn’t the library infinite? Wouldn’t you run out of souls before you get all the books?”

  “Ah, but there lies the weight of responsibility, Mana.”

  Nicola smiled bitterly.

  “Magic books in the library are inert, useless heaps of pages with strange prints on them – until a person gets close enough that they might be found. In that moment, a soul on the verge of rebirth is stolen and used to awaken a book’s consciousness and magic powers.”

  Mana stared at the desk and shivered as she realized something dreadful.

  “Portal… Blast… Arrow… Fireball… all of them. Even Doppelg?nger. I trapped their souls?”

  “Mana, it’s not your fault. And we are all happy to be used by you. It certainly beats being stuck in a bookshelf in the same lamp’s light for eternity, with no sounds…”

  Portal spoke up this time.

  “And about Doppelg?nger…” the Broker now continued.

  ***

  “Doppelg?nger is a very curious case. She took on a name, she loves you dearly – all this not because, but in spite of the nature of her spell.”

  Mana looked at Nicola from under the brim of her hat, biting her lower lip.

  “What do you mean?”

  Nicola cleared her throat before she continued.

  “Doppelg?nger is a malicious spell, designed to turn against its user. It performs one useful deed after being summoned – and then it merges with its user, taking over their body entirely. It becomes them. It has no other objective and will hunt its summoner down until they are absorbed, or Doppelg?nger is dead.”

  Mana furrowed her brow – this didn’t sound like Marisa at all.

  “She tried to absorb me at first, but… now she plays pranks and just… hangs around. She has a plan to prevent me from doing something that would result in a girl being born in the future, because she is jealous… and she gets violent when I tell her off.”

  Nicola nodded.

  “Indeed. Which leads me to believe that she is a fairly recently departed soul of someone who loved you dearly and still followed you unconsciously as a spirit – a love so strong that it transcends the memory loss of rebirth – and is almost as powerful as Doppelg?nger’s own diabolical will.”

  Mana’s head churned over a few possibilities after she heard Nicola’s words.

  “I never had anyone who loved me die… I’m too young. My grandparents are still around. My parents, too… it can’t be.”

  “Any pets?”

  Mana shook her head.

  “Nothing.”

  The Broker seemed a little troubled by that and rubbed her chin in contemplation.

  “Well, that’s all the insight I can offer for now. You used your one question wisely, young Witch Queen!”

  The Broker stood up, and so did Mana.

  “Think about what you want to ask me next. If it’s knowledge I don’t possess yet, I still have contacts in various worlds who might enlighten us.”

  She offered the young witch a reassuring smile and lifted her hand as if she wanted to pet the small girl – but decided against it to preserve her pride.

  Mana nodded and opened a portal back home.

  “I have something to do.” She admitted.

  July 2024

  ***

  Mana left her school – it was two weeks until summer break, so luckily, she could still catch her science teacher to help her with an equation.

  With all of that done she opened a portal to her destination.

  It was an unremarkable room, like any other in the library, and without any spell books on its shelves, either. Just random nonsense, the usual deafening silence and an unusual sense of anticipation in the air.

  Mana erected a barrier large enough to cover the entirety of the abyss in front of her. Then she sat down and leaned against a bookshelf.

  Every room is three meters high; the speed is two hundred kilometers per hour on average and it’s been 137 days…

  Mana Kanno sat 219,205,000 rooms down from where she tossed ‘Detect Magic: Portal’ into the abyss and waited – she gave herself some room for error by adding five thousand rooms to the result she came up with. She didn’t have to wait long – a loud ‘fwump’ announced the arrival of the book. It didn’t say anything, as if it stopped thinking a while ago to protect its sanity. Only as she picked it up did it start to scream again.

  “THE WENCH WHO THREW ME INTO THE ABYSS! HATE! I HATE YOU SO MUCH! MY MASTER SHALL GUT YOU AND HANG YOU FROM YOUR ENTRAILS! IF THE WORD HATE WERE WRITTEN IN MICROSCOPIC SIZE ON EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY PAGES IT WOULDN’T COMMUNICATE EVEN A MICROFRACTION OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR YOU RIGHT NOW!”

  The tirade didn’t faze Mana much. She was here to take responsibility.

  She tossed the book back on the barrier and took a few steps back.

  “I’m sorry for what you had to go through.”

  She extended her hand towards the object.

  “I’ll release your soul from the library.”

  “WHAT ARE YOU – “

  “Fireball.”

  ***

  Mana arrived back home, sighing heavily. She slipped out of her witch robes and put on some jogging pants and a t-shirt. She went downstairs and entered the kitchen to get herself a snack, to take her mind off the fact that she just killed a sentient being as a mercy. As she passed through the living room, she saw her father rummaging through a box.

  “Oh, Mana! Excellent timing!”

  “Hm?”

  Her father grinned and beckoned Mana towards himself. He was a thirty-six-year-old man. A glasses-wearing otaku with a slim build, who still kept his childish side despite having a wife, a house and a daughter. A fan of old video games and a PC gamer, a relatively uncommon choice of gaming platform in Japan. And today he appeared to be admiring some old photos. He held a piece of paper in his hand, meticulously pushed into a transparent protective sleeve. There was a lot of black ink on the side he wanted to show her – the brighter parts of it looked like someone unwrapped a cone. Most of it looked like random nonsense, but there was a black circle in the middle – with two little blobs in it which shared the odd texture of the surrounding cone.

  “This takes me back! And I never told you this, but did you know that you’re technically two people?”

  Mana blinked at her father, not understanding what he was getting at – he then pointed at the two blobs.

  “When we got the first ultrasound, the doctor told us we would be having twins. A few weeks later and one vanished, though. Apparently, it happens a lot – twins gestate at first but one doesn’t make it and then gets absorbed by their sibling. We were sad at first, but we still had you!”

  Her father’s cheerful smile disappeared, and worry was written across his face.

  “Mana? What’s wrong? You’re really pale all of a sudden.”