Editing Failing Witch:Volume1 Episode3 (section)

===9===

Myousou Yagoro’s wish was granted in an unexpected fashion.

But that didn’t mean he was happy about it.

''Boooooom!!!!

One corner of the old meal center exploded from within, spewing flames and rubble into the air.

The building had been sticking diagonally out over the entire city and now it had exploded. Stones larger than people’s heads and shards of glass poured down onto the city.

Screams echoed up from the ground, but they didn’t sound all that terrified. Most likely, everyone was watching from inside the buildings. This was not the shopping district, which was busy even at night.

Something had gone wrong.

Not even Maleficium would cause damage to the ordinary city like this. This was clearly an unplanned accident of some sort. The blond boy’s hands squeezed the windowsill tight, but the explosion had occurred far overhead. He couldn’t just walk there. Which meant…

“Schanze!!”

“Yes, yes. I’m being paid for this, so I’ll totally fly up and take a look around.”

The gyaru-style instructor mounted her Formula Broom at the window.

Yagoro took a seat behind her.

Despite the gyaru-style look, she noticeably blushed.

“Hey, wait! Don’t just grab me around the waist like that!”

“Hurry.”

“This totally isn’t happening. You can’t just do this. Do I need to throw you off in midair? If you’re going to hold me close and whisper a command in my ear, you’d better be paying me.”

“This big hair is in the way. I can’t get it out of my face. But whatever – just hurry it up. If you don’t, you’re the one the practice exam officials will be upset with, Schanze. And this is the official practice exam, so Carraway Cs’s headmaster can’t sweep it under the rug if you screw it up. Look, the old man’s already gone off to hide somewhere. Useless coward.”

“~ ~ ~!? Vwahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

She leaped from the window.

A self-taught witch was someone who fought against society with her own skill instead of authority or academic history. Schanze complained, but her flying was steady.

“I would really prefer ''not'' to have a boy riding me.”

Merlin or Myrddin or whoever was a complainer too.

“Omens and jinxes really bother him. Maybe because he does prophecy?” said Schanze while demonstrating perfect flying form to reach the roof of the diagonal old meal center.

She used the large roof as a runway to have enough space to decelerate and land.

Once both of them had their feet on the ground, Yagoro drew the baton from his hip and swung it to extend it to around 70cm.

“Is the practice exam still on?”

“We haven’t received a carrier pigeon saying its canceled, so I’d say yes? But if there are any girls who have lost the will to fight and we don’t collect them, they’ll be totally devoured by the monsters wandering the place.”

That meant the Benandanti and the Witch Doctors wouldn’t be mobilized. For one thing, Maleficium was only renting out the test site. They couldn’t give anyone extra help before they had a chance to complete the practice exam, so intervening could render the entire practice exam invalid. Had they decided to let the students deal with it themselves?

Measuring from the lake at the very bottom of the bowl-shaped city, they were at least 300m up. That was about equivalent to a 100 story building.

But that was easy to forget with how solid the place was under their feet.

When they slipped into a hallway through a window, they found something unusual right away.

The place had been called labyrinthine and that was an accurate description. The structure was strange. Silver countertops jutted out from the walls and ceilings. Water supplies that should have been behind two layers of door for sanitation reasons, witchy herb gardens, and even an outdoor parking lot for carriages were all in the same place. The floor numbers on the wall had become corrupted text. Thoughtlessly climbing the stairs could easily send you to a strange space that wasn’t the 2nd or the 3rd floor.

The bizarre scene was overwhelming, but ''something else caught their attention more.

“The cleaning supplies locker, don’tcha think?”

“Totally.”

Instead of the locker door, Schanze crouched down and stabbed her obsidian-handled athame into the floor. The knife’s moonlight shadow flickered unnaturally. The gyaru-style instructor sprinkled various dried herbs around to pursue the shadow and trap it back in a single shape.

The invisible distortion surrounding the locker vanished.

Someone was curled up inside. Neither of them recognized the girl. She only muttered to herself and didn’t react when they opened the thin door. Her entire body was so tense they could tell just by looking at her.

“Formu…– The Scandinav…help….Antecessor…”

Something solid but light clattered out onto the floor: a dream catcher and a Be Silent Spell Bottle. Both talismans would preemptively capture invisible malice and curses, such as bad dreams or rumors, preventing them from reaching the owner. However, they weren’t capable of stopping the evil god, sorcerer, or other threat creating the malice.

(Did she think this would shelter her? She probably knew she was using them wrong, but she didn’t have any other choice. Purifying them with fire or water or lighting some exorcising incense would have worked better, don’tcha think?)

“Look how hard she’s clenching her teeth. She did everything she could.”

The gyaru-style instructor thumbed off the lid of some smelling salts. The vial of course contained a witch’s potion, so it would even work on cursed sleep or possession.

“But she tried too many things at once. Just keeping the seal in place must have totally worn her down mentally.”

“Which tells us something in here scared her so bad she overprotected herself to the point of collapsing.”

This was the old meal center, which meant it contained an industrial kitchen larger than a theatre. When they looked around some more, they found students in more than just the locker. More were hiding in the locker room, the shower stalls, and even the large silver refrigerators that were ordinarily packed with magic ice.

None of them were responsive.

In the moonlight, they all looked deathly pale.

Seeing all the witch students curled up with empty eyes, Schanze Dwelling, who lived life as she pleased as a self-taught witch, put a hand on her hip and sighed in mild exasperation.

“If they were this scared, they totally could have flown out the window. Or is there something here that causes their Formula Brooms to malfunction?”

“They probably just didn’t want to give up on the practice exam, don’tcha think?”

The entrance exam created a unique set of values and mental state in these girls who hoped to be witches. Yagoro had seen enough of that already with Demon King Aristotle and the trio from Sassafras Cfa.

But the overly tense girls were still alive. Yagoro decided to leave them for the other prep school instructors who had since arrived, so he looked deeper into the darkness.

This had all begun with a massive explosion, but what had exploded?

(They ended up like this when they hid and sealed themselves away, so I hope there weren’t any girls who ''failed to escape at all''.)

A deep tremor ran through the building. And before he could gasp, another one.

This was no accident. Something had to be fighting. It could be two of the wandering monsters attacking each other, but if any of the witches in training were involved, he couldn’t just ignore it.

“This is totally going to mean more glass and rubble pouring down on the city.”

The meal center had been used to prepare food for more than a thousand people, so it was quite large. The pots lining the wall were large enough to bathe in. And the interior extended chaotically in every direction, forming a labyrinth.

Yet the place still felt claustrophobic.

Yagoro felt a pressure, like invisible walls were slowly closing in on him.

“Hyah?”

He grabbed Schanze’s slender hand and ducked below a nearby countertop.

With another tremor, the cold hard floor of marble and obsidian sank down a few centimeters.

Thanks to a foot.

Something unbelievably heavy had stepped right next to them as it walked past. The scraping sound they heard did not come from the floor or the walls. The thing’s head was scraping against the ceiling.

The giant stood more than 4m tall. A distorted three-legged body swung side to side as it walked. The moonlight entering through the broken windows reflected with a dull silver luster.

“(What…is that?)”

“(Sh.)”

The blond boy borrowed Schanze’s athame and silently stuck it out from below the countertop. He used the blade as a mirror to get a look at the monster.

He got a close-up look at the stout hunk of metal in profile. An unpleasantly biological mouth with thick lips and teeth was opening and closing. Was that white steam audibly shooting from the joints?

(But…three legs? What is this a distorted version of? If it had 5 legs, it would be a Buer. If it had a single snake or fish tail below its waist, it could be an echidna, a mermaid, or any number of other things. If the third leg is supposed to be a tail, maybe it could be following the standard image of a demon?)

They could only wait for it to pass, but Schanze proved she really was a witch by analyzing the monster just like the blond boy.

“(It’s totally not a toaster or an oven. Could it be a dishwasher that uses steam to clean the plates?)”

A kitchen item.

Witch hunt torture implements were generally tools like ladders, wheels, or smithing furnaces, but execution and sacrificing implements were a different story. For example, in the Earth country of Japan, criminals were once boiled to death. They could also be cooked in a pot instead of burned in flames so they would suffer more before they died and the corpse would be salted. In Europe, the victim would be suspended in a hanging cage until they starved to death.

A map was pasted on the underside of the countertop. Was that part of the building’s distortion? It wasn’t any help now that the place was a labyrinth, but it did contain some curious information. It was divided into colored sections.

(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… 6? This is part of a school, but it guess it isn’t divided into seven territories ruled by the bosses of the seven school mysteries. …No, wait. Is it a total of seven if you count the outside of the building?)

At 4m tall, that metal monstrosity could swallow a human whole. It was a cell of death filled with steam of more than 100 degrees. It was best not to imagine what would happen to you if it chased you down and caught you.

After confirming the giant had lumbered into a different room with so much hot steam trapped inside, Schanze breathed a sigh of relief.

“That was too close.”

(You idiot!!)

Yagoro didn’t have time to caution her. Schanze had carelessly stuck her long broom out from below the countertop.

A short distance away, that thing came to a stop and turned around.

It didn’t have eyes or a nose, so it shouldn’t have been possible to know which way it was facing, but they could still tell it had turned toward them. They could feel the pressure of its “gaze”.

The three-legged monster had locked onto them.

“Eek.”

Yagoro heard a straining sound.

Schanze Dwelling tightly gripped the reins attached to her broom handle.

“Eek, ee, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!?”

And she flew away without a second thought.

Leaving behind Yagoro and an unknown number of students.

The straight hallway continued for more than 500m, so an indoor takeoff was in fact possible.

“Ho ho. You are so despicably cute, Schanze. Nothing looks better on a strong-willed gyaru than tears of humiliation.”

“Shut the hell up, you old geezer!! I totally wish I’d left you on the floor and run away! There’s even an Aspect of Amorality legend saying that Isobel Gowdie placed her broom in her bed when she went to the Witch’s Sabbath so her family wouldn’t suspect! I don’t get paid extra for it and there’s no way I could win a direct fight with that thing anyway!!”

“Yeah, you made the right choice here, Schanze,” said a third voice.

Silence followed.

Schanze glanced to the right while pouring with sweat aboard her broom.

Myousou Yagoro was casually running alongside her.

“Here’s your athame, by the way. A witch shouldn’t abandon the tools of her trade like that. Besides, you- what?”

“You have to ask!? How are you keeping up with a Formula Broom totally moving at full speed!? How many Mach numbers do you think we’re moving? And you’re doing it on foot!!”

Even if the labyrinth was dozens of kilometers long, it was still an indoor space. Catching up to a flying witch on foot wasn’t completely impossible.

(But no matter how much I master witchcraft, flying is the one thing I can’t seem to do. Almost like there’s ''something'' stopping me.)

“ATU 0510a – Cinderella. One night of the multiday ball, the bell rings to signal the end, but the prince and all his men failed to capture the departing girl.”

You couldn’t explore the labyrinthine old meal center if you couldn’t manage this much. The structure was a mess, so there were trash chutes fallen on their sides and even areas where you had to pass through an oven taller than a person or a freezer room covered in white frost. So just like passing your hand swiftly through a candle’s flame, you had to pass through too quickly for the heat to reach you, or you would die.

“Also, Schanze, you did a good job.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

The gyaru-style instructor gave him a suspicious look, but he was serious. When she had fled, he had sensed another presence nearby. Most likely, it belonged to a student trembling behind cover. They couldn’t allow the steam-filled three-legged dishwasher(?) to reach the girl, so shouting and fleeing in a different direction had been a lucky shot for Schanze as a prep school instructor.

Couldn’t her broom do prophecy? Maybe it had stimulated a 6th sense in her or something.

(But in that case…)

“Schanze, we should turn left up ahead, don’tcha think?”

“Kyahhh!?”

Schanze screamed when Yagoro suddenly pushed the tip of her broom to the side. She veered into a large room off of the straight hallway and just barely managed to stop before crashing into the wall. Formula Brooms really were extraordinary to turn as sharply as a bicycle while moving at supersonic speed.

“…!! –––––!?”

Schanze was just about ready to yell at him, but she held her breath when a rumbling reached them from the hallway. The sound of escaping steam was unexpectedly close by. Yes, they could not continue playing tag forever. Now that they had drawn the three-legged thing away, they had to lose it.

If they stayed in one place, it would just search all the rooms for them, so Yagoro wordlessly beckoned Schanze over and led the way. The labyrinthine structure meant the hallway wasn’t the only way to get around.

“(Totally what is this place?)”

Schanze nestled up against Yagoro and clutched his coat like a scared girl during a test of courage. She was so nervous because of what she saw behind the thick glass.

Beakers, flasks, and colorful liquids. Some kind of cold lab equipment lay before them. They were no longer functional, but those looked like book-friendly moonlight seals in the ceiling lights.

“(Did Maleficium’s old meal center do herbs and alchemy too?)”

Visiting there wouldn’t help them, so Yagoro walked on past making his own guess.

None of it looked all that suspicious. The scrolls stuffing the shelves were probably full of nutrition information. There were a few large cloth bags on the floor and he opened one to find it was full of parchment cards.

“Was this for quality control and testing out new menu items?”

Even if it was a general meal center, they must have wanted to give the students what they wanted if at all possible. The parchment cards all contained food requests. The purpose of a general meal center was to help the students stay healthy no matter their financial situation. The place was creepy and abandoned now, but it must have once been full of people passionate about their jobs.

“Are these recipes?”

Schanze made sure not to step on the parchment littering the floor.

Yagoro glanced through the scrawled-out text.

“Let’s see. ‘Mix the juice of boiled dog tongue with the wolf claws and wait for it to cool.’ ”

“Don’t look so disgusted. Those are totally just alternate names for herbs.”

The sailor uniform boy did a double take toward the gyaru-style instructor.

Schanze seemed confused by his shock.

“This is a surprise. Didn’t expect someone who dresses like that to know how to cook. I assumed you relied on bike deliveries or instant witch recipes.”

“What about me made you think any of that?”

With witchcraft, it was common for texts to be encoded using strange symbolism based on similarities in color or shape. But even that was better than the cryptic symbolism found in alchemy artwork.

While the three-legged monster was searching the various labs, Yagoro and Schanze emerged into the hallway and moved deeper inside. That thing didn’t seem likely to pursue them now.

“H-hey, Yagoro. Could you defeat that thing with your magic?”

“That’s a meaningless question, don’tcha think? Would our situation change any if I destroyed that countertop there with my fist?”

The aim of the practice exam was to find four numbers. That meant no one was ever intended to defeat that monster. The students were meant to either hide from it or escape with the speed of their broom. Trying to fight would get you killed if you lost, but it would only wear you down even if you won.

“If your anxiety is getting to be too much, why not reduce your brain’s processing power with a quiz? Okay, Schanze, what is ATU 0510a? Hint: glass slippers.”

“Why would I know? I’m a self-taught witch who totally doesn’t have to worry about Maleficium’s entrance exam.”

He was pretty sure you didn’t even need to be a witch to know that one and he had given the answer himself earlier, but maybe the story was only seen as a specialist magic text in this world.

At any rate, he wanted to investigate the site of the explosion.

Until they ran into any obvious enemies or traps, they decided to keep a slow, careful pace. With the locations of enemy and ally unknown, they could end up guiding an extraordinary monster to a student who was trembling in hiding after escaping with high-speed flight.

They silently walked down the dark hallway. They frequently spotted strange monsters. A lot of them used blades or flames. And each of them was just as powerful as the three-legged one, if not more so. Even when they didn’t see it for themselves, they could hear them slithering up above the ceiling. They did not engage. Without a solid plan that let them create a united front, clashing with every monster they encountered would only wear them down until they were killed.

“Huh? Is that what I think it is?”

They found one of the numbers. A piece of parchment was attached to the bottom of a large mixer, which was a metal cylinder the size of an Earth metal drum combined with a rotating blade powered by a foot pump. **8*. The parchment even provide which digit it was.

That said, they had no way of knowing if this one was legitimate. An unkind student could have left it here. And placing it location on the bottom of a giant mixer felt malicious.

They continued walking a while more.

Thanks to the extreme tension, each step seemed to physically wear down their stamina.

They spotted some kind of lump in the hallway up ahead.

As they approached, they found it to be someone collapsed while holding a Formula Broom.

(Is that…?)

“Are you totally serious? Melehe Superlative?”

Things had to be bad. That girl prided herself in her future position as leader of the Private Striga coven, so falling to the floor like this had to be humiliating for her. Even if she hadn’t reached the peak of her skill yet.

For once, frightened Schanze actually ran out ahead of Yagoro.

That was a mistake. She shouldn’t have strayed from the survival strategy that had brought them this far.

Orange light flashed out. It broke through the wall to her side and swelled out in a massive explosion.

“Goh!?”

“Schanze!!”

She was thrown to the opposite wall.

Had she…protected the collapsed Melehe from the blast? Was doing the job she had signed up for something self-taught witch Schanze prided herself in?

“Teacher!!”

Yagoro recognized that voice. The destroyed wall led to a large room. Everything inside was scorched black and the outer wall had been knocked down, allowing the night wind in. Was this the site of the explosion? But it wasn’t large enough to fly around on a broom. Viocia held her Formula Broom in her hands like a sword and looked his way. Was that Dorothea trembling next to her? Dorothea had her forehead bandage tied extra tight, probably to keep her glasses from slipping and to help her focus on controlling her broom.

Then there was the giant.

Something blatantly inhuman boasted incredible deadly power.

Orange embers danced through the air.

Something large enough to scrape its head on the large room’s ceiling was facing the girls. The bipedal giant resembled a bronze bull. It must have had a furnace inside because its bronze body glowed orange.

(The Horned God? I know it’s a bull, but that doesn’t narrow it down much. If it’s a goddess with cow horns, it would be Isis, but its body looks masculine. For a male god associated with bulls, it could be Dionysus, I guess.)

But he was wrong.

“Watch out! It doesn’t use fire to attack. Melehe said it’s actually a pressure cooker, so its breath is dangerous because it crushes you with its pressure, not because of the heat!!”

“'''+1 point: if this is a deadly bronze pot, then the symbol it acquired in the distorted labyrinth is probably Moloch.'''”

Moloch.

That was originally an agriculture god worshiped by the Semitic Phoenicians. But in contrast to the gentle image of an agriculture god, his demand in exchange for a good harvest was the regular use of ritualized human sacrifice where children under the age of 6 were thrown into a bronze statue heated by flames. For this reason, the Old Testament depicted him as the pinnacle of brutality and one of the greatest forms of evil. For better or for worse, he was a being of immense power.

But since this was another world entirely, the information and circumstances found in the Earth mythologies could be ignored. Yagoro decided this would work as a tentative definition for the monster: a killer pot that started out as a kitchen tool and now moved autonomously to capture its targets and cook them inside its cronze form until none of their flesh or bones remained.

The students were never meant to stand up to something like this.

The best option was to never be found. The second best was to escape. The worst was to try to fight it.

(Wasn’t there a rumor a worker fell into a large pot before the place shut down?)

Rumors were only rumors. For one, a pressure cooker had to be locked shut to seal the interior before it could be used, so you couldn’t accidentally fall in. But where there was smoke, there was fire. He decided to assume there was a kernel of truth to the rumor.

And now the thing had been transformed by the abandoned building’s conversion into a labyrinth.

However, there was one silver lining here. Since the practice exam task was to collect the four numbers, defeating Moloch and ensuring the injured students’ safety would not count as intervening.

(I don’t actually gain anything from fighting it, but I don’t think it’s going to just let us go.)

“Viocia, do your best to not provoke it while you move slowly along the wall and leave the room. Dorothea, can you walk?”

“<span style="font-size:75%">Eh? Oh, um, uh.</span> I-I think so.”

“Melehe and Schanze are collapsed out in the hallway. You two gather them up and escape to safety.”

“Wh-what about you, teacher!?”

“Schanze said she didn’t receive a notice of cancelation via carrier pigeon, so the practice exam is still on. So don’t think about anything else. Focusing on the exam is your job, don’tcha think?”

Yagoro took a step past the broken wall. He walked toward the monster when he didn’t even have a Formula Broom.

He stared down the 4m statue of scorching bronze at close range.

He twirled his 40cm baton and gripped it tight.

“So I’ll clean up all the other trivialities while you do that.”