Chapter 42: Predicament and Faith
Above Hachijo-jima, the canvas of reality had been torn, shredded, and haphazardly stitched back together. Mitsuhiko's Witch Labyrinth was a vast, chaotic, and ever-shifting dark maze that had swallowed both earth and sky. The laws of physics were a forgotten dream here. Broken signposts spun wildly, pointing into a formless abyss. Fragments of city maps drifted and collided, forming a ground of shifting sand. Tangled, flickering neon tubes formed walls and corridors that nauseatingly rearranged themselves every second.
Gin and his remaining forces were trapped in this hellscape, born from a young boy's final despair.
"Left flank! Watch out for those damned lanterns!" an Organization contractor screamed. A moment later, several "Lost Lanterns"—child-shaped silhouettes with no faces, carrying old-fashioned paper lanterns—drifted out from behind a flickering neon sign. The soft, inviting glow from the lanterns was a siren's call, a psychic whisper that tugged at the primal desire for 'home'.
"I'm... going home..." one of the contractors murmured, her eyes glazing over as she began to walk trance-like toward the light.
"Idiot! Snap out of it!" her squadmate yelled, slapping her hard across the face. But it was too late. The map-fragment beneath her feet suddenly flipped over, revealing a swirling, bottomless void. With a short, choked cry, she was gone.
Vodka swung his heavy magic axe, cleaving through several of the familiars. He was panting, his face grim. "Boss! We can't kill them all! And this damned place keeps changing! We're just going in circles!"
Pinga zipped through the shifting corridors, the purple data-visors over his eyes streaming with red code as he desperately tried to find a stable path. "It's no use!" he finally reported, his voice tinged with a rare frustration. "The Labyrinth's structure is completely unstable! The energy flows are chaotic, and the pathways reconfigure every second! We're blind in here!"
Gin's face was a mask of cold iron. He knew. They had already encountered the master of this domain several times—"The Guide at the Crossroads of Samsara," the Witch that had once been Mitsuhiko.
It was a grotesque, towering amalgamation of countless shattered blue glass signposts. Each shard of glass reflected a different, disturbing, distorted image. From the cracks, a thick, black, tar-like substance that could only be described as "tears" constantly streamed down. At its peak, where an arrow should have been, was a single, giant, cracked eye. Its pupil was a void of pure darkness that seemed to swallow all light and hope, and it slowly swiveled, coldly observing the tiny intruders in its maze.
The Witch was here.
"It's coming! Three o'clock!" Chianti's voice was tight with tension.
The giant eye locked onto their position.
BOOOOM!
A massive beam of pure darkness, so dense it warped the very light around it, shot out, obliterating everything in its path.
"DEFEND!" Gin's command was a shard of ice. The remaining contractors poured their magic into a desperate, combined shield. It lasted for less than a second before the beam tore through it, vaporizing the two contractors at the front. Vodka, his body magically reinforced, managed to survive the edge of the blast, but he was thrown back, his arm horribly burned. At the same time, thorny black vines shot out from the Witch's body, impaling and draining the life from several more contractors.
Gin moved through the chaos, his mind a cold, calculating machine. The sacrifices of his subordinates did not move him. This Witch, born from Mitsuhiko, was far more powerful than any they had encountered. Its core seemed invulnerable. A direct assault was suicide. There was only one option: escape.
But how do you escape a living, breathing maze with no exit?
Unless... the exit was hidden in the Witch's own obsession. The Labyrinth's core concept was "getting lost" and "false guidance." Could a true "exit" be hidden amongst the countless false paths? Could a momentary weakness in the Labyrinth's structure be exploited?
It was an insane gamble, but it was their only hope.
"All units!" Gin's voice crackled over their communicators, cold and absolute. "All peripheral combatants, launch an all-out saturation attack on the Witch's main body! Draw all of its fire, at any cost!"
The last of the Organization's magical girls looked at each other. They understood. Their mission was not to win. It was to die, and in dying, to create a single, fleeting chance for their leaders to escape.
"For the Organization's purification!"
"For the future of humanity!"
"For the Boss's grand vision!"
Faith conquered fear. They threw themselves at the monster, their final, futile spells a blaze of defiant glory.
The Witch's eye glowed with rage. It unleashed its full power, a storm of dark beams and corrosive tears, annihilating the charging magical girls.
And in that moment of ultimate chaos, as the Witch focused all its power on the massacre, Chianti and Korn saw it.
"FOUND IT! SEVEN O'CLOCK!"
They both fired, their last reserves of magic channeled into two perfect, synchronized sniper shots. They weren't aiming at the Witch, but at a single, unremarkable point in the swirling, chaotic space beside it.
BOOM!