Overtechnology

The Blue Witch wakes in her quiet house, washes her face, combs her hair, and cleans the grave in the backyard. It is the same routine every morning.

Back when she was still called "Aoyama Hiyori" rather than the Blue Witch, she had preferred peaceful mornings. She wanted to be gently shaken awake by her little sister. It would also be nice to hug her sister when she crawled into bed and go back to sleep. Then she could wake up leisurely and begin the day slowly amid the warmth of her family, enjoying toast spread thickly with butter, sausages, and coffee with milk.

But now, that would never come to pass again.

After finishing breakfast with some tasteless canned food, the Blue Witch checked the operation of her backup weapon for emergencies—a handgun stripped from a police officer's corpse—then tucked it into a thigh holster and concealed it. She took a magic stone to patrol her territory, and was about to go outside when she was startled to find a magic wand where she always kept her magic stones.

It was the magic wand Cuanos, delivered a few days ago, but she still was not used to seeing it.

Dairi Kenshi, a wandmaker with monstrously deft hands and a fear of people, was a trustworthy human she had met for the first time in a long while.

His personality had its problems, but he meant no harm. He had no sense of danger, either. She was impressed that he had managed to survive this long like that.

The magic-wand sales contract with the strange beast of Okutama was also highly convenient for the Blue Witch.

After all, it was practically the same as obtaining an exclusive distribution right for the overwhelmingly strongest weapon in existence.

Skirmishes with other witches and wizards would be much easier to settle from now on. If she wanted, she could even use magic wands as bait to manipulate people and control the balance of power in various regions.

The Blue Witch had made Ome City, in northwestern Tokyo, her base.

Having once failed to save a single one of the citizens she was supposed to protect, the Blue Witch hunted the monsters destroying the city, determined to protect at least the hollow remnants of the memories left behind there.

What good would it do to protect houses to which no one would ever return? There was nothing beyond them.

Even so, the Blue Witch remained in Ome, like a mother wolf keeping watch forever over a nest from which her cubs had vanished.

With a magic wand, Ome's defenses would be even stronger.

She owed Dairi a debt. In these days when everything was breaking, rotting, and being lost, even one memory of the peaceful days that had already fallen apart was returning. How happy that made her!

As her benefactor had requested, the Blue Witch had begun scrutinizing potential customers in order to sell the magic wands.

She would sell to friendly forces and refuse hostile ones. That alone would let her draw a favorable map of the balance of power.

The Blue Witch intended to make the most of the broker's position that had fallen into her lap. She was poor at political maneuvering, but a large return made it worth considering.

If the magic wand became renowned as an important weapon capable of completely changing the balance of power, Dairi would be satisfied. If that balance changed and Ome's defenses grew stronger, the Blue Witch would be satisfied as well. That was a Win-Win.

Clutching the magic wand Cuanos, the Blue Witch set out to patrol the city once again.

She hunted monsters that had entered from other districts, as well as monsters that had appeared naturally within the district.

Sometimes she also hunted thieves who ignored the warning signs and tried to steal Ome's supplies, or miscreants who attempted to settle there without permission. Usually, she beat them half to death and threw them out of the district, but if they showed no remorse and continued to act brazenly, she showed no mercy.

There had been three battles against small fry that morning.

None of them had been worthy opponents for testing the magic amplification effect of Cuanos.

During her first monster battle after its delivery, the Blue Witch had fired her least powerful ice-spear spell at a carnivorous plant that had grown to the size of a compact car. Unable to control the abnormally amplified spell, she had pierced and brought down five private homes at once. It was wildly excessive power.

When selling a magic wand, it was pointless if the seller did not know the product's capabilities.

She wanted an ideal target for a test shot, but powerful monsters never appeared when she needed one.

Carrying the magic wand, the Blue Witch leaped from roof to roof and spent several hours checking every corner of the city from above for external threats before eating an early lunch. Thanks to having once looted every scrap of food from the Iruma Wizard's territory while taking him out, she still had plenty of supplies.

After eating, she would deliver more food to Okutama. She would put in a few fruits from the tree at Nakamura-san's house next door, too... She was thinking about that when a dull sound struck the window.

When she turned around, she saw a floating eyeball ramming itself against the window.

It was the Eyeball Witch's familiar.

Thinking that it had come for another pointless chat, she opened the window for it. The eyeball entered the house and began relaying the Eyeball Witch's voice from somewhere on it, despite having no visible mouth.

"Emergency."

The Blue Witch raised one eyebrow when the tense voice launched straight into the matter without a greeting.

The normally easygoing Eyeball Witch must have been in quite a desperate situation.

"What?"

"A giant monster has come ashore from Tokyo Bay. The coastal areas of Tokyo are a sea of fire right now. I need help."

"Don't ask me. Someone in charge of that area will deal with it."

The Blue Witch protected Ome, which lay inland within Tokyo. The coastal areas were outside her jurisdiction, and she had no interest in them.

She brushed the request off coldly, but the eyeball rolled its black pupil around anxiously and continued.

"I called it a giant monster, but basically, it's a kaiju. A kaiju. It's easily over a hundred meters long."

"Huh? That's pretty damn big. In that case, isn't the Vampire Wizard leading a joint operation?"

"The Vampire Wizard was killed in action. The Setagaya Witch fled. The Firekeeper Witch and the Hachioji Witch are holding it back for now."

At those unexpected words, the Blue Witch, who had been indifferent because she considered it someone else's problem, unconsciously tightened her grip on the magic wand. No matter how powerful the monster was, she found it hard to believe.

"Wait, Vampire died? Really?"

"It's true. But all the citizens of Minato Ward, where the kaiju came ashore, were evacuated safely."

"I thought he was the kind of man who wouldn't stay dead even if you killed him... I see. So that's how he died."

Unlike her, he had died after successfully protecting all the innocent people he was supposed to protect. She envied him a little.

He had always been an unpleasant man who was absorbed in playing at politics, but he was worthy of respect.

The Blue Witch offered a brief silent prayer and nodded.

"All right. This is a tribute to Vampire. If the kaiju comes near Ome, I'll finish it off."

"I know you don't want to leave Ome, but this is really bad. How long can the Firekeeper Witch and the Hachioji Witch hold out on their own? The other witches won't move... Hey, Blue-chan, could you come here? Please! We need every fighter we can get, even just one more!"

From the Blue Witch's perspective, it would be convenient to test-fire Cuanos against a giant monster.

However, she had no intention of leaving Ome undefended and going on an expedition for that purpose.

Once, out of kindness, the Blue Witch had gone to Kanagawa to defeat a man-eating bird that flew at supersonic speed after it appeared there. While she was away, the Iruma Wizard had attacked Ome and abducted all its residents. It was an unbearably bitter memory she would never forget.

She might pay a brief visit to a neighboring district, but she had no intention of venturing so far away that she could not return immediately.

"I'm not leaving here. If it comes near Ome, evacuate the Firekeeper Witch and the Hachioji Witch. I'll hunt it alone."

As she pictured the two witches who had said they had been her fans since her days as a magazine model, the Blue Witch offered the warning out of kindness.

The eyeball literally bulged its eye as it argued back.

"What are you talking about? Impossible! You're certainly strong, but aren't you about as strong as the Iruma Wizard? I'm not asking you to coordinate with us, so just provide covering fire――――"

"I said I'm doing this alone. If you want to get caught in the crossfire, then fight alongside me all you like."

"...Geez! Run if things get dangerous!"

The roar of the kaiju carried through the floating eyeball. Seemingly hurried by it, the Eyeball Witch rattled off a few words and cut the communication.

The familiar blinked at the Blue Witch in greeting, then floated away through the window.

After seeing it off, the Blue Witch climbed onto the roof of her house. What she saw was a gigantic kaiju advancing in the distance, mowing down entire clusters of buildings as it came.

"What the—it's huge...!"

Its enormous body exceeded even the reports, leaving her speechless.

The kaiju looked like a black Tyrannosaurus made even more bipedal, a monster with such an impossible body that it seemed as though her sense of perspective had gone haywire.

A creature that huge could devastate Tokyo simply by going for a walk. Yet the kaiju was clutching a gigantic structure that appeared to be Tokyo Skytree, smashing and sweeping everything around it into chaos like a tantrum-throwing child.

As she stared in stunned silence, a pillar of fire rose from the ground. It must have been the Firekeeper Witch's crimson flame.

It was powerful magic with enough scale and firepower to burn a skyscraper down to its foundations, but it only licked at the kaiju's knee. The kaiju ignored the fire around its feet and continued walking.

This time, several chains shot up from the ground and wrapped around the kaiju. From this distance they looked thin and unreliable, but they were the sealing chains of the Hachioji Witch, whose selling points were exceptional toughness and restraining power.

But the kaiju shook itself irritably, swung its tail around, and fired a beam from its tip, easily melting the chains.

She began to feel dizzy.

She had seen many monsters that surpassed human understanding.

She had hunted them after deadly battles, too.

Not long after the Gremlin disaster, pessimists preaching doomsday had repeatedly shouted that humanity was doomed. But she had believed that as long as witches like them existed, that would never happen.

Sacrifices were unavoidable, but humanity would never be destroyed.

Yet when she saw that embodiment of brutality walking with the rumble of an earthquake as though crossing an uninhabited wilderness, her certainty wavered. It had that enormous body, the intelligence to swing a weapon around, and it could even use magic.

She could not believe the sight before her eyes. Could such a super-creature even be brought down by a direct hit from a nuclear bomb?

The Blue Witch was beginning to hesitate when she remembered the feel of the magic wand in her hand and came to her senses.

Right.

She couldn't run.

Ome lay directly in the monster's path.

No matter what kind of monster she faced, the Blue Witch would protect the cityscape where the memories of peaceful days remained. If she could not even do that, her heart would break.

There was hope.

She could never have stood against it before, but now she had the magic wand Cuanos.

If she poured every last bit of her magic into her most powerful spell and amplified it with Cuanos, she could surely inflict some damage. She could at least make it change course rather than face her.

Monsters had originally been ordinary animals. She did not know what animal that one had once been, but it should be no exception.

They did not live for the purpose of destruction.

Just like wild animals, monsters would flee if they were wounded or felt threatened.

She probably could not defeat it.

But perhaps she could inflict enough damage to drive it away.

As long as she defended Ome to the death, she did not care if the kaiju changed course and rampaged somewhere else.

The Blue Witch took a deep breath and readied Cuanos.

The kaiju had seemed far away, but its enormous strides brought it closer much faster than expected.

When the kaiju came within range of her magic, the pillars of fire shooting up from the ground and the chains wrapped around it disappeared. As they had reported, the other witches must have begun their retreat.

At full power, magic was difficult to control.

Amplified by the magic wand, it would become impossible to control.

Even so, if she fired it straight ahead, there was no chance of missing the kaiju's enormous body.

The Blue Witch began gathering magic power from her body and pouring it into the wand.

The Blue Witch's magic, released outside her body, seeped into the surroundings as cold air.

Frost formed at her feet, while diamond dust created by the sudden cooling of the atmosphere and the resulting pressure change danced in the swirling wind.

"Ugh... ahh...!"

The Blue Witch groaned as the magic tried to flow back into her.

She had not even infused half her magic power, yet she had already lost control of the magic.

The signs preceding the spell's activation alone froze her home solid, and icicles sprouted here and there, growing thicker and thicker.

The heavy, cold, oppressive air invaded her lungs and stabbed into the Blue Witch's body from within, despite her being unusually resistant to the cold.

It was utterly impossible to limit the area of damage.

All she could do was point the wand forward and fire it in the kaiju's direction.

But that was enough.

Having finished charging the magic, the Blue Witch gripped the wand's handle with fingers covered in frost and beginning to freeze. She exhaled a white breath and smiled.

If this failed, no one could defeat that monster. So she would use everything she had—all of it.

Shall I put it to the test?

The skill of the world's one and only wandmaker!

Then the Blue Witch chanted the spell and unleashed the most powerful magic, the one that had once annihilated the Iruma Wizard with a single strike.

"You there, sink into the glacier. Sleep in the permafrost!"

A pale-blue wave burst from the magic stone in the magic wand Cuanos.

The wave itself was invisible, but the air along its path froze and liquefied in an instant, then went beyond even that, becoming a white solid. It made the attack look like a cold, merciless white beam pouncing on its prey.

The kaiju was no slouch, either. With reflexes that did not match its size, it tried to block the magic with the Skytree in its hands as a shield.

But the white wave pierced the kaiju along with the Skytree, and moments later, the entire kaiju had frozen solid.

That was not all.

The uncontrolled magic spread around the kaiju as though it had exploded on impact, sealing even the city beneath its feet under a layer of thick ice.

As a final touch, the magic that reached the sky swallowed the clouds and began sending down unseasonable snow.

Overrun by the kaiju and on the verge of being swallowed by fire and destruction, Tokyo was blanketed in quiet white snow.

A serene silence mercifully enveloped the world, and the Blue Witch let out a dry laugh at the sight her magic had created before her.

Who told me to take it this far?

At this rate, I'm the monster that will destroy the world.

"This is some serious overtechnology, Dairi."

The Blue Witch whispered feebly, then fainted after running out of magic power.