CRASH—
One heavy, jarring sound.
"What was that!?" Sakura Mai caught the strange noise from inside the dorm and bolted for the living room.
The living room looked like a disaster zone.
The custom coffee table — that absurdly heavy thing only Sakura Mai could drag around — had somehow been flipped onto the floor.
Its glass top lay shattered, and the tea set the girls used for their afternoon tea was scattered across the ground.
Sakura Mai felt a small pang for her poor coffee table.
But more important than that — her eyes settled on Soga Yura, who seemed to have gone out of her mind entirely.
Soga Yura's hands were flushed red, and both of them were shaking.
It was obvious enough. That custom table, the one Soga Yura normally couldn't shift an inch without Sakura Mai's help, was the very table she had just overturned in a single instant.
The girl's left hand clutched a sheet of letter paper, crushed into a wrinkled wad.
As for her right hand — in the instant Sakura Mai came rushing in, Soga Yura surfaced just enough from her fury to stuff a soft, powder-blue piece of fabric into her skirt pocket. It carried a faint scent of citrus.
What caught Sakura Mai's attention, though, was the girl's expression.
That little face that was normally so unruffled, so impossible to rattle, always wearing a smile both polite and distant.
That little face that softened only for Yuzu, going fretful and flustered, letting the crybaby underneath show through.
Right now it had gone frighteningly dark.
Blank. Empty of expression.
Faint glints of rage seemed to be buried in her crimson eyes.
The girl's long hair stirred as though in a wind that wasn't there.
Sakura Mai wasn't the one that anger was aimed at, and even so she could feel it — the matchless pressure pouring off Soga Yura, the pressure that belonged to a Fourth Sequence Esper.
She was angry.
She was in a rage.
Sakura Mai didn't need a second's thought to guess that Soga Yura's fury had to involve Sister Yuzu.
If a dragon has one inverted scale, and death comes to whoever touches it—
then Sister Yuzu was this idiot's inverted scale.
Even Sakura Mai herself — after she had 'eaten' Sister Yuzu, Soga Yura had pouted at her and refused to speak to her for ages, sulking like a child in a spat.
Right up until Sakura Mai 'admitted' it—
that she hadn't 'eaten' Sister Yuzu at all. Sister Yuzu had eaten her.
Only then, as if she'd finally been handed a way to climb down, did Soga Yura make up with her.
As if anything like that could ever have happened.
She had lost her reason to the rioting Sword of Erasure, and she truly had committed an unforgivable crime against Sister Yuzu.
And the rioting Sword of Erasure truly had been soothed.
That was a wall Sakura Mai had never once managed to climb over.
None of that mattered right now, though—
Watching Soga Yura pushed past the far edge of rage, Sakura Mai began to worry about Sister Yuzu too.
"Yura?"
She picked her way slowly around the debris and crossed to Soga Yura. "Is it Sister Yuzu?"
"What happened to Sister Yuzu?"
Sakura Mai honestly couldn't imagine it.
What kind of 'accident' could have befallen Sister Yuzu to drive Soga Yura into a fury like this?
Had Sister Yuzu decided to abandon Soga Yura and run off to the ends of the earth with her beloved?
Even then, an idiot like Soga Yura would only do what she'd done last time — throw herself into Sakura Mai's arms and bawl about how Sister Yuzu didn't want her anymore.
As for any other kind of accident?
Sakura Mai really couldn't come up with one.
Sister Yuzu had faced down the Sixth Sequence "Seat of Evil" in person; her combat experience ran deep.
And these days that "Seat of Evil" lived directly across from her.
Sister Yuzu was so thoroughly safe that Sakura Mai couldn't picture a single thing going wrong.
"Yuzu's been abducted—"
Soga Yura's very first words nearly broke Sakura Mai's composure.
Still, she forced her face back under control.
Her body was another matter. She was already closing in on Soga Yura, straining to see what was actually written on that crumpled sheet in her fist.
Because Sakura Mai could not imagine who had the power to abduct Sister Yuzu — in the Tokyo metropolitan area, inside Keigunen Private Academy, no less.
The Holy Relic Family?
Or Kujou Iruka?
The former wouldn't take a risk like that.
The latter... the latter ought to still be wandering the face of the earth with that never-extinguishing domain of hers unfurled.
"Who?"
"Who took Sister Yuzu?"
"Yura, don't panic yet..." Sakura Mai urged, struggling to talk both of them down.
Her mind raced through the situation.
Her words came out faster all the same.
"What if it's just some malicious letter?"
"We can call Yuzu's school first... get in touch with Director Saionji."
By now Sakura Mai could make out the neat, elegant little characters on the stationery.
A familiar citrus scent still seemed to cling to the paper.
"I have no choice but to believe it..." Soga Yura would have had a hard time explaining to Sakura Mai that the envelope had held more than the letter. It had also held a piece of Yuzu's underwear.
And going by Soga Yura's experience—
that garment was fresh enough that it might as well have just come off her body.
But there were things she could explain—
how this letter had turned up in their dorm without a soul seeing or hearing a thing.
And — the part that needed no explanation at all — exactly what the name signed at the bottom of the letter meant.
"Kujou Iruka!???"
Sakura Mai tore the letter out of Soga Yura's hand, and as she took in that signature and Kujou Iruka's brazen declaration, cold sweat crept down her back.
"Ring-ring-ring—"
Inside the security office of Keigunen Private Academy.
Unohana Chiyo had been counting herself lucky that Soga Yura hadn't heard the news yet, turning over how to tell Soga Yura and Director Sakura gently that she had failed to look after Little Yuzu — that Little Yuzu had been carried off.
Her phone rang.
She looked at the caller ID, and the unease already sitting in her stomach climbed straight into her throat.
SAKURA.
"Director Sakura..."
"Yes—"
"Yes..."
"Yuzu isn't at Keigunen Private Academy."
"That's right... she... she's been taken."
"What?"
"Director Sakura already knows?"
"I'm sorry!!! It's my fault, I didn't take care of Yuzu." Unohana Chiyo's fists clenched so hard with self-reproach that her nails looked ready to bite into her palms.
"Yura and I are on our way." Sakura Mai set down the phone.
Elsewhere—
A woman with a slender figure and healthy, striking wheat-colored skin knocked, then opened the door to her Eldest Young Lady's room.
"Is something the matter?" The girl had been sitting quietly in the sunlight with a book. She raised her eyes to the woman.
The woman's body shrank back before she could stop it.
She dropped her head fast, terrified of catching sight of something she wasn't supposed to see.
But out of the corner of her eye she'd glimpsed, faintly, what filled the pages of the book closed over her Eldest Young Lady's knees.
Illustrations, it looked like.
Or sketches.
"Word came in from the Investigation Bureau."
"Eldest Young Lady..."
"Su Yuzu has been abducted from Keigunen Private Academy."
THUD—!
The girl slammed the book down onto the floor, and pages tore loose and rained across the ground.
Tsukimisato Somehana saw what was drawn on the scattered pages. She hadn't been seeing things.
They really were illustrations.
And she knew the person in them very well—
That radiant little face, lovely as spring water rippling open, the kind of face girls fell for.
Shoulder-length hair.
A figure whose lines were nothing at all like her sister's.
Su Yuzu.
"Those—"
"useless wretches!!!"
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