Talk about working under pressure.
It felt like a group project that would determine their final grade at school, but they started it way too late. And of the one subject Konrad hated the most: programming.
Well, with Kasserlane's runes, it became magic. But only when it worked.
"Shit," Kaede winced, butchering a rune. "Someone took almost all my birds out."
Konrad gripped the arm-guard.
"Should I go and—"
"No," she protested. "Even if you're not their target, who knows what'd happen?"
"B-but can imps even do that?" he asked. "Or is Lucifer here?!"
"As if," the Demon Lord scoffed. "I banished him. Even if hell froze over, he can't set foot here as long as I'm alive on this planet. Must be his general controlling them."
A general. Great.
But that banishment spell was on his list now as well.
Magic he wanted to learn once his life wasn't about averting one crisis after the other.
He still couldn't learn Kaede's healing, after all, or even the basics.
"Whoever it was knew my blind spots," Kaede complained. "Wait, they finished playing?!"
Right. The cheers have gotten loud.
Konrad jumped to check, and the moment he did, Yuki-san's mismatched eyes stared back. She was still on the stage, clutching her bass, looking with a curious expression.
He didn't need mind-reading or telepathy. He signalled to keep going, and the girl nodded.
"Still no fair," she yelled into the manager's microphone. "I'll pick the next song, and—can you, like, put a curtain in front of the stage? So they won't be able to see who's playing what?!"
Poor Yuki did her best. He had to use the time she bought well.
Closing the door, he returned to the runes to find those two arguing.
"I'm telling you, this'll cause a loop and drain our mana for nothing," Kaede claimed.
"What d'you even know 'bout time manipulation?!" Midori-kun scoffed. "That loop's the reason it'd work. It'll loop back around before you could get out, and—"
"We don't want to trap ourselves," the dragoness pointed out. "Right, Konrad?"
And he was on the spot again.
"Well, I'm no expert," he held up both hands. "Know what it felt like to be inside, and that I hopped over here through a portal. But how and why? Dunno."
They were in the same thing, so they should have known.
Especially the Demon Lord, writing all those studies on it.
"This part's necessary to cut us off from realspace. Expensive or not, the whole pocket-dimension would fall apart without it," Midori-kun explained.
Whatever that meant.
"Well, worst-case," Kaede shot back. "We'd waste a bunch of time and mana, then fight our way through a minefield of children. Then, I'm sure we'd keep experimenting in jail."
Ugh. Did prisons in Japan have rock bands?
No, no, no, he had to focus. The next song was already reaching his ears.
And what an odd choice. Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells.
The specific part with that maddening bass line that goes on and on forever.
A cult-piece for sure, and Yuki was nailing it on her bass. Even without seeing, he could tell it was her. Depending on how much of it they'd play, it could buy them up to twenty minutes.
Likely less, but that was their only chance to disappear.
"Okay, this should be it," the Demon Lord announced five minutes later. "Double check everything. This part is the heart of it, the rest, um—are you sure?"
Again, he asked Konrad as if he knew.
"Once we're inside, there's no escape. If your portal theory's wrong, we'll be stuck inside forever," Midori-kun warned. "And that's a bit too long to spend with you two, no offense."
At least he had the strength to joke around. But that didn't add up.
"Last time we were all separated, and time passed at a different rate," Konrad noted. And when trapped with the Silver Mage and Zoltan, they were all far apart in realspace and still close.
"It's an anomaly for a reason," Maou shrugged. "Unpredictable. Even if you use the same spell."
Good to know. What a huge confidence boost—it was not.
"Aaand my last bird's gone," Kaede announced. "We're blind, surrounded, and running out of time. So, what will it be, bossman? Do we charge this up or what?"
Asking him again?! Well, that was on him.
Konrad chased that elusive control over his entire life. He wanted his decisions to matter.
So now, when it did, the pressure—
The cheers got louder again. They didn't play the whole song after all.
"Fuck, let's go," he decided, tucking his sword away into his guitar case. "I've been in this anomaly twice already, and got out every time, so—"
Wait, he never admitted the first one. It was a trap a future Maou Midori set up in the past—
And thinking about it made his head hurt again.
"All right, I'll power up my third. You do that one," the Demon Lord barked, missing his comment. "It won't be hard to tell which circuit fell apart, so we'll have someone to blame."
"That's what you're worried about?!" Konrad grunted, channeling his essence.
And as the runes lit up, the air in the green room turned cold.
It was like when Stella went wild with her necromancy back in Halaima. Entropy?
They were about to rip a piece out of reality, both time and space after all, so it made sense.
"Once we're inside, let me do the portal," he yelled as a strange wind picked up around them. Did they even hear him from the howling? "It's unpredictable where we'd end up if we all—"
"For heaven's sake, charge your part," the Demon Lord shouted back.
"Wherever we go, we'll figure something out," Kaede said, too. He hated it when those two agreed. "But only if we leave now. Let our future selves worry about the details."
No, that's not—whatever. They were right about the urgency.
Pouring in a significant amount of his essence, reality was finally breaking apart.
Floating above the pentagram was a growing, grey tear in space.
From certain angles, it looked like a black hole, but seeing it from the outside in general was new. Konrad always ended up in one before he knew it.
So what now? Did they have to step inside or something?
The bubble, or tear, or whatever started to grow. Fast. He worried about the wrong thing again.
"Man, that was great, I hope it—"
Yuki-san's mouth hung open mid-sentence as she entered the scene. Konrad tried to face her, but it was too late. The anomaly swallowed him whole.
Kaede and Midori-kun were already inside, looking overwhelmed from the strange sensations.
Right. Focus on the portal. The faster they passed this hurdle, the better.
Muffled, desperate voices followed him from realspace.
"Wait for me," Yuki yelled, running towards them.
Not that he saw. But he could feel. Idiot. Cast fast, before—
"For heaven's—"
A tiny emo ball crashed into their anomaly with the force of a freight train. The impact caught Kaede square in the hip, and with a gasp, the dragoness fell out of the pocket-dimension.
How?! Why?! Wasn't it unescapable?
Before he'd react, the portal activated, and—
Wait. He never finished. There was no destination. And Yuki was still inside.
Where the hell were they going?!