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She stares in bewilderment as glowing yellow smoke fills her room.
The triangle of summoning, drawn on the pale tiles of her apartment bedroom with colored chalk ‘borrowed’ without permission from her school, lets out a blinding glow that illuminates the dimly lit room. A gale kicks up, even though the room is an enclosed space with all windows shut and dark curtains drawn, and the beeswax candles she painstakingly lit and set in a circle before the ritual are extinguished one by one.
The dark-haired witch covers her eyes to avoid being blinded by the radiance. The pungent smoke fills her lungs, eliciting a cough from the dark-haired witch, but choking was the least of her worries now.
And to think she had almost forgone the preparation of a barrier to protect against a potentially unruly familiar, thinking that this ritual, like every single one before it, would end in failure, and all her fantasies of being a fallen angel wielding magical powers were just that – fantasies. She almost wants to kick her past self for lacking conviction. She steps backwards into the magic circle on the floor, hoping that the ward would serve as a sufficient defensive measure against the powerful minion she had undoubtedly summoned.
From within the smoke, a silhouette forms. In the chaos, her eyes strain to make out the summoned one’s features to no avail. The wind dies down, the blinding light fades, the smoke begins to dissipate, and the room descends back into inky darkness. Her night vision ruined, she gazes fearfully at nothing, sweat rolling down her face. She opens her mouth to speak…
Before she can say anything, a hissing sound heralds the sudden awakening of the sprinklers, spraying water everywhere as the smoke alarm beeps angrily. The empty room turns into a damp one within seconds, and she flails wildly in the dark, trying to no avail to keep her magus robes from getting wet.
“C-Can’t you do something?” she yells, her exclamation directed at her newly summoned minion. Far from the epic, commanding first impression she had wanted to impress upon her familiar, but she had not considered the possibility of her successful summoning being a fire hazard. In fact, she had not considered the possibility of her summoning being successful at all.
The sound of clapping palms rings through the room, and the incessant beeping ceases. The sprinkle of slows to a trickle before, much to her relief. In the following moments, there is only silence and the sound of dripping water.
She steels herself, forcing back an instinctual shudder. She is terrified, despite being a fallen angel herself. She assures herself that it is because she has yet to meet another of her own kind, and that she is merely nervous about finally reuniting with her kin. But another part of her argues that she is just a girl with childish delusions that had finally gone too far and did something she shouldn’t have. Once again, she opens her mouth to address the summoned one.
“My little demon,” she begins her spiel, “I summon thee thus as my retainer, to do my bidding in the realm of the mortal. But for now, I ask of thee a simple task.” She gulps nervously, preparing to utter her first command to her minion. This is it – if the creature refused to obey her, or even attacked her, she would have to rely on her protective barrier. And knowing her luck, whatever she had summoned, it was probably just that – a disobedient fiend. She had imagined summoning archangels to her command before, but even she doubted that an archangel would listen to the orders of a lowly hu- fallen angel, she corrects herself.
Inhale. “Conjure for me a light, so that I may appraise thy appearance.” Exhale. The air seems to turn electric with her anticipation.
No response. But after a moment’s hesitation, there is the sound of shuffling feet, the click of a switch being flicked, and the lights in the room are turned on.
She blinks thrice in surprise. She had expected some grotesque being, perhaps a rotting sack of flesh held together by its own guts, or maybe a spooky skeleton warrior. Maybe even an angel in white robes. But before her, wearing a dripping Uranohoshi school uniform with a sheepish expression, is a girl around her age with long brown hair reaching down to her shoulder blades, one hand still on the light switch and the other clutching what seems to be a book of some sort to her chest.
“Zura!” The summoned girl seems relieved, a smile breaking out upon her cute features. In fact, she was so cute that she definitely wouldn’t qualify as a succubus. The girl moves towards her with a happy expression…
“D-Don’t come near me!” Unable to keep her shock from seeping into her voice, the summoner ends up with a quivering, pathetic voice rather than a commanding one. “I-I have a magic circle of protection set up,” she manages to stammer out, cowering behind her invisible (and perhaps imaginary) barrier. “Come any closer, and you may find thyself being burnt into dust!”
The girl gazes at her curiously. “This barrier?” she asks, stepping past elaborately patterned circles that had taken hours to draw without any visible effort.
Her summoner’s screams echo throughout the entire apartment building.
She considers her options. Does she escape through the door? No, the evil fiend is standing between my and the door. Then her only option is to flee by flinging herself off the balcony, surrendering herself to the twelve-storey fall to the asphalt below, and putting her ‘fallen angel’ theory to the test…
“C-Calm down, zura!” The brunette covers the witch’s mouth hastily, pushing her to the wall as she attempts to flee towards the balcony.
So this is where I die, the dark-haired witch thinks, struggling against her demonic captor. I can only hope that the demon will execute me swiftly and painlessly…
The girl in the school uniform looks at her summoner with concerned, golden eyes. “I’ll explain,” she says patiently, as though teaching a five year old basic arithmetic. “You did attempt to draw a circle of protection, and you did fairly well for a first-timer. But you made the mistake of drawing it with table salt.” She glances at the barrier, and the witch’s gaze follows; the barrier, or rather, what remained of it, is disgusting grey sludge on the floor, distorted enough to lose its form as a circle. “Naturally, when the sprinklers went off, the circle also faded… “
Of course. What an amateur mistake. The witch was crestfallen. “Go ahead and consume my flesh now,” she muttered in resignation, closing her eyes in acceptance of her grisly fate. “Please, make my death as painless as possible…”
Rather than immediately rip her head off her shoulders, the girl merely looks at her with a confused expression. “Eh? Was I not summoned by you?” she asks with questioning eyes, taking a step back from her summoner. She almost looks… sad? “Or did Maru make a mistake? It’s the first time I’ve ever been summoned, too…”
At that remark, the witch perks up. “Is it your first time as well?” she blurts out, before catching herself with some embarrassment. She could not let her little demon get the better of her by admitting that she was a clueless amateur. “I-I mean, the fallen angel Yohane, while greatly attuned to the spirit world and well versed in the theory of summoning rituals, has never summoned you before!” A rather lame attempt at salvaging her image. “Are you, er, a new… newly hired… demon?” She had seen many, many images of demonic creatures in grimoires and forbidden texts on the Internet, but outside of anime, she was fairly certain that none of them were cute girls in school uniforms…
The girl looks at her suspiciously, before opening her book and flipping through it. When the witch attempts to sneak a peek at it, she frantically turns the book away from her with a horrified expression. “Don’t look!” she exclaims loudly, her face turning pink all of a sudden. The witch notes the slight blush spreading over the demon’s face, and wonders if she was even a demon to begin with. The uniformed girl frowns. “If… If you peek at my grimoire, you’ll lose your soul, you know?”
Oh. Losing your soul. Just an occupational hazard of being a practitioner of magic, the witch supposes.
“Anyway,” the brunette flips through the pages, intentionally angling the book away from her summoner, “it says here that it’s your first time doing any sort of summoning; in fact, your first time establishing any sort of contact with the spirit world. Is that correct?”
“H-Hey!” Shame spreads through her chest and creeps up her face.
The girl nods again to herself. “Very well then,” she says with a warm smile, “Maru will do her very best to ensure that you will not be left unsatisfied by our contract!”
Contract? “What contract?”
The girl’s eyes widen at the realization that her summoner was truly completely clueless. “Well,” she begins, putting on the same patient expression she had earlier, “there are many kinds of contracts to be made with spiritfolk, zura. For example, there are many classes of demons – Destroyer-class creatures that are capable of wiping out cities on their own, Voodoo-class demons specializing in hexes, Familiar-class beings who serve as magical assistants… In order to summon and control them, a contract must be made. And you made one such contract with Maru!” The girl looks extremely pleased to utter the last sentence.
The witch narrows her eyes in suspicion. Well, at least this… Maru didn’t seem to want to torture her with hellfire, and the contract she had unwittingly entered into would prevent her minion from attacking and killing her. “Wait, you said Destroyer-class and all that…” the witch ponders out loud. “Then what class are you?”
The girl’s smile grows wider. “Oh, Maru is a Companion-class! We’re usually summoned by people who have no friends or are in desperate need for companionship, zura.”
Suddenly the twelve-storey fall from the balcony feels like a much more appealing idea than before, as her face heats up.
“…Yohane has no need for mortal companionship!” She huffs, although her steadily reddening face did nothing to hide her embarrassment.
“Then Maru will serve as your immortal companion until the terms of our contract are fulfilled.” The brunette clutches her grimoire to her chest with a cheerful grin. Her expression turns apologetic suddenly as she seems to realize something. “Ah! I forgot the most important part of our contract. We have to exchange our names.”
The girl sticks out a hand in a gesture of goodwill. “In your tongue, you may call me Kunikida Hanamaru!” She beams in delight. “Maru is glad to be your friend from now on!”
The witch forces a smile, wondering what she has gotten herself into. “I shall christen you… Zuramaru, my little demon. Yes, that has a nice ring to it.” She replies with forced bravado, shaking the offered hand. “I am the fallen angel, Yohane. May our partnership bear fruits of chaos and despair.”
Hanamaru’s eyebrows perk up in surprise. “That’s weird,” she mutters, leafing through her book once again. “I thought the contract said that I was contracting with a human named Tsushima Yoshiko…”
Yoshiko sighs blearily. O Lucifer, when will my bad luck streak end…
“Zuramaru?”
“Yes, Yoshiko-chan?”
“…ditching honorifics already? A-Anyway… what are the terms of the contract? Are you taking my soul? My blood? My magical energy?”
“Oh, don’t worry, zura! All my contract asks of you is to make seven more friends – besides Maru, of course – within the given time limit. It might be hard for you, since you currently have no friends, but I will help you however I can!”
“…ouch. And what’s the punishment should I fail?”
“Hmm… Eternal damnation, zura?”
“That… doesn’t seem… too… harsh... What’s the time limit?”
“From now?”
“…”
“Two days, twenty-three hours and twenty-seven minutes.”
There was a long moment of silence, where the only sound audible in the room was the breeze from outside the window.
“Zuramaru, I am about to give you your second order.”
“What is it, zura?”
“Please kill me.”
“Zuraaaa?!”