Casa was evading popup ads like there was no tomorrow. Larissa was doing the same, but maybe she wouldn’t reach tomorrow.

“OW! Wait! Casa—GUH?!”

“Larissa?! Are you—wOAH-kay that was close! Lariss—aH!”

Finally, they reached the boss door.

“Oh my, there’s one of these!” Casa exclaimed.

They went right in.

“Foolish mortals!” the Bookkeeper greeted once more.

Not wanting a repeat of a while ago, the Bookkeeper immediately fired a ball of Thousand-Ad Death Magic. Casa’s classification instincts flared up, and classified this one as really bad—or at least, it normally would be.

Larissa’s evasion instincts were embarrassing, forcing Casa to push her out of the way.

The magic hit Casa, engulfing her in a blue sphere where windows popped in and out of existence.

“A-Ah, it worked? I mean—Ahahaha! Finally! A sensible opponent!”

Indeed, the last one was too much for him. Unfortunately…

“Wait… What’s this?!”

Naturally, such an attack was meaningless towards Casa, who understood the nature of the attack in one glance.

With his magic working almost exclusively off the Akasha, Classifiers such as Casa have a breeze reading his magic. Like the Bookkeeper, Casa almost exclusively used the Akasha, and in fact, derived almost all her power from it.

It can be said that they had the same weaknesses. However, Casa was not just a Classifier, but a Reclassifier: one who is adept not only in reading, but in fooling the Akasha to think that something was another.

Which was why, Casa didn’t deflect the spell, but used it to plug into the Labyrinth’s consciousness; using it not to receive ads, but to look for her friend, co-opting the deadliest labyrinth known to librarian-kind as a surveillance network.

“Why did you go there? Miki?”

By the way, Larissa threw her fighting staff at the Bookkeeper like a javelin and hit him perfectly in the face.

The duo ran towards the wall with the hidden passage. Casa punched and kicked the correct combination of bricks, causing the passage to open in a way that not even the Bookkeeper had seen before.

Just like that, they were gone. The entire fight didn’t even take a minute.

The lich got up and patted his ripped robes down. He was absolutely done for the day.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He had met three insurmountable opponents in the space of 20 minutes. His Death by a Thousand Ads magic was supposed to be the end-all kill-all solution for the fleshbreathers. He was so excited to finally test it out after so many decades of waiting, but after today, it was back to being a research recluse for him.

“And that girl! She used my own spell to hijack the labyrinth!”

Unbelievable. What a day.

What’s next? The Tomb Killer shows up?

The boss doors opened once again. Wow, lots of visitors today, huh?

The Bookkeeper cleared his throat, though he wasn’t feeling too enthusiastic.

“Foolish mortal—ah, wait, you don’t count at all, do you, Lockefeldt?”

The Tomb Killer himself stepped up, juggling a tactical strike magic between his hands. It was a ball of continuously-exploding nukes, unstable to the point that it would momentarily phase in and out of reality.

Without Lockefeldt’s sensitivity and finesse with magic, he wouldn’t even be able to hold it.

Were he to let it slip and hit the floor, say goodbye to a good 3% of the labyrinth’s total volume.

“I do not have time for this, abominable lich.”

“What a coincidence, me neither.”

The door to the next chamber opened. Lockefeldt stopped juggling the nuke ball.

“Just go. You’re all monsters, anyway.”

Though a bit confused, he sensed no danger from the lich, and so Lockefeldt withdrew the tactical strike magic. He called the rest of the class with a whistle.

The class piled in, armed to the teeth and dishelved enough to be comparable to those poor veteran souls from the Magic Engineering college. Considering that they had entered not too soon after Casa and Larissa had left, that only meant that they were powerful enough to steamroll through all the traps on the way here.

The lich feigned disinterest, but deep inside, he breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t have to fight an entire class of monsters! Good call, self!

Casa and Larissa reached Miki’s last known location: a lone bookshelf in the middle of an empty chamber. There was a dim light hovering far above the shelf. Books were scattered about at the foot of it.

“My god… What a mess!”

Casa promptly began cleaning up. She somehow conjured a broom and a dustpan out of thin air. Larissa wiped her eyes but she swore there was no magic involved.

“Where do you even keep that?! No, wait! Casa! Stop! We need the evidence!”

She went and tried to tear the broom and dustpan from Casa’s hands. Casa wouldn’t relent.

“No! Get off me! The mess needs to be cleaned! Purge! Kill!”

“What.”

“What?”

Larissa sighed. Casa saying such strange things wasn’t strange in itself, but time was moving without them.

“Guess I have no choice. Casa, confess—”

“What?!”

Larissa produced an empty glass jar. There were crumbs at the bottom.

“You ate them all, didn’t you?”

“N-No…”

A bright light shone on Casa’s face. She fell on her butt, covering her eyes from the light.

It was nothing but her, the darkness behind her, and her interrogator.

“Confess~ Confess~”

No! No! It wasn’t me! she wanted to say. But she knew. She damn well knew. It was her all along.

It only took a little bit of light.

“I-It was me!” she cried, “My sins are mine alone to atone for! Please, leave Miki out of this!”

Huh? Miki too, huh? It seemed that Larissa had loose ends to tie.

After being forced to confess to her sin of sneaking out Larissa’s cookies, Casa was stuck in a daze, still regretting having ever stolen from her friend.

—How could I have been so sneaky-like? I should’ve fought her head-on for it! Violence is the only way!

With Casa out of the way, Larissa got to work playing detective. She scanned the area for fingerprints, precariously hovering her hands over every surface that looked like it could be touched and invoking her Photocopy Magic.

Larissa’s light-based magic could read fine details—even ones that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Magnifying the image was a simple enough matter, as well.

She opened her pocket notebook and transfered her latest scan.

“Here! It’s Miki’s fingerprint!”

“Wait, how do you know her fingerprint—”

“No more questions! Look, she went through this book in particular…”

“Hey, don’t dodge the question—wait, this book is really concerning isn’t it?!”

How to Get Your Boyfriend to Stop Talking to Other Girls—truly, this was a most horrifying discovery.

Casa was not so dense as not to figure out why it was this book in particular.

It was in that moment that the chamber was filled with ads, all targeting Casa.

“What’s—NO! NOT YOU TOO!”

Larissa realized who the target of the ads was, and shouted after her, but she turned too late. Her fingers brushed against Casa’s shirt. She even stumbled after her, but Casa was just too athletic.

First the cookie jar, and now this? Casa felt that she had betrayed her friends too many times in one week.

“I need to fix this.”

The labyrinth gave her the answer:

How to Get Your Friend’s Girlfriend to Stop Thinking You’re Hitting on Said Friend!

Viva Labyrinth! Praise be the Labyrinth! She was having such dangerous thoughts again. Maybe she’d actually push through with the cult one day.

She came to a stop in another chamber, one much greater than the last. Atop a pyramid, at the base of a pillar of light, waited the object of her desire.