The air was filled with code. That was the first perception. Consciousness breaking through the surface of water and rising up—that ambiguous sensation. The back of her eyelids wasn't red, but rather dark. The smell of soil. The creaking of wood. Insects chirping somewhere in the distance. Seto Yui opened her eyes. There was a ceiling. Wooden beams ran across it, and spider webs swayed white in the corners. Plaster walls were peeling away in places, revealing rough stonework beneath. Dust-covered floorboards transmitted a gritty sensation against her body. (…Not a hospital.) The obvious conclusion descended with strange slowness. Yui had been holed up in the company server room for three days and three nights. Responding to a critical system failure. An unidentified memory leak had been eating away at the production environment, and the entire team was exhausted. Her last memory was holding a coffee cup in front of a monitor—and then it cut off. She must have collapsed, Yui thought. The heaviness of her body proved it. It took an unbelievable amount of strength just to lift one arm. Three days' worth of fatigue remained in her flesh. She slowly pushed herself up. Dust clung to her black short hair. Her white shirt was wrinkled, and the knees of her black slacks were soiled with dirt. Only the silver ear cuff on her left ear remained oddly unscathed. The faint burn-like marks on her wrist—scars she couldn't quite remember when she'd gotten, that she'd almost stopped noticing—peeked out slightly from her sleeve cuff. She searched for her smartphone. She patted her pockets. Nothing. She looked around the floor. Nothing. "…Ah." There was a window. Yui stood up, steadying herself against the wall as her legs wavered, and approached the window. There was no glass, just a wooden frame. Beyond it spread—a forest. Dense, verdant green. And beyond that, she could see stone buildings scattered about. Walls built from cut stone. Thatched roofs. Thin smoke rising from chimneys. A scene cut straight from a medieval European picture book lay before her. (…Not the company. Not a hospital. Where is this?) The moment the murmur left her lips, it happened. Text strings floated into her field of vision. At first, she thought it was an afterimage. The fatigue from staring at monitors for three days must be creating hallucinations, she thought. She closed her eyes. One second, two seconds. She took a deep breath. She opened them. It was still there. Faintly glowing text strings floated in the air. They hadn't disappeared. Rather, when she looked directly at them, their outlines became clearer. Yui furrowed her brow and stared intently at them. By professional reflex, she first tried to read the structure. —Variable declarations of some kind. —Conditional branching structures. —Loop processing patterns. "…This is code." She'd said it aloud. Something clicked into place in her mind. The brain of someone who'd lived as a programmer for nearly ten years recognized the pattern. A logic structure like Java and Python averaged together, but definitely readable. Variables bound to values, branches, repetitions. This was code. Definitely. (But what code?) There was a fireplace. In the back of the room, a small fire burned in a stone fireplace. And around that flame—the same text strings swayed. The syntax wavered with the flame's movement. As if the flame itself were written in code. Yui approached the fireplace. She knelt down and carefully read the flame's syntax. (…The combustion variable is being passed as a fixed value. Seriously? That's way too inefficient.) She found herself murmuring. The conditional branching was redundant too. The same check was nested three times over. This was code written by a beginner. It worked, but it wasn't optimized. The urge to refactor rose slowly from the depths of her exhausted body. It was a curse, she thought, the nature of a systems engineer. Yui extended her finger. Imagining touching the syntax. As if rewriting the inefficient notation. Concentrating her consciousness—changing the variable's fixed value to dynamic, cutting out the redundant conditional branches, optimizing the loops. The flame moved. Gently. As if it had taken a breath, it changed shape. It stretched thin following Yui's finger, then rounded, shrank with a snap, and glowed again. "…It moved." Her hand trembled. "It really moved." Warmth spread through the center of her chest. That sensation from when a program first ran. When you wrote code, executed it, and got the expected output back—that small, certain sense of accomplishment. It had returned now, through manipulating the flame. (I can debug this. I can debug the magic in this world.) Certainty ran through her like electricity. She got carried away. She admits it. But she got carried away. "Let me try making it bigger." She wanted to go back in time right now and stop herself. She plunged her hand into the syntax and rewrote the combustion limit value. Not in a test environment, not in staging—she immediately removed the limit in production. The most cardinal sin an engineer could commit, done in excitement. The flame exploded. Not literally an explosion. But a pillar of fire reaching the ceiling erupted from the fireplace in the abandoned cottage, flames licked the wooden beams, and the entire structure shook. "Oh no!" She frantically tried to call up water syntax. If you're fighting fire, water was the logical choice. The thinking itself was correct. The only problem was that Yui hadn't read a single line of water syntax yet. It was like calling an API that didn't exist—the spell naturally failed. She made a futile gesture into empty air and collapsed heavily onto the floor. "I bugged it." She held her head. "I bugged it myself." She desperately returned to the flame's syntax and changed the limit value back. Well, actually she didn't remember the original value, so she tried different numbers, adjusted several times, and finally got the flame back to normal size. The ceiling beams were slightly scorched. The fact that almost no smoke appeared in the unventilated room, she'd realize later, was because the flame's syntax included smoke control. She sat on the floor, looking up at the ceiling for a while. The smell of scorched wood. (That's what you get for not testing properly before touching things.) Self-recrimination descended on her. Nearly ten years as an engineer, and she'd removed the limit value in production without warning. But simultaneously, an important certainty also descended. The magic in this world could be debugged. She could read the syntax, understand it, and rewrite it. What that meant for Yui—she didn't fully understand yet, but at least it meant she wasn't helpless. That's when she heard voices from outside. Multiple human voices. —————— When Yui opened the cottage door, people had gathered. About twenty of them. People in work clothes, holding hoes, wood-splitting axes, and torches, stood about three meters from the cottage. Their faces all wore the same expression of fear. Yui raised both hands. "Don't be scared. Let me explain—" "A witch," an old man's voice cut in. "A witch has come. A rogue practitioner." "The seal will break," someone said. "Get out!" another shouted. Voices overlapped, becoming a wave. A stone flew. It grazed her cheek. She felt the thin sensation of blood seeping. The pain brought reality back. In the truest sense. The pain told her this wasn't a dream or hallucination. "Understood, I'm leaving," Yui said. She took a step back. "I'm leaving. I'm sorry." She closed the door. Curses continued from outside. Some words were intelligible. Ordina's Law. Rogue practitioners. Syntax registration. Punishment. Exile. Such words flowed through the door. Yui slid down with her back against the door, sitting on the floor. (The language… I understand it.) That was a strange fact. There was no language barrier between her and the people outside. She understood their words. Her words reached them too. Yet the conversation didn't connect. The meaning didn't transmit. Even with a shared language, those with completely different situational awareness couldn't meet through words—she understood this with her body. "Why does the language work but nothing gets through…" She murmured to no one in particular. She hugged her knees. Fatigue piled on top of psychological damage. Three days of overwork, on top of the confusion of transfer, the magical explosion, the stone-throwing. Her body had long since exceeded its limits. Blood continued to seep slowly from the wound on her cheek. She just sat there for a while. The voices outside gradually receded. As twilight light filtered through the window, Yui slowly raised her head. Thought slowly rose from the depths of fatigue. Emotional damage, given enough time, could be—not completely, but—processed. She'd experienced this many times in her life. Being a systems engineer was also a job that made you accustomed to isolation. Even working in a team, you fixed your own bugs. In a server room at midnight, with no one coming to help, you wrestled alone with error logs. That was daily life. So this isolation was—painful, but not unbearable, Yui told herself. It might be a lie, but she needed the lie now. More importantly. (Why does the magic in this world have the same structure as Earth's programming languages?) That question floated up in the silence. It couldn't be coincidence. It wasn't like convergent evolution. Variable declarations, conditional branching, loops—that might be universal as a logic structure for information processing. But if even the notation format was similar, that was different. (Did someone design it?) A strange hypothesis caught on the edge of her mind. Still no basis, just intuition. But the intuition of someone who'd lived as a programmer for ten years was speaking—this isn't coincidence. Something must be connected. The reason she came here, the structure of this world's magic. What that connection was, Yui couldn't know yet. There wasn't enough information. (Focus on surviving first.) A practical voice cut off her speculation. Right. Too right. Philosophical questions could wait, but physical danger couldn't. Yui stood up and found old cloth scraps piled in a corner of the cottage. She didn't know what fiber they were, they didn't look clean, and she couldn't disinfect them, but she pressed them against her cheek wound. It throbbed with pain. Her face twisted at the unfamiliar sensation. That's when she tried to look outside through the broken window— Her feet stopped. Light was moving along the distant hill's ridge. Torches, she understood after a few seconds. Not one or two. Lights arranged in formation, moving in orderly lines, were appearing one after another from beyond the hill. The movement was so mechanical, so orderly, that it became eerie. An army, even Yui could tell. That scale could only be an army. "This is the worst," Yui murmured. She assessed the situation. What she could do with syntax magic was, for now, only flame manipulation. And if she overloaded it, there was a risk of losing consciousness—she still didn't know how much her thinking capacity had been depleted by the explosion. Her body was at the limit of exhaustion and couldn't fight. If she tried to flee, she knew nothing of this world's geography or roads. She didn't even know what lay beyond this village called Fæhren. Escape or. Barricade. Yui looked at the hill's ridge through the window once more. The number of torches kept increasing. Or rather, they continued endlessly. As if a river of light flowed from beyond the hill. She didn't yet know the color of the military flags fluttering among them. Who commanded them. How large the force was. Only one thing was clear—before night gave way to dawn, something would change. The fireplace flame swayed quie