With a gentle laugh, she tapped the bottom of her staff on the floor. As she did, transparent spikes appeared before them. Like a cage, icicles rose up from the floor, surrounding them on all sides. “I was told by Yuuki to take Miss Dannoura to him. If you cooperate, I have no reason to harm —”

Yogiri kicked the icicle cage around them. A number of the icicles shattered, making enough space for a person to walk through.

“Wow, how fragile are these things?” Tomochika said, smacking a nearby icicle with her hand. As her fist bounced off it, she recoiled with an exaggerated shout. “It’s so cold! And why didn’t it break?! Why is this one so hard?!”

“I just tried killing the part I kicked. Seems like it went fairly well.”

Apparently, inanimate objects created by magic were also susceptible to Yogiri’s power.

“What does killing ice even mean? Is this one of those philosophical things again?!”

As Tomochika continued to complain, Yogiri pulled her out of the cage. Riza watched them, speechless. She must not have thought escape was even possible. The fact that she was here as an assassin was plain as day, so Yogiri felt more than justified in killing her. But they wouldn’t learn anything that way.

“What is going on?! I don’t understand this!” Completely at a loss, Riza raised a flustered voice as she pointed her staff at the two of them. The tip glowed bright, followed by an enormous block of ice appearing in the space in front of it.

She was probably planning on throwing it at them. With its sharpness and weight, that chunk of ice would easily reduce a person to a pile of lifeless meat. Since Yogiri had been planning on talking to her, his response had been too slow. In a situation like this, even if he killed the mage now, there was no guarantee the magic she put in motion would stop. So instead he unleashed his power at the ice itself.

The frozen block immediately shattered, dissipating into mist in front of them. Riza retreated a step with a sharp cry. Since she had tried to attack them, Yogiri now had all the justification he needed to kill her, but instead he turned his eyes to her staff. It really was a large thing to be carrying around for no reason, so it was possible that it was a necessary component of her magic.

He could kill her at any time, so first he tested out his power on the staff itself. It snapped in the middle, losing its magical glow as the jeweled head fell to the floor.

-Volume 1 pages 188-189