Chapter 14 — So If We Hurt Hanakawa until Just Before He Dies, Friendship Counter Will Activate!
“Huh? If you are here now, that means you must have embraced your role of saving me at the last moment, with a line like ‘No, I’m the only one who gets to kill him!’”
“Please, let me go home...” Lute moaned.
He was the spawn of a Dark God. Having met Hanakawa in the Garula Canyon, he had dragged him across the world in an effort to kill Yogiri. In the end, he had been killed by Albagarma’s sister in the Underworld. The Dark God Albagarma didn’t exist anymore now that the world had been reset, but as Lute hadn’t been killed by Yogiri, he was still around.
“If I deal with that thing, can I go?”
“Huh? Do you not wish to do something about Yogiri Takatou?”
“If Lady Mana couldn’t beat him, what do you expect me to do?”
Hanakawa had hoped Lute would become a useful ally for them, but it seemed Lute had already completely given up on his revenge.
“Very well! If you help me out of this situation, then I will be satisfied! But he is capable of devouring any attack and spitting it back at you! Is there anything you can do about him?”
“I see. I wonder if he can deal with this then?” Lute knelt down, putting a hand to the ground. The earth began to shake, and Daniel vanished as a rent in the ground opened beneath him. The earth had split apart, starting at Lute’s hand and reaching past the cat beast.
“What did you do?”
“It’s something like a pitfall trap. Being able to eat attacks doesn’t mean anything if you send him somewhere else. Okay, see ya.” Apparently having finished his part, Lute vanished.
“Wait, wait, wait! We have not won the battle yet!”
Victory required one of the sides to be killed, but there was no telling whether Daniel had actually died or not. Hanakawa ran over to where Daniel had disappeared. Looking down the newly formed crevice, he couldn’t see to the bottom. Naturally, Daniel was nowhere in sight either.
“We’re in the sky here, right?” Carol asked, coming up beside Hanakawa. “Maybe he fell all the way down to the surface.”
“In that case, will this decide the fight? There are no rules about leaving the arena, are there?”
“I guess getting out of danger didn’t help us much then.”
“Do not complain to me about it! Sir Lute is the one who suddenly appeared and did that without asking!”
“But if he fell and can’t return, that should effectively be a victory for us, shouldn’t it?” Ryouko asked. “Maybe we should ask?”
The Great Sage should have been watching their fights. Everything seemed to hinge on whether he found the fights interesting or not, so an ambiguous conclusion like this should have been against his wishes. If they called out to him, there was a good chance they’d get a response.
“Very true,” Hanakawa replied. “I suppose we should at least try—”
Looking up to shout at the sky, Hanakawa was stopped by something flying out of the crevice at a tremendous speed. Naturally, it was Daniel, the many-headed cat.
“Well, the crevice was not particularly wide, so it is not entirely unthinkable he could run up the side. Uh, Sir Lute?” Hanakawa tried calling for him, but Lute didn’t reappear. It was hard for him to tell what counted as him being in danger. Maybe no one would appear unless he was clearly about to die.
“So if we hurt Hanakawa until just before he dies, Friendship Counter will activate!” Carol declared.
“Please do not say that as if you have just struck upon a golden idea!”
“Stop joking around,” Ryouko interrupted. “It looks like he’s getting stronger.”
Perhaps out of rage, Daniel’s hair was now standing on end, countless heads sprouting from around his body and now glaring at the trio.
“Looks like it’s about time,” Carol murmured. A few moments later, Daniel exploded.
“What on earth just happened?!” Hanakawa exclaimed.
“That’s my nullification power!”
“I thought you said you had to make physical contact for it to work?”
“I can make an item that seals their power too! It takes a while for it to take effect, so it’s really annoying to use!” Carol explained, sounding strangely proud.
Where the enormous cat beast once stood, there were now four children collapsed on the ground. Just nullifying their abilities shouldn’t have injured them at all, but perhaps from the backlash of their transformation, they were lying motionless for now.
“But when did you place such an item on them?” Hanakawa asked.
“Remember that first kunai I threw? It was before they combined, so they weren’t able to eat it. Since they fused after that, the kunai got mixed in with them!”
“So...it only worked by sheer coincidence then?” Hanakawa said.
“Anyway, what do we do now?” Ryouko said. “Killing them would be like taking candy from a baby.”
“I am not sure about killing a defenseless opponent...” Hanakawa answered, pulling some rope out of his item box. Tying the four children up, he gave the other end of the rope to Carol, whose nullification ability could pass through it to restrain them.
“I suppose I’m the leader, so I’ll try talking to them,” Ryouko said. “If we let Hanakawa do it, he’ll just agitate them further.”
Depending on how the conversation went, the situation could get much, much worse, so Hanakawa left the negotiations to Ryouko.
Daniel looked up at her as she approached. It seemed he was able to talk.
“Admit that you lost or we’ll kill you all right here,” Ryouko declared.
“How direct can you be?!” Hanakawa exclaimed.
“Do we have any other choice?” she replied.
“Well...I suppose there are not really any grounds for negotiation here...”
Without determining a winner, they could never leave this channel, and once they had reached a conclusion, they’d be cut off from each other and so unable to interact at all. This was the only way out for them.
“Fine... I admit it, we lost,” Daniel muttered.
Ryouko Ninomiya Wins!
Words declaring their victory appeared in the sky.
“You beat us, so you definitely have to kill Yogiri Takatou. Then Mireiyu will—”
Before he could finish what he was saying, Daniel and his siblings vanished. Hanakawa and the two girls were now in a room, so it seemed they had been moved somewhere else.
“I see. After being victorious, you are moved to a waiting room, I suppose.”
“So it seems,” Carol replied.
It looked like they’d be able to take a short break.
◇ ◇ ◇
A man in a futuristic battle suit faced off against a woman with a wide-brimmed hat and a black cloak.
The man’s name was Saiz. The witch he was fighting against was Evon, but in truth it didn’t seem like much of a fight. From the first moment of their encounter, Saiz had totally overwhelmed her. As strong as Evon was, she just didn’t compare to the futuristic soldier. And yet the fight didn’t seem anywhere close to finishing.
Saiz’s gun fired a beam of light, punching through Evon’s head. The witch collapsed motionless to the ground, and for a moment it looked like the fight was decided, but before long, another Evon had appeared beside the first. The pattern had repeated countless times, though the previous bodies had vanished over the course of the fight.
“Light property, ranged, piercing, headshot. That sounds right, doesn’t it?” Evon analyzed the attack calmly.
“What? ‘Light property’? What is this, a fantasy RPG?” Though he knew magic existed in this world, Saiz didn’t know anything about how it functioned. He was powerful enough that he could fully ignore the whole system.
“I can make any number of clones, but repeating the same thing over and over is boring. So instead, I’m going to make myself resistant to your attacks.”
Saiz fired another shot, striking Evon’s forehead dead-on...and deflecting off it. Though the attack left a small burn on her face, it was clear she had become more resistant to it than before.
“My primary ability is Reproduction. I can produce improved copies of any number of things, including myself. So no matter how long this goes on, you’ll never beat me. How about it? Would you like to give up?”
“Hm? In that case, you give up,” Saiz replied. “Your attacks aren’t even scratching me.” A barrier had been deployed around him. It blocked everything from reaching him, whether they were physical attacks or what this world called magic.
“That’s only a matter of time. I said I can improve myself, right?”
Evon launched a fireball from her hand. Though the fire scattered harmlessly before reaching him, it had clearly been much stronger than the previous attack. Saiz’s battle log recorded everything as numbers, so he could clearly see that her power was gradually increasing.
“How about this then?” Changing his gun to ballistic mode, he fired a shot at her chest. The bullet tore through her heart, completely destroying it, and out of her back. For anyone else, it would have been instant death. Saiz’s battle AI even determined that she was, in fact, dead. But beside the bloody mess of Evon’s falling corpse, a new Evon appeared. Checking the battle log, it seemed she had just appeared out of thin air.
“The bullet punched through your clothes, but that cloak wasn’t even scratched.”
There was no way the bullet could have missed the cloak after passing through her, yet it had seemed to slip through the fabric, leaving no trace of its passage. The battle log showed that the bullet had struck the cloak, but had passed right through it. In short, it seemed like it didn’t actually have a physical form.
“Exactly,” Evon replied. “This is the Cloak of the Starry Sky. It’s the source of my power.” Though at first glance it looked like no more than a black cloak, upon closer inspection, Saiz could see small pinpricks of light dotting the fabric.
“So if I take that from you, you’ll die?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t count on it. No one but me can touch it.” For her to so clearly share the source of her immortality, he knew she must have had some plan to protect it. “The cloak connects me to my home world. The resources used to make my replicas all come from there. Basically, you’re up against an entire world.”
“Ha ha, seriously? In that case, can I ask you something?”
“What is it?” Evon replied.
“If you’re so strong, what are you doing in this world?”
“I’m on vacation. Back home, I’m revered as the Witch of Starry Salvation. To be brief, I defeated the Demon Lord threatening my world.”
“Well, congratulations.”
“But how do you think that world treated me after there was no Demon Lord to defeat?”
“They probably think you’re a nuisance, don’t they?”
“Exactly. A world that has achieved perfect peace has no need for warriors. I ended up being a sleeping threat, one that could come for them at any time.”
“So, which was it?” Had she run away, or had she been exiled? Saiz had to assume it was one of the two.
“I left of my own accord. As a parting gift, I took the whole world with me. It would have been destroyed if it hadn’t been for me, after all. I think it’s fair to say that it belongs to me.”
“Why wouldn’t you just kill the people who hated you and stay there?” Saiz asked.
“I didn’t have any personal grudge against them, and fighting them all one by one would be too much of a chore. Taking them to use as a power source solved both of those problems for me.”
“I can’t imagine the people of that world were all too happy about your choice...but I guess it’s their own fault for forcing all their problems on one person.”
“I came to this world so I could relax,” Evon finished her explanation.
“I see. I just happened to come to this world by chance,” Saiz said offhandedly.
“In that case, it’s fine if you lose, right? I’ll go kill Yogiri Takatou for you.”
“Actually, I have some business with the Great Sage,” Saiz replied. “My goal is a bit different from yours.”
“Oh, really? But my world has a population of 8,748,237,756 people. All of them serve as fuel for my reproductions.”
No doubt Evon had made that declaration in an attempt to inspire despair in him, but instead it had the opposite effect.
“That’s good to hear. I feel like I can handle that many.” Saiz lifted his gun up into the air. “Come!” There was no point in shouting like that or making such a dramatic display, but he couldn’t help getting into the spirit of things.
The world around them darkened as an enormous object appeared in the air, blocking out the sun.
“Wha...” Evon was speechless.
Saiz doubted anything like this existed in her world. It was an army of star forts. He had summoned countless star forts to the sky above them. One such fort fired a beam of light down at him, and in the next moment he was transported to its bridge.
“I feel bad for doing this to a world I’ve never visited and eight billion people I’ve never met, but...” Saiz ordered the armada to fire. The countless spherical star forts opened their firing ports, pointing cannons in all directions.
And then the world was consumed by fire. The Castle in the Sky, the island beneath it, the ocean, the atmosphere, everything in that world was consumed in the blaze, with even the ashes that lingered being caught up and incinerated once again. Though only within that channel, everything in the world aside from the star forts had been annihilated.
Saiz’s battle AI confirmed that Evon had been erased. No matter what kind of defenses she may have had, if he brought enough firepower to bear to kill eight billion people at once, there was nothing she could do.
Saiz Wins!
Words floated up in the empty air. The next moment, Saiz found himself in a waiting room. He had been brought to the Antechamber Area to wait for the second round.
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