Chapter 3 — Oh, I Thought You Had Already Passed On to the Next Life, Mokomoko
Ayaka Shinozaki floated in the darkness of the night. From her spot in the air, she looked down at the royal palace. Her goal was to kill the king who was suppressing the Gift throughout the city, but now that she was here, she was wondering how to actually go about doing that.
The easiest way would be to release a maximum strength Dragon Breath attack straight down. She was well aware of how much damage that could inflict. It would easily wipe out the castle. If the king was inside as she guessed, there was no way he would survive.
Listen! I am definitely against this! First of all, killing unrelated people for the sake of getting revenge isn’t logical! And even if it were okay, this is too much! The damage will be horrific!
That’s right. Our behavior has strayed too far. Don’t forget, our objective is to be a perfect reproduction of a human being. While seeking revenge is a human action, this is crossing a line.
Ayaka shook her head at the voices. She had long since become something far more than human. What was the point of trying to act like anything less?
“I wouldn’t do something like that anyway,” she replied. She had indeed considered it briefly, but ultimately decided it was no good. She had no proof that the king was there. She didn’t know the country’s situation or anything about his schedule. And on top of that, her classmates were inside the palace. If obliterating them all at once suited her, she would have done it at the start. She had already decided to kill them all one at a time instead.
“I’m just trying to figure out how I can find the king. Any ideas?”
I recommend you use Dragon Sense.
“What will that do?”
By disseminating countless mana entities into the surrounding air, it will allow us to get a grasp on the situation around us.
“I see. Dragon Sense,” she intoned. As she did, she felt the mana leave her body. The amount was small enough that it didn’t seem like it would be of any concern.
Suddenly, a torrent of information flooded through every fiber of her body, but it soon died down as the Dragon Language Unit collected the data and began to analyze it.
A number of our classmates have been discovered. I’ve marked them to allow them to be tracked in the future. Also, it appears the girl we fought earlier, Riona Shirayama, has returned.
Riona was the girl who used karate. She had the ability to boost all of her physical attributes. Perhaps she was just making excuses, but Riona had claimed that if it wasn’t for the suppression of the Gift within the city, she could easily beat Ayaka. So Ayaka decided to remove the source of that dampening effect, and had made her way to the palace to do so.
“I did promise her we’d fight again once the seal was broken. Do you know where the king is?”
A person who seems to be the king is currently in what appears to be the royal bedchamber.
Ayaka descended to the palace below.
The king’s bedroom was at the top of a tower jutting out from the top floor of the palace. Normally, there was no way the monarch’s quarters would be in such an obvious place, but his people had the utmost confidence in his powers. They must have had no expectation that an assassin could ever fly up there.
Ayaka burst through the window. Passing through shards of broken glass, she landed on the soft carpet inside. On top of an enormous, luxurious bed was a naked couple. They froze upon seeing the intruder, but it wasn’t long before the man came to his senses, grabbing his sword and rising from the bed.
“Who are you?”
“That’s right, you wouldn’t have heard of me yet. My name is Ayaka Shinozaki. Your ability to suppress the Gift has become a nuisance for me, so I came to get rid of it.”
“I suppose idiots like you are bound to show up once in a while. You people always think you can fight me even without your precious Gift.” Despite his nakedness, he seemed confident about fighting her with only a sword and no bodily protection.
Is there a reason his crotch is censored?
Just some consideration for the lady’s sensibilities.
The units in her head were messing with her vision again. Frankly, it was something she had no interest in seeing, so she was thankful for their interference.
“Are you the king?”
“Nope.”
“Oh?” The unit had only said that someone who appeared to be the king was in the room, so there was a possibility they had accosted the wrong person.
The man didn’t let that moment of hesitation go to waste. He raised his empty hand towards Ayaka and a light shone from his open palm for a moment before a fireball flew out from it.
The blazing sphere came straight at her face, but Ayaka didn’t even react. There was no need, as the flame vanished before making contact. She was protected by Dragon Scale, the invisible barrier that surrounded her.
The man gave an impressed grunt. Although it had only been an attack to test her, he must not have expected her to block it entirely.
He stepped in, thrusting his sword forward. The blade traveled in a straight line, aiming directly for her throat.
Ayaka answered with a casual swing of her arm. Dragon Fang was the most powerful magic she had for close-range combat. The invisible jaw unleashed from her hand bit into the man, countless fangs puncturing him from above and below, killing him instantly.
“That was only supposed to slow him down. He died awfully fast for someone who was so confident.”
His fighting style relied on blocking his opponent’s magic and using his own to give himself an overwhelming advantage.
The strength of his power increases as you get closer to him, so he likely assumed that he would be the stronger one in close-quarters combat.
The man’s miscalculation was a result of Ayaka’s power not stemming from the same system as that of the Sages. His ability to reduce the rank of the Gifts that people possessed had nothing to do with her own powers.
“I suppose I never determined if he was actually the king or not.”
He certainly does appear to have been royalty, at least.
“Hey, this guy is the king, right?” Ayaka asked the naked woman trembling on top of the bed.
“Y-Yes!”
“Are you also part of the royal family? I heard that others with royal blood have the power to block the Gift as well.”
“N-No, I have no royal blood! I can’t do anything! I was married to him from a foreign country!”
“Okay then, one more question. With the king gone, the skill block should be gone too, right?”
“Yes...but in that case, someone else from the royal family will take his place...”
Now that the king was dead, others would no doubt notice that the dampening effect was gone, so she would have to hurry. Before they replaced him with someone else from the royal bloodline, she would need to find and fight Riona.
Ayaka jumped out of the window. She looked for her adversary, which was easy now that she was tracking her. Her former classmate was in a building directly below, which must have been where her classmates had set up their base of operations.
Ayaka deployed her Dragon Wing power. It was another one of the abilities available to her through the dragon’s language. She didn’t have any actual wings, of course, but she could feel the strength in her back as if she did.
Using that power, the scenery before her flashed by in an instant. She punched through the ceiling of the building and landed directly in front of Riona, who was lying on a bed. Beside her, a girl in white clothes was tending to her injuries. Whether it was through magic native to this world or some other special ability, the wounds were being healed.
Riona stared up at Ayaka in shock. Her reaction was understandable; such a flashy entrance would take anyone by surprise. Ayaka waited for her opponent to collect herself before acting. She had gone out of her way to remove the block on the other’s abilities so that she could fight Riona at full strength. Killing her straight away would be easy enough, but it would put all the effort she had gone through to waste.
As she waited, she looked around the room. It was a clean, simple space that was starkly white. Judging from the look of her surroundings, it was some sort of infirmary. She also recognized the girl healing Riona as another one of her classmates, Akari Misono. Riona was in her karate uniform, and Akari was dressed all in white. Both of their outfits appeared to match their abilities.
“All right,” Ayaka finally said, “I’ve killed the king and unleashed your power. Let’s fight.”
As Akari took a step back in confusion, Riona got up from the bed and did a few warm-up stretches to get a feel for her current condition. “Let’s do it, then!”
“The block on your power is really gone, right? If you give me another excuse about not being at full strength, I’m not going to be happy with you.”
“Why don’t you see for yourself!”
The sound of an explosion rang out, accompanied by a strong impact. By the time she realized what had happened, Ayaka had lost all sense of where she was. As she tried to move, she felt an odd kind of resistance.
“What on earth happened?”
We received a punch from Riona, which sent us flying out into the city and drove us deep into the ground.
“Any damage?”
Nothing managed to make it through the Dragon Scale, but it was unable to completely absorb the blow.
Ayaka pushed herself up. Her body had carved a deep trough into the ground, leaving a hefty pile of dirt behind her. It was hard to move because she had been slammed so far into the earth.
Looking back the way she’d come, she could see that a straight line had been punched through all the buildings between her and the palace.
There was another impact just then. This time, she saw it coming. Flying over from the palace, Riona caught her in the stomach with a knee. Unable to completely block the blow, Ayaka was once again sent spinning head over heels through the air. Unable to control herself, she struck the ground with another loud crash, before taking a third blow.
This time it was a fist. The moment Ayaka had hit the ground, Riona was on top of her, throwing a punch directly into her face. For a moment, she blacked out, coming to to see Riona straddling her. Fists continued to rain down from the left and right, the unyielding storm of blows covering her with grime and leaving her hair a mess.
“Dragon Fang.”
With a snap, the attacks suddenly stopped and Riona slumped over. Her right arm had disappeared from the elbow down.
Grabbing her enemy’s slack body, Ayaka pulled her down, switching their positions.
“Wh-What...happened?” Riona stammered. Her right arm had been bitten clean off, and she had been completely unable to perceive the jaws of the dragon that had taken it away.
“You’re certainly much stronger, but that seems to be about it. Or do you have anything else?”
“Goddammit!” Riona lashed out with her remaining fist.
“Dragon Tail.”
An invisible tail wrapped itself around her, stopping the attack before it landed. Ayaka stood up, looking down at Riona.
“I guess I’ll just squeeze you to death slowly, then.”
If Riona couldn’t fight back against Dragon Tail, there was no point in playing around anymore. If that was the limit of the abilities gained by her classmates, dispatching the rest of them wouldn’t be difficult at all.
Truth be told, she was a little disappointed.
The palace was in an uproar. A mysterious intruder had killed the king and destroyed much of the building and part of the city. For the Sage candidates, that wasn’t particularly concerning. It was just some drama happening to the people of this other world. More concerning was the death of yet another classmate.
Eroge Master Shinya Ushio and the gorilla Riona Shirayama had both been killed by someone claiming to be Ayaka Shinozaki. Riona was the strongest in the class when it came to pure hand-to-hand combat, so anyone who could defeat her was far beyond a normal opponent. Even with the power of the Sage’s Gift behind them, the candidates were overcome by an oppressive fear.
“Maybe I’m a bit behind, but why on earth was her nickname ‘gorilla’?!”
“Probably because she was ridiculously strong.”
The day after the king’s assassination, Tomochika and Yogiri were walking through the city. Yogiri had asked her to come and help him with something, so they had gone out together. Tomochika had felt bad for Riona, but it was hard for her to care too much. If the killer had indeed been Ayaka, it seemed somewhat appropriate. She wasn’t happy about the king being killed, though, since he wasn’t related to any of it.
The king’s death was kept quiet for a short while. The first prince had taken over control of the skill-sealing magic for the time being, but the scope and strength of his power was less than that of the previous ruler.
Though it wasn’t forbidden to go outside, the rest of their classmates had hesitated to set foot into the city. But Yogiri, of course, wasn’t the least bit concerned about Ayaka attacking them. He and Tomochika had gone out into the city as planned.
“So, you asked me to help, but all we’re doing is walking around town.”
“I figured I probably shouldn’t leave the people targeting me to their own devices. I can deal with them as they come one at a time, but it’ll never end that way. I want to get them to attack me again, and then either kill them or catch them to find out who the culprit is.”
“Pick one!”
“I suppose if we don’t kill them, we’ll get more clues.”
“So, why do you need my help?”
“You have really good eyesight, right? I thought you’d be able to spot them easily.”
“I guess, but if they’re that far away, I’m not sure I’ll be able to see them. Like if they’re using magic, they could be hiding somewhere.”
No matter what method they used or where they attacked from, Yogiri could always strike back. The attacker would die, but that didn’t help them to find out where they were.
“I don’t think that’s the case. If they could do that, I’d probably be attacked inside the palace as well. I think they need a line of sight to me. And if they need to be able to see me, you’ll probably be able to see them too.”
As much as their wandering around the city seemed like a date, their conversation lacked any sense of romance. It was the first time in a while they had been able to walk around alone, so Tomochika had been a bit excited, but Yogiri remained completely oblivious. It was making her a little angry.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, noticing her displeasure.
“No.”
“All right, then.”
“Oh, come on, you have to try a bit harder than that!”
“If I ask, will you tell me?”
“I’d think about it. Maybe if you bought me lunch or something.”
“I mean, I guess I could, but you have as much money as I do, right?” Yogiri looked at her in confusion.
“That’s not the point.”
“Fine. You just want lunch?”
“Yeah. So! I got some recommendations yesterday!” Grabbing his hand, Tomochika happily pulled him through the streets, leaving her slightly exasperated companion no choice but to follow.
But as they moved through the city, the air around them took on an ominous feel. Though the streets were usually overflowing with lively noise, they were now filled with a dangerous, desperate atmosphere.
The reason soon became clear as the two came upon a mountain of rubble. The scene before them was the scar left over from the showdown between Ayaka and Riona. The fight had blown apart the buildings in the surrounding area, creating a scene that looked more like it had resulted from a natural disaster than an altercation between two people.
“Ayaka Shinozaki...I will never forgive you!” The shop Tomochika had been looking for had been blasted away with the rest of the area.
“The damage seems pretty bad,” Yogiri said, shocked by the scene before him.
“Well...I guess there are other places we can try,” Tomochika muttered, drawing a small notepad from her pocket. As she did, Yogiri suddenly grabbed her, pulling her close.
Tomochika was taken completely by surprise. The hug had come out of nowhere, but she didn’t try to shake him off. As she stood there confused, she felt something pass by her and turned to look. Whatever it was struck the head of a passerby behind her, who slumped lifelessly to the ground.
“Uhh...what...?”
Seems like a sniper. They were targeting you, not the boy.
“Oh, I thought you had already passed on to the next life, Mokomoko.”
I’ve been here the whole time!
More than the sudden attack, Tomochika was surprised by Mokomoko’s first appearance in a while.
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