Chapter 15 — From Now On, I, Mokomoko Dannoura, Shall Bear the Title of Heroine!
Yogiri and Mokomoko were heading for the City of the War God. It was a fairly large, walled city. Even from the outside, the towers it was famous for were clearly visible.
“The star of the story has now officially changed!” Mokomoko cackled. “From now on, I, Mokomoko Dannoura, shall bear the title of heroine!” she declared loudly enough for everyone around them to hear.
She was no longer a spirit invisible to the naked eye. Instead, standing beside Yogiri was a girl, just a bit younger than he was, wearing a red dress and gloves to match. Mokomoko was making use of the Enju-type robot.
“What are you talking about?”
“This robotic body has plenty of combat potential, and the one controlling it is a master martial artist! In addition, I can use this mysterious metal to create all sorts of useful items! And to top it all off, what a charming exterior! I should be more than qualified to be the heroine of this story now!”
“So, you admit your original form wasn’t remotely charming.”
“N-Not at all! If you think about it, my true form has its own sort of charm too!”
“Regardless, I’m not into flat girls, so no thank you.”
“Your bluntness is almost refreshing. But if that’s what you’re after, my descendant’s chest is very much up for grabs, I would think. I doubt she would turn you down if you asked.”
“I can’t exactly make a move on her in our current situation, can I?”
“I can’t see why not! I don’t think she’d be as unhappy about it as you imagine.”
“By the way, Mokobot, are you actually possessing her this time?”
“I’m not sure how I feel about that name...”
Although the spirit now looked exactly like Enju, Yogiri felt strange referring to her by his friend’s name, so he had come up with a new nickname for her in her current form.
“Well, whatever you choose to call me means little. This is more like remote control than possession.”
By hacking the android’s core processor, Mokomoko was able to manipulate it through long-range electromagnetic waves.
“Now then, we are about to enter the city, so please remember not to kill him.”
“Don’t worry; I’ll remember.”
The pair approached the gate. No guards were posted there, so they were able to walk straight in.
“It looks like a normal city, doesn’t it?” Yogiri commented.
They had heard the place was ruled by an outrageously arrogant man, but from the looks of it, people seemed to be going about their lives as usual. The purpose of the city was to act as a filter for those strong enough to challenge Raiza, but obviously not everyone there was a fighter.
“I guess this is what an average city in this world looks like.”
There were many stone buildings, and the roads were paved for the horse-drawn carriages that rolled along them. It was similar in appearance to the other cities they had visited so far. Of course, it was hard to determine what counted as “normal” in this world. Worlds were organized in a sort of abstract hierarchical structure, and this one existed at the lowest level of that order. As such, there were many examples of people and objects from higher worlds having made their way down here, so the native technologies and cultures were somewhat difficult to identify.
“I suppose there are plenty of abnormal things here too,” Yogiri continued.
There were numerous towers boasting at least a hundred floors scattered about the city. There were also a number of large domed structures visible. The battles that occurred within the city were seemingly restricted to those areas.
“I thought it would be more violent around here somehow. It seems like they’re locking the challengers up and making them fight. I’ve heard of things like that before.”
“You’re speaking of the ancient art of Kodoku, no? It certainly has that feel to it, doesn’t it?”
The city was peaceful. How would Orie and Darf have felt seeing that? Yogiri frowned. For such a disparity to exist within a single country was nothing short of absurd.
“We came here because they said that anyone could meet the Sage, but how do we actually do that?”
“I guess we’ll have to find someone and ask.”
The Sages were a group characterized by their fickleness, so it was rare for them to show up where just anyone could see them. But Raiza, the Sage in charge of this particular city, was different. He had built this place for the sole purpose of gathering and welcoming challengers.
The pair stopped to speak with one of the locals they passed along the way and were told, “In that case, just go to the reception building.” They were then given a set of directions and did just that.
Inside was a woman behind a desk, looking every bit the receptionist. She seemed almost bored, so they figured there weren’t many challengers around.
“Hey, I’d like to meet the Sage,” Yogiri announced.
“Very well. Will you accept the tower challenge?”
“If I can meet him after that, then sure. What’s the challenge?”
“Each tower is constructed of at least one hundred floors. Challengers must make their way through the building, starting on the first floor. By defeating the master of each floor, you can obtain the key that will lead you to the next one.”
“And I have to get to the top, right?” He was already dreading just how tedious this challenge would be. No matter how you looked at it, a hundred floors was too much.
“Yes. If you can make it to the roof, you will have earned the right to challenge Lord Raiza.”
“I’m kind of curious—are the people in there just sitting in the rooms with nothing to do? They must be bored out of their minds.” Waiting around for challengers to show up had to be an incredibly dull existence.
“They shouldn’t be bored. I’m sure they are all training desperately to someday escape the towers,” the receptionist replied in a surprisingly light tone.
“Escape? They’re being held prisoner there?”
“Correct. The Floor Masters fight among themselves, changing the floors they are responsible for based on their ranks. Once someone successfully defends their position at the highest floor for ten consecutive battles, they are permitted to challenge Lord Raiza.”
There was clearly a different system governing those inside the tower and those challenging it from without, but either way, it seemed like all he had to do was beat everyone else to get to the top.
“You asked earlier if I was okay with the tower. Are there other options?”
“There are also the pots. In this challenge, a hundred or more contestants are gathered together for a battle royale. That is a much quicker option but often ends with no survivors, and the few survivors who do make it through are generally at death’s doorstep by the time they finish. I wouldn’t recommend the option for outsiders.”
“All right, let’s go with the tower, then.” If he went into the pots, he might be forced to kill people who were there against their will, but in the tower, all he had to do was take the keys from them. In the end, he decided to attempt Tower A.
“Ha! Did you think there would only be one Floor Master? We Twin Flames will—”
“Die.” Yogiri killed one of the pair.
“What?!” the surviving girl yelped. “Wh-What did you do?”
“If the gap in strength between us is big enough, you won’t even see it when I punch, right? Something like that.”
“What a crude explanation,” Mokomoko sighed, shaking Enju’s head. She hadn’t officially registered as a participant but was permitted to follow Yogiri and observe.
“Give me the key,” Yogiri said. “If you don’t, I’ll have to kill you and take it.”
The final Floor Master offered no resistance, promptly handing over the key. Yogiri took it and opened the door, which led to a staircase that took them up to the roof.
“That was just as annoying as I thought it would be.”
“We managed to make it through rather smoothly, though. Too bad we had to kill almost everyone to get here.”
“They all tried to kill me. I didn’t have a choice.”
He had no reason to spare those who were actively trying to harm him. If someone was willing to take another’s life, they had to be ready to die themselves.
“Congratulations. Lord Raiza is heading towards you now, so please wait a moment,” a voice rang out from somewhere.
“We’ll meet him here?”
The rooftop was a flat space with no fixtures or ornamentation. Yogiri had expected them to be sent to a more formal location that could accommodate an audience, but Raiza obviously wasn’t big on style.
“You will likely be expected to fight him immediately.”
“At least it will be quick, then.”
As he said that, something fell from the sky, sending tremors throughout the tower. A heavily built, thickly muscled man had appeared. The rumors had painted him as some sort of battle junkie, but at first glance he didn’t quite give that impression. While it certainly seemed like he had a tempered body that was thoroughly ready for combat, his gaze was surprisingly cold and calculating. His expression held a clarity that made the stories of him being a crude, barbaric individual seem like lies.
“Okay, I know the rules say I’ll fight anyone who makes it through the tower, but you can’t possibly be that strong,” Raiza commented, looking Yogiri up and down. He was inspecting him intently, as if assuming that he had missed something or that Yogiri possessed some unknown quality.
“I don’t have much of a comeback for that.”
“Is the girl my challenger, then?”
“No. I’m the one who cleared the tower. If you don’t feel like fighting, do you mind letting me win by forfeiting?”
“What? What a strange thing to say. There’s no reward for this battle, you know. The only reason people challenge me is to defeat me.”
“Well, I actually came here because you have something I want.”
“Let’s hear it. If you entertain me, I’ll give you any reward you ask for.”
“The first thing is a Philosopher’s Stone. Do you have one?”
“Yep. And? Is there something else?”
“I heard you established this city and you rule over it yourself. So it’s like a possession of yours, isn’t it?”
“Sure. Everything in this city, down to the last pebble, belongs to me. All of it exists to give birth to a worthy rival for me to fight.”
“Okay, then give me the city too.” Yogiri figured the place would serve as a good location for the half-demons to use as a home.
“Done. I’ll give you everything. If you beat me, of course.” Yogiri had wondered if he’d gone too far with his requests, but Raiza accepted immediately. “Shall we begin?”
The Sage sank into a combat-ready stance. It was a calm, solid position, one that even a complete novice like Yogiri could recognize as being unbreakable by any ordinary person.
“Okay, let’s start with the right leg.”
Of course, there was nothing ordinary about Yogiri’s power, so he had no problems on that front.
Raiza was disappointed. He had arrived after hearing that someone had cleared Tower A, but the challenger was a normal teenager. He seemed frail enough that he might die with a single hit of Raiza’s breath, so the Sage had to be careful even in speaking to him. He thought the boy might have possessed some sort of hidden power, but his challenger carried himself like someone who had had only a brief introduction to martial arts.
Raiza had refined his ability to judge others during his search for powerful opponents. He was almost never wrong, but if he was right, the boy’s presence here was strange. There was no way he could have made it to the top of the tower if he was as weak as he appeared. Even the girl standing beside him seemed far more powerful than her companion. She appeared to be some sort of machine, but the way she moved and the way in which she carried herself spoke of a true master. However, when he asked, he was told that the boy was the one who had cleared the tower.
In spite of his doubts, he agreed to the boy’s request for a reward. He had taken an interest in him. It very much seemed like the stranger intended to win. Raiza had experienced any number of challengers losing their nerve and making a single desperate attack, assured of their own defeat before the battle even started, and it was always a letdown when that happened. He much preferred it this way.
Well, that’s fine. I don’t care how, just surprise me.
Raiza’s expectations had been dashed countless times before, so he no longer felt any anticipation for battles like this. The most he could hope for was to at least see something a little different.
He settled himself into his self-taught fighting stance. It was a meaningless pose, done entirely for show.
“Okay, let’s start with the right leg,” the boy said.
Raiza suddenly lost his footing. Unable to put any strength into his leg, he fell to the ground. It took him completely by surprise. He had no idea what was going on. He didn’t know what the boy had done or what had happened to him.
“You bastard! What did you do?!”
“It’s like a super high-speed attack. It was so fast you couldn’t even sense it,” his challenger replied as if it were too much of a pain to even explain.
“Like hell it was! I can perceive objects moving at the speed of light! I saw you! You didn’t do anything!”
Aside from having spoken, the boy hadn’t made a single move. Raiza felt himself becoming enraged. After so many years of feeling nothing regardless of any attack that came his way, he was now angry for the first time in a long time.
“You can see things moving at the speed of light? I’m not sure I believe that.”
“It’s not nearly as unbelievable as your own ‘power,’” the machine girl told the boy. “Leaving everyone behind was the right choice. His voice alone is enough to kill an ordinary human.”
At her words, Raiza realized that he had been shouting with no consideration for the pair across the roof from him. Cracks and fissures now ran across the surface of the floor. It had been specially reinforced to survive the intensity of the battles expected to be held there, but it had begun to break under the strain of his voice.
“Well? If you give up now and give me what I asked for, I’ll leave things there.”
“Ha! You think something like this will stop me? This is just the beginning!”
“Left arm.” As the boy muttered, Raiza’s left arm immediately lost all strength and fell to his side, lifeless.
“This is amazing!” The Sage swung his right arm down, slamming it into the floor. The blow demolished the entire tower beneath him.
Naturally, those standing on top of the roof had no option but to fall. Raiza gave himself over to gravity. By kicking off from the ground, he could travel as fast as if he were teleporting, but he possessed no ability to suspend himself in the air. As he fell, he looked at the boy.
“I thought you could control your fall by yourself,” his female friend complained. The boy was gripping her leg like one would hold an umbrella, while the girl had grown a pair of jet-black wings that kept the two of them aloft.
“This is easier.”
With a shout, Raiza threw his remaining functional fist forward. He was hardly within range for a punch to land, but it didn’t matter. The shock wave that it emitted would be enough to pulverize anyone on the receiving end, even from a distance.
But the boy didn’t react. The shock wave dissipated harmlessly before reaching him.
“We’re going to get buried in rubble at this rate.”
“Shall we relocate, then?” The girl flapped her wings, heading for a nearby clearing in the city below them.
Raiza set off in pursuit. Although he possessed no abilities that allowed him to actually fly, by unleashing shock waves as he had done a moment before, he could somewhat control his trajectory through the air.
“Left leg.”
But with both legs suddenly paralyzed, he failed to make a smooth landing. Losing his balance, he slammed into a fountain in the middle of the city square. That wasn’t enough to harm him, of course, and even if it had been, he would have healed immediately. But there were no signs of his legs or left arm recovering yet.
“You’re being awfully messy this time, aren’t you? You were much more precise before, targeting their ankles and fingers.”
“It’s kind of a pain to do it like that. I don’t have any information I need to get from him, so it’s easiest to just stop him from moving.”
The girl used her wings to control their descent, leading the pair of them to a soft landing nearby.
“Do you want to keep going?” the boy asked. “You still have a chance at life if you give up now.”
“Living with nothing but a right arm sounds like quite a challenge,” his companion commented.
“What the hell are you?! What did you do to me?!”
As Raiza shouted, the rubble filling the clearing was blown away, thrown in the boy’s direction, yet nothing hit him. He was able to step widely around everything that came his way. His movements were sloppy, but he seemed to be able to predict the paths of the flying debris.
“What are you so angry about? You wanted to know what it’s like to lose, right? Isn’t this exactly what you’ve been asking for?”
It was true that Raiza had despaired at his own strength and yearned to taste defeat—at least, that was the story he had told the world. But he had misgivings about his defeat being so absolute. This fight was entirely one-sided. He couldn’t even tell what the attacks against him were. Such a situation was certainly possible if the difference in their power levels was large enough, but the unexpected experience was so confusing, he couldn’t accept it. Raiza had wanted to have a true clash of power against another. If he had ultimately lost the fight, he would have been satisfied.
But this was different. His steps could split the earth, and his fists could turn back the flow of a river. He could follow movements at the speed of light, and the aura wrapped around him could nullify even conceptual attacks. But nothing was working. There was nothing he could do. He was helpless as, bit by bit, control of his own body was being stolen from him. This didn’t even qualify as a fight.
“Go to hell! How could I accept losing in this way?!”
“You’re making a fool of yourself,” the boy sighed. “I thought you were supposed to be a real warrior. Right arm.”
Raiza abruptly lost all feeling in his right arm. With all four limbs gone, he no longer had the ability to move.
“Now then, if you’re still not willing to give up, I’ll have to take the Philosopher’s Stone by force. It’s in your chest, right?”
“Good question,” the girl replied. “Lain kept hers separate from her body.”
“I was told that if it was in the body, it would lose its power when he died, but if he can still talk, it should be fine.”
The girl stepped closer to Raiza, who answered with a roar. It wasn’t just a scream but a full-powered attack with his breath. That explosive howl was enough to obliterate the buildings in front of him.
“Well, I can’t get close like this,” the girl said as she jumped behind the boy. “I’m impressed with the power he can wield with only his mouth.”
Raiza couldn’t help but be impressed in return by her quick assessment.
“So, how do we deal with that?” the boy wondered. “If we want to stop him from breathing, I guess I should kill his diaphragm? Going for specific muscles seems a little complicated, so I guess I’ll just do the whole area around the lungs.”
As the boy spoke, Raiza stopped breathing. The muscles governing his ability to do so had simply stopped, and he was no longer able to take in oxygen.
“Don’t you think that will kill him?”
“If he’s a Sage, he should be good for a while, right? Let’s take a look while he’s still alive. If the stone isn’t inside him, we can find it later.”
“You really are putting on an act in front of Tomochika, aren’t you?”
“I’m careful around her. I don’t want to make her hate me for no reason.”
“Well, that’s fine. There’s no need to go easy on him. We know full well what kind of person he is.” The girl stepped up to the Sage once again. “Is he releasing shock waves just by blinking at me? This man is a true monster.”
Raiza put whatever moving body parts he had left to work. His eyes and mouth could still move. That alone should have been enough to kill an ordinary human, but the robot girl didn’t so much as slow down. She kicked him, knocking him onto his stomach.
It was then that Raiza finally began to feel fear. He had suddenly realized that this was the end for him, that there was no coming back from it. He couldn’t even beg for his life.
He was tasting the bitterness of defeat far more than he ever could have anticipated.
Mokomoko’s fingers turned black and extended, becoming a razor-sharp blade. Like the wings on her back, the weapon was made from the mysterious material they had obtained from the Aggressor, which she could control at will. Bringing the blade down, she cut into the Sage’s back.
“Hm. Well, this is certainly a nuisance.”
The blade cut through the flesh without resistance, but the moment it did, the body regenerated. Still, all she had to do was create a clamping mechanism to hold the flesh apart, allowing her to progress deeper.
“With his lungs no longer functioning, he appears to have become considerably weaker. I imagine this would have been impossible otherwise.” Mokomoko pulled a round stone out of his body—the Philosopher’s Stone they were after. With their prize in hand, she returned to Yogiri’s side. “And there we go. But it’s too bad. It seems all the flags we set up with the beautiful girls in the tower were for naught. Normally, you would make them into comrades to join you as you traveled upwards to challenge the boss.”
From Yogiri’s perspective, it didn’t matter how attractive they were if they were his enemies, and they would only slow him down if they tagged along.
“That makes two stones. I guess we’re pretty close to a third one. I wonder if three’s enough to go home.”
In addition to the stone they had received from Sion, they now had Raiza’s, and Risley had Lain’s as well.
“It’s hard to say. It may serve us to meet that robot Aggressor one more time. It seemed well informed about such matters.”
“We really should have asked beforehand.”
But their trip here hadn’t been planned. They had only come this way because they were traveling with the half-demons.
“Next is the matter of the ownership of the city,” Mokomoko stated, looking down at the fallen Sage. “I wonder how we go about obtaining that with him in this state?”
Raiza’s limbs and lungs were dead, and his back was opened up. He was still alive, but any sort of communication with him at this point would be challenging.
“I’m sure that once we say we beat Raiza, things will work out somehow.”
A crowd had been watching them from a distance. There was no way anyone in this city was unaware of how strong the Sage was, so seeing him defeated at Yogiri’s hands should have been enough to ensure that they did what he said. Yogiri felt a little optimistic about that.
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