Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume1 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 8===

Utagai Karuta felt woozy.

Not even he knew how he was still standing right now. An unbelievable amount of blood flowed from his side where the long claw slipped out. He should have been the one to die after losing so much blood.

But for some reason, the first to collapse was the woman in a yellow and black military uniform. He felt like he had no choice but to look down on her.

That was his duty as the victor.

“Karuta!!”

His childhood friend Marika frantically ran over. She and Crystal Girl Aine supported his unsteady body and he finally managed to let out a rusty-smelling breath. The wound must have been deep because the sound of spreading crystal had yet to stop.

A beautiful blonde woman was collapsed at his feet.

He could more or less tell that there was no saving her. Nor did she beg for her life.

Her yellow and black armor melted away.

He asked her a question as she lay collapsed on her back and slowly stopped moving with her face on its side.

“You could have twisted your wrist to widen the wound before pulling your hand out. That would have shattered the healing crystals and kept me from ever recovering. In other words, you could have killed me. Why didn’t you?”

Marika belatedly looked over at him in shock. If he had made a single mistake – no, if things had gone normally – he would not have made it. She seemed to finally realize the tightrope walk he had made.

On the other hand, Anastasia did not look his way.

She may have already gone blind.

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“This is my apocalyptic everyday life. I am always destroying someone and I will be destroyed by someone someday. If that day is today, then I must give up the title of world’s strongest. I have no interest in taking you with me. I have become an ordinary woman and you have become the world’s strongest.”

“…”

“But be careful.” She continued with a thin smile directed at who knows where. “You will now find yourselves trapped in a life where you must combat the Threat as the world’s strongest. On the path of the strongest, fellow humans will constantly get in your way as they try to help or have decided they are your rival and you will find no allies outside of your immediate group. If you ever wish to bow out, then let your guard down for even a moment. You will be devoured in no time at all. Either by the Threat or by your fellow humans.”

Karuta, Aine, Marika, and Kyouka.

Those four would reign in place of the previous five.

They would be the four rulers of a new era.

Was that what this woman was saying?

“I’m not interested in being the strongest.”

“But there is no escaping it.”

“…”

“You will not be able to escape being the world’s strongest any more than we could.”

“What…”

The boy could not say if the Crystal Blossom’s healing would be enough or if this would count as a fatal blow and his entire body would be solidified. He desperately kept himself conscious in order to ask this question.

He wanted to know the answer.

“What were you Problem Solvers? Where did you start from?”

“Before being bound by the title of strongest, we were no more than an ordinary girl and her friends.”

Her words sounded like some kind of curse.

“And now I have relinquished the title. The world’s strongest form of violence is considered justified simply because it is the world’s strongest. So now that I have fallen, nothing will work to defend what I do or say. So let me say this one thing to you, the new strongest who so foolishly reached this point.”

Anastasia Blast gathered the last ounces of strength from the fading flame of her life to speak these final words.

“I am sorry about what happened at Grimnoah. We were scared.”

The last of the world’s strongest was gone.

After hearing her out, the tension inside Karuta finally snapped and his mind fell into darkness.

He thought he heard someone shouting in his ear, but he could no longer respond.

His revenge, the driving force supporting his soul, had reached its conclusion on that day – in that moment.