Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume4 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 9===

Efficient people would reuse a method any number of times once they knew it was effective.

He already had his answer.

What had he done to defend against an explosion from her Egyptian magic earlier?

He had triggered his own explosion first.

In other words, he only had to reach out his hand and grab the rope snaking across the floor.

With a muffled explosion, the effect was immediately evident.

He doubted she would have had time to swing it around after grabbing it. The instant the detonating cord received the pressure of his grip, it provided an electric shock to ignite the explosives. The flammable gas’s volume instantly expanded several hundredfold, blowing away the boy’s clenched hand from within. His paper-thin barrier was meaningless here. Instead of expanding in a sphere from a single point, this was more like a line of destruction used to burn through a thick metal door. The hunks of flesh blasted across the mat rapidly crystallized.

“Kah…”

With her last-ditch counterattack – her final hope – snuffed out, she finally hit her limit.

“Huh?”

Hetepheres’s hand dropped to the floor. This time, she really did appear to have passed out.

But Karuta could not just sit around.

His felt woozy and the lack of pain actually scared him.

[[Image:ApocalypseWitch_v04_bw2.png|thumb]]

Even a child knew that slitting your wrist was enough to kill you. His crystal magic would help him regenerate, but only with nonlethal injuries. He helped himself to one of the bandage-like strips of cloth wrapped around Hetepheres and used his right hand and mouth to tie it tight just below his mutilated hand. That didn’t fully stop the bleeding, but it didn’t have to. It only had to get the wound deemed nonlethal.

He heard several high-pitched cracking sounds.

Sharp pieces of crystal were covering his incomplete hand.

He raised that hand overhead.

With an especially loud noise, the crystal shattered away, revealing his clenched fist to be as good as new. Glittering crystal dust reflected the bright film lights, illuminating him in his raised-fist pose.

“Oh!” shouted Cinderella Queen. “Ohhhhhhh!! I-I don’t believe it! Did he protect her? He didn’t just defeat her Egyptian magic! Utagai Karuta grabbed the detonating cord rope himself to protect Hetepheres against her own last-ditch suicide attack!!!!!!”

After a short pause, the crowd erupted into cheers.

“The guy’s a legit monster! Was I the only one that thought his life was ever at risk here?”

“Damn, I guess the strongest really does look at the world differently.”

“Why didn’t he kill her!? Cause she’s a girl?”

The deluge of voices pushed in at him from all sides. Karuta’s victory meant all the money bet against the world’s strongest went right into Second Grimnoah’s pockets, but no one sounded angry.

But Karuta felt any icy chill himself.

The odds had been low, but there had been a chance she could have turned that detonating cord into a win. To prevent that small but very real possibility, he had rationally sacrificed his hand to save his life. His biggest fear had been her fingers or bones stabbing into his brain through his eyes, so he had prevented Hetepheres’s unpredictable action, chosen where he would take his damage, and turned his face away from the blast to protect his eyes from the pieces of his own hand.

That was the real reason for his decision.

But the people in the audience had chosen to dramatize the action.

“I only did it for myself,” he said just the once.

His confession was picked up by a distant shotgun microphone, but it only led to more cheers. They only saw this as the modesty of a saint.

''Eat shit,'' silently spat the ordinary boy.

He was afraid how they would interpret that one if he said it out loud.