Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume4 Chapter2 (section)

===Between the Lines 2===

“Sorry about the wait. Let’s get started.”

That night, Letnahe Kurent visited an important section of Second Grimnoah. She completely ignored the meteor shower event going on outside and her outline was swollen by the thick positive pressure protective suit she wore. This place was not controlled by the Sub Category or Main Category students. The adult teachers were in charge here.

Sophia Firenze and Kiyosawa Hadome were already there.

The latter Letnahe had never intended to see again after she sealed away the memories of her first love. He did not know she was one of the string pullers.

The bulky protective suit came in handy there. The thick shields kept them from seeing each other’s faces clearly and they were fully separated despite standing in the same space.

(Hadome-kun.)

“Make sure to record your work in three different formats. This one is in good shape compared to the thoroughly-destroyed samples collected during the days of the previous strongests. An opportunity like this might not come again, so we need to avoid any possibility of losing these records due to a silly mistake.”

She kept her feelings hidden inside and maintained a businesslike demeanor as she looked to the “sample” lying on the work table. It was a reddish-purple hunk of metal nearly 3m long.

It was a Threat.

Specifically, it was the one known as the Warrior Doll. It had been the most powerful Threat occupying Second Grimnoah. The part analogous to a head was missing, but this was still a crucial sample toward learning more about the Threat.

They were known as Metal-Derived Autonomous-Origin Higher Lifeform Combat Weapons.

They were a threat to humanity of extraterrestrial origin that rained endlessly down on the earth.

They fiercely fought against the Original Crystal Embryo that slept at the earth’s core and was the source of crystal magic.

The Threat had caused great damage during their occupation of the Port of Kobe and Second Grimnoah. That the battle had allowed the details of crystal magic to reach ordinary people’s phone lenses was especially damaging.

But some good had come of that battle.

A great many Threats had ceased to function within the massive closed room that was Second Grimnoah. If they were only going to meticulously deliver a finishing blow to each one anyway, they could easily fudge the official numbers of Threats discovered and secretly capture some.

That meant they could keep this fact from the human string pullers who Letnahe knew so well.

This was one of those.

Since Letnahe had taken such a risk on this, she was hoping for a discovery bigger than anything her higher ups had told her.

“Now, should we call this a dissection or a dismantling?” groaned Kiyosawa Hadome, standing around the same work table.

This was not a human. They all knew that. But the metal armor clearly had more joints than were necessary for pure efficiency. They may have been unsure how exactly to classify their actions here.

But they got to work regardless.

“The weapon is…wow, it’s the same material as the Threat’s body.”

There was no plasma jet anymore, but Sophia Firenze was very careful not to touch the blade as she examined the weapon. She may have started with a weapon instead of the Threat itself because the consequences of a mistake were far less.

The sword was designed to emit a plasma jet and it had fine, branching wiring on the inside. Letnahe initially likened it to a plant’s roots, but then she realized what it really was.

“Blood vessels and nerves…or a mimicry of them.”

“We do not even know if the Threat transports oxygen or carbon dioxide. Amaashi Marika saw Threats operating underwater.”

Hearing Hadome’s voice from unexpectedly close by made Letnahe’s heart leap a bit.

And he was right.

They had heard that the real Threat could not be defeated by ordinary means, so Sophia and Hadome were ready to activate their crystal magic if need be. But that did not prove necessary. Their surgical saws and drills – designed for use on human bones – worked just fine.

“I-is their armor only solid while they’re alive? Or do they activate a thin magical barrier around themselves?” nervously suggested Sophia.

They were recording all of this, so it was best to vocalize any idea that came to mind. Letnahe agreed with that stance anyway.

“When Utagai Karuta fought this armored warrior in the gym, he said he avoided an attack by using one of the tadpole corpses as a shield. Maybe the armored warrior is special and maybe micro-damage spreads through them at an accelerated rate as time passes after their death. We just don’t know enough to say.”

They could not focus on the weapon and exterior forever.

They finally shifted their focus to the armored warrior itself lying there on the table.

According to Utagai Karuta’s battle report, the armored warrior had not taken this form to begin with. It had initially been a lion-shaped Threat they had dubbed Sparkle. It had taken this humanoid form only after devouring several of the tadpole ones. Yet when they removed the armor piece by piece, none of it felt out of place. A closer inspection showed some notches that looked like a single unified pattern when viewed together.

“It’s beautiful.”

Kiyosawa Hadome’s assessment felt out of place here, but Letnahe had to agree with him. The gray artificial muscles were so perfectly laid out she would have sworn it was based on a wiring chart.

Once they split the Threat open, that was what they found.

Letnahe felt no biological disgust – only the artificiality of a wax food sample. Maybe that was due to her not viewing the armored warrior as a living creature like them, but she did not bat an eye even when viewing the burned-out capacitors arranged like wings.

“This is its heart?”

Letnahe went through a few different processes to open up the chest and gently extracted the object protected by rib-like metal pillars.

The unit was a little bigger than a clenched fist. It was constructed from a few gears and a U-shaped ''tuning fork''.

It reminded her of something, so she stated it aloud through her protective suit.

“Is this a tuning fork clock?”

A tuning fork would ring at a set frequency, so a clock could track time using the tuning fork’s constant amplitude. The Threat supposedly received solid fuel from the sea anemone ones, but Letnahe had not known that fuel was used to run something like this. It was fascinating to find they had this in place of a heart. What meaning did the Threat find in their own pulse?

And the idea of a clock increased the nagging sense she had that something was wrong here.

Yes.

That’s right.

“Crystal magic,” whispered Letnahe.

She could not use crystal magic herself, but its presence rapidly grew in her mind.

She recalled whose ''lair'' she was inside.

Crystals could also be used to produce a fixed vibration. And there were clocks that accurately measured time using that trait.

They were the one thing that could defeat the Threat which had tuning fork clocks inside them. They were the one thing the Problem Solvers had chosen to dirty their hands in order to eradicate. They were the vanguards chosen by the Original Crystal Embryo.

They could deflect any external interference with a barrier, they could defy gravity and fly through the sky, and they could regenerate any injury in 30 seconds. And if they died, they were not even allowed to rot. They would instead transform into solid crystal statues.

What if?

What if they too had a clock embedded in them? What if that was the true identity of their crystal blossom? And if they were ruled by a clock just like the Threat, then could they still be called human? If you looked past their ribs and sternum, would you even find the crucial component known as a heart?

This was a battle between two different types of clock – tuning fork and crystal.

Did that mean anything? Simplifying it down like that had actually left Letnahe more confused.

“What is it?” said Kiyosawa Hadome. He asked the fundamental question – a question that’s answer continued to elude scientists the world over. “What even is crystal magic?”

Humanity was beginning to rely on it.

They were reaching a point where they could not protect the earth without it.

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