Editing Failing Witch:Volume3 Episode3 (section)

===Part 10===

Myousou Yagoro landed on that small island and took a slow breath.

(That’s the second stage done. The bookseller helped me move the battle away from Sabbath Party and the city as a whole and now Sorbeddy’s magic took out the general army. This finally sets the stage for me to fight all out with the President.)

That only left the third stage.

He only had to directly silence the Student Council President.

The giant dragon named Hanako (who Yagoro had actually created in a Maleficium class before she escaped) could not pick up his scent this close to Maleficium. And she would only be shot down if she did try to rescue him, so he was glad she wouldn’t be showing up.

Several large, dark silhouettes lurked beyond the veil of white diamond dust. Were those the Leviathan he had seen used before and the multi-headed Hydra? The silhouette that looked like a fusion of a naked girl and several different monsters may have been a Scylla. If any of those mythical monsters caught her by surprise, even a Limit Breaker could lose her life.

Of course, unlike the giant creatures such as Tarou and Hanako, these weren’t actually real.

On this small uncharted island past even the ''deadly'' lakeside, any kind of nonphysical phenomenon could show itself.

But Yagoro couldn’t let that distract him. A much more dangerous monster stood before him.

Student Council President Ulrike.

It didn’t matter that he had cleanly hit her with a supersonic soaring kick.

She could still move.

“Tch. You really are a monster.”

She was just that extraordinary. He didn’t know how she had done it, but this meant that even a close-range shotgun blast to the head wouldn’t kill her. She was more durable than a zombie in a movie.

And “didn’t know how she had done it” wasn’t enough to survive.

He could not win this witch battle without revealing her tricks and putting a stop to them.

She gently stroked her cheek with her fingertips.

“Myousou Yagoro. Are you aware why you must die?”

“Are you mad I managed to fight back? Surely you aren’t that petty when you let yourself do whatever the hell you want.”

He swung his collapsible baton to extend it.

He twirled it in his hand and pointed it at her.

“You picked this fight with me. I won’t let you get anyone else involved. I will beat you down until you’re satisfied, Ulrike. As much as it takes.”

He had an enemy and two allies here.

Both sides moved at once.

The bookseller grew several more arms while Sorbeddy produced several thick hunks of ice from a distance.

“Who would like to die first?”

The President must have consciously switched modes because her calm had returned.

She reached for the sheath fixed alongside her broom’s handle.

And she sharply drew the weapon within.

She twirled the grip in her hand, drawing out a large circle with the rapier’s tip.

“Distance has no meaning. I am the witch who controls space both physically and geometrically. As long as I know their position, I can hit any target no matter how far away.”

There wasn’t even any sound.

A horizontal line suddenly ran across Sorbeddy’s neck before her head and body slid in opposite directions.

She would have died instantly had that not been an illusion created by light bending due to the extreme temperature difference between one position and another.

“Ee hee hee!! That was informative. Now we know your precious magic uses your ordinary eyes and ears for targeting!!”

Hunks of ice were launched Ulrike’s way, but she easily bisected them with her rapier. Each one was the size of a crane’s wrecking ball, but she did not break a sweat.

“Spatial awe. Tremble in fear of the ‘gap’ I have created, fools.”

Sorbeddy had already explained her stance.

It didn’t matter if her attacks failed.

If she could learn something from that failure, she was willing to invest any amount in it.

“So you control space, do you? Will you be messing with time too before long? Ee hee hee. But did you think you were the only one who could control the all-consuming black holes – those mysterious shadows that interfere with astronomical observations?”

“You already told me you are an ice witch. Wait…you don’t mean…?”

“Figured it out? Just like cooling the air creates drops of liquid air, all things (with a few exceptions) will reduce in volume when cooled. And while this world appears to be expanding endlessly, it will eventually lose all the heat gained from the big bang and cool off. …Now, what do you think you get when you take the concept of ‘ice’ to its absolute limit? Cooling is one way of creating any and all elements. I can easily provide ''a mere'' black hole by compressing a portion of the world into a single point. Ulrike, was it? I doubt you’re enough of a fool to still think you have exclusive use of this toy after that explanation!!”

The world audibly strained.

It wasn’t clear just how much Sorbeddy Icing could accomplish with her magic, but space as a whole was crying out in protest as both witches gave it simultaneous commands.

And the silver-haired witch wasn’t so inexperienced she would overlook an opening like this.

A momentary opening was plenty.

“Go get her, Maenads!!”

Several dark figures spread out to either side from behind the bookseller. More than 10 of them in all. Their claws were sharp enough to tear right through a castle wall and they rushed at Ulrike from a dozen different angles at once.

Their long claws would shred any life they encountered – even a wolf or a bear.

Ulrike was still in a state of confusion, so she couldn’t fully react to the priestess shadows rushing in from so many different directions.

“!?”

But they didn’t reach her.

That opening should have been decisive.

Yet for some reason the first attack of sharp swinging claws passed right by the President’s face.

The other shadows rushed in from their different angles, but they all failed to injure her.

''Something was clearly off.

''Their sense of depth was out of whack.

“This single centimeter is an eternal labyrinth with no exit. It can look so close or it can look so far. The distance will be misjudged without illusion and all who set foot inside will wander, lose all sense of direction, and veer off course.”

“Move, bookseller!! With a monster like her, it won’t end with a failed attack!!!”

“Kh.”

The silver-haired woman audibly gasped.

It happened the briefest of moments before Yagoro could intervene.

“If you hoped to trap me, you should have prepared at least a thousand of those shadows.”

Around 2 centimeters of long black hair were offered up as sacrifice.

Then another 2 centimeters.

And another 2.

“A hundred attacks, a thousand strikes, and ten thousand wounds. Enjoy this storm of blades!!”

It was like a silver-shining typhoon or hurricane formed around the President. Space split open, revealing countless rapiers that instantly pierced, sliced, and pinned down all of the dark shadows.

Ulrike had already arrived right in front of the bookseller.

The distance made no sense.

Maybe she had split apart space to teleport and maybe she had twisted the geometric meaning of that space to adjust the apparent distance or size.

The moon and the night sky? (Was it related to how bluer objects were more distant!?)

“Checkmate.”

It pierced right through.

With a sharp flash of the rapier, it stabbed right through the center of the bookseller’s chest.

The sexy silhouette unraveled.

It was in fact a decoy made of dark shadows.

Except…

“I saw that coming☆”

A dull sound rang out. The bookseller had circled around to Ulrike’s back left, the hardest spot for the right-handed witch to counterattack against, but Ulrike had accurately struck the side of her head with a roundhouse kick that sent her short skirt fluttering up.

She had already announced that distance was meaningless, so it didn’t matter whether or not her leg was actually long enough to reach.

This time, the bookseller was knocked to the ground.

“Moving a piece after checkmate will only get your king taken, you know?”

“Tch!! An attacker shouldn’t get taken out when we still have our tank, imbecile!!” shouted Sorbeddy as she adjusted her grip on her dragonfly-like Formula Broom.

She moved to prevent a follow-up attack against the unconscious bookseller.

Frigid white was compressed.

Something exploded.

Sorbeddy screamed.

“Gah!?”

Before she could construct her magic, it was sliced through right in front of her. The white explosion resembling liquid nitrogen hit her at close range, sending her rolling away.

“No number of straight lines can ever be exactly equal to the circumference of a circle. Which means no one can accurately measure my distance from them.”

The monster slowly approached.

She still held her sharp rapier and witch’s broom.



Silence fell.

Only one witch remained standing.



Silently, the white veil of diamond dust pulled back like a receding wave.

Sorbeddy had hijacked control of it and forced it this far out, so with her taken out, it was returning to its usual defensive line.

Even Yagoro gasped.

Two Limit Breakers had attacked at once, but they hadn’t even lasted 60 seconds.

The President turned toward him and grinned.

The two witches lay unmoving at Ulrike’s feet – the used bookseller on the right and Sorbeddy on the left.

“You monster…”

“Any more tricks up your sleeve, Yagoro?”

This wasn’t just about losing the great firepower of those Limit Breakers.

Another factor was much more frightening.

“No matter how powerful you might be, I know your one greatest flaw: you can’t fly. Which means with your Limit Breakers out of the fight, all I have to do is fly up and bomb you from the sky!!”

The air roared as it was compressed.

It didn’t matter that the island was only 200m across. With the extreme acceleration provided by Formula Broom – Wittenberg, Ulrike could even take off from the water.

After launching herself straight up, she began circling and took aim at the small island. Like this, he would be slowly worn down and killed.

But something odd happened then.

Myousou Yagoro did not rely on his collapsible baton. Even though that was supposedly the source of all his magic since he didn’t use a Formula Broom. He collected a thick tube from the ground and rested it on his shoulder.

“Hey, President Monster. An HEA house is a convenient item that lets me create any electronic as long as I create the plans first.”

“?”

“Which means I could also make precision devices if I set my mind to it, don’tcha think? And that includes Force equipment, like a portable short-range SAM that was redesigned by my country based on an American missile.”

An explosive soared into the night sky.

It drew out a long, white trail of smoke.

This was definite cultural contamination. It shouldn’t have existed here. Nevertheless, here it was.

Because she might choose to bomb Viocia and Sabbath Party too.

The President looked more furious about the technological contamination than about the attack on her. She yanked her Formula Broom around into a sharp turn, but the image recognition was in effect. The proximity fuse would trigger first.

It exploded.

The thick shockwave sent countless tiny metal balls rushing out like a solid wall.

The noise reached Yagoro after a short delay. The slight undergrowth on the small island shook and small waves formed on the lake’s surface.

Like lightning, there was a discrepancy between light and sound here.

However…

“Is that all?”

Something sharply broke through the cloud of filthy smoke.

The flying figure remained intact.

She wasn’t entirely unscathed, however. She had a small cut on her cheek.

Injuring President Ulrike even slightly was a historic achievement, but that was cold comfort given the circumstances.

If he couldn’t bring her down, it would be his turn to be shot up.

“Is that all you have, Myousou Yagoro!!!? I don’t care how many tricks you have as you sneak past the goddess of interworld reincarnation and contaminate this world! You can never defeat me… ''This world exists for meeeeeee''!!”

Left on land, Myousou Yagoro looked up at the President in the night sky while he tossed aside the empty short-range SAM launch tube. What it meant to introduce that to this world was of secondary importance.

It hadn’t worked.

But he didn’t feel a shred of the fear and despair that should have followed.

“Hey, Ulrike.”

“?”

“I managed to create a short-range SAM, which is like the basic, most simple version. If I can do that, did it not occur to you I might be able to make more complicated versions?”

Yagoro grinned just before the President saw what he meant as she soured in the night sky on her broom.

There were 200…no, more than 300 of them.

Surface-to-air missiles launched from all over the city.

The President briefly froze at the sheer number of them.

Now that she had dodged one, was he trying to increase the number in stages until he had cut off her escape? Even if their initial speed remained the same, adjusting the launch angle or their flight course could change their relative arrival times. He was confident that one would eventually hit her and shoot her down, even if it was the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, or even 10th wave!!

“The portable short-range SAM was more like a disposable talisman. It’s better than nothing, but it’s firing range is only around 4500m. Unlike the secret weapons seen in action movies, the real ones will only give a low-flying attack helicopter a scare and that’s if you’re lucky. You can’t use them to fight against a real fighter or bomber that can easily fly at more than 10 thousand meters straight up.”

“Yagoro…”

“But fixed-position mid-range SAMs have a range of 45km and long-range SAMs can reach as far as 150km. They can chase you down even if you’re flying over 15 thousand meters up where there isn’t much oxygen. As long as I write the plans out correctly, they don’t even need a phased array radar or a supercomputer. Not even a monster like you can laugh this one off, don’tcha think?”

“Myousou Yagoroooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!?”

Ulrike roared and began shooting the missiles down with magic, but she clicked her tongue and began dodging them instead when more and more kept flying in. She looked like she had just seen black bass clogging up a clear river. She used repeated S-like curves, loop-the-loops, and many other maneuvers to confuse even those precision guided weapons, driving them off course.

But not even that was enough to escape them all.

There were just too many. Witches could ignore the atmospheric pressure, the cold, air friction, and inertia, but even they would rapidly run out of options if they were forced to repeatedly dodge missiles flying at them from all directions. Then the process repeated, removing more and more cards from her deck. She occasionally directed her rapier toward the source of the missiles in the city, but that was when air-defense Gatling guns would draw out lines of light in the sky or antiaircraft guns would light up the night sky with midair explosions. She doubted any of those would hit her, but they were enough to give her a scare until she was used to them.

She charged straight into the storm of explosions. She would eventually reach her limit and the missiles would catch up.

“But not yet!!”

(I still have the diamond dust cloud protecting Maleficium. With that ice witch defeated, I once more have control over it. Even with hundreds of those missiles after me, a single command can bring them all down!!)

No response.

The anti-air diamond dust would not activate.

“Wha-?”

Down below, Sorbeddy Icing was still collapsed on the ground but one of her hands had grasped her Formula Broom.

The money-lover grinned.

There wasn’t even time to say anything.

Countless surface-to-air missiles rushed toward the midair President and then detonated.

They shot her down.