Editing Failing Witch:Volume3 Episode3 (section)

===Part 11===

Myousou Yagoro slowly breathed a sigh. He once more reached for his collapsible baton.

He had managed to bring Ulrike back down to the small island. But that didn’t end this. To defeat the top witch, he needed magic.

“O-ohh.”

A dark shape squirmed.

It was made up of long, long black hair.

In this world, that was a dye used in the greatest curses.

“Ohhhhhh…ohhhhhhhh!”

Not even a supersonic flying kick had been enough to kill that President. It wasn’t apparent how many of the surface-to-air missiles had hit her and struck her with their explosive blast and metal balls, but she was still capable of moving. Even if it meant screwing with this world’s culture.

She seemed immortal.

But there was no such thing as an incomprehensible darkness in witch battles.

If you figured out how it worked, there was always a solution.

“You have complete control over space, both physically and geometrically.”

“…”

“So whenever external damage reaches your physical body, you have magic capable of bending space to divert most of it away or shifting yourself to the sides or back to forcibly ‘weaken’ the attack. I can see how a point-blank explosion wouldn’t be enough to kill you.”

However.

One thing was obvious from seeing how weakly Ulrike’s legs were shaking beneath her.

“All that does is ‘weaken’ it by some amount. Even if it’s based on an icosahedron, you’ll still take as much as 5%, meaning you can’t fully negate the attack. That makes it simple – almost too simple, don’tcha think? By overwhelming you with both quality and quantity, I can wear your stamina down to zero and then I win.”

She wasn’t immortal.

Her power wasn’t endless.

As long as he knew there was a goal at the end of the long journey, Yagoro had no reason at all to give up. Making a show of having endless power had been Ulrike’s greatest strategy, but he had stripped that away from her.

“Y-you…”

She held a rapier in her right hand and a witch’s broom in her left.

She was unsteady on her feet as she stood up, but she managed to get an odd statement out.

“You’re…the real monster. I’m nothing more than a fake…but you…you’re the original…”

“?”

“You weren’t aware? Did you think it was really just luck that kept you alive so long? You’ve survived two crashes in the past. And this year alone, you took Voland Arbamini’s attacks to protect your student Viocia during the spring official practice exam and then you took the goddess’s punishment at the flea market to bring yourself and Instructor Flamberg down. …Did you really think nothing more than luck allowed you to survive the serious injuries earned by your reckless behavior?”

Yagoro drew a blank.

He was in the middle of a witchcraft battle, but he had found something he couldn’t explain.

That was bad.

“Class 1 L-FS – Strange Picking,” she announced.

Yagoro wasn’t familiar with the term.

He could hear the President’s tooth-grinding resentment even from a distance.

“If not for that loathsome power, you and your absurd abilities never would have wandered into this world. This is my world. Myousou Yagoro, I was told your arrival here was a complete accident not found on the goddess’s schedule. I was granted the goddess’s love along with Class 1 C-FS – Enemy Debug!! …This was supposed to be my chance to redo my life after my time in my original oppressive, unrewarding world. So why did you have to wander your way in here too!!?”

He knew nothing about Ulrike’s life.

Or her past life.

But he got the sense that she came from a world different from his own Earth.

How many different worlds did that damn goddess manage?

“I don’t care.”

“Kh.”

“I don’t care where we came from or why the goddess made her mistake. That’s her business. None of it matters to Viocia or the rest of the city’s people who were born in this world the normal way. …Don’t force all this onto them. Absurd abilities? The goddess’s love? To hell with that stuff, Ulrike. We’re nothing more than outsiders intruding on their world. Dying and being reborn somewhere doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want there. Stop using your own misfortune as an excuse to be a nuisance to this world’s rightful owners!!!”

Yagoro extended his baton with a horizontal swing and walked straight toward her.

He didn’t use any tricks.

Ulrike still flinched, because she knew it all.

Two flashes of light sharply intersected.

After stopping the attack with her rapier on reflex, the President would have learned two things.

First, a magic light shined from the tip of Yagoro’s baton.

Second, this was no longer a unilateral slaughter. Now she was on the defensive!!

(Yet again I need to thank the Force’s punishing drill sergeant for teaching me so much I never thought an astronaut would need to know!!)

The two lights clashed a few more times.

It was a good attempt for an ad lib.

The President took aim with a spatial grid and altered the movement distance to make Yagoro’s baton miss.

They glared at each other with weapons locked together and Ulrike roared at him.

“Nothing you do can keep me from winning in the end!! Yagoro, what good is this stick against a rapier!? And if I need to, I can fill this space with thousands or millions of blades and shred you!”

“But you can’t artificially multiply your blade without altering space remotely.”

“Kh.”

“Which means keeping you from using this one little rapier makes all the difference!!”

They were close enough to have their weapons locked together, so they were literally right in front of each other. Yagoro pushed back her rapier with his baton and sent out a kick.

But lifting his foot from the ground messed with his balance.

The President grimaced at the dull blow and pushed back. Overpowered, Yagoro felt the sharp blade pierce his shoulder. He nearly had his ear taken off, but he forcibly twisted his head out of the way.

“Did you panic and choose poorly, fool!?”

That was when she must have noticed it.

Her blade had stopped at the unnatural blonde boy’s collarbone. Her tremendous magic power failed to bisect him diagonally. And he had kicked her on the side of the hip.

Hitting her in the pelvis and the spine.

Even with the support of the Formula Broom in her left hand, it was her own willpower that allowed her to use magic. Her focus had wavered from the unexpected pain, so she failed to construct her magic even with knowledge from Earth pouring in. An extreme example of this problem was Tedaura who was so powerful yet was immobilized by her bad back.

This was a one-time failure.

But no matter how extraordinary the President was, shoving the rapier into Yagoro wasn’t enough to produce its magic cutting edge!!

“Just give up already… This world wasn’t meant for you! Your every attempt will ultimately fail!!”

“It’s over, Ulrike! I won’t let you lay a finger on my student!!”

Something unbelievable happened.

Ulrike’s face crumpled. She had her skill as the Student Council President, her political and institutional power, and a unique ability directly gifted to her by the goddess, yet there was an unmistakable look of envy on her face.

That was the look of someone seeing someone who had something they did not.

It must have been a common expression for her before she was reborn in this world.

The black-haired girl even bit her lip.

“Hey, President.”

Light shined.

A bright light flooded out from the collapsible baton.

That was an exorcising attack meant to carve the impure heart out of a wicked witch who had succumbed to greed.

With her rapier in his shoulder, she could no longer stop his baton.

“''This is magic. If you’d done your homework, you’d know the answer''!!”

The point-blank blast exploded out.

A fearsome shock shot through her body, obliterating her willpower, and knocking her out.