Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume6 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 12===

“Un.”

Azalea’s adorable and yet alluring lips smiled.

They looked like a flower bud.

“Deux.”

At the same time, the White Thorn that should have hit a Petal instead hit the wall of the Artificial Sacred Ground. This was not random. After ricocheting a few times, it accurately returned to her.

“Trois.”

She spun and once more hit the White Thorn before it disappeared. This high-speed loop was Azalea Magentarain’s pattern for assured victory. When a White Thorn was used, it was supposed to take 10 seconds to be replenished, but she overturned that and continued hitting Petals in with the force of a Gatling gun to build up a Material of overwhelming Cost without giving her opponent a chance to fight back. This attack was a nightmare to her opponents and it had brought her up to Government Award 930.

But Kyousuke had broken through this overwhelming barrage once before.

The Artificial Sacred Ground was a 20 meter cube at first, but it expanded and contracted to match the size of the summoned Materials. He could use that to change the size of the Artificial Sacred Ground’s walls she was trying to use and thus break her accurate loop.

Kyousuke had the Original Red (b). Cost: 1. Sound Range: Low.

Azalea had the Original Green (k). Cost: 1. Sound Range: Middle.

(Use my body as much as you want. I have no reason to let these lowly tomb raiders get away. Especially when they are so blinded by the glitter of treasure that they take hostages!!)

The voice from his contracted vessel scorched the back of Kyousuke’s mind.

It all began there and he knew the weakness of Azalea’s wild rush, but he could not fully break down her strategy. No matter how much he obstructed her, Azalea’s loop would close once more.

She had updated her weakness after her previous loss.

She had honed her skill to the point that she could accurately respond when the moving walls of the Artificial Sacred Ground grew or shrank.

Kyousuke had the Floating Blood-Craving Hammer (zn – bih – ei – xa – qux – hdi)

Cost: 15. Sound Range: Low. Just the head of the giant hammer was taller than Kyousuke. The head was a black and shiny stone, but the lovely girl’s form visible inside it made it look like a tranquil coffin.

Azalea had the Witch Trapped in a Bewitching Flower who Spreads a Sweetly Putrid Stench (su – j – ou – ve – bo – xm – wg – ei – ig – ta – ux).

Cost: 21. Sound Range: High. Just the upper body of an alluring and evil woman stuck out from the center of a giant flower with countless thick vines wriggling around it. Each time she twisted her body, a sweet smell lured in the enemy with a powerful attraction. Once the enemy was within the lethal range, the cruel monster’s vine spears would pierce their body and drain them of their nutrients.

Kyousuke had the superior Sound Range, but once the Cost difference reached 10, she would be able to force her way past that and wear down the Silhouette at the core of his Material. He of course had to solve this before that happened.

And…

(Kh. This is hard enough on its own, but I have to protect the two hostages at the same time…!?)

Sekurtiti’s thoughts flowed into Kyousuke’s mind as his contracted vessel. Renge and Higan were also inside the Artificial Sacred Ground. They could not let Azalea’s Material hit those two and they could not let their own Material’s rampage hit them either.

The lion cage was just not a good place to be.

So Kyousuke did not hesitate to shout an order.

“Destroy our footing, Sekurtiti!!”

(You want to open a pitfall below the lowly tomb raiders to send them into the abyss, don’t you!? I understand completely!)

The ground was concrete, but a swing of the hammer smashed the world around them. Kyousuke and Azalea both fell down along with the stage itself. Renge and Higan could not brace themselves for impact, so he reached out his Blood-Sign, caught them, and lowered them to the floor. They were now inside a large space with a temperature of -10 degrees.

(It’s cold? What is this? It reminds me of the desert night.)

Azalea’s long boots sounded on the ground as she landed in the nearly freezing space. Due to her struggling, her rose thorn pattern yukata was coming off in places, but her expression remained unchanged since she was safe inside her protective circle. No, even if she had not been, a summoner would leave behind such trivial worldly matters when focused.

Kyousuke and Sekurtiti had entered this off limits area back when they made their preparations. This was a meat storage room for the carnivores’ food. Aika’s white liger ate several dozen kilograms of meat a day, so a very large cold storage facility was needed to serve a zoo of this size. Zoos were on the front line of animal welfare, but they also had to allow some lives to be consumed to preserve the lives of their own ferocious beasts.

Frozen meat was savagely exposed while stored along steel racks and in containers. The overall location felt like a library or document archive built for giants. The steel racks were stacked as high as a 3-story building, so they could be knocked over, pulled out, or used in any number of ways.

But even with so much of her bright white shoulders, chest, and thighs exposed to the subzero temperatures, Azalea calmly adjusted her grip on her Blood-Sign.

“Such a boring location. Did you think you could stop my Gatling gun with this?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

Their fierce attacks resumed.

He could not suppress Azalea by growing and shrinking the Artificial Sacred Ground like before. She could make more attacks than him, so the Cost difference between Materials would only continue to grow. Certain defeat awaited him at this rate. He knew that, but there was nothing Kyousuke could do. There was no way he could manipulate the White Thorns to catch up to Azalea’s speed.

He knew that of course.

And he also knew failure here meant losing everything.

“?”

But as Azalea repeated loops as accurate as clockwork, her eyebrows shot up in doubt. Kyousuke’s Blood-Sign had clearly done something other than control the White Thorns. He sharply jabbed it toward something baffling: a faucet.

That faucet was made to produce water in the subzero cold storage room.

“Wha-?”

Perfectly normal tap water erupted from the faucet. The jab from the Blood-Sign sent it flying through the air like a water gun and it collided with a nearby steel rack. Before gravity could pull it down, it froze right where it landed.

“Cold storage rooms often have heated water pipes prepared in case the products freeze to the floor or wall. But it’s only an emergency measure, so it can actually freeze things or even harden if you let it.”

Irregular obstacles were built up all around the area.

And those obstructed Azalea Magentarain’s White Thorns. No, in that case, she would only have to recollect her randomly scattered Thorns. But Kyousuke’s attack went beyond that. He changed the direction of the water torrent according to his calculations in order to capture, swallow up, and stop Azalea’s Thorns.

There was nothing she could do then.

The stopped White Thorns quickly vanished into oblivion. She had set up her rapid loop Gatling gun to fire infinitely without using up her stock of White Thorns, but this water cannon made short work of that.

“Summoning Ceremony battles usually rely on the paranormal elements of the White Thorns, the Petals, the Artificial Sacred Ground’s walls, and the Spots, but that isn’t all there is.”

Now that the barrage had ended, Kyousuke started to catch up.

The Cost difference vanished.

“At times, life and death is determined by an entirely ordinary science experiment that even an elementary schooler could understand. All we’re doing is placing divine models on a stage created from the normal, everyday world.”

“…”

Azalea was dumbfounded as she stared at the ever-changing stage.

Just 5 minutes earlier, she had been an absolute queen. She had taken hostages, she had bound her opponent’s actions, and she had even held his life in her hands. She had taken away his Blood-Sign and Incense Grenades, she had surrounded him with a group, and even if he had fought back, she could have immediately and unilaterally crushed him with the Summoning Ceremony while remaining entirely safe herself.

But it was all gone now.

Her plans had fallen apart and she had nothing with which to get back on her feet.

“I…”

Azalea did not let up even now, but her Gatling gun revealed its fragility now that it was trapped by the concept of ammo. It was just like how actual machineguns were sometimes hated on the battlefield for using up ammunition too quickly and thus were modified on the scene to lower their rate of rotation. Azalea’s impressive rotation rate worked against her now and she only used up her White Thorns too quickly. She was strangling herself like this.

“But I must approach Her Majesty all the same. I am not worthy of this life that I received from Claude. So I must repay him! I must accomplish something glorious enough to make him glad he gave that life to me!!”

“I met him.”

Kyousuke kept his comment brief.

And he thought for a moment when he saw her eyes widen in surprise. Which meeting should he tell her about? He ultimately chose the Claude Magentarain he had met long ago.

“I had pulled the trigger and no one would have blamed him for killing me right there, but he still picked me up and ran across that nightmarish battlefield. He placed only me on a helicopter that could have been shot down at any time and he casually returned to that hell. And do you know what Claude Magentarain said to me then?”

“What?”

“You worked hard. That White Queen is enough to make a group of grown men shake in their boots, but you kept challenging her until your tiny body was this beaten up. So, boy, that effort gives you that much more of a right to seek happiness. If it didn’t, this world wouldn’t be worth fighting for.”

“Ah.”

“He was completely misguided and a great sinner like me had no right to hear those words, but I still remember them. I don’t know about now, but the Claude Magentarain from back then definitely said that with a tremor in his voice. He did not view the White Queen as divine! You’re free to walk the path of a worshiper if you want, Azalea, but that path will never lead to an accomplishment that would satisfy the Claude at your starting point!!”

Kyousuke’s White Thorn bounced around the cold storage room in a flash and knocked several Petals into Spots.

The Material based around Sekurtiti twisted around and changed form.

Divine-class. Cost: 11. Sound Range: High. It was a beautiful half-naked woman who was adorned with countless feathers that left most of her brown skin exposed. The Aztecs knew her as an impure sexual demon of beauty and love, but also as a goddess who absorbed the malice and hatred from human souls and carried it in their stead. She changed from a young girl to an old woman with the waxing and waning of the moon, she devoured human sin, and she stood on the front line as a god of war. This many-faced goddess was said to be the death brought by lust and the mother of all things. Now, she made an appearance to take on the impurities of the lost child named Azalea Magentarain.

But it was no use.

Azalea Magentarain could not escape the White Queen now.

After all, she had lost much while walking that path.

She was an illegitimate child of the Magentarain family. She was the seed of disaster created by sharing the legitimate bloodline with a common woman. She had been taken away – kidnapped really – wearing nothing but old rags and she had thought she would be literally torn to pieces by her father’s jealous wife, but then that man with such large hands had saved her. He had also been a likely candidate to inherit the Magentarain Family, but he had saved that rag-wearing girl and been driven from the family. Azalea had never forgotten that summoner.

The Magentarain bloodline meant nothing to her.

She had been told to live a life she could be proud of in the name of Azalea, so she had done so. As if pursuing his vanished back, she had desperately searched for a way to make up for his disappearance. She had searched all over the world and found nothing. She had walked around until her feet were blistered and raw, she had checked every nook and cranny, and she had finally found it.

The White Queen.

The strongest, greatest, and ultimate accomplishment.

If she had that, wouldn’t her savior’s disappearance have been meaningful after all?

That had been the thought in her mind all this time.

So…

And yet…

“Please do not…take this from me.”

No matter how much she struggled, her Material was still in the Regulation-class.

She could no longer defeat Kyousuke who had reached the Divine-class.

“Please do not take this desire from me!!”

“Don’t be stupid. You need to face your past. Who did you start all of this for? Look back to your starting point and redo it all from there! Assuming, that is, you can even come back from what you’ve done!!”

How could she?

How could she come back?

After living this long and after being saved on a whim by that smiling man, Azalea Magentarain’s life had left the rails and her world had veered off course. So how could she come back?

She could not win.

Even so, she clenched her teeth and tightened her grip on the Blood-Sign.

''Come with me,'' she willed.

Fractal Leskins, her vessel, had transformed into an otherworldly Material. He was her partner who had pursued that man with her and also arrived at the White Queen.

(That is fine by me.)

A voice replied in the back of her mind.

[[Image:BloodSign_v06_220.png|thumb]]

(If that is what you want, then it is sure to get through to Master Claude who let you live. So follow your own will as far as it will take you. The duty I have been given is to help you down that path.)

Those were words that would change meaning like a kaleidoscope depending on who heard them.

Someone with a brutal heart might let loose and rampage around. Someone with very little responsibility might place their sins on the shoulders of someone who was not even present and then flee.

“No…fair…”

But Azalea was different.

With the sound of rustling cloth, her wrapped ribbon Blood-Sign began to unravel from the tip.

“That would mean my evil deeds are dirtying his hands…”

As soon as she accepted that, her innermost core broke.

It happened once she viewed her life in pursuit of the White Queen as “evil deeds”.

The world was kind.

Even after coming this far, she was given a chance to “go back”.

And it all ended with a single attack.

A beam of what looked like concentrated moonlight swept across everything and Alice (with) Rabbit blew away his enemy.