Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume1 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 1===

The LCD TV went silent in the middle of the news.

No one had hit the power button on the remote. Amaashi Marika, a girl with twintails dyed a bright strawberry blonde, had thrown the remote at the screen.

Student Council President Omotesandou Kyouka smiled softly.

“Marika-san.”

“Oh, sorry. That just pissed me off way too much is all.”

Marika pouted her lips, but she did actually bow her head.

They had taken their RV out of England and to the fellow European nation of Germany. They had a simple reason for that: two of the Problem Solvers had been killed during the G21 summit. The country was bound to be locked down while a largescale search began. Britain was an island nation, so it could be locked down more tightly than other nations. Once the circle closed around them, there would be no escape.

But why had it not been locked down immediately? They could guess the higher ups decided not to explain to the normal police what had happened because they feared the chaos and panic if word of what happened got out.

Either way, they had needed to escape while they still could.

Marika glanced over at the dead TV.

“How long are we going to be able to watch TV like this?”

“Yes, defeating Yukino caused the Sunny Side Up network to break apart in earth’s gravity, didn’t it?” said Kyouka. “The system was not 100% reliant on that, but losing a major source puts pressure on everything else.”

“Yeah, I hear the houses that run on solar power are having the solar panels stolen from their roofs now. It might not be long before people start stealing car batteries.”

Yukino’s defeat had destabilized the world’s power supply. The governments that had been using her for general power were scrambling to get their old power stations running at full capacity again, but that would leave the government supercomputers and particle accelerators without power.

Those were used to develop new drugs for incurable diseases.

Or so it was claimed to secure the budget to keep them running.

If they stopped, it was sure to cause various problems.

Utagai Karuta blankly listened to them from the sofa while losing himself in thought. Their revenge had reduced the number of Problem Solvers, which in turn increased the fury of the Threat. Quite a few countries, regions, or cities had entirely disappeared overnight this month alone and many unrelated people had met an unfortunate end.

Everyone talked about it like they were blaming Karuta’s group.

It was almost like the Problem Solvers were intentionally holding back to increase the damage done so they could place the blame on them.

But Karuta also had another thought.

“Does the Threat even exist at all?”

That was a fundamental question.

He had started to wonder back in London. Yukino Arakawa had tried to escape responsibility for mass murder by shoving the blame onto the Threat. What if they had done that over and over in the past? The Threat might exist or it might not, but someone was clearly taking advantage of the situation.

The Threat was beginning to function as a means of manipulating public opinion through fear and confusion and as a veil to cover up inconvenient truths.

That thought painted the previous news report in a different light.

''Search out the villains who are attacking the Problem Solvers. The world needs to come together and hunt them down.

If the Problem Solvers had really destroyed several cities just for that, then they had brought their villainy to a whole new level. But at the same time, he could not help but note that the people who had destroyed their giant ship of a school could easily pull it off.

Not only did they have the ability, but they also had the lack of scruples.

“Anyway.” The Student Council President clapped her hands together in front of her large chest. “The dinosaur, the light spear, and the giant sword. We’ve taken out half of the Problem Solvers now, but you could say the real challenge is yet to come. You know why that is, don’t you?”

Crystal Girl Aine shook her rainbow-glowing silver hair, fluttered her transparent white dress, and quietly tilted her head in a corner of the RV.

Karuta sighed and refocused his mind.

“Unlike those three, we have no records of the other two fighting. We’ve defeated all the ones we saw use their God-Worshiping Magic at our school.”

“Yes. Our experience and data allowed us to put together a detailed plan and that made all the difference. The Problem Solvers are the world’s strongest and now we will be forced to go in blind and adlib our way through it.”

“By the way, Sacri-sama, is it possible the Problem Solvers not seen at your school did not actually participate in that battle?”

Aine seemed to be speaking on behalf of Karuta’s reluctance to kill, but it was him who rejected the idea.

“We know the dinosaur was on the ship and the light spear and giant sword most likely attacked from outside, so that means there was at least one more of them there: the woman who laughed over the ship’s speakers. This is only a guess and we can’t rely on it too much, but if four of them were a part of it, it seems unlikely just the one sat it out.”

There was no real cloud on Marika or Kyouka’s faces.

It felt wrong to consider the possibility that one of the Problem Solvers was actually a good person. They could not imagine it even as a hypothetical.

“But to be honest, going in blind is not going to be easy,” spat out his curly twintails childhood friend with a bitter look on her face. “What kind of attack do they use, how powerful is it, what’s its range, how often can they use it, etc. And beyond that, without knowing their name or where they live, we can’t fight them or even approach them. An intuition-based game of concentration using all 5.5 billion people on the planet doesn’t sound very promising.”

“We do have something to go on there,” said the Student Council President as she smiled and pulled something from the chest of her blazer.

It was a card-sized electronic device.

“The light spear woman was obliterated, but the giant sword one remained a little more intact, so I swiped her phone. And I made sure to modify it so not even the owner would be able to track it. …And by ‘modify’, I mean I checked the device’s plans and drove a nail through the transmission chip.”

“Are you saying that might tell us the location of a Problem Solvers base or personal information on the other members?”

“It’s worth looking into, don’t you think?”