Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume5 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 3===

Natalena Blast clearly saw the moment of impact.

The blue sky grew distorted.

The first thing to hit Second Grimnoah was a massive shockwave. But not because a mass of Threats had struck the surface. The space elevator’s wires were tens of thousands of kilometers long. If they suddenly snapped, they would respond like a stretched rubber band cut by scissors. The two halves would ''fly'' up and down. When they tore through Earth’s atmosphere, just how much friction and how great a shockwave would they produce?

The 600m ship sank down a few meters and all of its more than 1000 windows shattered.

“Gahh!?”

Natalena was slammed back first not into the floor or wall but into the ceiling.

But she didn’t have time to groan in pain. She was actually thankful she had been thrown away from the window, sparing her a body full of glass shards. By the time she had activated her crystal armor and used the flight to balance herself and avoid colliding with the floor, the next phase had begun.

The horizon was blurring.

No, that wasn’t it. Something black was wriggling there. But they weren’t approaching the ship. It was more accurate to say they were spreading out from their landing point. It just so happened that a portion of them were heading toward Second Grimnoah.

But even that meant thousands.

The giant spider crab, water bear, and blue-ringed octopus Threats could not be allowed to reach the ordinary people who couldn’t even fight back.

“All Subcategory and Main Category students capable of aerial combat, please gather on the side decks. Do not get too close to the Threat. Maintain a safe altitude and bomb them from above. Their numbers alone will overwhelm us, so the loss of any of our fighters would be too much of a burden for Second Grimnoah to survive.”

Was that Letnahe Kurent’s voice speaking over the ship’s speakers?

The Four Living Gods were gone.

Everyone’s efforts had failed to reach them. The world’s strongest Crystal Magicians had made up their own minds. The Threat pouring down from the sky regardless felt like a mockery of those four’s self-sacrifice.

Sacrifice.

That word was lodged in the back of Natalena’s mind. Her soul refused to let its meaning sink in.

She did her best to ignore the fact that they pushed those four to that decision just as much as anyone else.

She couldn’t muster the strength to fight without letting the anger course through her body.

She flew from the broken window onto the side deck wearing a combination of her summer uniform and crystal armor. A lot of students were already there and she shouted a question after spotting some familiar faces.

“Um! Wh-where do we start!?”

“How should I know!? Everywhere, I guess!?”

They were as confused as she was. Yamane Deiri’s response seemed incoherent at first, but it was the most accurate possible answer. It didn’t matter if the Threat were good or evil. The simple fact was humanity would never have peace unless they exterminated every last Threat.

Normally, Karuta and the others would have instructed everyone here.

Natalena flew from the side deck.

The space elevator’s wire was no longer there in the sky. It had snapped near the bottom, so it had launched skyward like a stretched rubber band cut by scissors. It had flown with such speed it had formed a vertical contrail in its wake.

“Um, is that safe? How many tens of thousands of kilometers was it? And how many tons? Um, what if it falls back to the surface from way up high?”

“I-it’s probably fine. Carbon nanotube wires are thinner than paper, so they should catch the air and float slowly down.”

“Phew. That’s a relief, Nekoumi-”

“Now the smokestack part meant to protect it from the elements is a different story. That was only 30 thousand meters long, but it had to weigh tens of thousands of tons.”

“-senpaiiiiiiiiiii!!?”

Natalena twisted around in midair and dodged falling pieces of rubble, each larger than a school building. She was glad there was only ocean below them.

Yes, ocean.

The open ocean provided no cover for them to take shelter behind. Since they had previously launched so many beams of light it had looked like a planetarium’s star projector, the Threat had to have deadly weapons similar to anti-air lasers.

A Crystal Blossom transmission from Matsuda Imi reached everyone indiscriminately.

“Found them! They’re at the base of the space elevator. The artificial float looks like it’s sinking, but that’s the epicenter of the Threat swarm!!”

“The closest population center is the island we’re stopped at for the Port Day. That’s about 10km away, which might as well be nothing.” Hashizaki Tayori’s voice remained calm even now. “But the Threat might be even more trouble if they dive into the ocean than if they attack an island or city. Our aerial observations and bombings can’t reach the bottom of the ocean and we’ve seen the Threat operate underwater before. If we lose track of them here, we won’t know where they’ll attack and we won’t be able to touch them until they make that attack.”

Natalena heard explosions up ahead.

Imi and Tayori had left ahead of the others and had already started their bombing. Natalena also wanted to concentrate their firepower on any Threats with lasers or other anti-air capabilities.

However…

“Wait a second. The Threat swarm landed at the base of the space elevator, right?”

“The bombing takes priority. We can’t let them escape into the ocean.”

“B-but we need to check for survivors! I know the float is already sinking, but someone might still be alive!!”

“We’ll be taken out if we don’t eliminate the laser beam ones right away!! Besides, anyone there was part of the human string pullers! They’re the ones who sent Karuta and the others into the vacuum of space to die!! Why should we care what happens to monsters like that!?”

Yamane Deiri shook off Natalena’s request and flew even higher. He was preparing to join the bombing. And the divine name sealed inside his Crystal Blossom’s tiny printed circuit was Kagutsuchi. He specialized in flamethrowers and napalm.

The ground or the sky?

Natalena was briefly unsure which to attack.

But she ended up letting it happen. A large quantity of flammable and explosive materials flew right past her on their way down to the surface.

Flames blossomed on the badly damaged artificial float, enveloping the many Threats there. The fiery blossoms covered a strip of the artificial island following Yamane Deiri’s course through the sky.

“Ah, ahh. Ahhhhhhhhhh.”

A wordless voice carrying flat resentment arrived over a Crystal Blossom transmission.

Natalena grimaced.

Was that Sophia Firenze’s voice? The man she had wanted to protect even if it meant making an enemy of the entire world had to be in that burning world below Natalena now.

But she didn’t have time for sentiment. She felt a pull on her hand from the side just before green light streaked through the spot she had just been flying through.

Nekoumi Hirosuke shouted in the young girl’s ear.

“Th-this isn’t over yet!! The Threat’s attacks can reach us at this altitude!! We’re screwed if we don’t take them all out!!”

“Tayori here. I’m going to make an additional bombing run from west to east at an altitude of 3000. On the count of 20, I want everyone who can join in to take a different line!”

Were those the student council members assisting the gyaru? Several Crystal Magicians drew out a large cross and even more explosions blasted the surface, even tearing through the black smoke there. Something must have bent because a last-ditch laser beam flew off in the wrong direction and sliced off the peak of a mountain on a different island.

The Threat’s numbers were falling.

But how many human lives had Second Grimnoah’s bombing taken?

They had done the right thing. But what did that matter?

The Four Living Gods had been holding back the ugliness produced by humankind, but with them gone, it now struck Natalena’s young heart directly.

How had it been for her sister Anastasia?

Had this pressure finally broken her? Or had she found a way to enjoy it?

“…”

Was there any real meaning to this?

If other Threat swarms were falling all across the planet – Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere, Western Hemisphere and Eastern Hemisphere – then the 1000 Crystal Magicians from Second Grimnoah could never protect all 5.5 billion people no matter how hard they fought. And even if they managed to protect this corner of Southeast Asia where they just so happened to be, the rest of the Threat would approach from every other direction after slaughtering 99.9% of humanity. When hundreds of millions of Threats flooded them, they would eventually find they couldn’t keep up.

“W-we might be lucky we can still focus solely on the Threat.”

“Why’s that, Nekoumi-kun? Afraid someone might launch a nuke?”

The 5.5 billion population was at risk, so it was unusual no nuclear weapons had been used yet.

They doubted they had human good will or good sense to thank for that.

With so many Threats pushing in all at once, the military and governmental chains of command may have collapsed in a panic. Launching a nuclear weapon required an intricate process. The leader of some country out there might be screaming that suicidal command, but the launch process would never complete if the command never reached the nuclear technicians operating the actual machinery. The long fiber optic cables would have already been torn to shreds.

“Nukes, huh? So would you rather be killed by other humans or the Threat?”

“Yamane!! Enough pessimism. If you think your Big Sis Imi enjoys helping you out with stupid problems, you are sorely mistaken!!”

That said, they couldn’t stop either.

Only Crystal Magicians could fight the Threat. Even without a feasible long-term plan, the ordinary people within reach would be slaughtered if they didn’t help them.

For better or for worse, they were not that strong. They would be losing resources and narrowing down their chances, but they couldn’t bear to abandon people they could see needed help.

“Yamane-senpai, and everyone else too!! Look 5km southeast of the float! There’s a fishing boat!”

“Are you kidding me!? The area around the elevator is supposed to be off limits! I bet they’re part of the human string pullers’ defense force disguised as a fishing boat!!”

“No…” muttered Natalena after spotting something.

A different part of the horizon was squirming now. Whether they were the giant spider crab type or the blue-ringed octopus type, another clump of Threats had fallen to the surface and begun to expand in every direction.

In other words…

“Another swarm has fallen in that direction!! And there isn’t just one fishing boat, so I bet they were driven off of the land and tried to escape out at sea!!”

The bombing stopped as if in shock.

That may have been a mistake.

A green laser beam sliced through the sky. It came not from the elevator base below them but from the middle of the residential zone of a different island. A flight group in identical summer uniforms had arms and legs covered by crystal armor blown away and they fell from the sky.

They could have struck back from this distance, but the Threat was in a city this time. This time they wouldn’t be putting the human string pullers at risk. They had no idea how many perfectly ordinary people were in that city.

Matsuda Imi gave some advice.

“Drop to lower altitude!! They’ll keep sniping us if we don’t use the horizon as a shield!!”

Natalena obeyed. They needed to help their shot-down schoolmates regardless.

But descending brought them to the partially-sunk artificial float that had formed the base of the space elevator. It was crawling with all sorts of Threats.

There were a few broken crystal statues there.

Those were the students who had been shot down earlier. Even with an arm or a leg vaporized, they should have been able to avoid death using their regeneration, yet that hadn’t happened.

Natalena grimace when she set foot on the burnt ground to avoid the deadly laser beams.

“Are they playing dead!?”

Some nearby rubble rose up.

The giant shape responsible was a Threat with long legs much like a giant spider crab. The interior edge of their pincers glowed an unnatural orange.

Giving up on the long term and fighting from moment to moment left Natalena and the others with no chance of winning. Their odds would have been 50/50 with just one swarm of tens of thousands. With another swarm in the same aera, the pure numbers were enough to overwhelm them.

Nevertheless.

Natalena Blast had known death was coming eventually, but it had suddenly arrived right in front of her.

(Ah.)

She froze up.

The flow of time seemed to slow. Everything that had happened raced through her mind. It may have been more about recalling her regrets than trying to find a way out of her predicament.

What had she done to Utagai Karuta?

She had shouted about revenge and vengeance, sent violence his way, and vowed to kill him without even trying to learn what a harrowing path he had taken to reach that point.

She hadn’t done any better when they were retaking Second Grimnoah from the real Threat. He had taken the most dangerous path, taken on the dirty work, and emerged both battered and victorious, but she hadn’t managed to carry any of that weight for him.

She had been fully left out of the Catastrophe, so she hadn’t been able to stop that martial arts tournament that might as well have been a public execution.

She had been so selfish and thoughtless.

She had been so narrow-minded and short-tempered and she hadn’t even apologized.

She was always causing him problems.

Even in the very end, she hadn’t been able to save that upperclassman being crushed below such a great weight.

(Maybe I deserve to die.)

That was when the world’s strongest shot down from the heavens and pierced through the giant spider crab more sharply than a lightning strike.

That enormous thing suddenly sank straight down. Its black metal shell shattered and threw off sparks while its long legs sprawled out. The orange light slowly vanished from its motionless pincers.

Natalena doubted her eyes.

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing play out in front of her.

Then the flow of time returned for the small girl.

Everything felt so normal again that she couldn’t help but cry.

“Damn, are you sure you had those calculations right!? The landing obliterated my right leg!!”

“I very kindly decelerated you with my flight preset, so you have no right to complain. That was a freefall from the upper atmosphere, remember? Besides, Karuta, you can regenerate, so tie up the wound and wait 30 seconds. You’ll be fine.”

“Also, Omotesandou-san is kind of heav-”

“I will find a wheelchair somewhere now that we are in gravity’s grasp once more, but any careless comments out of you, Karuta-kun, and I will never forgive you.”

“Mhh.”

“Don’t you get upset too, Aine!! I haven’t caused you any trouble, so can you please act like it!?”

The ugly, oppressive atmosphere from a moment earlier was nowhere to be found.

The Four Living Gods’ presence seemed to give new color to the world.

“Sen…pai?”

She was afraid the slightest move would cause this to break apart.

But she couldn’t just let it pass her by either.

That would be no different from before.

She needed to touch him, push him, hit him, and confirm his presence.

Otherwise she couldn’t believe his warmth was really there.

She could not lean on him without placing a burden on him.

Tears fell from her eyes.

“Karuta-senpai!!!”

The boy slumped atop the squashed Threat looked her way and smiled.

Just like always.

Utagai Karuta had been like this from the very beginning. His stance hadn’t changed since he first fought Natalena aboard Second Grimnoah.

''Don’t kill her.

He had stayed true all this time to the thing he had shouted when they first met.

“Ahh.”

“A lot has happened, but don’t you worry. This will all be over once we defeat the Threat. That hasn’t changed.”

“Wahhhh!! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!! AHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!?”

How?

Not only were they spreading across the entire planet, but it wasn’t clear they could even defeat the Threats in this area.

Could she accept him ignoring those basic facts because he was the world’s strongest? She knew the limits of Crystal Magic, but even she felt like she could rely on him unconditionally.

His words carried that much weight.

Meanwhile, he looked up into the sky and said something more.

Even checking that his broken leg had recovered was secondary to him.

“More importantly, don’t let your guard down, Natalena.”

“?”

“We’ve come to help, but that isn’t the end of it. We’re the world’s strongest Crystal Magicians, so we need to keep fighting until the end!!”

The giant spider crab roared.

Aine’s colder-than-ice sword gave a flash to silence it before it could do anything and the laser attack from a blue-ringed octopus in the distance missed its mark.

Powerful but invisible infrared shined from a modified military flashlight and dazzled the blue-ringed octopus’s vision before it could fire.

Natalena heard a cracking sound.

Aine had stabbed her sword into a water bear’s thick metal armor, peeled it away, and stuck her skinny arm within. She pulled out a giant coiled something. It may have been some kind of linear cannon that magnetically launched shells because she rested it on her shoulder even though it was thicker around than her own torso.

The explosive blast became an invisible wall.

And with the roar of firing, the distant blue-ringed octopus was blown away by a metal shell.

More than that, a horizontal line was torn into the float’s ground between them.

Almost like it was creating an embankment to keep the Threat swarm away.

“Karuta!!”

The Crystal Blossom at his chest vibrated.

He was receiving a Crystal Blossom transmission from Amaashi Marika, also of the Four Living Gods.

“I’m flying above you right now. There are so many Threats they’re blotting out everything else, but what are our priority targets!?”

Karuta looked around, searching for something out of place within the black swarm. The pitch black wave looked like overwhelming numbers pushing in without fear, but keeping your cool and observing them calmly showed the group frequently contacting some specific units.

It helped having some advance information on this.

(Transline is a central figure to them because her job is to transmit power to them as a pipeline. That means they highly value energy and nourishment. They aren’t equipped with perpetual motion machines.)

“Marika, look 3000m to one o’clock from me!! The sea anemone ones serve a supply role where they exchange energy. If you see any more like that from the sky, blast them all with your laser beams!!!”

Several beams shot straight down from the sky. Marika was soaring through the sky faster than Mach 3 and shot the specified unit when she passed above it.

Destruction blossomed 3000m away.

Nevertheless, Karuta felt something hot on his right cheek. The blast must have thrown a sharp Threat shard all the way here.

And this did not end with the destruction of just the one Threat.

As soon as the sea anemone one exploded with a giant flash of light, the swarm around it began to convulse. Aine used her lasers to snipe the giant spider crab and water bear ones when their movements slowed. Some of the convulsing ones stopped moving altogether.

“Ksh!! Destruction confirmed. Ksshh -ooks like you were right! Ksshh!!”

Powerful noise ran through the Crystal Blossom transmission that was supposed to be immune to jamming or interception.

They had already experienced this when fighting the real Threat near the Port of Kobe. After defeating the Armored Warrior, who contained a massive amount of energy, something invisible had been radiated in every direction. That had shorted out the Threats spread out across the ocean nearby and rendered them inoperative like a powerful microwave or EMP attack.

Transline was the same.

Except she seemed to accidentally let it out when she laughed.

In other words…

“We don’t have to fight them all?” said Natalena Blast in a daze.

This was real hope.

With 1000 against 300 million, everyone could tell there was no chance of winning, but this changed all that. The mere presence of the Four Living Gods changed the world around them.

“So if we concentrate our attacks on the units that supply energy and that triggers a chain reaction from supply unit to supply unit, we can eliminate an entire Threat swarm with invisibly-linked destruction, Senpai!?”

Who knows where she found it, but the student council’s bob cut girl brought over a wheelchair.

“You go to so much trouble for me.”

“It is no trouble.”

“You ''can'' criticize me, you know?”

“That is not my job.”

Once she was elegantly seated once more, the president asked the girl a question in her usual calm fashion.

“If we send out every member of Second Grimnoah, we will not get a second chance. If we want a chance to recover after a failure, we need to have unnecessary personnel fall back and set up a rotation of fighters. Can you do that?”

“Of course.”

The president brushed the hair from her shoulder and cut right to the chase.

“We need to assume any plan that looks safe has a landmine just waiting for us to step on it. Remember, there are 300 million of them. We cannot win if this stretches out into a long-term battle.”

Those four’s presence had changed the world.

Everything literally looked brighter and more colorful and the previous weight was nowhere to be found.

Second Grimnoah really had been built for them.

Letnahe could not use a Crystal Blossom, so she called them on the phone.

“I have picked up a new reading on sonar. A new Threat group is headed your way. This group is probably distinct from the island and peninsula groups we have already seen. I have reports of a major Threat migration from the coast guard in northern Australia!!”

They already had their hands full. If another Threat army joined in, they wouldn’t just be forced onto the defensive – they would collapse altogether.

But Natalena Blast saw a thin smile on Karuta’s face as that merciless report came in.

Like a war god.

Like a fighter god.

It wasn’t even about the divine name sealed in the Crystal Blossom’s small printed circuit. He may not have felt the need to rely on that anymore.

“Glad to hear it.”

A pointy crystal broke off of his cheek.

Fresh skin appeared below and his smile grew much more aggressive.

“Second Grimnoah only has 1000 Crystal Magicians, but the Threat is sending 300 million down across the entire planet. You seem to think that means we can’t fight this war, but that’s where you’re wrong.”

“Um, Senpai?”

“If one area shows significant success against the Threat, the surrounding Threats have to head there as reinforcements. Which means ''fewer Threats in the areas we can’t reach.''”

“Oh,” gasped Natalena.

He viewed the world differently.

He wasn’t just fighting the enemy in front of him. He wasn’t wasting the small fighting force they had left because he couldn’t bear to sit idly by and watch people be killed. Nor was he trapped by a self-destructive desire to accept death as long as he got a good fight in first.

He was looking at the entire world.

He was looking to the ordinary people who weren’t strongest, weren’t special, and couldn’t fight.

“We just have to avoid losing and remain the world’s strongest! That’s all it takes!! The ripple spreading from this one drop can go on to save the entire planet!!!”

Some might say it wasn’t possible.

Just like the Threat highly valued energy and nourishment, Karuta’s group could only keep fighting for so long. They might be fine now, but if the battle stretched on, the exhaustion would get the better of them and they would fail to push back the 300 million Threats.

“Not necessarily.”

“?”

“The more densely packed the Threat, the easier it is to start a chain reaction. And if we want to defeat all 300 million at once, we just have to focus on the unit managing all of their energy and nourishment. The more we do that, the wider and deeper the damage from that invisible radiation. I’ve already given the answer, Natalena.”

The boy looked up into the blue sky and gave a shout.

“Get down here, Transline! You’re the strongest Threat, so if we defeat you, this all ends!!!”