Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume2 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 4===

The flump of something hitting the ground was shockingly soft.

White snow had accumulated on the icy land and someone had fallen limply into it.

Aine had mechanically obeyed her instructions. After the follow-through of her sword swing, she kicked at the deep snow to maintain her stance.

“Ah.”

Amaashi Marika was not staring at her severed hand.

That did not matter.

But not because it would regenerate. She had never even been placing her own life on the scales.

“Ahhh.”

Small crystal shards were scattered everywhere.

The boy had collapsed into the thick snow. The snow was so deep she could not see the wound, but there was no questioning what happened. She had been holding his neck and Aine had severed that hand from behind him. Slicing off her hand like that would require the sword to pass through his neck.

His head had been severed.

Even if it could be hard tell given the lack of blood caused by the distorted crystal covering everything.

The Preset regeneration would heal any non-mortal wound in 30 seconds.

But that did not apply to the mortal ones.

With his head removed from his body, there was no saving him.

Would it be centuries? Millennia?

At the very least, she could never speak to him again in her lifetime.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!???”

She screamed.

The girl screamed and her legs crumpled beneath her.

Natalena was still clinging to her, so she was pulled down too and unintentionally ended up with her arms around Marika’s head. But she was not really that strong in the face of such horror, so once she began to wobble, she lost her balance and they both collapsed fully into the snow.

“Sen…pai.”

Her voice was weak.

But Marika did not care about Natalena Blast who had tried to protect Karuta no matter what or Aine who was tilting her head and awaiting further orders. She had to protect that boy at all costs. If violence would not bring him back, then she no longer had any reason to wield it.

But the boy must not have considered whether or not his childhood friend would be able to find a new reason to drive her actions ''once he took away her old one.

He had broken her.

She was broken.

One of the world’s strongest had their very core bent and mercilessly shattered. She could feel it so clearly inside herself. She screamed and screamed, but it never even occurred to her to turn her rapier toward her own throat. Even suicide required some kind of driving force behind it. With all her hope lost, she could not even seek revenge. She would simply stop moving at all and wait for the end to come.

“Do…”

At first, she thought it was a trick of the wind.

“''Do you get it now, Marika?''”

But it was not.

She clearly heard that voice. She hesitantly turned toward it with tears covering her face.

“U-um.” Natalena hesitantly spoke up as well.” Amaashi-senpai, um! Something isn’t right. Isn’t that girl his Crystal Magic!?”

Yes. Crystal Girl Aine was tilting her head like normal while holding the sword that had killed the boy. She was awaiting further orders. She looked so different, but she was still Crystal Magic. Marika had never heard of a Crystal Magician’s armor remaining after their death.

What did that mean?

“Wait.”

In a panicked frenzy, she threw aside her rapier-like device and crawled over to dig up the snow.

“Wait!! Are you kidding me!?”

She pulled out Utagai Karuta’s head.

But it was not alone. She did not know how, but it was still connected to the rest of him.

She simply had not noticed before because he had collapsed into the deep snow and then Aine had kicked the snow to cover up his head. The crystal shards scattered by her own severed hand had made it look all the more like he had been decapitated.

The half-frozen boy smiled weakly as he spoke.

“This will always be a card in my deck. Every single time you begin a rampage, I’ll throw that sucker right down on the table. I didn’t go through with it this time, but I really will shatter your hope next time.”

“But…how?” She still found it hard to believe and she looked like she was trapped in a bad dream. “Aine-chan’s sword must have passed through your neck to cut off my hand! There’s no other way she could have done it from that position!”

“I do not have a core or main body. ‘Aine’ refers to everything from my heart to the tip of my sword,” answered Aine with her head still tilted. “I am generally stored within Sacri-sama’s body, only emerging when needed. So everything from my heart to ''the tip of my sword'' can be contained within ''his body''.”

A silly-sounding gasp escaped Marika’s mouth.

“I stored the sword in the back of his neck and pulled it back out from the front.” Aine was as emotionless as a machine, making it sound like she had simply passed the blade through the water’s surface. “That allowed me to accurately sever your arm without harming his neck.”

He had not had time for such a complex command.

He had only told her to “cut right through my neck to cut off Marika’s arm”.

But that was with another factor already in place.

“''He had left me in nonlethal mode for everyone from Grimnoah.''”

“Wait, you mean…?” said Natalena.

That command went back to when he had first met and defeated her.

And that command naturally included Utagai Karuta himself.

So Aine had needed to obey his verbal command without violating that older command. He had used those multiple conditions to accurately control her.

The pale girl moved her eyebrows in a troubled way.

The human concepts of good and evil really did not apply to that crystal girl.

“It would have been much easier without that in place. To be blunt, I really wish someone would convince him that unnecessary restrictions to my combat are a pain to deal with because I have had no luck trying to explain it to him myself.”

“…”

That was why he had survived.

He still had his life.

But something ''had'' happened here. Even if his childhood friend was not physically harmed, his faked death must have psychologically scarred her.

And he had told her he would play that card whenever she tried something like this.

He said he really would break her next time.

“Do you want to keep going?”

He was half frozen and held in the arms of that sobbing girl, but he did not hold back.

Just like he could never kill her, he had stopped her by completely breaking her spirit.

“Aine, ''cancel nonlethal mode. You can go for the kill next time.''”

“Understood, Sacri-sama.”

Aine replied coldly.

The silly practice round was over, so it would be real next time.

“With that unnecessary burden lifted from my shoulders, nothing can stop me next time.”

That loophole was gone now. If he told Aine to kill him, she would do so. Marika’s actions here could lead to the severing of a bond a decade and a half old. So Karuta was asking her if she was still going to insist on this silly battle between two strongests.

He saw the fresh trauma there and tore into that still-bleeding wound.

He was asking her if she would make that fear real this time.

“No.”

This was no longer the world’s strongest.

The person holding half-frozen Karuta was no more than a weeping girl who had nearly been forever separated from someone she cared about more than anyone in the world.

“No, no, please noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!”

“Yeah,” groaned Utagai Karuta.

He had won. He had successfully stopped Amaashi Marika.

But when had he become someone who would feel victorious after bringing his childhood friend to tears? That was like slapping a small child on the cheek or kicking an old man in his bent back. It was a taboo one must never commit.

Something had changed in him.

Someone had changed him without him even noticing. He could only reach one conclusion based on everything he had seen while hunting down the Problem Solvers and everything he had glimpsed behind the scenes afterwards.

This was something he doubted any of Anastasia’s group had said out loud but that all of them must have felt deep down.

“Being the world’s strongest ''is a curse''.”

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