Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume1 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 5===

At long last.

It really did feel like so very long.

Utagai Karuta encountered his sworn enemy.

The woman had long white hair and wore a pantsuit.

The stopped elevator was like a dangling birdcage trapping her.

But there was no fear on Elicia’s face.

She returned her phone to her pocket and did not even pull her hand back out.

“How stupid are you? You could have just played dead, you know? Or are you here to receive the honor of being trampled below the great Elicia Luxverg’s feet?”

“Just you try it.”

Aine kept her sword at the ready and the boy took a step back from the dangling elevator. The avenger boy stepped into the safe zone of the solid elevator hall and he smiled with sweat soaking his body.

“You are standing on very thin ice right now. Safety devices? Emergency brakes? There’s no way those things can support the weight of that huge-ass dinosaur. Summon it here and all that will snap, sending you tumbling nearly 200 stories down to the ground. But if you’re fine with that, then summon your strongest.”

This was their first move.

It was all logically sound. If Elicia summoned her prized dinosaur, the elevator’s wires and emergency brake shoes would snap and she would fall. And if she hesitated, he would send Crystal Girl Aine toward her. Summoning the dinosaur meant falling and not summoning it meant getting sliced and diced. By normal standards, this was checkmate.

Yes.

Assuming the monster known as Elicia “Saurus” Luxverg fell into the categories of “normal” and “standard”.

“Heh.”

She laughed. Her undaunted ferocity sent a chill down Karuta’s spine.

“Aine!!” he immediately shouted. “Cut her down!!”

But the crystal girl did not follow his command.

There was a simple reason for this.

“I beseech thee, Vishnu, Indian God of Change.”

That reason was directly behind him.

It came from the sturdy elevator hall floor, but still within five meters of Elicia.

Tens or even hundreds of thousands of rusty metal pieces gathered together to produce a dinosaur as if it were rising up from a body of water.

“Sacri-sama!!”

Aine’s pure white clothing whipped around as she immediately changed the course of her blade. Instead of attacking the target directly in front of her, she used it as a shield against the dinosaur approaching from behind the boy.

That must have been the correct choice.

But the dinosaur made from a jumble of swords, spears, axes, and bows had much more force behind its charge. It sent Karuta flying horizontally with the crystal girl trapped in the middle. They were thrown through the pried-open door and into the elevator.

“Gah!?”

He did not feel the solid floor.

He was instead surrounded by something oddly warm, soft, and feminine-smelling.

Elicia had spread her arms to catch him and then buried his face in her chest.

“……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………”

Sweat poured from his body.

When he looked up from her chest, he saw a grin on the white-haired woman’s lips.

He did not have a second – or even an instant – to spare.

“Aineeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!”

His shout was answered by the crystal girl swinging her clear blade upwards.

The laser beam fired along the curving course of that blade tore through the elevator’s ceiling.

The thick wires, safety devices, and emergency brake latches were all destroyed and the boxy birdcage began to fall.

It happened in the moment just before the charging dinosaur broke through the doorframe.

The dinosaur just missed the dropping elevator, so it seemed to have crashed through the glass wall beyond that and flown out into the evening sky, but Karuta and Aine were too busy to check.

They had entered freefall along with the rectangular box.

Their weight seemed to vanish. Just like a weightlessness experiment using a rapidly descending aircraft or an astronaut training facility using the extra-large freefall inside a broadcast tower, they were able to forget about the concept of weight while still on earth.

This must have been a bit of a surprise for Elicia as well because he was released from her slender arms.

Once freed from her chest, Karuta glared at his sworn enemy.

“Your dinosaur is a gravity attack using its great mass, so can you really make use of it in a weightless world!?”

“A meaningless question. You have failed to trap the crucial dinosaur – my Avatar – in this weightless cage.”

“Don’t be so sure. This prevents you from abandoning the old one and summoning a new one inside the elevator. That makes you powerless. I can have Aine cut you down now or I can wait for you to die from the fall!”

“Again.” Elicia floated in the weightless box while pointing her thumb toward the orange world beyond the glass. “I said it was a meaningless question, didn’t I?”

A reddish-black cascade could be seen out there.

It was a rusty collection of weapons like swords, spears, axes, and bows, of junk like refrigerators and cars, and of components like screws and springs. They had abandoned their dinosaur form to enter freefall along with the elevator. In fact, they were maintaining the exact same speed to remain alongside it.

Then they formed the carnivorous dinosaur’s maw once more.

Within the resultant deluge of horrific sounds, Elicia Luxverg kept her back to the destruction and bathed in the light of sunset so her body’s outlines seemed to be burning.

“Now, ghost, I will be leaving. Incidentally, do you have an effective means of escaping this?”

“Aine.”

“If not, then it is you who will be splattered on the ground.”

“Kill her now, Aineeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!”

The crystal girl responded with the short laser gun on the jitte-like branch of her transparent sword, but something else was faster.

The dinosaur had fully regained its form and the claws of its feet dug into the small concrete wall built along the steel beams running between the glass panels. It used this to slow down while crashing its great maw through the glass.

The tremendous vibration threw off Aine’s aim.

The beam of light scorched the empty air right next to Elicia’s face, but she did not bat an eye.

It was all over if the dinosaur took the entire elevator into its jaws. Elicia could escape by climbing onto the dinosaur, but the other two would be stuck inside as the elevator was tossed out into the evening sky like used gum.

But that was not what happened.

Just before it could, an orange beam of light pierced vertically through the elevator from top to bottom. A twintail girl with sharp crystal armor growing from her body flew into the large hole this created in the ceiling.

“Mari…ka!?”

The girl must have been too focused to respond.

She took Karuta and Aine’s hands while they floated in the artificial weightlessness and she flew down through the hole in the floor.

Sounds of destruction continued from up above.

Most likely, the dinosaur had dug its claws into the TV station’s wall to gradually slow its descent with the elevator in its mouth.

“Marika, this isn’t over! We haven’t rid Elicia of her ‘strongest’ yet!!”

“I know…that!”

Marika turned ninety degrees away from the elevator shaft to break through the thick glass wall and fly outside.

They faced Elicia, who was riding the dinosaur’s shoulder, from a distance of 20 meters.

However, they were standing on the vertical glass wall.

Karuta’s group was supported by Crystal Magic flight and Elicia was using the dinosaur’s claws digging into the wall, but they were both freed from the concepts of gravity and the ground.

They stood on that glass battlefield.

“So you are finally facing me head on, ghost.”

The white-haired woman was delighted.

They had dropped a lot, but their surroundings still looked like a sunset ocean. Their glass footing glittered as it reflected the orange light.

Some artificial light was mixed in with that.

The lights inside were turning back on. The broadcast station was coming back to life as it switched over to emergency power.

They had expected the blackout to last about five minutes, so all this could not have taken any longer than that.

What a dreadfully intense battle this had been. It felt like they had been fighting for days.

“Are you all out of tricks? Then let’s end this with me sending you back to your graves. Your experience on that sunken ship should have taught you that you cannot defeat my Avatar in an exchange of pure violence.”

Marika and Aine.

The boy could not even stand on this wall without those two girls’ support, but he still spat back a response.

“Don’t screw with us.”

“My obvious superiority is not enough to deter you? If this is what you’re like, I can’t imagine how you managed to survive back then. …Do it.”

Crystal Magic and God-Worshiping Magic.

The wielders of those different powers took action simultaneously.

They charged straight ahead on that glass ground to take the shortest route toward a clash.

A single hit from that dinosaur meant death.

The spatial vibration field and auto-regeneration were useless. Not even the 700 people in the Ocean Crystal Magic Academy had been able to defeat this world’s strongest. Just because Karuta’s group had gained a few personal reasons for fighting now did not mean they could overturn everything that happened and defeat this dinosaur.

So.

That had never been their intent.

“Marika! Our footing!!”

“Got it!!”

The guard of her rapier-like weapon moved. It had covered the back of her hand before, but now it turned inside out like a broken umbrella in a gust of wind to form a firing unit. A blinding beam of light surged from there.

Their footing was nothing more than glass.

It shattered and the flat battlefield suddenly vanished, as if the three of them were diving underwater.

“…?”

Elicia briefly looked puzzled while left behind.

“–––––!!”

But then she clenched her teeth.

Something else had begun.