Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume5 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 7===

The Dimensional Leap Theory


Letnahe Kurent sighed while watching the students and teachers grabbing for the mic and then debating their various theories.

There was more to it.

That teacher in glasses and a white military uniform clenched her teeth.

(That one idea was based on the assumption that Kazamuki Gekiha and the others from the first ship will wake up in 7000 years, but that isn’t even true.)

That was only the official story.

It was a solid enough story that even Utagai Karuta and Amaashi Marika of the world’s strongests believed it, but it was in fact only a false story released to the public. And the key to survival in this thoroughly rotten world was to always question the major assumptions everyone believed to be true.

Letnahe had discovered the truth after doing some digging from the human string pullers side.

(Omotesandou Kyouka is lying to them. I had my suspicions before. She doesn’t use that wheelchair because of her old wounds; she uses it because she gave up her own recovery to boost the recovery speed of the first ship’s victims.)

Their recovery time of over 7000 years had been reduced to less than a year.

And not just one of them like Kazamuki Gekiha – this was every teacher and student on that ship, which meant hundreds of people.

The fact that the president could accomplish that was frightening, but that opened up a loophole.

What if Omotesandou Kyouka regained her full power?

(She is currently the only Regulation 3 in the world.)

Much of the rest was guesswork on Letnahe’s part.

As part of the human string pullers, she had the special privilege of extracting all sorts of hidden information from around the world, but that also meant she was an outsider when it came to Crystal Magic.

(Supposedly, her full power would let her pass through the dimensional barrier. Assuming that isn’t a bizarre bluff, it shouldn’t matter if she is thrown into space. I am not talking about long-distance movement by breaking the lightspeed barrier. They could ''instantly leap to another habitable planet and survive there.'')

Letnahe did not buy for a second that girl was powerless.

She had seen the girl use a strategy that required ''slowing the arrival'' of light and sound while remaining seated in the wheelchair.

Of course, that idea shouldn’t have been feasible either.

Even if they could leave the solar system, how far was it to the nearest star? If they traveled there, would they find a miraculous planet with enough water and air for people to survive? If you had enough resources to travel centuries at the speed of light, it would be a lot easier to build a fully artificial planet rather than search out a habitable one.

But the president could skip past all those problems.

She was the strongest Crystal Magician and she could teleport or warp without any kind of tool. If she had a large radio telescope with parabolic antennae lined up in the desert or a space telescope and she used them to search out a few planets with sufficient water and air, she could ignore the distance between them and arrive in an instant. The Threat might pursue, but that would take a considerable amount of time if they could not break the lightspeed barrier. Karuta’s group might die of old age before the Threat caught up and they could always leap to another planet if necessary.

That meant the Four Living Gods would not die after being ejected into space and the Threat would be redirected from Earth, saving the other 5.5 billion people.

It sounded an awful lot like a happy ending.

“Unfortunately, it isn’t an option.”

A nearby student gave her a puzzled look, so Letnahe cleared her throat. She organized her thoughts in her head from there on.

(That plan requires giving up on the hundreds of teachers and students killed on the first ship. That girl abandoned her power and accepted the inconvenience of life in a wheelchair, so I doubt she would compromise on that. The kind of woman who is willing to do anything will never back down when it comes to the core of her conviction. I know because I am the same.)

Letnahe concluded her idea wouldn’t work.

If the Four Living Gods were willing to let others die as long as it saved them, they would have had plenty of alternative options. For example, the 7000 Years Theory that Matsuda Imi had started with and everyone had concluded wasn’t an option. It would be a problem for Hashizaki Tayori because she had a big family and for Letnahe who wanted to save her husband and children more than herself, but the Four Living Gods could have emotionlessly abandoned everyone if they wanted.

They could be cold.

They could list out each problem they were facing.

They would not get complacent because they were powerful.

The four of them alone had defeated the Problem Solvers.

And that had given them the position of world’s strongest.

With that cunning and talent for finding loopholes, the idea had to have occurred to them. The 7000 Years Theory, the Live Among the Threat Theory, and everything else being debated here would have already been discussed by those four. Letnahe was curious how much that wicked schemer Omotesandou Kyouka had revealed to the others at the end, but she would have at least considered and rejected the Dimensional Leap Theory in her own head. Letnahe would have been surprised if they hadn’t come up with and rejected 100 or even 1000 theories she hadn’t even considered.

The first ship’s victims would die when Omotesandou Kyouka did, but she was apparently still unwilling to pull the trigger herself. That suggested she operated on more than pure logic.

If all four of them hadn’t been working in vain to find an alternative this whole time, they never would have all arrived at a conclusion as ridiculous as self-sacrifice.

A greedy desire for survival was not necessarily a beautiful thing. It always meant forcing death onto others, so that went without saying.

But after so much fighting and being hoisted into the position of strongest, those four had to know better than anyone that this was a cruel world where you could never find victory if you didn’t throw out all your nice-sounding ideals and where you would be devoured the instant you let up on the reins.

(They aren’t focused on their own survival. They aren’t placing that as their top priority.)

Letnahe watched the heated debate with icy eyes.

She already knew what the end result would be.

With an optimistic outlook, there would be options left to explore.

But those four would never choose those options. Not because of their strength and not because of their virtue. They had simply been backed into a corner where that wasn’t on the table.

The human string pullers had set everything up to manipulate the world’s strongests in that manner.

(That would explain why you are stumbling so badly when you normally always win, Four Living Gods.)