Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume2 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 8===

“…”

It was such a contrast.

The white igloo looked so adorable from outside. After Marika’s snow rabbit started a trend, the middle school students had decorated theirs as well. This one had two plastic buckets embedded above the entrance to make it look like a face with a gaping mouth.

But.

Inside…

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

Utagai Karuta was frozen in place.

It took a long while before he could move again.

The middle and high school students were watching from a short distance. Word must have already spread that something happened.

“Utagai.”

For once, the track suit teacher did not seem to know what to say.

He was having trouble looking Karuta in the eye.

“This is, um, not your fault. It was probably unavoidable.”

A metallic straining reached his ears.

A girl sat with her back pressed against the wall inside the adorable igloo. She looked like she was desperately trying to stay as far away from the entrance as possible. And she was frozen in place there. But not due to ice. She had received a mortal wound and crystallized.

The sound came from there.

Even though she was already dead and could not move a finger.

It technically came from her stomach. That was the worst part to look at. Since she was crystallized and thus translucent, he could see through that glittering armor. Three skinny bivalves as thick as two fingers were clearly visible embedded in her there. Unlike the actual creatures, these had jagged edges much like a beartrap and those continued to bite into the crystal. They were gnawing and gnawing.

''Yes.

''The cause of death had been caught in the crystallization process and remained trapped in her body.

“Sacri-sama.” Aine was as blunt as always. “Mr. Kiyosawa Hadome is correct. I obeyed your orders last night, but I doubt my patrols meant much. We had no light in order to avoid detection and there was a blizzard, so the visibility was 10m at best. Meanwhile, there are more than 1000 igloos. And if Threats of this size were crawling through the snow, it would have been extremely difficult to detect them with the naked eye.”

“I know that,” he said weakly.

They had been unable to find a solution yesterday, so this had happened. He had known this could happen, but they were clearly a step behind their unseen opponent.

He slowly breathed in and out.

He had to accept this death, so he whispered a name as if part of a ritual.

“''Moriyama Sanae.''”

It was the shy glasses girl with her hair tied back in two tails.

She may not have been the best when it came to Crystal Magic combat.

But had that really been a flaw deserving of this sort of death?

“Aine.”

“Yes, Sacri-sama.”

“We can’t leave her like this. We have to at provide the bare minimum of care before sending her to the Second Grimnoah. Will you help me?”

“If you order it.”

Kiyosawa Hadome was listening in and he started to say something but could not get out the words. He pulled back his half-outstretched arm, clenched his teeth, and looked away.

Karuta was not talking about placing a blanket over the crystallized girl or placing her in a special case.

He had asked for help from Aine, his greatest ''weapon''.

“Wait, what are you going to do?”

Blonde Alice had been slumped down on the ground with her head in her hands, but she seemed to realize something here.

Her ponytail swayed as her tearstained face looked up at him.

He did not look back at her. He forced himself not to.

“She was your friend, so I recommend not watching this.”

“Sacri-sama. She is already fairly cracked there, so I expect it would be most efficient to send my blade in through her right side. Then I should be able to break Miss Sanae’s torso in two.”

Alice’s throat tensed.

Her friend was dead and she would never see her again, but that was not the end of it.

“Wait!! Please wait!!”

“The Threat is still trapped inside her.”

A bitter feeling filled the boy’s chest.

The girl tearfully grabbed at him, but he could not bear to look her in the eye now.

“We have to remove them before sending her to our ship. I’m sorry, but there is no other option here.”

“But…but Sanae-chan is still alive.”

She was not being delusional.

She was using the rules of Crystal Magic.

“It might take decades, but she’s still regenerating! But it isn’t perfect, so the bigger the wound, the longer it will take!! So…so if you break her in two, I don’t even want to think ''how long'' it will take!!!”

She never would see her friend again.

She could never laugh and speak with her again in her own lifetime.

And the finishing blow would come from a fellow human, not the Threat. In military terms, it would be a human-caused casualty. And it would be mercilessly carried out by the world’s strongest they were all relying on.

(Yeah.)

Utagai Karuta felt like the back of his mind was numbing over.

He felt like he had finally come to understand the meaning and the weight of the phrase “world’s strongest”.

(That’s what it means when the strongest gives up. If I throw in the towel, it means no one else can do it either. ''Or so they assume''. Because that’s what the world has decided.)

“Kiyosawa-sensei.”

Karuta weakly turned around and looked to the track suit teacher who had been listening to all this.

“Please keep Alice away from here. So she can’t interfere until the work is done.”

“What!? No, let go of me! Don’t you dare touch Sanae-chan! Stop!!!!!”

Was she half in a frenzy?

Karuta could not bear to watch, so he started to enter the igloo. Someone tossed him a hammer. He caught it in his dominant hand and looked over to see Marika sighing with a hand on her hip.

“You can leave this dirty work to me, you know?”

“No, I’ll do it.”

The Student Council’s bob cut girl normally hated him, but she drove all the other students away now. Had she decided now was not the time for jealousy, or had she felt pity after seeing the look on his face?

He shook his head while looking half a cadaver himself.

“This was my fault. There must have been more I could have done last night.”

“…”

He held out his other hand and the girl silently handed him a large flathead screwdriver. It was apparently meant as a chisel.

He faced the crystal statue once more.

That was Moriyama Sanae.

She was not a part of him like Aine. She was not a childhood friend like Marika. She had not fought alongside him in their quest for revenge like Kyouka.

But.

Even so.

“I’m sorry.”

Those words sounded so inadequate to him.

He was shocked by how little weight they seemed to hold.

“I really am sorry, Sanae. There’s nothing more I can do for you.”

One trembling hand placed the end of the flathead screwdriver against the crack running through the crystal statue’s hip and his other hand squeezed the hammer’s grip.

He bit his lip, yet did not move for a while.

He had killed the Problem Solvers who had been known as the world’s strongest.

But this girl was different.

She was not a target of revenge. She had done nothing deserving this violence.

But someone had to do it.

“Sacri-sama, please give me a command.”

“No.”

He gulped and faced his own weakness. If he did not overcome this, he could never catch up to the enemy. He would remain in the palm of that unseen slaughterer and he would lose the kind world he had finally found.

It would happen again and again.

He had to stop that chain of events with his own hand.

So.

“No!!!!!!”

He raised the hammer.

A splitting sound soon followed. No matter how much he hurt the crystallized girl, she would not shed a single drop of blood. Yet, he still tasted iron.

It came from his own lip.

Still biting his lip hard, he swung down the hammer. Since he was not using a proper chisel, the first blow bounced off. But he tried again and slammed the hammer against the back of the screwdriver. The second blow dug in, but he missed with the third and hit his own hand with the hammer. That actually relieved him. But he could not stop. He had to keep going. He hammered again and again, spreading the cracks further and further.

His vision blurred and he belatedly realized it was due to tears.

He was killing her.

It was the Threat that had actually ended Moriyama Sanae’s life, but he was killing her in a different way.

Then the damage passed a certain point.

With a horribly inorganic cracking sound, her top half and lower half finally broke apart. With nothing to support it, the upper half toppled over like the mascot at an abandoned amusement park.

He hit his own limit there.

He turned the other way, curled up, and vomited. He had just destroyed someone’s body.

The metallic noise finally ended. The predators may have been rejoicing at regaining their freedom. Were they actually thanking the foolish boy?

“Kill them,” he groaned. That ''hatred'' he thought he would never again feel came rushing back. “Kill every last one of those bastards, Aineeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!”

“Already on it.”

The piercing sounds were like music to his ears.

She used the tip of her sword to skewer all three Threats with bivalve-like armor and she did not remove them. The three remained there on the blade, unable to move, while she rested the sword on her shoulder again.

“What shall we do now, Sacri-sama?”

“What do you mean?”

“You have your answer, do you not?”

He felt like he was speaking with his own hesitant heart. He wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand as she asked that second question.