Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume1 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 8===

After they broke through the orange-shining glass wall and entered the broadcast station again, Karuta finally felt a solid floor beneath his feet. He used that to run through the building along with Marika and Aine.

“She doesn’t have a body of steel and she can’t use Crystal Magic, but she always shows up on the front line and leaves herself open to attack. Why?”

They could hear the small explosions – no, gunshots – even from here.

If they did not reach their destination before those ended, they really would have no tricks left up their sleeves.

“The answer is simple: ''because nowhere is safer than by her dinosaur.'' That’s why she stood on that stage in front of 700 people in the ship’s gym. That dinosaur is tough enough to deflect any attack, but it can only shield one direction at a time. So her biggest fear was for the 700 people to spread out and attack separately. If she was surrounded, there would be a chance of an attack slipping through the gaps in her dinosaur shield and reaching her. That’s why she took a position where all those gazes were fixed on her from a single direction.”

So…

“She can only summon one of those dinosaurs. She can’t summon a second or third with the same mass and she can’t split the one into two smaller ones. If she could, she could stay in hiding with a bodyguard dinosaur while she sent in an attack dinosaur!”

What was Elicia doing now that she was surrounded by explosions on that building wall?

Was she unsure which direction to use her dinosaur shield?

Or…

“Karuta-kun, be careful. Elicia is acting oddly.” Student Council President Kyouka contacted him via Crystal Blossom vibration while she observed the exterior of the station with binoculars. “It isn’t shaped like a dinosaur anymore. It looks more like a crumbling donut as she forces it to shield her in all directions!”

“That’s fine.” Karuta’s group ran up the emergency stairs. “We were hoping she would panic and not know what to do, but this still keeps her from using the dinosaur.”

They ran down the hallway.

“I just hope she hasn’t considered this possibility!!”

They arrived at the glass wall decorating the floor.

Yes.

From Elicia “Saurus” Luxverg’s perspective, they were approaching from below her feet.

She had broken down the dinosaur and spread the rusty junk out in a donut shape to protect herself in all directions while it still maintained a single form, but those “all directions” were only in two dimensions.

Had Elicia forgotten she was using a glass wall like the floor?

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

Karuta’s fist broke through the thick reinforced glass wall.

“Wha-!?”

This was a first.

His sworn enemy cried out in surprise for the first time while he grabbed her ankles and dragged her inside.

He threw her to the floor.

“Khah!”

The blow to her back left her collapsed there.

From there, she must have seen what looked like a demon pulling an extendable baton from his purple blazer’s pocket.

“Aine, Marika.”

The two girls faced the broken window from either side of him. The junk donut was rapidly retaking its shape, but before it could, they used the beams fired from their katana or rapier weapons to blast the half-formed donut and forcibly tear it away from the wall.

Once gravity took hold, the dinosaur fell toward the orange surface.

Elicia reached out a hand from the floor, but there was nothing she could do.

“Ah.”

“Can you instantly eliminate that one and summon a new dinosaur? Of course you can’t. If you could effectively warp it around like that, you wouldn’t need to stick by its side to stay in the one safe zone on the front line. Once it takes form, you’re stuck using that one.”

“Ahhh.”

“This is the 104th floor, so how long do you think it’ll take for it to climb back up the wall?”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

“As long as we kill you before then, we win.”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh- <span style="font-size:200%">'''bgwahhh'''</span>!?”

He swung the first horizontal blow toward Miss Strongest lying screaming on the floor.

When he felt the raw sensation reaching his wrist through the weapon, he knew for certain that Elicia really did use God-Worshipping Magic.

She did not have the barrier or regeneration of a Crystal Magician’s presets.

He could do this now.

If he attacked her exposed human body, he could defeat this strongest!!

After delivering a second and third blow with the baton as if slapping her back and forth, it was the baton that broke and bent in a shallow V-shape. It was hollow inside to make it collapsible, but it was also quite cheap.

“This thing’s useless.”

“Pant, pant.”

He tossed it aside and pulled another weapon from his pocket.

These were knuckledusters, aka brass knuckles. He passed the four fingers of his right hand through the holes, clenched it, and prepared to throw a punch toward Elicia Luxverg with those brutal rings on his fingers.

“No, wait.”

He answered her with a solid thud.

But this did not last long either. After sitting on top of her and throwing several punches to her face, he heard an odd sound from the base of his index finger. A portion of the finger crystalized and began the 30-second healing process. He must have damaged the bone. Even though he had the barrier-like spatial vibration field, weakened though his might be.

“Dammit, are you kidding me?”

He tossed aside the useless hunk of metal and pulled out a modified military flashlight.

Elicia guarded her face with her hands. She looked just like some confused girl trying desperately to protect herself from the violence raining down her way without warning.

“How long have you been doing this!? We still haven’t killed a single person! You think this is enough? You expect me to believe you’ve learned your lesson!? You think you’re some helpless victim and it would be wrong to kill you? To hell with that!! You have to take responsibility for what you did! And that means you have to die, you piece of shit!!!!!!”

The flashlight was meant to blind an enemy, not beat them. It had a laser pointer in place of bright LEDs and its special laser pointer lens could spread that light out like a flashlight to fry someone’s eyes. This method was well known for being used by ill-mannered sports spectators and people trying to obstruct aircraft. But with a reinforced stainless steel exterior that lived up to the “military” descriptor, with the weight of the large battery, and with the amplifier attached to the back, it worked well as a baton.

He remained sitting on her and beat her some more.

He must have been screaming something as he did so, but not even he heard what it was.

White-haired Elicia Luxverg had been using her hands to guard her face, but eventually something must have snapped inside her. She went limp and stopped resisting.

Only his heavy breathing continued.

This was the person who had torn Kazamuki Gekiha in two, sunk the entire Ocean Crystal Magic Academy ship, and slaughtered the other 700 people in that school who he had smiled alongside as fellow Crystal Magicians. No, the number of deaths had to be several times that when the escort ships were included.

If the Problem Solvers learned that the crystalized victims were in that coastal cave and that those people would eventually reawaken, they were sure to desperately search the world until they found them. They would smash up those crystals as many times as it took, mix the pieces in with tiles or bricks, spread those around the world, and make absolutely sure those people could never be resurrected.

He knew that.

He knew every bit of that.

And yet.

Despite the heat blazing in his mind, he also felt something terribly bitter building up in the pit of his stomach. As he continued to punch Elicia, he grew irrationally angry at her for not just dying already and for clinging so stubbornly to life.

Killing people was hard.

That should have been obvious, but it really was hard.

So how could they do it so easily?

“…”

The hand holding the bloody modified military flashlight dropped.

There were tears in the eyes of Elicia Luxverg’s misshapen face.

He may have been crying too as he sat atop her.

No matter how unfair those tears were to each other.

“Sacri-sama,” said Crystal Girl Aine with a composed expression. She was not warning him that the woman really would die if he kept this up. “If you are having trouble achieving your goal, wouldn’t it be fastest to use me? I can end it with a single strike of my blade.”

“Pant, pant!!”

His shoulders rose and fell as his mind finally focused on reality once more. The heat of rage did not go away, but he managed to question himself again. Would he kill her or not? Would he kill to give her a tiny taste of her own medicine? Would he stoop to her level here?

A tremor ran through his body.

For a moment – only a moment – Gekiha’s supposedly shattered face appeared in his mind’s eye.

“Dammit!!”

He threw the flashlight weapon to the floor and loudly clicked his tongue. While still sitting on her, he grabbed the collar of that Problem Solver who looked like a squashed red sack.

“I have questions.”

“P-pant, g-gasp.”

“Tell me about the other Problem Solvers! What can they do and what are their weaknesses!! Give me every last piece of even remotely useful information you have! Keep anything to yourself and I’ll kill you. I should really be doing that regardless. Got that!?”

Her face was too swollen to tell her eyes from her nose, but she still nodded repeatedly.

He wanted info on the other Problem Solvers: their hideouts, where they generally lived their lives, the kind of magic they used, and their weaknesses. Elicia’s dinosaur was magic, so it was a technique. It was nothing more than information that anyone could learn. That dinosaur was a fearsome enemy now, but it would help immensely to be able to use it themselves.

He had dealt with this now.

Or so he though. Right up until a beam of light stabbed into one of Elicia Luxverg’s temples and out the other.

A blinding light similar to welding exploded a moment later.

He blinked his eyes for a bit to deal with the burning pain in his eyes and then he realized the person he was holding by the collar had died. Her entire head was gone. There was not much blood because the top of the neck had been burned entirely black.

(Laser…sniping?)

“Marika!?”

“What, we were trying to kill her, weren’t we?”

He raised his head, but he could not turn toward the voice.

He had never heard such an icy voice.

“Let’s say we tied her up and dragged her back with us. Then what? We don’t know what she needs to summon that dinosaur, so we have no guarantee even if we take all her weapons and armor and even strip her naked. That surprise attack wouldn’t have worked again and we’d be helpless if she was ready for us. Killing her makes the most sense.”

“…”

Utagai Karuta shut his eyes just once and then relaxed his hands. The corpse plopped lifelessly to the floor. Nothing remained of her dignity as the strongest. She was meat. Nothing more than a hunk of meat.

“Are you upset?” asked Crystal Girl Aine while slowly tilting her head. Her long silver hair swayed as she gave him a curious look. “If you had just used me, she would not have stolen your kill.”