Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume1 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 9===

The result looked horrific.

A large portion of the white scenery had been torn away to reveal the contrasting dark soil below.

Marika viewed the 20m-radius crater from the sky and then slowly descended toward its center with the boy still clinging to her hips.

Crystal Girl Aine was waving to them from there.

Susannia Evans’s location was unclear. Or rather, she was scattered across everything. More than just torn apart, it looked like she had been reduced to shreds. And the mechanical components with a dull silver shine were scattered over an even wider area that passed beyond the crater. The disastrous scene looked like a passenger plane crash site and Marika gave an annoyed comment while having her Crystal Blossom armor and rapier withdraw.

“It really was like fourth-dimensional storage. This is more than just a multitool. You could probably build a pyramid with all of this stuff. How was it all contained inside the volume of a human body?”

“That was probably the magic she used. Anyway, that is Susannia Evans defeated. But what should we do now, Sacri-sama? If we are lucky, Anastasia Blast will be here too, but if not, we will have to start from scratch in searching for her.”

“Look, this is all iron, aluminum, and stainless steel. It’s all been refined from non-recycled first-generation resources,” pointed out Marika. “Back in their ‘age of peace’ before we started picking them off, that would have been a pile of treasure.”

“I am only interested in pure gold,” insisted Aine.

Karuta belatedly let out a slow breath while listening to their conversation.

He had killed someone. It had happened so quickly it still did not feel real.

He had not had any other options.

“She could fly and probably swim through the ocean too, but does she really travel the world like that?” asked Marika. “She was like their top secret weapon who kept away from the media, so I bet they would want to avoid letting anyone see her using her magic…or using those weapons, I guess.”

“What are you getting at?”

“She would use normal transportation as much as possible. That car next to the log cabin was bait and she blew it up with her first attack, but she might have had another car or a helicopter hidden somewhere further away. If we can find that, we might be able to find some information in there.”

Utagai Karuta thought to himself while listening.

They had defeated a Problem Solver. Susannia Evans had been scattered across the ground.

(But is this really over?)

He had no basis for his doubt. Everything had gone as well as could be hoped. It might as well have scored a perfect 100, but that was why it did not sit right with him. Things had been different with Susannia than with the other Problem Solvers. They had not glimpsed her magic at the Ocean Crystal Magic Academy and they had not had any advance information on how she fought. Careful planning had just barely been enough before, but now they had been forced to go in blind and adlib their way through the battle. It was like being thrown back into that nightmare world in Grimnoah. They had been helpless their first time against that dinosaur and those light spears. They had only managed to stand up to them after seeing that magic, analyzing it from multiple angles, and using a surprise attack.

Yet they had won so easily this time?

This was the world’s strongest who used mechanization God-Worshiping Magic and it was already over? It had not been easy by any means, but was she really weak enough to be fought off using some adlibbed plan like that? Could she really be called the world’s strongest like this?

No.

There was a bigger question.

''Was Susannia Evans’s God-Worshiping Magic really and truly about mechanization?

“That composite armor is made from carbon, aramid, and fluorine-treated steel panels. These fiber optic cables were probably used for signal transmission. No, maybe they were for the laser beams’ power transmission. But they use chloride glass? In that case…”

The girls watched in confusion as Karuta stepped out of the dark soil crater and began checking through the scattered junk.

“What’s with you? What’s so interesting about all that wreckage?”

“Are there some rare earths worth a lot of money? Ah!? Could you gather all the semiconductors in these devices and melt them down to obtain a fair amount of pure gold? (Tremble, tremble.)”

“No, something isn’t right,” he cut in. “It is true modern medicine can artificially connect severed muscles and nerves. Even organs can be replaced with mechanical devices to a certain extent. And it’s probably all a lot more lenient when you can use magic to help. But this wreckage scattered around here is still strange.”

“Yeah, anyone could tell this wouldn’t fit in that body.”

“I don’t mean that. I’m talking about the materials used.”

“The materials?”

“Yes. The composite armor and artificial organs are all of the highest quality, but a human body would never accept these. The armor would lead to metal poisoning and the organs would be rejected by the body and necrosis could spread to the surrounding cells as well. There are a lot of medical devices made to be implanted in the body – artificial muscles, pacemakers, implants, etc. – but the materials used are chosen carefully. Yet I see none of that caution here. The things I see here would have been suicide for Susannia, so it doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe for a normal person.” Marika did not quite seem to get what he was trying to say. “But doesn’t that just mean she has some magic to force her way through that?”

“Maybe, but that changes things.”

This was his main point.

“Let’s say Susannia Evans had some God-Worshiping Magic that let her modify her entire body, fill it with dangerous materials, and completely suppress any kind of rejection. That would mean her magic wasn’t about mechanization or becoming a cyborg.”

“Wait, you don’t mean…”

“Her God-Worshiping Magic was one that doesn’t let her die. Or maybe one that causes her body to recover from any and all wounds interior or exterior.”

He breathed in and out before making his final statement.

“What if Susannia Evans’s God-Worshipping Magic was for regeneration!?”

In hindsight, the mechanization idea had never made much sense.

Even if you used largescale agricultural machines to cultivate the desert and desalinate the seawater, that scorching land was not going to become fertile so easily. Even with a supply of freshwater, the soil had to be properly developed or it would not contain the necessary nutrients and minerals. So how had Susannia done that?

The answer was simple: she had sown some form of nutrients across the vast desert.

For example, she could have chopped up her own flesh and blood. And conveniently enough, she had called upon the name of Persephone, a deity who, along with her mother Demeter, was closely related to the spring crop and winter hunger.

What had been used to grow all the world’s produce? What was indirectly contained in the foods they had been eating all this time?

But they did not have time to suppress an urge to vomit.

A clump of snow slowly rose up behind surprised Marika.

“Aine!!” shouted the boy.

The crystal girl shoved the curly twintails childhood friend out of the way just before something swept diagonally through that space. It was a scorching blade similar to a gas burner. Aine could not dodge in time, so her slender left arm was severed at the elbow. The barrier formed by a spatial vibration field was no use. The arm spun through the air and fell to the snow. Either she had no liquid circulating her body or she “tightened” the end of the stump because there was no bleeding.

And.

A redheaded woman emerged from the snow with what was more like strings than scraps of cloth draped over her. Was this the result and power of her regeneration? Her skin was tight and had an almost polished sheen to it and there was no sign of anything like a scar.

(This is after she was torn to pieces.)

Time seemed to have stopped, but Karuta still gulped.

(This is well beyond anything Crystal Magic can do. How far does her regeneration go!?)

“Susannia Evans!?”

“Ha ha.”

After being shoved out of the way, Marika finally managed to send a command to the printed circuit board smaller than a stamp, reequip her Crystal Blossom armor, and grab her rapier. She and one-armed Aine attacked from two directions at once. She slashed with a blade made from lasers or masers created from the vibration and excitation of crystal.

Susannia’s movements were far from perfect, but that must have been why she chose to make herself a mechanized cyborg. And she had used her regeneration to entirely ignore the burden on her physical body.

She had lost her mechanical parts and was nearly stripped bare, so she only had just the one close-range burner sword to work with. That was not enough to fully defend against Marika and Aine who had become incarnations of Crystal Magic. She took a few solid blows from the slashing lines of light, so her neck and torso were sliced right through.

But that was not enough to stop her.

None of it mattered to the Problem Solver who could regenerate.

She immediately recovered and resumed fighting without even collapsing. No matter how much they sliced and diced her, she never stopped. It was enough to give the illusion that they were fighting a liquid rather than a solid.

When her one arm was dangling down only half-severed, she cut it the rest of the way off herself to trigger a regeneration from the base.

She would not stop. Karuta had no idea what they could do to win this. Could the world’s strongest of the Problem Solvers really bend the rules of the world this far?

(Is there some core part like her brain or heart? Is she supported by some other object like a magic circle or some ritual artifact? What are we supposed to destroy? What can we attack to end this!? Does her regeneration ''have none of the rules that Crystal Magic has to follow''!?)

“What should we do!?” asked Marika. “Withdraw for now!?”

“The target currently only possesses a close-range weapon,” said Aine. “If we fly into the sky to bomb her from a distance, we should be able to unilaterally attack her.”

“We don’t know how much of the wreckage scattered around here she can still use! Don’t give her any freedom! We don’t stand a chance if she reconnects to her cyborg weapons. That trick we used in the dogfight won’t work again!!”

Opening up her own gut without anesthesia to stuff filthy machines inside while on the receiving end of a fierce aerial bombing would be entirely insane, but Susannia Evans could pull it off. If she could handle the pain, her regeneration would do the rest. She could survive even the most absurd forms of mechanization.

Karuta hated the fact the he could only watch since he had no special abilities himself.

“She’s almost like a planaria. No, she’s even worse!” said Marika. “We’re lucky the cuts don’t bubble out to create multiple copies of her, but she regenerates way too fast!!”

(Wait, a planaria?)

He was reminded of a cruel experiment shown on a TV science program.

And it was something that only worked with the incredible regenerative ability of a planaria.

“Aine, Marika. I want to try something, so aim for her arms!”

“We’ve chopped those off countless times already!!”

“''Don’t cut them off like that. Slice through them lengthwise''!!”

He was no longer talking about the woman like she was a human being, but Crystal Girl Aine mechanically complied.

She swung her crystal sword to slice between the middle and ring finger of braided Susannia Evans’s right arm and straight up to near the elbow. Instead of severing the arm, she opened it up in a floppy V-shape.

Susannia moved her other hand in response.

She intended to slice off her partially-damaged arm with the burner sword. She had done this before.

“Marika!!”

On his cry, Marika’s rapier pierced Susannia’s left hand to pin it in place.

“Kh, damn you!!”

For the first time.

Truly for the first time, the Problem Solver’s face twisted.

And a moment later, the regeneration began with a wet sound.

The split V-shape of her right arm did not reconnect. Instead, two right forearms grew out from her elbow.

“There’s a cruel experiment you can do using a planaria’s regenerative ability,” spat out Karuta. “If you partially damage them instead of fully severing their body, another body will emerge from the sliced portion. And it doesn’t just apply to the main body. Cut through the head, and it will grow two heads, brain included. Although I don’t know if that means your personality – or whatever you would call that mass of thoughts – is copied over or if it would be more like having two brains in the same body.”

The same thing was happening here.

Susannia’s regeneration was so absurdly good that they could take advantage of it.

Defeating her was not possible

Same for killing her.

But there was a way of ending the battle and keeping her from living her life even if they did not actually take her life.

“Marika, Aine.” The exacter of revenge made another cold statement. “Do not sever anything. It can be her arms, legs, torso, neck, or head, but just slice her up while keeping things attached like a kid trying to cut up some ingredients their first time cooking! That will transform her into no more than a hunk of flesh. Throw her soul into a prison of flesh where she can never, ever again move of her own free will!!”