Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume2 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 1===

It took longer than a day, but they had defeated every last one of the Threat.

They had gone around destroying more and more and more and more of the Threat flooding the ground and sky.

Even though that enemy was not even strictly alive.

This was not the first night they had seen during the fighting. It was the second one.

The fighting had been fierce, but Utagai Karuta was one of the survivors.

And if the category of survivors existed, another category also had to exist.

“34.”

A dray cracking sound reached Karuta’s ears.

It was the sound the small crystal shards scattering after his arm completed its regeneration.

This Threat had been artificial weapons created by Smart Arms, so the blinding laser emitted by his modified military flashlight could cause a malfunction in their sensors.

He could also use the Preset regeneration.

A human could derail a speeding train if they did not care what happened to their own body. They simply had to lie down and place their arm across the track. By jamming his hand into the joints of the mechanical legs, he could briefly stop them from moving. By having his own arm crushed to cushion the impact, he could prevent a fatal blow to his organs. He had avoided instant death and considered the cost-performance of each action to destroy his own body at maximum efficiency. Meanwhile, he had used Aine to slice through the center of the Threat and overcome the difference in numbers. It actually helped that the Threat was so large and packed together as a swarm. He could slip below one to escape the legs of the others, giving him a momentary shelter. At least until its stomach dropped to squash him.

He had to have destroyed more of them than even Marika who had used her superhuman flying instincts to bomb the Threat with frightening precision. His “poisoning” plan had worked well. The fake Threats could no longer evolve once they could not take in the parts of their fallen.

The weapon he used, his own destruction, and the strategy itself all came back to his own abilities.

Even so, the voices were still ringing in his ears.

“Help me!” “I don’t want to die!” “Aren’t you the world’s strongest!? The Four Living Gods!?”

He was haunted by the cries of the students who had trusted him right up until the very end when reality set it and they felt betrayed.

He could not live up to all their expectations.

The crystal scattered at his feet was not all the result of his own regeneration. Small hands, slender legs, and a cute face were lying there. They were translucent and not recovering.

Hadn’t she been the Student Council Treasurer?

He honestly did not even know her name. He remembered how coldly she treated him whenever he showed up to speak with Kyouka, but he also remembered how she had kept the other students away for him when Sanae died. She was not just some title. She was a human being who could pick up on people’s feelings and show them kindness. The fact that he only knew her by that title was a failing on his part, not hers.

And now she was gone.

Just gone.

“Altogether, that’s an entire class worth of kids dead!! Is this…is this what you wanted, Alice!!!???”

He knew his question would go unanswered.

That girl had been laser sniped by Marika and smashed to pieces by a Threat’s giant jaws. Not to mention the battlefield had moved around a lot during the fighting. Not even he remembered where exactly he had spoken with Alice Majority.

Despite everything, one group remained whole.

Karuta, Aine, Marika, and Kyouka.

The Four Living Gods were the ones that trio had actually wanted to kill, yet not one of them had died. Karuta knew from his own experience that plans had a way of going wrong, but still.

Their attempt had been an utter failure.

“Gh.”

With the extreme fighting over, the supply of adrenaline may have stopped.

For whatever reason, he suddenly hit his limit.

He collapsed onto his side and felt like he could never move again. He simply pulled in the object in front of him. It was the crystallized head of the Treasurer with a bob cut.

The killers and the killed were gone, having accomplished nothing. That thought triggered an explosion of negative emotion within him. He had done this. The world he had created had driven them to this.

Even though he had believed defeating the Problem Solvers would change the world so these cruel sacrifices were no longer necessary.

“Ahhhhhhh!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!”

“S-Senpai.”

He heard a weak and unreliable voice from beyond the blizzard.

It was Natalena Blast, another person trapped in revenge.

“That’s enough! Please stop fighting like that! You’re scaring everyone! Is that the ultimate form of Crystal Magic!? Destroying your own body to protect a non-regenerating flashlight!? Are we all going to end up like that eventually!? You’re the world’s strongest, so if you don’t pull yourself together, Grimnoah really will fall apart!!”

Now was the time to clean up the mess.

They had to check for any surviving Threats either in hiding or playing dead among the scraps, so everyone was combing the snowy terrain. With nonhuman opponents, they could not demand a surrender and the concept of war crimes did not apply. If they ran across a Threat, they would immediately destroy it.

“…”

But Karuta remained motionless on the ground, moving just his eyes to look over at the speaker.

It was indeed Natalena.

Only then did he slowly climb to his feet. Even if he had to force it.

She really was strong. There had been no guarantees out here, but she had found a survival strategy all on her own. Yes. Even when the Threat appeared in such numbers and could endlessly grow by devouring their own fallen, her ability to grab and swing around ''anything'' was just about the only thing that could defeat them head on.

Her Crystal Magic borrowed Anubis’s power. Before, she had attacked by using the thin wires and small grab buckets to grab at matter and swing it around as a blunt weapon. She had grabbed both solids and liquids from the area around her. Karuta had shown how to defeat that back on the beach that night. Her strength would probably rise if she grabbed something like explosives, magma, or powerful acid, but she did not use that sort of trickery here.

Instead, she chose a completely different fighting style.

She had grown yet again.

(She wasn’t using just solids and liquids. She was grabbing gasses and even plasma, which is known as the fourth state of matter.)

More than just grabbing containers or boulders, she could swing around water or the air to create her own cataclysms, like a flashflood or a powerful windstorm. She had even grabbed and twisted around explosions and blowtorch blades.

Just like her sister Anastasia, her destruction seemed more like ''magic'' than a weapon.

He had somewhat predicted this and even Omotesandou Kyouka had said the girl was powerful.

But still.

(She picked it up so fast. Scary fast.)

That young girl could transform a crisis into personal growth. At this rate, she might even surpass Karuta or Marika one day.

He had no proof of it, but he wondered if she would eventually be able to ''grab the dimension itself.''

He could not begin to predict what would happen if she did that. As a Regulation 3, Omotesandou Kyouka had once been able to leap beyond this dimension, so perhaps she would be able to find the answer.

But all of that was Natalena Blast’s personal situation.

He doubted he would ever forget the names of those 34. He had known her name was not on the list, but he did not know who all she was friends with.

He gently placed the Student Council Treasurer’s severed head on the snow and asked a question with haunted eyes.

“Are your friends okay, Natalena?’

“Y-yes.”

“Good.”

The world’s strongest piece of shit had failed to protect everyone coming to him for help.

The extreme exhaustion and cold had taken their toll, but the psychological damage was even greater. He was about ready to mistake the snow for a down blanket and fall asleep right there.

But young Natalena gave him a frightened look. It was the look of someone seeing a horrific wound. Yet that boy had killed her sister and she had vowed to have her revenge, so seeing him in such a haggard state should have delighted her to no end.

“Natalena.”

“Yes?”

“What will you do now?”

That was the fundamental question.

He did not have it in him to keep going right now.

“Are you going to keep at it? Even after seeing that?”

She bit her lip.

And…

“What if I do say I will have my revenge?”

“…”

Toudou Riho had her throat slit for suggesting they stop. Moriyama Sanae had her belly devoured while fearing she had made a mistake. Alice Majority had lit the fuse of doom after losing everything.

What kind of answer would an avenger accept?

After thinking, Utagai Karuta opened his mouth again.

He was worn down and injured, but he could not stop here.

“I will stop you.”

“That’s selfish.”

“I will stop your revenge no matter what. Before you end up like this too.”

“How can you say that after killing my sister?”

''Fair point,'' he thought.

It was a self-serving argument and it would sound shallow and idealistic no matter who it came from. When someone was boiling in the flames of vengeance, it did not matter how dangerous that vengeance would be. They could not rest until they succeeded.

But.

Even so.

“Fail in your revenge and you die. But even if you succeed, what you see before you is all it gets you.”

He spat out that truth. It was such a wasteful answer given all the lives cruelly taken. And now that he had learned the truth, he could not turn away from it.

He knew full well he could not recommend this path to anyone else.

“So I will stop you. No matter what it takes and no matter what anyone says! Natalena, I can’t let you face this dilemma!!”

Someone should have said this sooner.

At the very beginning.

Someone should have said it to Karuta’s group too.

And to Alice’s trio.

Someone should have prevented them from glorifying revenge as a noble goal. Someone should have stopped them before they had killed their first person and before it was too late. Someone should have dragged them away from the shadows and back out into the sun.

They had not had someone to stop them like that. Not that they would have listened while in the midst of their revenge. They would have gone mad with rage, decided that person was “one of them”, and added them to the list of targets. But even so, they had lacked someone who would silence those fools with their fists, show them an overwhelming power, and then rub their head, smile, and tell them everything would be okay.

Succeed or fail, revenge led to a dead end.

All who attempted it were doomed to sink into the depths of hell.

So he had to stop this young girl.

She could resent him, she could curse him, and she could spit on him.

But he would save her. He would give her enough of a future to eventually look back on it all and realize he had done the right thing. He knew where revenge led, so he would not back down here!!

“I took a loved one from you and words of apology will never bring them back.”

“…”

“So I don’t want to take anything more from you. Not a single thing. My hands are already stained with blood, so I won’t act like I’m in any position to give you anything, but I will put a stop to this to ensure you don’t lose anything more. I will end the chain of loss and violence here. And I’ll stoop to any level to do that!!!!!!”

Young Natalena pursed her lips.

As if to hold in what threatened to burst from her chest.

Then she whispered two simple words with a hand reaching for the Crystal Blossom on her flat chest.

“Power up.”

“Kh.”

He had failed to reach her.

Crystal armor appeared out of thin air and translucent units resembling long skis attached to her feet. Those weapons resembled spider legs or cranes, but they were the god of judgment’s scales. The wires and grab buckets allowed her to grab up to 16 things and swing them around as blunt weapons. Anubis, the Egyptian god of judgment, was the exact same god that Anastasia had once worshiped and relied on.

“Sacri-sama.”

Aine started to raise her sword while standing alongside him, but he held his right arm out horizontally to stop her.

“Don’t, Aine,” he said without turning toward her.

“But.”

“If you don’t like my orders, then cut me down with that sword. Right this instant.”

The look on Natalena’s face could not quite be described as smiling or weeping.

“No fair.”

“…”

“If you’re trying to apologize, stop trying to look so cool!! You can start by crawling pitifully on the ground to make me feel better about this! I mean, this isn’t right. You’re a murderer! You have no moral high ground here, so you can’t talk down to me like this! I have ''the right to feel good about my revenge''!! So…so why are you making me suffer like this!? Why are you making me feel like I’m doing something wrong!!!???”

Those words were like an epiphany to him.

He knew now why she had chosen Anubis, even if she may not have realized it herself.

“Oh…”

“Wait, what did you just figure out? No, you can’t do this.”

“Anubis is a god of judgment. He assesses human souls and weighs them on his scales.”

“Stop.”

Utagai Karuta’s legs gave out below him.

No, he took a knee and bowed his head in the presence of a god.

He looked through the trembling girl to the god of judgment within her.

“Anubis, I’m sorry.”

“Stop!!”

She had told him not to look cool and to crawl pitifully on the ground.

She was exactly right.

“I killed your partner. But the punishment for that belongs to me. So please don’t have this girl bloody her hands over it.”

She immediately kicked up a leg and had the crane unit grab a large mass of air using the grab bucket at the end of one of its wires, but that was all that happened.

It was not swung around.

She did not produce a weapon of wind.

She gently lowered her small leg.

Had Natalena Blast stopped herself? Nothing else should have been possible. Crystal Magic only sealed the god’s name in a small circuit board and did not call on the actual god the way God Worshiping Magic did.

But even so.

Something about this made Karuta feel like this was the direct result of him ''beseeching'' that deity.

“No fair.”

Her voice was barely audible. Nothing remained of the intense emotion she had been forcibly maintaining before.

She could no longer keep it up. Even her translucent armor crumbled around her.

She bit her lip.

But the loss was still too much to bear, so tears filled the corners of her eyes and she spoke.

Almost like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

“No fair passing the right of judgment onto someone else.”

Yes.

Revenge was justified by converting your thoughts for the deceased into violence. It would lose its driving force if the deceased said to stop, but the dead could not speak. When seeking revenge for the dead, that absolute brake did not exist.

But Anastasia’s situation was different.

One of the pair remained.

Anubis, Egyptian god of judgment, had fought alongside Anastasia as part of the world’s strongest.

That was why Anastasia’s sister had chosen him.

But did he really see violence as the answer here?

This was the only way to stop her revenge. No blow could have been more powerful than the forgiveness of her sister’s partner.

It had been the same for Karuta’s group.

If Karuta had managed to speak with Kazamuki Gekiha once more and he had told him to stop that foolish quest for revenge, his spirit would have broken. He had been ready to betray the world and take on the strongest, but that attack was one that he could never have avoided.

He had said he would do whatever it took, so he had taken the girl’s right to justified revenge and handed it to Anubis instead.

“Don’t worry.”

“You idiot.”

“If you don’t go berserk here – if you can stop yourself from doing something unjust now that justified revenge has been taken from you, then you aren’t like Alice. It means you can still go back into the light of the sun.”

“You saw it through to the ugly end yourself!! You know revenge can work out in the end if you stick with it. Um, uh, but are you really saying ''I'' am worth rejecting everything you did to reach this point!?”

He smiled a little.

He felt like he had finally found a place for himself.

He was fine simply viewing that bright world from the shadows.

As long as he could provide a push back into the light when he found someone who had not crossed the point of no return.

Still, he carried the weight of the world’s strongest.

He would have to wear that crown without letting it crush him.

“Sacri-sama.” Aine seemed to have found something. She was looking in a different direction altogether. “Won’t this conclusion make ''her'' an enemy?”

“…”

That was enough to tell him who he would find in that direction.

She was the most reliable friend but she could also lose control in the worst possible way. Without her, his revenge would have failed very quickly, but without her, he would not have fallen this far either.

“Marika.”

She had already activated her Crystal Magic armor.

Needless to say, she was not concerned about any of the fake Threats having survived. She was viewing a much more obvious target. That was the thing about her. She never considered the formless and unknown enemies.

Her own life was of secondary importance.

But when people she cared about would come to harm, Amaashi Marika would not hesitate to dirty her hands.

“Her revenge is over,” said Karuta in a weary voice.

“What proof of that do you have?”

He made an immediate decision.

Asking the other students or teachers for help here would be the height of folly. Not even Sophia Firenze or Kiyosawa Hadome could stop this fight. This was a clash between strongests. Marika did not care who else showed up. If they got in her way, she would mercilessly remove them from the equation.

That was the way the world worked.

And it worked that way because Karuta’s group had killed the Problem Solvers.

The twintails girl pointed at his face with her rapier-like unit.

“The mind is a fickle thing, so it’s easily ''swayed''. She might not feel like taking revenge now, but the desire for vengeance might come back when she wakes up from her shallow sleep in the middle of the night. You’ve already seen what happens when an avenger goes off the rails, haven’t you? It doesn’t stop them. She’ll keep going and make you suffer in some way or another. Anyone after you for revenge must be eliminated, no matter how insignificant. And they must be eliminated in a way that leaves no room for ''swaying''.”

This was a battle between friends.

It was the same ugly result reached by Riho, Sanae, and Alice.

Karuta was being drawn into the exact thing he had wanted to avoid.

But he could not stop it. And he knew why.

“Aine.”

“Yes, Sacri-sama?”

“Natalena is our top priority. Protect her even if it kills me.”

“…”

Aine’s mouth formed a small triangle as she kept her sword at the ready.

A clear change came over the look in Marika’s eyes, but he spoke all the same.

“Marika, you said people are easily swayed.”

“I did.”

“Then tell me. How can you trust me so much? You saw how cheap, persistent, and hopeless I am back when we fought the Problem Solvers.”

She did not even have to think about her answer.

“Because I know I can laugh and accept you no matter how much you might deceive me. That’s what it means to truly care about someone.”

Her words were accompanied by a slight smile.

It was true that she at least would not be swayed. She stuck with someone to the end. And it apparently had to be someone she felt that strongly about. He was touched, but it also explained why the list of people she would protect was so very short. She might even sink the new Grimnoah if it would protect Karuta or Kyouka. All while she claimed that was not the place for them.

At the same time, he found nothing to work with there.

He could beg her to trust Natalena because he did, but it would not reach her. She trusted him, not Natalena, so if he trusted Natalena and was betrayed, she would only see it as a “told you so” moment. She would only feel hatred for the deceiver and cut her down. The younger girl’s circumstances were irrelevant to her.

Worse, she was saying she would kill the girl ''before that could happen.

Because she did not want to even imagine seeing that boy soaked in blood and tears.

So…

(It’s no good. There’s no way to stop this!)

This would not end like it had for Natalena Blast. Amaashi Marika had already successfully completed her revenge. She was tougher and surer of herself, so there was no opening there.

She was too much to handle.

And others might say the same about Utagai Karuta himself.

“Are you quite done?”

She spun her rapier around to shift the tip away from Karuta.

She directed it toward Natalena Blast, the 12-year-old girl who had lost her sister and her chance at revenge.

She did not hesitate.

[[Image:ApocalypseWitch_v02_09.png|thumb]]

“Then move out of the way. Be warned, try to protect her here and it will only mean more pain for you.”

“Sacri-sama, you may have forgotten, but my nonlethal mode for Grimnoah people is still in effect. This would be extremely challenging and is not recommended. Shall we continue nonetheless?”

“Of course we will!!”

It was time to steel himself. He stuck a hand in his blazer uniform and pulled out the modified military flashlight before stepping up beside Aine.

That positioned himself in front of the defanged and now harmless young girl.

He had sworn he would not take anything more from her. Not a single thing.

So.

He had to live up to that.

“Aine, we need to work together to defeat Amaashi Marika, one of the world’s strongest! But don’t kill her, no matter what might happen!! I will never let you do that!!!!!!!”