Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume5 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 4===

Thinking back, the world had been an awful place as far back as the Problem Solvers.

The five previous world’s strongests and their God-Worshiping Magic had been overwhelmingly power, so Karuta and the others had been helpless as their ship was destroyed out at sea. It had all begun with that experience. The few students who remained had never even considered making it a fair fight. They had hidden, deceived, and used every trick in the book to kill. That was how they had arrived at the top, so perhaps that was what had created such a depressing world afterwards.

The world had been a terrible place to begin with, but Karuta and the others had clearly made the wrong decision when choosing how to fight back against it.



They had failed to escape the ugly side of humanity on Second Grimnoah.

All hell had broken loose on their school trip to Iceland’s Crystal Beach. In a frigid resort where they could not ask for help, they had been surrounded by what they thought was the Threat and forced to fight with the ordinary tourists over the few livable spaces remaining. They had ultimately discovered the supposed Threat was a military decoy created by humans and they were being controlled by a group who had infiltrated Second Grimnoah in order to seek vengeance.



Near the Port of Kobe, they had been shocked to discover how pure the real Threat was.

Unlike before, the tens of thousands of Threats there had been the real deal. Karuta and the others had worked to retake Second Grimnoah from them, but the Armored Warrior and the other Threats there had only been interested in the schools humans attended and had never intended to fight. It was Karuta’s side that had gotten the wrong idea and slaughtered them.



The human string pullers had taken away everything they had worked so hard for by using the Catastrophe meant to reunite the fracturing human race.

Their own parents and siblings had been working behind the scenes of the martial arts tournament. Of course, they were not trained professionals. The human string pullers hid in the shadows and manipulated information to have the 5.5 billion ordinary people unwittingly do their dirty work. They were so good at what they did that they could have people betray their own family with a smile and truly believe it was in their family’s best interests because “someone important” or “everyone” says so.



The boy asked himself again.

There was no salvation to be found on Earth as it was.

Was that world and the people living there really worth protecting? The current situation was undoubtedly wrong. But could he really find a reason worth returning to that hell when it meant abandoning the only chance at survival he still had?

Say you had the winning lottery ticket.

And then you find out multiple of the same number were printed by mistake and you hadn’t actually been testing your luck at all. Would you really ask for a redo that was completely fair? You didn’t have to. Maybe it was dirty and maybe it was ugly, but if you just held your tongue, you would be set for life.

He thought about it.

He considered it.

Agonized over it.