Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume1 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 4===

There was no need to hold back at this point.

Utagai Karuta summoned Crystal Girl Aine from his back and shouted to Marika who had already equipped her Crystal Blossom armor and rapier.

“Aine, you move out ahead! Marika, you take flight!!”

He gave instructions using his physical voice instead of the Crystal Blossom vibrations and, while Anastasia was focused on them, he moved straight toward her.

He pulled his modified military flashlight from his blazer’s pocket, activated a blinding beam of light made by combining a laser pointer with the special lens used for printers, and silently shined it toward Anastasia’s face.

But.

“Do you know what magic is?”

She vanished.

He heard a distortion in the black-uniformed woman’s voice and suddenly she was standing right next to where the laser was shining.

“That term refers to all attempts to understand the world around you that are based on worshiping the divine or believing in a religion. Can an arrangement of cards explain the Tree of Life? Can a special calendar reveal the day of the world’s destruction? Can a certain series of dance steps summon the rain at any time? The specifics go by many different names, but the root principle is the same.”

“Kh!”

Karuta continued to aim his blinding laser from the ground while twintails Marika switched her rapier’s guard to its reversed firing mode and launched truly deadly lasers from the sky, but none of them hit. They were not allowed to hit. Even with the speed of light on their side, Anastasia kept “disappearing” and they could not get in a proper hit.

(What? Is she teleporting or something? Or is she reading our thoughts as we aim!?)

“It is a simple matter.” Anastasia remained standing still. I said magic is all attempts to understand the world around you, didn’t I? That means it also applies to any attempts to understand the Newtonian physics that allows you to tangibly experience invisible quantum physics.”

“What?”

“Simply put, I can dodge attacks made of light if I move faster than the speed of light. And light is constantly hitting my body. If I add my own strength to the light that is already pushing my body, it establishes the following equation: (The speed of light) + (My athletic ability) = (My current speed). If I can add just a little bit on top of the standard value for light, then of course I can surpass it.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

That explanation was so absurd he suspected it was solely meant to confuse him.

It was such childish logic. No, even small children understood nothing could exceed the speed of light. Anastasia was producing such extreme results, yet the foundation of it was contradictory to an extreme. That creeped Karuta out to no end.

“And this is not limited to the speed of light. You saw the other Problem Solvers, did you not? Horoscopes and calendars? Your Crystal Magic may simply read the flow of power between heaven and earth, but did you really think that was enough to manage the world’s strongest power?”

“…”

The dinosaur, the light spear, the giant sword, and regeneration.

It was true those each felt like the strongest because they were from such different categories.

Any attempt to understand them had been abandoned by categorizing it all as God-Worshiping Magic.

He could not hope to understand them, yet there they were. That may have been what made them so frightening.

“There was an age of dinosaurs, an age of stone tools, an age of staffs and crystal balls, an age of guns and steam, and many others. I suppose ''the previous age'' was of electricity and petroleum. But we wiped it out. It was our ability to do that which established the age of God-Worshiping Magic and earned us the title of world’s strongest.” Anastasia laughed. “God-Worshiping Magic users are not brilliant geniuses or wise sages. In a way, we are the dumb ones. The power pouring down from space, the energy rising from the center of the earth, and the invisible mountains and valleys created by those things colliding are all irrelevant. While you stare at those occult weather maps, we create our own bomb cyclones. Because we can. …And once you reach that point, you reach a world where the speed of light is such a flimsy restriction.”

Her power felt like some kind of joke.

This was the definition of magic itself.

She was an incomprehensible monster in human form. Karuta felt his skin crawl while facing her, but then he realized a fundamental fact.

This was not over yet.

She could move faster than light. It felt like there was no hitting an enemy like that, but that was not true. That was simply how most people would view it since they thought of the speed of light as an absolute boundary.

After all…

(Anastasia’s childish form of evil does not think of…no, does not ''believe'' that light is the world’s fastest. She believes that plenty of things move faster than light.)

He gulped.

(So she knows how to conquer light, but she does not believe that is enough to bend the world to her will. It could be vibrations, or electrons, or wind, or fire. She believes that plenty of other ordinary things have the possibility of surpassing light. So, so, so…)

“Aine! Hit her directly!!”

(This only lets her dodge laser attacks since they use light, so another form of attack has a chance of hitting her!!)

A roar of wind came from a katana made from a translucent, crystal-like material. It had a jitte-like branch on the back of the blade and a special laser gun unit was attached there. Crystal Girl Aine’s clear white dress fluttered around her as she raced forward with weapon in hand.

There was less than 20m between them.

Her nonhuman legs could clear that distance in a single second.

But Anastasia laughed and took a step back.

That was all it took to kill Aine’s speed. She stopped. For some reason, she was running and running but could not reach the woman in a yellow and black uniform.

“I move back every time you move forward, thus you can never reach me.”

“Now you’re dragging out old Greek nonsense!?” shouted Marika from the sky while she charged in like a meteor with rapier in hand.

Anastasia could not use that method for an attack from above since she could not sink down into the ground. She could not bind the attack with the magic that let her ignore distance and speed, so Marika should have been able to reach her. However…

“The moon is pulling me toward it, so I can fly.”

“!!!???”

Anastasia disappeared.

Marika quickly pulled back her rapier, but then the weapon and her right arm’s armor were blown away. Even though she was using a barrier that (unlike Karuta’s) could deflect machinegun fire. The roar came a moment later. The twintail girl just barely avoided crashing and instead made an unsteady emergency landing.

Anastasia had passed through at a speed too fast to follow with the naked eye and her own right fist had been destroyed and her arm bones were sticking out at her elbow.

She stopped in midair, laughed, and kissed the back of her destroyed hand.

“I can kiss it and make it better.”

What happened next goes without saying.

There were no time limits or detailed rules like there were for Crystal Magic.

Sweat poured from Karuta’s body while he looked up from the ground thanks to the ordinary bonds of gravity.

Instead of tension or a fear of the unknown, seeing the true nature of magic filled him with disgust.

It was not that Anastasia did not know how things really worked.

She had said she could fly because “the moon is pulling me toward it”. That basis required knowledge of universal gravitation, but she still prioritized her own thoughts and believed in them without a shred of doubt. Because that was the age and the world they lived in. Was this her pride in claiming the title of strongest and remaking the world as she saw fit? Even if all the possibilities of every other parallel world would not allow this ridiculous conclusion, this world was different.

This was magic that distorted a world its user had truly never seen. It was a lot like drawing a map of the ends of the earth based on your imagination instead of actually going there.

(What do we do? What do we do!? This ''mixed up feeling'' from her is different from that dinosaur or light spear! It’s way worse! Is it even possible to come up with and follow a plan for someone like this? Can we really outdo the bomb cyclone itself simply by reading the weather map and following what it says? That just doesn’t sound realistic. She takes it so far I can’t see any way to outdo her!!)

“Sacri-sama.”

Aine jumped back toward him with her special katana in hand.

Marika waved from where she had landed a short distance away. She had taken a hit from Anastasia, but she could apparently keep fighting.

“Give me your instructions,” said Aine. “What should I do next?”

“Good question.”

That response came not from Karuta but from Anastasia in the sky overhead.

The yellow and black uniform woman smiled with the purple sky behind her.

“This is a taste of our apocalyptic everyday life. We are always destroying someone and we will be destroyed by someone someday. You started this, so let us end it. Are you out of options? What happened to your trump cards? Is it over already? Then it would seem today is not the day I die. I will hold onto the title of world’s strongest till at least tomorrow.”

Was this how it worked?

He did not know how many secrets and mysteries the world held. He had no way of checking to see which ones would blossom and cover the world if they were supported in the normal way. But their light faded so easily when up against something as baffling as this God-Worshiping Magic that was so mixed up and seemed entirely impervious to their every effort.

“All I did was recite a simple hex, focus my own actions on defense, and respond with the appropriate ''reactions'' to your attacks.”

They watched as floating Anastasia pulled something from the chest of her tight skirt military uniform.

The thick card set looked a lot like it could be for poker, but that was unlikely.

Or perhaps this was the original form of a card set.

“So now I will go on the offensive. Didn’t I say that magic refers to all attempts to understand the world around you? And that one of the prime examples is trying to explain the Tree of Life with tarot cards?”

The cards flew.

They followed some sort of rules to spread out like a shield in front of her.

“Technically, this is not how they are meant to be used, but I do promise you it will be entertaining.”

And.

And.

And.

“Enjoy my strongest.”

The ground broke apart and a giant form rose up behind Anastasia in the sky.