Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume1 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 7===

It all came down to this.

Anastasia had become a yellow and black spear intent on piercing the earth, but then a puzzled look appeared on her face. The time did arrive, but it was far different from what she had expected.

There was someone in front of her.

“Aine.”

An ear-splitting clang rang out. The preset barrier meant nothing. The noise sounded like crystal colliding with crystal, but that meant it was a sound of collision and not destruction.

In other words, her attack had been stopped.

Crystal Girl Aine had moved in front of Karuta with her pure white outfit fluttering around her. She held her translucent modified katana in both hands. Instead of breaking or shattering, it had stopped yellow and black Anastasia Blast’s max speed charge from the sky.

“What!?”

“We came all this way carrying the weight of Grimnoah’s 700 people on our backs.”

An unpleasant straining sound could still be heard, but this was not over. She did not collapse. The target before Anastasia’s eyes would not die. Karuta gave a roar while the crystal girl protected him.

“You have every civilization that has ever been destroyed? You have 1056 kinds of doom? Who cares!? We can overcome that without even trying!! So what if you have an ice age, floods, eruptions, and even manmade atrocities and wars? That might have been too much in an age before those things had happened, but those rules no longer apply.”

They glared directly at each other.

As long as he realized something so simple, he could stand on the same level as that world’s strongest who held every kind of doom.

“Don’t underestimate Crystal Magic. Maybe no one else has ever been able to overcome that wall, but we’re different!!”

“Have you forgotten? Those destroyed civilizations include that school that taught Crystal Magic.”

“So you think you could crush us if you sent all five Problem Solvers after us? Even though we’ve already taken out four of you!?”

People grew stronger when they persistently worked toward a goal.

They could gain the power to overcome the kind of disaster that once would have been unavoidable doom for them.

“So we will overcome this! The doom of all past civilizations is no more than an obstacle we must surpass here!! We have to show you we’ve changed, that those older eras are a thing of the past, and that we’ve conquered those things so you can rest easy!!”

This had nothing to do with the occult high and low pressure systems.

It was not the same as using brute force to grapple with a monster who could create as many bomb cyclones as she liked.

They had to search out a way to control this magic user named Anastasia Blast who could be seen as the world’s strongest form of doom. It did not matter if these were cumulonimbus clouds or a bomb cyclone. People had used horoscope charts and calendars to learn the rules needed to bring disasters onto their side. They had learned to store water, farm the land, sail the seas, and so much more. They could not stop just because they did not understand something. They had to conquer it.

They had to attack Anastasia Blast and bind her with the rules governing her that not even she was aware of!!

“''Humans are not the dinosaurs who met their doom and were no more. We won’t just tremble in fear! No matter how pathetic, ugly, or lame it might be, we know how to learn from our mistakes and overcome them!! So we won’t let it end with our defeat. What you brought to that boat was undoubtedly doom, but that’s exactly why we have to keep going so it doesn’t end there!!''”

“Kh.”

They finally pushed back.

That childishly evil voice finally gasped.

“''We can learn from tragedy. The pain drives us to claim something even greater in return! The greater the doom you place before us, the stronger we will grow. From the moment you failed to kill us with your very first attack at that school, the small snowball had started rolling down the hill. You can try to stop it now, but we’ve already grown well past your expectations!! So much so that this isn’t going to end with the simple revenge we initially planned it as''!!!!!!”

A cracking sound rang out, but not from Crystal Girl Aine. It came from Anastasia who was supposedly still charging forward.

“Yes, that’s right. I wanted to save everyone, even though I knew it wasn’t possible!” roared the boy. He roared straight at that absolute enemy known as a Problem Solver and one of the world’s strongest. “And not just Gekiha and the other crystallized students and teachers. I wanted to save Marika who was so excited by any glimmer of hope and by the thought of revenge. I wanted to protect the Student Council President’s smile!”

He had known revenge was the right thing to do, but something about it had not sat right with him.

He had felt oddly satisfied when he practically threw his life away to save the ordinary people participating in the protest in London.

If that was who he really was, then surely it had to be the driving force that had brought him so far against the Problem Solvers!!

“I wanted to tell them to stop dirtying their hands with revenge!! I wanted to tell them not to forget who they were back in that happy school!! So I took on as much of the burden as I could to prevent them from crossing the point of no return! That might sound like a ridiculous joke to those of you we were killing, but I risked my life for that!!!!!!”

The next thing he knew, sweat was soaking her face.

There was a smile plastered to her face as she spoke her mind.

“That may be true.”

But the world’s strongest was the world’s strongest to the end.

“''But that equation only applies to you; it does not apply to the entirely separate Crystal Blossom that has no civilization of its own''.”

“!!!???”

The cracks rapidly shifted toward Aine’s translucent katana. They spread through her pale hands and arms like the propagation of pressure.

If she shattered, Karuta would be defenseless.

Then he could not avoid Anastasia’s attack, but he doubted Aine could push Anastasia back even if he gave the order now.

He breathed in and out.

What did he need to end this revenge?

He thought about it, arrived at a conclusion, and raised his voice.

“Return to me, Aine!!”

Both Anastasia and Aine looked taken aback.

Then Aine fell back. She slipped inside the boy’s stomach.

It was obvious what would happen once that wall, dam, and plug was removed.

The max speed charge was completed.

Anastasia’s arm, the yellow and black armor surrounding it, and the long claw-like thing extending from there pierced the boy’s side. The single attack was enough to break right through the spatial vibration field of his weak barrier. He doubled over and coughed up blood.

“Bh.”

And then Anastasia realized something.

The tactile feedback of the blow sent a strange tremor up her spine that her brain finally managed to verbalize.

(I missed…his vitals?)

Those were the words that came to mind, but her knowledge rejected it. She had attacked his vitals. She had followed the muscle memory that let her pull that off with her eyes closed. And yet Utagai Karuta had not died. There was still life in his eyes.

She heard a cracking sound.

She thought it might be crystals enveloping him to heal the wound she had just made…but it was not.

(No, did he intentionally harm himself to produce crystals in his body that ''lifted up'' his organs!? He forcibly rearranged his own insides!?)

“Gh, bh.”

Either Anastasia’s attack or the intense burden he put on himself caused him to cough up a large hunk of blood.

But he smiled.

The boy smiled fiercely.

He gathered his strength.

He grabbed onto Anastasia’s outstretched right arm with both hands and gave a command along with more blood.

“Come out, Aine!!!!!!”

Yes, as long as the Crystal Blossom was not active, the translucent armor would not take damage. As long as he was prepared to take the blow himself, he could preserve his trump card in a place of absolute safety.

So he had hidden his ultimate weapon inside his body.

He had hidden it and pulled it back out.

All so he could take Anastasia Blast’s head off in this moment.

“!!!???”

The world’s strongest’s eyes opened wide.

For probably the first time in her life, she looked like her throat had gone dry.

It was the same look the Problem Solvers had carved on the faces of everyone in that Ocean Crystal Magic Academy.

In other words, a look of fear and terror.

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And.

And.

And.

In the few seconds of motionless forced upon her by punching through her target’s gut, the doubled-over boy’s back stirred.

His purple blazer pulled up.

The top half of a slender grim reaper with pale, pale skin popped out. She wielded a katana made of a cold, crystal-like substance and a short laser gun that branched off like a jitte. With her target within killing range, the crystal girl in white moved as accurately as a clockwork device.

There was no sound.

But the slash entered at the woman’s shoulder and cut diagonally down from there.