Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume3 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 10===

Utagai Karuta came back to his senses.

He blinked once and his childhood friend’s head was no longer in his hands. Everything around him had lost color and had transformed into piles of black metal. The Threat was generally made of metal, but this destruction was horribly soft and disgusting. He did not know how it had achieved that flexibility. Maybe thin wires were woven into a net and maybe it had been filled with small pieces like a beanbag cushion.

He held a hand to the side of his head and grimaced.

(Were the colors being used to alter my state of mind? No, this was even harder to fight than that. Did they follow a chemical formula to create a human attractant?)

“Aine, I don’t want the other Threats to eat this, so can you destroy it more thoroughly?”

“I can, but it would produce a lot of light, sound, and heat. All of the Threats in the region would likely notice and rush in here.”

“Then we’ll have to go with the poisoning tactic. If we could find a bomb or some powerful acid…”

“K-Karuta?”

He heard a quiet voice from very close by.

He tensed up a bit, but Aine was still letting her sword dangle at her side.

“That is the real Miss Marika,” said the crystal girl. “Shall I attack her?”

Karuta sighed.

Marika still seemed to find the result of this battle hard to believe. She held her rapier device in her hand, her eyes were wide as could be, and she was trembling.

“How…how did you just kill the Gestalt?”

“Well, if either Aine or I was acting weird, I ordered her to let the unaffected one make the decisions. I made the command because I thought a human like me and a nonhuman like her might be seeing things differently here, but it didn’t do much good in that sense. And this isn’t perfect. If Aine suddenly wanted to take control, she could send out high-voltage electricity or knock-out gas and use my command to justify her ‘rebellion’.”

Gestalt was probably a tentative name for the blue-haired girl…no, for the sea anemone Threat. That was a reference to the term Gestaltzerfall, but it was not quite accurate to use just the first half like that. This may have been similar to how the spread of the term “domestic violence” had given the word “domestic” negative connotations for a lot of people.

“It can only manipulate human perceptions,” said Karuta. “So it can’t affect Aine. Or maybe the Threat only ever expected to have human enemies.”