Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume3 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 4===

Karuta heard a sound like a clog being cleared from a pipe and then he realized it had come from his own throat. His vision was blurry and his head dizzy. It took him some time to recall why his entire body was wrapped in pain.

They had broken through the side of Second Grimnoah. He did not remember what had happened after they broke through the window and continued on at a shallow angle.

They appeared to be in the middle school building.

Since it had taken him some time to recover, his eyes had already adjusted to the dark.

This was not just a classroom. His nose detected the odd scent of chlorine and he heard the sound of water sloshing back and forth.

This was the indoor pool.

“Sacri-sama,” whispered the calm crystal girl while lifting up the boy who was lying limply on the poolside. She might as well have been speaking to a beach ball held against her flat chest. She was still drenched and he could feel her body heat through her soaked clothing. “We need to get moving. The Threat will notice soon.”

“Soon? What did you do???”

Why did they have any time at all? Those black lustrous things had been covering all of the exterior walls. He had assumed that was why it was so dark in the ship despite the oil fire, but…

“What is that? A wall?”

“Clinging to thin glass with their large metal forms would only break the glass. They must have learned from their mistakes.”

The glass wall was meant to let in plenty of sunlight, but it was now covered with metal panels, parasols, beach chairs, and more. It was all held in place with the ship’s repair parts and the adhesive for the deck equipment. The hole he and Aine had made on the way in was no longer visible.

Aine had used their speed and weight to force her way through the countless things ''crawling'' all over the outside of the ship. Some had looked like wharf roaches and others like tadpoles, but Karuta would have expected them to rush after them into the ship like a swarm of fire ants.

Aine lightly swung her crystal sword to scatter some clear drops of water from it.

“I have a laser sniping unit. We have no evidence it can do critical damage to the Threat, but it should work as effectively as your flashlight if used to blind them.”

He could faintly see his surroundings, so there had to be some light getting in through small cracks.

“So you just charged in without thinking it through, huh?” he sighed half in exasperation. “That wouldn’t have worked if they used ultrasound or microwave like that jellyfish from before. Then we would have been killed.”

“With so little data on the real Threat, every action we take must be based on some amount of speculation. And as an aside, I directed us toward a window covered in units with red glass-like ''lenses''.”

That did not mean much. Those could easily have been nonfunctioning camouflage like the eye patterns on a moth’s wings.

But Karuta was more surprised by something else.

“An aside, huh? I didn’t expect to hear you defend your actions after being criticized for them.”

“…Uhh.”

“I get it. You saved my life, Aine, so quit scowling. I don’t want a sulking partner.”

“A logical analysis would suggest you are trying to provoke me, Sacri-sama.”

The crystal girl puffed out the cheeks on her expressionless face. Her hair and clothes were still soaked, so water continued to drip from her hair and the hem of her dress. She must have crashed into the pool to help slow down after bursting into the ship because her hair smelled of chlorine. She had learned to feel embarrassment when her skin was visible, but the way she would just set that problem aside when there was “no effective countermeasure available” was still pretty inhuman. It felt like a simple computer algorithm where she would follow the yes and no arrows to see if the current situation applied.

A healthy boy like Karuta had to sigh.

He walked along the poolside, checked inside the locker room, and borrowed a dry towel from one of the lockers. This was Second Grimnoah, so it had most everything a normal school would.

“Here, Aine. You need to be dried off. Whatever we do next, we can’t leave wet footprints behind, right?”

“Good point.”

“…Why are you raising your hands overhead like that?”

“I thought you said you wanted to do it.”

He could not believe her overly straightforward answer.

He had said “you need to be dried off”, but by who? He had not specified, and this was apparently how she had interpreted it.

And there was a more fundamental problem.

(Being seen is embarrassing, but being touched isn’t!?)

Her strange learned behavior had him confused, but there was no point in getting hung up on this. He started by drying her wet hair like she was a small child and then he squeezed his eyes shut and moved to her body while doing his best not to think about it. …Although he had a feeling the shut eyes only made the sensation on his fingers all the more vivid.

Then something occurred to him.

“Oh, right. If you stick a thick towel under your dress, no one can see through it no matter how wet-”

“…”

“Sorry, Aine. I don’t know why that upset you so much, but please don’t glare at me like that.”

He was truly beyond saving if the inhuman crystal girl thought he needed to be more tactful.

At any rate, Karuta could not waste time here playing with the crystal girl. Aine’s laser had dazzled the Threat’s sensory organs like a stun grenade, but she had not worked out an actual way of killing them. ''It was possible she could not kill the Threat even in this state''. If the Threat recovered, they would be surrounded and killed.

(The real ones are incredible. They don’t just customize themselves endlessly when they get killed – they don’t even let it reach that point. You can’t even take them out in the first place.)

He had dreamed of getting back to Second Grimnoah.

Right now, it was a deadly labyrinth where Gekiha and his other friends from the first ship slept crystallized on the bottom level and where Marika’s group had gone missing. The familiar school was filled with the same powerful sense of death as a hospital late at night. Without Aine by his side, the dense darkness may have been enough to repel him.

He focused on the Crystal Blossom on his chest. It functioned as a communicator, but carelessly using it would put himself and Marika at risk. Those antenna-covered sea urchins or whatever were the biggest nuisance he had ever seen.

If they were found, they were dead.

He slowly poked his head out into the hallway from the locker room.

“We need to get moving, Aine. We shook their pursuit once, so I want to avoid letting them find us again.”

“Yes.”

“And we need to locate Marika’s group. Where did they get in, how were they pursued, and where did they escape to? I know it’s dark in here, but look for any sign of them. Use profiling techniques – read their mental state from the slightest scratches or stains. This ship is 600m long, but we should be able to find them if we gather enough actual data.”

“Well excuse me for having nothing but worthless speculation.”

“You really are sulking, aren’t you?”

He breathed an exasperated sigh as he and the crystal girl walked through the ship.

Now that he was paying attention, he could not help but notice how ''wrong'' this place felt. It was like thinking you were resting in an infirmary bed only to later realize it was an autopsy table equipped with belts to strap you down.

At night, a school became something else entirely.

The familiar artificial structure filled you with a dread different from a natural forest or cave.

A ghost would never appear on a truly desert island. With no one there, no one would die there, so no ghosts would end up there. Schools, hospitals, train stations, and other public facilities were more common settings for ghost stories than homes or sheds. That may have been because, when people found a normally crowded place to be entirely deserted, they would put their mind at ease by inventing a fictional being to fill the space left by the people that were normally there. The stories created that way could be creepy, but that was just how it was.

This, however, Karuta refused to let be “just how it was”. He would defeat the Threat and take back their usual school.

To do that, he needed cover to hide behind more than distance from the enemy. What wavelength they used was unknown, but since Aine’s laser had dazzled them, the Threats gathered on the outside of the ship had to use their vision to search out their prey.

Hide-and-seek would also work to prevent that.

When Karuta sensed a crawling in the air down the hall, he grabbed Aine’s slender shoulders and moved behind a rectangular pillar jutting out from the wall. Only Aine’s wet crystal sword was sticking out. She had apparently adjusted the angle for his use because he could use the refection on the blade like a mirror. That showed him a large form cutting across the end of the hallway. A round Threat resembling a slate pencil urchin was rolling along. Its many long spines resembled TV antennas, so that was probably the type Kyouka had mentioned that specialized in gathering data.

“Assuming Miss Marika is still alive, she must not have made a meaningless charge on the Threat or fled from the ship in fear,” whispered expressionless Aine while he still held her shoulders. “Drawing attention to herself while surrounded would only increase the risk of death. If she did not reach that conclusion on her own, she would be dead already.”

This was not about Aine knowing what Marika would do.

It was about that being the only option that did not lead to instant death.

And Aine’s harsh analysis continued.

“If holing up in here was Miss Marika’s only option for survival, then what remaining hope would she have? We do not even know if the real Threat eats food or consumes fuel. Too little is known to attempt to wait them out. So what else is there?”

“If she couldn’t do anything herself, would she hope for help to arrive?”

“Yes. And if she was desperate to survive, she would do everything she could to ensure that help found her. Thus, there is a good possibility she would have left intentional signs behind. Something that we would understand but the Threat would not.”

“I see,” said Karuta while flipping around the military flashlight in his hand.

''Assuming Marika had made the right choice and was still alive,'' she would have gone through the following thought process.

First, attempting long-range communications – either via her Crystal Blossom or her phone – would be suicide while aboard the ship. It would only call the Threat to her.

If someone was to come rescue her, it would be one of the Four Living Gods, but it was unlikely to be Omotesandou Kyouka since she used a wheelchair and could not use magic.

That meant either Karuta or Aine, who would obey any of his orders. So Marika would have to think up a sign that only those two would recognize. After some thought, the boy switched on the flashlight. He had installed it with infrared to blind the enemy, so it did not produce an obvious beam of light.

Nevertheless, it did produce a change. A faint handprint appeared on the empty hallway wall as if in glow-in-the-dark paint. It was not alone. More of them formed a trail along the wall.

“Bingo. She slid her hand a bit when making them, so maybe that’s to tell us which way the trail leads.”

“Did she smash some used regeneration crystals into a powder and mix them with something? I have heard that synthetic emeralds will produce a red light when exposed to ultraviolet.”

They could ask Marika for the exact recipe once they caught up with her. As soon as a Threat left after peering down the hallway in search of anyone there, Karuta and Aine rushed out from behind the pillar.

“That was careless of Marika’s group. The Threat uses lasers too. Or at least that lion one on the roof does.”

“We do not know if the Sparkle really is modeled after a lion or that it is using an infrared wavelength laser. Try not to let such baseless assumptions lead you astray, Sacri-sama.”

“Tell me what I can do to fix this bad mood of yours, Aine. Do I need to give you a baby bottle or a rattle?”

“I am no more than a piece of Crystal Magic equipment, so do not expect a level of intelligence and sensitivity equal to a human like you. But for now, I would recommend shutting your mouth.”

They carefully walked down the hallway and climbed the stairs as they followed the handprints glowing in the light of his infrared laser. Karuta was scared. He was always focused on the available cover so he could hide the instant the Threat approached.

They turned around on the landing and climbed the next flight of stairs.

It was still dark, but something other than the handprints glittered as it reflected the light of his modified military flashlight’s infrared. That reflection of visible light should not have happened. The source was lying in the middle of the hallway. It was a little longer than a loaf of French bread.

“…”

Utagai Karuta said nothing.

He said nothing as he stared at it.

It was a right leg.

A girl’s slender right leg lay translucently crystalized after being torn off at the base of the thigh.