Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume4 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 8===

Hetepheres Men-Nefer was an efficient person.

Karuta wasn’t about to call her a good person, but he had to admit that much. So if she thought a method was effective, she would repeat it as many times as it took.

Her initial attack had only missed because of Karuta’s trick.

And the fact that he had used a trick essentially told her that he would have been in trouble had he not used it. So if she had the chance, she was sure to try that explosion again.

Also, Karuta only understood that part of her so well because he was the same kind of person.

So when he saw that explosion, he knew exactly what to do.

He removed his remaining shoe and threw it.

But this time, he threw it toward her fireball instead of the exploding ropes behind him.

“Ah.”

Once she threw that fireball, it would explode.

So instead of waiting for her to throw it, he could trigger it himself.

Now, that explosion was designed to be thrown first – which meant she needed to move it away from herself before it detonated – so would she escape unscathed if it detonated in her hand?

“Gahhhhh!!!???” she screamed, swallowed up by her own explosion.

Karuta did not let his guard down while he gripped his flashlight and stood back up. He wanted to rush in and ensure she stayed down, but the blows from his blunt weapon would be blocked by her bluish-white barrier shield.

That swiveling defense blocked his attacks automatically.

He gathered strength in his arms and sent his eyes racing around.

(What could I use to make that ''malfunction''?)

“Fuck off, you powerless frauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuud!!!!!”

She interrupted his thoughts.

She shouted at him while the explosive flames burst like a balloon. And a white tornado emerged from within.

No, that wasn’t accurate.

He heard the rustling of cloth because these were long bandage-like strips of fabric. And not even her expertise in Egyptian magic allowed her to create something from nothing.

Her loose-fitting white priestess outfit was coming apart into those bandage-like strips.

The strips were curled up like an old phone cord and each loop contained a small vial.

“Papyrus,” said Utagai Karuta with a grin.

She had been pushed far enough to let her clothing fall apart and reveal the majority of her brown skin so she could access those vials more quickly. She trembled and blushed in the humiliation of having her methods revealed, but the boy continued the verbal assault.

Words could be used as a weapon to throw people off their game and keep them from fighting to their full potential.

She had taught him that herself.

“Most people think of papyrus as the water plant used to make Ancient Egyptian paper, but it was actually an all-purpose material with so many more applications, wasn’t it? It was used for carpets, tableware, boats, and buildings. The pith could even be eaten. But most importantly, it was used to make ''clothing''. You didn’t just have a secret pocket or two. You could open slits anywhere you wanted to pull out your weapon.”

“Don’t…don’t think you have me all figured out.”

“But.”

“You don’t know ANythIng aBOUt mE!!!!!!!”

“Now that I know where you get those vials from, I can throw off your timing. I can stop your magic.”

A small light flashed at the edge of Karuta’s vision.

That had to be Aine or Marika. Did they assume contacting him with their crystal blossom transmissions would count as assisting him with their magic? They were using a pen light to send him a signal from the stands. He mentally converted the message to Japanese.

(Hetepheres is a priestess of the Osiris line of Egyptian mythology. She specializes in mummification. Egyptian mythology has divine beasts that correspond to the gods and mummified birds or cattle worshiped as divine incarnations have been discovered in the ruins much like the mummies of the human pharaohs.)

“…”

(She uses this by indirectly drawing on a god’s power through a mummified version of an animal corresponding to that god, such as a falcon or jackal. They are so small because, after the life-size mummy is made, each part is boiled down and concentrated into something like a soup stock, making them portable.)

The information was valuable, but not enough to give him an actual plan.

Since those were real mummies, he felt like they would have a weakness to moisture, but that wasn’t much help when they were sealed inside airtight vials.

“Why do you assign different ratios to each power?”

“?”

“Is it because reworking the power back to life size takes too long, so you’ve found shortcuts that make that method viable in combat? So the greater the denominator, the more shortcuts you use. That would also explain why you can use some of the powers simultaneously and not others. Our crystal magic seals the name of a god in our crystal blossom, so we aren’t using the god directly. Of course your way would be trickier to use.”

She did not respond.

But tensing her face to avoid letting anything show in her expression was as good as a confirmation.

Hetepheres Men-Nefer looked furious as she held a vial containing a miniature mummy. Karuta squeezed his modified military flashlight in return.

He could not defeat this Egyptian priestess with a head-on strike.

But that was not his only weapon. He had replaced the ordinary light with a powerful IR laser emitter.

“Wha-?”

Only after reflexively moving to cover her eyes did the doubt enter her mind.

He had aimed his flashlight straight up instead of at her.

Then his malice bared its fangs.

A hammer dropped down from heaven to earth.

But this hammer was made of an aluminum frame, plastic, and silicon chips and it dropped because the IR scrambled its image-processing-based attitude control sensors.

“A drone!!!???”

It was only a toy, but it still weighed two or three kilograms. That was about the same as a small plant pot filled with soil. Dropped from a height, that was plenty deadly.

Hetepheres moved to protect herself, but then she noticed the invisible web she was trapped in.

Yes, something wasn’t right.

She had nothing to fear from a head-on blow by a blunt weapon heavier than a bat and she had plenty of mummy vials left. She only had to calmly draw on Anubis’s power and knock Karuta away with her bluish-white shield to solve this problem.

Yet she couldn’t do it.

The signals from her mind to her body seemed awfully slow, like her body’s gears were jammed.

“''Your reflexes kick in for weak points your instincts know about.''”

That was a solid rule.

Nothing was more reliable than information that came from painful experiences.

“''But when you need your mind to recognize the threat posed by an attack, your reactions slow.''”

Bringing down drones through malfunctioning sensors wasn’t actually going to hit her when they had no targeting or homing function.

Instead, he threw his heavy flashlight straight at her.

She gasped and moved, like her bonds had been broken.

She immediately held a brown palm out in front of her, activating the bluish-white shield to deflect the attack aimed at her face.

But had she noticed that this was exactly the reaction Karuta had wanted? The falling drones had needed her mind to recognize the threat, but her instincts were enough with the projectile toward her face.

Her defenses were a shield she held out in front of her, not enveloping armor.

As soon as she activated that shield to deflect the flashlight, Karuta stepped diagonally outwards and then sharply back in to move behind her. Then he wrapped his entire arm around her neck. He held her from behind and then let himself fall backwards.

Both of them landed face up.

“Gah!?”

On top, Hetepheres’s back was arched like she was performing a bridge, except her feet were lifted from the floor. Karuta raised one knee to lift her hips from behind. She tried to swing her elbow back into him, but it only found air. The more her back was arched, the less she could move her elbow like that. While nearly in the bridge position, it was next to impossible for her to attack behind herself.

“Oh, has he got her in a chokehold!?” shouted Delane. “Damn, chokeholds and joint locks are basically a win since they’re nearly impossible to break free from. Where’s the drama we all crave!!”

“Not only does this keep Miss Hetepheres from reaching the tool she uses for her magic, but the pressure to her carotid artery will keep her from thinking at all. That is two ways this prevents her magic,” explained Kyouka.

Karuta knew just how agonizing this was after Letnahe did it to him.

It took several minutes to pass out if you simply couldn’t breathe, but constricting the carotid artery changed that. A human would pass out in less than 30 seconds.

With so little time to work with, he had not managed to learn much from Letnahe Kurent and she mostly just beat him up, but this was one of the few things he had learned. From all the innumerable forms of violence out there, Karuta’s interest had been piqued by how this was nearly impossible to escape while also preventing any resistance or even screaming once it was in place. But that wasn’t the only reason.

He had also wondered if he could have avoided bloodying his hands if he had learned some nonlethal methods of knocking people unconscious at an earlier stage.

(No, it’s not worth thinking about that.)

“Also, Hetepheres, since you tried to elbow me instead of using magic, can I assume you have nothing else left?”

“!?”

“In real street fighting, there is no escaping chokeholds and joint locks. The fight is as good as over once one is in place. It’s time you lost. You don’t have to lose everything in this fight against the world’s strongest!!”

“Who, gh, gives you the right, ugh, to talk down to me, ah, like that!?”

She had foam leaking from the corners of her mouth, but she managed to free her trembling fingers form their meaningless instinctive movements.

A hand reaching for her throat instead stretched slowly to the side.

She reached for something that shouldn’t have been there.

It was one of the ropes meant to surround the ring. The initial explosion triggered by Karuta had left an unignited detonating cord lying out on the floor.

Black powder had spilled from where it had broken away. That was apparently a mixture of smokeless powder, penthrite, and other explosives to get the speed and power just right.

The rope had not been ignited yet, so it would explode if touched!

“This…this isn’t over yet. Agh, as long as I can reach this…”

“Hetepheres!”

“It’ll detonate when I touch it, but I just have to make sure the blast reaches you. Maybe my elbow can’t reach, but I can swing this soft rope around to hit you.”

It would never be that easy. That thing had a burning velocity of 5km/s, so it would almost certainly blow her hand off before she could swing it.

But almost certainly wasn’t certainly.

There was a chance she could swing the rope around before it exploded, or her blown-off fingers or bones could stab deep into his head through his eyes. There were no 100% guarantees in combat. Karuta had learned the hard way how terrifying malicious coincidences could be.

(What do I do?)

He could not stop her slowly-moving arm with his knee up and his arm around her neck. And chokeholds took time to knock people out no matter how much force you used. Squeeze any harder and he would only break her neck.

He would have to wait until later to feel good about the inefficient decision to reject that idea outright.

Because as things were, that decision wouldn’t even matter. He only needed the one arm to hold her neck in his elbow like a finger caught in a door’s hinge, so what could he accomplish with his other arm?

(What do I do!?)