At the top of the stairs was a big circular platform of light.
“—Abel.”
Our enemy was there as well, a dozen or so meters in front of us.
He looked nothing like he had before. The Phantom Thief wore a mask and held a big sword. Black wings had grown from his back, and his white body—I couldn’t tell if it was bone or armor—was twice as big as it had been. He wasn’t human, but a supernatural. This was the form of the Original Sin, something that could be called the ancestor of the Seven Deadly Sins.
We knew what we had to do, though: Talk Abel’s will around; then destroy the giant System floating over his head along with its “brain”—the Akashic records. Our first move here would be crucial if we were going to pull that off.
“I’ll keep questioning Abel’s will,” Nagisa said. “So I want you two to open a path for me.”
We exchanged looks and nodded.
It was only then that I realized the stairway we’d used to get here had vanished.
“Did Mia and the others’ wills hit their limit…?”
“Either that or we were the only ones allowed to enter this place.”
Oh, I see. If Siesta’s deduction was correct, we couldn’t hope for reinforcements.
No matter how much we cried, screamed, or raged about it, this would be the final battle. But naturally, I still wanted us to be able to smile at the end of it.
“Abel.”
Nagisa took a step forward. Siesta and I both braced ourselves—but a second later, Abel was there in front of us.
“Nagisa…!”
Siesta reacted first. She grabbed Nagisa then me, almost as an afterthought, and threw herself out of harm’s way. Abel’s sword swept right through the spot where we’d just been.
“Now that you’re the Singularity, there’s no one you can’t kill. That how it is?”
Abel turned around. His eyes, looking down at us from behind that mask, had turned a red so dark it was almost black.
“Listen, Abel!” Nagisa shouted. But by then, our foe was already swinging his sword down toward us again. Nagisa instantly used her will to manifest a red saber and tried to deflect the other sword.
“—Huh?”
There was no way she’d been careless. I knew the history behind the sword she was holding, but its blade snapped as if it were a toy. The tip of Abel’s sword nicked her shoulder, and bright blood spurted into the air.
“…Nagisa! Dammit!”
I tried to draw my gun from the holster at my hip, but by then, Siesta had lunged forward, leveling her musket. “That thing’s our target, right?”
There was a gunshot and a burst of sparks. She’d fired a bullet toward the System.
However, the next thing I knew, Abel was gone. Right before the bullet hit its target, he manifested in front of the System, taking the shot himself.
“Assistant, get Nagisa!”
Siesta used that as an opportunity to fire more shots at the enemy. As she attacked, I tended to Nagisa. Her shoulder was bleeding, but fortunately, the wound was shallow.
“Are you okay? Grab on to me.”
“This is nothing. It doesn’t hurt at all.” She was using a word-soul to trick herself. Although she needed to lean on my shoulder to do it, Nagisa promptly got back up.
“Abel, I’ve seen your despair. I know all about it!”
Abel appeared, having evaded Siesta’s barrage of gunfire unscathed.
Undaunted, Siesta charged him alone, gun raised. Two bullets imbued with will hit home, then a third—but Abel didn’t even flinch.
Then wordlessly, he slowly raised his sword and cut through empty space. Immediately, an invisible shock wave hit Siesta, hurling her backward.
“Siesta…!”
“……! My body, it’s…on fire.”
Siesta had collapsed, and as I tried to run to her, something cut me.
“……! What…is this?”
I slumped to the ground. In the same moment, I understood exactly what Siesta had meant.
The pain felt like my organs were being incinerated. Was it my heart, my lungs, my stomach? …No. What was burning was the invisible organ that housed my will.
“N-Nagisa…!”
Nagisa’s face was contorted in pain. Her will was burning just like ours. Even so, she made her way toward Abel using her saber as a crutch.
“…The despair you showed me. At first, I thought you were using it to attack me. I thought you were trying to make me suffer, to separate me from the Singularity. That wasn’t it, though! You just wanted me to know, didn’t you?! To know that pain and the limitations of this world!”
A ring made up of countless lights formed around the floating System, and it fired them at Nagisa all at once. Neither Siesta nor I could move.
Yet the lights ricocheted back as if they’d been blocked by an unseen wall. Whose will had protected Nagisa? There were countless heroes here, but I was sure it hadn’t been any one person. That shield had been created by their combined will.
“Abel! Your program has a motive! Even your codes have a will! There are other ways to vent your hatred…!”
The next second, the System began to blink a dark color. It fired thick rays of murky-colored light, which thrashed against the barrier in front of Nagisa, trying to shatter it.
“……! I’m a detective! Let me save you!” Nagisa shouted to Abel, stabbing her red saber into the ground. But her voice didn’t reach him. That murky torrent had hidden Abel from view.
“That ideal is incorrect.”
Just then, as Nagisa kept pleading desperately, a figure approached her. I hadn’t thought anyone would be able to intrude on a place like this.
However, strangely, I did suspect that if anyone could pull it off, it would be this guy. Lately, he’d always appeared at unexpected moments to provide just enough support and intel, then give me a lecture to top it all off. Basically, this guy’s role was to make mine redundant, and he was a giant pain in the butt.
“……I’m gonna outwit you someday, I swear.”
Even though my insides hurt, I stood in front of him, blocking his way. “What are you planning to say to Nagisa, Ookami?”
Ookami was the Enforcer, but he’d been a proxy assistant before that. Even in a situation like this, he was completely calm as he faced me. “I was only going to advise Nagisa Natsunagi to kill Abel.”
Then Ookami laid out his reasoning.
He said that all the Tuners should focus exclusively on ending Abel. That that was more likely to shut down the Great Cataclysm than a vague approach like trying to persuade him.
“Ookami, weren’t you Nagisa’s right-hand man?”
“It’s also the assistant’s job to correct the detective’s mistakes,” he retorted. “Listen closely. When you had to choose between the world and the girl, you chose the girl. Then you decided to work with that girl to save the world. In that case, go through with it: Save the world with her. There’s no need for you to save the enemy, as well. Figure out what you can save with your own two hands and what you can’t.”
Ookami was right. There was nothing strange about what he was saying.
Those were words I’d also lived by, in fact. I’d tried to save the people I could see, the ones I could reach. Since I’d been born with this weird nature, I’d thought that was the best way for me to live. Even Siesta hadn’t been able to save everything. She’d admitted as much herself.
That meant it was fine this way. It really was. I’d save my neighbor, that neighbor would extend their hand to someone else, and if that ring kept on expanding, we would eventually save the world. That was the answer we’d found during our journey. However…
“This is a fight to eliminate borders.”
This was the only battle—this moment right here—where we had to save everything.
Even if it was starry-eyed idealism or mere convenience, this time we couldn’t draw a line between neighbors and enemies. Since we were trying to destroy the Akashic records, the world’s standards for what was “correct,” we couldn’t measure anything by our own standards. Right now, we had to throw those scales away.
“…So please, Ookami. Let the detective…save…everything…” My whole body shook, but I managed to grab Ookami’s shirtfront.
Abel’s code had almost completely burned my will away.
“You’re only like this because you flippantly discarded the Singularity’s ability.”
I couldn’t hold out, and my knees had buckled, dumping me on the ground. Ookami looked down at me with an exasperated look.
“……I didn’t discard…the Singularity’s power… I let him steal it.”
“…What?”
People said the Singularity was the ability to turn unfairness on its head. It made idealism real and materialized convenient outcomes.
Now that that power was Abel’s, his will had manifested. The most unfair grief he harbored, his screams—everyone could hear them now.