A man in a futuristic battle suit faced off against a woman with a wide-brimmed hat and a black cloak.
The man’s name was Saiz. The witch he was fighting against was Evon, but in truth it didn’t seem like much of a fight. From the first moment of their encounter, Saiz had totally overwhelmed her. As strong as Evon was, she just didn’t compare to the futuristic soldier. And yet the fight didn’t seem anywhere close to finishing.
Saiz’s gun fired a beam of light, punching through Evon’s head. The witch collapsed motionless to the ground, and for a moment it looked like the fight was decided, but before long, another Evon had appeared beside the first. The pattern had repeated countless times, though the previous bodies had vanished over the course of the fight.
“Light property, ranged, piercing, headshot. That sounds right, doesn’t it?” Evon analyzed the attack calmly.
“What? ‘Light property’? What is this, a fantasy RPG?” Though he knew magic existed in this world, Saiz didn’t know anything about how it functioned. He was powerful enough that he could fully ignore the whole system.
“I can make any number of clones, but repeating the same thing over and over is boring. So instead, I’m going to make myself resistant to your attacks.”
Saiz fired another shot, striking Evon’s forehead dead-on...and deflecting off it. Though the attack left a small burn on her face, it was clear she had become more resistant to it than before.
“My primary ability is Reproduction. I can produce improved copies of any number of things, including myself. So no matter how long this goes on, you’ll never beat me. How about it? Would you like to give up?”
“Hm? In that case, you give up,” Saiz replied. “Your attacks aren’t even scratching me.” A barrier had been deployed around him. It blocked everything from reaching him, whether they were physical attacks or what this world called magic.
“That’s only a matter of time. I said I can improve myself, right?”
Evon launched a fireball from her hand. Though the fire scattered harmlessly before reaching him, it had clearly been much stronger than the previous attack. Saiz’s battle log recorded everything as numbers, so he could clearly see that her power was gradually increasing.
“How about this then?” Changing his gun to ballistic mode, he fired a shot at her chest. The bullet tore through her heart, completely destroying it, and out of her back. For anyone else, it would have been instant death. Saiz’s battle AI even determined that she was, in fact, dead. But beside the bloody mess of Evon’s falling corpse, a new Evon appeared. Checking the battle log, it seemed she had just appeared out of thin air.
“The bullet punched through your clothes, but that cloak wasn’t even scratched.”
There was no way the bullet could have missed the cloak after passing through her, yet it had seemed to slip through the fabric, leaving no trace of its passage. The battle log showed that the bullet had struck the cloak, but had passed right through it. In short, it seemed like it didn’t actually have a physical form.
“Exactly,” Evon replied. “This is the Cloak of the Starry Sky. It’s the source of my power.” Though at first glance it looked like no more than a black cloak, upon closer inspection, Saiz could see small pinpricks of light dotting the fabric.
“So if I take that from you, you’ll die?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t count on it. No one but me can touch it.” For her to so clearly share the source of her immortality, he knew she must have had some plan to protect it. “The cloak connects me to my home world. The resources used to make my replicas all come from there. Basically, you’re up against an entire world.”
“Ha ha, seriously? In that case, can I ask you something?”
“What is it?” Evon replied.
“If you’re so strong, what are you doing in this world?”
“I’m on vacation. Back home, I’m revered as the Witch of Starry Salvation. To be brief, I defeated the Demon Lord threatening my world.”
“Well, congratulations.”
“But how do you think that world treated me after there was no Demon Lord to defeat?”
“They probably think you’re a nuisance, don’t they?”
“Exactly. A world that has achieved perfect peace has no need for warriors. I ended up being a sleeping threat, one that could come for them at any time.”
“So, which was it?” Had she run away, or had she been exiled? Saiz had to assume it was one of the two.
“I left of my own accord. As a parting gift, I took the whole world with me. It would have been destroyed if it hadn’t been for me, after all. I think it’s fair to say that it belongs to me.”
“Why wouldn’t you just kill the people who hated you and stay there?” Saiz asked.
“I didn’t have any personal grudge against them, and fighting them all one by one would be too much of a chore. Taking them to use as a power source solved both of those problems for me.”
“I can’t imagine the people of that world were all too happy about your choice...but I guess it’s their own fault for forcing all their problems on one person.”
“I came to this world so I could relax,” Evon finished her explanation.
“I see. I just happened to come to this world by chance,” Saiz said offhandedly.
“In that case, it’s fine if you lose, right? I’ll go kill Yogiri Takatou for you.”
“Actually, I have some business with the Great Sage,” Saiz replied. “My goal is a bit different from yours.”
“Oh, really? But my world has a population of 8,748,237,756 people. All of them serve as fuel for my reproductions.”
No doubt Evon had made that declaration in an attempt to inspire despair in him, but instead it had the opposite effect.
“That’s good to hear. I feel like I can handle that many.” Saiz lifted his gun up into the air. “Come!” There was no point in shouting like that or making such a dramatic display, but he couldn’t help getting into the spirit of things.
The world around them darkened as an enormous object appeared in the air, blocking out the sun.
“Wha...” Evon was speechless.
Saiz doubted anything like this existed in her world. It was an army of star forts. He had summoned countless star forts to the sky above them. One such fort fired a beam of light down at him, and in the next moment he was transported to its bridge.
“I feel bad for doing this to a world I’ve never visited and eight billion people I’ve never met, but...” Saiz ordered the armada to fire. The countless spherical star forts opened their firing ports, pointing cannons in all directions.
And then the world was consumed by fire. The Castle in the Sky, the island beneath it, the ocean, the atmosphere, everything in that world was consumed in the blaze, with even the ashes that lingered being caught up and incinerated once again. Though only within that channel, everything in the world aside from the star forts had been annihilated.
Saiz’s battle AI confirmed that Evon had been erased. No matter what kind of defenses she may have had, if he brought enough firepower to bear to kill eight billion people at once, there was nothing she could do.
Saiz Wins!
Words floated up in the empty air. The next moment, Saiz found himself in a waiting room. He had been brought to the Antechamber Area to wait for the second round.