And then there was a hole. Where there had once been a blank patch of earth now sat a gaping pit roughly a meter in diameter. I couldn’t see its bottom—it descended seemingly forever into pitch-black darkness. I couldn’t even imagine how deep it really was. It was like the gods on high had driven a staff deep into the ground, gouging out a direct pathway to Hell in the blink of an eye.
Just how much gravitational force—just what degree of density packed into a single point—would it take to bore a hole like that in an instant? It was an attack capable of banishing the sinner it was unleashed upon far into the depths of the earth. Though, really, if a force strong enough to bore a vertical shaft into the ground were exerted upon a human body, whatever was left of that body would be completely indistinguishable from the dirt at the bottom of the pit by the time it was over.
Of course...the most important part of that last sentence was the word if.
“...Huh?” Present Sagami grunted with a cock of his head from the patch of ground he remained slumped on, still very much alive. Kiryuu’s ultra-powerful gravitational onslaught...had missed him entirely. The pit to Hell he’d bored into the ground was located just a single meter to his side. You’d think that an attack of that power would’ve done some major collateral damage to him even if he hadn’t been hit directly, but it seemed that its effects had been focused with pinpoint precision, and Present Sagami wasn’t any more wounded than he’d already been.
Sagami hadn’t dodged the attack. In fact, he hadn’t moved an inch. The moment before Kiryuu had tried to finish him off, Sagami had closed his eyes in what I’d assumed was acceptance of his inevitable end. He hadn’t even tried to evade...but then, what had happened? Why hadn’t Kiryuu’s attack obliterated him? Had Kiryuu missed on purpose? Or maybe...
“...Tch.”
Kiryuu clicked his tongue with very real irritation. That ruled out the “he missed on purpose” theory on the spot.
“Way to make a mess of things...Hitomi,” Kiryuu spat. He sounded somehow enraged and overjoyed at the same time. Now, his piercing glare was directed right behind me and Sagami.
I turned to look over my shoulder and found a lone woman standing atop the embankment. She was wearing a tasteful suit—the sort that people went to job interviews in—and her long hair was styled in a way that made it drape over her right eye. She looked a little older than us—in her early twenties, most likely—and in addition to her hair, she was holding a hand over her right eye, blocking it even more thoroughly from sight.
“Eternal Wink: the power of visual violation. You know how it works—after all, you’re the one who named it, Hajime,” said the woman. I have to admit: As dire as the situation was, the name she used for her power was awesome enough to make my heart skip a beat. “I have no idea how or why you and Sagami ended up fighting each other...but for the time being, I’ve decided to intervene. If that upset you, then good. That’s what I was going for.”
The Kitaro-haired woman flashed Kiryuu a triumphant grin. She’d called him by his first name, implying that they were pretty close, but the look she was directing at him was anything but friendly. There was a firm, resolved animosity in the one eye of hers that I could see.
“Saitou...? What’s she doing here?”
You know her, Future Sagami?
“Sure do. Her name’s Saitou Hitomi, and she’s one of Kiryuu’s crew. Well, she was—things got complicated, so she’s his enemy at this particular moment.”
Does that mean she has a power too?
“Yup. I’d say you must have heard her say its name just now, but I guess you might’ve been distracted by the metric ton of sarcasm she’d put into it. It’s called Eternal Wink: the power of visual violation. It lets her grant an Evil Eye to anyone within her field of view, which she then gets to control. She possesses the malevolent eye that rules over the Evil Eyes.”
“The malevolent eye that rules over the Evil Eyes”?! Wh-What’s coming over me? That sounded so profoundly cool it set my soul ablaze, but also, I have no friggin’ clue what it actually means at all!
“Yeah, Kiryuu’s the one who came up with all that naming jazz, and if there’s any actual difference between malevolent eyes and Evil Eyes, it only exists in his head. Long story short, she can give anyone she looks at an Evil Eye. I’m betting that she used it on me, and when Kiryuu made eye contact with me, the Evil Eye subjected him to some sort of illusion.”
So she gives people Evil Eyes, which in turn make other people see illusions?
It sounded like a bit of a pain, as far as powers go—pretty darn roundabout, to say the least—but on second thought, it struck me that the power’s complicated nature could actually be its greatest strength. If she simply used an Evil Eye herself, then the moment her opponent caught on to her power’s nature, there was a chance they would raise their guard against making eye contact with her. Having a third party act as a delivery system for the power, however, made it dramatically easier to find an opponent’s openings—the more enemies or allies you had in one place, the more people your foes would have to be wary of making eye contact with. With careful control of the particulars of an engagement, you could even lead your enemies into taking each other out by accident. It wasn’t a power that had much use in single combat, but in a messy melee, it could achieve astonishing feats.
“Of course, the Evil Eyes she gives people don’t really live up to their name, supposedly. The worst they can do is conjure simple illusions or do some basic hypnosis. Most likely, she used the Evil Eye she gave me to either slightly tweak Kiryuu’s depth perception or slightly alter where he perceived me to be.”
I get it. So he really did try to finish you off with that attack, but her power made him miss.
“I’ve gotta say, though, I’m surprised to see Saitou alive at all. Who all would Kiryuu have left alive to be in the Final Eight? Himself and the five literary club members are set in stone, but who else...?”
H-Hey...Sagami? Isn’t this a problem?
“Isn’t what a problem?”
If that woman—Saitou, I mean—used to be Kiryuu’s ally, then doesn’t he know all about her power?
“Well, obviously. He came up with its name, after all.”