“Powers of time manipulation are a poor fit for this girl’s ability. Her power, after all, cannot be used unless she is able to witness the very instance that another power comes into effect. And yet...I had faith, progenitor of the Fifth Spirit War. I had faith that you would, without question, strike a pose or recite a chant that told me unambiguously when you were about to use your power.”
That peculiar, distinctive manner of talking—like she was monologuing and held no interest at all in listening to what anyone else had to say—could only have come from Yusano Genre...but the voice itself was nothing like how she usually sounded. It was the voice of someone entirely different—but not someone unfamiliar to me. In fact, it was a voice I knew quite well.
“Phew... All right! That’s mission accomplished,” came another voice, one much less focused and clearly rather relieved. It was Genre’s normal voice...but no. That wasn’t quite right. The speaker wasn’t Genre at all. “Ugh... I-I was so nervous! I’ve never had to impersonate Miss Genre before... I was on pins and needles worrying that someone would call me out...”
“A-Are you...Fantasia?” I asked.
“That’s right! It’s been a while, Sagami,” the girl in the pink nurse’s uniform replied with a cheerful smile. The eerie archaic smile she’d worn before had vanished into the wind.
Yusano Fantasia was one of the many personalities in Genre’s roster. She was also the most sociable of them all, and as a result, hers was the personality who’d spent the most time in surface-level control of Genre’s body. Genre herself had been acting as the main personality more often than usual lately, but up until quite recently, she’d lived as Fantasia the vast majority of the time.
Anyway, it seemed that the person who I’d thought was Genre was, in fact, Fantasia putting on an act. I hadn’t noticed at all—though of course, since they were the same person, I wasn’t going to beat myself up too badly over that mistake.
But in that case...whose voice had I heard just now? Who had come from nowhere flawlessly replicating Genre’s characteristic cadence?
“Progenitor. I have laid countless plans, run myriad simulations, all for the sake of defeating you. And, at the end of my labors, I reached the conclusion that this was far and away the most likely strategy to grant me success,” said the person I was convinced was Genre. It really did sound just like her, while also sounding nothing like her whatsoever. “The most likely to grant me success...and far and away the most expedient means as well.”
Finally, a girl stepped through a void in space. I assumed she’d used some sort of power to pull that off, and she might’ve been watching the battle play out through a hidden camera or something as well.
That girl...was Kudou Mirei.
Kudou was a third-year at the high school I attended, the former student council president, and—most importantly—the wielder of a supernatural power, just like the five members of the literary club. She possessed the ultimate power of usurpation, Grateful Robber, capable of stealing any other power she so chose.
The girl who’d suddenly arrived at the battlefield was unmistakably Kudou, but the aura she exuded was nothing whatsoever like her usual self. She had a calm, mysterious presence, and a hollow, emotionless, archaic smile graced her lips. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that although she was Kudou, Kudou herself was not holding the reins. Kudou Mirei had been taken over by Yusano Genre.
Sex Eclipse, the power of fractured identities, was the ability that Genre, the core personality of the whole Yusano conglomerate, had awakened to. She could use it to implant any of the personalities within her into another person’s body, and—as Aki had secretly informed me some time prior—if the core personality herself took over another individual, the effects of her mental domination became dramatically harder to resist.
“Kiryuu Hajime. Your power...is mine now.”
The moment the words left Kudou Mirei’s—or rather, Yusano Genre’s—lips, Kiryuu staggered, seemingly slumping over in exhaustion. His eyes were wide with astonishment, and an expression of frustration came across his face as he turned to look at the girl who’d stolen his power. He glared at her like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“No...way... Kudou...Mirei...?” Kiryuu grunted.
“Hmm. It seems I’ve succeeded,” Genre dispassionately muttered using Kudou’s voice. She clenched and opened her hand a few times, as if to test her newfound strength, then raised that hand to point at a patch of ground a short ways in front of her—which instantly sunk into itself with a heavy thud. “The analyst was correct, then. By stealing his power to sever time, so too have I stolen his power to desecrate the force of gravity.”
The power Genre had just used was, without question, Lucifer’s Strike. She really had taken Kiryuu’s ability for her own. She’d casually, easily, and entirely claimed it.
“A new personality awakened within me,” said Genre. “Yusano Destinia is her name, and the power she awakened to in turn was that of omni-comprehension: Hard Watching. It grants her knowledge of every living Player in the War, as well as an understanding of their powers. Not as deep of an understanding as the analyst’s power gives her, however—Destinia can only understand their capabilities on a surface level.”
It sounded like a similar sort of power to Natsu Aki’s, but with very different strengths and limitations. While Aki’s power gave her deep, complete knowledge of anyone she could directly observe, Destinia’s seemed to give her shallow and incomplete knowledge of everyone on a broad, all-encompassing scale.
“It was through use of Hard Watching that I came across this girl. The power she bears is so mighty, it defies comprehension,” Genre said with her ever-present, empty smile. “It is preposterous...unthinkable beyond measure. How could a power such as it be allowed? How could it be acceptable for her to be able to steal any number of powers, at no risk to herself, with no requirement other than witnessing them in use? It is a violation of all rationality, and one of such excessive scale it could very well cause the collapse of the Spirit War itself. It rivals even System in the sheer danger it presents.”
The ability to steal any power just by seeing it really was way too overpowered. You had to wonder if something had gone fundamentally wrong when it was given to Kudou. If a character with a power like that turned up in a supernatural battle manga, they’d throw the whole story’s power curve out of balance single-handedly. It really was just as balance-breaking as System—or perhaps even more so, actually. It ran the risk of tearing apart a story’s world-building from the ground up.
The fact that its user had been isolated from the Spirit War along with the literary club’s members, preventing her from joining the battle in any real capacity, had kept her from exercising her true, terrifying potential so far...but when you thought about what she could have done, calling her power cheating felt like an understatement. The fact that it was both the ultimate buff and debuff all in one was enough to put it in the upper echelons of the power tier list on its own, but when you added in the fact that the conditions of its activation were so lax—well, the word “powerful” just didn’t do it justice anymore.
Even the godlike powers held by the four literary club girls were but dust in the wind in the face of Kudou Mirei. She was the human incarnation of avarice, capable of devouring power after power without cease thanks to the auspices of her Grateful Robber...