“Aaah!”
“Impudeeent!”
The key Angel and the sword Demon King clashed and bounced back. Each time, the Spirit power released sent shock waves and flashes of light rippling throughout the area like innumerable tiny explosions.
In the middle of the chaos, the key Angel Michael, transformed from a staff into a polearm, generated microscopic doors at irregular intervals to launch attack after attack in Tohka’s blind spot.
The speed of the battle was divine, imperceivable to the average human eye. Nothing more than a series of blinking lights in the sky. Even the average Spirit would have been hard-pressed to go toe to toe with Tohka on this level, and Tohka was grudgingly impressed by the key Spirit.
Most likely, her Spirit power had been locked by Michael, or her latent abilities had been temporarily opened. It was a beautiful sublimation, like a firmly closed bud blooming. A polearm of mortality, hostility, and pure murderous intent hardened into physical form.
The two Spirits were using the windows of the observation deck as footholds in their battle, and these shattered around them in the aftermath.
Tohka whirled around and moved even further up from the observation deck to the steel tower.
“You intend to set Muku out on her own? You mean to isolate Muku once again?” Mukuro howled, her attack not slackening in the slightest. “I shall kill you. Kill you. I shall kill any who attempt to take Muku’s lord from her!”
“Hmph.” Tohka sniffed disdainfully. “Then gouge my flesh without this blathering, key girl. If you can, that is.”
“You need not ask!” Mukuro readied Michael in front of her.
A strange sensation abruptly came over Tohka. She felt as though she were being swallowed up by a viscous liquid invisible to the eye. Her body grew heavy as lead, and her limbs grew reluctant to move at all.
“…What?” For a moment, she thought it was Mukuro’s doing.
It wasn’t. The other Spirit was also frowning, like she was feeling similarly strange. She turned hard eyes on Tohka. “What did you do?” she demanded.
This was someone else’s doing, then. Those people—the ones called Shido and Origami… Or perhaps their comrades.
This did not change what Tohka needed to do, however. She would slaughter the enemy before her. That was all.
“I shall devour you!” Mukuro had apparently reached the same conclusion as Tohka. She kicked at the air to accelerate and brought Michael down like an early summer rain.
Tohka inhaled sharply and beat back Michael’s handle to repel the attack. And then frowned slightly.
“…Hmm?”
She didn’t doubt that Mukuro’s attack carried with it the weight of her overwhelming power. For some reason, though, her instincts told her Mukuro didn’t mean this to be the killing blow.
Like Tohka, Mukuro’s movement was hindered, and she was quite certain that Mukuro wanted to kill her. It was more like Mukuro was carefully laying the groundwork to reach her true objective.
As Tohka considered this, she saw Mukuro move. She launched the polearm Angel with all her strength to bore a hole in Tohka’s midsection.
But she was reckless. Tohka twisted around and dodged the blow by a hair.
In the next instant, however, Mukuro twisted her Angel.
“Michael. Lataib!”
A door appeared in the space behind Tohka.
“Ngh!” She braced herself for an attack from behind. Instead, the door began to breathe, vacuuming the air out of the area.
Tohka floated up from the steel tower and was thrown into the sky. Most likely, the other side of that door led to a space with a serious air pressure difference.
But Mukuro wasn’t trying to suck Tohka into this door. It was instead a crucial distraction.
“Lataib!” Mukuro called, and a massive door immediately opened above Tohka’s head. Hunks of steel and stone and wood a hundred meters across rained down.
“Tch!” Tohka held Nahemah in a low position and swung it at the debris. It had probably once been a building of some sort.
A flash of light. A line raced across the enormous chunks, and then they split in two, missing Tohka entirely and dropping to the earth.
“Michael. Jerez!” Mukuro shouted again.
Impossibly, a new door opened between Tohka and the building debris skimming the edges of her body as it fell. A polearm in the shape of a key stabbed forward from inside of it.
“…”
She had only just brought her blade down to bisect the rubble falling toward her. She was off-balance. She whirled around to defend herself, but she was a heartbeat too late.
Michael shot through the edge of her Astral Dress and stabbed into a piece of the falling building.
“What…?” Tohka frowned.
The massive chunk of debris and her own Astral Dress vanished. They hadn’t been ripped apart or sucked into the door. They had simply disappeared like mist in the heat of the sun.
She had no time to wonder at this, however. The door grew wider, and Mukuro attacked from inside of it with Michael as her chief weapon.
“Haah!” Mukuro shouted.
“What mysterious—?!” Tohka danced out of range of the attack and used the momentum to get some distance from the other Spirit.
She leaped down to the ground to rematerialize the erased Astral Dress. But it didn’t return as complete as it had been. She may have been a Spirit, but shaping the absolute defense of the Astral Dress required a fair amount of power. And when her Astral Dress disappeared, the Spirit power it contained did not return to her. Her total Spirit power was being chipped away.
“…”
Her guard firmly up, Tohka watched Mukuro while she felt the remains of her Astral Dress clinging to her.
“The Spirit particles that composed my Astral Dress still linger,” she remarked. “Which means it was not erased. I would presume disassembly… You broke the link of molecules and Spirit particles with that key. I see. This was your true objective, then?”
“…”
Mukuro didn’t deign to offer a response. She simply planted her feet on the ground and stared hard at Tohka.
Tohka paid this no mind and readied Nahemah. Her opponent required this focus.
Murderous intent took control of her actions and thoughts, but the part of her that would have been called instinct was coolly assessing her opponent, seeking openings. In a word, she was quietly insane.
“Hmph.” A faint smile rose to Tohka’s face, and she turned the tip of Nahemah toward her dear enemy. “You have the face of a child, yet you are a full-grown warrior.”
Just as they were on the verge of clashing once more, however, voices called out to them.
“Wait! Both of you!”
“Please! You have to calm down!”
Shido and Origami wedged themselves between Tohka and Mukuro.
Tohka clicked her tongue unhappily and readjusted her grip on her sword to refocus her thoughts.
“You would interfere, then? Fine. I was going to beat you all down anyway!” she shouted and swung Nahemah. The inky black flash of her sword took on the form of a crescent moon and stretched out toward the humans standing between her and the other Spirit.
But Origami, clad in golden armor and snow-white limited Astral Dress, spun the lance in her hand around. Dark Spirit power collected at the tip and knocked aside Tohka’s slash.
“…What?” Tohka narrowed her eyes at the unexpected phenomenon.
It wasn’t that she was particularly surprised Origami had dodged this blow. She could feel her own movements being limited by an invisible power, and she hadn’t put her full weight behind the blow.
The Spirit power coiling around the tip of Origami’s lance, however, was clearly the same type as Tohka’s—that of an inverted Spirit. But only power she could sense in Origami right now was normal Spirit power and an artificial strength that tasted like the power enveloping both her and Mukuro.
She had to assume that the lance was able to collect any Spirit power hanging in the air, which made Origami’s intense expenditure of power make sense. After all, the air was full of the concentrated Spirit power of her own disappeared Astral Dress.
“Hmph. I must deal with you, too?” Her gaze sharpened as she brandished Nahemah and leaped into action. “You will at least entertain me, then!”
“…! She’s coming! Itsuka, take Mukuro!” Origami shouted, and stepped up to protect Shido from Tohka’s attack, dark Spirit power curling around the end of her lance.