The sound seemed not to emerge from Sylvia’s throat, but from the Orga Lux itself at her chest.
Once more she lashed out with her huge jet-black ax, but a split second before the weapon could reach Claudia’s neck—
Again, she somehow vanished and reappeared, this time diagonally behind her foe.
“I want you to experience for yourself the same humiliation you’ve inflicted on everyone you’ve toyed with,” she said, the smile evaporating from her face. “Even if it only adds up to a millionth of their suffering,”
“Break causality—Pan-Dora.”
As she uttered those words, her eyes shone with the same color as the urm-manadite of the Orga Lux she clutched in her hands.
Her eyes took on a demonic cast.
“…?!”
As those twin blades danced toward her, the Varda-Vaos swiftly raised her ax to parry them.
She should have succeeded in doing so, and yet—
“H-how…?”
The next moment, the mechanical body of the Varda-Vaos, snipped clean from Sylvia’s neck, fell to the ground—while Sylvia herself, freed from the Orga Lux’s powers, collapsed into a nearby flower bed.
“It’s no use. You must have realized it, no? My friend’s true power—the Pan-Dora’s true power—is control over the laws of causality. It cannot be resisted by one such as you.” With a brilliant flourish of her twin blades, precise enough to brush dewdrops from blades of grass, Claudia cast her gaze at the fallen Orga Lux.
“Causality? Control…? Not precognition…?” Minato mouthed, unable to understand what she was hearing.
Claudia fixed her with a gentle smile. “Yes. The Pan-Dora can interfere with the laws of causality. Precognition is simply a by-product of that power. If we can disrupt the relationship between cause and effect, it doesn’t matter whether the Varda-Vaos uses its powers against us. The cause, her black light, would no longer lead to the effect, mental interference. Similarly, as you just saw, her attacks wouldn’t lead to injury on my part, while mine would be guaranteed to hit.”
“…”
Minato was left speechless, her mouth opening and closing in silence.
Wouldn’t that make Claudia invincible?
“You…!”
All of a sudden, a voice reverberated in her head.
“You…! Curse you…! Primitive animals…! I won’t be defeated…! I won’t accept it…! Never…!”
There could be no doubt about it.
Those resentful cries belonged to none other than the Varda-Vaos itself.
Was it still trying to escape? Even ripped apart, the Orga Lux’s exterior was crawling along the ground like some kind of surreal, mechanical bug.
“Goodness me… You need to learn to accept defeat,” Claudia said with a sigh as she lashed out once more with her twin blades.
“Gyaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!”
The Varda-Vaos, falling near Minato’s feet, let out a piercing scream.
“Now, Miss Wakamiya. This is a job only you can complete.”
“O-only me…?”
Come to think of it, Claudia had said something along those lines earlier.
“That thing shouldn’t exist in this world. I’m not saying all Orga Luxes are like that, but this one is simply not compatible with our way of life.”
Minato understood the truth of that statement, albeit only vaguely.
This Orga Lux—the Varda-Vaos—would continue to cause unrest through its very existence.
“And I’m…already at my limit,” Claudia murmured, before collapsing limply to the ground.
She managed to catch herself using her twin swords as supports, but her face was lifeless, and even her faint smile seemed pained.
“A-are you all right?!”
“Oh-ho, don’t worry, it isn’t going to be immediate. It’s just that the cost of manipulating the laws of causation is the future itself. In other words…my life span.”
“…!”
This time, Minato was left well and truly speechless.
“It’s okay. My life was abandoned long ago. If I can save the world in the time I have, that’s good enough, don’t you think?”
Still clinging to her two swords, Claudia slowly slid to rest on the floor, before catching Minato out of the corner of her eye.
“When manipulating causality, the further you diverge from what ought to have happened, the greater the price you have to pay. It wasn’t such a huge amount this time.”
If she was willing to go this far, then Minato too had no choice but to do whatever it took.
She had shed considerable blood, her gaze was clouding over, and she found it difficult to stand up—but even so, she mustered what power she had to lift herself to her feet.
“…I see. What do I have to do?”
“Urm-manadite isn’t easy to destroy. It isn’t impossible using irregular forces, as indeed Hilda Jane Rowlands did in the Lindvolus, but that would require prana on a level of someone like Erenshkigal. I suspect even Ayato and the Ser Veresta would have a challenging time of it… But you and the Járngreipr…”
So that was it.
The Járngreipr’s ability was the power to freely change its own weight. That said, in actual combat, there was a limit on what was practically possible.
She preferred to adjust its mass only at the moment of impact. After all, even the slightest mistake in timing could tear her arms off at the shoulder.
But that wouldn’t be an issue if her target was stationary.
Whether one ton or ten, she could increase it to whatever weight she wanted. In terms of destructive power, the Járngreipr was probably capable of standing up to any other Orga Lux.
She took a deep breath, psyched herself up, and placed her fist atop the Varda-Vaos.
But then, realizing something, she glanced across at Claudia.
“Don’t worry. I’ve already used my precognition to check. There are only corridors beneath you, and there’s no one in them all the way down to the first floor.”
“Thank you!”
In that case, she could give it everything she had without needing to second-guess herself.
“What are you…? No… Impossible?! Stop! Stop, stop, stop!”
A panicked voice reverberated in her skull, but to Minato it was no more than white noise.
She twisted her arms and clenched her fists.
“Yaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!”
“Stopppppppppppppppppp!”
Her fist spun as it came crashing down, hitting the urm-manadite with its overwhelming weight.
Genkuu style—Collapse Gouge.
“Aaaaaiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
The Varda-Vaos’s bloodcurdling death cry echoed through her brain.
The impact easily tore through the floor, pushing the Varda-Vaos down to the building’s forty-first story. But even then, there was no end to their momentum as they passed though the fortieth, the thirty-ninth, and the thirty-eighth floors—when cracks began to course through the crystalline structure of the urm-manadite.
Before she knew it, Minato’s fists had penetrated through the entire building, all the way down to the entrance on the ground floor.
A shock like a violent earthquake shook the entire Hotel Elnath.
“Haah… Haah…!”
When she lifted her fists from the huge crater that had emerged beneath her, she found only the shattered remains of the urm-manadite.
“I-it’s over…,” she breathed heavily as she collapsed into a heap.