Well, I should be able to make it in time for the award ceremony…
It was customary for the student council presidents of Asterisk’s six schools to attend the award ceremony of any Festa tournament. Some, like Xinglou, tended to send proxies, but Shuuma didn’t have the gall to try anything so flagrant.
With that in mind, he turned his gaze to the lake outside—when a ferry anchored at the nearby dock exploded into a sea of flames.
“Huh…?”
His jaw dropped, his eyes widening in shock.
Fortunately, the passengers had yet to board the vessel, and the crew quickly leaped into the lake to escape the conflagration.
Nonetheless, amid the shouts and screams of the milling tourists, explosion after explosion kept sounding off into the distance.
Hurrying out onto the terrace, he came across a familiar, large-bodied autonomous puppet holding a weapon and wreaking destruction.
“AR-D…? Why is that here…? N-no, stop! What on earth are you doing?!”
Anyone who had seen the Phoenix would know that AR-D was the property of Allekant. If the puppet rampaged through the city, the responsibility wouldn’t just fall on Shuuma’s shoulders—the school itself, and probably even Frauenlob, wouldn’t be immune from criticism.
He rushed toward it, instructing it in a stern tone of voice to halt what it was doing, then the puppet turned his way, staring down at him in silence.
Only then did it dawn on him. The machine may have resembled AR-D, but it was something else entirely.
On top of that, looking closely, he could see that it wasn’t alone. There were five in total nearby—maybe more, given the explosions erupting all over the place.
They were mass produced…? But no one ever—
…No. He wouldn’t put it past her.
The individual in charge of developing the AR-D was Ernesta Kühne, the head of Pygmalion. Next to Magnum Opus, she was one of Allekant’s most gifted minds—and greatest troublemakers. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if she had produced more units behind the scenes.
The puppet staring down at Shuuma must have decided to treat him as a combat target, because it suddenly raised its hammer-type Lux over its head.
“Whoa…!”
Shuuma might have been a Genestella, but he belonged to the research class, not the practical one. He had no combat training, and there was no way that he would be able to fight a puppet on the level of AR-D.
The hammer swung down with tremendous speed, only to be easily blocked as a new figure swept in front of him.
“Fevroniya…!”
Having caught the blow in her right hand, she was holding open a thick book in her left.
“…What are you doing?”
It wasn’t clear whether she was addressing Shuuma with that comment or the autonomous puppet. Nonetheless, it was obvious from her tone of voice that she was in a particularly bad mood. After all, her wish—“I wanna eat pancakes with Shuuma in a café with a view of the lake”—had been unceremoniously interrupted.
Fevroniya squeezed the hammer-type Lux with her right hand, then lightly tapped the puppet on the chest as though knocking on a door.
The next moment, its entire body vanished without a trace.
Did she just rewrite Newton’s laws of motion…?
Fevroniya’s ability—Apeiron’s ability—was control over the laws of physics.
Newton’s second law of motion simply stated that mass and acceleration determined the magnitude of any given force, but Fevroniya had adjusted it so that even small amounts of mass and acceleration could result in a tremendous quantity of force.
And that wasn’t all.
It looked like she had also altered the third law—that for every action, there is always an equal reaction. Otherwise, her small hand would have been crushed to a pulp just now.
“Do you mind not interrupting?” she murmured.
Fevroniya always spoke in a questioning tone, irrespective of the occasion or who she was addressing—as if to suggest there were still so many things she didn’t understand about the world.
Soon, the remaining puppets gathered around them.
And without even the slightest change to her expression, Fevroniya turned the page of the book in her left hand.
It was blank—or rather, the entire book was blank. It seemed she used the pages for her calculations to compose new laws of physics. She didn’t need to use a pen, though—her eyes alone were enough to inscribe the changes. In other words, this blank book was her weapon and the medium for her abilities.
She raised her right hand into the air and clenched her fist.
At that moment, the puppets let out a crackling sound and crumbled together like a ball of wastepaper. Before long, they had been reduced to the size of a pebble, floating in the air at first, then falling heavily to the ground. Given the way the object dug into the pavement with a hard thud, the mass must have remained the same. Shuuma couldn’t even begin to guess what laws of physics had been adjusted this time.
“Let’s go back, Shuuma?” Fevroniya said, tilting her head to one side and glancing at him as though nothing at all was out of the ordinary.
By go back, no doubt she meant the terrace café, not Allekant.
But this was no time for that. Explosions and fires continued to burst up all across the city. He had to figure out what on earth was going on, and naturally, he had plenty of questions for Ernesta.
Yet…right now, he couldn’t refuse her request.
“Ah… All right. I’ll tag along,” he said with a heavy sigh before following after her.
Everything would have wait until Fevroniya’s whim had been fulfilled.
There were no other customers or even staff left in the café—no doubt they had all fled. Returning to their table amid the scattered and upturned chairs, Fevroniya set to consuming what remained of her half-eaten pancakes.
“…If you would have at least entered the Festa, it would make my job as student council president a little easier,” Shuuma grumbled in resignation.
Fevroniya nibbled at her meal, washed it down, then said, “You know I hate fighting, right?”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Shuuma said, his shoulders drooping.
That was why she so rarely participated in official ranked battles. Besides, Methuselah wasn’t willing to let her enter the Festa anyway. They would sooner use her powers to advance their research than let her waste her time on something as trivial as fighting.
Still, he couldn’t help but wonder…
If she had signed up for the tournament, maybe it would have been her in the championship arena today.