Tsushima looked at her with blank eyes before giving a vague response.
“What would you do if I was?”
The Shadow Informationist. One of the Seven Heroes of Elbar’s War of Independence. During the war, the allied fleet had gone all out in an attempt to recapture the eastern coast of Elbar Island. The Shadow Informationist was a legendary Informationist who single-handedly defended the coast and annihilated the fleet. But he was also rumored to have been one of those who had died.
And yet here he was, alive and kicking. Still in shock, Finé began to treat her wound.
“I see. So that’s why you’ve been hiding such absurd strength.”
As she wrapped a band of light around her body to stop the bleeding, Finé started thinking.
If what Tsushima said was true, then his Code should be able to erase anything from the world itself. If existence itself was erased, then no Code execution would matter. In other words, he possessed both the ultimate spear and the ultimate shield.
But Finé had one question. If he had such power, why hadn’t he erased her from the start? There must be a reason he hadn’t been able to do it.
That’s when Finé came up with a hypothesis: Perhaps his Code required precise location information to execute. With his vision blurred from the strain of Code execution, he couldn’t know her exact location. That’s why his fatal attack had missed.
Reaching her conclusion, Finé quietly licked her dry lips.
“You’ve slipped up, Tsushima Rindou.”
Now it was Finé’s turn to gloat. She wrapped her entire body in glowing bands. The physical light she generated shone so brightly it erased every shadow in sight.
Swallowed by the dazzling gleam, Finé began to form the Spear of Divine Punishment in her left hand. Tsushima gazed up at the looming premonition and let out a heavy sigh.
“It’s so annoying. You, this light, this place—it’s all an eyesore.”
Finé’s guess had been correct. Tsushima’s eyes, strained by excessive Code execution, were no longer working properly. With what little vision he had left, he couldn’t pinpoint her exact location. If he didn’t finish this with his next attack, he would lose.
Even so, Tsushima risked his life by executing another massive Code.
The path of vengeance he’d embarked on was a one-way road into the murky depths of a dark and stagnant world. If he had any choice left, it was merely who he would drag down with him. That was all there was to it.
“All creation in heaven and earth—vanish entirely.” As Tsushima spoke, the ground around him began to blur. The earth appeared to overlap in countless layers as the energy of existence was erased from it. Finé, poised in the sky, involuntarily gasped at the impossible sight.
At the center of the anomaly, Tsushima looked at the sky and spread his arms wide. Both of his eyes were completely crushed, with dark red blood pooling in his sockets and streaming down. Even so, he shouted with a beaming smile:
“All right, Big Sis. Now I’m going to kill the person who murdered you!”
There was no time to lose, Finé determined. She swung the Spear of Divine Punishment. The spear’s trajectory, carefully aimed, remained invisible to Tsushima, who was bathed in light. She had unleashed a strike meant to deliver certain death.
The spear of light tore through the air, its roar overlapping with the thunder rumbling in the sky. It reached Tsushima in less than the blink of an eye.
But once again, Finé’s most powerful attack was shattered by Tsushima’s monstrous defense. The spear of light vanished as it drew near him.
Still, cracks were showing in Tsushima’s Code execution. A remnant of the spear grazed his neck and disappeared behind him.
Immediately afterward, Tsushima smirked and pointed in the direction the lance had come from.
“See ya,” Tsushima said, blood spilling from his mouth. He’d long surpassed his execution limit. This was truly his final strike.
Watching from above, Finé clicked her tongue. As she saw the bands of light that had protected her body lose their brilliance and dissolve like smoke, she realized what Tsushima had done.
The Code he’d unleashed past his limits was a wide-area attack. There was no need to pinpoint a location. He no longer had any way to determine Finé’s exact location. That’s why he’d let himself be hit once to narrow down her direction and then unleash his move.
A simple plan, but an effective one.
Staring at her disintegrating body, Finé screamed. Those erased by Code normally vanished from the world as if they were falling asleep.
But Tsushima’s weakened execution lacked the power to erase her completely.
Finé’s grotesquely warped body gushed blood from every mutilated crevice. Stripped of her light defenses and faced with death, she shrieked and jumped down from her platform. With no way to protect herself, she crashed unprotected into Jabar’s rubble.
Tsushima sensed from the rising smoke and shock waves that the battle was over. He weakly knelt on the ground.
“Finé… It’s a shame I won’t get to watch you die.”
Facing his imminent death, Tsushima lit a cigarette. This would be the last one of his life. He took out his gas lighter, eager to breathe in the smoke he’d been looking forward to. Just then, Lupus’s face mysteriously surfaced in his darkened vision. Even at the brink of death, why was it Lupus he saw and not Shion?
Tsushima realized what the reason was.
The ring on his pinkie finger, clicking against his lighter, seemed to be speaking to him, even though he couldn’t see anything.
Is it really okay for you to die like this? Don’t you still have promises to keep?
Tsushima had a place to go home to. He had a person he needed to protect. It was a promise he’d failed to keep with Shion in the past, and a promise he’d made to Lupus, who was waiting for him to return.
“Guess I’ve got no choice. I should go home alive,” he muttered, flicking his lighter. As the cigarette caught fire, Tsushima took a step forward in the world he could no longer see. He could barely feel anything in his body, and yet, somehow, he could still clearly feel the cold of the snow that had begun to fall more heavily.
But when that cold was replaced by the chill of the ground as he collapsed, Tsushima didn’t notice at all.
By then, he had already lost consciousness. The price for pushing his Code execution beyond its limits was death. That was a fate even someone of his skill couldn’t escape.
As if the fierce battle from moments before had been nothing but a lie, a deep silence settled over the area. Snow fell and piled up on the land of Jabar, where two heroes had fought their desperate duel and perished.
The snow fell quietly and steadily, as if to cover all the world’s impurities.