It hurts... she thought as she flew through the sky. How strong is she...? Then, she found her footing in midair on a line of flowing green light.
“Why?” Izuna asked. “Why wouldn’t you leave me alone before you got hurt?! I told you to go away!”
Aisha had experienced her share of solitude. It was something she knew deeply. She knew its pain. She knew how difficult it was to struggle against. She would not let Izuna be alone. “Please, just listen to me!” she said. “I’ve told you why, but you won’t listen! So now, I have to make you listen with force!”
The air was filled with Aisha’s wind blades. There was nowhere to run. The blades tore through the very walls and ceiling of the mansion. No matter how well Izuna could move, there was no way she could dodge a hundred blades of wind.
It didn’t matter. Izuna had no need to dodge. She didn’t move a single step. The stars in her eyes twinkled brightly, and Aisha’s desperate assault simply vanished. For all its immense force, Aisha’s spirit magic dissipated, turned to motes of light, and was absorbed into Izuna. Her mana glowed brightly, and the suit of armor she had conjured became visibly more solid.
“Give up,” Izuna said, but Aisha didn’t move. She stared, enchanted by Izuna’s eyes.
“The Demon Eyes of Exorcism...” Aisha muttered. The power to defy magic granted by Eupito, the god of evolution. When Aisha had asked her mistress about it, Nacht told her that she knew of powers that could nullify lower-level attacks they came into contact with, be they magical or physical. These powers could only affect what they could touch. If Izuna’s power was in her eyes, then it would only work on attacks she could see.
“Magic won’t work on me,” Izuna declared.
“That’s not true,” Aisha said. “Or at least, your power has limits.” Suddenly, the ground beneath Izuna’s feet gave way. The blades of wind had been nothing but a trick to draw her attention. Aisha knew that Izuna had an overwhelming advantage against magic, so she put on a dazzling display to keep Izuna distracted and looking up, ensuring she would stay rooted to the spot.
“Gh!” Izuna fell. The floor, the foundations, and even the very earth on which the mansion stood had been transformed into one of Aisha’s specialty pitfall traps. The earth spirits laughed as she fell, satisfied with a job well done.
“Your eyes can change any spells they see into mana for them to absorb,” Aisha said. “But that means you can’t absorb anything you can’t see. You aren’t all-powerful, and you aren’t a monster!” As if to prove her words, Aisha transmitted her thoughts to the spirits of earth. Lances of stone erupted from beneath Izuna. They came from the walls around her, unrelenting. Izuna had nowhere to flee. She couldn’t even maneuver as she fell.
But when Aisha saw what was happening, her face went stiff. “What?!” The spears coming head-on for Izuna withered and crumbled when they came within her field of vision as expected. However, Izuna’s back, where her line of sight couldn’t reach, was protected by her suit of armor, deflecting the attacks harmlessly away from her. It reminded Aisha of the magic sword art Yuri had used against her, but even more powerful. Even deep beneath the earth, tormented by a hell of needles, Izuna didn’t seem daunted in the slightest. Having finally landed, she took a step forward, perfectly composed.
That’s not fair! Aisha thought, trembling. That armor of hers is just cheating! She had thought that she and Izuna were on equal footing, but Izuna, it seemed, was far stronger than anticipated. No wonder a demon like Analissia had wanted her. No wonder her power was so feared. It was overwhelming.
“It’s hopeless!” Izuna shouted up from the pit. “You can’t beat me, Aisha!” Her power welled around her like a thick, blackened shell. But Aisha could tell that despite her attempts to hide it, the poor girl was crying.
What should she do? How could she reach Izuna? Should she gamble everything and summon a greater spirit? Such a being could almost certainly overcome Izuna’s eyes, but summoning one was not something you could do on a whim. The summoning site needed to be arranged in advance. It would take far too much time—more time than Aisha could buy on her own.
“And you’ll never beat me if you keep running away!” Aisha shot back. In truth, those words were meant mostly to encourage herself.
“Change Equipment: Sandals of Pegasus!” Izuna’s mana surged forth as if to ridicule Aisha’s determination. In terms of pure volume of mana, neither Aisha nor Izuna seemed to have the upper hand. With a flash of light, white-winged sandals appeared on Izuna’s feet and she rose into the air. “Summon: Bow of Azure Sky!”
A brilliant azure bow appeared in Izuna’s hands. Mysteriously, it seemed to lack both a string to draw and arrows to fire, but when Izuna held her slender fingers where the string should be, the sound of a high-pitched chime could be heard. She grabbed hold of the empty space, and the string took form as a beam of light. A glowing magic circle appeared around Izuna, like a fixture point for a stationary turret. Izuna looked directly at Aisha and aimed.
“Aisha...” she said. Please don’t let this kill you...
Aisha heard Izuna’s quiet voice seconds before the shot was released. The next thing she knew, her entire world was submerged in a blinding white light.
~ ‡ ~
The vortex of light vanished and everything was gone. Izuna had nothing left. But that was only to be expected. She was a fake, after all. A liar. A fraud. This was the obvious outcome. It was so obvious that there was nothing more to be said.
Izuna had nothing. Ever since the day her parents died, she’d had not one single thing. It only made sense for this thing to vanish as well. Her father, her mother, her sister, and even her friend were all agonizingly far away, in a place she could never reach.
I wish we had never met...
If she hadn’t met Aisha, Izuna would have never learned the truth. She could have lived her whole life never realizing how alone she was.
I wish we had never met...
If she had never learned what it was like to spend time with another person, Izuna might never have realized the pain of her solitude. She might have never learned what things could and couldn’t be trusted.
I wish we had never met...
If only she hadn’t learned what it meant to not be alone. Being together made her feel like she was a unique, precious being. It made her feel like she could break free from her prison of solitude.
But she had been happy.
Her father and mother had come back to life.
That was good.
Her sister was always kind to her.
That was good.
She didn’t have any friends.
That was...fine.
It may have been fake, but without it, Izuna didn’t know how to keep on living.
I wish we had never met...
Izuna’s life had been like an act of a play. It didn’t matter that it was fake, and Aisha had never really been on her side. It was Aisha’s mistress who mattered to her, not Izuna.
Izuna was full of hatred—absolutely full to bursting. She hated and hated and hated with all her heart.
“I hate myself...” she said.
“I see,” said Aisha. “But I love you, Izuna.”
At first, Izuna thought the voice was a hallucination. But then, she saw her. “H-How...?” Izuna gasped. She was certain she had blown the girl’s fleeting life to oblivion. Aisha’s dress was in tatters. She had bleeding wounds all over her body. And yet, she stood firm on her tiny legs, looking directly into Izuna’s eyes.