Alex’s face lit up, and he exchanged a bright, satisfying fist bump with Karatena.
I couldn’t understand what either of them was feeling. It only made the sense of psychological isolation dig deeper.
“Karatena-saaan,” Alex said happily, “Oakley-senpai might look all gloomy and unlucky, but he’s actually super popular, y’know!”
“Yes, he has that ‘magnet for walking disasters’ aura,” she replied smoothly.
“Ahh man, I’m jealous! No one says it out loud, but Joanne-sama’s, like, insanely beautiful, right? And Stella’s obviously gorgeous too. I wanna be popular like senpai someday!”
“Shut up for five minutes, would you?” I groaned.
I’d been so careful, thinking everything through up to now, and yet ever since coming to the Northeastern Branch, everything had turned into total chaos.
The headaches and stomach pain wouldn’t stop, and my eyes stung faintly with unshed tears.
Because honestly, how was any of this normal?
Joanne had just told me she wanted to destroy the entire world, that we had to prepare patiently and carefully, and now she was flying off the handle, trying to kill Stella for bothering me.
Then there was Karatena.
Why the hell was she suddenly acting like a teammate the moment Joanne and Stella started fighting, when she’d been busy trashing my name behind my back?
Alex, too, was behaving like he’d fully accepted the apology and moved on. I couldn’t follow any of it.
They’re all insane… Am I really the only sane person left?
Things kept spinning and flipping so fast it hurt. Just keeping up with the current situation was exhausting.
As we ran through the tunnels, part of the cave ceiling had collapsed ahead, letting in a blast of frigid outdoor air.
Laughter-tinged screams rose from the onlookers at the sudden, vicious temperature drop as, through the ragged hole torn in the rock, two girls burst out into the open sky.
Fighting inside the cave would almost certainly have caused a total cave-in. Some sliver of reason must’ve fired in their brains at the last second.
Not that it stopped part of the base from getting wrecked.
In the end, they took their battle outside, into the biting cold.
Whip, who had shown up at some point, started barking orders to the crowd of eager cultists.
“Hey, hey! You almost never get to see two executives fight for real, right!?” she yelled. “Everybody out! Let’s watch and steal their techniques! We’ll just start the joint training ahead of schedule!”
From the fighters’ perspective, this was probably a genuine kill-or-be-killed match.
But Whip and the rest didn’t seem to grasp the seriousness of it at all. They settled on that convenient explanation and surged enthusiastically out into the freezing open air.
The Northeastern Branch had multiple exits.
We slipped out halfway up the mountain, and a slashing below-zero wind smacked me in the face the moment I stepped outside.
Whip walked ahead of me, completely unfazed, scanning the surroundings. She pushed through snow piled up to her waist and kept marching forward without hesitation.
The tough men of the Northeastern Branch followed in her wake, kicking up snow as they went and stamping out a path.
I gathered what courage I had and stepped out into the subzero world.
The distant view was blurred white, hard to see through, but heavy, rolling booms rumbled from somewhere beyond the snowy horizon.
“Come to think of it, where’s Celestia?” I asked.
“Celestia-sama went to try and mediate,” Alex replied. “Now that you mention it… Where did she go? Maybe she’s between them right now, trying to stop the fight—”
Right as we were tossing that thought back and forth, something tore through the white air toward us.
I jumped aside on reflex.
A heartbeat later, the impact blew apart the surface of the snowfield and kicked up a swirling ground blizzard.
Shouts, somewhere between cheers and roars, rose from the watching men, and Alex and I exchanged a look.
Peering into the huge crater gouged out of the packed snow, I was hit by a harsh, acrid smell of burning that stabbed at my sinuses.
White steam rose like breath from within the hole, and a moment later, a jet-black, charred hand clawed its way out.
In seconds, the massive, fatal burns began to heal, rapidly rewinding as if the damage was being played backwards.
The original body formed again from that ruined state.
Eventually, a human in Celestia’s shape, dressed in her fallen-angel outfit, fully reconstituted herself. She pushed her torso up out of the snow, and when I offered her my hand, she grasped it and let me pull her to her feet.
“Thank you…” she murmured.
“Did Stella-sama do that to you?” I asked.
“I tried to get between them,” Celestia said, brushing ash from her shoulders, “but… Stella swept me away with her full strength. I was very nearly reduced to cinders.”
In terms of raw combat ability, Stella Belmont was overwhelming.
First, there was the web of magical barriers layered across her entire body. They completely reflected all physical attacks and absorbed incoming magic. Any physical strike directed at her automatically bounced back. Any spell sent her way was swallowed and converted into fuel for the very heat rays that were tearing up the world right now.
Someone like Celestia, who couldn’t produce enough firepower to overload Stella’s absorption capacity, would find stopping this fight nearly impossible. Even now, the thunderous booms continued in the white-drowned distance.
One moment from the right, the next from the left. Sometimes it felt like they came from the sky, sometimes from deep underground.
Quakes and explosions pulsed at irregular intervals, and a suffocating tension gripped everyone around me.
Suddenly, Celestia raised a hand and fired a burst of compressed air into the sky.
A sharp gust tore upward, whipping the snow into a spiral and making our coats snap and flap around us.
“Please wait a moment,” she said. “I’ll clear the clouds.”
She lifted her arm fully overhead, spreading her fingers toward the heavens.
Then, like a painter running a brush across a canvas, she traced lines in the air.
Masses of air rose, shoving aside the fine snow as they climbed, then exploded outward in all directions. The thick clouds that had been spitting down constant flurries began to break apart.
A heartbeat later, blazing sunlight poured down onto the land.
The gloomy storm cover and choking veils of powder snow vanished, leaving only countless ice crystals dancing in the air, glittering in the light.
Unlike us, who’d been stuck squinting through white-out, these executives could casually rewrite the weather.
Utterly insane, I thought, a chill of awe and fear crawling along my spine.
The sky had cleared in a radius of a few kilometers, maybe more.
Centered around Celestia, the clouds continued to evaporate in real time, and at this rate, the whole stretch of mountains around us would be under a clear blue sky.
As the gap in the storm widened, Celestia caught sight of something and let out a small cry.
“There they are! On top of that hill over there!”
Far in the distance, Joanne and Stella were locked in a fight to the death.
Joanne, in her cheongsam, zigzagged wildly through the air.
Stella remained rooted to the ground, sweeping beams of searing light in all directions.
The snow-covered earth boiled where the rays struck, the ground beneath transforming into a molten, red-black landscape like exposed magma.
All we could do from here was stare at that patch of hell from afar.
“Doesn’t look like we can stop ’em,” Alex muttered beside me. “Lost cause.”
Among the fourteen executives across both factions, Joanne’s combat ability was on the low end.
In practical terms, she was probably weaker even than Celestia, who was often labeled a low-tier character.
First of all, Joanne lacked offensive magic.
Her main traits as an executive were: exceptionally strong healing magic, the ability to sense her own scattered flesh, and brute strength. Her regenerative power was second to none, but her defense was among the worst. Her mobility was a bit above average. Her destructive power was nothing special, and her fighting style boiled down to throwing rocks or brawling with her fists.
From the perspective of an ordinary human like me, her abilities were more than enough to qualify as a monster, but compared to a true executive like Stella, her specs were badly lacking.
In the center of my vision, Joanne was blasted away by a sweeping beam of light.
She kept charging in and attacking and then getting driven off.
You can’t win this without magic. She’s got that broken reflection ability. If you’ve got my ego mixed into yours, you should know this is a fight you can’t win!
Right now, letting Joanne die was not an option. I needed her as an ally to help bring down the cult and to keep a leash on Alex as well.
I kicked off the exposed ground and ran.
My target: the narrow space between Joanne and Stella.
Another set of footfalls matched my pace—Celestia, running at my side when I glanced over.