“I’m going to try talking them down!” I shouted. “Celestia, can you do something about those heat rays!?”
“Of course,” she replied.
We dodged patches of boiling earth and sprinted through the swirling heat.
Beams of light raged just ahead of us.
Joanne was slipping past them by the narrowest margins, but her face was drenched in sweat.
This fragile equilibrium was going to shatter any second.
Feeling that in my bones, I jumped out in front of Stella, standing between her rampaging barriers and heat rays to draw her attention.
“Oakley!? You idiot!” Joanne, down on one knee, shouted.
An instant later, a heat ray twisted in front of my eyes.
A mass of compressed air diverted the beam, kicking it upward.
The red-hot line lanced into the sky, piercing straight through the layers of cloud above.
After I stepped between them, silence fell for a few seconds.
Stella’s eyes were full of something like rabid obsession. Just as Joanne had said, this girl really might be someone you had to kill at least once. Even from Celestia’s perspective, it was obvious. I could feel her sympathies sliding toward Joanne’s side.
“Celestia,” Stella murmured. “Move. We don’t need her.”
Celestia and Joanne traded a look.
What a hellion. No, a complete maniac. How does Aros even keep something like this on a leash?
While the fight hung in a stalemate, Whip finally seemed to realize something was off and hurried over. She wrapped Stella up in a soothing hug and flicked a quick glance my way.
“Okay, everyone! The special exhibition match between Joanne-chan and Stella-chan ends here!” she called out brightly. “Let’s all work hard so we can become executives like them someday!”
With the branch leader, Whip, taking command of the scene, the tension dissolved. She led Stella away, the latter still muttering under her breath as they walked off together.
The men who’d been betting on the outcome didn’t seem especially bothered. Their blood was up. They scattered a bit and started swinging their weapons or pairing off for sparring.
A few griped, “Hey, we were betting on who’d win,” but it didn’t last long.
Before I knew it, they were dragging Alex into their group and diving headfirst into “joint training.”
I stepped back from the others and cornered Joanne. I had to ask why she’d done something so incredibly foolish. Even if she’d been furious, picking a fight with Stella was a terrible idea.
As if countering my accusation, Joanne shook her head with an oddly cool expression.
“My anger was just an excuse,” she said. “I used that time to figure out how to beat Stella Belmont.”
“What?”
“I’ve come up with a way to handle Stella,” she went on. “Whether we can actually pull it off is another story… but hey, at least my little rampage paid off.”
She smirked to herself, clearly pleased she’d found a thread to tug on.
You’re telling me everything up till now was calculated?
Had she decided that even if she went all out and genuinely tried to kill Stella, no one would seriously crack down on her because the reason was “something about a guy” and they’d never suspect outright rebellion?
No way. She just managed to redirect it after the fact. Half of that is a lie. That rage wasn’t an act.
I pushed her explosive comment to the edge of my mind and focused first on checking whether she was okay.
When my hands touched her, Joanne wriggled slightly, looking faintly pleased.
Then she lifted her leg, showing off the bare skin of her thigh through the high-slit dress.
“What’s with the outfit?” I asked.
“Whip made me wear it.”
“I figured as much.”
Once I’d confirmed she was in one piece, I circled back to the more pressing issue: what she’d just claimed about beating Stella.
“A moment ago, you said you’d found a way to defeat Stella-sama,” I reminded her. “But without magic, there’s no way for you to break that barrier. It’s impossible.”
Stella Belmont was strong. Terrifyingly so. I’d have to kill her someday, but the wall she represented was absurdly high.
The only people I could imagine breaking her barrier head-on were Saren Deputy, the Orthodoxy’s top-ranked executive, or the cult leader Aros himself. They were the only ones whose firepower might be able to brute-force their way through a barrier that absorbed magic.
A third maybe-candidate would be Pomette Yoster, Orthodoxy executive number four. Her magic manifested invisible blades of pure psychic energy that cut through anything.
Depending on her mental state, there were runs in the game where it was hard to imagine her ever losing.
But in any case, if you didn’t have offensive magic, you weren’t even in the conversation.
“Listen first,” Joanne said.
She lifted her chin, pride coloring her voice as she began to explain.
Apparently, this was her first time actually fighting Stella.
Even so, she’d vaguely known about the girl’s ability: reflects physical attacks, absorbs magical ones.
“Figured I’d try it and see,” Joanne said. “I slugged her full-force.”
The result? Everything from her right elbow down had exploded. That was where she’d concluded that pure physical attacks wouldn’t work under any circumstances.
When she tried to grab Stella and throw her, all five fingers had bent backward in the wrong direction. Even when she managed to snag the girl by her clothes and hurl her, the impact from hitting the ground was reflected. Stella herself took no damage at all.
The beams she scattered across the battlefield melted the snow, turning the terrain into a steaming, blistering hellscape…
But despite all of that, Stella hadn’t shed a single drop of sweat.
Her clothes weren’t even damp.
In other words, her defensive field blocked out not just attacks, but even the surrounding temperature.
Drowning her probably wouldn’t work either—the barrier would keep the water off, and besides, Stella wasn’t the kind of person who’d let herself be put in a situation where she’d drown without resisting.
The more Joanne fought, the more impressed she was—at least, with the physical side of that barrier’s perfection.
Up to that point, I’d been listening quietly… but then I frowned.
“You’re talking,” I said slowly, “like you’ve already tested magic on her, too.”
“What are you talking about? I do have something I can use.”
She lifted her right arm like she was checking a wristwatch—then chopped it off at the shoulder in a single motion. With a wet splash, a massive quantity of blood spilled onto the ground.
“What are you—”
Before I could finish, she grabbed the severed arm and swung it, hurling it far into the distance with the help of centrifugal force.
At the same time, she triggered her healing magic.
Flesh bloomed from her shoulder like time-lapse growth, bone and muscle and skin weaving themselves together until a new arm was fully formed.
The arm she’d thrown away, meanwhile, turned purple in the space of a few seconds, then blackened into charcoal, shriveling as it went.
A breeze caught it, and the outer edge began to crumble, flaking away into dust that scattered and vanished into the air.
Flexing the fingers of her freshly regrown right hand, Joanne spoke.
“Healing magic. With this, I can break through Stella’s barrier.”
Healing magic… as the way to defeat Stella’s defenses?
Something snagged in my memory.
I dug through my thoughts, trying to pin down the source of the discomfort, and a scene from the torture room surfaced. One of our experiments, where we checked what would happen when Joanne regenerated from the section of my ring finger, came to mind.
Right. When she regrew from my ring finger, the new body pushed my flesh aside, and part of the back of my hand just… disappeared.
Understanding what she was getting at, I slapped my knee.
“You mean using the phenomenon we observed during our experiments,” I said.
It was a bizarre, irrational phenomenon produced by magic that ignored physical laws.
To perfectly recreate her original body, Joanne’s magic extended nerves and bones into empty space, then filled them with blood and flesh.
Anything already occupying that space was simply… overwritten.
“When the coordinates for my regenerating arm and Stella’s position overlapped, I noticed something by chance,” Joanne said. “Once my arm was fully regrown, a bit of Stella’s finger had been shaved away—but my arm was totally fine. Looks like my healing magic has higher priority than her barrier. I’m gonna use that to kill her.”
“Even if you manage to trigger that push-out effect with your healing, actually killing Stella-sama outright would still be difficult, wouldn’t it? She’s an executive too. Leave even a single scrap of flesh, and we’re back to square one. Worse, once she realizes what you’re doing, it’ll never work a second time.”
“That’s the sticking point. Like, if I could get her to eat a piece of my body, then cast healing magic the moment it settled in her stomach and her whole body got shoved out of existence, that’d be perfect. But that’s way too convenient, huh?”
“Well, yes.”