Still, as far as schemes went, it sounded disturbingly feasible.
Compared to that, all I’d come up with were half-baked ideas like: Seal the cave entrances and set the inside on fire so she dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Or make her swallow a bomb and blow her up from the inside.
Full of holes, every last one of them. Joanne’s idea was several times better.
So, this is what it’s like when you’ve got an executive on your side. Your whole strategic toolbox expands.
Well, “on my side,” meaning someone who didn’t understand basic concepts like reporting or consulting and who wanted to massacre literally everyone except me.
In both good and bad ways, Joanne’s mind had gotten sharper after that night. She’d evolved from a slightly stupid, muscle-brained psycho beauty into a dependable psycho beauty you could never predict.
Maybe we can muscle our way out of Karatena’s little trap, I thought. We’d have to do something insane, but if it blows apart this suffocating situation, it might be worth it.
Hope sprouted from a direction I hadn’t even considered.
A second path: kill everyone in the Northeastern Branch, including Karatena, and then take down Stella Belmont.
Right. Just training quietly in the Northeastern Branch had been far too lukewarm. If I was going to be strangled slowly anyway, I might as well move first and smash everything myself.
“Thank you, Joanne-sama,” I said. “I’ve just decided on our next course of action.”
She smirked. “I figured. We’re probably thinking the same thing.”
Having finished laying out her strategy, Joanne snatched a glaive from one of the Northeastern men.
She spun it along the line of her body, the blade tracing elegant arcs in the air, an almost ceremonial display of how comfortable she was with the weapon. It made sense she’d be good with arms. Before she ever gained her current monstrous strength, she must have earned her achievements with steel in hand.
“Either way,” she said, “you have to get stronger.”
Her posture was nothing like her usual straightforward, smash-through-everything style.
It was fluid, controlled, refined.
Her old fighting style, I realized, must’ve been a technician’s: one that relied on speed and skill, making full use of her small frame rather than brute-force power.
Seen like this, I had to admit Joanne’s outfit wasn’t as ridiculous as I’d first thought.
According to Whip, female combatants, including herself, sometimes went into missions dressed in extreme gear. The idea was obvious enough. Weaponize an alluring body, drag the enemy’s eyes where you want them, and control the flow of battle.
Joanne kicked a new longsword toward my feet, baring her white teeth in a feral grin.
“Come on,” she said. “Come at me. I’ll whip you into shape.”
So she was willing to be my sparring partner.
That, at least, I was genuinely grateful for.
I pulled the sword out of the ground and turned to face her, the world around us already starting to churn with blown-up powder snow.
Whip had said it clearly: anyone aiming to become an executive needed to be strong enough to take a round off a current executive.
If we were going to do this as a real combat simulation, then I had to use every tool I had.
“I’ve got healing magic, so I’m not holding back,” Joanne warned me. “You won’t die from getting your neck chopped off once, right?”
“Uh, yes, I’ll die,” I replied flatly.
“If we stick it back on quick enough, you’ll be fine.”
She’s not wrong.
A thin, even layer of snow gathered along the spine of my blade.
Wind and ice kissed my eyelids, cutting slivers out of my vision. My lashes felt like they were freezing together. The skin on the windward side of my body started to lose warmth, and even my breath changed color, thinning into the cold.
I ran my gaze from the sword’s grip to the guard, then down the length of the blade, measuring the distance to my opponent.
At the end of that line of sight stood Joanne Sagamix, the woman I’d shared the deepest intimacy of my life with.
The person I loved more than anyone else in this world.
And the person I would one day absolutely have to kill.
Just as she’d spent this fight thinking up a way to bring down Stella, I wouldn’t lose anything by quietly preparing a way to kill her.
Between Fuankilo and Joanne, the difference in raw power was like heaven and earth.
Fuankilo could outmuscle an ordinary human in bursts, but she wasn’t good at sustaining that level of force.
Her magic’s nature didn’t lend itself to wide-area attacks either.
That’s why I was able to win.
But what if the one in that smelter had been Joanne instead?
The moment the fight started, she would’ve ripped the floor up from the foundations, folded the whole building in half with brute force, and crushed everything inside. That image came to mind so easily, I couldn’t help but let out a bitter little laugh.
There wouldn’t even be time to think about running.
Within five seconds, I’d be dead and gone. That was the kind of out-of-spec monster a magic-using executive truly was.
Even with the powder snow swirling around us, Joanne’s jade-green eyes didn’t blink once. Those spiral irises gazed at me with a tenderness that felt like hunger, like a snake fixing on a frog just before the strike.
This is my second time fighting Joanne, I thought.
But she was nothing like before. Now she had healing magic as a shield and would come at me with the intent to break me for real.
“Training” was just the label. This could easily turn into a genuine fight.
The snow piled on my blade slid off. At the same moment, I kicked off the ground.
I charged straight into the pressure radiating off her and brought my sword down with everything I had. I pushed power from my right leg into my hips, adding a full twist of my waist, and let my full weight ride that motion.
The rotational force of my entire body flowed into the tip of the blade, the point blurring with the speed of the swing.
It was a strike with real bite. In my whole life, I’d probably only manage a handful of blows that clean.
But the blade cut through empty air.
Why?
I tracked the path of my swing and fixed my eyes on where she’d been, only to discover that Joanne was gone.
A beat later, a cool voice brushed right past the tip of my nose.
“Nice swing,” she said.
Her shoe rested lightly on my lowered blade.
She stepped on it? That fast!?
Weight suddenly pressed down through the steel, and the longsword sank into the snow as if it were giving up and lying down.
Weapon neutralized, I stood there stunned as Joanne loomed above me, one foot on my sword, looking down on me like I was something small.
“Okay. You’re dead,” she said.
She flicked my forehead with a finger. I staggered back helplessly and landed on my ass.
Joanne watched me in silence, her expression as unreadable as a mantis’s compound eyes. I’d known there was a massive gap in power between us, but having it thrown in my face like this left me speechless. It felt like she was reminding me that I only managed to kill Fuankilo because she was weak.
Feeling the sheer size of the wall in front of me, I pushed myself up again, relying on nothing but the sword in my hand.
She hadn’t punched me on purpose. She wanted to show me the gap between us. Make it clear there was nothing I could do to win, no matter how I struggled.
She meant to grind me down, body and mind both, but I wasn’t empty-handed either. I’d been trained to death on the basics.
At the very least, I had enough fighting ability to stay safely above “liquidate on sight” standards. I had no idea how many tries it would take to score a single clean point on her. Still, my strengths were stubbornness and refusal to stay down.
And she wasn’t trying to kill me.
To be precise, even if she cut my head off, she’d just stick it back on and resurrect me right away. So as long as my heart didn’t break, this wouldn’t end. That was my grim, backward version of a win condition.
“Haaaaaah!”
Learning from the first exchange, I swung horizontally this time.
A line instead of a circle.
I stepped in wide, aiming for her neck.
And then… she slipped away.
Just a light hop, like she’d failed to catch a falling leaf. She didn’t even bother feigning to use the glaive. Twisting in midair, Joanne landed behind my guard and whipped a kick into my exposed ribs.