To be completely honest, Kaname had no chance of winning. In fact, he couldn’t even explain why he was still alive. He was sitting with his back pressed against the wall, with nothing between him and his foe. The pair were close enough that Kaname could hear the noise the oversize bayonet made as it sliced through the air. If this became a shootout, it was plain as day what would happen to the defenseless boy.
However.
Despite that.
“Hrh!”
The Lion’s Nose fired, and Kaname simply obeyed. Without even trying to stand, he rolled to the side, firing bullets as a distraction. Using his momentum, he transitioned into a cartwheel and got to his feet without wasting any time. Any other Dealer would have been hit a dozen times already, but Kaname was unharmed.
“You can dodge that?”
Kaname had seen someone win a fight without cover before. Bloody Dancer had dodged a hail of bullets with only his instincts, and he wasn’t even one of the Zodiac Children. Kaname had the Lion’s Nose on his side.
“Have you figured it out yet?” asked Uriel, seemingly unfazed by his failure to deliver a killing blow. Perhaps a .45-caliber bullet was not the proper weapon for a mythical being.
“What you call the powers of the Zodiac Children are in fact an extant form of miracle. Humans once sought miracles as a means to attain divine strength. However, only those possible through self-improvement could ever be granted.”
“…”
“No amount of prayer will allow a human to fire flames from their hands or to soar through the sky, but expansion of the mind and the senses is a different matter. For example, the power to accurately discern a dangerous situation. The power to follow the target of one’s obsession wherever they may go. The power to seek self-preservation in any circumstance. These meager wishes could be granted, could they not?”
Even as the angel spoke, the two continued silently firing at each other. Kaname knew he was only barely managing to evade his opponent’s bullets, but he couldn’t figure out why Uriel was unharmed.
“However.”
At the same time, both sides detached their magazines and let them drop to the floor. Whoever could reload their weapon first would be the victor.
Or so Kaname thought.
✦ ✦ ✦
“I am different. There are no limits to the miracles I am capable of manifesting.”
✦ ✦ ✦
He disappeared.
Kaname had lost sight of his foe. The next thing he knew, he was being flung back into the concrete wall. There was a bloody gash running diagonally down from his shoulder, and before he could even look down, his blood sprayed out in huge quantities.
He couldn’t even fall over. The sticky fluid seemed to fasten him to the wall.
“Gah?!”
“Incidentally…”
He heard the swish of the blade once more and saw Uriel standing before him a short distance away.
“I shall not explain how much of this is the Legacy’s power and how much is my own. Is it not tactically advantageous to keep my opponent in the dark?”
…It was painful to admit, but the angel was right. The single most important thing to know when going up against a Legacy was what sort of reality-defying powers it had.
At times like this, it was exceedingly helpful that each Legacy had only one effect and that stacking the effects of multiple Legacies was not possible. That allowed you to distinguish between the known and the unknown, and thus deduce the weapon’s properties. In this case, however, that wasn’t possible. The introduction of multiple unknowns into the equation made it unsolvable. Even if you could isolate the unknown from the known, there were still too many unknowns.
“You can’t tell, can you?”
Simple, but destructive, like how the equation for nuclear fission was only a few symbols long.
Uriel readied another attack, swinging his long blade.
“A miracle is a powerful secret. It is to be kept hidden, not explained like a child’s riddle.”
He was coming. Just as Kaname gritted his teeth and raised his weapon to defend himself, it happened.
Another unexpected actor joined the scene.
✦ ✦ ✦
“#distortion.err relies on ultrasonic vibrations to change trajectory. It projects a wall of sound inaudible to humans that automatically corrects the blade to an optimal course, no matter how an attack is launched.”
✦ ✦ ✦
He heard a voice.
A voice Kaname had thought he might never hear again.