Chapter 84

MAIN.31 The vegetable plant containers were all stacked up like building blocks. At a height of twenty meters, Kagun Kihara and Byouri Kihara clashed. The first to move was Byouri with her metal nails again. Whooom! The sniper’s bullets fired from her right arm, which had incorporated the structure of a skyfish, and pierced Kagun’s crown and heart. Or at least, they should have. But he was unharmed. Not even bleeding. Kagun had been forced to bend backward, but he’d sustained no other obvious damage. It wasn’t that his body was healing—he had no wounds to begin with. Ignoring the strike, he took a big step forward, reaching out with his index and middle fingers and slashing with them, as if to cut the air. Boom! A dull noise rang out. Byouri couldn’t comprehend what had just happened. But the facts were the facts—and her right arm had clearly been severed from her shoulder. A bluish-white blade of light, several meters long, now extended from Kagun’s fingertips. It was like he had a giant razor blade between his fingers. “Ha. Ha-ha!” Byouri laughed. No blood even spurted from her shoulder. The unnatural cross section began to swell in fits and bursts. “Form change. Reference: yeti!” An arm grew out of her, thick and furry, incongruent with the rest of her body. This made Kagun go on guard slightly. The situation had just changed in a way he hadn’t predicted. His thoughts lagged behind. Byouri didn’t let his confusion slip—she slammed her giant fist into him from above. And it smashed the entire container underneath them, too. Brrkkkkkk-oooooom!!!!!! With a rattling burst, Kagun and the container he’d been standing on both crumpled and sank. He was dead for sure. She’d felt it—she’d crushed his flesh, his bones, his organs into a pulp. And yet. “Is that all?” A voice drifted into her ears. A moment later, all sound disappeared. Several strands of bluish-white light danced, slicing the crumpled vegetable plant into several pieces. As Kagun appeared from within them and looked up at Byouri from a level below, his eyes said it all—they were mere shackles, annoyances, and he’d removed them. He was unharmed. She couldn’t even see a speck of blood on him. “Wh…what?” “You seem a little too absorbed in your incorporation of the Number Two brand. If your final grade is going to be this low no matter what raw materials you use, then I should be able to accomplish my objective without any difficulty.” “And what did you incorporate…? I can’t see your Kihara! You were researching near-death experiences. If anything, you should specialize in hypnagogic hallucinations. You shouldn’t have any of these brute-force techniques!” Kagun didn’t answer her. Byouri changed her right arm’s structure into that of a skyfish and fired three more thick metal nails, but they also failed to hurt Kagun. It wasn’t that his unknown blade had knocked them out of the air—nor had he used high-speed movement to avoid them. They’d struck him directly. His head, his heart, and his stomach. All of them lethal spots. Nevertheless. No. Kagun was subtly shifting the position of his own body, actively trying to get them to hit his vitals. And then. While Byouri was confused, Kagun took clear action. Without climbing up from the lower level, he swung his bluish-white blade around, slicing a nearby vegetable container into little pieces. He would cut down the mountain to drag Byouri to his level. As Byouri slid down with the rest of the metal debris, cautious of Kagun, who was approaching her, she thought: Strange. I’m a Kihara, so I know that our Kihara is strongly linked to some kind of science. So if one of us has a thorough knowledge of science, that science will bind them. I should be able to predict his tactics to an extent, but…! With her right arm—now with the yeti structure incorporated into it—she quickly tried to bat Kagun away, but that didn’t do anything to him, since he wasn’t taking any damage to begin with. He didn’t move to avoid it; he took another big step toward her and swung his right hand mercilessly with his index and middle fingers together, sending the bluish-white blade of light at her. I can’t…predict it…! What the hell kind of science is his power based— Her thoughts cut off. Her face had been diagonally sliced. It was out of place. Her skull, her brain, all of it slid down neatly as if down a bamboo chute. The destruction of the brain. It meant death. And right after that decisive moment, a new development came about. “Form change. Reference: Little Gray!” Her lips, still hovering around her torso half-heartedly, formed smooth words. The tip of Byouri’s left fingers suddenly swelled, expanding like a balloon. They reached about the size of oranges. Or as another analogy, the size of a young child’s skull. Its function: to create a brain. And if it had that function, then anyone living in Academy City would have thought of an additional possibility. Zh-booooom!!!!!! A moment later, an incomprehensible ability activated, and an incredible explosion engulfed Kagun. The monster, whose right hand belonged to a giant and whose left hand possessed five brains, slowly smiled. Byouri spoke into the gray ash spreading through the blizzard. “This was originally a side effect of an experiment to see if I could use an esper ability just by creating a brain. The experiment failed, you see. It seems the theory that a brain must be inside of a body is correct. Broadly speaking, I have to use a human form as a medium—my own body, for example—for a brain to function as a brain and use an ability.” As time passed, her rounded face reformed around that broken smile. “That said, I can only use powers somewhere between Level Two and Level Three. But even an elementary ability like telekinesis can destroy someone if I use five of them at once. Basically, I use waves of attacks to shave flesh from bone. It’s pretty efficient as a surprise attack, isn’t it?” Destroying her heart wouldn’t stop her. Slicing through her brain wouldn’t stop her. If she could make it, she could replace it. If she could replace it, she could lose it. Byouri had surpassed the form that made humans human. “…This is what it really means to be a Kihara. To use the same foundations of science shared by the entire world but apply them in unimaginable ways. I’m sure you understand it very well now—down to your very bones, I’d say.” “Yes. I get that, of course.” The man’s sudden voice froze Byouri’s smile solid. And then she realized something. The gray particles had been blown around. Kagun, who should have been blasted to bits by the explosion, still stood there in one piece. His coat and shirt had been carried away, exposing his bare skin to the negative-twenty-degree weather. But there was still not even a drop of blood on his upper body, as if it had been that way all along. “…When did you repair yourself?” asked Byouri. “I was never damaged. I can’t be. I remade my body for that very purpose.” Byouri felt her footing sway. It wasn’t how strong the man was—it was the fact that she didn’t understand what his power was founded on that freaked her out. She was one of the highest-ranking Kiharas there were. She should be able to figure out what kind of science was being used at just a glance, even if it was outside her own field of expertise. And yet she couldn’t with Kagun. At all. She was staring a nonsensical phenomenon in the face—and couldn’t make heads or tails of the trick. Byouri could mass-produce as many brains and hearts as she desired, but the rules behind this were different. She compared it with every form of science she could possibly think of but couldn’t even come up with a hypothesis that might explain Kagun right now. Then what was it? Was he even borrowing power from something in the first place? If he wasn’t, then how was he twisting the divine providence of his own humanity to cause these phenomena? “No, wait…,” she murmured. There was a way. A set of rules she wouldn’t understand, despite how well-versed she was in science. Something outside the massive category of “science” itself. In fact, Byouri had just seen it—and nearly been destroyed by it right here in Baggage City. Yes. “Wait. No. You… You were with Gremlin all along?!” Even for the Kiharas, each of them trailblazers on his or her own path of heresy in the world of science, this territory was unprecedented. The realm of sorcery. And of the sorcerers who used it. “What are you talking about?” In response, Kagun extended his right index finger and middle finger and smiled a little. The bluish-white blade of light reached out again. “I am a Kihara, remember? How could I be a Kihara without going beyond my opponent’s expectations?” “You… You demon!” Without thinking, Byouri used the same insult that so many dogs who she had felled had called her in the past. But at the same time, she had a thought. She considered the possibilities that lay outside of her awareness and began to analyze the phenomena before her eyes anew. If he could actually nullify all damage, he wouldn’t have bothered picking a day like this to attack me. He would have been able to break through Academy City’s front gates and slaughter the Kiharas. Kagun’s barrier has some kind of special property. And I should be able to deduce what it is from the way he acts. Working under the assumption that sorcery was a supernatural power different from the kinds created in Academy City, Byouri began to rethink everything as a fight against an Academy City esper. Kagun specifically wanted my attacks to hit his vitals. Which means… “Rrgh!” She incorporated a skyfish’s structure into her right arm, then fired a thick metal nail. This time, she didn’t aim for Kagun’s vitals. Instead, she went for the shoulder. She only wanted to scrape him, to damage him so little he could ignore it, to chip away at his skin with a super-high-speed projectile. And she was right. This time, it hurt him. Blood began to seep out, too. “I don’t know the mechanisms, but you only nullify attacks that would be lethal. That must be how your barrier works! In which case…!” “So you want to inflict slight, nonfatal injuries on me, let some time pass, and have me die from blood loss?” Despite revealing his own weakness, Kagun didn’t change his expression. “Many swords in Norse mythology have stones embedded in their hilts. They’re apparently charms that can heal wounds sustained in battle… As inexperienced as I am, though, I can only replicate it enough to avoid fatal wounds.” Knowing that an incarnation of science would not be able to understand this, Kagun continued to explain. “But there are ways to use that, too. Let me tell you about a sword known as Whitting. It was used for a decisive battle, and when the advantage turned against its wielder, a fragment of it broke off and turned the tables… One spell to avoid fatal wounds with certainty and another to sharpen the blade itself the more damage I sustain. Put them together, and its destructive power can grow without limit.” He slowly leveled the meters-long bluish-white blade of light extending from his right hand, from his outstretched index and middle fingers. “…If you want to kill me without a single fatal blow, you’ll need at least twelve minutes. But that’s more than enough time for me. I can kill you fifty-two times. And now that we’ve fought, my speculation has turned into certainty. Why don’t you use that power on a regular basis? Or rather, why, when you have so much freedom, are you obsessed with your female human form—the form of Byouri Kihara? …It’s because you’re simply scared. You’re rapidly losing sight of your own form even now, aren’t you?” “Ngh?!” “It’s proof you can’t fully control Number Two. You may be forcing it to do your bidding with electrical signals, but the things Number Two creates still have its lingering scent on them. And now, just like a rejected surgical transplant, it’s trying to drive Byouri Kihara’s mind outside of its artificial body. Is your limit one hundred seconds? Five hundred? It can’t be very long. If I keep killing you in the meantime, you’ll be forced to rely on Number Two, even if you know it’s dangerous. The more time passes, the more you fall apart. At a certain point, you’ll have destroyed yourself. I may not be able to kill your physical body, but I can make your mind disappear.” “…Form change. Reference: Nessie.” Blorph. Byouri’s entire silhouette began to wriggle and writhe eerily. Her body was reassembling itself from within, an omen that she was about to transform into something gigantic. “Both of us are close to immortal,” she said. “But there’s a clear difference—one of us recovers from damage, but the other one only holds the damage at bay. A small difference, you might think, but it’s actually much bigger. Especially in a war of attrition.” “……” “If I win, I can restore my body! If you win, you’ll stay injured! I don’t even need to think about winning. We’ll draw. We’ll kill each other! That will be enough. Then it will be over! But you need to win. You need to! The fight won’t end until you do! The difference is decisive. It’s like rock-paper-scissors—I can end the game by winning but also by tying!” Her body creaked and groaned as it swelled, expanding. An evil dragon and a knight. Depicted in so many legends, the setup was favored in Norse Mythology as well. But being ignorant of sorcery, Byouri didn’t realize that. “…You’re off the mark, Byouri,” said the sorcerer who had manifested the decisive blade Whitting, looking down slightly. Perhaps he was a Norse hero, this man crowned with the name Bersi. “I said at the start that I’m here to get revenge for the boy you turned into a killer. There’s no winning or losing for me. You created him, and I killed him. My only objective is to ensure we both kill each other.” “Wait… Then…” Byouri groaned. The man looked up. There stood the man Byouri had once wanted to crush with all her strength. A teacher. “Thank you, Byouri. I didn’t expect you to bring Number Two, but even if you hadn’t, you probably would have found some way to strengthen your body. I always knew that if unique powers like these clashed, it would bring an end to this battle of attrition. Your heresy was just as I predicted, and it has led me to peerless victory.” Zhhhk-slash-bang-gam-slash-bam-kreeeee!!!!!! The knight clashed with the evil dragon, both of them heading for their deaths. It was a tragic story, one with no salvation waiting for them. But when it came to the boy slasher who had been killed instead of saved… …he had finally been avenged.