by Yuu Miyazaki
“That’s why you sold out your fellow students?” said Julis.
“Fellow students? You must be joking.” Silas laughed, shaking his head. “Every single person gathered here is an enemy to every other, you see. We might make temporary alliances for team competitions or tag matches, but aside from that, we’re all out to get ahead at the expense of anyone else. I’d think that you two of all people would understand that, with your high rankings. You fight with everything you have, paying for your status with sweat and blood, gaining your place only to be hounded by those who would take it out from under you. I’m not interested in such a troublesome life. If I can make just as much money without standing out, that’s obviously the wise choice—wouldn’t you agree?”
“Well, I do see the point you’re trying to make. It is true that the students here aren’t out to make friends with each other. And it’s true that the more famous you get, the more troublesome people come for you.”
“Hey…Julis!” Lester scowled, keenly aware of having been called out.
“But that’s not all there is.”
“No? How disappointing. I always thought that you and I were of a similar mind.”
“You’re disappointed? To think I’d have anything in common with a lowlife like you.” Julis glared at Silas, signaling she had nothing left to say to him.
“I’ll ask you before I pummel you into the ground,” Lester spoke up. “Why did you call me here? If you actually thought I’d take your side, you’re much stupider than you look.”
“No, you’re more like insurance. I needed someone to play the role of the guilty attacker, in case the negotiations with Miss Riessfeld here fell through.”
“Are you actually an idiot? Why would I agree to that?”
“Oh, no need to worry. When the two of you can’t speak, I can write whatever script I want to fit my needs. Well, I suppose the easiest thing would be to say that you dueled so fiercely that it resulted in a deadly draw.”
At that, Lester’s fuse blew completely. “That’s a laugh. You think you can shut me up with your puny powers? Let’s see you try.” He drew his Lux activator, and the weapon that took shape was an enormous battle-ax as large as his frame—the Bardiche-Leo.
“Lester, don’t rush into combat. We don’t know what he has up his sleeve. Isn’t he a Dante?” Julis hardly thought of Lester as a trusted friend, but she wasn’t about to abandon him in a situation like this.
“Yeah, his power is telekinesis,” Lester scoffed. “It’s probably all he can do to toss around some rubble. Anyway, Julis—you stay out of this!”
Before he’d even finished the sentence, he launched at Silas and swung his crescent-shaped ax, its blade of light howling through the air. “Go to hell! What the—!?”
At that instant, a giant clad in black fell from the hole in the ceiling to insert himself between Lester and his opponent and stopped his attack—with its bare hands.
He growled as he strained to push his ax forward, channeling all his might into it, but the giant did not budge an inch. Lester, who had thought himself the most physically formidable student at Seidoukan, was stunned.
Even as he stared in surprise, he had enough presence of mind to jump back.
“Oh, I get it,” he spat. “So this is your friend.”
“Friend?” Silas gave a condescending chuckle. “Don’t be silly.” He snapped his fingers, and two more men clad in black appeared from the shadows. “These are my cute, adorable dolls.”
The men shed their black robes, revealing themselves to be just that—dolls. Their faces had indentations that suggested eyes, but no noses or mouths. In fact they were mostly featureless. They bore a slight resemblance to ball-jointed mannequins, only far more eerie.
“Battle Puppets…?” Julis observed calmly.
Remote-controlled Puppets could be used in combat but required dedicated facilities for operation. Julis found it unlikely in the extreme that Silas could build such a large-scale infrastructure. Not impossible per se, but to do so in Asterisk while managing to keep it a secret would be as close to impossible as one could get.
“I’d rather you didn’t compare them to such unrefined toys,” said Silas. “My beauties have no machinery whatsoever.”
Then how can they move? But right before their eyes, the dolls moved as smoothly as people.
“So, this is your power.” Julis finally understood why she could never sense the presence of the attackers until the very last moment. It was simply because they were inorganic. They had no presence, no fighting spirit there for her to sense.
“All this time, you were hiding it from me!?” Lester shouted. “You said that it was the best you could do to manipulate a knife.”
“You actually believed that!?” Silas burst into laughter. “Oh, forgive me. But think about it. What kind of fool tips his hand to his enemies?”
He shrugged grandly and went on. “As Lester just mentioned, my ability entails using mana to control objects that I’ve marked. So long as it’s inorganic, I can manipulate it as I please—even complex structures like these dolls. Of course, no one at our school knows this.”
Julis saw some of the reason why Silas was so self-assured. “You used the dolls to attack your targets. If no one knows about your ability, then it certainly would be hard to catch you.”
Ayato had said that Silas had the perfect alibi. It would be easy to establish with this ability. Whatever the range of his remote-control powers might be, there was no need for him to be at the scene if he could see what was going on. All he had to do was equip one of the dolls with a camera.
The reality was that it was difficult to prove Stregas and Dantes guilty of wrongdoing when they abused their powers like this—which was exactly why every nation required those so gifted to register.
“Enough with this!” said Lester. “I’ll knock you down and hand you over to the disciplinary committee or the city guard, and that’ll be it for you!”
“That’s assuming you can leave here unharmed,” Silas replied smugly.
“You asked for it…!” As Lester raised his prana, the blade of the Bardiche-Leo almost doubled in size.
Julis had seen this several times in the past. It was Lester’s deadly Meteor Arts move. His weapon now resembled a giant hammer rather than an ax.
“Take this! Blast Nemea!”
With a tearing shout, Lester swung, sending the three dolls flying. They smashed spectacularly into a pillar, pieces scattering, and the pillar cracked from the force.
Two of the dolls were completely destroyed, limbs broken off and bodies twisted into impossible positions. But the giant doll had suffered no more than a fracture in the torso. It wrenched itself from the pillar and faced Lester as if the blow had been a slight breeze.
“Hah, this one’s pretty sturdy.” Lester grinned, having no shortage of confidence himself.
“This is a heavyweight model that I built to face you,” said Silas. “Much more durable than the normal model. Its body type and weapon were also designed with you in mind. I need it to play your part when the need arises.”
“To frame me, huh? Then that one over there with the crossbow is supposed to be Randy?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Lot of work you put in,” Lester remarked. “Too bad it’s all going to waste!”
He swung down the Bardiche-Leo again—but just as the blade was about to make contact with the heavyweight doll, two new dolls emerged from behind a pillar and peppered him with bullets of light. He roared in pain.
“Lester!” Julis tried to come to his aid, but yet another doll appeared to block her path.
“I need you to stay right there, if you would,” Silas told her. “Oh yes—those ones are also specially equipped. They have increased heat resistance to withstand you.”
Three more dolls surrounded Julis. Unlike the others, their bodies were jet-black, but otherwise they looked the same. And they held Lux swords in their hands.
Julis activated her own Lux, the Aspera Spina.
“Can’t you do anything besides cheap ambushes…?” Lester heaved himself up to one knee, clearly in pain, and glared at Silas.
“Oh, look at that. I didn’t think you’d be getting up again!”
Lester must have diverted all his prana to defense. He was bleeding here and there, but his will to fight seemed unabated.
Everyone had a limited supply of prana. If it was depleted, the fighter would lose consciousness—and doing so in these circumstances would mean much worse for Lester.
“Go ahead, throw as many of these blockheads at me as you can. They’re no match for—”
“Oh, poor Lester… You really don’t understand a thing.”
As Silas spoke, another doll jumped down in front of Lester—followed by another and another.
Lester looked on furiously, but his expression transformed gradually into incredulity and then fear. Julis, trying to get past the dolls surrounding her, stopped in her tracks, wide-eyed.
They were not looking at ten dolls or even twenty. There were far more than that…
“Throw as many of them at you as I can? Very well, I’ll do exactly as you wish. The maximum number of dolls I can control at one time is one hundred and twenty-eight.”
“A hundred and…” Despair spread over Lester’s face.
Looking down on him, Silas hummed with pleasure. “Oh, what a nice expression. That’s just the kind of face I hoped you would make. Well, then—nice knowing you!”
He waved his arm once and the dolls descended on Lester.
“Silas, don’t!” Julis tried to break through the wall of dolls surrounding her, but against their numbers, there was nothing she could do. While the things were not that strong individually, they fought effectively as a team.
Silas looked at Julis with a thin smile on his face. From behind him, she could hear Lester’s muffled screams—but before long, they stopped.
“Don’t worry. I still need him alive,” Silas prattled. “I have to make it look like you finished him off. I’ll just need to find something flammable and—”
“Burst into bloom—Antirrhinum Majus!”
Julis didn’t have the patience to let Silas finish his monologue. She waved her sword and a magic circle took form along the arc of its path. With a fierce blast of heat, an enormous dragon made of flame tore forth from the circle.
“Ah. This I haven’t seen before,” Silas murmured, impressed.
He certainly shouldn’t have seen it before, Julis thought. This move was her trump card. She did not show it off needlessly.
The dragon of fire shook the air with a powerful roar, then crushed the dolls that were blocking the way with a single bite of its mighty jaw.
Silas exclaimed in surprise to see his dolls, including the models with increased heat resistance, helplessly destroyed by such awesome destructive power.
“Now, that is quite something. I suppose there’s a reason you’re ranked fifth…” He backed away and snapped his fingers again. “But I still have you outnumbered!”
Five dolls made their way past the dragon’s maw to surround Julis and attack. Gritting her teeth, she fought back with the Aspera Spina, but controlling the dragon took a good part of her concentration, and her movements were dulled. As she barely blocked a blade of light with her own, the interference of Lux weapon contact threw off dazzling sparks.
“I’m not done yet!” With a yell, Julis kicked the doll in the midsection to send it flying, then whirled to push away the weapon of the doll behind her and plunged her sword into that one.
But the doll continued indifferently and wrapped its arms around her.
“What—it sacrificed itself!?”
Silas laughed. “If you fight them as if they’re human, they’ll take advantage of you like that.” Several dolls, lined up in a row, readied their guns in unison.
Julis called back her dragon to shield her from the barrage, but not in time. Bullets of light ripped through the dancing flames and into her thigh.
As she bit down on a cry and fell to her knees, two dolls grabbed her by either arm and pressed her against a wall. The fire dragon melted away into thin air.
“Your spells are powerful, but they also blind you from incoming attacks,” said Silas.
“Heh. You’re pretty observant,” Julis replied, forcing her grimace of pain into a challenging grin. “But I figured out something, too.”
“Oh? What would that be?”
“It’s Allekant that’s backing you.” She watched the smile vanish from his face. “You said those dolls were specially made. Where did you get armor strong enough to withstand my attacks and Lester’s? And enough to mass-produce them in those numbers? No other school has the technological capacity.”
“Very insightul. But now I definitely can’t let you walk away from here.”
Julis scoffed. “You say that as if you actually ever considered letting me go in the first place.”
Silas walked toward her without saying a word, then kicked her right in the wound on her thigh, hard. She screamed.
He laughed gleefully. “No, I was thinking of making you suffer a little first. But I’ve changed my mind. Let’s finish this, shall we.”
He turned his back to Julis as she twisted in agony, then lightly lifted his hand. As she stood pinned up against the wall, one of the dolls lifted up a giant battle-ax. Julis squeezed her eyes shut.
For an instant, a gust of wind stirred. Gentle, pleasant, and yet fierce…
“Sorry I’m late.”
Hearing that voice, Julis opened her eyes to see a boy who was not supposed to be there. He held a greatsword of pure white.
“Ayato!?” As she yelled out in surprise, the doll with the battle-ax crumpled to the ground, and the ones that held her did the same. All of them had been sliced cleanly through the torso with a single swing of the sword.
“Wh-why are you here…?” Suddenly he was holding her up in his arms. She was relieved, but beyond that, a complicated mix of happy and embarrassed.
“All thanks to Saya and Claudia.”
“Sasamiya and Claudia…?” Then she snapped, “Don’t tell me you came here to save me!”
“Um, I kind of did?” he replied, flustered.
Now she was angry. He didn’t even understand why she had to settle this on her own. She admitted it—she was fond of him, this flighty but kindhearted boy. And that was precisely the reason why she did not want him involved.
“This is my problem! It has nothing to do with you! But you just want to throw yourself into harm’s way!?”
Ayato answered the question with a strangely calm expression on his face. “You told me the other day—you’re fighting of your own free will, for yourself. You’re trying to protect the children at the orphanage only because you want to.”
“Yes…that’s true.” The sudden change of subject was bewildering, but she nodded.
“I think that’s amazing, really I do, but…” Ayato looked straight into her eyes. “Who’s going to protect you, Julis?”
“Protect…me?” She had never even thought about such a thing.
It was all she could do to not lose the things she had. To regain the things she had lost.
To take control of the future so that the past would not repeat itself…
“I’ve been searching, Julis. All this time. For something that I can do, something that I want to do, something I should do—for the thing that I have to do. Ever since the day someone I loved left me. But then I came here and met you. And now I finally know what that thing is.”
Ayato sounded as if he were remembering something…and yet, at the same time, as if he were breaking away from it.
“I see it now. That if there’s something I want to do, and I have the strength to do it—then that’s it. What I have to do.”
“What you…have to…?”
“Right now, I want to help you. That’s all.” Ayato nodded to her with a small sm
ile.
He looked at Julis with such earnest, unwavering eyes. Deep and dark. Eyes like the night sky.
Her heart was pounding. A strange emotion welled up inside her—painful, agonizing, and at the same time comforting. Powerful, fierce, like nothing she had ever felt before…
“Are you done chatting now? You’re quite the unexpected guest, Ayato Amagiri.”
Recalled to the present, she saw Silas dramatically roll his shoulders. He was still brimming with arrogance, indifferent to the fact that Ayato had instantly destroyed three of the dolls. Apparently, he was confident that one new arrival would not change his advantage in this fight.
“So that’s the power of the Ser Veresta… Yes, it might pose a little trouble.”
Julis had heard of it—the Blade of the Black Furnace, famed as a sword of tremendous power, among the highest tier of Orga Luxes in the possession of Seidoukan Academy.
It was an enormous sword with a blinding white blade, but Ayato held it one-handed.
“What a waste. An Orga Lux in the hands of a second-class fighter. I’ve seen you fight several times, Ayato, and to be honest, at our school your skills are the very picture of mediocrity. You did well to ambush those three, but what do you hope to achieve against over one hundred—”
“Be quiet. You’re the one who knows nothing but ambushing, Silas Norman.”
Ayato’s voice was low and cold, hardly like him at all.
Silas took a step backward as if overwhelmed by its force. Then, self-conscious of his loss of composure, he scowled.
“That’s a bit harsh. Would you like to see what I can do?” As he snapped his fingers, his dolls all readied their Luxes. “You think you can take on this many dolls by yourself? Then let’s see you try!”
Bullets of light flew from every direction, and between them lunged dolls with swords, axes, and spears. But a voice rang out—
“By the sword within me, I break free of this prison of stars and unchain my power!”
Then Julis saw it. Agony filled Ayato’s face. As she sensed his prana heightening, glowing magic circles floated around him only to shatter in brilliant sparks. An overwhelming level of prana shot forth and rose in a pillar of pure light.
