“No, no!” Mutsuko declared. “You don’t give presents; you get them. You don’t help them, you get them to help you. That’s how it works. Their mind will start to think, ‘Why am I helping them? I wouldn’t help them if I hated them, so I must like them.’ Unconsciously, of course.”
“Of course, I bet it wouldn’t work if they really, really hate you,” Yuichi said. This surely only referred to someone who at least basically liked you.
Aiko seemed to accept the argument now, acting as if the scales had fallen from her eyes.
The three girls then blossomed in to love talk, asking Mutsuko what other techniques there were. Yuichi, feeling like he was being left behind, casually turned back to look out the window.
He heard a faint sound.
It was the kind of sound that you wouldn’t normally notice, and that you might ignore even if you did. But Yuichi sensed that something felt strange. Instinct told him that he couldn’t just brush this off.
“Noro!” How many times had this happened by now? Yuichi grabbed Aiko, who was sitting beside him, and picked her up in his arms.
A second later, the window broke.
Amidst the scattering shards of glass, Yuichi caught sight of the bottom of a shoe. Someone was flying in through the window.
Upon determining the glass shards wouldn’t hit anyone else in the club, Yuichi jumped back.
Glass rained down onto the desk as a person also landed on top of it.
Yuichi looked up at this person, still holding Aiko in his arms. It was a girl who had the label “Heir” above her head.
Yuichi couldn’t identify the person right away. He knew a couple of people with the “Heir” label, but this girl wasn’t either of them.
His classmate Kogan Yanagisawa was a man, so that didn’t match up. Neither did Chiharu Dannoura of the music curriculum, who was a woman, but one of substantial girth. That didn’t match the slender girl standing on the desk before him.
“My, my. Seen a ghost, have you, Yuichi Sakaki?!” the girl declared.
“Who are you?!” Yuichi shouted back. He had recognized the voice immediately, yet he couldn’t help but ask.
The voice was that of Chiharu Dannoura.
“Huh? Dannoura? Huh?” Aiko asked in shock as she climbed down out of Yuichi’s arms.
The girl laughed haughtily. “Indeed, ’tis I!”
“Yeah, we got that. Why did you break the window to come in?” Yuichi demanded.
“Sage Mutsuko told me that in romance, impact is of utmost import,” Chiharu announced. “I wished to test this theory. Create a powerful impact so that they never forget you, have them thinking about you 24 hours a day. And if you are always thinking about someone, the mind says, perhaps you are in love with them? Such is the tactic I seek to employ!”
“Sis! Stop spreading these annoying ideas about romance!” Yuichi shouted.
She was surely referring to the same romantic philosophies that Mutsuko had just been talking about, and Yuichi couldn’t imagine anything more obnoxious than ideas like that catching on.
“I’m not spreading anything! I’m just giving girlish advice!” Mutsuko objected, sounding hurt.
Yuichi looked at Kanako. She was muttering to herself as she wrote in a notebook. She seemed to have retreated from reality... which meant he could probably proceed as if she weren’t there.
“Um, I have a lot of questions to ask. But first, what do you want?” Yuichi asked Chiharu. If she had really only shown up to “make an impact,” he was going to want to knock her over.
“Ah, yes,” Chiharu said haughtily. “That resonance you mentioned has begun. I wished to communicate this to you as soon as possible, thus, I elected to come here myself!”
“Who would come besides you? And you could have just called!” he snapped.
“I deemed it important enough to climb down from the roof with a rope!”
“What does that have to do with its importance?!” Yuichi looked towards the window and saw a rope dangling outside of it. She must have rappelled down and broken through the glass. He had to admit, he was impressed by her physical prowess.
“Um, how did you lose so much weight?” Aiko asked.
“That’s your question, Noro?! Though I can’t deny I’m curious!” Yuichi added.
“Heh heh! I ascertained that Yuichi Sakaki did not like my previous appearance. I slimmed down via Dannoura-style dieting!” Chiharu, who was now so slim she looked like a completely different person, stuck out her chest proudly. Her chest hadn’t lost much mass despite her overall slimming down, but otherwise, she seemed to weigh about a third of what she previously had.
“We last met in mid-November, didn’t we?” Yuichi asked. It was a little hard to believe she could slim down so much in a few weeks.
“Please explain it to us in more detail!” Aiko burst out.
“Why are you so fixated on that?!” Yuichi couldn’t imagine why Aiko wanted to lose weight, but maybe that was important to girls.
“Hah! It’s simple. Decrease input, increase output! That is all!”
“If it were that simple, the world wouldn’t be full of dieting techniques!” Aiko said in a rare flash of anger. Chiharu’s casual way of putting it seemed to have gotten under her skin.
“Then let us say I supplemented with a Dannoura secret family medicine!”
“And what medicine is—”
“Enough, Noro,” Yuichi interrupted the rapacious Aiko.
Martial arts and medicine were closely related; there were branches that handed down secret recipes that modern science still couldn’t fully analyze. Any medicine that could be this effective must be extremely powerful, and probably wasn’t something an amateur should be meddling with.
“Dieting aside... you said the resonance has started? Do you know where the enemy is?” he asked.
“I do not!” Chiharu proclaimed proudly.
“Then what did you come here for?!”
“Try changing the way you’re facing,” Makina offered with a wry smile. “The strength and interval of the resonance should change. The degree of the change should give you an idea of what direction of the Divine Vessel lies in. Once you get used to it, you’ll be able to ascertain their positions more concretely.”
“Ah... hmm! Indeed... I feel several... the closest one is this way, I believe?” Chiharu tilted her head and pointed out the broken window.
The others looked in that direction, but of course, there was nobody there... which meant that the Divine Vessel host was, at least, not within their line of sight.
“That’ll make it hard for us to go after them... ah, wait! Monika’s in trouble!” Yuichi exclaimed.
Monika had some of the Divine Vessels, but she couldn’t be host to them, which meant she wouldn’t know about the resonance. Yuichi quickly put a call in to her.
✽✽✽✽✽
Off in the direction where Chiharu was pointing, there stood a group of three people.
This was right after Natsuki Takeuchi had run off.
“Hm? Huh? Natsuki?” Yurika Maruyama looked around herself, confused.
She was standing on the pedestrian footpath that ran along the highway, five minutes from school. Natsuki, who had been there a minute ago, had disappeared in the blink of an eye.
Before her stood just a preppy looking young man and a boy with a gloomy air about him, with long bangs that obscured his eyes. As if to add even more chaos to the situation, the resonance began in that instant, as well.
She had felt this once before — a dull sound in her mind, like the flapping of insect wings. This time, the sheer volume of it suggested that her enemy was right in front of her.
“Wow... I came to see the right arm. I never thought I’d find her on the way. I did suppress my presence to come after you... maybe that’s why I succeeded?”
The young man’s words snapped Yurika back to her senses. “Her” likely referred to Natsuki, so maybe they knew each other. But if Natsuki had run away
the moment she saw him, their relationship was probably complicated.
“Hey! What do you want with Natsuki?” Yurika demanded.
“She’s calling herself Natsuki here, is she?” the young man asked. “Goodness, what a fix. You’re the one I came here to see, but I have business with Natsuki, too... well, since you’re the one here right now, I suppose I’ll deal with you first. It’s rude to think of another woman when in a lady’s presence, after all.”
“What?! Did you come here after my Divine Vessel?” It was sounding like it, yet something still nagged at Yurika. They should have had to wait for the resonance to find out who to fight, yet he had come here to find Yurika before the resonance even began.
“I’m the game’s organizer, actually,” he said. “I have a lot of preparations to see to now that we’re ready to get started, and that’s what I’ve come here for.”
Yurika hadn’t even known the game had an organizer, but now that he mentioned it, it wasn’t that surprising. The Divine Vessel War seemed like the kind of thing someone would arrange for a reason.
“Are you the one who started this resonance?” she asked.
“Hmm? Oh, the fact that the resonance started now was coincidence. The Divine Vessels make that happen of their own will.”
“Okay. So, what did you want, then?”
“I want to test you to see if you’re worthy to participate,” he said. “Fight this boy, would you?”
“Here?” Feeling a bit dazed, Yurika put her right hand into her bag, wrapping her fingers around a spring-loaded gun she had brought with her in secret. It was a toy she’d bought at a cheap candy store that couldn’t even pierce through a sheet of newsprint.
“I’ve put up a spell to keep people away,” he said. “You should be fine for a little while. Of course, if I’d known this would happen, I would have put up a barrier... then she couldn’t have gotten away, either.” The man looked a bit chagrined.
The boy at his side spoke up. “H-Hey! I’m really supposed to do this? Are you sure?”
“Given your ability, you should be fine,” the man said. “Of course, remember that it’s just a test. You can wreak as much havoc as you like, but I’m stopping things the minute I get my result.”
Had he not used his ability before, or did he just have no confidence? One way or another, the boy seemed timid as he stepped forward.
The closer the boy came, the more clear it became: he was host to a Divine Vessel.
Defeating the hosts of Divine Vessels was Yurika’s job as a righteous hero.
Becoming a Divine Vessel host could be something that fell into your lap. But those who participated in the battle to get wishes couldn’t be anyone decent.
They were evil — and if they were evil, it was okay to kill them. Yurika pulled out the peashooter and fired.
Both the peashooter and her right arm were enveloped in a black flame that gave the toy every bit the power of a real gun.
Yurika didn’t even move very quickly, yet the boy still couldn’t dodge it in time. The bullet hit him straight between the eyes...
...But that was all.
It was just a silver-painted toy ball with no real power behind it. It bounced off his forehead and rolled onto the ground in exactly the manner that one would expect.
Silence fell. Both Yurika and the boy froze up in surprise.
For Yurika, it was over the fact that her ability hadn’t worked.
For the boy, it was over the fact that she had fired a toy gun at him in this situation.
“Ah, shall I explain? Neither of you seems to understand what just happened,” the young man said breezily as he watched things play out. “Your ability enhances weapons such that even a toy gun can be lethal. I wonder what you named the ability...” He didn’t seem to mind interrupting them despite the fact that they were in the middle of a fight.
Yurika ignored him; she didn’t care about ability names.
“Oh, but naming these things makes them so much more exciting,” the man said. “Let me see... let’s call it ARMS. It’s a rather basic pun — arm, arms — but at least it’s transparent. This boy’s ability is Skill Eater. Put simply, it’s an ability that devours other abilities — negates them, in other words.”
“ARMS?! Hey! If you know this stuff, then tell me! What would’ve happened if I hadn’t been able to negate it?” the boy yelled at the man.
Yurika began to back away. There was nothing she could do. She had other toy weapons in her arsenal, but they meant nothing if he could negate her ability.
“Not even I can say what an ability will be before it activates,” the man said. “And I’m sure you can handle a death or two. You must have some insurance.”
“Well, whatever,” the boy said. “So I can negate the abilities of Divine Vessels, right? Isn’t that kinda cheating in a supernatural battle like this?”
Yurika began to think. It was true that negating abilities was a threat, but surely there must be some condition attached to it.
As the boy had said, the Divine Vessel War was a battle of superpowers, and the Evil God had arranged it for some sort of purpose. He’d handed out the vessels and arranged the resonance to cause battles to happen, which meant that he wanted to see them fight.
While things might never be perfectly fair, he couldn’t want to see completely one-sided developments, either. Which meant the boy must have some weakness, or some limit to what he could do.
While she was thinking, the boy came even closer.
He was walking more confidently now; perhaps negating her ability had encouraged him.
Yurika examined the boy.
His uniform was that of Seishin High, just like Yurika’s. He wasn’t carrying a weapon, and the fact that he was walking towards her suggested that he had no long-range attack capabilities.
His frame was lanky, indicating a lack of physical strength, while Yurika was an athletic girl. She thought maybe she could take him in grappling.
As he approached, the boy raised his arm.
His hand was open, suggesting preparation for a slap, but he was too far away for that.
He launched his attack, which was laughably slow and shaky.
Yurika didn’t even have to dodge; she just stepped back. The boy’s palm passed through the air in front of her. Her body shook from a sudden chill, and she was assailed with a terrible feeling of loss.
She had lost something, but she didn’t know what.
“What... was that?!” In her confusion, Yurika ended up asking her enemy about it.
“This is the true power of Skill Eater: the power to steal the abilities of another,” said the man.
The man had had no reason to reveal the true nature of the boy’s ability, and plenty of reasons not to, yet he’d answered her question without concern.
“Earlier you said that it negated abilities...”
“Skill Eater does both,” said the man. “It can negate abilities directed at him, and if he gets close, he can devour an ability and take it for his own.”
“Hey, what is this? Avoiding surprise attacks? It’s a dud...” the boy spat as he scooted away from her again.
“That will happen sometimes,” the man said. “You won’t know what abilities you can steal until you try. Incidentally, avoiding surprise attacks means that even if someone attacks you out of the blue, the attack won’t hit—”
The young man began explaining more to the boy. Yurika began to think about running. She couldn’t think of a way to fight back at the moment, so her best option seemed to be running away to buy time.
“—Oh, and I don’t recommend running away,” the man said, as if he’d read her mind. “This is a test. Why don’t you show me how you’d handle this situation?”
If it was a test, what would happen if she failed? It seemed too much to hope for that he’d just let her go home.
He called me a hero, but I can’t do anything...
Even if Yurika was a hero, her only power was to be re
vived in a church if she died. That could be her key out of here, but Yurika didn’t have the courage to commit suicide. She remained stock still as the boy approached.
Without the ability to use her right arm, Yurika was just an ordinary high school girl. She didn’t have any way of fighting someone with supernatural abilities.
“Yeah! Don’t run away! Give me a decent ability already!” the boy shouted.
Yurika let out a gasp at the boy’s words. He was assuming Yurika had multiple skills, which meant there might be more in her hero’s arsenal. The moment she realized that, a strange sight appeared before her.
→Item
Strength
Skill
Ally
Other
It was a list of words in a white frame.
Yurika realized these must be her hero skills.
It wasn’t quite what she’d been expecting, but perhaps it was modeled after a video game. There was a cursor on the list which she could move with her own will.
But what should I do?! She didn’t know which one to choose, but she also didn’t have time to think about it.
Yurika chose her command via instinct.
“Urgh!” The next instant, the boy let out an undignified shout and went flying off to the side.
The one who had done it was a man dressed in black: Soichi Kiryu, the man in the church who had called her a hero.
Kiryu’s hips were lowered, his fist thrust straight out to the side. Given what had happened, he must have punched the boy from the side.
The boy was currently lying on the ground, having first crashed through a shop sign and hit a wall.
“Yurimaru. Have you finally realized how to use your powers?” Kiryu asked.
Yurika had chosen the Ally command, meaning the one friend she had waiting in the wings had been added to her “party.”
“Damn! That hurt! What the hell? I thought this skill let me dodge surprise attacks!” the humiliated boy cursed at the man, still lying on the ground.
Yurika was surprised he was still conscious, although his arm and leg were bent at strange angles — broken, or perhaps dislocated.
Humanity's Extinction Actually Happens This Time With the Evil God's Revival?! Page 2
