Elea… Where is Elea?! Something strange is going on here. This guy isn’t trying to save me here, and he didn’t come to talk to me or anything—
Something was thrust into her from point-blank range.
“Deddy.” (Approach.) “XM1060 thermobaric grenade.”
They were far up in the sky above the ground, still tinged with the heat of the sun. In the night sky, a new star’s brilliance came alight.
The monitor in the command room once again was cut off.
While the machinery was all produced by Mestelexil’s Craft Arts, with the scope of equipment that was possible to manufacture in this world, receiving the image Mestelexil transmitted from the stratosphere was difficult.
“Kaete. What the hell is Mestelexil doing?”
Hidow questioned, annoyed that the monitor image had gone away.
With this, there was no meaning to even bringing Beyond machinery into the command room at all.
“Given the nuclear attack was ineffective…”
All of Mestelexil’s tactical moves had been under Kaete’s instructions.
As long as Mestelexil was in this land, Kaete could provide him the tactics to display his maximum power, having a deep knowledge of Mestelexil’s capabilities and the weaponry of the Beyond.
“We now know that Kia the World Word has automatic, and invincible, defensive capabilities. This is the first method of breaking through this. Mestelexil’s hand that grabbed Kia will emit VX gas.”
“Tch, not more Beyond crap…”
“Hmph. The fact you lot can’t even fathom this method is what makes it significant. VX gas comes from an odorless liquid, and even exposure through clothing can cause fainting, paralysis, and difficulty breathing— If Kia’s defenses only work against attacks she’s conscious of, or simply just heat and impacts, then this will be able to kill her.”
“Kia defends against attacks she’s not conscious of, too. You know that in the fourth match, she defended against the swords Antel flew at her. I heard it looked like Kia hadn’t even noticed them coming at her.”
“Assuming that is the case, it will still be effective. If we hypothesize that Kia’s perfect defenses aren’t maintained in perpetuity, the VX gas that binds to her clothes will be left behind for several days and continue to be poisonous. If she’s driven into undoing her defenses mid-combat, then Kia will immediately lose consciousness and die. Just because she’s assumed to have nigh omnipotent Word Arts, doesn’t mean she can handle an otherworldly toxin that’s a total mystery to her.”
“We can just as easily assume she doesn’t need to put down her defenses. The fact surprise attacks don’t work means these defenses of hers don’t interfere with her daily life at all, even when she keeps them up all the time. Sorta like Tu the Magic, then. Definitely a possibility.”
“Not interfering with her daily life would imply she still breathes oxygen, right? I used Mestelexil to drag Kia up to higher altitudes to deprive her of that oxygen. On top of that, he’ll fire a thermobaric explosive right into Kia at point-blank range. Combustible material will spread in a wide area like a cloud, and following that, ignite a wide-range explosion. Its stopping power is nothing like the nuclear attack just now, but—”
Of course, the scale of the explosion and sustained blast wave alone boasted an almost excessively lethal punch.
However, this wasn’t where the true terror of the thermobaric bomb lied.
“It’ll consume all the oxygen in the air and instantly suffocate her. Scarcity is how to break through perfect defenses. We’ll cut off all the necessary supplies to support life and kill her.”
In a complete turn of events, Kia was falling.
The edge of the night. Clouds. Stars.
She began to process things one by one in her jumbled-up mind.
This is an attack.
The sort of attack that quite literally set the sky ablaze.
Something, fired at her from point-blank range, exploded with Kia herself in the center.
An attack. He attacked me… Wait, does that mean Mestelexil’s trying to kill me?! Why is he even out here…and then, what about Elea…?!
If Elea was alive, her Word Arts should have been protecting her. Just like her own body was perfectly untouched, she could protect the safety of others just as easily. First, she needed to do something about Mestelexil.
“Just what reason do you have to come at me like this, anyway?! Is it because I attacked the royal palace?!”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! That’s right! I-I am a, hero candidate! I defeat self-proclaimed, demon kings! Aren’t I cool?!”
Gunfire and bombs rained down endlessly from the sky above.
Flying at high speeds, Mestelexil was aiming with precision at Kia in her freefall and continued to shoot at her with countless firearms Kia had never seen before, with something being shot at her too fast for her to pick out with her eyes.
She didn’t even understand what was happening to her. The sheer material quantity of bullets hailing over her was enough to easily blow a small city to bits, wasn’t it?
“Like there’s, anything cool, about attacking me out of, nowhere!”
—And yet.
Even among this tempest of slaughter, Kia the World Word continued to survive.
The VX gas adhered to her had been broken down. The oxygen she lacked was generated automatically.
The Heat Arts and Force Arts to offset the harsh air pressure and acceleration speed, on top of responding to any attack that came at her, were being deployed nonstop. Kia the World Word dealt with absolutely all of it simultaneously without even being conscious of it.
Word Arts were a technique that used words to entreat various objects of the world.
The object Kia ordered to “protect her from anything harmful” was everything.
Her clothes, the air, all laws of nature, worked to keep Kia alive.
It didn’t even require Kia’s own capability to process the situation—her talents, beyond heaven-sent and instead devil-sent, ran roughshod over all feats of ingenuity from a level higher than any reason or logic conceivable to the common man.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
“Mestelexil… You don’t know your place, do you?!”
Letting her blond hair flutter as she fell, Kia pointed her finger at the flickering shadow.
“Break down!”
“Ha—”
Mestelexil’s limbs were dismantled.
His head and torso were warped and broken down, completely halting his functions as a golem.
“You’re just some stupid construct… Don’t get ahead of yourself!”
She hadn’t killed his construct core. Incapacitating Mestelexil without crossing that line was a simple feat for Kia’s Word Arts.
“Put me down.”
Her descending body, practically moving at the speed of light, entered into the swirling fog of the Dogae Basin’s clouds.
She controlled her inertia, returning to her original place. She didn’t have any time to spend on entertaining Mestelexil. She needed to check the city.
It was right as Kia realized she had landed—
“Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…”
“Huh?!”
Hearing the laughter, mixed in with static noise, Kia looked up to the sky.
There she saw Mestelexil, having completely regained his original form.
“Why?! That should’ve broken you down…!”
It wasn’t that her attack hadn’t been effective. He was regenerating.
Now that she thought about it, hadn’t this golem blown himself up along with Kia when he attacked her while dragging her up into the sky?
The bundle of gun barrels growing from his right arm rotated.
“GAU-19/B.”
A roar and impact, like being tossed into the middle of thunder, rained down.
As the line of fire licked the ground, the ruins crumbled apart like they were made of paper.
It was so powerful that even without getting directly hit, the gunshots alone were enough to shatter eardrums and make every internal organ burst apart, but Kia—nothing more than a single elf girl—stood amid the attack and remained perfectly unharmed.
“…! Protect Elea!”
She had lost track of how many times she had incanted the Word Arts.
Though she knew that her Word Arts were almighty and capable of realizing absolutely everything, she was still terribly anxious.
There wasn’t anyone else besides her who could survive this level of destruction. If Kia made even the slightest mistake with her Word Arts, Elea might get caught in it all and killed.
While there were no abnormalities in Kia’s oxygen supply, the terror and anxiety induced psychogenic hyperventilation.
“Ugh, enough, already…! Break down!”
“Ah.”
Mestelexil exploded.
He wasn’t broken apart at the legs or arms. Each individual part or piece of armor material was completely disassembled, transforming him into disorganized fragments and scattering him. He wouldn’t be able to revive. Kia needed to search for Elea—
“Ilmeswer myutem rextas shardhar ekzelion zialhart ectolia—” (Wandering grade interminably follow construction at time of melting one-eyed beast encircle bottomless fish shoal trap—)
“What…what’s with you…?”
Kia felt a faint chill and turned around.
It was an eldritch feeling, much like Rosclay getting back up again and again.
“Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Mestelexil, dissembled down to units too small to regenerate, was beginning to reassemble himself once more.
The restored monitor image was still greatly distorted from the left-over electromagnetic pulse.
However, this distorted image was enough to inform them that Kia the World Word was still alive.
“Son of a bitch! Kaete! I’m going to go ahead with throwing Uhak at her instead, you got that?!”
“Kaete! You have another plan, right?!”
“Pipe down, you imbeciles!”
It was bizarre. Incomprehensible. Totally contrary to reason.
Mestelexil had faithfully executed the attack, as Kaete instructed.
It was the way of killing with the greatest chance of success—he didn’t have any reason to hold back any aces up his sleeve.
Kaete had, without any doubt, thrown out the most effective strategy at killing an omnipotent, right from the get-go.
It can’t be. Is she really invincible?
He needed to think up the next move. However, they were all second-, third-, or fourth-best measures.
Would they have any meaning beyond being futile, last-ditch attempts?
“There are still many different ways to kill an omnipotent!”
He could only assume that Kia the World Word was able to block out any and all negative effects, included attacks she was personally unconscious of. Even using backhanded methods like oxygen deprivation wasn’t able to break through this defense.
A singularity that could not be surmounted as long as the imaginative powers of the world itself, effected by Word Arts, was up to the task.
Kaete’s brain couldn’t help reaching this conclusion. He couldn’t think up any possible method.
<Kae…Kaete!>
A voice mixed with static came through the communication device.
It was Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge. Merely dissembling him a second time was not enough to destroy him.
“Mestelexil! There has to be some attack that can pierce through those permanent defenses of hers. First, you need to get yourself out of the enemy’s consciousness. Fall back from there for now, and we’ll investigate one by one—”
<I don’t like, your order! C-can I, do this by, myself?!>
“What?!”
<I want to, fight Kia!>
“Don’t be selfish!”
Kaete shouted in a panic.
Mestelexil was a construct with a heart and free will of his own. While it may have been different for Kiyazuna, there was no guarantee that he would obey whatever Kaete ordered him to do. However, if he went on a rampage while the other members of the Twenty-Nine Officials were here to witness it, there was a chance that he’d be seen as having escaped from Kaete’s control.
“Remember what the goal here is! If you disobey my orders, then everything’ll go up in a puff of smoke!”
<I’m not disobeying! I will, defeat, Kia!>
“So you really can defeat her, then?”
Someone came by and snatched the communicator from Kaete. It was Yaniegiz the Chisel.
His eyes were sparkling with fire, lit up with the urge to kill.
<Yup! Since I am, smarter, than Kaete is! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!>
“I’ll allow it. Kill Kia the World Word here and now.”
“Yaniegiz, how dare you decide that on your own!”
“Is there a problem? I’m the one with the highest degree of responsibility here in this command room. Besides, Mestelexil’s the one fighting on the ground, so he should be the one thinking up how to break through, not us stuck watching things play out through a screen. Please don’t lose sight of our goal here.”
“Why do you think I have control over Mestelexil in the first place?! You’re just blinded by your vengeance for Rosclay!”
“Is that what it looks like to you? Even assuming that is true, I do believe I am far more cognizant of the goal here than you. Attempting some other method because we don’t have any chance of victory? Sure, that itself is quite fine. But on top of that, don’t you think we should be forcing Mestelexil to fight as comprehensively as possible?”
“…”
“Even if it means Mestelexil is crushed by Kia here. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Throwing Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge at Kia the World Word—
The composition of the situation was structurally the same as the Sixways Exhibition. Even assuming Mestelexil had no chance of victory at all against Kia, as long as Kia was able to kill him, then it meant one less threat to Aureatia.
However, what was going to remain once they had all finished crushing each other?
Now, with Rosclay dead, no one was looking at the future whatsoever.
Mestelexil…don’t you die on me! Not at a time like this…!
“…I get it.”
On the ground. The ruined townscape.
Watching Mestelexil restore himself, Kia took a single deep breath.
Far too many things had happened at once, and it had taken her a terribly long time to get her thoughts in order.
Either that, or she simply hadn’t wanted to consider it.
“I get it… Mestelexil. You came here on Aureatia’s orders to kill me, isn’t that right?”
“Aureatia?! I don’t know, maybe?!”
“That’s right… Now that I think about it, those papers were a trap from the start. There’s no criminal who’d get locked up in a bunch of ruins this far removed from the central city area… This town was set up to attack me from the beginning. They knew that I’d try to come and help Elea…”
“Help Elea?! R-right now, I am, helping Kaete! If I beat Kia, Kaete will become, important, and I will become, a hero, candidate!”
“Aren’t you stupid. You’re definitely getting tricked, too. I don’t know this Kaete person, but anyone who tries to get others to kill people to become more important isn’t…”
She felt an uneasy wrongness in what she was saying at that moment.
Kia had been tricked— Had it only started from when she was first brought out here?
“…Mestelexil! Do you know where Elea is?! The one’s who sprung this trap on me, they know about Elea, don’t they?! If you’re honest with me, I promise I won’t kill you!”
“Huh?! Kill me?! Kia, is going to, kill me?!”
Mestelexil seemed genuinely shocked.
He still didn’t get it? Even after Kia showed the overwhelming gulf in their power over and over again?
“That’s right… Listen. If I say ‘die,’ then anyone will die right there on the spot. After everything I’ve already showed you, you still don’t get it?”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I don’t understand! But I do know, the way to, defeat Kia!”
There was no way such a method existed in this world.
Much more, not a single one of Mestelexil’s attacks up until now had worked on Kia whatsoever.
The only thing that became clear from attempting all the different forms of attack was that they were all meaningless, and thus, it would’ve been impossible to learn some way to overcome her from it all.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Mestelexil created a new weapon. Something that Kia never would have imagined.
At this point, this was also just as irrelevant.
“Stop.”
“Uh—”
“I win.”
Mestelexil came to a stop. While Kia had been a bit surprised by his unique ability to regenerate himself no matter how many times he was destroyed, if she neutralized him without destroying him, then it would never pose a problem to begin with.
“We’ve been through this enough for you to know by now, so stop making me waste my time. Seriously…”
Kia turned on her heel. She considered abandoning this city altogether.
However, as she went to incant Word Arts to fly away, she hesitated.
What if? What if on the off chance Elea is being kept here? Right, right… Even if this was a trap, the documents being fakes doesn’t prove anything…
A hail of missiles swooped down on her.
The chain of explosions altered the terrain, and the scenery reflected in Kia’s eyes physically churned about.
Twisted around by the crumbling earth, she was left to watch the destruction from an epicenter of explosive flames.
“Mestelexil…!”
““““Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!””””
She had completely halted all of Mestelexil’s movements. He should’ve been immobilized.
However, the guffawing laughter came from all directions, everywhere around her.
“What is all this…?!”
On the other side of the flames were navy-blue golems.
Several dozen all closed in on Kia. Each and every one was Mestelexil.
““““S-stopping me, won’t work!””””
Mestelexil created unknown weaponry. While he couldn’t even hold a candle to Kia, he was still a Craft Arts user beyond common comprehension.
Couldn’t he then be able to simply mass-produce his own golem body?
Even the one she had just defeated might have merely been a drone unit that was made to look like his original form.
The attacks continued on and on. While she could only vaguely perceive just how terrifying they were, at the very least they packed enough of a punch to wipe out Kia along with the entire terrain around her.
However, no matter how much sheer material was incessantly sent her way…
“Stop.”
As she was exposed to an incessant stream of explosions and flames, she made all the golems within her line of sight come to a standstill.
She had indeed stopped all of Mestelexil she had her sights on. However, he still continued.
From somewhere in the distance, from a range that went far beyond the horizon, the bombs poured down on her without end. Kia herself wasn’t harmed at all, but her line of sight was totally blocked.
“I-I can’t see anything… What is this?!”
A white light completely blanketed all of Kia’s sensations.
The aluminum powder and potassium perchlorate mixed inside the bombs and sprayed everywhere was constantly bathing Kia in bright flashes of light.
This was too bright, though. Her sense of balance faltered.
Light. This light’s way too strong…so I know it’s something harmful. But just how much of it is harmful light?! I’m alive and can move just fine, but still…
Were her continuously active defenses letting the maximum allowable limit of light, just enough not to pose any problem with keeping her alive or conscious, to wash over her?
The same was true for the sound, not just the light. Through all this, she had been forced to listen to the intense attack noises, and part of her hearing had gone numb. She couldn’t listen for the signs that Mestelexil was incanting Word Arts.
“…Abate!”
Utilizing her Word Arts, she silenced all the destruction, light, and noise in the area at once.
Even the cloud containing radioactive material that engulfed the sky disappeared as well.
An overly abrupt silence descended, and it instead made her stagger as if she had been hit in the head.
Her eyes had gotten totally used to the light. The night was far too dark.
Only the big moon and the small moon, high up at their zenith, were vivid and clear.
“—”
The Mestelexil swarm had transformed into wreckage, with all their functionality halted.
Among the caved-in terrain, Kia took a few tottering steps forward.
She felt awful. Dizzy.
Her body was involuntarily shivering.
“Huh…?”
“K-Kia!”
A spherical golem with three legs rolled at her feet.
Mestelexil’s drone. She couldn’t completely defeat a foe that was able to duplicate itself.
“Are you, dead yet?!”
“Dead…? Blergk!”
Unable to stay standing, she vomited.
The mere sensation of unwell discomfort was a brand-new experience for her.
Her voice wouldn’t come out.
Nothing happened to me… I didn’t…
There was a lethal dose for almost all the substances that affected a living organism.
Oxygen was no exception. While the substance was universally necessary to maintain all life, inhaling a high concentration of it above a certain amount would exceed the body’s detoxification functions and prove harmful.
It presented with symptoms of vertigo, tunnel vision, spasms, and difficulty breathing.
It could even prove fatal in a very short amount of time.
Kia the World Word’s ongoing symptoms were from oxygen toxicity.
Kia’s automatic defenses blocked off any physical damage, decomposed any toxic material, and even automatically adjusted the light and sound of the surrounding environment to make it suitable for her survival. This power didn’t require Kia’s own judgment, regardless of whether she perceived the threat or not—the world itself tried to keep Kia alive.
In which case, what would happen when a deficiency, unlike the light or sound, was the element of attack?
The thermobaric bombs that Mestelexil saturated her with from every angle exhausted all the oxygen in the space around Kia. However, Mestelexil’s reason for creating his horde of drones and encircling Kia was not simply to carry out the saturation attack itself.
It was to continuously create highly concentrated oxygen on the outside of the bomb blasts.
Meanwhile, inside the bomb blasts, the world, in order to keep Kia alive, began to generate oxygen in response to the threat posed by the oxygen depletion.
Under those conditions, Kia—of her own volition—extinguished the explosions that blocked out all her senses.
The air pressure in the area, skyrocketed by the continuous explosions, instantly dropped.
As a result, the highly concentrated oxygen that Mestelexil produced and filled the air with instantly flew into where she stood.
Her defense response, automatically detecting any threat, for that one instant, was powerless against this oxygen. Right up until Kia had wiped away the blast cloud, it had been trying to generate that very oxygen in order to keep Kia alive.
The light to restrict her vision had been to ensure Kia didn’t perceive the horde of drone units producing oxygen.
His strategy to utilize an army of drone units was so that against Kia, able to incapacitate Mestelexil with a single word, he could maintain the attack nonstop with a mass of individual units that were left unaffected.
Mestelexil was not simply a weapon that regenerated himself every time he was destroyed.
As he was destroyed and regenerated anew, he acquired survival abilities adapted to his foe’s offensive capabilities and calculated the attack methods most suited to combat his enemy’s defensive capabilities—this inhuman learning speed was the true, fiend-like essence of Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge.
“Kia! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You collapsed, right?! Just now, you fell!”
The subunit hanging around her continued to laugh innocently.
It’s no use, my breath… Wait, how, do I, my breathing…
Crawling on the ground, her hazy consciousness tried to think up a way to escape her situation.
Nothing came to her. It felt like her ability to think wasn’t working at all.
All she needed to do was let out a single word of Word Arts, yet with her breathing choked off, she was unable.
She just had to chant her Word Arts afterward. But what was she supposed to do?
Normally, Kia was aware of tracing back cause and effect. She couldn’t breathe, and her voice wouldn’t come out. In which case, she could no longer make any follow-up incantations, either.
…?
It was a strange sensation, neither anguish nor fear.
Kia had always manifested any and all phenomena with a single word, and now for the first time, she experienced doubt.
Wait… Am I going to die…?
To any other creature with a heart of their own, it was a completely obvious and natural fact.
Everyone died. Kia had long known as much.
Even Elea, who she adored so much, would die one day.
That fear was entirely why Kia was so frantic.
However, in her fourteen years of life, she never once had imagined that she herself would die, too.
“Kia!”
The voice came from above. It wasn’t a subunit this time. The single red eye looked down at her.
The terrain Kia laid face down in had been deeply carved open by the previous attack.
She had survived all this destruction, and yet, she was going to die.
“A-are you, going to, die?! I, did a really, good job didn’t, I?!”
Incredible.
Her hazy psyche reflexively brought the thought to mind.
Before he finished talking, Mestelexil fired a tempest of bullets toward her. Her automatic Word Arts defenses blocked all of it. He was checking the possibility that her automatic defenses had disappeared with her consciousness hazy and fading— He was thorough.
Completely opposite of Kia, who had continued to turn her eyes away from killing, there were those like Mestelexil in the world who were this thorough and exhaustive when performing the act of murder.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I am, Mestelexil! The strongest, child, Mama ever, made! So I will become, the strongest Hero of, all, and help, Mama!”
Did he say…help his mom? Then, I want…save…
She wanted to save her so much. She absolutely couldn’t let anyone die because of something she did.
Even Kia, who had never imagined her own death, didn’t want to die.
If Kia died, then Elea would truly end up all alone.
Thus…
Elea’s way more than—
With this last thought, her consciousness cut out.
Darkness.
“H-her heart?! Did, it stop?! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Even in the middle of his uproarious laughter, Mestelexil continued showering her with gunfire.
There wasn’t any malice in it. Nothing more than an artless, innocent glee for slaughter.
Kia the World Word had died. The heartbeats he detected with his sensors had stopped, and her body temperature was dropping.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
The storm of explosions and flashes continued. Kia still maintained her original form.
Did her automatic, omnipotent Word Arts manifest continuously even on her corpse?
That wasn’t it. Something strange was happening.
Kia the World Word began to stand up, like a doll without any sense of balance.
Her heart unnaturally began to beat once again, while her body temperature remained cold.
She should’ve long lost any ability to move her body. But just as skeletons or ghosts, without muscles of their own, were able to move through an interaction of complex Force Arts—
“He…”
The vocal cords that should have been rendered useless by respiratory failure produced a voice.
“Heal me.”
“Huh? That’s we—”
Mestelexil understood the strange change.
He didn’t have time to respond—Kia’s attack finished with a single word.
Heat returned to Kia’s body.
“Die.”
Mestelexil collapsed on the spot.
The earth-shaking onslaught halted with it.
This was truly the strongest attack method of all.
Thrusting death directly on a foe, without giving them the chance for a single farewell.
From the very beginning, Kia the World Word held this authority in her grip.
“…Ah.”
The light returned to Kia’s eyes. She realized her body’s maladies had healed completely.
While in a state of being unable to move her vocal cords, nor possessing the consciousness to form any words…she had instantly removed the portion of oxygen harming her body.
The series of actions from regaining control of her body and wiping out Mestelexil’s existence had not been willed by Kia herself.
She could only assume that her thoughts of Elea the Red Tag had made her body move all on its own.
“R-right, I… I have to do this…”
The Word Arts that had saved Kia’s life were neither spoken at the same moment of her attack, nor chanted afterward.
They were the Word Arts she had already used prior to the attack.
There were Word Arts Kia had repeated over and over again since arriving in the basin—Protect Elea.
She continued this command on any and all possible targets.
There was one target on whom these Word Arts affected stronger than any other.
—Kia the World Word herself.
If Elea was still alive, then Kia the World Word was the only one able to protect her.
This understanding that came alight in her heart in the moment of her death, automatically forced Kia to stay alive.
“I need to find her…”
She began to walk, crawling out up from the sunken crater.
The fact she had regained her perfectly healthy body made it feel so much uncannier.
It wasn’t her first time using Word Arts to heal someone else. However, ever since the incident with Yawika, this might have been the first time she had used Word Arts to alter her own body.
Because she found it terrifying.
Was the Kia right now truly the same Kia who had existed up until a short while ago?
Not only that but, in the end, she had…
I-I killed with Word Arts.
Though it may have been a largely automatic defensive response made while she was unconscious, she had killed Mestelexil.
She knew. If she had done this from the start, she wouldn’t have been driven so far into a corner.
Both now and during the fourth match with Rosclay.
Everyone was spreading the rumor that Rosclay the Absolute had died. If that was the fate that awaited him, then if Kia had simply killed him back then, Elea never would have been captured.
It’s okay. It’ll be okay… Constructs, aren’t people. They told us that in class, right? Constructs are murderous monsters…created by self-proclaimed demon kings… And this one tricked me, made me suffer so much and tried to kill me… So, it’s just natural. K-killing him…was the obvious punishment he deserved…!
She didn’t want to acknowledge the black feeling of reality that gnawed at her psyche.
Though she was up against a construct, the line she had stood firmly on was crossed.
Kia wasn’t the same type of person as Jivlart the Ash Border or Kyaliga the Music Reed, willfully engaging in killing. She should’ve been able to remain so superlatively all-powerful that she’d never need to rely on such methods.
“Hng, blerk!”
Though her body was supposed to be back in perfect, normal condition, nausea attacked her.
Kia had returned to the abandoned district townscape.
Even amid all the destruction, the buildings of the town alone remained unnaturally pristine and unharmed.
She would search for Elea. She had killed Mestelexil, so she should have the time to do so.
“Why?”
There was a voice.
A subunit with three legs on a spherical body rolled around at Kia’s feet.
“…”
“You want, to look for Elea, right?”
Mestelexil had died.
However, her attack hadn’t been one with intent behind it, but Word Arts utilized as part of an automatic defensive response.
Kia the World Word wasn’t aware of the homunculus that served as the golem’s core. Even if the golem was killed, the homunculus would regenerate the golem, and if the homunculus was killed, the golem would regenerate the homunculus. Furthermore, they could not be killed simultaneously. This was Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge.
“Why’re you still aliv—”
“You won’t look for her?”
“…!”
She was searching. She had been this whole time.
It was the entire reason she was, at that very moment, looking around the buildings in the abandoned district.
Kia’s actions weren’t inconsistent at all.
What could a construct like Mestelexil possibly understand about Kia?
“Shut up. Just forget it…”
“Why don’t, you look for, her?”
It was an artless question, the kind a child asked out of pure curiosity.
Mestelexil was a weapon that possessed inhuman learning capabilities.
He understood.
Kia’s Word Arts could process impossible-to-process information that surpassed her own understanding and perception.
If she was capable of that from the start, then this battle should have never even happened in the first place.
Kia had unconsciously forgotten the Word Arts she had feverishly used during the Lithia fire.
Truly simple and minor Word Arts that just made a piece of cloth move.
In order to search, together with Elea, for Lana the Moon Tempest after she went missing.
Why didn’t I…
This was what Mestelexil was trying to say to her.
…use Word Arts to search for her right from the start?
Her heart pounded loudly in her chest.
Though her body was supposed to be back in perfect, normal condition, sweat poured unendingly out of her.
She understood. These simple, straightforward Word Arts could tell her.
Really, there hadn’t been any need at all to run around, gather information, or even battle Mestelexil.
“F-find…”
She could tell the cloth gripped in her fist was shaking.
That wasn’t it. It was Kia’s own hand that was trembling.
Even though she knew they were words she must not say, she couldn’t help but murmur them to herself.
Since maybe there was the chance they could meet again.
Because she would be forced to fight Mestelexil nonstop until she could confirm if Elea was here or not.
“Find Elea.”
Kia’s Word Arts had definitely communicated with the scrap of cloth.
Omnipotent Word Arts.
No matter where in this world Elea was, they should have led the way.
“…I’m telling you…to find her… Come on.”
The fabric didn’t move.
She had hoped to see her again.
The truth—being chased as a criminal and living out her days unable to talk with anyone else—had been unbearable.
Even if she had to endure such torment, she had hoped to someday find the best way to go about things, negotiate with Sephite, and be reunited with Elea once more.
She had to see her again.
“A-ahhh…”
Because, if she was truly never able to see Elea again…
It meant that, back then, Kia had let her die.
“No. No, no… Find her! Find Elea! Elea… Elea…”
Despite her tearful shouts, even as she took out all her anger on it, the fabric didn’t budge.
These should have been such easy and simple Word Arts. She would’ve been happy with even the slightest bit of movement.
“Ah—”
Her tear-drenched eyes looked at the scenery out in front of her.
The dead, empty city she had desperately tried to protect.
Elea the Red Tag was nowhere to be found in their world.
She would never get her back.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
Kia screamed.
She wasn’t begging the world but instead haphazardly commanded it out of rage.
“Break!”
As commanded, the abandoned residences were smashed apart and disappeared.
Absolutely anything and everything in this world would become whatever Kia wished it to be.
She made a mockery of it.
“Break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break!”
The abandoned district in the Dogae Basin was annihilated without a trace.
Kia the World Word had wished for it.
After destroying absolutely everything in her sights, Kia disappeared.
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