Episode 8: From the Once-Destroyed Dimension

In Base Dimension terms, this was two hours earlier.

"I'm off! Bye bye, Kotoha! Take care!"

I—the real Koito Hikari—said that as I walked out of the women's restroom and headed off. My destination was the rocket's boarding gate. In the wide, empty corridor, only my footsteps echoed. I felt like crying. But I kept smiling.

(Kotoha was seriously bawling back there.)

That made me kind of happy, actually. The fact that he cared about me that much.

"...Alright!"

So I decided I'd do my best. I felt like I could fight for everyone. I wasn't scared at all. But because of that, I noticed the man's gaze just a split second too late.

"—'Maiden of Gévaudan.'"

"Kyah!"

A slit-shaped hole opened directly beneath me. I couldn't react in time and fell right in. The drop was barely three meters, so I only landed on my rear—but still.

"Ow ow ow... wait... huh? Where is this?"

I had been walking through the Space Development Center's administrative building hallway. Falling three meters should have just dropped me into a basement level. But this place...

"Sky?"

Blue sky, seawater shallow enough to reach my ankles, and—a staggering number of ruined towers. It was outside. A vast expanse of ruins, and I recognized those towers.

(This is... from District 9... that cathedral, right...?)

This was a Chaos Institute building. The massive bell in the distance was the golden bell that used to sit atop the Chaos Institute's main academy building—their symbol. Now it was half-submerged in seawater, miserably half-destroyed.

(Why... is the Chaos Institute... like it's been... destroyed...?)

I stood up. The seawater splashed. There was a man standing right in front of me.

"Koito... Hikari...!"

—A skull-masked man. He called my name with hatred dripping from his voice. Apparently we had some kind of grudge between us. But I didn't have time to deal with someone like this.

"...Whatever. I'm busy. So, bye bye~"

I wrapped myself in cherry-pink miracles, floated up, and flew toward the slit-shaped gap in the sky—the hole I'd just fallen through, the passage back to reality.

"Myah!"

But the moment I tried to return, the hole closed shut. Trapped. I got irritated—because honestly, I'd wanted to keep chatting with Kotoha. There was no time left, and now this guy was stealing what little I had.

"—I've been waiting for this moment."

The man murmured. I at least glanced his way, while thinking about how to get out of this subspace. At minimum, the blue sky seemed to stretch on infinitely.

"The moment when it becomes too late to turn back. The moment to deal Azure Academy a fatal blow. The moment I can guarantee all of you are heading toward death..."

"Hey. Whatever, but how do I get out of here?"

"There is no way out."

I pulled out my guitar and gathered cherry-pink miracles.

"Okay. Then I'll just blast my way through."

An explosive burst of energy shot from the tip of my guitar, incinerating the man's body in an instant.

"...Wait, crap. I shouldn't have blown him to bits like that."

Eli-chan would scold me. If I made him unidentifiable, we wouldn't be able to figure out which Anti-Reality organization sent this assassin. This kind of thing happened a lot.

"—Hoia Baciu."

A nail pierced my chest. And not just any nail—a wooden one, absurdly long, more like a spear than a nail. There was no pain. But my body wouldn't move an inch.

"That shitty, disgusting, trash-heap, stench-spreading, pathetic excuse for a body of yours—I forbid it from moving even a fingertip, even as much as an ant's foreleg."

Not bad, I thought. I had pretty good resistance to abilities like this. But just as the man said, I couldn't move a single finger. I could barely move my eyes, so I looked at him.

(He slipped away pretty neatly.)

The skull-masked man had crawled out from a gap he'd made in the ground. He must have used the same ability that dropped me here—creating a subspace in the ground to escape into.

What surprised me even more was the translucent girl standing behind him.

(That's the one who was talking with Kotoha at the Sky Tournament—)

—Magina Avram. Her Slash was "Hoia Baciu." An ability that verbally forbids a target's actions. She should have been a third-year at Chaos Institute, but... she looked much older now.

(Mid-twenties, maybe.)

I finally realized this was the man Luna-san had warned us about.

"...Who are you?"

"I'm the one who will kill all of you."

I thought for a moment. What exactly was this world? Definitely a subspace, but what kind of properties did it have? I searched through my memories.

(Wait. I've seen an ability like this before.)

At the Sky Tournament the other day, the girl in the commentator's booth had used a Gunscar—"All-Alarm." An ability to travel through Recorded Worlds. If it were that ability, it could probably create a world like this.

"If I remember right... the name was... Isis Hareed?"

When I murmured that, the skull-masked man's shoulder twitched.

(That's right. The one who opened the hole in the ground was the Gunscar of that girl Léa who's close with Kotoha—the "Maiden of Gévaudan" ability! This guy is using multiple abilities. Some kind of copy-type ability, maybe?)

Thinking it through, I realized something. All the abilities he was using belonged to Chaos Institute students. Could this man be an assassin sent by Chaos? That academy did consider me quite dangerous.

"...You know Isis?"

"Know her? Well... I know her name at least. She was using her ability pretty flashily at the Sky Tournament. If I recall, her younger sister should be executing an operation with Simon right now."

"...Huh? Nadia is—with Von Simon? ...With that bastard?"

He gritted his teeth hard, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. It seemed I wasn't the only target of his grudge.

"What exactly is this? Are you an assassin sent by Chaos, or something like that?"

"...I'm here by my own will. To slaughter you. To slaughter all of you."

Through his mask, I glimpsed a scar. I felt like I'd seen it before. Something told me I should properly think about who he was—just intuition, but my intuition was usually spot-on.

"So basically—you came to fight me one-on-one?"

"...Yeah. That's right. You monster, the strongest of humanity. I came to stall for time."

The man's voice filled with dark pleasure—the smile of someone who had fallen into despair, overflowing at the thought of their sole hope: revenge.

"Sending Koito Hikari against the Necromancy Dimension and losing. I thought humanity would be annihilated. ...But they're sending you against the 'Star Whale.' I can't let you reach the Star Whale."

"You're stalling me? What's the point of that? You'll die too, you know."

"If I die and all of you are destroyed along with me, I don't mind at all. But... that won't happen."

The man turned his pitch-black eyes, steeped in despair, toward me.

"If you don't make it to Ibis-2's launch time, what do you think will happen?"

"What?... Nothing happens. We lose. The world ends. That's all there is to it."

"—Kotoyorozu Kotoha will take your place."

For a moment, I was slow to process that. Then I immediately understood.

(That's right. If Kotoha uses his copy Gunscar—"noapusa"—)

His ability was unfathomable. That was because even Azure Academy hadn't conducted those experiments yet. They were proceeding slowly and carefully, considering the impact on his identity and on others.

"...Heh, haha... Kotoha wouldn't do something like that. He's a smart kid. He doesn't act without thinking."

"No, he will. I know. Only I know."

The cherry-pink miracles were slowly analyzing "Hoia Baciu." Just a little more and the nail would come loose. Even so, I noticed my breathing had grown ragged.

"That pathetic loser will definitely become Koito Hikari. He's already realized it—that he could become 100% identical to you, that he could take your place. He will definitely board that rocket. Because that's the shape of his soul."

"Who... are you?"

The man smiled like a grim reaper. A pitch-black smile, hardened with hatred and resolve.

"—I am the ferryman of the underworld. The one who carries your sins, along with your souls."

The nail pulled free from my chest. The skull-masked man conjured a massive handgun in his grip—a brutish weapon that evoked the functional beauty of death, like a guillotine.

(No time. I have to put this guy out of commission right now!)

The moment the nail came free, I created three copies of myself with my cherry-blossom miracle. They split left and right, closed the distance to the man in an instant, and raised their pure-white guitars in unison.

"...I'm sorry, everyone. Lend me your strength. Let me fulfill the promise."

The man murmured quietly.

"Let's go. —Bard and Poetry."

[Bard and Poetry — Spread the Wings] [Gunscar][Endpoint]

A Gunscar that desecrates the dead. Through the Universal Source Code, it recreates the nature of those the owner once spent time with who have already died. The more time the owner spent with the deceased, the deeper the love the owner held for them, the more desperately the owner wished to see them again—the more powerfully their nature manifests.

The cost is this very act itself.

It was a forbidden Gunscar that could resurrect the dead. I understood that at a single glance.

(Because, those eyes—)

The translucent girl named Léa gazed at him with eyes on the verge of tears. As if to say, "You don't have to do this." And yet she quietly watched me with a fierce resolve to protect the one she loved no matter what. A gaze of compassion, sorrow, and determination—the eyes of the dead watching the living.

"Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!"

My three copies tried to crush the man. But right before they could, the chainsaw held by the translucent Léa Cœur de Lumière flashed with light.

[Maiden of Gévaudan — Chant de prière] [Slash][Endpoint]

A Slash that inverts. Whatever the chainsaw touches is inverted. An ability she awakened just once in her life—to protect the husband and daughter she loved. A Slash reflecting her resolve to protect them no matter what.

The cost is her memories of the happy times.

"Wha...!?"

A single chainsaw deflected every attack from my copies. The moment they touched it, they were "inverted"—flesh and skin turned inside out, their cherry-blossom glow shifted to ashen-pink, and they swung their guitars straight at me.

(My copies got "inverted" and... turned into my enemies!?)

One of them had somehow slipped behind me and cracked me across the back of the head. I hit the ground with ridiculous force. It hurt like hell.

"Fmyah."

I sat there seeing stars, little chicks circling my head, while the three ashen-pink copies closed in. They enlarged their guitars and swung them down to flatten me.

"Don't... get so... cocky..."

—Cherry Red Pistol, released.

"WITH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

I swung my guitar with everything I had. The impact was devastating—it blew my copies away all at once and annihilated them. My grin lasted only a moment. At the far end of that shockwave, the translucent Léa Cœur de Lumière floated there like a ghost.

"Wha...!"

—Maiden of Gévaudan — Endpoint.

Her beautiful, glowing chainsaw touched the shockwave and inverted it. Like a tsunami, it came rushing right back at me where I lay. I tried to dodge into the sky, but—

"You're not getting away. ...Hoia Baciu. —Your feet won't move."

The nail sprouting from my foot briefly stitched me to the ground.

(This is bad...!)

My full-power attack came right back at me, exactly as I'd thrown it. No way I was getting through this unscathed.

The devastating impact shattered every bone in my body. My cherry-blossom miracle repaired them in an instant, but I still couldn't stand. Lying in a crater gouged into the earth with cold seawater pouring over my head, I finally understood.

"Both your Slash and Gunscar carry the resonance of Parallel Law. You're... from a parallel dimension, aren't you?"

A parallel dimension—a sibling dimension to our own. A world among infinite choices where something turned out just slightly different. In other words, a parallel world.

"In your dimension... is this what happened to Chaos Institute?"

This subspace was probably a Recorded World created with All-Alarm—a world the skull-masked man had memorized somewhere, once. He had come from a parallel world where District 9 had been destroyed.

"Yeah. —You destroyed it."

"...!"

"In my dimension, Azure Academy first wiped out Corporations. It happened in a single night. A cowardly surprise attack. Next, they went around slaughtering the weaker academies. We gathered the remaining factions and fought back against Azure Academy. Azure Academy destroyed the surface, killed every living thing, and—"

He looked at Léa with tears threatening to spill from his eyes.

"—Killed everyone I ever loved."

I couldn't make sense of it.

(Azure Academy... destroyed the world?)

At the very least, he was someone who had come from a parallel world that had met such a fate. Time probably flowed differently there too. The translucent Léa looked to be in her mid-twenties, so their world was at least ten years ahead of ours.

(But I don't care about that.)

Because that's a story about a different world's version of us. Not the us living here and now. Maybe it's something I should think hard about someday, but at the very least—not now.

"You all cannot be allowed to live any longer."

The skull-masked man pointed his Gunscar at me where I lay.

"You think you can do it? With that flimsy gun of yours? Kill me?"

I stood up. Sure, all my bones had been broken and I'd been on death's door, but I was healed now. Honestly, Léa's chainsaw had rattled me pretty bad—but that was all. The man laughed.

"...Of course I don't. There's no way someone like me could beat a monster like you."

The man's eyes sank into darkness.

"—But Kotoyorozu Kotoha will die from this."

"...!"

"The biggest nuisance from Azure Academy isn't you. It's Kotoyorozu Kotoha. He can transform into you, into anyone else, with perfect accuracy—the most dangerous one in all of Azure Academy."

"You... from the very start..."

"You're just strong. You have overwhelming power. That's all. Under the right conditions, you can be killed. Kotoyorozu Kotoha isn't like that. He can become any disaster. There's no way to prepare against him. He's the one who needs to die first."

The blood drained from my face.

(Kill Kotoha?)

He was an ordinary boy you could find anywhere. He had no desire to be a hero. No desire to save the world. He was the kind of boy who could smile and be happy just eating something delicious with the people he cared about.

(That kid—he's just like me.)

That's why I felt happy when he looked happy. That's why I wanted him to find happiness. And yet, this man was saying what? That scrawny little boy—from the very beginning—?

"...Get out of my way."

My throat felt dry and scratchy. The smell of blood rose from somewhere deep in my nose.

"I won't. Even if it costs me my life."

"Shut up. Get out of my way."

In a few dozen minutes, if I didn't kill this man and escape this subspace, Kotoha would go to space in my place. He would use my exact same power—one hundred percent identical—and face the Star Whale.

—I didn't want that. I just didn't.

"You're in my way."

I kicked off the ground with everything I had and raised my guitar. The one who shielded him was the silver-haired maiden—Léa. Her chainsaw inverted the impact, shattering my guitar into splinters.

"—!!"

The instant my guitar broke, I punched her in the gut with everything I had. The impact alone blew away her physical form, and the ghostly girl was reduced to ashes in an instant.

"GET OUT OF MY WAAAAAY!!"

I screamed. Like a wolf. The momentum of my punch carried me into a low stance, and I kicked off the ground—without a trace of grace or showmanship—and lunged at the skull-masked man.

"I can't beat you. Absolutely not. But you know—"

"Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!"

What blew my lunging body away was an enormous harpoon meant for whales. But that wasn't just it. Dozens of warriors surrounded the area within ten meters of where I'd been blasted back, their weapons already raised.

"But! I can buy time! Koito Hikari!"

Dozens of weapons pierced my body. I didn't care. I didn't care about my pain—it was always like this. But more than that. More than that.

"—GET OUT OF MY WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!"

A wail of anguish echoed through the seawater-soaked ruins.