Imbuing

“—Aha.”

While everyone around them stood speechless at the person who had come plunging out of the sky, Katya swept her hair back and looked at Noelle.

“The person you were going to introduce me to — this one?”

Her eyes glittered with interest as she said it.

Why had this human come to be known as ‘Deathwish’ in the first place? She had earned the nickname because she took an interest in absolutely anyone capable of killing her.

“…”

And while Katya was dropping lines like that, Aiden was edging toward Noelle a little at a time, because he had an intuition bordering on certainty about the ‘situation’ that was about to follow.

Inside the game, keeping the lead-class characters from crossing paths wherever possible was practically a cardinal rule, one that absolutely had to be observed. Every one of them was so much larger than life that putting any two together often meant a collision. But if you had to pick the pair with the worst compatibility of them all, it was these two by a mile.

The Lionhearted and Deathwish.

The reason was simple. When it came to ‘personality’, their affinity was quite literally the worst possible. Call it a model student meeting a lunatic; neither could make sense of the other’s principles of action if their lives depended on it.

“The Lionhearted, though. Now that one I’ve got expectations for.”

At that, Noelle tilted her head.

“—Expectations? Of what, exactly?”
“You. Want to try killing me?”

“…”

Noelle looked at Katya without expression, then at Aiden’s resigned face, and one eyebrow twitched. Happily, since Aiden had called her saying he was in danger, she seemed to have worked out for certain which of the things here was the ‘danger factor’. As far as she knew, there could be only one human who would rattle off insanity like that without so much as blinking.

“…Would you be Her Highness Katya Heinkel Craven.”
“That’s right, that’s right.”
“I do not believe I heard any word of a visit to the Empire.”
“Mm.”
“I will hear the particulars at the Capital Command. If you would go through the formal entry procedures there as well—”
“That’s enough lip service.”

With a crack, Katya loosened the joints of her hands. She carelessly stripped off even the coat she always wore and tossed it onto the ground, and to anyone’s eyes she had the air of someone making herself ‘fully ready’.

“You’re not going to fight?”

“…”

Noelle’s mouth shut tight as a clam. She was plainly reeling at an opponent who skipped straight past every bit of context and cut to the point.

“If I’m going to die, I have to die with everything I’ve got poured out. Without a fight, that can’t even happen.”

But.

The moment Noelle heard the words Katya tossed out, her gaze turned heavy and dark.

“—There are civilians nearby. I would ask you to drop these absurd demands.”

Even setting aside the diplomatic and other political problems a fight between these two would raise, this would be a collision between one of the Holy Kingdom’s own handful of monsters and the strongest living Knight. A clash like that could not help but throw off a shockwave, and every single person nearby would plainly be caught up in it.

Yet the moment she heard that, Katya let out a snort.

“So?”

“…”

“Why do you care about people who aren’t even important?”

A fury she could no longer hide slowly surfaced on Noelle’s face. One of these humans did not care what it took so long as she got what she wanted; the other had thrown her whole life into morality and justice. The two were never going to see eye to eye, and Katya’s next words, sighed out as though the whole business were a bother, made that plain enough.

“Then let’s do it this way. If you won’t fight me, I’ll start by walking around here and killing everything I can see.”

“…”

“And then I’ll kill that husband over there, right in front of your eyes. That ought to be reason enough to fight—”

Pure-white ki burst violently out of Noelle’s body. Her battle stance brimmed with ‘killing intent’, and Aiden suspected it was the first time he had seen anything like it from her since the day they met.

“—Good.”

And of course, there was one lunatic who smiled with satisfaction the moment she saw it.

“That’s more like it.”

The instant the words left her, flames vast enough to light up the whole night sky shot up around Katya’s body.

And then.

The two supernatural powers collided, and an explosion as bright as the dawn sun burst out violently.

He’d known it would turn out like this. That was the thought he turned over while floating freely several meters up, as though gravity had ceased to exist.

Sure enough, exactly as he had expected, the shockwave from the instant the two of them collided was enough by itself to sweep up everything in the vicinity and send it fluttering. Soon he slammed straight into the stone paving and went clattering and rolling along the ground. Even through the searing pain that swallowed his whole body, Aiden’s mind was racing at full tilt.

‘Solving’ the problem that had landed here was now his burden alone, work the ‘protagonist’ had originally been meant to do.

This really is the worst.

The very thing he had wanted so badly to avoid was right under his nose: getting tangled up deep inside the main scenario. He wanted to run even now. He wanted to drop all of this and go far, far away, somewhere out of reach.

But if he took no measures, then in all likelihood every human nearby would die as well. Even Noelle, who had come here because he had ‘called’ her, would be put in danger.

And soon enough, he would die too.

“…”

To stop that, he had to subdue Katya Heinkel Craven over there, by whatever means. First things first.

“—Hup!”

Aiden shot to his feet and looked over the humans around him, who were rolling about on the ground exactly as he had been. Every one of them wore a dumbfounded face, their wits plainly knocked clean out of them by the sight of two fighters from the very summit of the superhuman world colliding. Among them, what he was looking for turned up at once.

“Hey.”

Aiden dashed over to a vicious-looking man who sat blank-faced, clutching a single box tight to his chest.

“Give me that.”

What the man was cradling as preciously as a family heirloom was the hellfire bomb, the ultra-high-firepower weapon that even Katya had shown a moment’s interest in.

“W-why should I do what you say—”

The man was trying somehow to squeeze out a threat, wanting to keep up a vicious front despite the state he was in. Aiden grinned and cut him off.

“You don’t see that?”

As he said it, he pointed at Katya, who was flying bare-handed at Noelle and her drawn sword. Tongues of flame lashed out and collided with ki.

“Believe me. If we don’t help that Knight over there right this second, we’re all dead.”
“What do you mean—”
“The Knight can’t put out her full strength. Because we might get caught up in it.”

Ranked on combat strength, of course, Katya and Noelle were much of a muchness, but anyone could see it was Noelle who had the shackles on. Katya would not care in the slightest about collateral damage, while Noelle had to fight with one eye on the safety of the civilians and of Aiden. Katya was not fool enough to miss even that much, which meant what she would do in a situation like this followed naturally.

“And that lunatic over there is the type to decide the Knight can’t use her strength because of what’s lying around, and then kill every last one of us to fix it, you follow?”

“…”

“If you can’t believe me, do you want to sit there sucking your thumb and die along with the rest of us?”

“You’re holding back an awful lot, Lionhearted!”

His words had barely ended when a mad, ear-piercing laugh burst out of Katya behind them.

“Is it because there are obstacles lying around? Shall I clear them away for you?”
“…For a start.”

Noelle answered flatly, her expressionless face gone cold.

“Before I put you in front of a court, it seems you will have to learn some basic decency first. Your Highness.”

A longsword wreathed in pure-white ki met a fist invested with The First Vow, and a violent explosion burst out from both sides, lighting up the night sky all over again. Over where Aiden was, everyone went rolling along the ground screaming, just as before. Even at a fair distance from where the killing blows were being traded, people were flapping through the air like sheets of paper, which was ridiculous to see.

“See?”

“…”

Aiden had gone rolling along the ground with the rest of them, and when he said so, his face thick with dust, the man held the box out to him as though spellbound.

Aiden took it, shot to his feet again, and ran the numbers in his head faster still. For materials, this was all he needed; what remained was the tool to handle them with. Right now, he needed three things.

He had brought these over by spending the skill-copy rights allotted to Noelle, Katya, and Dunadan respectively.

And, lastly.

“…”

Bile rose from his stomach, and Aiden clenched his teeth until his gums all but bled. What he was about to do was a road with no coming back, a one-way ticket to hell. There would be no turning around, not until the main scenario ‘ended’.

Even so.

If he did not do it, he would die. And there were people who would grieve if he died. For an instant, his family’s faces flitted before his eyes.

Dad. Sicella.

Right. He could not die in this place. Rather than watch those two cry, he would sooner go through hell once and have done with it.

Looks like I’m going to be a little late coming home.

Aiden took a deep breath and checked the feel of the revolver inside his coat. What met his hand was terrifyingly cold.

For a veteran Knight who had come through a historical event like the Coalition War, it would be no exaggeration to say she had seen every picture of hell imaginable.

Even so, Noelle could find only one verdict to pass on her opponent.

Absurd.

“Ha—!”

Katya rushed her with divinity wrapped around her whole body, at a speed so insane that only the beginning and the result of the motion seemed to exist. The speed was one thing, but the pressure of the divinity lodged in that body was enough to make even Noelle dizzy. Flames streamed around her in ropes, so dense that a mere glance left afterimages clinging beneath the optic nerve and confused even Noelle’s sense of brightness.

“Law. I swear it.”

Quietly, under her breath, she offered the consecration. Even with the overwhelming output of her ki, simple operation alone could barely hold this opponent off. Enhancement was indispensable.

“The safety of the guiltless.”

Ki, markedly more powerful than before, settled into her regulation longsword. Then she swung several cuts at empty air. Attacking from a distance where nothing could land looked useless at first glance, and yet Katya’s body, charging in from a good way off, was cut to pieces in an instant.

The slash had ‘leapt over’ space. Manipulate the ki lodged in a blade precisely enough, with transcendent concentration, and even an impossible feat like this came easily. Only ki made such a technique possible, thanks to an advantage in output the other supernatural powers rarely had.

But.

“—…!”

Noelle clenched her teeth and twisted aside. Katya, now a lump of flame, shot straight through the spot where she had stood an instant earlier; a moment’s delay and Noelle would have been caught and struck.

“You’re good! I’ve never seen anything like that!”

The state Katya was in as she said it was horrific past all description: severed ribs, muscles worn to tatters and showing at the cut surface. This woman had, just now, died ‘again’. Even so, the smile hanging on the princess’s face showed no sign of subsiding.

This was precisely why one ended up passing the verdict ‘absurd’. She made no attempt to dodge even a single attack, taking every one of them as she pushed in, fatal wounds beyond counting. And she showed not so much as a sign of tiring. Not one drop of blood spilled.

“But. You know.”

No, it went beyond even that.

“Even now, not a thing—”

The scream burst out of her as though she were sobbing. Mixed into a mad laugh that sounded like something tearing, it came out like crying and laughing at once.

“—I can’t feel it!”

As Katya charged in again on those words, Noelle let out a sigh and raised her sword once more.

At this rate—

She would not be able to subdue her. If anything, she herself might be the one to go down.

“…”

Noelle flicked her gaze aside. She still had any number of moves she had not brought out, but the safety of the people around them was the problem. If she began to fight in earnest, casualties would come as no surprise.

It must have been around then that Noelle spotted ‘something odd’.

…Aiden?

She could see Aiden straining to haul along the box held against his chest. When his eyes met hers for a moment, he waved his hands about hurriedly. She could not tell exactly, but he seemed to be telling her to ‘draw her over’ this way.

“…”

Plainly he had some scheme in mind. Noelle gave a faint nod and threw herself in that direction.

Just as she had said herself, Katya was repeating nothing but simple charges, as though the aim were to somehow ‘burn off’ her own overflowing power through combat, so drawing her to a given spot was not so difficult. Like a matador, Noelle slipped aside from the charging Katya and led her to the place Aiden had asked for.

In that same moment, the bomb Aiden had set there in advance detonated with a roar that seemed to shake the heavens.

The hellfire bomb was a weapon normally used to bring down high-rise buildings, and by rights the whole area should have been blown away. Instead, a small ‘dome’ formed at the hypocenter in an instant. Its shape was much like the one Noelle had once made with pure-white ki, except that this time it served to isolate only the hellfire bomb’s explosion, and Katya inside it.

Impressive.

Noelle wiped the sweat away and marveled at it inwardly. Using a defensive force field this way was a method that had never once occurred to her.

The application was one thing, but stranger still was the durability of a dome that had withstood that explosion. Even with the purest ki, holding a blast of that size inside so narrow a range would take several conditions being met, and doing it in so short a time without so much as a consecration was hard even for her. Most likely that was because the supernatural power composing the dome was of a kind unfamiliar even to her. She had seen it once before, at that: divinity mixed with ki.

—Output close to ki, firepower close to divinity—

The dome took only the advantages of both supernatural powers, so although Aiden operated ki exactly as she did, the result was all but a straight upgrade.

“—It was a good try!”

But this was plainly no situation for deep contemplation of such things. Torn all over by supersonic fragments and burning all over in the blast heat, Katya must have ‘died’ dozens of times in there from that alone. And yet a savage light still shone in her eyes as she tore at the defensive force field with her hands.

“There’s a long way to go yet before anything ends with this much—”
“I wasn’t hoping for that.”

Aiden’s level voice cut flatly across her sentence.

“That was just for ‘stripping it off’. If I’m going to shoot at all, I have to make you at least a little weaker first.”

At some point he had come to stand right beside Katya, revolver in hand.

The divinity packed through Katya’s body served, in itself, as both sword and shield, and it was generated at the ‘heart’, the origin point of every supernatural power. That was what Aiden was aiming for. The hellfire bomb had been there to weaken, for a moment, the divinity guarding it like an iron wall. Regenerating her body dozens of times over must have been quite a labor even for her, because the flames wrapped around her had plainly lost force.

“—You know.”

Katya glared at Aiden, genuinely incredulous.

“You stack up the whole preparation so nicely, and then the thing you bring out at the end is a toy like that?”

And of course, she had a point. Her body had taken a hellfire bomb square on and survived without a single wound; landing a meaningful blow on Katya with one tiny bullet would be impossible no matter who attempted it. Set against the monstrous explosion of a moment before, Aiden standing in front of her with a small firearm in hand looked almost shabby.

But.

“Well, now.”

Aiden sighed and drew back the revolver’s hammer.

“I think this will be plenty.”

At the sight, Noelle felt an odd sense of déjà vu, and one eyebrow twitched. She had seen this perhaps twice, but it had been burned so fiercely into her brain that she could name it at once: the feeling she got just before something ‘absurd’ broke out around Aiden.

“Law, I swear it.”

The first, a consecration, settled into the trigger. Pure-white ki rode down his finger at his will and lodged there.

“This lowly one offers a prayer.”

The second, a vow, settled into the barrel. This was the skill copied from Katya, the ‘correct’ prayer formula of the vow, which he himself had never learned. Flames shot up out of his body and coiled into the barrel.

And, lastly.

“O Jewel, O Lotus, send forth your radiance.”

The third, a mantra, settled into the bullet. This was the dharma power he had learned not long before, the last condition he needed to perform ‘supernatural power imbuing’ on a weapon. Of course, since he had yet to lay an interdiction, it was only half of one.

What a load of crap.

That was exactly why he was about to do something truly awkward. The more an interdiction defined a ‘purpose’ its subject would find hard to reach, the stronger the dharma power grew, because the color of ki, the temperature of divinity, and the ‘difficulty’ of an interdiction each set the minimum output of that supernatural power.

The pure-white ki he held was powerful, of course, and The First Vow was an outrageous ability too. But with those alone he fell a long way short of punching through the endless wellspring of supernatural power that the monster over there, swaggering about as she drove Noelle back, had been born with. Not unless one more ability ‘on a par’ with the two he had already eaten dropped into his hands, at least, and that was out of the question. Set against the ‘Unique’ skills he had scraped off the main scenario’s leads, the dharma power he held was a supernatural power with no characteristic whatsoever.

But.

He knew one method for making it special.

When it came to a ‘unique’ interdiction that nobody else possessed, one thing came to mind.

“And so, I—”

In that respect, there was only one ‘oath’ he could offer the God of the Supreme Vehicle in this situation. The only one of its kind in all the world: the oath that, ‘by the original’s standard’, a single person alone ever offered to Urgan.

“—will save the world.”

It belonged to the one who was not here. The ‘protagonist’s karma’.¹

With that message, ‘power’ settled into the round. The force that had risen the whole length of the revolver joined together and sublimated into a single ‘energy’ lodged there, and in that instant Aiden pulled the trigger.

— …

— …

— KRRRRRRRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!

“—Oh, hell, that’s insane!”

An aftershock dreadful enough to wring an instant curse out of even Noelle rolled out, and a ferocious power no one would believe had come from a revolver tore forward, trailing light like a meteor.

It smashed Katya’s body clean to pieces.

Her blood, not one drop of which had ever flowed until now, sprayed in every direction.