[Ding]
[Warning. Warning.]
Red warning prompts kept streaking past in front of Su Yuzu.
[Entering Boss Battle...]
[--Aberrant: Garan--]
Su Yuzu paid no attention whatsoever to whatever her system was trying to tell her. Right now, all she wanted was to fight her way back.
As for Kujou Iruka, the thought had never once crossed her mind—
That Su Yuzu could be provoked this easily. Like a powder keg. One spark, and she blew.
"Yesterday she was still such a sweet, easily bullied child."
"And now..."
"And now, just like that, she's bared her fangs."
Kujou Iruka could understand Su Yuzu flying into a rage over her bringing up Soga Yura, turning into an "adorable" "little cat gone feral."
What Kujou Iruka couldn't understand was how a few simple words could push Su Yuzu straight into a "fight to the death" with her.
Wasn't she worried about her Sister?
Wasn't she afraid that once she fell into the Edge of Aberration, there would be no coming back?
Or did she believe she'd already been driven into a corner?
That the moment had come to throw her life into a single strike?
Kujou Iruka couldn't work it out. It left her a little rattled, even.
"All I wanted..."
"was to toy with the girl a little."
As a Seventh Sequence calamity, Kujou Iruka regarded human beings as ants.
And yet... how could she not envy those ants?
These ants could earn the pity of Lady Fate.
These ants could hold their own families in their arms.
Could watch the people they loved grow up, bit by bit, and grow old, bit by bit.
She hadn't expected—
That Su Yuzu could throw all of that away so absolutely.
The gray domain had already unfolded — a domain that stripped away every color in the world save the brilliant, blazing hue of their two pairs of eyes.
Caught on the back foot, still half a beat behind, Kujou Iruka was pinned in an instant.
Su Yuzu had one hand clamped around Kujou Iruka's wrist.
At the same time, she drove her knee up between Kujou Iruka's.
The very concept of space seemed to have been wrung out of shape.
For Su Yuzu and Kujou Iruka, the ceiling of that plain Japanese-style room might as well have been the floor.
Inside the room, the utterly expressionless Aberrant girl simply tipped her head back and watched in silence as the two of them "wrestled" together up on the ceiling.
She seemed to possess no thoughts at all — a doll that happened to move, waiting for Kujou Iruka's orders.
Right now, Su Yuzu's one regret was that she didn't have the [War Maiden's Contract] with her. If she had... she would absolutely have signed her name across Kujou Iruka's body.
And then... she'd have made this woman understand exactly what became of anyone who casually used Soga Yura as leverage against her.
But unfortunately... Su Yuzu didn't have it.
The Contract she'd prepared specifically for Kujou Iruka had, after the reigning champion of gacha misfortune pulled off-banner and landed Tsukiyomi Fuya instead, been spent forcing Tsukiyomi Fuya into marriage.
And Kujou Iruka, after a brief stretch of blank confusion and being pinned, came back to herself fast.
She was, in the end, an invincible Seventh Sequence powerhouse.
If that Boss Battle title were the name she went by,
then she would be the Seventh Sequence "Seat of Garan."
Like Su Yuzu, she held authority and power capable of altering this world outright.
And on top of that... she was far, far stronger than Su Yuzu.
The wrist the girl had seized began to rise — slowly, steadily, inch by inch.
The legs the girl had pinned gathered strength and locked back around Su Yuzu's own.
She intended to shoulder the weight Su Yuzu bore down on her with and rise anyway.
To crush the girl against her chest and watch that slender waist bend backward into a lovely arc.
With Su Yuzu's flexibility and softness, holding a pose like that would be no strain at all.
But... wouldn't that just mean getting pinned and bullied by Kujou Iruka all over again?
Su Yuzu clenched Kujou Iruka's wrist with everything she had, pouring nearly all her strength into forcing the woman down beneath her.
A fight between one Throne and another turned out to involve far less flash of blades than one might imagine — or perhaps both Su Yuzu and Kujou Iruka were quietly holding back.
Two girls with their clothes in disarray, tangled together and grappling. The picture was honestly rather nice to look at.
But Kujou Iruka was a Seventh Sequence Senior, after all.
Su Yuzu had only barely scraped her way to the Third Sequence — and even if going dark made her ten times stronger, the gulf between them remained a chasm that could never be crossed.
"Nngh, ahhhh—" A straining whimper squeezed its way out of the girl's throat.
And bit by bit, the fight tilted against her.
Pitch-black thorns curled and surged out of the shadow behind Su Yuzu, winding around Kujou Iruka's wrists and ankles, lending their strength to their master's.
They were the physical form of the power buried deepest inside Su Yuzu.
The physical form of the "Seat of Karma"'s power.
Those thorns were far more than mere constructs of energy. What they represented... was Su Yuzu's rule — a rule that could Twist even the world itself.
The black thorns strained to pin Kujou Iruka flat against the ceiling so their master could finish locking her down.
Kujou Iruka's expression, however, held no particular panic.
"You know~"
"Sister Yuzu..." Kujou Iruka shamelessly lifted her head and murmured right against Su Yuzu's ear.
Su Yuzu's neck flinched in, and she twisted her head aside on reflex to escape those lips.
Kujou Iruka didn't mind in the slightest.
Smiling, she reached to catch Su Yuzu's other hand — and in the end the two of them simply ended up gripping each other, fingers locked tight.
Whatever—
It didn't matter.
Kujou Iruka looked at Su Yuzu. "A trump card—"
"whoever shows it first... is the one who loses."
Even now, Kujou Iruka wore the face of someone with victory already in hand.
The woman looked like a mentor patiently instructing a cute, easily bullied junior.
True enough... a Throne.
Su Yuzu was hardly the only one who had one.
Before Su Yuzu was ever born, Kujou Iruka had already been seated upon hers.
A pitch-black domain unfurled in full — one more despair-inducing than even the gray domain Su Yuzu had spread.
It was nothing like Su Yuzu's domain, which stripped everything bare.
Nothing like the Seat of Evil's domain either, which crept outward like crystallizing metal.
Kujou Iruka's domain looked as though the world itself had been ripped open.
It was a fissure.
It was an Abyss.
An Abyss that tore the world apart.
Kujou Iruka pressed harder, degree by degree.
Gradually wrenching her way back out of the disadvantage.
What she failed to notice was that the strength she used kept growing "gentler," carefully measured, as though she couldn't bear to hurt Su Yuzu.
If the Kujou Iruka of moments ago had been a brutal war chariot that wanted nothing more than to roll straight over Su Yuzu—
and whatever became of Yuzu once the wheels had passed was no concern of hers—
then now... her movements had turned gentle as a signet pressing into wax, or a mold closing around clay.
She only wanted to shape Yuzu into her own form.
"Rule—"
"Now taking effect."
Su Yuzu's "ultimate lady-killer" ability was doing its work without a sound.
The power of rules is the hardest power of all to guard against.
Somewhere along the way, the thought Kujou Iruka had been nursing — of thoroughly ravaging her junior until the girl learned some manners — had been quietly erased.
Now... all she wanted was to make Su Yuzu understand how strong she was.
To flaunt that strength, and flaunt it hard.
"Only absolute power," Kujou Iruka said, slowly raising the arm Su Yuzu had clamped down on and hooking it forcefully around the girl's shoulders.
"can hold absolute rights."
"..."
Inside the Japanese-style room.
The Aberrant girl knelt quietly on the tatami, head tipped back, watching the two of them grapple on the ceiling.
Into the wordless girl's mind, an image surfaced without warning: a black peacock.
She looked out past the room at the sun, stripped of its colors and its glare by the domains of Su Yuzu and Kujou Iruka.
Today, too, was a beautiful day.
____
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