"Only absolute power."
"Can claim absolute authority?"
On that point, Su Yuzu had no argument.
But as for that other line of Kujou Iruka's—
A trump card is the sort of thing where whoever shows it first loses.
About that, Su Yuzu had a few objections.
She wasn't entirely sure why Kujou Iruka's movements and strength no longer felt as brutal as they had before.
But the situation was still tilting, slowly and steadily, in Kujou Iruka's favor.
For Kujou Iruka, the Seventh Sequence [Seat of Garan], to lose to Su Yuzu would have been the abnormal outcome.
Even with the black thorns helping — so that from the outside it looked as though Su Yuzu and her thorns had Kujou Iruka jammed flat against the ceiling.
Kujou Iruka was still clawing back the initiative, inch by inch.
She caught Su Yuzu's wrist in a counter-grip.
Seizing the moment while the girl flinched away from the whisper against her ear.
Twisting her body hard against the girl's scissored legs, Kujou Iruka seized her yuri opportunity.
Thud—
A single dull impact.
The tide between Su Yuzu and Kujou Iruka flipped in an instant. Up on the ceiling, Kujou Iruka had Su Yuzu pinned once more.
The black thorns looked ready to bind them both up together.
Wrists and ankles wrapped in thick thorns, Kujou Iruka bore down on Su Yuzu with her full weight, having successfully trapped one of Su Yuzu's wrists in return.
Her grip still crushed Su Yuzu's wrist hard enough to sting.
Even so — compared with that terrifying Seventh Sequence avatar of the Abyss from before, what Kujou Iruka was doing now could almost be called gentle.
A "Rule" was called a Rule for one reason only.
Because Rules could not be resisted, and could not be crossed.
Even that Seventh Sequence Dream Demon of years past could not resist the "Rule" of the Witch who crawled up out of hell's famine-starved dead.
As the first-generation rule-type ability user.
Her "Rule" could grant all things in creation an equal death.
And in the end—
She chose to embrace the Catastrophe Beast that had thrown the world into ruin.
Holding it close, and walking with it into the end of death.
Long ago, when Kujou Iruka marched on the Tokyo metropolitan area, she too was barred at its edge by the power of Saint Michael's "Word of Command."
And even after Saint Michael 'died,' she still could not set half a foot inside the Tokyo metropolitan area.
Not until the radiant power of Saint Michael that blanketed the sky above the Tokyo metropolitan area vanished completely.
Only then could she finally step across that boundary.
Eighteen years—
A full eighteen years.
The Little Sister who had once done nothing but babble in a soft milky voice and tug at her trouser leg calling her Sister had grown up, come of age, and become a Superintendent in the Investigation Bureau's Fourth Action Division.
Had even, to her shame, gone and turned herself into somebody else's 'pet.'
That was how overbearing the power of a "Rule" was.
And Su Yuzu's rule — however ridiculous it sometimes looked.
However useless it seemed against living beings.
But—
Not even a being like Kujou Iruka was exempt from it.
Little by little, without her ever noticing, certain notions inside Kujou Iruka had been Twisted.
For instance, right now she found she couldn't quite bring herself to be rough.
Or, for instance… she'd started thinking Yuzu's scent smelled rather better than it used to.
Even with that cold little face, the girl looked somewhat adorable.
Su Yuzu, of course, cared about none of that.
All she knew was that this woman had just finished toying with Soga Yura.
Soga Yura had to be half out of her mind with panic by now.
Even if she couldn't make it back to the Tokyo metropolitan area herself, she had to get word to her Sister, and fast.
But her phone was still in Kujou Iruka's hands.
Which was when the regret set in — why on earth hadn't Soga Yura's Favorability broken through the 99-point mark yet?
If it had… she could have written a letter home directly onto Soga Yura's underwear.
Then trigger a remote one-click outfit change, swap out Soga Yura's clothes, and deliver the message that way.
Come to think of it, she could deliver the message by changing Kujou Katora's clothes instead.
Have Kujou Katora go comfort Soga Yura, tell Sister not to worry.
That she was 'perfectly safe' right now.
As for how to make Kujou Katora notice what was written on the note.
Su Yuzu had no shortage of ways.
It was just… Kujou Iruka had come hunting for her because of Kujou Katora in the first place, and here she was, about to use Kujou Katora's Loyalty and Favorability toward her to soothe her own Sister.
This strange, thoroughly warped four-cornered relationship between two pairs of sisters.
Wasn't that essentially her taking a hoe to Kujou Iruka's wall and poaching her sister right out from under her…
In any case—
She couldn't afford to stay passive any longer.
"So whoever shows their trump card first is the loser?" Su Yuzu strained against Kujou Iruka's grip, fighting to bend her wrist back and force her down again.
In a contest where neither of them wanted to hurt the other, the fight had degenerated into a pure trial of strength.
Only the sky outside the building kept changing.
Flickering back and forth between that gray, all-color-stripping shade of a domain that seemed to peel every hue off the world, and Kujou Iruka's almost signature, fissure-like domain state.
The shifting light stained the little face of the deadpan, expressionless Aberrant girl sitting on the floor, so that her coloring flipped back and forth right along with the sky.
She let Su Yuzu and Kujou Iruka wreck the place from end to end.
For an Aberrant girl who had received no orders from her boss, the sunshine today was lovely.
Then Su Yuzu changed the rule of her Twist without warning.
The concept of space she had inverted at the start of her earlier counterattack snapped back into place.
The ceiling resumed its duties as a ceiling.
Su Yuzu and Kujou Iruka dropped straight down off it.
Pinned beneath Kujou Iruka the whole way, Su Yuzu took back the initiative once more.
And this time was different from the last.
Because Su Yuzu and Kujou Iruka landed inside Su Yuzu's Thorned Crown thicket.
These squirming, writhing thorns — clingy in the most literal, "physical" sense of the word — actually possessed a certain natural countering property where beautiful girls were concerned.
Even someone as ruthless as Kujou Iruka.
When Su Yuzu's thorns first coiled around her wrists, she'd felt an instinctive flicker of unease.
You could never quite stop wondering whether the thorns might push their luck.
Whether they might go ahead and stage an outright scene of the underling violating its better.
It was only that those thorns bore Su Yuzu's mark far too deeply, so under ordinary circumstances Kujou Iruka wasn't all that uncomfortable around them.
But… falling into the thorn thicket together with Su Yuzu herself was another matter entirely.
The thorns didn't prick.
Yet Kujou Iruka could not shake the feeling that these twisting, madly spreading thorns were about to do something every bit as shameless as their mistress would.
Kujou Iruka tried to struggle free.
But Su Yuzu had fought so hard for this opening — there was no chance she'd let a yuri opportunity this good slip past.
Thorns wound up along Kujou Iruka's limbs.
And Su Yuzu threw her whole body into holding Kujou Iruka down.
At the same moment, white Kirishika bloomed at Su Yuzu's throat, blossoming in full, dazzling splendor.
Su Yuzu hadn't been left with nothing but that kimono of hers, which by now hung off her in tatters.
She still had Kirishika.
The world's foremost Holy Relic — [Godmother's Laurel].
And what it held within it was, likewise, the power of a Rule.
"You—!!!"
"Kneel."
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