"Eeek—!!!!" The sound was almost a wail of grief.
Pitch-black wings snapped wide open.
The Japanese-style house, which had never looked all that sturdy to begin with, was swept into splinters by Kujou Iruka's wings.
The taciturn Aberrant girl tilted her head back and looked at the sun.
The domains unfurled by two clashing Thrones had stained it a cold white—you could stare straight into it now, and it didn't hurt at all.
Her own immediate superior's voice was almost a wail of grief.
And yet the Aberrant girl only thought the weather today was lovely. Quiet. Peaceful.
If Catastrophe Crystals were the true bodies of the Aberrants—
then consider that Kujou Iruka was the first character in the game to have wings, and the only winged character Su Yuzu had ever laid eyes on.
Her wings were exactly what the ahoge was to the little rabbit.
The truest part of a true body.
And right now, someone had taken a bite out of Kujou Iruka's true body.
That was right—
Under normal circumstances, Su Yuzu, who was only Third Sequence, would have had trouble even scratching Kujou Iruka's defenses.
Even Saint Michael, all those years ago, had sacrificed herself only to hold Kujou Iruka back—to keep her from setting foot in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
But… that was under normal circumstances.
Su Yuzu's current state clearly did not qualify as normal.
She was "feeding."
Kujou Iruka's wings did look a bit tough. Next to the clothes clinging to a beautiful girl's body, they even looked a little hard to get down.
But they were, after all, the physical manifestation of the Catastrophe Crystals belonging to the Seventh Sequence, the Seat of Garan.
The higher the Sequence rank of the Aberrants Su Yuzu got her mouth on, the less fabric there was on them—which was to say, the less surface area the Catastrophe Crystals covered—until at the highest end she might be reduced to making do with a lick. By comparison—
this came with the unexpected satisfaction of tearing into a proper mouthful of meat.
The indestructible wing of the Seventh Sequence Seat of Garan went crack.
A small notch appeared in it.
The pitch-black wings shuddered and trembled, and Kujou Iruka's face wore, of all things, the look of someone who had been thoroughly and utterly bullied.
For an instant, those brilliant dark-golden eyes went almost hollow.
Kujou Iruka had never once imagined it—
the armor that Saint Michael's searing Holy Light had failed to punch through had just been bitten open.
At the center of the storm, terror washed over Su Yuzu's face like a physical wind.
The moment her teeth closed, an endless Calamity Aura, deep and dreadful as the Abyss itself, detonated outward.
The Aberrant girl standing nearest the "battlefield" of Kujou Iruka and Su Yuzu sank to her knees as though receiving a baptism, palms pressed together, eyes shut in prayer.
Her power climbed at a furious rate while Kujou Iruka trembled.
In the Tokyo metropolitan area—
countless pairs of eyes were watching the power erupting from Kujou Iruka.
Catastrophe swept across the world, staining everything visible on the face of the earth with the color of the Abyss.
A sight that magnificent, that terrible, they had witnessed only once before—more than twenty years ago, when Kujou Iruka first lost control and fell into the Abyss.
None of them knew what Kujou Iruka intended to do.
An attack?
After enduring all these years, was Kujou Iruka finally preparing to attack?
Not one of them would ever have guessed that the reason her power had blown open like a runaway reactor was simply that somebody had bitten her.
Inside the Central Laboratory of Keigunen Private Academy.
Soga Yura stared at that black tide spreading madly across the land, her fists long since clenched bloodless.
Once again, she felt how weak she was.
Breaking through to the Fourth Sequence hadn't given her the sense that she finally had the strength to protect Yuzu.
If anything, the farther she went, the smaller she understood herself to be.
The Seat of Evil.
Kujou Iruka…
Fourth Sequence power was less and less enough.
Even if she threw herself into the Abyss and jumped a whole rank in one go, that would only make her Fifth Sequence.
How was someone like her supposed to keep Yuzu safe?
Beside her, sensing the turmoil and struggle inside her best friend—and "sister-in-law"—Sakura Mai took Soga Yura's hand.
"It's all right—"
"Yuzu…"
"She's going to be fine. I know it."
—
Meanwhile, elsewhere—
Su Yuzu, the culprit behind all of it, had already blacked out inside the world-ending blast of Kujou Iruka's power.
Having descended in an Aberrant's form herself, she naturally collected the benefits of Kujou Iruka's loss of control.
The power that came flooding into her from Kujou Iruka in that instant,
together with the power she had torn straight off Kujou Iruka's wing, was enough to carry Su Yuzu from Level 33 to Level 35.
That was the kind of growth that would otherwise have cost her heaven only knew how many Advanced Combat Records, painstakingly harvested from the girls.
But… Su Yuzu didn't care in the slightest about the levels.
Even unconscious, a smile spread across her face—the smile of a winner.
She knew perfectly well that a single bite wouldn't do Kujou Iruka much harm.
But it was her first counterattack after being pushed around for so long. And the fiercest one she had in her.
In the game—
every time Kujou Iruka took heavy damage, her figure would flicker once, and then her health would start racing back up.
A boss with a health bar close to ten thousand, and you'd grind away at it for half a day with paper-cut damage.
Then, right when you'd finally scraped off half the bar, she'd flicker—and up her HP would climb, tick after tick, heading straight for full.
That maddening, curse-out-loud sense of futility was Kujou Iruka's boss mechanic:
"Garan."
And that heal happened three times per fight.
It was also why the campaign name for this World Boss fight was the "Kujou Iruka Interception Battle."
From the very start… the objective had never been anything but interception.
Kujou Iruka was a monster with an "undying" mechanic.
Even if you brought the Holy Relic obtained from the Boss fight's side story—the Mouth of the Silent One—and shut down her regeneration,
all you achieved was defeating her.
In the defeat CG:
Kujou Iruka kneeling on the sand, letting the seawater wash up over her thighs.
Lifting her face with such a fragile, pitiful look that you wanted to haul her back to the Home system, lay her across your lap, spank her backside raw, and give her a very thorough education.
And in the game, whenever the need arose later, they'd absolutely drag Kujou Iruka's corpse out for another whipping.
Summer events, beach events—any event that needed to sell some fanservice could trot her out as a dungeon Boss.
"The invincible Kujou Iruka is back!"
"And this time her evil scheme is… to get her hands on the Operators' skin-tight swimsuits." And so on, and so forth.
In that domain of deepest dark, Kujou Iruka's figure flickered.
The notch a girl had bitten out of her wing was whole again, as if it had never happened.
But those eyes of hers, once so dangerous, written over with disdain and arrogance and absolute solitude, were brimming now, shimmering with unshed tears.
She watched Su Yuzu falling, and her fingertips shook.
The Kujou Iruka of before would have already put an arrow through her.
But… somehow, this version of her couldn't do it.
Was it because, ever since she fell into the Edge of Aberration, it had been so terribly long since anything had made her shiver like that?
It seemed… no. That wasn't it.
It seemed to be only because the troublemaker who had sunk her teeth into her wing so viciously was Su Yuzu.
That was all.
If Saint Michael's Word of Command could make the world forget her,
then Su Yuzu's Twist could make the whole world sink for her.
Kujou Iruka spread her wings and watched the kimono-clad Aberrant girl rise from her knees, catch Su Yuzu, and gather her up in her arms.
"Lian—"
Kujou Iruka looked at the kimono hanging off Su Yuzu in tatters.
She looked at the wreckage strewn all around them.
Even in that domain of deepest dark, the lines of the girl's body showing faintly through the shredded cloth made it impossible to look away.
"Tidy this up." Kujou Iruka's voice came out softer than it had ever been.
Honestly? It sounded rather wonderful.
"And get her a change of clothes."
"Yes—" The girl, expressionless as a doll from beginning to end, gave a small nod.
At that same moment—
Su Yuzu, fully unconscious and sinking into the dark,
seemed to hear a chime she knew well and hadn't heard in a very long time.
[Ding]
[An Operator available to Recruit has been detected.]
[Recruit?]
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