Chapter 1: The Plan That Leads to a Small World

Two weeks had passed since the death of Fuankilo Legacy.

The few visitors who came to see her empty coffin, which was enshrined in the temple of the holy land Metasim, had dwindled to almost none. Even the death of a high-ranking officer had already been filed away as just one more corpse among many. Part of it was that she’d been a noncombatant, someone who had left behind no flashy exploits for people to remember.

Yet when it came to fundraising, base management, and torture, she had been head and shoulders above the rest. Very few understood just how large the void left by Fuankilo’s absence truly was.

One believer who knew better than anyone how exceptional she had been simply couldn’t let her go.

“Fuankilo-sama… I’ve come again today.”

In the underground sanctuary beneath the temple, where the empty coffin lay, a gray-haired heretic knelt before the box. Her stiletto heels dug into the stone floor as the hem of her tight skirt brushed the ground—an outfit carefully modeled after Fuankilo’s own.

Her name was Karatena Wallmix, a woman who called herself Fuankilo’s number one disciple and a candidate for the next generation of executives.

Karatena had never accepted Fuankilo’s so-called accidental death. If anything, she had gone so far as to suspect that Oakley Mercury, the man Fuankilo had been keeping an eye on while she was alive, had been involved somehow.

She had no proof. It was little more than an obsession bordering on delusion. Ironically, this wild suspicion came far closer to the truth than she knew.

Karatena let memories of Fuankilo rise to the surface.

The days they spent torturing Orthodoxy believers side by side, competing over whose victims yielded more and better information. Their youth spent honing and refining their techniques together, sharing whispered conversations in the basement between screams.

When she looked back on that life, on those routines that would never return, she bit down on the ache in her chest and felt a vast, desolate loneliness swallow her whole.

Fuankilo really did look after people.

Her colleagues called Fuankilo prickly, abrasive, unfriendly. The whispers around her were all sharp edges and bad reviews. But from Karatena’s point of view, Fuankilo had been a reliable superior and something very close to an older sister.

To Karatena, Fuankilo was a fundamentally cautious person. She simply could not picture that woman of all people “accidentally” stumbling and falling into a smelting furnace.

A high-ranking officer who was all but immortal, dying because she just so happened to fall into a smelting furnace? It made no sense.

Besides, there had been that time she’d casually revealed the bomb implanted in her own body, laughing as she called it her “emergency escape device.”

No… Someone killed her. Someone has to have killed her.

The uneasy thought in Karatena’s mind slowly hardened into conviction.

A lock of hair slid loose and tickled her cheek, jerking her back to reality. Somehow, she’d spent hours in front of the coffin, lost in thought.

“This won’t do.” Smiling faintly, the woman rose to her feet. After coming to the temple every day for about a week, her thoughts had finally settled.

She had to uncover the truth behind Fuankilo Legacy’s death. That was her calling. And more than that, the prime suspect, Oakley, needed to be dragged into the light and punished.

Lately, Oakley Mercury seemed to be on very friendly terms with Joanne Sagamix. If she asked Joanne to cooperate with the investigation, she was sure they could rip that mask right off his face. She didn’t yet know how he’d managed to kill Fuankilo, but she would make him pay for it.

“I swear I’ll see your grudge avenged… and lay Oakley’s head right here at your feet.”

With a sharp whirl of gray hair, Karatena turned her back on the temple and walked away.

※※※

Two weeks had passed since we welcomed the newly brainwashed Joanne into our ranks. Once the uproar finally died down, I decided it was time to move to the next phase—brainwashing Celestia the same way.

“Let’s go over our objective one more time,” I said. “In order to bring down the Aros Temple Cult, we first need to break the brainwashing placed on Celestia. If we can overwrite her thoughts through organ exchange, all the better… We’ll just proceed to brainwash the rest of the executives the same way.”

“Hearing it laid out like that, it sounds completely insane,” Joanne replied calmly.

“You’re the last person who gets to say that, you know?”

After reaffirming our goal, Joanne and I started our search for Celestia.

Joanne and I exchanged organs, engraving each other’s personalities into our very souls. That might be the reason she’s changed so much. Calmer than before, too. Probably my influence mixed into her.

Back then, she’d been the kind of girl who looked best when she threw her head back and laughed, baring her jagged teeth with a wild grin. Now, she pressed her emotions down and smiled in this slow, sultry way.

I couldn’t help but find it unsettling. She was too understanding, too composed, and that stirred a faint dread in me. Did I make an irreversible choice that night?

Under the fixed gaze of those distinctive eyes of hers, I felt like I was being watched every second, a tight, unpleasant knot twisting in my stomach. I hugged my own body, trying to shake off the unease, when Pawk Tedlotus wandered into my field of vision.

“Oh, Pawk-sama. Fancy meeting you here,” I greeted.

“Hm? If it isn’t Oakley,” she said.

“I’m looking for Celestia.”

Pawk rolled her shoulders in a helpless shrug, the very picture of “give it up already.” “I’m sure she’s gone invisible and is hiding out somewhere,” she said. “You two used to be enemies, remember? I bet it’s awkward for her just walking around the base.”

Celestia had originally been an executive on the Orthodoxy side, with a long history of life-or-death battles against us heretics.

Just like Pawk said, roaming freely through our stronghold probably felt unbearably awkward. At the same time, holing up in Fuankilo’s now-empty private room would almost certainly rub people the wrong way and make her hesitate.

“Well then, I’ve got things to take care of, so I’ll leave you to it. When you don’t have anything to do, make sure you rest with everything you’ve got, okay?”

“Thanks for worrying about me,” I said with a smile.

“And don’t trash your room again.”

“Ah… Right…”

The one who’d cleaned up the disaster of a room after Joanne and I had done our organ exchange there had been Pawk. Even though she was a heretic executive, I still felt bad for making her handle the aftermath.

I watched the androgynous beauty in men’s clothes wave her hand lazily as she walked away, then went back to searching.

Just then, as I was running all over the holy land Metasim, a man stepped toward me.

“Yo, Oakley-senpai, afternoon! You out here looking for someone?”

I didn’t recognize the man. His cheeks were sunken, dark circles pooled under his eyes, and the close-cropped gold buzz cut, shaved in uneven patches, only added to the sickly impression he gave off.

The fact that he knew my name probably just meant I’d gotten famous within the cult.

But this blond buzzcut bozo was way too suspicious to be called “friendly.” That soft smile he wore—the kind that was supposed to make him look like a nice, gentle soul—only made my skin crawl.

“I’m looking for Celestia. You know where she is?” I asked.

“Ahh, Celestia-sama, huh?” His thin brows arched upward, and he nodded with a little glint of interest. Since he seemed like he knew something, I pressed him about Celestia’s whereabouts. In response, he lifted a knobby finger and pointed toward the clock tower. “Probably over there,” he said in a vague, airy tone.

Feeling a faint, nameless wrongness prickling under my skin, I thanked him and moved on.

The chill hit me when I actually found Celestia on the balcony of the clock tower.

How the hell did that guy know exactly where an invisible Celestia was hiding?

The blond man was already gone. I shoved the thought to the back of my mind, convincing myself that I was just overthinking it.

I fixed my eyes on a single point on the balcony. The background looked warped, like the surface of water trembling in place. Celestia had to be hiding there.

The refraction of the air wasn’t quite enough. Then again, if she wasn’t seriously trying to vanish, this was probably plenty.

I thrust my hand into the distorted space.

Squish.

“Kyah!” A sharp, girlish cry rang out. I jerked my hand back on instinct.

That was… ridiculously soft. What did I just touch?

“S-Sorry!” I exclaimed.

Cold sweat trailed down my back as I waited for a response. A moment later, Celestia bled into view, as if seeping out from the air itself. Hands planted on her hips, cheeks puffed out, she was visibly fuming. I did not dare ask exactly where my hand had landed.

She started, “To just suddenly grab a lady’s body like that…”

“I really am sorry. But seriously, you being invisible makes it a pain to find you,” I said.

“Ah… I see. My apologies.”

“So, what are you doing up here?”

“They’re constructing the main facilities under Metasim. I was helping with that. I’m on break now, and… I’d rather not go back.”

Now that she’d dropped her invisibility, Celestia sat down on the edge of the balcony and leaned her cheek into one hand.

Under the holy land Metasim, construction work was underway to build new facilities. The plan was to construct a whole complex of human production facilities, research centers, and educational institutions—the backbone of the cult’s future funding.

“With wind magic, you’d be a real star on-site, you know.”

I tossed out the tease, and Celestia let out a strained little sound, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Yeah… It’s just, this world is so different from the one I knew that it’s… mentally exhausting,” she murmured.

“You mean the gestation sacs?” I asked.

“Yes…”

During the construction of the facility, she must have had plenty of chances—whether carrying them, installing them, or just working around them—where she couldn’t avoid encountering those things. Even Celestia, for all her composure, seemed worn down by it; her expression clouded as she stared off into the distance.

Just thinking about the gestation sacs is enough to make me recoil.

It wasn’t only that they’d implanted false memories into me. The very fact that I’d been born from a lump of flesh that didn’t even resemble a human body filled me with a deep, visceral disgust.

Having real, blood-related parents, what should have been an ordinary, unquestioned assumption, turned out to be nothing but an illusion. That alone dealt a heavy psychological blow, pressing down on my heart like a weight.

If I don’t want any more people to be sacrificed like that… I’ll have to settle things with those human production facilities someday.

To erase the cult from the world, it wouldn’t be enough simply to defeat the seven executives. Systematically destroying the facilities that formed its operational backbone would be just as effective.

“By the way, Celestia, feel like taking your mind off things for a bit?” I asked with a smirk.

“Yes. Very much so!”

“Good. Then come with me. This should be perfect for a change of pace.”

“Understood.”

By “taking her mind off things,” I meant the organ-exchange experiment.

Since the procedure could trigger changes in personality, in some cases, it might completely rewrite the way a person thought. Calling it a change of pace wasn’t entirely inaccurate.

Having effectively abducted Celestia, I brought her to the torture room where Joanne was waiting. I closed the door behind us and locked it, trapping Celestia between us, with Joanne at her back and me in front. No escape routes left.

“We’re about to begin an experiment,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“It’ll hurt a little, but I need you to bear with it.”

“That blade of yours doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

“I’ll give you a quick rundown of the experiment,” I said. “From here on, we’re going to swap your organs with Joanne’s, then observe you both for a few days. That’s the basic outline.”

“Ugh… where do you even come up with such grotesque ideas? It’s disgusting…”

Lured in by the promise of a change of pace, Celestia let out a voice full of disappointment and disillusionment once she heard what that actually meant.

“Isn’t this just you forcing your hobbies on me?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “That kind of thing is Joanne’s specialty.”

“So that’s how you see me?”

“Well, yeah.”

I already had Pawk’s permission.

When I’d asked to run an organ-exchange between Joanne and Celestia and then perform a Transfer on top of that to see what would happen, she’d cut me off halfway with a weary, “Do whatever you want already,” and washed her hands of it.

Having an executive personally sign off on me doing whatever I wanted to Celestia? Couldn’t ask for better.

Maybe something in me really had snapped the night everything changed, because I could put a scalpel to both of their bodies now without the slightest hesitation.

The organs going into Celestia had originally been mine. But no normal person could tell one set of guts from another just by looking, and Celestia was no exception. She never noticed a thing. She simply accepted my organs into her body without question.

If anyone could have seen through it, it’d be Stella. She was far too sensitive to the smell of blood and flesh.

I’d given Joanne a heads-up beforehand, and we agreed she’d keep her distance from Stella for the next few days. In the end, it turned out to be needless worry. Stella had already returned to the Northeastern Branch.

Two days later, when I saw Celestia looking exactly the same as ever, I finally reached a conclusion.

Secondary transplants didn’t trigger memory transfer.

No change had appeared in Joanne either, despite her having received Celestia’s organs. That was the biggest mystery of all.

“With that, the experiment’s over. You really helped us out,” I said.

“No, please, if there’s any way I can be of service, call on me anytime… Though, well, I’d really rather never do this again.”

“Can’t blame you.”

After putting their insides back where they belonged and letting Celestia go, I chewed over the results in my head.

Secondary transplants didn’t trigger memory transfer.

No, that part was still acceptable. What I couldn’t wrap my head around was why Joanne, who had carried Celestia’s organs for a couple of days, showed no signs of memory transfer at all.

I, on the other hand, had started suffering from it immediately after receiving Joanne’s heart. Sure, individual differences exist in how the human body handles all kinds of processes, but for neither of them to show any change after two whole days was completely outside my expectations.

So in the end, whether memory transfer happens or not comes down to luck? Right now, that’s the only conclusion I’ve got… and it’s a damn problem.

I’d been scheming to use memory transfer to destroy the cult from the inside. Now that I was staring straight at how unreliable it really was, all the wind went out of my sails.

If not that, then how was I supposed to deal with the executives and bring the cult down?

It’s not going to go as cleanly as it did with Fuankilo and Joanne. Those two cases were miracles, freak events that only happened because a bunch of conditions lined up just right…

Even with a surprise attack, I couldn’t picture myself taking down any of the other executives. I’d pinned my hopes on organ exchange, and now the whole plan lay in pieces.

As I sat there stewing, a familiar husky voice brushed against my ears from behind, as if it had slipped straight into my thoughts.

“You and I share a bond of hearts, and we love each other more than anyone in this world. That’s why it happened. That phenomenon belongs to us alone.”

I jolted upright, startled by Joanne cutting in on my inner monologue out of nowhere.

“Can something that convenient really be possible?” I asked.

“It’s happening in front of you. Deal with it,” she replied.

“Well. When you put it that way.”

Maybe the time we’d spent together, the emotions we’d built up—maybe those were factors in whether memory transfer took root.

If I could overwrite someone a full hundred percent with my own thoughts, it’d be a viable option. But if not, it was just a high-risk, low-return blunder of a strategy.

With that, we were out of ways to undo Celestia’s brainwashing. At this point, the only thing that came to mind was having the Orthodoxy executive Cress Walker use his lightning magic to tinker with her brain circuitry, otherwise called a “reverse brainwashing.”

“This plan’s a bust, Oakley. What’re you gonna do now?” Joanne asked.

“We’ll put undoing Celestia’s brainwashing on hold for now. From here, I’m planning to head to the Northeastern Branch and at least build up some basic strength.”

“You iced Fuankilo, didn’t you? I’d say you’re already pretty strong.”

“No. I still have a long way to go.”

“Hmm.”

She had a point. By most standards, I was fairly strong now.

But I couldn’t possibly be satisfied with “fairly strong.”

Because I knew someone like Alfie Judgment existed, an outlier, a walking exception.

Back in the original game, Seeker of the Netherworld, there had been a status system, and the protagonist, the playable character Alfie, could grow nearly without limit.

To give a few examples of his feats: there was a route where he faced Joanne one-on-one and beat her to a pulp in a straight brawl. Another where, despite not even being an executive, he casually knocked Stella’s magic aside with his sword. There were a handful of stories like that, scenes that were just a little too absurd to be called ordinary.

In key route battles against heretic executives, upon meeting the right conditions, Alfie could power up enough to defeat them head-on.

Even though Alfie was technically classified as a normal civilian, his accomplishments were so monstrous that fans jokingly called him an “exceptional extraordinary,” a not-so-subtle way of saying he’d broken out of the human category altogether.

You could say Alfie represented the upper limit of how strong a so-called “ordinary person” could possibly become.

His growth and power had only ever existed in the game’s world, of course. Here and now, in this reality, I had no idea how far I could go until I tried.

I started rebuilding my plans from the ground up, refining them in my head. Just as I was about to share them with Joanne standing in front of me, her chaotic eyes narrowed slightly.

“Hey, Oakley. You’re not… avoiding me, are you?”

“Come again?”

“You rewrote me, and yet you’ve been walking on eggshells. Why?” Joanne leaned in and peered up into my face. I couldn’t even begin to read her expression.

Before, she’d been fatally bad at lying or hiding anything. Every emotion she felt showed right on her face. If she tried to spit out a lie, her eyes would dart around, and she’d trip all over her own lines. She’d always been that kind of easy-to-read person.

But now, Joanne was different. In every way that mattered, she’d changed.

And facing that changed version of her, I’d apparently started to act differently without even realizing it. Joanne spoke in a level, almost eerily calm tone.

“I’m really hurt, you know. I was hoping that after being reborn, I’d finally be able to have a normal relationship with you, Oakley. But these past few days, you haven’t looked at me that way at all. Even last night, I was very obviously trying to seduce you, and you ignored every single signal. Not even letting me hope a little. Don’t you think that’s cruel? Even I have feelings, you know?”

From the moment she started speaking to the very end, the girl didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow.

Facing her head-on, I told her, “Right now is not the time to be wasting our energy on that kind of thing.”

“‘That kind of thing,’ huh?”

In an instant, a pitch-black fury roared out of her small frame. Since her awakening, this was the first time Joanne had openly shown emotion, and the alien pressure of it made me instinctively recoil.

She was plainly, undeniably disappointed in my answer. Joanne let out a long, heavy sigh and threw herself back into the torture chair.

“Let me put it to you in plain terms,” she said. “The cult, the Orthodoxy side—none of that ever mattered to me in the first place. I couldn’t care less. Everything except my future with you is garbage.”

“What?” I froze at the sudden confession. While my mind struggled to catch up, Joanne went on, a mad grin twisting across her face.

“All I want is eternity with you. I don’t need anyone else. Every other human being can disappear for all I care.”

This was the conclusion reached by the new Joanne. A chaos that had slipped completely off the rails of my own thought patterns now stood before me, wearing the shape of a girl I knew, and it brought with it a terrifying answer.

“Which means,” she said softly, “the faction that should win… is the third camp. Oakley Faction. We destroy the Kenneth Orthodoxy and the Aros Temple Cult. That loathsome phoenix of the Orthodoxy faith, the beloved cult founder I used to adore, every last one of them dies. The people of the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid… No, every human being in the entire world dies. The only ones who need to win are us. A small world for just the two of us. That’s the only true happy ending.”

The worst kind of chaos.

The silent, unseen fusion of our minds had surfaced in the ugliest possible form, and now it had started to drag me toward a future I knew nothing about.

“W-What… are you even talking about?” I asked.

Joanne was spitting out utter nonsense. I couldn’t follow her at all. It felt like the floor had vanished beneath my feet and I’d been dropped straight into an endless abyss.

Weren’t we the ones who staked our lives to melt our minds together, to share a single self? Weren’t we supposed to be partners with no secrets, bound together by fate?

“Oakley Faction…? You’re planning to trigger an internal split and drag things into even deeper chaos?”

“That’s right. Everyone in the cult trusts me. If I just keep my head down and play along until we’re ready, I think it’ll be easy to carry out the plan. Don’t you?”

“I mean…”

Joanne’s thick-soled boots tapped and scraped against the stone floor. That hard, clacking sound gnawed at my nerves. It merged with the pounding of my own heart and echoed in my skull, unbearably grating.

She walked over to where I’d unconsciously backed up against the wall and hopped onto the desk beside me. Letting her legs swing like a pendulum, she went on in a light, almost chatty tone.

“I’ve been thinking, you know. If we’re gonna wipe out the Aros Temple Cult and then live out our twilight years, there’s not much reason to cling to this idea of coexisting with the Kenneth Orthodoxy. You, Oakley… You were vaguely planning to wipe out the heretics and then just sort of drift over to the orthodox side, weren’t you?”

“That’s…”

“Let me flip it around and ask you instead. Why are you so hung up on defecting to the Orthodoxy? If surviving is all you care about, those guys are more likely to be dead weight than anything else. Or is there some reason I don’t know about? Some reason you just must cling to the Kenneth Orthodoxy…”

Joanne laced her fingers together and looked up at me from beneath her lashes, a gesture meant to shake me, to pull at my composure.

Now that our two minds had blended, the current Joanne was a warped mirror of my own true feelings.

I knew the answer to her question. It’d be stranger if I didn’t.

The reason I’m so fixated on the Kenneth Orthodoxy—

Because I carried knowledge of the original story, I understood the Orthodoxy far better than most. I had a solid grasp on their internal workings, more or less. With no fear of unknown threats on that side, of course, I was drawn to them, clinging to what felt “safe.”

“People who try to play nice with everyone never last long,” she continued. “Deep down, you’d already noticed, hadn’t you? Even if you keep going like this and manage to destroy the Aros Temple Cult, there won’t be any safe haven waiting for you on the other side, with the Kenneth Orthodoxy.”

What I’d brushed off as a proposal born from pure insanity, the founding of a third power, started to gain a disturbing weight, a terrible sort of plausibility, with every word she spoke.

“Don’t underestimate the absolute organizational power of the Orthodoxy. Those guys will hunt you to the ends of the earth and demand the execution of the one most responsible for destroying Daskel. Compared to the Aros Temple Cult, they’re a legitimate institution, but they show no mercy to anyone who defies them. They’ll keep coming until they’ve confirmed your corpse with their own eyes.”

Even so, I wanted the Kenneth Orthodoxy to win.

If Aros’s ambitions were ever fully realized, the millions of orthodox believers living in this country would be led straight to extinction. If stopping that calamity meant piling up sacrifices along the way, I was willing to pay the price.

If the Orthodoxy didn’t win, there was no point in me surviving at all. That conviction swirled in my chest like a dark vortex.

“And there’s your lifespan problem,” Joanne went on. “If you’ve got the wrong idea, I’m sorry to break it to you, but a human lifespan isn’t the time you stay healthy up to the moment you die.”

Once the topic of a lifespan came up, it was only natural to focus on a natural and healthy one.

A healthy lifespan would then be the span of years a person could live their daily life without needing anyone’s help.

Take Japan, for example, with an average ten-year gap between healthy lifespan and total life expectancy. In other words, for people born from gestation sacs like us, the average lifespan might correspond to a physical age of around thirty, but the period we could live healthily and independently would be even shorter than that. That was what Joanne was getting at.

People born in the facilities had their bodies pushed past their natural limits with drugs to accelerate their growth. As a result, the breakdown of their cells, from aging and every other cause, was accelerated too. I’d heard that believers who ended up bedridden early from the backlash of those drugs, unable to sustain their basic bodily functions, were turned into feed for the gestation sacs.

I was eighteen. Realistically, I had maybe twelve years of life left. But the window during which I could afford to throw my body around recklessly was far shorter.

“You don’t have nearly as much time left as you think to just retire and relax somewhere. At best, the next few years are going to be your peak, Oakley. And with all the crazy crap you’ve already put yourself through, who knows when things are going to start giving out. But with my plan, we can solve your lifespan problem. That’s what I wanted you to understand.”

So that’s it. I finally understood why Joanne was so set on building a third faction.

She wanted to save me.

The arrow that had once pointed toward Aros had lost its target, and all that force, all that mass of feeling, had swung around to stab into me instead. That was why she could talk about such insane things.

Before all this, I’d believed that once everything was resolved, I could just disappear somewhere, hide myself, and eke out a quiet little life.

But that little fantasy of mine had the usual flaw all daydreams suffer from: it quietly erased the entire process in the middle.

It never stopped to consider the concrete problem of how I’d actually shake off my pursuers. Or maybe deep down, I’d already understood it was impossible, and my subconscious simply gagged and buried any dissenting thoughts.

During her fusion with my mind, Joanne must have felt that contradiction inside me. She’d probably racked her brain, desperate to find a way to resolve it.

The answer she’d arrived at was the annihilation of both Orthodoxy and heresy at the hands of a third power.

A reckless solution from a girl who had decided that everyone except Oakley Mercury could burn.

The promise that she could solve my lifespan problem was tempting.

Human beings cling to life with a ferocity that borders on madness. No one could handle being told they had a high chance of being dead by thirty.

You can never escape death, yet you keep thinking of it as something that happens to other people in other stories. When it finally stands in front of you, just staying sane is a challenge. That’s what “death” really is.

“And how, exactly, do you plan to fix my short lifespan?”

“We take your brain and transplant it into one of the specimens in the incubation tanks. Move your self into a brand-new body. Do that, and you might as well call it eternal life.”

Joanne’s voice tapered off as she looked away. My eyebrow twitched in pure revulsion, and she gave a little flap of her hand, as if to wave off my reaction.

“Relax. I don’t have that kind of tech… yet. It’s just one possible option on the table.”

“Then what is your method?”

“Who knows? I can’t tell you.”… Maybe all she’d really wanted was to see whether I’d bite at the idea of escaping my early death. She’d dangled the bait just to find out whether I’d reach for it or not, and even that simple information, to her, was probably a major gain.

Her small lips curled into a bow-shaped smirk as she savored the fact that she’d found a weakness that might rattle me.

“I’ve killed a lot of people,” I said quietly. “And I made excuses for myself. Told myself it was to save the millions who’d die later otherwise. There’s no going back from that. I don’t get to suddenly start acting like my own life is the thing that matters most.”

“You really will die, you know,” she said. “You don’t want a future where you and I can spend an eternity together?”

“It’s tempting,” I admitted, “but there are things I can’t compromise on, things more important than that.”

The goal of surviving and slipping into retirement somewhere out of sight was something I’d only clung to before I realized my memories had been tampered with.

Now, the only path left was to accept my own death and keep moving forward anyway.

I was a monster who used the labels of “madman” and “savior” as shields, justifications for self-preservation. Part of me believed I had to accept whatever atonement and punishment came with that.

Joanne scoffed. “Fine. I’ll just keep trying to convince you.”

I’d thought we understood each other. In the end, this girl was still utterly insane. That realization hollowed me out with a fierce sense of futility, an empty exhaustion, and then crushed me beneath a heat like my whole body had caught fire with frustration.

So, I’ve got another enemy now? Joanne, who knows everything about me, turning into the leader of a third faction? N-No. I can’t. I’ll lose it…

Her proposal echoed in my skull.

If we just killed every last Kennethian and heretic, there’d be no threats left in this country. And on top of that, by some unknown method, I’d be freed from this short-lived body and get to spend eternity with my beloved Joanne.

Slowly, that image, so overflowing with bliss, floated up before my mind’s eye. The instant I so much as glanced at it, I felt Joanne’s consciousness seep into my own, like my very sense of self was being devoured.

My heart, stripped bare, was scraped away by a rough, red tongue.

I can’t let myself imagine that future.

The number of people who’d die was too different, on a scale that broke the mind. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lives, all snuffed out for the sake of one girl’s deranged love.

I could never allow that.

“Well, see you later, then.”

Her voice carried a note of regret as she crossed in front of me, head slightly bowed, heading for the door. She laid her hand on the knob and started to twist it—

And I caught her sleeve and pulled her back.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “Let’s destroy the Orthodoxy together.”

It was far too blatant, an obvious, brazen lie.

Her big eyes went wider still. She cupped my cheeks in both hands and forced me to face her directly.

“You mean that?”

“Yes. I do.”

Her grip was strong. So strong it felt like she might crack my molars, her fingers digging into my jaw as she stared straight into my eyes.

She absolutely knew it was a lie.

But Joanne didn’t call me out on it. That, too, was already factored into her thinking. Because she loved me so completely, she couldn’t bring herself to discard the possibility that I might actually mean it, that I might really lend her my strength.

No doubt it was my old indecisive, half-hearted nature that pushed her toward that choice. And just as I’d expected, her expression shifted from a brief, overcast gloom to a brilliant, cloudless smile.

“Ahh, I knew you’d understand. Thank you, Oakley… I love you.”

When I wrapped my arms around Joanne’s slender body, I could feel the tension melting out of her back, flowing away bit by bit.

She nibbled gently at my ear. The image of the earlobe sealed inside her pendant flashed through my mind, and at the same time, her tongue slipped into my ear canal.

“No running.”

Her voice was cold as ice, a chill that seeped straight into the bone. Along with it, a boiling, pitch-black mass of love and heat poured into me.

Then it hit me. I finally understood the true reason behind the unease I’d been feeling from Joanne all this time.

It wasn’t because we suddenly saw eye to eye or because it had become easy to get along with her.

It was the mad ambition coiled deep inside her, the thing born from the fusion of our two minds. A monster that far outstripped anything I had imagined.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You’re suffering because this cult came into being in the first place. At the very least, I swear I’ll wipe the Aros Temple Cult off the map. On that point, I want you to trust me.”

She was right. On that point, I could trust the current Joanne.

It’s just everything else I can’t trust at all.

I let my body go slack and surrendered myself to her.

After the chaos following Fuankilo’s death finally settled down, it was officially decided that I would be transferred to the Northeastern Branch.

On paper, it was for training. Apparently, this was the first time in the cult’s history that someone born from a gestation sac was being considered as an executive candidate. I now carried all of Aros’s expectations squarely on my shoulders.

Before a long expedition, there was, of course, one thing that had to be done: putting back the organs I’d swapped with Joanne.

“Hey, you there! Mind giving me a hand?” I asked.

“Who? Um… me?”

“Yeah, you. I want to run a little experiment.”

“Okaaay…”

I grabbed a gray-haired woman who happened to be nearby and roped her into helping with the organ swap. In the end, the two of us could have done it alone just fine, so all she really did was stand there, watching, face drained of blood.

“Funny, once it’s over, there’s hardly any blood at all,” she said.

“Don’t lie. I was absolutely on the verge of death.”

Thanks to the handy convenience of healing magic, the whole procedure took about an hour. We didn’t lose that much blood either, so after being out of commission for a day, I was back on my feet with full mobility.

Humans really are creatures of habit and learning.

A few days later, we set out for the Northeastern Branch.

“The thought of you getting even stronger sends a chill down my spine,” Pawk said, offering what had to be one of the rudest farewell comments I’d ever received.

And with that, we headed for the frozen lands.

The ones remaining in the holy land Metasim would be just two people: Aros and Pawk. Shadik had already been reassigned to another branch. My companions on the journey to the Northeastern Branch were Joanne and Celestia.

In name, Joanne was coming along to keep an eye on me, the next executive candidate, and to keep Stella in check. Celestia, for her part, was supposed to inspect the Northeastern Branch and then undergo some combat training.

That made it a pretty major operation; two executives relocating at once. On top of that, we had a few more who wanted to tag along.

Some believers who claimed to be “deeply moved” by my achievements, of all things, had volunteered to accompany us to the Northeastern Branch. I wanted to say, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” but… if I looked at my record objectively, it was annoyingly impressive.

Thanks to the incident with Steve, who’d been Pawk’s puppet, I’d sworn never to truly open my heart to anyone again.

And so, with that resolve firmly in place, we were all loaded into a carriage and began our journey to the Northeastern Branch.

It would take more than a week of travel, which would take us through the old castle stronghold.

Among the executives, Celestia had one of the fastest means of travel. She simply flew through the sky and disappeared ahead of us, making straight for the Northeastern Branch.

Joanne, who could effectively perform long-distance travel by throwing her own severed head, had still decided to sit in the same carriage as me and endure the long ride. She clung to my arm and didn’t say a word.

As if the scene from a few days ago had been a lie, she was now utterly, eerily quiet.

We shared the carriage with two other believers: the blond man with a buzzcut and a plain, taciturn man. I was only familiar with the former.

Not that I liked him. From the very first time we’d met, he’d left a bad taste in my mouth. That fixed, pasted-on smile of his was just too disturbing. We weren’t on chatting terms, and the silence between us was suffocating.

Joanne kept her arms coiled around mine, staring steadily at the other two. The air in the carriage was so crushingly awkward that the thought of spending an entire week like this made my stomach hurt.

I tore my gaze away from the atmosphere inside and turned to the scenery outside instead.

Beyond the jagged peaks rising in the distance, somewhere on the far side of those mountains, lay the infamous Northeastern Branch.

Far to the north, where the Northeastern Branch was located, stretched an expanse of frozen land, a barren icefield known as the Anecumene.

Because of that, the Northeastern Branch’s base had been built inside an underground cavern to escape the cold. Its scale was small compared to the old castle stronghold or the holy land Metasim, both in facilities and manpower.

The believers stationed at the Northeastern Branch were the very picture of a small, elite force. Tough youths hardened enough to survive the harsh climate, mercenaries from foreign countries, former orthodox regular soldiers. Measured by normal civilian standards, they all possessed top-tier combat ability. Getting tossed into the middle of that might be good experience for me, I figured.

Hours passed as I stared out the window.

The road our carriage followed was a special route the cult used to avoid Orthodoxy patrols. It wasn’t properly maintained at all. We were just barreling straight through raw, untouched wilderness.

On the way, we passed along sheer cliff faces, forked rivers, and jolted across fallen trees laid over fissures in the earth like crude bridges. Any old supply stations along the route had long since been swallowed up by nature.

“W-Whoa, what a view…” the blond man muttered as he gazed outside.

Joanne immediately clicked her tongue in irritation.

The plain man turned pale, and even the blond slapped a hand over his mouth, trembling at the oppressive mood.

The tension inside the carriage was so horrible that I couldn’t take it anymore. I seized on the monk’s comment as an opening and forced myself to speak.

“H-Hey, you there. While Stella-sama’s been away, there should’ve been someone managing the Northeastern Branch in her place. Do you know who?”

Officially, the head of the Northeastern Branch was Stella. But while she was away, someone had to be acting as her stand-in.

Maybe he was surprised I’d engaged him in conversation, because the monk stumbled over his words as he answered.

“T-The one acting as Northeastern Branch Chief is Whip Funny Task-sama, sir.”

Whip Funny Task… Never heard that name before.

Maybe she’d done something in the original game, but if I couldn’t even recall her, it couldn’t have been much.

“I heard she’s seriously strong, y’know?” he went on. “Supposedly hasn’t lost to anyone below executive level. Her contributions to the cult are amazing, too. People say she’s on par with, or maybe even above you, Oakley-senpai.”

“Whip’s… well, self-made,” Joanne cut in. “She’s actually pretty capable.”

I did not feel calm hearing that.

On par with me, the guy who’d destroyed an entire city during the mobile fortress plan?

Like hell there was another heretic like that running around.

No matter how hard I dug through my memories of named rank-and-file heretics, I couldn’t find anyone called Whip in there.

Maybe it’s an alias? I might recognize the face. There were a few background heretics with a strong enough presence to stick, after all.

After that, the hellish tension in the carriage softened a bit, and we started chatting.

That didn’t change the fact that with a carriage running nonstop and no suspension to soften the blows, my body never really got any rest.

All our supplies were just water and food loaded up back at the base. Breaks existed only when the horses needed them; otherwise, we pushed on. At night, we slowed down and followed the road by moonlight and the glow of torches.

Since we had Joanne with us, everyone figured we were safe enough and just brute-forced our way past whatever nocturnal creatures roamed around. People’s lives are really cheap here, huh. Or maybe they just don’t know the word “caution.”

On the fourth day of travel, the land finally began to change color. Snow-white outshone the green of any surviving plants, blanketing the world in pale light.

During one of our rare breaks, I slipped into the bushes to take care of… heavier business. As I was doing my best to maintain the minimum necessary dignity, the nearly bald monk of a man came squatting beside me, yanking his pants down.

He moved with terrifying speed.

Why the hell are you choosing to take a dump right next to me? I pinched my nose in disgust as the blond buzzcut bozo, Alex Eagley, started chatting away with a big, sunny smile, right in the middle of relieving himself.

Apparently unfamiliar with the concept of “awkward,” Alex just kept talking and talking until I cut him off.

“Alex, you’re literally mid-crap. Don’t cheerfully start small talk. And don’t lean over while you do it. That’s… Things would just crawl back up.”

“Aw, come on, it’s fine, senpai,” he said with a grin. “I just really wanted to get closer to you, y’know? Couldn’t really talk in the carriage, with, uh… Joanne-sama bein’ there and all.”

I gave him a look that said I was very tired of this, but Alex only brightened, delighted, and started eagerly explaining why he wanted to buddy up with “Oakley-senpai” so badly.

“Back when we invaded Metasim, I was right behind you, senpai. Don’t you remember? Well, you did kinda leave me in the dust halfway through, but still.”

“Can you at least drop the ‘senpai’ thing? You’re probably older than I am.”

“Eeeh, what’s it matter? We’ve got a nice bond like that, don’t we?”

“I don’t remember us bonding.”

Before I knew it, Alex had dragged me along at his pace, forcing me into a conversation I never wanted to have.

This was exactly why I hated smooth talkers like him. Can’t a man at least get some peace and quiet while he’s trying to take a crap?

“By the way, senpai, you haven’t gone at all since earlier,” he said.

“I’ve got diarrhea.”

“No way, man. That’d be constipation. Even someone as amazing as you gets backed up, huh, senpai?” Alex cackled, snatched up a handful of leaves, wiped, and stood up in one fluid, disgustingly casual motion. “Anyway, senpai. That day, you killed Fuankilo, didn’t you?”

My breath stopped.

I forced myself to stay calm, but my tongue just traced over my lips; no words would come.

“What makes you say that?” I wrung the line out somehow while my fingers quietly drew the knife hidden in my coat.

Alex was well within range. His back was to me. I could slit his throat any time I wanted.

“I saw you, y’know. Your back, in the refinery, swinging that spear around…”

The moment he mentioned the bombardment spear, I kicked off the ground.

I tackled him hard, slamming him down, and jammed the blade into his mouth. Before Alex could shout, I pressed the edge against his sharp canine teeth to shut him up.

“W-Wait! Please! I really do wanna help you, senpai! I just wanted to make sure, that’s all!”

I drove the knife in toward his uvula.

He threw everything he had into resisting, but I already had the mount. My position was overwhelmingly stronger. The tip sliced the inside of his mouth, and Alex’s eyes filled with tears as he shook his head frantically, begging for mercy.

Even if I killed him here, I could just say he fell off a cliff. Or got eaten by wild dogs. There were plenty of ways to write it off.

That was as far as I got before something clicked. “You’re serious about this?”

Alex nodded as hard as he could, desperate. I let the strength drain from my arms and slipped the knife back into my coat.

“T-Thought I was dead for sure…” he muttered.

Stepping over his sweat-soaked torso, I scanned our surroundings. This time, I was sure—no one had seen or heard a thing.

There was a reason I hadn’t killed Alex.

There’s no point in telling me, when we’re alone like this, that he saw me kill Fuankilo. If he wanted to, he could’ve just reported it. But he didn’t. This guy really does intend to help me.

I grabbed Alex’s hand and hauled him to his feet, demanding, “What do you want out of this?”

“Y-You’re asking my goal? I don’t really have one, y’know. I just honestly wanna help. I just wanna see you work up close, senpai.”

“…”

“So, who’re we killing next? Joanne-sama? Pawk-sama? Maybe Celestia-sama or Stella-sama? Ooh, or heck, we could go all the way and take out Aros-sama himself. Talk about a worthy opponent, right?”

I was speechless. Those were the kind of lines that would ruin anyone’s life if overheard. My thoughts completely locked up.

Is this guy… crazy?

“For now, don’t tell anyone about this,” I said at last.

“Got it, senpai,” he replied with a smile.

First Joanne, now Alex. One unforeseen development after another. Things were straying so far off the rails of my expectations that my stomach was starting to hurt.

What is wrong with these people?

I climbed back into the carriage and pressed my fingers into my temples.

“What’s wrong, Oakley? You look like death warmed over,” Joanne asked.

“It’s cold outside. My head hurts…”

Hearing my miserable little complaint, Joanne raised one index finger.

“I’ll tell you something that’ll take your mind off it… The executives of the Aros Temple Cult don’t need to excrete at all.”

“For real, Joanne-sama!? That’s news to me!” Alex burst out.

“Of course. We’re executives. We don’t use the toilet.”

“But, senpai, I know for a fact. Joanne-sama, the other day in the bushes, you were totally—”

“You wanna die?”

“Er, no ma’am! Shutting up now…”

“No sense of delicacy, that man,” Joanne muttered.

You’re one to talk, Joanne.

And then, on the seventh day…

“There. I see it. That’s the Northeastern Branch.” Joanne leaned close to share my view through the window, pointing to a single spot in the landscape.

Half-buried in snow and concealed among jagged rock, the entrance to the Northeastern Branch base yawned quietly open.

Hidden among the snow and trees, the entrance was so narrow, the line of sight so bad, that it did wonders for concealment. Unless you came right up to it, you’d never notice it was there.

We squeezed through an opening just barely wide enough for the carriage, and the walls inside glowed dully in the light of torches, blackened with smoke.

After we’d gone a little deeper, the passage suddenly widened out. A group of hooded figures, each holding a torch, stepped in to surround the carriage.

Joanne shot me a look that clearly said, “Open the door,” so I pushed it open and helped her down into the cave.

She strode toward the hooded crowd and swept her gaze over them with a bored, almost sullen air.

“Joanne Sagamix and her subordinates have arrived at the Northeastern Branch. Is Stella here?”

A short distance away, Celestia, who had come ahead of us, lifted a hand in a casual wave. Even mixed into the sea of black hoods, she looked perfectly at home. She folded her arms again, drawing that voluptuous body in as if to hug herself.

“Alex. Where’s Whip Funny Task?” I asked.

“Over there, senpai.”

Alex pointed to a single spot. Among the men who had thrown back their hoods stood one abnormality—a single girl, the lone woman in the group.

She was a head shorter than the brawny men around her, but… there was something about the air around her that screamed executive class.

“I’m here as Stella-chan’s stand-in! Name’s Whip-chan!”

Her voice was so bright you could almost hear a sparkle sound effect. Whip posed with a peace sign next to her face, stuck out a red tongue with a playful peh, and even topped it off with a wink.

Another intense one.

She was a long-haired blonde wearing the habit of the Kenneth Orthodoxy, a look not unlike what Celestia used to have.

But even from a distance, there was something about her—her bones, or the way her flesh sat on them, or… something I couldn’t put my finger on—that didn’t feel human.

Objectively speaking, she was a textbook beauty. And yet that uncanny quality wouldn’t let me look away.

She wasn’t like Joanne, or Stella, or Celestia. She felt closer to Aros, wrapped in that same off-kilter presence.

“Jo-chan, long time no see! Been doing good?” she chirped.

“You haven’t changed at all. It’s nice and cool here. Easier to live in than Metasim,” Joanne replied.

I stared, stunned, as Whip casually called Joanne “Jo-chan” like they were childhood friends. To make it worse, she reached out and patted Joanne on the head.

My cheek twitched.

Joanne was, without question, the type of person you called “difficult.” It was practically routine for her to lop off some no-name believer’s head over a trivial slight and have the remains sent off as feed for the gestation sacs.

There was no way Whip didn’t know that about her.

My eyes happened to meet Whip’s.

Her twin pupils, each gleaming like a five-pointed star, pinned me in place. It had been hard to tell with all the tall heretics around her, but she was actually fairly tall herself, about the same height as me, maybe a little over a hundred and seventy centimeters.

Finished talking with Joanne, Whip walked straight toward me. “So you’re Oakley Mercury-chan! The one they call the finest masterpiece ever to come out of the gestation sacs!”

“That’s the first I’ve heard of being called a masterpiece.”

For a moment, our gazes locked. I couldn’t read anything at all from those pentagram eyes. Then she broke eye contact, turned toward Alex and the other arrivals, and raised her voice cheerfully.

“Nice to meet you all! I’m Whip Funny Task, acting chief of the Northeastern Branch! Thanks sooo much for coming all the way from the holy land Metasim! Everything’s ready to welcome you, so go right on in, okay?”

The blonde pseudo-sister led us deeper into the cave. When Alex saw the Northeastern Branch members greeting us with warm smiles, he actually started bouncing up and down.

“Whoa, they’re welcoming us! This is kinda nice, huh, senpai? Like we’re important guests or something!”

While Alex frolicked like an idiot, I finally placed Whip’s true identity.

She had appeared in the original story, too. I just hadn’t recognized her because, back then, she’d gone by a different name: “Mary Henderland.”

If I had to sum her up in a single phrase, she was a fox in human skin.

Behind that harmless, friendly face, she’d infiltrated cities as a spy and assassinated one key figure after another. Honey traps, disguises, orchestrated “accidents.” That orthodox nun’s habit she was wearing now was probably a leftover from those days.

If memory served, Whip had used every trick in the book to throw the orthodox side into chaos.

In the end, the protagonist had sniffed out the disturbance and killed her. That was how her story had ended, but the number of important Kennethian figures she’d taken with her was staggering. She’d even killed a candidate for orthodox executive, which made it easy to understand why she was so highly valued, given her track record.

On the message boards, she was often labeled “one of the strongest among ordinary humans.”

According to her more dedicated fans, despite not being an executive, she was strong enough to make the strongest character rankings for the entire original game.

I’d never put much stock in those strongest character debates online, but one thing was certain: Whip’s strength was far beyond anything you’d call normal.

The fact that someone on her level could be treated as a minor storyline boss said a lot about how deep the heretics’ bench really was.

“Everybody! This way, this way! Don’t get lost, okay?”

The sparkling beauty named Whip led us toward what passed for the mess hall.

The base made full use of the natural cave formations, with human-made expansions carved in here and there.

There were no human production facilities in the Northeastern Branch. This place existed purely as a hyper-aggressive, hyper-tactical stronghold, with all its resources poured into espionage and battle readiness.

More secret base than proper headquarters, really, and a badly optimized one at that.

As we followed the winding stone passages, we finally came to a wide chamber where long tables and benches had been neatly lined up directly on the bare rock.

The men of the Northeastern Branch began filing in, dropping into their seats one after the other. We took places in an open section, and as soon as we’d settled in, Whip stepped forward and clapped her hands.

“Attention, everyone!” She called out brightly. “Today, some wonderful comrades have come all the way from the holy land Metasim to join us! Let’s give them a biiig round of applause!” She flashed a row of perfect white teeth and started clapping with cheerful vigor.

The Northeastern men responded with rough, rowdy applause and grins of their own.

At some point, Stella had taken the seat of honor at the head of the table; she brought her fingers together and offered a soft, refined clap of her own.

Right on cue, steaming-hot dishes were carried out and spread along the tables. It felt like we’d wandered into the wrong venue and crashed someone’s banquet.

The strange, high-energy atmosphere of the place left me a bit adrift. But on either side of me, Alex and Joanne were both staring at the food like nothing else in the world existed.

“Whoaaa! Looks sooo good!” Alex practically drooled, clearly at the limits of his patience.

Joanne kept sneaking glances at me, one hand rubbing her stomach in embarrassment as it let out a small, plaintive growl.

“Why do you keep looking at me?” I asked.

“No reason. I just thought you were full of openings,” she replied, embarrassed.

“Shut up…”

For just an instant, a pulse of something close to raw lust surged behind my eyes.

I suddenly wanted to press my ear against her emaciated inguinal line, against the hollow just under her protruding ribs, against the faint vertical line leading down to her navel, and listen to the sounds of her digestive organs at work.

It was a warped craving, one that had clearly come from her side of our fused mind.

Ever since that night, it chased after me. On and on, without end. No matter how I struggled, the parts of my heart that had been scraped away never grew back.

She’d looked away earlier, cheeks faintly flushed, but now, feeling the scent of me about to be painted over by someone else’s self, Joanne’s eyes flew open.

A devil’s smile spilled across her lips.

The dregs of that mental contamination were still smoldering.

The moment I accepted the piece of Joanne’s ego squirming in the corner of my mind, I would stop being me and become something else entirely.

Lately, she seemed unnervingly sensitive to even the smallest shifts in my emotions. Maybe that was only natural. She’d accepted everything that made me who I was, and from that, she’d gained a one-way link straight into my heart.

I, on the other hand, had chosen not to let her ego seep into me. I’d rejected her. None of what she was thinking ever flowed back this way.

I tore my gaze away from the oppressive mix of lust and malice pouring off her and forced myself to look down instead, at the plate of meat in front of me.

“This is our way of welcoming you all! You folks from the other branches, go on and enjoy some good old Northeastern-style cooking!” Whip shouted.

In this world, meat was extremely rare.

Most of it went into salt-curing or smoking so it would keep, and the idea of biting into a slab of meat still clinging to the bone and reveling in the flavor was little more than a distant dream, especially in a frigid region like this one.

I’d never once had what you’d call a proper meat dish.

But we, the Aros Temple Cult, had everything we needed to provide “fresh flesh.” And we’d already built the kind of culture where, even if you were served meat like that, you could eat it up and call it delicious without a second thought.

“Well then, everyone! To new encounters. Cheers!”

Cups shot into the air all at once, the clinking so loud it sounded like crockery shattering from every direction.

Whip, who’d led the toast, came right up in front of me and knocked back the contents of her cup in one gulp.

“I’ve been just dying to talk to you, y’know?” Whip giggled.

“Whip… I’ve heard you’re the lunatic who’s got bugs packed inside her body.”

“From my perspective, this little buggy is just an adorable part of the family, you know? She’s got a name and everything. I call her Milk-chan!” As she said that, Whip stuck out her tongue with a bashful little gesture…

And at the corner of her mouth, something wriggled out.

The feelers of a bug pushed past her lips. From deep in her throat came a dry, scraping metallic sound.

A pair of antennae, each as long as a human forearm, suddenly extended right in front of us.

Alex let out a strangled shriek and sprang backward. While he stared wide-eyed, the warped, orange-glossed feelers slid neatly back into Whip’s mouth.

“W-What the hell was that? T-That’s way too big to be a centipede…”

“It’s not a centipede. It’s Milk-chan!”

Alex gave a shaky, forced laugh as he asked, and Whip answered as if she were talking about a pet cat.

Right. That’s the secret behind Whip Funny Task’s monstrous strength.

She’d let a bug parasitize her body and shared her nervous system with it. In exchange, she’d gained a level of explosive power, agility, and raw strength that exceeded anything a normal human could reach.

She was the leader of the Hidden Insect Corps, an elite squad of parasite-humans, and every last one of them was a monster in their own right.

Whip jabbed her fork into the mystery meat on her plate. When the tines pierced the skin, there was a soft, springy puchi sound.

“So, I’ve heard the rumors, and I’ve gotta ask… Are you and Joanne-chan actually, y’know, together?”

“I’ll admit we’re a strange match, but… yeah. We are.” I flicked my gaze to Joanne for a moment. She wore an utterly satisfied expression, clearly pleased I’d declared our relationship out loud.

“Mind if I ask something too?” I continued. “What kind of meat is this?”

“The seasoning might be a little strong, but it’s yummy, I promise.”

“I’m not asking about the taste. I’m asking about the source.”

At the edge of my vision, Stella narrowed her eyes in delight as she savored the meat.

That was answer enough.

Whip just gave me a mischievous smile, as if to say, “You already know, don’t you?”

I took a sip of my drink instead, as if I could wash the question away.

While I stalled for time like that, Whip kept shoveling food into her mouth at a ferocious pace, a feeler peeking out past her lips as she raised one finger.

“Here in the Northeastern Branch, we’ve got a rule: precious resources are never wasted. Fuel, food, water, building materials, hides, bones, bugs—we make sure to use everything to its fullest!”

On this resource-starved, frozen land, food was desperately valuable.

Given what kind of base the Northeastern Branch was, enemies and allies alike were going to die here in droves. Turning their remains into “materials” was… probably inevitable.

I’d been raised in a gestation sac, pumped full of God-knows-what chemicals from before I was born. It was a little late for squeamishness now.

I curled one corner of my mouth upward and sank my teeth into the meat, making sure to keep the actual contact inside my mouth as minimal as possible.

The meat was fresh.

It tasted… normal. Pretty good, even.

But I felt like absolute garbage.

Stella’s eyes narrowed, and for the first time, I saw the corners of her lips curve in a faint bow. While my mood nosedived all at once, she began to bring the gathering to a close, her voice low and even.

“From what Stella’s heard,” she murmured, “back when the cult’s numbers were still small, everyone used to sit around a table like this and eat together. It’s nice, isn’t it? To share a little warmth with everyone.”

Nice, my ass. This is dystopia cuisine.

Once everyone had cleaned their plates, the mess hall gradually emptied out. Joanne and Alex had vanished off somewhere, and before I knew it, I was alone.

I wandered through the dim corridors of the Northeastern Branch, vaguely looking for Celestia. I eventually found her in the residential area.

“Hey,” I said.

“Oakley,” she replied with a giggle. “Shall we have a little chat?”

“Yeah. That’s why I came.”

Maybe because she was off-duty, her hair, which was usually pinned up, hung loose around her shoulders.

She twisted a lock around her finger as she absentmindedly stroked her own hair, over and over.

We chatted at length about the geography of the Northeastern Branch and the local food, long enough that the silence between us started to feel comfortable.

Then Celestia frowned when she noticed my complexion.

“Your face is completely pale,” she said. “Do you really think you can handle the coming training like that?”

“Mm… If we can do something about the food, I might be able to manage,” I joked, giving an exaggerated shrug.

Celestia let out a soft chuckle. “That doesn’t sound like you. Complaining doesn’t suit you.”

For an instant, Celestia blurred in my vision, doubling at the edges. That half-playful scolding unlocked something in my memory, triggering a sudden flashback.

Those words were almost miraculously identical to a single line that had once pulled the protagonist, Alfie, back from the edge when he was about to run away from reality.

If I remembered right, it was in the “merry bad end” route, a branch that split off from the Grand Finale with just one different choice.

In a world steeped in grief, where the deaths of fourteen executives had already been sealed, Alfie had fallen into stunned despair.

And then Celestia had appeared before him, spoken those very words, and cracked the whip of love across the player’s back.

Of all the endings that left a mark, there were few, if any, that embodied Celestia as completely as that route did.

Even if her ideology’s been overwritten, she hasn’t changed at her core…

For a moment, I almost clung to the ghost of that girl made of pure light. But my brief escape from reality shattered the moment I looked into Celestia’s clouded eyes, dragging me back to the present.

“You’ve been staring at me rather intently,” she said quietly. “Is something the matter?”

“No, I was just… captivated,” I replied. “You’re beautiful, Celestia.”

Celestia’s eyes went wide, darting about as she ran her fingers through the silver hair brushing her shoulder. “P-Please, don’t joke like that…”

She looked just like she had back when she belonged to the Orthodoxy, and that gap between memory and reality hurt in a way I couldn’t put into words.

The memory-transfer method was a bust, but I’ll find another way to save you. I swear I will. Just wait for me, Celestia…

My reality was here, a place so dim and miserable it might as well be hell, where there wasn’t a speck of hope to be seen.

I had to live to change that reality.

※※※

Before Oakley was reassigned to the Northeastern Branch…

On the outskirts of the holy land Metasim, Alex waited alone for Joanne Sagamix to arrive.

The reason Alex had joined the Aros Temple Cult was simple: curiosity.

He wanted a front-row seat to watch the world sink into chaos. That was it.

From that one, stupidly shallow desire, he’d stepped into the dark.

At first, he’d been just another grunt at the old castle stronghold.

He never got to fight any of the named Orthodoxy executives, was never chosen to act as Joanne’s marker, and somehow managed to survive without ever staring real death in the face.

He’d hear rumors now and then about Joanne’s exploits and savor them like good wine, going to bed every night with his heart racing, hoping the next day the world would be even more of a mess.

Then, one day, that young man appeared, like a comet blazing across the sky.

One moment, he was a nobody; the next, word spread that he’d been chosen as Joanne’s new marker. After that, it was a whirlwind. He racked up achievement after achievement, shot straight up the ladder as Joanne’s aide and an executive candidate, and rocketed into stardom.

The young man’s name was Oakley.

So, this is what it means to have talent, Alex thought. To just erupt into prominence like that.

The Mobile Fortress Plan he’d proposed to the executives was especially fascinating.

Deeply impressed by Oakley’s feats, Alex had quietly become his secret fan. It was after he’d started watching Oakley that the incident happened.

He saw it.

He saw Oakley and Fuankilo trying to kill each other.

A devout heretic murdering one of the executives. How could a jester of chaos like Alex not be intrigued by such an insane development?

During Fuankilo’s funeral, his eyes never left Oakley. By then, he was completely, hopelessly enthralled.

And now, today, Alex had been summoned by Joanne, who was rumored to be Oakley’s lover.

As he waited at the appointed place, he felt like someone standing by for a secret rendezvous. His chest ached with a strange anticipation, fit to burst.

A few seconds after the set time ticked by, Joanne appeared, clad in a pitch-black robe.

Her snow-white skin stood in stark contrast to the dark cloak, her pale, silky hair framing a face lit by those sensual, gleaming eyes.

She really is beautiful, Alex thought, and not for the first time.

“Yo,” she said. “Kept you waiting?”

“Not at all, Joanne-sama,” Alex replied, grinning. “I’d wait days for you if I had to.”

“Mm.” She brushed aside his passionate words with effortless ease.

The reaction stung, just a little.

Even so, Alex pressed on, trying to find out why she’d called him somewhere so out-of-the-way.

“By the way, Joanne-sama,” he said, tilting his head, “if you just wanted to talk, you didn’t have to drag me outside Metasim, did you? I mean, there’s tons of places where we could be alone, like the torture room or wherever.”

“What I’m about to tell you would be a huge problem if anyone else heard it,” Joanne answered, her voice dropping low. “I decided to tell you because I trust you. So, I’m asking you—keep this to yourself.”

“You… trust me.”

To be trusted by the most dangerous person in the world. What an honor that was. They’d barely even spoken before this, and yet… maybe working so earnestly had finally paid off.

Alex savored the sweetness of that single word like a fine liquor.

While he basked in it, Joanne began to speak, stringing her words together in quiet fragments as she glanced around at the darkness.

Alex had no way of knowing it, but she was on guard against Pawk’s zombies, those puppets he used to watch from the shadows.

“So, Alex,” she said softly. “What do you think of the Aros Temple Cult?”

“Think of it? I… don’t really know what you mean,” he answered, thrown off balance.

“I’ll be blunt. Let’s say the cult succeeds in conquering the country. Do you honestly believe a paradise, one everyone wants, will be born there?”

“Eh…”

A dry, stinging wind seemed to brush over Alex’s scalp. This wasn’t the kind of conversation he’d expected. He had the instinctive feeling that if he heard any more, things would cross a line they couldn’t come back from.

Normally, Alex loved the unexpected. He lived for it, even. But right now, every warning sensor in his body was screaming. A wave of primal dread jolted through him so sharply that he almost clapped his hands over his ears on reflex.

Joanne caught his thin arms before he could.

She held them in place, denying him the luxury of not listening.

Her lips curled into a dazed, almost rapturous smile, as if to say, “You were always meant to be pulled into the Oakley faction.”

Then, right by his ear, she began to whisper dangerous truths, taking her time, savoring every word.

“Aros-sama’s plan is to offer up all the Orthodoxy believers as a living sacrifice, become a perfect god, and create his ideal nation. But even if he does achieve that dream, there’s no way that ideal country lasts very long. The cult’s scattered too many sparks across the world. You’ve noticed it too, haven’t you? Deep down? Aros-sama’s plan is nothing but a fairy tale.”

It was a kind of thinking no cult member could afford to ignore, a heresy among heresies. Any ordinary believer would have completely fallen apart, panicking and scrambling away on hands and knees to report her to another executive.

But Alex was different.

He rejoiced at being allowed a glimpse of this woman’s true heart.

His vision blurred with the strength of the emotion welling up inside him.

Hold on, hold on, so first we had Oakley-senpai shaking things up, and now even Joanne-sama’s showing signs of rebellion? The factions in this cult are getting real interesting, ain’t they?

He’d been taught that traitors had to be eliminated. That was the rule.

Yet Alex’s mind was inexorably drawn toward the dangerous light burning in the girl before him.

“From earlier, you’ve done nothing but criticize Aros-sama,” Alex said, a shaky grin on his face. “What about you, Joanne-sama? What kind of dream do you have?”

“I wish to create my ideal world,” she replied without hesitation.

“Hearing just that, it doesn’t sound all that different from Aros-sama’s dream.”

“It’s a little different.”

Joanne brushed her bangs back with one hand. The words that followed blew Alex’s mind clean open.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said calmly. “There are too many people in this world. So, I’ll thin ’em out. I’ll leave just me, Oakley, and you, and kill every other human being on the planet. Then there won’t be any nations, any friction, any of those annoying concepts. I’ll have my ideal world. A nice and small world.”

Her words were so extreme that Alex was struck speechless. Her screws weren’t just loose; they’d been fired into orbit.

No, this went beyond that. Even for him, that idea was something he’d never once considered. His cheek twitched as he stared at her.

He sat there for a while, silently chewing over what she’d said.

Then Alex slowly, almost reverently, reached a kind of quiet, overwhelming high. Being force-fed such a dangerous ideology, being dragged bodily into this girl’s plan, set every nerve in his body on edge.

He was thrilled. His heart hammered.

His chest hurt with sheer, delirious joy.

This… This is the chaos I was looking for, he thought, his legs so weak with exhilaration he thought he might actually collapse.

His knees buckled, and he landed hard on his rear.

Joanne, wild and feral like a wolf, reached a hand out to him.

“Alex Eagley,” she said. “Help me build this small world. I’m sorry, but I need you to betray our founder, Aros Hawkeye.”

After hearing all this, do I even have a choice?

He’d been boxed in so thoroughly that even that realization sent another shockwave of pleasure crashing through him.

His answer had been decided from the start.

“I’d love to!” he cried. “Are you, like, a genius or something, Joanne-sama!?”

I’ll fall with her. As far as she goes, I’ll go.

He wanted to help create the “small world” Joanne dreamed of. And seeing what kind of hellish confusion the world would sink into along the way? That would be a spectacle worth living for.

Alex couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from curling upward.

He would follow Joanne all the way to the bottom of hell.

No, he had to.

It didn’t take long for her words to seep into him and stain him completely.

“Man, just thinking about it now, I can’t stop getting hyped!” he burst out, practically shaking. “The Kenneth Orthodoxy, the Aros Temple Cult, and then the whole world, playing them all like puppets. Ahh, that sounds so damn fun!?”

“Good,” Joanne murmured. “I’m glad. I knew I could trust you.”

She let out a quiet breath of relief, the tension easing from her shoulders.

After confirming that there was no lie in Alex’s eyes, she reached a firm conclusion. This man will be useful.

“I want you to serve as my loyal retainer,” she said. “You okay with that?”

“Of course, I am!” he replied immediately. “I’ll do anything you say!”

“Good… Then I’ll tell you the plan. Listen carefully, okay?”

Alex leaned forward, hanging on her every word.

The plan went along the lines of this:

At the core of everything was Oakley.

To fix his short lifespan, they needed to transform him into something utterly beyond the concept of mortality.

To do that, regrettably, every human being in the world would have to become a sacrifice for Oakley’s sake.

By annihilating all of humanity, they would create a world without conflict, a world where they alone could enjoy eternal happiness.

In other words, the foundation of Joanne’s plan to reach her small world was this:

She intended to cause a catastrophe surpassing even Aros’s scheme to sacrifice every citizen of the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid and pay with the entire world if that’s what it took to extend Oakley’s life.

The sheer scale of it, far beyond even Aros’s ambition, left Alex stunned. Just imagining it made sweat break out across the bridge of his nose.

“If you leave behind grudges, they’ll turn into the seeds of the next war,” Joanne went on. “Individuals might manage to understand each other, but the more people you have, the more friction you get. I want a small world that begins and ends with just me and Oakley.”

Sanity and madness, two incompatible minds, had fused inside her.

What now resided within Joanne was a chaotic psyche no one else could have imagined. A girl so devoted that, for the sake of the one she loved, could sacrifice every other human alive without a flicker of hesitation.

Oakley, who knew nothing of the plan’s true shape, would end up dancing on the palm of her hand.

The worst part was that Oakley’s “Orthodoxy victory route” and Joanne’s plan to create a small world followed the same path. At least for a while.

More specifically, the equalization of power between Orthodoxy and heresy—the internal operations Joanne and her allies needed to carry out for that—would, in practice, end up piggybacking on Oakley’s actions.

Because of that overlap, Joanne would throw herself wholeheartedly into supporting Celestia’s “reverse brainwashing.”

They’d bring the two sides’ strength to an even balance, let them grind each other down until they were in tatters, and then swoop in to snatch everything away.

Along the way, Oakley might get the wrong idea.

He might start to think, Maybe Joanne really has become my ally.

For Oakley, that would be a fatal misunderstanding.

For Joanne, it was nothing but the pure, undiluted truth.

Joanne was on Oakley’s side. She acted for his sake. If Oakley could live in peace, there was no greater happiness. After all, what could possibly be strange about wanting the person you love to live a long life?

Before the plan reached its end, she and Oakley would clash over and over.

Words would eventually fail them. At some point, they’d come to blows, literally trying to kill each other.

But in the end, he would understand.

He would be grateful.

“Thank you, Joanne…” he would say. “Thank you for creating such a happy world for us.”

After it was all over, she wanted to do the kind of sweet, ordinary things normal lovers did. To stare into each other’s eyes for no reason at all until the tension became too much and one of them burst into helpless laughter.

To ask, “What’s so funny?” and hear, “Oh, nothing,” in return.

To tickle his palm, teasing him into inviting her closer.

To lean in at the same time without knowing who moved first and share a light kiss.

To slide all the way down into debauched acts, tumbling into a deep, tangled joining.

A simple embrace would be enough. Just touching him would be enough.

She wanted proof of him.

She wanted to feel him for as long as time would allow.

She wanted to know his weak spots.

She wanted him to know hers.

I’ll hold your weaknesses in my arms, she thought. So please, accept mine too.

She wanted to bear his child.

To sink him into the cradle of her chest and let him drown there.

She wanted to taste his body.

Blood. Fluids. Flesh. Fat.

Red. Purple. Yellow.

She didn’t want to die before the man she loved.

She wanted to die with him.

She wanted to be the one to see him off at the end.

She wanted to live alongside him, with nothing left in the world to worry about.

Happiness, savagery, decay, like a jumble of childhood dreams and fantasies bathed in sunlight, free of every chain and obligation, in a ruined world where nothing remained but warmth and quiet… forever and ever…

That was Joanne’s wish.

“Right now,” she said, voice steady, “we’re in the preparation phase. Oakley needs to get stronger and move freely. First, we gotta earn his trust.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Alex answered, eyes gleaming.

“We won’t start moving for real until much later. Until then, sharpen your fangs.”

Joanne let out a slow breath. I really did get myself a good subordinate, she thought.

Alex, meanwhile, was practically bouncing. Best boss ever, his expression said.

A psychopath and a psychopath, hand in hand, guiding Oakley toward the best possible ending by their standards.

“By the way, Joanne-sama,” Alex asked, tilting his head, “why’d you decide to pull in a guy like me? We’ve barely even talked before, right?”

“It’s simple,” she replied. “You’ve been giving Oakley those weird looks for a while now. I figured people drawn to him the way we are would probably get along.”

“Oooh, that makes sense…”

Alex’s fixation on Oakley was abnormal.

Even after witnessing Fuankilo’s murder, his admiration hadn’t cooled at all. Of course, Joanne had noticed that gaze.

I always figured Joanne-sama only cared about Aros-sama and Oakley-senpai and literally no one else, Alex thought. Didn’t expect her to be this observant. Her awareness is kinda huge, huh?

They were moths drawn to a blinding light.

Their eyes met.

Between them, a fragile, dangerously unstable bond formed, one that existed only through a third party named Oakley Mercury. That thin connection was enough, and the two of them clasped hands tightly.

Chapter 2: Where Are the Sane People?

After parting ways with Celestia, I spent the night in the dim caverns of the Northeastern Branch.

Morning came. Sharing a room with Joanne was, of course, treated as the most natural thing in the world. While her sleeping face lay within arm’s reach, I stretched with a long, heavy exhale.

Out of habit, my fingers drifted up toward the inner corner of my eye to rub the sleep away, then my gaze snagged on my left hand’s ring finger.

The bone there was warped, fused in a crooked bump halfway between the second and third knuckles.

Joanne’s finger.

Every morning, in that hazy border between sleep and waking, seeing it always left me with the same complicated feeling.

So, none of that crazy shit was a dream.

I brushed aside the fringe of her bangs with a soft sweep of my hand, then began to change clothes. This girl seemed to genuinely not care about any human being who wasn’t me.

She’d said, with a straight face, that she wanted my help realizing her ideal, small world. The things that had come out of her mouth were nothing short of insane.

Joanne’s probably planning to use a holy relic to make that wish come true. There’s no other way to fix my short lifespan…

Holy relics referred to two things: the relics left behind by the first seven heroes in history to be born with magic—the Seven of Dawn—and the primordial holy relic known as the Mirror of Heaven’s Heart.

In practice, when people mentioned them, they almost always meant the latter.

Long ago, when the Seven of Dawn awakened to their magic, each of them said the same thing: in their dreams, they’d seen the Mirror of Heaven’s Heart, and when they looked into that mirror, they beheld the form of God.

Because of that legend, the Mirror of Heaven’s Heart had been revered ever since as the greatest of all divine artifacts, continuously drawing the faith of the masses.

Over time, the words “holy relic,” which originally referred to magic tools in general, became almost synonymous with that one artifact.

The Mirror of Heaven’s Heart is said to be an amplifier of desire, a divine tool that magnifies and realizes the wishes of those who touch it. In the canonical route, Aros launches a holy relic war to seize it for his grand design… but the Orthodoxy wipes out every attempt and wins in perfect fashion.

Joanne’s ideal world was almost certainly something she intended to force into existence using that very artifact.

The problem was that the holy relic was kept under maximum security in the Temple of the Phoenix in the holy capital Sasfect, the largest city of the Holy Kingdom of Gerlaid.

It wasn’t the kind of thing you just walked in and stole.

I had no idea how Joanne intended to pull off a clean, total victory after throwing those provocative declarations in my face.

If I couldn’t understand the path she’d mapped out in her head, I couldn’t even begin to come up with a plan to sabotage it.

I watched her as she slept, her breathing slow and steady.

Until the day everything would finally, irrevocably collapse, we’d probably keep probing each other’s depths like this.

The Aros Temple Cult’s grand design only comes together once they seize the holy relic. Your plan is to use the cult as a smokescreen up to that point, and then steal the final, juiciest piece for yourself.

The reason she hadn’t told me the full shape of her plan was obvious: she’d already seen right through what I was thinking.

She was only letting it slide because she still hoped I’d eventually fall in line. But the day we went our separate ways was a certainty waiting in the future.

Her chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm.

Even through the oversized sleepwear, my eyes were drawn to the generous curve of her breasts, and that was when I noticed it.

Her breathing was just a bit too quick.

“You’re awake,” I said.

“You got me.” Joanne stuck her tongue out, a shy little flicker of pink, then opened her arms wide in a clear hold me pose.

She looped her arms around the back of my neck and pulled herself upright.

Her warm, soft body fit neatly into my arms, and she let out a low, rumbling purr in her throat as she buried her face against my chest.

The comfort of it and the way she showed me absolutely no caution at all left me feeling like my fangs had been pulled. There was something even more unfathomable about her now.

Even as the sun rose outside, its light never reached the caverns, and the underground air barely changed temperature at all.

I could already feel my internal clock starting to go haywire.

Officially, the reason I’d come to the Northeastern Branch was for joint training, but there was more on the schedule than that. After nearly two weeks of drills, we were scheduled to attack the town of Jade, seizing and occupying its developed coal mines.

The heretics had momentum on their side lately.

If no one came up with the next move, the Kenneth Orthodoxy was only going to get pushed further and further into a corner.

Lost in thought over how I might strike a blow against the cult, I headed toward the rear exit of the cave after being summoned by Whip.

She was already waiting there. I gave her a light greeting, and the fake blonde sister got straight to the point.

“Stella-chan, come on out!”

I’d assumed this would be a private talk between the two of us, so when I saw a twin-tailed silhouette walking toward us through the blizzard, my heart sank into despair.

The pale, gothic lolita, Stella, stopped right in front of me.

White breath puffed from my nose and mouth and from Whip’s as well. But not from Stella. Not even a wisp. It only served to emphasize how inhuman she really was.

“It’s been a while since we’ve talked like this,” she said. “Did you enjoy last night’s meal?”

“Yes. It was very good,” I replied stiffly.

“Good.”

Since Joanne was nowhere nearby, there was no one here to shield me.

This was a terrifying encounter. I felt naked and unprotected.

The air had to be close to freezing, and yet sweat ran down my back like a waterfall.

Whip watched our awkward little exchange and let out a metallic-sounding giggle, like something scraping together.

“Stella-chan, what d’you think? He feels different from before, doesn’t he?”

“It’s hard to put into words,” Stella murmured. “But something feels wrong…”

She rose onto her toes and leaned in, sniffing around my chest.

Her sense of smell was far beyond that of a human.

I’d been afraid she’d detect how my insides had warped after fusing with Joanne, so I’d made sure to switch our organs back before coming to the Northeastern Branch.

But whether it was the lingering scent or just changes I couldn’t completely hide, Stella still picked up on the disturbance.

“An impurity,” she said after a pause. “It feels like everything has changed for the worst possible outcome…”

“What… exactly do you mean by that?” I asked.

“Joanne Sagamix is melted into your body… and in Joanne’s case, it’s even more serious… Stella feels a formless, nameless dread from her.”

Her sky-blue eyes speared straight through me.

This woman just nailed everything.

With the crushing force of a vise, Stella shoved me back and forced me to sit on a nearby rock.

She didn’t stop there.

Holding down the hem of her skirt with one hand, she swung a leg over and settled herself on my lap. Then, she leaned in and drew a deep breath right at my neck.

Stella Belmont’s sexual impulse came from cannibalism. Her mouth was the point of origin, the organ that needed to be feared above all others. With that mouth practically touching my bare skin, it was only natural that every nerve in my body screamed in rejection.

Back then, Joanne, twisted as she was, had at least tried in her own way to understand how I felt. Because of that, she’d hesitated when it came to cutting off my limbs, torn between her desires and the faint urge to spare me.

By comparison, Stella was a completely unchained monster. She had even less restraint than Joanne and not a single scrap of consideration for the other person.

“Stella smells other women on you. Not just Joanne,” she murmured.

There was a grinding sound, and her nails dug into my shoulder, biting into the skin.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

A warm, rough tongue, like a cat’s, dragged back and forth across my neck, scraping at the flesh as if to shave it off. The wet, sticky feeling of her saliva snapped a bit of clarity back into my mind.

Calm down. This is just another flavor of deranged obsession. I handled Joanne. If I use that experience, I can defuse this bomb too. Probably.

I couldn’t think of this girl as human. She felt like some kind of ape that had learned to eat people. No matter how beautiful her outward appearance, I simply could not accept her.

The gothic girl who’d been savoring my skin finally lifted her face. “Stella’s got a partial read,” she said. “Stella doesn’t understand the mechanism, but Joanne’s residue is causing an irreversible, extremely malicious change. Stella doesn’t know who the other woman is, but… they’re all doing the most unnecessary things, aren’t they?”

I didn’t understand half of what she was saying. But I figured she was talking about the memory transfer and psychological contamination caused by the organ exchanges.

Above my head, Whip tilted her own, a visible question mark in her tone.

“So basically, Jo-chan and Oakley-chan are into that thing, right?” she said lightly. “Y’know, the whole exchange something and feel super good sort of thing… If they’ve melted into each other a bit, that doesn’t sound like a problem to me.”

“You’re wrong,” Stella said, voice turning cold. “Every last bit of it is impurity that Oakley doesn’t need.”

Her hostility toward Whip was obvious, sharp enough to cut.

Most of that anger was probably directed at Joanne, but hearing her talk like that grated on me.

Joanne, an unnecessary impurity? Don’t screw with me.

What happened with her was a necessary step.

Sure, the result was this half-burned stalemate where nothing was neatly resolved, embers still smoking in the dark, but to call the remnants of that fight, that desperate gamble for survival and reversal, something I didn’t need?

That shallow judgment was what I couldn’t forgive.

“Could you get off of me for now?” I said quietly.

Stella obediently lifted her loafers. For a second, I thought she was actually going to move away. Instead, the sole of her shoe pressed down hard against the bridge of my nose.

A clear sign of rejection.

She ground it in slowly and deliberately.

I looked at her with frustration.

“You smell so good,” she whispered. “Your body is so wonderful. So why did you end up with someone like Joanne? Wouldn’t Stella be better for you? It’s true, Stella started taking an interest in you later than she did. But… to suffer this much, just for being a little late…”

Her expression stayed completely blank, but clear tears spilled from both eyes. The sheer difference in emotional temperature between us left my mind lagging behind.

You only see me as meat, and you still have the nerve to cry?

It was disgusting.

A sick, crawling discomfort punched straight through my chest.

Watching those endless, hot tears roll down her face, I started to wonder if I was the one out of step with reality.

But little by little, I began to understand.

Stella’s tastes weren’t built on normal human logic. It was as if the feelings ordinary people joked about—you’re so cute I could just eat you up—had been grotesquely magnified, stripped of context, and twisted into something endless, rootless, and wrong.

A childish selfishness elevated into an operating principle—that was what ran through her core.

She really was a monster wearing human skin. Holding a proper conversation with her was impossible.

Getting involved with her would end in nothing but loss.

“Anyway,” she went on, voice faintly trembling, “Stella wants to put you back the way you were. Right away. Stella will use every bit of knowledge Stella has and figure something out. And once Stella is done, Stella will eat you properly. Okay?”

Either way, I needed to calm her down before this went any further off the rails.

“I admit I’ve been influenced by Joanne-sama,” I said, keeping my tone as steady as I could. “But I’m not going to become her. I won’t be overwritten. I’m me, and I’m not going to change.”

I am me.

Even if memory transfer were an irreversible kind of erosion, it wouldn’t touch the core.

“And besides, Stella-sama, now is not the time for you to eat me,” I said. “We have a mission, don’t we?”

Her eyes widened. “We have to make Aros-sama’s dream come true…”

“Exactly. Everything has an order of priority, right? So how about you save eating me… for after that dream is realized?”

I tossed out talk of a future that might never come, just to get through this moment alive.

Stella gave a small nod, the madness in her bloodshot eyes slowly losing its edge. Of course, there was no way Aros’s ambition would ever be fulfilled. I’d never let it happen.

One way or another, I planned to kill everyone involved, including Stella.

“Yeah. That’s right,” she murmured. “Stella has Aros-sama’s dream. Stella can’t change the harvest schedule. Aros-sama… Aros-sama… Hahh, deep breaths.”

She wiped the tears clinging to her long lashes, then lifted her long, slender legs and slid off my lap at last. Even with her expression as flat as ever, there was a faint air of satisfaction about her.

Relief washed through me now that the weight on my waist was gone, but at the same time, I felt like I understood her even less than before.

Her obsession with human flesh was beyond abnormal; it was several levels worse than I’d imagined. I had no idea where the landmines were, and reasoning with her was nearly impossible. I’d barely managed to pull her back by invoking Aros’s name, but… personally, she was even harder to deal with than Joanne.

Back in Metasim, I’d thought of her as one of the “reasonable” executives.

Apparently, that had only been because Aros had been the one holding her reins.

How terrifying.

“Well then!” Whip chirped, clapping her hands once. “Now that the spicy little event is over, let’s get down to business!”

She brushed the whole scene aside with a theatrical throat-clearing. There was clearly another reason she’d called me out here at dawn.

“C’mon out, Karatena-chan!”

At that call, a woman stepped out from the darkness.

The woman had ash-gray hair that covered one eye and wore a tight skirt with heels, an outfit that looked extremely impractical for movement.

The moment I saw her, the pieces clicked.

I knew this woman.

“You’re the one from Metasim, the one who helped with the organ exchange…” I said.

“Allow me to introduce myself properly,” she replied, bowing her head just slightly. “My name is Karatena Wallmix.”

Karatena dipped her head in an exaggerated bow, her tone dripping with sarcasm.

“Thank you ever so much for your help back then,” she said.

She exchanged a glance with Whip, and her thin lips curled into a triumphant smile.

“Oakley-chan,” Whip sang, “I’m about to say something really shocking, so don’t freak out on me, okay?”

“What?”

“Karatena-chan here says there’s this little rumor that you might’ve killed Fuankilo-chan!”

I couldn’t hold it in anymore and let out a long sigh.

This was the one thing I’d been truly afraid of. That someone would tip off the heretic executives about the suspicion that I’d killed Fuankilo and I’d end up as the target of an investigation.

And now, that was happening. A frustrated heat rose in my chest, like my blood was flowing backwards. I forced my brain into high gear.

No time to calm down. Did Alex snitch? No, that doesn’t fit. Alex and Karatena aren’t moving in sync.

This woman had to be one of Fuankilo’s subordinates. When she’d helped with the organ exchange, she’d handled the tools with uncanny ease. That alone was enough proof that she’d assisted Fuankilo in her torture work.

She was probably trying to string me up out of personal grudge. If she had solid proof, she would’ve gone at me the way Alex had—directly, to end her revenge swiftly.

Keeping my emotions nailed down, I glared at Karatena.

Her lips twisted into a vulgar little smirk, and she stuck out her tongue where Stella and Whip couldn’t see.

Ah. I get it now.

That infuriating way she had of dragging at my heels, that petty, needling malice…

She was just like Fuankilo.

She’d heard all about me from Fuankilo while she was still alive.

Then Fuankilo had died in an “accident,” and Karatena had started doubting that story and decided to throw suspicion at me. That was probably how we’d gotten here.

There was a fire burning in her eyes, carrying a will too tangled to describe in a single word.

“There’s no evidence whatsoever,” I said flatly. “You’re making this up from nothing.”

I shrugged as I spoke, then twisted the knife.

“I’m just as heartbroken over Fuankilo-sama’s death as anyone else. Unlike some people.”

I watched the gray-haired woman’s face flush a furious shade of red.

“However,” Karatena snapped, jabbing a finger at me, “we do have Celestia-sama’s testimony.”

The moment she said it, I knew she was lying.

On the day I killed Fuankilo, Celestia had been off inspecting facilities at a nearby base. Someone like Pawk might’ve been able to monitor things remotely, but Celestia had no such ability, and more importantly, that girl had absolutely no reason to suspect me.

To her—and to most people—Oakley the heretic looked like a flawless, devout believer.

Furthermore, Celestia had snuck into my room before Fuankilo’s death and watched me the whole time. If she hadn’t been able to solidify any suspicion of treason from that, then her impression of me should’ve already been tilting in my favor.

Poor Oakley, being falsely accused by Fuankilo like that…

That was probably where she’d landed.

And yet Karatena had just declared, “We have Celestia’s testimony,” like it was fact. On every level, that was problematic. She was leaning too hard on the fact that Celestia wasn’t here to contradict her.

I watched her slowly realize how badly she’d messed up. A strained look crossed her face, and a bead of sweat trickled down her temple.

This woman… She’s speaking purely out of anger and momentum. She hasn’t earned Whip or Stella’s trust at all. No groundwork, then?

That careless line came back to bite her immediately, and the mood shifted. One extra sentence, and it had the exact opposite effect she’d wanted.

To make things even worse, that was when Joanne and Alex, who clearly hadn’t read the room, wandered over, drawn by the sound of voices.

“What’re you guys talking about?” Alex asked.

“Ahh, so here’s the thing,” Whip chimed in. “Karatena-chan here is saying Fuankilo-chan didn’t die in an accident. She says Oakley-chan killed her instead!”

Whip answered Alex’s question with a sunny tone, but her sparkling eyes twitched faintly, unable to fully conceal the contempt in them.

She’d recognized the claim as nonsense.

I turned my gaze to Alex, silently begging, Well?

I still didn’t fully understand what Alex really was. For all I knew, he might actually be an enemy, a die-hard Aros loyalist pretending to be a colossal idiot. A chill ran down my neck as our eyes met.

Then the blond man barked out a laugh.

“Oakley-senpai, kill Fuankilo-sama!?” he said, almost choking. “Hah! No way in hell. That’s impossible!”

A cheerful, unequivocal answer. I swallowed a mouthful of spit and realized I’d just understood one more thing about Alex.

For now, it seemed he was willing to act on my side. His motives were far too unstable to trust completely, but still, he was facing the right direction.

Backing up Alex’s words, Joanne lobbed in a follow-up shot.

“Before that fire broke out at the smelter,” she said casually, “I’d been going at it with Oakley so hard we were practically melting together.”

Someone let out a strangled noise.

“What?”

Between me, Karatena, and Whip, it was hard to tell which of us it was. Either way, everyone except Stella was stunned by just how wildly off-base this “support fire” was.

“That day, there’s no way he had any stamina left,” Joanne went on, face utterly straight. “I drained him completely.”

Half of what she said was true.

She’d attacked me relentlessly, given me a piece of her own ego, and wrung my sanity dry. And yet somehow, that same man had gone and fought another woman to the death?

Even now, she had no idea where I’d found the strength for that. That was what it felt like she was implying between the lines.

In the end, Karatena clicked her tongue and stalked off at a fast pace.

Whip scratched the back of her head and mumbled, cheeks puffing slightly.

“I mean, it’s not like I haven’t heard some rumors along those lines,” she said, “but… that was full-on taking her anger out on you, huh?”

As we watched Karatena’s retreating back, something like a storm warning coiled up in my chest, a sense of coming turmoil I couldn’t quite name.

After we split up with Stella and Whip, the real weight of the situation finally sank in.

Stella and Whip weren’t the main problem. Right now, Karatena Wallmix was the one I needed to treat as a top-priority threat.

Fuankilo, you left one hell of a parting gift…

I stepped outside to explain the situation to Joanne and caught sight of Alex trailing after me.

I tried to wave him off, but he just threw up a hand, all cheer.

“Hey! I, for one, can’t wait to kill Karatena!” he said brightly.

“What are you talking about? Don’t,” I snapped.

A cold prickle ran down my spine as I brushed off the blond man’s words.

Instead, Joanne spoke up.

“Listen up, Alex. We’ve gotta crush the Aros Temple Cult slowly and surely. We need to kill carefully—bold when it counts, cautious when it matters. No pointless flailing.”

“Mm, yeah, that makes sense, I guess!” Alex replied, as if they were talking about chores.

The way Joanne dropped that bomb so smoothly—and the fact that Alex didn’t even blink at it—short-circuited my brain. My heart froze over. It felt like all the warmth had been drained from my body.

“Ah… huh? Joanne, what… what did you just say?”

It was slipped in so naturally after everything that had come before, the fatal line just… slid past my defenses. And then the next thing out of Joanne’s mouth knocked the breath right out of me.

“This guy’s been on the Oakley Faction’s side for a while now,” she said. “You can relax.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Alex beamed. “I was, like, super shocked when I heard about your plan with senpai, but I’m really looking forward to helping out! Let’s smash this cult together!”

“… I haven’t told him the core details,” Joanne added calmly. “But our ideas lined up. He’s pretty much the same as you.”

“…”

“Alex is going to be your guard from now on,” she said.

“’Preciate it, senpai!” Alex chirped.

For a moment, my thoughts just stopped. Goosebumps ran over every inch of my body.

Joanne’s actions were so unthinkable that my mind could barely keep up.

W-wait. No. Come on… You’ve got to be kidding me.

You told him? You told him?

Joanne, you seriously blurted out our ideology and our goal just like that? That thing we’d guarded so carefully, the secret the two of us finally managed to share, after everything—how could you hand that to this shallow clown of all people!?

I was furious.

Her carelessness pissed me off in a way I couldn’t even fully put into words.

How did Alex even get close enough to become her ally in the first place? She was so extreme that getting on her good side was incredibly difficult; the power imbalance was completely in her favor.

I couldn’t see any reason she’d take the risk of telling him anything, let alone welcome him in, when she had so much more to lose than he did.

Reality failed to load properly.

Moving like a broken robot, I slowly turned my head to look at Alex.

He grinned wide, showing gums, all sunshine and friendliness.

“Hehe! I’ll do whatever Joanne-sama and Oakley-senpai say!”

I had no idea how I was supposed to respond to someone radiating that much suspicious energy. In the end, all I could do was keep my mouth shut.

Was this his way of worshipping Joanne? Or just the self-destructive enthusiasm of a man with a death wish?

Like with Stella, trying to understand Alex’s operating principle felt like a waste of effort.

Damn it, there’s too much to think about.

“So, Oakley-senpai,” Alex said, tilting his head, “why can’t we just kill Karatena? If she’s in the way, we should just get rid of her.”

“Right. Well, given how things are now, Karatena dying would be a serious problem.”

I forced myself to pull it together—though in truth, I wasn’t together at all—and restarted the discussion.

Karatena Wallmix, who’d appeared out of nowhere, was a far bigger obstacle than I’d ever anticipated. Calling her “small fry” would be a joke. She was more than capable of becoming the biggest stumbling block of my life.

“Eeh, really?” Alex asked.

“Think about it,” I said. “If someone who’s been loudly insisting I killed Fuankilo just happens to die soon after… That’d be suspicious as hell. They’d keep an even closer eye on me.”

“Ah… Yeah, that makes sense,” he admitted.

Most believers who heard about Fuankilo’s “accidental death” had probably thought the same thing: Could someone like her—an executive with that broken resurrection trick of hers, that lawless healing magic—really die so easily in some unlucky accident?

Aros had ruled it an accident, but it was far more natural to assume someone had killed her. And once you followed that line of thinking to its obvious end, one name rose to the surface.

Wouldn’t that mean that Oakley, who’d clashed with Fuankilo while she was alive, killed her himself?

Once that rumor started rolling, it would probably never stop.

No, in light of Whip’s reaction earlier, that kind of rumor had already started forming.

That was exactly why it was so dangerous for Karatena, Fuankilo’s number one disciple, to start shouting, “Oakley is the one who killed her!”

“Starting tomorrow… No, maybe even starting today, the rumor that ‘Oakley Mercury killed Fuankilo Legacy’ is going to spread like wildfire,” I said.

“Eh? H-How come?” Alex blinked.

“Because Karatena failed to expose anything back there,” I replied. “She couldn’t pin the crime on me in front of them. So now she’ll try to crush me using the people around us instead.”

If she’d thrown the accusation out in front of Stella, Joanne, and Whip, then managed to win even one of them over and corner me into confessing guilt, Karatena’s plan would have been a complete success.

But instead, Joanne had fabricated an alibi for me on the spot, and Whip and Stella had both shut the suspicion down.

At this point, the next move Karatena would take was obvious. She’d start spreading rumors embellished with extra drama, all out of spite, stoking doubt among the believers and dragging my reputation into the mud.

Some of them would believe it.

Even if they didn’t, people who thought it was interesting gossip, or those jealous of how I’d climbed the ladder by getting close to Executive Joanne, would help fan the flames.

Either way, the commotion would only grow.

In the end, the top of the organization, Aros himself, would step in and make his ruling: to prove Oakley Mercury’s innocence, he would peer directly into my memories and judge from there.

Unlike Fuankilo’s curse, which judged truth or falsehood based on answers to questions, Aros’s magic could literally look into a person’s memories.

The downside was massive. It risked utterly shattering the target’s mind.

Because of that, it wasn’t used often, but conversely, that meant Aros would use it if he decided it was necessary, and if that happened, it was over.

Without meaning to, I now had an unremovable time bomb wired into my life.

If I killed Karatena, the uproar would explode: “Oakley eliminated the one in his way.”

If I left her alive, she’d keep swimming around, chumming the water with more rumor and suspicion.

Either way, Aros would eventually be dragged into it, and the ending, me standing under his judgment, was already locked in.

I couldn’t use Joanne either.

Our close relationship was practically public knowledge at this point. If she killed Karatena, it would just be, “Joanne was acting under Oakley’s orders,” and the suspicion around me would deepen.

Karatena Wallmix! Damn it, I didn’t see the checkmate seed coming from there!

Threatening her would do nothing.

She was completely chained to the memory of the dead Fuankilo and in no mental state to listen to anything other people said.

Every escape route had been blocked.

This was the moment the pretty little ideal I’d had of pulling strings from the shadows and rising to executive rank shattered to pieces.

Alex watched me press my fingers to my brow and offered a wobbly smile.

“Uh… Are we, like, in serious trouble right now, senpai?” he asked.

Joanne said nothing.

I thought she was just small fry, but she’s moved in the absolute worst way and thrown everything into chaos. And this time, no matter what I do, I can’t evade suspicion. What do I do? What the hell do I do!?

The same chill I’d felt when I first realized I’d completely screwed everything up in Metasim crawled down my spine, mixed with a tremor of emotion that made it impossible to hold back the urge to cry.

I should have seen what Karatena was aiming for much earlier. I should’ve killed her. Back before we ever came to the Northeastern Branch, back when we crossed paths in the holy land Metasim.

But that was impossible. Who the hell could’ve predicted this?

A wave of nausea born from anxiety and impatience crashed through me.

I’d faced no-way-out situations many times before, but this one was on a completely different scale. If I simplified all my previous crises, they were basically all one-on-one fights.

The psychological war through Fuankilo’s curse right after Metasim collapsed.

The spiritual showdown where Joanne and I smashed our souls together.

The fight to the death with Fuankilo herself.

In every case, if I could just deal with that one opponent, I could pull through.

This time was different.

Now, everything surrounding me—the Aros Temple Cult itself, the organization, the mass of people—had become my enemy.

Unlike one-on-one fights, which I could overturn with a few ideas and some tools, a one-against-many battle, especially when group psychology was involved, offered almost no chance for reversal.

I’d lost at the opening move, and by the time I realized it, I was already in a state where there was nothing left to be done.

There was no winning line. I genuinely couldn’t think of a way to turn this around.

At this rate, I’d be swallowed by the big current and slowly strangled to death, like a neck wrapped in silk and squeezed over time.

My whole body flushed hot, and I nearly started clawing at my own head in sheer frustration.

What stopped me was Joanne’s gentle voice.

“It’s okay, Oakley,” she said softly.

“Huh?”

“I’m not going to let you die,” she whispered. “No matter what. I’ll fix this somehow.”

She meant it. Those words were her true feelings. But it was so obvious she was also trying to exploit me at my weakest moment.

Joanne was on my side, but she saw everyone except me as an enemy. She was hiding a fathomless plan in the pit of her stomach, watching and waiting for her chance to destroy the world.

I was going in circles. I had no one to trust.

“Just focus on what you can do right now,” she said.

It sounded like the kind of thin comfort people offered when they wanted to kick the problem down the road, but annoyingly, it was also true. If I wanted to survive the bleak future ahead of me, there was only one thing for me to do: I had to get stronger.

When the time for morning assembly came, Karatena, Whip, and Stella all gathered together.

Karatena made a point of ignoring me, her expression tight with barely concealed irritation.

Whip, on the other hand, took charge of the visitors from the other bases, cheerfully announcing she’d be showing us one of the Northeastern Branch’s unique facilities: the breeding pit, known here as the Bug Farm.

It was located in a section of the cave that was darker than the already dim surroundings, practically the deepest part of the whole complex.

“This is our Bug Farm, where we raise the lovely critters of the Hidden Insect Corps!” Whip declared.

When the door swung open, a lukewarm gust slapped me in the face. A beat later, a stench like something trying to claw its way up my nostrils hit us, and Alex clamped both hands over his nose, loudly gagging.

“Bleh—! That smells awful!”

Flustered, he lost his footing on the slick floor and went down hard, flailing. A moment later, he was rolling in some kind of white slime and screaming, while Joanne, watching from the back, clicked her tongue.

“Noisy idiot,” her face said plainly.

Whip lifted her torch and pointed it farther into the room.

In the circle of light, we saw piles of something, some kind of organic remains and the corpses of parasites, all heaped together in loose mounds.

It looked nothing like a place for “management” or “cultivation.” The sheer awfulness of it made Celestia cover her mouth.

“To call this a breeding facility… This is beyond unacceptable,” she whispered.

“We deliberately make the environment like this,” Whip replied cheerfully. “It helps us raise the strongest individuals!” She extended a feeler from deep in her throat and let out a shrill, metallic cry.

In response, something huge dropped down from the unseen ceiling above, landing right on the torchlight. It wrapped itself around Whip’s neck with something that almost resembled affection.

She stroked its thick, fleshy body, which looked disturbingly soft and muscular at the same time.

As expected of the leader of the Hidden Insect Corps, the trust she received from the parasites was overwhelming. She’d probably taken in and tamed some truly powerful specimens.

“We cram all kinds of little ones together in a tight room,” Whip went on, tone bright and casual. “Then we let them fight until only one’s left. It does kinda hurt my heart, you know. But anyway, we’ve got several rooms like this, and whenever a winner emerges, we implant that one into whoever volunteered. That’s what makes a member of the Hidden Insect Corps!”

Whip’s own parasite, Milk-chan, looked like a giant centipede, its whole body covered in hard chitin.

The one hanging from the ceiling, in contrast, had pale, almost translucent skin that looked strangely soft.

Apparently, parasites came in all sorts of types.

When I asked Whip what kind of bugs were in the other rooms, she answered with a sparkling grin. “There’s ones that can fly all around the sky and ones that have weapons!”

Looking down at the floor, I finally understood and noticed more details.

Scattered underfoot were fragments like veined wings and what looked like the severed forelegs of a mantis.

When most people heard “parasite,” they probably pictured some kind of simple worm. But the ones they were using here came in all sorts of forms, and they implanted a wide variety of them into their bodies.

“Whip, let me touch that one,” I said.

“Eh!?” she gasped, eyes sparkling. “Don’t tell me you’ve realized how wonderful bugs are!? Go ahead, touch all you like! Oh, hey, if you want, I can implant it for you?”

I took a step forward toward her, wanting to get a better look at the enemy we’d eventually have to defeat.

Whip handed over the worm with the casual excitement of an owner letting someone pet their dog.

I accepted the parasite the way you would a snake, and its size and weight hit me immediately. Its body was about thirty centimeters thick, and its total length was over five meters.

Since part of it still hung down into the darkness, it might have been even longer. Its head writhed near my neck, and a ring of toothlike mouthparts opened wide. Near the jaws, several small holes puckered and flared—probably how it sensed scent and sound.

Once it had completely locked onto my position, it used its many legs to climb up and settle across my shoulders, heavy as a sack of wet sand.

This really takes me back to the plated lizard I kept as a kid…

I’d always been the type who could handle insects and reptiles. This thing was a little too massive for comfort, but just petting it didn’t bother me.

The surface felt like one of those inflatable playground toys you see at parks, though deeper down, there was a lukewarm, spongy sensation, like warm gluten.

Aside from its nature, it was… honestly kind of cute.

“Cuter than I expected,” I said. “Do they usually get this big?”

“We’ve tweaked them so they do,” Whip replied proudly.

“Huh.”

“Bet you’re interested now, right? And seriously, the first thing you said after touching it was ‘cute.’ You’ve got great instincts. Come on, let’s do it. Let’s put one inside you. There is a pretty decent chance you’ll die, but… well, anyway!”

I stroked its head a few more times, and it eventually pulled away and crawled back up toward the ceiling.

“If you’re going out of your way to implant a bug, there’s gotta be some benefit, right?” I asked.

“It boosts your reflexes and increases your muscle output!” she said brightly. “There’sa side effect where your lifespan gets a bit shorter, but you’re facility-grown, aren’t you? So it shouldn’t be that big a drawback. I mean, I won’t force you if you don’t want it.”

These dangerous parasites couldn’t be tamed unless they were compatible with their host.

The bugs used at the Northeastern Branch would enter through every available opening in the body, burrow under the skin, and slowly eat away at the host’s insides over time.

Only when the host’s body and the parasite were in perfect harmony would the host’s physical abilities break past their natural limit. Or so the story went.

“Break past their limits, huh?” someone echoed softly behind me.

Karatena.

Her voice was edged with mockery, but there was a faint tremor in it that said she couldn’t quite dismiss the idea either.

We all knew there were risks in taking a parasite.

The question was whether there was enough reason to accept those risks, and that was something I’d have to test myself over the course of the joint training.

Early the next morning, I stumbled across Joanne and Stella in the middle of an argument.

Joanne was tearing into her with terrifying intensity, voice like a whip, while Stella muttered back in her usual low monotone. My name popped up every so often, which gave me a bad feeling. I would’ve loved to pretend I hadn’t seen anything, but with words like “stay away from him” and “I’ll kill you” drifting over, I couldn’t exactly walk off either.

“You were peeping on Oakley in the bath yesterday, weren’t you?!” Joanne snapped.

What the hell is that? Since when.

“If you know that, you’re equally guilty,” Stella murmured.

“I’m allowed!”

No, you’re not, I screamed internally.

For some reason, Joanne was wearing something that looked suspiciously like a cheongsam. Probably Whip’s doing.

“And another thing, at least stop peeking at him when he’s on the toilet!” she shouted. “It’s disgusting!”

She chose that moment to act as the voice of reason. They had both already broken through the ceiling of creepiness.

“I can’t stand how you stalk Oakley like some sleazy little freak!” Joanne snarled. “You peek in his private time, you put crazy crap in his food… I’m done holding back. Come on! I’ll kill you!”

More things I didn’t want to know just kept coming out.

I ran.

A few minutes later, I noticed the corridor growing noisy. Word had gotten around: Joanne and Stella’s argument had escalated and was about to turn into a full-blown showdown.

Crisis after crisis, one after another. I never got a moment’s peace.

“Seriously? Stella-sama and Joanne-sama are gonna fight?” someone said. “I’ll bet my dinner on Stella-sama winning.”

“Then I’ll bet on Joanne-sama,” another replied. “It’s a contrarian pick, but still.”

“Hey, hey, do you not know about Stella-sama’s unbeatable magic?”

“The best feeling is betting on the bigger payout and winning.”

The battle-happy members of the Northeastern Branch all took off running toward the commotion.

Fine, fight all you want… I thought. Except I can’t just leave it alone. This is such a pain. Someone, please, kill them all already…

I followed the flow of people toward the mess hall area. Alex spotted me and waved with a goofy grin plastered on his face.

“Oakley-senpai, things are getting real entertaining,” he said. “Looks like Joanne-sama and Stella-sama are gonna have an actual kill-or-be-killed match!”

“If you’ve got the time to call it ‘entertaining,’ you’ve got the time to stop them,” I snapped. “If either one of them dies, we’re in serious trouble.”

“I wanted to stop them, really. But those two were totally fired up. No way I could’ve stopped ’em by myself.”

“Fair point.”

Apparently, they’d been arguing while walking. They’d started out around here but had gradually made their way further and further outside.

As we quickened our pace in pursuit of the two, Karatena slipped into step with us, pointing at me.

The look on her face made it crystal clear she was enjoying this, like she was savoring the sight of me stuck between two feuding executives.

“My, my. You truly are the ladies’ man the rumors suggest,” she said with mock politeness. “To provoke a catfight between executives over you… How impressive.”

“You’ve got some nerve showing your face to me…” I muttered.

Apparently, she’d been spreading the rumors quite efficiently. The fact that she could still smirk like that meant she felt pretty secure. Probably because she believed she was gaining allies.

Staring at Karatena’s thoroughly condescending expression, I felt my strength drain away.

“Let’s put the past behind us,” she said breezily. “I was… mistaken back then as well.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s shake hands. There, I’m sorry. Good. Now, that topic is over.”

Her cool and steady hands wrapped around mine. Her panicked expression from the other day was nowhere to be seen. She looked composed. Confident.

And with the immediate crisis between Joanne and Stella to deal with, it felt like I was being forced to lower my fist and play along. At least, for now.

Alex’s face lit up, and he exchanged a bright, satisfying fist bump with Karatena.

I couldn’t understand what either of them was feeling. It only made the sense of psychological isolation dig deeper.

“Karatena-saaan,” Alex said happily, “Oakley-senpai might look all gloomy and unlucky, but he’s actually super popular, y’know!”

“Yes, he has that ‘magnet for walking disasters’ aura,” she replied smoothly.

“Ahh man, I’m jealous! No one says it out loud, but Joanne-sama’s, like, insanely beautiful, right? And Stella’s obviously gorgeous too. I wanna be popular like senpai someday!”

“Shut up for five minutes, would you?” I groaned.

I’d been so careful, thinking everything through up to now, and yet ever since coming to the Northeastern Branch, everything had turned into total chaos.

The headaches and stomach pain wouldn’t stop, and my eyes stung faintly with unshed tears.

Because honestly, how was any of this normal?

Joanne had just told me she wanted to destroy the entire world, that we had to prepare patiently and carefully, and now she was flying off the handle, trying to kill Stella for bothering me.

Then there was Karatena.

Why the hell was she suddenly acting like a teammate the moment Joanne and Stella started fighting, when she’d been busy trashing my name behind my back?

Alex, too, was behaving like he’d fully accepted the apology and moved on. I couldn’t follow any of it.

They’re all insane… Am I really the only sane person left?

Things kept spinning and flipping so fast it hurt. Just keeping up with the current situation was exhausting.

As we ran through the tunnels, part of the cave ceiling had collapsed ahead, letting in a blast of frigid outdoor air.

Laughter-tinged screams rose from the onlookers at the sudden, vicious temperature drop as, through the ragged hole torn in the rock, two girls burst out into the open sky.

Fighting inside the cave would almost certainly have caused a total cave-in. Some sliver of reason must’ve fired in their brains at the last second.

Not that it stopped part of the base from getting wrecked.

In the end, they took their battle outside, into the biting cold.

Whip, who had shown up at some point, started barking orders to the crowd of eager cultists.

“Hey, hey! You almost never get to see two executives fight for real, right!?” she yelled. “Everybody out! Let’s watch and steal their techniques! We’ll just start the joint training ahead of schedule!”

From the fighters’ perspective, this was probably a genuine kill-or-be-killed match.

But Whip and the rest didn’t seem to grasp the seriousness of it at all. They settled on that convenient explanation and surged enthusiastically out into the freezing open air.

The Northeastern Branch had multiple exits.

We slipped out halfway up the mountain, and a slashing below-zero wind smacked me in the face the moment I stepped outside.

Whip walked ahead of me, completely unfazed, scanning the surroundings. She pushed through snow piled up to her waist and kept marching forward without hesitation.

The tough men of the Northeastern Branch followed in her wake, kicking up snow as they went and stamping out a path.

I gathered what courage I had and stepped out into the subzero world.

The distant view was blurred white, hard to see through, but heavy, rolling booms rumbled from somewhere beyond the snowy horizon.

“Come to think of it, where’s Celestia?” I asked.

“Celestia-sama went to try and mediate,” Alex replied. “Now that you mention it… Where did she go? Maybe she’s between them right now, trying to stop the fight—”

Right as we were tossing that thought back and forth, something tore through the white air toward us.

I jumped aside on reflex.

A heartbeat later, the impact blew apart the surface of the snowfield and kicked up a swirling ground blizzard.

Shouts, somewhere between cheers and roars, rose from the watching men, and Alex and I exchanged a look.

Peering into the huge crater gouged out of the packed snow, I was hit by a harsh, acrid smell of burning that stabbed at my sinuses.

White steam rose like breath from within the hole, and a moment later, a jet-black, charred hand clawed its way out.

In seconds, the massive, fatal burns began to heal, rapidly rewinding as if the damage was being played backwards.

The original body formed again from that ruined state.

Eventually, a human in Celestia’s shape, dressed in her fallen-angel outfit, fully reconstituted herself. She pushed her torso up out of the snow, and when I offered her my hand, she grasped it and let me pull her to her feet.

“Thank you…” she murmured.

“Did Stella-sama do that to you?” I asked.

“I tried to get between them,” Celestia said, brushing ash from her shoulders, “but… Stella swept me away with her full strength. I was very nearly reduced to cinders.”

In terms of raw combat ability, Stella Belmont was overwhelming.

First, there was the web of magical barriers layered across her entire body. They completely reflected all physical attacks and absorbed incoming magic. Any physical strike directed at her automatically bounced back. Any spell sent her way was swallowed and converted into fuel for the very heat rays that were tearing up the world right now.

Someone like Celestia, who couldn’t produce enough firepower to overload Stella’s absorption capacity, would find stopping this fight nearly impossible. Even now, the thunderous booms continued in the white-drowned distance.

One moment from the right, the next from the left. Sometimes it felt like they came from the sky, sometimes from deep underground.

Quakes and explosions pulsed at irregular intervals, and a suffocating tension gripped everyone around me.

Suddenly, Celestia raised a hand and fired a burst of compressed air into the sky.

A sharp gust tore upward, whipping the snow into a spiral and making our coats snap and flap around us.

“Please wait a moment,” she said. “I’ll clear the clouds.”

She lifted her arm fully overhead, spreading her fingers toward the heavens.

Then, like a painter running a brush across a canvas, she traced lines in the air.

Masses of air rose, shoving aside the fine snow as they climbed, then exploded outward in all directions. The thick clouds that had been spitting down constant flurries began to break apart.

A heartbeat later, blazing sunlight poured down onto the land.

The gloomy storm cover and choking veils of powder snow vanished, leaving only countless ice crystals dancing in the air, glittering in the light.

Unlike us, who’d been stuck squinting through white-out, these executives could casually rewrite the weather.

Utterly insane, I thought, a chill of awe and fear crawling along my spine.

The sky had cleared in a radius of a few kilometers, maybe more.

Centered around Celestia, the clouds continued to evaporate in real time, and at this rate, the whole stretch of mountains around us would be under a clear blue sky.

As the gap in the storm widened, Celestia caught sight of something and let out a small cry.

“There they are! On top of that hill over there!”

Far in the distance, Joanne and Stella were locked in a fight to the death.

Joanne, in her cheongsam, zigzagged wildly through the air.

Stella remained rooted to the ground, sweeping beams of searing light in all directions.

The snow-covered earth boiled where the rays struck, the ground beneath transforming into a molten, red-black landscape like exposed magma.

All we could do from here was stare at that patch of hell from afar.

“Doesn’t look like we can stop ’em,” Alex muttered beside me. “Lost cause.”

Among the fourteen executives across both factions, Joanne’s combat ability was on the low end.

In practical terms, she was probably weaker even than Celestia, who was often labeled a low-tier character.

First of all, Joanne lacked offensive magic.

Her main traits as an executive were: exceptionally strong healing magic, the ability to sense her own scattered flesh, and brute strength. Her regenerative power was second to none, but her defense was among the worst. Her mobility was a bit above average. Her destructive power was nothing special, and her fighting style boiled down to throwing rocks or brawling with her fists.

From the perspective of an ordinary human like me, her abilities were more than enough to qualify as a monster, but compared to a true executive like Stella, her specs were badly lacking.

In the center of my vision, Joanne was blasted away by a sweeping beam of light.

She kept charging in and attacking and then getting driven off.

You can’t win this without magic. She’s got that broken reflection ability. If you’ve got my ego mixed into yours, you should know this is a fight you can’t win!

Right now, letting Joanne die was not an option. I needed her as an ally to help bring down the cult and to keep a leash on Alex as well.

I kicked off the exposed ground and ran.

My target: the narrow space between Joanne and Stella.

Another set of footfalls matched my pace—Celestia, running at my side when I glanced over.

“I’m going to try talking them down!” I shouted. “Celestia, can you do something about those heat rays!?”

“Of course,” she replied.

We dodged patches of boiling earth and sprinted through the swirling heat.

Beams of light raged just ahead of us.

Joanne was slipping past them by the narrowest margins, but her face was drenched in sweat.

This fragile equilibrium was going to shatter any second.

Feeling that in my bones, I jumped out in front of Stella, standing between her rampaging barriers and heat rays to draw her attention.

“Oakley!? You idiot!” Joanne, down on one knee, shouted.

An instant later, a heat ray twisted in front of my eyes.

A mass of compressed air diverted the beam, kicking it upward.

The red-hot line lanced into the sky, piercing straight through the layers of cloud above.

After I stepped between them, silence fell for a few seconds.

Stella’s eyes were full of something like rabid obsession. Just as Joanne had said, this girl really might be someone you had to kill at least once. Even from Celestia’s perspective, it was obvious. I could feel her sympathies sliding toward Joanne’s side.

“Celestia,” Stella murmured. “Move. We don’t need her.”

Celestia and Joanne traded a look.

What a hellion. No, a complete maniac. How does Aros even keep something like this on a leash?

While the fight hung in a stalemate, Whip finally seemed to realize something was off and hurried over. She wrapped Stella up in a soothing hug and flicked a quick glance my way.

“Okay, everyone! The special exhibition match between Joanne-chan and Stella-chan ends here!” she called out brightly. “Let’s all work hard so we can become executives like them someday!”

With the branch leader, Whip, taking command of the scene, the tension dissolved. She led Stella away, the latter still muttering under her breath as they walked off together.

The men who’d been betting on the outcome didn’t seem especially bothered. Their blood was up. They scattered a bit and started swinging their weapons or pairing off for sparring.

A few griped, “Hey, we were betting on who’d win,” but it didn’t last long.

Before I knew it, they were dragging Alex into their group and diving headfirst into “joint training.”

I stepped back from the others and cornered Joanne. I had to ask why she’d done something so incredibly foolish. Even if she’d been furious, picking a fight with Stella was a terrible idea.

As if countering my accusation, Joanne shook her head with an oddly cool expression.

“My anger was just an excuse,” she said. “I used that time to figure out how to beat Stella Belmont.”

“What?”

“I’ve come up with a way to handle Stella,” she went on. “Whether we can actually pull it off is another story… but hey, at least my little rampage paid off.”

She smirked to herself, clearly pleased she’d found a thread to tug on.

You’re telling me everything up till now was calculated?

Had she decided that even if she went all out and genuinely tried to kill Stella, no one would seriously crack down on her because the reason was “something about a guy” and they’d never suspect outright rebellion?

No way. She just managed to redirect it after the fact. Half of that is a lie. That rage wasn’t an act.

I pushed her explosive comment to the edge of my mind and focused first on checking whether she was okay.

When my hands touched her, Joanne wriggled slightly, looking faintly pleased.

Then she lifted her leg, showing off the bare skin of her thigh through the high-slit dress.

“What’s with the outfit?” I asked.

“Whip made me wear it.”

“I figured as much.”

Once I’d confirmed she was in one piece, I circled back to the more pressing issue: what she’d just claimed about beating Stella.

“A moment ago, you said you’d found a way to defeat Stella-sama,” I reminded her. “But without magic, there’s no way for you to break that barrier. It’s impossible.”

Stella Belmont was strong. Terrifyingly so. I’d have to kill her someday, but the wall she represented was absurdly high.

The only people I could imagine breaking her barrier head-on were Saren Deputy, the Orthodoxy’s top-ranked executive, or the cult leader Aros himself. They were the only ones whose firepower might be able to brute-force their way through a barrier that absorbed magic.

A third maybe-candidate would be Pomette Yoster, Orthodoxy executive number four. Her magic manifested invisible blades of pure psychic energy that cut through anything.

Depending on her mental state, there were runs in the game where it was hard to imagine her ever losing.

But in any case, if you didn’t have offensive magic, you weren’t even in the conversation.

“Listen first,” Joanne said.

She lifted her chin, pride coloring her voice as she began to explain.

Apparently, this was her first time actually fighting Stella.

Even so, she’d vaguely known about the girl’s ability: reflects physical attacks, absorbs magical ones.

“Figured I’d try it and see,” Joanne said. “I slugged her full-force.”

The result? Everything from her right elbow down had exploded. That was where she’d concluded that pure physical attacks wouldn’t work under any circumstances.

When she tried to grab Stella and throw her, all five fingers had bent backward in the wrong direction. Even when she managed to snag the girl by her clothes and hurl her, the impact from hitting the ground was reflected. Stella herself took no damage at all.

The beams she scattered across the battlefield melted the snow, turning the terrain into a steaming, blistering hellscape…

But despite all of that, Stella hadn’t shed a single drop of sweat.

Her clothes weren’t even damp.

In other words, her defensive field blocked out not just attacks, but even the surrounding temperature.

Drowning her probably wouldn’t work either—the barrier would keep the water off, and besides, Stella wasn’t the kind of person who’d let herself be put in a situation where she’d drown without resisting.

The more Joanne fought, the more impressed she was—at least, with the physical side of that barrier’s perfection.

Up to that point, I’d been listening quietly… but then I frowned.

“You’re talking,” I said slowly, “like you’ve already tested magic on her, too.”

“What are you talking about? I do have something I can use.”

She lifted her right arm like she was checking a wristwatch—then chopped it off at the shoulder in a single motion. With a wet splash, a massive quantity of blood spilled onto the ground.

“What are you—”

Before I could finish, she grabbed the severed arm and swung it, hurling it far into the distance with the help of centrifugal force.

At the same time, she triggered her healing magic.

Flesh bloomed from her shoulder like time-lapse growth, bone and muscle and skin weaving themselves together until a new arm was fully formed.

The arm she’d thrown away, meanwhile, turned purple in the space of a few seconds, then blackened into charcoal, shriveling as it went.

A breeze caught it, and the outer edge began to crumble, flaking away into dust that scattered and vanished into the air.

Flexing the fingers of her freshly regrown right hand, Joanne spoke.

“Healing magic. With this, I can break through Stella’s barrier.”

Healing magic… as the way to defeat Stella’s defenses?

Something snagged in my memory.

I dug through my thoughts, trying to pin down the source of the discomfort, and a scene from the torture room surfaced. One of our experiments, where we checked what would happen when Joanne regenerated from the section of my ring finger, came to mind.

Right. When she regrew from my ring finger, the new body pushed my flesh aside, and part of the back of my hand just… disappeared.

Understanding what she was getting at, I slapped my knee.

“You mean using the phenomenon we observed during our experiments,” I said.

It was a bizarre, irrational phenomenon produced by magic that ignored physical laws.

To perfectly recreate her original body, Joanne’s magic extended nerves and bones into empty space, then filled them with blood and flesh.

Anything already occupying that space was simply… overwritten.

“When the coordinates for my regenerating arm and Stella’s position overlapped, I noticed something by chance,” Joanne said. “Once my arm was fully regrown, a bit of Stella’s finger had been shaved away—but my arm was totally fine. Looks like my healing magic has higher priority than her barrier. I’m gonna use that to kill her.”

“Even if you manage to trigger that push-out effect with your healing, actually killing Stella-sama outright would still be difficult, wouldn’t it? She’s an executive too. Leave even a single scrap of flesh, and we’re back to square one. Worse, once she realizes what you’re doing, it’ll never work a second time.”

“That’s the sticking point. Like, if I could get her to eat a piece of my body, then cast healing magic the moment it settled in her stomach and her whole body got shoved out of existence, that’d be perfect. But that’s way too convenient, huh?”

“Well, yes.”

Still, as far as schemes went, it sounded disturbingly feasible.

Compared to that, all I’d come up with were half-baked ideas like: Seal the cave entrances and set the inside on fire so she dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Or make her swallow a bomb and blow her up from the inside.

Full of holes, every last one of them. Joanne’s idea was several times better.

So, this is what it’s like when you’ve got an executive on your side. Your whole strategic toolbox expands.

Well, “on my side,” meaning someone who didn’t understand basic concepts like reporting or consulting and who wanted to massacre literally everyone except me.

In both good and bad ways, Joanne’s mind had gotten sharper after that night. She’d evolved from a slightly stupid, muscle-brained psycho beauty into a dependable psycho beauty you could never predict.

Maybe we can muscle our way out of Karatena’s little trap, I thought. We’d have to do something insane, but if it blows apart this suffocating situation, it might be worth it.

Hope sprouted from a direction I hadn’t even considered.

A second path: kill everyone in the Northeastern Branch, including Karatena, and then take down Stella Belmont.

Right. Just training quietly in the Northeastern Branch had been far too lukewarm. If I was going to be strangled slowly anyway, I might as well move first and smash everything myself.

“Thank you, Joanne-sama,” I said. “I’ve just decided on our next course of action.”

She smirked. “I figured. We’re probably thinking the same thing.”

Having finished laying out her strategy, Joanne snatched a glaive from one of the Northeastern men.

She spun it along the line of her body, the blade tracing elegant arcs in the air, an almost ceremonial display of how comfortable she was with the weapon. It made sense she’d be good with arms. Before she ever gained her current monstrous strength, she must have earned her achievements with steel in hand.

“Either way,” she said, “you have to get stronger.”

Her posture was nothing like her usual straightforward, smash-through-everything style.

It was fluid, controlled, refined.

Her old fighting style, I realized, must’ve been a technician’s: one that relied on speed and skill, making full use of her small frame rather than brute-force power.

Seen like this, I had to admit Joanne’s outfit wasn’t as ridiculous as I’d first thought.

According to Whip, female combatants, including herself, sometimes went into missions dressed in extreme gear. The idea was obvious enough. Weaponize an alluring body, drag the enemy’s eyes where you want them, and control the flow of battle.

Joanne kicked a new longsword toward my feet, baring her white teeth in a feral grin.

“Come on,” she said. “Come at me. I’ll whip you into shape.”

So she was willing to be my sparring partner.

That, at least, I was genuinely grateful for.

I pulled the sword out of the ground and turned to face her, the world around us already starting to churn with blown-up powder snow.

Whip had said it clearly: anyone aiming to become an executive needed to be strong enough to take a round off a current executive.

If we were going to do this as a real combat simulation, then I had to use every tool I had.

“I’ve got healing magic, so I’m not holding back,” Joanne warned me. “You won’t die from getting your neck chopped off once, right?”

“Uh, yes, I’ll die,” I replied flatly.

“If we stick it back on quick enough, you’ll be fine.”

She’s not wrong.

A thin, even layer of snow gathered along the spine of my blade.

Wind and ice kissed my eyelids, cutting slivers out of my vision. My lashes felt like they were freezing together. The skin on the windward side of my body started to lose warmth, and even my breath changed color, thinning into the cold.

I ran my gaze from the sword’s grip to the guard, then down the length of the blade, measuring the distance to my opponent.

At the end of that line of sight stood Joanne Sagamix, the woman I’d shared the deepest intimacy of my life with.

The person I loved more than anyone else in this world.

And the person I would one day absolutely have to kill.

Just as she’d spent this fight thinking up a way to bring down Stella, I wouldn’t lose anything by quietly preparing a way to kill her.

Between Fuankilo and Joanne, the difference in raw power was like heaven and earth.

Fuankilo could outmuscle an ordinary human in bursts, but she wasn’t good at sustaining that level of force.

Her magic’s nature didn’t lend itself to wide-area attacks either.

That’s why I was able to win.

But what if the one in that smelter had been Joanne instead?

The moment the fight started, she would’ve ripped the floor up from the foundations, folded the whole building in half with brute force, and crushed everything inside. That image came to mind so easily, I couldn’t help but let out a bitter little laugh.

There wouldn’t even be time to think about running.

Within five seconds, I’d be dead and gone. That was the kind of out-of-spec monster a magic-using executive truly was.

Even with the powder snow swirling around us, Joanne’s jade-green eyes didn’t blink once. Those spiral irises gazed at me with a tenderness that felt like hunger, like a snake fixing on a frog just before the strike.

This is my second time fighting Joanne, I thought.

But she was nothing like before. Now she had healing magic as a shield and would come at me with the intent to break me for real.

“Training” was just the label. This could easily turn into a genuine fight.

The snow piled on my blade slid off. At the same moment, I kicked off the ground.

I charged straight into the pressure radiating off her and brought my sword down with everything I had. I pushed power from my right leg into my hips, adding a full twist of my waist, and let my full weight ride that motion.

The rotational force of my entire body flowed into the tip of the blade, the point blurring with the speed of the swing.

It was a strike with real bite. In my whole life, I’d probably only manage a handful of blows that clean.

But the blade cut through empty air.

Why?

I tracked the path of my swing and fixed my eyes on where she’d been, only to discover that Joanne was gone.

A beat later, a cool voice brushed right past the tip of my nose.

“Nice swing,” she said.

Her shoe rested lightly on my lowered blade.

She stepped on it? That fast!?

Weight suddenly pressed down through the steel, and the longsword sank into the snow as if it were giving up and lying down.

Weapon neutralized, I stood there stunned as Joanne loomed above me, one foot on my sword, looking down on me like I was something small.

“Okay. You’re dead,” she said.

She flicked my forehead with a finger. I staggered back helplessly and landed on my ass.

Joanne watched me in silence, her expression as unreadable as a mantis’s compound eyes. I’d known there was a massive gap in power between us, but having it thrown in my face like this left me speechless. It felt like she was reminding me that I only managed to kill Fuankilo because she was weak.

Feeling the sheer size of the wall in front of me, I pushed myself up again, relying on nothing but the sword in my hand.

She hadn’t punched me on purpose. She wanted to show me the gap between us. Make it clear there was nothing I could do to win, no matter how I struggled.

She meant to grind me down, body and mind both, but I wasn’t empty-handed either. I’d been trained to death on the basics.

At the very least, I had enough fighting ability to stay safely above “liquidate on sight” standards. I had no idea how many tries it would take to score a single clean point on her. Still, my strengths were stubbornness and refusal to stay down.

And she wasn’t trying to kill me.

To be precise, even if she cut my head off, she’d just stick it back on and resurrect me right away. So as long as my heart didn’t break, this wouldn’t end. That was my grim, backward version of a win condition.

“Haaaaaah!”

Learning from the first exchange, I swung horizontally this time.

A line instead of a circle.

I stepped in wide, aiming for her neck.

And then… she slipped away.

Just a light hop, like she’d failed to catch a falling leaf. She didn’t even bother feigning to use the glaive. Twisting in midair, Joanne landed behind my guard and whipped a kick into my exposed ribs.

“Guh!?”

The blow hurled me across the ground.

I tumbled over the thin layer of snow and came to a stop coughing, blood spattering out of my mouth. It felt like someone had plunged a hand into my chest through ice water and was wringing my heart bare-handed.

Obsessed with the notion that I had to get back up, I bounced to my feet.

My vision wouldn’t stabilize.

Through the blur, I saw Joanne standing there with her arms folded.

“Hah… hah…”

I’d seen it.

Right before that whip-like kick connected, she’d slowed it down. How many layers of restraint had she wrapped around that one exchange? I hadn’t even managed to make her consider using her weapon.

A crushing sense of despair washed over me.

This world was full of nameless masters, meaning a freak like Whip could lurk anywhere. Those people would be far stronger than a Joanne who was holding back.

If I couldn’t even win against her in this state, what was I supposed to do?

Third bout.

I shifted to a thrust-focused offense… and paid for it instantly.

A sharp kick snapped up from below, smashing directly into my extended wrist. There was a dull crack, and the sword flew from my hand. The pain was so intense that my legs simply folded, dropping me to my knees. I stared at my useless right arm; my upper arm was bent at an angle no human joint should ever make.

Joanne’s voice was gentle when she asked, “Want to take a break?” The tone lent itself to a sort of taunt, and I forced myself to refuse.

“L-Like hell I’m yielding… to this level of pain…!”

“Pain eats away at the mind, bit by bit,” she replied calmly. “That’s why torture works. No matter how tough you act, your heart’s getting ground down.”

She wasn’t even trying to hide that her goal was to break me mentally.

Joanne raised her hand and cast healing magic on me. The fracture had been so clean that the bone knit together perfectly, without so much as a bruise left behind.

Fourth round.

I kicked up a spray of snow, going for a blinding move, but she slipped past it easily and met me with a spinning kick.

She had to be ramping up the power now, because when the blow landed, something exploded inside my gut.

Fire roared through my solar plexus. I tried to double over from the heat and shock, but the impact had shot straight through into my spine, forcing my body to lock ramrod straight instead.

“Ngh!”

This pain and impact were nothing like the agony of having my organs swapped or the sickening sensation of my flesh being replaced.

What tore at me wasn’t the physical damage. It was the fact that all the techniques I’d honed on my own weren’t landing at all. I felt my heart chiseled away by that single truth.

The helplessness of having all the effort I’d poured my life into trampled underfoot.

The visceral reminder of the gap in kind between us as living creatures sent a chill of defeat rippling through my whole body.

No matter what I tried, I could never match her speed, her reflexes, her output. Probably not her technique, either.

So, what exactly was I better at?

Nothing.

Goddamn it. But if I can’t at least go toe-to-toe with the Joanne that exists now, there’s no way I survive this butcher’s world…!

In reality, people didn’t just suddenly get stronger. Convenient awakenings didn’t exist in this world.

The only ones allowed to gather the soil of true strength and, under the right conditions, brush against godhood were fourteen chosen monsters. And one of them was the girl standing in front of me, Joanne Sagamix.

Once I accepted that pure technique wouldn’t work, I resorted to every cheap trick I could think of.

I used anything my eyes landed on. My own blood. Stones. Chunks of ice. Branches. Wind. Sand in the eyes, feints, underhanded traps—if I thought it might work, I tried it. Every last thing was crushed and tossed aside.

She punched me, kicked me, slipped around my swings like water. My jaw was rattled, my world flipped upside down, my groin punted skyward. A few times, my consciousness even winked out entirely.

Then she healed me, and we went again.

And again.

And again.

Human beings can shed skin—even twice, at times—when they go through something extreme.

And this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance: to fight, over and over, against one of the few true demons walking this world and live. Every bout seared an insane amount of experience into my body.

The dense, brutal hours kept piling experience onto me. The stabbing agony kept grinding my mind down.

And then, on the ninety-fourth bout, my clumsy, desperate swordplay finally forced Joanne to use her weapon.

“Oh?” she murmured.

Up until now, she’d only dodged, but this time, my downward slash, aimed dead center at her skull, was precise enough to make her bring her blade up and catch it on reflex.

If I’d let my exhaustion show for even a second, she would’ve pounced on it immediately. I wore a blank mask, lied with my face, and used every trick and scrap of technique I had to pry open her guard.

But that was as far as my offense went.

She sloughed off the blow, twisted my imbalance against me, and slammed me to the ground.

Her counterattack didn’t stop there.

The glaive’s edge came down on my face without an ounce of mercy. My upper and lower jaws were separated, blood erupting like a burst pipe. Cold air rushed through the underside of my tongue.

All sensation vanished from my lower face, replaced an instant later by a detonation of blistering heat. I couldn’t even tell how bad it was, only that it was fatal.

I could feel the presence of death, sudden and close, and with it, my fighting spirit shriveled.

“How long is that will to fight going to last?” she asked.

Pain was far too simple a word for it.

My ear had been smashed into the frozen ground. The torn half of my face screamed with pure, unfiltered pain at the maximum volume the nerves could carry.

Were my eardrums ruptured? I didn’t know.

It felt like my brain was about to melt and ooze out of my ear canal.

If she’d planned this level of injury as a way to break me, then this girl understood exactly how to snap a human heart in two.

Healing light flowed over me. My severed jaw stitched itself back on. The cut had been so clean that it reattached quickly.

The joint was fragile, though.

She’d deliberately left an edge of fear, healing me enough to keep going but not enough for me to feel safe.

This damn woman. Nothing ever goes the way I expect with her. She hints about wrecking the Northeastern Branch like it’s our shared secret plan, but her real objective is to shatter me. And yet, at this rate… I might actually be able to beat Joanne.

The moment that thought surfaced…

Ninety-fifth bout.

A lightning-fast thrust, nearly indistinguishable from the blowing snow, blew that sweet delusion away.

The point slid perfectly through the space between my lungs and heart, carefully avoiding my organs and major vessels, a pulled strike calibrated not to kill.

Bone cracked as the cold blade pushed deep into my torso, and my mind was shaved down another layer by the sensation alone. When the steel finally withdrew, slowly, almost leisurely, the pain and violation wrung a raw scream out of me.

“You want to beat an executive, don’t you?” Joanne said calmly. “You want to save the world, don’t you? Then get up.”

Her face was expressionless.

But she was absolutely serious about this, about holding back just enough, about breaking me without letting me die. And somehow, I found a kindness in that. Because the way she was now, Joanne looked like she was genuinely cheering on my stupid dream.

No matter what kind of hell stands in front of you, you’ll tear through it, covered in blood, with everything you’ve got. You’ll move the world in ways I can’t even imagine. Otherwise, you’re not worthy of being mine.

Her eyes looked like that.

So full of expectation, affection, and hostility all at once.

She was truly a hassle.

Troublesome, twisted, impossible to handle. And I couldn’t help thinking she was unbearably cute.

By the time we reached the hundred and fifty-seventh bout, Joanne still didn’t so much as flinch at my refusal to break. She’d experienced my stubbornness and tenacity firsthand once before.

She’d probably accounted for this from the beginning, factored in that it would take a long time to crush me.

The snowfield around us was soaked in my blood and fat, a rotten painting smeared over white. Even the Northeastern Branch members who’d come to watch our training were wincing, their faces tight.

We’d started at dawn. Now the day was finally running out.

Without warning, the world simply slipped toward darkness all at once, the sky dimming. Joanne’s gaze flicked up for a heartbeat.

This was the instant I’d been waiting for.

I sprinted over the snow on legs that had long since hit their limit. Even a fraction of a second would be enough. For an opponent whose concentration had been stretched thin for hours, it was more than enough to push in and overwhelm her.

I slid low, driving in under her guard, and swung my sword upward with every last scrap of strength I had.

Her guard was a beat too late, and for the first time that day, she took a clean hit.

“Oh…?”

The blade bit into her right upper arm.

A heavy longsword cutting through that soft, pale skin was almost too easy. I let the momentum carry the swing through, the steel tearing its way out, and a single line of red slid down her arm.

Joanne let out a small, mad little laugh—not rage, but something like delight, maybe even praise for the fact that I’d kept my focus intact over such punishing hours.

She lifted her arm and licked the blood away, then pressed down the violence in her eyes and willed the wound closed.

“Oakley,” she said. “What number was that?”

“One… h-hundred… f-fifty… s-seven…” I managed between ragged breaths.

“You’re strong. For such a fragile little body, you’ve really hung in there.”

She gave a light, almost playful round of applause, then tossed the glaive aside and walked toward me.

“Ahh, this is a problem,” she sighed. “You’re just so damn cute I can’t stand it…”

She pulled me in, burying my face against her chest, and pressed a gentle kiss to my forehead.

“Let’s work hard again tomorrow,” she whispered.

Training, she called it, but it was torture, plain and simple. Even landing one solid blow didn’t mean anything.

This hell wasn’t going to end until she was satisfied.

※※※

While Oakley and the others were off in the Northeastern Branch, the restoration of Metasim quietly came to an end.

Once, Metasim had been a small, lively town where the orthodox faithful lived their days in peace. Now, wrapped in the brambles of Pawk Tedlotus, the place exuded a stagnant, poisonous air. Any trace of its former bustle was gone.

The outer walls that rose like cliffs for defense had been crudely patched back together. Over that warped stone ran an unbroken layer of thorny vines, woven so densely that not a soul could approach.

The only part of the walls that hadn’t been consumed and ruined by those venomous thorns was the patrol walkway atop the ramparts. Up there, cultists were stationed at the four cardinal points, watching the distant horizon for signs of enemy approach.

Metasim lay on the fringe of the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid. Hardly anyone passed through this region to begin with, and now that the city had been removed from the official maps, travelers almost never came close.

On top of that, a broad-area perception ward cast by Aros covered the entire Metasim region. Thanks to his spell, the area had become a paradise for heretics, utterly devoid of Orthodoxy presence.

The fall of Daskel had helped as well. After a certain believer’s efforts annihilated that city, it had become a de facto buffer zone between Metasim and orthodox-controlled territory. All of it together made it nearly impossible for Orthodoxy executives to mount a reconquest of Metasim.

In practice, the answer was obvious: months had passed since Metasim and Daskel both fell, and the orthodox side had shown no movement at all. Losing Celestia, a spiritual pillar of the Kenneth Orthodoxy, had been a wound too deep to rally from so quickly.

Even if someone did draw near the Metasim region, they would only be able to get so close before turning away.

They would pass right by, never reaching the city itself. The ward made sure of it.

Even if their eyes happened to land on Metasim’s walls, the next instant, their attention would slide off to something else.

It was like those moments when you feel on the tip of your tongue that you were about to say something important, only for it to dissolve like mist the moment you try to speak.

Aros’s perception-blocking magic worked by reaching into a person’s unconscious mind and brute-forcing the priority of certain targets downward.

No matter how large Metasim was, once he marked it with that spell, its very presence would fade. Be forgotten.

There were limits on what kinds of things his ward could apply to, but the fact that it could warp concepts at all made it a truly broken piece of magic.

“Oh? That’s rare. Looks like we’ve got a visitor for once,” Pawk murmured.

Perched on the outer wall, she pushed herself up from where she’d been sitting to admire the newly reconstructed streets.

Several kilometers beyond the walls, far out across the empty land, a lone man in travel-worn clothes was striding toward the city.

“Any closer than that’s gonna be a problem! Ah, no, no, no… That’s bad…” Pawk said, her voice turning sharp as she leaned out over the wall.

The androgynous beauty in men’s clothes shouted monologues to no one in particular, as if this were nothing more than a way to kill time.

One hand rested on an oversized, reinforced ballista whose string was woven from poisoned thorns. Pawk operated the siege weapon like a child playing with an amusement park ride.

The notched, fletched spear she’d drawn back was aimed squarely at the traveler’s torso.

An innocent passerby had become the target of her madness.

“Hmm, what to do,” Pawk mused, lips quirking. “Haven’t hunted any outsiders in a while. Maybe I should go for it?”

The spear, its metal tip corrupted and warped by the toxic brambles twined around it, no longer resembled ordinary steel.

Once she loosed it from that special thorn-strung bow, the thing would streak forward at supersonic speed. A single graze was all it would take to ensure a slow, inevitable death by poison.

And even if the traveler somehow dodged a direct hit, he’d still be finished.

The thorn buds embedded in the spear would burst outward, hurling their stalks in a radial explosion and filling the area with invisible death.

The man on the road had no idea he was a heartbeat away from a hopeless end. But without ever realizing it, the traveler slipped out of danger.

The moment his eyes fell on the bizarre heretic city, his gaze went strangely distant. A second later, he simply resumed walking, this time veering naturally onto a path that curved away from Metasim, as if being guided.

That was perception-blocking magic, a lawless power that could erase even a person’s intent and cast their thoughts back into the void.

Pawk took her hands off the ballista and puffed her cheeks out slightly in disappointment.

Aros-sama really is something else, she thought. It’s not even an exaggeration to say the Temple Cult only grew this big because of his perception ward…

Bored and vaguely reassured of her leader’s overwhelming authority, Pawk watched the traveler’s back grow smaller in the distance.

From what the wall sentries had told her, this was only the third time anyone had passed through the Metasim region since the fall.

No wonder the Kenneth Orthodoxy hadn’t even managed to slip in a spy.

There were, realistically, only two ways to enter this city.

First: tail a heretic into Holy Metasim and brute-force your way past the ward, riding in on their presence.

This was the method Celestia had attempted in the chaos right after Daskel’s fall. The operation itself had been sloppy, and she’d been beaten back, but so far, infiltration by pursuit remained the most plausible scenario.

As for the second method—killing Aros himself and breaking his perception magic—that one wasn’t worth seriously considering at all.

Even so, there was always a chance some random traveler passing through the Metasim region might happen to notice something they shouldn’t, so Aros had ordered constant surveillance, just in case.

Pawk hopped down from the outer wall and started wandering aimlessly through Metasim’s interior streets.

“If Oakley and Joanne were still around, I wouldn’t be this bored…” she muttered. “But the Orthodoxy hasn’t made any recent moves, so things are really dull…”

Grumbling to herself, the cross-dressing beauty drifted toward Oakley’s old room and peeked inside.

Obviously, its former owner hadn’t magically come back. Dust motes spun lazily in the stale air.

Ever since Oakley had left, Pawk had found herself cleaning that room for no particular reason. Maybe it was the trauma of what had happened in it—the pristine new quarters she’d prepared, turned into a slaughterhouse of Joanne and Oakley’s blood and gore.

Clicking her tongue at the memory, she stretched out a thorn-tipped tendril and got to work dusting and scraping, using the poisonous brambles as makeshift cleaning tools.

“Ugh, it pisses me off when I think about it,” she complained under her breath. “Who makes an executive clean up their post-coital bloodbath? Those two idiots are seriously the worst couple ever…”

Not that she was waiting for Oakley to come back. Of course not. She just… felt like it would be nice if the guy happened to be there. That was all.

Pawk kept going until the room was spotless, polished to a shine.

She spent the whole morning killing time like that, and when she was done, she checked in on the network of zombies she’d planted across the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid.

No abnormalities, no alerts. Everything was quiet. Too quiet.

She let out a long sigh. Nothing was happening. She was bored, and the ennui just kept leaking out of her in the form of little weary breaths.

As a rule, she only got called into action during emergencies or when a major operation was underway. In peacetime, her role left her with a lot of empty hours to fill.

“Even playing with my puppet zombies is getting old,” she said, voice flat.

Peace that lasted forever would mean one thing: Aros’s grand plan wasn’t moving an inch.

She wanted something to happen. Anything. News that the Orthodoxy had finally launched an attack would do. Whatever the trigger, she just wanted some shift on either side that would push this war for the kingdom one step closer to realization.

I just want to build a country where we can all live happily, as soon as possible… Pawk narrowed her gray eyes, toying with the short hair gathered at the back of her neck.

The memories of the abuse she’d once endured surfaced in her mind, raw and unhealed, and she let her eyelids sink shut in a powerless, quiet motion.

Pawk was born in an island nation far, far away from the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid.

Roughly a tenth of that country’s population was made up of a minority known as the Terrace people. That was the bloodline she carried.

When she was still a small child, a plague swept across the islands.

With the sea hemming them in on all sides and nowhere to flee, the nation drowned in corpses and sickbeds, painting the landscape in pure ruin. And in the middle of all that horror, a strange rumor began to spread: the blood of the Terrace people could cure the plague.

It was baseless, a fabrication with no source and no proof. But a portion of the populace swallowed it whole.

Driven by superstition, envy of the Terrace people’s famed brilliance, and deep-rooted prejudice, they turned into a mob and descended on the Terrace settlements.

Violence came before dialogue ever had a chance. Bodies, strewn as far as the eye could see. Blood. Entrails. People on their knees, lapping up pooled bodily fluids as if in a trance. No one there could really be called sane anymore.

The settlement was destroyed.

Because of a rumor whose origin no one could name, Pawk and the rest of the Terrace people were scattered to the winds. Her parents barely escaped that island-country massacre alive and wandered a vast, uncaring world with their daughter in tow.

In the end, they washed up in the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid.

As a child, Pawk lived in a shadowed corner of one of its cities, having almost no contact with the townsfolk.

Terrace people, terrified of a repeat of their island’s tragedy, hid their faces under deep hoods at all times, blending into the alleys and side streets.

Then one day, inquisitors from the Kenneth Orthodoxy forced their way into their home.

Avoiding the neighbors, keeping their true faces hidden—that behavior had brought them attention. Someone in the city had found them suspicious and reported them.

They were subjected to an inquisition.

It was, in principle, a formality, meant to smoke out heretics and rebels. Under normal circumstances, it should have ended without much trouble. But during the questioning, one orthodox man made an offhand remark.

“The blood of the Terrace people sells for a lot,” he said.

The moment those words hit their ears, Pawk and her parents froze.

The man kept talking. The plague back on the island had died down, but there were still buyers out there who wanted Terrace blood.

It was highly valued in certain circles and worth an enormous amount of money.

By the time Aros saved her, her parents had already been killed.

The scars etched into Pawk’s heart would never fade.

She remembered the path that had led her to yearn for an ideal world, and with that memory came the old nausea. A hand flew to her mouth as she bent over, riding out the wave of sickness.

“Hideous…” she whispered.

The men who had murdered her parents no longer walked this earth. Aros had beaten them half to death and then ceded the final blow to Pawk. Not only that, he had hunted down and killed everyone involved in buying Terrace blood.

With that kind of justice laid at her feet, it was no wonder she’d pledged him her undying loyalty.

Revenge is necessary if you want to restart a life.

Some proverb somewhere claimed revenge produced nothing, but such nonsense only sounded wise to people who’d grown up in a greenhouse, never once seized by a hatred so strong it made them physically writhe.

To take back your honor, your dignity, your sense of self and to rob your enemy of any future at all.

How could that not save a person’s heart?

There were still fools in the world who sought the blood of the Terrace people, but inside the Aros Temple Cult, not a single soul set their sights on hers.

Mostly because none of the believers even knew what the Terrace race was in the first place.

For Pawk, that suited her perfectly. She liked living a life where she didn’t have to hide her face.

“Ah, Aros-sama.”

In the underground levels of Metasim, she spotted a masked man standing alone at the planned site of one of the new facilities.

Pawk descended toward him with light, unhurried steps.

Aros turned slowly, his voice gentle and refined as it reached her through the mask.

“Good day, Pawk. Do you need something?” he asked, his tone soft.

“If you work in a dark place like this, you’re going to get hurt, you know,” Pawk said with a wry little smile.

“I’m accustomed to poor visibility. I wear a mask, after all.”

Pawk chuckled. “Well… that is true.”

To her, Aros was like a second set of parents. Just hearing that low, composed voice was enough to make strength well up in her chest.

“Do you have a bit of time to talk?” Aros asked.

“I’m free right now,” Pawk answered at once. “Did something happen?”

“Something’s simply been on my mind…” He beckoned her and held up a sheet of paper in his gloved hand.

On it was a layout sketch of the planned human production plant and pharmaceutical research facility. Most likely something Fuankilo had designed before her death.

At a glance, there were no contradictions or obvious flaws. The structure looked sound.

“Are you dissatisfied with the plant or the research wing?” Pawk asked, brows knitting faintly.

“Ah. No, my apologies. This sheet is entirely unrelated.”

With a graceful, almost aristocratic motion, Aros lowered the parchment. Then he let his voice drift into a more unguarded, conversational tone.

“Pawk… You’ve been thinking about Oakley-kun, haven’t you?”

“W-What!?” Hit with a bomb right out of the gate, Pawk flailed in a panic.

“Lately you’ve been cleaning his room quite often, haven’t you?” Aros said mildly. “By any reasonable standard, that means he’s on your mind. You should accept that it’s pointless trying to hide things from me.”

“N-No! It’s not like that at all!”

“Is that so?”

“It’s just that… when he’s around, I don’t get bored. That’s all. Just a little bit. But I’m not… I’m not interested in him, I don’t think…”

“Your attempts at deflection are terrible.”

“Ugh—”

A soft chuckle echoed behind the mask.

“He really is a natural-born charmer,” Aros murmured. “As expected of an irregular.”

Out of Pawk’s sight, he held up a hand and began folding down fingers one by one. One for Joanne, one for Stella, one for Pawk, and, on a whim, one last finger for himself.

Out of the seven executives the Aros Temple Cult could boast, four were completely taken with this single man.

He could not entirely hide the strange, swelling emotion that realization stirred in him.

He didn’t know why a mass-produced human, someone who should have been obedient and devoid of quirks, had produced a specimen as anomalous as Oakley.

But as long as the boy’s existence was bringing the organization a net benefit, the only wise course was to watch and wait.

“I have no intention of interfering in matters of romance,” Aros continued, tone almost playfully benign. “Relationships within the organization are quite welcome.”

“It’s not like that!” Pawk yelped.

“Oh?”

“And besides, he already has Joanne, doesn’t he?”

“If Joanne weren’t in the picture, would that make things easier for you?”

“Enough! You’re being annoying! Are you just bullying me for fun, Aros-sama!?”

He laughed elegantly, utterly amused.

In the old days, I was rather popular myself, he mused privately.

Then his posture shifted, and the air around them tightened as he returned to business.

“Now then,” he continued. “It’s already been several months since the battles of Metasim and Daskel. The Kenneth Orthodoxy is surely making steady preparations for reclaiming Celestia and for the complete destruction of our cult.”

“Any rash move on their part would only corner them further. It’s no wonder they’re hesitant.”

“I, however, want to know the enemy’s movements as soon as possible. That is why I value your abilities, Pawk.”

In this holy war, the decisive factor wasn’t the raw number of believers each side had. It was how many executives they could put on the board.

Right now, the balance stood at seven to six. The cult had stolen Celestia through brainwashing but lost Fuankilo in the process. Even so, the Aros Temple Cult still held a numerical advantage among their top brass.

“Has there been any activity from the Kenneth Orthodoxy? No matter how small. Anything at all.”

“That’s just it. Nothing,” Pawk replied with a frustrated shrug. “Every spy we’ve planted, every corpse puppet we’ve set sneaking around, not a single noteworthy report. It looks like their executives are desperately searching for some way to recover Celestia, who’s under our control… but they haven’t found it yet.”

Celestia had been missing for months. Unsurprisingly, the faithful were restless. Rumors were spreading that she might have died in the destruction of Daskel.

For the Orthodoxy’s leadership, admitting that one of the “Seven Chosen” had been brainwashed was unthinkable.

Officially, Celestia was away on an extended expedition, out in the wilds, subjugating magical beasts for the glory of God.

Just as Aros had predicted, the Kenneth Orthodoxy was being forced to spend time and effort merely calming its flock. Stir the people’s fear, rob them of peace of mind, and the nation’s strength would wither on its own. As side effects went, it was a beautiful one.

With their advantage steadily hardening into certainty, Aros finally gave voice to the hazy plan that had been forming in the back of his mind.

“Soon, we will send several executive bombs into the Holy City of Sasfect.”

The greatest metropolis of the Kenneth Orthodoxy, Sasfect. Aros’s proposal was to smuggle in followers stuffed with pieces of the cult’s executives.

Pawk swallowed, throat bobbing. For the first time, she felt the day of their grand ambition draw near.

With a flick of his hand, Aros conjured a three-dimensional map of Sasfect in midair, sculpted from shadow. Then he began setting down black chess-like pieces across its streets.

His intention was simple. The Mobile Fortress Plan would deliver the cult’s executives into the capital, and from there, they would steal the Sacred Relic that slept within the Phoenix Temple.

One by one, shadow-pieces shaped like their various executives dropped into position atop the floating city.

Outside the walls, Pawk. In the east, Joanne. In the west, Shadik. In the north, Stella. In the south, Executive Number Two.

And at the very center, Aros placed two final pieces, Celestia and himself, side by side.

Pawk let out a low whistle. So, while everyone’s running wild on every front, he’s planning to “borrow” the holy relic at the very heart of the Holy City…

Anyone could carry a fragment of an executive’s flesh. Of course, they’d assign the task to someone competent, but odds were that it would fall to an officer candidate or someone with power just shy of that rank to serve as courier.

Here, Pawk finally voiced the obvious question.

“Even if we manage to infiltrate the Holy City, getting inside the Phoenix Temple itself is impossible.”

The Phoenix Temple was eternally wrapped in the sacred flames of Saren Deputy.

Passed down from one supreme hierarch to the next, honed razor-sharp through an age of conflict, the phoenix’s power possessed a terrifying trait: it reduced the tainted souls of heretics to ash, down to the very last cell. That absolute annihilation had served as a powerful deterrent; because of it, Aros had never been able to lay a hand on the Phoenix Temple.

In the end, even if you attacked Sasfect, it would amount to little more than harassment. Only the executives of the Orthodoxy could even set foot inside the temple.

“Ah.” Pawk suddenly gasped as the thought struck her.

If they had a brainwashed Celestia, then there was no problem at all, was there?

That was the true core of the provisional operation titled Assault on the Holy City of Sasfect.

Celestia was still receiving magical power from the god of the Kenneth Orthodoxy.

In other words, they had only overwritten her thought patterns. She was, in the system’s eyes, still a devout orthodox believer. Saren Deputy’s flame wouldn’t register as deadly toxin to her.

So they captured Celestia alive with the Phoenix Temple already in mind…!? What incredible foresight. I am humbled…

For Orthodoxy believers, the flames shrouding the temple behaved just like ordinary fire. To pierce the temple’s barrier, Celestia was absolutely indispensable.

“How about it? You’re looking forward to this, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I can hardly wait!” Her chest wouldn’t stop thrumming with excitement. Pawk’s dream was to help bring Aros’s grand ambition to fruition—and in doing so, finally avenge the Terrace people.

The three-dimensional map of the Holy City Sasfect floating in midair was swallowed by shadow.

They were on the verge of launching an operation far greater in scale than Metasim or Daskel. Pawk pictured Aros’s magic swallowing the world whole, and a wide, unrestrained grin split her face.

※※※

Joanne’s training, which was already little more than sanctioned bullying, showed its true face from the second day onward.

In the end, the only time I managed to score a single clean hit on her was that very first day. Up through the fifth, I wasn’t even allowed to brush the hem of her clothes.

The hellish drills ran from early morning until sundown, and more than once she pushed me to a point where I would have died without the use of healing magic. Because clean fractures and severed limbs could apparently be fixed on the spot with no lasting strain on the body, she made me taste that particular brand of agony again and again.

But the pain and the fear sharpened my movements with ruthless precision. Maybe it was because this body had been artificially accelerated to maturity with drugs, but my learning speed felt wildly out of the ordinary. The muscle mass had been there from the start. Now it was just a matter of beating the proper technique into my brain.

By the time our special training reached day six, I’d started to grow accustomed to fighting Joanne and her green dragon saber, and the number of times I needed healing magic dropped dramatically.

Naturally, the moment she saw that, Joanne ramped up both speed and power, tossing aside any pretense of holding back. If I let my guard slip for even a heartbeat, she really would carve chunks out of my body. Blocking her head-on was simply not an option; my flesh wouldn’t survive it. So, I improved my last-second evasions, slipping out of danger by razor-thin margins.

Joanne was a practitioner of a soft, flexible style of swordplay. Her blade work and body control, reminiscent of her days before she’d been promoted to executive, were honed to the point that anyone could see, at a glance, that she was operating on a master’s level. The boisterous, overwhelming style she’d shown before faded away. She stood before me as a pure swordswoman, an unyielding wall I had to overcome.

Today again, Joanne swung her green dragon saber.

From a low, coiled stance, she launched a barrage of diagonal slashes. The blade seemed to split into several afterimages, and I kept dodging them by the skin of my teeth, relying on ducking and swaying to stay alive.

The ground beneath our feet was a field of snow, but I was used to the instability by now. I even used the sliding momentum to my advantage, stepping out toward the side opposite Joanne’s dominant hand.

“Hmm…”

Apparently tired of my endless evasion, I decided it was time to take a risk and drove in with a bold thrust, aiming straight for the girl’s eye.

Of course, she wasn’t the kind of opponent to let an attack like that land. With the slightest twist of her neck, she let my longsword skim past her face, evading it with the barest minimum of movement.

Immediately afterward, her blade snapped upward from below, a vicious strike that traced a line straight from my Adam’s apple to the crown of my skull.

I knocked the green dragon saber aside with the pommel of my sword and, in the same motion, slashed at her fully extended right arm.

“That’s my move,” Joanne murmured, her voice husky with ecstasy, as if she were both entranced and savoring the moment.

Once upon a time, Joanne had specialized in turning her opponent’s superior strength and reach against them, seizing the initiative after their attack and wringing the maximum effect out of a single opening.

In the six days since training began, I’d copied that very sword style and answered her counter with a counter of my own.

The girl’s eyes followed her severed right arm as it spun away. Far behind her, the green dragon saber stood buried in the ground, and her arm, trailing a red ribbon of blood, tumbled across the snowfield.

Joanne dipped her chin in a deep nod, then curved her well-shaped lips into a bow.

“Oakley… you pass. You’ve gotten strong.”

At those words, Alex, who’d been watching our training, let out a shout of admiration. “That was insane! I didn’t understand a thing that just happened!”

“You’re strong enough now that I don’t have to be ashamed to call you my partner,” Joanne said.

With her newly regrown right arm, she thumped me on the back. There wasn’t a speck of flattery in her tone.

“But… how about one versus many?” She jerked her chin toward a group of men training a little ways off. There were five of them in total.

So that’s it. Time to get thrown into the rough seas, huh?

Thanks to all the rumors from Karatena, I’d built up a nice stockpile of resentment among the troops. It was a dangerous gamble, but if I poked at them a little, they’d almost certainly bite.

Sure enough, when I approached the men, they pulled openly sour faces. I’d never harmed any of them, and yet the atmosphere was so hostile it felt like even exchanging a single word would be a struggle.

We were all destined to try and kill each other sooner or later anyway.

Putting on a gentle smile the way Alex always did, I walked up to them. Unlike with him, though, my attempt just seemed to creep them out.

“Um… would you be willing to train with me?”

The man who’d been sparring with Joanne only moments ago suddenly speaking to them clearly caught them off guard.

“What the hell’s with you all of a sudden?”

“I’d like to train for combat against multiple opponents.”

The moment I indirectly told them, “All of you, come at me,” the men’s faces flushed a deep, angry red.

“You makin’ fun of us?” a man asked.

Imitating Alex, who never let his smile falter, I silently raised my sword. Maybe the rumors flickered through their minds, because they drew their blades without a moment’s hesitation and moved to surround me.

“Don’t screw with us.”

“We’re gonna break you, oh esteemed executive candidate.”

The bloodshot rage in their eyes said it all. Every last one of them had clearly been fed a healthy dose of Karatena’s poison.

“Oh! I love the enthusiasm, guys!” Off in the distance, Whip called out cheerfully.

Joanne, arms folded, simply watched from on high like a spectator at an arena match.

“Die!”

Blades came screaming in from every direction of my vision and from true blind spots—my flanks, directly behind me.

I slid between the gaps in their attacks, but the instant my balance shifted after a dodge, one of them delayed his swing and went straight for my compromised posture.

Snapping my trained back muscles tight, I yanked my upper body upright in a full-powered sit-up. The edge of his sword sliced across the tip of my nose, but I avoided being bisected. There was no time to breathe; the next attack was already crashing down.

This is the logic of one-versus-many.

Outnumbered like this, I wasn’t meant to counter at all. Only hunted down and butchered.

But Joanne was watching me with eyes full of expectation. She smiled in that loose, relaxed way of hers, her expression making it clear she hadn’t considered my defeat even for a second.

“Hah!”

I kicked up a spray of packed snow, blasting it into one man’s eyes.

As he reeled, the two on either side of him flinched, instincts screaming that something was off, and all three of them stopped for a split second to reassess.

The remaining two were just ordinary men. Their offense couldn’t compare to the density of Joanne’s blows, which fell like rain and hail.

I bent sharply at the waist, letting the swords coming down from front and back whistle over me. As both strikes cut nothing but air, I drove a spinning back kick into one man’s ribs, then rode the recoil into a high kick that snapped the other’s jaw.

I’d taken a point off Joanne by sniping the opening after her attack with a counter. Compared to her, the gaps these guys left were dozens of times larger.

Three left.

The two who’d just watched their comrades get neutralized froze, their momentum shattered by shock.

I barreled straight into one of them and, riding the collision, slammed him down into the snow-covered ground.

“Don’t take it personally,” I said.

I cracked him across the temple with the sword’s hilt and knocked him out cold.

Then, I grabbed his limp body and hurled him toward the remaining two. On the snow-covered ground, they couldn’t get proper footing; when they tried to catch him, all three of them went down in a tangle of limbs.

I leveled my blade at the two sprawled on the ground and declared my victory.

“That should do it.” I glanced over at Joanne, who was grinning from ear to ear, looking thoroughly satisfied.

But this was going to make me stand out way too much inside the base. It wasn’t just the five guys I’d wiped the floor with. I could feel the hatred simmering from the others who’d been watching the fight.

Leaving the five men with shattered pride where they lay, I walked back over to Joanne.

Compared to a week ago, I was on a completely different level. I felt confident—confident enough to believe I could even beat an executive candidate like Whip Funny Task.

If I can beat Whip as I am now, there won’t be anyone left in this Northeastern Branch who can stop us. The plan to destroy the Northeastern Branch just became a lot more realistic.

In truth, I’d already prepared countermeasures for the Hidden Insect Corps.

Between training sessions with Joanne, I’d been taking short trips a bit farther out, gathering several kinds of plants with fresh, sharp scents—mugwort, mint, and the like. Then, I’d mixed them with spices I’d stolen from storage and brewed up a homemade insecticide.

I still needed to test how effective it was, and I didn’t have much hard data on those bug-people yet. If the insecticide failed to kill them, I’d need to be ready with something else, and that meant studying their fighting style in advance.

Fortunately, we’ve got the perfect excuse: joint training exercises. Next, I should learn how Whip fights.

Information was the greatest weapon of all.

My knowledge of chemicals and explosives came from memories of my previous life. If I wanted to survive in this world, I had no choice but to compensate for my fundamental weakness with knowledge and experience.

And for that, I needed a deeper understanding of this entire insect-human category.

On the seventh day of special training, my sparring partner switched from Joanne to Whip Funny Task.

“Ever since the joint training started, you and Joanne have been all alone together, you know? I’ve been wondering about that! I finally get to fight you, Oakley.”

According to Joanne, “If you can take a point off me when I’m holding back, you’ll manage just fine.”

This was my first time fighting an insect-person, but once the match began, I found that I could keep up with Whip. If anything, it felt like we were more than evenly matched.

With Whip’s subordinates watching from the sidelines, I held my longsword straight up in front of me.

Whip Funny Task was one of the strongest rank-and-file believers in the Aros Temple Cult; the sharpness of her attacks was on a completely different scale.

Even so, I could deal with them. Maybe she just wasn’t going all out yet, but compared to Joanne, whose onslaught exceeded what I could possibly handle on the defensive, her offense felt undeniably a tier below.

Whip brought her weapons down, and the impact spiderwebbed cracks through the ground.

It didn’t look like he was putting in any particular effort, nor did it seem like some refined technique. The raw output was just that overwhelming.

“Look at that, Whip-sama’s dual blades can’t touch him.”

“Yeah, but Oakley’s not landing anything either. What’s she playin’ at?”

“Still, y’know, Oakley’s that guy everyone’s talking about…”

The believers watching our fight muttered just loud enough for me to barely make out their voices.

Contrary to how smoothly training itself was going, Karatena’s rumors were spreading quietly but efficiently beneath the surface. It felt like the time limit was going to arrive sooner than I’d planned—proof enough of how fanatically dedicated Karatena was.

While dodging Whip’s attacks, I tracked the source of a sticky, lingering gaze from farther off.

A woman with long ash-gray hair covering one eye. Karatena Wallmix. When she noticed me looking back at her, the single eye barely visible between her bangs narrowed in manic delight.

Karatena… Looks like your little scheme’s coming along nicely. But just you wait… I’ll send you down to Fuankilo’s side too.

“Oakley, are you spacing out and thinking about something?” Whip called out over the drifting powder snow.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Our mock battle dragged on through the falling snow, stretching into a long bout. Her stamina was basically endless. As expected of an executive candidate, there was nothing soft about her.

These guys literally went out of their way to let parasites into their own bodies. There’s no way this is the full extent of their power…

For the first time, I took the initiative against Whip. From a diagonal line below, I slashed upward, aiming for her throat.

“Oh! First time you’ve attacked on your own,” she said, sounding delighted.

The blonde sister caught my strike on the right-hand sword.

She only swept her blade aside in a rough, careless motion, yet my longsword was knocked violently away.

Our weapons had barely scraped together, but the force still dragged my whole body off-balance. The sheer physical strength left me speechless, and in that massive opening I’d given her, Whip brought both swords down.

I drove my back muscles to their limit and snapped my arched torso upright again, shoving the flat of my blade upward to catch the blow in a last-second guard. At that moment, my hips gave out, and my knees slammed into the snow.

Taking that attack head-on was a fatal mistake. A blast-like crack split the air, and a heartbeat later, I was smashed into the ground, my body folding, then whipping backward as I was hurled away.

“Gah!?”

So this is how heavy her swords really are… Feels like getting clubbed with a stone pillar the size of a tree…

I rolled across the snow as mocking cheers rose from the men of the Northeastern Branch.

“That’s all you can do after getting your hand held by an executive for training?” Karatena’s taunting voice rang out across the field.

Joanne had clenched her own fist tight enough to draw blood, but Alex’s frantic, soothing pats seemed to be just barely keeping her from snapping.

I underestimated her. So this is the caliber of an executive candidate.

What overwhelming power. What explosive speed. For an instant, I felt pressure so intense I nearly mistook her for Joanne. I’d have to take back what I was thinking earlier.

“That was thirty percent! You blocked it pretty well, huh?” Whip called.

Karatena watched from her lofty vantage point while Alex had slipped in among the men, shouting upbeat encouragements. Joanne puffed out her cheeks and jerked her chin at me as if to say, “Hurry up and get on with it, already.” I really wished she wouldn’t.

Whip strode toward me with a pure, guileless smile. The moment she entered a certain range, she sank in and closed the distance with a flash-step-like lunge, bringing a diagonal cut down from my shoulder in a classic kesa slash.

I turned her strike aside, letting her blade slide harmlessly along my sword’s length.

Before I could draw back for a counter, her second sword came screaming in; I dodged it again by the width of a sheet of paper, and her twin blades plowed into the ground, throwing up snow.

Even as I saw them bury themselves, Whip was already using that momentum, shifting smoothly into a kicking motion.

I planted the sole of my foot against her thigh, pinning her leg and stopping the kick before it could even begin.

The momentum swung in my favor. With Whip’s eyes flying wide, I drove my sword in with everything I had, aiming straight for her carotid artery.

The inescapable blade reached the girl’s skin—and stopped.

The point that should have punched clean through her slender white throat struck something hard and alien beneath the surface and went no further.

“Ngh…!?”

A metallic ring echoed from under Whip’s skin. Numbness shot up my right elbow.

It was the carapace of the parasite she’d implanted, Milk-chan, the bug tucked inside her flesh.

The instant that realization flashed through my mind, something slammed into the side of my head and I went flying.

Sparks burst in the corners of my vision. A high-pitched ringing swallowed the world. As Whip finished the follow-through of her roundhouse kick, one hand pressed to her neck, the cheering, jeering men of the Northeastern Branch came back into focus behind her.

With a strangely calm part of my mind, I zeroed in on her throat. There was a small puncture there, and beneath it, black and glossy chitin glinted faintly through the hole.

She’s got a centipede-type parasite buried in there. The carapace has seams. All I have to do is hit those.

On a whim, I glanced over toward Joanne, and for some reason, she was absolutely, murderously furious.

Her eyes were blown wide open, and she was biting her lip hard enough that blood trailed from the corner of her mouth. She wasn’t looking at me. Her gaze was locked, without question, on Whip Funny Task.

Hey now, you beat the crap out of me too, you know, I thought, a bit dumbfounded. Apparently, she was the type who couldn’t tolerate watching someone else hurt me.

“Kill her.” Her low command slid between the gusts like a curse. I drew a deep breath under the weight of it.

“Maybe I should get a little serious on this next one,” Whip chirped. She didn’t even finish the sentence before she moved. No human should have been capable of that kind of acceleration.

She was on me in an instant, like she’d flash-stepped. Her body creaked and groaned with a harsh, grinding noise, like it was screaming about its own limits. Wearing an expression that said she was already certain of victory, she brought both swords down.

This wasn’t a speed I couldn’t track. Not after taking Joanne’s attacks head-on all week.

My awareness kicked into overdrive. The world warped at the edges.

Searing heat surged through my entire body, burning away every restraint that had been shackling my flesh.

I deliberately released my brain’s limiter and stepped into the realm of monsters.

Whip loomed right in front of me, face twisted into a look that said she fully intended to kill me.

Calling this “just training” is a joke, I thought, even as I moved to meet her.

I checked my footing, fixing my awareness on the twin blades cutting into my range from both upper diagonals. I could track their paths down to the millimeter. I saw them clearly. The only question left was whether my body could keep up.

Rough stone pressed against my back. Nowhere left to run.

All right, come on. Lady Luck, smile on me just this once.

As Whip’s twin swords swept in toward both my shoulders, I twisted my torso. I bent my knees, drawing myself in as far as I could, adjusting my position so that when the blades completed their arc, they’d strike the rock face behind me.

I couldn’t bend any further. A heartbeat before the real blades would have met my torso, the absurdly low stance I’d forced myself into finally paid off.

The slashes she’d unleashed mid-charge kissed the stone before they could touch me.

Driven by Whip’s completely unhinged raw power, her weapons snapped clean in half at the center. The broken fragments of steel spun through the air, and the shortened swords only managed to slice my clothes open.

Facing the wide, gaping opening she’d left, I drew my arm back in a deliberate, almost theatrical motion.

I drove my blade straight through the gap in her exoskeletal armor, punching into her slender neck.

A roar of cheers went up from the assembled men.

And then… the one kissing the dirt… was me.

“Ghh—!?”

What the—?

Something had hit me from outside my awareness. My body spasmed as I forced myself upright, only to realize the sword in my right hand was missing a chunk of its blade.

It hadn’t been deflected by the chitin hidden in Whip’s throat. A massive parasite was peeking out of her mouth.

So, while I was busy exploiting the host’s opening, the real threat slipped in a surprise attack on its own…

My blood smeared along the glossy black body of the insect told the story of what had just happened.

A whip-like blow, relying purely on mass and momentum. That wasn’t a human way of fighting. It was insane.

My forehead felt strangely cold. My vision washed over in red. My consciousness was fraying at the edges.

With both my fighting spirit and awareness shaved down to the bare minimum, I understood I was at my limits, and still, I kicked off the snowy ground.

“You’re still coming at me!? I was sure you were completely done for!” Whip shouted.

Both our swords were wrecked beyond recognition. On paper, Whip had the advantage. She still had that parasite as a living weapon.

Doesn’t matter.

With my jaw throbbing and my consciousness threatening to blink out, I charged straight in.

Seeing my unnatural charge, Whip drew back her half-broken sword and the parasite, readying both. She greeted me with a grotesque three-blade style—two swords and one living weapon.

It was only because I’d crawled through so many killing fields that my split-second reactions and decisions had been honed to a razor edge.

I sprinted across the snow, factoring in every quirk of the twin blades I’d crossed with until now and the new variable: that parasite.

Whatever happens after, I’ll deal with it then. Right now, I just need to beat this insect-person down with everything I’ve got and rip as much information out of her as I can.

We passed each other in a single heartbeat.

Two clear notes rang out. Whip’s twin swords flew into the air.

And then, both of us dropped to our knees at the same time.

A rustle of tension ran through the crowd. As the onlookers held their breath, we both pitched forward and collapsed into the snow.

The clash between executive candidates had reached its conclusion. The result was a draw.

“No waaay… Don’t tell me you actually aimed for the gaps in the carapace…?”

I whispered, “Coming from you? That speed was unreal. I couldn’t react at all…”

Whip was bleeding heavily from the blow I’d landed on her neck, while my right shoulder had been ripped open by the parasite’s jaws. We’d both taken lethal hits and run out of strength at the same exact moment.

Celestia hurried over and cast healing magic on us. Before my eyes, the wounds knit closed at astonishing speed. Whip and I bumped fists, acknowledging each other’s performance.

“Listen up, you lot! There’s someone here who can push me, leader of the Hidden Insect Corps, this far! The future of the Aros Temple Cult is bright!”

Her proclamation of a shining future for the Aros Temple Cult sent the believers into an uproar.

I caught scattered comments praising the fact that she’d been forced to bring out “Milk-chan” in our very first match, and from the sound of things, my performance was being rated rather highly.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Joanne’s expression, like she was holding something back with all she had.

From her point of view, winning was a given… Is that it?

Her wolf-cut swayed as she turned around and vanished into the blizzard.

Basking in the satisfaction of having pried out new intel on the insect-people—and the dull ache of wounds that hadn’t fully healed—I slipped away to a quiet spot to cool off my overheated body.

We’d cracked the mystery of the parasite species. Ridiculous power and speed, chitinous armor wrapped around the host’s vital points, attacks that slipped past conscious awareness… Maybe Whip’s setup was a special case, but what I did know was this: it was safer not to think of them as humans at all.

If I could fight Whip to a draw on our first encounter, then with the insecticide in play, I had a decent chance of taking her down in a rematch.

Right after our bout, I tested my homemade insecticide on the bugs in the breeding yard, and those things went down in one hit.

I still didn’t know how much the hosts themselves would be affected by the insecticidal compounds, but if I could get the stuff circulating through their bodies, there was no way they’d walk away unscathed.

Now that I had a way to pin down the insect-people, the idea of killing Stella Belmont stopped being a fantasy and started to feel disturbingly real.

The destruction of the Northeastern Branch was no longer an impossible dream.

I’d already picked out a likely date for the operation. One week from now, the forces of the Northeastern Branch were scheduled to attack the mining town of Jade. In the chaos of that battle, I’d have to wipe out their elite unit and kill Stella. There was no other way.

All that remained was to share the plan with Joanne and Alex and set it into motion.

I clenched my pendant in my hand. The little accessory that had defined my relationship with Joanne gave me a strange kind of calm just by being there.

That was when someone stepped in, casting a shadow over the flickering torchlight. Karatena.

Her hard-soled footsteps clicked sharply against the stone as she approached.

“Your battle earlier was splendid,” she said. “To think you’d make Whip Funny Task eat dirt like that.”

She laced her hands behind her back and took up a spot beside me. With the hallway torches at her back, her expression was lost in shadow.

“It was almost as if you were testing Whip,” she went on. “Or rather, it would be more accurate to say you were testing the properties of her parasite, wouldn’t it?”

“Find the weak points, give your partner a chance to shore them up, then all of you keep sharpening yourselves. That’s what full-contact training is for, isn’t it? If you’re not going in like you mean to kill, what’s the point?”

She didn’t so much as twitch. A strangely viscous darkness clung to her face, hiding every nuance of her expression.

I shrugged at her roundabout wording, and that little display of easy confidence must have gotten under her skin. Karatena clicked her tongue in irritation.

“You’re trying to win everyone over and use them to get rid of me, aren’t you? Instead of taking the long way around like that, why not just come at me directly? Or is it that, just like dear Fuankilo-sama, you’re a non-combatant who couldn’t possibly win in a straight fight? Or maybe you’re great at handing out torture but can’t stand getting hurt yourse—”

“If you’re going to talk, at least spare me the endless backchat,” she sissed.

“You know, you and I might actually be pretty similar,” I went on. “You’re obsessed with risk elimination, but once you make up your mind, you charge ahead like a runaway cart. Your thought process is practically written on your face.”

“Do not lump us together!” she spat.

She let out a sharp breath, and the air seemed to twist; the flames in the wall sconces wavered, their shapes jolting, the angle of their light shifting.

And in that flickering glow, I finally saw Karatena’s face as she leaned in toward me—twisted, saturated with madness.

“Traitors are always struck down by divine judgment in the end,” she said. “You’d do well to tremble in anticipation of it.”

Her beautifully clear, willow-slit eyes gleamed with a steel-cold light.

An ordinary person would have been overwhelmed into silence by that unnatural, almost inhuman beauty. But I shoved her back, hard, by the shoulder. I drove her all the way to the wall and glared at her face from right in front.

“That narrow field of vision, that way you make pointless enemies… It’s exactly like your beloved Fuankilo-sama.”

At that, the smile pasted on Karatena’s face began to twitch violently. “Enjoy acting tough while you still can,” she hissed.

“You really are as narrow-minded as you look. Try not to get your legs swept out from under you.” I deliberately jabbed at her appearance, flicking a glance at those long bangs that hung low enough to cover one eye. Karatena bared a canine at me and fixed me with a venomous glare.

Then her pale pink lips parted ever so slightly, and she spat. It happened so suddenly that I couldn’t react. Something translucent splattered under my eye, and the lukewarm, filthy sensation made me click my tongue in disgust.

Wow. She really does hate my guts… That resignation lasted only a moment before a strange crawling sensation on my cheek made me freeze.

Right under my eye, it felt like ants were swarming across my skin, right where her spit had landed.

I wiped it with the pad of my finger, almost absentmindedly, and my blood ran cold. On my index finger, inside the saliva, a tiny insect with ten legs was squirming, and it wasn’t alone. There were dozens of them writhing in the gob of spit Karatena had launched at me.

Every single one of them was alive, their indistinct heads—or tails, I honestly couldn’t tell—wriggling furiously as they stretched and contracted, groping blindly for something. Parasites.

I moved on reflex, thrusting the part of my face her spit had touched into the flame of the nearest torch, scorching it clean.

“Karatena, you—”

Karatena said nothing to me as I somehow managed to avert disaster. Her eyes, the screws in them completely blown loose, bored into me.

In the depths of those irises, I saw the faint shadow of a larva drift by.

“Well then. Excuse me.” The ash-haired woman turned on her heel and walked away.

From that moment on, the paths Karatena and I walked were irreversibly, decisively divided.

Chapter 3: The Last Supper

She wanted to eat.

She wanted to eat so badly she could hardly stand it.

Ever since that day, she’d been stuffing the hole in her heart with human flesh.

And now, perhaps, someone had appeared who could finally fill that emptiness for good.

Oakley Mercury.

Stella Belmont opened her eyes, sweat pouring off her like a waterfall. It was the dead of night, the hour when the whole world should have been asleep, when some strange, gnawing hunger dragged her up from a shallow doze.

Her proud black drill curls had come undone, her semi-long hair plastered to the corner of her mouth. Since she was awake anyway, she decided she might as well head for the kitchen, only to freeze as a particular scent drifted from her destination, making her spine snap straight.

A rich, intoxicating fragrance.

She drew in a slow breath, taking his familiar scent into her lungs, and Stella’s mind came fully awake.

“This smell…”

Still in nothing but a baby doll, Stella padded down the hall toward the kitchen. The girl, who’d been given a strict “no snacking” order by Whip and Joanne, let a soft rumble escape her slim stomach.

Ah… This is bad. Stella will end up sneaking a bite.

She’d worked so hard, clenching her teeth, sucking on her fingers, waiting patiently for him to ripen.

Heart pounding too hard to control, she stepped into the kitchen, where that heady scent was flowing.

There he was: Oakley, enjoying a late-night snack. Noticing her in the doorway, the young man awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck, clearly caught red-handed.

“G-Good evening. Out for a little midnight nibble yourself, Stella-sama?” he asked.

“Something like that,” Stella replied.

“Care for a bowl?”

He seemed to be eating out of a stockpot, and now, thin sheen of sweat on his brow, he held a spare dish out to her. Ordinarily, Stella would have eaten him instead… but Whip had explicitly forbidden it, so she held herself back.

“I suppose I’ll have some.”

If nothing else, she could at least trick her stomach for a while. Stella accepted the soup.

As he watched her quietly begin to eat, Oakley spoke up, looking genuinely surprised.

“Didn’t expect this. I was sure you’d say, ‘I’m not here to eat the soup. I’m here to eat you,’ then go ahead and do it.”

At his utterly tactless remark, Stella clenched her molars so hard it hurt.

He could at least try to imagine how it felt, breathing in the concentrated scent of the very object of her obsession at point-blank range.

To be perfectly honest, Stella’s appetite was on the verge of exploding.

Her body should have been altered into something that never grew tired from any kind of exertion, and yet she felt lightheaded. Every time she leaned back against the rock wall and drew in a breath, a thick, murky ache throbbed dully in her lower abdomen.

And still, the rational part of her slammed the brakes on the idea of eating Oakley, the very man who had become the catalyst for the cult’s meteoric rise.

Stella recalled something Aros, the founder, had once told her.

“Discipline yourself, Stella. Actions driven purely by desire invite ruin.”

A week ago, when Oakley had said not to eat him until Aros-sama’s ambition was fulfilled, it had hit her.

Whip told Stella the same thing, didn’t she? Why was she a part of this cult? Until she fulfilled her role, she had to think of the organization’s benefit and live without hurting anyone.

But when a violent impulse took hold, she lost sight of herself. The moment she saw Joanne’s smug, triumphant expression, her composure slipped away. No matter how deeply she regretted it afterward, her rage would hijack her mind and leave her memories of those moments hazy and incomplete.

And whenever that happened, she always saw the same scenery.

Her hometown, being swallowed by a world of silver. The memories of a past where she could only survive by eating flesh…

Oakley slid down to sit beside the girl as she quietly worked her way through her meal.

“Stella-sama, why do you try to eat people?” The question slipped out of him naturally.

Stella’s expression didn’t shift in the slightest; only her gaze drifted upward. “Stella was born into the family of a local power. Stella still remembers it. It was a very warm little town…”

According to her, her family had once ruled as lords over a small city. From the scattered fragments of memory she offered, Oakley could tell that she’d held a real fondness for that place.

Stella, of all people.

The realization left him with a strange, unsettled feeling.

This was someone who had tried to kill him more times, someone he’d written off as even less reasonable than Joanne, and yet here she was, revealing the kind of ordinary attachment anyone might have.

His chest stirred uneasily. If he asked any more, he might not be able to kill her.

That was the instinctive warning that ran through Oakley’s mind; there was so much quiet sorrow in the girl’s voice it almost hurt to listen.

“Stella’s town was in a region with very harsh winters,” she said softly. “Even so, we were wealthy enough that we never had trouble finding food.”

When Stella turned ten, her town was struck by an unprecedented, abnormal winter.

A sudden, long season of snow and ice descended on them, bringing death to the city. Heavy blizzards cut off all roads and contact with the outside world, and the food piled up in their granaries ran out before spring ever arrived.

Once they’d eaten the few animals they had, they turned to what plants remained. The fruit vanished almost instantly, then they dug up roots, stripped bark from the trees, gnawed on new shoots—anything that could possibly be considered edible.

But after the townspeople had devoured all the organic matter they could find, they finally turned their helpless hatred on Stella’s family, the local rulers.

Why do you get to sit by your fireplaces in your cozy castle when we can’t even get a proper meal? While we starve, you pampered rich folk feast on meat!

Resentment boiled over, and the people turned into a mob. As if venting all their bottled-up misery, they slaughtered Stella’s kin.

Of course, killing people didn’t make winter end any faster. The bloodshed spread until even those in the same households turned on each other, and Stella’s hometown was slowly buried beneath the white snow.

The long, long winter ended at last, and over several weeks, the snow began to melt.

The only one left alive was Stella.

“Stella’s big sister once said,” Stella murmured. “‘Survive, no matter what. Eat people if you have to, but live.’ After the food ran out, for three months, I kept myself alive by eating people. Stella didn’t waste even the smallest scrap of meat. Stella ate all of it.”

They were lucky, Stella said, that the temperature had always stayed below freezing.

The cold slowed decay, and the bodies lying outside didn’t rot. She took meat from that natural freezer, smoked it, roasted it, gulped it down raw. She tried every way she could to eat it.

She never hesitated. But there was always a storm of complicated feelings churning in her chest.

Couldn’t there have been a way to stop the fighting?

No matter how she turned it over in her mind, she never found an answer.

At some point, Stella started to find human flesh delicious. More than that, when she ate someone, she felt as though she could sense the life they’d lived. Understanding people through devouring them became an unbearable pleasure.

“Stella likes the winter,” she said. “Because it reminds me of that time. And Stella likes eating, too. Because it feels like I can go on living together with the person I’ve eaten…”

Listening to that conclusion, Oakley thought, Stella really is deranged. But he also found her pitiful.

Aros himself had warned her: If you eat too many capable believers, I’ll have to send you back for retraining. That alone spoke volumes about how poor her self-control must be.

“You’ve given me quite the story,” Oakley said quietly. “I feel like I understand you a little better now, Stella-sama.”

“I see.”

Stella’s past, huh? Better to have that information than not, he decided.

With that thought, Oakley simply stayed there for a while, sharing the quiet night with Stella.

※※※

There were several reasons to target the mining town of Jade.

First, the cult needed mines and coalfields to expand its military strength.

Second, I wanted a real battlefield to gauge Celestia’s true capabilities. The latter was the main reason the heretics decided to launch what they were calling the Jade Occupation Operation.

Our operation party would consist of a set number of believers, including Whip and me, as well as Joanne, Stella, and Celestia.

Two special units were scheduled to participate this time.

The first was the Hidden Insect Corps, a unit of inhuman soldiers who’d taken in parasites and turned themselves into something else entirely. The second was the Raid Unit, commanded by fellow executive candidate Gerugoroi Workforce.

Unlike the insect-people, the Raid Unit was supposedly a group of humans who’d honed their swordsmanship to the extreme on a hundred different frontlines. In other words, they were still within the bounds of human logic. Probably.

We had almost no concrete intel on the Raid Unit, but with only five days left before the Jade operation began, I couldn’t afford to wait any longer.

I called Joanne and Alex in and laid out the outline of my real plan: the destruction of the Northeastern Branch and the complete annihilation of both the Hidden Insect Corps and the Raid Unit.

“That’s, uh… pretty wild. Hardcore kind of plan, huh?” Alex said, rubbing a hand over his shaved head.

Putting the day’s events simply:

We’d use the fighting in the mining town of Jade as cover. In the chaos, we’d wipe out the Hidden Insect Corps and the Raid Unit, then I’d team up with Joanne to finish off the last one standing—Stella.

On paper, it sounded impossible.

From my point of view, though, the odds of success were actually pretty high.

First of all, Jade was a tough nut to crack.

According to the soldiers who’d gone ahead for reconnaissance, the outer walls were far more solid than anything in Metasim or Daskel, and they had way more soldiers stationed there, too.

And whether they realized it or not, any major Orthodoxy city by now should have serious defensive magic and magical infrastructure woven into it.

One example was something called the Fixed-Line Communicator.

Orthodox executive rank six, Known Tilti, possessed plant-controlling magic. The Fixed-Line Communicator was a device that used Known’s roots, reaching through the earth, to link cities. Blossoms served as the voice input and output points, enabling long-distance communication.

Even ordinary people could use these communicators, which were scattered across the cities like phone booths. Naturally, input and output flowers were also installed at outer gates and in garrisons, so if anything unusual happened, the information would spread quickly to other cities.

Metasim out on the frontier was probably just unlucky. It must’ve been attacked before the system was fully deployed. After that ambush, they’ve almost certainly rolled it out to every city.

There was no way the Orthodox side had just sat on their hands after being forced to abandon Metasim and Daskel.

Almost certainly, they’d taken those losses to heart and reinforced every town with defensive spells and magical infrastructure.

It’s been over a month since the incidents in Daskel and Metasim. After the first large-scale offensive by the cult in history, the Orthodoxy’s entire mindset has probably shifted.

Another likely defensive measure that came to mind was the Anti-Magic Flower-Stems.

It was a colossal plant that spread out like an umbrella over the sky and outer rim of a city, detecting high-speed flying objects and hostile magical attacks in the area around it.

Of course, developing a weapon like that took both money and time. If it hadn’t already been designed and approved, there was no way it could be deployed in the first place.

And the thing that practically neutralized all these defensive systems… was the Mobile Fortress Plan.

This time, because they wanted to test Celestia’s power and structure the operation around the Hidden Insect Corps and the Raid Unit, it had been decided that there was no need to transport any flesh fragments. But honestly… looking back on it, what we’d done was insane.

What was done was done, though. No use dwelling on it. I pulled myself together and turned to Joanne.

“This time, I’m just a side character, huh?” she said.

“Right. If my betrayal gets exposed, that’s a completely different story. Taking into account the risk of witnesses escaping and what happens if we fail, your role, Joanne-sama, will be limited to the final showdown underground.”

The biggest risk in staging an internal revolt was that people who’d been treated as allies up until now would suddenly flip into enemies. Once our rebellion came to light, we could expect retribution so horrific it was better not to imagine it at all.

And right now, Joanne’s position was absurdly valuable. If possible, I wanted her by Aros’s side for as long as we could arrange it.

Because of the whole Karatena situation, I’d already arranged things so I’d be the one to shoulder all the blame for the coming chaos. I’d bear the “great sin” of having destroyed one wing of the cult, and then run.

I’d disappear from both camps, hiding from the Orthodoxy and the heretics alike, while staying in contact with Joanne and Alex and waiting for the right moment to strike back. As far as I could tell, that was the best plan available to us.

What I hadn’t predicted was just how many believers already suspected me. Rather than Karatena starting the fire herself, it’d probably be more accurate to say there were already embers smoldering everywhere, and she just fanned them into an inferno.

I’d heard it even during my training with Whip. The rumors about me had already spread everywhere. My image had flipped completely: from rising star to infamous executive killer.

From here on out, my reputation would only plummet further. In the end, it was just a question of when, not if.

And yeah, if someone asked whether I found Karatena an eyesore, I’d probably nod hard enough to snap my own neck.

“Alex,” I said. “Has Karatena been acting weird lately?”

“She’s been doing nothing but weird stuff, senpai. Totally obsessed with spreading rumors about you and adding extra spice to every retelling,” Alex replied.

“That’s not what I mean. Karatena looks like she’s turned herself into an insect person.”

“Eh!? So even Karatena’s taking that sort of gamble. Wow.”

Judging from what happened that day when she spat on me, Karatena had to have taken a parasite into her body.

From the way she was back then, I’d guess she was in the stabilization phase. It’d be a little while yet before she fully adapted to the insect and could squeeze out any real monstrous strength.

Why go so far, risking death itself, just to become an insect-person?

If I assume she was afraid of how fast I was growing and grabbed at the parasite out of desperation, I guess that does make a twisted kind of sense.

A few days prior, Whip had given us a tour of the breeding yard. Thinking back, even through her permanent scowl, Karatena’s interest had been obvious.

So that’s what that look was about?

I didn’t know the exact details, but with my insecticide ready, her choice actually worked in my favor.

I planned to kill her in Jade anyway; no point wasting concern on her now.

The other problem is that Joanne might not obediently go along with the script.

Right now, Joanne occupied an insanely convoluted position.

She was a member of the cult’s side, yet aiming to wipe out both Orthodoxy and heresy alike, so she could walk away as the last one standing. There was no need to spell out how unusual that was.

If this operation went well, the cult would lose its brawler-type executive, Stella, setting Celestia aside for the moment.

From Joanne’s perspective, her real aim was to slip in and steal everything after both sides had worn each other down. She shouldn’t want to see the cult weakened too much.

Or so I’d thought.

In reality, Joanne was surprisingly enthusiastic.

Maybe Stella was simply too dangerous as raw combat power… or maybe she was just too annoying as a romantic rival.

I had Alex haul a certain device and quietly slip it in among the supplies prepared for the Jade Occupation Operation.

With that, I figured our preparations were complete and turned in early, only for Joanne to come running up, a little out of breath.

“Just now, Celestia passed along a message,” she said.

“And what kind of message would that be?” I asked.

“The details aren’t set yet, but apparently they’re drawing up a plan to invade Sasfect and steal the Holy Relic.”

The cocky confidence she’d always had as someone above me in rank was nowhere to be seen; Joanne’s face looked genuinely uneasy. And I couldn’t blame her. The moment the term Holy Relic came up, I felt my own stomach knot.

In the original story, the battle over the Holy Relic didn’t break out until somewhere between the mid and late arc.

In more concrete terms, it was an event that should’ve happened about three and a half years from now.

The Mobile Fortress Plan working better than expected, managing to turn Celestia into their puppet, was probably the main reason the schedule had been pushed up.

I’d never even considered the possibility that they’d bring that plan forward by years. And if that was the case, then the Jade Occupation Operation suddenly became the linchpin.

As I thought about stopping that operation, a whole swarm of worrying elements rose up in my mind: The lingering traces of mental pollution and ego intrusion from Joanne. Joanne’s own dangerous ideology. Alex’s carelessness and unfathomable depths. Stella’s magic and her past. Karatena’s transformation into an insect-person. My reputation among the believers. Whip and the Hidden Insect Corps. The strength of Gerugoroi’s Raid Unit. Jade’s defensive systems. Celestia’s brainwashing…

By the time I’d walked through all of it, a formless, heavy anxiety had settled over me.

There were simply too many unknowns. Was it really okay to just move forward like this?

It was a crucial gamble that would shape both my future and the entire balance of the world; of course, it would be a lie to say I didn’t feel at least a little uneasy. But this time, the emotion was different from every other time.

If I had to put it into words, it was like…

You’ve done everything you can. Now, live the way you want, so that even if you die tomorrow, you won’t have regrets.

That sort of voice, gently talking me down.

At this point, nothing I did would change the outcome.

I’d already laid my groundwork, setting up the mechanism to bring Stella down. I had the tools and intel to annihilate the Hidden Insect Corps and the Raid Unit. I’d done everything I possibly could.

Precisely because I’d gone that far, what I needed now was to live freely for a little while, clear my head, and be ready when the day came. That was how I chose to interpret this little piece of “divine guidance.”

Have some confidence. What I need right now is room to breathe.

Acting on impulse, I pulled Joanne into my arms. She stiffened in surprise for a second, then wordlessly wrapped her arms around my back and hugged me in return.

I decided to give Joanne a small, selfish request. “There’s one thing I’d like to do before the battle.”

“What’s that?”

“I’d like to cook something with you, Joanne-sama.”

“Huh? I’m crap at that sort of thing, you know. Never really done it.”

“I don’t mind.”

“If you’re gonna insist, I’ll go along with it. But what’s with you all of a sudden?”

“Honestly, no real reason. I just… feel like it’s something I should do.”

“Your line’s unusually fuzzy today. Well… more than usual, I guess.”

Right then, the door to the room banged open.

Noisy, I thought with a sigh as I turned, and there was Alex, walking in with a small animal corpse dangling from his right hand.

“Ah! Sorry, I’m totally interrupting, aren’t I?” he asked nervously.

“Not really. Just feels like one weird thing after another lately,” I said.

“Found this just outside the cave! Dropped it in one shot with my homemade slingshot.”

“You’re pretty good with your hands.”

“Nah, nowhere near you, senpai.”

I’d been wondering why he hadn’t come back after saying he was just dropping off some gear. It made sense now.

Alex set the carcass down on the table. It looked like a big rabbit, well-fed and meaty. Even at a glance, you could tell it was quality meat.

“I can’t cook at all, so could you guys handle that part for me?”

At his cheeky but perfectly timed request, Joanne and I glanced at each other… and then both burst out laughing.

I scooped Joanne up in my arms to head over and start prepping the food.

“Whoa! You’re light?”

“Hm?”

I slid my arms further under her armpits and lifted, and her body stretched upright like a startled cat with its paws thrown up in a victory pose. She was light enough to pass for a bundle of feathers.

“Hey. Have you been eating properly?” I asked.

“Perfectly normally,” she replied.

“Come on, there’s no way this is a healthy weight. You’re already skinny to begin with. Make sure you eat.”

“I don’t put on weight even when I eat.”

Pouting as I scolded her, Joanne let me carry her over to the bed. I set her down, then turned to glare at the high-quality meat Alex had brought back.

We needed to eat something good before the battle.

And I wanted to put a little more meat on Joanne’s bones.

“I’ll go grab some tools from the kitchen,” I said. “There’re some edible weeds and nuts around here. Let’s throw those in with the meat and turn it into a decent soup.”

“Oh, that sounds great! Make the seasoning on the strong side, yeah?”

Alex whistled and sat cross-legged on a chair. With his clearly defined dark circles and scrawny, shaved-headed frame, he looked… worryingly unhealthy, now that I really took him in.

Guess I’ll fatten him up, too, while I’m at it.

Come to think of it, the whole cult had this sickly air about it. The only ones who clearly had some meat on them were Fuankilo, Karatena, Whip, and Aros. I wasn’t even sure I should be counting the ones with parasites inside them.

I slipped into the kitchen, which was silent now that everyone else was asleep, and helped myself to the cooking tools without hesitation.

On the way back, I ran into Whip.

“What’s up with the pot and knife combo, Oakley-chan?” she asked.

I answered honestly that I was going to cook.

I’d braced myself for a lecture, something about how food should be shared with everyone, but Whip didn’t stop me.

When I asked why, she told me it was because she was trying to be considerate of my situation with Karatena.

“You get that your position’s pretty shaky right now, yeah? If you suddenly went, ‘Hey everyone, I made food!’ it’d just turn into a weird mess.”

“Fair point,” I murmured.

“The rumors all started with Karatena-chan, right? I feel like I’m partly to blame for not stopping her, so… sorry.”

“So you don’t suspect me at all, then?”

“I’m pretty sure you didn’t do it. But, y’know… from my perspective, this whole situation’s also kind of a chance.”

“A chance?”

“Yep! If Oakley-chan gets pushed out, my chances of getting picked as an executive shoot way up and— Ahaha, forget I said that!”

This one’s got her own brand of crazy coming out of her mouth.

So the Aros Temple Cult wasn’t exactly a united front after all.

As we were parting, Whip thrust a frilly women’s apron at me.

“I’ll lend you this! The size might be off in, like, several ways, but it’s fine, right?” she said with a smirk.

“How many outfits do you own, exactly?” I asked.

“I’m a top-class spy, obviously! Okay, see you later!”

With metal scraping sounds ticking faintly beneath her laughter, Whip disappeared around the bend in the corridor.

Come to think of it, she’d shoved some mysterious Chinese dress onto Joanne once, too.

Earlier, she’d claimed it was for spy disguises, but… I personally suspect it’s her hobby to dress Stella up like a doll. Otherwise, there was no explaining why so many of her outfits were weirdly small compared to Whip’s own build.

She’s clearly a dangerous woman in several directions. Not that this wasn’t obvious from the start.

I went back to the room and immediately slipped the apron onto Joanne and pressed a knife into her hands.

The moment it came to cooking, Joanne turned as meek as a borrowed cat. Standing stiff as a board while I tied the strange scrap of cloth around her and shoved a blade at her, the girl lifted her brows and looked between Alex and me with a distinctly uneasy expression.

Seeing Joanne in an apron, looking oddly unsure, almost like she didn’t know where to put herself, I couldn’t help the words of praise that slipped out.

“That’s an amazing view, Joanne-sama.”

The gap from the usual, utterly self-confident Joanne was lethal. Left to her own quiet, she was beautiful enough to seem almost unearthly.

Put an apron on her, and every trace of blood-soaked menace vanished. Like this, she was just a pretty girl, enough that I found myself reminiscing about nonexistent memories of spending time with her in modern Japan.

I lifted her arms into a T-pose and spun her around like I was turning a potter’s wheel, just for fun. Alex clapped his hands and cheered in a rather childlike manner.

“I-I don’t get it. How can you two get that excited just because I put on a piece of cloth?”

Smiling at how completely off-balance she’d been ever since all this started, I finally turned to the actual prep work for the meal.

Alex had gone to the trouble of bringing back such precious meat, so we put him on spectator duty while Joanne and I started cutting up the ingredients.

“Ah!” Alex’s cry of shock rang out immediately. Trouble, right out of the gate.

Thanks to Joanne’s monstrous strength, the table we were using in place of a cutting board had been sliced clean in half.

Wood chips sprayed into the air. With a loud clatter, what had been a functional table seconds ago collapsed into scattered planks across the floor.

Joanne brought a hand to her mouth with a whoops sort of guilty look, only for her expression to snap right back into its usual bold confidence as she snorted.

“How’s that? I’ve got a good feel for this, don’t I?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” I asked.

“Tch. My bad,” she said.

“No, I should’ve said something first.”

“Yeah, really. What would you have done if you ruined the ingredients? Hah… think about your actions, Oakley.”

“What are you even talking about?”

If I left this muscle-brained woman to her own devices, we’d have holes in the floor next, so I moved in behind her and took her hands like a two-person coat trick, guiding her grip. She seemed more than ready to just let me handle it; she relaxed completely and leaned her full weight back against me.

“This is how you do it,” I said.

“Hmm.”

“Simple enough, right?”

“If someone told you to cut just the tip off a feather, a single filament, could you do it perfectly?”

That hard, huh?

Well, given that a casual swipe from her could bisect a table, ingredients probably felt like dust motes to her, light enough to scatter if she breathed on them.

Alex watched us with a soft, gentle smile that somehow felt exactly like a con artist sizing up his marks.

Maybe that look rubbed her the wrong way, because Joanne suddenly plunged her hand into the strangled carcass, yanked out the guts, and ripped the pelt off in one swift, brutal motion.

Once we finished all the prep work, we set the pot on the tiny built-in fireplace, tossed in the ingredients and seasonings, and shut the lid.

“Now we just wait, I guess,” I said.

“I thought it’d just be ‘chop it and burn it,’ but this takes longer than I expected,” Joanne muttered.

While we chatted, the lid began to rattle. I checked that it was boiling, lifted the pot off the fire, and set it down between the three of us.

The moment I flipped the lid open, steam billowed up and swallowed our vision. A mouthwatering aroma rose with it, and all three of us let out low, involuntary groans.

None of us said a word.

Unlike the lowest-of-the-low mystery meat we usually got in the Northeastern Branch, this was real meat. A proper dish. Between the midnight hunger and the anticipation, our hearts were pounding.

Alex, as the one who’d hunted the animal, took point. When he stuck his fork into a piece of meat, the fibers fell apart softly.

Unable to hold back any longer, Alex lifted the piece and guided it onto his extended tongue.

Then he bit down. His eyes flew open as wide as they would go.

“Delici—”

Before the word could fully escape, Joanne’s fork flashed. Faster than anything she’d shown in training, her strike neatly stole the meat right off his fork.

“Hey—!” Alex yelped.

A beat behind, I hurriedly snatched up my own share of meat. The nuts and foraged greens got no love at all; the meat was so popular it vanished at a terrifying pace, so the only option was to grab it before someone else did.

Realizing the situation, both their expressions sharpened, predatory glints lighting their eyes.

Cutlery whirled around the pot at the center like we were in an actual knife fight.

There wasn’t a scrap of table manners to be found. This was a serious battle.

We tore into the meat, gulped down the rich, soaked-through broth, scraped up the last bits of meat and leaves from the bottom, and just like that, the bloodthirsty little feast was over.

My spoon clinked against the bare metal at the bottom of the pot. When the three of us peered in together, it was completely empty.

“It’s already gone…?” Joanne murmured.

“You eat way too fast, Joanne-sama.”

“You’re the ones who panicked,” Alex grumbled. “I wanted to savor it more…”

They sounded disappointed but both looked deeply satisfied.

As for me, a tidal wave of happiness crashed over my chest, and I let myself tip backward and flop onto the floor, staring up at the ceiling with a stupid, contented smile.

I’d originally planned to just cook with Joanne, but eating together like this, the three of us… It was the right call. I feel a lot lighter now.

Since being reborn into this world, I hadn’t felt this good even once.

When I pushed myself upright and glanced at the other two, they were both slouched in their seats, eyes half-lidded, wearing the loose, satisfied expressions of people in an exceptionally good mood.

“I guess I’m actually a cooking genius,” Joanne murmured, throat rumbling with contentment as her face melted into a dozy smile.

At that, Alex and I traded a look in perfect sync. Alex even jerked upright without thinking.

“Cute, good at cooking, totally devoted, and strong on top of it all,” she went on proudly. “Come on, is it really fair for there to be such a perfectly gorgeous woman in the world, huh?”

Alex and I both fell completely silent.

What is this woman even talking about? And why does she look so absurdly happy while staring at us like that?

“Senpai did almost all the cooking, though,” Alex pointed out timidly.

He’s right.

“Huh? I cut the greens and stuff properly,” Joanne protested, frowning.

You cut the table, I thought.

In the end, I’d taken her hands and guided her through cutting the ingredients myself.

She’d gone completely limp during it, spacing out with an empty look in her eyes.

No, pointing it out is a waste of energy. This is just how Joanne is.

Watching me not correct her, Alex seemed to realize that her personality was probably beyond any form of rehabilitation and quietly closed his mouth.

And so, with only Joanne staying blissfully pleased with herself right up to the end, the three of us drifted off to sleep.

Maybe when I’m on the verge of dying someday and my whole life flashes before my eyes… the memories that come back won’t be the dramatic ones at all, but stupid little moments like this.

※※※

Words, Karatena Wallmix believed, were a kind of magic—spells that let you steer people wherever you pleased.

Sensing the rising anti-Oakley sentiment in the Northeastern Branch, Karatena settled herself onto an obscene throne made of countless tiny insects, her chittering kin packed together into a warped, living seat.

She had already set every scheme she could think of into motion, carefully tuning things so that all that anger toward Oakley would erupt during the Jade Occupation Operation. The men she’d lured and tamed in her nightly visits wouldn’t hesitate for a second if given the chance to kill him.

From deep within her altered body, the sound of many small somethings crawling reverberated. The old saying about “a thousand worms beneath the skin” felt a little too apt.

But Karatena herself never once believed that ordinary elite believers could actually bring down Oakley.

That was precisely why she had accepted the insects of the breeding yard into her own flesh.

The one who will stop Oakley Mercury’s breath will be me, Karatena Wallmix.

Anything less, and the insects in her belly would never settle.

If she presented Oakley’s head, even Fuankilo-sama would surely praise her.

At the foot of her throne, her insects eagerly slurped up the body fluids that had splattered there, growing stronger with each drop.

The reason Karatena collected “essence” so obsessively was simple: she needed it to fuel the growth of her parasites.

On top of bodily fluids, she’d also stolen bits of meat in secret, but it still wasn’t enough. She needed to drain far more.

Oakley was the only man that brawler Joanne had ever acknowledged. He’d survived inhuman training at a brutal density, over and over, turning Joanne’s skills into his own flesh and blood and continuing to grow.

I have to become stronger. Much stronger.

That thing was insane. In terms of sheer mental fortitude, he was more inhuman than any of the executives.

No, he probably wasn’t human at all. He was some monster that had wandered in from a different dimension entirely. Not a simple personification of strength, but a creature whose psyche was like distilled human horror and madness, boiled down until it collapsed into pure chaos.

For a human to defeat something like that, they had no choice but to rely on insects.

She’d seduce those spineless fair-weather types who lacked any core of their own, narrow their vision, whip them up to a fever pitch, and let the pressure of the crowd crush them. And waiting beyond that was her final insurance: a direct confrontation with the power of the parasites inside her.

Now that her enmity with Oakley had become absolute, he would almost certainly strike back under the cover of the Jade Occupation Operation. An assassination carried out in the chaos of battle was the easiest kill of all.

And even if she died in the attempt, Oakley would unquestionably be subjected to interrogation afterward.

If people who’d been openly suspicious of him started dropping dead one after another, it would turn into a massive scandal, one big enough to drag Aros himself into the mess.

If Oakley died, Karatena’s objective would be achieved. If he survived in some half-broken state, the swirl of bad rumors around him would only burn hotter.

That was exactly the checkmated situation Karatena had wanted to create.

Like a spreading blaze, it had all begun as a tiny spark: Karatena’s idle speculation.

She’d fanned it with ugly human instincts—jealousy, the urge to drag down those more talented—and used them to spread the fire throughout the entire Northeastern Branch.

By now, some of those in her palm were already loudly proclaiming that Oakley was responsible for Fuankilo’s suspicious death. Once she’d let the flames catch, there was no putting them out. Not ever.

It was a vicious trap, a purgatorial hellfire, made possible only because she was an interrogator skilled in using words like a blade.

Good thing the boy I wanted to get rid of was so utterly unpleasant. If he’d been a genuinely decent young man, I might have hesitated.

Holding that lowest of thoughts in her heart, Karatena swung a leg over one of the men sprawled on the floor, straddling him.

“Come now, everyone,” she cooed sweetly. “You’ll have to work a little harder. This still isn’t enough.”

The truth was something you could always tack on after the fact.

She hated that Fuankilo’s death had been written off as a mere accident.

She intended to overturn that assessment.

She would cement a story that Fuankilo, having sensed the young man’s betrayal ahead of anyone else, had faced Oakley alone. She’d make that rumor stick until it became accepted reality, until the world saw Fuankilo as someone worthy of praise, even in death.

She wanted her to be an eternal, unseen pillar, an unsung hero in everyone’s hearts.

For the sake of that woman she adored, Karatena had to see this through to the bitter end.

Her body rose and fell in a steady rhythm, and the necklace at her throat swung in time, a calculated bit of ornamentation, swaying in a way meant to flatter and entice.

The men’s gazes were pulled toward her chest, their minds fogged by her sensual silhouette, and under that provocation, they lost themselves in fevered ecstasy.

That necklace had once been a gift from Fuankilo to Karatena.

Cherished ever since, the pendant scraped together with a light clinking sound, gleaming dully in the dim room.

In the stifling heat of the air, listening to the lively rattle of the accessory, Karatena sank into a haze of ecstasy and lonely yearning, thinking of the one who had given it to her.

I will not lose, Fuankilo-sama. I will kill him. I will drag down that man, and only that man, to the very bottom of the earth. I’ll lay his head to rest in that empty coffin, no matter what it takes.

As Karatena drank in their essence, her body warped further, drifting away from anything that could be called human.

She was evolving at a terrifying pace, growing in her own way, utterly different from Oakley’s.

Chapter 4: The Jade Occupation Operation

The day of the Jade Occupation Operation, in the city of bitter cold.

In the early morning, with fine powder snow drifting down, the Hidden Insect Corps and the elite forces of the Northeastern Branch began their march.

Roughly a hundred warriors in total—eighty percent insect-people, the rest ordinary humans—advanced toward the city of Jade, accompanied by Joanne, Stella, and Celestia.

Moving among them, I traded a glance with Alex, who was acting as our pack mule, and gave him a small nod.

Hidden among the baggage he carried was the secret weapon I’d prepared specifically for this day.

In answer to his look, I lifted my sword’s scabbard slightly. Alex pulled his hood further down over his face and slowly slipped toward the back of the column.

Thanks to Celestia’s weather manipulation, the area around Jade was, quite unusually for this season, completely free of snow. The light flakes coming down now were just camouflage, an illusion to deceive the enemy’s eyes. In the forest, Whip led the vanguard. When she raised a hand, the line came subtly to attention.

At the foot of the low, oppressive clouds, a sheer cliff came into view.

Beyond a snowbound landscape wrapped in what looked like a thin silken cocoon, we could see the city of Jade, pressed against the face of the cliff as if leaning on it.

I tilted my head back to take in the full view, and a blade of cold air slid in against my throat, making me tuck my chin down. The cold and the white were so extreme that my eyes ached, my conjunctiva stinging as though they were being crushed by the glare.

The chill felt like it could freeze me to the core, but I’d tucked stones heated by the campfire into my inner pockets, so my body temperature wasn’t completely leached away.

I’m going to be moving more than anyone once things start. I made sure my preparations were thorough.

Jade should have that installed, I reminded myself. If I can get my hands on it, dealing with the Hidden Insect Corps and the Raid Unit will become a lot easier.

At Whip’s hand signals, the believers around me began to draw their swords one after another.

In contrast, I did not draw mine.

I held my breath, careful not to reveal the little trick I’d already arranged.

Karatena spotted my non-movement immediately and shot me a sharp look. I glared right back, and she surprisingly backed off without pushing it.

Ever since she’d started spreading rumors, she seemed to have pulled most of the men of the Northeastern Branch onto her side. There were always a few of them hovering around her.

By contrast, there was no one near me. It was like everyone had agreed to leave exactly one person’s worth of empty space around where I walked.

That obnoxious woman’s obsessive needling hadn’t let up in the slightest.

Just the other day, one of the believers, overheated from all the whisper campaigns, had finally laid hands on me.

Some guy whose name I didn’t even know had grabbed me by the collar, eyes wild, and shouted, “You killed Fuankilo-sama, didn’t you!?”

Whether Karatena had egged him on directly or he’d just cornered himself in his own narrow worldview, I didn’t know. I’d only brushed his hand away with a little laugh at the time, but honestly, the way they were working themselves up had already crossed into a dangerous zone.

No one said it out loud, but it was obvious: everyone here saw me as the enemy. I half expected to get stabbed in the back at some point during the operation.

Feels like my space to exist is being squeezed from every direction, I thought, flicking the dusting of snow off the bridge of my nose with a fingertip. It’s about to start.

When I turned my gaze forward, Whip was calling Celestia over. After a brief exchange, Celestia, draped in black robes, lifted her clouded eyes to the sky.

She thrust her hand upward, then slowly closed it into a fist.

The fine, driving powder snow swirled and thickened, transforming into heavy, clumping flakes like peonies falling from the clouds.

They meant to use the reduced visibility to give us the upper hand in occupying Jade.

Even in the roaring wind, Celestia’s voice rang out clear and dignified as she addressed us.

“Once we link up with the Raid Unit, we will begin the Jade Occupation Operation,” she declared.

At her words, strong, confident smiles spread across the soldiers’ faces. It wasn’t carelessness or arrogance. This was the expression of people utterly certain of victory, the easy atmosphere of a battle they already considered won.

“There are two troublesome mechanisms in cities of the Kenneth Orthodoxy,” Celestia continued. “First, the Fixed-Line Communicators. These devices transmit information to surrounding cities. Second, the Anti-Magic Flower-Stems. These nullify a fixed number of attacks directed at the city’s skies and outer walls.”

Stella and Joanne stood on either side of Celestia. Neither of them looked the least bit tense. Their shoulders hung loose, like they were just heading out for a casual walk.

“As far as I know, the city of Jade has not yet been equipped with these devices,” Celestia said coolly. “However, there is no harm in assuming the worst. Destroy them on sight if found.”

At the word “destroy,” the soldiers howled as if they’d been waiting for exactly that cue.

In this wind and whirling snow, there was no way their roars would carry to the city.

The gale was strong enough that even if someone screamed at the top of their lungs, the sound wouldn’t travel far.

There’s one thing you haven’t noticed, Celestia. The cities of the Kenneth Orthodoxy have one more defensive mechanism. That thought ran through my mind as I tightened my grip around my sword’s scabbard.

From behind us, the harsh pounding of hooves began to slam against the earth. It wasn’t just one set but an entire wave, rumbling closer like a localized earthquake.

Out of the swirling snowstorm emerged riders on bridled warhorses: the elite of the Raid Unit.

They slowed, the ground trembling under their approach, then began to wheel in a broad circle.

The giant at their head dismounted in one smooth motion and spoke in a low, carrying voice.

“Gerugoroi Workforce. Reporting for duty.”

The deep, steady tone sent a shiver of tension through everyone who heard it, a cold bass brimming with ruthless intent.

Even through his winter gear, the steel-thick bulk of his body was obvious, his massive frame radiating oppressive pressure.

A well-kept beard framed his jaw, his scalp was shaved smooth, and his eyes were a murderer’s. Gerugoroi’s presence alone put his executive candidate title to shame.

And yet Whip, knowing no fear as usual, called out to him without a hint of hesitation.

“Heya, Gerugoroi-chan! Still as gorilla-like as ever, I see.”

“Hmph… and you are still as frivolous as ever,” Gerugoroi snorted, not missing a beat.

Leading his horse, he gave a brief bow to the assembled executives, including Stella, acknowledging them with minimal, disciplined courtesy.

Then he kept walking until he stopped right in front of me.

“At a glance, I could tell,” he said, extending a hand. “You must be Joanne-sama’s right arm, Oakley Mercury. I’ve heard plenty of rumors.”

His tone carried a faint edge of mockery, so I matched him, letting a wry smile tug at my lips.

“The Raid Unit’s Gerugoroi Workforce,” I replied. “I’d imagined nothing but muscle for brains, but you actually seem like a sharp one.”

“Funny,” he said, lips curling. “I’d expected you to be all brain and no body… but it seems I was mistaken.”

Under the gaze of the assembled troops, we clasped hands in a firm handshake.

What strength. It’s like shaking hands with a chunk of living bedrock.

Certain now that all that muscle was anything but for show, I felt a chill of sweat spread under my clothes.

This man was the leader of the high-mobility cavalry corps commanded by heretical executive rank three, Shadik Lane, and the shadow player who’d helped make the attack on Metasim possible.

Normally, the Raid Unit operated across the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid, carrying out reconnaissance and raids. On paper, that didn’t sound so different from any other mobile unit. But what set them apart was their blistering mobility on horseback and the individual combat strength of every rider.

For example, just before the attack on Metasim, the Raid Unit had launched a pillaging run on the other side of the country to draw attention away from the region.

Even if Orthodoxy soldiers responded immediately, the average rank-and-file couldn’t handle them. By the time reinforcements or one of the Orthodoxy executives arrived, the unit was already gone.

They targeted only lightly defended regions and villages, snatching headlines and pulling eyes away from the real operation. They were bait to drag attention off the main strike.

Leave them alone, though, and the damage only snowballed.

They were practically the embodiment of heretical cruelty.

After a brief glance at Gerugoroi and his men, the ones who had almost certainly been a distant cause of Alfie’s death, I let my eyes run slowly over their equipment, taking in every detail.

Truth was, this was my first time seeing the Raid Unit. I’d picked up some vague intel on them before, but nothing concrete.

Horse tack on everyone, and most of them are armed with lances. I see some crossbows in the mix, too. So their main style is mounted combat, overwhelming the enemy with reach and mobility, trampling them without ever letting them get close.

Even with that quick assessment, it was obvious: if they were just a regular cavalry unit, they wouldn’t be this infamous.

They were elites above even the Northeastern Branch regulars.

Still within expectations. With the third defensive system built into Orthodox cities, I can wipe them out in one sweep.

The Raid Unit remounted and took their positions.

I met Joanne’s eyes for a heartbeat, then looked ahead.

Confirming that all preparations were complete, Celestia lifted both hands and fired two dense spheres of compressed air at Jade’s outer wall.

Invisible rounds wrapped in white swirling wind shot forward and struck the city wall at a speed the eye couldn’t even track.

The Jade Occupation Operation had begun.

※※※

Celestia’s compressed air bullets struck the outer wall of Jade and awakened the Anti-Magic Flower-Stems embedded within the stone.

In response to her spell, a colossal bud tens of meters tall swelled and opened its petals, blooming against the gray sky as it swallowed Celestia’s attack and nullified it.

“As expected. Let us see just how sturdy that defense truly is,” Celestia said, her voice calm as she gathered magic once more.

She wove a second spell, blending razor-sharp kamaitachi wind with another air bullet, then fired the combined strike straight at the massive flower.

At her side, Stella extended a hand and unleashed a lance of thermal light, a beam of heat that raked across the enormous petals.

Even when bathed in a slashing-infused shockwave and a laser hot enough to reach several thousand degrees, the petals held their shape. Celestia folded her arms, a note of admiration in her tone.

“They have built it to be impressively durable, it seems.”

But the gargantuan blossom offered no resistance of its own.

After taking blow after blow, the Anti-Magic Flower-Stems finally crumbled with surprising ease. In the end, a plant that only sprawled large across the sky was good for nothing more than buying a little time.

The moment a gaping breach yawned open in the outer wall, the Raid Unit was the first to surge through, pouring into the city like an avalanche.

Infantry followed close behind, flooding into Jade and immediately beginning their looting.

Oakley ran over the hard ground, mentally reviewing the flow of the operation.

Stella, Karatena, Whip, and the rest of the Hidden Insect Corps were to enter the mine tunnels and suppress resistance underground.

Meanwhile, Celestia, the Northeastern Branch’s surface forces, other non-insect believers, and Gerugoroi’s Raid Unit would advance across the city above.

Joanne’s task was to support the surface troops from the rear and secure an escape route.

Alex had taken on the job of holding the mine entrances and exits.

After I wipe out every surface unit except Celestia, I’ll head into the tunnels and annihilate the detachment underground. There’s nothing to fear. All I have to do is what I came here for!

The hundred-plus heretics split into surface and underground forces.

Oakley slipped through the breach in Jade’s wall last of all, entering the city a step behind the rest.

Alarm bells rang out shrilly, warning of enemy advance.

But the bell tower had already been seized by the Raid Unit; after a few frantic peals, the sound cut off abruptly.

With the blizzard raging this fiercely, the bells likely wouldn’t have carried far anyway. Oakley shook his head in the white-out haze.

It’s fine. In this, the bad visibility and the wind pounding our ears are on the side of rebellion.

He could still follow what was happening around him.

More importantly, he had already found the thing he’d been searching for. Everything was on track, progressing exactly as he’d planned.

The moment the young man reached for the third of the city’s defensive mechanisms, something foul and sticky speared through his side.

Oakley sprang straight back on instinct.

An instant later, a cluster of bolts thudded into the spot where he’d just been.

He landed, reset his stance in a smooth motion, and scanned for the source of the attack.

They’ve boxed me in on all sides. Orthodox soldiers? No. This is too precise. They’re aiming for me and only me. Once he put a name to it, Oakley couldn’t stop the bitter glare he hurled into the storm.

“Karatena’s puppets…” he hissed. Grinding his molars, Oakley found himself surrounded by seven armed believers.

Of course. A whole crowd of idiots, faces twisted in righteous fury, lured here on that woman’s strings.

Even at a time like this, you’re still getting in my way. Quite the rabble-rouser, aren’t you? he thought, a dark heat boiling up in his chest.

Thick killing intent seethed. Among the men hemming him in, he didn’t see the one face he wanted to crush under his heel.

She’d put all her effort into riling others up and hadn’t bothered to stain her own hands.

What a thoroughly vile woman.

“Oakley, we know all about your crimes,” one of the soldiers snarled, eyes bloodshot as he kept his finger on the crossbow’s trigger. “Confess the truth, you traitor.”

The familiar, played-out tone of hatred made Oakley sigh.

“So you all got together just to parrot that at me?” he asked dryly.

“You don’t deny it,” the man shot back.

“There’s no point talking to people who’ve already gone this far off the deep end,” Oakley said, his voice flat.

He let that sink in for the seven men, then pictured Karatena’s loathsome face in his mind’s eye.

All this, just on the strength of your assumptions.

Steel glinting dully, he drew his sword in one smooth motion and lashed out with a full-force kick at the nearby streetlamp.

“Wha—!?”

The metal post crashed down under a single blow, bent and shattered, and the believers ringed around him flinched in unison.

This was the result of being forced to keep up with that monster Joanne’s training.

The crossbowmen found they couldn’t move a muscle. In that instant, they superimposed the image of rank six executive Joanne over the young man in front of them.

Taking full advantage of their paralysis, Oakley crouched down where he was.

He reached for the fallen streetlamp’s head, its lantern, and with a flick of his blade, scooped out the small flame burning inside. The fire slid slowly onto the sword, then swelled, engulfing the entire length of the blade. Heat thick enough to shove the blizzard back billowed out, the flames licking at the freezing air like a demon’s tongue.

Feeling the unnatural warmth coiling around Oakley, the believers broke out into a greasy sweat.

“W-What is that flame…?” one of them whispered.

At a glance, it was just ordinary fire.

But the weight of it, the alien density they felt on their skin—the longer they stared, the more it felt like iron wire was tightening around their hearts. A crawling terror bubbled up from inside, like something monstrous was invading them from within their own flesh.

Every one of the heretics understood, on pure instinct, that this was no mere fire.

It was natural. The flame clinging to the fuel on his blade was none other than the holy flame of Saren Deputy.

“You don’t need to know anything more than that,” Oakley said flatly.

The young man with the flaming sword sprang forward.

Exploiting the brief gap in their reactions, he swept his blade once, and the first man’s Adam’s apple parted.

“Ggh—!?”

He hadn’t given them so much as a heartbeat to guard. The fatally wounded believer collapsed, drowning in his own blood and divine fire, and did not twitch again.

The others, frozen in blank shock, snapped back to their senses at the sight of their comrade’s death.

But Oakley was already moving, bringing his sword down a second time.

Before a single bolt could be loosed, the next man’s rectus abdominis was split cleanly in a horizontal line.

“Agh… AAH!”

The moment the blood erupted, the man’s body went up in flames.

The holy fire used the flesh of the heretic as fuel and roared higher.

Those who were cut down burned to ash and scattered into the white world like they had never been there.

“Don’t panic! It’s only one enemy!” one of them shouted. “Keep your distance from the flames, surround him, and hit all at once!”

The remaining five might have been swayed by Karatena’s rumors, but they were still elites.

The shock of those opening kills wore off quickly; now they moved with cold precision.

The five left… They’re the ones I fought in that one-versus-many, Oakley noted. They’re plenty wary this time.

Perhaps learning from that previous beating, the five had tightened their formation into something disciplined and compact.

Gone was the earlier confusion they’d shown when overwhelmed by Saren’s phoenix flame.

Two swordsmen stood at the front as vanguard, with three crossbowmen in the rear—clean lines, no visible openings.

But Oakley was not the same as during that earlier training, either. With his trump card, the Flame Blade, his killing power had multiplied several times over.

He lifted the fire-wreathed sword high in a classic overhead stance. The weapon seemed to howl, digging into the enemies’ instincts, eroding their will to fight and even their ability to think straight.

Letting that pressure build, Oakley watched them carefully, waiting for a crack in their guard.

He couldn’t afford any reckless moves on his side; he knew perfectly well that his only chance at victory lay in exploiting an opening.

For that very reason, the five believers didn’t move either. The stalemate stretched.

And in a drawn-out deadlock like this, the one at a disadvantage was Oakley.

If another squad appeared from the blizzard, he would be driven into even deeper trouble. The fuel feeding the flame on his blade was limited.

Drawing their eyes to the flaming sword, Oakley’s hand moved in the shadow of that spectacle. From within his cloak, he flicked a throwing knife free and sent it spinning toward them.

The small feint did its job, jolting the front line into motion and beginning to shift the flow of battle.

As Oakley let fly a second throwing knife, the three men in the rear loosed their bowstrings, bolts whipping toward him.

The projectiles crossed paths in midair.

The three bolts were swallowed by the intense heat of the flaming sword’s follow-through, burning away before they could reach him, while the thrown knife was knocked aside once again by the front-line swordsman.

In that brief exchange, Oakley closed the distance to their formation.

He swept the Flame Blade in a wide horizontal arc, and the front line flinched as the shockwave rolled over them, shrinking back from the sheer terror of the holy fire.

“Like hell we’re letting you!” one of the rearguards shouted.

He tossed aside his crossbow, drew his sword, and lunged in to cover the two in front.

But Oakley had been waiting for that exact reaction.

Rather than target the rattled vanguard, he put everything into a strike at the would-be rescuer rushing up from behind.

“Ngh!?”

He vaulted over the two front-line swordsmen, his body a blur as he launched a surprise blitz.

The man, stunned and a beat too slow to react, had his chest run through by the flaming blade.

Oakley moved at once to rip his sword free, then noticed the dying soldier wrapping his arms around the sword, clinging to it even as his body crumbled to ash.

“N-Now… Do it!” the man choked.

The others were not about to waste the opening bought with their comrade’s life.

Seeing Oakley’s Flame Blade trapped, all four remaining soldiers lunged at him from every direction.

The last thing the four men saw was the young man’s face, bending low as he ducked, lips curling into a fearless grin.

“Zeeaaah!”

Leaving the corpse skewered on the flaming sword, Oakley planted his right foot and spun clockwise.

The trail of fire carved a perfect circle in the blizzard, and in the next instant, the upper and lower halves of the men who had leapt at him parted company.

The gale sent ground-snow spiraling upward, mixing in midair with the blood and flesh of those who had died in an instant.

The arc of his blade was beautifully traced in flame for a brief, vivid moment. Then the fire went out, and the chunks of flesh suspended in the air disintegrated into fine gray ash.

So this is the power of Saren’s magic, Oakley thought. For people like us, it’s one hell of a deadly poison.

The third defensive mechanism of the city was the flame of Saren Deputy, dwelling inside its streetlamps.

Within the cities of the Holy Kingdom of Gerlaid, there existed a special kind of lamp known as the Ever-Burning Streetlights.

The discovery had been simple but revolutionary: if Saren’s flame was kindled on a special catalyst, it could serve as a near-permanent light source.

From there, the Ever-Burning Streetlights had been developed—magical holy-fire infrastructure meant not only to illuminate the cities of the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid, but to keep heretics from approaching the places where people lived.

Oakley intended to take that small, sanctified fire and turn it into a weapon for hunting heretics.

His Flame Blade was a crude design at its core: grooves carved into the steel, catalyst etched along them, fuel smeared over the surface.

Naturally, it came with all kinds of risks. To start with the obvious, it was unimaginably hot. The hand gripping the sword was already burned raw, pain roaring up his arm every time he so much as shifted his fingers.

He was handling a deadly toxin that gnawed at the minds and bodies of heretics at point-blank range.

Just by standing in the heat haze, Oakley’s body and spirit were starting to falter; he felt as though he could collapse at any moment.

A true double-edged sword.

Reeling in that blinding agony, he resumed his ambush—cutting down heretics one after another from within the storm.

The clash of steel, the screams, every sound was shredded and devoured by the blizzard.

In the poor visibility and howling wind, the bodies piled up unseen, then vanished as the snow swallowed them whole.

“More or less done here.”

By the time the corpses he’d laid to rest hit forty, he finally caught sight of the Raid Unit at the very front.

He brought down the horses first with throwing knives, then slaughtered their riders as they fell, helpless in the snow.

The blizzard had grown so fierce that even the snow Celestia had melted earlier was returning, coating the ground again in a fresh white layer.

In conditions like this, cavalry lost half their mobility; a rider whose mount had stalled was nothing more than a large, easy target.

Thanks to Joanne’s brutal training, the work went smoothly—almost too smoothly. But Oakley’s right arm was already starting to go numb.

Looking down, he realized that even catching the holy flame’s residual heat had discolored the skin. It was far more poisonous than he’d imagined. He didn’t have the luxury of wasting time.

As he ran through the streets of Jade, a new disquiet began to gnaw at him.

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any civilians. And barely any Orthodox soldiers. Sure, they’d hole up indoors in this kind of blizzard, but this few?

It was also strange that the Raid Unit’s riders, who should have been at their best operating in coordinated groups, were scattered and moving alone.

The heretics I’ve killed so far… It felt like they were searching for something. Were they… looking for the civilians, just like me?

The blizzard was harsher now than when they’d first broken in.

Celestia should have been controlling the weather, and yet the snow had intensified to the point that it was stopping the cavalry in their tracks.

It didn’t match the believers’ movements. Something was off.

Realizing that the other heretics were also hunting for civilians, Oakley began peering through the windows of nearby houses, one after another.

Every single one was empty.

There were no signs of ransacking inside. Rooms were strangely pristine, furniture untouched.

It was as if the city had calmly prepared for the cult’s attack, then vanished in good order.

Oakley sucked in a sharp breath. He was about to learn why the citizens had disappeared.

As Oakley ran, hunting down heretics, something unfamiliar caught his eye—a corpse lying diagonally ahead in the snow.

At first, he assumed it was someone he had killed. But that wasn’t it. The fatal wounds were entirely different from those left by the Flame Blade.

The body had lost everything above the waist, ragged flesh hanging like torn rags, as though something with immense strength had ripped the upper half clean off.

As if answering his growing suspicion, the snow and wind began to rage with an abnormal fury.

The gears of the Jade Occupation Operation were slipping.

Oakley became sure of it at once: the Orthodox side was moving.

“Oakley, are you all right!?” a voice called.

He turned to see Celestia hurrying toward him through the storm.

“I’m fine!” he shouted back. “What’s happening? What about weather control?”

“There is an Orthodox executive in this city!” Celestia replied. “Giather Cormode’s summoned beasts have had a full view of our movements from the start!”

Oakley clicked his tongue. He’d just been thinking it was lucky he’d sheathed the Flame Blade to conserve its catalyst, only for this revelation to drop on his head.

Orthodoxy executive rank five, Giather Cormode.

Just like Fuankilo, he wasn’t suited to direct combat, but he commanded magic that allowed him to gather particles of light, shape them into summoned beasts, and control them freely.

So that’s what felt wrong. Giather’s summons are absurdly versatile. He must have brought out some snow-based creature and yanked control of the weather out from under Celestia.

Beasts with excellent night vision. Beasts that could fly. Beasts that could turn invisible.

Giather could generate and manipulate any number of different summons.

Most likely, one of Giather’s creatures had been patrolling high over the kingdom and had spotted the Raid Unit moving toward the northeast.

From there, it would be simple: throw up a defensive line around Jade, the city in their path, and lay down countermeasures in advance in case anything happened. That was how Oakley chose to interpret it.

“Any intel on Giather’s summoned beasts?” he asked.

“There are too many varieties,” Celestia said, shaking her head. “I don’t know which ones he’s using. I haven’t catalogued them all myself. What I can say is that we must first concentrate on securing the surface.”

“What about the Raid Unit and the others?”

“The Raid Unit is circling the city to gather information. I’ve also sent runners to warn Joanne and Stella about the situation. They should be returning around now, but…”

The small groups of soldiers moving alone, Celestia’s runners, had already died by Oakley’s hand.

Realizing that explained why he kept finding isolated cultists, he quietly adjusted his understanding of the situation upward from “complicated” to “worse than expected.”

His thoughts began to spin at high speed.

Celestia was desperately trying to seize control of the weather again, but it didn’t look like it was going well.

The storm only grew harsher. A sub-zero wind knifed through them, squeezing at their organs as if trying to wring the life out of their guts.

At this rate, they’ll all freeze to death before they die in battle. What a sick joke that would be.

Just as that bitter notion crossed his mind, a massive silhouette emerged from the white, fog-like world ahead.

Gerugoroi stepped out of the blizzard.

“I have assessed the current state of Jade,” he announced.

“And the others?” Celestia asked.

“My squad has been annihilated by summoned beasts. All but myself are dead.”

“What…?”

“I will report,” he continued. “Giather and the enemy soldiers appear to be gathering the civilians in the old castle. Furthermore, they have raised ice walls around it and seem fully intent on a siege. So, what will you do?”

Celestia bit her thumbnail, frowning.

Soldiers and civilians clustered in a single location was the worst-case scenario for occupying a city.

The longer they dragged this out, the more the cold would sap the cultists’ strength, and the more likely it became that Orthodoxy reinforcements would arrive.

And Giather’s summoned beasts, which dominated the snowy world outside, were very likely beyond Celestia’s ability to handle in her current state.

“The messengers sent to Joanne and Stella still haven’t returned?” she pressed.

“If their return is this delayed,” Gerugoroi said, “they’re almost certainly already dead.”

“Also the work of summoned beasts, then?”

“In truth, I did see a corpse. But the wounds were mostly cuts and burns. Summoned beasts crush their prey with far greater force. I would say a very skilled fighter is moving through the blizzard.”

“What did you say?”

“If the couriers don’t make it back, we have no way to know what’s happening underground. The storm is so fierce now that we can’t even see ten meters ahead. In my opinion, we should withdraw for the moment.”

His suggestion was offered with complete composure.

He saw the greater picture clearly. As befit an executive candidate, his judgment left little to criticize.

Taking his proposal in, Celestia suggested they first regroup the scattered surface units, then link up with the forces underground.

Oakley stayed silent, pressing down the sleeve over his right arm and suppressing his presence as much as he could.

Gerugoroi’s gaze slid over to him, lingering with a hint of meaning.

“By the way, Oakley…” Gerugoroi began slowly. “What’s up with the burns on your right hand?”

With a faint, crooked smile at that roundabout question, Oakley turned away, walking over to the toppled streetlamp. He held his blade to the glass, and once more kindled fire along the steel, the sword gleaming wetly as the flames caught.

“What do you think?” he asked quietly.

“Heh… Making me say it out loud, are you, executive candidate Oakley Mercury-kun?” Gerugoroi chuckled.

The Flame Blade roared back to life, tongues of fire stretching long along the edge.

Celestia’s beautiful features twisted; her shoulders trembled as she shook her head.

“Oakley?” she whispered.

If there were a perfect example of someone struck dumb with shock, it would have been that expression.

Looking at that face steeped in raw grief, Oakley gave her a gentle smile.

“Did you betray us?” she asked.

Oakley fell silent.

“The rumors back at the base… Were you truly the one who killed Fuankilo?”

“More or less,” he said at last.

“Fwahaha! So, it was an internal squabble gone rotten!” Gerugoroi barked, slapping a hand against his thigh at the new piece of gossip.

Oakley ignored him completely, keeping his gaze fixed on Celestia as he spoke.

“I’ll come for you someday,” he said softly. “Wait for me until then.”

The moment the words left his mouth, a monster emerged from the far side of the blizzard.

Its head was lost in the raging whiteout, but its nature was obvious. It was a giant.

Perhaps ten meters tall, its limbs were like enormous rods and its torso a round sphere, all of it oddly artificial in shape. Clad in armor of ice and snow, the giant of frost simply stood there, watching the three of them.

The Frost Giant Frimslus, one of Giather’s summoned beasts.

In its right hand, it held a club carved as if straight out of a glacier.

With a body that size wielding a weapon like that, a human would be swatted aside like dust.

“Celestia, I’ll deal with this traitor,” Gerugoroi called out. “You focus all your attention on the summoned beast!”

“Understood!” Celestia answered.

She sprang toward Giather’s summoned giant, cloak whipping in the gale as she launched herself at Frimslus.

Left behind in the storm-churned street, Gerugoroi and Oakley faced each other, keeping a careful distance as they slowly circled.

Gerugoroi spun his long spear lazily around his body, coiling it along his torso like a serpent, his mouth stretching into a delightedly vulgar grin.

“Really now, Oakley…” he drawled. “The way you spoke to Celestia just now. Those were the eyes of a man talking to his first love. For a moment, I thought some tragic romance play had suddenly started.”

“Poetic of you,” Oakley shot back, tone dry. “You should quit being a heretic and aim to be a poet instead.”

“I refuse. I have but one wish: to cross blades to the death at the farthest edge of battle.”

Flaming sword and pointed spear. The two executive candidates glared at one another, the distance between them taut as a drawn bowstring. Then, in the same heartbeat, they leapt. Trailing long bands of sparks and flame through the blizzard, the two men collided with explosive force.

※※※

After a gaping hole had been blasted in Jade’s outer wall, Alex watched as the Hidden Insect Corps and Stella charged into the mine.

The scrawny, blond, shaved-headed youth had been given a simple role: hold the entrance to the tunnels and kill anyone who tried to move between the surface and the mine.

He sat down right at the boundary between cave and open air and began setting up for Oakley’s plan.

The large trunk Alex had brought was packed full of weapons and armor. They were, of course, decoys, props to fool the cultists’ eyes.

When he dug through the jumble of gear, something else appeared from the bottom: a wheeled device, built to disperse insecticide.

The plan was to light this special device and kick it down into the tunnels.

Once it fell to a certain depth inside the ant’s nest-like structure of the mine, it would ignite, belching smoke and insect-killing chemicals through every passage.

Jade’s veins mostly produced iron ore, but a mine fire was never a small matter.

How many will die if we pull this off? Once Oakley-kun takes all the blame, how will everyone react?

He could hardly wait to find out. The anticipation, the sheer delight of it, made him shiver. Alex gave himself a little shake and turned his mind back to the task at hand: finding a flame.

“He said I should use this streetlamp as the fire source, yeah… Wonder what’s so special about it,” he muttered, squinting skeptically at it.

Even as he grumbled, he lit a torch from the Ever-Burning Streetlight.

From that flame, he felt a truly nauseating miasma seeping into the air.

Remembering Oakley’s warning, Alex was careful not to touch the fire directly as he transferred it to the insecticide device.

With a whoomph of greedy heat, the flame spread.

He quickly kicked the device off the ledge, sending it tumbling down into the depths.

This mine had been built by taking an already deep vertical shaft and excavating horizontal tunnels branching out from it. In other words, the vertical pit he’d just kicked the device into connected to every passage.

It’ll take them a good while to climb back from the tunnels to the surface. Can’t wait to see how many people croak before then.

Down below, the Hidden Insect Corps was aggressively carrying out suppression operations.

Just how many cultists would survive the triple-pronged nightmare of insecticide, oxygen deprivation, and holy-fire smoke?

It would be quite a sight.

Several seconds after he booted the device down, a response came echoing up from the depths—screams, raw and ragged.

Half-mad with panic, several members of the Hidden Insect Corps scrambled up toward the surface.

No one could blame them; having holy fire and poison vapors suddenly poured into your workplace wasn’t exactly a calming experience.

Alex raised his sword and swung it toward them two, three times, driving them back.

Then he planted a foot in their chests and kicked them right back down into the dark.

“Road’s closed, so you can’t come through here,” he said cheerfully.

He was the gatekeeper. His job was to keep the chaos underground from reaching the surface troops.

Acting like nothing at all was wrong, Alex sat back down at the entrance.

The next moment, the blizzard-wall in front of him split open, and Joanne stepped through, making Alex jerk so hard he nearly flipped over.

“Yo, how’s it looking over here?” Joanne asked.

“Just finished chucking the device in and sending the Hidden Insect Corps folks back home, so to speak,” Alex replied. “And, uh, that thing is seriously bad news. I still can’t stop shaking, y’know.”

Joanne plopped down right there at the boundary of cave and snow, still in her miniskirt, folding her legs into a cross-legged sit. Propping her elbows on her bare inner thighs, she stared off in thought.

“Oakley knows one hell of a lot for some reason, doesn’t he?” she muttered.

A heretic with insect wings sprouting from her head came buzzing out of the storm. Without even looking particularly bothered, Joanne scooped up a handful of snow, compressed it into a tight ball, and hurled it.

The snowball smashed into the woman’s head with a wet crack.

Her skull shattered, and the insect-person dropped like a stone into the white void below.

“He was born out of a gestation sac,” Joanne went on. “He was never supposed to have a chance to learn anything systematically.”

“That’s exactly why we call someone like that an irregular, yeah,” Alex said lightly.

“I guess.” Her chin dipped, and her translucent white hair slipped forward, veiling her eyes.

Alex’s answer wasn’t what she’d been looking for.

That’s not it, she thought.

She knew better than anyone that Oakley was an abnormal existence.

The problem was that she had absolutely no idea where that knowledge of his came from.

It wasn’t just herbs and poisons.

He understood concoctions, explosives, insecticides—he even knew details about the Orthodoxy cities and their infrastructure.

That wasn’t something you could just hand-wave away with “oh, he’s an irregular.”

He’s hiding something from me. Almost certainly, Joanne thought. I laid everything bare back then, and he’s still keeping his cards close.

When Alex glanced over at her, he noticed a faint, fragile smile on her lips, one that looked like it might disappear if the wind blew too hard.

He started to say something, but a gust tore through the entrance.

When he blinked the snow from his eyes, the expression on her face was gone.

Joanne was back to her usual self.

“By the way, Joanne-sama,” Alex said after a beat. “You think Oakley-senpai can really win against Gerugoroi?”

“He’ll win. No problem at all.”

“But that guy’s got that big fancy executive candidate title hanging off him, right? Is that like… some kind of rank or official position or something?”

“‘Executive candidate’ isn’t something you get handed out lightly. And no, you can’t just call yourself that on a whim. It only means the executive seats are full, so they’re stuck with the candidate label. In terms of pure ability, plenty of them are already at the top.”

“For real?”

“Yeah. Now and then, someone who’s still a bit lacking, like the old Oakley or Fuankilo, manages to claw their way up… but that’s the exception.”

The weight of those words hit Alex hard. Hearing it laid out like that, he felt the difference in their standing like a physical pressure.

And then Joanne followed up, and Alex realized just how far away Oakley really was.

“Within the Aros Temple Cult, the title executive candidate is a mark of honor given only to a few: those whose combat prowess is unmatched among the believers, those who’ve contributed enormously to the cult’s rise, or those who’ve saved us from crises unlike anything we’ve faced before. It’s a name reserved for monsters of that caliber.”

※※※

A howling blizzard raged, swallowing the city of Jade whole.

Within that absolute, bone-crushing cold, two men clashed, scattering sparks through the white void.

“Zeeiih!”

Having dismounted, the tall man wielded his long spear with nimble precision, driving the young swordsman in front of him back step by step.

A spear should have been a weapon poor at tight maneuvering. And yet, in terms of sheer number of strikes, the spearman was utterly overwhelming.

Oakley, with his holy flame blade, was being pushed onto the defensive.

“What’s wrong, Oakley?” Gerugoroi drawled, voice thick with amusement. “In the end, were you only ever a one-hit wonder with a good head on your shoulders?”

“Kh…!” Oakley spat blood, dropping to one knee.

Handling a long spear should have been cumbersome, but it felt like he was facing a dual-wielding fighter instead. The spear’s rhythm was that relentless.

The crushing difference lay in battle experience, pure and simple.

As the one leading the Raid Unit, Gerugoroi’s strength stood worlds apart from the swarm of lesser cultists.

He’s much stronger than me in raw power. I’ve only barely got the edge in speed, and that’s almost dead even!

Under different conditions, he could stand toe-to-toe with Joanne during training. With enough rounds, he could probably even take a point off her. What had Oakley struggling now was the sheer reach Gerugoroi commanded.

The man never let his spacing collapse, maintaining the full range of the long spear plus the length of both his arms, stabbing constantly with point and butt-end alike.

With only a sword, Oakley was pinned to a purely defensive role.

If I try to slip past the spear tip, he snaps the butt at me on the rebound. There’s practically no opening at all!

Joanne was a single-blade fighter. She overwhelmed him with sheer volume and unerring precision. Compared to her raw, brutal violence, Gerugoroi was clearly weaker. Weaker yet far more skilled.

He shifted the timing of his attacks just enough to throw Oakley off, using tiny movements of his eyes and fingers to force feints and mind games on him.

That was what made him so hard to deal with: strength and technique, plus psychological warfare. This man possessed everything Oakley wanted for himself.

He’s strong. I want that strength. Oakley glared at Gerugoroi with eyes starved for power.

He briefly considered breaking the spear somewhere around the midpoint but quickly dismissed the idea.

With carved grooves and holy fire wreathed along the blade, his sword was structurally weaker than usual; in a straight contest of durability, he’d probably lose.

So he threw himself into the spear’s zone with death in his heart instead.

Gerugoroi’s footwork was delicate even on the treacherous ground; he traced tight steps and refused to allow Oakley anywhere near the flame blade’s ideal range.

The deadline on Oakley’s right arm was ticking closer with every heartbeat.

His entire right side felt like it was about to burn away.

If I’m going to die to the holy fire anyway, I’d rather die moving forward.

Oakley took a deep step in, fully prepared to be hit.

The bald giant’s torso rose in a smooth motion, and he drove a thrust forward that seemed to tear the very air.

Oakley twisted his body, letting the spearhead pass by with nothing but a rotation of his hips, then grabbed the shaft with his bare hand as Gerugoroi tried to withdraw and widen the gap again.

The thrust had been a touch shallow, fired off roughly to chase away an opponent suddenly crashing into his guard.

Using the spear’s retraction as a springboard, Oakley kicked off and hurled himself forward, driving the momentum straight into a slash aimed at Gerugoroi’s flank.

What ran up his right hand was the jarring sensation of the blade being knocked aside by something hard as a wall.

“Guh!”

A grunt escaped Gerugoroi’s throat.

The Flame Blade had been deflected by his gauntlet; he’d managed a last-second guard.

But the long reach of the flame still seared half of his body, leaving him with no small amount of damage.

“You…” Gerugoroi hissed. “That flame… It is no ordinary fire, is it?”

“Yeah. They call it the phoenix flame or Holy Fire,” Oakley answered.

“No wonder it sinks into the bones…”

The man’s once-confident face twisted into a blend of agony and exultation. What could be more intoxicating than staking one’s life in battle?

Clenching his empty left hand into a fist, Gerugoroi spun his long spear, resetting his stance.

“This is… unbearably delightful,” he said with a laugh. “To have an executive candidate I can fight without a single regret is fortune beyond measure!”

A man who fed his soul with the joy of winning life through death, Gerugoroi paid no mind to his burns as he pressed the attack.

His long arms sent thrust after thrust spearing forth.

He aimed repeatedly for Oakley’s face, disrupting his sense of distance, and the unrelenting waves of strikes steadily carved away at Oakley’s body.

But humans learn and adapt. Just as he had with Joanne, Oakley began to pick out tiny flaws in Gerugoroi’s offense.

He knocked aside the clinging, sticky barrage of spear strikes with the Flame Blade and backed away to open up some space.

“What’s wrong?” Gerugoroi called. “All you’ve done is get pushed around.”

“The only one who matters is the one still standing at the end. All I need is a single blow.”

Gerugoroi’s spear had harvested countless Orthodoxy warriors.

Overwhelming experience against human opponents, technique honed in true killing fields, and a hard-earned certainty born of repeatedly winning battles of wits.

Layered together, those things had elevated his spearwork to something near miraculous. In other words, his spear was too fast.

At least when it came to his thrusts, Oakley could almost believe they were briefly breaking the sound barrier.

And that, he realized on instinct, was where the opening lay.

To break the stalemate, he began to wait, retreating again and again, letting the spear tip shave away at his flesh, watching closely for his moment.

As if mocking that hopeful calculation, Gerugoroi reached into his coat and pulled out a small sphere, then flicked it toward him.

The next instant, a brutal flash exploded across the silver-white world.

“Ggh!?” For several seconds, Oakley’s world was nothing but white. He swung his sword wildly as he stumbled backward, but he couldn’t guard everything. The spear tip pierced his left shoulder. “Gah!”

The spear twisted as Gerugoroi wrenched it, tearing the wound wider and hurling Oakley backward. As his vision slowly cleared, he saw Gerugoroi standing there as if nothing at all had happened.

He used a flashbang.

A man who talked about “duels to the death” like some honorable warrior, but in practice didn’t shy away from any tactic at all.

Or perhaps that knightly talk had all been part of the act from the very beginning.

Oakley pushed himself to his feet, testing his left shoulder with a sharp intake of breath. The spear hadn’t reached the bone, but it had torn into a blood vessel. The bleeding was heavy; he wouldn’t last long like this.

Retreating with everything he had earlier had at least kept the penetration shallow.

“A death match is a kill-or-be-killed fight where anything goes, isn’t it?” Gerugoroi said, his breath steaming in the frigid air as he exhaled. “Don’t make such a tragic face just because I used a little trick.”

He stepped in again, restarting his barrage. There wasn’t a crack anywhere in the flurry of his strikes. Pinned under that storm of steel, Oakley racked his brain. His only real chance against Gerugoroi lay in countering a thrust. But he’d squandered the first opportunity.

From here on, Gerugoroi would be meticulous about never letting him get a hand on the spear shaft again.

If I can’t grab it, then I’ll have to snare it instead.

Oakley raised his left hand in front of him, taking a stance that clearly telegraphed he was waiting for a decisive thrust.

Gerugoroi, of course, wasn’t naïve enough to oblige such an obvious gambit.

Watching the young man try to stake everything on that sliver of hope, he ran a palm over his smooth skull and bit back a laugh.

So, you plan to grab the shaft again and force your way inside my range. Gerugoroi thought. Pointless. Do you really think I’ll let the same thing work twice?

His confidence was absolute, and anger, fueled by that pride, flooded his thoughts.

But he never lost his composure.

His next move would kill without fail.

Gerugoroi bit down on something hidden at the back of his throat—a flash charge he’d kept tucked there.

“Ngh!”

His mouth opened, and the silver world exploded into light. The vicious flash that erupted from his lips robbed Oakley of his sight a second time.

Even so, Oakley’s posture didn’t crumble; he stayed braced, unwavering.

Gerugoroi silently praised him in his heart. Even caught off guard and hit full-on by a flash, he doesn’t curl up? That willpower is truly splendid. His awareness sharpened, the world around him stretching thin.

Right foot, then left, he stepped in. In an instant, he went from zero to full speed.

Oakley’s eyes, wide open, were still useless; his irises had yet to recover their function.

He could not stop Gerugoroi’s advance.

Even so, Oakley made no move to flee.

He simply stood there, left hand held out in front of him.

Is he trying to read the timing by sound alone!? Gerugoroi thought. If that were truly possible, no one would have bothered to invent flash charges!

Once he had built up speed, he added rotation, a circular motion driven by the twist of his joints, multiplying the force.

From ankle to knee, from knee to hips, from hips through the spine, shoulder, arm… When every joint passed the power on without waste, the thrust approached godlike speed.

“Die, Oakley Mercury!”

The killing blow that had pierced the brows of countless foes flashed forth.

The spearpoint distorted even the heavy fall of peony-like snowflakes as it closed in on the young man’s head.

And then, as if answering that movement, Oakley’s left arm slid into the spear’s path.

What…?

His left eye had tracked the spearhead.

That one eye was moving, fixed on the incoming tip.

Did he anticipate a second flash and close one eye ahead of time to preserve his vision?

Because he assumed that anyone carrying flash charges would rely on blinding their opponent before moving?

Was he… waiting for me to trigger it?

Thoughts scattered for a heartbeat, but the spear only grew faster.

Pointless, Gerugoroi told himself. He grabbed the shaft once because my thrust was soft. There is no one alive who could seize my full-power strike head-on.

He shifted the line of his attack to slip past that raised hand and drive the spearpoint into the traitor’s brow.

Or so it should have gone.

“Tch—”

In that accelerated awareness, what he felt was the sensation of his spear punching through Oakley’s upper arm instead.

The tip had passed right through the gap between the radius and ulna in the forearm.

This man… He really wanted to catch it with his body!?

Gerugoroi’s eyes flew wide at the sheer madness of the act.

Oakley had let the spear run him through.

Even so, the young man’s head still lay squarely along the line of the thrust.

If Gerugoroi simply pushed forward, the spearpoint would punch through his frontal lobe. Instant death.

Your last show of stubborn will is impressive, I’ll grant you that. Well done, Gerugoroi thought, readying himself to deliver the finishing shove… and then felt the faintest resistance at his fingertips.

The line of the thrust was drifting. Pulling to the right.

What…?

His strike was far too fast; there was no time to correct the trajectory.

Gerugoroi’s all-out thrust grazed Oakley’s ear and stabbed into emptiness.

In a world that had slowed to frame-by-frame, he rolled his eyes to track the cause of the miss. And then he saw the young man in front of him and understood at once: Oakley’s left arm had been skewered by the spear.

He was clamping the shaft between his radius and ulna, the bones of the forearm, using them like a vise to both bleed off the force and twist the line of the thrust away.

He didn’t fail to grab it but let himself be pierced on purpose!?

By the time the realization hit, it was already too late.

Oakley wrenched the spear upward, forcing Gerugoroi’s arms to lock out and stretch to their limits.

And right there in front of him, perfectly poised in that helpless interval after an all-in attack, stood Oakley, Flame Blade already raised high.

Gerugoroi could only stare, dumbstruck, as he spent that inescapable post-motion lag in a world of slow motion.

Ah. I see. My thrust is a sure-kill, not a sure-hit.

If the enemy was willing to meet it with flesh and blood, to let it punch through and bind it, they could twist the line of a straight attack off course.

A thrust was, by nature, a linear motion.

Give it a strong enough force from the side, and even the straightest line would bend.

The first “failed” attempt to grab the spear had been nothing but a bluff.

Oakley had been playing him from that moment, turning this into a war of nerves.

That one time he’d successfully slipped past the Flame Blade had become a poison in Gerugoroi’s mind, tricking him into subconsciously believing that he was the one dictating the flow of the fight.

That was his downfall. He’d lost in strength and psychology. It was an absolute defeat.

“Magnificent,” he breathed.

The moment Gerugoroi’s strength left him, Oakley’s blade swept across his torso, tracing a brilliant arc of holy fire.

Scarlet flames roared up, swallowing the man whole.

Gerugoroi crashed to the ground, blood scattering across the snow as the blaze coiled around him.

Black smoke rose as his steel-hard body began to melt away, consumed from the inside out.

Oakley looked down at the wide-eyed corpse of Gerugoroi Workforce, then his own knees finally buckled, and he dropped to the ground.

If the Flame Blade hadn’t finished it, his backup plan had been simple and vicious: use the muscles of his left arm to clamp the spear in place, rip the weapon away, haul Gerugoroi in close, and land a second, killing strike.

In the end, he hadn’t needed to go that far.

But it had been close. Far too close.

If he’d had room to use his horse? If he’d come with allies at his back?

He’d only won because chance had tilted the board in his favor.

There was no sense of achievement. He was instead hit with a heavy, guilty feeling of having somehow lost anyway.

“Damn it… The blood…” he muttered through clenched teeth. “I have to get to the tunnels… I have to kill them all…”

The long spear was still stuck halfway through his left arm. Oakley gripped the shaft, yanked it free in one harsh motion, and staggered toward the mine, leaving a trail of red in the snow.

Somewhere far off, beneath the roar of the blizzard, he could hear the crash and boom of Celestia battling Giather’s summoned beast.

He didn’t have the strength left to even consider heading that way.

The ones left are Whip, Karatena, and Stella… He said the names to himself and felt a weight like lead drop into his gut.

They were far, far beyond him.

Once he went underground, he could rely on Joanne and Alex, but the existence of Stella Belmont, the strongest of them all, pressed down on his heart like a mountain.

Even so… what good would it do to falter now?

I keep going, he told himself, until every last heretic is dead.

With unsteady steps, Oakley made his way to the mine entrance.

There, in the spinning curtain of snow at the threshold, he finally rejoined Alex and Joanne.

“Whoa! You okay, senpai!?” Alex yelped, diving in to catch Oakley’s staggering body.

While he supported him, the scantily dressed girl stepped in front of them, cupping the young man’s cheeks in both hands and lifting his face.

“You won, didn’t you?” Joanne murmured. “You really are incredible…”

As her healing magic began knitting his wounds closed, Joanne stroked his head like she was petting a dog.

It didn’t feel like being treated like a child so much as being indulged by some higher being, and the mix of embarrassment and discomfort made Oakley’s skin crawl.

He gently pushed her hands away and looked down at his own left arm and shoulder, both of which had been speared clean through.

The wounds were swollen and almost closed over, and thanks to the magic, the holes themselves had vanished completely.

There was still numbness and pain lingering there, but it was far better than walking around with gaping holes.

The real problem was his right arm.

The skin that had been roasted at close range by the holy fire was horribly burned, oozing yellow fluid.

Because the injury was caused by Saren Deputy’s flame, healing magic barely worked on it at all.

If he kept using the Flame Blade like this, his right arm would rot off. Joanne had warned him as much.

But if he wanted to fight the Hidden Insect Corps, he had no choice but to borrow the power of the holy fire.

So, Oakley proposed a compromise. What if they turned Gerugoroi’s long spear into a second Flame Blade? Up until now, he hadn’t been able to convert ordinary spears because the blades were too thin and snapped under the stress.

The longsword he’d modified into his flame sword had a thick, heavy blade. Gerugoroi’s signature spear, however, had a broader, thicker head than a normal spear, not to mention longer.

He’d heard it had originally been taken off a famous Orthodoxy soldier.

Compared to a sword, the extra distance between blade and grip would give his hand more breathing room, hopefully slowing the pace at which the burns worsened.

While Joanne worked on modifying the weapon for him, Oakley eyed the spear and felt a small shiver run through him.

Hard to believe I survived getting skewered by this thing, he thought. Then again, I’m not exactly unharmed, am I? Hard to say if I’m lucky or not.

Joanne dug her fingernails into the spearhead and scored the surface with a series of shallow grooves.

Then she pressed in the catalyst, a resin kneaded with special agents, smearing it into the carved channels before sandwiching the blade between her palms and squeezing.

A thin, sharp clang of tortured metal rang out, and just like that, the Flame Spear was finished.

Work that would normally require heavy machinery was reduced to a heartbeat in Joanne’s hands, thanks to her monstrous strength.

Oakley ran his eyes along the curves where steel and catalyst met, confirming the pattern, then transferred the holy flame from his sword to the long spear.

Gerugoroi, it seemed, had used a spear heavier than standard, no doubt to increase the power of his strikes.

Some things only became clear afterward.

Oakley gave the Flame Spear an experimental thrust and was genuinely startled by how naturally it fit his body.

“So,” Joanne said, “what happened to Celestia?”

“Giather’s summoned beast was lurking in this city,” Oakley replied. “She’s fighting it now.”

“There’s an Orthodox executive here, too, huh? That’s scary stuff,” Alex chimed in, wincing.

“The blizzard getting stronger is the summoned beast’s doing, then?” Joanne asked.

“Most likely,” Oakley said.

“That’s a problem,” Joanne murmured. “We may have more executives on our side, but they’ve got the terrain and the weather. If we dawdle, Cress might show up. Best to finish this quickly.”

Having convinced herself, Joanne headed toward the yawning mouth of the mineshaft. Oakley and Alex followed the small figure, stepping into the dark. Their targets were the Hidden Insect Corps and Stella Belmont.

The Raid Unit and Gerugoroi were only one fragment of the Aros Temple Cult.

Only by killing the Hidden Insect Corps and Stella would they finally come close to collapsing the cult itself.

The moment they crossed the threshold into the mine, Oakley could feel a faint haze clinging to the air, a poisonous gas that made even breathing feel taboo for a heretic.

Every breath sent tiny stabs of pain from his nose down his throat and into his chest, like a shower of minute needles.

It was a haze of insecticidal smoke blended with the toxic fumes left behind by the phoenix flame’s heat.

Even Joanne grimaced, her expression tightening. The environment was brutal enough to make her face twist.

But there’s no way something like this killed Stella or the other executive candidates, Oakley thought. If they walked into a trap this simple, they’d just be idiots.

It had been several hours since the fumigation began.

Climbing down the first vertical shaft they came across, they found a mound of ash and scattered bodies near the remains of the device he’d kicked down earlier.

The ash piles were what remained of cultists burned by the holy fire the device had carried.

The bodies were those who had inhaled a lethal dose of insecticide and sacred smoke at point-blank range.

The bodies of the dead insect-hybrids were shriveled, their torsos collapsed like balloons with the air let out. From their mouths and eye sockets, the parasites had crawled halfway free, then died on their backs, legs curled tight.

They were such perfect corpses that Oakley didn’t even feel the urge to finish them off.

“Looks like it’s working,” he said quietly.

“My chest’s killin’ me, though…” Alex wheezed.

“The concentration’s probably thickest around this shaft,” Oakley replied. “Don’t let your guard down.”

The three of them stepped over the bodies and headed deeper in.

As they moved away from the vertical shaft, it went just as expected: they ran into surviving cultists.

They were writhing on the ground, half-mad, groaning in pain as they thrashed. The insecticide must have disrupted the balance between host and parasite, unraveling whatever harmony they’d had. Oakley went through them without pause, driving the Flame Spear through their heads one by one, then pushed on toward the next level.

Once they reached a section where the smoke had thinned, the entire mine seemed to tremble.

He stopped instinctively. At the same moment, the other two halted and glanced upward.

“The ground just shook,” Alex said.

“Maybe some flammable gas ignited and exploded?” Oakley suggested.

“No,” Joanne said, head tilting slightly. “This isn’t the kind of shaking you get from an explosion. It’s probably Celestia’s fight with Giather heating up.”

The minor tremors came again and again after they first took notice, low, distant growls rumbling through the rock.

Threaded through those muted groans, a new sound reached them from somewhere: the murmur of flowing water.

Oakley’s thoughts flicked to a TIP from the original story, a bonus nugget of information.

The area around the city of Jade is renowned for its hot springs, with abundant groundwater and mineral resources.

That was how it had been described. If that were the case, there might be an underground river flowing through a hollowed-out space nearby. He listened harder and realized the sound was coming from below.

“Let’s move,” he said at last.

Judging from the faint booms and roars still audible from above, the cultists on the surface were almost certainly all dead except for Celestia.

Some had fallen to Oakley’s Flame Blade, others had been killed by the summoned Frost Giant Frimslus, and the rest would have frozen to death or succumbed to frostbite.

There can’t be fifty enemies left, he calculated. We finish this fast. Kill every last one of them and end this.

They walked for a while into a section of the mine where the structure had grown far more complex, tunnels branching, weaving, twisting.

And here, he couldn’t feel a single living human presence. No trace of Stella. No sign of Whip.

Either they’d passed them by, or the three of them were on an entirely different level.

However reckless Stella might be, she wasn’t stupid enough to fire her heat rays toward the surface and bury herself alive under a cave-in. Which meant, without question, that she was somewhere in these tunnels.

We might’ve gone too deep, Oakley thought.

He turned and told Joanne and Alex behind him that they should head back, then pivoted on his heel to retrace their steps.

That was when a faintly sweet scent brushed his nose, tickling his sinuses.

He froze mid-step.

At the same time, a roar shook the mine—rock collapsing on a higher level.

“What!?” he snapped.

The battle on the surface had intensified, and the shockwaves were finally starting to chew at the bedrock near the tunnels. A cascade of rubble and stone crashed down between them, forming a barrier that split the three apart.

“Oakley!” Joanne shouted.

“Senpai!” Alex’s voice followed, muffled by dust and stone.

And the collapse triggered yet another upheaval.

A fissure ripped open under Oakley’s feet, and the ground simply gave way, dragging him down into a bottomless black.

As he dropped in free fall, he glanced up and saw a perfectly square opening cut into the rock above, as if someone had gouged the earth out with a giant chisel.

This wasn’t natural. It was obviously man-made.

“A trap, huh?”

Oakley twisted his body midair, jammed the Flame Spear’s tip into the wall, and used it as a brake.

His fall slowed at last, and then, something slammed into his right flank.

Pain exploded along his ribs.

He twisted to see what it was, and a raw scream tore out of his throat.

A fist-sized monstrosity was clamped onto him, fangs buried in his side.

“Ghh!? You—!”

It was a strange, spider-like insect. Its legs were absurdly numerous, its body long and flattened, like some nightmare cross between a centipede and a threadworm.

He had a split-second’s certainty that it would chew straight through his flesh if he didn’t act. Clinging to the spear with one hand to keep from falling, he yanked a knife from inside his clothes with the other and hacked at the parasite.

He slashed it over and over; after several strikes, the thing went limp and peeled off, tumbling away into the dark.

Even as it fell, Oakley already knew whose handiwork this was.

“Karatenaaaaaa!” he roared, voice echoing up the shaft.

The name alone made his guts boil.

That gray-haired woman was a lump of pure disgust given human shape, a torturer who had seduced the believers of the Northeastern Branch, turned them into her tools, and sent them as assassins.

“Get out here, you bastard! I’ll kill you myself. Come on out, you coward!” Oakley roared into the dark.

Dangling in midair, he glared down into the blackness below.

She had to be down there.

Once she’d noticed his betrayal, she must have flipped the board and laid a trap in the depths instead.

His voice echoed up and down the shaft.

No answer from Joanne. No answer from Alex.

Instead…

Hith, hith. Skitter, skitter. Something huge and many-limbed was moving in the dark. Climbing.

Answering his shouted challenge, a massive presence drew closer. In the halo of holy fire flickering at the tip of the Flame Spear, the woman finally revealed herself.

“You’ve walked right into my trap, Oakley,” Karatena said, her voice dripping with satisfaction. “There’s no escape now.”

From her back sprouted ten jointed limbs like monstrous insect legs, and the once-delicate face he remembered was now marred by bulging veins.

A cruel-looking beak-bladed weapon hung at her hip, and in her right hand, she gripped a buster sword far too large for a normal person.

Karatena Wallmix crawled along the wall on those hooked, chitinous tarsi as if she’d been born there.

“Karatena!” Oakley growled.

“When the tunnels began to fill with smoke, I realized you were behind it. So, I went to ground and waited. They say criminals always return to the scene, don’t they?”

“That body. You really went and let a parasite in.”

“Oh yes. Just to make absolutely sure I'd be the one... to kill you.”

Her body warped into something grotesquely inhuman as she slowly dragged her purple tongue across her lips in obscene delight.

Even the fact that the soldiers she’d sicced on him had been wiped out seemed to fit neatly into her expectations.

“If you had that oversized toy from the start,” Oakley said, nodding at the buster sword, “you could’ve just come yourself instead of throwing small fry at me. Why drag the other believers into it?”

“To draw out your anger, of course. You hate that sort of thing, don’t you?”

“It’s not ‘that sort of thing.’ I hate all of you.”

“My, my… more savage than I thought. How brave.”

She flexed the jointed limbs on her back and began to bound freely around the shaft, kicking off walls and rock with inhuman agility.

Each time she jumped, something dropped from the wide sleeves of her robe—fist-sized, twisted spiders that tumbled and clung to the stone.

All of them were small parasites, clearly her brood, Karatena’s own “children.”

“Go, my darlings!” she crooned. “Feast on the fool until nothing remains!”

A swarm of grotesque insects, shaped in ways that triggered pure, visceral disgust, swarmed up toward him.

Suspended as he was, Oakley couldn’t even swing his weapon properly.

With all those spider legs, Karatena had the clear advantage in this vertical battlefield.

Oakley slammed his knife into the rock wall and planted a boot on the hilt, using it as a makeshift foothold to launch himself toward Karatena.

Dodging the oncoming insects midair, he drove the blazing Flame Spear straight at her.

Of course, an attack that straightforward was never going to land.

In stark contrast to Oakley, who was restricted to mostly linear movements within the shaft, Karatena used the jointed limbs on her back to move freely in three dimensions, skittering and leaping with inhuman agility.

But Oakley had expected that outcome from the start.

He twisted his body mid-flight and whipped out an overhead kick.

“Ggh!?”

Caught off guard, Karatena let out a startled cry and hurriedly brought her buster sword up to guard.

The sole of his boot crashed dead center into the blade.

Using that impact as a springboard, Oakley kicked off the flat of the sword, flipping through the air as he spun the Flame Spear in a vicious arc.

In the darkness of the vertical shaft, an elliptical trail of fire carved itself into the air.

Two of Karatena’s jointed limbs were swallowed by the holy flames.

Before the fire could spread, she made a ruthless decision and severed them herself.

The band of fire lit their faces for a heartbeat, painting two visages, stark in the gloom, twisted with hatred and murderous intent. Oakley lost his footing.

Karatena, her posture ruined, staggered in midair.

They grabbed at each other’s clothes at the same moment, and together they plunged into the depths.

They tumbled, grappling and striking, smashing into the rock walls as they fell through endless black.

After that long, sickening descent, they finally slammed into a ground that felt strangely soft for an underground space.

The impact sent them both bouncing and rolling, until they were flung back-first into opposite walls at diagonal corners of the chamber.

Right after they hit, the “ground” beneath them changed. What had felt like solid footing shuddered with a deep activation roar and then began sinking gently downward. They were standing on top of an elevator platform that had been abandoned long, long ago. The entire structure was made of plant tissue, but neither of them noticed.

As the lift slowly picked up speed, the two, still reeling from the fall, dragged their faces up.

“Karatena!” Oakley snarled.

“Oakley!” Karatena hissed back.

Both of them were lives twisted off-course by Fuankilo, now facing each other head-on, eyes locked.

Karatena rose, supported by eight remaining jointed limbs, and swung both her weapons in powerful, sweeping motions.

Oakley Mercury, executive candidate of the Aros Temple Cult.

Karatena Wallmix, likewise an executive candidate of the Aros Temple Cult.

On the descending platform, far beneath the city of Jade, the second duel between candidates began.

※※※

Before Oakley settled things with Gerugoroi…

There was a bit more to Alex and Joanne’s conversation.

Within the Aros Temple Cult, the title of executive candidate was a badge of honor granted only to a few: those whose combat prowess was unmatched among the believers, those who contributed greatly to the cult’s meteoric rise, or those who had saved the cult from crises unlike anything it had ever faced.

Fuankilo Legacy, in life, had been hopeless when it came to direct combat.

But in administration and fundraising, she had been a star.

Her talents in that area were essentially irreplaceable, and so Aros himself had bestowed healing magic upon her and protected her as one of his executives.

Because of that unusual precedent, her direct disciple Karatena had ended up suffering from a kind of reputational collateral damage.

If her master was a non-combat executive, the reasoning went, then Karatena, as her top disciple, must be bad at fighting too, right?

The reality, however, was different.

“Uh, I don’t know all that much,” Alex said, scratching his shaved head. “But does Karatena really have what it takes to call herself an executive candidate?”

“You’d better not underestimate her,” Joanne replied flatly.

“Huh?”

Joanne started talking about the past. About something that had happened back at the old castle base.

One time, while Fuankilo was away, they’d tortured a group of Orthodoxy soldiers the cult had captured. That night, after the interrogation was over, the captives were thrown into a cell and left there.

They rose up. The soldiers overpowered the guard, stole his weapons, and started a large-scale revolt.

But by the time Joanne arrived, having rushed over when the alarm reached her, the uprising had already been crushed. The stone floor was littered with mangled corpses, carved up without mercy.

Neither Joanne nor Fuankilo had put that rebellion down. It had been Karatena. She alone had slaughtered the entire armed group of soldiers.

“S-So… that means she’s stronger than me, right?” Alex asked, his voice suddenly small.

“You wouldn’t stand a chance, Alex,” Joanne said. “And if someone like that’s gone and taken insect power into her body, she might actually be an even nastier opponent than Gerugoroi or Whip.”

※※※

Oakley had almost no real information on Karatena as a person.

He knew her only as Fuankilo’s top disciple, an executive candidate, just a title, a position on the board. He’d never bothered to think of her as more threatening than Gerugoroi or the other candidates.

And now that the lid had been ripped off, what did he find?

A far bigger monster than the man he’d just put down.

Inhuman strength and a cloud of familiars spilling from her body.

He’d drawn his old Flame Blade at first to thin out the swarm, burning away the parasitic brood. But even a casual, probing strike from her had shattered that sword like cheap glass.

Her raw output was a nightmare.

Forced into a completely different style of fight from the ones he’d had against human opponents, Oakley found himself constantly on the back foot.

“Hmph!”

On the sinking platform, he swept the Flame Spear in a wide, brutal arc.

The mass of parasites swarming up from his feet turned to ash, their bodies scattering as cinders while a band of fire hung in the air, serving double duty as both slaughter and warning line against Karatena herself.

Some of her brood spat silk, trying to bind him, but the threads were weak to heat. Exposed to the holy flame, they melted like spun sugar and lost all stickiness.

When he realized Karatena herself made no move to close the distance, a cold sweat slid down his spine.

Oakley bared his teeth at her, provoking her on purpose.

“Scared of the fire?” he called.

In this vertical darkness, where the shaft was swallowed by black, the holy flame burning in the head of the Flame Spear was the only true light.

Karatena’s gaze was locked on that fire.

“Fuankilo-sama once told me about it,” she said, voice low. “That flame… The phoenix hellfire they keep in the streetlamps of the Orthodoxy cities.”

“You know your stuff,” Oakley said, unease churning in his gut.

The elevator beneath them continued to accelerate, dropping them ever deeper. They must have fallen nearly a hundred meters from the original tunnel already.

How am I supposed to climb back up from here?

And if he couldn’t find a way to stop this platform, they’d just keep sinking.

“Tch!”

Once he confirmed the tide of parasites had stopped spawning, Oakley stepped in hard, right into the reach of Karatena’s buster sword. Considering their builds, the range of that oversized sword and his Flame Spear were nearly identical.

If anything, with those jointed limbs holding her body a meter off the ground, Karatena had the advantage when it came to bringing weight down from above.

Gritting his teeth, Oakley forced his half-healed body to move and swung the Flame Spear straight at her.

He angled the spear sideways, thrusting upward from low on his right.

Karatena slipped away with a whip-quick motion, so Oakley snapped his wrist, dragging the spear across his body and slashing up from the opposite angle, lines of fire crossing.

But with eight legs beneath her, Karatena’s movement was almost unfair.

She glided across the sinking platform with impossible smoothness, darting and sliding as if hover-skating over the surface.

There was no readable tell, no weight shift to signal where she’d go next. The moment she’d slipped past the Flame Spear, the flow reversed.

She grabbed the beak-headed pickaxe hanging at her hip and shifted it into her left hand, then came at him in a dual-blade rush with both it and the buster sword.

“Ugh!”

With those powerful insect legs bracing her, Karatena could pull off a style of dual-wielding that should have been physically impossible for a normal human.

The pickaxe, its head jutting forward like a bird’s beak, came chopping down toward his face. He barely managed to get his spear up in time; the strike stopped just short of his eyeball, steel ringing inches from his pupil.

Before he could breathe, the buster sword followed in a too-heavy swing, carving a murderous line from his left chest toward his right flank.

Every instinct screamed that blocking it head-on would shatter him.

He knocked the pickaxe upward, then let his upper body sway back, using a boxer’s slip to read the arc and twist his torso clear of the swing.

A fraction of a second later, a blow that could freeze his spine grazed his nose. The air pressure alone felt like it might peel his face off. A normal human would have been dragged off-balance by the weapon’s sheer weight, but Karatena had eight legs anchored to the ground. Her core never wavered.

Forcing his posture back under him, Oakley answered with a flurry of thrusts, driving the spearhead forward again and again in tight, snapping motions, trying to force some distance between them.

Her reaction was fast, almost like she’d been expecting it. Oakley’s thrusts were batted aside by the pickaxe in her left hand. But he flowed straight into the next move without a pause.

He hooked the Flame Spear’s tip around the pickaxe’s crescent-shaped head and wrenched, sending the tool flying from Karatena’s grip.

The beaked weapon spun weightlessly in the air, only to be shredded mid-flight as Oakley slashed it apart.

Fragments scattered, and with the butt-end of the spear, he flicked two, then three pieces toward Karatena, forcing her to respond.

She slid back, deflecting the incoming shards with a light sweep of the buster sword’s flat, using the motion to steal a bit of space between them.

And that was exactly when Oakley made his strangest play yet.

“Eh…?” Karatena’s eyes widened.

He lunged forward, chasing after the very fragments he’d knocked loose himself, and from the blind spot created by her raised buster sword, he drove the Flame Spear upward.

Believing she’d taken enough distance to simply let the debris fall harmlessly away, Karatena had relaxed for a heartbeat.

The surprise thrust caught one of her jointed limbs, severing it cleanly and throwing her balance off.

He used the only light source to fake me out!

She realized, too late, what had gone wrong.

The holy flame illuminating the shaft hadn’t moved.

That was what had fooled her into thinking Oakley hadn’t moved either.

He’d choked up on the spear, manipulating only the tip, using the flame like part of a pantomime to create an illusion of fixed distance. Having misread the range completely, Karatena suddenly found herself on the defensive.

Sensing the opening, Oakley dove straight into her guard.

Karatena, instead of panicking, flipped her ruined balance to her advantage and snapped into a roundhouse kick aimed at his head.

Oakley’s reaction speed bordered on monstrous.

He dashed in even deeper, under the arc of her leg, and the kick that would have crushed his skull instead carved through empty air at his back.

His attempt to press the attack was cut short, his timing thrown off by that one evasive lunge. He was forced to break away instead, flipping into a cartwheel to exit her immediate range.

He came out of it in a low stance, the Flame Spear level and rock-steady, its tip unwavering as it tracked Karatena’s centerline.

She’s a pain to deal with, he thought. But not impossible. I can handle this… I have to.

Having lost her pickaxe, Karatena shifted tactics. If she wanted to kill Oakley, she would have to win on volume of attacks. She gave up standing fully supported by her jointed limbs and planted her own two feet on the platform instead.

Her insect legs remained extended behind her, but now only as auxiliary limbs, a network of living stabilizers to reinforce her offense and defense.

“Mmm. Yes,” she murmured. “My own two feet really are more reliable than these unfamiliar parasite limbs.”

Karatena hefted the buster sword onto her shoulder and tapped the platform a few times with the tip of her toe, like a fencer testing their stance.

Then she gave a light hop on the spot.

For all that ridiculous bulk of steel on her shoulder, her movement was absurdly nimble, like the weapon weighed nothing at all.

Her tone had been lazy a moment ago, almost bored, but in the next instant her body snapped into a straight, focused line.

She launched herself toward Oakley in a sharp, linear leap. Her approach telegraphed the angle plainly: a rising diagonal slash from below.

Seeing it coming, Oakley chose defense. No matter how much sacred flame he wrapped around his weapon, the destructive force of a long spear and that of a buster sword were worlds apart. If they traded direct blows, he would die.

Keeping both eyes locked on Karatena as she stepped deep into his range, he brought the shaft of the spear low, catching her bottom swing near the butt and redirecting it, then let the weapon swing like a pendulum, bringing the head up to catch the overhead follow-through on the tip.

She flowed right into her next attack, plugging the gap between weapon swings with a jab from the jointed limbs sprouting from her back, driving one straight at his face.

Oakley twisted his upper body so hard it felt like his spine might snap and forced the blazing spearhead into its path.

“Tch!” Karatena hissed.

A harsh sizzle rang through the air as the sacred fire responded to the defiled soul in that limb and swallowed the warped appendage whole.

Karatena was forced to sever it herself again, the charred stump tearing away and spinning through the air before disintegrating to nothing.

Those jointed limbs were powerful weapons, but they were still part of her body, and that was betraying her now.

Unable to press the attack the way she wanted, a prickling frustration grew beneath her skin.

Oakley wasn’t exactly experienced in fighting insect-hybrids.

If anything, in pure movement and adaptability, Karatena still had the upper hand.

But she couldn’t turn that edge into a decisive onslaught, because the holy flame burning at the tip of his spear smothered her every advance.

If I break that weapon, the flow will turn my way, she thought. Without that, he’s nothing. Borrowing insect power, I will never lose!

The spear’s reach and the sacred fire at its end were an absolute menace. The sheer despair radiating from that flame stabbed straight into the instincts of any heretic, and the fact that Oakley could wield it unflinchingly made him feel wrong, monstrous.

Karatena spat to the side. She just had to make him block a full-power downward strike with the spear shaft and snap it in half.

No matter how well-forged the weapon was, if the shock hit dead-center on the handle, it wouldn’t survive.

She sent her brood forward.

Silk shot out across Oakley’s ankles, forcing him to adjust his footing, and the moment one foot left the ground to evade, she came down from on high.

Just before their weapons collided, a rapier-like stab from one of Karatena’s jointed limbs hit Oakley square in the torso.

It came at a timing no ordinary human could ever pull off.

His eyes flew wide, and the foot that should’ve carried him clear froze for a split second.

Snarling, Oakley swung the Flame Spear up to meet the descending blade.

Karatena poured every ounce of the brute strength she’d gained from fusing with the parasite into her sword.

A heartbeat later, the world detonated.

The impact sounded like the air itself had exploded. The spearhead of the Flame Spear shattered into glittering fragments. And a deep, ugly crack split the thick blade of the buster sword.

“Ngh!?”

Neither of them had expected this. She hadn’t simply smashed his weapon one-sidedly; both of their weapons had broken.

He hadn’t stopped her strike on the center of the shaft; he’d driven the very tip of the spear into her sword at maximum speed.

A point-blank, pinpoint thrust into the buster sword’s face had been enough to damage it.

And the sheer velocity of Karatena’s downswing had only made the clash more catastrophic.

“Ugh!”

The recoil blasted them both backward.

Sacred flame scattered from the ruined spearhead, drifting upward, away from the falling platform, before winking out one ember at a time.

The only light vanished. And the space above the sinking elevator was swallowed in pitch-black, a darkness so thick that even a single step ahead was lost to sight.

The accelerating descent of the lift whipped air up from below in violent gusts, turning their footing treacherous. It was hard to even stay upright.

The enemy who’d been right in front of her was gone, devoured by the dark. The battle froze.

But once it came down to bare hands and bodies, the advantage clearly shifted. As an insect-hybrid, Karatena outclassed Oakley by an overwhelming margin.

She opened her sleeves and let her brood spill forth.

With six of her jointed limbs still intact, she wouldn’t be at a disadvantage even in close combat.

In the roaring updraft, Karatena felt, rather than heard, the squelch of her own familiars being crushed underfoot.

Too small to do it alone, then, she judged. Still, if this keeps up, they’ll land a real hit eventually.

Instead of charging in, she rooted herself in place, fully committed to defense as she continued to spawn more and more parasites.

Somewhere ahead of her, a presence flickered across her senses at an angle.

“He’s here!” she snapped.

Of course, he’d come from the direction her brood had last approached from.

Karatena caught the onrushing front kick on both forearms, arms jolting with the impact, then drove her jointed limbs forward in a vicious counter.

The blow landed—she felt it cleanly through the exoskeletal limb.

Her jointed leg had been caught on a gauntlet. A hard garri scraped through the air as a thin line of sparks flashed in the dark.

For a heartbeat, their positions were laid bare. That was all either of them needed. Using that fleeting awareness as a guide, they clashed again.

Greaves and gauntlets smashed into jointed limbs. Human flesh and twisted exoskeleton met over and over in the pitch-black, each impact jolting through bone and chitin.

But once their relative positions were clear, there was no logical path to Karatena’s defeat.

She had six jointed limbs plus her own four human limbs. Ten points of attack crashed down on Oakley from every angle, and he was driven entirely onto the defensive.

When a particularly strong clash spat a spray of sparks, Karatena seized her moment.

Now she understood his stance and position completely.

All six of her auxiliary limbs whipped out at once, striking together to finish the fight in a single exchange.

A storm of blows. Oakley met three of the most lethal strikes with his armor, letting his gauntlets and greaves deflect them away.

The remaining three he took with his body. There was no other choice.

Of course, “taking them with his body” didn’t mean he walked away unscathed.

The hooked tips of those limbs tore into his right arm and left thigh, and the last one punched clean through his left shoulder.

“Gah!”

The moment Oakley faltered, Karatena’s long leg snapped like a whip. An axe kick.

Her heel crashed down. Even with both arms raised in a desperate guard, the impact punched straight through, rattling his brain in his skull.

Drool spilled from the corner of his mouth as he staggered backward, feet skidding on the unstable platform.

And still, he didn’t fall.

That blow had the full power of the parasite behind it! Karatena thought. How is he still standing!?

Who was this man? What was he?

No normal human could possibly remain upright after that.

Eyes rolled half-white, Oakley swayed, somehow keeping his posture, dragging himself back into a flimsy imitation of a fighting stance.

After all that damage… and he’s still clinging on!? Karatena thought. What a stubborn man you are.

She didn’t dare rush in carelessly. The safest route was to end this from a distance, with simultaneous long-range strikes from her jointed limbs.

Karatena bent all six auxiliary legs, coiling them tight, then snapped them out to full extension in an instant, sending them lancing forward, aiming to pierce his forehead and end it.

Opposite her, Oakley flung something out in front of him—his own robe, stripped off just a second earlier.

It billowed between them in the air, a makeshift smokescreen in the dark.

Idiot! she thought, a vicious thrill running through her. You really think something like that can blind me!?

Karatena drove her jointed limbs straight through the robe without a flicker of doubt.

Cloth tore with a dry rip, fabric skewered in six places.

Her real body, however, stayed guarded, both arms raised, senses straining against the darkness around her.

An obvious decoy, she thought, lips curling. He thinks he can catch me while I’m distracted by the robe, but I’m not that naive!

In battles like this, survival hinged on one thing: solid, instantaneous judgment.

She’d stayed cool.

She’d seen through the bluff.

With this, she’d forced him to waste one of his precious tricks.

All she had to do now was repeat her long-range volleys, over and over, until the man in front of her was nothing but meat and silence.

In her mind, the path to victory was already set.

But Oakley’s thinking had slipped a step further ahead.

A sudden, heavy weight settled on her jointed limbs, still tangled with that black cloak.

Outstretched in the dark, those limbs had become rails, guides through the air—and Oakley had used them. He’d leapt straight up and landed on one of Karatena’s own auxiliary legs.

An unpleasant sensation jolted up through the exoskeleton.

She had just enough time to begin to think, That’s bad—

And in the next instant, a hideous feeling ripped through her. Every joint in those parasite-born legs was being bent the wrong way and twisted.

Krackle, krack. Ugly little cracks echoed in the dark.

She didn’t even manage to scream before she understood.

Like someone wrenching off a crab’s legs one by one, all six of her remaining limbs were destroyed in a single brutal motion.

“Agh… AAAAAHHH!”

Joint locks.

Leverage applied to a joint, forcing it to bend past its natural limit in the opposite direction.

That was what he’d done to her. She had lost the battle of minds.

Instead of going straight for her main body, he’d gone one step wider, targeting the weapons themselves and ripping her jointed limbs away.

The parasite lurking beneath her skin shrieked in her nerves, its true body howling soundlessly as every one of its legs was snapped.

“D-Damn you!”

She had lost all of her jointed limbs. She couldn’t even safely spawn more brood in this chaos. But she still hadn’t lost.

Karatena lunged into bare-handed combat. On legs that wobbled but did not fail her, she closed on the reeling Oakley and drove a full-force straight right at his jaw.

Opposite her, Oakley, his consciousness flickering at the edges, launched his own right straight to meet her. Two mirrored silhouettes. Two fists.

Their punches landed at exactly the same moment, knuckles crashing into jaws. Both skulls rattled violently.

“Gh—!”

The clean hit snapped both their heads back, and the two of them rocked like toy balance dolls, swaying on their feet.

Their torsos arched back, then snapped forward again. Using that rebound, they sent their fists together a second time.

This time, the exchange favored Karatena.

Oakley’s punch only managed to crack her collarbone. Karatena’s fist, on the other hand, shattered his nose and cheekbone. Two heavy concussions in such a short span scrambled his brain.

Oakley spat out a spray of blood and bile and dropped to one knee.

“Die already,” Karatena snarled, whipping a high kick down toward his skull.

But the moment she moved, the fighting spirit flared back in his eyes.

Oakley twisted away, his body turning with the motion, and answered with a high roundhouse of his own. The air boomed like an explosion when their legs met, sparks skittering in the dark.

The brutal exchange repeated, shin slamming into shin, heels crashing again and again.

“Karatenaaaa!” Oakley roared.

“Oakleeeey!” she screamed back.

In the end, the two of them weren’t so different.

Both had tried to use the people around them, dragging others into their schemes to reach their goals.

They stepped into the line of fire only when they had to. When two such people crossed paths, they couldn’t help but see each other.

Looking at someone who couldn’t carve a path alone was like being forced to stare directly at their own weakness. It was suffocating, irritating. An eyesore they couldn’t ignore.

Oakley used Joanne and Alex, manipulating events from the shadows to tilt the balance in favor of the Orthodoxy side and drag them toward victory.

Karatena bent the Northeastern Branch’s believers to her will, trying to erase Oakley without staining her own hands.

To him, she was a heretic he would someday have to kill.

To her, he was the murderer of the superior she had adored.

On some level, they had both known from the start. One day, they would have to face each other head-on and fight to the death. That “one day” had simply turned out to be today.

“Haa!”

Karatena let the monstrous strength she’d gained from fusing with the parasite surge through her body, throwing a vicious hook. Reading the true strike hidden among the feints, Oakley brought his left arm up in an L-shape, catching her fist on the guard.

The bone creaked under the impact. It hurt like hell, but it wasn’t fatal. Karatena snapped her long leg up toward Oakley’s crotch.

In a fight to the death, there was no such thing as a foul. He’d been on guard against exactly that cheap shot, though. Oakley caught her knee in the palm of his hand, crushing the kick at its source.

“Tch!”

Seeing her forced onto one leg, he threw himself forward in a desperate shoulder tackle.

They crashed down together, and he rode the momentum straight into a mount, pinning Karatena beneath him as he hammered his fists down again and again.

Skin split across his knuckles, flesh peeled away, and white bone began to show—but Oakley kept punching.

Pinned and unable to use her hands to guard, Karatena’s composure finally cracked. Her lips parted just a fraction.

Oakley’s vision vanished. The parasite nestled in her throat had pushed its true body into her mouth and spat out a flood of silk.

“Ugh!”

“Just hurry up and die, you piece of trash!” she screamed.

She reversed the mount in an instant. Now on top, Karatena drove a straight punch down at Oakley while he clawed at the sticky strands blinding him. A vertical blow struck down from above to drive his skull into the floor.

At the last possible moment, his sight came back.

Oakley twisted his neck sharply, the punch grazing him instead of crushing his head, and his own fist snapped up in a counter uppercut, shattering Karatena’s jaw.

“That soft excuse for a punch is nothing compared to Joanne’s!” he snarled.

Karatena’s eyes rattled, focus slipping. She abandoned her hard-won dominant position entirely, reeling backward and staring up into the darkness overhead.

He didn’t waste the opening. Oakley surged to his feet, dropping his hips low, fist coiling tight at his waist.

He threw himself into the punch, driving all his weight behind it, and just before his fist obliterated Karatena’s neck, he saw it.

Something forcing its way out between her teeth.

The parasite was crawling out of her mouth.

Trying to abandon its host the moment she dies, or a last-ditch ambush?

His thoughts blazed through two possible answers in an instant, but either way, what he had to do didn’t change.

He would smash this insufferable woman’s jaw to pieces.

Oakley drove his fist up from the floor, voice ripping out of his throat.

“HAAAAAAAH!”

His full-power uppercut slammed into Karatena’s lower jaw.

The knuckles that caught her face solidly didn’t just lift her chin; they rammed her own parasite’s head, which had lunged halfway out of her mouth, straight back up with it.

Her own teeth closed on it.

Her bite crushed the parasite’s skull to pulp. His fist kept going, tearing through and snapping every last tooth in her mouth, upper and lower alike, while the shock violently shook her brain inside her skull.

“Kkh… Gah!” Her vision spun. The world flipped a full three-hundred and sixty degrees.

Up and down dissolved. Front and back smeared together. Even the shape of her own “self” blurred and slipped away as Karatena toppled backward.

As her consciousness sank under a blizzard of static, she saw something in that one blow Oakley had thrown.

A storm. A killing storm that tore across the battlefield. The figure of Joanne Sagamix.

Karatena’s brain matter churned, her neural cells shredded. The shock tore through her entire body, and then she stopped moving altogether. One function at a time, her body shut down.

Her flesh died.

And even so, at the very end, a gentle smile rested on Karatena Wallmix’s lips.

“Fuankilo… sama…”

Her chest stopped rising and falling.

The woman lay there with her eyes half-open and did not move again.

Only when his enemy fell completely silent did Oakley finally let the strength drain from his body and drop to his knees.

“Hah… hah…!”

He slumped where he was, sucking in ragged breaths. In the endless shaft that dropped away below them, there was only one sound of breathing left.

Standing atop the ever-falling elevator platform, Oakley threw his head back and roared into the dark.

Karatena’s final smile hadn’t been born of relief at being freed from her burden.

Even in defeat, she’d been certain: down here, at the bottom of this pit, Oakley had no way to survive.

He understood that. He understood, and still, he couldn’t move from the descending lift.

The edges of the platform scraped against the shaft walls, throwing off sparks.

At last, the mechanism could no longer bear the strain. The plant-like structure that formed the entire lift started to break apart.

“So this is it? This dim little hole in the ground is where I die!?”

The scrap of Joanne’s flesh fused to the ring finger of his left hand remained utterly still. Something must have happened to both of them after they were separated in the tunnels. He couldn’t expect any help.

All that was left for Oakley was to fall to the bottom of the shaft and wait for death.

That was when Karatena’s last familiar sank its mandibles into his frontal lobe.

The impact that ripped through him was unlike anything he’d ever felt.

A complete blindsiding. He didn’t have the strength left to even tear the thing free.

Cracks split the platform under his feet. The entire structure of the lift, woven from living plant tissue, finally gave way and collapsed.

A queasy lurch rolled through his gut as the floor vanished out from under him, and Oakley was thrown into the dark.

A heartbeat later, he was slammed by the shock of water. Spray hammered against his skin, and then the full force of the underground torrent swallowed him whole.

The young man’s consciousness sank into that murky darkness and vanished.

Deep within Oakley’s mind, the tiny fragment of Joanne that remained watched his despair with something like tender affection.

※※※

Let's go back in time a little.

Separated from Oakley, Joanne was close to panicking.

The collapse of the rock, Oakley’s fall… In the span of just three seconds, he had vanished into the dark.

At his side, Alex immediately suggested they go after him, but Joanne, connected to Oakley more deeply than anyone, slowly realized there was a way to turn this situation to her advantage.

“Uh… we’re not gonna go after him?” Alex asked.

“No. Leave him,” Joanne replied calmly.

“We finally got a shot at taking down Stella-sama, and you’re not gonna help senpai!? We might still make it in time, y’know!?”

She could feel a distant, sinking crisis, a tremor of fear and pain at the edge of her perception.

Sensing her beloved in such danger, Joanne felt her very soul shiver. Karatena had done far more work than she’d ever expected.

“The Raid Unit is wiped out. The Hidden Insect Corps is wrecked beyond recovery. We’ve done enough damage. We’re pulling out,” she said.

“Eeh!? That’s the total opposite of what you were saying before…”

“It’s fine. For Oakley, this is probably the worst thing that could’ve happened… but for me, this is the best chance I could ask for.”

Stella Belmont possessed a barrier that nullified physical attacks and absorbed magic.

On top of that, no matter how many times she was reduced to chunks of meat, she would revive instantly with healing magic. Their shot at victory was a one-time thing, and without Oakley, they had no way to crack her.

But what Joanne wanted even more than Stella’s head was something else: Oakley Mercury, battered, broken in some underground pit, pushed so far he might lose his memory.

After their organ exchange, Joanne had come to share a faint link to him, a sense for his emotions, blurred but present.

The bond wasn’t equal. She had accepted all of him. Oakley, however, had rejected her.

To reach the small, closed world Joanne dreamed of, she needed Oakley’s wholehearted cooperation.

With the iron will he had now, dragging him over to her side was nearly impossible.

But if, instead, he lost his memories and the residue of that organ exchange seeped deeper into him…

If she could reshape him into someone who shared her ideals…

That future was far closer to the one she wanted.

Stella could wait for another day. For now, she needed to spread one message far and wide: that Oakley had annihilated the Raid Unit and the Hidden Insect Corps.

She could retrieve him later. For someone with only one life to live, that man was far more tenacious than any executive. He’d survive. He always survived.

In fact, she wanted him to suffer for a while. This disappointment, this hollow, sinking despair…

You’re going to carve it into yourself, Oakley. If you don’t, then the defeat I swallowed that day and the resolve I forged with it will all have been for nothing. This is your punishment for keeping secrets from me. For trampling over what we shared that night, and over my feelings. If you’d really told me everything… I would’ve followed you anywhere.

Joanne turned on her heel and started back the way they came, heading for the surface.

“We’re regrouping with Stella and getting out of these tunnels,” she said. “I’m not getting buried alive in here.”

“Eeeh…? I seriously don’t get this at all…” Alex muttered.

Later, once they linked up with Stella and Whip, Joanne and the others confirmed it: The Jade Occupation Operation had failed exactly as expected.

Most of the Hidden Insect Corps that had gone to secure the underground was dead, and no one knew what was happening on the surface. Whip’s voice shook as she said it, on the verge of tears.

Joanne added another blow on top of that and told Stella and Whip about Oakley’s betrayal.

“There’s one more reason the Jade Occupation went sideways—”

Oakley Mercury had turned traitor.

Why there’d been no contact with the surface team. Why poison gas had flooded the tunnels.

She laid all the blame on him. The news that their loyal Oakley had betrayed them rattled Whip to the core. Even Stella, who was usually quiet and expressionless, let a shocked sound slip from her lips.

“Lies… That’s impossible. That man… betrayed Stella and Aros-sama…?” Stella whispered, voice trembling.

“Quit joking around… That’s a nasty joke, Joanne-chan. There’s no way that’s true… Oakley-chan did so much for the fall of Daskel, and now you’re telling me he suddenly betrayed us…?” Whip babbled, eyes wide and glassy.

“He attacked me,” Joanne snapped. “That man came at me swinging! Told me it’d be ‘fun to see your face when you finally realize you’ve been played,’ or some crap like that!”

She slammed her heel down.

With a sound like the world cracking, the ground underfoot simply gave way. The shock set the whole area trembling like a localized quake.

Whip froze, drenched in sweat, overwhelmed by the sheer killing intent behind Joanne’s performance.

Then, as if suddenly remembering it, Joanne glared at the scrap of Oakley’s flesh fused to the ring finger of her left hand and bit it off. She chewed once, twice, and swallowed it down.

“On top of that, the bastard made sure to erase my meat chunk, too! I’ve got no idea where he is now!” she shouted.

Of course, she hadn’t crushed it earlier precisely so she could keep it safe for later by sending it to her stomach, but Stella read it as something else.

As a pointed jab at herself for putting blind faith in Oakley all this time.

Her shoulders shook, and she bowed her head, as if holding back something heavy and raw.

Was she always this good an actress? Alex thought, watching Joanne with a mix of awe and unease.

“Joanne-chan,” Whip whispered, “where’s Oakley-chan now?”

“No idea. He ran down into the tunnels, so I chased after him but… Come to think of it, what happened to Karatena?”

“She didn’t regroup with you?” Whip blinked.

“Don’t tell me those two got caught up in that cave-in just now…?”

“Tch, so that’s how it is! Hey, Whip, you can use Milk-chan to track them, can’t you?” Joanne snapped.

“It’s way too dangerous to send her down there right now!” Whip yelped, waving both hands. “We’ve already got poison gas and cave-ins to worry about. There’s no way I’m just tossing one of my clones in there like it’s nothing!”

“If we don’t at least recover the bodies, Pawk can’t drag the truth out of them with his magic. This is the worst…” Joanne muttered.

Neither Whip nor Stella had the faintest idea that Joanne of all people had suddenly become an expert at acting; they simply stared at her, stunned.

“Anyway, forget chasing Oakley. We’re pulling out. Let’s link up with Celestia,” Joanne said.

At her left hand, new flesh squirmed and pushed out as she calmly regenerated the finger that had once borne Oakley’s flesh, as if casting him off. She made a point of projecting the air of someone who had already lost all interest in him, and started up the ladder.

Of course, there was no universe in which Joanne had stopped caring about Oakley. Not before this. Not now. Not ever. He was, and would remain, the one person she loved more than anyone.

Once they’d gathered up the survivors of the Hidden Insect Corps and climbed out to the surface, a solid wall of white loomed up to block their way.

In reality, it was just an obscene blizzard, but even for a group of high-ranking cultists, it was the kind of weather that made you hesitate to step forward.

Stella, who’d barely had a chance to cut loose underground, tilted her head back with a faint frown. As if to vent her pent-up frustration, she unleashed a superheated beam straight into the sky.

A white-hot pillar bored up into the storm, gouging a vast circle through the clouds and forcing open a hole in the heavens.

But Stella’s power only subdued the weather for a handful of seconds. Like a film rolling in reverse, the gap in the sky sealed itself over, and the blizzard howling above Jade thickened again, swirling down around the city with renewed fury.

“Celestia-chan’s weather control isn’t working…!?” Whip cried.

Before anyone could answer, a human figure came hurtling out from the direction of the old castle, like a bullet spat from a gun.

They smashed into the cliff face with a sickening impact, then slid down and crumpled against the rock. It was Celestia, her body a map of cuts and bruises.

“Celestia-chan!” Whip called.

“Joanne, Whip… You’re both here… Good,” Celestia rasped. “Perfect timing. The operation is canceled. We need to withdraw the entire force immediately!”

“What happened?” Joanne asked, her tone deceptively calm.

“Giather Cormode’s summoned beast has seized control of the weather from me!” Celestia snapped. “Cress Walker and the other high-ranking Orthodoxy will be here any moment! We must retreat at once!”

She gritted her teeth so hard it sounded like her molars might shatter, beautiful features twisted in sheer frustration.

“The worst part,” she spat, “is that Oakley Mercury betrayed us! That man slaughtered Gerugoroi and the entire Raid Unit! That’s where everything started to go wrong!”

She stamped her heel into the snow in impotent fury.

Behind her, Joanne pressed her lips together, trying to smother the little thrill that ran low in her belly. Her man had taken down Gerugoroi and the Raid Unit. The pride that flared in her chest was almost indecent.

Oops. That won’t do. I’m supposed to be furious right now, she reminded herself.

Even so, she couldn’t quite iron the edges out of her smile as she fell quiet and let the conversation flow around Celestia’s orders.

“So these are all the believers who survived?” Celestia asked at last.

“The Hidden Insect Corps has… just over ten survivors,” Joanne answered coolly. “In my judgment, returning to the branch and regrouping is the only sensible option.”

“Fortunately, the enemy seems intent on holding their defenses rather than pursuing us,” Celestia said. “Let’s head back immediately. They won’t chase us far.”

Compared to what had happened at Metasim and Daskel, the Jade Occupation was never truly a do-or-die mission that had to succeed at any cost.

They could not afford to suffer any more casualties. That simple, solid sense of danger was what finally pushed them toward retreat.

As they withdrew, Stella turned back one last time and fired a blazing beam toward the ancient castle. The attack was slapped aside with contemptuous ease by the ice club of Frost Giant Frimslus.

Seeing that the summoned giant made no move to advance from its post, Stella clicked her tongue, turned on her heel, and left without another glance.

And so, the Jade Occupation Operation was thwarted by Oakley Mercury and the Orthodoxy.

The betrayal of executive candidate Oakley sent shockwaves rippling through the Aros Temple Cult… and those ripples would carry his fate into even wilder, more turbulent waters.

Chapter 5: The Bell of Beginnings Rings

The scene shifted, returning to the holy land of Metasim.

After Aros and Pawk had gone over the operation to seize the sacred relic, they settled on their execution date: during the Phantom Night Holy Festival, held once a year in Sasfect.

Blessed by divine protection, the Seven of Dawn had once stood as living miracles, and so that their deeds would never be forgotten, an enormous festival was held every year.

That was the Phantom Night Holy Festival.

With swarms of tourists and pilgrims flooding in, the Holy Capital’s checkpoints and security inevitably grew lax during the celebration. The plan was to exploit that gap and slip their senior “bomb” assets into the city.

Of course, vital facilities like the Temple of the Phoenix would be under ironclad guard. That was precisely why they had Celestia. She could rattle the watch, create confusion where it mattered, and become a trump card strong enough to get them through the barrier.

“Looks like it’s really coming together,” Aros remarked.

“And who do you intend to have transport the flesh?”

“Oh, that’s obvious. Oakley-kun, of course.”

“Lately, I can’t help feeling Oakley’s burden has gotten excessive, but the advantage of the Mobile Fortress Plan is that it can be deployed with a small team and is extremely difficult to counter. I think it’s a good operation.”

“And even if Oakley-kun fails,” Aros said without a hint of doubt, “as long as we recover the flesh, everything returns to how it was. Once a year, we get a plan that’s all upsides.”

Pawk swept a hand through her black hair and resumed writing, pen scratching steadily across the operation dossier.

Aros talked as if Oakley were expendable, but Pawk doubted he meant it. If anything, Aros had a habit of favoring Oakley a little too much.

Well, he’s the cult’s ace. Pawk’s lips tightened faintly. Honestly, I’m expecting a lot from him, too.

When the dossier was finally complete, Pawk collapsed forward onto the desk, face down. Aros skimmed the contents once, then instructed her to circulate the written briefing to each base so preparations could begin.

Then Aros spoke again, his tone changing just slightly.

“One last thing I want to confirm.”

Pawk raised her head. “What is it?”

“What happened to the girl named Marietta?”

Marietta, the only girl to survive the assault on Metasim.

In the original story, it should’ve been Alfie, the protagonist, who lived. Instead, Marietta had endured in his place, and while her connection to Oakley was minor, it was still a thread.

When Pawk heard the name Celestia had mentioned before, she answered without hesitation, “She looks like she’ll become our enemy someday.”

“Marietta had no family,” Pawk continued. “Celestia and her subordinates took her in. Right now, the fourth-ranked Pomette is watching over her… and it sounds like the girl has real talent for combat.”

“So, we let a survivor slip through our fingers,” Aros murmured, folding his arms as he stared up at the ceiling. “And now she’s become the sort of enemy we’d rather not make. People like that have a way of standing in our path… sooner or later.”

From Pawk’s perspective, it was nothing. One more disposable stray hardly worth the caution Aros was showing. Her expression said as much, brow faintly knit in disbelief.

She twirled her pen against her upper lip, and then an electric jolt skittered through her mind.

The self-driving unit she’d left “sleeping” in the Northeastern Branch as a makeshift communicator was being forced online. Celestia’s face filled her awareness, tight and urgent, as if she’d run there without breathing.

“Hm…? Looks like Celestia’s contacting the zombie line,” Pawk said, distracted. “Hold on a sec—”

Her eyes widened.

“Haaah!?”

Aros, who’d been keeping his thoughts sharpened for the relic seizure operation, had his concentration cleanly severed by Pawk’s sudden outburst. She was always noisy, yes, but screaming out of nowhere meant something had gone catastrophically wrong.

He asked gently, “What happened?”

“The Jade Occupation Operation… failed.”

“What did you say?”

Pawk swallowed, the color draining from her face as she relayed the report.

“T-The damage is… extreme. The Raid Unit was wiped out. The Hidden Insect Corps took massive losses too… Most of the Northeastern Branch’s elite are dead… and I’m told that even counting all three executives, fewer than twenty people made it back alive.”

The masked man fell silent, words failing him outright. When he finally managed to force something out—“The cause?”—his shock still bled through the cracks.

And the details only made it worse.

Executive candidate Gerugoroi: dead.

Whip: critically wounded.

Karatena: missing.

And then Pawk, white as a sheet, delivered the finishing blow with the next words out of her mouth.

“C-Celestia and Joanne are… They’re shouting that the reason the operation failed is that Oakley Mercury betrayed us…”

“Impossible.” Aros slammed his hand against the desk before he could stop himself. A heartbeat later, he caught his breath, forcing composure back into place. “My apologies.”

For a leader known for unshakable calm to lose control like that, the report was simply too far outside anything he’d imagined.

And as if that weren’t enough, the youth in question was now missing alongside Karatena.

As Pawk continued pouring out the details, Aros found his words slipping away from him entirely.

They’d lost a huge number of capable, irreplaceable believers.

Worse still, the alleged traitor was the very executive candidate who’d carried suspicion before.

And Fuankilo Legacy, the one who’d been most vocal about doubting Oakley, was dead.

Was her suspicion right?

But the idea didn’t fit. Oakley’s contributions to the cult had been too substantial. His obedience had been too consistent, too absolute. Was he really supposed to have turned on them overnight?

It made no sense.

Accepting that Oakley had betrayed them was far harder than dismissing the whole report as a misunderstanding, some error, some distortion, some hysterical leap in the fog of disaster.

When Aros finished hearing the account of the Jade Occupation Operation’s collapse, he turned to Pawk, still flustered at his side, and gave his order.

“Pawk. Search for Oakley with everything you have. And if he’s dead, we’ll revive him with that toxin and make him speak.”

“Understood!”

“We have to confirm it,” Aros said quietly. “Oakley’s true intentions.”

“Yes!” Pawk snapped. “I’ll search for where he is with every last ounce of myself!”

The beautiful woman in men’s attire bolted from the room, urgency radiating off her like heat. The moment she was out in the corridor, she pressed two fingers to her temple and issued commands to every autonomous unit linked to her network.

“Switch to search-and-detect mode! Find him. A young man with black hair and black eyes. On the honor of the Aros Temple Cult!”

When the door finally fell shut behind his noisy subordinate, Aros sank deep into his chair.

He stared out the window at the night sky and let a slow breath spill from him.

“Oakley never lets me grow bored.”

Judging by the masked man’s reaction, the cult’s crippling blow, the failure of the Jade Occupation Operation, wasn’t what hollowed him out most.

What drained him was the loss of Oakley.

And so the Jade Occupation Operation came to its end in the midst of upheaval.

Half of Oakley’s plan had succeeded.

Half of it had collapsed.

Only Joanne, quietly, had achieved her hidden aim.

The already-warped balance of power tipped further, and the world began to sink—deeper and deeper—into chaos.

※※※

Dawnlight Calendar, Year 1319.

A wind blew in at summer’s end—cool, dry, and sharp with the kind of change you couldn’t ignore—announcing that a full year had passed since Metasim fell.

In a town far from the place where Metasim had once stood, a lone girl knelt in the quiet cemetery beside a church. Her beautiful brown hair stirred in the breeze as she set down a bouquet, then reached out and brushed her fingertips gently over the vast, silent gravestone.

“Morning, everyone. It’s been a whole year since that fateful day…” She closed her eyes, a pained crease forming between her brows as memory dragged her back to the day of tragedy.

The number dead from the collapse of Metasim and Daskel had exceeded ten thousand. There were too many bodies, too many names, too much loss, so those taken in the twin assaults were memorialized together. The long stone stretched wide, packed tight with every confirmed name carved in relentless rows.

There were precious few remains sleeping beneath it.

No bodies were ever recovered from Metasim. The town had been completely taken over, its residents swallowed up so thoroughly that there was nothing left to bring home.

They’d barely managed to pull some corpses from Daskel. But what they found was unbearable. Bodies crushed under Aros’s shadow. Bodies so mangled they couldn’t be identified. Bodies burned down to fragments by Stella’s magic, leaving only scattered pieces like ash and broken bone.

Either way, the people left behind hadn’t healed. Not from Metasim. Not from Daskel. Not from the gaping wound those names had torn into the world.

The brown-haired girl traced the letters carved on the back of the gravestone. ALFIE JUDGMENT. Her face tightened into something complicated, grief braided with a bitterness she couldn’t fully speak.

“I really thought we’d grow old together. But now it’s like I’m a year ahead of you, Alfie.”

Her name was Marietta Vallières. Her eyes were a deep crimson, chestnut-brown hair cut to a semi-long length, sharp brows that usually suited a bright, lively expression.

But today, that liveliness was nowhere to be found. Her back looked too small for the sorrow it carried, as if the weight might snap her in two at any moment. Even her posture, her very presence, seemed fragile, unreliable, on the edge of breaking.

In the shade of a nearby tree stood Pomette Yoster, fourth rank among the Orthodoxy’s executives. Watching the girl’s trembling silhouette, she lowered her gaze, eyelids falling shut as if she couldn’t bear to keep looking.

Alfie Judgment’s end had been horrific.

With a horde of zombies surging in and the world around him swallowed by flame, he’d shielded his childhood friend. Fire wrapped around his small body like a living thing, and he burned to death protecting her.

Pomette leaned against the tree, one hand pressed over her mouth as if she could physically hold back the ache rising in her throat. To force a child into an end like that… There was something obscene about it.

The only mercy, perhaps, was that he hadn’t risen again as one of Pawk’s zombies.

Pawk Tedlotus. Pomette’s jaw tightened. In her hands, even an ordinary death starts to feel like a luxury. Enough that people who understand what she can do end up saying things like “at least they died normally.”

Her brow creased, and her fist clenched until her knuckles ached.

Marietta’s life was too brutal. She’d been made to watch her parents eaten alive. And then she’d lost the boy she loved most, her oldest friend, right in front of her.

She was still so young. No child should be made to carry that kind of history. The helplessness struck Pomette like a blow, and with it came something darker, a pitch-black intent that burned through her chest.

And the worst of it was what happened afterward.

So many of the dead ordinary citizens had been turned into puppets by Pawk’s poison. If Pomette had been able to truly honor the grief of the bereaved, Pawk should have been the first target, killed before anything else. But Pawk wasn’t someone who could be cut down easily. Pomette had never hated an enemy’s cruelty this much.

And Pawk’s depravity hadn’t stopped at the battlefield. It reached even those who tried to recover the bodies.

There was a story people told, a story that captured Pawk’s nature perfectly.

A couple who’d lost their child in the Battle of Daskel came to the ruined city, desperate to retrieve his remains—if nothing else, to bring him home.

After days of searching, they finally found him.

Their son’s body had changed, and yet the parents trembled with relief through their tears, whispering, “Thank goodness… We found you.”

Then they witnessed something impossible.

Their boy, cold, lifeless just moments ago, opened his eyes and rasped, “Dad… Mom…”

For a heartbeat, they could only stare. Confusion flickered across their faces before collapsing into desperate joy. They clapped their hands, crying, laughing, refusing to acknowledge the chill of his skin, refusing to accept what their senses were screaming at them. They took him back to the nearest town, clinging to the hope that he’d survived.

That night, a corner of that town had been devastated.

A massive fire. A sudden outbreak—zombies spreading through the streets, born from Pawk’s poison. The panic started from the couple’s temporary lodging.

They hadn’t known what Pawk Tedlotus could do.

Pomette Yoster, an Orthodoxy executive who happened to be staying in the town, managed to contain the blaze and halt the spread, but the incident sent shockwaves through the upper ranks of the church.

The road to Daskel was sealed immediately. Recovery efforts were canceled indefinitely. And as the abandoned ruins of Daskel turned into a breeding ground for outlaws, security collapsed so badly that the city slipped entirely from orthodox control.

Rumor said Aros and his people had lured those criminals there on purpose, but no one could prove it.

The Aros Temple Cult… You stole Celestia, and then you toyed with innocent lives like they were nothing.

She didn’t let any of it show. Not with Marietta so close, speaking softly to her dead friend as if he could still hear. But the more Pomette thought about it, the more her anger threatened to tip into delirium.

If only she’d managed to bring down an executive from the heretics that day Daskel was attacked.

If only she’d stopped Celestia, who’d pushed too hard, demanded results too fast.

If either of those things had happened, the Kenneth Orthodoxy wouldn’t be trapped in such a painful position now.

“Marietta,” Pomette said gently. “It’s about time…”

“Oh, yes.” Marietta gave the gravestone one last look, forcing a small smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Then… Alfie. Everyone. I’ll see you later, okay…?”

Pomette turned. Her blonde hair, tied back in a single bundle, lifted in the breeze as she left the cemetery.

Marietta followed at a quick trot, hurrying to keep up.

A year ago, the shockwave from Celestia Hothound’s disappearance had rattled the orthodox leadership to its core.

It wasn’t only the raw loss of strength, though that alone was severe. The deeper blow was psychological.

Celestia had been a pillar, the kind that held people up without them realizing how much they leaned on her. Her nosy, meddlesome streak and her almost maternal kindness were famous even inside the organization. Losing her left an emptiness that spread through the ranks like cold.

Pomette, who’d been close to Celestia, rediscovered a particular kind of pain. That of someone who’d always been there for pointless chatter, for warmth, for normality, vanishing without warning.

She’d loved watching Cress and Celestia together, their easy closeness and playful back-and-forth. After Celestia disappeared, Executive Third Rank Cress’s face never truly brightened again.

Then, half a year ago, Celestia was sighted in Jade, a far-northern city.

Giather Cormode had attempted to communicate with her through his summoned beast, the Frost Giant Frimslus, but Celestia hadn’t so much as acknowledged him. Every attempt failed, brushed aside as if it meant nothing. The church’s upper ranks reached a grim conclusion: she’d been brainwashed by some unknown method.

To have a former comrade turned into an enemy’s puppet was an insult too bitter to swallow.

And for it to happen to Celestia, an earnest sister who embodied the orthodox conscience, made it unbearable.

In the end, they’d found no further trace of her after that sighting six months prior. The Aros Temple Cult’s movements had also gone eerily still, and the days that followed became a slow grind, the kind that wore down the heart.

Still, in the middle of that attrition, Pomette and a few others had something they secretly clung to.

Watching Marietta grow.

To Pomette, the girl who had survived the Metasim and Daskel tragedies felt like something that could fill the hollow Celestia had left behind, even if only a little.

Marietta Vallières was still only fifteen. And yet her shoulders carried tragedies far too heavy: the deaths of family and friends, the annihilation of her hometown.

Maybe because of that, maybe because she refused to let her grief be the end of her story, Marietta volunteered to become a soldier of the Kenneth Orthodoxy. Her results were so exceptional that Pomette herself took her on, giving her special training personally.

Pomette glanced at her as they walked. “Earlier… I’m sorry. I cut into your time with them.”

“It’s fine. I can’t afford to take even a single day off from training.”

Pomette’s golden ponytail swayed as she drew her sword. Marietta straightened, drew as well, and called out clearly, “Please spar with me!”

Lady Knight Pomette held authority over the Kenneth Orthodoxy’s regular forces, meaning she was, quite literally, the flower of the order: the female knight-commander.

The blonde, blue-eyed knight proceeded to beat Marietta senseless.

And when the girl finally collapsed, unable to move, Pomette cast healing magic on her, then promptly sat down on her backside like it was a perfectly reasonable place to rest.

“Gweh…” Marietta wheezed. “You’re way too ruthless…”

“This is me holding back,” Pomette said flatly. “If I went all-out, Marietta wouldn’t be standing for even a second.”

Pomette narrowed her cool, clear eyes and smiled almost teasingly. Her magic converted sheer force of will into energy, then released it as a blade.

The trick lay in the way she could alter her sword’s length at will. In theory, her reach was limitless.

Meaning… even the stars hanging in the sky were within range, if she truly wanted them.

That was the dimension in which Pomette’s “serious” existed. As someone, somewhere, had learned the hard way, ordinary people didn’t stand a chance. Not even if they tried to fight upside down, screaming.

Even so, it seemed Marietta couldn’t stand the fact that she couldn’t so much as scratch Pomette during training, even with the executive’s monstrous strength deliberately restrained. Pinned down in the most literal sense, Pomette seated squarely on her, Marietta puffed out her cheeks, pouting as if it might ease the sting of humiliation.

“Pomette-sama, you’re heavy.”

“Hea—” Pomette choked. “No. I’m not heavy. It’s the armor.”

“You’re not wearing armor right now,” Marietta said, deadpan. “You can’t dodge it.”

Pomette’s composed profile stiffened. When Marietta tipped her gaze up at her, she caught sight of Pomette’s exposed ear, bright red, like it had been boiled.

“Did I gain weight?” Pomette muttered.

“Huh? No! Don’t actually get devastated! I was kidding!”

“You were lying, then.”

“Yes.”

“Be honest. I’m a little heavy, aren’t I?”

Marietta grimaced, trapped between honesty and survival.

“I mean… compared to the average woman, maybe. But that’s because you train, Pomette. It’s proof you’re strong.”

“That’s complicated.”

Pomette planted the practice sword between her legs like a cane, grunted out a “heave-ho,” and stood. Then, with one hand, she hauled Marietta upright as if she weighed nothing at all.

“Anyway,” Pomette said. “You’ve got good instincts. If you keep producing results, you’ll rise to squad-leader level without much trouble.”

“Really?” Marietta’s eyes lit up. “I mean, I got absolutely destroyed, so my feelings are complicated… but I’m happy!” The brown-haired girl beamed like sunlight breaking through clouds.

And at the sight of that unguarded, carefree smile, Pomette found herself relaxing, relieved in a way she hadn’t even realized she needed.

After being the sole survivor of Metasim and then barely escaping the calamity at Daskel, Marietta had been badly unmoored. Between the deaths of her family and friends, and then the news that Celestia, the woman who’d saved her life, had vanished, she’d folded in on herself until it became frightening.

She’d despaired of living. For a time, she’d even stopped eating, shutting herself inside her room like she meant to disappear.

“Pomette-sama,” Marietta asked suddenly. “Do you remember that day?”

That day. The day Pomette couldn’t bear watching her crumble any longer. The day she’d stood outside Marietta’s door and knocked.

Pomette was not a graceful person. She knew how to swing a sword and little else. Words didn’t come easily, and she’d never been good at encouraging someone the way kind people did.

Whenever she tried to be close to someone who’d been broken, she ended up communicating in the only way she understood—straightforward, clumsy, honest action.

What saved Marietta at rock bottom was nothing poetic at all. Pomette had simply wrapped her arms around the girl and held her with everything she had.

Now, as if mirroring that moment, Marietta slipped behind Pomette and hugged her from the back, arms tightening around her waist.

“When it hurts, we should hold each other,” Marietta said softly. “You’re the one who taught me that, remember? That day.”

Pomette’s body was trained to react to killing intent, to threats, to malice, to the twitch of an enemy’s muscles.

But this wasn’t that.

And it was the first time since becoming an executive that she’d failed to read the “attack” at all.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do at times like this,” Pomette admitted.

“I didn’t know back then either,” Marietta said.

“I see.”

Being supported by Marietta made it feel as though their positions had reversed since that day. The emotion was tangled: embarrassing, warm, strange, and quietly precious.

Pomette took a breath, then patted Marietta’s back lightly.

Truly, she was glad Marietta was alive. The simple fact of another person’s existence hit her with sudden weight, as if she’d been taking it for granted until now.

But a knight-commander couldn’t show weakness.

Pomette’s expression snapped back into place. She cleared her throat a little too loudly.

“Training’s over. Let’s head back to the base.”

“Yeah!”

On the walk back, their conversation drifted into small talk.

Marietta began telling the story again, the one about being saved by her benefactor in Daskel. She’d told it a few times before, but there was always something in it that snagged at Pomette’s thoughts.

“Haaah…” Marietta sighed. “I wonder what Oakley’s doing now, where he is. The one who saved me…”

“Well… he’s probably still alive.”

“Really!? You can tell!?”

“Just a feeling.”

“Wow…”

“And for the record,” Pomette added, entirely too serious, “my instincts are usually right.”

The name of Marietta’s savior was Oakley. It was an ordinary name, but it wasn’t just Pomette who felt something snag in her chest when she heard it. Other executives had reacted the same way.

Because Oakley was also the name of the heretic who had helped bring Daskel to ruin.

According to what Pomette had heard, Marietta met him in the very heart of Daskel’s collapse, at the moment a crumbling outer wall threatened to crush them both. In that instant, the man had shielded Marietta and slipped them out from under the falling rubble.

A cultist who slaughtered and abducted people wasn’t the sort to risk himself to save a girl.

You could write it off as a madman’s whim, sure… but among the executives, the prevailing conclusion had been simple: same name, different person.

But Marietta’s Oakley matches Oakley Mercury in more than just the name, Pomette thought. The features match too. Every time she talks about him, it feels like someone’s raking a hand through my insides.

Pomette’s thoughts churned. She combed her fingers through her translucent golden hair, offering distracted half-answers while she sank deeper into contemplation. Because she had her own brush with an “Oakley.”

When she’d been driven into a corner by Shadik and Pawk’s assault, a young man had appeared and saved her. Black hair, black eyes—exactly the same traits as the person Marietta described.

And that wasn’t all. He’d been searching for the boy Alfie. And if Marietta was to be believed, the Oakley who saved her had been searching for Alfie, too.

Was this truly a coincidence? It nagged at her—no, hooked into her mind, refusing to let go. The thing that stuck the deepest was what he’d said when they parted.

“Good luck, Pomette.”

It was the tone, as if he were commenting on a stranger’s errands. If he truly were an unrelated bystander, why did it sound like he was already standing outside her life, looking in?

As Pomette turned the oddness of that farewell over and over, Marietta snapped her back to the present.

“Hey! Are you even listening!?”

“Yeah… yeah!” Pomette jerked. “I totally am!”

Startled back to reality by Marietta’s sudden shout, the lady knight jolted, shoulders jumping as she blinked and asked her to repeat herself.

Somewhere along the line, the center of the conversation had shifted away from Oakley and onto something else entirely.

“It was going around among my classmates!” Marietta said. “That story about the squad that went to a village hit by monster attacks!”

“O-Oh. Right. That.”

Grinning, Marietta launched right back in.

It had happened only a few days earlier. A certain village had requested aid from the Kenneth Orthodoxy to deal with a pack of magical beasts, and in response, a squad had been dispatched.

But when the squad arrived, the first thing they saw was a field of carcasses.

The beasts were already dead. The extermination had been completed before the soldiers ever reached the village.

The villagers could only repeat one thing: “An outsider, a young man, wiped them out.”

When asked where he’d gone, they said he’d left right after, claiming he was headed for the Holy Capital of Sasfect.

Rumors moved fast, and Pomette had heard that tale in passing as well.

Compared to reports of heretics surfacing, it was almost peaceful news. Still, the idea that someone that strong existed outside orthodox awareness was… troubling. Even so, it hadn’t felt like something worth personally moving on—not until now.

While Marietta buzzed with excitement, Pomette responded with cooler, measured nods.

“Taking on a whole monster pack alone and just dominating. That’s so cool, right!?” Marietta leaned in. “Pomette-sama, don’t you think so too!?”

“It would take time for you to reach that level. Don’t get carried away.”

But even as she spoke, the knight’s instincts whispered.

The outsider’s description was familiar: a scarred young man with black hair and black eyes.

Could it be?

For a moment, the thought caught her. Then Pomette shook her head hard enough to scatter it.

No. Impossible.

She shouldn’t overthink uncertain information. Oakley Mercury had no reason to show up in some nearby village. No reason at all.

Forget it. Pomette exhaled slowly. I’m exhausted. I need rest.

That night, she drank—something she normally didn’t do—and went to bed early, as if she could drown the unease before it grew teeth.

Afterword

Hello again, and as always, thank you for your continued support. This is the author, Heaven99.

This is Volume 3 of I Got Reincarnated as a Cultist Mob in an Eroge Full of Maniacs with Death Wishes. First of all, I’d like to express my gratitude that we were able to release a third volume at all.

And now, at last, our protagonist Oakley is on the cover! Beside him stands the main heroine, Joanne. It’s wonderful. Being able to see the two of them together in the cover illustration genuinely fills me with emotion.

By this point, if you’ve read through to the end, you probably noticed that Volume 3 turned out much more straightforward compared to Volumes 1 and 2.

A powerful rival appears. Pride is put on the line in life-or-death exchanges. There’s teamwork with companions. And then, betrayal… Compared to Volume 2, where blood and flesh were practically exploding everywhere, I think this one feels remarkably calm.

Also, starting in the latter half of Volume 2, Cultist Mob branches into a different direction from the web version. This printed Volume 3, continuing directly from Volume 2, uses the web version’s Chapter 3, “To the Northeastern Branch,” as a foundation, but it’s been heavily revised for publication.

If you read the web version, you already know what I mean: I rewrote almost all of it.

The easiest examples are the new characters Gerugoroi and Karatena.

In particular, Karatena—who holds the key to this volume—ended up becoming such a fantastic character that it feels like a waste for her to exit after only Volume 3. I’ve grown deeply attached to her.

Thinking through her connection with Fuankilo and the way their lives create a kind of fated enmity was incredibly fun, and honestly, my pen just flew across the page.

On top of that, Namanie-sensei’s character designs hit me right in the heart. After I’d already turned in the manuscript, I received Karatena’s design draft and found myself genuinely clutching my head, thinking, “She’s this cute… and she dies?” I mean, I’m the one who wrote it that way, but still, her departure hurts. I’ll miss her.

Also, the cheongsam scene in this volume exists thanks to a suggestion from my editor.

“What if we put Joanne in a cheongsam for the training scene?”

Editors N and S, excellent eyes. It absolutely suits her. Of course it does. I felt real defeat that I didn’t come up with it myself.

Finally, my acknowledgements. To the editors and everyone at GC Novels who helped bring this book into the world, to Namanie-sensei, who elevated this story’s personality with truly incredible illustrations, and to everyone else involved in the production.

And most of all, to all of you readers, thank you, sincerely, always. I hope we meet again somewhere.

Thank you all

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