Chapter 87
Late at night.
At a time when everyone was asleep, the mana lamp in Sara's private quarters still illuminated her room.
Dressed in comfortable pajamas, she read the script for the play scheduled for the next day with a serious expression.
This time, spent drinking tea brewed from a mana herb that brought peace to body and mind while a ballad played softly from the phonograph, was peace itself.
"You've really become an actor."
A voice interrupted that peaceful time.
Rustle.
Sara shifted her eyes slightly to confirm that it was Sailor speaking to her, then crossed her legs and spoke casually without even looking at him.
"If you came here just to pick a fight, get out."
This voice and tone were the exact opposite of the gentle voice and manner she had used during her previous meeting with Abel.
Her voice held unmistakable hostility toward Sailor.
"Ha-ha!"
Seeing Sara like that, Sailor laughed ferociously and approached the phonograph playing the peaceful music.
Just looking at an esper living such a peaceful everyday life made bile seem to rise in his stomach.
The disgust rising in him was worse than what he had felt when his organs ruptured from Sara's resonance attack before.
Click.
So he would change it. Even a single piece of peaceful music like this was a luxury for espers.
The adjusted music emitted a sound completely different from the peaceful ballad it had played before.
[---!]
A fast, irregular beat, a low bass, and dissonance that evoked discomfort burst from the phonograph.
"Haa..."
At Sailor's action, Sara turned her gaze from the play script to Sailor, who was looking at her with murderous eyes.
[What are you trying to do?]
"Urgh!"
The resonance phenomenon erupted again.
Her ability had a horrendous exchange ratio, but it possessed one exceptionally outstanding advantage.
Its casting speed was absurdly fast.
Simply by speaking, she could attack as much as she wanted; if her mouth was blocked, she could attack her opponent by tapping her body or clapping her hands.
[You didn't ask to see me just to do some stupid nonsense like this.]
"Kahaha!! Stupid nonsense, huh?"
Sailor, whose insides had been turned to mush by Sara's attack, laughed as he watched blood spill from his mouth at her words.
"No. It isn't stupid nonsense."
Shing.
Surely, what could be trivial about making espers uncomfortable?
At the same time, Sailor drew his sword.
Seeing it, Sara opened her mouth to render Sailor incapable of action, but just then—
Slash.
"You think I'll fall for that technique twice?"
Sailor, who had vanished from her sight in an instant, cut off a little of her bangs and glared at Sara.
"The first time you used that technique to incapacitate me was the optimal moment to kill me."
Resonance.
A technique that matched an object's natural frequency to inflict an absolute, unblockable attack on the opponent.
It was certainly excellent.
Its level of completion and efficiency were remarkable, after all.
However, it was only possible when Sara spoke and released sound.
Sara's body was weak.
Ah, of course, that was from the perspective of Sailor, a traditional knight.
In any case, from Sailor's perspective, Sara's resonance was an absurd technique that left him incapacitated if it hit.
However, the caster who ultimately performed that technique was a living creature with a physical body.
From Sailor's perspective, simply observing the movement of a single muscle in her neck was enough to respond.
"..."
As Sailor brazenly pressed a blade to her neck, Sara watched her pink hair flutter gently to the floor.
'Oh, seriously.'
How much time and money had she poured into maintaining this hair?
'I really hate this bastard.'
She had played classical music and waited to calm herself because he said he would come late at night, and now this mess had happened.
The peculiar hatred of espers characteristic of [Lainas] was truly impossible to understand.
It wasn't for nothing that [Lainas] itself was regarded as the craziest faction within [Organization].
Recalling that fact once more, Sara sighed and looked at Sailor, who was holding a sword to her neck.
"So when do you plan to have a normal conversation?"
A sword pressed to her neck?
It didn't matter.
After all, that great boss had established a contract as a minimum safety measure to prevent members of the same organization from inflicting wounds serious enough to take each other's lives.
In the first place, the very act of pressing a sword to her neck meant he wasn't going to kill her, so what was there to be nervous about?
Thinking that, Sara crossed her legs and pointed with her chin at the chair knocked rolling by Sailor's attack.
"Sit. If you can't sit, then this conversation ends here."
"..."
Swish.
"Is it really impossible for your organization to have a normal conversation?"
"Shut up. Just being in the same room as an esper makes me nauseous."
"Yes, yes."
At Sailor's growling reply, Sara sighed and drank the tea she had brewed.
Click.
"So what is it you want to say?"
"Cooperate with me."
As expected.
"Abel?"
Abel.
A being her boss had personally designated as this world's singularity.
To be honest, although he called Abel a singularity, the boss had never explained what exactly that singularity was.
She only recognized him as a singularity because her boss said he was one.
"You really intend to pick a fight with Abel?"
Is he insane?
From Sara's perspective, she couldn't help thinking that.
Abel's strength?
She didn't know.
But think about it rationally. It was that boss.
He was a human whom that boss—whose very species was on a different plane from ordinary existence and who far surpassed their understanding—personally went around calling a singularity.
"You don't even know his full strength, do you?"
Right. Even if she conceded a hundred times over that Abel was hostile to them and therefore had to be dealt with, was moving now remotely sensible?
They should be estimating his strength, uncovering his abilities, and luring him into a trap—yet he wanted to charge straight at him?
"Are you insane?"
Thud.
At Sara's words, Sailor held out a certain crystal orb, as if he did not even want to exchange words with her.
Sara frowned at Sailor's behavior, but gave a small sigh and accepted the crystal orb, infusing it with mana.
Well, he wouldn't give her anything strange.
It was an action born of a bizarre sort of trust: he was the kind of madman who would swing his sword once more rather than spend the time doing something so petty.
Pop!
"This is..."
As the crystal orb activated and transmitted a video, Sara instinctively used mana to enhance her eyes and watched it.
The image had been filmed from far away and was low-resolution, but she could clearly tell what was happening.
It showed Abel fighting an unidentified enemy.
And then.
[------!!!!]
At the display of Abel's full strength captured there, Sara could not help but shudder faintly.
What the hell was that absurdly massive attack?
She knew Abel's ability was smoke.
But he was using the simple concepts of convergence and expansion to fire off absurd mass weapons as techniques?
And what was that attack that exploded inside the body of the entity that appeared to be the enemy at the end?
Unintelligible. Impossible to understand.
Abel's full strength was so outrageous that the video truly seemed to demonstrate why the boss called him a singularity.
After watching the entire video, Sara frowned and glared at Sailor in front of her.
"Are you kidding me?"
"..."
"Fine. Now that I know Abel's full strength, that's enough. You're not going to say something stupid like this, are you?"
An overwhelmingly powerful individual capable of fighting an entire city—or even an entire kingdom.
And he wanted the two of them, Sailor and herself, to fight such an opponent?
He was insane. Even calling him insane didn't begin to cover it.
Why had she deliberately drawn Abel's attention and tried to get him to watch her?
Half of it had simply been carrying out an order from the organization.
In other words, [Lainas] had come here partly to steal Abel's focus so it would be easier for them to turn him into a plaything, but her true motive was different.
'It's impossible.'
While they still didn't know Abel's full strength, he wanted the two people sent from [Lainas]—herself and the other person—to take him on?
She had coolly judged it impossible.
Besides, Abel hadn't come alone; he was traveling with a companion.
If they were going to fight Abel, how did he plan to deal with the person accompanying him?
She had no concrete basis, but she expected the woman accompanying him to be quite skilled as well.
So she had simply helped Abel, subtly or otherwise.
Since fighting here wasn't worth the cost, she had intended to end things by giving Abel what he wanted.
But then.
"How thoroughly must hatred have consumed you to attempt such reckless behavior—something even a child wouldn't do? No, are you trying to kill yourself?"
And it wasn't merely suicide; attempting it while dragging her into it made it even more reprehensible.
At Sara's words, Sailor frowned as if even speaking with her was unpleasant and said in a sunken voice,
"Your task is not to face Abel in cooperation with me."
Abel's full strength?
Yes. It was certainly impressive.
Though he claimed he hadn't gone himself and had instead used possession arts, judging solely by that overwhelming mana and the power of his ability, he was strong enough to be counted among the strongest espers alive.
Moreover, Abel possessed that level of strength without having undergone his second awakening yet, making him a monster among monsters whose future was even more frightening than his present.
"You deal with the woman beside Abel. I'll deal with Abel alone."
Therefore, he had to eliminate that budding threat now.
No, it wasn't anything so grandiose. Sailor was simply filled with the desire to kill Abel himself.
Think rationally. You know this situation is strange, don't you?
Yes. He was right.
Even Sailor himself knew well enough that confronting Abel now was tantamount to suicide.
Abel was traveling with only a single woman?
He was more aware than anyone that it was suspicious.
But. But still.
"If you won't accept, I'll proceed alone. That's all."
If he could accept the situation rationally like that, he would never have joined [Lainas] in the first place.
He wouldn't have become a knight consumed by revenge and slaughtered innocent espers.
He could no longer stop. No, he couldn't stop.
If he stopped, then on that day—
[Aaaaaaaah!!!!!!!!!!!!!]
The hallucinations of his wife and son, who had burned to death after being consumed by his ability, and the child stirring in his wife's womb continued to appear before him.
Espers must be killed.
Pathogens! Vermin! Bugs! They were germs that, consumed by their abilities, sought to harm others!
Not rational?
The other espers were innocent?
So what?
If he was going to lecture me with such trite words, then they shouldn't have been consumed by their abilities and killed my wife and child in the first place!
It was already too late.
He had come too far to stop.
"Look, I'm asking because I'm genuinely worried. Are you insane?"
Sara, watching Sailor's hatred burn like that, had no choice but to blurt it out.
He seemed beyond irrational, as if he couldn't even form a proper thought, so what the hell was—
"Huh?"
At that moment.
Sara noticed a subtle sense of incongruity as she looked at Sailor sitting still.
Perhaps because she had awakened the ability [Sound], she was extremely sensitive to sound.
In her ears, she heard a highly irregular pulsing sound.
'This is...'
A heartbeat?
No, it wasn't. Even if it were a heartbeat, what insane species would have its heart located in its lower abdomen?
Sailor's current strange and impulsive state of mind.
The bizarre sound ringing in her ears, and the fact that it was coming from his lower abdomen—his dantian, just below the navel.
The conclusion she reached after putting all those circumstances together.
"No way..."
As an executive of [Organization], she had heard of it.
A drug created by one of [Organization]'s subordinate groups, [Seekers of Truth], which primarily used alchemy.
"Don't tell me you took [Vital Flame]?"
[Vital Flame]
In simple terms, it was a kind of doping agent that burned life itself like a flame to obtain immense strength.
Only now did things begin to make sense.
'[What were the side effects of [Vital Flame] again?]'
Living on borrowed time after taking it—that was obvious, so she could skip over that.
She remembered it was said to destabilize cognitive abilities, cause hallucinations and auditory hallucinations, and finally make the user extremely impulsive.
She recalled that all this was caused by mana surging as if it would burst the moment it was consumed.
"..."
"Really?"
Sometimes silence meant yes.
He had taken a doping agent that even [Organization] kept quiet about and come here.
Should she marvel at Sailor's mentality, which had made it this far with the brakes in his head completely destroyed and no self-restraint?
Or should she be appalled by his stubborn fixation, trying to pour blind hatred onto Abel even while devoid of self-restraint?
"Haa..."
I don't know. I really don't know.
"Fine. I'll cooperate."
For the record, she was absolutely not moved by Sailor's resolve, which had driven him to take even [Vital Flame].
But if she refused to cooperate here and now, Sailor would probably collapse before ever reaching Abel.
That wouldn't be efficient.
Having gone so far as to stake his life on doping, it was only natural to put that life to more meaningful use.
"How many days can you hold out?"
"...Three days."
"That's cutting it close."
But it wasn't impossible.
If she started inciting people with her voice, protests might begin as early as tomorrow.
Of course, she would need to hire a few agitators, too.
"Good. Then try to hold out as long as you can. I'll prepare the optimal stage for you."
"...Understood."
***
The next day.
I was performing as usual with Bellias when I suddenly looked at a procession of people moving through the streets.
"Guarantee freedom for artists!!!"
"We are not slaves!!!"
"Stop all oppressive administration immediately and answer us!"
A procession of people.
"Huh..."
It was a protest.