The Former Swordmaster Who Pretends to Be the Worst, and the School’s Top-Ranked Chairman’s Daughter Who’s Way Too Sweet in Public, It’s a Real Problem
“That was a brilliant deduction just now, but that’s where your limits lie… Aragaki?”
“…………”
Nishimiya smiled with obvious delight as he looked down at me, who had dropped to one knee in pain.
He’d mentioned earlier that he’d laced the air with poison. I’d thought he’d revealed more than I expected, but it seems he was just waiting for it to take effect.
He’s a pretty cunning bastard, Takanashi included.
If I go head-to-head with someone like this, I’ll get tripped up. To keep my consciousness from fleeing in pain, I forced myself to keep thinking.
“Well then, what are you going to do? If you can’t move, you won’t be able to show off your so-called sword skills, will you? After all, no matter how far you reach, that’s the limit of a mere mortal without magical power.”
“…………May I ask you one thing?”
“Hmm…?”
And so, gazing defiantly at my opponent as he looked down on me, I spoke those words.
Perhaps surprised that I was holding my ground despite the poison, Nishimiya rested his hand on his chin with a look of curiosity. If he wasn’t going to refuse, I should be able to extract some information from him.
With that in mind, I focused on the man through my blurring vision and asked.
“Why did you bring a child like Takanashi into this world…?”
—Why did this guy get his hands on a technology considered taboo?
There were other things I should have asked. But right now, I seemed to be getting a little emotional. In any case, I couldn’t forgive this sly man named Nishimiya.
However, my anger seemed to amuse him.
With a faint smile, he nodded a few times before beginning to speak.
“Alright then, consider this a parting gift. I don’t know if an incompetent child like you can understand it, but I’ll teach you our noble ideology!”
Step by step.
Slowly approaching me.
“With the emergence of magic, humanity has achieved great progress, hasn’t it? Yet, since ancient times, humanity has imposed upon itself the shackles of strangely rigid moral codes. “After all, with such an outrageous power as magic existing, don’t you think those ethics are meaningless and ridiculous…?”
Saying that, Nishimiya grabbed me by the collar, leaving me unable to resist.
He forced my body upward and peered into my eyes with his bloodshot gaze.
“And humanity is, by nature, a species that has developed through science. So we should use magic to break those unnecessary shackles. You see, we’re simply shedding blood out of ‘goodwill’—the desire to contribute to humanity’s further progress.”
With a sigh of exasperation, he pressed his free hand to his forehead as if troubled.
Nishimiya, spouting his hopeless ‘self-righteousness,’ slammed me to the floor as if I were trash. A searing pain shot through my entire body, but even more than that, rage welled up inside me.
Crawling on the floor, I glared up at the blasphemer and screamed.
“Don’t mess with me…! What ‘good intentions’? What ‘shedding blood’? It wasn’t you guys who went through the agony of shedding blood, was it!? Have you shed even a single drop of blood that comes close to matching Takanashi’s suffering…?!!”
The nausea rising in my throat—nothing mattered to me right now.
I screamed until my throat felt like it would burst, hurling abuse at the researcher standing before me.
“You’re just exploiting others for your own selfish gain, aren’t you?!”
“…………Hmph, so you still don’t understand, do you?”
“Wh-what…?!”
Nishimiya must have grown irritated as well.
He kicked me in the stomach without hesitation. Normally, it would have been a blow of no consequence. But my organs, poisoned and ravaged, screamed in agony from that single strike.
A numbing sensation ran through me from my fingertips to my toes, like an electric shock.
And as I coughed, a clot of blood stained the floorboards a deep red.
“Too bad, Aragaki. Though I never expected you to understand from the start… I suppose, in the end, a mediocre person will always remain just that.”
Nishimiya spoke dismissively to me as I lay there, too weak to do anything but collapse.
“With our research, we can create the talent we desire. That’s precisely why ‘disappointing beings’ like you wouldn’t even be born. Still—”
Though his tone was one of exasperation, his words were clear.
He said this:
“I don’t know how you managed to master the feat of cutting through magic. But if you can’t see it, that ability is completely meaningless.”
The moment I heard those words, a sense of unease welled up inside me.
I had been absolutely certain that Nishimiya had taken some kind of antidote beforehand. But would a cunning man who wouldn’t shed a drop of his own blood even put himself in a situation where he might be poisoned in the first place?
If that were the case, why was I the only one affected by the lethal poison?
In other words, the poison had certain “conditions” that triggered its effect. If so, there must have been something Nishimiya could do that I couldn’t.
“Ah—”
Once I thought it through that far, it finally clicked.
“—I see.”
And then, I finally found it.
The possibility of a truly tiny opening that Nishimiya, a man so meticulous, had overlooked.
◆
“It’s okay, Azusa. …Saito won’t lose to a sneaky guy like that.”
“Edward…?”
Sitting down next to Takanashi, who was hugging her knees, Edward spoke.
There was no basis for it. Yet, the boy said it with absolute confidence.
“Saito is always straightforward. Do you really think someone like him would lose to a little surprise attack? I, for one, believe that if it were him—”
With a beaming smile, devoid of any hesitation.
“I think he’d use nothing but a straight-forward approach to turn everything around,” he said.
◆
“…………What do you mean?”
It was the very moment Nishimiya lost interest in Saito and turned his back on him.
That was when there was a fluctuation in the magic in the air and its movement. Startled, he turned back to find
“……Sorry, Nishimiya.”
There, staggering but standing up,
was the figure of a boy wearing a defiant smile—a complete contrast to just moments ago. He swept a small knife lightly to the side and said,
“I can cut through more than just magic you can see.”
“……Wh-what?”
At those words, Nishimiya instinctively covered his mouth.
There was only one reason for his action. Saito, as if to point that out—
“What I cut through isn’t magic.”
I declared this to the cunning man.
“What I cut through is the very ‘concept of magic’ itself.”—I said.
Maiban