[496] That Afternoon (4)
"Kuhahahahaha!"
From the collapsed, mangled mass where eyes, nose, mouth and limbs had all fused together, Satan's laugh burst out.
A powerful shockwave rippled the air, and in an instant the demon's body snapped back to its original form.
"This is—!"
Satan's huge hands closed around the angels' throats.
The force felt as if their necks might snap at any moment; the two angels, so alike in beauty, both twisted in pain.
'Has it swung this far?'
An angel's body isn't something any creature can casually destroy.
And the secondary application of the Law they'd used had clearly been effective.
But Satan's Law—which had erased countless ordinary angels and even the archangel Metatron—had grown far stronger than Metiel and Satiel had expected.
If the Akashic Record is the entirety of the universe, Satan's Law was a second entirety set against it.
So when the seesaw of Laws reaches a certain balance, not even physical force, divorced from concept, can be transmitted intact.
"Two archangels, huh."
Satan glanced between the two suffering archangels and wore a wicked smile.
"Is this about enough?"
Just as Metiel and Satiel's halos trembled as if about to explode from the strangulation, someone ran up behind Satan and struck.
Satan flinched as strength drained from his body, and Metiel and Satiel slipped free.
But angels already broken like that no longer registered in Satan's sight.
"Who the hell—?"
The blow itself hadn't been huge, but it had been enough to momentarily neutralize Satan's Law.
Satan turned and finally understood why.
A bearer of the perfect Law of Goodness—Bishop Etella of the Karciss Monastery—glared at Satan with burning eyes.
* * *
'Just a little further—.'
Arabot's city wall flashed across Plu's sight.
But it vanished like an unreachable ideal, replaced by a sea of giants.
"Ugh! Huh...!"
Sorrowful tears spilled down.
She had come to Heaven proud as a professional mage, but this place was overwhelmingly beyond her power.
Matei's giant guards were so huge her magic couldn't even reach them.
What could she possibly do here?
Still, she ran because if she stopped now she felt she would never be able to do anything again.
Because even the mage's pride she'd kept all her life seemed about to collapse.
"Not yet— I can still fight!"
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
The giants spotted Plu racing at their feet and stamped down again and again.
Plu tumbled across the ground, crushed like an insect, lips bitten raw with misery.
A grand voice boomed from the sky.
"This is why humans are annoying. They're weak and they're small."
Annoyed by Plu's frantic dodging, a giant slammed his greatsword down with all his might.
Kraaaaaaang!
To Plu it felt as if the world split in two.
House-sized fragments sprayed outward and the shockwave hurled Plu dozens of meters.
Her back slammed into an earth hump like a stalagmite, and while she lost focus for a moment, a rock the size of a human head flew in and smashed her shoulder.
"Aaaaargh!"
As bone-crushing pain ran through her body, Plu sensed everything was over.
She screamed and collapsed, but her right shoulder was shattered so she couldn't even roll.
Seeing a giant palm descending from the sky, Plu trembled as if electrocuted.
Like a child imagining a hundred ways to torment an ant, she couldn't even guess how the giant would kill her.
"Plu!"
Before she could turn toward the voice, someone ran up, scooped Plu into his arms, and launched himself.
"Aaaaaaaah!"
Plu screamed, clutching her ruined shoulder, then opened her eyes wide at the face of the man who'd saved her.
"How are you here?"
Crud—who should have been commanding the rebels in the thick of battle—why was he here alone?
And he wasn't in a Titan or a Kuroi; he had only a Piper, a stage-1 mecha weapon.
"Why did you come? What about the rebels?"
"The war's over. We lost."
"That's impossible!"
Even if they'd lost, shouldn't a commander fight to the end?
Plu shut her mouth quickly.
She had no right to reproach Crud—he'd been the one who couldn't bring himself to tell the rebels God's punishment was coming for Arabot.
'He must blame himself.'
Plu knew Crud had been unable to tell the rebels to the end.
He'd said it wasn't his place, but Plu couldn't imagine how that must have felt.
That was why Crud had come.
'Good. If my death eases his conscience...'
"But."
Crud, who had roughly gauged the height of Arabot's wall, continued.
"Now that it's come to this, wouldn't you be satisfied only after seeing Heaven destroyed?"
Plu was speechless at those unexpected words. Crud ran toward the wall with her in his arms.
Making full use of the Piper, he zigzagged through the air; the giants stamped the ground in an insect-hunt rhythm.
Each giant footfall shook the earth like a rubber sheet and the roar nearly numbed the ears.
'I can do this.'
Even in that distant, unreal terror, Crud clung to reason with desperate focus.
He was the kind of pilot who, while wearing a Piper, had once boarded a Kuroi and then manipulated a Titan with millimeter precision.
Though he couldn't match a giant's brute power, his understanding of machines rivaled even the ageless ones.
"Pathetic humans, less than insects!"
But as the giants' stamping tempo quickened, limits of scale that skill alone couldn't overcome appeared.
A hundred human steps still left you within a giant's single stride.
Given that, it was a miracle he'd carried Plu this far.
"There—Arabot!"
Crud saw what Plu shouted.
But trying to climb the wall head-on would only end with being crushed in a giant's hand.
"Do you know why I came to find you?"
It was a strange question in such a desperate moment, but Plu strangely felt it made sense.
Even she could understand why he'd come for the one who should hate him most.
"To kill me..."
At Plu's honest answer, Crud fell quiet, then smiled as if deciding something.
"Promise me you'll come back alive."
"What are you saying...?"
Before Plu could reply, Crud pulled out the Piper's voice recognition module and issued the command.
"Release limit."
Clang! Clang!
The Piper reads the user's movements at near-nerve speed to amplify strength.
But no matter how high the assist, the human body has a clear endurance limit.
With the limit released, the Piper was no longer merely a strength-assist device.
It became a trap.
A killing machine that constrains and destroys the human body.
'I have to run it at maximum output.'
Crud knew better than anyone this was the last chance.
He slid Plu under his arm and twisted his waist; the Piper, sensing the motion, spun to maximum output.
Grkrrrrrk!
His waist twisted half a turn and the vertebrae in Crud's spine creaked and began to crush.
"Kuhhh!"
Crud didn't care.
He poured every ounce of strength into whipping his twisted waist to gain the force to fling Plu up onto the wall.
"Aaaaagh!"
A small engine roared as Crud's waist snapped back at tremendous speed.
As discs were crushed and a vertigo-inducing shock hit his brain, Plu's body launched through the air like a cannonball.
"Catch her!"
The giants reached for Plu as she flew past.
She moved at tremendous speed, but the giant hands stretched across the vast space and closed toward her.
A palm filled Plu's vision and five fingers tightened inward.
Dokins Algorithm.
Plu slipped through as if bounced out from between the contracting fingers, hastily cast Fly, and landed on Arabot's wall.
There was no time to feel relief. In pure terror, Plu looked back at Crud far below.
"No—no—"
She thought he might be smiling, but a giant that had followed later seized Crud.
Bent as if about to collapse, the giant straightened, reared up, and screamed his frustration at having missed Plu.
"Graaaah!"
If Crud leapt down into Arabot, Anke Ra's holy site, the giant would no longer be able to catch him.
So the last possibility was a human slingshot aimed at Plu on the wall.
The giant swung, and Crud's body flew in a straight trajectory toward her.
Thud!
Crud missed Plu by the smallest margin; his body slammed into the corner of the wall, spun, and bounced.
"No—"
Plu stared at Crud in a daze.
Seeing his grotesquely twisted limbs spinning unnaturally, her first, selfish thought rushed in.
'He still hasn't heard me.'
Crud's body, turning in the air, carried its momentum over the wall and fell to Arabot's ground.
"Noooo!"
Unable to hold back her sobs, Plu leapt from the wall after him.
* * *
Clang! Clang!
Highest-grade steel began to crack.
Girsin, the giant legion commander who'd reached Ilhwa Technique, Rank 7, finally began to tear through Babel's hull with his sword.
Kanya hugged the unconscious Rena and trembled.
Girsin and Babel's duel had been too fast for Kanya, an ordinary mecha soldier, to follow, but she could picture it clearly from the roaring flashes alone.
The other giants had already annihilated the rebels and left to push back the following forces; on the desolate field only Kanya and Rena remained.
"No... this can't be..."
Why had everyone died and only they survived?
Kanya didn't want to think about it, but she had a duty to know.
Babel had calculated the war's odds at zero percent and had moved only to protect Kanya and Rena.
And now... even the third parameter of the Shirone Algorithm was converging on zero.
"Heh heh heh—pretty good for a tin can. But that's the limit of a machine. No one can surpass a giant's might."
To Girsin, Babel was a long-awaited rival, but his excitement ended there.
He had always won; no being meant more than a worthy opponent.
Only one being could dominate him: Imir the giant, the strongest creature in this world—not Anke Ra.
"Taaah!"
Girsin's roar was swallowed by the continuing din; a flash streaked and Babel's right arm was severed.
In Babel's programming—specialized for one-on-one combat—losing a limb was a fatal blow.
That's why the Gaia designers had prioritized durability when they built Babel.
But Girsin's brute force exceeded that durability, and at last Babel's computation unit produced a win rate under 0.1 percent.
Avoiding Girsin's next stroke, Babel hurled itself to block in front of Kanya and Rena.
Thud! Thud-thud-thud!
Armor plates burst from its shoulders and drove into the ground, shielding Kanya and Rena.
Almost simultaneously, Girsin ran in and brought his sword down on Babel's body.
Kraaaaaaang!
The tremendous impact detonated against Babel's back; Kanya's shoulder, standing nearby, jolted from the shock.
But Babel's expression did not change.
It simply stared at Kanya and Rena with its machine-cold face and endured Girsin's assault.