The "Seat of Evil," dressed in those amusing fishnet stirrup stockings and matching mesh shoulder sleeves.
She swung the greatsword, its crystal clusters regrown, and brought it down viciously toward Su Yuzu's face.
The heavy, edgeless blade hung perhaps an inch from Su Yuzu's forehead, close enough that the next second should have split the offender's skull open without the slightest effort.
But... there was no next second.
The "Seat of Evil" froze in midair.
Like a character in an animated short with someone's finger on the pause button. Only the flames still roaring all around them, and the trembling muscles of the "Seat of Evil's" thigh, seemed to be saying something without words.
Su Yuzu tilted her head, slipping neatly around the greatsword aimed at her.
A subtle expression crossed her face as she reached out both arms and gently wound them around the girl suspended in that blazing vortex.
She cocked her head a little, studying the lost, helpless shape of the "Seat of Evil."
"How cute—"
"How very interesting—"
This girl on a "Throne," who moments ago had been swinging a crystal-clustered greatsword like she meant to cut through every unfair, crooked turn of Fate.
And now... she had turned into something this adorable.
Pinned in place, the "Seat of Evil" felt every nerve in her body about to burst.
If she were still human, every hair on her skin would have been standing on end.
But... after falling into the Abyss, apart from the decorative hair on her head and her eyebrows, she existed as an Aberrant, and even her body hair had been erased.
Her skin was as smooth and tender as cheese.
A pity that, in front of the "monster" currently holding her, tender skin was probably not a good thing at all.
Inside the roaring vortex of flame, the smiling girl with the machine-blank eyes... seemed to have finally shown the "Seat of Evil" what she truly was.
She was nothing at all like the earlier victims, Sakai Miho, Soga Ishikawa Kiyomi.
As the girl who was the "Seat of Evil," she could recognize with perfect clarity the essence the girl before her had revealed.
A predator.
A dangerous, alluring, lethal predator.
And right now... she was the dish laid out on that predator's table.
Every muscle in her body had drawn tight.
Her nerves felt magnified a dozen times over.
The girl's soft murmur against her ear. The pressure of the girl's fingertips as she held her. Even... the way strands of hair slid across her shoulder when the girl tilted her head, brushing loose from her brow.
Every last fraction of it registered on the "Seat of Evil," who had lain sealed in armor, sleeping through countless days and nights at the bottom of the deepest abyss.
"You look—"
"You look like you'd really... really taste good."
That gentle whisper brushing her ear made the nerves the "Seat of Evil" had strung tight from the moment she recognized the other's predatory nature swell until they felt ready to split apart.
But... her body wouldn't move. Not an inch.
Her will resisted.
Her body and her subconscious, without consulting each other, had both already chosen surrender.
And each of them surrendered for entirely different reasons.
Vicious black thorns spilled out from behind the white-draped girl and coiled around the "Seat of Evil's" limbs.
More terrifying than the thorns was the other's nature as a predator.
Just as a "Throne" normally holds absolute dominion over "Beasts" and "Aberrants" alike.
As a predator, the girl had just as easily taken her and cupped her in the palm of one hand.
The dark golden vertical pupils turned helpless and unfocused.
Su Yuzu held the "Seat of Evil" close.
The "Seat of Evil's" body was rigid, but her skin was so soft.
It was a strange feeling.
A subtle feeling—an almost entertaining one.
Though there was no essential difference between the Yuzu on the "Throne" and the Yuzu who kept the wicked beast in her chest sealed away day to day.
They shared the same awareness, they shared the same memories, they shared the same patterns of thought. They were, entirely, the same individual.
But... to the "Seat of Evil," who was being consumed as the main course of this gluttonous banquet, it still felt, subjectively, as though the girl had changed.
Su Yuzu looked down at the "Seat of Evil" in her arms.
The grand and imposing "Seat of Evil"... why so nervous?
So nervous—as if Yuzu really were some kind of villain, as if she really would eat her up.
Honestly... if that was what she was thinking—
Su Yuzu's eyes curved into a lovely crescent. Then she had to congratulate the girl. She had guessed right.
Parting her lips on purpose to bare white teeth and a pair of cute little fangs, Su Yuzu put on a ferocious face and bit down toward the "Seat of Evil's" throat.
The "Seat of Evil" could only watch, wide-eyed, as Su Yuzu seemed about to sink her teeth into her neck—and while she was still braced in terror, what she saw instead was... the girl catching one strand of the black fishnet at her throat between her teeth, lifting her head slightly to draw the thread taut, and smiling at her with the most wicked smile imaginable.
This was nothing like clothing in the ordinary sense.
The Catastrophe Crystals on an Aberrant's body were, to them, a root-level existence—more important, even, than flesh.
In other words... the girl biting at that thread, unraveling her strand by strand, was to an Aberrant more horrifying than simply being devoured whole.
The Seat of Evil's hand, frozen in the air, went slack and then snapped rigid again, and the dark golden vertical pupils blew wide and empty.
On the shore, Kirishika had been resting her chin on both hands, gazing at the sun's disc rising over the sea, apparently deep in thought—and then her legs shot straight out and braced against the ground.
"Nn?" A small, bewildered, helpless sound.
Kirishika's slender fingertips dug down into the gaps in the bench slats, trying to grip hold of something that could not possibly be gripped.
"Wh... what happened?"
"Did Yuzu finish off the me on the 'Throne'?"
"But how could—"
"Nnh!!!" The small hand clutching the wood nearly wrenched hard enough to fracture a knuckle.
The girl's outstretched legs curled, toes tightening bit by bit.
Kirishika and the "Seat of Evil"—what difference was there between them, in the end?
—
Black tides surged up and crashed down.
A small sightseeing boat pitched in the swell, its engine long since cut.
Because its owner knew that against a disaster of this magnitude, that scrap of horsepower was a drop in the ocean.
And the noise of a running engine might well attract something troublesome.
For instance... the woman glanced back at the cabin.
The mermaid lying in there was still struggling.
On any other day, a living "Beast" would have been a marvelous piece of experimental material.
But... right now she had no time to deal with this "Beast."
"Too noisy—"
She raised her right hand, and the cherry-pink tachi nailed through the mermaid's chest scattered all at once into petals that filled the cabin.
The mermaid, tail fin slapping wetly against the deck, eyes stretched wide, dissolved into a sky-wide Calamity Aura that spiraled upward and fell into the sun overhead.
The woman watched the vortex of the sun without blinking.
And then—
She pulled the memory module out of her right ear canal.
"Record..."
"Failed."
"No 'Awakening' fluctuation from Yuzu-hime was recorded."
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