"Haaah!"
Kiyama Harumi let out a sharp cry. Clenching her fists, white spherical ripples of pressurized kinetic force enveloped her knuckles as she drove a vicious strike straight at Takahashi Yuuya. Knowing her former student's terrifying strength, she held nothing back.
Fzzzt—
The very next second, her pupils contracted sharply. The pressurized kinetic blast vanished into absolute nothingness the moment her knuckles made contact with his chest—erased from reality as cleanly as if someone had pressed a cosmic reset button.
"How is this even possible...?"
Kiyama's throat went completely dry. Desperate, she immediately re-routed her calculations into high-voltage Electromaster arcs, but the blue electricity dissolved into thin air the instant it brushed against him.
A suffocating wave of utter powerlessness washed over her.
'Is this truly the unbridgeable gulf of a Level 5?' she thought, her hands trembling. 'Even with the synchronized processing power of over twenty thousand linked brains... I don't possess a shred of power to fight back?'
She had felt so confident. She had genuinely believed that commandeering a parallel network of twenty thousand minds would make handling Anti-Skill, the city's automated defenses, and any external threats an absolute breeze.
Now, the harsh truth crashed down on her: it was all just wishful thinking. She couldn't even leave a scratch on a Level 5, let alone bypass the specialized anti-Esper divisions capable of suppressing high-tier rebellions.
Gritting her teeth, Kiyama attempted to trigger Spatial Movement to teleport herself away, but her calculations collapsed before the coordinate shift could even initiate.
'Is his ambient AIM diffusion field simply too dense, or is his Personal Reality actively jamming my spatial calculations?'
"Hehehe... To think that leading the charge would end in such pathetic defeat right here," Kiyama laughed bitterly, her eyes hollow with despair and crushing disappointment. "Why did you have to awaken the power of a Gemstone? Why did you join the Dark Side? And why... why did it have to be you who came to stop me today?!"
Her voice cracked with raw, suffocating grief. "If you had just arrived one month later... those children would have been saved! Now everything is ruined. It's all your fault, Yuuya!"
Looking down at his former teacher—whose bloodshot eyes were filled with bitter tears and burning resentment—Yuuya remained unmoved, a faint, understanding smile resting on his lips.
"That's one way to look at it," Yuuya said quietly. "You think you were on the verge of success, Sensei, but that's just your own optimistic delusion. Your plan was doomed from the start. Academy City's true depths are not something a jury-rigged brainwave network could ever bypass. Even if your calculations finished, the higher-ups would have never allowed those children to wake up."
"What do you even know?!" Kiyama practically roared, the broken capillaries in her eyes turning a violent crimson. "You only met them a handful of times when you were younger! What could you possibly understand about what they went through?!"
She reached up, grabbing Yuuya's collar with both hands as tears finally spilled down her cheeks. "You're the leader of the Dark Side! In that position, you of all people should know the horrors the General Board of Directors inflicted on those Child Errors! You know damn well what the board's attitude toward them is! You can't possibly be blind to that truth... so why are you standing in my way?!"
"Since you had the authority to disrupt the Level 6 Shift Project," she pleaded, her voice breaking into a ragged sob, "why couldn't you just turn a blind eye for my sake?! For the sake of those innocent children?! Why must you insist on being Academy City's loyal hound, no different from the Anti-Skill puppets who blindly execute the board's orders?!"
Kiyama clutched his shirt tightly, her bloodshot gaze a painful storm of fury, helplessness, and deep sorrow for the boy she had watched grow up.
Yuuya knew she harbored a massive misunderstanding about his true allegiances. But in a moment like this, simple words would ring completely hollow. She was too emotionally exhausted, too driven by tunnel-vision guilt to accept verbal reassurances.
To break through her despair, he had to present undeniable facts. Only when Kiyama saw her students awake and smiling with her own eyes would she truly understand.
"Even if I lay everything out right now, you wouldn't believe a word of it," Yuuya said softly, his expression gentle. "So just go to the detention center with peace of mind for now, Sensei. I will use my authority to pull you out of custody shortly after. We just need to go through the public motions for the city's cameras."
"Why... why won't you just help me...?"
Kiyama bit her trembling lower lip, staring at the student she had known for years. He had always been a boy who went out of his way to help others, so why was he acting so cold and unyielding when she needed him most?
Memories of him barging into her messy laboratory uninvited unspooled involuntarily in her mind:
'Sensei, you can't keep burying yourself under research papers like a hermit. Look at your hair—it's so disheveled you're going to end up with a family of birds nesting in it.'
'I brought over some home-cooked food today. Why am I cooking for you? Heh, well, I was bored at home and figured my favorite teacher was probably surviving on instant noodles again.'
'Sensei, you really need to stop stripping down to your underwear in public whenever you get overheated. Though, for the record, I don't mind if you do it in private.'
'Look at those dark circles under your eyes, Sensei...'
Seeing the genuine, unfiltered sorrow in her expression, Yuuya softened his posture, patting her head gently. "Sensei, I am helping you. Once the official procedures are settled, I'll show you the result."
"You..."
Kiyama parted her lips, realizing she truly couldn't read the boy in front of her anymore.
Before she could say another word, the massive, synchronized brainwave network linking twenty thousand minds violently desynchronized.
BZZZZT—!
"Kh... aagh...!"
Kiyama suddenly let go of his collar, clutching both sides of her head in agonizing pain. Her face twisted in torment as if thousands of sledgehammers were simultaneously smashing against her skull.
"Aaaagh! S-Stop...! The network's calculation threshold... it's overflowing! It's gone completely berserk...!"
THUMP-THUMP.
THUMP-THUMP.
An ominous, thunderous heartbeat echoed out of thin air, resonating across the entire street.
"AAAAAAAHHHH—!"
Kiyama screamed in sheer agony, falling to her knees as she clawed at her scalp. It felt as though an alien entity was physically clawing its way out from the center of her brain.
Yuuya immediately rose to his feet, stepping back two paces as his eyes narrowed with deadly focus.
'The artificial embryonic angel... formed by the compressed convergence of ten thousand AIM diffusion fields... It's finally here.'
Fwhoooosh—!
Thick, iridescent white ribbons of dense psychic energy erupted from the crown of Kiyama's head. The energy rapidly expanded, twisting and weaving into a massive, concentrated sphere of pure AIM radiation, as if invisible tendrils were anchoring an extradimensional parasite directly into her cerebral cortex.
THUMP! THUMP!
A sound like an ancient, primordial war drum reverberated through the atmosphere. The heavy spatial resonance caused the souls of anyone within a kilometer radius to instinctively tremble.
It was as if an entity straight out of sacred myth was forcefully tearing its way into the physical world.
Above their heads, the sphere of light solidified.
Curled tightly like an unborn human fetus, the creature possessed a faint, shimmering golden halo hovering above its brow. More than a dozen thick, luminous bands of white energy extended from its spine like the writhing tentacles of an octopus, swaying erratically in the wind. From a distance, they formed the silhouette of two pairs of grotesque, incomplete angel wings.
The AIM Burst.
"Cough... cough, cough..."
Kiyama pushed herself off the fractured pavement with immense difficulty, clutching her pounding forehead. She looked up at the terrifying, floating monstrosity born from her network, letting out a hollow, self-deprecating laugh.
"After the network collapsed... an unknown creature like this actually manifested? Is this... Academy City's divine punishment for my sins...?"
In that exact moment, the embryonic creature broke completely free from Kiyama's neurological control.
Snap.
Its crimson, slit-like eyes snapped open. Resembling a newborn demon crawling out of the abyss, it unhinged a bizarre, gaping maw entirely devoid of teeth, unleashing a horrific, screeching sonic roar saturated with volatile, higher-dimensional energy.
SKRRREEEEEEE—!
It was a form of vocalization completely incomprehensible to human biology—a harmonic resonance belonging to an entity from an entirely different phase of reality.
The surrounding air shattered instantly under the pressure, generating an invisible kinetic shockwave that pulverized the concrete.
Kiyama was sent flying backward like a ragdoll. Yuuya blurred forward, catching her securely in his arms and sliding back twenty meters across the asphalt to absorb the impact.
Setting her down safely behind him, Yuuya looked up at the screeching artificial angel, a wide, predatory grin spreading across his face as his eyes blazed with excitement.
"Now... it's finally my turn to take the stage."
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Give me powerstones.
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