A crisp clicking sound reached Yanagi Tsukishiro's ears. She knew that sound better than almost any other: high heels on a hard floor.
And when she finally saw who those heels belonged to, her pupils contracted before she could stop them, the shock on her face completely undisguised. Because the figure standing there wore her own face.
The delicate features, the figure other women envied, even the posture and the small habits of movement were identical to hers.
"So my next opponent is myself? How interesting. Though it wouldn't be the first time I've faced an opponent like that."
Fighting yourself sounds like a rare privilege, but as luck would have it, Yanagi Tsukishiro had run into exactly that on an earlier mission.
It was during the operation to capture Zuishu, against a creature of Filth created by the Sacrifice, Dagarel.
Across the floor, Yanagi Tsukishiro' charged without a moment's hesitation. Yanagi Tsukishiro met her at once, the naginata in her hands sweeping in broad, committed arcs that never once lost their precision.
Watching martial skill and techniques cut from exactly the same cloth as her own stirred nothing in her at all.
If she felt anything, it was a flicker of admiration that this system had managed to collect her data so completely in so little time.
"In that case, the way to beat her is perfectly clear."
She brushed a strand of hair back behind her ear, and the corner of her mouth curled into a wild grin that had nothing in common with her everyday self.
"All I have to do is surpass the me of one second ago!"
The words were barely out before she moved, the light of her blade falling with the crack of lightning.
Yanagi Tsukishiro' clearly hadn't expected that. Whatever data the system had gathered, this was not in it.
Even so, the copy was not about to fall so easily.
She collapsed the naginata's shaft into itself, and the weapon became a tachi in an instant.
Using the shorter blade's agility, she slipped past the descending cut, drove her foot down to close the distance, and swept the tachi across Yanagi Tsukishiro's waist.
An inch longer, an inch stronger; an inch shorter, an inch deadlier. Once an opponent gets inside your reach, the short weapon's advantage shows itself in full.
Which is to say, longer is not always better.
And now, caught at close quarters, Yanagi Tsukishiro stood at an absolute disadvantage…
But did she?
The wild grin never left her lips. Her hands simply opened and let the naginata go, and without the slightest regard for the blade coming at her, she clamped both hands around the copy's throat.
There was a wet tearing sound as her abdomen split open, pale skin and thin lines of blood showing through the ruined fabric of her uniform.
But this was a virtual world, so Yanagi Tsukishiro would not bleed out.
The Yanagi Tsukishiro' in front of her, on the other hand, would very much die if her neck was snapped.
So the copy thrashed for her life, swinging the tachi again and again into Yanagi Tsukishiro's body, trying to force her to let go and defend herself.
Yanagi Tsukishiro showed no sign of loosening her grip. She let the other woman carve wound after wound into her, and as long as none of them were fatal she did not even try to dodge. She just kept her hands locked around that throat, straddling the body beneath her.
A few seconds later came a dry crack, and the self under her hands went limp as a rag doll, all struggle gone.
Watching herself dissolve slowly into raw data, Yanagi Tsukishiro's expression drifted back toward calm.
She picked up the blade she had dropped, straightened a uniform that was now little more than rags, and the gentle, composed Yanagi Tsukishiro everyone knew was back again.
She let out a long, stale breath. Venting something she had held down for so long left her feeling lighter than she had in years.
"That should be the end of it."
Clap. Clap. Clap.
The words had hardly left her mouth when footsteps pattered out of the corner behind her, accompanied by slow applause.
"Well, I never would have guessed. The famous brains of Section Six, and she has a side like that. Makes you wonder how disappointed your fans would be if they ever saw it."
The speaker was the guide Bangboo that Yanagi Tsukishiro and the others had met earlier: Little Gan.
"So you're the one running this from behind the curtain?"
She pushed her glasses up, then spun the naginata in her hands and leveled it at Little Gan, the threat in her eyes utterly undisguised.
"Hm? Whatever do you mean, Executive Tsukishiro? I'm nothing but a humble little guide. Why get so heated? Is it because I saw your dirty little secret?"
An expression at once wicked and ridiculous spread across Little Gan's Bangboo face, so smug and punchable that Yanagi Tsukishiro let her disgust show openly.
"Stop dodging the subject. That isn't what I asked."
"Tch. No fun at all. Dealing with clever types like you always costs me half the entertainment."
Little Gan clicked its tongue, and stopped bothering with the false persona.
"Allow me to introduce myself. The name's Ganmian, and I suppose you could call me a Proxy. Thank you so very much for taking care of me the other day."
Ganmian leaned hard on those last three words.
Some time ago, Public Security had carried out a mass roundup of Proxies. Wise and Belle had escaped it because their main account, Phaethon, was already suspended, and because various connections had put them on the whitelist, so that operation never touched the siblings.
Ganmian was another matter. A net hacker moonlighting as a Proxy, he left a trail that Public Security picked up without much trouble.
But he proved so slippery that Public Security finally decided to ask HAND for assistance.
And Anti-Air Section Six, where Yanagi Tsukishiro and the others served, was the unit they asked.
"Thanks to you people, even my last stand-in got hauled off. These days I'm a lost ghost wandering the net, with nothing left to lean on."
"You brought that on yourself. If you had only ever worked as a Proxy, you'd have served a short detention, paid back everything you earned in the role, and walked out again soon enough. But you insisted on doing a great many things you shouldn't have. Helping smugglers move contraband through the Hollows, ferrying dangerous individuals across the border, colluding with outside forces to threaten New Eridu. Any one of them is enough to put you on death row."
Yanagi Tsukishiro was not the least bit rattled by Ganmian's accusations. As far as she was concerned, every bit of it was his own doing, and on top of that, what they had arrested was only a stand-in. The man himself was still walking free.
"Hmph! Sharp-tongued little girl. Not that it matters. Very soon you won't be able to make a sound at all."
Ganmian's small Bangboo hand waved, and three virtual screens appeared in the air between them.
"So what if you won? Your friends might not be nearly as lucky as you are."
On the screens, the fights of Hoshimi Miyabi, Soukaku and Asaba Harumasa played out live in front of Yanagi Tsukishiro's eyes.
Facing enemies that were exact copies of themselves, all three of them were clearly locked in a desperate struggle.
____
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