"Beako, you two know each other?" Natsuki Subaru was so startled he forgot to even draw his knife.
If Beatrice was here, then Emilia had to be safe, right? With Yimi around, there was no way Emilia would be in any danger.
Subaru looked over at Petelgeuse, baffled.
Petelgeuse—mushroom-shaped head, a face straight out of a rage comic—and Beatrice, who from any angle was an adorable little doll of a girl: the two of them looked like they'd stepped out of completely different art styles.
"Huh? Who's that? What did you say?" Petelgeuse cupped a hand to his ear, as if he hadn't quite caught it.
Beatrice's eyes dimmed. She bit her lip lightly. "I see. So you're not Geuse anymore…"
Geuse had once been a minor earth-element spirit. Four hundred years ago, Beatrice's mother—the Witch of Greed—had appointed him as Beatrice's etiquette tutor.
He'd been a member of the Witch Cult even a century back. The Cult of that era had its share of radicals, but it wasn't nearly as unhinged as it was now, and Geuse had always been a sunny, handsome, hardworking man. Plenty of members took pride in serving under him.
He'd even shared something faintly tender with Emilia's adoptive mother. As a little girl, Emilia had always hoped he and her mother Fortuna would end up together.
When Emilia was still young, Pandora—the Witch of Vainglory, set apart from the Witches of Sin—had come with Regulus and attacked that place, wanting the special Emilia to open a certain door.
Fortuna, her adoptive mother, and Geuse fought desperately to protect her. To hold Regulus back, Geuse even forcibly took in the Witch Factor of Sloth—something almost completely incompatible with him.
In the end, that loss of control, combined with Pandora's manipulation, drove him to accidentally kill the woman he loved, Fortuna. Broken by grief, he was brainwashed by Pandora into the thing he was now.
Beako didn't know all the details. Four hundred years was far too long. The mother she'd known, Roswaal, that child—they had all left her, one after another. And now even Geuse had been reduced to this wretched state.
"A spirit? Mm, a spirit! Spirits are good, spirits are diligent, so very diligent!" Petelgeuse bit down on his own finger hard enough to maim it, head and waist tilting to one side together.
"How wretched you've become, Geuse." Beatrice bowed her head, pained.
A reunion like this was harder to bear than simply learning he'd died. As an old friend, at a moment like this it was her duty to release him from his suffering—
"Ul Minya!"
The purple halo of light that closed around Petelgeuse was the herald of a devastating strike, one that devoured an enormous amount of mana. But at that very instant she heard Subaru shout:
"Beako, look out!"
The moment she made her move, the Unseen Hands had already closed in around her from every direction. As deranged as he was, Petelgeuse remained acutely sensitive to the emotions of others.
Even from mere inches away, Subaru couldn't shove Beatrice clear before it all happened. But Petelgeuse—already wary of Subaru because of how off he'd seemed—split his focus, wheeling around instead to seize Subaru's arm and twist it until it snapped.
Seriously? What rotten luck.
In agony, Subaru stared uncomprehendingly at the mangled twist of his arm. And it was in that exact moment that the Stillness holding him in place broke.
But what truly baffled him was this: the fracture at his joint began to travel down his arm—to his ribs, then down to his thigh. Before he could even howl at the sensation of his whole body hurting in turn, the wound of the broken bone slid along the ground and into a nearby tree, then kept moving off into the distance.
And it wasn't just him. Beatrice and Petelgeuse, locked in combat a moment ago, were the same—as if caught in a rift in some other dimension, their attacks rendered completely ineffective.
The source of this upheaval lay inside Roswaal Mansion. To land her Noble Phantasm from range, Yimi had simply hurled the Spear of Longinus—and the divinity she unleashed came spilling out from beneath her feet.
Capella, transformed into a black dragon, had crashed down in the rear courtyard. To a dragon that size, an ordinary spear was no more than a toothpick—and yet Capella was now in excruciating pain.
The spear buried in her chest had cut off her dragon blood entirely, leaving her unable to use her Authority to reshape her own flesh. Worse, some energy she couldn't comprehend was seeping all the way into her Witch Factor.
"You scrap of meat, is this some kind of joke? You want Lady Capella to die looking like this?!"
She spat out a furious curse and opened her dragon's maw to bite down on the small but deadly Spear of Longinus—only to find that, for such a minuscule wound, her whole body was pinned as though nailed to a cross. She couldn't move.
Worst of all, the spear that had been in her chest slid—wound and all—straight to her neck. It was a spot her massive dragon frame could never have reached, even if she'd been able to move at all.
D4C Love Train—its power to draw in happiness and shunt away misfortune—could nudge a small, easily overlooked injury toward a vital spot.
I'm dying. I'm dying.
A rattling krk-krk came from Capella's throat. She glared at Yimi, standing at the dead center of that divinity—and saw that the one who'd caused all of this hadn't even spared her a glance in these final moments.
Just as she herself had said before: Anything too ugly doesn't deserve to be loved. One glance is enough to turn your stomach.
"Hahahaha…"
In the last instant of her life she let out several meaningless laughs—wild and shrill.
The rain parted of its own accord, leaving only a soft breeze to stir the hem of the little girl's dress. Her eyes, stripped of emotion by the divinity, were like a set of scales concerned only with weighing what lay before them—not deliberately ignoring whatever they happened to face.
Some distance off, a petite girl who looked as though she'd draped a tablecloth over herself held a smile at the corners of her mouth, her eyelids drooping like half-closed curtains. This was Pandora, the Witch of Vainglory who moved behind the scenes of the Witch Cult.
She met Yimi's eyes for a few seconds without much feeling, and in the end—amid the clattering of the scales—she chose to leave.
"What happened here?"
Emilia, who'd shielded the frogs under a dome of ice, came running out, only to find that the courtyard fence had somehow drawn flush against the greenery, the two fused together with no line between hard and soft.
"No idea. But this is absolutely the kind of power that could destroy a world." Puck raised a front paw gravely toward Yimi. "Hey, niece—if you can answer, give me a squeak."
Yimi ignored him. She grabbed the spear, now shifted to the dragon's skull, planted one foot on the dragon's head, and hauled it free with all her strength.
For a little while, at least, she could keep it somewhat under control.
The gathered happiness slowly dispersed, and the Sin Archbishop of Sloth, who'd been caught within it, dropped to his knees, staring blankly at his own pale, trembling hands.
"What… have I been doing?"
Then Subaru, finally snapping back to himself, lunged behind Geuse faster than the eye could follow and locked a flawless chokehold around his throat.
"Beako—now's your chance!"