Alice breathed a sigh of what may have been pity.
“To be clear, no excuses are needed here. That man really did not say a word about this place’s location. He simply introduced us to one of the trainers at the center of your enterprise. While doing his best to ensure we did not bring any kind of tools with us.”
The man overlooked the dark shadow that fell over her face.
“Miss B opened the hole. She truly gambled her life to get it in here.”
The look on her face seemed to say “no matter what she had to sacrifice”. That would be in reference to the period before Lavriel found Mutsuki and used the transmitter. She could likely imagine some of the experiences that would have changed that girl’s entire view of life.
But Keigo failed to notice. The bulging veins on his temple were enough to say he found someone else’s sacrifices trivial compared to his wounded pride.
“Lady Lilith, please wait a moment longer.”
He breathed in so deep his large body seemed to swell out. The height difference was so great that his clenched fist hung at the girl’s face height.
“I will transform this noisy little girl…”
FeTUS Leader Alice Arc and Kurosaki Family Head Kurosaki Keigo.
Two hidden leaders of the world faced each other here.
“…into a silent bloody pulp.”
An enormous fist was swung.
As FeTUS’s strongest Witch, Miss A was well-versed in countless combat styles, but she most specialized in predicting her opponent’s actions.
She had known he was going to punch at her and she had predicted the timing, so she moved to dodge it by a hair.
“Gwah!”
But just beforehand, her small body was launched from the floor.
“A shockwave? Damn you.”
She placed her hand on the floor as she landed. The golden threads she had set up welled up and tangled around the man’s entire body.
This was the heat-eliminating Dimensional Transition that Machina had only been able to eject into space. Miss A had already gained limited control of the technology within a thread. As soon as the threads tangled around someone, they infinitely robbed the target of heat, so the man’s skin immediately grew gangrenous. At the same time, all the moisture within froze.
However…
“Impudent brat!”
The frozen body shattered and a humanoid dark-red blob of flesh burst from within.
In the less than a second before it reached Miss A, it retook the shape of Kurosaki Keigo.
This time, Miss A leaped almost to the ceiling to dodge his fist.
But the wind pressure slammed her to the ceiling even though she had jumped nearly to it already.
“Tch. That is impressive.”
The 600-year-old Witch was more horrified by what she had seen than by the damage she took.
She had definitely seen the man’s arm tear itself apart only to have regenerated flesh cover it a moment later.
The punch thrown from his muscular body had surpassed the limits of his muscles and entered a zone where muscles were entirely irrelevant.
It far surpassed the speed of sound. That was why its sonic boom had easily knocked Miss A airborne even though she had supposedly dodged it and why his arm had been destroyed. And with that intense destruction, this had to be more than just Mach 2 or 3.
Needless to say, that speed and regeneration were not human abilities.
Producing Mach speeds was not that much of a threat. The problem was how he broke the sound barrier with an action as simple as punching.
What would happen if a creature like that started using its head?
“Boy, why did you abandon your humanity when, in a way, you were the most honest of us all about your human desires?”
“Geh heh. Geh heh heh heh heh. You wound me, Miss Arc. I have never had any intention in the slightest of abandoning my humanity.”
They both looked to Lilith. The Witch with loathing and Keigo with adoration.
“I have offered her everything! I have offered my entire fortune and my entire being to Lady Lilith! Including my own body! And she has given me something in return. Lady Lilith, who stands at the peak of the demons, has made me the ultimate lifeform!”
“I can see why your kid ran away.”
“My kid? Geh heh heh. You mean Shuntarou? Yes, that was a surprise, but some garbage flesh who only has half my blood is irrelevant. As the knight who guards the goddess, I have no need of him.”
“…”
That ugly transformation would make it hard to call himself a servant of the grim reaper, much less a goddess.
But Miss A understood his logic. His body had been entirely remade around the Fruit of Life that formed a demon. He had turned his entire body into a Succubus.
“The loss of familial love must be another distortion caused by the ripening of the Fruit of Knowledge. Humanity may indeed need to face the time of rivalry.”
Miss A held her head.
She was clearly no longer prepared to fight, so Keigo gave her a curious look.
She sighed and turned toward Lilith again.
“Lady Lilith, this man has done so much for you, but you still do not love him?”
“…”
The woman waved her golden hair and showed them no interest as she watched the exploding facility on the monitors.
“Too bitter.”
The wine was her only interest.
She gave a displeased look toward Schwarze who had brought the bottle to her.
“What is with this flavor? The grape flavor has been contaminated. What did you put in it?”
“…”
The woman blinked at that.
She had been watching over Keigo and Miss A’s battle, but now she sighed in quiet resignation.
“Chain Reaction Ion Channel Interference Program Ver. 7.”
“…!?”
Lilith only looked displeased that something undesirable had been put in her drink, but Keigo was much more horrified. He glanced at the glass of red he had been drinking from earlier.
“E-Elisabeth…don’t tell me.”
“Sigh.”
Schwarze looked a little sad, but there was no sign of hesitation.
“I did love you, father. I respected and loved you as a parent. I cannot lie about this feeling…this emotion that was carved into my instincts from the moment of my creation.”
She had not hesitated to spend the past five days poisoning all of the glasses Keigo used.
“Thank you for raising me as the kind of warrior who can kill her own father.”
“E-Elisabeth.”
“Perhaps I will have Fujita soothe the sorrow of losing you.”
“Gbwah!”
A moment later, all of the flesh that had formed Kurosaki Keigo was stained pitch black.
Blood erupted from the entirety of his blackened and split body. The wounds quickly healed as before, but the movement to seal them only tore open more wounds from which more blood spewed.
The Chain Reaction Ion Channel Interference Program was a nerve contaminant based on cobra venom.
The program pattern changed its signal every second to continually kill the cells it had infected. Lucia had previously proven that not even a demon could keep up with the changing patterns of the toxin.
However, Keigo had a demon’s regenerative power, so if it were injected it into the surface of his body, he would only need to cut away that part of him.
By including it in things he ingested for five days, what he had digested had permeated all the cells in his body. There was no eliminating it now.
His body would regenerate in a single second, but the cell death would return a second later. The chain reaction began where he was slow to regenerate and the number of wounds only continued to grow. He still had a mouth at first and shouted “Stop this! It hurts!”, but either his vocal cords were filled with regenerated flesh or the nerves between his brain and body were obstructed because he stopped saying anything. He drew out too much flesh for regeneration, so his organs emerged on the outside, those attached to his regenerated outer skin, and he soon lost any resemblance to a human form.