“I’d never even suspected the monster could possess a robot,” said Miyuki, her expression still one of disbelief.

“It’s probably because it was a humanoid type. What an unlikely tsukumogami.”

The siblings weren’t talking in their home living room but in a self-driving car. The car wasn’t a citizen-shared commuter but Tatsuya’s personal possession. In name, it belonged to their father, but the purchase cost came out of Tatsuya’s income as Taurus Silver.

As to why Tatsuya owned a private motor vehicle, despite the existence of commuters you could utilize as cheaply as buses—it was to pick up and drop off Miyuki, in addition to being a safety measure and form of prestige.

Not many people knew this, but Miyuki was a girl from a respectable family. And she came from a very high-class one at that. In other words, she was a proper lady.

And as a well-bred young lady, lessons outside school were indispensable.

Thanks to the Yotsuba’s unique circumstances, she didn’t yet need to appear at social gatherings like Mayumi had to, but whenever she went to a classroom patronized by the elite, even if it was in the form of a private lesson, she needed to keep up appearances to suit the occasion.

Inside the high-class car, equipped with a driving control AI, of course, but also with an anti-bullet coating, heat resistance, and shock absorption all to rival a military vehicle, Miyuki, formally dressed up, continued to speak with a dark look that didn’t match her gorgeous outfit.

“More importantly, Brother…what do you intend to do about it?”

“You mean, how am I going to handle Pixie?”

On the other hand, Tatsuya, who was wearing what was, in a sense, a high schooler’s outfit—despite its darkly colored jacket, you couldn’t call it formal—made an expression like he tried to grin painfully but failed and ended up only going halfway.

“We can’t exactly take it home,” he said. “I’ll probably make up some excuse to get information out of it at school.”

“…We can’t?” asked Miyuki, a little fear mixed into her voice for some reason. “Is that not what Pixie wants…?”

“We can’t let her inside the house,” answered Tatsuya, his face an actual smile this time. “We barely know anything about parasite ecology or nature. We don’t have any guarantee that it isn’t lying to us.”

The popular belief that youkai didn’t tell lies, only humans, was ruined by the presence of a youkai called an amanojaku. Both youkai that told the truth and those that lied existed only in stories, and yet nobody present had thought to doubt the words of the parasite that possessed Pixie, which Tatsuya found unbelievable.

“It isn’t as though there aren’t any grounds for its claim that it responded to Honoka’s thoughts. Its ‘form’ that Mizuki saw is evidence of it. But for everything else, all we have is its word. We don’t know what sort of abilities it has, so we can’t bring it close to us. If Pixie has the ability to communicate with other parasites and calls its friends while we’re asleep, it would be terrible. At the very least, we have to see whether or not it has a way of contacting the others before I consider any careless ideas.”

“But if you questioned her, you wouldn’t know whether her answers were true or not, either, would you?”

“That part is the same as questioning human prisoners—it falls to us to determine whether the information given is truthful or not.”

Though there was still a bit of stiffness in her face, the color of worry that had been covering it like a veil was wiped away.

It wasn’t very big, but the refined Western-style building was still far from common. Tatsuya stood at the entrance, handing over his bodyguard duties.

It was nothing formal, though—he just looked at the other person’s face.

This classroom (though it may be more proper to call it a school), where Miyuki took piano and etiquette lessons, was for women only. Even if he was a bodyguard attending an elite member of society, he wasn’t allowed in.

“I’ll come pick you up when class is over, like usual.”

“Yes. I will be waiting for you.”

Therefore, out of necessity, these were always the sorts of words they exchanged.

He would be picking her up in two hours. It wasn’t quite enough to go back home and relax before leaving again, so he usually spent the time at nearby restaurants.

Tatsuya entered a family restaurant randomly chosen by his GPS. Given his mature appearance, he could go into places that focused on alcohol and not be thrown out, but he wasn’t in that kind of mood today.

Dinner was ready for them at home, so he only ordered a drink. For the restaurant, getting only drinks and sticking around for two hours would have made him a nuisance, but whatever eatery he went to, he always ordered somewhat expensive drinks. That way, he wouldn’t have to worry about coming off as unintentionally mean.

Even if other people did give him bad looks, though, he’d just pretend he didn’t notice it.

After taking a seat by the window, Tatsuya rested his face on his hand and stared out the window, not opening up his reading website.

From the outside, he appeared to be in a mood of absentminded gazing.

On the inside, Tatsuya himself had to admit that he didn’t feel like he could focus on anything.

But when people gaze absentmindedly, they did the complete opposite of what he was doing.

He wasn’t focusing his mind—rather, he was diffusing it.

Wider, wider, until his vision had a complete view of every little bit of the areas around both him and Miyuki.

It wasn’t a bird’s-eye view but a view of the information dimension.

Tatsuya fixed his stare not onto an elliptical space with multiple foci but at a space unrelated to physical distance, a relational space defined in terms of causal-link strength.

This way, he wouldn’t miss a single thing that could bring harm to Miyuki.

Because he had these “eyes,” he could guard his sister alone, over and above gender restrictions.

But it wasn’t as if he could possess these “eyes” all the time. Normally, he did this work unconsciously, but now he had solidified it further by paying attention to it.

If he left his body in the physical dimension, where causal relations frequently popped into existence as what we call “coincidences,” and stationed his range of view in that relational space, it would continue to wind him up forever. Instead, it was exactly because he was in a situation where he could calm down like this and “observe” that he could move his mind into the other plane.

Though he called it relational space, he didn’t mean there was a dimension like that.

It was a framework of the mind—a manner of seeing.

And though he called it relational, it wasn’t connected by any red or black strings or chains or anything along those lines. He could simply read the information that causal relationships existed in certain places. Depending on one’s way of imagining things, they might look like strings or chains, but Tatsuya could visualize straight through the beings and events with causal relationships and see them behind the beings themselves. That was what he focused on today.

In theory, one could use this method to predict the future, but Tatsuya could still only read the present and the past up to twenty-four hours prior. However, it was very effective for searching. It could pick out “enemies” with as much or more scope and precision as hereditary farseeing skills.

In his field of view, it showed information of an enemy approaching.

Approaching not his sister but him.

I sure am a failure as a bodyguard.

If he ended up being the target, it would actually expose the one he was guarding to more danger. Saying he was a failure as a bodyguard wasn’t necessarily him being too hard on himself.

It was just that when he muttered that, it had no disappointment, regret, or any other emotion in it.

After hearing the report that everyone was in position, Colonel Virginia Balance nodded to herself.

Ahead of today’s mission, they’d analyzed the target’s lifestyle habits, and she’d been shocked at how few opportunities there were to attack him.

This was because he never, ever went out at night like kids were supposed to (?).

The place he went to every morning for training was a “ninja dojo,” which they couldn’t go after on a whim. (There were still many Americans who didn’t understand what this was.)

Both Sundays, he seemed to have gone somewhere on his motorcycle, but when they tried to track him, they were thrown off right away—and even with their observation satellite, they couldn’t figure out where he’d gone.

The only thing she’d learned after these two weeks’ observation was that he couldn’t possibly be a normal high school student. In fact, it would make more sense to think that he was a special forces operative or something. Those doubts were linked to identifying (more accurately, predicting the identity of) the target, so her investigation wasn’t completely pointless.

The difficulty level while he was with his younger sister was something Major Sirius had already proven. It needed to be when he was by himself for a long time, and when there was little chance of him escaping—and tonight was one of their very few opportunities.

“Major Sirius, do you read?” said Balance directly into her communicator. Lina answered immediately. As planned, she was standing by in a nearby park.

Their strategy went like this.

Stardust members would force their way into the restaurant pretending to be robbers and launch a nonfatal attack. If they were able to capture the target then, they would kidnap him. If they came under counterattack, they would exchange blows while running and lead him to the park where the major was waiting.

It was a rough plan, but with there being so many uncertain elements, she couldn’t devise a more detailed one. Balance had learned through real battle, the genuine article, that it wasn’t practical just to look impressive to superiors.

In chess, such detailed plans were useful because you could see everything your opponent was doing.

What I’m worried about is Stardust being wiped out in the first phase…

Balance quashed her own unease by telling herself that was a slim possibility.

They may have been failed versions marked for discarding, but the Stardust were still enhanced magicians with USNA magic engineering technology poured into them. They wouldn’t be wiped out by a boy in his midteens, five to one.

If her prediction was correct, the enemy was an unknown strategic-class magic user, but many strategic spells focused on large-scale destruction had no use in person-to-person combat. All the more so if his strategic spell was that strong. He probably couldn’t use it unless he was prepared to die with them.

As long as he didn’t have a special tool like the Brionac.

Even if they are all wiped out, their memories have been erased, making it impossible for him to unravel their identities.

Therefore, even if the operation failed, the colonel concluded to herself, she wouldn’t need to worry about the aftereffects.

Unconsciously, she tried not to think about Murphy’s Law.

After finishing her briefing with Colonel Balance, Lina was inside a station wagon in a park’s car lot, doing the final checks on the Brionac, a strategic magic weapon.

A superweapon made for her, which only she could use—and yet she wasn’t allowed to use at will, even as the commander of the USNA’s magician forces. It was a portable weapon, but its maximum power rivaled the main gun on a warship, and even having such destructive force, its output and range could be freely controlled. The nonsensical weapon’s exterior was a large club about four feet long.

Two-thirds of the object was about the thickness of a tennis racket handle, with the front third a cylinder twice as large. Where they met, a short, box-shaped pole about the width and thickness of her hand’s grip was affixed in a cross.

Her inspection really only involved a weapon purely for working with magic power.

It wasn’t even an integrated armament CAD—it was simply a magical weapon.

The Brionac had no electric power supply, nor even any springs. It was impossible, of course, to do a mechanical inspection. It only involved her setting the spell into standby mode, ready to fire, and verify the response.

She understood they couldn’t make an intricate design for it because of how the tool worked. But the Brionac looked like a staff, a spear, and a club all at once, and it made her feel like she’d accidentally stepped into the shoes of a fantasy novel (or video game) heroine. It felt strange.

Speaking of things that felt strange…

Not to doubt the colonel’s abilities or anything, but…is this going to work?

Her true feelings were of doubt that such a slipshod plan would work on Tatsuya.

She did know that plans that were too complicated weren’t practical, though.

Still, she couldn’t help but be concerned over the basis of the operation: whether just five Stardust-level casters could hold out against him. She worried that it was actually more likely they’d all get wiped out immediately. Tatsuya had already fought on more than even terms against four Stars members.

Tatsuya was a troublesome opponent, but at first, Lina too had thought Miyuki the stronger one.

But now, such ideas had vanished without a trace.

She had zero intent to make light of him as inferior.

Lately, Lina had started to believe that it wasn’t her slipup that had caused her defeat.

When she was released from her false show of power, she’d begun to see his actual ability as eerie and bottomless—because she’d realized she didn’t actually know what he’d done to her.

What was the spell that had brought Dancing Blaze to dust?

What on earth was the skill that had disabled Muspelheim?

At the time, she’d simply thought he’d destroyed the molecular bonds.

She thought he’d neutralized the spells.

But the instant she considered how that was possible, her thoughts had frozen.

Because it wasn’t possible.

At least, not for anyone in the Stars, including her.

It was one thing to destroy molecular bonds. But what about disabling Muspelheim?

In order to neutralize magic, you needed enough “influence” to overcome it.

Even if she accepted that his influence was stronger than hers, Miyuki’s spell had been active at the same time.

In that area, her Muspelheim and Miyuki’s Niflheim had been clashing with each other.

With two spells traveling in opposite directions, their effects would only cancel each other out. That wasn’t the same as neutralizing it. To neutralize a spell, you had to use a spell that overwrote its magic program.

In other words, if the method Tatsuya had chosen was to neutralize the spells, he would have had to use over twice as much influence as Lina.

When she’d come to that conclusion, she couldn’t stop herself from trembling.

If that was possible, that would mean Tatsuya also had some ability to hide all that power.

If he’d disabled the spells without neutralizing them, then doing anything other than destroying their magic programs was impossible.

Lina knew of ways to destroy magic programs using the impact from a highly compressed psion flow, but there was no such indication at that time.

Not destroying them with an external impact but interfering with their informational construction itself to get the job done—if it had been Major Benjamin Canopus, vice commander of the Stars, he might have pinpointed Tatsuya’s spell as Program Dispersion. But Lina didn’t know about that spell.

As someone who had joined the Stars at a young age (a very young age, one might say), she was the opposite of a normal boy or girl: She had ample combat experience, but for all the time that had taken, she lacked knowledge about certain things. Of course, she knew all sorts of things compared to normal (magic) high school students, but one’s knowledge capacity was limited by how much time one spent learning. No matter how good she was at memorizing things, there couldn’t be any information in her head that she hadn’t learned yet.

Lina’s worry was that since she lacked learning time, she didn’t have enough of an ability to extend her experience. It all came down to her being too young to be commander of the Stars.

One might say their complete ability-based system was having harmful effects.

It hadn’t worked against her yet, but during a mission away from her home country where support was thin, up against a soldier like Tatsuya—who made up for how relatively few combat opportunities he’d had by always cramming knowledge and skill into his head—she was footing the bill for her bias.

Tatsuya wasn’t a battle junkie. At least, he didn’t think so. He only ever picked fights with people under very specific circumstances. In particular, he did it only when necessary to protect Miyuki’s safety and honor.

Still, he wasn’t a pacifist. He believed, as many young people do (?), that in order to protect peace, one needed to fight for it.

Five of them…

Confirming the number of enemies waiting, literally about to burst out of a small vehicle parked on the other side of the street, Tatsuya hesitated for a moment.

In this case, if he wanted to run, he could. He could just call his car back by remote.

He reached a conclusion in one second.

After completing payment using the terminal on the table, he stood up.

They must have seen it, because the wagon door hurriedly opened.

Walking quickly, Tatsuya headed for the entrance.

The front of the restaurant was right across from the vehicle.

Five people with ski masks, only their eyes visible, stepped out of the wagon at about the same time Tatsuya left the restaurant.

The eyes peering out of the ski masks were an array of colors—blue, red, black, brown, and gray.

They were color contacts, which foreign criminals frequently used to disguise themselves during crimes, but that probably wasn’t what this was. In fact, they didn’t appear to have very much intention of hiding their appearances. Maybe they were confident nobody would identify them even if they saw their faces.

When Tatsuya walked up to them, as if to preempt them, the attackers seemed to get confused.

But their staring contest didn’t last long.

Tatsuya moved.

Not forward, not backward—he walked out of their line of sight and along the road.

He could feel their astonishment.

Without breaking step, Tatsuya distanced himself from them.

Five meters turned into ten meters, and finally, the attackers came to their senses.

The soft sound of a gun clicking reached his ears.

They weren’t large CADs shaped like submachine guns but armament devices where submachine guns were fitted into the CADs.

Their loadout alone made it seem like they were straight-up confessing they were USNA magicians.

Nobody else—not western European nations, eastern European nations, or the New Soviet Republic—used such contrived devices as weapons.

The only ones who used weapons this elaborate, aside from America’s military, was, perhaps, none other than Japan’s own Independent Magic Battalion.

He could tell from the expanded activation sequences that the soft silicone-compound bullets would be given an electric charge upon firing and discharge when they landed. They must have been a sort of Taser gun. Apparently, they were under orders to capture him alive.

Tatsuya had already put his right hand in his inside pocket and gripped his CAD handle. His finger was on the button made to look like a trigger.

His back still turned to the masked men, he pulled the CAD’s trigger.

Then, he quickly turned around and launched himself into a dash.

He heard the dry sounds of submachine gun parts clattering all over the paved surface after he began to run.

While the enemies were frozen in surprise, he closed the distance.

When he reached unarmed combat distance, the enemies finally began moving again.

In Tatsuya’s opinion, they’d been too shocked, but maybe they couldn’t help it.

In order to use magic to interfere with an object already under the effects of someone else’s spell, you needed to have a clear advantage in influence over their magical power. When there was physical contact between the object and the caster, the difficulty of doing so leaped up significantly. That was the reason people said it was essentially impossible to use magic to directly destroy CADs and armament devices.

But if that was the reason they were so surprised, they’d misunderstood.

The spell they’d tried to use was one to give electrical charge and discharge effects to their bullets. The target of that spell was the bullet, not the gun. The barrel was connected to the CAD, but the breechblock and the detonator were independent devices.

Gun parts were made to be easy to take apart to maintain them, making them simple for Tatsuya’s magic to handle.

The reason they’d been so shocked was perhaps—like how Japanese people once had absolute faith in the katana—an absolute American faith in firearms.

Of course, Tatsuya wasn’t just relaxing and thinking about that sort of thing.

Those ideas simply shot through his mind out of reflex at seeing them surprised. His mind was focused on how he’d attack the enemies now that he’d gotten into close range.

He had no reason to spare their lives.

But he was in public right now.

It wasn’t a shopping district, and though it was nighttime, there were people around and road cameras dotting the streets. He’d probably have a lot of trouble to go through if he killed them.

Still, he didn’t want to show his Dismantle spell many times to the observer he knew existed. He should refrain from using his part dismantling.

That was why he purposely closed the distance between them.

Tatsuya thrust out with the heel of his palm.

He aimed for one man’s gut.

He didn’t bother to try to aim for the solar plexus.

As his palm landed, he used a flash-cast.

The spell he activated was an oscillation type.

From the point of contact, the vibrations pounded into the enemy’s body—or at least, they should have.

But his spell was bounced back. Tatsuya knew not through the sensation in his hand but by looking with his “eyes.”

He immediately jumped aside.

He felt a wind whip up from below him.

The enemy’s fist, with a shiny black knuckle-duster on it, thrust into his afterimage.

Slipping past the man, he went around behind him and hit him with another vibration wave.

The attack was in his blind spot, and the man’s body fell to the ground.

Still, he had a surprising level of magical resistance.

He’d fired his spell through physical contact into a part of his Information Boost armor that was weak, but the man had reflexively canceled it with a burst of influence. Tatsuya’s attacks’ output may have been weaker than others because he fired it from a virtual magic region, but this would normally be impossible.

An engineered magician— No, an enhanced human?

As the enemies regrouped and attacked and Tatsuya jumped back to avoid them, he accessed their physical information in search of their identity.

Information with a distorted structure, which went beyond simple genetic engineering. Doubtless a result of layers of forced enhancement impossible to gain by learning.

How can these guys even move like that?

Tatsuya had “seen” hundreds of people as they were about to die, and in the state these men were in, he wouldn’t be surprised if they keeled over at any moment.

They were much better suited for getting an IV drip in a hospital bed than swinging around guns or knives.

But how did they have so much energy?

They were like meteorites right before burning out.

It was precisely as though stardust trapped by the earth was breaking apart in flames, casting a light. Tatsuya didn’t think he would lose to something of this level, but he didn’t know what sort of crazy things these irregular opponents would do.

He needed to end this swiftly, even if it meant taking some risks.

Tatsuya changed his way of thinking. In his mind, he quickly drew up a blueprint for the future.

Jump farther back to get distance, then reach for my CAD.

As I pull it out, fire four partial dismantle shots.

That will stop them for good.

Right when Tatsuya’s thoughts had solidified, by total coincidence, something happened.

He came to interrupt them.

Naotsugu Chiba was at a loss.

He hadn’t predicted this would suddenly turn into a street fight. His preconception of the boy from his excellent classroom grades was as someone with a careful personality.

He was on a third-floor terrace of a mid-rise building about eight hundred meters from the boy, the subject of his monitoring and protection. The investigation report had said he was keen in sensing others. Putting himself at such a distance had backfired.

It would be an awful pain to run down the stairs, too.

He grabbed his weapon and jumped down.

As he hit the ground, he launched into a sprint.

Naotsugu’s running speed, enhanced with the Godfoot spell (originally a hermit technique), could reach a maximum of one hundred twenty kilometers per hour over short distances.

At this distance, it was faster than using a powered vehicle, and it would get him there earlier.

About thirty seconds until he arrived.

As he ran, he sensed two vibration-type spells being used.

He saw one of the assailants take a palm strike from behind and crumple to the road.

Can that boy use Magic Arts? wondered Naotsugu to himself. That information hadn’t been in the report.

It wasn’t the sort of intel one would eschew putting in a report, so the information bureau probably hadn’t known, either.

He seemed to have several other tricks up his sleeve, too.

Interest toward Tatsuya Shiba, his observation target—currently his protection target—swelled within him.

Just how well could he fight…?

But he’d have to find that out another time. Naotsugu was the type to keep work and private life separate. (He thought so anyway.)

He pressed the button on the armament device in his hand.

The short club changed into a kodachi.

The Chiba had developed this new model and had begun supplying it to the police. Naotsugu had fine-tuned this one for his own use.

He preferred multipurpose tools he could swap out to single, high-efficiency ones like the Ikazuchi-Maru or Orochi-Maru.

Weapons were tools, after all, and disposable. And depending on how you used them, they could be sharp and celebrated or dull and forgotten.

That was part of his confidence in his own skills, the skills of the one lauded as one of the world’s strongest combat magicians, when within three meters—

His protection target jumped far back.

The investigative report relating to who the boy was fighting came up in the back of Naotsugu’s mind.

The opponents were Stardust, enhanced magicians—no, it was more accurate to call them living magical weapons—belonging to the USNA military. A death squad formed of magicians who couldn’t withstand the engineering and enhancement, who knew for sure they would die in a matter of a few years. Several groups existed within Stardust, each excelling in different things. Naotsugu had been told that the band fighting the boy now was one specializing in close combat.

Their minds had been aligned with the idea that if they didn’t have long to live, they wouldn’t die needlessly… It was doubtlessly a form of brainwashing, but Naotsugu didn’t consider it evil. In fact, he felt empathy for them as they literally gambled their lives for their mission—not for faith.

But that only made them that much more troubling.

Soldiers prepared to die were the strongest soldiers in the world.

No matter how good a high schooler was, it was probably too much to handle.

Naotsugu stepped in between Tatsuya and the Stardust.

Tatsuya already knew that there were eyes monitoring him—and that they belonged to someone other than the USNA military.

But he hadn’t expected someone to intervene in this short a time. He’d predicted them to remain observers.

The man had his back to him, which meant that in this fight at least, he wasn’t an enemy.

Tatsuya recognized who the person was, too, from the instant their face became visible as they entered the fight.

It was Erika’s older brother.

But he didn’t know why he was offering assistance.

“Shiba.”

If it was unexpected for him to say anything—

“I’m Naotsugu Chiba. Older brother of your classmate Erika Chiba.”

—then it was also unexpected for him to reveal his identity.

“I’ll take over from here. You stay back, all right?”

He obviously didn’t explain any more, but now wasn’t the time for that.

“Thank you very much.”

Tatsuya had no objections if the man wanted him to leave things in his hands.

When he quickly retreated, he felt a sense from Naotsugu that the man had been outwitted. Maybe he’d expected Tatsuya to say something like I’ll fight, too! But unfortunately for him, Tatsuya’s personality wasn’t that self-serving. If an expert was telling him to stand back, he would obey them—as long as it was to his benefit, at least.

The enemies were confused at the sudden intervention for only a few seconds.

Excluding the one who was already down, the four masked men pulled out handguns and thrust them toward Naotsugu.

Modern magic was a technological system that placed emphasis on speed, and CADs were the answer to that demand.

Still, pulling the trigger of a gun without the safety on was faster than using magic, which had to deal with an activation sequence to construct a magic program. At this range, the opponents didn’t even have to take aim.

It seemed these men were significantly accustomed to combat. They chose a method to quickly eliminate an obstacle rather than rely on special skills like magic. They wouldn’t abandon magic and not use it at all—they were in the process of executing a movement-type spell as well that would stop flying objects. It was probably to protect themselves from projectile weapons.

Guns as their weapons, and magic as their shields.

The arrangement made use of both their advantages. Presumably, they’d been shackled by the rule to take Tatsuya alive and hadn’t displayed their full combat prowess. Killing enemies no questions asked—that was doubtless their original fighting style. A combat style that pursued rationality was enough to take down most enemies.

But Naotsugu Chiba wasn’t like most enemies.

Faster than the men could pull their triggers, Naotsugu closed the distance. To anyone else, it must have looked like Naotsugu had disappeared. It was so fast, even Tatsuya had to concentrate or he’d lose sight of him.

His kodachi flashed as he passed by one. The blade was bordered with a dark line.

The hand holding the gun fell off from the wrist down. The crosswise repulsive field created by the kodachi’s blade had sliced skin, pried open flesh, and severed bone.

Did the men notice that at the moment of his strike, he’d activated the acceleration-type spell Pressure Cut?

Paying no attention to their comrade’s shriek, the other three redirected their muzzles at Naotsugu.

Their bullets shot through his afterimage.

With the sounds of screaming and glass breaking as his background music, Naotsugu got into close range.

It wasn’t godlike speed, but the soldiers still couldn’t get a lock on him.

Images both true and false overlapped in their vision.

Even Tatsuya, who was watching from behind, wasn’t confident he’d be able to find Naotsugu’s true position if he’d been fighting him in super-close range.

The secret lay in charging, stopping, and repeating.

Naotsugu charged, stopped, changed direction, charged again, stopped again… By repeating the process, it created afterimages on his opponents’ retinas.

Normally, the theory behind swordsmanship objected to stopping, or itsuki. If you removed the logic’s finer details, itsuki meant “a stiffening of muscles.” The act of stopping your feet stiffened your leg muscles and locked them in place, which was one cause of falling into itsuki.

But that only applied when you were moving just with muscular force.

By controlling his “wake-up,” or the initial motion of his body, with magic, he could move from a completely stopped position to top speed without any time in between.

But this was infinitely easier said than done.

Movements preceding thoughts was a naturally occurring phenomenon in the martial arts world, and some said you couldn’t be first class unless you could move faster than you thought.

What Naotsugu was doing was preceding the very motion of his body, which overtook his thoughts, and triggering magic.

Come to think of it, his earlier Pressure Cut had activated in an instant and ended in an instant, so fast that not only his opponents but those watching couldn’t perceive it happen. Opponents couldn’t figure out your game like that, nor could they take any countermeasures.

That on-off switching speed was, Tatsuya thought, without a doubt the essence of his technique, and why the man was counted among one of the top ten most well-known in the world.

While Tatsuya was analyzing Naotsugu’s combat strength, he’d disabled all the masked men.

Naotsugu lowered the hand holding the kodachi.

He didn’t seem to have let down his guard, but he did seem somewhat less tense.

Tatsuya felt the same way.

Meaning to thank him for the assistance, he began to walk toward Naotsugu, when on the third step…

…he felt an intense sense of danger upon him.

Naotsugu must have felt it as well. Tatsuya dropped himself to the ground, and Naotsugu brought his kodachi up at about the same time.

A moment later…

…a shining ray of light shot at Naotsugu.

The kodachi parried the ray—a high-energy plasma beam.

Right before the blade, the beam split into two, left and right.

He was probably bending the intense plasma stream with the repulsive field that formed on the blade using Pressure Cut.

But it wasn’t enough to block the EM wave effects.

The ray of light disappeared.

Mysteriously, the plasma beam had vanished before reaching any of the buildings along the road.

As Naotsugu held the kodachi up in front of him, still standing there, he trembled. His muscles had probably been paralyzed by all the EM waves hitting him from close range. It was like he’d taken a high-power stun gun shot to the body.

Tatsuya looked toward the ray’s estimated firing point.

In the distance, in the middle of the dark, hazy road…

…form illuminated dimly by a streetlight,

was a head of red hair and a pair of golden eyes.

Pointing what looked like a staff in his direction, the masked magician Angie Sirius stared down Tatsuya as though in invitation.

(To be continued)