The first thing that leaped into view upon opening her eyes was the ceiling of a familiar large utility van—her team’s mobile relay station.

The air clung to her skin like stagnant, tepid water.

But she would obviously have caught a cold left out in that chilly air, so complaining about the lack of ventilation would be asking too much, thought Lina.

Still only sort of awakened, she looked left and right.

Not out of any particular goal, but…a sense of something being wrong quickly swelled within her.

Something was going on.

And when she arrived at what it was, it instantly wiped all her remaining drowsiness away.

“Nobody’s here…?”

With her mind clear, it didn’t even warrant thought—it wasn’t possible. The vehicle itself was a large van sold as something that could be used as a camper as well, but her people hadn’t come out here to play.

If they’d encountered an accident, they might have gone outside to look.

Lina being defeated was itself a major accident. It was fully believable that they’d split up for multiple objectives, such as recon, support, and rescue.

But for everyone to be gone at the same time—that was impossible.

Why?!

Her teammates never would have voluntarily abandoned their mobile relay station all at once.

Then had someone…?

Suddenly realizing something, Lina went to the onboard information system’s console. She’d remembered that it always recorded everything going on in the vehicle at all times. The arrangement made her feel ill at ease, but right now, those recordings would be a boon. She decided to replay the last ten minutes of footage for now.

Nothing appeared on the display.

Huh?

Lina’s eyes and mouth froze into a shocked expression at the unexpected result. A moment later, she wore a fake smile, even though nobody was watching. She thought she’d used the console wrong.

Once again, this time more carefully, she set the playback starting time to ten minutes earlier.

It still showed nothing.

She changed the command to play in 4× reverse speed from the current moment. She changed the rewind speed. She changed the playback starting time to an hour before. Two hours before. Three.

The result never changed. The recording data had been deleted.

Frantically, Lina checked to see if other data, apart from the onboard monitoring, was there. But all the storage was empty. The data had been completely deleted, including what the vehicle needed to operate.

As Lina hit the keys with a look of desperation, she suddenly struck the console with her hand. Her palm and fingers stung with pain, but she was so riled up she didn’t even care.

Right. I need to report this to the command center.

But once again, this led to Lina losing her temper.

All the communication instruments had been cleverly destroyed so people wouldn’t be able to tell by only looking.

After slamming her hand on the console a few more times, she ran out of energy and plunked herself down into a seat.

Her hands were throbbing and hot.

Slowly, she raised her hands, looking to see if they were injured.

Fortunately, she wasn’t bleeding anywhere.

Becoming hysterical and hurting herself was too much to be called childish. Knowing the unsightly display wouldn’t be revealed to anyone else, Lina breathed a slight sigh of relief.

And after calming down a little, she realized something even more wrong about all this.

“No injuries…no pain?”

First, she looked at her thighs, then rubbed her left and right shoulders in turn.

But the wounds that had delivered such intense pain that she’d passed out were nowhere to be found.

They weren’t just gone—there weren’t holes in her clothes anymore, either. Nor any bloodstains.

“What’s going on…?”

Lina suddenly felt reality slipping away from her.

How much of it had been real?

Had she really been injured?

Had she only been made to think that way?

Could they, too, have been…?

No… Exotype magic… A mental attack?

A chill ran through Lina’s body and caused it to shiver.

Have we…have we been misunderstanding something really important?

What if Tatsuya isn’t the one who cast the matter-energy conversion spell, and he actually has a high affinity for mental interference magic…? An illusion master?

…If he is, that would explain a lot.

The reason his right arm went back to normal after being burned off—if he used an illusion to make it seem like that had happened, things would make sense.

And if he was better than me at illusion magic, it wouldn’t be impossible for him to see through Parade, either.

When he nullified Muspelheim, too—considering the existence of mental interference spells that apply directly to someone’s magical abilities, it all makes sense.

Those spells need delicate control, so he could have disrupted my mind only a little, just enough to keep me from realizing it, to stop me from maintaining the spell. I think that would be a lot easier than destroying the spell itself.

I mean, Tatsuya is a disciple of a ninjutsu user famous for his illusion magic. It’s perfectly sensible to assume Tatsuya himself is an illusion master, too.

Her mind in chaos, Lina continued to think.

Tatsuya had no way of confirming whether his misdirection (not that it was anything crazy—he’d just repaired the wounds in her limbs and her clothes) had caused Lina to start getting the kind of wrong ideas that would work in his favor.

Besides, there was a more important matter he needed to deal with right now.

There were only twenty minutes left until he had to pick up his sister.

He wanted to finish making the necessary arrangements before then.

Inside a fully automatic car, Tatsuya opened a strictly encoded voice communication line.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Tatsuya. What’s the matter?”

“I’m sorry for calling so late, Mr. Hayama.”

The butler of the Yotsuba house, or more aptly Maya Yotsuba, was the one to answer.

Tatsuya had called a hotline that went straight to Maya.

“I daresay it isn’t that late, but unfortunately, the mistress is currently attending to matters and can’t answer the phone.”

“Ah—well, I apologize.” Considering the time, she was probably in the bath. He certainly should have expected that.

“You needn’t apologize. To my memory, this is the first time you’ve ever given her a call. It must be something quite important.”

The old butler was right—this was the first time Tatsuya had ever been the one to open this direct line.

Truthfully, it got on Tatsuya’s nerves to have to rely on the Yotsuba, something he avoided whenever possible. But he couldn’t be stubborn about it this time. Unlike the No-Head Dragon incident and the GAA invasion, this wasn’t something he could use brute force to get through.

Hayama, part of the Yotsuba family core, would understand the current situation even better than Tatsuya. But the proper method for asking them for help was for Tatsuya to explain it in his own words.

“Well, I just came under attack by a small USNA military force. I fought off their first wave thanks to the intervention of Naotsugu Chiba, the Chiba family’s second son, but he was hit by an attack from the Stars commander, Angie Sirius, and incapacitated. After that, I engaged Sirius…”

Once he defeated Lina, Tatsuya hadn’t wasted the time to tie her up, instead heading for the parking lot adjacent to the park.

He didn’t need to capture her. Even if she recovered her senses, Lina wouldn’t be able to move. Even if she blocked her sense of pain, as long as her motor nerves were severed, she wouldn’t be able to stand up or even crawl. He shot her limbs in a way that ensured that.

And if she’d had significant pain-tolerance training, she wouldn’t have lost consciousness in the first place. Tatsuya had decided that for the time being, Lina wouldn’t recover her senses.

What he needed to prioritize was her backup team.

The optical (light wave–oscillation-type) spell blocking “vision” from the skies above was still in effect. This was an obvious measure, since Lina wouldn’t want her true face being photographed. But at the same time, it also meant she couldn’t leave this place.

The USNA military would never abandon their Sirius.

In order to retreat, they’d have to split their people and recover Lina.

The time they took to do that was an opening Tatsuya needed to take advantage of.

They’d probably predict a surprise attack, so they’d be exercising caution now. After all, they’d just seen their star beaten down before their eyes. Even despite that, though, Tatsuya didn’t have the option of leaving the backup team alone.

He couldn’t kill Lina.

Not only couldn’t he kill her, he couldn’t capture her, either.

She was far too important a figure to either kill or capture.

Tatsuya had already sent one of the nationally recognized strategic-class magicians, aka the Thirteen Apostles, to his grave. It wasn’t on purpose, but its effects on the global balance of power were not insignificant. There would be far too many variables to consider in terms of affecting the global situation should he erase another one of the strategic magicians factoring so heavily into the world’s military balance.

But her support personnel were a different matter.

They were a group possessing clear harmful intent—and who had probably attacked him with the malicious goal of making him a human test subject. That was equivalent to someone trying to kill him.

There was no room for a lenient response. He needed to make them fully aware of the cost of pulling Tatsuya Shiba into a secret struggle.

He hadn’t had the luxury of splitting his attention between Lina and her support unit when he was fighting her, but when he’d stretched out his sensory tendrils again, they hadn’t moved from the positions he’d originally sensed them at. The unexpected defeat of their ace probably had them awaiting orders from the main force. Nothing else could explain this slow response.

They might not have been able to help it, but Tatsuya still felt it was naive of them.

Every mission needed a built-in procedure for retreat in case of defeat.

He might have even called this carelessness.

Although…

I’m more grateful that they were so careless.

From the start, it was clear as day that if he faced them all head-on, they’d drive him back through sheer numbers. Considering that they’d set up the one-on-one situation with Lina, they’d been nothing if not careless.

Of course, there were surely other reasons that they couldn’t make a big spectacle of things in another nation’s capital.

For Tatsuya, though, those reasons just needed to be overturned and taken advantage of.

Not wasting time with a targeting action, he used only his own abilities to take aim, then pulled the trigger of the CAD still in his hand.

His target was the electronic equipment in a utility van.

With his first shot, he disconnected the communicator wiring; with his second, the outside camera’s power cable; and with his third, the inside camera’s power cable. Magic was never meant to be used for this sort of delicate mechanical operation; this was all thanks to Fujibayashi and Sanada ganging up on him and putting him through the wringer.

The portable terminals would have still had their communication functions, but Tatsuya ignored that and put his hand on the utility van’s door.

It wasn’t locked.

No anti-theft systems using biological verification, either.

Instead, he was welcomed by a volley of bullets.

The gunshots made almost no noise because they were either using fairly advanced suppressors or the explosives themselves were special. As Tatsuya hid behind the door, the mechanical noise of the submachine guns’ bolts opening and closing actually sounded louder.

And those soft gunshots quickly ended, too.

One of the things Tatsuya had a lot of practice with when it came to dismantling magic was disassembling firearms.

Men burst out of the thrown-open door at him, wielding large knives.

An activation sequence expanded inside the vehicle.

Draw the attention of close combat personnel, then use projectile weapons from behind—or in this case, attack magic. A classic tactic, but he had to admit it was an effective one.

If only their opponent hadn’t been Tatsuya, someone capable of recognizing activation sequences on sight.

If the sequence was still expanding, he didn’t need Dismantle to deal with them—he could just hit them with a psionic bullet.

Tatsuya thrust his empty left hand in front of him.

Creating a compressed psionic bullet—the fundamental form of the farstrike he’d been practicing so much lately—in his left hand, he fired it into not only the activation sequence around him but all the enemies as well.

He saw the sequence shatter in its entirety.

The enemy magicians did a good job of blocking the reverse psionic flow, but the time they took to do that meant they couldn’t parry the psionic bullet that flew at them; they didn’t seem to be preparing their next spell, either.

Three close combat troops had jumped out of the vehicle, and two of them had an unsteady posture.

Farstrike didn’t affect the physical body, instead striking at the astral form—a person’s soul, particularly the part in charge of the flesh, rather than the one in charge of the mind. The better a person was at controlling their body with their mind, the more easily psions hurt them. But gaining proficiency in controlling one’s mental soul offered the chance to learn to parry the psionic bullet itself or ward it away.

In other words, those with only half-baked training on how to mentally control their bodies were the easiest fodder for farstrike.

The two people trying their best not to fall over in front of Tatsuya were those sort of people. The other one must have been a stout believer in maintaining good physical condition, one who wouldn’t even consider doing any such eastern-style training in the first place.

And it was the simpler sort of opponent who was more dangerous.

Tatsuya took the initiative.

He closed in, stopping right before he was in range of a kick, and stuck out his right foot.

He’d switched his right-hand CAD with the knifelike armament device he’d stolen from Lina.

He swung that right hand up in front of his left shoulder, in a reverse shuriken-throwing form, and hurled it at the center of the enemy’s chest who hadn’t been affected by the farstrike.

A surprise attack with a projectile from point-blank range.

The knife had enough momentum behind it that the man wouldn’t emerge unscathed just by knocking it away. In fact, his judgment to dodge it meant he was definitely a professional.

But his evasion was just what Tatsuya had ordered. It was a logical movement—and therefore easy to read.

The man pivoted his left side back, moved from outside Tatsuya’s knife hand to inside, then knocked the knife’s trajectory away from his body.

The move put the soldier’s right side forward and the knife knocked to his left. But the next attack didn’t come from Tatsuya’s exposed right back but from below.

Tatsuya’s right foot bounced up.

Kicking with his right foot was an irregular motion, as that was where his weight had been for the knife throw, and it caught the man off guard. The man had been bringing his posture back, cautious of a left hook or a left spin kick, and Tatsuya’s foot hit the back of his right hand.

The man didn’t let go of his knife.

Enduring the shooting pain in his wrist, he tried to bring Tatsuya down with an opposite kick.

The only way to use your pivot foot for a kick was to jump off the pivot foot. Both Tatsuya’s feet were now off the ground. If the man could stop the momentum of Tatsuya’s kick, he’d have the better position and be poised to ruin Tatsuya’s balance—if, anyway, this had been a pure contest of martial arts.

Tatsuya activated the gravity-control spell he’d been preparing in his virtual magic region. The spell was for flying, had a duration of three minutes, and restricted the number of trajectory changes to ten. He bent his blocked right foot underneath him, rising in the air without first touching the ground again, then whipped out a spinning left kick.

This time, the man’s response didn’t make it.

Tatsuya’s right shin dug into the man’s neck.

He felt it hit with a dull sound.

It was a feeling familiar to Tatsuya—the sensation of kicking someone’s bone and breaking it.

The man’s body flew sideways.

Tatsuya’s body, ignoring inertia, slid to the left.

A knife pierced through his afterimage—one of the man’s comrades had struggled through the farstrike damage to throw it.

Flight spell still effective, Tatsuya planted both feet back on the ground.

Then used the magic to propel himself off it.

With a speed impossible for a human—or at least, impossible with Tatsuya’s muscle mass—he rushed into range of the second man.

Tatsuya placed his right-hand CAD into its holster and switched to a knife.

Rather than stopping himself with magic, Tatsuya planted his feet to take in his body’s kinetic energy. With a ground-shaking footstep, he absorbed it, and his right hand flew into the man’s chest.

It was a strong palm strike, not a fist, to right above the man’s heart.

The man fell over backward, unable to take the fall gracefully. From his crouched posture, Tatsuya kicked off the ground with both feet at once.

His flight magic had one round of maneuvering left.

A bullet from behind rushed below his feet, which had risen two meters in the air.

A gun attack from inside the vehicle. They must have taken out a pistol instead of using their submachine gun, which was now in pieces. But actually, he’d expected the strategy sooner than this.

Tatsuya pulled a gun from his waistband.

It wasn’t a gun-shaped CAD but a live firearm. This, too, was something he’d stolen from Lina.

He twisted in the air, then sent a return bullet at the shooter leaning out the window. His bullet caught the man in the chest. His body slid out the window—and down onto the floor inside the vehicle.

Tatsuya went over to the original third man.

With his right foot, he stomped down on the man’s shoulder, and with his left foot, he folded his target’s neck in from the side.

Without the effects of his spell, he then landed neatly behind the fallen enemy.

Panicked gunshots rang out one after another. Using the third man as a shield, Tatsuya responded with fire of his own.

It was hard to aim without damaging the inside of the vehicle, but fortunately for him, there was only one shooter there.

Suppressing the gunfire, Tatsuya charged into the van—only to suddenly deflate.

Aside from the two he’d shot to death, two other men had fainted.

The CADs wrapped around their arms told Tatsuya they were backup magicians.

His farstrike had worked better than expected. His special training with Yakumo had benefited him more than he thought.

Just to be sure, he stepped on the pit of their stomachs, once each, to check for a reaction. Then he threw the unconscious bodies outside the vehicle along with the corpses.

It was a good thing Lina’s gun had a small caliber, since the bullets hadn’t gone all the way through them. No flesh had been shot off, and there wasn’t that much blood splatter, either.

After pilfering a data cube and making a backup, Tatsuya erased everything left on the onboard computer.

Whoever came next would probably clean things up nicely, but he gave the gore a simple wipe up and then left the utility van behind.

All the while keeping up the act that he hadn’t noticed a hidden observer’s eyes on him…

“…By the time I brought Angie Sirius to the mobile relay van, the backup team I’d taken down was nowhere in sight.”

“Whoever was observing you took them away, then?”

“They probably decided it was more important than continuing to watch me. Naotsugu Chiba, who had been put out of combat, was nowhere to be found when I returned to him, either.”

Once Tatsuya finished his report, Hayama hummed briefly. The complete lack of emotion may, perhaps, be called the wisdom of age.

“The observer was likely someone under the Saegusa family’s yoke.”

“The Saegusa? Not the Chiba?”

“Tokyo is currently part of the Saegusa family’s sphere of influence. I have gotten word that Mr. Kouichi is ordering his men to act. He seems to be plotting something.”

Tatsuya knew that “Mr. Kouichi” referred to Kouichi Saegusa, current leader of the Saegusa family. The names of Ten Master Clans family leaders were common knowledge to Japanese magicians.

“They may have responded with close combat skills, using as little magic as possible because they were aware of that observer’s eyes, but we cannot call it desirable that the observer is watching you now.”

Of the incidents Tatsuya had repeatedly encountered since April, he hadn’t taken the initiative on a single one of them. It was always him getting wrapped up in everything. Still, he was aware it was a poor act that would make a bodyguard stand out too much, so he couldn’t object.

“However, I’m fully aware that you have committed no grave mistake, Mr. Tatsuya. And while it is your responsibility to protect Lady Miyuki, a candidate for the next head of the family, that responsibility does not belong to you alone. Lady Maya, too, believes that other families learning of her position now would be too early. Of course, this is Mr. Kouichi. They may have a faint guess, but…”

When Hayama said “guess,” he probably meant that Kouichi Saegusa had surmised that Tatsuya was related to the Yotsuba. Tatsuya was privately impressed—they only had a faint guess of it?

“Still, we wouldn’t want more evidence than expected to fall into their hands. Please send the backed-up data here. We will do something about the USNA military for the time being,” Hayama continued smoothly. It didn’t seem to Tatsuya that he was trying to boast.

The Yotsuba family was conspicuously fewer in number than the Saegusa or the Ichijou. But that didn’t mean they had less combat power. In fact, it was safe to assume each individual was of superior quality. And even though they had fewer people, they still had enough to accept extralegal business from governmental agencies, serving as for-hire counterterrorism trump cards. The Yotsuba family was highest ranked among the Numbers in jobs that involved eliminating sabotage groups and assassination teams, all while keeping it hidden from the public eye.

“Without an excuse to make the JDF act, Mr. Kouichi should back out for the time being as well.”

Tatsuya didn’t know about their other henchmen, but if Hayama said it, then even Tatsuya could believe it. He sent the data over their line and then bowed his head toward the camera.

As soon as Miyuki saw Tatsuya when he came to pick her up, she gave him a dubious expression. “Has something happened?”

“No, nothing,” he said—but it was clear it wasn’t the truth, and he spoke it only because others could be listening in.

As Tatsuya escorted her to the car, she exchanged goodbyes with a ladylike smile. After getting into the self-driving car and setting off…

“Brother, you aren’t hurt, are you—?”

…she was suddenly all over him, to the point that even Tatsuya was surprised. “No… Miyuki, calm down a little—”

“I shall not calm down! This blood… You fought with Lina, didn’t you?! And it wasn’t one-on-one, either, was it?! I smell a fight against at least ten people on you!”

Just as Tatsuya perceived “information” using his vision, Miyuki did through touch. And in Miyuki’s case, that wasn’t all—she could interpret instinctual recognition through smell, too. Tatsuya was sure there were no physical traces left on him at all, but she seemed to have sniffed out the lingering scent of battle.

“Please just stay calm.”

He was honestly happy she was worried about him. But he was also honestly concerned that if she didn’t calm down, they couldn’t have this conversation.

“You know that nobody can leave injuries on me if I don’t let them, right?”

The words, sounding slightly perplexed, caused his sister to startle.

Quickly, her excitement began to fade. After five seconds or so, she finally regained her calm.

“…I’m terribly sorry, Brother. That was shameful of me.”

His sister tried to make herself small, both her words and body language speaking to her embarrassment.

Tatsuya gave a modest smile—partly forced—and shook his head. “Not at all. I’m sorry for worrying you.”

“No, that’s not… It is natural for a sister to worry about her brother!”

The thought Is it? reflexively came to the back of his mind, but he didn’t commit the foolish act of saying it.

But he did think this to himself:

Sure, it may be ordinary to worry about a family member, but maybe acting this passionate about it is another matter…

“I am aware that no matter how many times Lina challenges you, she cannot defeat you. Nobody can defeat you, though you may search the entire world,” she declared with her usual fervor, causing Tatsuya to realize he was giving her a detached sort of look.

Her trust didn’t weigh heavily on him. Tatsuya knew that if Miyuki believed in him, he’d respond to that belief as much as he was able. That was his determination, his pride, his resolve.

But apart from that resolve, he’d also objectively analyzed tonight’s incident as dangerous.

If his opponent hadn’t been a mentally inexperienced sixteen-year-old girl, if it had been someone with the force of will to put all their combat abilities on full display, he knew he could have been the one who was defeated.

But cluing in the one he protected to such diffidence would be bad, even aside from his job and his responsibilities.

So for now, he purposely gave her a strong-willed reply. “I wouldn’t lose to anyone—not with you waiting for me.”

That, however, had been an overstatement.

At the very least, it could be seen as “going too far.”