Saturday, April 28, 3:00 PM.

Tomitsuka and Takuma appeared in seminar room three on time, as instructed.

Hattori would be the one judging this match. And for whatever unfortunate reason, or possibly it was just the natural course of things, Tatsuya was once again involved with a Takuma match as a witness.

Incidentally, as far as Tatsuya could tell, Takuma wasn’t showing any aftereffects from the preceding night. Not only physically, but mentally as well. The actress had probably done a good job supporting him. But at the same time, that meant Tatsuya could assume she hadn’t “broken up” with him. He figured that for a time, she would be watching and waiting.

An array of prominent guests were here as well, including Miyuki from the student council, Sawaki and Mikihiko from the disciplinary committee, and Kirihara from the club committee. Kirihara had permission to use his CAD, and not just for show.

Should they need it, he would be the peacemaker.

That, too, was because this match was being held under somewhat unusual rules. More accurately, exceptional rules had been added to it: There was no usage restriction on Million Edge. Nobody would stop it, regardless of how strong or weak it was. Only in the event that it was clear the opponent would sustain excessive injury would they stop the match. Thinking about it calmly, the risks for a rule like that were far too large. And it would be one-sidedly against the opponent. But the one who had suggested this rule was that very opponent: Tomitsuka.

More than likely, Tomitsuka had a secret plan to completely negate Million Edge. Takuma understood that, too, and he wasn’t happy about it. He felt like he’d been told the Shippou family’s trump card was little more than nothing. But this match had been put together because Takuma had argued against his being disqualified for using it. This was a rule he needed to welcome—not one to be unhappy with.

Tomitsuka and Takuma faced each other from a distance.

Today, Takuma was wearing outdoor training coveralls, too.

Meanwhile, Tomitsuka wore a magic martial arts uniform. It consisted of a long-sleeved, buttonless shirt with cushioning on the elbows and a loose, beltless pair of pants tight only near the ankles, with cushioning on the knees. On his feet were soft shoes for close combat. The wide rings on the eight fingers, excluding his thumbs, coming out of his fingerless gloves were input devices for his magic martial arts–specialized CAD. One ring corresponded to one button, and by moving his fingers or concentrating psions in them, he would relay his activation sequence choice to the actual CAD attached to the wrist of his glove. The rings had been covered with flexible resin-based cushioning, so he wouldn’t be able to use them as weapons. That was official match style. In other words, Tomitsuka was completely in serious mode.

Hattori stood between the two and explained the rules. Still, there wasn’t much to explain. It was mostly ceremonial.

Hattori stepped away from them, then raised his hand.

All at once, the tension grew. Everyone observing could feel the nonphysical waves—not psionic waves—clashing between Tomitsuka and Takuma.

Tomitsuka lowered his body slightly. Takuma put his right hand to his book, the activation medium, which he still held in his left hand.

Even those not participating couldn’t move a muscle or make a peep. The room was deathly quiet, and they could even hear Hattori’s intake of breath before he broke the silence.

“Begin!”

The first to move was Takuma.

Though it may be more accurate to say that Tomitsuka didn’t move.

Takuma opened his book and grasped the first dozen or so pages in his right fingers. He ripped them out all at once—actually, they turned into a paper blizzard right when he put force into his hand.

Paper blades, each four millimeters square, numbering about eighty thousand in all. Instead of manifesting a million blades at once, Takuma seemed to have chosen the strategy of finely controlling a small number of them.

In response, Tomitsuka, without moving, just watched as the paper scraps flew toward him, separated into four clouds. He appeared to the others to be patiently saving his energy. And their judgment was correct.

White paper belts slithered through the air. They were like four snakes crawling through the clouds. Their fangs were aimed at the arms and thighs. Takuma first planned to deal damage to Tomitsuka’s limbs to stop him from moving.

Right before the paper flows reached Tomitsuka, their lengths decreased, and their densities increased. Their march stopped—and a moment later, they suddenly accelerated. The swarms of paper blades circled about Tomitsuka’s arms and legs, trying to tear his skin.

At the same time—

Tomitsuka released an explosive psionic light from his body. As the invisible light glittered, the paper blades reverted to mere scraps. Eighty thousand pieces of paper lost their energy in midair, then turned into a paper blizzard that scattered and danced all over.

Sawaki, Kirihara, and Mikihiko each unintentionally raised a hand to their eyes. Tatsuya, Miyuki, and Hattori, too, squinted at the brightness.

They knew what this light was.

“Program Demolition…?”

A dazed murmur—it was Mikihiko’s voice.

“Someone besides Tatsuya can use that at our school…? And he’s in the same grade…?”

Program Demolition was an incredibly rare technique that almost nobody used. That was a fact and common knowledge, not just something Mikihiko had convinced himself of. And there were two people in his grade at his school who could use it. His shock was completely understandable.

“Maybe we should prefix that with contact-type.”

This supplement came from Miyuki.

“That’s right! I should have guessed, Shiba—you’ve got a good eye!” The one who agreed more eagerly than he needed to was Sawaki. “I gotta say, though, Tomitsuka’s really into this.”

As Tomitsuka’s senior in the club, Sawaki already knew he could use what Miyuki called “contact-type Program Demolition.” This technique, which could nullify magic that touched you, could be called Million Edge’s natural enemy, since the latter changed simple paper scraps into flying blades via sustained, magic-induced event alteration.

Sawaki also knew Tomitsuka had suggested the special rule because he was confident in this technique. He’d been prepared for Tomitsuka to use it, but today, Tomitsuka was more brilliant than he’d anticipated. That was a happy thing for Sawaki—in many ways, Sawaki hadn’t lost his boyish heart.

But unlike the upperclassman witnesses, Takuma didn’t have time to be impressed. He knew full well what this exchange meant.

Million Edge wouldn’t work on his opponent.

It had only taken one attack to inform him of that.

…No, it just means it won’t work if I attack him head-on! I learned two days ago that magic is all about how you use it!

As Takuma told himself that and got himself pumped up, Tomitsuka watched patiently. He was full of options right now. Tomitsuka knew that if he wanted to, he could end the match right now. But that wouldn’t mean anything. He knew just as well as Takuma that he couldn’t let this match end so easily.

Finally, Takuma readied himself again. As he did, Tomitsuka increased his psionic activity. Takuma flipped through the book’s pages—well, he pretended to do so as he went for the CAD on his wrist.

The spell he activated was Air Bullet. Seven compressed air masses shot toward Tomitsuka at a high speed.

Without watching the result, Takuma activated his next spell. Even he didn’t think Air Bullets would be able to take Tomitsuka out. They weren’t anything more than a distraction. Takuma tried to use a self-accelerating spell to go around Tomitsuka.

However, when Takuma reached that point, Tomitsuka was there waiting for him.

“Guh, gah!”

There were no rules against physical attacks. A combination body blow into a hook came. Unable to withstand it, Takuma fell to the floor. Only his stubbornness kept the activation medium book in his hand. Blowing away the mists threatening his consciousness with willpower, he searched for his opponent.

Tomitsuka looked at him without a follow-up. He always looked so friendly, even childlike, but now scorn was on his face, as though he were looking down at—down on—a filthy wild dog.

That was how it looked to Takuma. For a moment, the anger boiling within him overrode his fear. Kneeling on one knee, he opened the book in his left hand.

Twice the paper fragments of his initial eighty-thousand attack sailed toward Tomitsuka. This time, not split into four but combined as one. The more “colonies” were involved in colony control, the more its power waned. Takuma challenged Tomitsuka’s Program Demolition head-on by combining the quartered magic power into one.

But it was a feint. The real attack was the one he fired a few moments later.

The paper blizzard made of one hundred and sixty thousand pieces turned into scraps against the psionic light Tomitsuka released and scattered to the floor.

Then, as if piercing the white clouds, twenty thousand more blades, fired a few moments later, turned into a tornado and struck at Tomitsuka’s feet!

Takuma knew he’d done it. All Program Demolition did was emit a large amount of psions. But Tomitsuka had to do more than that—he had to compress them tightly enough to blow away the magic program. He wouldn’t be able to fire it again this quickly.

But Takuma’s prediction was wrong. He only realized long after that it hadn’t been a prediction at all, but a dream.

At the time, he didn’t understand. Program Demolition and contact-type Program Demolition were similar but different techniques.

The moment the twenty thousand blades struck Tomitsuka’s body, they turned into twenty thousand paper scraps.

This time, as Takuma stood there blankly, Tomitsuka delivered the finishing blow.

“That’s enough. The winner is Tomitsuka.”

Named the victor by Hattori, Tomitsuka gave a small bow.

Then he knelt next to his classmate, who was lying on the floor.

“Shippou, are you conscious?”

Takuma, moaning in pain as he was, was of course conscious. Tomitsuka had hit him so that he’d stay awake—this was what he’d wanted.

After coughing several times, eventually Takuma simply answered, “Yes.”

“Then stand. Take a short rest near the wall.”

“…All right.”

Takuma, a sense of defeat pounded into him, followed Tomitsuka’s instructions, not knowing why he was hearing them. He staggered over to the wall unsteadily, slowly, while holding his gut where he’d been hit, to the opposite side from where the observers were standing. Resting his back against the wall, he slid down it until he was sitting on the floor.

Once Tomitsuka saw that Takuma was watching him, he walked up in front of Tatsuya.

“…What is it?” asked Tatsuya eventually.

Tomitsuka, looking like he was having a hard time saying something, finally spoke. “Shiba, would you have a match with me?!”

The request, broached after some hesitation, was one that made Tatsuya tilt his head and wonder why.

With the suspicion-filled gaze on him, Tomitsuka averted his eyes uncomfortably. But immediately, he took a leap into that abyss—that was an exaggeration, but he did have enough determination to try bungee jumping, anyway—and looked back into Tatsuya’s eyes.

“I want you to show your true strength to Shippou!”

His gaze burning brightly, Tomitsuka stared at Tatsuya. He probably envisioned a scenario in which Tatsuya accepted as a response to his own masculinity.

But Tatsuya’s confusion only deepened. “I don’t understand why…?”

As soon as he said that, Tomitsuka faltered so hard it was almost funny. “Uhh, right. I guess that was kind of sudden. What I mean is—”

“Could you show to Shippou what a match between two people who have true skill looks like?”

While Tomitsuka was busy being flustered, Hattori took up the explanation for him—and that alone was still incomprehensible to Tatsuya.

“If you want a match of true skill, wouldn’t you and Sawaki be more suitable for it?”

“There’s meaning in you showing your skill here, Shiba.”

Hattori’s explanation was nowhere near enough.

“Brother, it will be fine, won’t it?”

But then support fire—and to Tomitsuka and Hattori, the strongest kind—came flying in.

“If they want you to set an example for an underclassman, I believe that’s a role suited to a student council member.”

The upperclassmen and classmates listening to her speak (except Tatsuya) for some reason all translated student council member to brother.

“In fact, I was just thinking that I’d quite like to see you display your strength as well, Brother.”

Miyuki’s motives were obviously different from Tomitsuka’s. There was a metric ton of irritation behind her smile. And it had crossed the threshold of what he could safely ignore.

“…Well, if you say so.”

Tatsuya changing his mind, or rather making a decision, should have been what Tomitsuka was after. But for some reason, Tomitsuka couldn’t stop himself from feeling like something had just been spoiled for him.

And others, not just him, were feeling the same way.

Hattori had stretched out the reservation for this room because of this right from the start. All the seniors present already knew about the plan for this match. They’d gotten permission, too, so as soon as the battlefield was clear, they could start.

“Please, leave it to me.”

The one who volunteered to clean up all the paper scraps strewn about the floor was Miyuki. She used her CAD, and without a moment’s delay, an indoor airflow gently began to blow. It passed around the room’s corners, whirling in a complicated fashion, and it barely took any time to gather the garbage in one place. Then Miyuki used the vacuum for the room’s maintenance and sucked it all up.

She’d just performed a complex, elaborate spell as though it were nothing, a testament to her skill. The seniors looked at her with approval, Mikihiko and Tomitsuka gave sighs of admiration, and Takuma was shocked—leaving aside the process of hardening the paper scraps, the spell Miyuki had just used was technically superior to his Million Edge.

“Shiba, is that good?” Tomitsuka asked.

“Yeah, it shouldn’t cause a problem.”

Tatsuya handed his jacket to Miyuki. Now he just wore his school uniform.

“Do you want me to take my shoes off?” he asked.

“No, you can keep them on.”

That implied he didn’t care if Tatsuya used kicks with hard shoes.

Tatsuya and Tomitsuka faced off in the center.

Hattori would remain the judge. But this time, he skipped the rules explanation.

“Are you both ready? Then begin!”

Right as Hattori gave the signal, Tatsuya and Tomitsuka both pushed off the floor.

In complete contrast to the previous match, Tomitsuka charged aggressively straight for Tatsuya.

But Tatsuya’s backing up was quicker.

In the blink of an eye, he jumped to the edge of the seminar room, then pointed his handgun-shaped specialized CAD at Tomitsuka.

Loaded into it was a dismantling spell: Mist Dispersion.

Despite the startled look Miyuki gave, Tatsuya pulled his CAD’s trigger.

…And nothing happened.

Thought so.

Miyuki had a hand to her mouth, her face white, while Tatsuya looked as though he’d predicted this. When Tomitsuka came at him with a straight fist, pushed forward by a self-accelerating spell, Tatsuya jumped to the side to dodge it.

It hadn’t been a failed show of strength—he’d predicted his Mist Dispersion would be neutralized.

Tatsuya’s vision showed him an outline, covered in thick clouds and hard to make out—Tomitsuka’s true form. It was Tomitsuka as seen from the information dimension.

The dense clouds were a psionic suit of armor, thickly covering his physical body and its information bodies.

Program Demolition was an anti-magic spell that used psionic pressure to separate a magic program from a target.

But Tomitsuka didn’t fire a psionic bullet to blast away a magic program. With thick psionic armor to cover his “body,” he was preventing any magic programs from getting inside.

If Program Demolition was a cannon, Tomitsuka’s contact-type Program Demolition was a steel rampart. Plus, that rampart didn’t possess such a structure as an information body. It was just a huge amount of psions wrapping around him chaotically. Piercing this wall and applying direct magic to him wouldn’t be easy, even for Tatsuya.

If he attacked indirectly with an event caused by magic, the psionic armor wouldn’t mean anything.

And as long as Tatsuya didn’t use his retrofitted low-output virtual magic region, he was a flawed magician who could only use magic that directly affected a target.

After his fifth charge was dodged, Tomitsuka began to grow impatient.

He was called Range Zero—he didn’t have any ranged magic tricks. But in exchange, he thought, he’d honed his close-combat magic skills to twice those of anyone else.

But his attacks were being handled with ease.

Not with magic, but by a combination of magic and martial arts.

I had guessed he’d be good, but not this good…

Frank admiration began to sprout at his opponent’s skill level. At the same time, his fighting spirit began to boil.

But I won’t lose. At this distance, I can’t possibly lose!

Shippou disappeared from his mind. The goal of this match and his personal role in it also began to fade from his mind. His intentions were converging on one thing: victory.

“They’re amazing! I knew about Tomitsuka’s skill, but not that Shiba was this good.”

“I’m surprised Tomitsuka can even match my man Shiba out there.”

As he listened to his upperclassmen talking, Mikihiko was simply in awe. His opinion was the same as Kirihara’s. He’d never thought they had a classmate who could rival Tatsuya in close combat ability. He felt like this was the first time he’d ever seen Tatsuya having a hard time.

Already, Tatsuya was getting to the point where he wouldn’t be able to simply dodge the attacks. Soon he wouldn’t be able to handle them without counterattacking. With his CAD in his right hand, he was handicapped. Because of the match rules, he couldn’t strike with it. But without that, Tomitsuka’s crazed offensive was driving him into a corner.

Suddenly curious, Mikihiko looked next to him.

Miyuki’s expression was tense as she watched her brother, immersed.

Takuma, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, was overwhelmed by the duel happening before his eyes.

At a glance, it just looked like they were brawling. Actually, kicking techniques were coming out sometimes, so it looked like a simple martial arts match. But each and every strike was woven with advanced magic. His shock was all the stronger because he’d been born with the ability to understand that.

Tomitsuka closed the distance too quickly to see. He was increasing his speed with a self-accelerating spell, but it wasn’t a slipshod kind that implied speed was the only answer. He was controlling it, keeping it just barely within the mental zone where he could consciously keep up with it.

His footing faltered slightly. The floor was shaking with pinpoint precision each time his forward-charging foot hit the ground, rattling his senses. The vibrations were, of course, created by Tatsuya’s magic. But even though he tried to send vibrations to where Tomitsuka stood, they were all being nullified by Program Demolition, which was constantly active (or at least appeared to be). Takuma had experienced that the hard way. But the aftershocks of the vibrations, created a moment later, were a purely physical phenomenon, and Program Demolition couldn’t cancel them out. Had the ground been dirt or a sidewalk, the aftershocks probably would have been too small to perceive. But the seminar room’s floor was made with suitable hardness and elasticity to both soften the impact of falling and to not interfere with movement over it. The magic-based interference had been in consideration of that.

It threw Tomitsuka’s precise and accurate body-controlling calculations to the wind, causing him to pause to reoptimize his motions. Taking advantage of that slight window, Tatsuya pointed his CAD at Tomitsuka and pulled the trigger. And at the exact same time, without any time for Takuma to perceive an activation sequence expanding, an oscillation spell attacked Tomitsuka. It vibrated psions—it was both an oscillation-type spell and a typeless spell at the same time.

The spell didn’t have enough strength to punch through Tomitsuka’s defenses. Takuma guessed that was because the spell prioritized speed over power. He thought that the reason he couldn’t actually perceive any of these activation sequences was that they’d been adjusted specifically for speed. Or maybe it was the CAD’s specs that was responsible.

But even if it wasn’t strong enough to knock Tomitsuka down, that didn’t mean it had zero effect. Hit with an oscillating psion wave, the psionic field surrounding Tomitsuka also shook slightly. It became noise, a smoke curtain, and it dulled Tomitsuka’s senses.

And the next attack was the real one. Palm strikes from Tatsuya’s left hand fired out toward Tomitsuka. Takuma sensed that there was some kind of spell in his palm, too.

His attacks came one after another, none of them having the same pattern as any before, but Tomitsuka once again defended against them. With his Program Demolition–harboring right arm, he stopped the oscillation spell–harboring left palm. As an infinite variety of attacks pummeled him, Tomitsuka continued blocking them all with a single shield.

Tomitsuka’s left hand struck out toward Tatsuya’s stomach. The blow was slow, which actually made it harder to block; Tatsuya just barely let it slip by his right arm.

A spell triggered—Tomitsuka’s acceleration magic, Exploder. As it was in the process of activating, Tatsuya’s own Program Demolition destroyed it.

Tatsuya evaded the follow-up attack and took a leap to the side. On the sidelines, Takuma’s eyes were glued to the action; he’d forgotten to breathe. He couldn’t believe what he’d just sensed. And he felt fear, as well, from his own magician’s senses being thrown so far out of whack.

Tomitsuka’s acceleration spell—the one that had been canceled midactivation. Tatsuya had used that canceled event alteration as a springboard to activate his own self-acceleration spell.

Takuma wanted to shout, You can do that?!

If the shock to his mind had been a little smaller, he doubtless would have. He knew that if two event alterations were the same type, you could activate a second spell without getting in the way of the event-altering force of the first spell. And Exploder created an acceleration vector in a half sphere around its activation point, so acceleration to the side didn’t break the basic premise of this spell.

But it didn’t do anything—it just didn’t get in the way. Taking advantage of someone else’s spell and linking a new event alteration in the direction the natural law of resistance was weakened in? Takuma had never even thought of such a possibility.

What he was seeing before his eyes was still the same old magic he’d always used. Techniques belonging to the same system. But these spells were in a different dimension from his. Takuma’s eyes were glued to the next-level skirmish unfolding in front of him.

I can’t get any attacks to hit!

Tomitsuka was steadily losing his cool.

They hadn’t exactly been fighting for long. Not even ten minutes had gone by since the match started. But separate from his physical senses, his mind felt like it had been fighting for hours and hours.

He commanded the flow. Without a doubt, he had the advantage. He was confident of that. He had the initiative right now, and though he hadn’t landed any clean hits, his blocked strikes were still racking up damage. He could feel it.

Still, Tatsuya wasn’t the only one taking damage. Tomitsuka could feel it building up inside him, too, little by little. He’d blocked all his enemy’s attacks. The damage he felt wasn’t physical—it was, so to speak, illusory damage. But that illusion was still shaking his defenses a little at a time. The one constant built into the ever-changing attack patterns was an untyped oscillation spell. Those vibrations were rebounding off his wall, and at the moment they disappeared, the spell delivered a wave to the wall itself. He felt those waves rattling his psion particles, inflating his psionic field just like a solid undergoing thermal expansion, lowering its density all the while.

Tomitsuka couldn’t fire his own psions far. The farthest he could expand them was so they tightly covered his body. This was the flaw that made him unable to use ranged magic very well. The magic scholar his parents had called had explained that his “core” was extremely rigid, strongly drawing the psions in, and thus psions that would normally have flowed out of him weren’t parting from the source. What Miyuki and Sawaki called contact-type Program Demolition was a product of what was, in a way, an accursed nature.

He’d already made his peace with this nature. He’d worked out how to use ranged magic a little bit as well, and had turned this characteristic into a weapon for close combat that other magicians didn’t have. It was no more than a moderate defense against attacks that hit him with purely physical force like the shock waves Sawaki delivered by accelerating his fist—it was a club secret that the president of the magic martial arts club had given his own technique the embarrassing name “Mach Punch”—but he had absolute faith in it against spells of the sort where the magic program directly touched you.

Unfortunately, that psionic field that he shouldn’t ever be able to expand was dispersing, little by little, under Tatsuya’s attacks.

That fact gave Tomitsuka an indescribable shock. He wasn’t just frightened, he wasn’t just recoiling—he felt like he’d peered into the bottom of Pandora’s box.

The never-expanding psion field kept expanding. Wasn’t that just an impossible hope?

Tomitsuka desperately clamped down on his mind before that fact exhilarated him.

The person he was facing was not an opponent he could beat while thinking of unnecessary things.

Deciding it was time to settle the score, he decided to play his ace.

Psions flooded every part of Tomitsuka’s body. Everyone who was watching could feel that, not just Tatsuya.

His body abruptly accelerated—and only Tatsuya and Sawaki realized it wasn’t because of a self-acceleration spell.

The psionic particles enveloping his body like a formless cloud rapidly began to neaten. Under Tomitsuka’s will, they were controlled into an orderly shape.

With more precision than before, Tomitsuka lashed out with a middle kick.

A heating magic program had been constructed in his foot. If Tatsuya took the kick, he’d take damage equal to that of a microwave oven showering him in electromagnetic waves. Using Program Demolition with his elbow as the affected point, he tried to block the heat magic–upgraded kick.

But just before Tomitsuka’s right foot connected with his left elbow, it unnaturally came to a stop.

The heating spell had been nullified by the Program Demolition fired from Tatsuya’s elbow. But Tomitsuka had worked that into his plans from the very start.

Still in his midkick pose, he sent out a right hook. No, not a hook—it wasn’t a fist, but an open-handed strike. A slap, in other words. And there was no way he could have launched a powerful attack from a position where he couldn’t put his weight into it.

And yet his open-handed strike was equipped with speed and power both. Tatsuya, who had lowered his waist to block the kick, was not in a position to evade the blow.

There was a dull blump.

“Brother!”

A silk-tearing cry rang out.

Tatsuya’s body fell to the floor.

Tomitsuka, in a somehow doll-like pose with his right foot swung down, his right hand having followed through, and standing on only his left leg, blinked dubiously.

“…Didn’t expect Tomitsuka to be so nasty. He went right after my man Shiba’s eardrums.”

Kirihara had seen that Tomitsuka’s open-handed strike was delivered while his palm was cupped and the wind pressure was all focused on the point of impact.

“Whoa, he purposely got knocked back? I can’t believe he withstood Tomitsuka’s Self Marionette with that sort of movement. Shiba’s good!”

While the two seniors were evaluating the exchange, Tatsuya stood back up. As Sawaki had seen, he’d purposely rolled to create distance.

Tomitsuka’s expression was suspicious because he’d felt a hard sensation, but he hadn’t felt like he’d made an impact. If Tatsuya had firmed up his neck to keep his brain from shaking, he would have firmed up his waist and legs as well, which means Tomitsuka would have felt a strong impact. If Tatsuya hadn’t fought against his blow and loosened up to be knocked back, the sensation that came back to Tomitsuka’s palm would have been a soft one. That meant that Tatsuya had both tightened up and relaxed.

Leaving the surprise welling up in his mind for later, Tomitsuka activated Self Marionette again. It was a movement-type spell, a technique that moved his body using only the spell itself. He relaxed the muscles that would resist the magic as much as he could, then carefully put together a magic program that wouldn’t exceed his joints’ articulation.

It wasn’t a spell with which he could move the way he wanted. Because of how modern magic worked, it only reproduced movements based on patterns. But as the previous attack had shown, he could deliver attacks that were impossible from an anatomical and dynamic standpoint.

He made his own body into a marionette, became a puppeteer to control himself, and struck out at Tatsuya with movements that defied all martial arts logic. Tatsuya was watching how the psions incident to his body were moving.

One magic program was covering his whole body. The technique was so complicated that even high-level magicians would have found it difficult to reproduce. The psions probably moved so they wouldn’t get in the spell’s way. The chaotic psions simply spinning around his body had organized, ordered themselves, and the information bodies were being reconstructed in such a way that they wouldn’t allow any spells but Self Marionette near.

The orderless chaos transformed into an orderly cosmos.

Order was form, and form was structure.

Tatsuya’s dismantling was the destruction of structure. It couldn’t break the formless, but if something had form, even if it was only information, he could dismantle it.

The cloud of psions that hadn’t had a form while covering Tomitsuka’s body fell into a form in accordance with his spell.

Tatsuya understood this through Elemental Sight, his power to see the Idea’s status—its form. And there, he saw the chance of a lifetime.

He injected psions into his CAD. He wasn’t pretending to use it—he was going to use the dismantling magic stored within. The spell he chose was Program Dispersion.

The trigger was pulled.

Tatsuya’s information structure–destroying spell blasted away Tomitsuka’s now-structured armor.

An exposed combat puppet closed in on him.

A mass of psions condensed in Tatsuya’s left hand.

Firmer, firmer—firm enough to pierce even Tomitsuka’s armor if it came back up.

Not to hide his strength, but to grasp victory. He chose not his specialty magic, which might have been stopped by insufficient armor, but a magic bullet, which would certainly shoot through insufficient armor.

A high-pressure, high-hardness farstrike he’d learned to use against nonhuman foes—the AP Psionic Bullet (name courtesy of Yakumo)—fired from his hand and pierced the combat puppet that was Tomitsuka.

Taking the insubstantial gunshot, Tomitsuka careened backward on his own. This was a side effect of Self Marionette. That he’d been hit with a hard impact from the front had overwritten his magic program’s variables. When the spell tried to execute with an inconsistent command, it threw a logic error and crashed.

Launched by his own spell, Tomitsuka fell to the floor, limbs sprawled, not moving. Because his muscles had been so relaxed, he didn’t have any time to take the fall with a roll, which left him with a mild concussion.

“The winner is Shiba.”

Hattori, having confirmed that, proclaimed Tatsuya the victor.

“Bro—”

About to say “Brother,” Miyuki looked down. She’d probably forgotten herself and nearly dived into Tatsuya’s arms before remembering her role and barely restraining herself.

When her face came back up, Tatsuya sent a smile her way.

She smiled back, and it was like a huge flower blossoming. Nodding to her, Tatsuya faced back the way he’d been turned.

He put his right-hand CAD back in its holster and walked over toward Tomitsuka, who was still on the floor.

“Tomitsuka, can you stand?” he asked, offering his right hand.

Tomitsuka remained on the floor as he grabbed it with his right hand.

“Thanks.”

With Tatsuya’s hand’s help, Tomitsuka stood up. He was still a little unsteady, but the concussion didn’t seem to have been very bad. He quickly got his feet back under him.

“Just like I thought—you’re strong, Shiba,” said Tomitsuka honestly, removing his helmet.

“Same goes to you. This one hurt.” Tatsuya pointed to his reddened cheek and grinned.

A figure dashed by them.

“What—hey, Shippou!”

Without turning around, Takuma fled from seminar room three.

The empty space behind the robot club garage, nestled next to the outdoor training grounds, was used as a secret meeting place because people barely ever visited it.

But Takuma hadn’t come here because he’d known that. He’d simply been running away from where others could see him, and that had led him here.

In front of a tree—not a particularly gigantic one with any special attributes, but a fairly large one—Takuma stood for a while, staring at nothing. But then, as though he couldn’t hold in his nervous emotions any longer, he suddenly began to punch the tree with his right hand.

“Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

Over and over again, his fist met the bark.

“Give it a rest, Shippou. Look, you’re bleeding.”

Just as his swearing began to falter, a voice called out to him from behind.

Takuma whipped around. There, he spotted a miffed Kasumi.

“Saegusa, you—!”

As Takuma turned a sharp glare on her, Kasumi put up her hands and shook them. “Hey, don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t following you or anything. It’s a complete coincidence that I’m here.”

After finishing, she walked up to Shippou with a frown. She took out a handkerchief, then folded it up into the shape of a bandage before taking the still-glaring Takuma’s hand.

“What’s that for?!”

“Great… The skin is peeling off, you know.”

Scowling at the blood, Kasumi began to wrap her handkerchief around the confused boy’s hand.

“Sorry, but I still don’t have permission to use healing magic. You’d better get to the nurse’s office.”

Takuma didn’t respond. He just stared at the handkerchief as the blood crept into it.

“Oh, you don’t have to give that back.”

“…”

Takuma still didn’t move a muscle, so Kasumi sighed. “Looks like you lost pretty handily.”

“…”

“Guess the upperclassmen wall is just too high.”

“…How?”

Takuma’s gaze was still lowered.

“Huh? How what?”

But now that Kasumi had finally gotten a reaction, she figured she’d respond accordingly.

“How the hell are they so strong?!”

A bitter cry. Probably the kind you’d use the expression shouting himself hoarse for, thought Kasumi—and she had a feeling she knew whom he meant by they.

“They’re in high school, too, aren’t they?! They’re only one year above me! How are they still that freaking strong?!”

“Maybe there isn’t a reason.”

“What…?”

Houston, we have conversation, thought Kasumi, but she didn’t say something that foolish, of course. “They’re just strong because they are. I mean… If you really want a reason, they probably worked really hard to get that strong, right?”

“But I—”

“Yeah, I know you’ve been trying hard. I’ve been putting my best foot forward, too. But if they’re stronger, doesn’t that mean they’ve been trying even harder?”

“…”

“I’m not denying you have talent, here. Most of my strength comes from talent too anyway.”

“…”

“But the strength you’re so shocked at—maybe it came from something other than talent.”

Takuma looked up and into Kasumi’s eyes.

A single frustrated tear had fallen from his own.

“Anyway, I’m not really interested in this whole being strong thing. But if you want to get stronger, that’s your problem—and I think your strength is something only you have.”

Just like she said, she easily turned away from him and disappeared from Takuma’s sight.

One more time, not with a fist but with a palm, he struck out at the tree trunk with his rage.

After parting with the club committee members, starting with Hattori, and returning to the student council room, Tatsuya sat at his desk and booted up his device’s communication function. As his fingers darted over the keyboard with blinding speed, the message he was composing was for someone in the same room.

“Yes, Master?”

Active telepathy, its target restricted to only Tatsuya, came back in response.

“Have you doctored the data?”

His written communication, which he didn’t want the other student council members to know about…

“As ordered, I recorded false data in real time.”

…garnered the answer he was hoping for.

“Master, have I been of help to you?”

“Yeah, you did well,” he replied to the evil spirit who had guarded his secret. “You can rest for today.”

“Yes, Master. Entering suspend mode.”

After ordering the doll to go to sleep, Tatsuya erased all records of his communication.