Volume 9, Chapter 3 - What Miss A Left Behind

“Ange-san!”

Machina had detected someone making a phone call.

No one was going to answer that call, but they managed to trace who had made the call quickly enough.

It came from the Fujita home – Mutsuki’s family home.

Once they arrived, Mutsuki’s younger sister, Fujita Chiaki, rushed out. She had been hesitantly watching things outside the house and tears filled her eyes when she saw someone she knew.

“Are you okay?”

Ange just about asked “you’re still alive?” instead but caught herself.

“Um, something isn’t right. The TV is weird and I don’t hear anyone at all talking outside.”

The girl was panicking, but she had not fully grasped the situation yet. She may have been starting to realize that people had vanished from the city. Ange patted her on the back to help calm her.

Once she checked inside, she found the Fujita family was confused, but all five of them were there: father, mother, older sister, younger sister, and littlest sister.

They had apparently eaten dinner together and started watching TV as a family when the TV suddenly started acting oddly. A few shows did not start when they were scheduled to begin. The channels showing recorded shows continued as normal, but the live news programs all showed empty studios. The older sister had checked some websites that were updated in real time, but they had suddenly stopped updating as well.

They had initially assumed there was some kind of trouble, but things only grew more and more disconcerting and no one answered when they calling the TV stations. The internet was functioning on the software side of things, but no one was accessing any of the sites.

It had felt a lot like their family had been cut off from the world, so they were scared and trying to find a way to escape.

Explaining the situation to the Fujita family would only scare them, so Lucia snapped his fingers to put the five of them in a deep sleep. The trio carried them to their respective rooms and placed them in their beds. They could assume this whole situation was only a dream.

And after placing a stuffed animal in the arms of Mutsumi, the third sister…

“What does this mean?” asked Ange.

“There is something in common between all of the people unaffected by this situation,” said Machina.

“Kind of makes me happy,” said Lucia.

The three of them walked outside.

With the Fujita family asleep, Machina could not detect anyone else in the world connecting to the communications network. They spotted an airplane that had landed safely, so apparently the pilots were avoiding an accident and then falling under its effects.

But there were exceptions who were not affected by it: Fujita Mutsuki’s family, Ange, Machina, and Lucia.

In other words…

“It looks like the people who Mutsuki-kun loved are unaffected.”

“…”

“Th-that feels too optimistic to me, but I can’t deny the possibility.”

Ange and Machina blushed and tried to dodge the issue, but that did best describe the current situation.

It was unlikely Mutsuki had done this consciously. Leaving his family alone in an otherwise empty world would be dooming them to a living hell, so something subconscious inside him must have created these exceptions like some kind of bug in the system.

But what did it mean for this bug to have occurred?

“…”

“What do we do?”

They exchanged a glance.

They knew what they had to do. First, they had to save transformed Fujita Mutsuki, break free of this situation, and return humanity to normal.

Thanks to that bug, they were the only ones who could do that…no, they were the only ones who would want to do it.

But wanting to do it did not tell them exactly what they had to do.

How could they save Mutsuki now that he had fused with Lilith? Would they have fight against Micha, Schwarze, and Ren who had sided with that fusion? And even if it all worked flawlessly, was there any way to restore the humans who had melted away?

“Let’s head to FeTUS HQ.”

The first to speak up was Machina.

“Is there something there?”

“I do not know, but Miss A told us to return to the sanctuary. There may be something there.”

“That’s a pretty flimsy hope,” sighed Lucia.

They had too little in the way of guidance, so Ange was unsure if it was even worth going with Machina.

Drip.

“…?”

But then she felt some wetness on her cheek.

It was water…seawater.

Thinking it was rain, she looked up.

“Huh?”

She saw an enormous structure floating in the night sky, as if placing a lid over the city.

It was so big that Ange and Lucia could not tell what it was. Machina was more familiar with artificial objects, so she finally realized it was a ship. But she could only tell it was the bottom of a super-massive cruise ship.

However, all three of them could tell where that ship was headed.

It was moving toward the mountain that overlooked the city.

Which meant it was headed toward Megutono Academy that stood at the peak.

“Hop on!”

With a powerful sound of scraping metal, three cars parked at nearby houses changed form.

The engines alone were extracted and they took grasshopper-like shapes. The driver’s seats moved up to the heads with four tires surrounding each one.

Machina hopped onto the seat for one and Ange and Lucia followed suit after a moment of hesitation.

Then the total of 12 tires began rotating at high speed.

The grasshopper engines surrounded by the tires were ejected like coil shooters. They launched straight toward the mountain. Gravity pulled them down partway through, but the grasshopper portion detonated the gasoline in the instant of landing to instantly reaccelerate them.

They arrived at Megutono Academy on the peak faster than the big but slow-moving ship.

The three of them landed below the familiar clocktower.

At the same time, they saw two people jump down on top of the clock tower.

“Miss E, Jiyuuni Ange, and Satowa. We are here to meet you.”

“Fujita loves you too and wants you by his side. So come with us.”

It was Ren and Schwarze. That confirmed who was on that ship.

“Get in.”

There was no time to chat. Machina made a split-second decision and opened the tower door.

As soon as the three of them rushed in, the floor within was split in two. The inside of the tower was designed to act as an elevator to the lower level, so slicing the floor naturally created a pit straight down.

While the three fell, they could see Schwarze and Ren pursuing them.

“I was hit by a barrage of defenses last time I was here!”

“And I will use those to delay them. …If I can.”

FeTUS HQ’s alarms blared at the presence of three intruders. Shutters covered up the pit and an electric current rushed in to attack.

Machina reached out a hand and the Witch’s command had the shutters pause just long enough for the three of them to pass through and then shut tight. The anti-angel electric current was reprogrammed to wait until those three had passed and then be emitted upwards.

“It’s no use, Miss E!”

The closed shutters were carved through in mere seconds and the two new intruders passed through. The waves of electric current were shredded with claws and a sword.

FeTUS Witches Misses B and C did not waste the time to unlock the path ahead, so they destroyed the defenses instead.

Even while forcibly breaking their way through, they moved faster than the three who were simply falling.

“What do we do now?”

“I want time to search for whatever Miss A was talking about once we arrive in the sanctuary. You will have to stop them here, Jiyuuni-san.”

“Don’t blame me if I kill them!”

Ange raised Prominence toward those charging in at her.

“Syzygy!!”

The fire burning within her sword turned to plasma and erupted out.

It grew to a beam large enough to fill the entire elevator shaft and was launched upwards. It took less than a second for it to envelop the two pursuers.

The inside of that was hotter than the center of the sun. Not even FeTUS had heat-reduction devices capable of enduring that, so the only defense was to transport the dimension itself like Machina did. But they would have to first stop their fall to create a “staring point” for that transport.

Or they should have.

“Lancelot!!”

“Eh? Wait!”

Lance-wielding Ren charged straight down the center of the beam.

Ange panicked when her collar was grabbed. Machina was surprised and distracted too, but…

“We are here because Adam has given us life. Do not defy him, for that is defying the very laws of nature.”

“Gh!”

Schwarze also caught up and grabbed Machina’s hand.

Machina tried to send out golden thread to bind her, but the thread unraveled and vanished like dust as soon as if touched Black Cat’s skin.

“The Anti-Code? That was fast.”

“This is the law of nature. Defying us is defying your very nature as a living being.”

All of FeTUS’s tools were programmed machines. There was an Anti-Code that would neutralize all of them and all of the Witches could use it.

However, it was supposed to take a fair amount of time to insert the code, but Miss C had done it in an instant. Even though that had never been her forte since she preferred to fight more directly.

Those two’s energy boost had been far greater than they imagined.

“Tch. Adam’s doping? Play fair!”

“What a rude thing to say. Obeying him is an inevitability for and the duty of all women.”

Ange tried to resist, but she could not at all keep up with Miss B’s speed or strength, despite having fought on equal footing with her just a few weeks earlier.

The women chosen by Adam could draw out more than 100% of their body’s strength. That power had helped Ange a few times in the past, but now it was working in those two.

“Come with us. We can live in eternal bliss with Fujita.”

And more than that, their enthusiasm was much greater.

While the fleeing three were only trying to get away, Ren and Schwarze truly thought they were doing the right thing.

“I realized over the past five days that this world has gone insane. When those men were introduced to ‘Haramiya Koishi’ as a girl with the misfortune to be born poor, not one of them felt a twinge of sympathy. They laughed, greedily indulged in her body, and said nothing at all to her while thanking the man who had sold her to them.”

“Society is fundamentally broken. I was created to kill people more efficiently. The politicians who used me to bring down their rivals are now heroes in their countries. The people who kill most efficiently and deceive most effectively are the ones who receive all the praise.”

“People’s souls have been corrupted by discord. They are corrupted to the core by original sin.”

“Fujita is attempting to correct that, so you should help. This is the only way to rid the world of its insanity. We can only rely on the Perfect One!”

“Jiyuuni, you must understand. Metatron, the flame of indignation at the source of your power, is supposed to be anger toward the world’s discord.”

“…”

Ange flinched when they touched on her personal weak point.

Only once it was put to words did she realize that she and Metatron were the same as the people supporting Fujita Mutsuki now.

They were the same as her when she turned herself into an all-destroying bomb out of her rage toward the human world.

They said Mutsuki was the one who had felt that same rage and turned himself into a being who could change it all.

“Oh, shut the hell up.” Lucia flipped around while falling and circled behind Schwarze and Ren. “Who cares about the laws of nature? I love Mutsuki-kun, and that’s why I don’t like what’s going on here.”

He sent a karate chop toward the back of their heads to end this instantly.

His karate chops could pass through flesh, so they could directly attack the human nervous system. A single attack could knock them out.

“!?”

Except his attack was stopped before they hit.

An arm grew from Schwarze’s back and grabbed his hand. It was a slender, female arm.

“Ohhhhhhh!”

A moment later, the arm grew as thick as a log and punched Lucia away.

The power was great enough to cancel out the energy of his fall and he was launched upwards. The arm returned to normal thickness while the owner reverted her tall body to normal size while riding on Schwarze’s back.

And she fixed her maid uniform that had shifted out of place.

“You too, Miss D?”

“Please stop this resistance, Miss E. FeTUS exists to stabilize the human world and the time for our greatest task has finally arrived.”

It was Daima Makoto. There had been three Witch pursuers from the beginning, but she had shrunk down to hide behind Schwarze.

The fall ended just them. The five of them landed at the bottom level of FeTUS HQ, a hallway lined with countless doors. Lucia landed a short time later.

They glared at each other – three against three.

“What are we supposed to find here!?” asked Ange.

“We need time to search, but it does not look like we will get it,” replied Machina.

“Tch. They’re only human. I can stop them by myself,” said Lucia.

Being punched must have pissed him off because he stepped out in front.

But Makoto did not seem remotely intimidated by a demon, despite the supposed compatibility issue. She adjusted her white lace glove that continued past her elbow, and…

“That is impossible.”

A moment later, her fist grew large enough to fill the entire hallway.

Lucia and the other two stared in shock as that fist was mercilessly swung their way.

They were sent flying.

Ange and Machina put up their guards and Lucia tried to escape by turning himself to liquid, but all three were launched with the exact same force. The glove must have been made to repel water, so Lucia could not get to her skin.

“Gh…damn her.”

“Miss D was the final guardian of this sanctuary. That means her abilities have been customized to be most effective within the HQ.”

“I would prefer not to punch students, but you leave me no choice.”

She raised her left hand and it too grew large enough to fill the hallway.

It was large and powerful.

She had a power boost from Adam, but there was also no way to defend against this simple attack. At this rate, they would be knocked out by the simple impact rather than anything related to skill.

“Get inside where we have some defenses!”

Machina struck the floor.

A door down the hallway flew open to reveal a grassy field and blue sky.

The three of them rushed inside simultaneously. The fist was too large to fit through the door, but the doorframe was shattered from the blow.

From the field side, the door itself disappeared as soon as the frame was destroyed. They had temporarily managed to isolate themselves from their pursuers.

“They’ll be in here soon, so we need to search! Miss A must have left something for us!”

“But what!?”

They had escaped in here, but the grassy field really was just that. Miss A’s beloved table sat in the center. It contained a washed tea set and a few cookie tins. A game of chess sat there unfinished and the stuffed rabbit she always played against was there too.

A new door appeared in the grassy field. Without bothering to check who had accessed it, Machina bound it in gold thread to prevent it from opening.

Ange and Lucia searched for “something”, but that was difficult when they did not know what it was. They checked all around the field, but it was only a hologram.

Once accessed, it disappeared to reveal a hall with playing card patterns on the floor. That was the place Ange had burned before.

The only thing that remained unchanged was the table. Ange and Lucia ran over, assuming there was something in the tea set or chess set.

At the same time, a hole was blasted in the wall rather than the bound door.

Misses B, C, and D rushed in.

“Kh.”

They were trapped. They would have to fight, even though they had already been shown how outmatched they were.

Ange, Machina, and Lucia stood side by side and the three Witches faced them.

“Myrddin.”

Ren’s lance returned to being a short sword.

“Prominence – Loop!”

Ange split her large sword into two blades to fight back.

“Shut up.”

“!?”

A third party’s voice was suddenly heard in the sanctuary.

It was a quiet, mumbled voice. Ange and Lucia did not even hear it. Ange rushed to strike Ren with her dual swords.

But Ren did not even raise her weapon.

In fact, the three Witches – no, all four Witches including Machina – had stopped moving altogether.

They could not move. They could clench their teeth, but changing their expression was about all they could do.

Their clothes had suddenly become as hard as rock. They had received a fair amount of muscular modification, but witches were generally powerless without their tools, so they were motionless.

“Yahhhhhhhhh!”

But Ange did not notice and continued rushing in.

“Stop that, you savage!”

Ren’s short sword flew from her hand like it had a mind of its own and it blocked the slash.

“Wait, eh!?”

The scabbard flew toward Ange as well, and with enough speed that she needed both swords to block them. She panicked.

But Ren was even more surprised.

“Excalibur!? Impossible! That’s a hidden code!”

This interception did not seem to be her idea.

Ange put some distance between them and the sword returned to its scabbard, which then reattached itself to Ren’s hip as if to say its job was complete.

The battle ended calmly.

“You?”

Lucia was the first to realize who was speaking.

The stuffed rabbit on the table had an obvious red light in its eyes.

“What is all this hubbub about? Oh, an angel and demon have gotten in. Do something about that, will you? I really would prefer not to be burned like last time.”

There was no tension at all in its voice, but it had also kept the four Witches frozen from the moment it began moving. All six people there were dumbfounded.

“Who are you? Was Miss A…telling us to meet you?”

Miss A had always had this partner by her side while having tea here. She had also sometimes played chess with it. But none of them had known it had a mind inputted into it.

The four Witches were confused and the rabbit blinked its red eyes.

“Miss A? Oh, yes.” It must have realized who they meant. There was a hint of sadness in its voice. “Henriette… Yes, she is dead. She held out for quite a long time, but it seems her time finally came.”

“Dead?”

Machina had not been there, so she alone gasped. The other three seemed to have already accepted it in some way, but hearing it stated so bluntly must still have been hard. A shadow fell over their faces.

The rabbit picked up on the situation based on the differences in their expressions and its red eyes flashed.

“Ugh.”

With a quiet groan, Ren, Schwarze, and Makoto fell to their knees.

At the same time, Machina could move once more and stumbled in place.

“What did you do to those three?”

They had fallen and she had been freed. She appreciated that the rabbit had taken her side, but she was still worried about those enemies who were like big sisters to her.

“I injected them with wormwood. They have simply fallen asleep with a nice, lightheaded feeling. They will wake back up in two or three hours.”

A close look showed the three of them were indeed only sleeping. They had apparently been given a knockout code through their hardened clothing.

Even with the boost from Adam’s power, they had been defeated so easily.

Ange and Lucia had no idea what was going on, but they knew enough to be cautious of this extraordinary newcomer.

“I detected abnormal values in the sleeping trio’s physical abilities. And here we have an angel, a demon, and the child who left surgical scars on Henriette’s stomach. I can only conclude that the time of Adam is upon us.”

“At least we don’t have to explain that.”

“Please have a seat. But given my form, you will have to prepare your own tea.”

The previous hologram rebooted and the grassy field returned.

Miss B and the other two collapsed Witches were left behind and did not enter the field. Ange and Lucia put away their weapons for the time being.

The three of them sat at the table.

The stuffed rabbit’s eyes continued to flash. It was apparently using the network to gather information on the current state of the world.

“Who are you? I don’t know much about computers, but are you what they call an AI?”

Ange and Machina remained cautious, but Lucia spoke casually to it since he could shrug off an attack from a machine.

“I am nothing as old-fashioned as artificial intelligence. The evolution of life inevitably approaches a breaking point and intelligence is no different. Creating intelligence means creating a child that will eventually take its own life.” The rabbit’s eyes shined as it opened a tin of cookies. “In the end, all human actions – be it going to space, creating people, or constructing a virtual intelligence – comes back to earning their daily bread. By growing and harvesting wheat. Civilizations role is to develop the techniques and intelligence needed to mix that wheat with sugar, bake it, and create delicious cookies.”

It was apparently multifunctional because it picked up a cookie and bit into it with its front teeth. Whatever the structure of its mouth was like, it ate the cookie up.

“Henriette loved to find out what kind of soil would produce the most wheat. On the other hand, I preferred creating the most efficient sickle for harvesting that wheat.”

“!”

Machina reacted to that.

The rabbit referred to Miss A as Henriette. That was a name that 600-year-old Alice Arc had used for about 100 years during the 17th century. That was right about when she had established FeTUS.

Machina knew the name of the Witch who had helped her do that. While Alice had worked hard to create the soil that was FeTUS, that individual had been in charge of combat and had developed Witches’ wisdom and weapons, such as the springs that were much like the sickles to harvest the wheat grown from that soil.

“Are you…Miss Y?”

“Miss Y? You mean of that Y Device?”

Ange recognized that name. The Y Device had given them the most trouble in their fight against FeTUS.

“You could say I am a copy of a someone’s memories. I have no way of saying how similar I am to the original, though. …Oh, could you bring me some chocolate?”

“Yes, yes. …Wait, this box is nothing but hard candy.”

“Really!? Oh, Henriette, you ate my chocolate, didn’t you? You always would eat everything and replace it all with hard candy.”

Lucia was relaxed and seemed to get along with the rabbit fairly well, but…

“But enough about who I am. I am more curious about who you are.”

The red eyes directed at the boy were unliving balls of glass, but they held a sharpness that seemed to see right through him.

“You have the same DNA sequence as Eve’s womb, the Holy Grail that Henriette spent her entire life creating. Since you appear to be a demon, could it be?”

Machina’s eyes widened upon hearing he had the same DNA sequence as Eve.

Lucia also looked somewhat surprised. But only that his secret had been discovered. It only made him scratch the back of his head.

“Are you…the previous Eve?”

“Seems that way. Or at least my body is.”

He moved his hand in front of his face and the skin of that hand, that face, and the rest of his body grew brown. His androgynous build grew rounder and more feminine.

“It apparently belonged to a girl named Lucya who was chosen by Avalon, the Adam from a few thousand years ago,” he calmly explained. “Although I had my female cells sealed away. Oh, but I can turn back pretty easily. The seal placed on me by that old hag Lilith is coming undone. I think she doesn’t care much about me anymore.”

Machina and Ange both stared.

Machina’s was the obvious reaction. FeTUS had spent so long gradually developing the Holy Grail needed to save humanity from the rivalry, yet the original they were trying to reproduce had been so close by.

As for Ange…

“That’s the perfect person to keep around Adam. Although sealing away your sex kind of defeats the purpose.”

“Lilith set that up. She was thankful she had created me, but she lacked confidence in herself. She was afraid Mutsuki-kun – that is, Adam – would choose me again since I was young and she had grown so old. That’s why she tried to restrict me by making me a guy.”

“I see.”

The other two were still too shocked to say much, but Miss Y seemed to have figured something out. Her eyes stopped glowing for a bit as she began to think.

But she stopped that line of thought before finishing.

“So this boy is what remains of Eve and Miss E is an Eve-based clone.” She looked to Ange. “Then who are you?”

“Eh? Who am I? I’m Jiyuuni Ange of the angel combat division.”

“Is that all? Hm, your DNA is normal, your parents were some nobodies, and you have nothing special about you save for your exceptional Fruit of Knowledge.”

“Well, excuse me for having nobody parents. Not that I ever knew them.” Ange was angry, but then she calmly continued. “I was simply made Fujita Mutsuki’s bodyguard because I was in the combat division.”

“And no other reason?”

“Um…”

Finally, she recalled something that had flashed through her mind earlier.

She was different from those other two.

The world had changed based on Fujita Mutsuki and his Adam DNA. With the exception of this rabbit since she was not a living creature, all life forms around the world had been changed.

The only people unaffected were Mutsuki’s family, Lucia whose DNA was closest to the Adam DNA, and Machina whose womb was a duplication of that.

She alone did not fit in there.

“…”

What did that mean?

She was not sure if she understood that or not. She bit her lip and looked away from those flashing eyes.

Had anyone noticed the flush to her cheeks?

“Well, no matter.” The stuffed rabbit turned back toward Lucia. “The current Adam boy, Fujita Mutsuki, is both Adam and a modern human. That means the source of his bloodline is the previous pair: Avalon and Lucya.”

“Oh, so I might be able to physically interfere with him even now.”

“If that body is based on Fujita-kun, then it contains a large number of your cells after you healed him so many times. The possibility is high.”

Lucia and Machina began working out a plan.

Mutsuki’s cells contained a large number of Lucia’s cells. Enough to change his biological sex.

Lucia could get in there. And only into the Mutsuki part of that Mutsuki-Lilith mixture.

And if he could get in there…

“O’clock, lend Miss E your power.”

It was not visible in the grassy field hologram, but the giant rabbit decoration in the actual hall leaned forward. It entered the field and made a straining sound as it stood up.

“Hee hee. This is my greatest masterpiece. I assure you it has a 100% chance of defeating any intelligent being.”

Miss Y tossed Machina a pocket watch she had pulled from somewhere.

It needed to be wound and the second hand ran a little slow.

“Thank you. You can entrust Miss A’s will with us.”

Machina tightly wound it.

“Hmph. Her will is not what matters.”

That was apparently the startup switch. When the giant rabbit began to move, the stuffed one turned to the side.

She faced the rocking chair Miss A always used.

She said nothing more, so the others took a step back.

Lucia, Machina, and even Ange did.

“That takes care of the three Witches, but he’s bound to have a few angels defending him,” said Ange.

“I will deal with them,” said Machina. “FeTUS and Miss A have spent centuries researching how angels use their flames and how to control them. The result of all that research resides within me.”

“Once we find Mutsuki-kun, I’ll contact him,” said Lucia. “I’ll find some way of drawing that old hag Lilith out of him. And then…”

“Defeating demons is an angel’s job.”

They knew what they had to do.

The only remaining opponents were the living being closest to being classified as a god and Michael, the glorious sword of heaven that humanity worshiped like a god.

They could not imagine how outmatched they would be here, but they had been given the will to fight back.

They were proud of that fact alone, which only solidified their resolve.

They were proud that they wanted to save Mutsuki.

When the grassy field hologram disappeared, they saw the hole in the collapsed elevator hall outside the half-destroyed hall.

If they looked up through there, they were sure to see the ship on which he rode.

They brought their feet together and leaped outside.

“…”

But the other two failed to notice that Ange alone seemed somehow distracted.