Inside an ordinary family home, after receiving guests, a middle-aged woman who was little more than skin and bones and two outsiders were turning the house upside down, rummaging through every corner.
It was not because they were scammers, as the middle-aged woman’s daughter had told others, that they were wrecking a home someone had to live in.
On the contrary, they were people who would never have visited while the owner of this house was still sound.
Though if one were to ask whether they were good people who did not commit crimes, the sight of the household belongings overturned would be enough to say they were not.
“As expected, there’s no information here about the protagonist of another world. ...Judging by the shoes left at the entrance, the daughter of this house seems to have run away. Shall we go find her? Or leave her be?”
The leader of a group of murderers who had no qualms about killing people, and a girl who gave orders to those murderers in place of that taciturn leader.
To others, the idea that those close to “evil” were going to look for the daughter who had run away would have been chilling, but in truth it was the opposite.
The daughter’s ability was useful to them, so they intended to find her and protect her before people from another side came and broke her even further.
The group they had created was by no means a group made of goodness, kind enough to protect someone for no reason; socially speaking, it was rather an evil criminal organization. But it did possess a minimum line of decency.
The line that it would not allow infighting among its members, and that it would never touch anyone necessary to the group.
And the ability possessed by the daughter of this house was well within the line that made her eligible to be included in that group.
“Yes, then let’s go find her. I already connected a thread so we can locate her at any time. As for the people out front, it looks like they were dragged here as bait, so shall we just dispose of them appropriately?”
Half-listening to the girl’s words, the brown-bobbed woman walked with a vacant expression toward the people beyond the front door, then suddenly stopped.
The girl walking beside her while holding the woman’s hand also stopped and looked at the women waiting for them outside.
Bait.
Worthless bait, left behind because she had thought that if she simply ran away, they would immediately chase after her. As the girl wondered why her master had stopped before that bait, she grinned.
“Ah, shall I dispose of them on my end? There is no reason for you to dirty your hands, Master.”
A black current rose from the girl’s hand. The wind generated by it alone was fierce enough to split the walls and send shoes flying outside, torn apart.
It was fired powerfully, meant to sweep away the bait blocking their path. There was no way a girl who assisted the protagonist standing at the peak of a psychic battle series could ever be weak. And yet the current the girl manifested merely tickled Erika and Inna’s hair as they stood outside, then vanished.
“You should have had the sense to move out of Master’s way. To think you would dare stand in Master’s path and resist—you really must be desperate to die.”
Contrary to her words, the girl’s mind was working busily. A technique that fired currents was among the harder ones to block. If they had stopped it as if it were nothing, then it was better to approach from another angle.
The black current stretching from the girl’s hand no longer extended outward; instead, the girl’s shadow stretched toward them.
Rather than a current that exerted physical force, the shadow clinging to the ground and far more difficult to weaken was closer to a jab, meant to discover how the opponent had blocked that fierce, sharp current.
But even if the girl thought of it as a jab, to those who had no way to block the shadow, it was no different from the scythe of the reaper.
“Mm, the one who’s brainwashed is the woman back there, right? Since this isn’t even a fight against a brainwasher, and I’m fighting in your place, will you grant me one request later?”
“A request?”
Along with Inna’s carefree voice, the ground rose up and blocked the entrance together with the shadow. The shadow scratched the earth several times, but after confirming that the ground restored itself again, it struggled without finding another route and rejoined the girl.
What mattered in a fight between psychics was keeping one’s own psychic ability hidden from the opponent while figuring out what the opponent’s psychic ability was.
In that sense, the fact that even the girl, who had fought many psychics before, could not guess the ability of the enemy before her at all was the same as saying she could not estimate how strong the opponent was.
And of course, there was no way she could guess.
The fierce current, under the effect of Influence, had become a hand that gently stroked her, and the ground she stood upon, under the effect of Influence, had become a shield to protect her.
Even the heroine of a psychic battle series could not possibly infer a power that made the world itself protect her.
“Master. To face them properly, I think I’ll have to release my power. May I have your permission?”
If she could not understand the ability, then she would simply trample the opponent with overwhelming firepower and speed, so thoroughly that they could not even react.
To do that, the girl first sought the permission she needed from her master, but her master gave no answer and merely extended her left hand forward.
Her left hand had taken a shape in which the thumb pressed down on the index finger—the shape of a hand about to flick someone on the forehead.
“Surely... you’re not going to do it yourself?”
As if the slightly frightened voice of the girl, who could one-sidedly slaughter psychics unaccustomed to life-or-death battles, had been the signal, the woman’s index finger pointed forward. And then began a soundless collapse.
It opened a gaping hole in the earth that had blocked the entrance. The walls around where they stood could no longer withstand the impact and disintegrated into powder.
A soundless miracle, hard to believe had been created by a human, was drawn away by the white lightning that sprang forth with a crackling sound, unable to advance toward Yu Inna and Erika, and quietly vanished.
The white-haired girl seemed to have blocked it by stretching out her right hand and using the supernatural ability of white lightning.
Though she must have overexerted herself, her right arm trembling, Erika’s blue eyes stared straight at the enemies before her with anger in them.
“What are you?”
Confusion, born from not having expected murderers to appear—murderers who were not from the violation-genre side, presumed to use abilities related to the mind, but who had no hesitation in instantly blowing away part of a house and unleashing a strike capable of killing people—and anger born from having her life threatened.
“Is there any reason for us to tell you? Once we leave, you’ll immediately report us to the police or the Association, so there’s no reason for us to give you information first...”
As Erika’s emotions surged with the first anger she had felt in a place she had thought was a false world, the girl’s words poured oil on the fire.
Blocking the [Strike] in front of Inna, and her ability activating—both had been coincidences. With the system completely unresponsive, it had been an action she took while relying solely on instinct.
Inna, who had come here only because she listened to her, had nearly died. It did not matter if Inna’s true identity was nothing more than a fake heroine from a dating sim.
She seemed like one of the few real people in this world.
The thought that such a person had almost died made her ignore the speculation that there was no guarantee her psychic ability would appear again next time.
As the emerald-haired girl quietly tried to extend her shadow while watching Erika approach with clenched fists, the woman wearing glasses took them off.
“It’s been... a long time. I didn’t know you had come here too.”
Erika walked forward, looking only ahead because she did not know when another ambush might come, and Yu Inna gazed fondly at Erika’s back, the back of the girl who had protected her, without the slightest intention of listening even if the words were directed at her.
With both of them ignoring the murky voice of the woman, the emerald-haired girl grew angry and thumped her chest, but the woman who had spoken merely smiled, as though her pride had not been wounded.
“This doesn’t seem... like a good time to talk. Then for today... I’ll be going.”
Before they even had time to say something like where do you think you’re running, the girl’s shadow swallowed both the woman who had been wearing glasses and the girl at the same time, then disappeared.
Faced with the opponent’s flawless escape, Erika held her trembling right arm with her left and continued to look down at the place where they had vanished.
The first meeting between the protagonist of a psychic battle series, permitted to possess the strongest power in her worldview, and Erika, who possessed the yet-incomplete strongest shield, thus ended with the other side fleeing.
*
“Why didn’t you finish them off?”
If it were her master, who possessed the strongest power in the world, she could have swept away in one blow both the girl who had blocked an attack close to a prank so poorly that her entire arm trembled, and the girl who had blocked her powers with an unidentified force.
Not only had she not conveyed her opinion with her gaze as usual, she had even spoken directly.
It had not felt as if she had tried to remove them merely because of the unpleasantness of their blocking her path, but rather as if there had been a familiarity, as though she had met them before, and that made the girl uneasy.
Because she had clearly moved in order to kill them.
The woman, now wearing her glasses again, stroked the girl’s head and was about to enter one of her hideouts, an abandoned factory, when a rustling sound came from above the factory.
“You’re not the one I was looking for, but I found you.”
The boy who had gone out that morning to search for the queen together with the student council president appeared as if welcoming them, who had just returned to the abandoned factory.
The protagonist of a school slice-of-life story.
In the boy’s hand dwelled radiance, proof of a protagonist.
Like a small sun, the power of that radiance brightly illuminated the abandoned factory, a place in a world where the sun had fallen and not a single ray of light should have appeared, making the boy shine even more vividly.
“Sorry, but it’s game over here.”
“How dare you!”
The boy who could be called the true protagonist of this dating sim leapt down toward the woman beside the girl below, who was screaming as if in desperate struggle—in other words, toward the place where the protagonist with the greatest power in this dating sim stood.
—And so, in a place Erika could not see, the battle between protagonists began.