The sun had completely sunk, and darkness had come to the city, yet the streetlights gave off no light. The buildings around them, where people lived, were silent and unlit as well.
All because a single girl had used her ability to create lightning. The blessing of radiance, born under the influence of the brilliance of a boy who was the protagonist of a genre. Lightning being formed as that power manifested to its utmost limit.
The dozens of lightning bolts blooming from the fingertips of Erika, who was as beautiful as a fairy, were in truth somewhat beyond her control, leaping and scattering in every direction.
The output itself was something she had forcibly dragged into the present for this single moment, power that should have been displayed in the future as well, so it was certainly something Erika herself had created. Yet why was it that the stray bolts, one after another, did not harm the student council president, who was not even their user?
Erika, who had clearly never experienced controlling her ability on her own, could not possibly have such precise control that it would harm neither the student council president nor any other ordinary person.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’
Erika found the answer within herself.
More precisely, it was the remnant of the old Erika, who proved she had existed through affection levels whenever she met the other heroines.
If that remnant was desperately trying to keep the student council president alive, then the current situation made sense.
The remnant inside her did not answer Erika’s question, but seeing how desperately the lightning avoided harming the student council president, she felt as though she could hear an auditory hallucination that should never have reached her ears.
‘If Seora was trying to protect me until the very end, then it’s only right that I answer that in kind. Back then, I was clearly trying to die, so I don’t care how my body is used after my death, nor am I curious. But if you think you owe me even the slightest debt, then just this once, protect her.’
A girl within an illusion that should not have been visible appeared where the dolls should have been and spoke.
Erika could not look in a mirror, so she did not know. Yet even without knowing, she could recognize at once that the girl resembled Erika herself. The girl, whose white hair flowed down to her waist, left behind her final words and disappeared.
‘—Because that is the minimum duty owed by the one who came to possess my body.’
After that, the girl in the illusion vanished.
But she likely had not disappeared completely; she was merely no longer visible within Erika’s sight.
The faint warmth that could be felt in her voice only when she mentioned the student council president, Lee Seora, until the very end. Whether that time had revealed what the previous Erika had been like, or whether it had merely been an auditory hallucination, it came to an end, and Erika had to face the dozens upon dozens of dolls in reality.
Before her ability had awakened, the sight had been close to terror. An army of dolls that would not end no matter how many she struck and broke.
Erika pointed her index fingers to both sides at once, and one bolt of lightning each, among those that had been continuously forming from her hands, shot out in different directions.
And the slender silver lines swelled larger and larger the farther they extended, becoming waves that swept away one side of the alley.
A wave that swept away everything in that direction—walls, streetlights, dolls, all of it.
Yet even as it did so, the residential buildings right beside them were entirely unaffected, and the student council president, who had been watching, could clearly feel just how delicate and precise that ability was.
“Erika, this is...”
Before the student council president could say anything about it, Erika collapsed.
Out of dozens of bolts, only two. And merely extending those was enough to make her lose consciousness.
Was it because this was an unfamiliar transformation of power? Or was it because even with Erika’s mind, it was unavoidable that she overexerted herself to sweep away every doll without killing anyone?
Or had that overwhelmingly powerful force placed too great a strain on Erika’s mind?
Before the student council president, who possessed wisdom, could find the answer, a single doll opened its mouth from a place where she had thought everything had turned to ash and vanished. Its upper body and half its lower body had been completely blown away.
“Ama... zing.”
One glance at the side of the doll that had been blown away made it clear. The inside of its body was hollow. The place where blood should have flowed was empty, so it was, quite literally, a doll.
A doll being controlled by someone, speaking even after suffering a wound that would have killed it had it been human.
“To have this much power... without killing... a single person.”
In a world where those born with offensive psychic abilities were rare, that mighty lightning had swept through an alley even though she had not used the entirety of her power.
The doll, having recognized the strength of that lightning, could not help but laugh. Because the weakness accompanying that strength seemed equally clear.
“I’ll... remember.”
With those words, the last remaining doll also turned to ash and vanished. The moment she heard the word weakness, the student council president had no choice but to understand what the doll’s master had realized.
At present, there was no trace of the blessing that usually lingered around Erika’s body.
If, after releasing her power like this, there was someone present to protect her, then it would not matter. But if she were to use this power alone, without anyone to protect her, she would inevitably be abducted by someone while in a state with no blessing.
Unlike the power that had looked supreme, its weakness was far too clear.
“...For today, I suppose I’ll have to take her home first. That side should finish things on their own.”
Leaving behind the fight of the boy still battling with heavy, pounding impacts, the student council president held the girl she loved and headed toward that girl’s home.
This was after she had sent a message to the one who was both this girl’s enemy and her older sister, asking her to resolve the situation.
Though one could say Erika had not done much wrong in this incident, it was still a problem that could grow bigger if it was not resolved by borrowing the power of Erika’s older sister.
Even if that result was something Erika would hate.
Perhaps because of the lightning Erika had unleashed, the streetlights did not turn on. Into that dark alley, the red-haired woman carried Erika on her back and quietly disappeared.
*
In a certain room filled with trash, a girl whose hair had grown out like a ghost’s tapped the monitor inside the room—thump, thump—but no matter how much she hit it, the crackling monitor did not fix itself.
Because it was a monitor connected to the eyes of a certain doll outside, even if that doll had not been struck directly by lightning, there was a high chance it had malfunctioned under the influence of the “lightning.”
The girl, who would usually bite her nails and look anxious whenever things did not go her way, gave up on hitting the monitor this time and plopped down onto the floor.
“I was only going to end it by showing her the president abandoning her, or maybe by making her show a slightly indecent side of herself in front of the president, but as expected, she always goes beyond my predictions.”
She had not intended to replay the footage and identify Erika’s weakness.
She had simply wanted to admire Erika’s appearance, which had been no different from an incarnation of lightning, a little longer.
Her physical abilities were only somewhat better than an ordinary person’s, but the sight of her annihilating well over several dozen dolls with a single blow had, as expected, been exactly like the cool Erika she loved.
“But I’m not really sure whether it was okay for her to show that power for real, right now—”
It had been an overwhelmingly powerful force, but its limits were clear as well.
If even the owner of the ability fainted from the aftermath of using it, what did it matter how strong that ability was?
All one had to do was send in an advance party to induce her to use her ability, then send in a follow-up unit afterward, and she could be easily conquered.
Within the head of the girl whose black hair trailed across the floor like a ghost’s, countless ways to攻略 Erika’s ability surfaced.
If she had seen it under ordinary circumstances, instead of finding ways to攻略 it, she would have first thought of ways to act cute toward Erika—but.
Even for that girl, the sight of Erika revealing a method of using her psychic ability that she had kept hidden until now, all to protect the student council president, was extremely unpleasant.
“So the other side ended without killing them after all?”
Dolls made from actual living humans. She had intended to have the boy kill those psychic-powered dolls with his own hands, so that the country would begin hunting him down, but perhaps he had realized they were alive in the middle of the fight, because he had ended it without killing any of them.
More than a hundred dolls had been captured, and the human dolls capable of using abilities had been subdued by the boy. For a single moment’s expenditure, it was an excessively severe loss.
Even so, the girl’s expression was strangely calm.
The boy who persuaded capable women with his own charm and made them his allies, or a certain woman around whom others were gathering through the value called power.
Both sides certainly possessed power that she could never defeat on her own, but if it came only to expanding forces, there was no faction that could beat hers.
As the girl thought of ways to expand her forces, she recalled the warning Erika had given her through the “doll.”
“Did she really know it was me, or did she not know and just say that because she was worried I might get hurt?”
Including her age from her previous life, the girl thought she was far older than Erika, but whenever she thought of Erika, polite and casual speech naturally mixed together in her words.
Because the image of the [past] that had tried to protect her seemed to her like a dependable older sister, regardless of age, whenever she spoke to Erika, casual and polite speech ended up mixing together.
Since Erika was not right in front of her anyway, the girl decided to worry about such speaking habits later and lay spread-eagled in the room filled with trash.
It was an entirely different tone from when she had given a mission to the student council and that plan had failed.
That was likely because she had been twisted and broken as the price of the ability she had obtained.
The owner of that broken and twisted soul stared at the moldy ceiling and grinned.
—As she began creating her next plan based on what had happened today.