*
Hiding under the cover of sand, she used an old technique devised by Kaori, synchronised calamity. She creates countless body doubles of her mana signature, laying decoys that move about across the field while suppressing her actual one as much as she could. She converts the rapier into an axe and trudges through the sandstorm, the debris landed on her face, sticking to her sweat. Her body felt clammy as it was stuck to her combat dress and the flying debris. She desperately wanted to take a shower, but now wasn't the time.
*Boom*
One of her doubles ran into a mine. It pretty much confirmed that Karell was the one who placed those mines. Her heart shivered at the thought of the previous scenery, what sense would it make for a magical girl to kill civilians? It made more sense that they killed each other instead, some of them could be immature or lacking sanity, they would see other magical girls as threats and eliminate them. But civilians? It was like going out of one's way to find sleeping ant hills just to exterminate them. The ants weren't particularly bothering anyone, they were in the wild.
It would be one thing to run away now, and it would be another to stay. There wasn't any particular meaning to it, all thoughts of the competition between the human King candidates had already left. She was simply crawling forwards with the power of her measly pride as a magical girl. She let people get killed in front of her, after this battle she'll devise a way to disable or block mines.
She moved forwards, she could easily track the mines herself and avoid them, but the decoys couldn't. She could also locate Karell, but Karell wasn't free to do anything. If Karell ran, she would be leaving her back wide open to Kaede.
"... Refined technique, Nuclear expansion. Hold. " (Karell)
A bubble of clean air expands instantaneously with Karell at its origin, superseding the sand storm for the illusion of clear air... This... Was the forceful expansion of a single atom, as a tremendously small unit of matter it remains perfectly transparent after expansion, so it looked like a bubble had cleared the sand storm instead, when there was a clear boundary between the sand and the insides of this atom. The inside was a void.
It was nearly the same as her void rapier, that she could instantly tell. She could easily tear away at this atom... However she understood why the opponent said 'hold' in her technique. This was a 2 step technique, the next would inevitably be an explosion. Now Kaede could deduce that one of Karell's passives was to resist the pressure difference of entering an enlarged atom. Magic had enlarged an atom, that should include the insides, meaning that other than a vacuum there was a massive electron cloud inside this 'bubble'.
Yet... They were nowhere to be seen. Most of an atom was empty space and even this expansion didn't effect reality that much other than creating a vacuum. But to shift the boundary of the atom this much, energy was being accumulated and then amplified by magical particles,
"Oi, you're not the only one who's been messing around in this world. Don't let it get to your head just because you have a bunch of techniques." (Karell)
Techniques were the supposedly inventive usage of skills applied in ways that created more versatility, a tool of survival for fights between magical girls. Monsters were usually too much of brutes for techniques to be particularly effective against them, monsters require more raw power instead. As such, it could be reasoned that techniques are born from fights between magical girls, they are the crystallisation of that desperation for struggle between 2 inhuman beings.
Kaori in particularly has more techniques than most magical girls, it was practically a gauge of how much blood she had drawn from her foes. Karell pointed the staff at Kaede, expanding more atoms to the size of rooms, swallowing up the entire battle field. She was way too similar to Kaori, her theme of skills resided over the territory of spacial control, coinciding with Kaede's movement control.
These atom bombs that she was creating was pretty much the basis for the propulsion technique that Kaori employed. Rapid expansion and contraction, resulting in an explosive burst of energy. In a short moment, the sky had severely darkened as even light was mostly pushed out of these atoms. The scenery was dim as Karell approached closer to Kaede.
"... Tch, if you blew up this entire place, would you still have supporters left alive?" (Kaede)
The situation didn't look good at all, it was pretty much a mistake to have kept challenging Karell. Her control over her magic wasn't enough to copy what Karell did, it had more to do with moving things than fully manipulating space itself.
"... Supporters...? We're in the middle of a messed up continent, the surroundings here were part of a village before being integrated into central. These villagers... Can't be regarded as human. So it's fine if I erase every single trace of their existence. " (Karell)
She spoke with all the contempt in her being, she had seriously regarded all of the residents around here as less than human. It wasn't as if Kaede had the final say on whether the place gets blown up or not, she couldn't disable something as delicate as these giant masses of energy waiting to be released. If popping even a single one would set off the rest, she might not even survive it herself. Karell would be fine herself, her passive neutralised all pressure from it, Kaede was guessing that it included the subsequent explosion's impact as well.
"... Can't be regarded as human... It sure didn't look like so to me. Especially the crying children and elderly at that stage event. " (Kaede)
Her face contort as if she was looking at something ugly. She was able to maintain her composure thus far, but even that level of discipline didn't inhibit her from displaying such abject disgust.
"... What are you-...? The Human King gains unprecedented faith and recognition, power on the same level of a God magical girl. After all, only such a being could kill the Demon King.
That's why there's so many people vying for this position, an unimaginable reward lays at the end after crawling this mountain of corpses. Someone like you... Who is some kind of self righteous person...
Someone like you won't have enough power to do anything. Even if you're good at fighting, that won't be enough to beat the Demon King or purge all evil from the world or something. You at least need the guts to commit atrocities like what's about to happen if you want to change anything. " (Karell)
She couldn't refute it. It was clear as day, it was precisely because she was weak in the first place that she bothered to resort to persuasion... Moral persuasion... Of course it wouldn't work on her. She slaughtered that crowd of avid fans with a smile on her face.
'Tch... If only you were a few years earlier...' (Karell)
Her murmured carried her suppressed sorrow. Surprisingly, she had a pained expression. The bombs erupted, at the center of the explosions, Kaede instantly lost her hearing as waves of heat and kinetic force swept the area. The most efficient way to fend this off... Was to use her second skill and freeze the air coating her skin. Some of the heat would inevitably get through, it would feel like being in a sauna, but most of the kinetic energy and radiation is kept out.
A cyclical chain of explosions assault her vicinity, if anyone was nearby their eardrums would get pierced out. Even the ground could not escape as it got vaporised from under her feet. She prepared a few layers of this barrier, creating vacuums and air barriers beforehand. The light was also blinding, but for some reason her eyes didn't seem so adversed to it. Usually this amount of light would cause even a magical girl to flinch, but... Kaori's body was weird. Seems like it had gotten used to this overexposure of light before.
She stood still, cold sweat dripping down her neck as the continuous savage energy pounded indiscriminately across the surface area of her barrier. She had barely been surviving this entire battle, inching out a parry with close shaves after close shaves. Not once did she felt like she was winning. She knew her pride was petty, and it was foolish to lose her life over it. But she didn't want sully Kaori's reputation, she had so many excuses but most of all she didn't want to lose in a battle. She felt like it was the very last thing she had, the final thing that assured her of her survival in this world.
In a world one could get killed by a magical girl at any time, strength was the most blatant key to survival. If she loss today, her mind would simply shatter from the anxiety that Karell could arrive and kill her at any time. The existences of beings stronger than her threaten her. It was animalistic and primitive, but it wasn't something she could discard easily... Despite inheriting Kaori's memories while remaining detached from the feelings brewing in those memories, her feelings from the battle with The Progenitor felt real.
She lost Myuu and Paridia, out of sheer fear she didn't want to lose anyone else. It pushed her to keep moving forward, to keep getting stronger. A selfish desire born out of her insecurities, an embodiment of her greed that would affect countless lives. Especially her own.
With one swift slice after the energy and heat had dissipated a little, her void rapier extends to the edge of her world.
*Swing*
The sound of something sharp tearing through the air overshadows everything else in its surroundings, as if it sliced through sound as well. The attack was so sudden... Well, it wasn't meant to be an attack, that's why it didn't trigger Karell's second skill. It passed through, a clean line was drawn across the dress over Karell's torso along with the surrounding buildings.
She merely 'sliced apart' the byproducts of the explosions and everything else in it, for a short instant she had open a void inside everything in a 10 km radius, then used her movement skill to shift that entire mass away into the sky. In the process, she accidentally carved away Karell's torso.
"Wha...!?"(Karell)
Changing the gradients, the heat and radiation shoots off into the sky and dissipate away. The blinding light that swallowed a portion of central finally flickered away, leaving charred land as far as Kaede could see. In a few moments, the authorities would get here and it would spell trouble for the both of them. Even if their license had permitted them to kill as they saw fit, the other magical girls could similarly exploit the license and take their lives in the name of justice.
They had killed countless in those explosions alone, their corpses desecrated as not even a trace was left. Even ash had dissolved in the superheated air and flew far into space. Karell used her magic to bring her body back to the ground, taking a bit to regenerate her lost lower half. In the one moment that Kaede slice everything apart, she had nearly used up all her magic.
In the end, Karell's second skill can't recognise physical patterns as there are countless variations of the same movement. Blocking, attacking, kicking, there were so many angles and directions it could occur in, it didn't make sense for actions to have triggered her skill. Actually, it used a far more efficient and practical method of detecting the triggers, it read Kaede's intent through her mind.
Nothing more, nothing less, I couldn't do anything else to her mind other than read it. So when she thinks of landing her kick, hitting her sword swings or blocking the staff swing, Karell's second skill would pick up on this intent and freeze her. In a stroke of luck, Kaede who simply wanted to change the landscape from a scorching hell to somewhere livable had discovered the weakness of Karell's second skill.
The sky was clear and cruelly beautiful, it was as if that previous hell had never happened. The explosions had vaporised that event stage and the sea of corpses along with it. There was no longer any life around but the 2 of them.
"Tell me, why have you killed so many? Was it simply for self gratification? Like the rogue?" (Kaede)
She broke the silence out of her own curiosity.
"... Isn't it obvious? The only thing that could have made me endure this long... It was revenge." (Karell)
"... Revenge against this village of yours, I take it? " (Kaede)
As of foreseeing this response, she smirked at Karell.
"..." (Karell)
"Anyway, they're all gone now... Sad to say, I used up almost all my magic to do that. You can run if you want, the authorities are coming. So I'll hold them back with what I have left. " (Kaede)
"?! Why...?" (Karell)
Kaede looked away, sensing magical signatures entering her detection range.
"... If you make that kind of face, it's not fair. I'm fine with going against my little rule of being the ideal magical girl that saves everyone... If it means you stop making such a pained expression." (Kaede)