"..."
Only after a long silence did the gentle, inorganic voice slowly drift out from within the glowing cylinder.
"Selene, it seems the arrival of God's Right Seat has given you a new idea."
The moment Selene abruptly appeared inside the Windowless Building and held out her hand like that, Aleister Crowley knew she had another job for him.
What does she want this time? Or did Terra of the Left's attack make her want to retaliate?
"I'm curious. If it were you, how would you obtain the 'Holy Right'? What's your plan, and how do you need me to cooperate?"
Although Aleister was immersed in the life-support apparatus filled with pale-red, weakly alkaline culture fluid and not a single part of his body moved, including his mouth, that electronically synthesized, mechanical voice still reached Selene's ears with perfect clarity.
"I'm simply responding to whatever move they make."
Standing before the cylindrical life-support apparatus, Selene raised an eyebrow slightly. "The Roman Catholic Church has already made its move. Enduring it quietly isn't my style."
"Among God's Right Seat, the only one who has ever truly deserved attention is Fiamma of the Right. Of the other three, two are already gone. Vento of the Front is nothing to worry about."
"Two are already gone? As far as I know, your subordinate Arisa Benares only killed Terra of the Left. Acqua of the Back is still alive and has already escaped Academy City with Vento of the Front. His combat strength doesn't appear to have been diminished at all. How does that make two out of four?"
Very little that happened within Academy City could be hidden from Aleister. Arisa and Ferdinand's argument at the School District 23 international airport, along with the battle against Terra of the Left, had naturally been observed since UNDER_LINE was still functioning. Selene had never intended to conceal any of it anyway.
"Don't think of Acqua of the Back as being the same kind of person as the rest of God's Right Seat."
Sky-blue streams of data flashed through Selene's eyes. Inside the life-support apparatus, the glass cover before Aleister suddenly flickered, and then a light screen materialized out of thin air in front of him. Within the holographic display, a woman wearing a voluminous dress, with long golden hair and snow-white skin, gradually appeared.
"Shouldn't the Chairman know more about matters on the magic side than I do?"
"You mean..."
Aleister ignored the faint teasing in Selene's words and stared at the woman on the screen.
"Britain's Third Princess, Villian? Villian... I see. The Spanish magical faction's attack ten years ago. The knight who saved the princess, the knight who was never knighted—William Orwell."
"I see. You've certainly understood the situation clearly." Aleister gave a soft chuckle. "It appears my life-support system still has room for improvement."
After entering the life-support apparatus, Aleister had entrusted all of his biological functions to machinery. According to calculations, this would grant him a lifespan of approximately seventeen hundred years. His entire body, including his brain, remained in a state of hibernation, with machines assisting in most of his thought processes.
"Want me to help?"
"If you feel like it, I'll trouble you."
The two smoothly diverted the subject in perfect tacit understanding, and Selene exchanged a knowing smile with him.
Whatever other people thought—about how the tragedies produced by Aleister's plans within Academy City were as numerous as the stars in the sky—Selene reserved judgment. Ever since arriving in Academy City, she hadn't personally experienced much misery at all. The Dark Side directly under the Board of Directors treated her like royalty. Mm, she'd been living quite happily.
At times, even Aleister felt that the degree of tacit understanding between himself and Selene was unprecedented. If back then... Sigh...
"Acqua of the Back—I will deal with him. Perhaps he can even become a nail driven into the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, if the Chairman is interested in angelic spells and they can benefit your plans, then your needs take priority above everything else."
Selene didn't understand all the twists and complexities of magic-side knowledge very deeply, but that didn't stop the angelic spells possessed by God's Right Seat from being valuable. The "Holy Right" possessed by Fiamma of the Right was an even greater prize.
The Holy Right, the power of the "right side" that gathered together the various miracles of Christianity, was an ability Fiamma of the Right had possessed from birth.
It contained the power of every miracle associated with the right hand in Christian legend. For example, "Michael, He Who Is Like God, used his right hand when slaying the leader of the fallen angels," "the Son of God used his right hand when healing the sick," "the Bible was written with the right hand," and so on. It could draw forth all manner of Christian miracles.
If these treasures of the magic side were handed over to Aleister, who wholeheartedly wished to exterminate magicians, destroy magic, and eliminate the Phases, Selene believed that with Aleister's talent as the greatest magician of this century—and even the previous one—it wouldn't be difficult for him to reverse-engineer them and ultimately use the results to advance his own plan to destroy magic.
At the same time, through Arisa's Honkai body, which had been present at the scene, Selene had remotely seized every memory inside Terra of the Left's mind. Besides learning even more secrets of the magic side, she had also glimpsed the darker side of the Roman Catholic Church's headquarters.
Tch. Terra of the Left had even more disgusting tastes than I imagined.
While in the Vatican, Terra of the Left had repeatedly used children and tourists from the outskirts of Rome as test materials while calibrating his Execution of Light spell.
Compared with him, even Kihara Gensei's habit of discarding the inferior and retaining only the superior for experiments somehow didn't seem quite as rotten.
At least his experimental subjects were children abandoned in Academy City by their parents or guardians, and they didn't necessarily die. Terra of the Left, meanwhile, simply abducted people by force. He was no different from a human trafficker or an organ trafficker. And his mortality rate was one hundred percent.
The former might merely deserve execution by firing squad or beheading. But Terra of the Left? Putting him through every one of the ten great tortures would still have been lenient.
This needs to be put to good use. If there's a moral high ground available, why not occupy it?
After World War III broke out, she could expose all of this and throw even more fuel on the fire. Of the supposed two billion believers the Roman Catholic Church loved to boast about, how many would remain unwavering afterward?
Public opinion and the media admittedly suffered from the flaw of being temporary. Once the frenzy passed, little but debris remained. In Selene's Empire, the overwhelming authority of the central government had suffocated public opinion and the media so thoroughly that they had become little more than mouthpieces. But this wasn't Imperial territory, after all. Any force that could be exploited should still be exploited.
Snap!
"Scandalous material on the Roman Catholic Church, taken directly from Terra of the Left's brain. I hope you find it useful."
Along with the crisp snap of her fingers, several more light screens materialized before Aleister. Terra of the Left's ugly face appeared among them, followed by images of children and tourists who had died horribly in experiments involving magical spells. Every image was so clear and vivid that it was almost as though the viewer had been there in person.
Reading memories was a mental ability. Converting those memories into electronic data and displaying them on electronic devices required an extraordinarily refined combination of mental abilities and electromagnetic abilities.
At that moment, Aleister abruptly felt that the words spatial ability user written in Selene's personal profile were remarkably irritating to look at.
Manipulating repulsive and attractive forces by using Imaginary Space to influence the real universe could, with some difficulty, still be explained away. Manipulating lightning and flames could also be explained through the conversion of Honkai energy. But mental abilities...
You call this spatial? Isn't that going a little too far?!
"The power of the 'Holy Right' is so tempting. Why don't you want it? I doubt anyone would ever complain about having too much power, especially someone as greedy as you, Selene."
Only after a long while, once they had finished their diversion, did Aleister's voice slowly speak again.
The other side of his extraordinary tacit understanding with Selene was, in some ways, simply his helplessness toward her.
There was nothing he could do. Not a single plan he'd devised against Selene had proven reliable so far. No matter how he considered or calculated the matter, if they openly turned against one another, Academy City's destruction and the collapse of his century-long plan were... almost guaranteed.
Aleister was now certain that Selene probably already knew about his plans targeting the magic side, the Phases, and the Magic Gods. The only thing he didn't know was how deeply her understanding went.
Fortunately, their objectives aligned. As for everything else, he could simply let her do as she pleased. Once his great plan was complete, he would probably have already vanished into dust.
"Because I don't need it to decorate my strength."
After hearing Aleister's words, Selene smiled faintly. "Prepare yourself, Chairman. Soon after the Daihasei Festival ends... Ah, Terra of the Left is already dead. The Roman Catholic Church may lash out like a cornered dog. We can't afford to ignore that possibility. Perhaps the great war will break out before the Daihasei Festival is even over."
As she spoke, bzzzz—!
Dark-purple Honkai energy, dazzling and painfully bright, churned around Selene's fingertips.
Like a violet sun.
So deep a purple it was almost black, its glare stabbing at the eyes.
"I hope this can help the Chairman accelerate the progress of your plan."
Clang!
The sound was neither crisp nor dull, neither light nor heavy, yet it seemed to penetrate directly into the soul and set it trembling.
A perfect cube more than ten centimeters on each side, resembling a puzzle cube, was placed by Selene onto the metal base before Aleister's life-support apparatus.
Its entire body was purplish-red. Countless cracks intersected across every face, dividing the cube into irregular fragments.
A Honkai Cube of unprecedented concentration and volume.
As expected. She was hiding her true capabilities from the very beginning.
Aleister withdrew his gaze from the purplish-red crystal and looked toward Selene as she turned to leave.
"...What exactly do you want?" he asked.
Tap, tap!
"What do I want? Let me think..."
The beauty stopped. Her silver-white hair, tied into a long ponytail, swayed gently through the air as its owner turned. The scarlet diamond-shaped pupils in her eyes gave off a faint glow, mingling with the countless points of light scattered throughout the building.
In a fleeting instant, a golden cross-shaped halo flashed and vanished, like the sun and moon shining together.
"The Overlord of the old era will be shattered by you, Chairman. As for me, I merely want to be the one who reaps the benefits."
"..."
"..."
"Aleister, she's already gone."
No one knew how much time had passed before a strange voice rang through the silent surroundings, laced with static like a speaker whose sound source had slipped out of alignment.
Along with it came gentle golden light, dispersing the sealed and profound darkness inside the Windowless Building.
That "person" resembled an angel. A golden halo floated above their head. Long golden hair spilled down around a tall body glowing with pale light, while loose white cloth enveloped their limbs and torso. Their feet were bare.
From a human perspective alone, it was impossible to distinguish their sex. Although their appearance resembled that of a woman, a being like this was in truth closer to sexless.
"Mm."
Staring at the Holy Guardian Angel summoned using the body of his beloved wife, Aleister spoke to them word by word in that emotionless voice.
"Aiwass... we need to accelerate our plan."
Aiwass calmly looked toward Aleister, suspended upside down inside the life-support apparatus. "Aleister, given the relationship between summoner and summoned, here's a friendly warning. She actually noticed me long ago. And given everything she's done, there's no way you don't understand it. She's using you."
"I know..."
"But rather than saying she's using me, it's more accurate to say I'm equally willing to be used by her. At least as long as my objective remains unchanged, she and I are unbreakable allies... Everything I possess—if she wants it, she can have it..."
...
Aiwass... the Holy Guardian Angel. Aleister really has managed to summon both a Great Demon and a Holy Guardian Angel. As expected of a mad genius who, despite being human, wants to wage war against "Heaven."
Standing atop the Windowless Building, Selene gazed toward the distant sunset and the shadows cast by one building after another, sighing with considerable admiration.
Even if they're both secondhand... Ahem.
"A night banquet, huh~"
Whoosh—
The daylight gradually softened toward evening.
School District 7, near School Garden.
Naturally, Mother Katy had taken the feelings of Selene's ordinary friends such as Saten Ruiko and Uiharu Kazari into consideration and hadn't chosen Selene's luxurious estate. That place was far too extravagant, ornate, and dazzlingly opulent. It wasn't suitable for a warm gathering among friends. It was far better suited to discussing official business and overwhelming visitors from the moment they arrived.
The area around School Garden was much better. Its overall design imitated the style of small European coastal towns along the Mediterranean, while the subtler decorative touches carried the refined atmosphere unique to elite girls' schools. It was sufficiently distinguished to receive a member of royalty like Villian without seeming disrespectful.
Just right, refined without becoming inaccessible.
Inside the reserved courtyard, on the balcony of a two-story oval pavilion, Villian watched Carissa ascend surrounded by knights. She timidly rose to her feet and said, "Sister." Her voice was barely louder than a mosquito's buzz.
"Ah, Villian."
Seeing that her younger sister still looked every bit as meek and fragile even outside the palace, Carissa, dressed in a scarlet formal gown, immediately furrowed her brows.
She really did hate seeing Villian act like this. But this wasn't Buckingham Palace, after all. At a banquet hosted by outsiders and Mother Katy, she couldn't very well air the family's dirty laundry. She motioned for the knights behind her to withdraw, pulled out the chair in front of Villian, and sat down with bold, commanding ease.
"Hey, hey, Uiharu, look. Those sisters don't seem to get along very well."
Peeking out from behind the edge of a curtain, Saten Ruiko spoke with intense curiosity.
"Saten, isn't this a little inappropriate? This is someone else's family business, and we're spying on them like this..."
The timid Uiharu Kazari sniffled as she desperately tugged at Saten Ruiko from behind. "They're princesses! If they catch us, maybe they'll have us snip!"
"Seriously, what are you two doing?"
"Eek—!"