What circumstances must drive an Esper to fall into the Edge of Aberration?
To be tainted...
Saturated. Rotted through.
When no hope remains in a blackened, festering heart — that is when one might begin to hear the Edge of Aberration calling.
But —
For Su Yuzu, it seemed to be something else entirely.
Inside the girl's heart, there was a switch.
When that switch was pressed, the entire world would come crashing down.
The switch's appearance did not depend on the girl herself — or rather, to put it more precisely, there existed within her heart someone more important than herself. Someone worth pressing the switch for.
And clearly —
This was exactly the moment to press it.
She would not allow it. She would absolutely not allow anyone to harm Soga Yura before her eyes.
The Soga clan's crimson eyes — those authentic, true-born crimson eyes — began to burn with blinding radiance. So brilliantly that through Soga Yura's perspective, Su Yuzu could even see the flames licking up from the corners of her own eyes.
The little girl with blazing, radiant eyes — reborn from death itself.
And likewise — returned from hell.
"Damn it —"
"I knew it... I knew it!!!" The Beast — one hand still clutching Soga Yura's slender, delicate waist — let out a thunderous roar.
To Soga Yura's ears, it was nothing but a sharp and incomprehensible shriek. But for Yuzu, the mermaid woman's voice rang out with perfect, awful clarity.
The mermaid stared at Su Yuzu in terror, her entire body trembling, desperate to flee — yet unable to stop herself from instinctively wanting to submit.
"I refuse to believe it!!!"
"I refuse to accept it!!!"
The mermaid's fish tail coiled tight, and the Beast — harbinger of Catastrophe — pressed her body low.
The next instant, her entire being erupted.
Her coiled fish tail launched her forward like a spring, granting her incomparable momentum. The skin along her outstretched pale arms split open — and from the splits grew dark violet, razor-sharp bone fins, crystallized from Catastrophe itself.
A single strike from those bone fins would be enough to cleave Su Yuzu's small, soft body clean in two.
And in the mermaid's hand, Soga Yura was being squeezed until she could barely breathe.
Her consciousness was nearly gone.
Through Soga Yura's fading perspective, Su Yuzu could only watch — in a world that had gone nearly ashen-white — as her past self reached out her hand.
The next instant — crack. Crack crack crack. The sharp, unmistakable sound of bones snapping.
The arm the Beast had thrust toward her past self bent, inch by inch — even those dark violet bone fins twisted and buckled along with it.
Those fins had been mere inches from the little girl's nose. But that inch might as well have been an uncrossable abyss.
The infinitely amplified force of rule-type power warped everything within Su Yuzu's field of vision, with a ferocity that defied all reason.
Black thorns erupted from the earth, weaving themselves into a twisted Throne — and across those thorns ran rivers of crimson light, blood-red and gleaming.
Soga Yura was flung to the ground by the mermaid's pain-wracked hand.
The little girl felt the impact shoot straight up through her — her bottom went numb, sensation fleeing entirely.
But... Soga Yura, who was always such a crybaby — (°□°) the girl who sobbed and wept pitifully at the slightest thing — in this critical moment, did not shed a single tear.
The shimmer of tears spun endlessly in her eyes, but because of the worry coiled tight in her chest, not one of them would fall.
She stared at the thorns growing endlessly before her.
The earth beneath her feet had been torn apart — and from the fractured, shattered ground, the same crimson blood-light seeped through.
The wildly spreading thicket of thorns was far more absolute, far more unchallengeable than any false Throne Zero had ever simulated. An ear-splitting alarm tore through the skies over Tokyo Bay.
Those jet-black thorns — running with rivers of crimson blood-light — pierced effortlessly through the mermaid's shoulder, that creature from myth, and hoisted her high into the air.
Yet these thorns and briars were nothing but a byproduct of the little girl's awakened Throne.
Su Yuzu suddenly remembered.
After falling into the Abyss, she had felt as though she stood atop the pinnacle of the world.
After sinking into despair, she had felt as though she had seen through to the very essence of existence.
She suddenly thought of the Eye of Insight.
She thought of the pitiable, wretched misery of those pitiful, contemptible people.
That "Truth" — the thing those people had spent entire lifetimes, generation after generation laying down their lives just to catch one glimpse of — had always been something laughably trivial and effortlessly within reach for Su Yuzu.
The destination they had dreamed of and never dared hope to touch — for Su Yuzu, who bore the weight of Fate Scale, it was simply a place she had been born standing in.
Su Yuzu did not, in truth, like theories of bloodline supremacy or predestined fate.
But this world was genuinely cruel — and genuinely absurd.
And she... was, undeniably, someone who had been handed every advantage from birth. A beneficiary who had consumed every privilege the world had to offer.
Su Yuzu — born as a Throne.
"By what right?!" the mermaid shrieked, hurling herself at the little girl enthroned above her — only to be lashed savagely by the thorns, fresh wounds splitting across her body, blood running freely.
"By what right do you people get to do this?!"
"I despise being controlled by you!"
"I despise being constrained by you!"
"Wretched humans — even by claiming the Abyss for yourselves, you cannot change your own cowardly nature!" The mermaid screamed her defiance and charged at the little girl upon the Throne — only to be lashed mercilessly by the thorns again and again, wounds opening across her body.
But... at this moment, what concerned Su Yuzu more was something else entirely.
What happened after —
What on earth happened after this.
How did her sister awaken.
And how did her sister use it on her — that one and only time — that single use of Mind Control.
Su Yuzu gazed through Soga Yura's eyes at the spreading thicket of thorns and the mermaid being punished within them.
And at... a little sister who was utterly, completely unfamiliar to her.
"Yuzu..."
"Yuzu." Still clutching the necklace Yuzu had pressed into her hands earlier, Soga Yura staggered, struggling to rise.
"Did I come too late..."
It was precisely at that moment that Soga Yura suddenly heard a girl's soft, gentle voice.
She spun around sharply.
From within the white fog, in the direction of the voice... Soga Yura saw... a girl in a white sundress.
Su Yuzu's heart clenched without warning.
Because... she had seen that girl before.
Back when the earthquake had struck — when Feng Ke and the others had broken through the holy radiance defensive line, entered the Tokyo metropolitan area, and confronted Su Yuzu —
That girl had appeared suddenly at the scene of Su Yuzu and Feng Ke's standoff.
She had been taken along with Su Yuzu to the [Investigation Bureau] police station — and then vanished without a trace, never to be found again.
[Exactly the same...]
Twelve years had passed between that memory and now.
And yet...
[Exactly the same...]
That girl's appearance looked as though not a single thing about her had changed.
The only difference was —
The girl who appeared in Soga Yura's memory had eyes flowing with light that was almost a fiery gold. She looked so commanding, so sovereign — just like... Yuzu.
"The Eighth?"
"Or the Ninth?"
The barefoot girl had already stepped out of the white fog and walked to Soga Yura's side.
Those fiery-gold vertical pupils moved between Soga Yura and Su Yuzu, studying them in turn.
When her gaze landed on Soga Yura's tear-streaked, sobbing face, something strange passed through the depths of those cold, inorganic fiery-gold eyes.
Something that looked almost like... envy.
And then —
The corner of her mouth curled into a mocking smile.
"Because of my negligence..."
"It seems I've caused you quite a bit of trouble."
"Little girl..."
"Make a wish."
"I will do my best to grant it."
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