Estella, the person reflected in the young princess Soraya, was just that, a young teenage girl prone to pouts and mischievous streaks, for most of her life bedridden because of a terrible illness. All these were true and did not deceive.

But a person does not exist in a vacuum. For every different circumstance, we may behave differently.

An overbearing boss at work could well be a meek husband at home. We are molded by our varied environments, too often yielding easily to other people’s expectations.

In that light, someone like Agravain’s little sister was unfathomably impressive.

She was the same no matter who or what she faced.

She might act cute and self-deprecating and even resort to her disability to get out of trouble, but these are just tactics, only weapons. A set of items carefully selected to deal with enemies with respective elemental weaknesses. What beneath never changed or altered in any way.

All this might not be saying much, people with particularly strong core values are not rare.

But her circumstance was one in particular extreme.

There was her sickness, of course. That rare disease which confined her to bed all day. Such a life could make just about anyone depressed.

It takes someone with a particularly strong will to not only live such a life with a genuine smile always on her face, but also to constantly plot escapes from her prison, the only environment which kept her reliably alive.

You may even call it reckless stupidity, or on the flip side, bravery in the face of adversaries. But that would be understating it.

Because, like Agravain, his sister was a member of that household. The infamous McAeda.

His mother was her mother.

The kind of woman for whom frightening a state judge with a few choice words was something she could do while multitasking. It wouldn’t even be legal to list the thing she was capable of doing, much less the lengths she was willing to go.

In such a household, such a strict household, where express commands had been given out to keep the daughter safely locked within the house, all her possible needs taken care of. Commands for the staff, and commands for the girl herself.

Nor was she the kind of woman who spoils her daughter just because she is sick. One simply did not gainsay that woman’s will.

In such a circumstance, the girl had still defied her overlord without fail, without fear, without even anger, even if only to take a brief stroll in their estate’s massive garden.

Someone who could consistently stand up against such a woman, an ever-dominating presence in her life, while being sickly, could not be brave, or stupid.

They would have to be someone with nerves of steel.

A cool head even in the face of dire adversaries.

To face reality.

For someone who spent most of her day in bed, you hardly saw her indulge in idle fantasy.

Role-playing games, for many are the ultimate tools for escapism, a medium to express themselves in ways they could not in real life, were something she simply treated as grinding simulations.

If Agravain was an idealist who sometimes brute forced his ideal image into reality, his sister was someone who treated reality with utmost solemnity.

She never looked away from it.

Never averted her eyes from the harsh truths.

“I’m telling you to shut up,” Soraya said measuredly, “and stop fretting, it’s not all that bad.”

While the words themselves were simple and offered no solid reasoning, the way she said it brooked no argument. One gleaned truths from her firm conviction alone.

It was the kind of tone that bids soldiers to hurl themselves gladly onto the battlefield.

Frightening.

“It’s not all that bad,” the young princess repeated, “far from it. You are only being swept away by the flow and allowing yourself to think so. But it’s really not, ok? It’s not hopeless, not yet.”

“What are you saying, Soraya?” Jophiel’s voice came along. “Are you seeing something we could not? Did you notice a trick they’re playing?” She scrambled for the open codex. “Is it something in here...?”

The angel’s voice was echoing closer to Agravain’s ears, while Soraya’s was somewhat more distant. He felt like listening to a conversation through the phone between the receiver and someone nearby.

“No such thing,” Soraya said firmly, “what you see is what you get. There are no tricks here, no hidden moves, nor secret tactics to unravel this situation.”

Though the barbarian wished if she had some brilliant plan or insight to impart she would do it quickly. Not like they were having the luxury of discussing a battle plan before the real thing. This was the real thing. And even then, he was running from a certain death that inched ever closer.

Maria’s deadly hook-chains were still flinging around. And though her attacks might be inaccurate for now, all it would take was one hit to finish him off.

“No matter how you look at it,” Jophiel said, “Hanael’s Player Character had already snowballed out of control. Even if we destroy the red crystal now the buffs still won’t go away–it’s applied effects, not a constant effect!”

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“Then it doesn’t matter, does it?” she countered. And the barbarian could practically see in his mind the way she was arching her brow at Jophiel’s useless remark. “It does not matter,” she repeated, “if Argravain’s going to die in one hit anyway, it doesn’t matter how much stronger she’s going to get. Pretty irrelevant, if I must say. And in the first place, the red crystal does not offer Maria anything in terms of protection. She’s as vulnerable as before it was activated.”

“But the green crystals...”

“Can be destroyed. And then she will have no way to heal her own wounds anymore. In fact, the only thing standing between us and a victory is the blue crystal. The shields it’s generating are hindering Agravain’s movements. These are the real annoyances, not the girl’s attacks. Agravain had been evading the hooks just fine thus far, right? You still haven’t got it? Let me reiterate from the beginning since you still can’t wrap your heads around something so simple.”

After a moment, Soraya’s voice grew louder. It seemed she had moved closer to the angel.

“No matter how fast the blue crystal can generate shields now, once you break it there will be no more shields. Without the shields, you just have to focus on evading the hooks. Then you just have to proceed to break the green crystals: no more healing. At that point, Maria will just be as vulnerable to attack as during the first phase of the fight. Evade the rest of her attacks and only then strike her down directly. That’s it. Ignore the red crystal and the white crystal is what I’m saying. Destroying the former is pointless now, while the latter is useless without the green and blue crystals, since the only thing it will reduce the cooldown of by then is the red crystal. And that’s the whole crutch of things. The biggest vulnerability in their side’s plan is that we have managed to destroy one blue crystal. It would have been troublesome with all the shields coming at once, but with only half the amount, it is feasible. Break the remaining blue one and the flow of battle should swing instantly to our advantage.”

Of course, when she put it like that, the situation was perfectly salvageable.

One single right move and most of the big advantages Maria was enjoying over them should at once vanish.

Such an overwhelming force suddenly did not seem so invincible anymore.

It was far from complicated once you sit down and calmly think about it. Certainly no masterful tactic. But even something like that both Agravain and Jophiel had not managed to. They had truly been swept along by the flow and willed themselves into believing the hopelessness of the situation.

Or not.

“Except,” Jophiel pointed out, “there are two things you forget to consider, and because of that you make it out to be simpler than it should. Firstly, there’s still the golden crystal. Whatever it is, it could be something that once again thwarts our effort just like the others!”

The angel had grown cautious after the many surprised their foe had sprung upon them thus far. And true enough, every activation of the previous crystals had pushed the opposition closer to this nigh invincible state. And the golden crystal had thus far taken this long to activate, one would naturally assume its effects would prove the most devastating.

“Not really,” Soraya dismissed flatly. “Hanael began the battle with one girl at each of the crystals, right? Then only once a crystal had activated did she move the assigned one over to the white crystal. With the blue and green, she reassigned two of four. With the red one she reassigned the only one stationed there to the white one at once. That white crystal seemed to be their focus, their finisher, so she had focused all her force there thus far. I think the task of those girls at the crystals is to reduce the time it takes for them to activate and then their cooldowns afterward. But if so, then why didn’t she just place all of them at the white crystal to begin with? With the white crystal in effect that much sooner, the rest of them should have been activated all the faster, that would be more effective. So why?”

“Ughhh,” Jophiel mumbled, clearly struggling, “Could it be because the crystals had to be activated once for the effect from the white one to be applied?”

“That’s my guess,” Soraya agreed, “I might be wrong, and there might be another reason for Hanael’s maneuvers, but from what I have observed, these crystals have been steadily glowing brighter and brighter up until their activation. The golden one hadn’t got any brighter at all since the one assigned to it was moved away, despite the white crystal being in effect all this time. It’s logical to assume they had abandoned their effort to activate it at all, instead of tunneling everything into the white crystal.”

And this too was true, the golden crystal seemed to have entered an idle state, neither getting any brighter or darker. Yet another observation those who were engrossed in the frantic flow of battle could not easily notice. Soraya had naturally had the benefit of watching from the side. She had a complete view of the area as Agravained zoned in upon Maria.

In the end, the whole thing was obvious if you care to pay a bit of attention. Or if you weren’t stuck dealing with a life-and-death situation.

It should be safe to ignore the golden crystal, the last of seven.

But Jophiel had noticed not one, but two problems in how Soraya had simplified the situation.

“There was still the problem of...” Jophiel began.

“How to break out of the shields and the hooks to destroy the blue crystal in the first place, all while he’s being sieged by hooks, yeah?” Soraya cut her off. “That too is simple.”

That one single simple move to swing the flow of the battle to their side--that in itself was something the barbarian could not realistically do now. But Soraya did not think so.

She had always been a frightening realist.

If her voice was loud before, now she drew it to a higher pitch: “Rania!”

“No!” Agravain cried. “She won’t stand a chance!”

“Stop it.” The princess’s voice was cold. “I have faith in her, and I know her better than you do, Agravain. Rania, you understand what to do?”

The maid did.

So far, the barbarian had tried to run in the opposite direction of the maid. Only one shield had been assigned to block the girl’s path, but even that had been enough to lock her in place.

As soon as Soraya gave the instruction, however, she wheeled away and raced towards Agravain.

With a curse, Agravain came to a halt, not running anymore.

Having learned the patterns of Maria’s thoughtless attacks at that point, he ducked just in time as the hook homed in. Then like a tiger propelling itself on powerful hind legs, the barbarian performed a powerful leap, bashing the shields in front of him with a wide arc of his club. With that one strike, all the shields in front crumbled.

At once, the blue crystal came into effect, flashing wildly its light. A fraction of a second later, they materialized again at Maria’s side, and once again, the silver chains swung them out towards the barbarian.

Only this time, the maid had wedged herself in their path.

Whatever happens, happens.

Agravain grunted, turning from the maid and leaving her life to fate. He wheeled towards the blue crystals. It would be a waste of her sacrifice if he did not make use of it.

The twin hooks had recovered their trajectory by then. They shot through the air and intercepted his path to the blue crystal, forcing him to turn away unless he wished to perish at their incredible power.

The painful cry of Rania reached his ears from behind. The maid had only managed to hold them for so long.

If he turned from the hooks now, even just sidestepping, even taking a breath too long, all the girl’s work would be in vain, and the shields would gain him again.

The only way is ahead.

Ever onwards.

He discarded the Pigman’s Metal Club.

What he needed now was speed.

And jumped.

On his first day in this world, he had managed to reach the roof of a two-story house with a similar leap.

With his rage activated, these slim hooks in midair were nothing he could not jump clear.

It wasn’t the first time he had attempted the same thing.

Every time he had tried the trick before, the shields had without fail moved to intercept his movement.

But now they were lagging behind, thanks to Rania’s effort.

And so he completed the great leap.