“You came.”
“I came.”
No more words than that were exchanged between Shiko and I at first, though we were both women of few words in the first place. For a good while, we simply stared at one another, neither of us daring to speak first. There was much to say, and yet no words to say it with.
“You want to stop Baal Zebul?”
“Yes.”
“And you know that this is your final trial before you meet him?”
“Yes.”
“So, you understand what’s about to happen?”
“...Yes.”
Nothing else needed to be said. Shiko darted towards me, an axe in her hands and a cold look in her eyes, swinging for a lethal attack right out of the gate.
I retreated quickly, taking flight to get myself out of her range and just barely dodging the head of the axe aimed at my throat.
She followed me into the sky, continuing to swing her axe with lethal intent every time she got close to me, though I deftly dodged each one with my mastery over flight. She flew with magic, a costly method and one that the human body wasn’t made for. My ability of ‘true flight’ outclassed it in every way. In a no-holds-barred death match, I had every advantage.
But that wasn’t the way I wanted to win.
“Shiko! Why are you so desperate to destroy our world?” I asked desperately, rolling out of the way of yet another axe swing.
“Why are you so adamant about defending it?” She replied, not slowing down her attacks at all. “Society has chewed you up and spit you out, just as it did to me. So why do you want to protect it when it doesn’t give two shits about you?!”
She swing her axe downwards, damn near cleaving me in two, but with a heavy flap of my wings I threw myself backwards and pushed Shiko towards the wall behind her.
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“Society isn’t perfect, but there are still things worth protecting!” I nocked an arrow and drew my bow, hoping to ward off another attack. “What about your friends? Don’t you have any love for them?”
Despite my warning arrow, Shiko began approaching me again.
“I’ve had friends before. It never lasts. Eventually, even the people you think you can trust will turn on you. It’s better to get rid of trust altogether and let everyone be the selfish bastards they wanna be deep down!”
I fired the arrow as she drew closer, but it whizzed over her head. I couldn’t bring myself to aim at her directly.
I was too close to the wall to dodge backwards again, so I ducked under her decapitating swing by doing an aerial backflip and tucking in my wings. The axe almost grazed my nose as it swept over my head and struck nothing.
With the momentum of the backflip, I kicked downwards onto her head and sent her falling straight towards the ground, before spreading my wings again and returning to a steady glide.
“You’re wrong about people!” I came to perch on a jutted out bit of a wall like a gargoyle, shouting down to the now grounded girl with despair in her eyes. “Sure, people are selfish! And cruel, and judgemental, and even vindictive! But there are good things about people too! Kindness and love and family! You want to strip away all that good and leave only the parts you hate? That makes no sense!”
“All those good parts are just deceptions! Things people use to curry favour! In the end, they’ll all be thrown back at you! Nothing more than symbols of your own naïveté!”
“How can you say that so adamantly?!”
“Because I’ve seen it all before, Kobun!” Her voice grew more and more distressed as she spoke. “There are no selfless good deeds! Everything you see as a kindness is just done in search for personal gain down the line. At least if we tear it all down like this, people will finally be honest with each other! No one will have to worry if everyone around them secretly hates them, or if they’re just being manipulated for someone else’s gain. Those ideas won’t exist anymore! Everyone will just be their own person, free of the shackles of society and expectations, free of other people! Haven’t you been mistreated badly enough to understand why that’s good?” Despite sounding so sure of herself, her voice shook as she spoke. It was clear she was trying to use reason as a guide to hide her hurt, but she wouldn’t listen to reason in return.
“I’ve been kicked down and mocked my entire life, but I’ve never hated our world for it. For every awful person that made me hate my life , there was someone incredible who made me glad to be alive. I wouldn’t trade that away for the world.”
“Then I guess you simply haven’t suffered the way I have.” There was a tone of finality to her voice, as if she now no longer had reason to hear me out. She took to the skies once again, matching level with me on my perch. “This fight has no reason to continue. Goodbye, Sunao Otonashi.”
“No, wait!”
“「Outcast!」”
I launched myself away from my perch and spread my wings, only to be met by an immensely powerful pushback. Shiko’s signature power: the power of rejection.