"Charlie-kun!"
The staff office door slid open harshly, revealing the figure of Mahiru standing on the threshold with her breath appearing to pant heavily.
Her flaxen hair was slightly messy. For the sake of being able to reach this room as quickly as possible, she had to fight hard against the current wave of hundreds of panicked students along the outer corridor.
"Shiina-san. In the school environment, please call me Charlie-sensei."
Turning from the window, Charlie stepped closer toward Mahiru, then halted his steps right a few inches in front of the girl.
"This is no time to care about that thing!" Mahiru bit her lower lip tightly, staring at him with eyes that implied a sense of guilt. "The terrorists downstairs... they came for me, didn't they?"
As an exemplary female student who possessed an above-average intelligence, it was very easy for her to deduce the complications behind this sudden attack by an international armed group on Seijo High School. The appearance of unfamiliar foreigners dressed in tactical gear was clearly related to the Abyssal Devourer that threatened her life.
"Not just you." Charlie shook his head slowly, instantly correcting the girl's statement before she drowned in her own assumptions. "Their operation target is also aiming for Fujimiya Amane."
Too bad, hearing that new fact did not make Mahiru's mood improve at all. On the contrary, the sense of guilt instead grew even larger. After all, she was the trigger that brought this danger to the school environment.
Facing an extreme situation involving firearms, she knew her ordinary self could not do anything, and could only hang all her hopes on the man in front of her.
"Charlie-sensei... How will you handle them later?" Her voice trembled holding back anxiety. "There are too many eyewitnesses in this school. I am very worried you won't be able to live a peaceful life anymore after you show supernatural power in front of the public."
The speculation and fear overshadowing Mahiru's mind were not exaggerated at all.
In a normal and ordinary world without any mystical elements, if a real superpower or supernatural capability suddenly appeared, undoubtedly every country in the world that found out about it would definitely deploy all their best resources to obtain it by any means necessary.
Mahiru truly did not want it if just for the sake of protecting her, Charlie had to be hunted by the government, captured, and end up tragically as a horrifying experiment subject on top of a surgical operating table.
"You are worrying about me, Shiina-san?" Charlie formed a thin smile, then he extended his right hand and patted the girl's head gently. "It feels so good~ If the male students out there were to find out that their coveted 'Angel' showed such obvious favoritism to me, they would definitely be very jealous, wouldn't they?"
Mahiru quickly swatted the man's hand from the top of her head, then looked up staring at him with a facial expression that scowled in annoyance.
"This is absolutely no time to joke! Charlie-sensei!"
"Haiz... this was all deliberately done by me so that you wouldn't be too tense." Charlie chuckled softly, staring straight into her eyes. "Now, you already feel much calmer, don't you?"
"..."
Under that gentle gaze that was so soothing, Mahiru instantly threw her face toward the side.
Her cheeks blushed slightly; she hoped that the other party would not hear the sound of her heartbeat that was suddenly racing very fast inside her chest.
"Alright. Enough with the joking." Charlie changed his tone of voice to become full of confidence. "As for the problem of the terrorist group downstairs, I have already handled them all. At this moment, they all are already dead."
"Huh?" Mahiru flinched staring back at him with a look of disbelief. "Charlie-sensei... you aren't lying to me just to calm me down, are you? Since earlier I have been standing here and did not see you perform any action or movement."
Charlie only raised both his shoulders casually. "It is very easy to confirm the truth of my words. At this moment, the Tokyo police party is already on an emergency journey toward this school. Who knows which student or staff member managed to call them in the middle of the chaos just now."
Through the Senrigan capability that remained continuously active, he could see clearly the visualization of dozens of police patrol cars turning on their red sirens, speeding at high velocity cutting through the Tokyo highway straight toward Seijo High School.
Mahiru stared with an anxious look, her hand squeezing the edge of her skirt.
"Charlie-sensei... were... were there any casualties from the incident downstairs?"
"..."
Charlie fell silent. Knowing Mahiru's nature which was fragile yet always tried to be strong, he chose not to hide the true facts.
"There were." He answered straightforwardly with a heavy tone of voice. "Besides our school security guard who was shot at the guard post, several civilians outside the gate who came gathering out of curiosity also became victims. In total there are sixteen people who died outside the perimeter."
Mahiru's eyes widened completely hearing the number mentioned. Her body briefly tensed before Charlie immediately continued his sentence to soothe her.
"However, there is not a single casualty from the inside side of the school, be it teachers or students. They all are safe."
"Based on their movement earlier, I suspect those terrorists deliberately restrained themselves and did not kill the students inside the building. They needed them to remain alive as hostages so as to possess a strong bargaining position to escape from the security forces' siege after their mission was finished."
Hearing the reassurance that none of her school friends were injured, Mahiru reflexively patted her own chest. She exhaled a long breath, trying to dispel the tight feeling that had briefly clogged her lungs.
"Thank goodness... Thank goodness if everyone at school is safe..."
However, that sense of relief did not last long. In the next second, the sparkle in Mahiru's eyes dimmed.
Her conscience suddenly felt as if it were hit by an extremely heavy moral burden.
The figure of sixteen lives that passed away out there kept echoing in her head.
Even though those who died were strangers she did not know, Mahiru knew very well the root cause of this entire bloody tragedy.
If only the Abyssal Devourer were not targeting her, if only she were not involved in this vortex of conflict, those four white vans would never have come, and those dozen or so innocent people would not have needed to lose their lives on this peaceful afternoon.
A sense of guilt began to creep in and grip tightly the depths of her heart, making the girl only able to hang her head deeply with a regretful look.
(Hundred Gauntlets is truly very practical. It seems I must explore this capability more deeply in the future.) Charlie thought in his heart.
Hundred Gauntlets was judged as an "unharmful" capability and tended to be less useful by its original owner, Najimi Ajimu from the Medaka Box series.
However, that only applied within Ajimu's standards. Within the standards of general fictional character power scales, this capability still fell into a category that was extremely strong, cheating, and manipulative (Hax).
The main power of Hundred Gauntlets purely was full Causality Manipulation, namely the absolute ability to reverse cause-and-effect relationships. This capability worked by swapping the positions of what became the "Cause" and what became the "Effect".
In a fight, its user can freely manipulate the basic laws of logic that bind reality.
At a defensive level, this capability makes its user almost impossible to be defeated
With any kind of conventional physical attack.
For example, if an enemy deploys an attack with a destructive power on a planetary or even galactic scale toward the user (Cause), the user can reverse the effect so that the massive destruction instead turns back to hit the attacker themselves, without the user having to bother parrying, blocking, or dodging from the attack area.
Then, why did Ajimu call Hundred Gauntlets an useless capability?
She categorized it like that solely just because its own power scale was too broken. Ajimu possessed a quadrillion other capabilities that were far more conceptually destructive, like destroying stars (Making Space Debris) or cutting concepts (Meaning Network).
For her, Hundred Gauntlets "only" swapped an already existing reality, not erasing that reality from the roots of history permanently like what was done by its evolution version—All Fiction.
Even so, Hundred Gauntlets purely sat at a High-Tier Causality Manipulation power level. Although it was not as abstract and terrifying as All Fiction which was capable of erasing the concept of color or time from the world, its pure capability could still make its user dominate almost all fighters who relied on conventional physical and energy attacks.
Exactly a minute before Mahiru came to the staff office, Charlie had used his Hundred Gauntlets to replicate the effect of Instant Death.
In the universal law of causality, every smallest action of a living creature is a "Cause" which naturally produces an "Effect". Using Hundred Gauntlets, Charlie can manipulate this basic thing instantly on a wide area scale.
Cause: The enemy intends to draw a breath to stay alive.
Effect with Hundred Gauntlets: That biological process is reversed in its function totally, making the enemy's heart instantly stop beating or their lungs reject the oxygen supply right at that exact second.
With that logic manipulation mechanism, Charlie succeeded in finishing the lives of all the drug cartel terrorists in the school environment at the same time, even without needing to show himself in front of them.
The resolution of this crisis indeed gave off a highly anti-climactic impression.
There was no thrilling fierce battle scene.
There was no firefight that damaged the school building.
There was no moment of showing off or aura farming to intimidate opponents.
There was no other choice.
The gap in strength between the two sides was already like heaven and earth.
For Charlie, even though that terrorist group from Mexico held the most complete military-caliber automatic firearms, their existence in his eyes was nothing more than a swarm of ants that happened to be slightly larger in size.
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