Just then, someone the rest of them had overlooked made her way to Ogre's body.
Seryu sank down beside the corpse and wept, the grief pouring out of her.
Her master lay dead and the ones who'd killed him were standing right in front of her, and she didn't have the strength to make a single one of them pay for what they did.
"Hey. What do we do with these two we've got left?" Mine asked, cold as ever.
Leone was the first to move, hooking Tatsumi in against her side. "Eh, this one and I have a bit of a connection going. I'm taking him home with me."
"Huh?"
"And the other?"
Night Raid's eyes settled on the sobbing girl.
She might have been crying pitifully enough to soften anyone's heart, but there was no hiding the madness and the hatred rolling off of her.
"...Eliminate."
Akame knew this one couldn't be left alive.
And just as she moved to strike... the soil beneath Seryu suddenly churned, and in the next second it swallowed her whole.
Akame's eyes shot wide at the sight.
She burst forward at her absolute fastest and drove Murasame straight down into the earth.
When she pulled the blade back out and looked it over, there wasn't so much as a drop of blood on it.
'She got away?'
Akame's face darkened.
She would not mistake it.... that had unmistakably been the work of the Thousand-Layer Cloths.
Slipping away without leaking the faintest trace of one's presence... as far as she knew, only one person alive could pull off something like that.
"Guy..."
...
Watching people through a screen was seriously addictive.
It was a lot like playing one of those sandbox games.
Except this sandbox happened to be completely real, because it was the real world, and in a world like this, owning a "satellite," even a bargain-model one, meant he could see everything happening across the Capital.
Noah dismissed the surveillance magic.
His eyes stung a little, so he picked up the eye drops from the desk and let a few fall into each one.
'Maybe I've been overdoing this a bit,' he thought, half scolding himself, and closed his eyes to rest.
The Black Nightmare was an aircraft whose performance ran centuries ahead of anything this era could produce, and with a power source as monstrous as the Forest Dragon Jewel keeping it aloft, it drifted endlessly above the Capital, holding a level line somewhere between fifteen and sixteen thousand meters up.
From that height it could take in the whole Capital and even the land around it, and on top of that the Black Nightmare bent light around itself with a refraction array, keeping perfectly hidden.
Through scrying magic, or, after Noah's improvements, what could just as well be called a "surveillance array," he'd tagged every person in the Capital who had any connection to him, so he could keep track of their movements at any time.
If he wanted too, he could even adjust the focus and zoom in for a close-up on whatever was unfolding down on the ground.
That was exactly why his eyes were sore now.
With nearly all of his Lv.2 ability values at the top level, even his Endurance could not keep him from feeling the strain.
That alone showed how much he had been using his eyes earlier.
'Najenda's got some nerve on her,' he mused, 'building Night Raid's base barely ten kilometers out from the Capital. Mm, there's probably some kind of barrier doing the heavy lifting there.'
'Anyway.'
'That boy really is something else.'
Barely arrived in the Capital, and already he'd gotten himself tangled up with this many unusual people.
That web even included Noah himself.
By the Blazer world's theory of destiny, what the kid had lived through in a mere two days was already more turbulent than most people's entire lives.
If someone were pulling strings behind the scenes, that would be one thing.
But if it really came down to nothing but "luck," then the boy was almost certainly no ordinary person.
He was someone carrying a special destiny.
The Empire was the largest, oldest, and strongest nation in this world.
It held weapons powerful enough to anchor the very fate of the nation: the Teigu.
Now, after a thousand years of history, the Empire had reached a critical point between survival and collapse.
If one combined this historical background with everything currently happening in the Empire, it was easy to see that the Empire's fate was about to take a massive turn.
The stage was set.
And a stage like that would always need its cast to come out and perform, the way his old world had its figures who went down in history, and its nameless souls who shaped a thousand years without a single record of their names.
Some people were simply born carrying a destiny all their own, bound to finish their given role within a single lifetime.
Right now, Noah was both part of this era's background and an observer standing outside it.
As for the major events that were about to unfold, he could step away or involve himself as he pleased.
So far he'd analyzed more than ten Teigu, and most of them hadn't impressed him.
There were forty-eight Teigu in all, each different in the order it was made and in what it could do, and of everything he'd seen, only two had actually satisfied him: the Empire's biological Teigu, Hekatonkheires, and Chelsea's Teigu, Gaea Foundation.
Those two produced effects he'd struggle to reproduce with his own abilities.
As for the others, whether it was the one-cut-kill Murasame or Esdeath's ice Teigu, none of them were impossible for him to recreate.
Murasame's true power lay in a blade that could sever the soul itself, and that much he could already manage through Spellweaver.
Granting a weapon the same property would only take a bit of effort; push the development far enough and he could even mass-produce it.
The poison Teigu was, for him, more a matter of convenience.
Its real value was how efficiently it cultivated poison strains to restock his materials.
Its single most lethal threat mattered less, since with the right elements mixed together he could synthesize anything through Spellweaver, nerve agents and every other deadly toxin included.
As for the ice Teigu, it was essentially a very high-grade application of the secret arts, the crystallized result of fusing alchemy and arcana into a single discipline, giving its user the terrifying, super-dangerous-species-level power to command ice, with an output that could even surpass the original depending on the wielder's aptitude.
Spellweaver could command ice just as well; and while its power fell short of what the Teigu granted for now, skills grew alongside every rank-up and every rise in his stats.
If Noah reached Lv.5, Spellweaver's power would absolutely surpass the abilities of a super-class Danger Beast by a wide margin.
Before he could rank up though, he had to get the new gear ready for Level 3.
Whether it was Oranides or Focalor, both were products he had created through early experimentation.
He needed to complete the design of his new equipment before leveling up.
'For that, I really do hope I can analyze a few more powerful Teigu.'
He sighed.
Even with forty-eight Teigu to their name, there were bound to be some duds mixed in.
Take the "Twin Great-Axes," Belvac, for instance.
An axe-type Teigu. Its weight was staggering, well past anything an ordinary person could ever hope to swing.
Given enough strength to actually use it, the sheer stacking of force and mass made its power passable, and its trait was that it could be thrown, and would keep tracking a target until the momentum of the throw finally gave out.
But its performance might not even match up to some ordinary weapons.
The conditions for using it were brutal, the demands on the wielder sky-high, its power merely so-so, and its trait nothing to write home about.
That was from Noah's point of view, of course.
For an ordinary soldier or warrior, its performance was still plenty frightening.
No ordinary person could hope to block a slash from it, and dodging that homing throw was next to impossible.
Even a seriously capable strongman couldn't hurl the thing over and over without wearing down, which was why Noah's advice, plainly, was to just use a rocket launcher.
Far more reliable than this hunk of metal.
If he had to rank the Teigu, this one sat dead last among the third-rate.
If anything, the perfect match for Belvac was an enhanced human.
Find a compatible user, then use drugs and body modification to greatly increase their physical strength. Only then could the Teigu's ability be fully brought out.
An axe hurled by a heavily modified enhanced human carried force enough to strike a distant enemy, and out in open ground, with no terrain to duck behind, even a fairly strong opponent would be hard-pressed to take that kind of mass head-on.
A weapon that came with strings attached, on its user, its setting, and its enemy alike, could only be called third-rate.
'All members of Night Raid seem to be Teigu users. I didn't pay much attention last time. Maybe there are a few interesting ones among them.'
Just watching from afar was getting dull, so he figured he'd step in a little.
But before that—
"Taeko."
Noah called out once, and in the blink of an eye the girl appeared in the corridor just outside the living room.
"Senpai? What is it?"
"Mm. Bring me your sword. I'm going to give it a little enhancement."
"Eh? Senpai's going to do that for... um, understood. I'll go get it right now." The girl's cheeks turn red a little, though what was going through her head was anyone's guess.
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