"I knew his lordship would see reason."
Gojo beamed at Roswaal.
"Still, forgive the doubt. Can I trust his lordship to tell the truth?"
"I'll swear a Vow."
Roswaal's voice came out low and steady.
"The two of you really aren't taking me seriously at all."
From the sky, Capella's massive voice rolled over them.
Gojo glanced up at the oversized lizard circling above, then waved toward Regulus, still being worried at by the rabbits.
"Regulus. Lend a hand."
"Can you shut that noisy woman up before she interrupts us?"
"Who do you think you are, giving me orders? Why should I listen to you?"
Regulus's mouth worked faster than his brain.
Then.
The words caught up with who he'd been shouting at.
"My, my. Are we really this distant? Here I was thinking we were friends."
Gojo's face crumpled into theatrical hurt.
"I even had my Betty let you out this time."
"And this is the thanks I get. How disappointing."
"Maybe I shouldn't have let you out. Fine, fine, let's just put you back..."
The air cracked.
Capella, enjoying the show from the sidelines, found Regulus's head snapping toward her with the look of a man who'd decided something final. He struck.
"My, my. You really are scared."
Capella didn't dodge. Didn't try to block. She took the strike full on and ended up riddled like a sieve, the whole dragon form hanging together by threads.
Her flight dropped to barely holding altitude.
Even so.
No flash of anger surfaced. If anything, she studied Regulus with open surprise, as if the choice he'd made didn't compute.
In her experience, Regulus was the pettiest creature alive, the center of his own tiny universe.
A wrong look, a stray word, and he'd take it as a personal violation of cosmic magnitude.
Given all that.
Regulus not going for Gojo's throat. Actually obeying the man's instructions. Turning on her instead.
Capella couldn't make the pieces fit.
"Is there something I'm missing here, or does he have some leverage on you?"
Capella let Roswaal drop off her list entirely. Her wings beat, tattered flesh already knitting back, and she drifted up above Regulus, voice dripping curiosity.
Every word she spoke cranked Regulus's fury higher.
Leverage? Was that what they were calling it?
The man was a wall he couldn't get over, around, or through.
Unless he pinned his own consciousness in place with his Authority.
Which would make him indistinguishable from a statue.
So the only move on the board was Capella, because the alternative was that torturous prison dropping on him all over again.
Regulus dragging Capella's attention off Roswaal meant, in its roundabout way, the task Gojo had handed him was complete.
On the ground, Roswaal drifted down to hover in front of Gojo.
"Apologies. This is the condition I have to present myself in."
Roswaal looked at his missing limbs without a flicker of pain and smiled.
"No, no. Don't worry about it."
"A small matter."
Gojo returned the smile and reached out, lightly brushing a finger against Roswaal's body. Reverse Cursed Technique activated.
However.
The wounds weren't healed. Only the bleeding stopped.
"Go on, your lordship. Swear your Vow. Then open up. Every goal, on the table."
The smile on Roswaal's face turned bitter around the edges.
He would have preferred to keep his cards close. Anyone would.
But.
Gojo had put it plainly enough. Every plan, every careful arrangement, gone to pieces under the man's hand.
For all Roswaal's probing, he couldn't figure out the rules of the "correction" power the other side held. He couldn't even confirm whether the one doing the correcting was Gojo or Natsuki Subaru.
Even with the Book of Wisdom in hand.
He'd lost ground. No answers. No purchase.
Continuing the game was pointless.
Because in that same stretch of time, Felt's reputation had vaulted past every other Royal Candidate.
Drag this out any longer and he'd still have nothing, while Felt took the throne in the meantime.
What was the point of probing then?
What had it all been for, really?
Dragon blood. To bring back the teacher he'd loved.
If the Book of Wisdom had him losing at every turn, trying a different angle wasn't off the table.
Coming clean now was the second iron in the fire.
One option was Emilia, noted in the Book as standing beside the one who would change the world. The other was Felt, now carrying the strongest force and the highest public standing in the kingdom.
Either way, he didn't end up empty-handed.
Following Gojo's instructions, Roswaal swore the Vow with full gravity.
Gojo nodded, pleased.
"See? Was that so hard? Everyone being honest with each other. Isn't this nicer?"
With Roswaal handled, Gojo stretched and signaled Betty to haul him off to the side. His gaze slid back to Capella, Regulus, and the rabbits clustering around them.
"Time to wrap these ones up too."
"What's the plan?"
Betty dropped Roswaal onto the grass without ceremony, ignoring his present state of disrepair, and drifted over to Gojo's side.
"Simple. Gather them all in one place and take them in one move."
One Domain Expansion, wide enough to catch Capella, Regulus, and the rabbit swarm together.
"And how do you plan to pull them into one spot?"
Betty scrunched her nose. The rabbits were too many, and too scattered.
"Simple. You."
"As a being made of pure mana, I'd think you'd be awfully appetizing to a Great Rabbit."
"You're using me as bait?"
Betty's small fists came up, puffed-cheek glare fixed on him.
"Of course not. I'll be carrying you."
With that, he scooped her up and kicked off into the air.
"Come on. Show them what you've got."
"Don't say weird things like that!"
Betty protested loud, but her body moved on cue, gathering the ambient mana of the area the way he'd asked.
Gojo swept a wide, swift lap around the village with Betty in his arms.
The mana she condensed pulled in exactly as he'd expected. The rabbits locked on.
Flying low enough, always just low enough, that the swarm felt one more leap might catch them.
A single circuit and a fat column of rabbits had been walked right back to where Regulus and the others stood.
"That should do it, right?"
Betty tipped her head up at him.
"That'll do."
Overhearing the exchange, Regulus felt the back of his neck go cold.
"Gojo, you bastard! What are you planning now?"
His voice cracked up toward the figure in the sky.
"Nothing, nothing. Keep going, don't mind me. Just pretend I'm not here."
Gojo smiled and waved him down with every appearance of reassurance.
"Do I look like an idiot to you?"
Regulus abandoned Capella without a second thought and broke into a flat run toward the far edge of the village, trying to put as much distance between himself and Gojo as physics allowed.
"Leaving?"
"And going where, exactly?"
A minute ago Regulus had been the one keeping Capella pinned. Now the roles had flipped.
Capella had latched onto Regulus like a hook.
"Get away from me, you ugly meat-woman!"
"Why run? Are you really that terrified of that man?"
Mid-sentence, her wings snapped hard and she banked, peeling off Regulus and arrowing straight for Gojo.
"I'm curious. What exactly do you have that could make that stingy coward this wary of you?"
Gojo watched her bear down on him and gave a small shrug.
"Not running like Regulus. Coming straight at me instead?"
"Fine by me."
Without breaking stride, he tossed Betty toward Reinhard's group.
"Betty, remember to follow my lead in a second."
"Honestly, am I some kind of tool? Use and discard."
Betty muttered the whole way as she drifted down to land beside Reinhard and the rest.
"All right then."
"You wanted to know why Regulus is so determined to run?"
"I'll give you the answer."
The corners of his mouth lifted. Two fingers came up.
"Domain Expansion."
"Unlimited Void."
"Here it comes!"
Some distance off, Regulus flinched at the words before he could stop himself.
Not cowardice. The memory of being sealed, truly sealed, was too crushing for anyone sane to want a second taste.
One cage was the body. The other was the world around it.
Stack them, and the despair didn't add. It multiplied.
So much so that even Regulus, centuries old and convinced of his own invincibility, would have done almost anything to avoid another round.
Capella, tasting Unlimited Void for the first time, had no such caution. No defense prepared. No thought of defense at all.
Exactly like Regulus before her.
Because of her Authority.
Attacks aimed at her had never warranted more than a glance.
No wound mattered. Fatal or otherwise.
Head taken clean off her shoulders? She'd have it back in a breath.
So Regulus's reaction only sharpened her curiosity rather than warning her.
What kind of ability was it, exactly, that could scare a man like him that badly?
That line of thinking led her into the worst decision of her life.
From her own perspective, it took the space of a blink. One moment she was closing on the village from above, and the next she was standing somewhere else entirely.
"Hmm. What is this..."
Capella took in the unfamiliar space with idle interest, ready to poke around.
A foreign force drove itself into her skull. No warning. No gentleness.
By the time she registered it, it was already too late.
Information poured in like a dumpster overturning. Torrents of it. Oceans.
Her body locked in place under the weight.
The brain simply couldn't process it. Not any of it.
Every detail of her surroundings bloomed in perfect, crystalline clarity.
The direction and speed of wind. The trajectory of a torn-up blade of grass, where it would land, what it would graze on the way down.
Everything. Alive. Immediate. Unimaginable.
For Capella, it registered, at first, as something novel.
From a certain angle, it wasn't even unpleasant.
Put into words.
It came close to the feeling of omniscience.
Then the novelty wore thin, and she understood.
She could perceive every single detail. But the useless noise was so vast that her brain couldn't keep up. She couldn't judge. Couldn't decide. Couldn't move.
She'd crashed.
For a computer, that state wouldn't have fazed anyone from the modern world. They'd have the fix on hand.
A hard reset. Try again.
But.
A human brain isn't a computer.
The two concepts don't overlap.
And so.
Capella, with all her ironclad confidence in herself, emerged from Gojo's domain as a vegetable.
Exactly like Regulus before her. Movement, gone. Will, gone.
As for the rabbits, the effect landed cleaner still.
Creatures driven by hunger alone simply stopped under Unlimited Void's gaze.
Every instruction line filled. Every channel packed full.
The hunger itself, even, pressed down somewhere under the flood.
From outside.
A black sphere bloomed into existence, swallowing the rabbits and Capella whole.
Watching it form, Regulus felt the urge to run crystalize into something closer to panic.
In his mind, whatever monstrous ability this was had to have limits.
Back-to-back use had to be off the table.
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