Crack!
There was a strange sound from my wrist.
It was because Ariel, being a beastkin, was physically far superior to me.
No…at this point, isn’t she basically superhuman?
Then why is she affected by something as weak as a pheromone?
“Yu, Yuna! Help me!”
“Uh, yeah!”
One small mercy is that Yuna and I have already settled things between us.
If it were the old her, she might’ve used this situation to her advantage or even tried to compete.
“Princess Ariel, get a hold of yourself!”
“I’m more clearheaded now than I’ve ever been, Miss Yuna. After calmly weighing my options, I’ve decided this is the time and place.”
A bead of cold sweat ran down Yuna’s face.
“Johan… was I ever like that?”
“I wouldn’t say no.”
Honestly, it’s no exaggeration to say she was even worse.
The only thing past-Yuna lacked was the guts to actually follow through.
“L-Let’s all calm down for a second!”
“What are you talking about? Miss Yuna, aren’t you the one getting the most excited here?”
“This is shock, not excitement!”
Ariel’s brazen, borderline shameless remarks made Yuna shout in embarrassment.
This isn’t good.
Now that the assassin’s composure is broken, there’s no way she can exploit Ariel’s openings.
– Oh? Now this is getting fun. Infighting… it’s just what I was hoping for.
“You son of a…”
– Should I give the young couple some privacy?
The Scriptwriter was feigning politeness.
His willingness to toy with people’s emotions like this… It’s starting to make me truly angry.
“Ariel! Don’t fall for the Scriptwriter’s tricks. You have to fight it!”
“Why not just go for it? I think I’ll feel a lot better afterward.”
“…What on earth are you talking about, Ariel?”
How can she say things like that so shamelessly?
Isn’t she a princess? Shouldn’t she have some dignity?
“Ugh! Ngh! What is this strength! Seriously…”
Ariel, gripping both my wrists, tries to push me down.
The sheer power is ridiculous.
No, I’ve felt this before. But even now, I still can’t overpower Ariel?
Even with the Babel Gear and all the other gears integrated into my right arm spinning in sync?
Maybe her strength isn’t just average beastkin level. Maybe it’s far beyond that.
“Princess Ariel, please snap ou—”
Thud!
“Gah!”
Yuna rushed in to pull me out, but it was pointless.
She was repelled like she’d slammed into an invisible wall.
Falling to the floor, stunned.
“Wait your turn, Miss Yuna.”
“Huh…?”
Yuna’s lips twisted and then came a flicker of hostility.
She must be furious after being struck like that out of nowhere.
The Scriptwriter really is something else.
With a single move, he managed to shatter all unity in our party.
And now, with Yuna gripping her weapon in fury, Ariel finally succeeded in pinning me down.
“Ariel, you can’t do this. You’ll definitely regret it later.”
“Then try resisting.”
“…What?”
“Hehe, but you’re not resisting. Honestly, Johan, you’re thinking the same thing as me, right? I know you are.”
But I am resisting?
I’m thrashing around with everything I’ve got here.
Is the difference in strength really that overwhelming? Just how deep does Ariel’s power go?
Of all times, her worst trait is surfacing now:
She gets way ahead of herself.
The biggest example? The engagement ceremony.
Sure, things turned out okay in the end. But there’s no denying she rushed into it.
She’s being rash again.
But unlike before, this time there’s no way things will work out in the end.
We need to stop the Scriptwriter.
There’s no time to waste here.
“Hang on, Johan. I’ll drag that crazy woman off you and get you out of there.”
Yuna who was clearly at her boiling point now gripped a dagger in her hand.
This could easily escalate into bloodshed.
Even if I somehow managed to calm Ariel down, we’ll have burned through far too much energy.
Meanwhile, Ariel was now unbuttoning my shirt one by one…with her teeth.
Yuna narrowed her eyes and steadied her stance at the sight.
The tension reached a breaking point.
Bang!
A single gunshot rings out.
Then, Ariel who had been straddling me silently collapsed to the side.
“…Huh?”
– Huh…?
Both I and the Scriptwriter, too stunned to speak, slowly turned toward the direction the shot came from.
There stood Emily.
I didn’t even know Emily could use a gun.
Wait…did she shoot just now? At Ariel? Without hesitation?
“I stopped her.”
“She’s… she’s not dead, right…?”
“It was a tranquilizer bullet. Not a drug-based one. It has an electric shock effect.”
“O-Oh… Good job!”
Maybe it was because the attack came from such an unexpected direction.
Or maybe she was too focused on keeping Yuna in check.
But Ariel….Archmage Ariel was taken out in one clean shot, having completely ignored the one person she should have kept an eye on.
It was almost absurd.
All I can hope is that this becomes a good learning experience for her.
– What… the hell was that? Hah. I’m speechless. I didn’t see that coming.
The Scriptwriter put a hand to his forehead.
Even he seemed dumbfounded. And he was the one who wrote this “script”.
– Hahaha! Now this is fun. That moment when an experiment gives you a completely unexpected result…that’s when the heart really starts racing.
“……”
– Johan Damus.
“What is it?”
“I’ll be waiting on the lowest floor. I look forward to seeing how you’ll get past the traps I’ve set.”
With those words, the Scriptwriter collapsed as if someone had shut off his power.
That’s probably what actually happened.
He must’ve disconnected.
Anyway…
“That damned hedonistic lunatic.”
It was clear that the Scriptwriter had changed in many ways from the past.
But I had to admit. There were still parts of him that hadn’t changed at all.
“First things first.”
Well, I’ll think about how to deal with that maniac later.
If I can keep the upper hand, there’s a chance we could negotiate.
Though, knowing him, he’ll probably say he’d rather die than give up.
Still, since I know him, I’d hesitate to kill him outright. No harm in at least trying.
“Ariel, can you hear me?”
“……”
Ariel blinked in response to my question.
Should I be impressed that she’s still conscious even after getting hit by Emily’s stun round?
Either way, if she hasn’t passed out, that’s for the better.
“I’m going to purge the drug from your system now. So don’t be too alarmed, even if it feels a bit strange.”
Crunch!
I bit into my right thumb and drew blood. There was no pain. My entire right arm was already fused with gears.
If I peel it off later, my real arm will still be there… probably.
Anyway, right now my right arm is basically a supercomputer.
“I’ll now use Worm Gear’s blood manipulation ability to flush the drug out of your system. Alright, open wide.”
First, I need to get even a small amount of my blood into Ariel’s body.
I brought my thumb close to her mouth.
My thumb, brushing against her small lips, slid gently into her mouth.
“Ahem!”
This feels… weird. I’m definitely trying to save her, so why does it feel like I’m doing something inappropriate?
“Um, Ariel, you don’t have to lick it, you know.”
Maybe… I’m doing something not so different from what Ariel was trying to do.
It’s hard to look directly at her as she suckles on my thumb with a flushed face, drawing out my blood.
“Johan, now that I think about it, I feel like the drug’s affecting me a bit too.”
“Let’s not make things more complicated, Yuna. I’m already struggling enough as it is.”
“Blood…”
What the hell are we even doing in the heart of a terrorist stronghold?
Anyway…
“I feel like I’m missing something.”
Is it just a hunch?
No. If I’m thinking this, then it can’t be just a feeling.
There’s something. I need to remember it.
But…
“Jo… han…”
Right now, it’s hard to think about anything else with Ariel like this.
This is a medical procedure.
***
The Scriptwriter’s main body….the massive computer that controlled this entire mechanical fortress processed the situation and logged it.
– Hahahahaha!
Countless calculations and footnote-like comments streamed across the monitor.
Having lost his physical body, his ways of expressing thoughts and words had changed drastically.
He converted everything a human could perceive with the five senses into data.
Because of that, he could still understand everything he once felt as a human.
– How amusing. Just as I thought, it’s fun.
Since constructing the fortress, he had been digging endlessly downward.
All of his resources had been devoted to excavating and reinforcing the ground beneath, but things were a little different now.
There was the danger Johan mentioned, and he also had to prepare for incoming guests.
Naturally, that meant the pace of his work had slowed dramatically…
But the Scriptwriter was having fun.
– The unexpected always gets the heart racing.
Yes, he was enjoying himself.
Even now, having cast aside his flesh and become a cold machine with his “emotions” reduced to mere reflexive responses programmed into him…he could still feel his heart race.
That was the trace of the Scriptwriter Deus.
Even after transforming into such a body, there remained something fundamental that couldn’t be erased.
A strange presence within the principles and patterns behind his every action.
– Heh… heheheheheh!
The countless wires and cables connected to the computer shook as if they couldn’t suppress laughter like shoulders trembling from mirth.
The creaking sounds made it feel as if the Scriptwriter were truly laughing.
– The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it gets.
Just moments ago, his plan had failed.
You could even say the script had fallen apart. But he was someone who didn’t mind failure…someone who believed there was always something to be learned from it.
He analyzed the cause of that failure.
– To think she’d be that ignorant.
Provoking Ariel had worked.
He had believed that with her around, she would keep Yuna in check and reliably bind Johan’s hands as well.
But in his script, one more person was supposed to be under the drug’s effects.
– That Emily… she really was raised in extreme overprotection.
Ariel wasn’t the only one affected by the drug.
Unlike Yuna and Johan, Emily had no resistance to it. In that sense, she was no different from Ariel.
But that didn’t mean she was some superhuman who could suppress or neutralize the drug’s effects on her own. Because she wasn’t.
The reason Emily had remained fine or rather seemed fine was because of her ignorance.
She had no idea how to process the sensations she was experiencing.
And so, she remained composed.
– This too could become an interesting experiment. How far can human instinct take someone? It won’t be long before I have my answer.
An intriguing variable. Watching how, and at what moment, it kicks in…that’s part of the thrill.
– Now then… time to write a new script for the next phase.
The Scriptwriter pulled up a map of the fortress and observed the movements of the intruders.
Of the red dots marking the infiltrators, three groups were worth watching.
First, Theseus and Immun who were closest to the lowest floor.
Then, just one step behind them, Johan’s party.
And finally…
– The young Prophet and her knights.
A blank space advancing as if erasing the very map itself like a living eraser.
Agents of Wholeness, whose mere presence caused all kinds of machinery to break down due to their divine power.
It was the movement of the Prophet, Helena, Dietrich, and Jeff.
– It might actually be us who are running out of time.
At the top floor of the fortress was the power source.
The Scriptwriter hadn’t paid much attention to it, assuming only the usual riffraff were involved. None of whom would think to probe underground.
But if Johan had figured it out and deliberately split his team, then it was nothing short of astonishing.
– Still…
If the power source were to be taken out, the current Scriptwriter would only be able to operate for six more hours.
Of course, with power conservation, the backup reserves could last for a few months… but their opponents weren’t the kind you could afford to conserve energy against.
– It would be unwise to expect this to be resolved so easily.
The monsters roaming the underground. Minos.
They were mass-produced models, created solely to delay Theseus and Johan, merely by strength in numbers.
But on the top floor… there was their completed form. A final perfected weapon of war, designed with no concern for cost-efficiency or practicality…only raw power.
[Asterion]
The Scriptwriter who was thinking of that monster that even he couldn’t fully control….chose to simply watch how things would unfold.
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