Uchiha Itachi (Naruto) vs Fiamma of the Right (To Aru)

“Stop it. I don’t like being praised like that. You saw Othinus at full power, didn’t you? If the predicted specs I calculated out are accurate, her power would go well beyond mine which is limited to the world we’re in now. How many times was the world destroyed on your way here? In fact, how’d you even defeat her when she had her lance? …No, merely winning in a fistfight wouldn’t get you back to this world.”

It was true that 100% Almighty Thor would likely be killed in an instant if he faced 100% Magic God Othinus. Thor ruled a single world while Othinus created infinite worlds. That was an obvious and insurmountable wall.

But that was not the current problem.

Almighty Thor stood before Kamijou as a real threat and Othinus could no longer use her power. To move on, Kamijou would have to defeat him with the fists of a puny human.

“Just to be clear, I don’t designate the coordinates. For one thing, coordinates on paper are meaningless in an ever-expanding universe.”

Fiamma of the Right’s body shook.

Not only his heart constricted and retracted. Centered around his third arm, his entire body did as well. It was a reaction to the power stored at his center travelling to his right arm of flesh and blood.

A great change occurred as if to prove that the power to change the world had descended.

However, this change was not in Fiamma’s body.

It was in the planet that received him.

The heavens greatly opened up.

That clear otherworldly and artificially arranged night sky of red, blue, yellow, and green split open. Like an old stocking ripping, large cracks appeared in places and they spread soundlessly.

On the other side was a golden light.

It was just like a legend. It was just like the world seen in religious art. That lowering curtain of light looked like a scene of the heavens and the earth being connected. Someone who did not know the circumstances would likely have mistaken it for an angel above the clouds about to spill out. In reality, god and the angels were not at a physical height. They were on the other side of some invisible phase like infrared rays or ultraviolet rays. However, that mistaken impression may not have been too far off in a way. That golden light was a massive amount of Telesma.

Fiamma had not called in an angel.

It may have been more accurate to say he had called in the world where angels were.

Fiamma of the Right had not pitifully knocked on the door again and again and then waited for the heavy door to open. He had only transformed the place at which he stood into an appropriate place.

When a certain Christian holy woman was forcibly thrown into a brothel, that brothel had turned into a shining place for sermons. It was the same as that.

When a different holy woman was thrown into a cold and dirty prison while injured, the entire space had overflowed with the shining power of the angels making it like a pure spring and the woman’s injuries were kindly healed. It was the same as that.

(It has been dyed by heaven.)

The area around the proper ones would be dyed in the proper manner.

Fiamma of the Right’s lips twisted in pleasure upon confirming that truth.

(Once I rearrange the depths of the earth, all the gears will have been readjusted and the devices will have been set to keep them running smoothly. Then this world will once again be moving as it should be.)

That meant that he no longer needed the boy who had lost his right arm.

That mass of flesh that had been nothing more than an adapter to keep that right arm in the world needed to be quickly disposed of.

(I will save this world. You are no longer necessary to do that.)

“…Oh, it’s the failure.”

Immediately after Othinus’s voice rang out, another person was now there.

At some point, a blond young man had come to be in the ring.

There was nowhere he could have been hidden. There had been no sign of him using Academy City psychic powers. And yet that blond young man stood there. It was not that he had suddenly appeared. Kumokawa Maria could not put it that way. She had no idea when he had arrived.

And the strangest thing of all was that the blond young man was facing Othinus who had wielded such great power.

“Magic God,” he spat out rudely. It was as if he were declaring himself to be opposed to the one he named thusly. “I am not here for you this time.”

Most of the chain-link had been destroyed but the blond young man still pointed toward the mainly useless exit of the ring.

“Hurry up and leave with the Dvergr. I have business with that Imagine Breaker.”

“…”

Othinus remained silent for a bit.

But then…

A tremendous explosive noise burst out between Othinus and the blond young man.

Actually, it was not just one. Thousands and tens of thousands of explosive noises burst out at such short intervals that they all sounded like a single whole.

However, Kumokawa had no idea what had happened.

She saw no visual phenomenon.

She knew only one thing.

That blond young man could rival that Magic God named Othinus.

“Give it up. This will settle nothing,” said the young man.

Most likely, Othinus had only been testing him. After a few seconds, the explosive noises suddenly stopped.

“Do you think a mere failure can stand before a pure Magic God?” spat out Othinus.

“No, I don’t think I can win. If I could, I would have killed you long ago. I will abstain from killing you as long as I have no means of doing so. That’s all there is to it.”

“…So you’ve come to be killed by me?”

“It isn’t that either. You know that. You may be a Magic God, but you are not perfect. Or rather, you are too perfect and that gives you a troublesome characteristic. You know that and that is why you have put together this exaggerated plan to free you from that dilemma.”

“…”

“Infinite possibilities sounds good, but that gives you both the possibility of success and the possibility of failure. I suppose it’s something like matter and antimatter. For everything, you must hold the possibility for success and the possibility for failure. No matter how much power you gather, you have a 50/50 chance. If you think of it like Russian roulette, it’s like taking a shot with three bullets loaded. Let’s be honest, Othinus. While you possess the power to destroy the world, you also have a 50% chance of losing to a child in a game of rock-paper-scissors. It’s almost a miracle that Kamijou Touma has lost twice. His misfortune must really be something. But given this condition, you cannot just wield your full power at random. You want to find a way to control those possibilities. Wanting to increase your possibilities for victory is natural, but when your possibilities for failure increase too, you need to find some way of dealing with that. 50/50 is the most troublesome of all.”

The young man then pointed toward his own chest with his thumb.

And he spoke.

“I am an impure example that stopped at the point where I ‘should have’ become a Magic God. In other words, I lose to you in overall power, but I am freed from that 50/50 dilemma. After all, I am imperfect. Unlike your perfect balance, my odds of victory have a deviation.”

“And you think that will let you win?”

“No, I already told you I can’t. If I could, I would have killed you long ago,” said the young man before smiling and continuing. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have an idea as to how to push you back just a bit. It’s all thanks to how you so carelessly crushed Kamijou Touma’s right hand.”

“You don’t mean…?”

“World War III was started by a man who held the power to save the world. He had the power to save the world, but could not save the world without a right hand to output that power into the world. That was why he used various methods to obtain that special right hand. That’s right. You cut off the right hand that only one of can exist in the world.”

A great metallic noise came from above.

It was from one of the pillars used to support the chain-link fence surrounding the ring. A man wearing red had appeared atop it at some point. His right arm had been severed at the shoulder. Growing from there was an unnatural distortion of space that looked as if sugar water had been mixed in.

“Fiamma of the Right with his power to save the world. And me, a man who can wield the power of a Magic God even if it is impure. …Now then. What will you do in response to these changing possibilities, 50% Othinus? I believe you have even odds of just forcing your way through this.”

“Hmph,” snorted Othinus.

While holding Marian Slingeneyer in one hand, she turned her back on the young man. She was going along with her opponent’s suggestion.

But after taking a few steps, Othinus suddenly stopped. She carelessly tossed Marian to the side.

“No, I guess I’ll kill you,” she said.

With a great roar, something beyond Kumokawa Maria’s understanding blew about.

Natural Selector, the one who determines natural selection. On that stage where countless contestants, Kiharas, Gremlin, Kamijou Touma, and Marian Slingeneyer had all fought, a battle began that had the same theme but was on a completely different level.

...................................................................................................................................................................................................

“What happened to those that made that complaint? Did you make them part of that army of the dead too?”

“No. As usual, someone got in my way.”

Someone got in her way.

For Othinus, the number of people who could do that was quite limited.

“Did the failure…Did Ollerus appear?”

“Currently, when I face him, it always ends in a tie. That’s just how things are set up. I will need to do something about him too at some point.”

Her one weakness.

A threat greater than Imagine Breaker

She was a library with perfect copies of the world’s 103,000 Original grimoires in her head. To obtain her was to obtain all the magic in the world.

“…Right.” From her voice, it sounded like she was about to die. “With the 103,000 grimoires, you would be able to twist everything in the world to your will without exception. That is what we call a Magic God.”

Not the god of the demon world, but someone who had thoroughly mastered magic to the point of entering the domain of god.

A Magic God.

Also, if Index, despite lacking magic power, were to join forces with a magician, she would have had no reason to run. That… was how dangerous Index’s memories were.

The 103,000 grimoires were on a completely different scope even in comparison to the possessing of a nuclear weapon.

All living creatures eventually die, an apple dropped from above would fall down, and 1+1=2. You would be able to take those kinds of natural and unchangeable rules of the world, destroy them, rewrite them, and create new ones. You could make 1+1=3, make an apple dropped from below fall up, and make all dead creatures eventually be revived.

Magicians called such beings Magic Gods.

Not the god of the demon plane,but a magician who had thoroughly mastered magic to the point of entering the domain of God.

Magic God.

The scientific psychic powers developed by Academy City had their base in quantum theory. In quantum theory, the world was thought about at an exceedingly small level and it was a strange field in which Newtonian mechanics such as an apple falling to the earth when you let it go did not apply.

The object was definitely there, but it went somewhere else when observed by someone.

An object in a box could only be expressed in possibility or probability. It was not said to be there or said to be not there. It could only be said to 70% exist.

If you thought about it in the terms of the normal world of science such as in terms of drink cans or oranges, the ideas of quantum theory made no sense whatsoever. However, if you controlled the microscopic world with the observer of a human mind, the macroscopic world (that is, what could be seen with the naked eye) could be controlled. That was what Academy City’s psychic powers were.

However, there was another theory that was the counter to the microscopic quantum theory.

Holism.

In that theory, the entire expanding universe was treated as a single large system or network and things were viewed at the largest scale that humans could manage.

This once branched off to Gaia Theory which viewed the entire Earth as a single environment or ecosystem, but the life forms on the Earth were also affected by solar winds and the gravitational pull of the moon. If you also added in the time axis and other dimensions to that large ‘world’, you were no longer dealing with just a single planet. In that way, many had gone back to the origins of the theory and talking in true wholes once more.

Gremlin had used Baggage City as a giant testing ground to complete the foundational theory behind psychic powers that used that holism.

The theory itself was simple.

It was the opposite of the butterfly effect that said the beating of a butterfly’s wings could cause storms.

In other words, a major change on the global scale could cause flames to come from your palm.

Just saying that the large affected the small may make it a little hard to understand.

However, we are constantly undergoing changes caused by large things.

For example, take the theory of relativity.

Setting aside the precise definition, let us focus on the part that says the flow of time slows the closer an object gets to the speed of light.

A human riding in a car and a human riding in an airplane are in different ‘times’ that would cause a slight immeasurable error.

So let us make the scale larger.

What about a human on Earth versus a human on the moon? What about a human on the moon versus a human on Mars? Due to rotation and revolution, those people would be within different speeds and therefore different times.

Now let us bring the scale up to the whole.

The universe was created in the Big Bang and is constantly expanding moment by moment. Of course, we of humanity live in the universe and are all moving at the speed of that expansion. This puts us in the relativistic time created by the Big Bang.

Now, let us go through a thought experiment.

The universe is expanding equally in every direction, but what if the expansion speed of a single local area changed?

The change in speed would create a change in time.

An exceedingly large phenomenon would change the concept of time for a tiny human.

Of course, that is merely an example.

However, if you could bend or ball up the entire universe, the side effect of that power would cause an exceedingly microscopic phenomenon that would be immeasurable even with an electron microscope.

Does it seem like a rather roundabout method?

Do you think that if someone had power great enough to alter the expansion speed of the universe, they should just use that power to directly crush the planet or the galaxy?

However, a holistic esper would only notice the flames coming from their palm. Even if some distant galaxy was crushed in the process, that would be all they could comprehend. Just like how a person in a car cannot notice that someone standing on the Earth is in a different time.

As such, an esper created from the whole might only reach a Level 2 or 3 on Academy City’s scale. Even if some truly ridiculous thing was occurring in reality, no one would notice it, so it might as well not have been happening. Ironically, this was the same as the concept of zero in quantum theory.

What Gremlin had been doing was the first step toward that.

Before actually creating a holistic esper, they were carrying out an experiment to see if a small supernatural phenomenon would occur when the world was greatly distorted.

The game piece of Almighty Thor remained in place while the world map laid below it was moved.

It sounded simply unbelievable, but Kamijou knew of a technique that would make it possible.

“The battles in Baggage City were also an experiment to see if holistic espers existed. That ridiculous system would smash together multiple distant galaxies to fire flames from the hand. Are you saying you’ve reached that?”

“That’s not what this is. Do you understand why?”

Thor grinned and placed a hand on his hip.

It was obvious he was waiting for Kamijou to steady his breathing.

He sought an even more stimulating battle to gain even more experience points.

“That would eliminate Gremlin’s reason for targeting Fräulein Kreutune,” said Kamijou. “If you already had a holistic esper, you would’ve used it in your plan.”

“I’m similar but different. It might be a lot like the relationship between Ollerus and the #7. I’m the approximation of someone from the science side. I can produce almost the exact same phenomenon, but I’m not actually one of them. I really am a magician, so I’m not an esper in any way.”

“Stop it. I don’t like being praised like that. You saw Othinus at full power, didn’t you? If the predicted specs I calculated out are accurate, her power would go well beyond mine which is limited to the world we’re in now. How many times was the world destroyed on your way here? In fact, how’d you even defeat her when she had her lance? …No, merely winning in a fistfight wouldn’t get you back to this world.”

It was true that 100% Almighty Thor would likely be killed in an instant if he faced 100% Magic God Othinus. Thor ruled a single world while Othinus created infinite worlds. That was an obvious and insurmountable wall.

But that was not the current problem.

Almighty Thor stood before Kamijou as a real threat and Othinus could no longer use her power. To move on, Kamijou would have to defeat him with the fists of a puny human.

“Just to be clear, I don’t designate the coordinates. For one thing, coordinates on paper are meaningless in an ever-expanding universe.”

“You are quite a troublesome boy,” Fiamma said.

He played with Index’s remote control spiritual item in one hand.

“Thanks to you, I have to carry out the ceremony before Academy City or England can interfere. As such, it’s about time I took your right hand.”

“…Do you really think it’ll go that easily? Misha is gone. I’m not really sure why things have gone so well, but we humans won against an archangel. The scales have clearly tipped in our favor.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Fiamma as he pointed up toward the heavens.

The physical walls and ceiling had been blown to pieces by his earlier attack. This allowed the unnatural night sky to be visible past the crumbled building materials.

That was when that spiky haired boy realized something.

Archangel Misha Kreutzev had been defeated, but the state of the sky had not changed.

“The angel’s role ended once the sky had been turned to this night sky I wanted,” Fiamma said as he greatly stretched out his third arm. “I mentioned that the symbols of Uriel and Raphael were out of alignment earlier. And I also mentioned that the name Misha Kreutzev was not suitable for Gabriel as it is derived from Michael.”

The spiky haired boy seemed to be on guard, but it was too late.

By the time Fiamma was finished speaking, it was already too late.

“Using Gabriel to remove all the stars from the sky and leaving the Star of Bethlehem as the only thing floating in the incomplete heavens that are filled with Telesma was establishing the large flow of power needed for the ceremony to reset the four elements. …You stopped the magic circle covering the surface of the sky that Misha caused during Angel Fall and the Croce di Pietro that used the arrangement of the stars as seen from the earth’s surface, so I’m sure I do not need to explain just how much important magical meaning there is in controlling the screen known as the heavens. The prophets believed that a certain star would appear in the night sky to mark the birth of the Son of God. I suppose you could say I am carrying out a large-scale spell that uses that legendary truth. Well, I’ve also affected the flow of power on the surface by moderately destroying churches and cathedrals all across the world.”

Direction and depth were indistinguishable in that black space, but three distinct presences existed there.

“So have we managed to finish in time, Nephthys?”

An old man’s voice spoke in the darkness. More than simply “wrinkled”, the voice was better described as “dried-up”.

The responding voice sounded like a young and bewitching beauty.

“Yes. That zombie girl is useful at times like this. Thanks to her background of actively drawing in a great number of cultures, she has an affinity for most anything.”

“But, High Priest,” cut in a girl’s voice that sounded even younger and also childish. “Miss Zombie’s theory is essentially the same as holding up opposing mirrors, right? By splitting up our power infinitely, we can intentionally weaken ourselves and avoid destroying the world whenever we move an arm or leg.”

“What about it, Niang-Niang?”

“I’m just wondering if the symbol ∞ will really grow weaker when you split it up. I don’t want to smash the world up like stained glass the first step I take. We’re not like Othinus.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a mere deception as long as it works. Just like a Moebius strip or a Klein bottle, some concepts are allowed to exist even if they can’t be properly defined, Niang-Niang.”

“Yeah, but I prefer practical ideas over theories. You could say I’m the inventor type instead of the scientist type. I have a hard time believing it’ll actually work just because the theories all add up. I can’t rest easy until I try it out for myself and see that it works.”

“Then how about we try it?”

“Are you sure we should turn the world into our toy so casually?”