His attention was wholly fixed on the young, beautiful body in his arms.
The body trembled faintly with fear.
Seiji Fujiwara felt the girl's heartbeat surge to its absolute limit, felt her skin turn suddenly cold, felt the firelight reflected in those beautiful purple eyes.
This extreme symbolic pleasure, full of contradictions and clashes, gave him a satisfaction he had never known before.
"Look, Eru."
Seiji lowered his head, his lips against the curve of her ear, and spoke in a tone laced with amusement, mockery, and provocation:
"Isn't this exactly the ultimate 'curiosity' you've always craved? The instant where life and death intersect, the moment where beauty and destruction coexist. Beautiful, isn't it?"
His voice seemed to carry some kind of magic.
It instantly shattered the fear that had just risen in the girl's heart.
Not because it comforted her.
Because in that voice was the absolute indifference and playfulness of a god. Death was nothing.
As if that incendiary about to bring annihilation was, in Seiji's eyes, no more than a firework laid on for entertainment.
Inside Eru, there was no struggle left.
The lake of her heart, having just rippled with terror, settled back into deathlike stillness.
She gave up thinking, gave up fearing.
She handed everything she was over to the man holding her.
Whatever happened next was his will.
Seiji was pleased with her submission, and was even more delighted, in this moment of extreme stimulation, to admire the defiled, willingly debased beauty of his possession.
"Now, give me your voice."
Seiji said softly.
The voice carried an authority that brooked no objection.
"Sing your hymn for this land that's about to be reborn."
Under the threat of death, on the brink of destruction, he wanted her to sing.
Eru's hollow purple eyes trembled faintly.
"Eru."
In a magnetic, coaxing tone, he said, "Aren't you curious? In a situation like this, what kind of sound your body will make?"
The line was a key, and it turned some twisted switch inside her that he had built and she had never been permitted to see.
The flush rose to her cheeks against her will, the same way her body had gone slick against her will, the same way it tightened around him now against her will, every part of her answering the question he had put to it instead of to her. Her breathing turned rapid and burning. And then the sound came, the one he had ordered, her hymn, broken out of her at last in the second before the world was meant to end, a high helpless cry forced out on his next deep stroke that she heard leave her own mouth and could not believe was hers and could not stop, could not stop, while death came whistling down and her own body sang for the man who was killing the line between her terror and her pleasure.
In that moment, she fully completed her recognition of her own "dehumanization."
Then...
[Ding!]
A clear, heavenly system chime sounded directly inside Seiji's mind.
[Congratulations, Host, on conquering 'Eru Chitanda.']
[Received Tier-Three Reward: "Aegis" Small-Scale Weather Control Satellite Array!]
In an instant.
Seiji felt his will break free of the planet's gravity and stretch out into the boundless, cold deep of space.
There, dozens of military weather satellites simultaneously lit with a ghostly blue glow.
They belonged to different nations, were the cutting-edge crystallizations of technology.
They had been dormant. Now, they seemed to swear fealty to their new sovereign.
Their command authority, in that moment, was forcibly seized by a force nothing could resist.
They formed an invisible net spanning the globe.
Drawing clouds, generating rain, summoning thunder, raising storms...
The authority to define "natural disaster" had fallen into his hands.
He had become this planet's god of weather.
A genuinely satisfied smile curved at the corner of Seiji's mouth.
By now the white phosphorus incendiary had reached the apex of its arc. It began plunging at a terrifying angle toward their position.
Death was less than three seconds away.
Seiji held the warm body in his arms. The girl had completely abandoned resistance, trembling faintly with unfamiliar pleasure.
"Listen."
The instant his words ended.
In the cloudless night sky, a muffled crack of thunder broke out.
The sound was like the heartbeat of an ancient beast.
Yet a bright moon hung in the sky.
In the next instant, the originally thin clouds above began, in a way that defied every rule of meteorology, to gather, swirl, and darken at a furious pace.
A massive thunderstorm cell, in the span of a few seconds, blanketed the sky over the entire Kamiyama Region.
It bore a terrifying pressure.
Countless lightning bolts, like silver serpents, rolled and roared inside the dense black clouds. As if waiting for their sovereign's order.
...
...
Kamiyama Town, the edge of Nishiyama Forest.
The mercenary squad leader "Ghost" was like a predator hidden in the dark.
He was crouched behind a cold rock, watching the golden rice paddy a hundred meters away through night-vision binoculars.
The moonlight poured down like quicksilver, lighting that vast field like a sacred ground from myth.
The night wind passed through, sending golden waves rolling across the rice with a soft rustling sound.
Beautiful enough to intoxicate. Beautiful enough to make one want to destroy it utterly.
"Damn pretty place."
A mercenary beside Ghost murmured in admiration.
He was the heavy gunner code-named "Butcher," a hulking man covered in muscle, with a scorpion tattoo on his neck.
"Real shame the client's paying thirty million dollars to burn it down."
"Shame, my ass." Ghost lowered the binoculars, a cold, professional smile on his face. "Take the money, do the job. That's our work. Client wants it turned to scorched earth, scorched earth it becomes. Even if this is God's back garden, same thing."
They had just been through an inexplicable "incident."
Just as they were about to fire the signal flare, a rookie in the squad accidentally pulled his trigger and sent an incendiary shooting off at random.
Then something even stranger happened.
A cloudless night sky, in the span of barely ten seconds, conjured up dense black clouds out of nowhere, with lightning flashing and thunder cracking. A thick bolt of lightning had even struck a hundred-year-old tree near them.
That bolt had nearly torn the night sky apart. The tree had ignited on the spot, and was still smoldering.
The sudden thunderstorm completely defied every rule of meteorology.
It put fear into these battle-hardened soldiers.
A small disturbance ran through the squad.
A few of the more timid men had even started checking whether their gear might attract lightning. But under Ghost's barked rebukes and brutal suppression, they quickly settled down again.
By now the strange thunderstorm had stopped just as strangely as it began.
The sky had returned to its earlier calm. As though everything that had happened was nothing but a collective hallucination.
"Pull yourselves together, all of you!" Ghost growled into his throat mic.
His voice carried an authority that brooked no question.
"Don't let it shake you! That was just a coincidence."
He believed firmly that the power of modern weapons was enough to destroy anything.
He raised a hand and, through the throat mic, issued the final attack order to the eleven men scattered through the surrounding darkness.
"All units, pay attention! Target zone confirmed! Repeat, target zone is the entire rice paddy directly ahead! No blind spots!"
"On my command, three rounds of saturation incendiary fire! I want this ground so dead even the earthworms can't survive! Make sure not one inch of soil is spared!"
He paused, drew a deep breath. A cruel smile spread across his face.
"Three..."
"Two..."
"One..."
"Fire!"
At his cold command, more than a dozen black-mouthed portable launch tubes simultaneously poked out of the darkness at the forest's edge.
Like the fangs of vipers, they were trained on that quiet golden ocean.
A chorus of piercing shrieks tore through the air as more than a dozen M14 White Phosphorus Incendiaries vaulted into the sky.
They dragged long, ominous orange-red tails behind them, like a swarm of furious wasps.
In the depths of the night sky, they traced over a dozen clean arcs.
Like a flock of bloodthirsty vultures spotting a corpse, they bore down on that defenseless, beautiful golden rice paddy with unstoppable momentum.
The atmosphere of destruction reached its peak in that moment.
At the edge of the forest, the squad leader Ghost and his men wore cruel, satisfied smiles on their faces.
Some were even whistling.
In their eyes, the battle was over.
All that was left was to enjoy the grand white blaze.
To watch how it would burn this field, along with all the hope and inheritance it carried, into a charred, glassy, lifeless husk.
"Cameras ready!" Ghost shouted into the comm. "Record this thirty-million-dollar fireworks show properly for our former boss!"
One of the men had already set up a high-definition camera.
He was preparing to capture this "work of art" in full and send it to the generous client.
Even though the client was already bankrupt.
...
And yet, at the very heart of the storm of destruction, in the center of the rice paddy.
Seiji didn't even glance at those death-stars hurtling toward them.
He simply held that warm and lovely body quietly in his arms, even with the leisure to wind his fingers through Eru Chitanda's smooth, faintly fragrant black hair.
Eru's eyes still stared blankly at the sky.
The fear of moments before was gone. All that was left was a resigned numbness. A numbness mixed with humiliation and sanctity.
She watched those howling fires swelling in her pupils. As if watching a fireworks display that had nothing to do with her.
She had already given her body, her soul, and her fate to the man holding her.
Whether what came next was life or death, destruction or rebirth, was for him to decide.
Seiji felt the absolute submission of the girl in his arms, the total surrender.
A satisfied smile curved at the corner of his mouth.
He slowly raised his head, looking up at the night sky.
The sky was once again shrouded in black clouds, churning with countless lightning serpents.
Seiji needed to make no gesture, speak no word.
He simply, in his mind, issued the command to the "Aegis" satellite array he had just brought fully under his control.
Clear them.
The instant the command went out, he could clearly "see" it.
Dozens of military satellites simultaneously adjusted their attitudes.
They sat in geostationary orbit. Their internal ultra-high-energy capacitors completed their charge in a ten-millionth of a second, focusing the energy on the sky above the Kamiyama Region.
...Ten.
[Read 40+ chapters ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]