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(Subaru’s Point of View)
Of course, in that sense, things weren’t quite that simple.
If I had to bet on when Capella would get bored of beating me, I honestly wouldn’t have an answer. She seemed incredibly motivated.
“Damn it, damn it! Why won’t you react? Why won’t you even try to hit me back?”
As I crashed into a wall, her screams kicked up the dust around us. That was how loud they were.
“You just stay there, refusing to make a single proactive move. What the hell do you think you are? Are you saying you don’t need to attack me to win?”
Surprisingly, she was rather perceptive. I thought it would take her a few more minutes. I see that pretty face of hers is still just an extra among all the other good qualities she has.
“Hey! Are you seriously just going to lie there like that? I know you’re still perfectly intact! Are you saying I don’t even deserve that much now? Your standing presence? Seriously, fuck you!”
Turning her arm into some strange mass, she stretched it toward me with overwhelming force, sending out a shockwave the moment it slammed down.
Fortunately, I had rolled over, looking like your typical insomniac searching for the right sleeping position.
Two, three, four, five, six times. Every one of Capella’s impacts was avoided completely. My clothes were the only victims, scraped and dirtied by the debris.
She knew very well that she was missing. Beyond the frenzy, she let out growls that climbed exponentially in volume and irritation. Of course she would notice. There was a large difference between a body of flesh and cold concrete. And she probably knew that even better than I did.
A few more seconds of one-armed attacks passed before the wet, sloppy sound of skin regenerating reached my ears.
Her second arm, instead of trying to crush me, seemed aimed at capturing me. It resembled a spoon bent horizontally.
She certainly had talent.
Unfortunately, I had to stop lying around.
Clearly, the possibility of her catching me was plummeting down the stairs; we did not even need to enter the conversation of her dealing any relevant damage. Still, simply handing myself over did not entirely appeal to me.
At least, not any more than I already had.
Pushing off with my legs, I managed a flawless triple flip, threading my hands through the small openings she left behind. I was able to dodge both her attempts to capture and crush me in parallel.
Authorities really are unfair.
Because of the short distance, I left the enormous hole in the wall within moments, returning to the center of the area and looking at the irritated Capella. When she did the same, she stopped her assaults, drawing her extensions back into her body and returning her arms to normal.
I took it as a sign of a tacit truce.
That was a lie.
Letting go of the stiffness in my body, I loosened my muscles, wanting to summon some god of massages. I did a few stretches, using them as the key to a ritual, but nobody seemed to be coming.
After observing my own spectacularly shameful act, I started rubbing my neck and shoulders myself.
A horrible clicking of the tongue began to sound repeatedly.
I could ignore it. Truthfully, Meili had played around plenty while making me carry the princess with her.
However, there came a point where the sound reached my eardrum with a disastrous screech, making it impossible. I stopped rubbing my eyes and raised my head, opening them lazily.
“Why…?”
A whisper, a faint voice, intertwined with the wind of that place. My ears, paying attention to what they were hearing, received the brief phrase and processed it, extracting the tone it carried.
“Why…?”
It was feminine. To such a degree that confusing it for anything else would have to be considered a highly stupid action. The timbre alone seemed to sweetly caress the tips of your ears.
“Why…?”
You might wonder whether I doubted if the question was meant for me, for no one, or for herself. However, it really was meant for me. Her incomparable violet eyes never stopped looking at me with intense anger.
“WHY?!”
The previous softness became so distant that, if you had arrived minutes after those brief lines, you would have thought I had been hallucinating earlier. Her wounded ego was openly seeping into that unbridled rage.
“What the hell is wrong with you?! You earned the privilege of having a fight with me! And this is your damned gratitude?!”
Her face, although it did not distort, pushed the opening of her eyelids, the opening of her mouth, and the shaking of her tongue against her teeth to their absolute limits.
“You were supposed to have overcome the obstacles in your path. Destroying my men, preventing the deaths of those hideous maids, saving that prostitute Elsa’s life. You even managed to find Meili with zero clues to her whereabouts.”
She was not wrong.
For that reason, outside of Regulus being indisputably stronger, fighting her did not give me any peace of mind. The cunning and slippery shape of her personality made me think twice before deciding what to do.
“That’s why it makes no sense for you to be this disgustingly calm! You should have gathered rage, disgust, the urge to tear me apart! You should have come here with every intention of crashing into me! Stop disrespecting me!”
Making threatening shapes, she twisted the fingers of her hand with her forearm extended. Forming terrifying examples of strangulation, or of a violent, irregular seizure.
I really had managed to make her angry. Haha.
The curious part was that, basically, her complaint consisted of me not giving her the attention she wanted. The great offense I was throwing at her was that all the “interest” she had offered was not being reciprocated. Her intense anger came from the childish tantrum of “pay attention to me, stop pushing me aside!”
Exactly like a spoiled girlfriend.
I suppose my plan had worked correctly.
Perhaps too correctly.
Apparently, Capella possessed a sensitive heart, broken and lonely at levels that surpassed my expectations.