Now the real show had finally begun.
Rita knew this was the part Ling Ke had been aiming for all along.
And compared to Kiana, Mei, Bronya, and the others, Rita was far steadier.
So she didn't hesitate.
"Manchester."
When she spoke the name of that city, her expression did not change.
She knew very well that among the ten cities Ling Ke had listed, that one mattered most to her.
Because it was not only her hometown.
It was also the place where she had met that person—the place that held memories no one else could replace.
Ragna Lothbrok.
Former captain of Schicksal's assault squad.
The one and only reason the younger Rita had once wanted to become a Valkyrie.
The guide who had shown her what kind of life she wanted to live.
So—
"I understand."
The black-haired young man not far away nodded. "Then from this moment on, all nine remaining cities aside from Manchester will come under full assault from my side, until no intelligent life remains in any of them."
"…Huh?"
Rita froze.
The first thing that shocked her was that Ling Ke had not deliberately twisted the knife. He had not played the cheap trick of destroying the city she chose.
And then came the second thing.
The questioning… was over?
Just like that?
Only two questions?
This—
"Wait!"
She could no longer sit still.
Nine cities. And nearly all of them were major ones.
The Herrscher of Domination's side was about to launch citywide massacres?
Why so suddenly?
One second he had been calmly asking questions. The next, he declared the whole thing over.
It was so abrupt it almost felt disconnected.
Honestly, at that moment, Rita—who had once held quite a bit of confidence in her own ability to read people—had completely lost track of what Ling Ke was really after.
It was a strange feeling.
Like dealing with someone whose thoughts jumped so fast you couldn't see the thread between them.
As for Ling Ke—
"Miss Rita, I've already gotten the answers I wanted. And… a result."
Remotely controlling the puppet that wore his face, he rose from the sofa. Still smiling, he gave her a neat little bow, all false courtesy.
Then—
"Thank you very much for your cooperation. I'll be taking my leave now."
He glanced toward the door.
"After all, we have company."
The instant those words fell—
Bzzzt.
A spatial door leading straight back to the Theater of Domination opened.
And at the same time—
Bang!
The door to Rita's quarters was kicked open from outside by brute force.
In the Ling Ke puppet's vision, all he saw was a streak of golden light flash in—
and then fill his vision at terrifying speed.
Boom!
A brutal straight punch smashed into his face.
Because the puppet instinctively twisted aside to dodge, the angle of the blow went crooked—and as a result, his head followed the motion and spun almost one hundred and eighty degrees around with a sickening snap.
"!"
That grotesque sight made the intruder pull back at once and step in front of Rita in a protective stance.
There was no doubt who had just barged in.
Durandal.
And she had not come casually, either. The moment she arrived, she was already using the strongest power currently available to her—drawing on the anchored bubble world within her, along with the power of the holy sword.
At this point in time, she had not yet reached the realm she was destined to reach later.
This was already the current peak of the strongest S-rank Valkyrie alive.
And yet—
Crack.
Facing her, the Ling Ke puppet acted as if nothing had happened. He simply lifted his right hand, grabbed his own head, and violently twisted it back into place.
A petty little flourish—something he'd copied from a lunatic clown in Black Bullet.
Then he looked at the two women in the room.
His gaze drifted across Rita—whose face had finally lost its composure—before settling on Durandal, whose expression had gone grave.
"Tsk. So this is the strongest S-rank Valkyrie in history."
"You're absurdly strong. Like some kind of monster."
"That's terrifying."
The moment the words left his mouth—
"Ling Ke, surrender."
Durandal was exactly the sort of person who did not waste time on nonsense. She had no interest in trading extra words with him.
Her knees bent slightly. She was already preparing to launch a second attack.
Unfortunately—
"Is that really the right choice?"
The Ling Ke puppet pointed toward the virtual globe still hanging in the air beside him.
"The war to slaughter those cities has already begun…"
"If you want to save people, your time is running out."
"Talking is pointless."
Durandal answered in a low voice as she lunged forward again. "We can discuss the rest after we take you down."
Almost before the last word had fully landed, she had already crossed the distance and charged him a second time.
Clearly, she had no intention of letting him get away.
Even—
even though Durandal already knew the "Ling Ke" in front of her was not the Herrscher of Domination's real body.
She might be rigid by nature, a little too straight-line in the way she handled things, but she was not stupid.
And in battle, her instincts often made up for what she lacked elsewhere.
The instant she entered the room, Durandal had already reached a conclusion.
If they could not catch Ling Ke's true body, then they needed something else—
some kind of leverage.
Some means of establishing contact with him.
Some way to force the matter.
And because she had realized that—
Boom!
This time, Durandal's methods were even harsher.
She ignored the surrounding walls completely. With one hand, she seized the Ling Ke puppet by the throat and drove him straight forward, smashing through room after room without slowing down in the slightest.
For a while, dust and rubble burst everywhere.
Inside Schicksal Headquarters—inside the floating island itself—everything was thrown into chaos.
Until—
"…Hm?"
Still driving the black-haired young man forward by sheer force, Durandal finally slammed him into a very special room.
This place was another kind of prison.
A sealed chamber.
And in the adjoining section—
there stood a locomotive.
The Second Divine Key.
The Key of Eternity—Cosmic Juggernaut.
"So you sealed the surrounding space."
"And… by analyzing the battle data from Raiden Mei's fight on the deck of the Hyperion, you realized that the essence of my side's authority theft is, in the end, still a contest of raw output?"
"And these devices around us… this odd little design philosophy…"
"This doesn't look like something this era alone could have produced."
"So you borrowed the strength of Flame-Chaser memory data too?"
The moment he entered this special room, the Ling Ke puppet grasped all that—or at least inferred enough of it.
Then—
"Come to think of it, in the original story, both Anti-Entropy and World Serpent eventually found ways to detect and trace spatial gates."
"Looks like Dr. Einstein and the others haven't been sitting idle these past few days either."
"Too bad…"
Inside the Theater of Domination, Ling Ke's real body slowly opened his eyes.
"The Theater of Domination has already been bound to my system as the Resurrection Chamber. Without my permission, nobody gets in."
"That part is absolute. I've tested it again and again."
"And besides, I'm no longer the Herrscher of Domination of merely a thousand."
"I'm the Herrscher of tens of thousands. Or, if I want to put it in local terms… maybe I should call myself the overclocked version. The upgraded model."
In any case, for the Ling Ke of today, even if he were facing a complete Herrscher—Raiden Mei, for example—he could win the clash of power head-on and strip away her authority on the spot.
Back on the Hyperion's deck, before all this…
the only reason he had not done that was because he had chosen not to.
He had other plans.
So—
"Whether you're living scholars of the Current Era or memory constructs from the Previous Era, this is about as far as world-class geniuses like you were ever going to get."
At the moment, the Ling Ke puppet looked completely trapped.
Back in Rita's room, he had opened a spatial gate and acted as though he was about to return directly to the Theater of Domination, but Durandal had tied him up long enough to stop him from crossing through.
And now—
"Fine. I'll go along with what they want and pretend that, under the interference of this special setup built around Cosmic Juggernaut, 'I' really can't open a spatial gate inside this room."
"Wouldn't want all the effort I spent painstakingly delivering 'myself' right to your doorstep to go to waste."
With that thought, the real Ling Ke let out a cold, satisfied sneer.
In the end, it came down to one thing:
the natives of this world had very clearly never watched The Avengers.