Adolescent Adam 8: Chapter 9 - Changing World

When the golden cocoon split open and that floated to the ground, the people there had difficulty defining what it was.

“Mutsuki-kun.”

Lucia called it Mutsuki.

That had indeed been the boy named Fujita Mutsuki a moment before.

“Princess Lilith.”

Raphael called it Lilith. That too was correct.

However, the lifeform that set foot on the ground resembled neither of them.

It was a manly and fit young man. There was some slight resemblance to Mutsuki in the face, but this man was masculine and mature with no boyishness.

“Avalon,” Micha called him.

He did not respond because he did not think of himself as Avalon.

But what she said must have reached Mutsuki since she was right next to him. That young man was Avalon. He was the ancestor of the modern human race.

And he was the man Lilith idealized.

“What is that?”

Before making a decision about him, Ange first focused on the change to the ground.

She had burned down the golf course earlier using enough heat to melt the layers of dirt.

But as soon as he landed, life returned to the dirt and it was dyed faintly red.

The redness spread out in a circle around the young man and, once it reached the unburnt grass, it exploded with life. A green carpet spread back toward the center to cover the ground below his feet.

Plants and life automatically welcomed him.

“…”

Ange did not know what this was, but she could tell this was the birth of something she had never before seen.

“!”

Nevertheless, she preserved her fighting spirit as a combat angel.

Micha had lowered her defenses as she wept and ran toward him.

Now was her only chance. She raised her large sword again.

Whoever that young man was, her angel flames should work on Lilith who had gone into creating him. She cloaked herself in blue flames as she attacked with her giant sword.

Micha did not notice her. Lilith’s strongest bodyguard was not doing her job.

Ange could kill Lilith!

Or so Ange thought until she felt a powerful blow to her gut.

“Khah…what?”

She had been stopped by a hand reaching in from an unexpected place. She looked back to see this was apparently Miss D’s fist. It hurt. She realized she had never fought that woman, so this attack power came as a surprise.

But more than that…

“What are you doing!?” she shouted. “Stop interfering! I need to kill Lilith!”

“Kill?”

“What are you talking about, Jiyuuni?”

She received only cold responses.

There were three icy voices in all.

“Why are you trying to kill him?”

In addition to Miss D, Black Cat and Lavriel gave her cold looks of utter bewilderment.

“Ange, isn’t that rude?”

“Huh?”

It was not just them. Rapha also gave her a critical look as if he could not believe she would try to cut down the young man. The Dante angels also looked like it was her who was acting weird.

“Wh-what? Nii-san? What is with all of you?”

She looked around in search of help.

Something was not right.

Something was changing.

No, everything was changing.

It was like the common understanding of the world had changed with his birth.

His birth had brought a pulse back to the earth and breathed life into the grass.

No one was opposing him. Except for her.

“The world was created from discord,” said the young man.

His was a disturbingly pleasant voice. As soon as she heard it, Ange felt herself calming down despite the abnormal situation. That realization made her tremble.

“The human world has naught but discord. Civilization can bring naught but discord. In all of recorded history, conflict has never vanished from the human world. No human in this world is without sin. All life is born into the crucible of natural selection.”

He turned toward Schwarze and Ren who were listening in obvious adoration.

“I can change that.”

His voice resembled Mutsuki’s.

“If there is one – just one – form of harmony that can exist, that perfect being must change the world. That is the only way to rid the world of discord.”

“Yes.”

Schwarze and Ren wept.

“Sensei, do not cry. Your father does not matter. I will love you in his place. Senpai, I will do whatever it takes to repay you for the feelings that led you to save me.”

The two of them naturally fell to their knees.

Miss D, the Dante angels, Rapha, and even Micha kneeled.

Even angels had a hard time saying how much of the religions out there were correct, but kneeling before someone you considered a god seemed to be an instinctual part of all life.

As soon as he was born, the world had changed in order to worship him as perfect.

With a few exceptions.

“Wake up, Mutsuki-kun!”

Lucia’s angry voice brought Ange back to her senses.

The demon tried to grab at the young man, but just like with Ange, he was knocked back by the young man’s followers. Black Cat and Lavriel in this case.

And as a finishing blow, a vanilla-colored arrow launched by one of the Dante angels was aimed between his eyes.

“Tch!”

The golden thread net released by Machina caught the arrow at the last second to save Lucia.

Ange, Lucia, and Machina were the only ones who could resist that. They rejected the rules of this changed world and followed the rules of the world before that was created.

They followed the rules that would protect Fujita Mutsuki.

“What’s wrong, you three?”

“…!”

But even that was a tiny exception.

When the young man called to them, Ange, Lucia, and Machina all felt their hearts waver. At the very least, they lost their fighting spirits.

He was calling to them.

So they had to respond.

Their instincts rather than their minds told them so.

Their “understanding of the world” had already been rewritten. Opposing that young man seemed almost unthinkable to them.

If he called to them, they wanted to respond. They did not want to do anything that would oppose him.

“Come on over here, Ange, Lucia-kun, and Ibekusa-san.”

“O-okay.”

They hated how much their hearts leapt with joy when he called their names.

Their bodies rejoiced at his recognition of them.

They felt like they now understood the true nature of the Serpent’s Eye. That power brought sexual arousal just by looking him in the eye, but it must have only been a fragment of the perfection oozing from this young man.

All life was made to love him. The world had been engraved with the knowledge that he was to be loved and that they should kneel before him like he was god.

The arousal produced by the Serpent’s Eye was only a small fraction of that nature leaking out.

Ange, Lucia, and Machina were not at the stage of simple arousal as they came in contact with him now.

When he merely called their names, they could no longer think of him as an enemy.

They found themselves loving him.

“Gh…run away…you three.”

The only other one who had escaped the world’s changed understanding was 600 years old. The emotion of human love may have shriveled up within her long ago.

“Y Device!”

Alice had been standing in a daze as her thoughts slowed to a crawl, but Lucia’s voice had snapped her out of it.

She somehow managed to use the function installed in her hat.

A great many cords extended from her beloved sunhat and stabbed into her temples and the sides and back of her head.

She had the machine invade her brain to slam the brakes on her brain’s attempted obedience toward that young man.

She moved in front of those three and wrapped some golden threads together into something like a whip. Wherever the whip moved, a mist-like distortion filled the air. It brought those areas down to absolute zero.

She obviously intended him harm, so Micha, Schwarze, and Ren moved to protect him.

It was no surprise from Micha, but Schwarze and Ren also showed open hostility to Miss A who they had adored like a mother. They hated her as the person trying to harm the man they loved.

The Y Device robbed Alice of all her emotions, so she showed no mercy as she used that deadly whip on those three, two of whom were like daughters to her.

The three of them easily dodged it. Just like Micha, the other two appeared to have their abilities enhanced in order to protect the perfect one.

However, the whip had not been aimed at the young man.

After it missed and was deflected back, it wrapped around Ange, Machina, and Lucia’s necks. The absolute zero effect had already been removed, but it was still cold enough for them to grimace.

Then the whip flung them into the air.

A passenger plane with roaring jet engines was flying by overhead.

The whip attached to it. The three were instantly carried to the jet plane and thus carried away from the facility.

“Miss A! What are you doing!?”

“Go! The Fujita boy has chosen you, so only you can return the world to normal!”

“Chosen us?”

“Return to the sanctuary! I left everything I have there!”

There was no time for a discussion because Miss A’s voice could not reach them after that.

After watching those three disappear into the distance, she turned back toward the young man.

Schwarze and the others watched the jet plane with suspicion, but they did not pursue it because the young man did not order them to. They longed to be by his side and did not prioritize the elimination of those enemies.

And more than that…

“So Ange, Lucia-kun, and Ibekusa-san have left.”

The young man sounded sad.

He himself did not want to force them to return.

He had already become something else, but the root of this thoughts was still that boy named Fujita Mutsuki.

He did not like forcibly controlling what other people did.

If he wanted it, Schwarze or Micha could have easily caught up to that jet plane fleeing at a subsonic speed. He wanted to change the world, but he did not want to do it by force. That was their last hope for breaking free of this situation.

Although it was not much of an opening because a perfect being like him did not need to do anything by force.

“I am counting on you, Machina…as well as Jiyuuni Ange, and Satowa Lucia.”

Alice had kept the hope alive.

There was nothing more for her to do, so she breathed a deep sigh.

“Alice-chan,” called the young man.

Her heart leapt in her chest and she looked up with red in her cheeks.

It seemed she had already fallen for him. She loved this young man. She smiled bitterly at how she arrived at that conclusion in an oddly detached way due to the machine that had partially taken over her brain.

“Call the three of them back. That way we can all get along.”

“…”

He was making a request.

She rejoiced at that simple fact, but her mechanized brain rationally analyzed the situation.

How should she respond? Her mechanical brain crunched the numbers and predicted a few different futures.

The instant she agreed, she would be enveloped in the greatest bliss imaginable and she would offer him the love she had supposedly cast out 600 years ago.

But what if she refused? She could calculate that out as well.

“Heh.”

She looked up at him.

Her cheeks grew warm when she viewed his face. Her heart pounded in a happy way.

This was love. Love of a man. Of the opposite sex.

How many centuries had it been since she felt that? At the very least, she did not recall feeling it for the past 500 years.

(No.)

That was not entirely true. There was that moment this very summer.

When she had shared a table with a certain boy, drank some delicious tea, and eaten some less delicious cookies, she may have felt a similar feeling.

“I refuse,” she bluntly stated.

He shut his eyes regretfully.

In that instant, Miss Alice Arc’s skin peeled away.

Her flesh, bones, and hair fell to the ground and vanished like no more than sand.

She had known this would happen. Refusing a perfect being meant turning her back on her understanding as a living creature. It meant to reject her life itself.

She had known refusing him would cause her body to give up on living.

But those words had still been worth saying. The 600-year-old witch maintained her cynical smile to the end as all that was Alice Arc turned to dust and blew away.

The young man breathed a quiet sigh.

“Let’s give up on Ange’s group. We can change the world first.”

He turned his back on her.

With that, Micha, Schwarze, Lavriel, Makoto, and all the others lost interest too. As if they had never known that girl named Alice.

As if anyone who defied a perfect being might as well have never existed.

“I want to rid the world of discord. You will all help me, won’t you?”

When he called to them…

“Of course.”

They all replied while experiencing ecstasy at being commanded by him.

They all left the golf course.

The remaining pile of sand was soon scattered by the wind.

Only a cheap bear print ribbon remained there, caught on some grass.