[MASS RELEASE 1/5] CHAPTER 2 — PART 10: HE WHO WANTS IT ALL.

The paperwork was multiplying.

I had signed one towering stack, stamped another with the official Prime Minister's seal, and was halfway through a third when I realized the very first stack had somehow migrated back to the center of my mahogany desk.

I stared at the pristine white sheets in absolute, suffocating silence.

"No," I whispered.

The stack remained exactly where it was, completely unapologetic.

I leaned back in my leather chair, the joints popping in protest, and pressed the heel of my hand against my throbbing forehead. "I am a mother. I am the Prime Minister of Kazumaki. I am an S-class Battle Maiden and—according to certain terrified politicians—a terrifyingly capable administrator."

The paperwork offered no response. It just sat there, mocking me.

"Then why," I muttered to the empty room, "am I losing a war of attrition against a bottle of black ink?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose, fighting back a migraine that had been building since the morning Yami awakened his Light Magic. I picked up the nearest document and scanned the crisp text again. A supply request. A budget report for the Colosseum. Three pages of bureaucratic whining asking for permission to repair a reinforced dormitory door that had apparently been broken for six months.

"Six months," I muttered, the sarcasm tasting bitter on my tongue. "And now, it is suddenly an emergency that requires the Queen's signature? How endlessly fascinating."

I dipped my fountain pen into the inkwell and slashed my name across the dotted line with an increasingly dramatic, aggressive flourish.

There. One less trivial problem in a world currently buckling under the weight of catastrophic ones.

A soft, hesitant knock echoed from the heavy oak door.

I immediately straightened my spine, smoothed the stray dark-violet hairs framing my face, and arranged my features into a mask of dignified, untouchable authority. A woman in my position could be exhausted. She could be overworked. She could be one rejected budget proposal away from screaming and hurling a desk through a window. But she must never look desperate.

"Come in," I called out, my voice smooth, elegant, and perfectly modulated.

The heavy door creaked open.

Ah. My secretary.

Her face was pale. Too pale. The kind of bloodless white that usually accompanied news of a localized disaster or a breach in the city's perimeter. She clutched a sleek black tablet to her chest like it was a shield.

"Lady Oshima, there are new reports—"

"More!?" The polished mask slipped for a fraction of a second. "I just saved the world from an avalanche of them! Give me five minutes of peace!"

Then I saw it. The rigid tension in her shoulders. The tremor in her knuckles. That specific, hollow seriousness on her face that demanded immediate action.

My breath hitched. The annoyance evaporated, instantly replaced by a cold, sharp dread that settled in the pit of my stomach.

"Lady Oshima..." Her voice barely registered above a whisper. "It's him."

"Him?" I repeated.

Silence stretched between us, thick and heavy.

Problem after endless problem. The Order breathing down my neck about Yami's anomaly. The Blighted Emperor awakening from his slumber. The constant political tightrope of managing an academy the size of a self-contained city.

And now, the biggest ghost of them all decided to materialize from the shadows. Now, of all times.

"Does this..." I swallowed the sudden lump in my throat, forcing my voice to remain steady. "...does this have to do with my dear Yami?"

My secretary lowered her gaze, unable to meet my golden eyes. "The intelligence reports... they conclude that Yami's public appearance and his mana signature at the entrance ceremony were the catalyst."

"Of course," I breathed out, a humorless, hollow laugh escaping my lips. "Of course they were."

"You knew, Lady Oshima?"

"Yep." I stood up, abandoning the paperwork entirely, and walked slowly toward the massive floor-to-ceiling window behind my desk. "Reynos Nishima discovered that a male can harbor dense, weaponized magic. Why wouldn't that madman be deeply, obsessively interested in my baby boy?"

"But we are talking about Reynos... my lady." Her voice trembled. She knew the stories. Everyone in the upper echelons of Kazumaki knew the stories of Circulos and their leader. "If he is moving his assets..."

"God only knows what that man is planning."

My eyes slowly drifted downward, sweeping over the sprawling grounds of Asaimizumi High. Beneath the warm, golden afternoon light, it didn't look like a military installation. It looked like a paradise. Students moved in vibrant clusters between the grand cafeterias, the training grounds, and the distant, sparkling edge of the Great Lake. They laughed. They argued. They worried about exams, internal tournaments, and trivial clan drama that would feel entirely insignificant a decade from now.

For a fleeting, fragile moment, everything looked so painfully peaceful.

Too peaceful.

And I would burn the sky itself to keep it that way. I would not lose my son the way I lost Yasuke to the Blighted fire. I refused.

Somewhere beyond these fortified walls, beneath the pristine veneer of our society, Reynos Nishima was shifting pieces across a board that no one else could even see. He possessed no conventional magic of his own, relying entirely on extraordinary physical conditioning, brutal strategy, and lethal anti-magic technology.

And if these reports were accurate, my son—my untrained, traumatized, fiercely stubborn son—was his next target.

I tightened my grip around the window frame until the wood groaned in protest.

"Lady Oshima?" my secretary asked carefully, stepping further into the office.

"Prepare a full, unrestricted security report on Yami's daily movements," I commanded, my voice dropping an octave, slipping from the tone of a politician into the tone of an S-class Battle Maiden. "I want every entrance to Asaimizumi monitored. I want the barrier frequencies rotated every four hours. I want every unfamiliar face, every vendor, every maintenance worker thoroughly investigated."

"Should we inform the Royal Guard? The Order?"

"Not yet."

"But my lady, if Circulos is truly involved—"

"I said not yet." My voice cracked like a whip.

The secretary flinched.

I exhaled a long, shaky breath and released my death grip on the window frame. "Forgive me. But you must understand... if The Order realizes Yami's Malice has drawn Circulos to our gates, they will not see him as a victim. They will see him as a volatile liability. They will order lethal intervention before Reynos even strikes."

My gaze returned to the thousands of students milling about below.

Yami was down there. Somewhere among that sea of girls, carrying a historic, dangerous power that was expected to belong only to women.

A mother's desperate heart screamed at me to rush down there, grab him, and lock him away in a vault where no monster, no politician, and no assassin could ever touch him. An administrator's cold mind demanded patience, observation, and strategic counter-play.

Unfortunately, both warring parts of my soul knew the exact same, undeniable truth.

Reynos Nishima would not stop. He treated human beings as disposable assets, containers, and variables.

And he had never, in the history of his miserable existence, been the kind of man who made a threat without meticulously preparing the weapon first.

Across the sprawling city, buried deep beneath the rusting, skeletal remains of an abandoned industrial district, a single, massive monitor flickered to life.

The harsh blue light bled across the cold steel walls, illuminating the grime and the shadows. The screen displayed a highly detailed, three-dimensional topographical map of Asaimizumi High.

Several crucial points had already been highlighted in pulsing red markers.

My heavily gloved hand reached into the projection's field and expanded the image. The colossal main gates. The fortified dormitories. The sprawling combat training grounds.

And a digitized tracking line detailing that boy's usual, predictable routes.

Everything had been observed.

Everything had been meticulously measured.

"Oshima knows," I said.

My voice echoed through the cavernous steel chamber, sounding less like a human and more like the grinding of heavy machinery.

A sensual woman stepped out of the periphery, moving with the lethal, fluid grace of a predator. Faint, wispy tendrils of dark shadow magic coiled and danced lazily around her high-heeled boots, licking at the concrete floor.

"She suspects us," the woman corrected, her tone completely devoid of warmth. "Suspicion isn't the same thing as knowing. She is arrogant. She relies on the sheer scale of her academy to protect him."

"It is close enough."

I leaned my weight against the tactical console, my eyes narrowing as I studied the paused surveillance image of Yami Oshima.

There he was. A scrawny, withdrawn former NEET. A pathetic, unpolished anomaly. Yet, he was a gifted boy protected by a world that had viciously, violently denied men that exact same power for generations.

The sickening irony of it almost made me laugh.

When I was a child, I hadn't harbored this darkness. I had looked up at the Battle Maidens with pure, unadulterated admiration. I had watched them streak across the sky, defending our cities, closing Rifts, and standing as glorious shields between ordinary, fragile people and the monstrous Blighted. They were heroes. Untouchable gods.

I wanted to be one of them.

I wanted magic.

Not for glory. Not at first. I just wanted to fight beside my friends. I wanted men to carry part of the bloody burden instead of standing helplessly behind the women who bled to protect them. I wanted to invent a way for men to wield magic, even if the entire world insisted that such a concept was biologically impossible.

Then, one arrogant, self-righteous girl overheard me discussing my theoretical research at school.

Her fragile pride could not tolerate the idea. The very thought of men standing beside Battle Maidens as true equals disgusted her.

So she destroyed me.

A simple, cruel lie became a formal accusation. The accusation morphed into fabricated evidence. The evidence became a swift, merciless sentence. By the time anyone in authority bothered to question the story, my name had already been dragged through the dirt and burned to ash.

I was expelled. Persecuted. Locked away in a sterile institution while society congratulated itself for protecting the innocent maidens from a "dangerous deviant".

No one cared whether I was actually innocent.

No one cared what happened to me in the dark.

For years, I was treated like subhuman garbage. A problem that had been conveniently swept under the rug. My life was supposed to be over before it even began.

But hatred... hatred is a phenomenally excellent fuel source.

It burns significantly hotter than ambition. It lasts agonizingly longer than hope.

I looked down at my hands. Calloused. Scarred. Burned by electrical fires and sliced open by jagged metal.

These hands had built lethal weapons from rusted scrap metal. They had assembled complex machinery from broken appliances, discarded wires, and stolen corporate components. Every agonizing failure had taught me something crucial. Every societal rejection had sharpened my mind into a razor.

The world had aggressively taken everything from me.

So I built Circulos. I built an empire in the shadows.

"Reynos," the sensual woman said, drawing my attention away from the bitter past and back to the cold reality of the room. "The container is fully calibrated and set."

I turned away from the monitor and looked at the massive device standing behind a wall of reinforced, blast-proof glass. Its heavy metal frame surrounded a pitch-black core, thickly reinforced with layers of advanced circuitry and experimental anti-magic insulation.

The machine trembled softly, emitting a deep, bass-heavy hum that vibrated in my teeth. It was a siphon, designed to gorge itself on raw power.

"Can your body withstand the Malice when the time comes?" I asked, my gaze locking onto the shadow user.

"For a limited time," she replied smoothly, unfazed by the terrifying implications.

"A limited time is all the time we need."

Her eyes narrowed, a flash of genuine curiosity piercing her cold exterior. "And if Yami resists? If his Light Magic proves too erratic to contain?"

I smiled. It was a cruel, bloodless expression hidden beneath the shadows of the room.

"Then you will give him a reason not to."

The digitized image of Yami Oshima remained suspended on the screen between us.

He possessed the ancient, terrifying power I had spent my entire, miserable life pursuing. The power that should have belonged to men just as much as women. The power that could finally shatter the system that had kept people like me crushed beneath the pristine heels of the Battle Maidens.

I did not want Yami's Malice because I envied him. I didn't care about his grief or his pathetic struggles.

I wanted it because the world had violently refused to give me anything else. I would extract the Malice from his very soul, and I would use it to break their entire reality in half.

"Soon," I murmured, my voice a jagged rasp as I looked at the thrumming extraction machine. "Soon, this arrogant world will learn exactly what powerless men are capable of."

I reached out and picked up the heavy helmet resting on the steel table.

Null Driver.

Its jagged, pitch-black armor reflected the cold, sterile laboratory lights overhead. Violent red lines ran across the metallic surface like glowing, infected wounds, while the dense tactical belt at its waist hummed with tightly contained, magic-nullifying energy.

The very first time I had worn this suit, the first time I felt its synthetic muscles align with my own, I had felt something I had not experienced since childhood.

Possibility.

I had relentlessly trained my physical body until it could rival the strongest fighters alive. I had obsessively studied close-quarters combat, military strategy, advanced engineering, and magic theory until each distinct discipline became another weapon in my arsenal. I had successfully created devices capable of completely nullifying magic itself.

But even that was not enough to topple Kazumaki.

I needed Malice.

I needed raw, undeniable, catastrophic power.

And once I possessed both, no elite Battle Maiden, no terrified government Order, and no divine God would ever be able to stand above me again.

I lifted the heavy helmet and slid it over my head.

The dim laboratory disappeared behind a veil of black glass. The Heads-Up Display flickered to life, bathing my vision in a sea of tactical data, threat assessments, and glowing crimson targeting reticles. The servos in the armor whined as I clenched my armored fists.

"Phase One prototype, begin now," I ordered, my voice modulated and amplified into a terrifying, metallic boom.

The sensual woman nodded once, melting backwards into the shadows.

Behind us, in the sprawling darkness of the subterranean base, the lethal operatives of Circulos moved silently into position. The game had officially begun.