“No. What I mean is, if someone does something to you, you like to turn around and do it right back,” Raphtalia explained. I made a puzzled sound, so she continued. “When your name was raked through the mud after being framed for rape, you changed the name of the woman responsible and raked her name through the mud. When someone is unreasonable to you, you reply by being unreasonable yourself. You give as good as you get.” Hearing all that and thinking back on what had happened to me so far, I could only nod in agreement. I always repaid kindness with kindness, that much was for sure. In the case of Takt, I only did back to him what he did to me. “Don’t you think that sounds like a mirror, reflecting back your opponent?” she asked.

“I see. A real reflection of the life of the kiddo here,” L’Arc said with a cheeky grin. I wasn’t happy with them accepting this so easily . . . but if that was how they saw me, it couldn’t be helped. It was definitely true that if someone did something to me, I wasn’t satisfied until I got some payback.

In any case, Witch had to pay. She had to pay dearly.

She’d betrayed the trust of the queen, betrayed Trash’s feelings, and then sided with the scum who killed Atla—all with no sign of regret. Leaving her alive was simply not an option.

“Okay, okay. I get it. Good, bad, whatever. If someone does something, then I do it back, so the mirror suits me. Fair enough,” I said, finally accepting it. While one way of looking at this was that the shield was manifesting itself through the medium of the mirror, in terms of power-up methods, we had to work with the vassal weapons of this world. Once I got back to the world I was responsible for, the shield was likely to return to normal, but I couldn’t use it here.

We also didn’t know what weapons the moron woman and S’yne’s other enemies were holding. And we had to get the seven star weapons back. It was worth giving some thought to what the moron woman had said about our lack of enhancement. Various holes had also quickly been poked in the seemingly almighty Liberation Aura X, although I considered that a good thing in the long term.

Whatever happened, our fight here was going to be a complex one.

As I worried about what was coming, Filo and Raph-chan arrived.

“Master!” said Filo.

“Raph,” said Raph-chan.

“Hey. What’s up?” I asked.

“I’m hungry!” Filo chirped.

“Raph,” Raph-chan agreed.

“Not this again,” Raphtalia said, starting to caution Filo. “I understand how you feel, but Mr. Naofumi is exhausted.” I gently pressed her shoulder and waved my hand.

“No need to worry about it, Raphtalia,” I said.