Project GB is an official initiative by Re:Library.

Amidst the confusion, Maria Lou, apparently using up the very last of her strength, collapsed in a heap at Colin’s feet. From her breast pocket, she pulled out something resembling a pocket watch and let it clatter to the floor.

“With this, it’s over. In my… last minute, I managed to do what should have been impossible—to draw Lady Clara’s blood… haah, haah… I really did succeed.”
“What do you mean, Maria Lou!? ‘Last’… what do you mean by last!?”

Sensing the moment, C’estlavie dispelled the restraints around Colin’s feet, and he instantly scooped Maria Lou up into his arms.

Maria Lou gave a faint, wavering smile. Her gaze shifted between Colin and me, and in a half-delirious murmur, she spoke:

“From the start, the powers I hold… no, added to me from…haah… haah… are only two. The first: Plunder, to steal the abilities of other gifted ones. And the second: Reversion, to rewind time by about a single minute… Fufu… just now, Lady Clara should have been able to avoid that wound, and yet… haah… you bore it. That’s how I did it.”

“Plunder and Reversion? In other words, you can increase your abilities as much as you like, and if you make a mistake, you can just roll back time to before it happened and continue as if nothing went wrong? That’s extraordinary. In a sense, it’s not a dream at all that you could evolve into ‘Transcendence’—an invincible, omnipotent existence.”

“…That’s right. Conceptually, that’s exactly it, Lady Clara.”

Maria Lou nodded faintly at my words of astonishment, her smile carrying a strange, elusive weight.

It’s simple, but the more you think about it, the more terrifying that ability becomes.

After all, in theory, given enough time, one could acquire every ability in existence—and if anything went wrong, they could immediately undo it. She’s as much in her element as a fish in water.

Multiple-attribute magic, spirit magic, qi techniques, healing arts, memories of a past life, and so on—
For so long, people have been calling me a cheat, or not human, or an ancient OOPArt wearing human skin, or a “final weapon lady,” or the “perfect primordial princess.” I’ve suffered no end of slander. But compared to that, I’m downright ordinary. Ahh, how wonderful it feels to be average!!

In stark contrast to my reverie, Coppelia—who, when it comes to alchemy and especially human modification, has no shortage of opinions—fixed a decidedly frosty stare on Maria Lou and voiced her doubt.

“Sounds fishy. If that were actually possible, life wouldn’t be so hard. I mean, if you’re still based on a Human, can you really cram everything into one bento box like that without running out of resources?”

After rattling that off, Coppelia glanced at Echidna, still floating in the pool.

“Ahh, I see. So the price of overreaching is ending up as that hideous monstrosity—the mess we see before us.”

She nodded with a look of understanding.

“? …What do you mean by that?”

“In short, I’m saying she’s cheating. Or maybe ‘a foul play’ would be more accurate. You see, Lady Clara, when we talk about an Artificial Saintess, what it really means is this: How many high-performing functions appropriate to a Saintess could you install within the vessel called a Human Being? Imagine there’s a bottle of fixed size set in advance—this is your human—and you carefully, delicately, and creatively assemble a ship in that bottle using tweezers. That’s the sort of work it is.”

I think I sort of get it. Though the part about modifying human beings as raw material is a massive problem in itself.

“You have to aim for the optimal solution, make choices about what to include or exclude, and in the end, complete it properly as a work of art. But those idiots in the Church had no brains between their ears. They just kept slapping on more and more unnecessary parts, and the ‘ship’ they were building turned into some incomprehensible piece of avant-garde art. In the end, it wouldn’t even fit in the bottle, so they went and remade the entire bottle. Actually, at that point it wasn’t even a bottle anymore—just some other kind of vessel. What you’re left with is nothing but a failed experiment.”

“Ahh, I see. So it’s like trying to create the ultimate dish. You keep adding more and more top-quality ingredients and spices one after another, but what comes out in the end is just a slop pot—or outright garbage. Is that about right?”

“Exactly. The key is how you balance specs against one another. But they never considered balance at all. And because of that, even the specs themselves get dragged down into useless junk. Oh, and by the way—research into duplicating other people’s abilities is actually pretty common. But at the end of the day, it’s still only a copy. It’ll never match the original, and you can’t target just the ability you want with pinpoint accuracy. That’s why she specifically went after specialists with single-focus abilities, isn’t it?”

As if to confirm Coppelia’s deduction, Marialu’s strained smile deepened.

“And on top of that, even if you plunder abilities, it’s not like your own mana or base specs increase. You hit saturation almost instantly and blow a fuse. A ‘Plunderer’ is basically no different from some s̲l̲u̲t̲ who spreads her legs for anyone—just gets used up and self-destructs. And a time-based ability? That’s even harder to use properly, isn’t it? Is that clock the only medium you’ve got for it?”

“…No. What I really need is an enormous amount of mana and my lifespan. Every time I use Regression, it feels like I lose about half a year of my life, at least subjectively. And since I’m not immune to the rewind myself, I don’t even know what went wrong in the previous iteration. All I can do is infer from the situation before and after.”

The secrets she revealed left us speechless.
Well, except for Coppelia, who just nodded with a smug ‘of course’ look on her face and remarked cuttingly, “A flawless failure, then.”

“…Yes. That’s what I-, *we* are. Failures—through and through. Worse than that, as if mocking all our desperate efforts, a true ‘Next-Generation Saintess’ suddenly appeared one day.”

Everyone’s eyes turned toward me. I even checked behind me just in case, but nope—no one there. Apparently, I was being ridiculously overvalued yet again, treated as if I were some grandiose chosen one.

I decided I should at least make a token protest.

“It’s not like I was born in a place connected to the Church, or to your goals or interests, you know?”
“Yes, I know that. But isn’t it frustrating? As if all our efforts had been for nothing.”

“They were for nothing, though,” Coppelia added, needlessly pouring oil on the fire.

“…That’s why my interests and hers ended up aligning…”

Maria Lou’s gaze shifted toward Eliza, who sat in silence, head lowered. She was pressing a fingertip to her lips, licking something with quiet little sounds.

“—!!”

I felt my heart pound violently in my chest. Could it be… she’s licking my blood…?

“…I wanted to become someone like you.”
“…I wanted to create the perfect Artificial Saintess with my own hands.”

Eliza’s and Maria Lou’s voices echoed through the vast underground chamber.

““—That’s why.””

Slowly, Eliza lifted her face.
No—what stood there was no longer Eliza.

“I’ve decided to become you… Adelheid, the Shrine Maiden Princess Clara.”

The innocent smile she showed was one I’d seen countless times in the mirror—my very own face.

“Impossible—!?!”
“She transformed into Jill!? That’s absurd!”
“To dare assume the form of My Princess—how blasphemous!”

The room erupted in chaos. But amid the uproar, for some reason Coppelia alone was—

“Ahh!! Ohhh, I get it! I totally get it now!”

—bizarrely excited, as though she’d just solved some fun puzzle.

Author’s Note:

“This is actually a Parallel World, not the past!” Yeah, that’s not the punchline here.
The flow of the story is a bit different, but this is canon.
The birth of Jill and Clara is like the Time Machine in Kiteretsu Large Encyclopedia, so the Time Loop is essential.

Translator’s Note:

I had my suspicions.
Still messed up tho lmao.