Along with the feedback from her spirituality came every trembling muscle and every bristling hair on her body.
This was life's most instinctive perception of danger. Every pore and every cell in her body screamed at Alice that she was in danger, while her muscles betrayed her—her legs nearly gave out beneath her.
Don't misunderstand, "nearly" did not mean she managed to stay on her feet. It meant Amon reached out and caught her.
Being this close to him left Alice utterly unable to move, yet Amon seemed completely unaware of it. He looked at her with a smile and asked in a gentle, harmless voice:
"Why aren't you saying anything?"
He did not even carry the slightest hint of malice, as though he truly cared about her.
Alice was actually quite familiar with this attitude. There was a high probability Amon did not intend to kill her. He probably just wanted to... play a little?
Just like last time.
But this fear was not something Alice could resolve simply by understanding it. Leaving aside the fact that even if Amon was merely playing, he was genuinely studying how to kill her, the main cause of Alice's fear was the suppression brought by a Mythical Creature's very nature.
Even at Sequence 5, Alice didn't think the Angel of Time was all that different from when she had been Sequence 6. At most, she was now a slightly fatter cat...
Come to think of it, was "fatter" really an appropriate way to describe a cat getting stronger? Fat cats might not necessarily be good at fighting...
Getting distracted at a life-or-death moment was probably Alice's innate talent. Her mind, which had been a complete mess a second ago, naturally continued along that train of thought and even led Amon astray.
Alice