Chapter 255: The Celestial Beetle Sea Retreats, Threatening the Entire Magical Community! (Patreon)

Just as Alcides fused with the Bull of Heaven, the storm that had been dying down seized the sky once more.

Clutching Tsubaki Kuruoka tight, Honami Ichinose understood in an instant that this was nowhere near over.

There wasn't a single moment to celebrate Ishtar's defeat. The Avenger who had taken the Bull of Heaven was already the next challenger!

Black thunder raced in from the horizon, as if it meant to grind the entire world to dust.

"Ngh…"

She felt the small body in her arms go rigid.

Honami Ichinose drew a deep breath.

She was about to tell her companions in the Mirror World to carry Tsubaki away first, or to call on Pale Rider to move little Tsubaki deeper into the dream.

But Alcides was simply too fast.

Like a demon god, he tore apart the three-headed hellhounds blocking his path with his bare hands, and in the blink of an eye he stood where he could see Ichinose and Tsubaki Kuruoka clearly.

As if to force Pale Rider's true body out of hiding, Alcides didn't waste a single word.

He drew his great bow.

Thunder, storm, and Hydra venom that could dissolve souls, all of it converged into Nine Lives!

Honami Ichinose's mouth opened, but she had no time to speak.

"Twang!"

Alcides's fingers released.

A pitch-black arrow wrapped in storm and lightning tore through space like a roaring black tide and plunged straight at them.

"Sister Ichinose… what do we do now?"

Tsubaki Kuruoka was trembling all over. She clapped both hands over her face and dared to peek at the scene outside only through the gaps between her fingers.

Ichinose didn't back down. Instead she tightened her arms and pulled Tsubaki firmly into her embrace.

"I'll protect you."

"Tsubaki, close your eyes!" she said gravely, her free hand already raising the Ruby Staff.

It wasn't that Ichinose was arrogant enough to think her upgraded magical girl template could take on a great hero who had just seized the Bull of Heaven head-on.

She wasn't afraid.

She simply believed.

She believed in Chris. She believed in the comrades waiting in the Mirror World, ready to back her up at any moment. And she didn't think for a second that Pale Rider, who regarded Tsubaki as his everything, would stay unmoved now.

If Pale Rider could use this chance to move Tsubaki to safety, then whether Honami Ichinose lived or died after that no longer mattered.

She was the woman holding the most "extra lives" in the whole party.

Ichinose had every right to be this bold.

And reality did change just as Ichinose had expected.

It just wasn't Pale Rider answering Tsubaki's wish from the shattered sky who intervened first. Nor was it Chris and the others leaping out of the Mirror World.

It was a female voice that rang out out of nowhere.

'Huh? Why do you smell like some other god… Ah, whatever, I don't care!'

'A useless god who only knows how to take and won't lift a finger for their believers when it counts? You may as well become MY believer!'

The instant the voice rang out, a glowing Class Card floated up in front of Honami Ichinose.

It was the one she had exchanged for earlier from the blind box in the Presiding God's Space, the card that originally held the power of the love god Kama.

Kama was a god of love and would probably be little help in a real divine slugfest, so Ichinose hadn't planned on using it in this battle.

But she never expected the card to surface on its own, accompanied by a mysterious voice, and even blaze with dazzling golden light!

It happened fast. The light settled.

On the back of the card, behind Kama's design, the figure of a golden-haired goddess holding a divine spear suddenly appeared.

She was confused, but in this life-or-death moment Honami Ichinose simply reached out and snatched the card.

"Dream Summon!"

Mana surged.

A massive spear of light, radiating authority, dropped into Ichinose's palm.

Almost on instinct, as if following some guidance, Ichinose drove it hard into the ground.

"Kur Kigal Irkalla: Bellows of the Underworld!"

The earth shook and the mountains trembled!

With Ichinose at the center, the surroundings instantly turned into the land of the dead.

Countless purple lightning bolts burst up through the ground and rampaged like mad dragons.

Right behind them came several pillars of red energy that pierced the boundary between heaven and earth and slammed head-on into Alcides's Nine Lives, laced with Hydra venom.

The two forces collided.

"BOOM—!!!"

With Ereshkigal quietly helping from behind, the hastily unleashed Noble Phantasm fought Alcides to a dead heat!

The sky-filling rain of venom and the storm were blown away entirely.

Alcides, watching from afar, was a little surprised.

But he was a veteran of countless battles, and one glance told him that what had blocked his attack was the Mistress of the Underworld, who had possessed the pink-haired girl and put her power into it.

Alcides didn't quite understand why the goddess had cancelled out his Nine Lives and then withdrawn at once.

But he didn't dwell on it.

After all, his goal had never been to simply slaughter or kill someone.

Everything he did was only to seize as many Noble Phantasms as he could within limited range, strengthen himself with them, and keep taking revenge on the gods.

Especially now that his Master had already been killed.

The Bull of Heaven's mana supply meant he wouldn't fade quickly for lack of a Master. But if he wanted to last and keep winning this Holy Grail War, he almost certainly needed to find a new magus to contract with.

Alcides thought it over and decided there was no need at all.

He would just clean out every remaining Servant in this Holy Grail War who reeked of that hateful "scent of gods."

Even if he finally burned out and left the stage, it made no difference to him.

And to reach that goal, Alcides would naturally go after Pale Rider.

After all, Sea of Vengeance, Wind of Heaven in Hand was in essence a Noble Phantasm that forcibly gouged out another's Spirit Origin and stitched the enemy's Noble Phantasm and Spirit Origin onto his own body.

Hydra venom and Black Mud ate at his own Spirit Origin every moment.

Having absorbed the Bull of Heaven, he'd likely have no way to forcibly read that time-stop brat's Noble Phantasm without using divine energy to patch up his Spirit Origin.

So settling for second best, Pale Rider was a compromise he'd reached after weighing the pros and cons.

Only…

He had overlooked one thing.

Just as he was attacking Ichinose.

Ichinose hadn't had time to call for help.

But while the Noble Phantasms were clashing, Chris, Ryuuen, and even Goldie obviously weren't going to let Alcides do as he pleased.

So in fact, while the energy of the two Noble Phantasms was still raging, everyone who needed to arrive had already arrived.

Before Alcides could unleash Wind of Heaven on the descending Pale Rider—

"The World!"

Using time stop, Ayanokoji Kiyotaka caught him in the wind-up and cut his motion short.

Then time resumed.

Right behind it came Goldie's Gates of Fortune and Arisu Sakayanagi's Romantic Cannon.

And the Super-Spiral Incineration Cannon, unleashed jointly by Ryuuen and Kouenji Rokusuke!

"BOOM—!!!"

In the blinding firelight, Ryuuen finally understood his own role.

His conventional physical output wasn't enough to deal lethal damage to Servants whose Spirit Origins were often rated at the level of high-ranking gods.

But it seemed like… those Servants and goddesses really couldn't withstand his firepower bombardment either!

In that case, with Kouenji Rokusuke's support and the Allspark supplying energy, Ryuuen had no worries about running dry!

Just keep pouring on the firepower and be done with it!

Facing this sky-darkening carpet of fire, Alcides was surprised but not afraid.

His face cold, he raised one hand.

A phantom of the Bull of Heaven condensed before him and effortlessly blocked the entire barrage.

And he himself, hidden behind the phantom, turned and drew his great bow.

His gaze crossed the clouds and locked on Goldie standing at the prow of his ship.

Nine-in-one Nine Lives!

Alcides sneered mockingly.

"King of Heroes, did you finally fish your spoon back out of that goddess's mangled carcass?"

"You need a bunch of weak humans to pin me down just to have a fight. Incompetent as ever."

High in the sky, Goldie, whose sore spot had just been stepped on, went dark as a thundercloud.

"Mongrel!!!"

"A mud-stained mongrel like you dares to bark at me!"

Goldie bellowed, and his actual answer was to draw Ea, the Sword of Rupture.

And this time he not only released it at full power but linked hearts with his dear friend Enkidu.

The crimson light of Ea tearing the world apart combined with the Son-of-Man Cannon that Enkidu had become, reaching the strongest form the two could output together!

It was as if he meant to win back, all at once, all the face he'd lost in front of Ishtar and Alcides!

"Enuma Elish!!!" x2

Not far from the battlefield, Amasawa Ichika and Arisu Sakayanagi and the others, who had been lurking and waiting for an opening, obviously weren't going to just stand and watch.

Amasawa Ichika, holding Origami Tobiichi's spirit crystal, summoned an angel and, together with Arisu Sakayanagi, surrounded Alcides from different angles!

At that moment, Tsubaki Kuruoka, still shielded by Ichinose, finally gathered her courage and opened her eyes fully.

Her eyes shone as she watched the scene before her, with heaven and earth changing color like a myth come to life.

And…

In the heart of the storm, the outline of a knight gradually took shape.

"Um…"

She was a little surprised, and couldn't hide her joy:

"Sister Ichinose, is that Mr. Pale? Is… is that Tsubaki's very own knight?"

Honami Ichinose crouched down and gently set Tsubaki on the ground.

Taking a deep breath, she replayed in her mind the feeling of facing Alcides's Noble Phantasm just now.

She raised her hand again, lifting Ereshkigal's divine spear high.

"Yes, Tsubaki! That's your knight!"

"All you have to do now, Tsubaki, is not be afraid. Believe in your knight, and come with me… and let's go defeat evil!"

Hearing Ichinose, Tsubaki Kuruoka nodded hard, like a little soldier who'd been given courage.

She balled her two small hands into fists and shouted up at Pale Rider in the sky, cheering him on:

"Go, Mr. Pale! You have to beat that bad guy!"

Seeing this, Honami Ichinose smiled softly.

In that moment.

As if by instinct, she grasped the true meaning of a god's authority.

She planted the divine spear into the cracked earth once more.

"This is… everything I've got!"

"Kur Kigal Irkalla: Bellows of the Underworld—go!!!"

…

Under a gang-up from every side with no sense of sportsmanship whatsoever.

Even having seized the Bull of Heaven, Alcides was tormented by the double corrosion of Hydra venom and Black Mud, and stubbornly refused to absorb the divine energy inside the Bull to patch his Spirit Origin.

Unsurprisingly, he fell behind in the encirclement.

When Ea and the Son-of-Man Cannon tore through the Bull of Heaven's phantom, when Ryuuen's barrage wrecked his defenses, and when the sneak attacks from Amasawa and Sakayanagi threw off his balance,

Chris, who had been drifting along the edge of the battlefield like a ghost, finally drew the [Enma Blade] and finished it with a single Dimension Slash.

Honestly, from the viewpoint of Chris, the "presiding god" with a god's-eye view of everything, Alcides's play was a regrettably stupid one.

If, after absorbing the Bull of Heaven, Alcides hadn't greedily gone after Pale Rider's Noble Phantasm, and had instead focused his firepower on killing Goldie, who was in the worst shape at the time,

and then used Wind of Heaven to try gouging out Enkidu's Spirit Origin,

then given how irreversibly a missing Spirit Origin damages a Servant, Enkidu's combat power would have fallen off a cliff.

That would have taken two "lightning-tier" fighters off the board.

The remaining students and Servants, however good their gear, would have struggled against an Avenger wielding multiple divine-crafted Noble Phantasms.

And Alcides's position would have been far better than it was now.

After all, Pale Rider's Noble Phantasm was in essence a conceptual barrier that existed on the strength of Tsubaki Kuruoka's dream.

Even if Alcides had forcibly stolen the ability with Wind of Heaven,

he had no host like Tsubaki who could manifest dreams to activate the Noble Phantasm for him.

A stolen half-broken ornament.

"Basically a mismatch of intel plus overconfidence… this greed was indeed excessive."

Chris flicked the residue off the Enma Blade and thought as much to himself.

Of course, amid the clash of so many Noble Phantasms,

since Goldie's Ea is itself a top-grade "world-breaking Noble Phantasm,"

its space-tearing effect had finally collapsed Pale Rider's already teetering dream barrier.

It was lucky that Chris had timed that last Dimension Slash right.

Otherwise, if Alcides had used the chaos of the shattering barrier to escape into the real world and wage guerrilla war, an Avenger with the Bull of Heaven's foundation behind him would not have been without a real chance at turning things around.

Of course, Chris hadn't picked that moment to act in order to grab some "kill points."

He simply wanted to use the [Enma Blade] to strip the Black Mud out of Alcides's body.

So that when this guy was defeated and returned to the Grail, he wouldn't drag that source of corruption into the Greater Grail system along with him.

Meanwhile.

With the pale barrier shattered, Tsubaki Kuruoka, forced awake from her long sleep,

rubbed her still-dazed little head in Suzune Horikita's arms.

When she instinctively lifted her eyes, hoping to find Ichinose and the others who had kept her company in the dream in this unfamiliar real world,

the first thing to meet her gaze was the Black Mud writhing like a living thing in the huge crater blasted out by the Noble Phantasms not far away.

The little girl gasped.

"All of this… was actually real."

The little girl stared blankly at her own palms and murmured, unable to believe it:

"Tsubaki… Tsubaki really saved the world together with the big sisters?"

Suzune Horikita reached out and stroked the girl's little head.

"Yes, you did," Suzune Horikita affirmed softly. "Tsubaki, you're a great hero to all of us."

But Tsubaki didn't break into a proud smile right away.

She turned to look at Suzune Horikita, who was holding her, and a trace of regret surfaced in her big eyes:

"But… what a shame, Sister Horikita."

"You were outside, so you didn't see how amazing Sister Ichinose looked when she raised that spear! And Tsubaki's knight was just so pretty and so cool!"

Hearing Tsubaki's praise, Honami Ichinose couldn't help covering her mouth with a soft laugh.

She walked over to the two and said gently:

"Tsubaki, don't you have that backwards?"

"Mr. Knight is the amazing one. Thanks to his help, Chris was able to take care of Ishtar."

Tsubaki shook her head very seriously, tilting up her little face and staring right at Ichinose:

"Tsubaki didn't say it wrong!"

"Sister Ichinose was strong and pretty when she protected me! And Mr. Pale… he wasn't just good-looking, he made Tsubaki feel safe!"

Watching Tsubaki chatter on so earnestly, not at all like a patient confused by suddenly awakened memories or by just coming out of a long dream,

Honami Ichinose felt a stir in her chest.

If it could stay like this.

Then let her keep this innocence.

Until she was taken out of this cruel magus world and returned to our world… keep this beauty intact for her as best they could.

Ichinose quietly made up her mind.

But right now there was a very real problem.

Pale Rider was strong in the dream, but he couldn't interfere with the real world for long.

That meant that with the dream dissolved,

Tsubaki Kuruoka's parents, who had fallen asleep, must have regained consciousness by now.

And, barring accidents,

they would revert to being that cold, ruthless magus couple who cared only about the Grail and family interests and saw their own daughter as a tool…

'As expected, we still can't let them recognize each other now.'

Honami Ichinose mulled it over silently, resolve flashing in her eyes.

If some bonds were doomed to bring only pain, better to cut them with her own hands from the start!

…

As Ichinose was quietly thinking.

Elsewhere, Ryuuen had been about to look for Suzune Horikita, borrow her [Crazy Diamond] to heal Charlie and Hippolyta, and then switch on "Octagon Cage" mode and farm S Points to his heart's content. He suddenly paused.

He turned his head.

The reflection at the water's edge nearby rippled slightly.

Hiyori Shiina came hurrying out of the Mirror World into reality.

Ryuuen raised an eyebrow and asked:

"Shiina… why'd you come out? Did something else happen?"

Hiyori Shiina pressed her lips together, as if weighing how to put it:

"I'm not sure how to describe this…"

"But either way, it's definitely a big deal."

As she spoke, Hiyori Shiina raised a slender white finger and pointed at the sky:

"Just now, when Ishtar's divine realm dissipated and the physical laws of reality returned to take over Snowfield,"

"I found out through Rasiel… that Faldeus has already contacted the military of the Big Beautiful Country and had several hydrogen bombs shipped over."

"He plans to use the gap while the divine realm is gone to blow up every Servant who survived the fight against Ishtar in this area… and all of us along with them."

Hearing this absurd news,

Arisu Sakayanagi couldn't help rolling her eyes:

"If I remember right, that man is the Master of the 'Assassin,' Hugo, isn't he?"

"A magus who runs into a problem he can't solve, and instead of using magecraft, goes off to pull some out-of-system cheat move?"

Amasawa Ichika also scoffed:

"Is his head full of scrap? Does he really think something that could handle a problem like Ishtar would be afraid of two nukes?"

Ryuuen ignored their snark entirely.

Instead, his eyes lit up as if he'd just thought of something wonderful.

He turned to Ayanokoji Kiyotaka and Kouenji Rokusuke beside him.

"Ayanokōji, Kouenji."

"Forget the Servants for now. Let's go deal with that little nuisance overhead!"

"Fine."

Ayanokoji Kiyotaka nodded, understanding without words.

He knew exactly what scheme Ryuuen had in mind.

"Since someone's delivering it to our door, we should go welcome them."

Kouenji Rokusuke elegantly flicked back his golden hair, smiled, and went with them, heading right toward the faint roar of warplanes from the sky.

Judging by how eager they looked, they weren't going to intercept nukes at all. They were going shopping!

All they had to do was use the [Allspark] to turn the U.S. military's equipment into Decepticons, and the S Points would pour in.

That beat the one-time payout from Servants by a mile.

Chris watched with a thoughtful look and didn't try to stop them.

With that troublemaker Ryuuen gone,

Goldie, who had been watching coldly from the side, finally put away the contempt in his eyes.

He stepped forward and spoke in the unquestionable tone of a superior:

"Travelers from a foreign land."

"Now tell me. What is the true purpose that brought you across worlds to this place?"

Facing this domineering interrogation, Chris slowly turned his head.

Instead of answering, he looked at Goldie and asked:

"If I remember right, your Noble Phantasm, the Star of Omniscience and Omnipotence, can be used as a top-grade clairvoyance, can't it?"

"And that ability isn't affected even when the Gate of Babylon is temporarily sealed."

The corner of Chris's mouth curled up, a hint of mockery in it:

"So, honored King of Heroes. In all that long time before Ishtar was dealt with…"

"you really never took a peek at who we are, out of curiosity?"

Hearing words that practically called out his weak spot to his face,

Goldie raised an eyebrow and gave Chris a long look.

"A bit of cleverness, at least."

He made no effort to hide his disdain. "But what I can't understand is this."

"With the Noble Phantasm in your hand that can cut through causality and space with ease, even if you went straight to the underground of Snowfield and quietly took out that azure jewel, it would be no difficult matter for you."

"Yet you refuse to."

Goldie snorted. "Not only did you voluntarily join this filthy war, you even treat it as a test?"

"What an arrogant band of fools who don't know when to die!"

Faced with Goldie's merciless rebuke,

Chris only spread his hands noncommittally and chuckled:

"Overestimating ourselves?"

"You probably don't know this, though."

Chris looked straight into the King of Heroes's crimson eyes. "Two months ago, we were nothing but ordinary students sitting in a classroom."

"It's precisely those 'overreaching' trials you mention that let us defeat enemies we should never have beaten, again and again, and transform into this strength in such a short time."

"And now we can even cross the walls between worlds to save yours."

"Save the world?"

Goldie sounded like he'd heard the biggest joke ever and let out a cold snort:

"A mere ant dares to hang such arrogant words on its lips!"

He swept a hand out, the aura of a king in full force:

"Listen well, mongrel! This entire world, from beginning to end, is my property!"

"My domain has no room for lowly mortals like you to prattle shamelessly about salvation!"

At that,

Arisu Sakayanagi and Suzune Horikita, standing nearby, exchanged a glance and hadn't yet opened their mouths.

Kei Karuizawa, who had followed on Hiyori Shiina's heels and just returned from the Mirror World,

couldn't hold back any longer.

She strode forward, pointed at Goldie's nose, and shot back:

"Huh? Your property?"

Kei Karuizawa let loose a sarcastic barrage without any restraint:

"Heh, then you, great hero who calls himself the 'Wedge of Heaven' and opened the age of humanity—"

"just now, when that woman called Ishtar was trying to steal humanity's future, force the modern age back into the Age of Gods, and turn everyone into servants of the gods…"

"what. were. you. doing?"

Karuizawa deliberately drew out her voice and put on an exaggerated look of sudden realization:

"Oh~ I almost forgot."

"Our great King of Heroes was lying on the ground, playing dead very comfortably!"

"You—!"

Called out in front of everyone by a human girl with not a trace of magical energy, rage ignited in Goldie's eyes.

"Mongrel! Who gave you permission to look at me? Who gave you permission to speak?"

"A mere bystander, a worthless weakling. As an ant, you should hide quietly in the dust and wait for the strong to save you!"

The words weren't finished.

Behind Goldie, several golden ripples surged up at once!

Several terrifying divine-crafted Noble Phantasms thrust their points out of them, locking onto Karuizawa, plainly ready to blast her to nothing at any moment.

Karuizawa instinctively ducked her neck.

But she didn't regret it.

Her whole brand was having backup: let the sky fall, she wasn't scared.

And Chris, naturally, wasn't about to indulge Goldie's temper.

He stepped forward and placed himself in front of Karuizawa.

He didn't even draw the Enma Blade. He merely lifted the fingertips of his right hand, arms folded, with a careless flick.

"Swish—!"

Several invisible Dimension Slashes appeared out of thin air.

"Crack! Crack!"

The Noble Phantasms that had only just poked out of the golden ripples, not yet showing their power, were cut cleanly in two and clattered to the ground.

Seeing this, Goldie laughed in fury and was about to teach these otherworlders who didn't know the heavens from the earth a lesson.

Enkidu walked over just then.

The green-haired beauty stood smiling beside Goldie and smoothed things over gently:

"Bear with it a little, Gil."

"You yourself said you would cross swords with them sooner or later. There's no need to rush and indulge in verbal point-scoring now."

Hearing Enkidu's counsel,

Goldie still looked displeased, but in the end he snorted and withdrew the Gate of Babylon spread out behind him.

He turned his head, and his gaze locked straight onto Hiyori Shiina in the crowd.

To be exact, onto the archaic book she kept hugging to her chest.

"The Book of Omniscience…"

A glint of appreciation passed through Goldie's eyes:

"A creation that contains the laws of the world is indeed worthy of a place in my treasury."

He lifted his chin and said in a commanding tone:

"Then, mortal who holds the Book of Omniscience."

"Tell me! What exactly is this 'saving the world' you speak of?"

The old Hiyori, the introverted, socially anxious literary girl, would probably have been too frightened to get a word out under a question with this much pressure.

But now.

Facing Goldie's entitled, condescending attitude,

the girl rarely showed a gentle smile, and she didn't answer meekly either.

She simply looked at him calmly and shot right back without giving ground:

"With an EX-rank omniscient clairvoyance…"

"something simple enough to understand with a single glance, King of Heroes, shouldn't you have known it perfectly well already?"

"…You!"

Mocked to his face again by a seemingly soft, delicate girl, Goldie's brow furrowed sharply.

Anger surged again and he was about to snap at her.

Seeing the mood about to fall into another deadly standoff,

Honami Ichinose, the party's undisputed good-natured peacemaker,

sighed helplessly and stepped forward to mediate:

"Okay, okay, everyone, stop arguing."

Ichinose took a deep breath and spoke to Goldie and Enkidu in a steady voice:

"Put simply, a door suddenly appeared in this world… or rather, several doors."

"Behind those doors lies a strange space stitched together from countless world fragments."

"Even now, we don't know what exactly it is or who is behind it."

"But from what we've experienced and learned ourselves so far…"

Ichinose's voice tightened slightly, carrying a seriousness she couldn't hide:

"Once a world is chosen by that door called the Backrooms,"

"one day in the future all its nutrients will be drained. The only ending is complete shattering and annihilation."

She looked sincerely at Goldie:

"Besides searching for the jewel, we came here also hoping to cooperate with worlds like yours, ones suffering the same abnormal invasion as us, who share our plight."

Enkidu's smile faded at that, and his expression turned serious.

He thought a moment before asking:

"Absorbing the nutrients of an entire world…"

"If such a thing truly exists, in your judgment, how great a threat is the space on the other side of the door?"

Hiyori Shiina gently stroked the angel in her arms and took over:

"We don't know where its upper limit lies either."

"But what I do know so far is…"

"During our earlier exploration, we encountered a certain world."

The girl looked at the two of them and spoke word by word:

"In that world, the supreme being equivalent to your world's Root…"

"was devoured and wiped out from the very roots in an instant."

"The Root…"

Hearing the forbidden word that touched the fundamental logic of the world,

even the arrogant Goldie paused for a rare moment.

…

Meanwhile.

High in the sky, the wind howled.

Having received Faldeus's orders,

the several stealth strategic bombers that had been flying at full speed toward the battlefield where Chris, Goldie, and the others stood, meant to drop tactical nukes,

hadn't even opened their bomb bays when the alarms in the cabins began screaming madly.

Next they were forcibly taken over and locked in an instant.

Amid the pilots' bewildered shouts, they turned their noses around in midair and flew right back the way they'd come.

And in the clouds not far from them,

Ryuuen hovered in midair, arms crossed, smirking as he watched the machines he controlled.

Before long, the group arrived safely above the military base.

Kouenji Rokusuke combed his golden hair, standing on end from static, and looked at the fifth-generation fighters, heavy armored vehicles, and main battle tanks packed tightly across the base.

He turned to Ryuuen and said, a little troubled:

"Hohoho, how magnificent."

"But, Ryuuen, boy, a base this big must have plenty of personnel stationed here."

"We don't have much time. Once you use the [Allspark] to awaken all these lifeless machines into shoddy Decepticons…"

"we can't exactly stuff every one of those people into the Mirror World and haul them back to farm points, can we? That would be so unbeautiful."

Ayanokoji Kiyotaka cut in flatly from the side:

"Didn't I beat Jester half to death and throw him into the Mirror World earlier?"

"He's badly hurt, but as a Dead Apostle he shouldn't be completely dead yet…"

"Why not take him out and put him to some use? Have him turn all the soldiers in this base into lesser Dead Apostles?"

"A Dead Apostle, huh…"

Ryuuen stroked his chin.

The proposal sounded tempting, but after only a moment's thought he shook his head firmly:

"No. Not worth it."

"Even at his peak, that Jester guy didn't rate high in the Black Sphere system."

"The low-grade Dead Apostles he'd turn out would be worth, at best, a dozen or so points each."

"Not only a waste of time," Ryuuen snorted, "but don't forget, if Shiina finds out we deliberately turned innocent civilians into monsters just to farm points…"

"she won't say anything to us, but she'll definitely go tell Chris. Extra trouble, and we'd come out behind."

Having heard this, Ayanokoji Kiyotaka didn't insist.

He simply kept his hands in his pockets and threw out another proposal:

"If I remember right, you can take over the world's internet and communication towers in an instant?"

"In that case, we may as well play big."

Ayanokōji's eyes were deep. "Use 'exposing all the hidden mysteries of the magus world and the truth of the Holy Grail War on the global network' as leverage to blackmail the world's magus organizations."

"I'm sure those old men who treat mystery as life itself won't mind spending some of the surface world's resources."

"In exchange for the chance to stay hidden in the shadows."

Hearing this brilliant plan that amounted to extortion,

Ryuuen froze at first.

Then he couldn't help but laugh.

"Hahaha! As expected of you, Ayanokōji!"

"I like this idea! Let's do it!"

…

Snowfield, at the edge of the ruins.

Atsuomi Ayanokōji, who had barely dodged the aftershocks of the Bull of Heaven's scattered storm,

was gasping for breath on a rooftop with half its upper floor sheared away.

After confirming that the storm had finally died down and the spatial distortions caused by the magical turbulence were gradually returning to normal, he carefully removed the magic ring from his finger.

He straightened his somewhat tattered suit and prepared to head to the Snowfield police station to see whether any Advanced Nurturing High School students might still be there.

Only.

Before Atsuomi Ayanokōji could reach his destination,

as he rounded a toppled street corner, he ran straight into Faldeus, equally dusty and disheveled, who was on his way to the police station to seek cooperation from Chief Orlando Reeve.

The moment their eyes met,

Faldeus, being a sharp magus,

first confirmed that the middle-aged man in the expensive suit before him had not even a trace of a magic circuit in his body.

Yet the man radiated a strange pull that made even Faldeus's heart skip.

When something is this abnormal, there must be a demon behind it.

Faldeus thought for a moment.

With the nuclear threat likely to fail and the situation completely out of control,

he gritted his teeth and, with the desperate resolve of better to kill the wrong man than let one go,

let magical energy flow through his eyes and, without hesitation, used hypnosis on Atsuomi Ayanokōji.

"Look into my eyes."

Faldeus stared at the man's eyes, which were slowly going vacant, and said in a low voice:

"Tell me…"

"Who are you monsters who suddenly appeared in Snowfield?!"