"Assolute Argento Mondo."
The moment the words left Augusta's lips, the laws of physics on the mountain peak ceased to function. It was not merely a storm of snow or a drop in temperature. It was the manifestation of a primordial concept, the Absolute Silver World, a Snow World Believed to be Eternal.
A blizzard of silver ice erupted from Lavinia's body in a perfect, three hundred and sixty degree sphere of annihilation. It moved with a speed that defied the wind, a white wall of absolute zero that did not just freeze the ground, but seemed to solidify the very air and the flow of time itself.
The jagged rocks of the peak were encased in diamond-hard frost in a microsecond, and the atmosphere groaned as the moisture within it was forcibly crystallized.
This was the Balance Breaker of the Longinus Absolute Demise. It was a power meant to reshape the world into a silent frozen wasteland, and in the hands of a madwoman like Augusta, it was being fueled by a suicidal consumption of Lavinia's own life force.
Augusta grinned, her sapphire eyes glowing with a manic, oily light as she watched the silver wave rush toward the edge of the cliff. In a few more seconds, the blizzard would cascade down the slopes, burying the city below in an eternal winter from which no one would ever wake.
But before the first snowflake could reach the descent.
"...Overworld."
Jay's voice was barely a whisper, lost in the roar of the freezing gale, yet it carried the weight of an ultimatum.
A ring of purple embers suddenly ignited in the air around them, forming a perfect circle forty meters in diameter.
Then, with a sound like the world's heart breaking, the space within that ring simply gave way. A jagged, violet tear in reality manifested andd forming a dome of darkness that rose up to meet the silver blizzard.
It was not a barrier. It was a mouth of space that eat everything that comes at it.
The Overworld acted as a localized dimensional portal. A formation of Ruptures in the space.
The silver storm, the Absolute Zero wind and the crystalline shards of the Balance Breaker were not stopped, they were absorbed like light being absorbed into a black hole.
They vanished into the jagged darkness of the spatial tear, consumed by the void before they could touch a single leaf on the trees below. The collision between the eternal frost and the spatial void created a terrifying vacuum, a silent war where the silver light was swallowed by the violet shadow.
Within heartbeats, the gargantuan expansion of the Assolute Argento Mondo was contained.
The dome of darkness flickered and vanished, leaving behind a perfectly circular field of ice exactly forty meters wide. Outside that circle, the mountain was untouched. Inside, it was a wasteland of silver.
Augusta's jaw dropped. She stared at the spot where her continent-ending spell had been erased from history.
"Unbelievable." She knew that even though he possess Lavinia body and all her powers, she never use or trained with her Sacred Gears or any of her powers. But still, the absolute power that a Longinus like Absolute Demise bring should be enough, but here it stopped and disappeared like its never unleashed.
"This guy... tsk. I did not expect him to be hiding a trump card of this scale. To scale up a spatial deletion to this level..."
Her expression of shock quickly smoothed into a sneer as she looked at the center of the ice field.
There stood Jay, his body encased in a thick, translucent shell of silver ice. His arms were raised as if he had just finished the spell, but he was frozen solid, a statue of a boy caught in the middle of a desperate move.
"It seems you were too focused on that one spell, boy," Augusta said, her voice dripping with venom. "You focused so hard on protecting the useless ants below that you forgot to protect yourself. How ironic. In the world of magic, compassion is a terminal weakness."
She began to walk toward the frozen Jay, her boots crunching on the silver frost. "Now, I shall shatter you into a million pieces and reclaim what is mine."
But as she reached out a hand, a single flicker of purple embers ignited deep within the ice block.
Augusta's eyes widened. "What!"
In an instant, the purple flame flared with the intensity of a dying star. The "Primordial Ice" of the Absolute Demise, the frost said to be capable of freezing the very fires of hell, did not just crack. It evaporated. It turned directly from solid to steam in a violent, hissing explosion that sent a cloud of white vapor into the night sky.
Jay stepped out of the mist, his hazel eyes fixed on her with a terrifying stillness. He was not panting, but his skin was pale, and the glow of the embers around his feet was dimmer than before.
"What? How!" Augusta shrieked, floating backward on a cushion of wind. "It does not even make sense! How are you able to melt the Absolute Zero? That is conceptually impossible!"
Jay ignored her, his mind focused on the cold math of his own survival.
His mana reserves were screaming. Overworld or so had been a massive gamble, a scaled-up version of Rupture that required him to calculate and delete thousands of cubic meters of magical energy in a split second. Success had cost him dearly. He was down to thirty percent of his total mana. He could feel the familiar ache of magical depletion beginning to gnaw at his nerves.
He had been limiting his use of the Incinerate Anthem throughout the fight, not because he lacked control as Augusta thought, but because he was acutely aware of his flaw as a human.
He did not have the infinite well of mana reserves as a dragon or devils. He was a man, nothing more and nothing less.
"It is time to end this," Jay said softly.
"How! Who are you!" Augusta's voice was finally high-pitched with the first notes of genuine fear. "You are not a human! No human can command spatial deletion and primordial flame with such surgical precision!"
"That's a bold statement coming from you," Jay said, beginning to walk toward her. Each step he took melted the silver ice beneath his feet, turning the "eternal frost" into mundane puddles. "You, who does not even understand what it feels like to be a human."
Augusta let out a primal scream, and the blizzard around her intensified.
She was no longer aiming for the city, she was aiming for the boy. She threw everything she had left into the fight, but the loss of the Ice Doll and the failure of her wide-range Balance Breaker had left her in panic state.
And against someone like Jay, that is a fatal weakness.
She was a queen throwing a tantrum, her attacks becoming jagged and predictable.
She unleashed a tornado of ice, a swirling vortex of thorns and spears designed to shred Jay into ribbons. Jay didn't even blink. With a simple horizontal sweep of his hand, a sheet of purple fire erupted.
The law of physics was absolute, fire melts ice. The tornado did not even reach him before it was reduced to a harmless warm breeze.
"You who don't understand the beauty in compassion," Jay said, his voice piercing through the howl of the wind.
"Shut up! Shut up!" Augusta screamed, her face twisting into a mask of rage. She raised her wand, summoning dozens of Ice Golems from the frozen ground. They were smaller than the Princess, but they were fast, lunging at Jay with mindless ferocity.
Jay clasped his right hand.
Rupture.
The space where the golems stood simply ceased to be. They were deleted mid-leap, their forms vanishing into the void as if they had never been sculpted from the frost.
"You who don't understand the pain of losing someone," Jay continued, his tone low and steady, yet it carried an edge that felt like a sword of Damocles hanging over Augusta's head.
"I have lost everything!" Augusta retorted, firing beams of concentrated black mana. "I lost my power, my status, my student! I know loss better than you ever could!"
"No," Jay said, blinking through the beams with Voidwalker and appearing ten feet closer. "You lost possessions. You lost tools. You never lost a person, because you never bothered to see anyone as a person. Not even yourself."
"ARGHHH!" Augusta forced a massive wave of ice to rise up around Jay, intended to crush him from all sides. She poured the last of Lavinia's immediate mana into the strike.
Jay stood in the center of the rising frozen walls, the purple embers of the Incinerate Anthem glowing like a steady heartbeat. The ice touched the flames and died.
Every atom of the attack was unmade before it could exert a single pound of pressure.
The gap between them was no longer about raw power. It was about control. Augusta was using the Balance Breaker like a club and swinging it wildly in the dark. Jay, even without his own Balance Breaker active was using the Incinerate Anthem like a scalpel.
And in the battle between two Longinus wielder, control is everything.
As Augusta reached for another spell, her movements faltered. The strain on Lavinia's body was reaching a breaking point. Jay saw the opening.
He teleported.
In a flash of violet light, he was in front of her. His hand shot out, catching Augusta by the throat.
The amber sparks of the Incinerate Anthem flared around his fingers, melting the frozen ground for yards around them and turning the mountain peak into a steaming mire.
"Ack!" Augusta clawed at his wrist, her breath hitching as the heat began to sear through her stolen skin. Even in defeat, she tried to find a way to hurt him.
"Now what... boy? What will you do? If you kill me, you kill the girl. Are you ready to be a murderer of an innocent girl!"
Jay looked at her, his hazel eyes cold and deep. He don't even bother with her taunts and antics. He had been contemplating this moment since the bunker. He had gambled on the Overworld, and now he would gamble on the very essence of the power he held.
A strange serenity began to wash over him.
The howling wind seemed to fade into a dull hum, and the world took on a solemn, monochromatic hue. Augusta felt it too. She froze in his grip as her eyes widening as she felt something ancient, dark, and utterly foreign beginning to stir within the boy.
It was a presence that didn't belong to anyone. It was something that felt like the beginning and the end of all things.
Jay decided to let go. He would stop fighting the flame and start being the flame. He would allow the power that had changed his life to finally reveal its true face.
The power to burn everything. The power to burn nothing.
As the internal clock of his mana hit a critical threshold, a sound echoed in the minds of both combatants. It was not a physical sound, but the tolling of a bell that existed outside of time.
As the bell tolled, it sang the anthem of the End.
He who was ordained to judge the wicked
cast forth the flame of righteous wrath,
and by holy fire were sins unmade,
consigned unto the deepest abyss,
where neither name nor memory endure.
Thus were the transgressions burned to naught,
and silence reigned where darkness once dwelt.
The air around Jay's hand began to ripple. A spectral image of a wooden cross shimmering in a black flame manifested behind him.
The True Cross of Golgotha
Augusta stared into Jay's eyes and felt as if she were staring into the deepest darkness of the universe. She was no longer looking at a boy. She was looking at a judge.
She felt her soul being bared, every atrocity she had committed, every life she had twisted, being laid out on an altar of black flame.
And as the boy spoke.
"...Burn Everlasting Sins."
A darkness of light more silent than the snow consumed the peak.