Jay stood face-to-face with the blond exorcist, his expression remaining an unreadable mask. He hadn't realized how much he had changed until this moment. He was taller than even Lavinia right now.
He wondered whether it was simply a natural growth spurt, or if being bound to the divine properties of Ame-no-Habakiri had accelerated his physical development, the same force that had boosted his physical capabilities to a superhuman level.
"Ah, and the lady is...?" Dulio asked, his green eyes shifting to Lavinia with polite curiosity.
"Lavia," she answered simply, offering a slight nod.
Jay studied Dulio and the woman beside him. He had initially assumed they would recognize him and Lavinia immediately, but the world of the supernatural was vast.
Dulio was likely active almost entirely within the Vatican's direct sphere of influence in Italy, while Grauzauberer operated mainly in Germany and remained highly secretive about their activities. Unless Lavinia had unleashed the frost of Absolute Demise in public, it was unlikely that Dulio would have known of her existence.
'Unless...'
Still, Jay did not care much about his identity being recognized. People knew what they knew, and that was all there was to it.
"And this is Sister Griselda," Dulio continued, gesturing to the blue-eyed woman. "My mentor."
"Nice to meet you," Jay said. He stepped forward and shook her hand.
It was a brief, professional contact, but in that split second Jay silently planted a microscopic strand of his mana onto her glove. A trace so faint and refined that even a master magician like Lavinia wouldn't have noticed it.
He feels like he is going to need it later.
Griselda nodded back, her gaze sharp and clinical, as if she were trying to peel back the layers of Jay's identity.
"What do you think about this mission, Illya-san?" Dulio asked, leaning back slightly with his hands in his pockets.
'Mission?... Is this guy serious?' Jay thought.
It seemed Dulio still believed Jay was an operative of the Church, likely based on their first encounter in Verona. Beside him, Lavinia looked visibly confused, while Griselda's eyes narrowed, staring at Dulio as if he had finally lost his mind.
Jay decided to play along.
If the Church was mobilizing, he wanted to know the scale of it.
"I don't know," Jay said, his voice even. "But a tragedy of this scale, with five hundred dead and not a single survivor to tell the tale... don't you think there is something weird about that?"
"That's the mystery," Dulio admitted, his cheerful demeanor dimming for a moment. "Especially since several of the victims were high-ranking individuals who shouldn't have been taken down so easily even by the likes of them."
"By the way," Jay asked, prying deeper, "how many of us will be involved in the retaliation?"
"I think aroun-"
Dulio stopped abruptly as Griselda let out a sharp, pointed cough.
"Mr. Gesualdo, I believe we are expected elsewhere," Griselda said, her voice like cracking ice.
Dulio blinked, realizing he had been a second away from disclosing mission specifics to two people who hadn't officially checked in. He rubbed the back of his head, looking sheepish.
"Right. Sorry about that. Well then, Illya-san, Lavia-san. Excuse us."
Dulio turned away with a friendly wave, while Griselda lingered for a heartbeat. Her eyes locked onto Jay's one last time, as those blue eyes met with his dark hazel eyes.
Then, she followed Dulio into the crowd.
Lavinia stepped forward beside Jay, watching their retreating backs.
"I think she knew."
"Yeah," Jay replied, his eyes following the strand of mana he had planted.
Meanwhile, as they walked away from the crowd, Dulio found himself on the receiving end of a sharp scolding from Griselda.
"Do you have any idea who that girl was, Dulio?" she hissed, her voice low but stern. "That was the Ice Princess of Grauzauberer, the wielder of Absolute Demise."
"Eh, really?" Dulio asked, looking genuinely surprised. While he was the strongest human in Heaven's arsenal, he wasn't exactly known for keeping up with the intricate social hierarchies of the supernatural world. He scratched the back of his head, feeling a bit embarrassed to have missed such a high-ranking individual standing right in front of him.
"Then what about Illya-san?" Dulio asked, his face full of curiosity.
"Your friend probably lied about his name, because I have never heard of a high-level operative named Illya in any of our records," Griselda answered flatly.
"No, no, he wasn't lying. I'm sure of it," Dulio insisted. He had a knack for reading people, and he hadn't sensed a single trace of deception in the young man's words.
"Then he is probably..." Griselda trailed off.
She had her own channels of information, and whispers of the incident in Japan had already begun to circulate among the elite. The death of a Major God like Susanoo wasn't something that could be kept quiet for long. If there was a man traveling alongside the Ice Princess, then there was only one conclusion to draw.
The Scorch Magician.
The Godslayer.
"Let's just meet with everyone," Griselda said, cutting the conversation short as they approached one of the building. "Pastor Cristaldi has called us. Tonight, we move."
***
That evening, after carefully analyzing what little information they had gathered, Jay and Lavinia decided to return to Transylvania.
The region itself was massive, it was nearly one hundred and twenty times larger than Kyoto. Jay's good old strategy of wide-range teleportation combined with domain scanning, the same strategy that he used to found Lavinia would be nothing more than a reckless waste of mana here.
Instead, they narrowed their search to three possible locations.
Based on the information they had, which are the rumors of a Vampire World hidden beneath forests and mountains then there were only two truly logical choices.
The first was the Apuseni Mountains, a region riddled with caves, abandoned mines, and Jay's childhood stories about forgotten settlements where entire communities could vanish without leaving a trace.
The second was the forests of the Eastern Carpathians, it was known by the local folklore as an ancient dense canopy steeped in old magic that predated modern civilization.
And finally.
Sighișoara.
An old fortified city, steeped in history and legend. More importantly, it was the only place explicitly mentioned in one of the vampire-related texts Lavinia had found in Glenda's library. Unlike the vague references to mountains and forests, Sighișoara was named clearly as it is the birthplace of Vlade the Impaler.
It also helped that Jay had been here before.
The sun was already setting when they arrived, its orange glow spilling across the stone-paved streets. Medieval walls and rooftops basked in the dying light, shadows stretching long and quiet.
Jay and Lavinia teleported from point to point across the city. At each stop, Jay expanded his Domain of his own, letting it brush against the fabric of reality, while Lavinia focused on detecting even the faintest fluctuation of mana.
"Nothing here either," Lavinia said, appearing in a flurry of snowflakes behind Jay.
Jay stood near a cobblestone path as the distant tolling of a church bell echoed through the valley. He stared at the scenery, the long shadows of the medieval towers and the flickering street lamps.
"Illya-kun? Is something wrong?"
Jay's hazel eyes remained fixed on the horizon. Sister Andrea had brought him here seven years ago to sell the milk from their small farm.
'Seven years…' he thought. But this city never change.
"Nothing," he said quietly. "It just reminds me of something."
Lavinia stepped closer and gently took his hand, her silence offering the understanding he didn't need to put into words.
Before Jay could respond, a sharp crystalline ripple of magic brushed against the edge of his Domain. Jay's eyes snapped open. Lavinia felt it too as a sudden, unnatural pressure in the atmosphere. Without a word, their figures vanished in a flicker of purple embers.
They reappeared atop a high tiled roof overlooking a narrow alleyway. Below them, the world was frozen. The falling leaves were suspended in mid-air, and the flickering light of a broken lamp was held in a static hum.
"Localized time stop," Lavinia whispered, removing her glasses. "Who has the magic to do this?"
"I don't know, but it's possibly a Sacred Gear," Jay replied, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the area.
In the center of the frozen alley was a girl, or perhaps a boy with girlish features panting heavily.
Meanwhile, the boy felt his stamina draining with every passing second. He had been running for what felt like hours, not away from danger at first, but away from the red-haired and black-haired girls who had brought him back to life.
He had run because he wanted to meet Valerie. He wanted her to know that he was still alive, that he had not disappeared forever.
But before he could even get close, everything went wrong.
Now he was being hunted by those vampires instead.
He might have been ungrateful for abandoning the girls who saved him, but fear and desperation drowned out reason. If he stopped, if he hesitated even for a moment, he knew he would never reach Valerie at all.
'I want to meet Valerie... I have to tell her I'm still alive,' The boy thought, his legs trembling. He was a coward, he knew that.
He was terrified of the vampires hunting him, but with this strange new power, he felt a flicker of hope.
Suddenly, he tripped over a loose cobblestone, slamming into the dirt.
"Ouch!"
The impact broke his concentration. The world lurched back into motion as the leaves fell, and the lamp flickered. But the relief was short-lived. An ominous, heavy mana surged from the end of the alley as a bounded field snapped shut around the area, sealing him in.
" No... " The boy voice trembling.
He crouched on the ground, shivering as a small leak of liquid stained the pavement beneath his skirt. He was paralyzed with fear. Six or seven cloaked figures emerged from the darkness, their eyes glowing like rubies.
"A time stop," one of them sneered, his voice cold. "A valuable power indeed, but with the Grail in our hands, your presence is nothing but a hindrance to His plan, Gasper Vladi."
One of the vampire lunged, moving in a dark red flash of lethal speed. The boy called Gasper squeezed his eyes shut.
'Valerie, I'm sorry!'
SHRIIK
The sound of severed flesh echoed through the alley, followed by a heavy silence. Gasper waited for the pain, but it never came. He slowly opened his eyes and saw a broad back clad in a black coat standing before him.
The man had one hand casually tucked into his pocket, while the other held a platinum-hued holy sword that pulsed with a faint dying light.
The vampire who had rushed him lay on the ground, his body cleaved cleanly into two.
"Who..." Gasper started, but he was suddenly pulled into a warm embrace from behind.
"Are you okay?" a soft voice asked. A beautiful woman with blonde hair and deep blue eyes looked down at him with genuine worry.
Jay stared down at the wounded vampire, his expression cold.
'Strange…'
'How is a Holy Sword not affecting him at all?' Jay wondered.
The vampire was groaning from pain, but the holy energy from Sister Andrea's holy sword wasn't incinerating him as it should have.
It's peculiar.
The remaining vampires halted, their predatory confidence vanishing.
"Human! Who are you?" one hissed. "This is none of your business. That boy belongs to us."
Jay glanced back at Gasper, who was shaking his head in terror.
"Doesn't look like he wants to go with you to me," Jay said, his voice flat. He stepped forward, and a flicker of purple embers erupted from the ground beneath the fallen, severed vampire.
FWHOM
The purple flames roared to life. The vampire's screams were cut short as his body turned to ash in seconds. Jay noticed a slight resistance as the vampire's body was unnaturally durable.
But Incinerate Anthem was one of the original Thirteen Longinus for a reason. Any resistance was ultimately futile.
The cloaked figures recoiled, their faces draining of color as shock rippled through them. There was no one in the supernatural world who would not recognize those violet embers.
"Those flames… Incinerate Anthem?" one of them shouted in disbelief.
"Damn it! Retreat!"
They turned to flee, but to Jay, their vampire speed was little more than a crawl pitifully slow compared to a literal God of Lightning he had faced in Kyoto.
Jay banished the holy sword back into his pocket dimension. In one seamless motion, he reached into a tear in space and drew forth a jet-black blade. Ame-no-Habakiri blade pulsed with a dark hue as it tore the space around it.
As violet flames danced along the blade's dark edge, Jay swung it in a lazy horizontal arc, and he whispered.
"Cleave."
SHIIIING
""ARGHHHH""
A deafening scream was swallowed by the bounded field as a massive arc of violet light tore through the cloaked figures in an instant. In the next heartbeat, blazing purple flames erupted from the slash, consuming them in agonizing holy fire.
Their bodies were cleaved apart and reduced to drifting ash, erased before their remains could even touch the ground.
Jay looked empty space where the vampires had stood, his gaze hollow and distant. And then Ame-no-Habakiri disappeared into thin air, before he turned to the boy behind him.
Gasper stared at Jay, his eyes wide with awe. The terror that had gripped him only moments ago was replaced by a single, overwhelming thought.
'So cool…'