Jay stood amidst the ruins of the laboratory, the violet embers of his presence clashing against the stagnant heavy air.
His eyes shifted toward Lavinia, who remained frozen by the side of her Glenda. The weight of the situation was settling in.
Lavinia clutched Glenda's limp body, her hands shaking as she tried to steady her breathing. The warmth that once radiated from her master was gone.
Jay felt it too.
Whatever had been done to Glenda was likely soul-related. The emptiness clinging to her presence was disturbingly familiar, almost identical to Valerie's condition in the altar room.
Jay lifted his gaze and met Rizevim's eyes.
The Devil stood there casually, one hand holding the Sephiroth Grail as if it were nothing more than a decorative cup. His posture was relaxed, his expression amused, but the pressure he radiated warped the air around him. Not through magic circles. Not through visible power.
Just presence.
Jay's eyes looked at him in a cold gaze.
'So this is him...'
The Devil Azazel warned about.
The one Euclid served.
The one who made Incinerate Anthem disappear.
The one who responsible of killing his family.
The Son of Morningstar
Rizevim Livan Lucifer
But the technique that made the Incinerate Anthem flames simply vanish was what baffled him the most. Jay extended his senses again, probing for magical interference, spatial distortion, any trace of a magic circle or formation but there is nothing.
That was what bothered him the most.
Rizevim did not negate magic the way anti-magic fields did.
Magic simply ceased to exist around him.
' Or is it not magic...' Jay thought. 'A Sacred Gears?'
And then Jay raised his hand slightly.
Purple embers erupted from the ground upward, manifesting in jagged arcs that closed in around Rizevim from every angle, spiraling upward like a tornado of flames.
Rizevim did not move.
He didn't even look away from the golden grail held casually in his hand.
Poof
The flames vanished. There was no residue, no heat, not even a wisp of smoke. It was as if the attack had been erased out of reality. Jay's mind raced through a thousand calculations per second. Again, there was no magic circle. There was no chant. There wasn't even the ripple of a defensive barrier.
'That's quite troublesome.' Jay thought.
Rizevim saw the gears turning in Jay's head and let out a dry, rattling laugh. He looked at Jay with a bored, half-lidded expression that dripped with condescension.
"If you only plan on attacking me with those little sparks, don't even think you can scratch me, boy," Rizevim said. "It's getting quite boring now."
Contrary to the expected reaction of frustration, Jay's expression remained a mask of coldness. He didn't speak. Instead, he unleashed another burst of purple flames, even larger than the last.
Rizevim's brow furrowed, a flicker of genuine irritation crossing his face. To him, it felt as though Jay was simply doing the same thing back-to-back because he was too dumb to understand the concept of failure.
"Tsk what an idiot, I told yo—"
Rizevim raised his hand to activate his Sacred Gear Canceller, intending to wipe the flames away with a flick of his fingers. But as he focused on the fire, he felt a sudden violent ripple in the space directly inside his head. A spatial rupture tore through the air like a jagged claw.
Rizevim's instincts flared.
He threw himself backward with blinding speed, his body blurring as the rupture closed less than a finger's width from his skull. The pressure shattered the ceiling above, sending fragments of stone crashing down.
But it wasn't the end.
In that microscopic window of opening, Jay had already closed the distance. He swung Ame-no-Habakiri in a horizontal arc, a blazing purple flame trailing the edge of the world-cutting slash.
SHIIING
But before Jay even finished his Cleave, suddenly Rizevim's body blurred. He left an afterimage behind as he surged forward, his presence manifesting inches from Jay's face.
"Now that's quite dangerous," Rizevim whispered. He reached out with a lightning-fast grab, his fingers snapping toward the hilt of Habakiri, intending to snatch the divine blade right out of Jay's hand.
But Jay's Phantasmagoria flared to life as his body glowing in purple hue.
Rizevim's hand passed through Jay's arm and the sword hilt as if they were made of mist. The Devil's eyes widened slightly, his fingers closing on empty air.
"Hoo," Rizevim murmured, his interest piqued.
Lavinia seeing the opening didn't hesitate. She forced her mana through the suppression of the room as she activated her Absolute Demise once more. Jagged spires of frozen ice erupted from the floor, locking Rizevim's feet in place.
Then a spectral figure of the four-armed ice doll princess manifested behind her, sending a massive, frigid slash toward Rizevim's front.
Jay didn't waste the opportunity. He pivoted behind the Devil, swinging his blade from the blind spot. The bluish-white light of the ice doll's slash from the front and the dark purple arc of Jay's sword from behind converged on Rizevim in a pincer of absolute destruction.
Rizevim simply raised one hand toward the spectral princess and the other toward Jay.
An invisible wave of negation rippled outward. The ice doll shattered into sparkling dust instantly, its power annihilated. Simultaneously, a sharp clanking sound rang through the chamber.
Jay's blade didn't hit Rizevim. Instead, it was parried by a silver sword that had appeared out of nowhere.
Euclid Lucifuge had materialized in the nick of time, his eyes cold and focused as he held Jay's strike at bay.
"You again," Jay muttered, his gaze freezing.
Purple flames erupted from the point where their blades met, hungry to consume the Devil.
Euclid didn't wait to be burned as he launched himself backward, creating distance.
At the same moment, Rizevim moved with a flash of silver light, reappearing behind Lavinia. He raised his hand, intending to end her life with a single, casual blow.
As his black coat fluttered, Jay's reaction was near-instantaneous. He twisted his body mid-air and sent a long-range slash of Habakiri toward Rizevim's head. Rizevim ducked to the side, and the slash sailed over him, striking the magic shackles that bound Glenda's unconscious body.
The chains shattered, freeing her from the laboratory's drain.
Rizevim's dodge was supposed to be a success, but he found himself staring into a spatial rupture that had opened on his flank mid-movement. It threatened to tear half of his torso away.
For the first time, Rizevim's smirk turned into something sharper as he thought.
'This thing and that ghost like state... Spatial magic of this caliber...'
SHRIEEK
"That's dangerous," Rizevim muttered in that split second.
His aura suddenly increased twofold, the pressure of it cracking the stone floor. Jay's eyes widened. At the last possible second before the rupture could consume him, Rizevim moved like a streak of silver lightning. He bypassed the distortion and threw a punch straight at Jay's chest.
Jay's body glowed with a purple hue as the runes of Phantasmagoria activated just in time. \
The punch passed through his spectral form, but the sheer force of the wind behind the blow was enough to rattle his concentration.
Before Jay could process the next move, dozens of silver and dark-red magic circles manifested in a sphere around him and Lavinia.
BOOM
A chain of explosions rocked the foundation of the castle. Jay stood his ground as the smoke cleared, breathing heavily. But before the explosions could hit them, Lavinia had managed to conjure a thick ice barrier just in time to shield them from the worst of Euclid's magical barrage.
"KUKUKU! Interesting, truly interesting," Rizevim laughed, standing atop a pile of rubble. "To think that even without the flamethrower toys you had, you are already this strong. But then, you are just a human. That's a shame, really."
As the ice shield crumbled, Jay ignored the Devil's taunts.
He turned his head slightly toward Lavinia.
"Lavi... take Glenda and get out of here," Jay commanded.
He saw the way Rizevim looked at her. With the Devil's ability to annihilate her Sacred Gear with a single touch, she was in a position of extreme vulnerability. With an unconscious Glenda to protect, both of them would be a burden in this fight.
After all not everyone can use Phantasmagoria to dodge both of these devils rapid attacks.
Lavinia crouched, her hands trembling. She felt the weight of her own perceived incompetence, a curse rising in her throat for her inability to help the two people she cared for most.
But she looked at Jay's steady back and knew he was right.
Rizevim's smile vanished when he realized Jay was ignoring him.
"Fucking brat," Rizevim said, his voice dropping an octave. "I'm asking you a question. Don't you have any decency in you?"
"Shut the fuck up, old man," Jay replied coldly.
Jay swung his hand in a wide arc. A series of spatial claws tore through the air toward Rizevim and Euclid.
While they were forced to maneuver, Jay engulfed Lavinia and Glenda in a swirl of purple flame. Within a heartbeat, they vanished from the laboratory transported to the safe zone where Gasper and Valerie waited.
"Oh, how sweet," Rizevim mocked, clapping his hands slowly. "Protecting your loved ones even though your own life is in peril. It's almost make me cry a little bit."
Jay didn't flinch as he adjusted his grip on Habakiri and spoke a single word.
"Cleave."
He swung the blade with everything he had. A world-cutting slash, massive wide and violent as it tore through the room, and then-
BOOM
The slash divided the entire roof of the castle wing in two. The ceiling groaned and collapsed inward, the laboratory of the Tepes castle ruined under the weight of falling stone.
Boulders rained down, threatening to bury everything. Jay leaped upward, his body turning intangible as he moved through the falling debris like a ghost.
But Euclid was already waiting for him in the open air. Hundreds of silver magic circles appeared in the sky, firing bolts of explosive energy like an auto-lock missiles.
Jay activated Phantasmagoria to let the blasts pass through him, but as his body become a tangible again, a demonic bullet of enormous proportions suddenly erupted from Rizevim's position below.
The bullet screamed through the air and exploded against Jay's position.
BOOM
The explosion tore through the upper levels of the castle, destroying the entire structure in a single attack.
Rizevim's smirk widened as he floated upward, his laughter ringing out across the ruined battlements. "How about that! Still having that arrogance in you, boy?"
Silence followed.
But then, suddenly Jay had already teleported behind Rizevim. As he trying to swing Habakiri on his right hand, but Euclid was a veteran of a thousand wars as he caught Jay's movement and swung a demonic sword from his left flank.
CLANK
A humming silver blade appeared in Jay's left hand, parrying Euclid's strike with a shower of sparks.
Jay used the momentum to teleport back, creating a gap of several hundred meters between him and the two Devils.
'It's impossible without the True Cross,' Jay thought.
Worse, he had no idea how the Black Flame would interact with that power. Anti-magic. Anti–Sacred Gear. Canceller. Whatever.
Though the black flame of the True Cross almost felt like antimatter made manifest. But what happened when annihilation met negation.
Would it burn through… or be erased outright?
Nobody knows.
At the end of the day, it was a gamble. But it was a gamble worth taking.
Rizevim's eyes locked onto the sword in Jay's left hand. The beautiful silver blade with some sort of archaic runes, crackling with some sort of lightnings around it. His expression shifted from amusement to genuine intrigue.
"That sword... Ame-no-Murakumo. I see," Rizevim said. "I've heard whispers from my connections about a human who slew that child of storms in Japan. So you are that human. KUKUKU! Now it's getting much more interesting."
Jay remained silent. His dark hazel eyes were fixed on his targets with a singular intent.
"I must say, you aren't very talkative aren't ya," Rizevim said with a smug smile. "But I don't mind. I like the submissive ones too. Since I've never met a human as fascinating as you, why don't we converse? Let's talk about this world, this hollow but beautiful world."
"No," Jay said.
He sent a horizontal swing of Murakumo forward. A blast of lightning, shaped like a roaring dragon suddenly erupted from the slash and surged toward them. Even Jay was taken by surprise by that attack, after all It was the first time he had ever wielded Murakumo in a real battle.
Euclid quickly manifested a massive barrier, the dark-red sigils groaning as the lightning dragon slammed into it before dispersing into silver crackling sparks.
Rizevim's smile didn't fade. He began to pace in the air, looking at the horizon.
"What do you think is the reason we were born into this world, Silence-kun? Is it for money? For power? Or perhaps you're one of those fools who thinks it's for love?"
Jay stayed silent, as he was still contemplating whether to unleash his Balance Breaker or not. Right now, he still didn't know what Rizevim was capable of. Just like against Susanoo, he waited for him to activate his Trump Card, The True Divine form before he even dared to unleash his trump card.
One thing that Jay believed was that whoever unraveled their true trump cards first would be the first one to lose.
And right now, he could not afford that.
Rizevim continued, his voice airy and philosophical. "No! All of those are just pointless cycles that will end. Money runs out. Power is never absolute. Love is a chemical lie. The only thing that remains is legacy. And what is a greater legacy than creating your own utopia? A world you fashioned, a universe you conquered."
He looked at Jay with a strange, piercing intensity. "Do you believe me if I tell you there is another world?"
"No,"
But Jay didn't let him finish.
"I don't care about your ambitions, your dreams, or your vain philosophies. Utopia or Hell, all I know is that this world is better off without your kind."
Jay pointed Murakumo at the two Devils, his mana flaring into a dense, purple shroud.
"You insolent brat," Euclid hissed, his fist clenching at the insult to his master. But Rizevim just laughed maniacally.
"You know, I actually agree with you there!" Rizevim shouted. "I mean, what kind of father kills his own sons? It's a devil things KUKUKUKU!"
Jay looked at him with a faint sense of disgust. He remembered Azazel's words about the man who caused Vali to flee his home, the man who treated his own blood like disposable trash.
"So you are the one," Jay said, his voice turning into ice. "The one who sent that half-devil to bring Vali back to his father."
"Half-devil? Half-vampire? I don't really remember," Rizevim said nonchalantly, waving a hand. "He must have been someone weak, then."
That was the final straw.
Jay thought of his life at the orphanage, the struggles of the kids, and the way Vali's very existence was treated as a nuisance by this man.
To him, it's all worthless.
Rage? Hatred? Vengeance? A man like this didn't deserve the dignity of such emotions.
The only thing he deserve
Jay whispered.
"...Is a plain forgotten death."