Jay stood amidst the drifting ash that was once a man who proclaimed himself as the God-King of the Vampire World.
His dark hazel eyes looked down at the remains of grey flakes caught in the Romanian wind.
Jay felt nothing but a hollow sense of finality as he bear witness to the mortality of a man who called himself a True Immortal.
In his left hand, the Sephiroth Graal pulse with a steady rhythmic golden light.
The chalice was a masterpiece of divine craftsmanship.
Exquisite engravings of ancient vines and celestial symbols wound around its surface, shimmering with a majestic hue that seemed to defy the gloom of the morning.
It was a beautiful thing, yet in Jay's eyes, it was nothing more than a vessel of blood, then or now.
An object that had fueled a massacre for the sake of a shallow, artificial immortality.
But as he stared at it, a prickle of unease crawled up his spine.
It was a sensation of profound haunting familiarity.
It felt like hearing a melody from a dream he couldn't quite remember, or seeing the blurred silhouette of an old friend in a crowd, someone he should recognize but whose name he simply couldn't bring to mind.
'What is this feeling...' Jay wondered,
Behind him, beyond the jagged stone walls of the Carmilla territory, the battlefield raged with elemental chaos.
The air was bitter with frost, cold enough to freeze a mortal in seconds, the power of Lavi's Absolute Demise.
Above, the sky groaned as the Zenith Tempest roared, yellow thunders crashing down in relentless strikes.
'Lavi is holding the line,' Jay thought, a small spark of warmth flickering in his chest amidst the cold. 'And Dulio… too, I guess.'
As his thoughts drifted, the familiarity suddenly twisted into a violent pull.
The Grail began to vibrate in his hand.
It felt as though the chalice was reaching into the deepest, most shadowed corner of Jay's soul and dragging something out. Before he could react, a burst of black flame erupted from his palm.
Jay's heart nearly stopped.
He wasn't in his Balance Breaker. He hadn't called for the fire. Yet the black flames of his supposed Balance Breaker, the True Cross of Golgotha, poured out like it's claiming the grail, wrapping around the entire surface of the chalice.
"No!" Jay hissed, his eyes widening in panic.
Sacred Gears were fragments of souls, or at the very least bound to them on a fundamental level.
And this Sacred Gear, this Holy Grail, belonged to Valerie Tepes.
It was her soul. Her essence. A fragment of who she was.
If the black flames, which possessed the all-burning property to consume matter, magic, and even souls, destroyed it…
What would happen to the girl if a part of her soul was annihilated?
Jay tried to pull the fire back, his mana flaring in a desperate attempt to stifle the blaze.
But it was too late as the black flame already consumed the whole grail in it's blazing darkness.
And the next thing that he witnessed surprised him even more.
Instead of turning the gold to nothing, the fire seemed to wash it.
The golden chalice was not destroyed.
It transformed.
The majestic celestial golden surface of the chalice bled into a deep obsidian black. The engravings shifted, becoming almost sharper and more primal than before.
The golden glow was extinguished, replaced by an eternal serene blazing black flame that flickered around the entire surface of the chalice like a crown of thorns.
Then, a memory or perhaps an echo of information whispered directly into his mind, cold and absolute.
The Holy Grail of The Last Supper
The information hit him with the force of a physical blow. The black chalice, now a twin to the darkness in his soul floated upward.
It hovered before his face for a fleeting second before lunging to his chest and melted to it.
A sensation of overwhelming disgust washed over Jay.
It felt like he had been forced to swallow a torrent of thick, iron-scented blood. His stomach churned, and his heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs as the foreign object integrated itself into his very being.
Then, the sensation vanished as the world returned to its grey, quiet state.
"What..." Jay muttered, clutching his chest. "What just happened?"
He reached inward, searching for the presence of the Grail. And with just a single thought, he called for it. Immediately, the blazing black grail manifested in his hand, its obsidian flames dancing lazily in the wind.
"The black flame... it didn't burn it," Jay whispered, his voice trembling with confusion. "...Is it absorbing the Grail and integrating it into my soul?"
He stared at the black fire. He had always known the True Cross was an anomaly.
Again and again, the black flame, the True Cross' black flame, continued to defy everything he thought he understood about it.
It possessed both the all-burning property and the unburning property. It could annihilate matter, magic, souls, and divinities alike, yet now it was doing something else entirely.
It was absorbing a soul.
He had once believed the True Cross was merely a sub-species Balance Breaker of the Incinerate Anthem. But after what had just happened with the Grail, he realized he might have been fundamentally wrong about what it truly was.
"No, it can't absorb just any soul, It can't be." Jay reasoned, his mind racing.
If it could, it would have consumed the souls of the hundreds he had killed before. This was the first time it happened, and it's pretty specific.
The Cross which was Incinerate Anthem. The Grail which was the Sephiroth Graal.
One thing they have in common, both of them are related to the Cruxification, both were directly tied to the God of the Bible.
'The Cross... the Grail...' Jay's breath hitched. 'Is it possible? If there is a third... the Spear. The True Longinus. If the flame encounters that, would it consume that too?'
The thought was a chilling one.
And that led to the real question.
What is the Black Flame?
He had no answer to that question.
He looked back at the blazing black chalice. Remembering how he had used it to weaken Marius, to strip away the power the Grail had given him, Jay willed that same authority in reverse.
This time, he commanded it to strengthen him.
And the response was instantaneous.
Jay's eyes went wide as he felt his physical capabilities surge, doubling in an instant.
Combined with the exponential growth he had gained from wielding Ame-no-Habakiri for the first time, he realized that he was now sixteen times stronger than he had been before his battle with Susanoo, physically.
For a human, this was nearly the highest point possible, perhaps even beyond it. He was still leagues away from the raw, monstrous physical power of beings like Rizevim or even Euclid, but he had already surpassed the limits of mortal biology.
Enchantment magic, which he had relied on for so long, now felt like it would offer only diminishing returns.
And all of this came from using the newly formed Black Grail… or should he call it his new Sacred Gear?
It was said the Sephiroth Graal could govern the concepts of life and death.
As that thought took root, a dark thoughts clawed at Jay's mind.
He can revive them, using this power, maybe, just maybe he can undo their death.
Sister Andrea, Elena, Mihea, Filip, Iacob, Ilea, Andrei.
Everyone...
But then, Jay stopped.
'No... In this world full of suffering, grief, and sorrow. I can't just revived them and then let them experience death once more. I… Maybe they were in a better place, or maybe not…'
But,
In this world where people died a pointless death.
In this world where bloodshed and war occurred for people with power.
In this world where the weak is abused and can't do anything.
In this ugly, despicable, and evil-filled world.
No child deserved to be born in this world.
Jay remembered that night.
The Utsusemis.
The basement beneath the Tepes Territory.
That's what humanity is in this world.
The blazing black chalice disappeared once more.
Jay felt his body grow light, weightless. All the mana he had spent slaughtering Tepes vampires in their castle, fighting Rizevim and Euclid, and waging the war inside the Carmilla territory and killing Marius just now… it all returned to him, replenished and overflowing after the physical enhancement.
It was as if his mana capacity were a lake that had been cut in half, only to have an entirely new lake poured on top of it.
Still, he needed to analyze this new power, to understand how it differed from the original Sephiroth Graal.
And also, he needs to explain and apologize personally to Valerie and Gasper.
With Ame-no-Habakiri still in his hand, Jay vanished from his place in a flicker of purple flame.
***
Inside the Carmilla territory, the war was reaching its frozen twilight.
Lavinia floated gracefully in the air, her dark purple robes whipping in the wind as her sapphire eyes glowing in a white sparks.
Below her, the battlefield had become a graveyard of ice. Her Balance Breaker, the Absolute Silver World, Assolute Argento Mondo was a sentient disaster.
It wove through the ruins, bypassing the Church exorcists and the Carmilla defenders with impossible precision, as if it possessed its own will, seeking out only the Tepes reinforced nobles.
"Fhuuu..." Lavinia exhaled, her breath coming in a heavy silver mist.
Her energy was bottoming out. Even with her mastery, maintaining a Longinus-tier Balance Breaker of this scale was like trying to hold back the ocean with her bare hands. She had maybe five minutes left before her mana collapsed.
And yet, there were still plenty of them left.
CRACKLE
BOOM
A pillar of holy lightning obliterated a cluster of vampires to her left. Dulio Gesualdo surged forward, propelled by flight magic, wrapped in golden light like a falling star.
He was a whirlwind of divine judgment, his carefree smile replaced by grim focus.
Four Tepes vampires burst from the shadows behind him, claws extended in a coordinated strike.
Dulio didn't turn.
SHIIING
A golden flash of holy energy cleaved through the air. Griselda Quarta appeared at his side, her blade a blur of silver engulfed in a golden light of holy energy. She cut through four vampires in a single fluid motion, her eyes sharp and cold.
"ARGH!!"
"Don't stop, Dulio!" Griselda commanded.
Dulio nodded, his hands blazing with light. He didn't give the cleaved vampires a chance to let the Grail's power regenerate them.
At point-blank range, he unleashed a thunderous blast of storm energy that vaporized their remains instantly.
Seeing that their God-King was nowhere in the sky, and watching their front line being crushed between a frozen blizzard and a lightning storm, the remaining Tepes forces finally broke.
The reinforcements from outside never came.
The so-called "immortal" legion was nowhere to be seen.
"Run!!"
"Retreat!"
"Fuck you, Carmillas! You'd ally yourselves with filthy humans?!"
Around five hundred vampires from the Tepes army turned their backs on the battlefield, sprinting and flying toward the main gates of the Carmilla territory. They were no longer warriors, only prey, desperate to escape the nightmare this Twilight March to the Carmilla Territory had become.
But when they reached the massive stone gates, they skidded to a halt.
What awaited them was not an escape.
It was a man.
A single man, standing alone atop the ruined walls.
A blazing black chalice hovered around his body, casting long flickering shadows against the stone. In his right hand, he held a sword of absolute darkness that seemed to drink the very light of the morning.
Jay looked down at the fleeing Tepes Vampires, his eyes cold and distant.
"Where do you think you're going?" he whispered.
The last remaining of the Tepes faction looked up at the silhouette of the Godslayer as he descended from the top of the walls.