Back in the Armament Kingdom, Aoto and Auren were locked in an intense, furious fight — though for all its fury, it was mostly one-sided.
Auren was taking his sweet time with him, dragging the torture out. Once again he raised several thousand spikes, each one as big as a man, and sent them at Aoto with blinding speed.
They came like a wave of giant needles, hungry for every inch of his body.
Aoto's condition was bad. His clothes hung torn in a dozen places, and he didn't have the time — or the spare energy — to warp them whole again with his unique skill.
His eyes went wide. He thrust both hands forward and curled his fingers as if gripping the very air.
Space itself buckled, and hundreds of spikes veered off in the wrong direction while the rest shattered on their own.
KACHA!...
For all his effort, one smaller spike slipped through and punched straight into his abdomen.
Half of it stuck out, the other half still buried.
"Fuckkkkkk..." Aoto screamed, his face contorting. He touched the spike and warped it, the deadly thing softening into cloth that coiled around his body as new clothing and healed himself once again.
"Take this!" he shouted, pure frustration spilling out.
He bent down and touched the ground. At once the whole surface began to vibrate, violently.
A palace erupted out of the earth, building itself piece by piece — so huge that beside it, Aoto looked like an insect next to a man.
Stranger still, it hung in the air with nothing holding it up, dirt and debris raining down beneath it. It showed how far his warping fell short — just making the thing had drained his focus and strength.
He swung his hands at Auren. The whole palace lurched forward, as if shoved from behind.
Auren looked up at the mountain of stone bearing down on him and smirked. "So you've finally decided to do something instead of just defending yourself."
He raised his hands and said, simply, "Hydrogen bomb."
"Hydrogen— what?" Aoto's eyes went wide. Hydrogen bombs — a thousand times more destructive than nuclear ones. There was no time to think anything.
Too late.
It was just too late.
BOOOOMMMM!...
A blinding wave, so bright it was hard to tell white from orange from yellow, poured out in a wall of pure destruction.
A normal man wouldn't have had a second to react. Aoto threw both hands up and warped the air around himself into a transparent cube, a shield against anything.
But the energy was simply too much. His vision went white, heat scorching into his skin, his legs shaking just to keep him upright.
Blood began to trickle from his eyes, his nose, his ears. His head felt ready to burst with the pain. He held for a few seconds — then the blast washed over his whole body.
A few seconds later, the energy thinned and faded, and the surroundings settled back to normal as if the blast had never come. The only difference was the palace Aoto had raised — it was gone, reduced to dust that drifted down and settled over everything in a fine grey film.
Aoto's vision swam. He stumbled, dropped to one knee, then forced himself back up, swaying.
"Am I alive? I'm alive, right?" he whispered to himself.
He blinked, over and over, waiting for his sight to clear. It did, slowly — and then he saw himself. Half of his right hand was burned away to the bone. He was nearly naked, more than half his body scorched, the skin raw and split. Burn marks crawled up his handsome face. It was a small miracle he still had hair at all.
Clap!... clap!... clap!...
A few dozen meters off, Auren clapped in satisfaction. "Good job. I knew you'd survive it."
"That wasn't a hydrogen bomb, though." He chuckled, tilting his head. "I lied. I can construct one — but honestly, even I wouldn't survive it in my current state. That was just an atomic bomb. A much smaller one, at that."
"Fuck. He's an even bigger liar than I am." Aoto gritted his teeth, clenching his one good palm.
He remembered the way Auren had lied to him and Scarlett at the very start. He understood now — Auren carried strength and cunning in equal measure.
"It's not over yet, though. Let's see if you can survive ten more of those," Auren added, as if setting a casual little test.
"I accept my defeat, okay? I'm out of this shit," Aoto shouted.
He turned and ran. His body healed over in an instant, and his legs warped into something like jet engines, fire blasting where his feet should be.
He threw his magic into it too, pushing his speed to its limit.
He launched into the air, his figure already blurring. He'd never flown this fast — not even half of it — and the instability showed. He wobbled badly, holding on only by instinct and the fear of another round with Auren.
Auren didn't fall behind. He gave chase at nearly the same speed — no engines, no fire, just flying, clean and steady, matching Aoto without so much as a wobble.
"Running won't do anything. My domain isn't fixed in one place for you to escape — it shifts as I move. You can't run from it as long as I'm near you," Auren shouted, trying to kill the pointless attempt.
"How would I know if he's lying or not," Aoto muttered, still flying.
But the further he went, the tighter his anxiety wound. Auren's words were coming true. After all this distance, he could still pull things out of thin air and hurl them at him.
And his luck was truly out today. One problem wasn't enough — ahead of him, he stopped dead on his own.
The mystviel border. The huge pillar of light. So close.
Instead of running toward Dreadhaven, he'd run the wrong way, straight to mystviel.
Forward meant fighting the Holy Knights guarding the ritual. Back meant another one-sided beating from Auren.
"Today's really my death day, huh?" Aoto sighed.
Meanwhile, back on the battlefield, things weren't looking good at all for Rin's group — him, Ingrassia, Richard, and Chiyoko.
They'd been having the time of their lives up to then, riding their advantage of being human. No robot would touch them, and whenever one tried to swing at Rin, one of them would just step in front of him. It was a simple strategy, and it worked — they smashed one robot apart after another, the wreckage piling up around them.
That is, until they caught sight of a real enemy — Warlord Sparda Malus.
The famous dark knight cut through everything Ingrassia, Chiyoko, and Richard threw at him without so much as a grunt of effort. He was simply too strong for them, too fast, too drilled.
The only one who even troubled him was Rin. As an oni, he had the durability and the strength to keep standing, but he was still no match for Sparda's battle experience .
Despite it being four against one, Richard and Ingrassia were already down on the ground, groaning. Chiyoko and Rin were barely hanging on, Chiyoko's legs shaking, Rin's arms feeling heavy.
But their luck hadn't run out. A sword wave burst toward Sparda out of nowhere, and he stepped back for the first time, knight boots skidding in the dirt.
The dark, malevolent energy rolling off it was strikingly like his own.
"Irish?" Ingrassia said, a smile of hope flickering onto her lips.
Irish — another dark knight — was there to save the day.
"Are you all alright?" she asked, her tone flat.
"Do we look alright to you?" Chiyoko sighed, his legs already shaking with exhaustion.
Irish didn't say anything more. Not because she didn't want to — she was simply too introverted for it. Her stomach was actually churning with panic and confusion over what to say. The flat voice was just a lid on all of it.
She shakes her head and turns her focus forward and went straight into Sparda.
They traded several blows of equal power, shockwaves bursting off each clash and rolling across the field.
It was fair to assume neither was going all out — but the way Sparda watched her from behind the helmet said plainly enough that he was surprised.
He hadn't expected her to match him.
"Dark sword edge," Sparda whispered, raising his blade high and slashing down.
A wave of dark force poured off the sword like the sea falling.
But Irish only grinned.
Her skill drank the whole violent wave down, swallowing it until it vanished in thin air.
Sparda's surprise was plain now — and one moment was all she needed. She closed the gap and touched his hand.
Her skill set to work at once, corruption creeping up from his hand into his soul.
But Sparda tore himself back several meters in an instant, putting a good gap between them.
"Soul corruption?" he said.
"You have potential — no, far more than that. Doesn't seem like you can be hypnotized like them," he said, his eyes sliding to Ingrassia and the others.
"That means you're with them willingly." His voice turned angrier with every word.
With a quiet hush, his hand went back to normal.
"He healed it?" Irish's turn to be surprised.
"Do you feel no shame? Working with these demons, betraying your own race?!" he shouted, charging in with an even more vicious attack.
"Leeches of humanity," he snarled, growing more aggressive with each stroke.
Irish kept defending herself well enough.
She had no interest in answering him — but Ingrassia couldn't stop herself after being called a leech.
"So we're the villains here? Aren't you ashamed of working with those good-for-nothing holy knights who killed almost every kingdom's rulers, twisted the whole situation to pin everything on Miss Scarlett, and are now running that ritual to take over the entire world?" Ingrassia spat it all out in one breath.
"After all that, you're calling us hypnotized?"
Sparda's movement stopped, and he looked at her.
"No? I confirmed with several other people at Almeida," he said, not sounding sure of himself anymore.
"Oh yeah, look — the second prince of Almeida is right in front of you. Do you know better than him?" she shot back, jabbing a finger at Richard.