*
Her left kick slices through the sky, from the ground it looked like a black comet turned and slammed into a white comet. Narrowly dodged, she swings her great sword toward Ledaine, who brandished his scythe in retaliation. From the left, a wing of reddish black expands excessively, painting the white sky with a chaotic tree branch like structure. It didn't have the membrane like regular wings did, existing as sharp outstretched spikes, as irregular as a tree branch's growing pattern.
Using the wing, she turns mid manoeuvre to chase after Ledaine. The air roared as it couldn't withstand the pressure of her movements. The blade scarves diagonally, then back back up. Before transitioning into a thrust. Every attack that landed was successfully blocked by the scythe. She just couldn't break through. 10 more seconds. Without ascending, neither of them could enter oblivion and drag out the fight.
This might just be defeat. Despite all the techniques Yggdrasil mustered, it was only able to bridge the existing gap between them. Built on the premise that Ledaine did not get any stronger, this was his base form. She won't die instantly like other magical girls would, but she couldn't win either. She can feel it, her 'limits' have already been passed. However there's still another 'limit' coming up, one imposed by the world itself. The arcane overturns normality, then this was the limit of the arcane, her magic could only bring her so far.
9 seconds.
"look, there's still hope. It wasn't all futile." (Sariel)
She pointed at the long forgotten ground. 26 sentinels for each residential zone series. Lines of light flashed over the ground, covering the earth's surface in infinite patterns.
8 seconds.
" This is Taneda Vila, sentinel of zone A. we commend you for protecting humanity. But we aren't so helpless." (Taneda)
A girl in brown twintails and a cloak with kaleidoscopic patterns spoke. She clicked her finger and the light covering the ground explodes like a flashbang. 5 seconds left, and time froze. The victory condition for this battle was Sariel, Sariel who defeated {Nerve} promptly and assembled the sentinels here. The white expanse covering further than the sky dims into a grey, light no longer moves and the world was supposed to shut off into a pitch black. However it's only the world that has stopped moving, all the magical beings here practically emit light on their own, and magic doesn't obey time.
"{Fleeting light won't stop for you}, you can think of this grand magic formation as an extension of my ability.
It is exceedingly simple, we have been transferred to a snapshot of the world. You can think of it as a mirror dimension and go wild. " (Christine grayinne)
The sentinel of zone B, a woman with platinum toned shoulder length hair. The sentinels were pretty much all elders that kept their youthful appearances, as the chosen that didn't graduate upon the 3rd year of highschool. Her ability was camera related, and was able to repel The Calamity for a bit conceptually.
Yggdrasil never had much of a concrete plan. When she ascended she gained a 6th sense of sorts via extending her senses throughout the planet. Her goal was to look for Ledaine then and she succeeded, but inadvertently she felt of the flow of the world itself. In other words, she sensed the presence of all forces in this world. All of the sentinels, Eterna and some other great beings that reside on earth, it was enough to repel Ledaine but it was only a vague hunch of hers that Sariel could bring all of them together. She couldn't quite tell that Sariel should bring them together right now, only that she was capable of doing so and would do so had Yggdrasil died.
In a way she felt the river of destiny's flow, divine foresight of impervious victory. However, what is the divine if not for nature? If not for the world's calling itself? After all, the gods are spirits that embody the world's forces, pagan gods of the past represented the elements that resided in nature. Indirectly, she tapped into the all encompassing god of fate's ability. To put it more accurately, she accidentally recreated the ability, but it is as natural as the real deal itself.
Obscured instincts they may be, they have lead here passed on from Yggdrasil to Arin, and then back to Yggdrasil. Her 'prophecies' was just her attempt to put this strange feeling into words, without knowing this feeling existed. Clairvoyants peak into the indecipherable unknown, desperately conveying what they've seen, it wasn't necessary or natural to understand what they saw after all.
"... No...! " (Ledaine)
{Cocytus} guided fate towards the preferred end. Sariel wasn't quite the same, {Swap} fundamentally switched the places of elements in fate, it was way more immediate than mere guidance. In both battle and strategy, he was barely thwarted. The only thing that stood between himself and victory now... The magical girls in front of him.
*beep beep*
*Warning! Warning! Descension of external entity detected. Unable to detect repulsion measures, and suppression measures. You're adviced to evacuate this world. *
The withered divine core responded. If what happened before with Ledaine's heavenly king authority is akin to a faucet spilling liquid into a basin, next is a flood where the basin is disintegrated. The world begins to fall apart, before it would still repair itself faster than Ledaine could erode it. Thus tolled the true invasion. There was no soft rumbling or any forewarnings, air itself screeched violently and the fabric of space itself seemed to fall apart like a sand castle.
Unlike before, this was not a state that Ledaine could sustain for long. It was similar to Yggdrasil's efforts to bridge the gap in grading, it tore his own body apart and put a timer on himself. If it went on for too long, the world will submerge and drown him. Unlike dying normally, he won't revive outside like other Traces do. He was giving up conceptual immortality, it wasn't a card the other heavenly kings could play given their intelligence. That meant somewhere out there, The Observer and The Calamity was still respawning.
*Foreign Encounter has become inevitable, fate lock detected. The river of destiny has converged to a single stream. Good luck. *
It's eery how the remnant of a dead deity would impart some final courtesies.