Zzzzzzt—!
With a thunderous roar, even the howling blaze of exploding flames could not drown out the deafening crack of lightning.
A massive plasma sphere shot toward Kevin, who was half-kneeling. Vast arcs of sky-blue electricity tore past his ears.
Kevin tilted his head at once. Even with the DNA of the Emperor-class Honkai Beast Parvati coursing through him, the scorching heat generated by colliding electric arcs still seared his cheeks.
Clang!
Without hesitation, Kevin swung Judgment of Shamash downward at his feet. The seabed, already transformed into a sea of molten lava, split apart instantly.
In the next moment—
Whoosh—!
As Kevin dropped into the fissure, he had no time to look up. The dark-blue plasma sphere, radiating terrifying heat, screamed down after him. Not far away, Roboute immediately raised the greatsword of heavenly fire in his hands horizontally.
In the blink of an eye, the spot where Kevin had stood was gouged into a crater over a hundred meters wide. Spiderweb-like cracks spread outward in all directions. After streaking forward several thousand meters more, the sphere detonated with a violent explosion.
Blinding lightning burst outward from the impact point in a ring-shaped shockwave, compressing the surrounding terrain into folded mountain ridges. Fine currents burrowed deep underground and dispersed.
The already shattered seabed structure was completely destroyed. Countless fish and shrimp, roasted by the heat, were pulverized into dust by the shock.
"Great General?"
Roboute glanced at Budo, who was speeding in from afar, and instantly understood.
His time for a duel was over. Now—
It was time to kill him together.
They were generals of the Empire, not gladiators in an arena. This was war. How could it possibly remain a one-on-one contest? A brief exchange of blades had been courtesy enough.
Above all, they were soldiers of the Holy Selene Empire. Recognition was one thing—but victory was their foremost objective.
Besides, what greater respect could an Imperial soldier show than welcoming you with the strongest firepower available? If you were too weak, you would not even be worth such a formation.
At most, after the battle, they might erect a symbolic tomb or a nameless stele in acknowledgment.
Immediately afterward, Roboute drove the greatsword of heavenly fire into the ground. On the hilt, the radiance symbolizing the authority of the Herrscher of Fire flared brilliantly.
Boom!
In an instant, the ground within several thousand meters around him melted completely. Orange-red magma bubbled and churned, expanding outward.
"Ten o'clock direction. One thousand four hundred sixty-eight meters," Roboute reported through his power armor's internal comm system.
"Understood."
Having locked onto the position, Budo raised his right hand. Power surged through his entire body as violent arcs of electricity danced across him.
Crackle! Crackle!
On his heavy gauntlet, the Teigu: Thunder God's Rage · Adramelech retracted its prismatic iron rod like a pile driver, emitting hydraulic thump-thump sounds.
Just as Kevin burst out of the molten sea, heat waves rolling off his body and much of his long black coat burned away—
"Thunder Bone!"
Danger!
The delay was only an instant. On a battlefield, there was rarely even a sliver of margin for error. That fleeting hesitation cost Kevin his chance to evade.
Budo's voice was as cold as a breath from the frozen abyss. In the next flash of lightning, his massive, muscle-bound frame crashed down.
It was him—the one called Budo.
So Raiden Mei has already been defeated.
Budo's body angled sharply. He seized the moment Kevin's emergence from the lava had slowed him. Twisting his wrist and rotating his waist slightly, he drove his iron fist downward and slid forward across the magma sea.
It was an angle from which Kevin could not break free.
Budo's arm—encased in both finely crafted heavy power armor and Thunder God's Rage · Adramelech—was grotesquely massive, nearly larger than Kevin's entire upper body.
Boom!
The iron fist clad in heavy gauntlets slammed into Kevin's torso.
Crack.
The wail of breaking bone rang out. Kevin heard his own body keening.
His mouth fell open involuntarily. Blood foam sprayed forth. A tremendous force invaded his body. His organs churned violently, like a washing machine gone berserk.
Kevin's handsome features twisted. His head snapped back. His legs lifted forward off the ground. Using Budo's fist as a pivot, he floated upward like a weightless feather.
Budo's eyes turned cold. Inside his power armor, electronic muscle bundles bulged high.
"—Shock!"
Second-stage force.
The long-charged prism of Adramelech erupted.
Boom!
Like a firing pin striking the primer of a shell, sky-blue lightning burst outward from the iron-gray prism in a web of crackling energy. Terrifying power detonated.
Kevin was sent flying like a withered leaf caught in a typhoon. Wrapped in lightning, he shot toward Roboute like a railgun projectile. Blood scattered through the air.
The thousand-meter distance vanished in an instant.
Seeing this, Roboute's expression did not change. His wrist shifted. Surging flames exploded from the blade of his sword as he brought it down vertically.
Clang!
"Gah—!"
Blood mixed with fragments of internal organs spilled from Kevin's mouth. Though grievously wounded, his breathing ragged like a broken bellows, he had not lost the ability to fight.
He still gripped Judgment of Shamash tightly. At the critical moment, he raised it to block the descending blade.
Boom—!
The next instant, Kevin was blasted away again, crashing into the earth like a falling meteor.
Rumble—!
Basalt melted by extreme heat shot skyward like meteors. Lava continued to spray outward until a trench nearly a thousand meters long had been carved into the ground.
Kevin's condition could hardly be called good.
His short silver hair had dulled. His body was embedded deep within the rock layer, surrounded by a hell of magma. The arm supporting Judgment of Shamash trembled uncontrollably.
Thud! Thud!
Two heavy impacts sounded.
Kevin struggled to lift his head. Blood flowing from the gash on his forehead blurred his vision with a crimson haze.
Not far away, Budo and Roboute stood side by side, staring at him coldly.
"Kevin Kaslana. You have lost."
Faced with Budo's declaration, Kevin voiced no complaint.
The struggle against Honkai had always been a war of life and death.
War was never fair.
Ambushes. Being surrounded.
All of it was normal.
At this moment, Kevin thought of many things.
The youthful days of the Previous Era civilization. Mei. Elysia... everyone.
From the moment his beloved Mei died, his time had stopped.
Or rather, during the endless loneliness before he escaped the Sea of Quanta, he had replayed those memories over and over again.
He had witnessed opportunities that ordinary mortals could never even dream of. He had endured the sorrow of all things falling into ruin. Yet everything—everything those eyes had once seen—had been forged by extraordinary will into two slabs of merciless, frigid ice.
A lonely, obsessive soul.
Yes. This was Kevin. This was the existence known as Kevin Kaslana—lonely, despairing, stubborn to the point of absurdity. Apart from the mission he carried upon his shoulders, he had—nothing left.
That mission belonged to Mei. To the comrades of the MOTH. To everyone of the Previous Era civilization who had entrusted their hopes to him.
It was a burden so heavy he did not dare abandon it. Did not dare relax. Did not dare die before Honkai was eradicated.
Had he lost?
No!!
As long as life endured, he would never forget!
"My mission is—to eradicate Honkai!"
A frigid light flashed within Kevin's azure eyes. He tore open his tattered windbreaker. The exposed flesh of his body radiated an icy chill. Veins bulged. His wounds began to mend themselves, faint streams of ice-blue substance flowing beneath the skin.
"This guy... he's like a machine."
At this moment, Roboute could no longer sense even a trace of emotion belonging to a sentient being.
Emotion. Memory. Warmth.
There was not the slightest fragment of humanity in those eyes.
Even as Kevin appeared to erupt with newfound strength, those azure pupils remained hollow and empty, as though anyone illuminated by them would feel a void rise from within their own heart.
Not human.
Not even life.
Rather than a man, he seemed more like a machine—one that retained only its programmed objective. Every action, every thought, existed solely for that goal.
If Roboute had not earlier witnessed Kevin's intense emotional fluctuation when he used Judgment of Shamash, he might truly have believed him to be a robot.
Crack. Crack.
Ice began to form.
Before the naked eye, the rolling rivers of magma around him cooled at astonishing speed, freezing solid. The spreading cold even caused frost to crystallize across the outer shells of Budo's and Roboute's power armor.
"A dying flare? If I'm not mistaken, Kevin Kaslana's strength has yet to recover to its peak. His body shows clear depletion."
As the finest product of the 'MANTIS' Project, Kevin could absorb Honkai energy to restore stamina and replenish power—this was beyond doubt. Budo had sensed it from the very beginning.
Unfortunately, the Honkai energy currently dispersing around the metropolitan headquarters of World Serpent had been generated by Imperial bombardment. And the raw materials of Imperial weaponry were derived from the Honkai energy produced by Selene herself.
It carried the terrifying corrosiveness of Finality.
To Kevin and the others, it was poison.
"Still struggling at death's door. It seems he intends to fight to the bitter end. Great General, there's no need for further talk."
"Indeed. Then we can only cut the weeds and pull out the roots."
As he spoke, Budo mobilized the power within his body. Terrifying bolts of lightning as thick as barrels coiled across his frame.
Originally, Budo had somewhat approved of Kevin's gaze and will. He would have made a fine soldier.
But the man had become a deranged machine that knew only one thing—eradicate Honkai.
Then there was only one outcome.
Death.
Voom!
A blurred afterimage sliced through the air, arriving before Kevin in an instant. It was Budo. His heavy gauntlet traced a half-arc through the sky before chopping down like a battle-axe.
Crack!
Yet what Budo heard was merely the shattering of ice.
He had struck nothing.
"Hm? His physical functions have improved to this degree. To squeeze his life force like this... he truly has no intention of living," Budo murmured, turning his head.
Kevin had appeared behind him.
Judgment of Shamash thrust mercilessly toward Budo's back. But before Kevin could land the blow, he sensed a wave of scorching heat surging toward his own spine. Abandoning the attack, he retreated without hesitation.
As he withdrew, Kevin activated the ultimate power of Judgment of Shamash.
Hummm—!
Sensing the exponentially escalating energy fluctuations in Kevin's blade, Budo knew this would be his full-force strike.
"Order: All units immediately activate Void Shield defensive fields. Protect the metropolis. There is Imperial experimental data within the city. Roboute and I will do our utmost to divert the attack elsewhere."
Though the battlefield had already shifted hundreds of kilometers offshore, Budo had a premonition. The impact would still spread.
The irony was striking.
This time, the roles were reversed. Kevin was the destroyer, while the Imperial forces were the 'protectors.'
In Kevin's hand, the circular ring at the hilt of Judgment of Shamash glowed a blazing crimson.
Flames rapidly engulfed the blade.
Deconstructing. Reassembling. Extending...
The pistol-like guards fused together into an inverted V. The blade elongated. Within the roaring fire, it became an alien greatsword as dazzling as a star.
The frost covering Kevin's entire body formed a stark contrast with the overwhelming inferno of Judgment of Shamash.
Because the ice power derived from Parvati's DNA neutralized part of the heat, Kevin could wield it with minimal injury—aside from the massive stamina drain that left him weakened.
His descendants, the Kaslana family, had not been so fortunate. Over the past fifteen hundred years, twenty-three Kaslana warriors had died to the indiscriminate flames of Judgment of Shamash.
As for Roboute, he had no need to worry about Honkai corrosion from the blade at all. He could freely adjust his output, drawing upon the Honkai energy stored within himself.
Of course, the Judgment of Shamash in his hand lacked the twin-gun form. It existed only as a greatsword—after all, this one had been personally forged by a certain someone.
"Judgment of Shamash—Limit Release!"
With Kevin's roar, scorching waves of fire swept outward. An aura thousands upon thousands of times more terrifying than orbital bombardment enveloped even the metropolis hundreds of kilometers away in sweltering heat.
The distant tsunami, which had begun to refill the shattered sea after Roboute and Kevin ceased clashing, was instantly vaporized again—burned away before it could even approach.
"Hm? Great General, aren't you going to exert yourself?"
Having likewise ignited a pillar of flame that shot into the heavens and preparing to meet Kevin's attack head-on, Roboute suddenly noticed that Budo stood with arms crossed, almost leisurely—holding back?
This... Great General, have you seen the situation?
"No need for us to act, Roboute. Because..."
Budo lifted his gaze skyward, confidence filling his eyes.
"Ravaging—Flame!!!"
Kevin brought the greatsword down with all his might. The colossal blade of fire crushed the air itself, erasing the colors of the world.
Wooooooooom—!!
The sea could not refill fast enough to match the rate of evaporation under the Shuhadaku of Uriel form. In less than a second, the ocean was 'pushed' back dozens of kilometers by the infernal heat.
Flames ignited everything within Budo's and Roboute's sight. The inextinguishable heavenly fire burst upward from beneath the earth, piercing the clouds—visible even from outer space.
Even as the heavenly fire nearly reached their faces, Budo remained calm.
"Her Majesty has arrived."
"Heh... selling off your father's fields doesn't hurt your heart, does it? You don't care about Mother Earth—but I do."
"Imaginary Barrier."
RUMBLE—!!!