Silas should have known better. The True Creator wasn't about to let him off so easily.
He'd killed this evil god's offspring, wiped out His believers, and even rejected His grace, turning instead to pray to His mortal enemy, the Fool.
And yet, through this whole string of blasphemies, the other side had shown no sign of retaliation, to the point where Silas had started to wonder if this god had simply gone completely mad, beyond all reason.
But in truth, He had already been quietly preparing all along, and when He finally struck, it was with a terrifying killing move.
Ouroboros.
The Sequence 1 Angel King.
A mighty favored servant of the True Creator.
Though Suah was likewise Sequence 1, the gap between the two of them was immense. One had been born only a few centuries ago, while the other had lived through multiple epochs.
One was mad and chaotic, utterly unable to restrain its own malice, capable of fighting only on instinct, while the other was cold and composed, as unpredictable as fate itself.
One had been born of an evil god, its spirit unstable, while the other had mastered its pathway completely, rising all the way to Angel King.
The reason Silas had managed to gravely wound Suah was partly thanks to the fierce pinning effect provided by Bernadette and the others, and partly thanks to Medici and the others, who'd drawn on the strength of their past selves.
Now, none of the other kings of the seas were present, and that item capable of borrowing past strength had already been used up. What he faced now was Ouroboros, whose strength far surpassed Suah's. His odds of winning were vanishingly slim.
But even so, he had to resist!
A series of unbroken rings surfaced before Silas's eyes, rings covered in silver white scales, like living serpents, joined seamlessly from head to tail, transcendent and mysterious.
Within these rings, the very orbits along which all things moved were forcibly stitched together. The end connected to the beginning, cycling endlessly.
The crimson sea of blood had only just begun to seep from his body when it surged right back in. It couldn't unfurl at all, let alone be released outward upon the lambs.
Atop the peak on Banshee Island, time itself seemed to fall into some bizarre loop.
No, this won't do... I have to break it!
Silas thought to himself desperately, driving the illusory tide within his body with everything he had.
Whoosh.
The sound of the tide grew from faint to thunderous, passing through his body and acting upon the space around him.
His effort seemed to be working: unseen, the reversed flow of time around him began to slow, giving him more room to take other action.
The tide within him was, after all, capable of resisting a true god, and his opponent was only of the rank of an Angel King. He still had a chance. Ouroboros gazed at him, expression indifferent.
He stood barefoot, as though standing within the very river of fate.
Boom!
Silas's body suddenly lurched, the altar beneath his feet cracking open all at once, nearly sending him tumbling down.
Not only that, but from within the altar came a wave of air laden with the meaning of ruin and calamity, striking at his consciousness.
Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't have affected him in the slightest.
But right now, with his full concentration bent on summoning the tide to resist, this wave of air succeeded in scattering his mind for a single instant.
And in that brief instant, the situation reversed itself once more. As though he'd just woken from a dream, Silas opened his eyes to find himself standing before Ouroboros once again, the sea of blood still unable to break free.
Ouroboros truly couldn't affect the tide directly, so instead He turned His attention to Silas himself, the one summoning it!
All of Silas's resistance seemed so utterly feeble before Him!
Shh!
Just then, the space before Silas warped. Antia, the ship spirit with her delicate features and asymmetrical black dress, appeared.
Though the surrounding atmosphere seemed nearly frozen solid, her black hair and the hem of her dress whipped straight back, as if buffeted by a violent current of air, or as though this region itself were fiercely rejecting her.
Antia's lovely face was twisted somewhat from the strain, her movements as slow as if she were submerged in some thick, viscous glue. She looked at Silas with anxious eyes, reaching one hand toward him, slow and labored.
Time's flow had become abnormally sluggish; Silas could see Antia's mouth opening and closing slowly, but he couldn't hear a single sound.
Still, he could roughly guess what she meant, and he strained to reach his own arm out toward her.
Antia's true body was a ghost ship. If he could just grasp that hand, she could carry him into the spirit realm, and he could escape.
Tap.
Ouroboros took a step forward.
His bare foot came down on the coarse, gravelly ground, and that soft sound crashed heavily against both their eardrums.
Boom!
Silas watched, helpless, as Antia's body was swept away, like a leaf scattered by a violent gust. Before his eyes, the beautiful woman in the black dress vanished in an instant, leaving only the silver haired angel across from him.
Ouroboros advanced, step by step.
With every step closer He took, Silas's control over his own body dropped by another degree. The air around him felt like it had solidified into hard iron, refusing to permit his limbs the slightest movement.
Medici!
He roared inwardly, calling out to the red angel within him.
"Stop shouting. Give it up." Medici's voice was languid. "I know full well what this fellow's capable of. As you are now, you can't even manage to run from Him, let alone resist."
"So what you're saying is, I should just sit here and wait to die?"
"The good news is, He probably won't kill you outright," Medici went on, as though shifting into a more comfortable lounging position, "the bad news is, He'll most likely drag you over there... to go see..."
"You useless piece of trash, Medici, this is all your fault!"
"Shut up already, I don't want to hear a single word out of you!"
Two other voices rang out, breaking into an argument with Medici inside his head. At this critical moment, the vengeful spirits of the three conquerors had actually descended into infighting among themselves!
Go see whom?
The True Creator?
That enemy I despise so much?!
An indescribable fury welled up in Silas's heart, a cacophony of arguing voices ringing through his mind, throbbing at his temples. Could it really be, just as Medici had said, that he had no means left at all?
To hell with it!
He forced the words out through gritted teeth, in the Hermes language: "One who does not belong... to this era, the Fool..."
Things had come to this. He would summon the Fool, and let the tide and the grey fog collide head on!
Ouroboros had already come to stand before Silas, meeting his gaze with perfect calm. And with that, Silas's thoughts grew even more sluggish, as though a single sentence would take ten thousand years to finish speaking.
"...Mysterious sovereign... above... the grey fog..."
Ouroboros spread His wings, nearly two meters long, fully open, then folded them closed, wrapping them around Silas's body.
Holy, illusory feathers filled his vision, and that Angel of Fate looked down upon his struggling with an utterly expressionless face.
"...who presides... over... good fortune..."
The wings had already blotted out his sight completely; before Silas could finish his prayer, they would swallow him whole.
A surge of extreme fury and unwillingness to accept defeat rose within his heart, and he fought with everything he had to force out the final line of the incantation.
Just then, he suddenly saw a portion of Ouroboros's wings vanish all at once, as though some unseen eraser had wiped that patch of feathers clean out of reality.
Through that gap in the feathers, Silas saw that behind Ouroboros, an intruder had appeared, at some point he couldn't say.
That intruder stood there quietly, cloaked in black.