The crimson aura enveloping Bedeze Abaddon pulsed with a violent intensity, casting a sickly red glow against the artificial moonlight of the Underworld's night sky.
High in the mountains of the Adramalech region, the sheer pressure of his demonic energy caused the surrounding trees to wither and the very earth to groan.
"He is quite strong..." Lavinia noted, her voice steady despite the overwhelming power radiating from the Devil noble.
She adjusted her grip on her wand, her eyes never leaving the Devil.
"That's probably because of the King Piece, though," Jay muttered.
His eyes were already dissecting the flow of energy within Bedeze's body. Through Avesta, he could see the unnatural surges of power provided by the piece embedded within the man's soul.
With a flick of his wrist, a jet-black sword manifested in Jay's right hand.
Ame-no-Habakiri hummed with a quiet hum, its blade absorbing the red light of the surroundings.
"So, no killing?" Lavinia asked, glancing at him for confirmation.
Jay nodded, his expression unchanged.
"I don't know what would happen to the King Piece if he died. The risk of damaging or worse, completely destroying the piece is too high. Let's not take any risks."
"Okay~" Lavinia chirped, her tone shifting into the playful yet focused demeanor.
Meanwhile, Bedeze struggled to process the destruction of his previous attack. He let out a forced, booming laugh to mask the flicker of uncertainty in his heart.
"KUHAHAHA... Interesting! I have never seen my Hole destroyed like that before. But let's see how you handle this!"
Bedeze threw his arms wide.
His crimson aura flaring more intensely.
And suddenly, the sky above the mountain peak was perforated by hundreds of obsidian holes.
Each void rippled with gravitational distortion, creating a cacophony of whistling winds as they began to manifest in every direction.
Bedeze intended to overwhelm them with sheer volume, banking on the idea that no matter how powerful Jay's black flames were, they couldn't be everywhere at once.
'Let's see if that black flame can destroy all of them!' Bedeze thought, the arrogant grin returning to his bloodied face.
"The power of the Hole lies in its ability to absorb and reflect," Lavinia analyzed calmly, her Magician's mind breaking down the threat.
"Using them like this doesn't really create a dangerous attack. It's too slow and entirely predictable."
"Then I'll destroy them, while you focus on immobilizing him," Jay muttered.
"Okay!" Lavinia smiled, her mana flaring as she raised her wand.
"TAKE THIS, YOU BASTARD!" Bedeze yelled, thrusting his hands forward. The hundreds of black holes began to rain down upon the pair like a localized meteor shower of pure vacuum.
But Jay expression remain unchanged.
He had stood his ground against Azi Dahaka, facing hundreds of literal meteors that possessed the weight to shake the very foundations of the earth.
In comparison to that primordial terror, these spatial rifts were nothing more than a bunch of black balls.
Jay moved his right hand in a fluid arc.
The glowing X of Avesta ignited and his right eye began to emanate a trailing wisp of black flame from the now turned black iris.
With his body now strengthened far beyond the limits he had possessed during the fight against the three-headed dragon, his movements were a blur of absolute precision.
As he whispered,
"Turn to dust..."
With an almost gentle, horizontal swing of Ame-no-Habakiri, the world seemed to fall into a momentary silence.
SHIIING
"World Slasher."
FWHUOM
A black slit appeared in the fabric of space, stretching wide as if the world itself were being unzipped.
A violent burst of black flames followed the trajectory of the slash, engulfing the entire swarm of black holes in a single, sweeping wave of incineration.
The Abaddon's legendary holes didn't even have the chance to absorb the flame as they were simply snuffed out, turned into drifting grey ash before Bedeze's horrified eyes.
The Devil had no time to mourn his failed technique. As a split second later, he realized that the burst of black flame was continuing its path, rushing toward him at an unnatural speed.
"Fuck!"
Bedeze cursed, flapping his ten devil wings in a desperate panic to launch himself higher into the sky.
However, Jay did not grant him the luxury of movement. Suddenly, three black slashes manifested in the air around Bedeze's flight path, appearing out of nowhere.
SHIIING SHIIING SHIIING
He stopped and dodged it.
Gritting his teeth, Bedeze attempted to envelope himself in his black hole to teleport away. But before the portal could fully manifest, another slash tore through the air.
SHIIING
The new strike vaporized the nascent portal instantly, causing a small explosion of black flames that singed Bedeze's wings.
"No way! What kind of power is that!? How can those cuts appear instantly!" Bedeze screamed in a mix of confusion and shock.
He had been confident that his Hole could absorb any attack in existence, even those from the Satans themselves.
Yet, this man's flames turned them to ash like it was nothing, and on top of that, his slashes seemed to bypass the very concept of distance.
'What kind of spatial magic is capable of this!' Bedeze yelled internally.
'And also... he is underestimating me!'
Bedeze realized with a sting of wounded pride that Jay was holding back.
If those slashes had been intended to kill, the black flames would have aimed and erupted inside his chest already.
Instead, the three previous slashes had been aimed with surgical precision at his wings and limbs. Jay was playing with him, intending to dismantle him rather than destroy him.
"How can I... be played with like this!" Bedeze roared, clenching his fists as his crimson aura flared to its limit.
But before he could counter, a sudden burst of ice erupted from the air behind him. Feeling the extreme chill of the wind, Bedeze spun his body around, raising his hand to manifest an enormous black hole to swallow the incoming frost.
"Didn't i told you that your ice magic is futile!"
But then-
SHIIING
A black slash appeared directly over his black hole, vaporizing the portal in an instant and leaving Bedeze defenseless.
A split second before the burst of Absolute Demise ice could freeze him solid, Bedeze's instincts took over. He tensed every muscle in his body and launched himself upward with a desperate burst of speed.
FWUOOH
"Argh!"
Though he successfully avoided being encased entirely, his right foot was caught by the edge of the ice burst. In an instant, his lower leg was frozen into a solid, brittle block of ice.
"Bastard!"
As he cursed, the pain hadn't even registered before he heard a silent, terrifying crackle from the darkness of the sky behind.
"Fuc-"
Before he could react, a heavy, crushing impact slammed into his torso.
A gigantic Ice Dragon manifested by Lavinia, emerged from the mist and mauled his body with its frozen jaws.
Bedeze felt his ribs shatter under the pressure as the extreme cold of the dragon's mouth caused an agonizing, burning sensation throughout his nervous system.
"ARGHHH!!"
In a gruesome display of power, the dragon dived toward the mountain floor with Bedeze clamped in its jaws.
The Devil's screams were muffled by the frost as blood began to stain the translucent blue ice of the dragon's teeth.
And then they hit the ground at an incredible speed.
BOOM
The earth exploded. A massive shockwave rippled through the forests, and a fountain of dirt and shattered stone erupted into the sky.
As the dust slowly cleared, the aftermath was revealed.
One hundred and fifty meters away from Jay and Lavinia, Bedeze's body was pinned to the scorched earth like a trapped sewer rat.
The Ice Dragon held him down, its weight crushing the life out of him. He was still alive, his fingers twitching as he tried to move his bleeding, mangled figure, but nearly every bone in his body had been reduced to splinters by the jaws and the final impact.
"A-a..."
He tried to speak, coughing up crimson blood. With a final, desperate effort, he raised a shaking hand to try and manifest a hole for teleportation.
Before the spatial balls could even form, it vanished in a small explosion, as if his magic has been failed to activate forcefully.
Bedeze's fading eyes widened in absolute despair.
As the portal he tried to create disappeared, he saw a figure walking toward him through the settling mist.
A young man in a black trenchcoat approached slowly, his steps silent. The 'X' over his left eye glowed with a faint, ominous light in the darkness of the forest as he looked down at him.
"You used it five times already," Jay muttered.
Bedeze didn't understand. His mind was too clouded by pain to grasp the meaning of Jay's words.
But Jay was referring to his Hole ability. It had taken exactly five observations using Avesta for Jay to completely deconstruct and comprehend the entire magical structure of the Abaddon's Hole.
The magic was fairly complex, but it was far inferior to the high-level formulas the Satans had used in the stadium too shield the divine lightning. Even Serafall's casual ice magic contained more intricate lines of logic than this.
The Ice Dragon slowly dissolved into a fine mist, and Lavinia floated down from the sky to stand beside Jay.
As the figure of the ice dragon vanished, it revealed the grueling condition of Bedeze's body as giant bite marks, frostbite, and shattered limbs made him a pathetic sight.
Bedeze looked up at the two of them, his breath hitching.
"W-who... who are you two..."
Jay and Lavinia remained silent, their figures silhouetted against the moonlight.
The only sound was the crackling of the frozen grass and the ragged, wet breathing of the dying Devil.
"Hahaha... I see now. So you two are the ones who attacked the stadium..."
Seeing neither a confirmation nor a denial in their cold expressions, Bedeze let out a weak, rattling laugh.
Now that he saw them up close, without the heat of battle or the darkness of the forest, he was struck by the realization that they were young.
To a long-lived being like him, they were practically children.
"So it's true... Hahaha, fucking monsters. How incredibly incompetent is Sirzechs Lucifer, that he can't even catch a half-devil kid and a human kid after they attacked him and his people in front of the whole Underworld and walked away."
He laughed again, but it turned into a fit of coughing that sprayed crimson blood onto the frost-covered dirt.
"But why... Why are you targeting m–"
Bedeze's voice cut off abruptly as Jay turned his head toward Lavinia.
She had activated some kind of magic circle, and with a simple reading through Avesta, it seemed to be a form of magic designed to erase sound.
"You surely have some weird magic, Lavi," Jay commented, watching the runes settle into the air.
"It's convenient, isn't it?" she replied with a small, satisfied smile.
"I guess...," Jay shrugged, not bothering to deny the utility of the spell.
He turned his attention back to the broken man at his feet.
"Let's just finish things here, Bedeze Abaddon."
Ame-no-Habakiri vanished from Jay's right hand, dissolving into his pocket dimension.
In its place, a dark ominous object manifested.
The Black Grail appeared as an obsidian chalice, its surface etched with black flame, that danced perpetually along its rim.
"One last question," Jay said, his voice dropping to a low, cold tone. "Do you know anything about the location of the Ars Goetia?"
Jay knew he would eventually extract the truth through the King Piece, but he wanted the perspective of a high-ranking devil noble like Bedeze, someone who had lived through the shifting tides of the Underworld's history.
Bedeze's eyebrows rose slightly, a flicker of genuine confusion crossing his battered features.
Seeing that expression, Jay didn't wait for a verbal answer.
He pushed the blazing black chalice forward. The Grail hovered in the air, vibrating with a dark resonance that began to pull at the very essence of Bedeze's being.
Suddenly, a viscous, black-and-white substance began to leak from Bedeze's chest, swirling like liquid mercury as it was sucked into the cup.
As his literal soul was drained, a brilliant crimson light began to pulse from within Bedeze's torso, cutting through the darkness of the forest.
The object they had been hunting finally revealed itself.
The crimson-painted King Piece emerged from the cavity of the man's soul, glowing with a surreal but faint crimson light that matched the beat of a dying heart.
It looked exactly like a king from a chess set, just painted and glowing red.
The piece floated in the air before Jay reached out and gripped it firmly in his hand.
"Finally..." Jay muttered.
He raised his hand toward the broken remains of the Devil noble.
And then a flicker of the black flame erupted, instantly engulfing Bedeze's body. And in seconds, the man was reduced to fine grey ashes that drifted away into the dirt, leaving no trace behind.
"So that is the King Piece?" Lavinia asked, leaning over curiously to inspect the glowing artifact in Jay's hand.
But before Jay could answer her, his posture shifted.
His muscles tensed, and his eyes narrowed as he turned his gaze toward the darker part of the forest. Within his domain, he had felt it, an unmistakable ripple from a teleportation circle just seconds earlier.
Lavinia, noticing the sudden change in Jay's expression, immediately followed his gaze.
"Show your face," Jay said.
He found himself unable to clearly identify the nature of the intruder.
He couldn't sense a magical imprint like usual, there was no trace of human, demonic or holy energy.
It was as if the person was masking their presence by perfectly synchronizing it with the surrounding nature.
If not for the teleportation magic his domain had picked up, he would have thought the forest was empty.
From behind the gnarled trunk of an ancient tree, a figure began to move. Walking slowly along a low-hanging branch, a simple black cat appeared.
It moved with slow steps, its hazel-gold eyes reflecting the faint light.
The King Piece and the Black Grail had already disappeared into Jay's pocket dimension, leaving his hands empty.
"A cat?" Lavinia tilted her head, her confusion evident as she watched the small, unassuming animal.
Jay, however just stared at the cat with cold eyes.
"I said... show your face."