Seiji Fujiwara's final words were like an invisible spear of judgment forged from the sharpest divine speech, driven viciously, precisely, and without mercy into the deepest, most untouchable wound in the King of Heroes' heart.
The creation mother goddess, Tiamat.
That name was the sword of Damocles hanging over all of Mesopotamia, destined to fall.
It was also the final doom that the wise King Gilgamesh had spent his entire life preparing for, yet stood no chance of overcoming.
The Clairvoyance he possessed as a Grand Caster had let him glimpse that hopeless future countless times. A black ocean surging in from the Persian Gulf, swallowing the land, dissolving life, all of humanity and all of civilization returning to nothingness amid the wails of the creation mother goddess.
That was the final ending, written into the very Root of the world, that he could never change no matter how he struggled.
Everything he had ever done. Guarding Uruk, distancing himself from the gods, transforming from a tyrant into a wise king. All of it was only an attempt to leave humanity a tiny ember and a shred of dignity called "human nature" before that foreordained end arrived.
This was his last pride as a king.
But now Seiji Fujiwara, this "virus" from another world, had torn that final pride to shreds before his very eyes, thrown it to the ground, and ground it under his heel twice over.
"You... how could you know... about Tiamat..."
For the first time, Gilgamesh's voice carried an unmistakable, uncontrollable tremor. Those red serpent eyes that looked down upon all living things now contracted into dangerous pinpoints from sheer shock.
This secret was the highest-level confidential knowledge belonging to him alone, the Observer! Apart from himself and the handful of old gods high in the heavens who had long since turned their hearts from humanity, no fourth being could possibly know of it!
This man... what in the world was he?!
"Why do I know?" Seiji Fujiwara laughed, the smile brimming with the absolute superiority of someone who has already beaten the game looking down at a struggling new player.
"I don't just know about Tiamat. I also know she's sealed at this very moment beneath the waters of the Persian Gulf. And I know that the one who wakes her is some fool who calls himself the King of Mages, along with his seventy-two treacherous Demon Pillars."
"I also know that your era will eventually be utterly destroyed, becoming a failed Singularity that later generations will have to come and repair."
With each sentence Seiji spoke, the color drained further from Gilgamesh's face.
By the time he finished his last sentence, the King of Heroes' face had gone pale as paper.
His unbreakable conviction and confidence as a king were shattered to pieces in that instant by Seiji's dimensional-strike spoilers from the "future"!
So... all of his efforts had been in vain.
So... everything he protected was destined to be destroyed.
So... the great feat he took such pride in, humanity rebelling against the gods, against fate, was, in the eyes of a higher-dimensional Observer, nothing more than a laughable tragedy whose defeat had been decided long ago?
"No... that's wrong... this can't be!"
Gilgamesh's body began to tremble faintly, beyond his control. He tried to refute it, to deny it, but his Clairvoyance was frantically warning him. Every single word Seiji had spoken carried the weight of pure truth, drawn from the Root of the world!
A mouthful of golden blood erupted from the King of Heroes and splashed across the cold city wall.
This was the first time since becoming a wise king that excessive mental shock had thrown his magical circulation out of control and wounded his own Saint Graph!
"My King!"
The high priestess Siduri, who had stayed hidden nearby, could no longer keep her composure. She cried out and appeared behind Gilgamesh in an instant, reaching to support him.
But he merely raised a hand and stopped her.
He slowly wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and straightened up again.
Those red eyes, which had briefly fallen into chaos and bewilderment, were now filled once more with a cold flame that seemed almost to burn.
The name of that flame was wrath.
Not the cheap anger born of trampled pride.
But the final wrath of a king, the wrath that comes when everything one guards and cherishes is denied with the air of a handout.
"...Mongrel."
He slowly raised his head, glaring at Seiji, and spoke each word with deliberate weight.
"Perhaps you're right."
"Perhaps my era is destined to perish."
"Perhaps everything I've done is nothing but futile self-satisfaction."
"But..."
Behind him, golden ripples began to surface one after another, like a sky full of stars!
From within each ripple jutted the edge of a divine weapon radiating terrifying magic, enough to make any god tremble!
"...I, the King, will never allow it!"
"I will never allow a monster like you, who sees the human heart as gears and life as data, to define the future of my humanity!"
"What I, the King, protect is precisely that useless, irrational human nature brimming with passions and desires! It's because of these that humans are not cold machines! Not the lowly bees of your hive!"
"Even if the final ending is destruction!"
"I, the King, will let humanity, in humanity's own form, proudly bloom with the most dazzling brilliance, and then... walk toward its end!"
A buzzing filled the air as hundreds, thousands of god-forged weapons containing "myth" itself emerged from the Gate of Babylon, hovering in dense ranks behind Gilgamesh, dyeing the entire night sky a brilliant gold!
Every Noble Phantasm hummed, as though sounding a final, tragic lament for their king!
"So take back that laughable theory of yours, mongrel!"
Gilgamesh thrust out his hand, pointing at Seiji, and delivered his final judgment as a king.
"Right here! I, the King, will use the full extent of my treasury, at any cost, to erase you, this foreign object, along with your twisted future, utterly from this world!"
And in the second before that world-destroying rain of Noble Phantasms behind Gilgamesh came pouring down.
The anomaly struck without the slightest warning.
A bizarre cry, as if from the depths of hell, brimming with ill omen and chaos, suddenly carried in from the distant southern horizon!
That sound was nothing any known creature could produce. It seemed to act directly on the soul, saturated with an indescribable corruption capable of driving any sentient being mad!
Merely hearing it, the mortals inside Uruk below the walls, those who had been fighting like maniacs over "divinity," froze in unison, their faces a tangle of bewilderment and terror. Some with weaker willpower clutched their heads and wept on the spot, foaming at the mouth, collapsing into utter chaos.
"What is...?!"
The arm Gilgamesh was about to swing down jerked to a halt in midair. The towering rage on his face was instantly replaced by a deeper emotion called shock.
He whipped his head around, his future-piercing Clairvoyance opening to its absolute limit, gazing toward the source of the sound. The south. The Persian Gulf!
In his vision.
That once-calm, deep blue ocean was now churning violently like boiling water!
An immense void beyond all words, formed of pure black mud and chaos, was slowly opening above the surface!
Countless winged black monsters, twisted and hideous in form, as if molded from humanity's deepest nightmares, were pouring endlessly out of that void like a plague of locusts!
They let out their bizarre cries, blotting out the sky, forming a black tide of death and chaos that came sweeping inland toward the Mesopotamian plain at an unbelievable speed!
"Lahmu...?!"
Gilgamesh's pupils contracted to the extreme.
He recognized these monsters!
These were the very "children" of the creation mother goddess Tiamat, the ones he had seen countless times in his Clairvoyance, the vanguard of that foreordained calamity of world annihilation!
But...
"How could... how could it be now...?!"
A monstrous wave surged up in his heart.
By his observation, although Tiamat's seal was weakening by the day, there should have been at least several months before it broke entirely! He had originally planned to use that time to unite all of Uruk's strength and build the Absolute Demonic Front, to win humanity one last, faint chance of survival.
But now, all of it had come early!
Without warning, without reason, in the worst possible way, it had erupted ahead of schedule!
"Why...?"
Gilgamesh's gaze turned, almost on instinct, toward the man beside him, the one who had worn the same calm expression from start to finish, as if he had foreseen all of this.
A terrible thought, one that chilled him to the bone, rose in his mind.
"It's you... you did this?!" he asked, his voice hoarse.
"Bingo. Correct."
Seiji snapped his fingers, his expression as gleeful as a child who'd pulled off a successful prank.
"You didn't actually think I went to all that trouble, holding an auction, throwing out Artificial Divinity, turning all of Uruk upside down, just to have a boring debate over ideology with you here, did you?"
"King of Heroes, you've underestimated me, this player, far too much."
He spread his hands and explained in a tone bordering on showing off:
"Everything I did was to interfere with and contaminate this world to the greatest degree in the shortest time. Whether it's a substance like God Crystal that contains the rules of another world, or a concept like Artificial Divinity that can overturn an entire belief system, their very existence is like a potent virus injected into the body of this fragile Age of Gods world."
"And when a world's rules are violently shaken, the first things affected are naturally those ancient, powerful beings most deeply bound to the laws of the world."
"Unfortunately, the sealed goddess Tiamat is one of them."
"The chaos I triggered acted like a catalyst, bringing forward and intensifying the world's collapse. Her seal, already loose, was naturally... weakened ahead of schedule."
"So congratulations, King of Heroes."
A vicious smile spread across Seiji's face.
"The Absolute Demonic Front you prophesied has, with my help, successfully... raised its curtain early."
"How about it? Are you satisfied with this grand gift?"
"You... you... bastard!!!"
At last Gilgamesh understood.
From beginning to end, he had been toyed with in this man's palm!
His opponent had never intended to play a slow game with him. From the very start, his goal had been to flip the entire board, along with every piece on it, in the crudest, most direct way possible!
Towering rage welled up in his heart once more.
But this time, his wrath was replaced by a deeper emotion called helplessness.
Because the disaster had already arrived.
Pursuing the culprit now was meaningless.
His responsibility as a king demanded that he set aside all personal grievances at once and face this final battle for the survival of humanity, arriving ahead of its time.
A shrill horn, signaling the highest level of enemy assault, rose and echoed throughout Uruk, one blast answering another.
Countless soldiers jolted awake from the chaos, rushed onto the walls, took up their weapons, and stared in terror at the apocalyptic black curtain in the south.
A brutal, utterly unprepared siege was about to begin.
Gilgamesh withdrew all of his Noble Phantasms. He looked at Seiji one last time, and in that gaze there was no longer any personal emotion, only the cold resolve of a king.
"...Once I've dealt with these things."
"I will come back and kill you with my own hands."
With that, he turned into a streak of golden light and flew toward the command tower of the palace.
He was going to carry out his final duty as a king.