As the second wave of the flood came to an end, the hand of the clock hanging deep within the dark clouds began slowly descending from "2" toward "3" under the tense gazes of everyone in the world.
"BOOM!!!"
A resounding chime echoed through the void.
The story of Noah's Ark was known throughout the world. According to the myth, the Great Flood should have taken forty days to submerge the entire world. Yet under the influence of the world's distorted laws, it had instead taken the form of a clock heralding death, announcing the arrival of the apocalypse to everyone.
"Rumble..."
Over the distant waters beyond Itogami Island, the instant the bell rang, a blood-red flood surged into the sky with the point where the Angel and Devil were locked in their struggle as its center.
Wave after wave rose higher than the last, overlapping endlessly without end.
Within the dense black clouds that enveloped the entire planet and blotted out the sky, the crimson glow of Heavenly Fire faintly appeared in the depths. Distorted vortices formed without wind across the surface of the clouds beneath every cluster of Heavenly Fire.
A grim, destructive, suffocating atmosphere settled over every living creature in the world.
The thick stench of sulfur spread across the globe on the damp sea breeze.
Cracks burst open across the earth as though they led directly into Hell. Vast quantities of sulfur poured from them as flames shot into the sky, and what little normal water remained throughout the world began to boil.
If the previous floods and Heavenly Fire had still been something the people of this world could barely withstand, then now...
Blood-red waves rose out of nowhere from the ground, already several times higher than the tallest mountain in the world and poised to turn every landmass into seabed.
The sheer volume of blood-red water that had appeared from nothing far exceeded all the water on the planet combined. As it poured into the deep ocean, the thunderous walls of blood threatened to drag the entire world beneath the Great Flood.
"Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh..."
"Thud! Thud! Thud..."
Heavenly Fire descended from above, embodying judgment and preparing to burn away every sin.
Infernal fire rose from Hell below, embodying punishment and preparing to drag everything down into Hell.
The two great fires erupted simultaneously from heaven and earth.
When the flames of heaven and the flames of earth met and merged, the judgment of the mortal world would begin. The day when all things were destroyed would truly descend upon humanity.
And that moment was... now.
The forty-day Great Flood? Seven stages? Seven plagues? Seven trumpets proclaiming the Final Judgment?
They could worry about those things if they lived long enough to see them.
The first two stages were merely warnings.
The third was where the destruction of the world truly began.
The surviving, distorted Angel and Devil would drag this world, which had strayed from its proper path, back onto the correct course. Back to that distant ancient age when they could finally become complete.
As for the people who came from other worlds?
They could stay behind and become the foundation upon which their mythology developed.
"I'm a believer! Your true believer! Lord, please protect me! Please let me live..."
"Old bastard, I've hated you for ages! Every day it's all 'stand on your own feet' and 'make yourself stronger,' but all you ever gave me was crap I couldn't even use! Just die already..."
"Damn Evil God, you ****, I..."
Some prayed and begged for salvation. Others revealed their true colors. Still others hurled curses.
The streets had already descended into complete chaos. People screamed, sobbed, and raged, exposing every side of human nature.
But their suffering could not affect the disasters about to descend from the sky, the earth, and the sea.
For a world developing toward the Old Testament, the destruction of the world itself was simply part of the natural order.
All resistance had become meaningless.
The hand in the sky was about to reach "3."
The towering Sea of Blood that would engulf the world and turn every continent into a vast Atlantis was about to crash down...
The Heavenly Fire descending from the firmament to judge this world was about to burn away every sin...
The sulfur rising from the heart of the earth, meant to drag every sinner into Hell, began to stir beneath the domain of original sin...
"Aaaah!!!"
With disaster already upon them and death staring them in the face, people began to scream in terror.
But as had been said from the beginning, none of it had any mea...
"Please, wait a moment."
An indescribable ripple accompanied the gentle, magnetic male voice and spread across the world.
Something strange happened to the entire world.
It was a change that people could not sense, observe, or see...
No.
They could see it.
A finger.
A slender, perfectly ordinary finger pressed against the hand of the enormous yet tiny clock hidden deep within the dark clouds, stopping it with only the slightest distance left before it reached "3."
Yes.
An enormous yet tiny clock.
No matter where someone stood in the world, all they had to do was look up and they could see every division on that clock clearly. It was the clock that declared their deaths.
With a finger now pressing against its hand for comparison, anyone should naturally have imagined that the finger was just as enormous as the clock itself.
Yet for some reason, when people saw the clock that embodied the forty-day Great Flood and the destruction of all things alongside that slender finger, the first thought to enter their minds was how small the clock seemed before it.
The very clock that had only moments ago brought such overwhelming catastrophe upon them now looked utterly insignificant.
Golden light appeared with the ripple and spread in every direction.
A sacred golden Magic Formula pierced beyond the black clouds surrounding the entire planet and was engraved across the firmament, its radiance impossible to conceal even within that seemingly bottomless darkness.
The terrifying Magic Formula contained power that far surpassed the Day of Destruction, weaving one unfathomable rune after another across the heavens.
No one understood what those runes meant.
Yet the instant they saw them, the name of the Magic Formula appeared in everyone's mind.
"The World!"
And with that, the world froze.
The waves about to crash down, the descending Heavenly Fire, the erupting sulfur, the clamoring crowds.
Every tangible and intangible thing in the world, without exception, stopped following the natural flow of the world.
The only exception was the consciousness of the people trapped inside their own bodies.
Their bodies could not move. Everything around them had gone completely dark. They could no longer even sense their physical forms. Only their souls remained capable of thought.
They panicked, yet they could not even express that panic.
Unfortunately, Cid needed a battlefield that was at least somewhat convenient to fight in.
There had to be airflow and light at the very least. Otherwise, even he would need several minutes to adapt.
So he had chosen this form of time freeze, which allowed him to stop time without destroying the world while still letting him adapt instantly.
After all, this was not the version of time freeze that stopped the entire universe.
"Yare yare, can someone tell me what exactly happened here? How did the world suddenly end up on the verge of destruction?"
Cid strolled leisurely through the air toward the Devil and Angel, both of whom remained frozen in the middle of their struggle, exactly as they had been before time stopped.
His relaxed steps were accompanied by a teasing tone.
Honestly, even now he still had no idea what was going on.
His friend had suddenly gone completely overboard and decided to destroy the world. Even someone as easygoing as Cid had been stunned for quite a while.
How had the world suddenly ended up about to be destroyed for no apparent reason?
He really couldn't figure it out...
Thoughts drifted through his mind as Cid casually swayed along.
In his left hand was a clock divided into forty sections. His right index finger pressed against its hand, dragging it backward from a position infinitely close to "3" until it returned to "2."
"Woo! Woo! Woo!"
Layer upon layer of trumpet-like sounds echoed through the void.
The flood, Heavenly Fire, and sulfur that had nearly completed the destruction of the world retraced their original paths and returned to the places where they had first waited for the signal.
The mud and stone blasted upward by the sulfur erupting from the earth flowed backward as though time itself had been reversed, returning to where they had originally been.
"Woo! Woo!"
The trumpets sounded again.
The moment the force restraining the Sea of Blood disappeared, the enormous volume of blood-red water, enough to wash away everything in the world in an instant and raise the planet's sea level until it became a water world, rapidly receded.
Blue and dark oceans once again appeared before the eyes of everyone in the world.
"Woo!"
The final trumpet sounded.
The dark clouds that had been brewing an endless supply of world-destroying Heavenly Fire disappeared from the sky.
The Heavenly Fire hidden deep within those clouds dissipated as well, bringing a trace of warmth back to the world they had only just plunged into cold.
"Letting the world get destroyed like this does seem kind of interesting, but forget it. If the world really got wiped out for some ridiculous reason, even I'd find that troublesome..."
Cid fiddled with the clock in his hand while complaining in a mildly bored tone.
Then, as though something had just occurred to him, he extended the hand holding the clock toward the Angel and Devil.
"Do you guys have any more of these? It's pretty useful. At the very least, I wouldn't have to worry about the world suddenly collapsing."
He spoke in a friendly tone.
But when neither the Devil nor Angel moved at all, showing no intention whatsoever of answering him, Cid slapped his forehead.
Oh, right.
Time was still stopped.
So...
"Hum..."
The Sacred Marks surrounding the planet in outer space flickered.
A vision like countless mirrors shattering appeared, and time resumed its flow throughout the world.
Most of the people who had been frozen in place, dragged into darkness, and then returned to the light almost immediately lost their balance from the sudden transition back to reality and fell to the ground.
But nobody cared about something so trivial.
They simply stared in astonishment at the Sacred Marks across the heavens and began voicing their praise.
...
"You're impatient..."
Cid remarked casually as he turned sideways, avoiding the slash of a Blazing Greatsword stretching a kilometer in length.
The scorching sword trail struck the ocean.
The immense force carried by the Blazing Greatsword instantly tore through the sea, carving an abyss ten thousand meters long and a thousand meters deep in the direction of the slash.
Tens of thousands of tons of seawater along its path were blasted high into the sky before crashing back into the ocean as an even greater mass of black water.
"I already guessed you didn't have any reason, but this only makes me even more curious. Just who could be powerful enough to forcibly drag down even non-living existences without any Wisdom...?"
Cid raised his head and lifted the black sword in his hand.
With a sideways swing, he blocked the blazing trident coming straight for him.
The trident collided with the weapon in Cid's hand.
Another overwhelming burst of force exploded outward, sending wave after wave racing from their position toward every part of the world.
They... should be able to stop those, right?
Cid watched the tsunamis spreading toward the rest of the world and briefly entertained the thought before quickly dismissing it.
After all, he had already compressed the entire Day of Destruction and taken it away.
The waves forming now were merely the result of his clash with the Angel and Devil taking place above the center of the ocean, with the shockwaves generated by their attacks slamming into the sea below.
He had already done more than enough.
If the people of this world couldn't even stop a few tsunamis like these, then the world might as well be destroyed anyway.
That was Cid's conclusion.
Seems like that's everything...
Then he felt an intangible force tugging at the hand holding the clock.
Cid instinctively glanced down.
Where the clock had been, only an incomplete, phantom-like image remained, slowly fading away as countless white particles of light scattered from it and dissolved into the world.
He tried to tighten his grip around the remaining fragment of the clock, but his fingers simply passed through the illusion-like object and closed firmly around his own palm.
Why did it suddenly disappear?
Cid stared at the place where the clock had vanished.
At the same time, he sensed the Devil and Angel attacking him simultaneously from the front and rear.
Still looking down in thought, Cid spun the black sword around his body, intending to block both attacks directly.
After all, they were nothing more than two mindless programs that knew only how to attack head-on.
No matter how powerful they were, they lacked the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Cid could fight ten beasts like these with his eyes closed.
But compared with that, he was far more concerned about his missing clock.
He still couldn't figure out where it had gone.
He had finally found that treasure lying around in some obscure corner. No matter who it was, nobody was taking his things away from him...
Wait.
He might have found it.
Cid's eyes swept across the scenery flashing rapidly past him.
He lightly tapped the tip of his foot against the air, instantly bringing his body, which had been hurtling through the sky at tremendous speed, to a halt.
Then he turned his head and looked across the vast distance separating them toward the two hideous, terrifying behemoths.
Yes.
He had just been sent flying.
The Angel and Devil, whose strength theoretically should never change no matter what happened, had suddenly increased their power and blasted him away while he was distracted by his thoughts.
So what exactly could make these machine-like Angel and Devil change?
"ROAR!!!"
Monstrous roars erupted from the location of the two colossal beings.
Shockwaves began bursting outward one after another, each stronger than the last.
The immense power inside the Angel and Devil continued to rise.
Across the sky, the ocean, and the earth, faint traces of the black clouds, blood-red water, and sulfur that had disappeared earlier began appearing once again.
The answer to Cid's earlier question was obvious.
The clock itself had been created through the fusion of the world's natural laws with the powers of the Angel and Devil.
Once its main bodies came under attack, it naturally broke apart of its own accord and automatically returned the power belonging to the Devil and Angel.
After all, once everything was over, the Angel and Devil could simply bring down the forty-day flood again.
Perhaps because the portion of the rules they used to destroy the world had now been restored, Cid could see a mass of flesh inside Itogami Island that shared a faint connection with the two colossal beings in front of him.
It was racing toward them at astonishing speed.
In the blink of an eye, it arrived between the two behemoths.
Then, under Cid's slightly startled gaze, the portions of the Angel and Devil closest to that mass of flesh began collapsing inward.
Their bodies intertwined.
Then they began to fuse.
The sight was extraordinarily bloody.
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