The Space Slash that Griffith had twisted into a Möbius strip, born from the Sword of Actuation's cut, was planted squarely inside the Emperor of Fear, Ganishka.
By the book of fated causality, this strike should have thrown open the gate between the Astral World and the mortal realm. The legendary creatures sleeping in the depths of the abyss would have poured into the world.
Unfortunately, this world had already been chosen and possessed by the Backrooms.
If nothing goes wrong… that's usually exactly when everything does!
When two forces chosen by fate collided, it was like dumping cold water into boiling oil. A violent reaction erupted almost instantly.
"AAAAH—!"
The Emperor of Fear had barely clawed back a sliver of his sanity. Now he plunged into chaos and madness again.
Lost in the fog, he devoured the colossal power on pure instinct.
His body began to collapse, reform, and swell wildly in every direction.
In just a few breaths, his entire upper body was consumed. In its place writhed a giant vortex of flesh and demonic essence. A blinding white light exploded from its center and shot through the heavens, as if it meant to pierce the sky itself.
Yet Griffith couldn't bring himself to be happy, even though this scene matched the path fate had laid out for him. It wasn't that he couldn't feel the Astral World's presence within that light…
The problem was that he could clearly sense it. The vast demonic essence of the Emperor of Fear, mutating into a World Tree, touched the Astral World—had even connected to it—and in that very instant, the link suddenly snapped!
Worse, this sudden anomaly stripped Griffith of his ability to observe the threads of fate and causality in this world.
Griffith frowned on reflex.
He was about to reach out to his true self in the Astral World and ask the other four, older God Hand members what was happening. That was when it happened.
Out of the towering light born from the Emperor's runaway demonic essence, a huge, bizarre eye veined with chaotic patterns appeared without warning.
The giant eye vanished in a heartbeat. But the Emperor's surge of demonic essence had scattered every storm cloud in the sky, and everyone's attention was dragged upward.
Naturally, most of them spotted that flash of a colossal pupil.
The light was so sacred, and it spread across the sky so fast, that it scattered brightness and a gentle breeze over the earth together. The human coalition and the soldiers of the Reborn Band of the Falcon all took it for a miracle drawn down by the "Falcon of Light." Fanatical worship spread across their faces.
"A miracle… this is a miracle brought by the Falcon of Light!"
But only Griffith, now completely severed from his true self in the Astral World, knew just how terrifying what had happened really was.
The instant the mortal realm and the Astral World began to merge…
The giant eye had found this place. Then… the boundless Astral World was destroyed in a blink!
It was as if it had been devoured down to the last crumb. Even Griffith, a member of the God Hand, could no longer reestablish contact with the "Idea of Evil."
What kind of world-shattering power was that?!
That unimaginable upheaval made Griffith's long-frozen heart shudder for the first time in ages.
"Bang! Bang!"
Suddenly, two dull gunshots rudely shattered the silence.
The shooter, naturally, was Arisu Sakayanagi!
While everyone on the battlefield stood stunned, she and her companions launched a sneak attack to finish off the equally dazed minotaur Apostle Zodd and the shadow demon Rakshas!
After all, their exam time was running short.
However earth-shaking Griffith's commotion might be, it had nothing to do with this band of passersby fighting just to survive.
The only thing they had to do now was kill Griffith and the Emperor of Fear, and meet this exam's clear condition.
Meanwhile, the Skull Knight was none other than Gaiseric, the overlord who had unified the continent a thousand years ago.
He had clung to life in the darkness in a skeleton's body. That made him, apart from the God Hand themselves, the one being in the world who best understood how the God Hand and the Apostles worked.
There was no doubt about it: Griffith was afraid right now!
And the Skull Knight truly no longer sensed that nauseating aura of the Astral World.
Whatever had happened, since his enemy had been stripped of the causal protection woven by the abyss, this was absolutely the best chance to slay a God Hand!
With that thought, the Skull Knight abandoned his plan to withdraw and bide his time.
He yanked the reins. Riding his warhorse, hooves wreathed in flame, he wheeled around and swung the Sword of Actuation down at Griffith once more!
The sharp whistle of the blade cutting air finally snapped Griffith out of his daze.
In that brief moment of thought, Griffith suddenly remembered the "Backrooms" that Chris had mentioned earlier.
He could no longer observe the world lines, so he couldn't pin down exactly what Chris and the others had revealed back then. But since things had come to this, Griffith had no choice but to accept that the Astral World had been erased.
With the Astral World gone, the Emperor of Fear, who now held a huge portion of its demonic essence inside his body, became even more indispensable to him.
And besides… the God Hand, as subordinates of the Idea of Evil, had their own fates written in stone by it. There was no chance of ever stepping off the board.
But now, the Astral World was gone.
It sounded like a bad thing, but in a way, it was the last shackle around his neck coming off. He was free!
So as the Skull Knight struck, Griffith chose not to counter. He dove straight down and leaped into the huge cavity in the Emperor's body, which was still expanding and spewing demonic essence!
In that brief exchange, Zodd and Rakshas had already been reduced to ground meat, dead for good, under the focused fire of Arisu Sakayanagi, Ryuuen, and the others.
Ryuuen turned his head and saw Griffith trying to run. He spat in annoyance:
"Tch… what the hell?!"
"Doesn't that bone rack's slash cut through space just like Chris's [Enma Blade]? Chris makes it look so easy. How do you let him get away, you tall guy on a horse?"
"Does that even make sense?"
Ryuuen cursed and grumbled. Azure flame blazed from the thrusters on his back, ready to dive down and stop Griffith himself. But the Skull Knight rode in front of him and spoke in a hoarse voice:
"The being of the Astral World is gone."
"Without the Idea of Evil's causal protection, the so-called God Hand is now nothing more than a slightly stronger Apostle. Nothing to fear."
"He's diving in now to use the Astral World's leftover demonic essence inside the Emperor. He means to recreate, or rather steal, the power of the Idea of Evil!"
"If that's true…"
Honami Ichinose hovered in midair on spread wings, frowning in confusion. "Shouldn't we be stopping him right now?"
The Skull Knight shook his head. The ghostly fire in his eye sockets flickered:
"Compared with what he was, a God Hand able to draw on the Idea of Evil's authority, even forcibly fusing with the Astral World's demonic essence inside the Emperor will only get him to the threshold of a 'false god.'"
"A hollow foundation. Nothing to fear."
The Skull Knight raised the Sword of Actuation. "But you're right. He must be finished."
"I'll cut open that thick shell of demonic essence for you, straight through to the core buried deep inside."
"The rest is up to you."
While Griffith forced his way into the cavity to wrest the vast demonic essence from the Emperor's befuddled hands, the battlefield on the ground changed too, because of the Emperor.
Even with the Astral World disconnected, the enormous demonic essence kept reshaping his body, irreversibly, toward something like a "World Tree."
His colossal feet twisted and drove into the earth, turning into thick, fleshy roots.
All the monsters around him, made from his own flesh, were supposed to be wiped out by the blinding light the moment Griffith joined the Astral World to the mortal realm. They would have become nourishment for the World Tree.
But now that Griffith had suddenly lost the support of his true self in the Astral World, the purification never finished.
The monsters that hadn't been instantly annihilated by the light benefited from the disaster instead.
They had received the Astral World's baptism of demonic essence along with the Emperor, and grown even more frenzied and powerful!
It wasn't just the monsters. The Apostles among the Reborn Band of the Falcon had visibly strengthened too.
Yet on Griffith's orders, these Apostles now had a new priority. Rather than protect the ordinary human soldiers of the Reborn Band of the Falcon behind them, they were to wipe out the otherworlders still fighting in the monster horde, like Kei Karuizawa and Hayasaka Ai!
But becoming an Apostle meant having completed a sacrifice, trading away your humanity and your dearest ones for power. How could they feel any guilt over the lives of ordinary humans?
This shift hit the Reborn Band of the Falcon's human soldiers hardest. They had still been full of hope.
They watched their strongest fighters ignore the monsters swarming in to tear their comrades apart. Instead, the Apostles turned and attacked the boys and girls fighting in the monster sea to protect those very humans.
With their defensive line collapsing, the soldiers were stunned into despair.
"Bastards… whose side are they even on?!"
"Of course. Monsters are monsters in the end… to them, human lives have always been nothing but weeds!"
No one knew who first cried that out in a breakdown.
Soon, more and more ordinary soldiers answered that rage of betrayal with fury of their own.
And naturally, this widespread wavering of morale reached the ears of Sonia, the girl Griffith had chosen.
As a natural-born medium, she could read minds with ease and even alter people's perceptions to a degree.
And in her heart, Griffith was an absolute god.
She rose from Irvine's arms and, trembling, pointed at the wavering soldiers of the Band of the Hawk. Her voice was sharp as she rebuked them:
"How foolish!"
"So what if they're human? So what if they're monsters?!"
"Who was it that protected you all the way here?"
"Do you naively think that just because they wear the same skin as you, they're your friends?!"
"You're all focusing on the wrong thing!"
"What matters now is whether you'll keep standing shoulder to shoulder with Lord Griffith!"
Her voice rang out across the chaotic battlefield, carrying a bewitching power:
"Because that is the Band of the Hawk!"
"Regardless of birth, regardless of race… it is the sacred Falcon of Light who has bound our souls together!"
"Don't be deceived by the illusions before your eyes!"
Far away, Hiyori Shiina stood in a relatively safe clearing, guarded by several Phantom Legion ninjas. She watched the whole scene.
To be honest, when she saw the human soldiers trapped on both sides, she had meant to have the shadow ninjas drag those ordinary people into the Kingdom of Shadows and away from the battlefield.
But after hearing Sonia's absurdly fanatical speech, the confusion in the Band of the Hawk soldiers' eyes really did begin to fade. They burned once more with a shaking resolve to die for Griffith…
Shiina quietly closed her mouth.
Maybe she should drop the savior complex and respect other people's fates.
Meanwhile, at the main battlefield, the Apostles grew even stronger, catalyzed by demonic essence, and the pressure on the students shot up.
Because of the Black Sphere exam's rules, the S Points they'd earned wouldn't be settled until the next exam.
So even though most of them held a decent pile of points, their actual combat power hadn't improved at all.
As their stamina drained, more and more of them fell behind.
A few of those who had barely returned to the exam through the Revival Round even lost their hard-won extra lives to Apostle ambushes, screaming, and respawned on the spot in a flash of blue light…
The defensive line was wobbling. Chris had been watching from the sidelines all this time. Now that almost everyone was down to a single life, and had fully felt the pressure of life and death, he finally decided to act.
"Shing—!"
The [Enma Blade] left its sheath.
A pale-blue flash of blade light swept out.
In an instant, Chris cleared a safe zone in the middle of the battlefield.
Then, with his super speed, he gathered every struggling student into one spot.
Among the monster horde, the Reborn Band of the Falcon Apostles, who'd lost their targets, flew into a rage.
Unable to find the students, they simply vented their fury on the frenzied monsters around them, tearing flesh from them in a frenzy!
Luckily for the students, Irvine, the Demonic Bow Hunter and a sniper Apostle, had been circling the edge of the battlefield and hadn't gone deep.
A hunter's eyes found Chris's group again quickly.
He saw the suddenly empty patch of ground. It puzzled him, but he still called out to the two Apostles with him:
"They're over there!"
As he spoke, he drew his huge bow to full draw again.
Grunbeld let out a mad laugh and stomped forward with his huge fire-dragon body. Together with the Moonlight Knight, whose lance punched straight through the sound barrier, he opened his abyssal maw and spat a flood of flame hot enough to melt steel, meaning to burn Chris's whole group to cinders!
Facing the sudden onslaught of flame and charge, Chris simply raised the [Enma Blade] and drew a light stroke in front of him.
A rift in space bloomed open like a natural chasm. It blocked every flame and impact and swallowed them into another dimension.
That done, Chris turned to the group behind him, now gasping for air.
"Can you hold on?"
"If you really can't, I can send you back inside the Mountains and Rivers Sovereignty Map for a breather…"
But before he'd even finished speaking:
"No."
Suzune Horikita planted her Black Sphere Combat Blade against the ground and slowly pushed herself upright.
Her long black hair was plastered to her cheeks with sweat, but her phoenix eyes shone with startling brightness:
"If we run this time, are we going to run next time too?"
"If we shrink back every time we hit a wall we can't climb, then when we finally meet a monster even you can't handle, with nowhere left to run… do we just stand there and wait to die?"
Not long ago, Ryūji Kanzaki had misstepped and been run through the back of the neck by the Moonlight Knight's lance. He had only just revived, and he rubbed his fully healed neck, still shaken.
He hesitated, but couldn't help speaking up to object:
"Horikita, forgive my bluntness."
"Against an enormous gap in strength, a pointless fight to the death means nothing."
"Rather than throwing our lives away and wasting the precious S Points we carry, it's safer to preserve our strength…"
"Kanzaki."
But just like with Chris, Ryūji Kanzaki was cut off before he could finish.
This time, though, it wasn't the determined girls who interrupted him. It was Katsuragi Kohei, a man known for his steadiness.
Katsuragi Kohei wiped the sweat from his bald head and said in a low voice:
"There's really nothing to argue about here."
"Let the ones who are exhausted and can't fight anymore go rest. Let those who want to train, and have the guts to face death, stay on the battlefield."
"It's a simple principle. There's no need to force your views on everyone."
Ryūji Kanzaki opened his mouth, then only gave a wry smile and said nothing more.
Beside him, Shiranami Chihiro, who'd also been through the Revival Round, silently lowered her head.
Just as the mood turned a little stiff, Yotsuya Miko, who'd been shrinking at the very back of the group with almost no presence, timidly raised her hand.
"Um…"
Yotsuya Miko swallowed and offered in a small voice:
"If we can find a way to gather those three Apostles together… maybe we can use the [Momonga Orb] to solve everything at once!"
At that, everyone turned to look at her.
Yotsuya Miko hurried to explain:
"If I remember right, the [Momonga Orb] is a world-class item."
"By sacrificing one of the user's lives, it triggers an instant-death area skill with no wind-up that ignores defense!"
Amasawa Ichika stroked her chin. The Parasyte on her left arm rolled its eyeball along with her.
She looked at Yotsuya Miko with a half-smile:
"Oh? Miss Yotsuya, are you planning to be the bait?"
Yotsuya Miko bit her lip and nodded hard:
"My technique reduces my own presence. On a chaotic battlefield, they won't notice me right away."
"And thanks to the Revival Round reward, I happen to have an extra life right now."
The girl took a deep breath, her eyes more resolute than ever:
"I think trading one life for that huge pile of S Points… that's definitely not a bad deal."
"As for how to get them together…"
Before Yotsuya Miko could finish, Suzune Horikita picked it up:
"Use the Phantom Legion's soldiers as fodder! Drown their vision in countless expendables!"
"And Shiina can use a Contract Advent to force open a path right in front of Miko!"
Kushida Kikyo, standing nearby, saw everyone getting a job. She hurried to raise her hand and grab a bit of the spotlight:
"Um! I have the archer Apostle's hair!"
"I secretly collected it when he shot his arrows and missed. I can use the [Straw Doll Technique] to pin him down so he can't move!"
Kouenji Rokusuke elegantly flipped his blond hair and rounded out the plan:
"In that case, it's happily settled."
"The rest of you with fighting strength, go lure away the extra monsters so they don't get in the way."
"As for those Band of the Hawk people…" Kouenji chuckled. "let's respect their own choices and fates."
Amikura Mako and Nanase Tsubasa pressed their lips together.
Watching those bewitched people march to their deaths left them uneasy.
But they knew this was no time to play the saint.
In the end, the two agreed to the tactic.
Chris stood to the side and nodded, satisfied.
"Then let's go." With a casual wave, he withdrew the rift in space that had shielded them.
Outside, the Moonlight Knight and the fire-dragon Apostle were actually hesitating. Chris's strange ability had them wary. Being able to draw a rift that devoured every attack, on a whim, was simply too bizarre to ignore.
But just as they wavered over whether to press the attack,
the rift vanished, and the students launched a counterattack of their own!
Their execution was nearly flawless, without a second wasted.
"Final Vent!"
Hiyori Shiina stood at the very front and decisively slotted the matching Advent Card into her Magnuvisor.
"Rumble rumble!"
With the heavy grinding of machinery, her fortress-sized Contract Monster, [Magnugiga], teleported to her side.
Shiina pressed the muzzle of her Magnuvisor right against the connector on the giant bull's back.
Then, all at once, every heavy weapon hatch on the giant bull's body swung open!
Countless machine-gun rounds, heavy rockets, high-energy lasers… like a world-ending metal storm, they poured wildly toward the Apostles' zone ahead!
"BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!"
The violent explosions rang across the battlefield.
Under such dense saturation fire, the weaker monsters in front were blasted into puddles of meat. The slightly stronger ones lost limbs and took heavy damage.
The two strongest Apostles endured it with their inhuman bodies and took no fatal wounds.
But being blasted by that savage firepower, covered in soot and forced back step after step, was still no fun at all.
At the very least, they'd been pinned in place!
Far behind the line, Irvine, the Demonic Bow Hunter, was hunting for a sniping chance. He saw what was happening, drew his bow again, and prepared to shoot the girl who'd summoned the giant bull.
But just as he was about to release the string,
Kushida Kikyo, at the rear, pulled a straw doll bristling with red thread from who-knows-where.
She quickly wound Irvine's hair around the doll, raised the hammer in her hand, and drove a nail hard into the doll's heart!
"Straw Doll Technique: Resonance!"
"Gaaah!!!"
The technique ignored physical defense and struck straight at his soul. Irvine shuddered like he'd been electrocuted and let out a scream.
In the agony,
the giant arrow that had been aimed at Hiyori Shiina slipped from his grip and veered off. It struck, dead center, the back of the fire-dragon Apostle Grunbeld, who was busy tanking the barrage!
"You bastard! Irvine! What the hell are you doing?!"
The fire-dragon giant, stabbed in the back by his own teammate, roared in pain and whirled around. "You blind idiot! Watch where you aim, damn it! I don't want to end up fighting my own side before I've even finished off those bugs over there!"
Before he'd finished, the fire-dragon Apostle sharply noticed that something was off about the Demonic Bow Hunter.
He frowned slightly and became certain in an instant that those otherworlders were behind it.
But as a battle-hardened veteran mercenary, the fire-dragon Apostle was no hothead who'd throw his life away for some notion of honor.
Charging in against a bizarre ability was the kind of dangerous dirty work only a dull-witted knight like the Moonlight Knight Locus would take on.
So Grunbeld smoothly stepped back and retreated to Irvine's side.
He called it noble: "I'm here to protect you, so you don't get ambushed again!"
That left only the Moonlight Knight Locus on the front line, charging through the fire alone.
And that played right into Kei Karuizawa's hands!
Before the smoke from Shiina's [Final Vent] had even cleared, everyone was already moving as planned.
Kamuro Masumi, Katsuragi Kohei, Shiraishi Asuka, Yagami Takuya, and Amasawa Ichika fanned out at once.
They led the endless stream of summoned Phantom Legion soldiers like a great black net and forced back the stray monsters trying to get close.
Hayasaka Ai, Suzune Horikita, Nanase Tsubasa, and Hiyori Shiina stayed on the main front.
They met the Moonlight Knight, the only one who'd broken through the fire net and was lunging at them.
Meanwhile, Kouenji Rokusuke, Amikura Mako, and Kei Karuizawa slipped in quietly from the flank as the vanguard shielding Yotsuya Miko.
Everyone worked together seamlessly.
In front, Kei Karuizawa activated the invisibility of her [Kamen Rider Emerald] as a smoke screen. It fooled the Apostles' eyes and let Yotsuya Miko creep up on her target, her presence already dimmed.
Behind, Suzune Horikita faced the Moonlight Knight's deadly thrust, which could punch through a city wall, and calmly dodged with a Substitution Jutsu.
At the same time, Nanase Tsubasa pinned the knight in place.
Finally, Hayasaka Ai seized the fleeting opening. Together with Hiyori Shiina's [Final Vent], cooled down and ready again, she poured all the firepower onto the Moonlight Knight at once!
Once Chris confirmed that they no longer needed him here, he dropped straight into the safe zone behind Hiyori Shiina.
He stopped in front of Shiranami Chihiro and Ryūji Kanzaki, who were still catching their breath.
Seeing the shame and frustration on both their faces, Chris comforted them:
"You two are revived players who haven't fought head-on many times."
"There's no need to feel too bad about losing your lives to inexperience just now… Take what you learned and do better next time."
Ryūji Kanzaki and Shiranami Chihiro exchanged a glance. Neither knew what to say.
To be fair, when they had watched as ghosts, the snarling monsters had still scared them badly.
But they knew the monsters couldn't really hurt them in ghost form, so in truth they'd always had a safety net in the back of their minds.
Even before coming here, while hunting inside the [Mountains and Rivers Sovereignty Map], the Gravity Gun had fed them monsters in an orderly way as point fodder. They had never felt real danger.
But now they were standing on a killing field where one wrong step meant death…
That rush of blood and despair finally showed them what it meant to have their scalps prickle with dread.
"Chris… thank you."
Shiranami Chihiro kept her head down. Her voice trembled slightly.
Chris looked at them and didn't waste more breath trying to console them.
Some things you only grow from by going through them and overcoming them yourself.
He raised his head, his gaze sweeping past the raging battle to the golden World Tree, which now blotted out the sky and blazed with dazzling light.
"Kanzaki."
Chris gave the order: "Take out your Controller and check."
"I'm curious what changed in that monster called the Emperor of Fear after a mutation like that."
"And whether I need to go over there and lend a hand right now."
At that, Ryūji Kanzaki snapped out of it like he'd been shaken awake and fumbled at his body in a panic.
He didn't even notice that the Controller Chris used to wear on his wrist had vanished at some point.
His hand was still trembling a little, but Ryūji Kanzaki forced himself to stay calm.
He raised his hand, opened the Black Sphere Watch's detection interface, aimed at the biggest red dot left on the map, and tapped for details.
[Target: False God Griffith]
[Value: 210 points]
[Traits: Femto, the original God Hand. After confirming that the Astral World and the Idea of Evil behind it had vanished, Griffith, determined to fulfill his dream, resolutely chose to absorb the vast Astral World demonic essence stored in the Emperor of Fear, in an attempt to recreate part of the Idea of Evil's authority.]
[He has now fused with the Emperor, who has become a golden tree, and commands the Emperor's calamity power over thunderclouds. Backed by his own foundation as a high-grade vessel of abyssal power… he has indeed forced a measure of divine authority into being, enough to earn the title of 'false god of the mortal world.']
[Fatal point: Without the protection of the Astral World and the Idea of Evil, he can no longer interfere with or view others' threads of causality. In exchange, he is no longer bound by the fate the abyss wove. He can now unleash all of his abilities without restraint, including but not limited to: lightning control, space distortion, and tearing open dimensional rifts.]
"Uh…"
After reading it, Chris murmured under his breath:
"A 180-point God Hand, plus a 150-point Emperor of Fear."
"Two high-value bosses fuse together, and the total is only 210 points?"
"Feels like we're getting shortchanged."
Chris grumbled offhandedly, ignoring Ryūji Kanzaki's increasingly strange expression beside him.
He patted Kanzaki's shoulder and gave another order:
"Zoom the map out."
"Let's see if anything else changed in this world just now."
Ryūji Kanzaki swallowed his urge to complain and nodded, doing as told.
His fingers slid across the screen, shrinking the scale again and again.
But as the map kept zooming out, the image on the Black Sphere Controller no longer showed the hemispherical curve a planet should have.
Instead, it showed a single flat plane!
No matter how Kanzaki zoomed, the radar displayed this land as a perfectly level geometric slab!
"What… what is going on?" Ryūji Kanzaki's eyes went wide.
Chris took a deep breath. His expression turned more serious than ever.
"Maybe Sakayanagi's first guess was right all along. The Backrooms… really is alive!"
"It's feeding on this land, assimilating and devouring this world's fundamental laws."
With that, Chris gave the two no chance to ask questions.
He raised his hand and drew the [Enma Blade].
A pale-blue flash of blade light carved a twisting rift in space through the air.
Chris turned and quickly briefed the two behind him, both slack-jawed:
"I'm taking Horikita up there to check things out."
"If you two feel unsafe here, go find Shiina and have her open the Mirror World. Hide inside for a while."
Meanwhile, at the core where Ryuuen's group stood, no one had a Controller to check the monsters' points and information in real time.
But they had watched the Emperor of Fear's mountainous body rapidly twist and harden after Griffith leaped in, finally becoming a towering, skyscraping giant fleshy tree that shimmered with eerie golden light.
Even without going down to borrow a Controller, everyone present knew it.
Some kind of fusion had definitely been completed, either a Synchro Summon or an Xyz Summon!
Honestly,
facing an enemy clearly harder to deal with than before,
the group felt a little uncertain about the Skull Knight, who'd been so confident a moment ago.
But thinking of Chris waiting down below, ready to come up and back them up at any time, eased the lump in their throats a bit.
Ryuuen gritted his teeth and, bracing himself, crushed the Hoi-Poi Capsule holding his [Piloted Robot] in his hand.
With a blinding flash of white light, countless mechanical parts, as if drawn by an invisible magnetic force, appeared around him and assembled in seconds.
In the blink of an eye, a heavy mech over ten meters tall encased him.
Just as Ryuuen finished arming up,
"Watch out! He's coming!"
The Skull Knight, who'd been standing quietly in front, suddenly raised the Sword of Actuation. The ghostly fire in his eyes jumped.
Everyone looked up at the sound.
Above the golden tree's dense branches, which had once stretched into the sky, a churning mass of black thunderclouds had somehow formed.
The thunderclouds gathered and rolled, and slowly took the shape of Griffith's giant face.
"A band of mad gamblers who staked everything, hoping to take my life with an ant's body."
The lips of that huge face made of lightning parted slightly. His voice rumbled like thunder and boomed in every soul:
"Your courage truly deserves praise. But sadly, you chose the wrong opponent. Before this absolute gulf, all your hot blood will only turn to dust on this land."
"In this new world, completely reshuffled, no one and no law can harm me in the slightest."
"Here, I shall build my own eternal kingdom of the gods!"
"Blah blah blah. Who do you think you're fooling, acting all high and mighty!"
Inside the mech, Ryuuen hated posers like this more than anything.
If he's so awesome, why doesn't he knock that eye that just showed up out of the sky?!
He fired back without mercy, slammed the control stick forward, and the plasma tachi on the mech's right arm shot out, shimmering with hot particles.
"Get down here, you bastard!"
Ryuuen roared and swung the mech, unleashing a crescent-shaped plasma slash dozens of meters long, straight at the face of thunderclouds in the sky!
A look of mockery crossed Griffith's lightning face.
He let the plasma slash, which could split a mountain, sink into the clouds.
It vanished like a clay ox into the sea, without raising a single ripple.
Then,
his eyes hardened, and he answered with the thunder of a god.
"BOOOOM—!!!"
The heavens shattered.
Several dark-purple bolts as thick as water buckets, carrying the violent energy of twisted space, struck like divine punishment straight down at Ryuuen's mech below!
Seeing the strike,
the Skull Knight, Arisu Sakayanagi, Ayanokōji, and the others nearby all threw themselves aside with everything they had.
Ryuuen, however,
was inside a bulky piloted mech and had no time for any effective evasion. He could only watch the lightning fall and grit his teeth to tank it.
Under the killing intent of a 210-point monster's blow,
"BANG!!!"
In just an instant,
the 100-S-Point Black Sphere mech was blown to scrap in the blinding flash of lightning!
____
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