Raging lightning hacked down, lighting up the World Tree as bright as day and instantly blowing apart the piloted mecha that had taken the blow head-on.
Fortunately, a piloted mecha was a top-tier piece of gear in the Black Sphere Space, with a price tag of a hundred points.
It couldn't withstand the damage, but it had at least done its job as a buffer.
Besides, the Ryuuen sitting in that cockpit was himself a Lion God Template, remade by alien technology into a purely mechanical lifeform.
Flesh is weak. Machinery ascends.
The instant the lightning pierced the mecha and poured into his body, Ryuuen made a insane decision.
Using the energy-conversion module in his cybernetic prosthetics, he channeled the high-voltage current straight into his core converter and forcibly turned it into his own output power!
A second later, he raised both arms and unleashed his palm cannons at full overload!
"Boom!" With a thunderous blast, a dazzling beam of mingled red and blue light tore the wrecked mecha apart from the inside out and shot straight toward the sky!
Meanwhile, on the other side of the World Tree.
Skull Knight and Ayanokoji Kiyotaka hadn't been idle either.
Guided by Skull Knight, the group wove through massive limbs of living flesh and soon closed in on the core, where the demonic essence transformed by the Golden Tree was gathering.
"This is the place."
Skull Knight reined in his Astral steed. His hollow eye sockets stared into the shadows ahead as he explained:
"The Emperor of Fear has already fused with the fifth God Hand. Griffith used that to reproduce part of the Idea of Evil's divine might, but that vast demonic essence has also become a shackle he can never fully shed."
"In other words, the two of them now live and die together."
"If the Emperor of Fear's soul core collapses, Griffith won't come out of it well either."
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka held the Gravity Gun and asked flatly:
"So all we need to do is find a way to deal with the Emperor of Fear."
"If we smash the soul core hidden in the Emperor's demonic essence, we win. Is that right?"
Skull Knight nodded. "Correct."
"My Sword of Actuation can cleave through the barriers of dimension and causality."
"Create an opening for my slash. Once it hits the core, the Emperor of Fear will perish together with the God Hand."
It was an obvious, fatal weakness. And without the endless demonic essence of the Astral World to replenish them, Griffith and the Emperor of Fear couldn't keep up an endless, unstoppable recovery like some perpetual motion machine.
But Griffith was far too shrewd for that. He had seen this flaw from the moment he began merging with the Emperor.
That was exactly why he had deliberately refrained from fully devouring and erasing the Emperor's consciousness. He kept it as an insurance policy. If something irreversible happened, Griffith could abandon this vessel at any moment, leave the Emperor behind as a sacrificial pawn to buy time, and slip away.
In Griffith's eyes, Skull Knight was nothing more than an old relic who had clung to life in the cracks of causality and simply lived a bit longer. He had no idea what the God Hand was truly capable of.
Of course, he didn't mind letting these foolish mortals go on believing so for now.
His plan was to wipe out these otherworldly visitors and the rats alongside them with everything he had. Then, once he had established the absolute divine kingdom of Falconia he longed for in reality, he would take his time exploring this "Backrooms" they kept talking about.
To that end, Griffith immediately unleashed the ability he had grown most adept at since becoming a God Hand.
The authority to pluck at human hearts.
It dragged everyone into a false dream called "perfection."
Since the two sides were in open combat, this mental lure couldn't easily break battle-hardened examinees or brainwash them into servants. But it didn't need to.
All it needed was for them to lose focus for a moment. The dark thunderclouds condensing overhead and the thick tentacles of flesh erupting around the World Tree would be enough to pound these madmen into paste!
"It's over."
Griffith lowered his eyes, indifferent.
Too bad. Without the full authority of the God Hand from the Astral World itself, he couldn't manage a false omniscience, and in the end he had miscalculated by one move.
After hurling that wrathful bolt of lightning at Ryuuen's mecha, he had judged the man "dead" and looked away.
He had no idea that Ryuuen was less a human being than a weapon of war with a human mind!
With no human soul fluctuation, he was naturally immune to the mental illusion!
After converting the lightning into output power and reflecting it back, Ryuuen saw that Griffith had simply ignored him. He cracked his neck and blinked straight in front of the thunderclouds still gathering.
"Don't look down on people so much, pretty boy!"
He didn't care what would happen now that he had no piloted mecha to protect him. He only knew one very simple principle:
Since he'd just taken Griffith's attack and converted it, taking a second hit would be a piece of cake!
He even planned to use the thunderclouds Griffith himself had summoned as a charging station, and turn them around into a destructive strike on the Golden Tree!
Seeing Ryuuen, a man he had thought dead, suddenly charge at him, Griffith was surprised.
But it didn't change his plan.
The demonic essence the Emperor of Fear had seized from the Astral World was vast as an ocean, and as a God Hand, Griffith could draw on several times more power than the Emperor himself.
"Fool."
Griffith's will stirred.
In an instant, the clouds churned.
Several bolts of heavenly lightning crashed straight into Ryuuen's metal body!
"Crack!"
Before absolute divine might, even a body forged by alien technology finally hit its limit.
His outer armor cracked open, looking ready to fall to pieces at any moment.
But amid the blinding lightning, Ryuuen roared, reached back and pulled out a purple crystal glimmering with a dim glow, and rammed it straight into his own chassis!
"Energy Amethyst... Let me see where your limit is, you bastard!!"
In an instant, a purple light even more dazzling than the lightning filling the sky erupted from Ryuuen's body!
At the same time, the cracks in his damaged armor began mending at a speed visible to the naked eye, flooded by the amethyst's enormous energy.
And Ryuuen himself, charged by that surge, threw both arms up and let loose the energy that had filled him to the point of bursting!
"Zap! Zap!"
Two beams of red high-energy laser burst from his palms.
They sliced like a hot knife through butter, cutting down first the giant fleshy tentacles that were about to slam into Arisu Sakayanagi, Ayanokoji Kiyotaka and the others, who were caught in a brief daze below!
Foul-smelling fluid rained down, and every drop that hit the ground turned into a monster.
Then Ryuuen forcibly twisted his body in midair and aimed his cannons at the spot in front of Skull Knight where the Emperor's core was gathering demonic essence, putting out everything he had!
"Shatter, damn it!!!"
Amid the violent commotion, Ayanokoji Kiyotaka and the others finally snapped awake and broke free of the perfect illusion Griffith had woven.
There wasn't a moment of hesitation, or even a word exchanged.
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka raised the Gravity Gun, aimed at the point where Ryuuen's attack would land, and pulled the trigger without hesitation.
At the same moment, Arisu Sakayanagi, her head clear again, narrowed her eyes, steadied herself and set up the Romantic Cannon in perfect sync.
After the Gravity Gun's brief countdown delay...
"Boom!"
An invisible, terrifying gravity wave crashed down from the sky!
Combined with Ryuuen's crimson laser and the beam of Sakayanagi's Romantic Cannon, three destructive forces converged on a single point and drilled straight down!
It was about to smash through the shell of demonic essence and reach the Emperor of Fear's soul core, hidden in the deepest part!
At this moment, even Griffith, who had always looked down on everyone from above, could no longer afford to be dismissive.
It wasn't only because Ryuuen had been able to take his full-power lightning head-on.
It was because these seemingly weak humans, working together, had really torn through his defenses and reached the Emperor's core. He found it unbelievable.
Seeing Skull Knight nearby already raising the Sword of Actuation, ready to land a slash that would sever causality, Griffith had no choice.
He forced a deeper fusion with the Emperor of Fear and pulled the Emperor's core into his own, sturdier body.
Instantly, everyone still standing on the Golden Tree felt a violent twisting beneath their feet.
Ayanokōji and Sakayanagi kept up suppressing fire thanks to their ability to hover in the air.
Off to the side, Honami Ichinose, who was handling support and cover, watched the Golden Tree's branches, which had blotted out the sky just moments ago, wither and rush inward to fill in around the white figure at the center.
Her brows knitted. "He's gathering his power...?"
Skull Knight, astride his Astral steed, fell silent for a moment before sighing:
"I misjudged. He hadn't fully merged with the Emperor of Fear before."
"I suppose he planned that if anything went wrong, he'd use the God Hand's absolute dominance over Apostles to slip away easily, leaving the Emperor as a sacrificial pawn to stall us."
"So are Griffith and the Emperor completely fused now?" Honami Ichinose pressed anxiously.
Skull Knight shook his head.
"I don't think so. This hasty union is still a deformed state of 'two hearts, one body'..."
Honami Ichinose nodded in understanding.
Drawing a deep breath and raising her guard to the maximum, the girl lifted the Ruby Staff high, ready to meet the counterattack should Griffith go berserk in a second phase.
As for Griffith himself.
Keeping up a God Hand's arrogance mattered, but keeping the Emperor's soul core intact was the foundation that let him keep going.
So when the enormous Golden Tree had finished contracting around the Emperor's soul core,
Griffith's figure naturally ended up directly in front of everyone's attacks.
Even so, he didn't dare take a full volley of that firepower with his bare body.
Using the authority of spatial distortion, he deflected and displaced the incoming beams and gravity waves for a moment.
Then, with his fusion greatly deepened, he activated a kind of "elementalization."
It wasn't a simple transformation into a natural phenomenon like thunderclouds or storms, as the Emperor had done.
Instead, he wrapped all the highly compressed demonic essence of the Astral World around his body like a solidified nebula.
In exchange, he gained absolute strength and speed that defied the laws of physics!
Barely a second later,
space warped, and Griffith was already in front of Ayanokoji Kiyotaka!
A fist wreathed in destructive lightning slammed into Ayanokōji's abdomen without a shred of mercy!
"Squelch!"
The dull sound of flesh being pierced rang out.
A charred, bloody hole had been punched through Ayanokōji's stomach.
Yet in the face of a wound that would have killed an ordinary person on the spot, there wasn't a flicker of despair or agony on Ayanokōji's face.
On the contrary, in that instant between life and death, his instincts as the White House's greatest masterpiece were fully awakened.
Enduring the agony of his organs burning away, he didn't retreat. He surged forward!
At the same moment, the Parasyte "Zero" living in his right hand understood at once, turned into several tough tentacles and wrapped tightly around half of Griffith's body!
"Ryuuen! Sakayanagi!"
With Ayanokōji's low shout,
Arisu Sakayanagi reacted instantly, her eyes hardening.
Countless golden ribbons of magic shot out and, together with the Parasyte's tentacles, pinned Griffith down for the moment.
Then she and Ryuuen, diving from midair, coordinated perfectly. Cannon and gun barrels aimed at Griffith together!
And Skull Knight had finally gotten the opening he'd waited so long for!
"Die, White Hawk!"
He swung the Sword of Actuation, carving several pitch-black rifts through the air, swiftly severing every spatial node around Griffith that he might use to escape.
Then, riding his Astral steed, hooves trampling the void, he charged at Griffith in a death-or-glory attack—
At the edge of the battlefield,
Honami Ichinose closed her eyes. The Ruby Staff vanished and in its place appeared a magnificent sugarcane longbow. As the strongest crowd-control piece on the team,
she parted her lips and chanted the release verse of the Noble Phantasm of the god of love:
"Sugarcane bow, arrows sharp as blossoms..."
"Behold the arrow of love that stirs ten thousand desires!"
"—Bearing love yet withered, no romance remains! (Kama Sammohana)!!!"
A huge heart-shaped magic circle bloomed behind her and locked onto Griffith from across the distance!
Faced with this flawless counterattack, made in an instant,
Griffith, trapped at the center, remained neither sorrowful nor glad.
"Everyone rushing me at once... so what?"
"All your burning rage is the futile struggle of those who defy fate."
"Before absolute causality, your efforts will only become the withered bones that pave my road to the throne."
With that, the demonic essence around Griffith suddenly contracted, triggering a small energy collapse.
"Boom!"
He simply burst out with pure magical force and snapped the Parasyte's tentacles and Arisu Sakayanagi's ribbon magic!
Raising his right leg, he delivered a whip kick faster than sound. He booted Ayanokoji Kiyotaka, who was stuck on his arm, along with Skull Knight, who was trying to close in, and sent them flying!
Then he casually pointed a finger.
A black bolt of lightning, denser than before, tore through space and instantly pierced most of Arisu Sakayanagi's body as she cast from the rear!
Blood splashed across the sky.
Before anyone could recover from this breathless reversal,
Griffith's figure blurred again.
He appeared at Ryuuen's side like a ghost and clamped one hand around his neck.
"A boring toy."
Griffith hoisted him high and held him out in front of himself.
Then, in a move like the cruelest, most humiliating hold in classical wrestling, the "waist breaker," he exerted force with both arms in a sudden wrench—
"Crack!!!"
A sharp sound of snapping metal rang out.
Ryuuen had been folded in half by Griffith's bare hands!
Sparks and machine oil sprayed everywhere.
Just as Griffith, with thunderous speed, had seriously wounded three people in an instant,
the pink arrow of light fired by Honami Ichinose finally broke through the void and appeared right in front of him.
Under normal circumstances,
given the state of invincibility Griffith's demonic essence currently gave him, unless the Idea of Evil itself were resurrected, or the owner of that eye from earlier arrived in person,
any physical attack would simply pass through his illusory divine body and do nothing.
Griffith didn't even look at the arrow. He simply brushed it aside, meaning to annihilate it.
But this time, Griffith had clearly underestimated Ichinose's Noble Phantasm.
Or rather, he had underestimated how unreasonable other worlds could be.
This was no ordinary arrow!
It was the Noble Phantasm of the Servant [Kama], drawn from a Heroic Spirit Class Card that Ichinose had bought in the Presiding God's Space!
Kama, the god of love and desire in Indian mythology, had seen her standing weakened over time in the pan-human-history mythos for various reasons and ranked at best in the third tier.
But according to the Item Illustrated Guide, Heroic Spirits were high-ranking conceptual spirits, condensed from humanity's great deeds and faith.
Drawing the Indian goddess of love was already astonishing luck.
What's more, Ichinose also carried a Love-Love Fruit that had been strengthened with S Points, its prerequisite trigger conditions erased!
And so,
just as Griffith raised a hand to answer Ichinose's position with a bolt of lightning...
"Thump."
His movement suddenly froze.
Griffith had been struck in the soul by that arrow of love and hard-locked in place!
Of course, a single undeveloped Kama Class Card could never cross dimensions and hard-lock a God Hand on its own.
It was thanks to the Love-Love Fruit on Ichinose's person, which shared the very same essence, stacking its concept on top of the Noble Phantasm to produce the extraordinary effect.
After all, in the original Vedic version of the myth, Kama embodies the primordial desire of the universe, the first cause of the birth of all things. Her conceptual status was no lesser than great Trimurti gods like Shiva or Brahma!
With the boost from the kindred Love-Love Fruit, the arrow's power had already touched the edge of a law of the world.
Even Griffith, who had long since severed his own humanity, who was utterly indifferent to women and existed only for his goal, a judge who condemned without mercy,
found his soul forcibly dragged into the ultimate dream he longed to see, deep in his heart.
In that illusion,
there was no Chris from another world and no Ichinose to meddle.
After the Emperor of Fear turned fully into the Golden Tree, the Astral World descended perfectly on the present world.
Naturally, he built a perfect nation beneath the Golden Tree that belonged to him alone, Falconia.
And even...
the man who had once betrayed him and driven him to madness knelt on one knee before his throne now and swore him absolute loyalty...
He and Guts fought side by side, waged war together and slept on the same bed, shoulder to shoulder.
He became once more a great hero, revered by the people and remembered through the ages...
Griffith smiled, intoxicated, and slowly lost himself in the dream.
And in reality,
the arm Griffith had raised high fell limply, his eyes unfocused.
Ichinose Honami's strained nerves loosened a little.
But she didn't rush in to finish him off.
Partly because she had just released her Noble Phantasm and wasn't so confident about the Ruby Staff's magic output for the moment.
More importantly, out of the corner of her eye she could see the wretched state of Ayanokoji Kiyotaka, Ryuuen and Arisu Sakayanagi:
a pierced stomach, a body folded in two, half a body destroyed.
Left alone, wounds that fatal would surely kill them on the spot!
And among those present, if Honami Ichinose's memory served her right...
there was someone who had no spare lives left as a safety net!
Ichinose bit her lip, ready to let Suzune Horikita out of the Mountains and Rivers Sovereignty Map to save them.
But before she could move,
her vision suddenly blurred.
The shattered bodies of Ayanokoji Kiyotaka, Ryuuen and Arisu Sakayanagi had all vanished from in front of her at once.
Or more precisely...
they had all appeared at her side at the same time!
Ichinose whipped her head around in shock.
Somehow, Arisu Sakayanagi, who should have been gravely wounded, stood there restored to perfect condition.
She was gracefully wielding ribbons of magic, holding the barely conscious Ayanokoji Kiyotaka and the snapped-in-half Ryuuen steady in midair.
And beside Sakayanagi,
Chris, who hadn't made a move until now, was cradling a Suzune Horikita with a look of intense concentration.
Behind Suzune Horikita, a pink-and-blue phantom of [Crazy Diamond] rose.
Both fists shot out, pressing against the fatal wounds of the two men.
With the flicker of Miracle's glow, in an extremely short time, the hole in Ayanokōji's stomach began to close, and Ryuuen's broken metal spine clicked and whirred back together.
Seeing the crisis resolved, Chris looked over the few who had just escaped death.
He teased, half-joking:
"I watched your whole fight from the sidelines, you know..."
"Looks like that Substitution Jutsu you learned didn't do much in a real fight, huh?"
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka dropped down off the ribbons, expressionless.
He rubbed his stomach, now good as new, and explained coolly:
"Master Jiraiya's Substitution Jutsu needs a physical object nearby to serve as an anchor. And..."
"Casting it requires forming five basic hand seals in an instant."
"Against an opponent whose speed completely overwhelms mine, there was no way I could use it before he hit me."
Ryuuen let out a sigh beside them, still shaken, and flexed his newly reconnected mechanical spine:
"Yeah, he's ridiculously fast."
"Damn it, I didn't even get to activate Sianweistan's time deceleration before he got in close and finished me off..."
After complaining, Ryuuen looked around and asked, puzzled:
"Oh right! Where's that bastard Griffith?"
"Don't tell me you took advantage of the moment to finish him with a time stop?"
Chris shook his head.
"Of course I could use a time stop plus Space Slash to solve this problem for you."
"But..."
Chris deliberately paused for a moment, as if checking the time on his wrist, before he spoke at leisure:
"There are eight minutes left before the exam ends."
"If you really can't handle it, then I'll have to step in."
"But I think an enemy of this level would actually be good training for you, a way to build experience..."
Chris pointed at Griffith, who was still standing motionless, trapped in his illusion a short distance away:
"By the way, since Griffith fused with the Emperor of Fear, he has stacked both of their skills. In the Black Sphere's evaluation, he's been upgraded into an ultimate BOSS worth 210 points."
"If you defeat him with your own hands, you'll clear this exam perfectly."
Hearing how Griffith's score had changed, Honami Ichinose said with some worry:
"In that case... I'm afraid the charm-and-control effect from my Noble Phantasm Sammohana won't last very long."
"I have to prepare another shot before then..."
She hadn't even finished speaking when,
down below, Skull Knight, flying back up on his Astral steed, spoke up at the right moment:
"Girl from another world! If you can, please aim your next strike at the Emperor of Fear's soul core inside him!"
"Now that the Idea of Evil is no longer his foundation, the absolute, obedience-enforcing hierarchy between Apostle and God Hand is no longer as insurmountable as it once was."
"If your attack awakens the Emperor's consciousness, lurking inside, and drives him to fight Griffith from within for control of the body... he'll be bogged down by infighting and have no attention to spare for anything else."
"Then his ability to bend space as a defense will fail."
"As long as my Sword of Actuation is no longer blocked, I can cut a path for you to real damage!"
Hearing that,
Skull Knight had looked rather useless on the front lines a moment ago, and his words didn't carry much weight.
But Chris was standing right there.
And the person who held the Controller that could see through monster information hadn't spoken up to object or stop him.
That at least meant Skull Knight's suggestion was workable, and that he wasn't on the opposing side.
So Ichinose didn't ask much more.
She took a deep breath and drew the bowstring taut. Behind her, the love goddess's magic circle began rapidly gathering power again.
Ryuuen turned to glance at Ayanokoji Kiyotaka beside him and bared his teeth in a grin:
"You hear that?"
"When that bag of bones breaks through Griffith's spatial defense, get ready to launch the final assault with me!"
"I remember the Gravity Gun needs a three-second countdown before it fires. Don't be late this time!"
But Ayanokoji Kiyotaka didn't respond right away.
He calmly surveyed the positions and condition of everyone present.
Then,
he handed the Gravity Gun over to Arisu Sakayanagi without a moment's regret.
"Your Romantic Cannon's trait is that the more danger its user is in, the higher its damage."
Ayanokōji analyzed quickly:
"Conveniently, you have ribbon magic to help, so you don't need to hold the equipment to fix it in place. Operating the Gravity Gun and the sniper rifle together for a double strike shouldn't conflict."
"What do you say? Are you willing to gamble at this decisive moment?"
Honami Ichinose, standing beside them, opened her mouth.
She wanted to say that she was the one holding the most lives right now, and that a job like this, drawing aggro at close range and taking heavy damage to power up a weapon, should just go to her.
But before she could speak,
Arisu Sakayanagi had already seized the Gravity Gun.
The girl answered without hesitation:
"Hehe... why wouldn't I dare?"
She lifted her chin, her eyes full of confidence:
"I've dared to venture into the Backrooms, floors that are completely unknown. It's just a two-hundred-point BOSS. What is there to be afraid of?"
Seeing that, Ichinose swallowed her words of dissuasion, resigned.
She could only fire one arrow and then focus again on the Noble Phantasm in her hands, ready to react the moment Griffith might stir.
And as for Griffith himself,
trapped in his illusion, he naturally couldn't fully sense the decision this swarm of bugs outside had made.
But as a God Hand, the authority he held was of the type that wove and manipulated dreams.
As long as a strong killing intent or fluctuation of magic stimulated him from outside, escaping this gentle trap wouldn't be hard for him.
Sure enough,
just as Ichinose was about to release her second Noble Phantasm,
Griffith's eyes snapped open.
Though a trace of lingering reluctance for the Guts of that perfect illusion still clung to the depths of his eyes, he quickly noticed something was wrong inside his body.
"This is..."
The Emperor of Fear's soul core, which he had been pinning down so tightly, seemed to be pulled by some force and had begun to pulse?!
Before Griffith could spare the attention to suppress the disturbance,
"Boom!"
the invisible, terrifying pressure of the Gravity Gun came crashing down on his head!
As the only surviving God Hand in this world,
Griffith naturally wouldn't allow his perfect body to be crushed to the dust like a mortal's and humiliated.
He snorted coldly.
And chose to take it head-on!
At the same time he pressed his palms together, meaning to forcibly borrow the Emperor's thundercloud form and use the lightning filling the sky to blast into ashes the mortals he was sure could not withstand a lightning strike.
Once he cleared away these annoying flies, he could focus on dealing with Chris, the one who gave him such an acute sense of danger.
But he had miscalculated one thing.
Precisely because he had actively drawn on the Emperor's source power,
he had handed a perfect opportunity to the Emperor of Fear, who was already half awake and, thanks to Ichinose's Noble Phantasm, had finally sunk into a dream.
"Falcon of Light... you dare steal my power!"
The Emperor's resentment erupted in an instant as he tried to show this lofty god a thing or two!
This sudden backlash from within inevitably made Griffith's casting falter.
"Now!"
Skull Knight, who had been poised and ready, seized the opening.
"Slash! Slash! Slash!"
The Sword of Actuation carved several pitch-black cracks through the air.
The sword wind howled, carrying the power to sever causality, and slammed into the space shielding Griffith's body!
Griffith frowned hard and had to divert half his attention to suppress the agitated Emperor within, preparing to run his spatial distortion again to defend himself.
But Skull Knight had learned his lesson this time.
He didn't attack Griffith head-on.
Instead, he took Griffith by surprise and swung a single stroke at the empty air behind himself!
Just as Griffith was puzzling over it,
"Hum!"
the pink Noble Phantasm beam Honami Ichinose had long been charging crossed the distance between spaces.
And burst out of nowhere from the rift of sword energy Skull Knight had just made!
It struck Griffith's chest under his startled, unprepared gaze!
This time, because he had braced himself mentally, Griffith wasn't dragged back into the enchanting illusion.
But the sudden turn of events completely threw off his rhythm.
All he could do was take the slash that Skull Knight followed with.
"Squelch!"
The Sword of Actuation cut into the divine body.
The wound wasn't deep, but it was like a breach in a dam.
The Astral demonic essence within Griffith, which never belonged to him and had never fully assimilated, began pouring out in a mad rush.
"Laying traps with such care, lying in ambush in the shadows... this obsession of yours has twisted into something pitiful."
Griffith's eyes were cold as he passed judgment in a supremely arrogant tone:
"But your sneak attack ends here."
With that,
he used the absolute rank of the God Hand to forcibly suppress the raging Emperor of Fear inside him.
Then his form began to blur, and he once again activated that small-scale, invincible elemental state.
Amid the glare of crackling electric arcs,
Griffith appeared in front of Skull Knight as if he had teleported.
One simple punch left the armor that had existed for a thousand years dented and cracked, and it plummeted straight down through the clouds.
Then,
he turned, raised a hand and aimed at Arisu Sakayanagi, who had just caused him no small trouble.
A flick of his fingertip!
"Crackle!"
A pillar of lightning even more terrifying than before shot out with a roar.
Without any suspense, it pierced her stomach and half her body and vaporized them!
But Arisu Sakayanagi...
this was exactly the moment she had been waiting for, the razor's edge of real mortal danger.
Strengthened by her Soul Gem, the magical girl's true self had long since been relocated into the gem.
As long as the Soul Gem didn't shatter, no matter how badly her physical body was damaged, she could still fight at one hundred percent.
And the Romantic Cannon's trait was now driven by this "near-death" state to its theoretical maximum!
"Go... to hell!!!"
Gritting through the tearing pain at the level of her soul, Arisu Sakayanagi summoned all the ribbon magic she had left with everything she had.
She bound Griffith in midair for a brief moment!
At the same time,
Ryuuen and Honami Ichinose didn't hold back either. Laser beams and the remaining glow of the Noble Phantasm lit up together, suppressing and harassing Griffith from every angle.
In that fleeting opportunity everyone had fought to the death to create,
the [Romantic Cannon] in Arisu Sakayanagi's hands, glowing red-hot and nearly melting from the heat,
finally spat out a terrifying beam of destruction powerful enough to pierce stars!
"Boom!!!"
The beam drilled straight through Griffith's chest, leaving a huge hole you could see clear through.
Ichinose's Noble Phantasm arrived right on schedule and hit the wound again.
With the demonic-essence drain debuff from Skull Knight continuing to act on him,
and with the Emperor's soul inside him, having sensed the host badly wounded, waking in a frenzy and trying to seize control of the body, leaving him beset from within and without,
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka, who had been biding his time all along, waiting for the perfect moment,
appeared silently behind Griffith like a true ghost.
He gripped Ryuuen's Soul-Release Blade, the one that specialized in wounding souls, with both hands.
Without hesitation,
he aimed at Griffith's spine and drove it in hard!
"Shrrk!"
The blade sank into bone, then swept all the way upward in a horribly cruel cut!
Griffith's eyes went wide, disbelief written across his face.
"Even the future I observed... was torn apart?!"
"A pack of strugglers who broke out of the cycle... can actually kill a god?"
"How... is this possible!!!"
Facing this question at death's door,
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka, who had arrived by Substitution Jutsu, remained completely unmoved, his dead-fish eyes as still as an abyss.
He didn't even feel it was safe enough.
With a flick of his wrist he swung the blade again.
"Squelch!"
He cleaved Griffith's noble head in half down the middle, like slicing a watermelon!
At that moment,
Skull Knight finally flew back on his Astral steed, looking somewhat battered. Seeing Griffith's body completely collapse, he shouted in alarm:
"Retreat! Now!"
"The Astral demonic essence inside him has completely lost its balance! The fully awakened Emperor of Fear would never let this empty husk of a God Hand, now without its master, keep pressing down on him, even if it means dying together!"
"A demonic essence explosion is about to happen here!"
"Get out of here, now!"
____
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🔥 New history: HSR x ZZZ x Genshin: My Life Is Streamed to Everyone! — posted on The_Mikudayo