Apotheosis — transformation of someone into something beyond mortal existence, where limitation ends and divinity begins.
As the world seemed to implode inward, Jay stood frozen, staring as if nothing had happened.
Michael, Gabriel, Dulio, Carmilla, and the remaining forces of both the Churches and the Carmilla Vampires all lifted their eyes to the sky.
Hundreds of colossal meteors hung above them.
Dragon clones filled the sky.
Black flames churned through thunderous clouds.
A golden gate burned in the firmament.
But nothing happened this time.
The silence was underwhelming. Unnatural.
But Azi Dahaka knew better.
Suddenly, his eyes widened.
Agony tore through him, as if his scales were being ripped from his existence.Dark blood streamed from his eyes.
"Fucking bastard. HAHAHA! The backlash is back."
Dark light surged over his body as he regenerated. Then, with a snap decision, most of the clones vanished into nothingness.
Only ten remained.
Azi Dahaka looked up at Jay, his heads swaying with a mixture of exhaustion and a new, more dangerous level of insanity.
"I have killed countless gods while bound by the limitations of my flesh!"
The three-headed dragon roared, his voice echoing in the sky.
"And who decided I cannot kill a single human while under those same constraints?"
He beat his wings once.
"BRING IT ON!!!"
Eight of the massive clones swarmed the sky, their wings beating like thunder as they converged on Jay and Lavinia.
The remaining two plummeted toward the ground, intending to tear through Michael, Gabriel, Queen Carmilla, Dulio, and the exhausted Church and Carmilla forces.
Beside Jay, Lavinia remained the eye of the storm. With a sharp, commanding motion of her hand, a waterfall of frost and a screaming blizzard descended from the heavens, encasing the clones and the original body in a crystalline prison.
Azi Dahaka's central stomach ballooned, his scales glowing with internal heat before he vomited a torrent of demonic flame to melt the encroaching permafrost.
But the blizzard was a feint. As the steam hissed into the air, the freezing mist coalesced into a complex network of jagged ice platforms suspended in the sky.
"Go, Illya-kun!"
Lavinia took to the air, her flight magic propelling her higher to dodge a snapping maw from a lunging clone.
Jay didn't need to be told twice.
He was a blur of obsidian motion, his boots echoing sharply against the frozen platforms.
He sprinted toward two of the approaching clones as Ame-no-Habakiri trailing a wake of black fire that looked like a scar across the horizon.
"ROOOAR!"
The two clones snapped their heads toward him, their jaws closing on the space he occupied with enough force to shatter the sound barrier.
BOOM
The air imploded from the force of the bite, but Jay was no longer there. He shifted into a ghost-like intangibility, his form flickering in black embers like a glitch in reality before he teleported directly above them.
"Cleave."
SHIIING
A single, horizontal fracture of space tore through the sky.
Both heads were severed in one clean motion. For a heartbeat, their colossal bodies continued forward, still driven by momentum.
Then the black flames detonated.
Dragon flesh ignited.
Bone cracked.
Scales liquefied into ash.
The severed heads burned midair, collapsing into showers of burning cinders that rained across the sky.
Jay landed back on the ice platform, the frost instantly mending under his boots.
He spread his hands to both sides, the black flame of the True Cross pulsing as it fed more power into the conflagration. And then from both sides of him, massive pillars of black fire erupted, incinerating the headless torsos of both clones in an instant.
FWOOM
As his domain detected another ripple in the space, Jay glance backwards.
"Hm?"
Another clone rushed him.
And as it was meters away, its throat glowing with the grey light of a localized Time Stop. Jay flared his own aura, the black fire neutralized the space-time magic before it could stop time.
As the dragon's maw opened wide enough to swallow him whole, Jay tightening his grip on Habakiri and ready to activate Phantasmagoria and end the beast's existence.
But suddenly, his world tilted. His dark hazel eyes widened in genuine shock.
SPLURRRT
Jay felt the agonizing crush of bone and the searing heat of draconic breath as the clone's maw clamped shut.
His Phantasmagoria had failed him. It was the same bitter lesson he had learned against Susanoo, overconfidence in his intangibility was a death sentence against those who stood at the pinnacle of their craft.
"Illya-kun!" Lavinia's scream pierced the sky, her voice thick with terror.
"Your space-time magic is child's play in front of me, boy!"
The real Azi Dahaka bellowed from above, his three heads swaying in triumph.
"There is no magic that hasn't been written in the Avesta! To me, your 'invincibility' is nothing more than a simple sequence of runes I've already solved!"
Jay was a second too late to realize his magic had been nullified by a formulation override or some sort anti-magic bullshit from the Diabolos Thousand Dragon.
But he didn't give the beast a moment to savor the victory. Even as the teeth ground through his flesh, Jay's remaining hand shot upward.
FWUOM
A massive, concentrated pillar of black flame erupted from his palm, incinerating the clone from the inside out. The dragon's head detonated in a spray of obsidian sparks and ash.
Jay pulled himself back, stumbling onto the ice platform.
He looked down at his left arm. It was gone, severed cleanly from just above the elbow down to the palm.
And the stump didn't just bleed like a normal wound, it smoked with a sickly, purple miasma that fought against the natural closure of the capillaries.
"KAHAHAHA! That one-handed look suits you!"
Azi Dahaka taunted, his voice dripping with childish malice as he circled above like a vulture.
"In fact, get used to it! You'll be looking like that for the rest of your short life. I've used forbidden magic to curse that wound and it is now permanent! HAHAHA!"
Lavinia reached Jay in a flash of frost, her hands glowing with a frantic, desperate blue light.
She pressed her palms against the stump, her mana surging to bridge the gap and regrow the limb, but the purple curse repelled her magic like oil on water.
"Illya-kun... it's not working. It can't be healed," Lavinia panicked, her eyes welling with tears as she watched his life force leak away.
"No, there must be a way. Gabriel! We have to get Seraph Gabriel to heal you again!"
"Lavi... it's okay," Jay said, his voice flat and terrifyingly steady.
He looked at her, his dark hazel eyes meeting hers with a coldness that momentarily stilled her heart.
"The battle hasn't even finished yet."
Jay raised his right hand and drove black flame into his own left arm.
The fire burned through flesh and magic alike. The wound cauterized instantly, and the purple miasma around it was incinerated and erased completely.
The black flame is the all-burning flame.
No spell is immune to it.
No magic escapes it, forbidden or divine alike.
Lavinia's eyes widened.
So did Azi Dahaka's.
"Forbidden magic or whatever...," Jay muttered.
The black grail flared with dark flame. As the black flame dancing on its rim, the severed hand began to knit itself together, bone reforming, flesh weaving back into place, skin sealing as the limb regenerated fully.
Azi Dahaka grinned.
Jay's dark hazel eyes already set on the main body of the dragon, the black flame on his blades flaring with a renewed intensity.
"Let me teach you how to give a permanent wound."
Azi Dahaka threw his heads back and laughed, a sound of pure unrestrained delight.
"HAHAHAHA! You are the greatest human I have ever seen! Truly, a monster to match my own! Let's battle each other to the death, shall we!?"
But suddenly Jay's energy erupted. A dark aura surged outward.
The scenery began to distort. The gloomy sky of Romania and the destruction of the Carmilla territory vanished, replaced by a desolate, infinite land of darkness. The sky turned a bruised black, torn apart by a single bleeding red streak.
And behind Jay, a towering ancient wooden cross rose, its beams so immense they seemed to pierce the sky above, it's wreathed in black flames that roared with the sound of a thousand dying stars.
Azi Dahaka's three heads recoiled, his six eyes darting frantically.
"An illusion?"
The dragon's voice trembled, touched by a fragment of something ancient and forgotten.
'Now that it's unleashed, this fire… it reminds me of that bastard, Asha. Its presence, the feeling it carries, it's just like Ahura Mazda's.'
He paused.
'But it's different. It Twisted. Wrong in a way I can't name.'
His thoughts were cut short. In a flash of black embers, Jay appeared directly behind the dragon's central neck.
"Turn to dust..." Jay whispered.
Azi Dahaka's instincts screamed. Using a burst of forbidden space-time magic, the dragon's physical form blurred, teleporting him miles away to the edge of the domain. But Jay was already mid-swing.
"World Slasher."
FWOOM
The obsidian arc bypassed the concept of space, and create a wide spread tear on the space overlaying every single clones before the devastating wave of fire caught the remaining eight clones as they tried to regroup.
There were no screams, only the sound of high-pressure combustion as the clones were reduced to drifting cinders in an instant by the sudden burst of black flame.
Jay coughed up blood, but a flicker of black flame danced along the rim of the black chalice, and all of his internal wounds were instantly healed.
"Shit… I can't keep using this," Jay muttered, clutching his chest.
The Avatar Manifestation helped significantly in unleashing the Black Flame faster, since he no longer needed to draw it from within himself. Instead, it behaved almost like a domain he could summon that allowing him to manifest and control the black flame at any point coordinate in space.
However, using it on top of World Slasher strained his body far too much.
Then Jay suddenly remembered the ability of the Sephiroth Graal, along with the information it had given him when his hand was severed by The Three-Headed Dragon.
The Sephiroth Grail had told him to reconstruct his hand using Azi Dahaka's soul and flesh, but because of the urgency at that time, he had been forced to use his own soul instead.
Seeing his army reduced to ash, Azi Dahaka roared, his crimson aura flaring to its absolute limit.
"I am the dragon of the end! You cannot trap me in this illusion!"
He vanished again, reappearing behind Jay with a speed that defied logic. Simultaneously, hundreds of wreathed, crimson-red chains erupted from the rift on the space, surrounding Jay.
The Chains of Ahriman, designed to bind the souls of gods. They lashed out like vipers, seeking to tie Jay down.
Jay flared his black flame, and the chains that touched the fire dissolved instantly into nothingness.
But Azi Dahaka was a master of variables.
He noticed that the black flame did not entirely cover Jay's body. While Jay focused on the frontal assault, chains coiled around his torso and legs, tightening with a force powerful enough to crush a mountain range.
Jay gritted his teeth, his body flickering.
'Phantasmagoria'
"Nullified!"
Azi Dahaka screamed, his three heads grinning.
"I told you that your magic is a child's play!!!"
The chains groaned as they began to compress Jay's ribs. But Jay simply reached out, his bare hand grabbing the red-hot links.
The black flame spread from his skin into the metal. The crimson chains turned to ash from the inside out, the fire crawling back along the flow of the dragon's mana, tracing it to its source. It then engulfed the entire gate from which they had been summoned, burning it away completely.
Azi Dahaka's eyes narrowed.
'If I cannot reach you physically, then let us see how your mind handles the weight of eternity!'
He opened his jaws, and a wave of grey light suddenly rolled over the battlefield.
This was one of his forbidden magics, the Illusion of the False Prophet, a fabricated world shaped from the target's deepest psyche and hidden desires.
It was a spell that had felled thousands of the world's strongest warriors, trapping them in a loop of their own perfected lives until their souls withered away.
It was the same illusion that had allowed him to fight the armies of the Zoroastrian gods and Θraētaona single-handedly, leaving them with no choice but to seal him.
Azi Dahaka plunged his consciousness into Jay's mind, searching for a hook.
His desires, power, love, vengeance, a home.
But as he reached the core of Jay's psyche, the dragon froze. There was no gold. There were no faces. There was nothing.
It was a world of plain, absolute black. A void so profound that even a dragon of darkness felt like a trespasser.
In the center of that black world stood a figure. It was not Jay, but a silhouette of pure darkness that looked back at him with eyes or no-eyes that held the weight of a collapsed star.
"A Spirit?" Azi Dahaka thought, his hearts pausing in a moment of pure, existential confusion.
Before he could react, the illusion shattered like a mirror hit by a hammer.
The mental backlash sent Azi Dahaka reeling. Jay was already in front of him, Habakiri poised to cut the dragon in half.
Azi Dahaka dodged by a hair's breadth, teleporting to Jay's back, but Jay's reflexes were now operating on a level of pure instinct. He did not even turn around. He sent a Cleave backward through the space the dragon had just occupied.
Azi Dahaka teleported once more, appearing high above, but Jay was already standing on his central head.
"Turn to dust...," Jay whispered.
FWOOM
A localized explosion of black flame erupted. It stripped the dragon of every last scale on his central neck, exposing his raw, black smoking flesh.
Azi Dahaka shrieked, instantly activating a series of Forbidden Healing Magics. He forced his body to teleport away, his scales regrowing in a frantic burst of mana as he stabilized his form.
The dragon hovered in the air, his chest heaving.
The pain. The damage. The agony.
He devoured it all.
"If there is nothing left that can reach you," he roared,
"then the world itself shall end."
Azi Dahaka's aura exploded, turning the dark sky of the domain into a bleeding crimson. He began to chant, the words of the Avesta vibrating with such power that the ancient wooden cross behind Jay began to shake.
"I sacrifice half of my soul!" the dragon vowed, his three heads weeping blood.
"Feast upon my souls, Malice of this world!"
The clouds above bulged like an overweight stomach, pulsing with a sick rhythmic light.
Seeing the sky turn into a churning, bruised crimson as it bulged with necrotic energy, Michael paused mid-swing.
He was locked in a desperate struggle alongside Dulio against one of the final two clones of the Three-Headed Dragon. They had just managed to strike down the other, but the Seraph suddenly looked up in absolute terror.
"The magic of this scale...," Michael whispered, his golden aura flickering as the pressure from the sky intensified.
Carmilla, who was barely holding her ground alongside Gabriel while providing long-range support for the both of them, felt the malice erupting from the firmament.
It was a predatory chill that bypassed her vampiric nature and struck directly at her core.
Gabriel's twelve wings shuddered as she poured holy light into a barrier that felt increasingly like paper against a hurricane.
"The barrier... I can't hold you barrier anymore brother," Gabriel gasped, her face reddened as sweat beaded on her brow.
The crimson energy began to coat the manifestation of the wooden cross, trying to corrupt the very source of Jay's power.
"Forbidden Magic: Corrupted World!" Azi Dahaka screamed.
"The Will of Ahriman... End of Everything!"
The sky exploded.