Jayr POV - Nasuverse, Moon, Far Side, Sakura Labyrinth - 2030 AD
The tense silence that fell on the battlefield after Kang Yaling revealed herself as a Chaos King didn't last very long.
A deafening fracture tears through the battlefield as the frozen mass I created with Divine Freezing Coffin explodes outward in a storm of shards and vapour. The shockwave alone is enough to tear through the already unstable arena, sending fragments of shattered terrain spiralling into the void.
And from within it, Tiamat moves once more, but she doesn't roar or hesitate. Her massive form emerges, unbroken, with visible damage.
Then light gathers around her. A vast, suffocating pressure builds as her raw magical energy condenses, thick and heavy, turning the space around her into something almost solid.
And she releases it in the form of a beam of blinding pink energy that erupts forward, wide enough to swallow everything in its path.
I react instantly, dragging Nero with me as the beam tears across the battlefield, erasing everything it touches and leaving behind a glowing scar of molten reality.
The Sea of Life surges immediately after, no longer a passive threat but a raging force, rising in colossal waves that try to swallow everything whole while also restricting movements.
There's no pause or reset, only another escalation, and then Kang Yaling steps forward.
I feel the shift instantly. Her presence sharpens while her gun and her knife are gone, just like most of her Phantom Thief attire.
In their place a light purple blade forms in her hand, one made of pure, condensed demonic energy, humming with something far more dangerous than raw power.
Her body is marked now, glowing patterns spreading across her skin like living sigils. The result of her merging with Magatamas. Likely all twenty-five of them.
Her calm and empty gaze meets mine before she moves without any hesitation.
My sense barely registers the motion before I'm forced to react, luckily the precognition granted by the Crateris God Cloth is still able to help me anticipate her movement, barely.
Her blade slices forward, not toward where I am, but where I will be.
I pivot, redirecting my momentum, but even then I feel the edge brush past my side, space itself splitting where the blade passes, causing a deep cut in the Crateris God Cloth and thus my body, which makes me realise that her attacks now bypass all forms of defence and durability.
Luckily, the damage on the Crateris God Cloth fixes itself a few moments later, thanks to its natural regeneration, while I use Dark Resurrection to quickly restore my body and focus back on the battle.
Kang Yaling continues her assault with no wasted movement or hesitation.
She appears closer, the energy blade is already moving when my mind catches up.
I shift sideways on instinct alone. The purple edge skims past my ribs again, not cutting flesh this time, but space. The air splits with a sound that isn't sound, a thin, tearing distortion that lingers a heartbeat too long.
She follows immediately with a second strike that comes low.
I drop, pivoting on my heel, and drive a counter toward her flank, and she casually lets it land.
My fist cleanly connects, and then the energy is gone.
Drained straight out of the impact, pulled into the glowing sigils crawling across her skin. The light intensifies for a fraction of a second, and her gaze sharpens further.
In an instant, I realise that she is not just absorbing the energy of my attack, but converting it.
She moves through me before I can pull back. An elbow aimed at my throat, but I catch it, trying to redirect it.
However, this time I'm too slow as her knee drives into my side, folding me just enough for her blade to follow.
I barely twist my body. The edge kisses my shoulder instead of cleaving through my neck. Pain lags behind the motion, then crashes in all at once as the Crateris God Cloth splits and knits itself back together in the same breath.
There is no opening, no rhythm to exploit, only constant pressure.
I flip back to create some distance between us while also inciting her to hastily chase after me, giving me the opportunity to change the pace and regain the initiative.
But she doesn't, she stands still and simply raises her hand as energy condenses instantly into her palm, dense and blinding.
Then she fires the gathered energy in the form of an energy sphere that quickly crosses the distance between us.
I don't block.
Gravity bends around me as I force my body down and to the side. The blast tears past, grazing my arm, and detonates behind me with enough force to crater the ground and rip the air backwards.
I make use of the pull and step in, closing the distance before she can reset.
My hand snaps forward as I cast, "Sagitta Magica, Series Glacialis."
Unleashing a storm of ice projectiles between us at point-blank range. Too close to dodge. Too dense to avoid.
They all hit, but the moment they make contact, the storm collapses inward and is once again absorbed.
Every shard, every fragment of magic pulled into her like it never existed.
Her markings flare brighter, then she mirrors the motion as her hand flicks.
My own spell comes back at me, making me click my tongue in annoyance and chant, "Tch. Veniant spiritus glaciales obscurantes! Cum obscurationi flet tempestas nivalis! Nivis Tempestas Obscurans!! (Come, spirits of ice and darkness! With the darkness flees the Snowstorm! Snowstorm of Darkness!)"
Generating a powerful storm of ice and darkness that freezes everything in its path into a drak crystalline ice.
This is a storm-type attack spell which combines the forces of ice and darkness into a directed storm that obscures light and causes serious ice-based damage.
Another useful aspect of combining Ice and Dark magic is that it enables the Ice to freeze non-physical and conceptual objects, like shadows and magic itself.
The storm explodes outward, swallowing her counter in a violent collision of shadow and frost. Light vanishes. Sound dulls. The battlefield turns into a churning void of blackened ice.
For a second, nothing, then she steps through it completely unaffected.
Seeing that, I almost exhale while thinking, 'This confirms it. She truly has all the passive resistances granted by the Magatamas. This means that she can absorb and repel almost all kinds of attacks. This means that my magic and pure physical attacks are useless. How annoying! If I want to damage her, I can only go back to the basics and use my Spiral Cosmo techniques to bypass her passive defences.'
While I'm thinking that, I notice her foot lifts slightly and the insane energy gathered in it. That's all the warning I get before she slams it down.
The next moment, the ground under my feet erupts as dozens, no, hundreds, of energy javelins tear upward in a cascading wave. Not in a random pattern, but a precise one, as each one is aimed at where I will move.
Crateris' precognition screams the warning, but I move anyway.
Every landing point becomes a death zone the instant I commit to it. One javelin grazes my leg. Another tear through my side. The third, I catch mid-rise, using it as leverage to vault higher, but it is the wrong choice.
She's already there in midair waiting for me to come to her.
Her blade arcs down, leaving me no space left to evade, so I don't.
I breathe in, letting the Spiral Cosmo course through my body and explode as I gather a massive amount of energy between my hands, forming an icy blue orb of energy.
Then I shout, "Hundred Roaring Ice Fangs," releasing everything and generating a powerful and turbulent wave-like vortex of energy with countless ice spears, all of them with temperature at the absolute zero, that crashes into Kang Yaling, piercing throughout her whole body, with her passive resistances unable to protect her.
The massive, turbulent vortex takes hold of Kang Yaling, swallowing her whole as if space itself has turned against her.
The moment it connects, the battlefield distorts.
The spiral of energy expands violently, its rotation accelerating beyond anything natural, dragging everything within its radius along with it. The air collapses inward, sound tearing apart into a deafening, continuous roar as the vortex drills forward, carving a path through reality itself.
Each ice spear within is erasing all forms of resistance.
They pierce into her body in rapid succession, hundreds, thousands, each impact detonating with absolute-zero force that doesn't just freeze matter, but halts motion, halts energy, halts the very concept of flow. The sigils across her body flare wildly, struggling to absorb, to convert, to deny the attack, but for the first time, they fail to keep up.
The vortex doesn't stop and widens even more.
What began as a directed attack blooms outward into a catastrophic surge, its edges spiralling into the Sea of Life itself. The black, writhing ocean recoils on contact, locking in place, its endless motion forcibly stilled as towering waves are caught mid-rise, suspended like shattered glass across the battlefield.
The hastily mended sky fractures once again.
Thin, jagged lines spread outward from the core of the impact, like reality itself is under strain, unable to fully contain the force being unleashed. Light bends unnaturally, dragged into the vortex's pull, while the ground beneath it is no longer breaking; it is being ground down into nothing, layer by layer, erased under the pressure.
At the centre of it all, Kang Yaling is driven downward.
Her body is forced through the storm, slammed from midair into the battlefield below with a force that doesn't just impact, it overwrites. The instant she makes contact, the accumulated energy releases all at once.
A silent moment.
Then the arena freezes.
A shockwave of absolute zero erupts outward in every direction, like a domain. Frost manifests instantly, consuming everything within range. The terrain, the air, the lingering magic, even the Sea of Life itself, all of it is locked into a vast expanse of dark, crystalline ice.
For a brief moment, the battlefield is no longer a battlefield but a frozen ruin, suspended in perfect stillness.
Then I land hard, skidding, already resetting my stance, my breath is steady, my eyes locked on her frozen figure lying on the ground because I know that it wasn't enough.
As expected, the ice encasing her starts to crack as a purple beam of light seeps through those very cracks before a blinding pillar of purple light is released, followed by the sound of ice shattering.
Then, when the pillar of light fades, she's there, still standing as the wounds on her body close before my very eyes.
At the same time, the battlefield becomes even more chaotic as Tiamat resumes her advance.
The Sea of Life rises again, breaking free from the ice, this time erupting upward in violent pillars. From within it, forms begin to emerge, the Lahmu, countless and grotesque, born directly from it.
The pink light of her magical energy gathers around her once more, and another barrage of beams tears through the arena, forcing Nero and me further apart.
Two threats, both overwhelming, both relentless, and I don't have the luxury to focus on one, so I don't I decide to trust my partner and focus entirely on Kang Yaling while Nero deals with Tiamat.
Soon, Kang Yaling attacks again, and I meet her head-on.
Our movements blur. Her blade descends, and I intercept, but not by blocking, as I have already learned that it is impossible.
I shift the flow of energy at the last possible moment, pushing her strike off course. The redirected force still tears through the ground behind me, leaving a deep scar across the already ruined arena.
She doesn't stop, she doesn't need to, as every exchange pushes me further, every second tightens the pressure, making me focus more and more on her.
Suddenly, I feel that Nero is in danger, and I turn just in time to see it.
Tiamat's massive limb was descending toward her, the Sea of Life surging upward to trap her in place.
There's no time to think, so I don't and just act, opening the first door of my unlimited potential.
For a very brief instant, I close my eyes, almost like a blink, and fully focus on my whole body, perfectly sensing every single part that makes up my body, having a perfect awareness of its inner working before I quickly further enhance this awareness to include also the energy within my body while making sure that my whole being enters that special state.
When I open my eyes, a smoky pure white aura starts to emit from my body as the world narrows and everything aligns.
My body, my energy, the battlefield itself, it all falls into place with absolute clarity. Control floods through me, precise down to the smallest detail, making me smirk and mutter, "State of Self Actualisation... First Door. Pinnacle of Hard Work."
Kang Yaling strikes again, but this time, I take it, not by enduring, but by intercepting the principle behind it.
Her blade descends, and I meet it at the point where motion becomes force.
I catch it there. Not the edge or the strike itself, but the flow that drives it.
For a fraction of a second, everything slows.
The violent surge of demonic energy coursing through her attack crashes into my control, resisting, tearing, trying to slip past my grasp, but I hold it. I seize it mid-motion and twist.
The direction flips, and the intent behind the attack collapses.
What was meant to cut me down is forced into stillness, then bent into something else entirely.
The power she used to attack me becomes mine.
It doesn't settle cleanly. It fights. It thrashes inside my control, unstable, corrosive, but I don't discard it. I force it into alignment and layer my own Spiral Cosmo over it, wrapping her energy in mine, compressing both into something denser, sharper, far more destructive than either alone.
For a single instant, the combined energy warps space around my arm, then I move as I turn and drive it forward in the same motion, releasing everything at once.
A beam erupts, not clean or stable, but violently compressed, spiralling purple and gold as it tears across the battlefield. It doesn't travel so much as arrive, crossing the distance to Tiamat in less than a heartbeat, dragging the surrounding space along with it.
The Sea of Life splits before it reaches her, forcibly parted, as if the concept of continuity itself is being denied along its path. The Lahmu caught in its wake don't even have time to react, their forms collapsing into nothing as the beam passes through them, erased without residue.
Then it hits.
The impact isn't a simple explosion but a rupture.
For the first time since this battle began, something gives.
The beam drives into Tiamat's draconic body and keeps going, forcing its way through scales that had, until now, rejected everything. There's resistance, immense, absolute, the kind that should stop anything, but it cracks.
Her defence breaks.
The energy tears through her, ripping apart a massive section of her form as the force punches through and exits her body in a violent surge.
For a moment, her entire frame distorts around the point of impact.
The shockwave that follows spreads outward across the Sea of Life in a massive ring, flattening everything in its path. Waves collapse, the black ocean forced downward as if pressed by an invisible hand, while the very air fractures under the pressure, splitting into visible layers before snapping back into place.
The pink beams flicker and falter, just for an instant, as a system pushed beyond what it was meant to handle.
The Lahmu across the battlefield seize, their movements breaking, bodies destabilising as the force ripples through their connection to her.
And at the centre of it all, Tiamat is wounded.
A massive portion of her body is torn open, the damage not closing immediately, not ignored, but present, undeniable. Something that should not be possible has been forced into reality.
The perfect being has been broken.
And for a single, fragile moment, everything stills once again.
For a heartbeat, Tiamat's Titan form buckles where my attack tore through it, then the air warps, like reality itself is flinching. Her body stops falling, then she releases a deafening roar as her body starts to change.
It compresses, draws inward, folding into itself as something beneath the surface forces its way out. The pressure spikes so fast it makes my chest tighten.
Heat follows, suffocating, rising in waves, and then it reverses as she erupts, expanding as her entire existence surges beyond what it was a second ago.
The ground groans beneath her as her form swells past her previous size, past anything that should still be called the same creature.
What stands before me now isn't just a Divine Spirit, but an actual God. Tiamat in her most primal state.
A dragon towers where the Titan stood, vast, overwhelming, easily dwarfing what she was before. Her body stretches higher, broader, her presence swallowing the space around her as if the world has to make room just to contain her.
Her form is a contradiction made real. Pale flesh, smooth like polished stone, wraps over immense, coiled muscle, but it's split apart by jagged, volcanic growths. Blackened, charred protrusions crawl across her body, glowing from within with a deep, molten red, like something inside her is burning its way out.
A dark mane lashes around her head and neck, strands of black threaded with ember-red light, flickering like fire trapped in motion. It moves without wind, alive in a way hair shouldn't be.
Her face leaves no room for doubt; it is draconic and absolute.
Her jaws part just enough to show rows of jagged teeth, made for rending, not killing cleanly. Her snout is carved with narrow, vent-like slits, exhaling heat with every breath.
Her eyes are still closed, but I'm confident that they are still the same, with that same molten red, burning from within, like I'm not looking at her gaze so much as standing in front of something that's looking through me.
Crown-like horns flare back from her head, their edges lit with the same infernal glow.
She lowers slightly, and even that small motion makes the ground tremble. Four limbs anchor her, but there's nothing animal in the way she holds herself. The hind legs coil with crushing strength, while the forelimbs remain poised, precise.
Behind her, her tail lashes once, then unravels at the edges, dissolving into smoke and fire before knitting itself back together, over and over, like her body can't fully decide where it ends.
Then her wings spread, making her appear even more massive.
Feathered, but wrong, each one gleaming with a metallic sheen, gold layered over deep red, like forged blades instead of anything natural. Heat ripples along their edges, warping the air, promising destruction with even the slightest movement.
Tiamat manifests her true form, her Draconic Body. This is Tiamat Draconic Corpus.
(Image Here - Tiamat Draconic Corpus)
She is a colossal dragon that rises from the Sea of Life, vast beyond scale, her body radiating an oppressive, absolute power. The arena groans under her mere presence, barely holding together as her existence anchors itself into reality.
Her eyes open, and the battlefield dies.
Black beams fire from her eyes, larger, denser, unavoidable. The Sea of Life surges into massive tsunamis, crashing down with enough force to erase everything they touch.
So fast that Nero doesn't even have time to react before she is completely erased, but then she once again returns, consuming all three extra lives granted by the skill Invictus Spiritus: Thrice, Even Though I Welcome the Setting Sun.
Then, from Tiamat's body, more Lahmu tear themselves free, endlessly spawning, endlessly advancing, trying to swarm us.
The revived Nero doesn't hesitate as she charges in, even now.
She cuts through the Sea of Life, cuts through the horde of Lahmu, forcing her way forward, refusing to yield even against this overwhelming force. I feel her resolve through our bond, burning, unshaken.
She reaches Tiamat and strikes, but it doesn't matter as her attack is unable to leave even a faint mark on Tiamat's massive scales.
Tiamat moves, just once, a single, overwhelming counter, and when the impact lands, Nero's presence shatters.
Her last life is gone, and for a fraction of a second, the battlefield feels empty.
But this isn't the end, as my bond with her still exists, and through it, I can sense another force awakening, one that we unlocked some time ago but held tightly restrained until now.
Through our bond, I can visualise her Saint Graph being flooded by a crimson light and drastically changing to the point that for a brief moment I fear that at the end of this process I may lose my Nero forever.
At the same time, she starts to return for the fourth time, but this time it's different.
The revival is slower, and the motes of light gathering are now stained in the same crimson light that flooded her Saint Graph.
However, I can't stop focusing on Nero too much at the moment, because Kang Yaling is already moving again, and Tiamat also doesn't stop.
I need to do more, keep them occupied long enough to allow Nero to complete her revival.
So I decide to fully trust my partner and take a metaphysical step forward and open the Second Door while announcing, "State of Self Actualisation... Second Door. Pinnacle of Widsom."
The white aura around me changes as stars begin to flicker within it.
At the same time, the world expands. Everything unfolds at once. The expanded mental abilities granted by my Blessing start to work like never before as endless possibilities, outcomes, and movements appear in my mind.
I see it all, Kang Yaling's next strike, Tiamat's next beam, the rise of the Sea of Life, the collapse of the terrain beneath my feet, all of it, all at once, surpassing even what Crateris is able to show me. I just have to choose the optimal path.
Then I move, but I do not react; I act before anything can happen.
The world unfolds in front of me in fragments of what will be, and I step into the only path that exists.
Tiamat's beam fires, but I'm already gone.
The black light tears through the space I occupied, erasing it completely, but I'm beneath it, sliding through the collapsing air as the beam carves a scar across the battlefield.
Kang Yaling is already there, or rather, she will soon be.
I turn before she arrives.
Her blade manifests mid-swing, aimed for my spine, and I meet it at the exact moment it exists. Not blocking, never blocking, but shifting it just enough that it passes through me instead of ending me.
The edge takes my arm clean, taking advantage of the gap in the Cloth.
For a fraction of a second, my right arm is no longer attached to my body, sent spinning into the frozen ruin below.
Pain follows, sharp and immediate, but I'm used to it, so I hold on, and before I know it, it's gone.
Dark Resurrection surges, flesh knitting, bone reforming, nerves reconnecting before the severed limb even hits the ground. At the same time, the pieces of Crateris attached to the cut-off arm equips itself on the regenerated one.
I step forward as if nothing happened.
My counter lands, not where she is, but where she completes her motion.
My fist drives into her ribs just as her body settles into existence, the impact folding her frame inward. I feel the resistance, the absorption starting, the sigils lighting up, so I don't stop.
I shift the angle, convert the force, burn my Spiral Cosmo and release it sideways, blasting her across the battlefield before she can fully convert it.
She skips across the frozen Sea of Life, shattering layers of dark ice before vanishing into a distant impact.
With no pause, the Sea of Life erupts again.
A tidal wave rises beneath me, vast and absolute, carrying within it countless Lahmu clawing their way upward, their forms twisting, reaching, screaming without sound.
Tiamat moves behind it.
I see it before it happens.
Her claw descends.
So I jump into it.
The impact comes anyway.
Her limb collides with me midair, and for a moment, there is nothing but overwhelming force. My body breaks under it, ribs collapsing, spine snapping as I'm driven downward like a meteor.
I hit the surface of the Sea of Life and go through it.
Deep, far deeper than I should.
The pressure crushes inward, the black fluid invading, tearing, dissolving, trying to consume and corrupt, and then I move again before it finishes.
My body restores as I rise, forcing myself back upward through the collapsing layers of the sea just as Kang Yaling reappears above.
She doesn't hesitate as her blade descends again.
This time it takes my head.
For a single instant, my vision splits.
My body falls one way.
My head another.
Then both vanish. Restored. Reconnected.
I'm already moving as it happens. I catch her wrist this time, not to stop the attack, but to delay it, just enough.
Tiamat's beam arrives as expected. It slams into both of us.
The force engulfs everything, a massive column of annihilation that consumes the space we occupy, erasing, crushing, burning all at once.
I twist within it and use it.
Redirect a fraction of it sideways, letting the rest pass through me, tearing my body apart again in the process.
Skin burns away. Muscle peels. Bone cracks under pressure, and then it all comes back. Again, and again, and again.
I drive my knee into Kang Yaling's abdomen, using the redirected force to launch her straight into the descending edge of Tiamat's next strike.
The collision is immediate and violent.
Her body is crushed between forces that should not coexist, her form breaking apart under the pressure before reforming an instant later.
She retaliates immediately.
Her blade pierces through my chest.
It goes straight through, emerging from my back in a burst of distorted space, completely ignoring the Cloth.
For a moment, I feel nothing, then everything.
I grab the blade with both hands, ignoring the way it splits my palms apart, and pull myself further in, closing the distance instead of escaping it.
Her eyes meet mine; they are still calm, still empty.
I strike using a point-blank Spiral Cosmo burst that detonates between us, blowing both of us apart in opposite directions.
I spin through the air, body reconstructing again before I even land.
Below me, the Sea of Life churns.
Ahead of me, Kang Yaling stabilises midair.
Above Tiamat looms, untouched by any of it in the grand scale of things.
I step again.
Into the only future where I'm still alive.
I slip between another beam, tear through a wave of Lahmu, and shatter another incoming strike before it completes.
Every movement is perfect. Every action optimal.
For the first time in this fight, I'm ahead, but it is not enough, not even close. Because no matter how many times I break them, they return. Just like I do.
Behind me, Nero is still in the middle of her revival, her presence unstable, growing, changing.
In front of me, Kang Yaling stands, calm as ever.
Above us, Tiamat looms, her Draconic Body casting a shadow over everything.
No one speaks. No one needs to. We are all aware that this is it. The turning point of the whole Holy Grail War.