Jayr POV - Nasuverse, Moon, Far Side, Sakura Labyrinth - 2030 AD
Despite its immense size, the battlefield seems to be getting smaller and smaller with each passing moment as the pressure generated by Kang Yaling and Tiamat keeps increasing.
Kang Yaling steps into my range again, but "step" isn't the right word. There's no transition, no shift I can track with my eyes. One instant, she's outside my reach, the next she's already inside it, her energy blade cutting through the space where my body is about to be.
Tiamat looms above us, vast and suffocating. Her presence presses down on everything like the world itself is being forced to acknowledge her existence. The Sea of Life churns in response, rising and collapsing in endless, violent cycles. Waves slam into each other, split apart, and reform. The sound is constant. Heavy. Drowning.
But none of it matters as my focus narrows.
The world fractures into countless possibilities, each one branching forward, overlapping, competing. Every movement Kang Yaling could make, every response I could take, all of it unfolds at once. My enhanced senses calculate, refine, and discard all the possibilities until a single path remains, and I follow it.
Her blade descends toward my spine, already past the point where a normal reaction would matter. The attack exists before the thought does. Before intention can even fully form.
I move at the exact moment the strike becomes real. My body shifts through the only viable gap, the space between what is and what will be. The blade passes through where I was, slicing cleanly through the afterimage of my position, but not entirely.
A fragment of the Crateris God Cloth is caught in the edge. For a brief instant, I feel the connection severed. Not pain but something sharper. The sensation of something absolute being denied. The Cloth is removed, carved away as if it never belonged there.
However, I'm already moving.
The instant her strike completes, I'm inside her guard. My fist drives forward along the shortest possible line, cutting through the minimal distance between us. Spiral Cosmo ignites at the point of impact as a controlled detonation compressed into a single moment.
The hit lands. There's a solid connection, but the feedback is wrong.
The pure kinetic force vanishes on contact, absorbed seamlessly into her body. The energy is taken, converted, and redirected back at me, but I carefully control my own force to make sure that the reflected attack would be mostly negligible. On top of that, Spiral Cosmo isn't there just for show.
The destructive principle behind it blooms a fraction of a second later, tearing through her from the inside. Flesh, structure, whatever constitutes her current form, all ruptures outward. A section of her body is simply erased, blown apart by the delayed effect.
For that brief instant, there's an opening, but then it closes.
Part of the absorbed energy feeds back into her, reconstruction occurring faster than the damage itself. Tissue reforms, structure realigns, and the void I created is filled as if it never existed.
At the same time, her knee is already moving.
I see it before it connects. I adjust. Shift my weight. Recalculate angles, vectors, and timing. Every variable aligns with a solution. But it's not enough, I'm still too slow.
The impact lands against my side with precise, controlled force. My body folds slightly around the strike, structure compressing under the pressure. The air leaves my lungs in a sharp, silent burst.
That single moment is all she needs, as I sense her blade is already descending again.
I react on instinct and calculation at once, twisting my torso just enough to divert the line of the strike. Not a full dodge as there isn't time. Just a deviation. A compromise that shifts the outcome from fatal to survivable.
The edge meets resistance for less than an instant before it doesn't.
Space itself splits along the path of her blade.
It tears through my torso, not like a physical cut but like a concept being divided. There's no clean sensation of pain at first. Just dissonance. A disconnect between what my body should be and what it is.
Then everything catches up at once.
My body is already restoring before gravity can take hold. Flesh reconnects, structure reasserts itself, Spiral Cosmo flowing through the damage and forcing it closed. The wound exists, then doesn't, leaving behind only the memory of its shape.
I hit the ground and don't stay there.
Momentum carries through the impact, and I convert it into forward motion. My foot plants, stabilises, and I step in again immediately, closing the distance without pause, without hesitation, as if the exchange never broke, because it didn't.
Above us, Tiamat also makes her move as her eyes start to glow in that menacing black light, and noticing that I'm already gone.
The black beams erase the space I occupied an instant later, carving through the battlefield and tearing open what little remains of it. The Sea of Life surges upward again, massive waves collapsing inward, Lahmu spilling out in endless numbers.
I pass through them without fighting them as I don't want to waste critical movement, even more so as their threat is nonexistent.
Every step is carefully chosen, every action optimal and yet something feels off, making my mind move even faster as I analyse, 'It's not Kang Yaling, not it is Tiamat, it feels like it is coming from behind me, no, it's everywhere. Something like a pressure, it feels wrong, not like the Sea of Life or like the demonic energy released by Kang Yaling. Something heavier, something that doesn't belong.'
While I'm thinking that, Kang Yaling moves again, taking advantage of Tiamat's interference. She bends her body forward, compressing herself along a single axis as she focuses an insane amount of power. It builds rapidly, dense and unstable, until her entire form begins to emit a dim purple light that pulses unevenly, like something trying to break free.
Then it does.
A myriad of light rays erupt from her body all at once, each one carrying the same destructive intent as the whole. They descend on me in a collapsing pattern, cutting off escape routes before they even exist.
In response, I intercept the motion itself. Not the beams, but the flow behind them.
My hand moves through the converging lines of force, finding the exact points where their trajectories overlap. I twist the energy at those intersections, disrupting the alignment just enough to alter the outcome. The rays bend, slide past me by margins too small to perceive normally, redirected instead of resisted.
They pass, but they don't dissipate.
The moment they clear my position, the redirected attack slams into the battlefield behind me and the world gives way.
There's no simple impact.
The beams carve forward without slowing. The surface splits instantly, a jagged fracture ripping outward at impossible speed, as if reality itself has been cut along a predetermined fault line.
The crack doesn't stop.
It stretches across the battlefield, tearing through layers of terrain, through the already unstable remnants of space warped by Tiamat's presence. Entire sections collapse inward as the energy continues forward, drilling deeper, forcing open a path that shouldn't exist.
For a brief moment, I can see beneath it.
Not just depth, but absence. A hollow where structure fails to hold, where the rules that define the battlefield thin out under the strain of the attack.
Then the delayed force catches up, and the split detonates.
Everything along the path of the fracture is violently displaced, the edges forced apart as if pried open by an unseen hand. Fragments of ground, chunks of condensed Sea of Life, even stray Lahmu caught too close are erased or hurled outward, unable to withstand the residual energy still tearing through the line.
The shock channels forward, extending the damage even further into the distance, until the end of it is no longer visible, swallowed by distortion and collapse.
Even after the beams are gone, the scar remains.
A massive, unstable divide cutting across the battlefield, its edges still writhing, struggling to reconnect but failing as remnants of that purple energy linger, preventing the world from fully repairing itself.
Then I instantly notice that Kang Yaling is still in her bent forward stance.
For a fraction of a second, she hasn't moved.
Her body remains compressed, the faint purple glow still clinging to her form, unstable and uneven. The energy she released hasn't fully settled yet. It lingers around her like residue, like something still in the process of completing itself.
A delay. Small, brief, but real.
An opening.
My mind processes it instantly. An attack of that scale, that density, demands a cost. Even if it's minimal, even if it's almost nonexistent by normal standards, it's still there.
And I move to exploit it.
I draw in the Spiral Cosmo within my body, dragging it upward, compressing it, refining it into something sharper. It gathers rapidly, coiling through my limbs, concentrating at a single point.
My arms rise above my head, palms open, fingers spread as the energy surges.
It builds, condenses, the temperature around me dropping sharply as the Spiral Cosmo shifts in nature. Heat vanishes. Motion slows. Even the chaotic movement of the battlefield seems to hesitate for the briefest moment as the concept of cold asserts itself.
Then I release it by calling out, "White Ice Spears!"
My hands snap downward and cross in front of me, and the compressed Spiral Cosmo detonates into form.
Dozens, no, hundreds of spears manifest in an instant, each one perfectly shaped, perfectly aligned. They aren't just ice but the absence of thermal motion given structure, absolute zero made tangible.
The space around them fractures slightly, unable to fully reconcile their existence.
Then they launch.
In the same instant they are formed, they cross the distance between us, piercing through Kang Yaling's body from multiple angles at once. There's no time to evade, no gap to exploit. The attack is too sudden, too complete.
The spears embed themselves deep within her form, and the cold follows.
It spreads instantly, locking everything in place. Structure halts. Energy flow ceases. Even the faint purple light flickering around her freezes mid-pulse, suspended in a moment that refuses to progress.
Her entire body is encased. Still. Silent.
For a moment, everything aligns.
The prediction holds. The outcome matches. The path I chose reaches its intended conclusion.
I step forward slightly, ready to follow up, and something feels wrong.
The ice sinks into her body.
The entire structure collapses inward. The absolute zero I imposed is drawn into her body, absorbed the same way she absorbed my earlier strike. The spears dissolve from the inside out, their form unravelling as if they were never solid to begin with.
The frozen stillness vanishes.
Her body restores immediately, the holes left behind sealing without delay.
No damage. No lingering effect. Nothing.
My thoughts don't even have time to fully register the failure before she moves.
The energy gathers in front of her face, dense and concentrated. Not wild like before. Not unstable. But refined and focused.
Her eyes ignite, and for the first time, I feel something close to danger before the attack is released.
The beam fires.
There's no buildup I can exploit. No visible trajectory I can adjust to in advance. They exist the moment they are launched, thin lines of condensed malice that cut through space without resistance.
I move. I know the path.
My body reacts instantly, shifting along the optimal line, adjusting by the smallest possible margin to avoid a direct hit, and it's not enough.
The beams pass through me. Not fully, just enough.
They pierce through the Crateris God Cloth as if it isn't even there, grazing my shoulder, but the contact is wrong. It doesn't feel like a clean strike or even a partial one.
It feels like something latching on.
For a fraction of a second, my body stops responding correctly.
The point of contact doesn't close when I run the Dark Resurrection technique.
It doesn't even try.
The Spiral Cosmo that should already be repairing the damage meets resistance, then fails to progress. The wound remains open, not bleeding, not worsening, just fixed in place, as if the concept of recovery has been denied.
My movement stutters.
A delay, small, but real, making me realise, 'If that had been a direct hit...'
The thought doesn't finish as I force it out.
Spiral Cosmo surges toward the wound, not to heal it, but to purge it. I isolate the foreign energy, compress it, and expel it violently. It resists for a moment, clinging to the edges of the damage, before finally being forced out.
Only then does the restoration begin.
Slowly. Way too slow.
I regain full control of my body, but the aftereffect lingers just long enough to leave an impression.
That wasn't just a normal attack; it was something designed to deny me.
I reset my stance, eyes locked onto Kang Yaling, ready to keep fighting, but still that pressure kept rising.
Behind me, Nero's presence flickers, becoming more unstable and through our bond, I feel her Saint Graph, now completely stained in crimson, constantly expanding.
For a fraction of a second, Kang Yaling's gaze shifts, not to me but past me as she has likely picked up what is happening, then it returns unchanged as she continues her assault.
But the battlefield doesn't, as it suddenly starts to distort. Like something is forcing its way into a space that isn't ready to contain it.
At the same time, Tiamat reacts as she lets out a resentful roar as if something dared to personally challenge her authority, while the Sea of Life halts for a fraction of a second.
Then it surges violently outward, as if rejecting something.
That's when it finally happens, Nero returns, but not like before.
There's no clean reconstruction or gentle gathering of light. The crimson motes collapse inward, then explode outward, followed by a violent eruption of energy that tears through the battlefield, forcing everything back, even me, even Kang Yaling, even the Sea of Life.
For a single instant, the pressure overtakes everything, then it focuses and at the centre of all that, she stands once more, Nero, but not the Nero I'm used to.
She has changed; her green eyes have been corrupted, becoming red, and her facial features have become more dragonic. She also has a red mark on the left side of her face. Her long flowing hair is now untied and also slightly obscures her right eye, and most notably, she now has black horns with red flame decals emanating from the tips.
She dons a black Roman cuirass with a red fabric underneath, a black fur coat with a smooth red underside, black greaves, black armoured high-heels and a black bodysuit as the base of her armour.
Finally, she wields her own version of Aestus Estus, now in the form of a two-handed sword, with sharper edges, and in a proportionally larger size. Its name is Aestus Estus: Terminus Fire, a "reforged" version of the weapon used by her Saber self.
This is Nero wielding the full power of her Beast Class, the Demon Beast Emperor Draco.
(Image Here - Nero Demon Beast Emperor Draco)
Her form is there, but wrong in the way it holds itself. The air around her bends, distorts, unable to settle.
Crimson light burns across her body, not stable or contained, but overflowing wildly. Her presence spreads instantly, covering the whole arena.
Then her head lifts slowly, and I notice that her eyes don't look at anything. They just burn through it with pure destructive intent, making me instantly realise that she has lost control and that, at the moment, she is simply driven by the Beast Class' instincts.
Then she moves, but not toward Tiamat, not toward Kang Yaling, simply forward, erasing everything in her path.
The Lahmu don't even have time to react. Their bodies collapse instantly as she passes through them, torn apart by something that doesn't resemble a technique or a spell.
Just force, pure, overwhelming force.
I try to use our bond to bring her back to her senses.
It should work; it always has.
For a fraction of a second, something answers, but it isn't Nero as it turns violently before the link reverses.
A surge of crimson force floods back through the connection, not information, not emotion, just raw instinct.
Consume. Destroy. Dominate.
My vision distorts for a moment as the feedback crashes into my mind. My body reacts before I consciously process it, Spiral Cosmo flaring as I sever the connection manually.
Too late to avoid it completely.
The residue lingers, heavy and oppressive, making me realise, 'That wasn't Nero, not entirely. It was the Beast. If I had pushed further...'
The thought doesn't finish; more precisely, I can't afford to finish it.
Kang Yaling doesn't give me the time to fully focus as she conjures black hellish flames on both palms, then launches a blast of heat at me, forcing me to dodge it.
At the same time, the Sea of Life rises to meet her.
It doesn't surge like a wave, but it heaves upward like an entire ocean of mud and flesh lifting as one, towering into a wall that blots out everything behind it. Within it, shapes form and dissolve endlessly, Lahmu clawing their way outward only to be reabsorbed an instant later. The surface writhes, alive in the most wrong way possible.
It crashes down toward Nero with the weight of a world, but she answers with a single swing.
Aestus Estus: Terminus Fire moves, and for a moment it looks almost slow, the massive blade dragging a trail of distorted space behind it, then the strike completes.
The Sea of Life splits as if the very concept of it is rejected.
The blade cleaves through the descending mass, and the ocean divides along the path of the strike, forced apart as if it has no right to exist in front of her. The separation isn't clean as the edges churn violently, trying to reconnect, to swallow, to reassert their dominance. They fail.
Flames erupt along the cut, not spreading outward but consuming inward, devouring the Sea itself. At the same time, the Bestia Coccinea manifests around her, multiple draconic heads forming from that same crimson fire. They lunge into the parted mass, tearing into it, devouring Lahmu by the dozens, their jaws closing with wet, crushing finality before dissolving and reforming again elsewhere.
The backlash comes a moment later.
The divided ocean finally detonates outward, the force of its separation sending shockwaves through the battlefield. The ground fractures further, and what little stability remains gives way as reality itself struggles to maintain structure under the strain.
I feel it even from a distance.
The impact travels through the air, through the ground, through the very space I occupy. My footing shifts slightly despite myself, Spiral Cosmo instinctively reinforcing my stance to counter the distortion.
Even Kang Yaling reacts.
It's subtle, almost imperceptible, but she takes a single step back, her balance adjusting to account for the disruption. Her gaze flicks briefly toward Nero, measuring, recalculating.
Then Tiamat moves.
Her Draconis Corpus shifts, and the scale of it becomes impossible to ignore. Her body rises higher, already massive form expanding further as the Sea of Life feeds into her. Sixty meters becomes more. Then more again. Her wings spread, blotting out what remains of the sky, each movement displacing entire sections of the battlefield.
This time, the Sea of Life doesn't lash out blindly, but it converges.
Every current, every wave, every writhing mass redirects toward a single point. Toward Nero.
The ocean answers its creator's will, while Nero doesn't slow down, doesn't hesitate. She charges straight into it.
The collision is immediate. Violent and absolute.
The Sea of Life collapses inward around her, no longer a wave but a crushing convergence from every direction at once. It engulfs her completely, burying her under layers upon layers of writhing mass. Lahmu swarm through it, their forms twisting, multiplying, reaching for her, tearing at her from all sides.
Tiamat's presence bears down at the same time, a suffocating pressure that saturates the entire space, turning the very concept of resistance into something fragile.
For a fraction of a second, Nero disappears beneath it all, but then it erupts.
A pillar of crimson force tears upward through the Sea of Life, blasting it apart from the inside. Nero surges forward out of the collapse, not breaking through cleanly but ripping her way out, dragging chunks of the ocean with her as they disintegrate under the force surrounding her.
The Bestia Coccinea follows.
The seven flaming dragon heads burst outward alongside her, snapping, tearing, burning. They don't act independently; instead, they move as extensions of her will, striking in perfect synchronisation with her advance. Every Lahmu that comes close is instantly devoured, crushed, or incinerated, leaving nothing behind.
Every step she takes distorts space.
The ground under her feet gives way entirely, collapsing into jagged fragments that are immediately consumed by the energy radiating from her body. The air warps, bends, unable to stabilise in her presence.
She isn't fighting the Sea of Life; she's forcing it to acknowledge her.
Tiamat answers.
Her massive claw descends.
From this distance, it looks less like a limb and more like a falling structure, something closer to a collapsing building than an attack. The sheer size of it displaces the Sea of Life as it moves, dragging currents upward in its wake before bringing them crashing down alongside it.
Nero meets it head-on.
There's no attempt to evade, no redirection. She simply plants her feet and swings.
Aestus Estus: Terminus Fire rises to meet the descending claw, crimson fire surging along its length. The Bestia Coccinea converge at the same point, their jaws snapping forward in unison as if to bite into the attack itself.
The moment they connect, the battlefield breaks once more.
The impact doesn't just produce a simple shockwave, but it shatters the surrounding space, cracks spreading outward in every direction as if reality itself can't withstand the force of the collision.
Then the shockwave follows.
It erupts outward in a massive ring, flattening everything in its path. The Sea of Life is forced back, entire sections of it blown away, leaving temporary voids that struggle to refill. Lahmu are erased instantly, their forms unable to withstand even the residual force.
I'm pushed back despite bracing, my footing sliding as I resist the wave.
Kang Yaling holds her ground, but even she is forced to anchor herself more firmly, her stance lowering slightly to absorb the impact.
At the centre of it all, the two forces hold.
Nero stands against Tiamat's claw, her blade locked in place, crimson energy surging violently around her. The Bestia Coccinea coil and lash around the point of contact, reinforcing the clash, their presence amplifying her already overwhelming force.
Tiamat presses down.
The Sea of Life surges upward again, feeding into her, reinforcing her mass, her strength, her existence. Her roar reverberates through the battlefield, a sound that carries weight, authority, and inevitability.
And yet she stops.
For the first time since assuming her Draconis Corpus, her advance halts completely.
Neither side yields. Neither side retreats.
The clash stabilises, the overwhelming chaos narrowing into a single, concentrated point of conflict. The battlefield itself seems to reorganise around them, as if everything else has become secondary to this one collision.
Space warps. Forces align. And the war shifts once again.
Two forces collide on one side of the battlefield, leaving the other clear, which allows Kang Yaling to make her move, and so do I.
The distance between us closes instantly, her energy blade manifests mid-swing before she fires a wave of purple particles at me.
I meet it, but again I have no itention of blocking it as all her attacks are able to bypass all form of defense, so instead I use the extreme control over energies granted by the First Door of the State of Self Actualization, the Pinnacle of Hardwork, and the ability to predict all my opponents moves granted by the Second Door, Pinnacle of Widsom, to anticipate and redirect her attack just like I did many times before.
But this time the path of her attack suddenly shifts mid-execution.
Kang Yaling doesn't move immediately; for a fraction of a second, she observes, not my position or my stance but the flow.
The way I intercept, redirect, and reposition before her gaze sharpens slightly, then she moves.
My prediction and movement are still correct, but the outcome changes and as a result, the wave of purple particles hits me, leaving many holes in my Cloth and body. Much closer than any of her attempts before.
Unconsciously, I take a step back, and in response, she steps forward with no wasted motion nor hesitation.
Her attack comes again. I see it. I chose the most optimal path. Move accordingly, and it's wrong again. Not entirely, but not as perfect as I thought.
Because of that, the edge cuts deeper this time, and my body restores instantly, but the gap exists.
For the first time since opening the Second Door, there's a delay, it is a fraction. A moment where the future doesn't align cleanly.
Kang Yaling's gaze sharpens, and she steps in again much faster than before. Her blade arcs toward my chest.
I intercept the motion, but for some reason, it is too late as it pierces through, straight through my heart.
I feel it, then I move anyway, I let the energy blade tear through the rest of my body as I close the distance and once again use Dark Resurrection to restore the damage done.
Then I grab her extended arm and, twisting my body, I throw her away with enough force to make her crash on the ground and create a crater.
After that, I reset my stance and take a deep breath.
The world unfolds again, but not as cleanly as before. The many paths still exist, but they overlap, interfere and shift constantly.
Behind me, Nero and Tiamat clash again, and the impact distorts everything.
In front of me, Kang Yaling stands, still calm and unchanged.
I'm about to step forward, into the next future, but for the first time since I've attained the Pinnacle of Widsom, it doesn't feel absolute, and that's a problem.