Whoosh—
Gudako piloted the Outer God EVA and engaged Goetia in close combat, swinging the grotesquely shaped Blasphemous Holy Sword straight down at his head.
She could feel her sanity rapidly declining. From time to time, incomprehensible whispers of ancient gods echoed through the cockpit.
This EVA had been custom-built to Setsuna's specifications. For her, operating it was a strain. Simply driving it required tremendous effort.
If she piloted it for too long, there was even the risk of being assimilated outright.
"???"
Goetia was even more horrified.
Crack!—
From the wound carved into him, countless tentacles suddenly sprouted, wrapping around his body. He had to exert all his strength just to suppress this bizarre energy.
It was not magecraft. Nor was it any Noble Phantasm of a Heroic Spirit. Nor was it technology.
It was a divine authority he had never seen before.
An inexplicable fear surfaced in his heart, as if some higher existence were gazing down upon him.
The sensation was deeply unpleasant.
"Even the Third Noble Phantasm can't kill you?! Just who are you?!"
"I am Chaldea's Master!!!"
Gudako raised her sword and hacked down again, forcing Goetia into a frantic retreat.
Whoosh—
He used magecraft to widen the distance, cautiously observing this bizarre entity.
Goetia's rationality was terrifyingly sharp. Yet Outer Gods stood in direct opposition to rational mechanisms. The more rational one was, the less one could comprehend them.
"Come on! Stop running and fight me!"
Gudako pressed the attack relentlessly.
Each strike carried a tremor-shaking force.
"The Temple of Time!! The stability of the Temple of Time is dropping!!"
A staff member monitoring from Chaldea shouted.
The Temple of Time had originally been Goetia's enhancement of King Solomon's corpse, forged into a Reality Marble—a space that gathered and unified thousands of years of human history.
It was his Second Noble Phantasm: [The Time of Crowning Has Come, He Is the One Who Begins All.]
Even Tiamat had found it difficult to shake the Temple of Time. Yet under the interference of the Outer God's power, it was now showing faint signs of collapse.
"???"
"Mr. Setsuna, just what did Ritsuka Fujimaru learn in the Starsea Empire?!"
Roman's eyelids twitched wildly.
When even repeated Noble Phantasms and relentless bombardment had failed to kill Goetia, he had already prepared himself to step forward and trade his First Noble Phantasm for Goetia's life.
And then Gudako pulled out something no one had ever seen before. Just watching it from afar was enough to make Roman's sanity drop.
"It's my equipment. I let her borrow it for fun."
Setsuna replied with interest.
"Looks like she did her homework too. She knows conventional weapons are useless against Goetia. You need a weapon of higher rank."
"However... piloting an Outer God EVA made from Nyarko's avatar is not so easy."
Bang—Smack!!—
Faced with a completely unknown opponent, Goetia displayed the utmost caution.
He deliberately kept his distance from Gudako.
"Come on! Fight me! Weren't you enjoying that clash with Strelizia earlier?"
"You casually tanked Tiamat's and the Lion King's Noble Phantasms—why don't you dare take a few more of my hits?!"
Gudako taunted him relentlessly.
"..."
Goetia remained silent, focusing entirely on evasion while observing his opponent.
Twisted. Grotesque. Incomparably powerful.
That was his first impression of the EVA.
Yet in contrast, the pilot inside was not nearly as formidable. He could sense Ritsuka Fujimaru's urgency—she was desperate to end the battle quickly.
Boom!!
Rumble!!—
Another slash carved an enormous crater into the ground. Black mist billowed within it, as though some unspeakable monster were brewing inside.
Goetia continued to dodge, widening the gap while probing with magecraft.
All offensive spells dissolved into the black fog surrounding the mech. Even the Third Noble Phantasm, whose power rivaled billions of Excaliburs, could not harm it—let alone lesser spells.
"Tch..."
"Heh—"
After several failed pursuits, Gudako panted, shaking her head to clear her mind.
"Are you fighting or not?!"
"Hmph."
Goetia ignored her.
"Foolish. I do not know what magic or weapon you are using—but it is clear you cannot fully control it. You are reaching your limit."
"Tch..."
"You're sharp."
She clicked her tongue.
Indeed, her control over the Outer God EVA was far inferior to Setsuna's. She could not fully draw out its speed or strength.
She could only rely on basic attacks to strike him. Yet Goetia, who had been arrogantly unstoppable before, had become exceedingly cautious upon seeing the Outer God.
If this dragged on endlessly, she really might be worn down to death.
"Should we restrict his movements?"
"We'll help you."
Ishtar, Ereshkigal, and the others—protected earlier by Tiamat from the Third Noble Phantasm—moved closer.
"No need."
Gudako waved them off.
In a flash of thought, she recalled information about this EVA—and about Nyarko.
"All of you, get back."
"And everyone in Chaldea—don't look carelessly. I'm about to use my ultimate move."
"Huh?"
"You still have an ultimate move?!"
A question mark practically popped over Roman's head.
"Learned it from the Commander and Nyarko."
The next moment—
Inside the cockpit, Gudako pressed her palms together, using all her strength to connect with the fragment of Nyarko residing within the EVA.
Her consciousness sank into boundless darkness.
Before the EVA, she felt infinitely small.
In the unseen depths, it seemed an ancient god responded to her request.
Power poured into her body from the void.
Clap!—
The EVA mirrored her gesture, pressing its palms together in Nyarko's signature pose.
"Chaotic Grand Extermination!!!"
Hummm...
In an instant, the entire Temple of Time was dyed black by light.
The radiant bands of the Third Noble Phantasm, the surrounding void, and the wasteland ground—all were swallowed into utter darkness.
Up and down lost meaning. The laws of time and space ceased to function.
All of Chaldea's systems went berserk, spewing incomprehensible error codes.
"Is this a Reality Marble?! It covered the Temple of Time?!"
"Th-This is possible?!"
Crack—
The barrier of the Temple of Time shattered in an instant.
Goetia was seized by terror as he looked up.
Within the darkness that enveloped heaven and earth, countless figures writhed before him.
They came from the distant depths of the cosmos, filling the entire space.
Setsuna and Gudako knew what they were.
They were all Nyarlathotep—the Thousand-Faced God—in countless forms across innumerable universes and timelines.
It was a finishing move Nyarko had once used by accident during a spar with her master. In essence, it summoned versions of herself from every universe and every timeline to fight alongside her.
There was a Nyarlathotep resembling a night-gaunt crowned with thorns.
A Nyarlathotep with the visage of a faceless Buddha.
A Nyarlathotep who was a member of an anti-Outer God organization. A Nyarlathotep wearing an eyepatch over the right eye.
A Nyarlathotep carrying a crowbar, silver hair crowned with an absurd ahoge.
And of course, Nyarlathotep in forms so indescribable that a single glance would drive one mad.
Nyarlathotep of the past. Nyarlathotep of the present. Nyarlathotep yet to be born—and already born...
The thousand manifestations of one of the three pillars of the Cthulhu Mythos appeared before Goetia.
Within the cosmic expanse, only the majestic silhouettes of the Outer Gods remained.
Countless figures stepped forward in unison and spoke together:
"Thousand-Confusion-Wars—Chaotic Grand Extermination."
"I am—we are—Nyarlathotep."
At the very front, the most indescribable Nyarlathotep raised a hand.
More precisely, it had no hand. That was merely a part of its body.
Boom—
A vast and boundless force erupted outward with the Temple of Time as its center.
There was no imagined violent energy shockwave, nor any high-energy ray that annihilated all things.
What everyone felt instead was an overwhelming distortion of time and space.
It was as though the entire Temple of Time had been seized by a higher god and kneaded in its palm—rolled, flattened, compressed into a lump.
Space shattered and reassembled. Time fractured and reconnected.
Chaldea and the surrounding region became like clay, kneaded at will in the hands of the Outer God.
Many of Chaldea's staff even began hallucinating.
Within the fissures of time, reflected through the Thousand-Faced God's mirrored images, they saw their past selves, their future selves, and innumerable versions of themselves across countless timelines.
Roman saw himself as King Solomon, himself winning the Holy Grail War alongside Marisbury, himself making a wish upon the Grail to live again as an ordinary human.
Like slides in a projector, they flickered endlessly across the shattered fragments of space before his eyes.
"Aaaaaaaah—"
Goetia felt only a fleeting instant of terror before his intellect was completely destroyed within seconds.
Along with it, his "perception," his "wisdom," and even his capacity for thought were stripped away by the Outer God.
Paradox resistance was meaningless before Nyarlathotep's power. The Demon God King was twisted by an indescribable force into a primordial chaos monster.
"Waaaaah—"
Some staff members who had stared outside for too long clutched their heads and crouched down, nearly descending into madness.
Crack!!—
All sense of time vanished. It felt as though only an instant had passed—or perhaps countless years.
Only hollow echoes and static noise remained in their ears.
The ancient gods ended their ravaging of this space—or rather, they departed. Beings of that magnitude caused severe temporal collapse merely by manifesting here.
Goetia did not warrant them exerting much power. Along with him, the entire Temple of Time was erased from the past, present, and future alike.
Nothing but pure void remained between heaven and earth.
Chaldea had originally descended upon solid ground. Now, when they looked outward, they found themselves floating in the vacuum of space.
The Second Noble Phantasm could not withstand the Outer God's power. The Temple of Time it constructed had been utterly dismantled.
"...Confirmed. Goetia's Spirit Origin response has disappeared."
A staff member glanced at the holographic interface with lingering fear. Only after the Outer God's departure did the systems gradually return to normal.
"He... has been completely erased from human history."
"Haaah—"
At the location where the two had clashed, Gudako panted heavily.
Looking down, Goetia had already transformed into a grotesque creature shrouded in black mist.
There was no rationality left, nothing connected to the Demon God King or Solomon. It possessed no capacity for thought or communication—only grotesque instinct.
His body, his power, his intellect, his wisdom—even his very existence—had been completely erased. Dead beyond all doubt.
Howling, he gradually dissolved into the void.
Ereshkigal, Ishtar, and the others huddled beside Tiamat, trembling.
"Mother!!"
Ishtar kept squeezing into Tiamat's draconic embrace.
Even merely being caught in the aftershock had filled them with absolute terror. Only by staying close to Tiamat could they feel the slightest sense of safety.
"Mm..."
Gudako felt that at a time like this, she ought to say something to declare her victory.
After a moment's thought, she sheathed her sword and gave a soft snort.
"Have you fully experienced it? What it means to be the Commander's blade."