"Do not think your victory is assured, Selene! This strike will bring an end to both of us."
Around Ishtar Ashtart, a ring of radiant golden runes instantly lit up. They descended like chains that transcended space and distance, extending outward in a flash.
Neither light, space, nor even time could escape. The radiance born at creation extinguished the stars, illuminating and igniting a dead and silent region of space.
It seized the edge of the ruined universe, which wailed in despair beneath the devastation of the Goddess of Finality as it moved toward death.
Crack!
The stars that had long since been reduced to dust rose once more. With constellations as her skirt and nebulae as her silken train, sun after sun adorned Ishtar Ashtart's dignified, sacred, and beautiful face.
"I am the scarlet goddess crowned with Shugurra in the wilderness of nothingness, Edin—the radiant galactic vortex, the Quasar, who reigns over the young and untamed universe of the distant primordial age!"
Vrrr—!
Dong, dong, dong!
It sounded like the low tolling of a funeral bell heralding the annihilation of the galaxy, yet also like music celebrating the birth of a new universe.
That active phenomenon connecting the cosmic sea to the birth of the galaxy and the origin of life was the very power of Ishtar Ashtart.
Higher-dimensional universes were dimensional spaces even more ancient than the parallel worlds inhabited during the various eras of humanity, such as the Servant Universe, also known as the Ether Universe, which was the present cosmic world. Whether born naturally or having migrated from beyond, every ancient god dwelling there was an extraordinarily powerful transcendent being.
The primordial universe was the first universe born from the Swirl of the Root. It was the first and most ancient old universe, the universe in which the origin of all life began.
As for Ashtart, she was the cosmic region that had been observed and preserved by a prehistoric ancient civilization during the primordial age of that old universe—before mammals were born on Earth and before the concept of faith itself had emerged.
A cosmic god—the primordial goddess.
One dazzling golden radiance after another instantly linked the half-erased primordial universe together with the galaxy, or rather, with Ishtar Ashtart, at its center.
A terrifying concentration of ether meant to burn away all alien invasion ravaged the surroundings. Runes shaped like crescent moons, stars, and pentagrams hummed faintly in the darkness.
On a battlefield measured in cosmic scales, the runes were very small, not even an inch long. Yet even when they flashed for only an instant, their brilliance far exceeded the radiance of a supernova.
It was the union of strength and beauty, ultimate splendor within light, a breathtaking visual feast.
"Gather. Return to the beginning. Reach the critical point."
Ishtar Ashtart raised both hands as a vortex of endless stars gathered between them.
"So be it. Since gaining awareness at birth, we have known only how to take, never how to repay. At such a moment, perhaps returning to the embrace of our 'mother' is indeed our destiny."
With a single glance, the Type-Moon gods who had followed the revelation of the Swirl of the Root and come to assist the primordial cosmic goddess Ishtar Ashtart against the foreign Goddess of Finality, Selene, stopped what they were doing.
Some gods resignedly accepted their fate. To them, their very birth had been a gift from heaven, earth, and all creation. They had lived for so long, wielded the laws of the world, and enjoyed the worship of countless believers. They should have been satisfied.
"You—!"
"Why would you strip away the very concept of our existence?!"
Other gods revealed expressions of resentment and openly condemned Ishtar Ashtart's actions. Their furious questioning overflowed with hatred and profound fear.
Ishtar Ashtart was already the most primordial and highest-ranking supreme deity. After receiving the full support of the Swirl of the Root, she possessed a natural suppressive power over higher-dimensional life-forms like them, who had ascended by absorbing the essence of heaven and earth.
After all, they were not like Selene, who had carved out an entirely different path, built her own foundation, seized control of everything, created everything herself, and declared, 'I am the law.'
If the continued operation of the world depended upon Selene, then the Type-Moon gods were the ones who depended upon heaven, earth, and all creation.
They could separate themselves from it, but the consequence would be a drastic reduction in their scale, and even that required the Swirl of the Root to ignore their actions.
Everything they possessed was derived from the Swirl of the Root. They were manifestations of heaven, earth, and all creation. Now, heaven, earth, and all creation demanded that they return to it. That meant their disintegration and the annihilation of their consciousness.
How could gods accustomed to abusing their authority and acting however they pleased possibly accept that?
Some immediately fled. A few even rushed toward Selene, openly choosing to betray the heaven and earth that had given birth to them.
Ishtar Ashtart ignored them with indifference. She displayed neither joy nor anger, nor the slightest emotional fluctuation, and continued her actions with mechanical detachment.
Vrrr—!
As the trinity belonging to the primordial goddess Ashtart completely fused, the portion represented by the individual known as Rin Tohsaka, who had served as a medium, became negligible. What remained was Ashtart's transcendent aspect...
No. More accurately, that was the primordial goddess' original aspect.
Without desire or longing, without joy or sorrow, every action she took embodied the laws of heaven and earth.
She understood the actions of the gods. She accepted them. But she alone would not stop.
Crack, crack, crack...
Vrrr—!
One after another, they began to collapse. Among them were famous great gods, chief gods, god-kings, and creator gods whose names had spread throughout human history, as well as obscure lesser gods.
Far more were alien gods that the human civilization of the present age had never encountered or understood.
Without exception, their divine bodies, divine power, divine rank, authorities, and every other part of them shattered and returned.
They transformed into the purest particles of energy between heaven and earth—the primordial essence of all things.
Multicolored currents became threads of golden light, and the entangled radiance fused together.
All of the primordial essence that had gathered once more converged between Ashtart's raised hands. The concepts, meanings, and entirety of the gods' existences were infused into the galaxy of her higher-dimensional Saint Graph, accumulating, transforming, and churning within the endlessly rotating vortex.
Everything unfolding before them was simply too overwhelming.
Perhaps the individual aid those gods could offer in a collision between Selene and Ashtart was merely a drop in the ocean, but they were still the symbols and manifestations of certain concepts within the universe and its planets.
Within the Type-Moon world, gods could broadly be divided into primordial gods and ascended gods, as well as nature gods and machine gods.
The oldest among them were the "primordial gods."
They were manifestations of concepts or natural phenomena.
They had existed before life itself was born. People worshiped celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and Venus, as well as storms, thunder, the sky, and earthquakes.
Cosmic and natural phenomena gained consciousness or personality, then reigned over the human world as legislators of heaven. Their scale varied immensely, but without exception, they belonged among the strongest gods.
If the primordial goddess Ashtart had to be classified, she would be a primordial god. More than that, she was the most ancient primordial god—the conceptual embodiment of the entire galaxy of the primordial universe.
"Ascended gods," meanwhile, referred to those who had not originally been gods, such as humans and demigods. Through various artificial factors, they overcame countless trials and tribulations, escaped human causality, and became heroes or saviors worshiped as objects of faith.
Heracles was one such example.
There were also naturally born gods of forests, plants, rivers, and other earthly phenomena.
Last came the accidental products known as machine gods.
The Olympus interstellar fleet had originally possessed no names. But after ancient humans witnessed them, they believed the machines possessed personalities and worshiped them as sacred beings.
Thus, the machines received "names," and the machine gods were born.
Crack!
Vrrr—!
At its root, primordial essence possessed no inherent difference. When Ashtart completely gathered the authorities scattered among the gods...
Her entire body blazed with golden light. Her multicolored palms shone with the radiance of newborn planets. Her body became semi-transparent and was stained red, violet, and silver, while a magnificent and boundless sea of stars seemed to circulate within her petite shell.
Her body was almost entirely composed of endless galaxies, as though a whole universe existed inside her. Merely standing there exceeded what the physical universe could endure. Space cracked inch by inch, then shattered with a deafening collapse.
Dense golden radiance became a "mist" spreading throughout the universe. It extended from beneath her feet in countless strands, rising and spiraling around her.
The radiance surrounded and protected the pale golden oval of light in Ashtart's palm.
"You realized that delaying the inevitable would only mean a slow death, so you decided to stake everything on one final attack?"
Without needing to think, Selene instinctively sensed the threat posed by that object. A faint stinging sensation spread across her skin.
"Come."
The corner of Selene's mouth curved upward. She opened her hand, and an ink-black arc of light flickered.
Vrrr—!
In an instant, countless strings drew together. The boundless and omnipresent Sea of Imaginary Numbers began to contract. Cosmic radiation, atoms, neutrons, and particles normally invisible to the naked eye gathered and compressed violently.
It resembled countless black holes twisting and folding over one another, dark and empty. Then, without warning, a dazzling ball of fire ignited in Selene's palm!
No, it was not a ball of fire. Upon closer inspection, it was clearly a proportionally miniaturized solar system. Eight comparatively large grains of dust spiraled around the blazing sphere.
"Not enough."
Selene spoke indifferently, and her eyes lit up.
In an instant, the universe in her palm compressed, expanded, compressed again, and expanded once more—!
The spiraling illusion of starlight instantly encompassed the entire solar system, stretching from one end of the Kuiper Belt to the other. The Oort Cloud appeared, followed by the Orion Arm, the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds... the Local Group... the Laniakea Supercluster... the Sloan Great Wall, extending without end.
"I already told you that victory and defeat have been decided. The end of this war has never depended upon any of you. It depends only upon how intact I wish my spoils to remain."
"..."
Ashtart gave no response. She stared at the oval sphere of light in her palm and parted her lips.
"This is—the Infinite Crown Shining in the Primordial Universe, Edin Shugurra Quasar!"
At that moment, boundless power poured from Ashtart's body. The primordial goddess herself began to disintegrate, transforming into radiant rivers of stars like flowing galaxies.
She would exchange her own life for the continued existence of her "mother" and defeat the great enemy. If she won, then although the countless gods would have been sacrificed, the Swirl of the Root would survive, and everything could be restored.
If she lost... then, as Selene had said, the victor would claim everything.
With Ashtart at its center, a scorching golden vortex filled with infinite points of light formed in the void.
At the outermost edge of the vortex, countless streams of energy spread like innumerable phantom threads toward the endless parallel universes and worlds of the entire Type-Moon composite world.
For the first time, the Swirl of the Root fully revealed itself before Selene of its own accord, because there was no longer any need to hide.
Although it lacked both the concept of self-destruction and true self-awareness, its actions already carried the meaning: Even if I die, I will cover you in my blood.
Past, present, and future... countless timelines, countless parallel worlds, countless higher-dimensional universes...
Every infinitely multiplying scene since the birth of the Swirl of the Root appeared within the boundless void of the primordial universe.
Then the two goddesses simultaneously thrust their hands forward.
In a single brief instant, an abyssal maw shaped like a black hole emerged from the depths of the primordial universe.
The entire Type-Moon composite world seemed to release a mournful cry, while the eternally unchanging flow of the Swirl of the Root erupted into towering waves.
Everything that came into contact with it—space-time, matter, or energy—was annihilated outright.
As the location where the collision occurred, even the oldest and most powerful primordial universe could no longer maintain its form. It began collapsing in an instant.
Countless cracks appeared across the structure of the physical universe like glass struck by artillery fire.
They spread at countless times the speed of light, continuing to expand and accelerate!
In that instant, the cosmos began and all things were born!
Daylight swept across the universe, annihilating and destroying everything!
...
At the same time, across the countless secondary battlefields of the Type-Moon world.
Chaldea's headquarters had now been razed to the ground. Even the Antarctic continent was riddled with holes, with more than half of it having collapsed.
The wreckage of interstellar warships completely unlike those of the Imperial Navy lay scattered across the surface. Some had plunged nose-first into mountain ranges. Some protruded partially from the frozen ocean, their exposed hulls scorched black by lightning. Others...
A moment later, the thunderstorm above the clouds dispersed, and Arisa returned from a deep crater filled with glassy crystals.
Foamy drops of blood dripped from both her hands, and a few stains marked her white undershirt. Her body, however, was completely unharmed. The blood did not belong to Arisa, but to those disrespectful fools.
The Royal Guards and surrounding Imperial soldiers stared in stunned silence.
Although they had not seen Her Majesty's sacred figure commanding the battle as the pre-battle documents had claimed, witnessing Princess Arisa display her divine might was still an exceptionally rare event.
No one had expected Princess Arisa, who was usually adorable, often visited the lower ranks to mingle with the people—meaning she was bored and went out to play—and always loved to smile, to become so terrifyingly violent when enraged.
Arisa: I may look like all I do is eat and play, she thought with her hands on her hips, but I am actually very strong!
The sight of that tiny body swinging a machine god larger than a mountain and smashing everything apart had deeply shaken the hearts of the Imperial soldiers.
"Your Highness, congratulations on your victorious return..."
One of Arisa's Valkyrie Guard members saw the bloodstains on her princess and hurried forward with a towel, preparing to wipe them away as she spoke.
"Susannah, thank you."
Arisa nodded with a dignified expression on her little face, then reached out to accept the towel. Just as she prepared to wipe herself clean, she suddenly sensed something and raised her head.
"That is..."
In the next instant, rumble, rumble, rumble—!
A roar transcending space and time resounded throughout the entire world.