"It's the Queen."
Arisa wiped the blood from her fingertips with a towel, then raised her head and gazed joyfully into the heavens with her innocent eyes... No, more precisely, she gazed toward the world-shaking reverberation echoing across countless worlds, breaking through the restraints of past, future, and present as it transcended space and time.
"Whoa—!"
With a startled cry, the B-rank Valkyrie named Susannah, a member of Arisa's Valkyrie Guard, immediately shrank her neck. With an orange ahoge, a bear-shaped hair ornament, and the uniform of the Immortal Blades, she tucked a kettle beneath one elbow while holding a basin in both hands and nervously glancing around. Her youthful lips parted slightly.
Judging by the wilted ahoge atop her head and her timid, belatedly frightened expression, anyone could tell that the girl carried labels such as "cute," "adorable fool," and "mascot."
And that was indeed the case. Susannah was a B-rank Valkyrie of Schicksal who had once belonged to the elite West Asian Branch squad, Phosphorus. Her strength was hardly outstanding. Before Schicksal was reorganized into an institution subordinate to the Holy Selene Empire, she happened to be serving with the Immortal Blades at Schicksal Headquarters.
As the Valkyries' role shifted away from their original focus on specialized anti-Honkai operations, formal Valkyrie units intended for large-scale warfare, decapitation strikes, and diplomatic occasions were established. Susannah had been fortunate enough to catch Arisa's eye at first glance.
As for why she had caught Arisa's eye... Ahem. Although Arisa never said, and although Selene ignored such trivial matters, Sebas had investigated the matter at the time and could more or less guess the girl's thoughts.
Oh my, she's so silly and cute. Anyone can tell she's a mascot. Hehe... Her Majesty is always calling me a mascot, so I'll just keep a few more! Then I won't be the one who looks most like a mascot anymore, right?
Ahem. It might not have been perfectly accurate, but it was close enough.
Sebas had no objections. In fact, he had even subtly encouraged it.
A cold-blooded ruler, a shrewd politician, an unscrupulous pursuer of desire... Deep down, Sebas did not want Arisa to become overly tainted by such things.
Had Selene truly wished to turn Arisa into someone like that, Sebas would not have stopped her despite his regret, nor would he have been able to. In reality, however, Selene seemed to share his inclination. She apparently did not want to impose too many of reality's cruel and dark laws upon Arisa.
The fact that she had arranged for Shirahoshi, the mermaid princess from One Piece, and many other playmates who embodied life's nobler qualities to remain at Arisa's side was proof enough.
Perhaps it seemed hypocritical and wishful. As Selene's closest companion, someone who constantly remained at the Empress' side, Arisa could never emerge unstained from the mire, whether because of her position or identity. But... let it be the humble selfishness of an ordinary old man toward a child.
As for the question of succession to the Imperial throne... Sebas hoped that day would never come.
"Don't be afraid, little Susannah. That was the Queen's attack. Besides, I'm here, so what are you scared of?"
Imitating the tone of her Queen, Selene, Arisa subtly rose onto her toes. With one hand tugging Susannah's ahoge and the other patting her own chest, she narrowed her eyes as though some strange new trait had awakened within her.
Crunch...
"Your Highness, that is Her Majesty's presence." Arisa then heard gravel being crushed behind her as a towering shadow appeared before her.
The commander of the Royal Guards dragged behind him an ancient dragon several thousand meters long. After severing its head, he stopped two and a half paces behind Arisa and raised his head. His breathing grew heavy as he lifted his right hand and cried out with entirely justified fervor, "Victory to Her Majesty!"
"Victory to Her Majesty!"
The Royal Guards, Sisters of Silence, and Astartes also raised their right hands, struck their chests, and shouted.
"Victory—!"
"Victory—!!"
More and more Imperial Army soldiers joined them.
In an instant, accompanied by the tremors spreading from the primordial universe and resounding across countless worlds, the Imperial Army's cheers thundered across the Antarctic battlefield and continued without end.
...
Elsewhere, upon another vast and boundless battlefield...
The once-dreamlike natural realm had been reduced to dust. The Inner Sea wailed as mountain-sized war machines poured freely through the horrifying breach in the world's barrier, unleashing artillery fire like torrential rain.
Rumble, rumble, rumble—!!
Every kind of deafening explosion shook the heavens. Saturation bombardments delivered dimensional reduction strikes across the ravaged world. Heavy lasers, disintegration plasma, and macro-cannons lit up one after another, filling the sky with flashes of plasma and artillery fire until it resembled a dangerous cloudbank of ionized gas.
Mountain ranges were flattened. Oceans, forests, and cities were mercilessly vaporized or burned away.
Destruction. Despair.
Entire formations of assault fighters screamed down from above the clouds. Like flocks of wild geese flying in formation, they raced toward the foremost edge of the artillery barrage.
"Haa... haa... haa..."
One heaven-piercing heavy lance of light after another descended. Upon the shattered earth stretching beyond sight, the Queen of the Land of Shadows steadied herself with the crimson spear that pierced through death itself. By now, none of her former alluring beauty remained.
Panting heavily, she exposed blood-soaked muscle beneath her flayed skin. Ugly scabs formed from sweat, blood, dust, and gunpowder residue covered her body. Her once-beautiful hair resembled burnt straw, dry and blackened, with sparks still glowing within it.
"Cú Chulainn..."
Scáthach looked sorrowfully toward her prized disciple a thousand meters away, most of his body melted away. A flash of grief crossed her crimson pupils—eyes from which beads of blood still fell.
This higher-dimensional world was an important node born from one of the Swirl of the Root's main branches. Naturally, it had become one of the principal battlefields into which both sides had committed vast forces.
At that moment, the world's extraterrestrial space had already fallen completely. The counterattack on Earth's surface, the core of the higher-dimensional world, had also ended in defeat. The corpses of dragons, fairies, and magical beasts were piled into mountains. After retreating into the Inner Sea of the Planet, they stood only a single step away from total annihilation.
Was it because they were weak?
Not at all. Many of the nature gods, dragons, fairies, and true bodies of Heroic Spirits participating in the battle were individually stronger than the Astartes. But this was war, not a one-on-one duel. The more modernized warfare became, the more heavily it depended upon logistics and equipment.
And what damned "logistics" did they have? After the Swirl of the Root emptied every resource it could muster, all its attention shifted toward wrestling Selene to the absolute limit.
It was as though these common soldiers had received a single round of supplies at full strength, only for their base to disappear without a trace afterward. The enhancements they received could only be described as better than nothing.
Now look at the other side. Once the advance forces landed, reinforcements arrived without end. Each successive offensive was fiercer than the last, with no sign of decline or conclusion. The artillery support from the rear was even more earth-shattering.
Without exception, every release of their Noble Phantasms received special attention from the battleships in the heavens, which neutralized, overwhelmed, or destroyed them.
Yes, some Noble Phantasms were said to bring down stars, pierce stellar remains, or tear worlds apart. They were ranked EX.
But the main cannons of those aerospace warships in low orbit were all EX-rank in destructive force and annihilation capability, to say nothing of their other functions. They were planet-killing weapons.
Because the Imperial Navy possessed Honkai energy, a "clean and pollution-free" universal high-energy substance, as its power source, it did not need to make excessive design compromises for energy storage or engine volume.
Honestly, even the most basic frigate class in the Imperial Navy possessed various models of radiation bombs, viral bombs, and lance emitters capable of scouring a planet's surface.
Its firepower was grotesquely excessive.
Take Scáthach. In the past, she had genuinely robbed countless beings of their lives, whether humans, undead, or gods. After confronting and slaughtering an innumerable variety of existences, the Land of Shadows under her rule had finally been cast outside the world, while she herself became an existence hardly different from a divine spirit.
Her strength undoubtedly belonged among the highest tier of planetary beings.
But no matter how powerful she was, a planetary-level existence could not withstand concentrated lance strikes from an Imperial Navy battleship formation.
So the death I longed for was to die fighting on the battlefield.
The divided spirit of Cú Chulainn who had participated in the Fifth Fuyuki Holy Grail War had long since died. The original body summoned from the Throne of Heroes had also died moments ago. Without Alaya—or rather, without the Swirl of the Root—to restore them, Heroic Spirits whose true bodies had been destroyed could no longer be summoned.
Scáthach's divided spirit had also been crushed by Selene long ago. The woman here was her true body, which had been preserved within the Land of Shadows. Awakened by a revelation from the Swirl of the Root, she had been sent here as one of the battlefield's principal combatants to delay the enemy.
Step...
She stood once more. Her exquisitely crafted, dark-purple, gauzy bodysuit had long since been torn apart by the aftershocks of fortress-grade battle cannons. Only a few threads and scraps of cloth remained, tracing Scáthach's beautifully shaped and alluring yet heartbreaking body.
Unfortunately, the enemies facing Scáthach and the others possessed not the slightest shred of mercy.
"For Selene—!"
When the customary artillery barrage ended, rapidly rotating drive shafts and heavy hydraulic rods produced their own distinctive chorus. Row after row of colossal war machines activated fortress-grade void arrays. Mechanical drive shafts turned amid the roar of gears, while an overwhelming battle cry left the newly risen Scáthach silent for a long time.
Bang! Bang, bang!
"Hide! Hide! Go on, crawl into hiding... Hahaha! No matter where you flee or where you conceal yourselves, so long as you oppose the Empire, you think you can cling to life? No. All that awaits you is death! You will die in some dark and stinking gutter, cursed for all eternity! Hahahaha—!"
"Victory? Hahaha! What a fearless struggle. That word never belonged to you in the first place!"
"Kneel! Or die!"
"We shall destroy everything you care about and slaughter everyone you love! We shall annihilate the ignorant world in which you place your faith! Weep! Wail! Scream! You have only one choice—to witness with your own eyes the exquisite suffering of this world, and then perish in humiliation!!"
Beneath blood-colored bat wings, the weapons of the Night Haunter warriors fired an unbroken barrage of mass-reactive rounds. Heavy bolts tore through layer after layer of the sound barrier and pierced the chest of Karna's true Heroic Spirit body from every direction.
On the brutal battlefield, his god-slaying spear had already been used. Without the protection of his golden armor of the sun, the concentrated barrage of 1.25-inch Kraken-pattern armor-piercing heavy bolts punched through Karna's Spiritual Core without suspense and tore apart his divine body. The son of the sun god collapsed powerlessly.
The divine shield of Achilles' true Heroic Spirit body had also been completely melted through. If the shield projected the world Achilles had witnessed—the mountains and rivers of Greece—then the descending lance of light had raised its output to enough heat and radiance to incinerate more than half the Balkan Peninsula.
When the lance faded, what remained within the Inner Sea of the Planet was a crater broader than the Aegean Sea.
Karna's lifelong rival, the divinely blessed hero Arjuna, was also dead. After suffering dozens of wounds across his body, he had been dismembered amid the shriek of lightning claws.
Beneath the Goddess Rhongomyniad, the Holy Lance that anchored the planet had already dimmed.
The Argonauts had been annihilated.
The Knights of the Red Branch had been annihilated.
The Knights of the Round Table had been annihilated.
The Fianna had been annihilated.
The Twelve Paladins of Charlemagne had been annihilated.
...
Rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble—!!
At that moment, another reverberation shook heaven and earth, piercing the battlefield. Above the turbulent low orbit lay the dark side of the cosmic heavens.
Within the haze, nearly endless magical energy, cosmic ether, and Honkai particles were drawn together and molded into something almost tangible—a torrential downpour that blotted out the clouds and sky.
Scarlet radiance spilled from above, shining from a distant, hazy shore whose distance could not be measured and illuminating the boundless battlefield.
The night sky, originally pitch-black except for the thunder of artillery, suddenly bloomed with a scarlet halo. Heaven and earth trembled. The cosmos shook, and the stars wailed hollowly. Everything linked together into a suffocating net without the slightest opening.
It seemed ready to drown the entire war-torn world.
Yet that oppressive force was not directed at the Empire. To the Empire's warriors, the radiance felt like returning home. Their morale soared, and their roaring cheers testified to their emotions as they charged with even greater ferocity.
Scáthach's breathing seemed to stop. The sudden wail shook her soul. Yes, that was no metaphor, for the glass-shattering agony truly exploded in the depths of every soul born within that world.
She stared blankly at the sudden trembling of the sea of stars. Faced with the inexplicable pain and sorrow that had arisen within her heart, emotions she had not felt in countless years filled her with tension and unease. Tears of blood streamed from her eyes beyond her control.
It felt as though she had lost something important... her "mother"...
Before she could search more carefully, however, a transformation quietly began within the depths of everyone's souls.
An indescribable tearing sensation from an unknowable source made her collapse weakly to the ground once more.
"Mm... Have we... already lost...?"
...
"You have lost."
The ancient and glorious primordial universe had now reached the end of its destruction. It should originally have possessed a brilliant future, continuously growing like every physical universe born from a cosmic Big Bang.
As the primordial goddess, Ashtart should also have grown alongside the universe.
Unfortunately, Selene had forcibly ended its life and shattered the Swirl of the Root's hopes.
Within the empty void, all was deathly silent. Only an immense gravitational force remained, forming an overwhelmingly powerful vortex as the countless parallel worlds derived from the primordial universe collapsed one after another.
The pitch-black vortex resembled a devil that could never be satisfied. It continuously devoured matter and crushed everything it consumed. Like a mysterious prison, it confined the primordial goddess within itself.
Shnk!
A slender hand abruptly pierced the dimming divine body of the cosmos, stabbing through the black hole along with it.
"Got you, Root."