-Broadcast-
Wendy was done with distance.
The Knight of God and Crown of God were running through her system at full output, the sky-attribute blessing amplifying everything the fruit could already do and then continuing upward from there. In human form, without the hundred-meter wingspan or the full atmospheric dominion of her dragon shape, she was still not a small thing. She was the current vessel of tens of millions of years of accumulated sky-dragon capability, and right now she had decided to put all of it in one direction.
She drew breath.
Not a human breath. The lungs of someone carrying the Tori Tori no Mi, Model: Seiryū (Bird-Bird Fruit, Sky Dragon) pulled magic particles out of the surrounding air along with oxygen, converting the ambient energy into fuel in the fraction of a second between inhale and release. She held it for the length of one thought.
Then she roared.
Roar of the Dragon.
The sound wasn't the problem. The sound was just the carrier. What came with it was a blue storm that originated at her chest and expanded outward in a cone wide enough to sweep across half the arena, a breath attack with the pressure of concentrated weather behind it — not merely cold, not merely kinetic, but carrying both and adding a third quality that belonged ally to the creature whose memories she was built from.
Alongside it, from the other direction, Lissandra added True Ice in parallel arcs.
Ainz Ooal Gown watched the combined assault close the distance in the time it takes to raise an arm.
He raised his.
Black lightning moved across his palm — not the product of a casting time but something already present, something maintained at a low simmer for exactly this kind of moment. In his open hand, a black hole appeared. Small — the size of a bird's egg, unremarkable in isolation. The suction it generated was not unremarkable at all. The air around it curved first, then faster. The blue storm and the True Ice arcs crossed the space between them and reached it and simply — stopped. Not blocked. Not countered. Absorbed, the energy folding into the event horizon and disappearing without residue, until the arena had returned to its baseline temperature and the space between all three of them was clear and quiet.
Wendy hovered in the air and looked at where her technique had gone.
"This damn skeleton," Lissandra said. It was Esdeath's voice, but the frustration in it was ancient. "How many categories does he have prepared?"
"His magic capacity has limits," Wendy said. "Everything does. We push him to spend it."
The black hole dissolved when there was nothing left to consume. Both women closed in.
Ainz received them without retreating.
His left arm generated one magic circle. His right generated another, the geometry different, the activation timing offset. The preparation he'd laid down over the past minute meant most of what he needed now cost him nothing in casting time — the investment had been made. He simply accessed it.
Magic Most Powerful: Gravity Vortex.
The purple-black spheres formed in his right hand three at a time, dense and humming, and he threw them without ceremony — not aimed at the women directly but at the space in front of their movement vectors. They hit the air and the air stopped cooperating. Everything within the gravity field slowed, not by impact but by geometric distortion, the local physics renegotiating what velocity meant.
Both women veered. The Galloping Wind auxiliary circle compensated partially but not fully — the gravity gradient was orthogonal to what sky-attribute speed enhancement was built to address. They altered course.
That was what he needed.
Magic Most Powerful: Thousand Bone Spears.
The floor vibrated. A moment later it broke, bone spurs driving upward through the stone in the hundreds, each one sharp and accelerating, the growth fast enough that the launch was functionally simultaneous with the eruption. They cleared the ground and continued upward, filling the airspace over the trap zone Ainz had just herded both women into.
Wendy crossed her arms over her face and let them hit. The Crown of God was doing its job — the impacts registered as pressure rather than penetration, the defensive conversion absorbing what would otherwise have been puncture damage across a dozen vectors simultaneously. The bone spears weren't wrong to be called powerful. They were simply not powerful enough, by a meaningful margin, to find the gap between Wendy's natural resilience and what the crown was adding to it.
Lissandra hit them with Armament Haki already deployed, the black coating dense over Esdeath's body. The combination of Haki and Wendy's blessing made the bone spear rain feel, apparently, like being struck with moderate-force blunt objects. She didn't bleed.
But they were both still inside the trap zone when the next spell completed.
Magic Most Enhanced — Rib Binding.
The ribs came from below, enormous — not human-scale, but the bones of something so large that each one was a wall rather than a structure element, rising and curving, the tips crossing overhead in the time it took to recognize what was happening. Stone-textured surface, no visible seam, no gap wide enough for even a narrow body to pass through. The cage sealed.
Lissandra's hand found Murasame. She started forming the True Ice technique that would take this apart from the inside, calculating the angle, the frost spreading along her grip —
Her sixth sense interrupted the calculation.
Not a sound. Not a motion she could track with her eyes. Simply the sensation that something terminal had been decided in the space she couldn't see, and it had been decided about her.
Outside the rib cage, Ainz Ooal Gown had opened his arms.
The magic circles appeared above him in layers — large circles containing smaller ones, each nested ring a separate component of a single compound casting, the geometries interlocking in ways that no single-attribute technique required. He wasn't building toward one thing. He was completing something he'd begun several moves ago, paying out the last of the setup cost.
Super-Position Magic — Sky Fall.
The arena sky opened. Not dramatically — no crack of thunder, no buildup. A door. Light poured from it in a column so wide its edge-to-edge diameter covered more than half the floor space below, white so complete it erased the concept of shadow within its radius. The pillar dropped from that door to the ground in the time it takes a heartbeat to finish.
The rib cage was inside the column.
It became ash in approximately the same duration.
The light didn't stop when the cage was gone. It didn't distinguish between the cage and what the cage had contained. It filled its radius completely and held there for a full second, and the arena floor under it ceased to have texture, the stone surface flattened and seared to an undifferentiated white.
Then it stopped.
The column withdrew. The door closed. The arena was silent.
Ainz Ooal Gown lowered his arms and observed the impact zone with the detached attention of an expert reviewing technique rather than outcome. He had, in total, deployed somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand available spell categories — not all of them tonight, but tonight's selection had represented a reasonable cross-section. The Bone King mastered all magical attributes without exception, and the calculation of overwhelming a target through sheer variety rather than any single overwhelming blow was an approach he had refined over centuries.
The red light in his eye sockets made no particular comment on what had just happened.
Where the two Admirals had been, the light column's aftermath was still dispersing. Whether anything had survived the radius was not yet clear.
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