A thunderous crack split the air. The brilliant white light running along the golden threads that covered the blue planet flickered in and out, like an incandescent bulb under unstable voltage. Sparks of radiance flashed across the entire world for the briefest instant before rapidly dimming.
Murder, destruction, greed, and all manner of negative emotions surfaced in the hearts of every living creature.
But this time, no one was controlled again.
A tiny yet stubborn thought, or perhaps a question, had taken root in their minds.
Who... am I?
Epsilon raised her slender arm and examined it.
Though delicate in appearance, the powerful physique she had built through relentless training meant that even in the most dangerous situations, all she had to do was clench her fist slightly to feel the reassuring solidity and strength of her own body.
Yet as Epsilon looked at her arm now, a thought suddenly appeared in her mind.
Am I this?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
The immense strength contained within it and the solid sensation of touch told Epsilon that the arm was still firmly attached to her body and completely under her control.
Yet the exhaustion rising from deep within her, combined with the strangely hollow sensation of touching something through a machine rather than directly, kept telling her brain that this was not her arm.
If this isn't my arm, then where is my arm?
Her mind instinctively followed that question.
She looked at the golden threads wrapped around her body and the white motes of light drifting outward from her.
Memories flashed through her mind, somehow blurry yet painfully clear at the same time.
I... I don't have arms.
I'm... I don't think I'm Epsilon.
I... don't seem to exist.
Then... who am I?
"Drip!"
Bright red blood seeped from Rias's pale skin beside her.
Epsilon instinctively turned her head and met Rias's gaze just as she regained consciousness from the earlier control.
Her unfocused eyes moved across Rias's face and the Devil blood continuously seeping from her skin and dripping onto the dirt.
Vaguely, the white motes drifting from Epsilon's own body seemed to merge into that blood.
Another thought suddenly emerged from the chaos inside her mind.
I... I'm this red-haired person in front of me.
Or maybe I'm the... blood she spilled on the ground?
No.
I... shouldn't be.
Or maybe I am.
Then... who exactly am I?
"Rumble..."
"Whoosh!"
Something possessing overwhelming power tore through the atmosphere nearby, distorting the air and leaving sonic booms in its wake.
Epsilon followed the sound with her eyes.
The buildings outside, some standing damaged and others already collapsed into rubble, now resembled tentacles growing from the earth. They twisted and tangled together in a viscous mass, like lumps of wet cement being stirred into one another.
Scattered dust, shattered tiles, and hardened asphalt rippled like the surface of a calm lake disturbed by a breeze.
The entire island...
No.
The entire world seemed to have gained a life of its own.
It was breathing.
The once-solid ground was slowly softening, rising and falling in waves.
Fires caused by the chaos intertwined with the blood-red water falling from the sky. The two clung together as though they had always been one. Water soaked into the sand and bound the grains together, while the flames simultaneously dried that moisture away. The evaporated water then returned to the muddy mixture of stone, blood, and flame, repeating the process endlessly.
But these were merely things Epsilon happened to notice while looking toward her true target.
There was no reason to be surprised.
None of it mattered.
What she was actually watching was the Heavenly Fire descending from the sky, falling toward the earth that was trying to merge with everyone upon it.
Yes.
None of this mattered.
Epsilon looked upward.
Despite the enormous distance separating her from the Heavenly Fire, she could clearly smell the sulfur radiating from it.
That was the essence of Heavenly Fire.
A Purifying Flame originating from Hell, meant to drag every virtue upon the earth into Hell and burn it away.
She knew perfectly well what was about to descend from the sky.
After all...
That was her.
She was the thing that would destroy everything in the world.
Yes.
The Heavenly Fire was her.
I... I... she...
Within Epsilon's clouded mind, the Magical Power seed left by Cid began vibrating continuously.
Those faint vibrations repeatedly pulled her fading sense of self back from the brink, only for it to start slipping away again.
Everything twisted and absurd around her filled Epsilon's spinning vision with intense revulsion.
Yet at the same time, waves of familiarity and closeness rose from deep within her heart.
She felt a powerful urge to merge with everything around her.
Of course, there was nothing strange about that.
Every living creature in this world was already part of the world.
Everyone was one.
What was there to care about?
After all, all of them were parts of the world, and together they made up the world itself.
Which meant they were the wor...
"Be still!"
A cold male voice, devoid of even the slightest trace of emotion, thundered across the heavens.
It struck the heart of the world like an enormous hammer.
Epsilon felt her head jolt.
The chaotic flood of information that had nearly overwhelmed her mind was instantly sorted into truth and falsehood, and everything that did not belong was stripped away.
"Hah... hah..."
Epsilon abruptly snapped out of her daze and gasped for breath.
When she realized she had come within a hair's breadth of believing she was a nonexistent mass of fire, cold sweat drenched her body.
She had no idea what would have happened if she had failed to hold on and truly believed herself to be some lifeless object belonging to the world.
But her instincts told her it would not have ended well.
There was no miraculous outcome where she suddenly replaced something else and ascended in one step to become an existence beyond even the world's strongest.
Had no one stopped what was happening, every living creature in the world would already have been absorbed into the world itself as nourishment by that phenomenon resembling the black-and-white static of a dying television.
Only after everything returned to nothingness, chaos restarted, and the world evolved anew would they emerge again within that newborn world.
Epsilon quietly raised her head and looked around.
Aside from the people in the streets who had just been awakened alongside her by Shadow-sama's voice, the buildings twisted together around them were horrifying beyond description.
Several unfortunate humans had already approached those unnatural structures and stepped into patches of earth or walls.
The solid concrete and their flesh seemed to exist in entirely different dimensions, overlapping without interacting.
Only once the victims had completely entered did the illusion suddenly become real.
Flesh-like concrete materialized inside their bodies.
Their lives were snuffed out almost instantly.
All they could do was scream before death, warning those nearby, before becoming grotesque masses of flesh embedded in concrete.
The filter the world had imposed upon Epsilon's perception had shattered.
The beautiful fantasy of ascending in a single step was gone, and the truth now stood exposed before Epsilon and everyone else.
There had never been anything beautiful about it.
During this sixth descent, Heavenly Fire and infernal fire twisted together.
Their power had multiplied severalfold, and the terrifying heat was about to descend upon the world, destroy it completely, then recreate heaven and earth so that nature could evolve anew.
But before the world itself was destroyed, the true threat to everyone's lives was the golden threads wrapped around their bodies and the white motes constantly scattering outward.
Those motes were merging with everything nearby.
Including them.
"Damn it! I can't tear them off!"
White motes drifting from other people's bodies and the surfaces of objects passed through every obstacle and touched them.
The strange lights seemed utterly incompatible with the world, yet the instant they made contact with someone, they melted directly into their body.
Huge amounts of chaotic information flooded their minds, battering their sanity.
Their identities and physical forms began to break down.
Having witnessed the horrific fate of others and realized that the golden threads wrapped around them were most likely the source of everything, Epsilon immediately struck at one of the mysterious golden strands.
Her powerful attack simply passed through it like an illusion and struck the ground.
The difference between them was so vast that they did not even seem to exist within the same dimension.
The fact that Epsilon and the others could see the threads at all was practically a privilege granted to them.
Their sense of self grew increasingly blurred.
Meanwhile, the foreign substances appearing inside their bodies felt disturbingly natural, as though they had existed there since birth.
They became part of their bodies and entered their biological systems.
Within mere seconds, trees and soil began intertwining and merging.
Seawater and flame fused into entirely new lifeforms.
Epsilon could already feel something beneath the surface of her skin beginning to twitch and grow unnaturally.
"Return!"
The cold male voice thundered across the heavens once more.
The white motes that had been scattering and merging into everything around them instantly stopped.
As though someone had pressed rewind, they floated back out of people's bodies and returned to the lifeforms or objects from which they had originally come.
As the white motes left Epsilon's body, the unnatural growth twisting beneath her skin stopped.
The non-flesh substances that had appeared inside her also vanished.
Only then did Epsilon finally breathe a sigh of relief.
That had been close.
Just a little longer, and she would have become a monster.
She looked up.
The hand of the gigantic clock had already begun turning backward.
Just as expected, the disasters that had now appeared four times vanished for the fourth time as the clock rewound.
All that remained in the distant sky was the enormous Seated Angel and a tiny silver-white figure standing before it.
Cid raised the clock with forty divisions once again.
When he saw that its hand was already pointing at "6," he narrowed his eyes.
He was certain his index finger had not moved in the slightest.
He had also been pressing down firmly on the dial itself, making it impossible for the face to rotate.
So...
There was only one possibility.
The divisions themselves had moved.
Cid was utterly speechless.
He withdrew the golden threads, restored all the scrambled information to its proper place, turned the hand back to "0," and casually put the clock away.
Then he looked at the grotesque monster before him, an existence that somehow possessed a strange beauty despite its horrific appearance.
This was becoming troublesome.
Cid had known the world would contain enormous amounts of accumulated garbage and countless bugs.
But seeing it firsthand still made him marvel at the sheer mountain of shitty code holding reality together.
He genuinely wanted to know how a world had to develop for removing one restart program to cause the entire system to collapse.
The biological system of a single human body was already far more intricate than the most advanced modern computer.
Yet something as complicated as a human body was still only an insignificant fraction of everything contained within the world, nowhere near as fundamental as natural phenomena.
Under those circumstances, a world that had no true deletion function and could only let things be processed naturally would inevitably accumulate an unimaginable amount of junk and useless programs after surviving for several hundred million years.
And in Cid's current world, three different worlds had fused together without collapsing and had somehow successfully formed a new one.
There was an extremely high chance that the accumulated garbage from one world would interact with something unnecessary from another and cause some bizarre chemical reaction.
Exactly like what was happening now.
"ROAR!!!"
"BOOM!"
A violent collision and piercing roar erupted from the Seated Angel trapped within the Magic Circles.
Its body, which had previously collapsed into motes of light, had already completely regenerated.
Then it began expanding.
"BANG!"
At last, the Magic Circles shattered.
A blazing blade of light swung toward Cid, only to strike another Magic Circle that appeared before him.
"Clang!"
The green-yellow weapon slammed into the Magic Circle, unleashing layer upon layer of shockwaves.
Darkness began pouring from the Seated Angel again.
Specks of blood-red color appeared across the churning sea.
The scorching Heavenly Fire began to glow.
Give it another dozen seconds, and the apocalypse of "7" would erupt across the world.
But Cid's attention was no longer focused on that.
If he could not find some way to make the Seated Angel settle down, then it did not matter how many times he acted.
Killing it was impossible.
Cid had already tried finding the true body behind the Seated Angel, the invisible program spread throughout every corner of the world, and dismantling it directly.
The result had been obvious.
The entire world immediately began collapsing, and the information making up human bodies scattered everywhere.
So that plan was out.
It was no different from tearing out the load-bearing wall of a building.
In that sense, Epsilon had only seen the surface of what had happened.
How was the system supposed to restart after the entire system had crashed?
Removing the program's bug had simply caused an even larger bug that froze the whole world.
Well, Cid had more or less expected that.
The world was a mountain of shitty code.
As long as it ran, that was apparently good enough.
Still, the bug caused by removing this particular bug had exceeded even his expectations.
It was only a restart program.
Did removing it really need to crash the entire system?
Cid frowned suspiciously.
Then he remembered the heart-like mass of flesh that had flown out of Itogami Island.
Could that be it?
"Aaaah!!!"
The sound of another Magic Circle shattering pulled Cid out of his thoughts.
He looked at the darkness spreading around him, then at the divisions beginning to move across the clock face.
Only then did he realize that "7" was almost here.
With the previous six disasters, he had still had time to intervene.
But judging from the bug he had sensed, the seventh would instantly collapse the physical bodies of every living creature in the world.
There would be no opportunity to save anyone.
Everyone's information would immediately be reduced into one enormous "lump."
So what the hell was that mass of flesh?!
Forget it.
Cid had already decided that he absolutely could not allow "7" to happen.
He was going to get serious.
That was easy to say.
Actually doing it was another matter entirely.
Magic Circles appeared around the Seated Angel once again, attempting to restrain her movements.
But in the very next instant, the white motes reappeared throughout the world.
That confirmed it.
She could not be sealed.
If he sealed her, the program would freeze and drag the entire world into another system failure along with it.
...How the hell was he supposed to fight something like this?!
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