Nazarick — or rather, the Mirror World that mirrored it.
"Senpai, aren't we going to wait for the upperclassmen from the official exam to show up?" A rescued first-year Intruder trailing at the back of the group watched the silver-haired girl walking ahead of them and finally worked up the nerve to ask.
Kiryūin shook her head. "Time doesn't wait for anybody. Besides, our condition for opening the exam is to bring the Intruder inside Nazarick down to zero — or knock one Floor Guardian off the board."
"According to Shiina, Ainz Ooal Gown has a way to resurrect his Guardians. Which leaves exactly one road: walk every Intruder out of here."
"But what if it really does come down to trading pieces with them?"
"That's what idiots do."
Fūka Kiryūin let out a soft laugh.
She talked a big game about cutting loose, and she was, without argument, the strongest fighter among the upperclassmen these days — but there wasn't a single brainless impulse behind her plan.
The moment she reached the Great Tomb she gave her first order: the Phantom Legion, who could slip through any crack, were to melt into shadow and infiltrate every floor of the Tomb to scout it.
She herself took the successfully turned Shalltear and went straight for the Treasury, where Nazarick's endless hoard was stored.
As for the rest of the students holding position in the Kingdom of Shadows and the Mirror World, their job was to free the Intruder the Great Tomb had captured, and farm points off weaker monsters while they were at it.
Strong against strong, weak against weak.
Kiryūin didn't really like splitting her forces; she'd rather have massed everyone in one place and thrown a rested fist at the enemy's soft spots. But the situation didn't allow it.
Strictly speaking, they were the invaders in this world.
For a power like the Great Tomb — dug in for years, waiting comfortably on home ground — "weak pieces" and cannon fodder were things it had in bottomless supply.
So Fūka Kiryūin simply leaned on the one forbidden ground the enemy could never afford to slack off about: the Treasury. Hit that, and their strongest would have to show themselves.
Fighting inside a vault where the other side had an infinite supply of items did carry a certain flavor of dancing on a powder keg.
But by her own reckoning, the situation had reached the point where risk was mandatory. The only direction left was forward.
Some dangers look lethal, yet turn out to be illusions once you commit to walking through them; take one step back, and you fall into an abyss you never climb out of.
So she padded her insurance to the limit, even borrowing a [Phantom Mask] from a classmate she knew well.
She had shadow ninjas for tactical support anytime, anywhere, plus The World's Time Stop, the body granted by Beast King Transformation, the regeneration of the [Darkness Devil flesh fragment], and…
…the spirit crystal that had given her the power of the Yamai spirits.
With that loadout, Kiryūin judged, holding out until the exam formally opened was not going to be a problem.
By then, even if she took a crippling wound, the Darkness Devil's flesh would patch it back together.
"As for right now—"
Fūka Kiryūin glanced at the arrogant vampire standing beside her.
"Let's go, Shalltear."
"Let me see exactly how much punch a so-called spacequake really packs."
Meanwhile, on the Eighth Floor of the Great Tomb.
As the soldiers of the Dark Shadow Legion seeped into the floor where the Tomb kept its captured Intruder—
The Pleiades, whom Ainz Ooal Gown had stationed there long in advance, and the elite magical beasts under Aura and Mare, were already braced and waiting.
Still, once Albedo and Cocytus had returned to their own floors and finished what needed doing, they hurried straight back to Ainz's position.
After all, these invaders from another world could use shadow ninjas and the Mirror World to bypass the Tomb's defensive barrier entirely and force their way inside.
Which meant the standard doctrine — Guardians holding their own floors, bleeding the enemy layer by layer — had lost all its value.
Basic maintenance on each floor was enough, just in case the enemy tried some backwards-thinking ambush.
Ainz could pinpoint-teleport anywhere inside the Tomb regardless of obstacles anyway.
Better to concentrate the highest combat power in one place and maximize it than scatter and be picked off one by one.
But before the Guardians had all confirmed their return—
Nazarick's highest-alert system threw a red warning window up in front of Ainz.
[! Violent spatial fluctuation detected in the Treasury domain of the Great Tomb of Nazarick !]
[! Obstruction magic has failed !]
[! Spatial barrier has failed !]
"What?!"
Ainz's grip clamped down on the Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown.
'So it was a feint — they mean to hit our vault directly!'
'But… how is that possible? The Treasury's defenses are an independent pocket dimension. They forced their way through the Tomb's own full-domain dimensional lockdown?!'
Panic churned in him, but outwardly he held the dignity of a Supreme Being.
'No more waiting.'
The Treasury's defenses were pierced, and Pandora's Actor could not possibly handle an intrusion on this scale alone.
He made the call on the spot. "Demiurge, you stay here and oversee the whole picture! All remaining Guardians, come with me to the Treasury at once!"
"I've opened Ring of Ainz Ooal Gown privileges to all of you — teleport directly!"
"Yes, Lord Ainz!"
Demiurge bowed deep and low.
When he lifted his head again, the throne room held no one but himself.
He nudged his glinting glasses up and opened every information panel currently within his reach.
Beyond the demon generals grinding away at Miyabi Nagumo's robots outside—
Most of his attention went to coordinating the Tomb's internal intelligence network, trying to slam the door on any further surprises.
Demiurge still had no idea how the enemy had broken through the Tomb's spatial barrier, nor how they were pulling precise intel on them straight through World-tier concealment items.
But in his eyes, nothing in this world could stand against the divine majesty of a Supreme Being.
So long as Lord Ainz acted personally, everything would turn out fine.
At the same time, inside the Treasury.
When the alarms began to howl, Pandora's Actor didn't panic in the slightest. He rubbed his hands together with theatrical relish and struck an eager pose.
As a Guardian NPC created by Ainz Ooal Gown's own hands, he doubled as the keeper of the Great Tomb's treasure.
By rights, even if Nazarick's very survival hung in the balance, he would never get a chance to go out and contribute in battle.
The Tomb's treasure — and the Mausoleum housing its World Item — were too important to risk, after all.
Never in his wildest dreams had he expected the day would come when he'd see real combat!
And the vault stood apart from the Tomb's regular floors.
It was a separate pocket dimension, unseen by anyone, reachable only by teleporting in with the Ring of Ainz Ooal Gown.
On top of that, it had the defense-specialized World Item [Throne of Kings] as its last line of insurance.
In Pandora's view, this was an absolute fortress with no gaps whatsoever.
Which was exactly why he was so worked up.
He was already savoring it: the despair and shock that would break over the faces of those suicidal invaders when they discovered their grand assault amounted to nothing at all, loud thunder and not a drop of rain.
"Come! Let me hear you wail!"
Pandora murmured, giddy.
Sadly, on this particular point, he had miscalculated.
The so-called World Items in Ainz's world—
—were fundamentally nothing more than a fragment of a world from the game Yggdrasil, carrying that world's laws with them. That was the only reason their functions outstripped ordinary magic.
But actually representing an entire world, let alone standing against the complete laws of one… they fell hopelessly short.
Take the Kingdom of Shadows behind the Phantom Mask. The Mirror World behind the Blank Card Box. Or the spirits' Neighboring World behind the spirit crystal.
Every one of those was a separate, self-contained extra world.
They were conceptual worlds Chris had created with his own items, purely so those items could function properly.
In terms of rank, that sat who knew how many dimensions above a mere world fragment.
So, naturally, once they had the coordinates of the Tomb's vault, tearing a hole in space and forcing their way inside was hardly a challenge for Fūka Kiryūin and the others.
As for how they got the coordinates… let's just say this.
Loyal Shalltear on one end, Hiyori Shiina's god's-eye view on the other — the coordination between them was flawless.
And so.
By the time Pandora's Actor listened to the alarms climbing higher and higher and finally realized things were slipping outside his control—
A pressure far beyond anything in his understanding — beyond even Super-Tier Magic — crashed down on him in an instant.
He could have mimicked one of the Supreme Beings on the spot and ducked into the Mausoleum that housed the Throne of Kings, dodging the lethal blow entirely.
But as the guardian of Nazarick's treasure, his settings would not let him stand and watch the vault he was made to protect be destroyed.
Pandora immediately took the form of Touch Me, the strongest physical fighter among the Supreme Beings, drew his sword, and prepared to tank it head-on—
And in that hair's-breadth moment—
Light flared, and Ainz Ooal Gown arrived with the Guardians in tow.
'Pandora, you are truly my creation. Your loyalty is something to be proud of.'
Ainz's Message rang in Pandora's mind.
Hearing his creator's voice, Pandora nearly burst with joy, his morale soaring.
But before he could withdraw and settle in to watch his all-powerful Lord Ainz work his divine might—
Ainz's hollow eye sockets stayed fixed on the collapsing space ahead of them.
'This… so it really isn't magic. It's closer to a physical phenomenon — a purely destructive energy shock?'
Ainz reached his conclusion fast.
He turned at once to order Aura to use the World Item [Depiction of Nature and Society] and drag every undamaged section of the Treasury into another world and seal it off.
But Aura was grinding her teeth, and the news she brought was bad. "It's terrible, Lord Ainz! The man we sealed inside the Depiction of Nature and Society somehow found one of its random escape routes! He's already halfway through it!"
"What?!"
Ainz reeled.
The rules governing a change of ownership for the Depiction of Nature and Society were absurdly abstract.
Find one of the forty random clearing routes inside it, walk out, and you stripped the item's ownership away outright.
Nazarick itself had won that very item in the old game through exactly that loophole, so nobody understood the risk better than Ainz.
The enemy already had absurd combat strength and an unknown way of gathering intelligence. If he pulled the entire Treasury inside now…
If that man called Chris hurried up and cleared the route, they'd be hand-delivering their entire fortune to his doorstep.
But this was no time for Ainz to stand around being shocked.
The terrible spatial tremor ahead was already on top of them.
He changed his orders in an instant.
"Mare! Albedo! Build a defensive array with me! Use the cash-shop items, no holding back!"
Neither Albedo nor Mare could understand why Ainz had suddenly abandoned the safest option, the World Item. But NPCs designed for absolute loyalty obey the second an order lands, and they moved without hesitation.
The two of them gave everything, straining to squeeze two hundred percent of their mana into the magic barrier.
Since Ainz had already seen through the fact that the attack wasn't magical, he skipped the flashy wide-area defensive spells.
Instead he swapped his mage's robes straight out for Touch Me's World Champion armor.
And at the same time he piled skills onto himself like a madman.
"Super-Tier Magic, 'Absolute Physical Defense'!"
"Tenth-Tier Magic, 'Radiant Emerald Body'!"
Buffs he had already layered, he layered again, purely for insurance.
And reality proved every bit as cruel as he'd predicted.
A pitch-black hemisphere of energy, its edges crawling with violent lightning, expanded outward.
It was as if space itself had split open a great mouth and begun swallowing everything into exile.
Gold coins, treasures, the architecture itself — everything the wave touched was ground mercilessly into powder.
Because Albedo and Mare had raised magic shields designed to stop tenth-tier and super-tier spells, pure physical annihilation went straight through them.
The shockwave rolled on without resistance.
Ainz's judgment, however, was vindicated beautifully.
With the guild weapon in his hand as his core protection and layer upon layer of defensive buffs stacked on top, the spacequake's backwash annihilated everything around them — yet he and the handful of Guardians he'd shielded behind him rode it out shaken but whole, without a single fatal wound.
When the black storm of energy finally faded—
In the middle of the wrecked Treasury, standing before Ainz and the others—
—was an arrogant girl in an ornate astral dress, silver hair dancing in the wind, a pair of fluffy lion ears perched on her head.
Fūka Kiryūin.
'A physical destruction skill on that scale — she has to be sitting in its cooldown right now!'
Red light flickered in Ainz's sockets.
His hands never stopped; he was already winding up an instant-death spell with no cast animation.
The Guardians beside him raised their weapons too, ready to shred the invader who dared defile the Great Tomb.
And yet.
The first answer to the Tomb's focused fire did not come from Fūka Kiryūin.
It came from Shalltear Bloodfallen — who had appeared, silent as a shadow, directly behind Ainz.
Clad in crimson valkyrie plate, spear gripped tight, she had it leveled squarely at Ainz Ooal Gown's back.
"[Purifying Javelin]!"
A divine-class throwing skill with lethal bonus damage against the undead, carrying a holy attribute on top.
At that distance, if the blow landed, it would cripple Ainz beyond any hope of recovery.
He was wearing Touch Me's World Champion armor, and its defense was monstrous.
But what Shalltear had aimed at was his completely unprotected skull.
In that razor-thin instant—
"Lord Ainz!"
Albedo had no time to think, no time even to stack a defensive skill. On pure instinct she threw her whole body into Shalltear's path.
"Shhk—!"
The holy spear punched clean through Albedo's chest.
Blood sprayed.
There wasn't a trace of pain on Albedo's face.
There was only rage, so total it bordered on deformity.
She glared at Shalltear and snarled through clenched teeth. "Shalltear! You filthy vampire! Have you truly betrayed Nazarick?!"
"To raise a hand against Lord Ainz! Unforgivable!"
Faced with Albedo's fury—
Shalltear only split her fang-crowded mouth open and let out a sick peal of laughter.
"Hahaha~"
"Albedo, what stupid things are you saying? How could I possibly betray anyone?"
"I've come back to swear my loyalty… to my true master!"
With that she flashed forward, the Spuit Lance stabbing out without a shred of mercy, aiming to finish the gravely wounded Albedo off for good.
But every Floor Guardian except Demiurge and Gargantua, left behind in the hall, was standing right here.
There was no chance they'd let her have it.
"Don't even dream of it!"
Cocytus drew his great odachi, and he and Sebas Tian closed in from left and right in the same breath.
Shalltear ranked near the top of the Guardians in one-on-one power, but no amount of skill was going to carry her through a gang beating from several enraged Floor Guardians.
The scene collapsed into a brawl.
In Ainz Ooal Gown's eyes, though, the deadliest threat here wasn't the turncoat vampire.
It was Fūka Kiryūin, hanging in midair.
Held aloft by a swirling wind, she gripped a bizarre, asymmetrical weapon — one large piece and one small crossing each other — and had it pointed straight at him.
Ainz narrowed his gaze.
Only then did he realize the thing in her hands was no twin-headed spear.
It was an arrow. An arrow of an absolutely ridiculous size.
And once he found that his signature [Grasp Heart] had zero effect on Kiryūin—
Ainz Ooal Gown made an instant decision and invoked the forced-teleport authority he'd set up in advance.
"Fwoosh—!"
Every single person present — the dueling Shalltear, the gravely wounded Albedo, Fūka Kiryūin included — was ripped away and dumped onto the Eighth Floor of the Great Tomb.
In truth, the Treasury was a pocket dimension with an absolute lock on teleportation magic.
By all rights, mass forced teleportation that ignored resistance shouldn't have been possible there.
The only way out was through the Ring of Ainz Ooal Gown as a medium.
But he was the guild master, after all.
And their position happened to be the Treasury's entrance zone, which on a conceptual level retained a faint link to the Tenth Floor — so he'd used that as a cheat to override the restriction.
Credit where credit was due: for this, he actually had Pandora's Actor to thank.
If Pandora hadn't wandered up near the entrance to check on things—
If Fūka Kiryūin had appeared in the vault's central core instead…
Then the Tomb's spatial lockdown, which treated every intruder equally, might well have sealed Ainz and his own people into a death trap with no exit.
Unfortunately.
A rushed forced teleport like that came with its own downsides.
The abrupt shift in space broke Shalltear straight out of the encirclement the Guardians had been grinding her down in.
Free again, she could once more deploy the high-tier teleportation skills she took such pride in, flitting and weaving around the battlefield to her heart's content.
On any ordinary day, that would have been tolerable.
Against multiple Guardians, hit-and-run tactics gave Shalltear almost no path to victory.
The problem was that there was also a Fūka Kiryūin standing right there, charging her ultimate.
If Shalltear tied up the Guardians' feet—
And Kiryūin loosed that one arrow—
Fortunately.
As the Bone King, who put the Great Tomb's interests above all else, Ainz was capable of a ruthlessness ordinary people could never match.
When he'd arranged the holding of the captured Intruder earlier, he had stashed every one of them on the most heavily guarded Eighth Floor.
Now that group of Intruder finally had a use.
Ainz gave his staff the faintest wave.
"Fwoosh!"
Dozens of Intruder students, bound rigid by high-tier magic, faces slack with terror—
—materialized out of thin air in front of him, planted squarely in Fūka Kiryūin's firing line.
"Come, visitors from another world."
Ainz's voice was ice. "Your classmates. Your schoolmates. The families of your friends…"
"Fire your strongest shot into them!"
Faced with an act that deranged—
Shock flickered through Fūka Kiryūin's eyes, and for a heartbeat her drawing fingers locked up.
She had, in fact, anticipated that Ainz would use the Intruder as meat shields.
What she hadn't anticipated was that the testers she'd sent off to farm points would fold this fast.
Did Nazarick have hidden high-value elite monsters on top of the Guardians it showed the world?
That harrowing scene, seen through the Mirror World's god's-eye view—
—landed in Hiyori Shiina's sight in perfect detail.
Watching those innocent students shoved forward as shields—
The quiet, reserved girl felt her chest clench tight.
Even before this, when she'd been watching those upperclassmen struggle against the Eighth Floor's monsters, pinned down by wave after wave of elite mobs—
She had wanted to switch her viewpoint and warn Miyabi Nagumo, Hayasaka Ai, and Chris.
But even with the Kingdom of Shadows and the Mirror World letting them walk through space and ignore most traps and obstacles—
The distance was simply too great. Reaching the core battlefield would take time no matter what.
She saw the flicker of hesitation cross Fūka Kiryūin's face.
Then something like resolve settled in; the girl's gaze sharpened again, and the bowstring drew taut once more.
Panic clawed at Hiyori.
She refused to watch her schoolmates die at the hands of their own side.
It was a moral trap that would sit on her conscience forever.
And on a battlefield this far away, she had no way at all to intervene with force.
She turned it over and over in her mind…
In the end, the only real advantage she had was the god's-eye view itself.
She drew a deep breath and pressed her palm against the mirror projection.
A clear voice, strained tight around the edges, cracked across the sky of the entire Eighth Floor.
"Ainz Ooal Gown!"
"Or should I say… Momonga! Suzuki Satoru!"
That name belonged only to his original human identity — a name that by rights only he himself and that mysterious Black Sphere could possibly know.
Ainz Ooal Gown's head snapped up before he could stop it.
'Who?! How can anyone know that name?!'
And that split second of distraction, fatal in every sense—
—was caught instantly by Fūka Kiryūin's razor combat instincts.
"Skyrunner!"
She let the strained bowstring go.
The keen arrow of wind and light became an azure meteor tearing through heaven and earth.
It drove forward without deviation, straight at the "Momonga orb" hidden deep inside Ainz's body.
With that killing blow already in his face—
The thoughts Ainz's forced calm had suppressed came flooding back.
"Tenth-Tier Magic, 'Instant Time Stop'!"
As a quick-cast spell, its duration was pitiful — only a few seconds of frozen time.
And it came with the system rule that no direct damage could be dealt to an enemy while time was stopped.
But as a life-saving instant-cast trick, it was without question the perfect answer here.
A gray, colorless world descended.
Ainz looked at the arrow of wind that had slipped through a gap in the crowd and come within a breath of touching his robe, and a chill of hindsight ran through him.
He didn't dare waste a moment.
In those precious few seconds of frozen time, he first used a high-tier displacement skill to pull far outside the arrow's path.
His plan was to wait until the stop ended and time flowed again, then see whether that terrifying attack carried a conceptual "forced tracking" effect.
If it did—
Then humiliating or not, he would use the guild ring again without hesitation and teleport to some safer floor of the Tomb to wait out the storm.
Because even wearing Touch Me's World Champion armor, with every defensive buff he owned stacked to the ceiling—
He still wasn't willing to gamble on whether he could tank a shot that looked like she'd thrown away everything to fire it.
Once he was safely relocated—
Ainz turned his head toward the other side of the field.
There, Shalltear was being hounded by several Guardians.
But between vampiric regeneration and sheer agility, she was carving a rampage through the summoned elite monsters instead.
She was a tireless meat grinder, swinging the Spuit Lance and drinking her wounds shut as fast as they opened.
"Damn it…"
Ainz raised his hand, baring the shooting-star ring set on his finger bones.
"Super-Tier Magic — [Wish Upon a Star]!"
"Strip the Mental Domination off Shalltear, completely!"
If he could bring Shalltear back to her senses, he could learn where the enemy was and drag the situation back under his control.
That done, he let out a long breath.
Then he turned back toward Fūka Kiryūin, who had loosed that arrow of wind.
The reason Ainz hadn't simply slaughtered the captured Intruder from the start—
—was that he'd always meant to use them as bait, drawing high-end enemy assets like Fūka Kiryūin and Miyabi Nagumo into one concentrated spot.
And then erase every one of them at once with the absolute instant death of super-tier magic.
Given that his [Grasp Heart] had failed on this woman—
Ainz guessed she was like Shalltear: a racial trait or a piece of gear granting near-total immunity to death effects.
Which meant—
He would pair the spell with his own trump card and make one final attempt.
However.
When he lifted his head and swept his gaze across the patch of air where she'd been hanging—
He found, with a jolt—
Fūka Kiryūin was gone.
"What…?!"
Alarm bells screamed through him.
'Does she have some special ability with time resistance? Can she move freely inside these frozen seconds?!'
Ainz hastily threw out detection magic, searching in every direction.
Pressure surged in from his flank.
Fūka Kiryūin appeared beside him without the slightest warning, like a dump truck barreling in at full speed.
And she launched Ainz Ooal Gown clean off his feet.
"BAM!!!"
Ainz tumbled across the ground several times before he scraped to a halt.
Feeling the shock still ringing through his bones, he was utterly lost.
"That's wrong…"
"Even if you can move inside a time stop, how can you inflict actual damage within a law that has frozen time itself?!"
"That doesn't follow the rules of magic at all! It's not logical!"
Watching the Bone King get sent flying, Fūka Kiryūin tossed her silver hair and couldn't resist a jab.
"Heh… looks like that time-stop magic of yours just doesn't measure up to my Stand, The World."
"A pathetic few seconds of magical time stop, and you thought that would cage me?"
As she spoke, The World rose into being behind her, and Kiryūin closed the distance.
She meant to use her advantage in stopped time to break this pile of bones down into scrap.
Against that unreasonable, in-your-face steamrolling, Ainz was still shackled by his own spell's rigid rule: inside a magical time stop, he could not damage the enemy.
He had never felt so helpless.
All he could do was fire off [Perfect Warrior], wrenching his fragile mage class over into a warrior's—
—and rely on the massive dual resistances of Touch Me's armor to grit his teeth and eat Kiryūin's storm of blows.
But converting a mage into a warrior only swapped the stat sheet. It granted no combat technique whatsoever.
And even converted, his stats couldn't touch a Fūka Kiryūin stacked with Beast King Transformation and every other buff she carried.
Pinned down, Ainz was reduced to a punching bag, yanking defensive scrolls and items out of his inventory one after another just to stay in the fight.
Fortunately.
The tenth-tier time stop he'd cast had a very short duration to begin with.
A few seconds later, color and motion came flooding back into the world.
"Now!"
Ainz seized the instant the stop broke and threw his hand up.
"[Reality Slash]!"
Wave after wave of tenth-tier blade energy wove into a net and bore down on Fūka Kiryūin.
Kiryūin, now carrying the wind blessing of the Yamai astral dress [Skyrunner], answered it instantly.
Light as a swallow, she cut through several sharp changes of direction in midair and slipped past every blade with room to spare.
But that was exactly what Ainz wanted.
All he needed were those few seconds she spent dodging.
"It's all over."
Ainz lit the shooting-star ring on his hand a second time and chanted aloud.
"Skill, activate! [The Goal of All Life is Death]!"
"[Widen Magic — Cry of the Banshee]!"
"Uwaaaaaahhhh—!!!"
A banshee's shriek tore across the floor, more hideous than anything living.
An invisible gray ripple spread outward with Ainz at its center, swallowing every tester and every Intruder in a vast radius around him.
Behind Ainz, a ticking, ghostly clock slowly took shape.
Its hands began counting down, second by second.
The moment that countdown reached zero at twelve—
The death effect would ignore every resistance and rip the life out of everything still standing inside the radius.
The instant the ripple washed over her—
Fūka Kiryūin felt her heart drop, and a cold like the gaze of death itself crawled up her spine.
But her willpower was formidable, and she crushed the tremor down almost at once.
She looked at the enormous clock ticking behind Ainz, its meaning impossible to mistake.
Kiryūin understood the skill's kill mechanic immediately.
'I can't stay here.'
'Before that clock hits zero, I use the Phantom Legion's shadow passages and duck into the Kingdom of Shadows — try to slip the death check that way.'
But before retreating…
"Trying to drag us down with you?"
"Then I'll send your people to hell first!"
"The World!"
Fūka Kiryūin's shout rang out.
Golden Stand light blazed again.
This time it was the real thing: time stopped across the entire universe.
Locked inside the stop, Ainz Ooal Gown—
—discovered to his horror that even with a time-resistance artifact on his person—
Under Kiryūin's higher-dimensional Stand-based time stop, he could still think, could even move—
—but not one of the items he carried for breaking control effects could unfreeze this halted time.
And what terrified him more—
When he looked up, Fūka Kiryūin was out of his sight all over again.
"She's vanished again?!"
Ainz threw detection magic out in a frantic sweep.
At last, on the far side of the battlefield—
He found her.
She had already appeared, without a whisper of sound, in front of the Guardians who had no immunity to a time stop.
She even had the spare time to drag Albedo, Mare, Aura and the Pleiades battle maids around like dolls, hauling them into one perfectly straight line.
And then.
Kiryūin drew the bow to full.
The wind arrow, blazing with destructive azure light, was leveled at point-blank range at the front end of that human skewer.
'This woman… she has no honor at all!'
Ainz Ooal Gown howled it inside his skull.
Wasn't this exactly the kind of cheap, gutter-level move only a villain like him was supposed to pull?!
You're a bright-eyed, justice-stuffed high schooler — how is your heart blacker than mine?!
Still.
Furious as he was—
Ainz, powerless inside the stop, couldn't help a thread of relief either.
'Thank goodness… I hid Gargantua and Rubedo deeper in.'
'And Demiurge and Pandora's Actor aren't here.'
'We've already revived Aura and Mare once with gold before. Even if the vault took a beating from the spacequake and the losses are severe, the Tomb still has enough gold left to bring all of these Guardians back one more time.'
'As long as I don't die, Nazarick will not fall!'
So.
Ainz's only thought now was preserving himself.
He absolutely could not let that madwoman find an opening inside the stop and burst him down in one chain.
And so.
Not only did he leave the Guardians lined up in their neat row to their fate—
He used what movement he could still scrape together to struggle over to the Intruder he'd used as meat shields, and buried himself in the crowd.
The Goal of All Life is Death amplified every instant-death spell, so that even targets with resistance would die within a set span of time.
Under the law of the stopped time, its effect had been forcibly paused and couldn't fully express itself.
But he'd already seen it: the ghostly clock behind him had counted all the way down to zero.
Which meant—
The moment Kiryūin's time stop ended and time began to flow again—
His death magic would ignore every defense in existence and take hold.
"Come on…"
Hidden in the crowd, Ainz kept his hollow sockets locked on Kiryūin.
The next second.
"Time — resume!"
Fūka Kiryūin released the taut bowstring.
Color and sound came rushing back into the world.
The wind arrow detonated in their faces, and the Guardians — consciousness only just returning from the stop, minds still rebooting — had no chance whatsoever of reacting.
"BOOOOM—!!!"
The azure storm punched straight through.
Albedo, Aura, Mare, and the Pleiades lined up behind them—
In that single strike, every one of them was shredded into a sky-wide rain of blood and fragments.
And in that same instant—
Ainz Ooal Gown's [Goal of All Life is Death] finally went off.
A soundless death wave swept the entire field.
All around him—
Including the innocent Intruder.
Including Fūka Kiryūin, who had just loosed her killing shot and hadn't even had time to slip into the Kingdom of Shadows.
Every last one of them, under that rule of forced death—
—lost all life in their bodies, dissolving into drifting motes of blue light where they stood.
Ainz Ooal Gown surveyed the emptied battlefield and finally let out a long, long breath.
The Guardians had been wiped out to the last. The price could hardly be called anything but agonizing.
But it had worked.
The Goal of All Life is Death and its forced death check had come through.
No monster with total immunity to instant death had turned up.
Clear out the most troublesome testers, and the rest was simple: revive the Guardians at his leisure.
'So then…'
'Now it's just the two of us here.'
Ainz turned his head.
And looked toward Shalltear, standing not far off, with something close to hope.
The obstacles were all dead, and he had already dispelled her control with super-tier magic.
So then…
"Shalltear."
Ainz's voice dropped low, carrying a gentleness he rarely allowed himself. "Come back. It's all over."
However.
What answered him was a Spuit Lance trailing crimson blood-aura.
There was reverence in Shalltear's eyes, and affection too — and not the slightest pause in her hands.
"Lord Ainz, why are you dodging? I came all this way to bring you warmth!"
"…"
Ainz went quiet.
The last sliver of wishful thinking in him died.
'Brainwashing that even super-tier magic can't undo…'
'So it really is a World Item.'
In that case, he would hold nothing back either.
He lifted the staff in his hand, ready to summon Gargantua and Rubedo — Nazarick's final trump cards, hidden away in its deepest reaches.
He would erase this traitor completely.
And afterward he'd test whether the guild's stored data could put Shalltear right again.
But.
In the very moment he raised the staff—
Above the ruin and wreckage of the Eighth Floor, an electronic chime rang out without warning.
It drowned every other sound of battle.
[Detected: all Intruder within the Great Tomb of Nazarick have been reduced to zero.]
[Prerequisite condition satisfied.]
[The Special Exam is now officially open.]
____
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