The whole time, nothing. Not a shadow.
Which was why he'd meant to slip away the moment chaos gave him cover.
Gojo was a problem he had no answer for.
No answer at all.
Worse, the man had that eerie ability to reach past flesh and claw at the mind itself.
Under those terms, running was the only sensible move.
And look where his effort had landed him.
The little girl's words shattered every piece of that plan.
Every move he'd made had been watched. Noted. Seen.
A clown performing for an audience he hadn't known was there.
That humiliation had already been served to him once. And here it came again.
Walking the same path twice was more than he could stomach.
"Damn it!"
"Damn it!"
The memory of that dimensional prison, trapped inside his own body with nothing around him, was enough to drive him out of his mind.
For an ordinary person, that environment would end in death, and death would be the end of it.
Not him. He didn't age. He didn't bleed. He didn't hunger.
Locked in a place like that, even dying was a luxury he'd be denied.
Whatever it took, he wasn't going back. Never.
"All of you, die!"
The panic response had taken over. Murder lit every corner of his eyes.
He dropped into a crouch, scooped two handfuls of dirt off the ground, and roared.
Mid-roar, his body twisted and he flung the dirt in every direction.
The soil scattered through the air.
A single heartbeat.
Red mist bloomed around him in a dozen places at once.
The rabbits that had been worrying at him, tirelessly trying for a bite, became the first casualties.
The dirt spread like petals thrown at a wedding.
Each rabbit burst into a grim red flower.
But.
The rabbits weren't the only targets. The arc of the attack carried right up into the sky where Roswaal was holding.
Capella didn't so much as flinch. She kept laughing, kept pressing Roswaal, and let the dirt punch straight through her body like she was cheesecloth.
Capella could afford not to care. Roswaal could not.
One hand kept Capella off him. The other had to track whatever Regulus was throwing next.
The clown lord who'd been playing spectator moments earlier, comfortable as a man in a theater box, had been dragged into a two-front siege within minutes of Elsa stepping out.
A wet pop cut through the air.
Going one-on-one with Capella, whose offense wasn't her strength, Roswaal had the upper hand.
Two at once was another story.
Not long into the exchange, Roswaal grunted, and his right calf exploded into a cloud of red.
Regulus had lost it. All coherent thought gone. Every living thing in reach was something he wanted dead.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. Took us long enough. Finally got him cornered."
Gojo watched Roswaal's situation with something between amusement and admiration.
"I'm almost starting to feel bad for him."
Felt crossed her arms and pitched her voice into exaggerated pity.
"Hey now, don't say gross stuff like that. Who was the one complaining a minute ago?"
"Hee hee. Just talking."
Gojo watched Roswaal's position grow more precarious under the two-pronged assault.
Whatever schemes the clown had been cooking, whatever endgame, whatever point to any of it, Gojo didn't know.
This, though. This was the opening.
Staring death in the face had a way of clarifying priorities. If Roswaal wasn't an idiot, the correct choice would present itself.
Patience was all that was needed now. Wait for the moment the noose closed all the way.
Facing Capella and Regulus both, plus a slanderous frame-up he'd done nothing to earn, Roswaal didn't lose his composure.
He didn't bellow like Regulus. He didn't waste breath protesting.
He stayed quiet.
The only change was a seventh... no, a sixth orb of light blooming in his palm.
Six orbs.
Sextuple casting.
The apex of his craft. The most destructive magic he commanded.
The caster had to hold an unusual mind, capable of imagining, observing, condensing, and releasing six distinct spells at once.
Not a split focus. A consciousness fractured six ways.
Early-fight Roswaal had been a pistol. Then a submachine gun. Then a heavy machine gun. And now a metal storm.
A flood of spellfire in its truest form.
Sextuple casting.
The magical light turned night into something else.
Night became day. Brilliance spread across the earth.
Nothing in its reach had anywhere to hide.
A continuous thundering rolled across the sky.
Carpet bombing. A single man with the firepower of an army.
The figure in the sky had become an airborne carrier throwing out unlimited ordnance.
The scale of it was staggering.
And yet.
Firepower enough to erase an army, and against Capella and Regulus, it amounted to almost nothing.
One of them regenerated like a nightmare. The other simply didn't register damage.
The fight had become Roswaal burning mana into a void.
Capella and Regulus were spending almost none of theirs.
"What happened to conservation of energy? This doesn't track at all."
Gojo watched Capella knit herself back together yet again and mentally stamped her as a nuisance of the highest order.
Different flavor from Regulus, same headache.
The cleanest solution was the one he'd used before. Lock her in Unlimited Void and file her away in dimensional space.
"Roswaal's not going to last much longer. Aren't we stepping in?"
Felt kept her voice low as her eyes stayed on the figure above.
One leg gone. The other man's blood loss had left him pale enough to pass for a ghost.
"Not yet. He hasn't hit his limit."
Gojo stayed calm.
"The moment he can't hold anymore, that's our cue."
"Whatever he's planning, whatever he wants, we're dragging it out of him this time."
Taking things this far was its own declaration. The cards were on the table.
Either a real conversation followed.
Or nothing followed at all.
He'd barely finished speaking when Roswaal's silhouette wavered in the sky.
A closer look showed the right arm and shoulder were gone.
Roswaal cut a pitiful figure now.
Leg missing. Arm missing.
Blood streaming from wounds that weren't stopping.
Below, the sight sent the rabbits into a feeding frenzy, fighting over every drop that fell.
"About time we took the stage."
Gojo stretched his neck and turned to the others.
"He hasn't asked for help, though."
"A man like Roswaal doesn't beg. Not out loud, not to us."
"All we have to do is make him see the truth. Everything he thought he knew, everything he thought he controlled, has slipped clean through his fingers."
"Showing up is enough."
Gojo saw it clearly. He always had.
That was the whole reason he'd set this up.
"Come on. Let's put an end to this circus."
No one argued once he'd said that much.
Gojo took Betty's hand and stepped out of cover.
Reinhard stayed with Felt and Natsuki Subaru and the villagers. Someone had to keep them safe.
The moment the two of them appeared, every eye in the field tracked to them.
Elsa pulled Meili over to stand behind Gojo and Betty. The message didn't need words.
"Good evening, everyone."
"Up this late, all of you getting in some exercise?"
Gojo waved toward the distant group, his smile broad enough to light the dark.
The first to react to their arrival wasn't Regulus. Wasn't Roswaal.
It was the rabbits. Hunger made the call.
A wave of fluffy little bodies peeled off from the main mass and poured toward Gojo.
"Such a warm welcome."
"Though I'm not huge on the kind where I'm the meal."
Without breaking stride, he hoisted Betty up onto his arm.
"All yours, Betty."
"Hmph."
She made the sound without further comment. A flick of her hand and mana surged through the air overhead, condensing into purple blades that streaked toward the swarm.
Whistles cut through the air, overlapping in a rising chorus.
The rabbits bearing down on him got pinned to the earth mid-leap.
"Oh my. Looks like my daughters have taken quite a liking to you."
Capella's enormous dragon eyes narrowed on them, and a bell-clear voice came out of a mouth that had no business producing it.
"Of course they have."
"You might not realize, but the enemy you were going for just now is a major client of your organization."
"It's rather unseemly, if we're being honest. Today's assassin guilds have lost all sense of professional ethics."
"Not only do they botch contracts, the leadership turns up at the client's home to tie off loose ends personally."
Behind Gojo, Elsa's eye twitched.
Before crossing paths with him, she'd considered her ethics more or less intact.
Gojo's little speech also handed Capella and Roswaal new information about each other.
After all that mutual throat-ripping, the two of them turned out to be vendor and customer.
"Is that so. Rather embarrassing, isn't it."
"I never imagined a Sin Archbishop would be running an assassin's guild."
Roswaal's tone stayed even.
"Save the small talk for later."
Gojo clapped twice, gathering attention.
"Now, Lord Roswaal. Anything you'd like to say to me?"
"I'm offering you the floor. Speak freely."
He looked up at the man in the sky, smile as mild as ever.
"If your wounds are bothering you, I can patch you up first."
Roswaal stared back at him without answering, letting the wounds drip.
"What do you want to hear?"
"Everything."
Gojo smiled. One word, nothing more.
"Fair deal, don't you think? I'm only asking for the right to know."
"You're not in a position to bargain."
"Your plan's in pieces. Two options left on the table."
"Die, or keep pursuing whatever goal you had. Up to you."
"In pieces, is it?"
Roswaal turned the words over, and something like a smile worked its way across the bloodless face.
"And how do you know this isn't part of the plan?"
Betty glanced up at Gojo without thinking.
Set aside everything else.
That one sentence alone was enough to give a person pause.
But.
Gojo wasn't buying.
"I see, I see."
He wore the face of a man who'd just had a revelation.
"Let's go, Betty. If everything's running according to his lordship's design, our work here is done."
"Still, if one earl happens to die in all this, the bounty on a Sin Archbishop ought to jump quite a bit, wouldn't you say?"
"Assuming the Council of Wise Men have functioning heads on their shoulders."
"Which, well, no guarantees..."
The two of them batted it back and forth as they turned to leave, not sparing Roswaal another glance.
True enough.
Gojo's play was to squeeze Roswaal, to pry loose whatever the man was really after.
Call it housekeeping for his own future peace.
He had no interest in watching Natsuki Subaru die over and over once he was gone, dragged through the same grinder by this walking headache.
But if Roswaal wanted to play coy, fine.
Let him take his secrets with him.
Curiosity had never been his defining trait anyway.
A dead Roswaal served the same purpose, just by a different route.
"Am I part of your plan too?"
"What a novel experience."
Capella grinned at the pale figure, her voice sweet as poisoned fruit.
Her hands kept working while she talked. No mercy in them.
A black dragon's breath roared out toward Roswaal.
"Satoru!"
Watching the black flame close the distance, Roswaal called out the name.
"What is it, your lordship? Changed your mind?"
Gojo turned back, the easy smile still in place.
"You win."