"True Cross."
As the whisper left Jay's lips, the world underwent a terrifying structural shift.
A black flash, colder and more absolute than any shadow erupted from the earth. In an instant, the blade of Ame-no-Habakiri manifested in Jay's grip, black flames dancing on its blade.
Enhanced by the Holy Grail, Jay's physical form felt lighter than a feather, yet dense with a power that threatened to crack the stone beneath his boots.
With a motion so fluid it blurred the perception, he delivered a quick horizontal swing toward the sky.
"Cleave."
SHIIING
Time seemed to stutter.
The gigantic meteorite of demonic crimson flame which had been seconds away from turning the entire Carmilla territory into hell was suddenly bisected. A slash of pure obsidian darkness slit the very dimension the meteorite occupied.
Azi Dahaka's central head tilted, a low, guttural sound escaping his throat.
"Hooo?"
BOOM
The black flames, silent and as vast as the Dimensional Gap erupted from the seam of the slash and engulfed everything. The demonic fire was devoured whole, reduced to drifting inert dust in a single heartbeat.
The impending destruction vanished. Where a star of damnation had been, there was now only the gloomy overcast sky of Romania as if the attack had never existed.
Michael, Gabriel, and Queen Carmilla remained frozen, their gazes fixed on the empty air.
The two Seraphs, in particular, felt a jolt of spiritual dissonance. The energy Jay had just released felt hauntingly familiar, yet it was draped in an abyssal ancient feeling that felt entirely foreign.
'That energy...' Gabriel thought, her heart sinking.
The heavy silence was shattered by a familiar, urgent voice.
"Michael-sama, Gabriel-sama! Are the two of you okay?"
Michael turned his head, his emerald eyes landing on the three humans who had just entered the epicentre of the catastrophe.
"Dulio... why are you here? What happened with the Tepes army?"
"The army is gone," Dulio replied, though his eyes were immediately drawn to the mountainous figure of Azi Dahaka. He swallowed hard, caught between the awe of a legendary mythical creature and the primal fear of its malevolent aura.
"I sensed a spike of malicious energy from the castle, and then..."
While Dulio scanned the three-headed dragon, Azi Dahaka was doing the same to the humans. However, his reptilian eyes bypassed the exorcists and the ice princess and settled entirely on the black-haired young man with the blazing black sword and the hovering obsidian chalice.
"That flame..." the dragon rumbled, his three heads swaying in unison.
Rizevim, seeing the familiar face that had consistently derailed his parties, let out a frustrated click of his tongue.
His face soured instantly. "Tsk... that brat again."
Beside him, Euclid Lucifuge's eyes narrowed into cold, murderous slits, his hand tightening on his silver blade as he glared at Jay.
Jay ignored the Devils. He walked slowly toward the Seraphs and the Vampire Queen, his boots crunching on the glassed stone.
His focus was entirely directed at Azi Dahaka.
The dark hazel eyes staring at the doom incarnate with narrow gaze.
To human eyes, aside from the fact that this being was the embodiment of a mythical dragon, a creature from fantasy books, there was nothing that could explain the sensation Jay was feeling right now.
He hadn't been in this world long, by "this world" meaning the supernatural one, but no one had ever made his body scream for him to run like this. After being physically enchanted by the Grail, Jay's senses had been enhanced as well, including his magical perception.
Just by standing in front of this monstrosity, Jay could tell that the amount of aura the creature emanated was unparalleled.
Susanoo and not even Rizevim, had ever given him this feeling.
And the only word he could use to explain it was-
Malevolent.
"Silence-kun! We meet again!" Rizevim called out, his voice dripping with forced cheer.
Jay didn't even look at him.
Instead, he swung his hand in a blinding arc. The motion was faster than Rizevim had anticipated as Habakiri was already cutting through the air before the Super Devil could finish his sentence.
Acting on pure survival instinct, Rizevim grabbed Euclid by the collar and threw himself backward.
A Heaven-Severing Slash of black flame whistled through the space they had occupied a millisecond prior. The silver-crimson barrier Euclid had reflexively raised was atomized into dust in second.
Rizevim hovering mid-air, felt a cold sweat break across his neck.
'He's getting faster. And what is that black flame? That's not the purple fire of Incinerate Anthem...' He thought.
As they landed, Rizevim's eyes locked onto the black chalice floating at Jay's side. His confusion turned into sharp, piqued curiosity.
"I see... you took the Sephiroth Graal from that useless prick, Marius," Rizevim noted, his voice trailing off as he analyzed the relic's different appearance. "But why does it look it has been painted black? What did you do to it?"
The attention of everyone including the Seraphs and Queen Carmilla shifted to the Blazing Black Grail.
"You talk too much," Jay retorted flatly.
The response elicited a booming, three-fold laugh from the dragon.
"HAHAHA! You're goddamn right he does, human!" Azi Dahaka roared. His serpentine heads moved closer, his amusement tangible.
"I like you already. A man of few words and sharp steel. Speak! Tell me your name!"
Jay remained silent, his mind racing through tactical permutations. Could a being of this scale even be killed? And with Rizevim and Euclid still looming nearby, he had no real grasp of how strong the Angels and Vampires in front of him truly were.
Too many unknown variables.
"My name is Aži Dahāka,"the dragon continued in a weird accent, his voice taking on a formal, regal tone.
"Zahhak. The Dragon of the End. I have been known by many names through the cycles of time, but i'd like to be called Doom of Humanity."
Azi Dahaka said.
But Jay still didn't gave him his name as he just clenching his grip on Habakiri and called upon Ame-no-Murakumo on his other hand.
"Still not going to give your name? Well, then let's just fight!"
The dragon didn't wait for a response.
With a sudden violent snap, Azi Dahaka clapped his six colossal wings together. The result was not a gust of wind, but a sonic boom of such catastrophic proportions that the earth itself surrendered.
A massive fissure ripped through the foundation of the Carmilla fortress and in a single heartbeat, the main castle, a structure that had survived centuries of war instantly disintegrated into a cloud of stone and dust.
BOOM
Rizevim and Euclid had already unfurled their devil wings, soaring into the safety of the upper atmosphere.
The Seraphs took to the sky with frantic beats of their twelve golden wings, while Queen Carmilla manifested her own bat-like wings to escape the collapsing ruins below.
Jay, having no natural means of flight, felt the ground vanish beneath his boots.
He reached for a teleportation spell, but before the mana could coalesce, a soft hand gripped his. He felt himself lifted upward, stabilized by the icy magical currents of the woman beside him.
"Thank you, Lavi," Jay said, his voice steady despite the chaos.
Lavinia smiled, though her eyes remained focused on the monster above. "You should really learn flight magic, Illya-kun. Though I don't mind being your wings anytime."
They hovered near Dulio and the Seraphs, a small group against the mountain of scales that now dominated the sky.
Azi Dahaka beat his wings, hovering with a grace that mocked his massive size, looking down at Jay with six eyes brimming with malice.
"You can't even fly? HAHAHAHA!" The dragon threw his heads back in a mocking gesture.
"I have the higher ground now, boy!"
Jay ignored him. Instead he looked at Lavinia and gave a subtle nod. "It's okay... I have a plan."
Before she could ask, Jay released her hand.
But his figure didn't fall, it vanished.
Azi Dahaka's predatory instincts flared a millisecond too late.
Though he was still the first to realize that the human was no longer in the distance. Jay had reappeared directly atop the dragon's central head. To the onlookers, Jay was no larger than an ant on the back of a giant salamander, but the energy he radiated was heavy enough to tilt the world.
Black flames erupted from Ame-no-Habakiri with a roar that drowned out the wind. With two blinding diagonal swings, Jay traced a path of absolute destruction through the air.
"Cleave."
SHIIING SHIIING
"You think that would scratch my scales, boy!" Azi Dahaka roared, his mana surging to reinforce his hide.
But the attack was not aimed at his hide.
In an instantaneous display of spatial severing, the dragon's six massive wings were bisected, and the severed wings is burned in seconds by the black flame.
The giant world-cutting slashes didn't just cut flesh, they severed the ability to flight from the beast.
Azi Dahaka's six eyes widened in genuine, stunned surprise as he felt his connection to the air vanish.
"What!"
The "Dragon of the End" lost his footing in the sky. His massive, hundred-meter body plummeted like a falling mountain. The impact with the Romanian earth created a shockwave that carved a massive crater into the valley, sending a wall of dirt and stone a hundred feet into the air.
As Azi Dahaka struggled to rise, a guttural roar of agony and fury escaped his three throats.
The stumps where his wings had been were not bleeding, they were being consumed.
The Black Flame of the True Cross had latched onto the wounds like a parasitic entity, eating through his regenerative magic.
"This goddamn parasitic flame!" he roared.
Azi Dahaka's body flared with a dark crimson, almost black energy.
He began to chant, forcing his forbidden healing magic to activate. The air around him distorted as he poured his life force into the wounds. The black flames hissed and fought, stubbornly devouring the new flesh as fast as it could grow.
It was a battle of attrition.
The dragon was forced to cycle through dozens of forbidden healing magic techniques written in the Avesta.
Forbidden magics is cursed because it was a binding vows that demanded price in blood and life force. And he burned through at least fifty different healing variations just to exhaust the lingering black embers and finally force his wings to knit back together.
On the ground, Azi Dahaka found his footing, his six wings finally whole but trembling from the strain.
He looked up, his expression turning dark.
High above, silhouetted against the gloomy Romanian sky, Jay descended from the sky, a blazing black-flamed sword in his grasp.
His dark hazel eyes swept over the hundred-meter-long dragon below him.
He held the higher ground now.
'What is that flame?'Azi Dahaka thought, a bead of cold sweat invisible beneath his scales.
The healing he had just performed had cost him hundreds of years of his lifespan. For the first time in millennia, the Dragon of the End felt a flicker of something he had long forgotten.
But instead of the expected roar of pain or the stench of defeat, a sound erupted from the crater that made even Michael's blood run cold.
It was laughter.
" HAHAHAHA YES YES YES. "
The three heads of Azi Dahaka began to shake, and then, a wide predatory grin split across all three maws.
His six eyes weren't filled with fear, they were dilated with a manic overwhelming joy. The dragon let out a roar not of agony, but of pure ecstasy.
"That's it!" the central head bellowed, the sound rippling through the air like a physical blow.
"That's the sensation! The sting of a wound that won't close, the weight of a mortal who can actually reach my throat! That's so PEAK!"
The dragon's massive tail thrashed against the earth in a rhythmic pulse of excitement, shattering the remaining stone pillars of the courtyard. The sheer thrill emanating from him was so thick it felt like a second atmosphere.
"Don't stop now, human! Bring it! Bring it all on again!"
Jay, who had teleported to the ground with a soft click of his boots against the glassed stone, stood about hundred meters away.
He looked at the giant ecstatic monster wagging its heads like a crazed hound, and for the first time since the fight started, his stoic expression faltered.
His eyebrows raised in genuine disbelief. A look of profound, soul-deep disgust washed over his face.
'What...' Jay thought, his grip on Habakiri tightening as he stared at the writhing, joyful dragon. 'Is this guy some kind of masochist?'
The thought of fighting an ancient, world-ending disaster was one thing. Fighting one that seemed to be getting a "high" off having its wings ripped off was another level of repulsive entirely.
"You're sick," Jay muttered, his voice cold and flat, though it was drowned out by Azi Dahaka's continuing laughter.
***
Meanwhile, high above the sky, Michael, Gabriel, and Queen Carmilla widened their eyes, though not for the same reason as Jay. Especially Michael.
"That black flame…" Gabriel murmured in a low voice. "What is that black flame, brother? And why does it feel so familiar…"
Michael slowly shook his head.
"I… I don't know."
The one who answered was Dulio.
"Michael-sama, Gabriel-sama, that man is the wielder of Incinerate Anthem."
"The cross?" Michael turned his head, eyebrows rising.
Dulio nodded. "Yes. That black flame is probably some kind of sub-species Balance Breaker of Incinerate Anthem. I think that is the only logical explanation."
But instead of confirming it, Michael looked even more confused by the statement.
"Hm? Am I wrong, Michael-sama?" Dulio asked.
Michael turned his gaze back toward Jay's figure in the sky and spoke slowly.
"Before I came here, I checked the current Sacred Gear database in Heaven to confirm which Sacred Gears possess sub-species Balance Breakers. I know there are several in this era, with the Grail being one of them. But…"
"But?" Dulio asked quietly.
Everyone focused on Michael as he finished.
"There is no recorded sub-species Balance Breaker of Incinerate Anthem."