"There is no recorded sub-species Balance Breaker of Incinerate Anthem."
The revelation sent a wave of confusion through everyone present, but the most shocked among them was Lavinia.
She had seen that black flame before anyone else. How could she not? It was the warm black fire that had once saved her life. She had spoken about it with Jay. Even Jay himself believed it was a sub-species Balance Breaker of his Sacred Gear.
If Heaven's archives, which had tracked all the Sacred Gears since the creation of it had no record of this power, then the truth is far more complicated. Lavinia's eyes drifted to the figure of Jay, whose swords were currently wreathed in a flame that looked like a tear in the fabric of reality.
A flame so black it absorbed light instead of radiating it.
'What kind of power do you truly possess, Illya-kun?' she wondered, a shiver running down her spine that had nothing to do with her ice magic.
Dulio Gesualdo broke the tension, scratching the back of his head with a forced, nervous chuckle.
"So, it wasn't even his Balance Breaker? Maybe it's just some crazy ability from those legendary swords of his. Either way, it works so we good."
"It doesn't matter right now," Michael intervened, his voice regaining its gentle authority. "We can analyze it later. For now, we help him."
The Leader of Heaven turned his gaze toward Gabriel. "Gabriel, split my buffs and give them to the young man as well. Dulio and Miss Reni will provide long-range support. Queen Carmilla, I want you to debuff and slow his movement."
Gabriel nodded, her face set in a mask of focus. She clasped her hands in a tight prayer, her twelve wings flaring with a brilliance that rivaled the sun.
A golden holy aura suddenly enveloped her body as she whispered,
"Golden Revelation."
Streaks of liquid gold launched from her palms. One hit Michael, causing his twelve wings to grow in size and intensity.
The other struck Jay. He widened his eyes as a sudden torrential burst of power flooded his veins, enhancing his senses to an almost painful degree.
His body glowed with a golden holy aura for a split second before the light was abruptly smothered, turning into a dense, oily blackness that pulsed in time with the Grail at his side.
Gabriel's body shook for a moment, a look of profound distress crossing her features as she felt her holy energy being swallowed by the void within Jay.
She bit her lip and focused on the battle, forcing the doubt to the back of her mind.
Dulio launched himself into the sky, while Lavinia glided toward Jay's flank. Queen Carmilla vanished into a pool of darkness, her presence becoming a predatory chill that crept across the crater.
Michael soared upward, his golden light creating a vast shimmering golden barrier that stretched for thousands of meters square.
"I will immobilize him!" Michael yelled, his voice echoing through the barrier.
"KUHAHAHA! YES! COME! GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU HAVE!" Azi Dahaka roared in pure ecstasy.
As the dragon prepared to lung a massive glacier erupted from the earth, encasing his massive talons in miles of enchanted ice.
Lavinia stood at the edge of the crater, her eyes glowing purple as she poured her mana into the frost.
Jay didn't wait. Fueled by the Grail and Gabriel's buff, he moved.
In a flash of black flame, his body vanished and reappeared directly behind the dragon's central neck.
"The Heaven's Nail!" Michael shouted from above.
Six piercing, gigantic spears of light formed in the sky, each the size of a cathedral spire.
They launched downward with the weight of heaven judgment, pinning Azi Dahaka's massive body to the scorched earth.
Jay began his swing, his twin blades trailing arcs of obsidian flame that promised to sever the dragon's heads from its shoulders. But just as the blades cut through the air, the dragon's middle head slowly began to grin.
"TIME STOP!"
SHIIING
The world froze in a monochromatic grey. Jay finished his swing, but the blades passed through empty air.
When time resumed with a violent jerk, Azi Dahaka was gone from the crater, appearing hundreds of feet in the air, flying majestically despite his earlier injuries.
The Heaven-Severing slash burned nothing but the wind.
Azi Dahaka hovered above, his three heads looking down at Jay with a new sharper calculation in his six eyes.
'So, even in the suspended world he can still move his heart and his blade. That flame... I cannot allow it to touch me again.'
Even a dragon who craved the peak of pain knew the difference between a thrilling wound and total erasure.
Azi Dahaka's body began to glow with a dark pulsating crimson aura.
Michael's barrier began to groan and crack just from the pressure of the dragon's presence. The world went silent as the beast prepared his true masterwork.
"Let me show you why they called me the Diabolus Thousand Dragon!" Azi Dahaka declared, his voice resonating from all three mouths at once.
"Forbidden Magic: The Hundred Centuries of Death."
What happened next defied the logic of the supernatural world. From the singular form of the giant dragon, a hundred identical copies erupted into existence.
One second the sky was grey and the next, it was choked by a hundred dark purple almost black-scaled monstrosities, each one radiating an aura just as massive and malevolent as the original.
Michael's face turned grim, his swords trembling.
Dulio cursed under his breath, looking at the sky in disbelief.
"There is no fucking way," the exorcists muttered. "A hundred of them? All with that much power?"
Lavinia, Gabriel, and Carmilla felt their bodies begin to shake. The sheer weight of the combined mana was enough to crush the spirit of any lesser warrior.
Jay looked at the sky, eyes narrowing.
'What a monster… Duplication magic at this scale. And every single one of the clones shares Aži Dahāka's appearance and his aura of power. What kind of mastery over magic is this…? Forbidden magic...'
And the most terrifying part was, Jay did not even know how many more forbidden magic technique existed in that monster's arsenal.
This was why he preferred fighting true warriors rather than true magicians. A master warrior relied on skill, strength, and discipline. A master magician fought with variables, layers, systems, and reality itself.
A warrior could dominate a magician in a normal battle.
But a truly skilled magician…
…would rewrite the battlefield itself.
Unless the warrior could wield magic on the same level.
There is no way the former would win against the second.
Lavinia appeared beside Jay in a flash of light.
"Illya-kun… I think something is wrong with the way he exerts his magic," she said quietly, her eyes fixed on the monstrous figure in the sky.
"Lavi… something wrong? What do you mean?" Jay asked, not taking his gaze off Aži Dahāka.
"Forbidden magic is called forbidden for a reason," Lavinia replied. "Using it usually costs the caster their lifespan or their life force. Even beings with long lifetimes cannot cast magic on this scale without consequences."
Her voice lowered.
"But the way he is using it… it is as if he realizes that his lifetime is barely being affected at all. This isn't just recklessness." She hesitated, searching for the right words.
"How should I put it… it's calculated. Controlled. A deliberately reckless way of wielding forbidden magic."
Jay frowned.
"Then you're saying there's a reason he doesn't care about the cost of his life force?"
Lavinia nodded slowly.
Jay's gaze shifted.
Beside him, the Blazing Black Chalice hovered in the air, radiating a dark, oppressive presence. His eyes narrowed.
"Is it possible that the Grail is the reason?" Jay asked.
Lavinia's eyes widened slightly.
"The Grail?"
The implication hung heavily in the air between them. Jay thought about it.
"The Grail could govern the concepts of life and death. Did that mean it could also bypass the price of life demanded by forbidden magic?"
Jay's words made Lavinia's expression turn grim.
"Then… he can cast those spells without paying a price?"
Jay fell silent and his gaze shifted to his own Grail. He did not know how it would work. He did not know if it would even respond the way he hoped. But it was worth trying.
This was no longer just a battle of power.
Before Jay could finalize his tactical descent, the sky over Romania was rewritten by a godlike hand.
Hundreds of gigantic magical circles ignited above Romania's shattered horizon, layered across the heavens like an apocalyptic constellation. Each sigil burned with dark crimson light, etched with ancient runes written in Avesta that twisted reality around them.
From the maws of a hundred dragons, a rain of fire began.
Meteors of dark crimson energy and shrieking skulls of purple flame plummeted toward the earth, aimed directly at the heart of the Carmilla territory.
The air vibrated.
The mana pressure alone made the atmosphere scream.
Lavinia's eyes widened.
"Oh no…"
Azi Dahaka let out a roar that vibrated through the very souls of those below.
"COME! DESCEND! DEVOUR THIS WORLD!"
"Barrier formation!"
Gabriel raised her hands.
Queen Carmilla's shadows surged outward.
Lavinia threw up layered frost barriers.
Dulio summoned lightning shields across the sky.
But to ensure the destruction was absolute, the central head of the original dragon snapped its jaws shut.
And a ripple of grey distorted the air as he exerted his dominance over the space-time magic once again, then he screamed.
"Time Stop!"
The world was plunged into a suspended, monochromatic void. Yet, as if untouched by the frozen reality, the meteors continued their descent at a terrifying speed, tearing through the stillness like falling judgments.
Michael, Gabriel, and the others were turned into statues of gold and silver, trapped in frozen divinity, unable to move, unable to react.
It was a continent-destroying attack, crafted to annihilate the defenders while they were helpless, unable even to blink, let alone resist.
Suddenly, a violent eruption of black flame burst from Jay.
The black flame expanded in a dome of absolute negation, clashing against the dragon's grey world.
With a sound like shattering glass, the space-time magic was pulverized. Jay had forcibly dragged everyone back into the flow of time.
Azi Dahāka's Time Stop collapsed instantly, torn apart by the black flame's presence.
His eyes widened in shock. "What…? You broke through my suspended world again? That flame is a nuisance, human!"
Michael did not waste the opening.
He thrust his twin swords of light toward the heavens, his twelve wings flaring with the combined strength of his own power and Gabriel's support.
He roared.
"Heaven's Gate!"
Massive rifts of holy light opened up across the sky. The portals acted as gravitational wells, vacuuming scores of the crimson meteors into a dimensional pocket of pure light before they could touch the soil.
But there were too many.
Too many.
Beside him, Dulio Gesualdo raised his hands, summoning the full authority of the Zenith Tempest.
Dulio launched upward, electricity exploding around his body.
"Zenith Tempest!"
A thunderous storm of divine lightning ripped through the sky, obliterating a couple of meteors in violent detonations.
Still not enough.
Not even close.
But even their combined efforts were being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the dragon's output. There were simply too many.
Jay felt the heat of the falling stars on his skin.
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, and suddenly the entire right side of his body ignited in black flame.
The limb began to engulfed in darkness as black flames erupted from his skin, completely enveloping the blade of Habakiri until the steel was no longer visible.
The black flame from his hand towered into the sky like a world piercing spear, vast enough to scorch several Azi Dahaka clones into nothing but drifting ash.
Jay's dark hazel eyes shifted, the color bleeding away until they were twin pits of abyssal black.
He stepped forward into the air, his posture shifting into the primal, effortless stance of a god of war. It was a form he had seen only once, during his clash with the storm god Susanoo.
"Turn to dust..."
He swung the sword in a casual, sweeping horizontal arc.
"- World Slasher."
The world went silent. A thread-thin cut appeared in space, a literal rift in the dimension that spanned across the entire horizon of the battlefield.
FWHUOM
And then a second later, the mana channeled through the blade erupted. The black flame followed the path of the spatial rift, turning the sky into an ocean of black flame.
It burned through the meteorites, the skulls, and the very air itself, reducing every projectile to inert dust.
Dozens of Azi Dahaka's clones were caught in the black flame, incinerated before they could even activate their healing magic.
Just as Jay had expected, Azi Dahaka had struggled to recover the first time the black fire struck him. The flame did not vanish easily. It forced him to invoke his healing magic again and again before it finally faded.
And if Jay forced him to do that for every single clone…
then imagine the cost multiplied across them all.
In the end, it was nothing more than a game of numbers. And no matter how freely he could wield forbidden magic without paying its price.
He would assume that even for a monster like him, that many consecutive spell activations of forbidden healing magics on dozens of his clones would overwhelm both his mana reserves and the processing limits of his mind.
Even monsters had ceilings.
But the cost of the strike hit Jay instantly.
He buckled to the ground, coughing up a spray of dark viscous blood.
He clutched at his chest, feeling his heart hammer against his ribs as if it were trying to break free. The sheer output of the World Slasher was threatening to tear his human body apart from the inside out.
"Jay!" Lavinia cried out, rushing to catch him before he fell.
She tried to hold his trembling frame, her ice magic cooling the feverish heat radiating from his skin.
Suddenly, Jay's body was bathed in a gentle, warm golden light once more. The internal ruptures and shattered capillaries began to mend with miraculous speed.
Jay looked back and saw Gabriel, her face drenched in sweat and her hands trembling, pouring every ounce of her grace into his body.
He gave her a silent, appreciative nod before turning back to Lavinia.
"I'm okay, Lavi," Jay rasped, wiping the blood from his chin. He looked into her worried sapphire eyes.
Jay then turned his gaze toward Azi Dahaka once more, "Didn't you say you would be my wings anytime?"
Lavinia's expression softened into one of fierce determination. "Of course I did, Illya-kun."
"Then let's do it now."
High above, the original Azi Dahaka let out a booming laugh that shook the clouds, though several of his remaining clones were still struggling to extinguish the black embers on their hides.
"That attack! That boy is truly something else!" Azi Dahaka bellowed with manic joy.
"Even with that weird feeling his flame gives off, he is still just a human in a human body! What the hell are they feeding the mortals in this era to produce a monster like you?"
Suddenly, the dragon's laughter cut short. He felt a presence looming directly above his central head.
He looked up, his six reptilian eyes narrowing.
Jay was there, standing on a platform of frozen air provided by Lavinia, who stood at his side as his support.
But Jay was no longer holding a sword. His right hand was wrapped around the base of the Blazing Black Chalice.
The grail was pulsing with an oppressive, light-devouring rhythm that made the very air around them bleed.
Jay scanned the sky, looking down at the army of dragons.
His gaze was cold.
"Let's see who truly has the right to govern the concepts of life and death," Jay whispered, his voice carrying clearly over the roar of the wind.
It was Grail against Grail.
His.
Against Rizevim's.
As the black on its rim flickered, Jay whispered.
"The Holy Grail..."
Jay's hazel eyes turned toward the central dragon, a look of absolute denial reflecting in his pupils.
"Denial of Apotheosis."
As the words left his lips, the world imploded inward.