"—Persona!"
With a hoarse shout, the butterfly mask on Shinji's face ignited with a pale blue flame, instantly burning away.
In the next moment, something even more peculiar appeared—entities, vast in both number and variety, emerged all around.
They appeared everywhere: on the mountains, in the skies, on the ground, and even underground. A rough count showed there were hundreds of them.
Some of these beings had wings, and some had tails.
Some had six arms, while others had four pairs of eyes.
Some were humanoid, and others were not.
Some were singular entities, while others moved in swarms.
None of them were identical, yet all shared a common trait—they could all be traced back to myths and legends from Earth.
There were famous gods like Seiten Taisei, Sataniel, and Loki.
There were mythical creatures like the Hecatoncheires and armies of the undead.
There were renowned beasts like Suzaku, the Bakeneko, and the Unicorn.
And there were also cute fairies like Tinkerbell and Pixie.
However, unlike the attack on Cefalu, these gods, demons, mythical beasts, and fairies didn't seem out of place in the world. There wasn't that usual feeling of discord, where magic was needed to break the natural order for their appearance. Instead, they were tightly connected to the world, as if they were naturally a part of the modern era where mystery had faded.
"You've conjured something quite interesting again," Aoko Aozaki's fighting spirit was ignited further. As expected, battling a magician was far more exciting than fighting weaklings.
Zelretch's analysis was, as always, more profound.
"The power of belief?"
"You can tell just by looking?"
Shinji's reply confirmed Zelrech's guess.
"When you live long enough, you see a lot."
Zelretch, with his millennia of life experience, had witnessed the end of the Age of Gods and the entire Age of Fairies. He understood how belief could shape the world.
What exactly is belief?
The dictionary defines it as faith and reverence toward a certain idea, religion, person, or object.
That definition is correct, but in Shinji's eyes, it was too narrow.
To him, belief is human cognition.
Faith and reverence are parts of belief, but so are negative emotions like hatred, fear, and jealousy. Even rumors and distortions are forms of belief.
Just as the gods in myths embody both good and evil, benevolent gods are the crystallization of positive emotions, while malevolent gods are the aggregation of negative ones.
When belief reaches a certain level, it gives birth to fantasies. These might be based on reality, or they might create entirely new forms out of thin air.
The reason the world's myths gave birth to countless gods is precisely because belief split the primordial gods of nature and led to the creation of deities that never existed.
Heroes like Vlad III and Innocent Monsters for the same reason—through the power of belief.
The army of gods, demons, mythical beasts, and monsters that Shinji had summoned weren't strictly the originals. Rather, they were manifestations of belief still present in the world—in the collective cognition of humanity.
As long as people continued to hold fantasies about these beings, Shinji could summon and materialize them.
Even the smallest emotion is a form of belief. When these beliefs converge and are given a fixed form, they become Personas. This is the domain of the Third Magic—the materialization of the soul. It is no less vast than the Second Magic, Parallel World Interference. What Shinji had shown thus far was just the tip of the iceberg.
Incidentally, Zepia's Night of Wallachia also falls within the scope of the Third Magic. The true nature of the Sixth Law remains unknown. It might not exist at all, or it might, like the Fifth Magic's time manipulation, be a byproduct of other magics and conflict with the Third.
As Shinji's explanation grew more esoteric and tangential, Aoko's patience started to wear thin.
"Why are you talking so much? In the end, isn't it just a fight? Let me see how strong these freaks are!"
With that, she shot into the midst of the Personas like a red meteor.
But within just a minute, the red meteor retraced its path, returning to where it started. Although she wasn't injured, there was a hint of awkwardness in her posture.
The reason was simple: there were too many Personas, each with their strange abilities. One-on-one, Aoko could easily handle them, but when hundreds attacked at once, the sheer quantity overwhelmed her. She couldn't even find an opening to use her larger-scale attacks like the Lunar Eclipse and had no choice but to temporarily retreat.
Steadying herself, Aoko wiped her face vigorously. Instead of being angry, she laughed, "Now this is getting interesting. So what if there are more of you? I can do that too!"
In the next second, a pillar of blue light shot into the sky.
Aoko's figure within the pillar alternated between blurry and clear.
When blurry, there was only one of her. When clear, there were three.
Blurry again. Clear again. Nine now. And so it continued. By the end, there were more than a hundred Aokos.
"Again? Don't tell me you're going to make the universe suffer again."
Touko murmured.
"Not this time. I've grown a bit."
All the Aokos spoke in unison, glaring at Touko. It was quite the spectacle.
The sisters' exchange gave Shinji an idea.
"Summoning versions of yourself from different points in time... It seems the essence of the Fifth Magic is just as I thought—manipulation of quantum entanglement."
In the events of Mahoyo, the turning point in Aoko's battle against Touko came when she summoned her future self from ten years ahead.
Now, with one-half of her facing the army of Personas and the other half targeting Zelretch, Aoko was essentially a one-woman army.
Seeing this, Shinji also split his army of Personas, ensuring the three-way battle was fair.
"Old man, they say you're the only version of yourself across all parallel worlds and timelines. How will you handle this? Are you going to bend dimensions again?"
"That's one way of doing it. However, folding dimensions a hundred times and performing different actions is too complicated and inefficient. I'm not as energetic as I used to be, so I've chosen a different method."
The last part of his sentence was key. In the first part, Aoko and Shinji both dismissed it as a joke—there's no way a direct servant of the Crimson Moon would lack energy.
Ripples, similar to the Gate of Babylon, appeared beside Zelretch. He reached into one with his empty left hand. When he pulled it out, a dark gold metal glove adorned his pale hand. Embedded in the center of the glove's back and on each of its five finger joints were six differently colored gems.
The old man curled his pinky and ring finger inward, then with his thumb, middle finger, and index finger, he snapped.
With a peculiar snap, space and time violently distorted.
The Personas swarming around him, as well as Aoko's duplicates, were swallowed in waves, disappearing into thin air.