Dantega:Volume 8 Chapter 2
(PART 2)
To the average person thrown into the chaos of this fight, it must seem like every destructive weapon ever built by mankind is exploding all at once.
Describing this moment can not be done in simple terms like ridiculous, insane, tremendous, horrifying, or incredible. Those blanket terms aren’t even in the proper realm of what’s actually taking place in this snowy mountain range.
This is a battle that far out stretches the imaginations of the typical man, it’s like teaching a toddler how to walk and telling him to begin training for space travel the second he stands. It’s just that far ahead of anything fathomable.
The battle goes as follows:
Ubica and Tusbiri vs. Leviathan.
Napoleon, Strauphius, Aria, and even Xavier involved in a fight against the 5th ranked member of the Hiearchy, Mammon.
Michael the Archangel vs. Abaddon.
Trojia vs. the 7th ranked Asmodeus.
Rage, the Angel of Death vs. the 3rd rank Beelzebub.
And to top it off, Damien is squaring off against the 4th ranked Amon and his father, Satan.
All of these battles are going on at once within a mile radius, and the sounds they make cannot be described in words alone.
The noise, concussions, and sheer terror are felt perfectly by a violet haired girl who was knocked far enough away by Abaddon’s initial blast that she was fortunate enough to avoid a battle with a demon.
Sora gets to the two unconscious Eiyalazonian princesses and begins her attempt at waking them up.
“Niera! Daey! Wake up!”
Though she is sure that they would rather be asleep through such a ridiculous battle, she knows that if they are awake and able to protect themselves, they would be much more safe.
To her relief, Niera is the first to wake up, and shortly after, Daey comes to as well.
“Eh..? What’s going on?” Daey asks.
As soon as she awoke, the sound of explosions convulse in her head, giving her a severe migraine.
Sora, overrun with regret over what happened to Cyrus, tries to get her to look away. She stands in front of her and begins pulling her towards the only spot where one of the multiple battles isn’t raging.
“We need to get somewhere safe, it’s too late for any of us to do anything to help.” Sora said as she pulls the two along the snowy ground.
One may think of this as cowardly, but she’s just being realistic. As much as she wants to help, she knows full well she’d just be jumping in to die. She might be able to help in the battle between the humans and Mammon, but she figures that keeping guard over the two princesses will do far more good than throwing herself in without any kind of plan. If there’s one thing she learned in the Dravic Branch of La’Juune, it’s to weigh your options before taking unnecessary actions.
“Is everybody fighting over there?” Niera asked, still a little woozy.
“Yes, we were ambushed.”
Sora’s tone is starting to resemble her old self now that things have gotten so hectic. Sometimes it’s best to have no conflicting emotions that hinder the progression of a proper thought process.
“Is everyone alright!?” Daey inquires.
Now this is where having emotions can be used to benefit the already bleak situation at hand. It might mentally break the two girls depending on how she says it. But as her instincts take over and are replaced by a machine-like soldier’s mentality, she is unable to convey any sympathy in her tone when she answers.
“Cyrus was killed.”
“!?”
Niera doesn’t even look shocked. Actually, that’s wrong. She’s so shocked that the light in her eyes just about faded into a charcoal color. She has no idea how to process that information.
“Y-You’re kidding...” Daey mumbles in disbelief.
If Sora knew any better, she wouldn’t reply. She’d just keep her mouth shut and let them come to terms with his death on their own.
But sadly, as if she was reverted back to her robotic self, she coldly says, “...No...”
Niera remains broken and unresponsive, Sora can feel her body gain weight with limpness as she pulls her along.
Daey on the other hand has tears that begin to form in her eyes; she frowns and pulls her arm out of Sora’s grip and shouts, “Let go of me!!”
Daey’s sudden surge of emotion could have been brought upon by Sora’s lack of emotion, but she wouldn’t know if it was or not.
“If Cyrus died without me being there to support him, then there’s no way I can just run away while everyone else is fighting!”
Daey didn’t even give Sora a chance to reply before she started running towards the battlefield.
With Niera still shocked, Sora lets her grip on her arm go and begins to chase Daey while wearing an expressionless face.
The severely trained royal guard quickly makes up the distance and grabs the arm of the princess just before Daey trips over something and falls flat on her face, almost pulling Sora down with her.
“Waaahhh!”
Sora was able to avoid whatever it was that Daey tripped on by jumping over the hump, and in a smooth motion she was able to contain Daey the moment she landed.
Thinking it was a rock buried in the snow, they think nothing of it until the rock begins to groan as though it has just been awaken from a deep slumber.
“Uuuooooh...”
“Huh?”
“...?...”
That’s when the hump in the ground rises and the snow slides off to the ground, revealing what it was covering.
Slowly rising to her feet is a girl with yellow hair and stupidly bright purple eyes. Unbeknownst to Daey and Sora, the girl is the 4th Gatekeeper and goes by the title of Joan of Arc.
“By the grace of God I have survived!” She says while pulling out her sword from the snow. “I shall ever be defeated by enemies of the Lord!”
Although this may sound like she’s pumping her self up with resolve, between her weird accent, her slouched over body language and her slightly ruffled hair, she looked very comical when she said that.
“Umm... Who are you talking to?” Daey asked, the purple eyed girl hadn’t even noticed they where there.
“Haa?” Joan looks very confused for a moment when she sees them, and then her face grows red with embarrassment. “I-I need not tell you!”
“...Okay?”
“Anyways...” Joan says as she clears her throat, she still seems to be a little flustered. “Reveal yourselves. Are you allied with the demons?”
Daey has a hard time understanding her because of the way she talks, but she heard the last part clear and replies with a resounding,
“No!!”
Daey realizes that she doesn’t have time to keep dealing with this mysterious person and begins to once again run towards the battle. “Our friends are fighting those demons as we speak! We need to get over there and help!”
Joan watches her run off, and she is immediately passed up by Sora who’s in pursuit of her. By just looking at the determination in her eyes, Joan knows that Daey is not an enemy. Even though she is a Gatekeeper, her main goal is to stop the demons from advancing.
Joan unhooks her shield from her arm and tosses it aside, then she grabs the small sword she was fighting with earlier and throws that as well.
She holds out each arm and a purple flash engulfs her hands until it is replaced by a silk banner hanging off a wooden pole in her right hand, and the infamous jet black Sword of Fierbois in her left.
She runs alongside the two and says, “Allow me to offer you my services.”
Niera watches as they run to the battle with eyes as blank as a dead fish.
One of her precognitive visions flashed in her mind and it immediately made her nauseous as her sister and friend run towards the epicenter of that epic battle. The sudden feeling knocked the wind out of her so badly that she fell on one knee; with tears dripping from the eyes that have yet to blink landing on the snow by her cold hands, she begins to mutter.
“...How come..? How come the only future I see is one where everyone is dying..?”
“My fair child... You have succumbed to your human desires. The desires that separated you from your original role as the Anti-Christ. These desires have destroyed you, they’ve transformed you from the child of prophecy into a frail and brittle man whose desperation knows no bounds.”
“Such words come from a man infatuated by the souls of those very humans. I won’t take your words to heart. There’s nothing you can do to change my reality, there’s nothing you can even do to change yours. You will die here, and you will lose your title and become a footnote in the history of my new world.”
Satan chuckles through his nose and replies, “Do you know who you’re talking to? Do you know what I am capable of? I 'own' reality, boy.”
He then spreads his arms and the world around Damien, Amon, and himself, begins to contort and melt away like stained glass on fire.
Satan’s eyes glow a bright red when he explains, “The difference between me and you is that you let people alter your reality, whilst I create my own. Tell me my fair child, what will you do when the reality you’ve perceived ceases to exist? How will you fight?”
Damien doesn’t answer, he merely shrugs his shoulders and sighs.
And that’s when he presses forward and moves at such a speed that the gap between him and his father is gone within an instant.
“!?”
Damien grabs Satan’s throat and slams him onto the snowy ground with such force that the Purgatory surface below splintered in millions of pieces and caves in from the impact. The melting glass-like environment shatters and reveals the devastation of the world around them.
Just from that simple attack, just from Satan’s body hitting the ground, a crater forms as though a comet had just hit; and the snow plumes outward in a great gust so heavy that it almost floors Amon.
“Khhaaaaahhh!?” Satan moans as his throat is pressed into his spine with more force than a head on train collision.
Damien squeezes even harder and gets to the point where he feels his father’s neck becoming puddy in his hands.
He glares down on Satan and says, “You’re wrong father... I’ve created my own reality ever since the day my mother died.”
The shocked face of Satan goes stale and his bleeding eyes fade into what seems to be a brutal death.
But that’s when something odd happens, the corners of his limp lips begin to rise into a smile and a deep laugh is heard. It is certainly Satan, but the laugh comes from behind Damien.
“??”
The person in Damien’s grip melts away in a fine black powder and is taken away by the wind.
“You creating something for yourself? Don’t be ridiculous, you have always been, and will always be wrapped around my little finger.”
Damien quizzically turns around and sees Satan standing there, unscathed with a smile on his face.
Satan then snaps his fingers and the world around them spins for a nauseating moment or two and then comes to a dead stop. The crater that Damien created is gone, the snow that was blown away is once again felt below their feet. It’s as though nothing happened at all.
Amon, a mere bystander at this point is in shock. He was certain he had just seen the Devil die in a brilliant display of brute strength, but there he is, standing tall and proud, altering reality with just a flick of his finger.
“An interesting trick.” Damien says, “I didn’t know you were so adept at forcing hallucinations on others.”
“I assure that was no illusion, it was simply the reality that I allowed you to enter. You felt it didn’t you? You felt the ecstasy after you thought you killed me. Don’t you get it? I own you and the world around you. I own everything, boy.”
“That’s just your pride talking... You think you own that much just because your ego is telling you that you do. You’re going to find that out the hard way when it is all taken away.”
Satan chuckles a little and makes a hand gesture. While doing so he addresses Amon, the only Demon of the Hierarchy who still has his back. “Amon, leave me be and go find that priest. While you’re at it, I’m going to teach my son a harsh lesson in how I handle those who wish to oppose me.”
Amon is reluctant, but he really wants no part in this battle; even though he is the 4th ranked demon in all of Hell, he can see that this fight is so far out of his league that he’d only get in the way of the person he’s trying to help.
“Understood.”
Without any further hesitation, Amon distorts himself out of the range of the father and son duo’s battle.
“Now that it’s just us...” Satan says as he finishes making his hand gesture, “Let me introduce you to an alternate reality... The one you would have had if you weren’t my son.”
The world once again begins to awkwardly shift and melt away; this time however, as the night sky drips towards the ground, the blank areas shine a sky blue and begin to take the place of the stars. The further the melting goes, more of the world behind it starts to reveal itself; and after a few seconds, it molds into a place that Damien immediately recognizes.
“Is this..?” Damien asked as he scours the city in which he’s found himself in.
The sun is shining down on the town and there are even people walking about as though they are supposed to be there. The sound, the smell, the humidity in the air, everything about this place is exactly the same and the nostalgia pelting on his senses is almost eerie.
“Avignon?”
Avignon France.
It is the place where Damien lived out most of his life as a child who was worshiped by the people of the Catholic religion. In fact, he can even see the Palace of the Popes where he and his mother once called home.
“Is something wrong Damien?” asked a woman.
Damien, halfway in a trance, looks to his right and sees the concerned glare of Rosemary Halloran, his mother.
“..?”
“If you look at me like that I’ll get concerned... Did you eat this morning? It’s almost lunch, if you can hold out for a few minutes we’re almost home, I’ll cook you up something.”
Rosemary is holding a basket filled with bread and other foods. Dressed in her relatively tight nun attire, she looks as though she has just gotten done with Sunday services and headed into town to shop for dinner.
For Damien, this is the first time he’s seen her in over 1500 hundred years, he’s more or less speechless.
“I... I’d like that.” he replies softly.
Rosemary smiles and says, “Good, I’ll make your favorite!”
Damien follows her in a zombie-like fashion and completely succumbs to the desire to be with her once again.
Just as Satan planned.
Damien now has lost himself in a fake world that his father created. He’s lost himself in this world so deeply that he has forgotten what reality is. He has forgotten everything, from his personal vendetta against Satan, to his disdain for Ubica, all the way to his thirst for the power of Dantega.
To him, this is the reality he desired most.
And unless he snaps out of it and realizes it is fake, it will be the death of him.
Amon is walking towards the other battles that his traitorous comrades are involved in. He doesn’t even want to help them because of what they’ve done, but he assumes that the priest that he met at the Second Gate a few months back should be caught up in the fray. Once he finds him, he’ll bring him back to Satan and kill him.
However, he is once again hesitating. He has a horrible feeling in the pit of his chest that’s telling him to go back to his leader. Something is nagging him so hard that he stops in his tracks and ponders his next decision.
“Why do I feel like Satan is in danger..?” he asks himself as he turns back to look towards the area where he and Damien are fighting.
He can’t see them, nor can he even feel their presence. He assumes it’s likely that the two have more or less completely left the realms of this world and entered into another. If that’s the case, there’s nothing he can do about his bad feeling, but that still does’t keep him thinking that he can.
Lost in thought, he doesn’t notice that there is someone standing behind him. He can’t feel the aura of the menacing man standing just a few feet away.
SSSCCHHLLUUUNKK!!!
This is, until he is overcome with a dull pain that instantly sent his body into a convulsive shock.
“Gbbbuuahh!?!?”
Amon shakily looks towards the source of his pain and sees a sight he never had thought he would see out of his own body.
Protruding out of the right side of his stomach is a hand and a forearm.
“I thought I overheard an order for you to find me?” said the voice of the man who’s hand has violently impaled the demon.
“...You... It can’t... Be.”
Amon knows full well who it is, just by looking at the skin color of the blood soaked hand was enough to figure it out.
“I’ve been watching this entire time.”
Phoenix slides his face to the side of Amon and continues, “I’m happy that you left those two to their ways. It would have put a damper on my plans if you stuck around.”
“...Plans?” Amon struggled to ask as the dull pain grows sharp and sends shockwaves needling through his body.
“It’s simple really.”
Phoenix pulls his hand back through Amon’s torso quickly, but firmly grabs something on the way out.
That something being Amon’s spine.
In a smooth yet relentless motion, he yanks on the demon’s spine with tremendous force and tosses his whole body about ten meters back. Amon slides onto the ground and leaves a red stain on the white snow.
As soon as he landed, the feeling in his legs completely vanished and he knew right off the bat that he’s been internally decapitated. He can even feel the cold snow chill his extruding spinal cord.
With blood spraying like a fountain from both his stomach and his back, Amon writhes. Even though he can’t feel anything below his legs, the two massive holes in his body, along with all of the ripped and severed nerves around his spinal cord has gotten him feeling as though his entire system has been thrown into bowling water.
Phoenix smiles and wipes the blood off of his hand and arm with his La’Juutian priest sash. He takes a couple steps towards Amon and says, “I’m planning on taking it all for myself.”
Amon can see it in his eyes, there’s evil. Those eyes are not supposed to belong to the son of God.
With his fleeting and shoddy breaths; he asks the incoming priest,
“...What happened... to you?”
Phoenix holds out the hand that just skewered the demon and a huge fireball forms in front of his palm. It grows and grows until it becomes obvious that it is going to be used to end the life of the downed man.
He smiles and answers, “What happened?”
BOOOOOOOOOSSSHHHH!!!
He shoots the fireball forward and engulfs Amon in a severe flame. The fire melts the paralyzed Amon’s flesh and begins to char his bones.
In a flash, any chance of the demon’s survival is destroyed along with his body.
But what’s odd about the demon’s dissolving body is that his eyes are still there, completely unscathed by the flames. They stare at Phoenix as though he were still alive, and the jilted priest stares into them as his lips rise in a thin, thin smile.
Phoenix and Amon’s eyes glow in the reflection of the blaze as he says, “I’ve accepted Ubica’s offer of nothing... And from it, I have gained freedom.”
Beelzebub and Rage are squaring off in a battle that shakes the very core of Purgatory. The fight is so intense that one wouldn’t be surprised if the other three levels of Purgatory are feeling the effects of such power colliding.
“What are you doing!?” Rage asks as he rides atop his cloud at fast speeds while avoiding swarms of flies that are chasing after him.
Beelzebub’s voice comes from the swarm of flies that are in the shape of something very sharp; as though he were speaking through a loud speaker, his voice is exemplified when he answers, “I’m trying to kill you... That should be pretty obvious.”
“I’m not talking about that.” Rage replies. He swings his scythe and sends a black beam of dark energy into the swarm. “I’m talking about why you’re so eagerly going along with this!?”
The swarm scatters in perhaps millions of different directions and avoids Rage’s attack before molding back into the sharply pointed object.
“I’m simply fulfilling my role as a member of the Hierarchy.”
“That’s ridiculous, we both know you’ve never been a mere pawn who so easily follows orders. Out of all of the demons of Hell, you are the only one who can be reasoned with.”
“I suppose so.” Beelzebub re-animates himself into his human form and flies to the ground. While looking up at Rage atop his cloud, he continues, “But that doesn’t change the fact that I live to further advance the future of Hell. I am not a pawn, but I am not a man of honor either. My allegiance lies solely within our mutual goal to destroy Heaven and dethrone God.”
Beelzebub spreads his arms and millions upon millions of red bugs scatter outwards and paint themselves onto the ground, dying the white snow a churning red.
“Satan has proven himself to be disconnected from that goal, he has changed his views from the destruction of God, to the control of God’s people. That’s simply not what I strive for.”
The red bugs begin to fly straight upwards toward the sky, but they are pulling hundreds of feet of ground along with them, leaving a huge scar on the surface. All of Purgatory shakes as it proceeds to get taken apart down to its very fabric and the noise is almost deafening.
Rage screams through the loudness and his voice barely reaches the demon below, “Can’t you see that that is what Damien is doing as well!? That’s my point; no part of this uprising will ever reach the realm of God! This is just his personal vendetta against Ubica!”
The noise continues to grow as the red flies mold the hundreds of tons of sediment into an enclosing circle that looks to swallow Rage.
However, Rage can clearly hear Beelzebub’s voice when the demon replies, “You know nothing of the truth… As the Angel of Death, you’ve always been stuck in the middle of our war and have been forcefully kept away from the inner workings of both sides. Damien’s intentions lie far past his disdain for the Anti-Christ; the future he will create with the power of Dantega is something that I want to be apart of. And I will go to any lengths to secure my spot in that future.”
“Tch.”
Rage clicks his tongue at those words. He knows that as the Angel of Death who works for both Heaven and Hell, he would never get to know the details of both side’s goals and inner workings. In order to keep him neutral in their war, both sides avoided telling him anything so that he would not decide to fulfill his objectives based on what he felt was right or wrong.
For instance, when Damien unleashed the Bubonic Plague on Europe all those years ago, he had no clue about it until he was forced to try and collect the souls. Being caught off guard like that, allowed Hell’s reapers to take the souls for themselves and Rage could only watch as they were sacrificed. It was definite proof that Hell didn’t trust him, if he knew of that beforehand he could’ve prepared for it and ruined their plans.
Now we would have to look into Heaven’s distrust of him as well during that pivotal time in the history of the Earth. God did nothing while Rage worked so tirelessly for two years, and because of that Rage was under the impression that this was what he was supposed to be doing. In truth though, God did nothing simply because he didn’t need to. That whole ordeal led right into God’s true objective. So when it was time to put an end to it, God came down to Earth and gave Rage the power to end it all in a flash by forcing Rage to kill off an even greater amount of people through ‘The Black Death’.
If that wasn’t enough, it was written in the bible that Death itself will be destroyed once Judgment Day ended, of course that didn’t happen but who’s to say it won’t sometime in the near future? With the bible pointing to Death as the ultimate enemy of man, it’s only natural that Rage would look at Heaven wearily in contempt.
Why was he given the title of Angel if he was an enemy to begin with?
So once again, Rage is constantly being left out of the loop. Even now, he knows that God is up to something, but he doesn’t know what it is. He knows that Damien is up to something, and he doesn’t know that either. He knows that Satan is up to something, but the specifics of that plan are far above his head as well.
This infuriates him.
He knows that in all of their plans, he is supposed to be involved in one way or another. They have expected, and are expecting him to act in a certain way that benefits them, and it would seem that there’s nothing he can do to change that.
But he doesn’t have the time to fret over such a thing because the walls of Beelzebub’s attack are closing in on him quickly. He attempts to flee but is enclosed in an instant and he is surrounded by a darkness. In this rapidly encroaching sphere of sediment and bugs, he can only hear the deep base noise emitting from the buzzing insects.
“Damn it!” Rage hisses as he realizes that he’s been careless. The battlefield is no place to get lost in thought, especially when the opponent is the 3rd ranked demon of Hell.
Although the Angel of Death and the Demon of Gluttony are separated by a sphere floating in the sky about the size of a mountain, Rage can hear Beelzebub’s voice clearly.
“You are the ultimate enemy of everyone Rage. Death is the enemy of man, Death is the pawn of Hell, and Death is the puppet of Heaven. You are so important, yet so worthless. But I intend to give you worth by destroying you... Malach HaMavet’s disappearance from all worlds will lead to the expanse of mine. You will never be forgotten... ‘Azrael’.”
Beelzebub makes no gesture, nor does his face even flinch.
He simply turns around and
BBBBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!
The mountain sized sphere of sediment in the sky explodes in a great blast so bright that it turns the night sky hot white. After the initial flash, a bright red circle of energy screams outwards for miles as though it were the ring of a planet that had just been destroyed by an asteroid. In the center of the ring is a plume of smoke that is constantly changing colors from red, to blue, to purple, and yellow, before finally setting on the distinct color of dark green.
Rage is surely blown to smithereens, it’s almost a surety that not even a trace of him will be left.
Just like that, the Angel of Death is no more...
At least that was what was supposed to happen.
“I haven’t heard anyone call me by my real name in quite some time.” Comes the voice of Rage, loud and clear from the dark green plume of smoke.
“!?”
A rare expression of shock makes itself known on Beelzebub’s face as he quickly turns around to see what his ears heard.
That’s when a scythe comes zooming out of the smoke and smashes into the ground as though it were a javelin thrown from the heavens. It is certainly Rage’s scythe, but something is different about it...
It is completely black.
“I haven’t used this power in over 1500 years. To be perfectly honest, I have tried to avoid using it again for so long because it represents the darkest time of my existence.”
Rage floats slowly from the core of the smoke and falls gently to the ground. As he floats, one can see that he has his black hood on so his face can’t be seen; the way his tattered overcoat sways in the wind of that amazing blast is very menacing, even to Beelzebub.
“It represents the moment when I realized just what kind of being my creator was.” Rage says as he lands. “But even more so than that... It represents the moment I realized exactly what I was created for.”
Rage lifts his face and reveals an eerie paleness to his skin tone. In contrast to this ghoulish appearance, there are multiple black lines that stretch vertically over his mouth and reach all the way to the center of his cheeks until two of those lines fall down his jaw, and stretch up past his eyes into his hairline. His eyes carry no pupils and have no color; they are simply as white as a blank canvas that looks to swallow a man’s soul.
“What is this..?”
Rage takes his two hands and grabs the sleeves of his overcoat around the shoulder area of each side and rips them both off, revealing his stunningly pale arms. Similar to his face, there are black lines that slide down his arms and reach all the way to his hands and branch off into his fingers as if they where supposed to be the outlining of black bones.
“This is...” Rage replies as he walks to his scythe and holds his hand out in front of it. “The Black Death.”
VVVVVVVOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!
A swirling black inferno swirls around Beelzebub and encloses him similarly to the demon’s attack earlier.
Beelzebub can sense how dangerous this is and desperately tries to find a way to escape, and luckily enough he found it. Though he is completely surrounded, he looks up to find that he can exit by flying into the sky.
Without further hesitation, flies in the millions form under his feet and propel him upwards so quickly it was like he was a green flash.
Not weary in the least, Rage simply squeezes his hand into a fist and
VVVVAAAAABBBAAAAASHHHHH!!!!
“!!!”
The black tornado like inferno encloses under Beelzebub’s feet and fires upwards in a great blast so fast that it rips the atmosphere and disappears into the night sky. The sound it makes afterwards is similar to the sound of a sonic boom a jet fighter makes after flying over one’s head at top speed. That cracking noise doesn’t end for close to a minute even though the blast was out of sight in only a second.
“Though I may be the enemy to all worlds... I have still been given a name by God, and along with the name Azrael, I have been given a portion of his power.”
Trojia and Asmodeus are squaring off in a fight that can only be seen a split second at a time. Whether that be on the ground or in the air; the two seemingly appear out of nowhere and sparks from their respective weapons fly before they vanish once more.
“Damn it all you’re a pain in my ass!” Asmodeus shouts in frustration when nothing she does gets under the guard of the princess.
“.....”
Trojia remains silent and teleports to the ground. She watches as Asmodeus does a couple flips before landing herself about 10 meters away.
“Are you getting tired?” The demon asks as the chain tongue ring dangling from her mouth sways back and forth. “It’s gotta be exhausting to teleport like that so frequently. You may seem like a monster, but you’re still just a human.”
“.....”
Trojia blankly glares forward until she lifts up the sword in her right hand and then sets it back to her side in a smooth motion.
“..?”
Asmodeus looks at her quizzically.
“You’re right.” Trojia says, “It is tiring.”
“Huahahah I thought so!”
Asmodeus rushes her and prepares to cut her in half with her chain linked bracelets.
However, when she gets a few feet away from the girl, she is suddenly struck by something extremely heavy from above. This heavy object plows into the top of her head and stops her dead in her tracks. The object smashes her face into the ground so violently that it caves in, burying half of her body.
The object is a 5 meter long and 3 meter wide stone pillar that was taken from the castle out in the distance and teleported just above Asmodeus’s head. The 20 ton pillar falling from such a height shatters and breaks apart against the Demon’s body and buried her in rubble.
If one listened carefully, they’d hear the echo of the castle out in the distance collapsing off the surrounding hills.
“Teleporting an object is much easier.” Trojia coolly said as she turns away from the pile of broken stone.
“...Wait, you bitch... Don’t think I’m done yet!”
Asmodeus’s muffled voice barely exits out of the pile, and smaller pieces of stone begin to fall off as though the demon was desperately trying to push her way out.
“You know...” Trojia says as she slowly turns around and watches her feeble efforts. “You are very weak.”
In truth, Asmodeus is the weakest demon out in the Hierarchy, and that’s mainly because her specialty has nothing to do with fighting. Unlike the freak Abaddon who jolted up the ranks to 6th solely on fighting ability alone, the others have to use their specific powers to tempt people into the Original Sin they represent.
Now if it came down to that, Asmodeus is likely the strongest out of all of them. Her temptations have led to more souls swaying from righteousness than any of the others; her list of notables range from King David of Israel, to his son Solomon. Her temptations directly led to the destruction of Solomon’s temple, which in turn made her solely responsible for the Holy Land’s map to be changed for millennia to come.
Asmodeus can normally control the lust in one's body to have them act in any way she wills it, but Trojia's soul seems blank, and she can't grasp onto any of the princess's negative feelings.
As for sheer fighting ability, she doesn’t hold any special powers really. Unlike her comrades who’s powers range from controlling antimatter, all the way to the water of the ocean, she can only move at fast speeds and use occasional illusions to fool her enemies.
Therein lies the problem, she may be extremely fast, but when facing off against someone who can literally teleport anywhere in a blink of an eye, and do the same for surrounding objects, she’s flat out of luck. She's ran into an enemy with the perfect power to destroy her, illusions won't work against someone like that either.
“I won’t accept that from a mere human! Do you know who the fuck I am!? I am Asmodeus! I eat rotten girls like you every day!” she shouts, the pieces of stone start falling more rapidly as the anger spewing from the pile grows.
Trojia sticks both of her swords into the ground and raises both of her arms towards the sky.
Without showing any kind of expression, she replies to the demon, “I’m tired of you people throwing out your names and title as though I am supposed to know or care who you are.”
VVVUUUOOMMMMM!!
With a distinct base noise, above the pile of rubble Asmodeus is trapped in, a new object appears. This time it’s something so large that it blocks out the light of the three moons and cascades an ominous shadow onto the snowy surface.
The object is the rest of the castle that pillar belonged to.
That’s right, the entire stone castle that stretches the size of 5 mansions is dangling over head, dropping pieces of rock and stone to the ground where the foundation once was.
Of course, Asmodeus has no way of knowing this and continues to scream with all of her might, “I’ll turn you into my little whore and watch as I force men on you ten at a time!! I’ll take that rotten soul of yours and make it mine! You hear me!? I’m coming to fucking kill you!!”
Trojia has heard enough of the demon’s nonsense and is about to drop the castle on top of her when she hears someone softly speak from behind.
“You’re going to kill her, aren’t you..?”
Trojia shifts her head to the voice and sees Niera, standing there with a face that has obviously been crying.
“Of course I am.” Trojia easily answers, “This demon is trying to kill us too.”
Niera shakes her head and points to the ground just a couple feet away from Trojia. “No... I’m talking about her.”
Trojia follows Niera’s gesture and is surprised at what she finds. Sitting up against a block of stone pretty much covered in snow, is Messor the False Prophet.
“!!”
Trojia more or less can’t believe she didn’t even notice Messor’s presence until now, when she thinks about it, she must have stepped over her a few times since her fight started.
“You...” she said roughly through gritted teeth.
This is the first time she’s seen Messor since the third Gate, and at that time she had vowed to herself that she’d kill her the next time she did.
And now there she is, obviously wounded and hopelessly defenseless.
However, one wouldn’t think that by looking into Messor’s eyes.
The False Prophet is staring at the princess as though she were a pitiful bug. What’s more, Messor’s lips faintly rise and form into a cold smile.
Trojia bitterly frowns, pulls her swords out of the ground and begins to walk towards Messor like a zombie. Her thought process completely switched in that moment and the castle in the sky begins falling down.
In that very instant, Asmodeus frees herself and comes out with a wide, cynical grin. Her hazel eyes glow in insanity as her face is swallowed by her own blood.
“I’m coming you little bitch!!! I’m gonna ki-----“
BABABOOOOOOOOOOOOOSHH!!!
The castle lands right on top of the demon and results in a heavy explosion that rattles the ground for what feels like minutes afterward.
That noise, and this rumbling is ignored by the two girls staring at each other with more hate brewing between them than a freed slave and his former abusive master. The air grows heavy around them and pressure is felt like a heavy blanket of malice.
“I knew it...” Niera says as she drops to her knees and throws her hands onto her head. She firmly grasps at her jet black hair and mutters a defiant confirmation. “It’s just like my vision... You’re going to kill her... We’re all going to die!!!”
Trojia ignores the screams of her distraught friend and keeps moving towards the Messor as if the False Prophet’s demeaning glare were a magnet. Her eyes begin to glow that emotionless red and shine like the burning hot anger in her chest.
“Come girl, show me if you really have it in you to ruin everything you built.” Messor said with a smile as she watches what would seem to be her doom inch closer.
“.....”
Trojia points one of her swords towards Messor’s neck, but keeps herself from skewering her as soon as she makes contact with her skin.
“What’s wrong? Are you actually thinking ahead to the aftermath of my death? Are you afraid of what ‘he’ll’ do?” Messor inquires.
“...Kkhh..!”
Trojia is obviously struggling to decide if she wants to lop of her head and hold herself back.
“It’s too late for you girl, you might as well just do it. You’ve already lost Ubica to Tsubiri, and you’ve already lost the control of your soul. The only thing you have left is whatever pathetic bond you think you have with him. But with the two most important things in your pathetic life gone, what good does that last shred of hope do for you?”
“...Grrra..!”
Trojia is fighting with all her might. Just a few minutes ago on the stairs after she lost her tempter at Tsubiri, she made up her mind that she’d be strong. But something is pulling at her heart so hard that her resolve is beginning to break. It’s like an addiction that she can’t beat, whatever it is that is pulling her seems like the best and most pleasurable option, and fighting it just seems like a painful action a human instinctively wants to avoid.
Choosing the latter path just seems so unreasonable.
“You see... That’s where you and I differ, I’m realistic here, and I know I may never have the same kind of love that he feels for Tsubiri. Yet it doesn’t mean that I’ve given up, I’ll be with him no matter what, whether he hates me or not doesn’t matter. You are still grasping at straws, that’s why you don’t want to kill me. You are afraid that if you do, that last shred of hope you cling to will dissolve.”
For whatever reason, Messor is purposely tempting Trojia into madness.
“So what will you do? Will you risk losing him for revenge? Or will you sacrifice your bodyguard’s honor by letting me live just so you have a slight chance with someone else’s man?”
“I... I!!!”
“Try to kill me Trojia! Show me that Niomyo’s useless existence actually had any worth!!”
“SHUT UUUUUUUUPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!”
Trojia snapped.
Just hearing Messor mention Niomyo’s name is the final insult that she has no intention to let slide. All forms of the shackles called restraint break and along with it the princess’s mind goes blank.
All of the sudden, hundreds of base noises appear overhead and bring along thousands of pieces of rock and stone from the pathway and statues leading up to the castle. Though this doesn’t compare in size to the castle Trojia had just dropped on Asmodeus, the sheer number of items she had to teleport individually make this attack seem even more deadly.
“Finally!” Messor says as though she is overcome with relief. “You've finally shown me who you really are!”
The broken stone wall Messor is leaning on rots away and disintegrates into the dirt. The area behind her back is replaced by golden wings so bright that they almost look transparent. A golden halo forms over her head and she begins to float up towards the stone and rock in the air.
“I thought for a second there that you’d changed your views on him, but now I see that nothing’s changed. More so now than ever before, you are a threat to Ubica!”
Messor is almost giddy at the fact that Trojia has revealed such a hollow soul to her like this because she promised Ubica she wouldn’t do anything to harm his friends. Believe it or not, Messor’s word and her general values as a person are set at a very high standard, if she says she’ll do something, she will.
But not at the cost of any harm being brought to the person she lives for. By Trojia losing herself to revenge, she has fallen into an abyss where escaping back to reason is an impossibility. The girl Ubica knows and cares about is no longer there. The person she is now is a true threat to Ubica, and must be eliminated at all costs.
Trojia’s heard enough, she sends the thousands of pieces of heavy stones zooming down towards Messor’s head.
Messor seemingly ignores the gale of death approaching her and simply waves her hand.
The result of that simple gesture is all it took to save her life.
Sharp, jagged chunks of ground numbering in the thousands manifest themselves below the False Prophet’s feet and shoot up towards the sky. Each jagged chunk of Purgatory soil bends and shapes in every which direction, and the sharp point of each pillar of hits the stone of Trojia’s attack.
The resulting scene is hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of fine particles of stone and soil sprinkling down to the floor as though it were glitter. The moon’s light shines off of them and make the once devastating attack seem like harmless stardust.
“You’re going to need to do a lot more if you want to kill me.” Messor said, holding out her hand to Trojia in a gesture for her to come.
Trojia’s expression does’t change one bit and it looks as cold and evil as ever when she disappears.
Messor knows that the princess has teleported and calmly awaits her reappearance amidst the forest of sediment she created around herself.
She actually did such a thing on purpose.
Because of the presence of obstacles between her and Trojia, it forces Trojia to use an even more exact calculation so she doesn’t end up teleporting herself into a shish-kabob.
This would explain why it’s taking a little longer for Trojia to appear before Messor.
“Hmph.” Messor smiles and huffs air out of her nose. “I may have grown soft due to Ubica’s kindness..." Her eyes land directly where she knows Trojia will appear and prepares herself. "But I’ll always be the False Prophet!”
Trojia appears directly in front of Messor and throws her arm forward for an attack. This time however, she does something different than her previous attempt.
Instead of teleporting an item and using it as a projectile of sorts, she uses the power she learned first.
Phsycokenisis.
VVVUUMMP!!!
Messor is hit dead on by an invisible collision and is knocked back at such a force she smashes through the forest of sediment roughly in a series of loud crashes and bangs.
Using the gold wings behind her back, she braces herself and keeps from breaking any bones. Slowing after each hit, she eventually slows down and immediately flaps her wings forward. What follows is a huge gale of wind that rips through the already broken trail of sediment she had just flown through.
But the wind seems to have an effect on the jagged pillars, each one explodes violently.
BADADADADADADADADADADADADABBBAAAMM!!!!
The explosion that sounded like machine gun fire and spread forward like a napalm ball engulfs Trojia. But even with the severity of such a blast, Trojia managed to teleport in time to escape and she reappears just above the inferno and floats in the sky.
“Tch.” Messor clicks her tongue and says, “You can fly too huh? What a monster you’ve become.”
Messor flaps her wings once more and floats up into the air, reaching the point where she and her enemy are eye to eye in the sky.
“.....”
Trojia stays silent as they stare each other down. Though it’s more than likely that she couldn’t talk even if she wanted to.
“I know this for sure...” Messor says as the golden halo above her head begins to spin like a top and her eyes glow brighter than ever. “If I don’t kill you here, you ‘will’ be the death of Ubica.”
Messor flaps her wings.
Trojia teleports.
The battle between the False Prophet and Princess of Troy continues with no one there to stop them.
Abaddon and Michael are in a place so dark that nothing, absolutely nothing can be seen.
This place can’t even be considered as such because it literally holds no mass. There’s nothing here.
One must wonder how a battle can possibly commence from within a black hole, and in order to do that, one must know what’s in a black hole to begin with. But that answer has and will likely never be known.
Unless you are a demon so strong that you can create your own.
Abaddon knows what this dark world consists of, he knows how to fight in it, and most importantly, he knows how to escape.
All of these are pieces of knowledge Michael can’t fathom, even as the Archangel who sat to the right of God.
“.....”
Michael tried to speak but sound won’t escape his lips.
“..?”
“Quite the place ain’t it?” Abaddon’s voice rings through the darkness. “It’s amazing how the destruction point of an object can create something like this. It coulda been anything really, as long as it had a mass I could compact it to the point where it’d deform spacetime.”
“.....”
“Oh I bet ya wanna talk now right?”
The gentle snap of Abaddon’s finger echoes in the darkness and all of the sudden, Michael can feel an odd surge of energy reformulate in the back of his throat.
“Go right on ahead and say something.”
“...How?” Michael asks, “How did you learn how to do such a thing?”
“God created me to be the key-holder to the abyss. Wouldn’t ya say that this is the ultimate abyss? I just never had the strength to realize how vast my power was until I came to my senses and shifted to the darkness.”
“The key-holder to the endless abyss... Well then, I’m not too big into science but I know that a fight in this place should be impossible. You have limited yourself along with me right?”
“In one way or another.”
“Then what are you trying to pull? If you can’t fight me in here, then what’s the point of doing any of this at all? Are you just trying to stall me and keep me away from the battle with the others?”
“Man oh man you must have rocks for brains. Get over yourself Michael, you aren’t the most important person on the battlefield anymore. I wouldn’t waste my time stalling you when you aren’t even a threat to the others in the first place.”
“Tch, big talk coming from a coward hiding in the dark!”
“Hmph.”
Abaddon snaps his finger once more and out of nowhere, he appears a few meters in front of Michael from within the darkness.
Michael is shocked to see his own hands in front of his face as well. Scouring the area for anymore signs of light, he sees that other than the image of the two of them, there is nothing but the darkest black.
“I ain’t dumb enough to leave you any kinda opening, so looking for light is pointless. And don’t think about trying to make a spark either, no kind of light will shine here unless I say so.” Abaddon said, his usual smile is tilted downwards and replaced by a bitter frown.
Michael, without being able to form his spear out of the light he keeps it in, is weaponless and virtually defenseless. But that doesn’t stop him from floating in this outer space like atmosphere towards his enemy and saying, “Then it comes down to hand to hand combat huh? Fine then, I’ll take you out without the aid of my weapons.”
“Ah-ah-ah.” Abaddon holds his index finger out and shakes it from right to left. “I wouldn’t do that if I was you.”
That’s when Michael floats into something in the darkness and it gently presses against his stomach.
“..?”
This little object is certainly small, but it’s odd because at first he couldn’t see it in the darkness. He has to look very closely and he finds a little black spot pressed against his white shirt. Focusing his eyes, he realizes that this little spot actually holds some kind of mass, and the sphere the size of an eerily familiar marble begins to register into his brain as a threat.
“!!!”
But by then it’s too late.
BBBBBBBBAAAAAAAAAMMMMMM!!!!
In invisible explosion hits into Michael’s gut and sent him flying into the darkness until his back viciously collides with something like a wall.
“GGBBAAHH!!??”
He coughs out blood that disappears the moment it exits his mouth.
“A blackhole must constantly bring in mass in order to contain itself. The outside world from within that royal guard’s remains is stimulating the power of this particular fracture in spacetime. So, that means that there is mass all around us, we just can’t see it. I’m guessing you smashed into a stone pillar or something.”
Though, that doesn’t explain why Michael was blown back by an invisible blast.
Abaddon answers that question before Michael can ask.
“To ensure my victory, I emptied out my pouch of marbles and manipulated the destruction point in each them so they detonate upon contact. I know I know it’s risky, it could hit me or hit some debris and I could be blown to bits; but I figured my best bet is to just sit here and watch you struggle to find your way out of this before the eventual boom.”
Michael stays silent, all he can to is cough as he tries to retake the breath that was squeezed out of his lungs from the blast and the impact. While holding his bleeding stomach, he glares at his demon counterpart.
The thin and cynical smile returns to the former angel's face as Abaddon holds out his hand and readies to snap his finger once more.
“Have fun. I'll be watchin ya.”
Snap.
With that, Abaddon’s image vanishes.
However, Michael’s figure can still be seen illuminating the darkness.
“Shit...”
He knows that one wrong move can be the death of him, even though he has a general idea where Abaddon is, he can’t just blindly rush in and try to take him out. After all, the demon could be lying, moving his way towards him this very moment and there’d be nothing he could do about it.
For the first time since the last time he found himself in darkness like this, he feels fear.
The last time was when Ubica engulfed the entirety of Mt. Zion and all 144,000 thousand angels in a world of evil darkness and subsequently killed every one of them but him. The last time was when Ubica tricked Michael into killing his two lovers Catherine and Margaret.
The eerie similarities don’t go unnoticed and it really is starting to affect him negatively.
It’s like throwing someone in solitary confinement and telling him that if he moved one inch he’d detonate an grenade. Except this is worse.
“What’s wrong, Archangel?” Abaddon’s voice rings. “Ain’t ya gonna do nothin?”
This is too similar, if he didn’t know any better, he’d swear that this was done on purpose.
He starts to hallucinate in the darkness and sees the burning faces of Catherine and Margaret right in front of him, he can even hear the echoes of their screams.
“Uaah...” he groans.
“C’mon Michael, move. Or you’re gonna force me to come for you.”
Michael grabs his hair and continues to see and hear memories of the past as though cheap film was projecting itself directly in front of his eyes.
This time he relives the moment when he felt the sensation of his comrade’s severed wings floating down on him from above, and the accompanying screams of agony.
“Not again...” he said hoarsely, clearly beginning to delve into insanity.
“What do I do..?”
“Come on man, everyone here except you is utterly useless.” Mammon said as he floats atop his ball and peers down on his adversaries.
Huffing and puffing, and seemingly unable to move, are Strauphius, Xavier, and even Aria.
The only one still standing and able to fight is Napoleon.
“Don’t count us out yet.” Strauphius says, shoddily standing to his feet in the process.
“You just might be the most useless of them all. You can only use your power once every couple minutes? That’s weak. I can’t believe you’re still alive.” He then gestures to Xavier and continues, “And you, what are you even doing here? You ought to bury yourself in the snow and hope we forget about you after we’re done killing everyone else. I mean really, fighting me with no powers of your own? Useless.”
The next person Mammon shifts his attention to is Aria, who is standing guard in front of Xavier as his last line of defense.
“I’ll admit, you’re strong, but you wasted too much energy protecting that kid.”
This is when the demon’s expression turns sour and morphs into a bitter frown. He slowly looks to Napoleon and then points his sword at him. “But you! How the fuck can you keep up with my attacks??”
Mammon voices his frustrations so openly because he just hasn’t been able to deal any damage to the General since the start of the fight; not only that, Napoleon has been protecting his comrades at the same time. It’s like his instincts make the correct decisions for his body’s movements a full second earlier than the actual event that forced it to move. It is sheer battle hardened instinct that’s propelling him to stay on level ground with the 5th ranked demon of the Hiearchy.
Napoleon has solid masses of rock snake around him as though they were a barrier. Even to Mammon, the way he controls the elements of what would technically be called ‘Earth’ is unnerving. The General can freely maneuver and shape the ground in any shape, and propel it as fast as a bullet.
“I can see your next move before you make it. Your eye movement tells me all I need to know.” Napoleon answers, giving the demon a hint at why he’s failing.
“Bullshit.” Mammon spits. “Do you know who’s power that actually is? I’d say you just got a lucky draw and ended up with an ability almost exactly the same as the False Prophet’s.”
This is true, Messor was born from the Earth while Ubica was born from the sea; thus the two’s natural elemental power is water and Earth.
Though when Messor instilled power to everyone, she had nothing to do with exactly what it was. The group’s natural function of the soul along with the limit of their brain decided that. But that doesn’t mean that some abilities are stronger than the others solely on what type of power it is. By Napoleon unlocking the power to manipulate the Earth, he literally unlocked the power of the False Prophet, and since it was the False Prophet herself who gave him the push to unlock it for him, it added a crazy amount of strength to it.
This along with his distinct ability in battle has risen him to a status never thought attainable by a human. He’s taken a step into the world of the beings that stand far beyond his origins as a regular man.
“Still.”
Mammon points his sword in the air and a ball of antimatter grows from the size of a fist, all the way to the size of a school bus. Then snow starts to swirl around the orb and it gets sucked into it as though it were a magnet.
He’s mixing regular matter with antimatter, causing high energy photons to rise to an unsustainable level.
Even if the regular matter isn’t that great, two opposite forces colliding will always result in devastation.
“You’re not the False Prophet, and your strength is nowhere near that monster. Deep down you’re just a flesh and blood human who’s stumbled across a convenient ability.”
Napoleon can sense something is coming so he builds a very thick wall of sediment about ten meters in front of him that rises to the size of a building.
“That shit isn’t gonna do you any good pal. You are no monster, your body can’t withstand a direct blow to multiple vital points like Messor.”
He speaks to the point that the group of demons literally nailed Messor up on a stone wall and cut her throat as to provoke Ubica, yet she still didn’t die. In fact, even though she’s weakened by the blood loss, those wounds have more or less already healed.
“And your frail body certainly can’t withstand a direct blow from a gamma ray like Ubica’s!”
On that topic, he speaks to the point that he fired a gamma ray at Ubica back in the first level of Purgatory only to have it repelled back and blown up in his face.
“And neither can a damn wall of rock!”
He speaks to the point of the mere physics of such a thing. The demon’s most powerful and frightening attack simply cannot be repelled back by rock. If he fired a gamma ray at the Earth’s surface, the ground would melt into lava and rise in temperature until it literally eviscerated in a dazzling flash of light.
That being said, he holds the power to defeat the menace that is the General of the La’Juutian army in one fell swoop.
Mammon points his sword forward and the orb above his head flashes in a bright light before zinging out a yellow beam that moves faster than the speed of a shooting star. The beam is so hot that melts the ground below it and almost blinds Aria and the others.
“!!!”
Napoleon doesn't even need to see it, he knows that he has no chance to defend that attack. He will die, it’s just a matter of a blink of an eye.
And in that blink, his wall of sediment is obliterated so badly that it actually engulfed in flame before it vanished into the heat of the gamma ray. Napoleon heard that bang and shut his eyes, he knows that this is his end.
The heat continues to get closer and closer and then...
BBBBBBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSHHHHHHH!!!!
He hears a second blast.
“Huh..?” he mutters, he shouldn’t have heard anything after his wall was destroyed.
Napoleon opens his eyes and finds a blond girl cloaked in silver armor swinging her black sword and repelling that unstoppable ray. The beam takes an acute angle off of her sword and shoots straight up into the sky before exploding in a light that turns the surrounding night sky into daylight.
“...Wha?”
The girl doesn’t turn around but her presence alone is enough to make the battle hardened General’s heart skip a beat.
“I’ve come to aid you warriors in the battle against the Lord’s enemies.” she said firmly as though she were a super hero coming in for the late rescue.
She swings her black sword and the heat still permeating off of it from the ray is still so hot that the wind from her swing melted the snow in a straight line.
“I was hoping not to use the Sword given to me by God himself. That was actually the first time I used it.” she said in a voice that had a tinge of disappointment in it.
“Joan of Arc...” Mammon hisses.
“Joan?” Napoleon asks, still recovering from the shock of being alive after fully expecting to die.
“That’s right.” she says, swaying the banner held in her right hand with pride. “May I ask of you your name as well?”
“Ask of me my name?"
Napoleon finds her distinct accent very odd and pauses for a moment.
“Yes, state your name please."
“It's Napoleon.”
“Hmm, Napoleon... A great name.”
She finally turns around to see the man she had just met and her eyes instantly light up.
“Your skin!?”
“..?”
“Ooaah, I’ve never seen a real black man before!” she exclaims excitedly and rushes to him.
“Exuse me?”
In a flash, she’s pinching Napoleon’s cheeks and smiling in an over the top fashion in awe.
“I’ve only read of your kind! Amazing! Just amazing!”
He tries not to take offense to this and is more or less embarrassed at her reaction to his skin tone. After a few seconds of feeling like a helpless child who’s cheeks are being pinched by an overbearing adult, he gently slaps her hands away and says, “Knock it off, I’m in the middle of a fight.”
“I send you my sincerest apologies, but my hands are moving by themselves.”
“Are you kidding!?”
“I never kid.”
She keeps reaching for his face and he dodges each of her swipes until Mammon’s voice is heard from above.
“Hey hey, I don’t think now’s the right time to be distracted.”
They both look up and find that there are a dozen black orbs collecting snow and other forms of matter, and all of them begin to shine until...
BBAAAAMM!! BOOOOOOOSHHH!!! BAAANNNG!!!
All twelve of these orbs shoot out gamma rays in every which direction.
Aria and the others desperately run and try to avoid being obliterated by them as each one hits the ground and melts it into lava.
The heat is so extreme that the melting ground sprays forward a burning hot mist that engulfs all of them. The mist sends shock-waves of pain into their lungs and stings their eyes and skin.
“Damn it!” Napoleon shouts while struggling to keep his eyes open, “I lost focus!”
“Don’t worry.” Joan says, standing in the heat seemingly unaffected. “With my help, you all shall be safe.”
She swings her banner and the mist is blown away, the wind from that gentle swing is enough to send the scorching air directly at Mammon and it knocks him back. The orbs firing the gamma rays tilt off course and shoot off in random directions.
“What the fuck was that!?” he shouts, the pain from the hot air still lingering on his face.
“Deflect and destroy.” Joan says, holding both of her weapons triumphantly. “God has given me the Banner of Heaven to deflect attacks from my enemies, and the Sword of Fierbois to destroy them. Come evil demon, come face the wrath of the Maid of Orleans!”
Ubica and Tsubiri are squaring off in their battle against Leviathan, and believe it or not, they are holding their own.
Leviathan has been attacking with wavering commitment because of the presence of Tsubiri; if he’s careless, she’ll electrocute him and be vulnerable to one of Ubica’s onslaughts. This has put his two foes on equal footing and is resulting in a stalemate.
“I guess my water has been rendered useless.” Leviathan said with a sigh that seemingly shows no concern whatsoever.
He pulls out a blue diamond sword from the sheath on his waste and charges Ubica. The two’s swords collide and Ubica attempts to kick him away when Leviathan morphs into water and his attack literally goes right through him.
In that moment, Tsubiri found an opening and sent lighting through her fingers towards the blob of water at tremendous speeds.
Knowing this would happen, Leviathan returns his mass to his normal human form and uses his sword to deflect the electricity. Immediately after, he rushes the much slower Tsubiri and attempts to cut her in half before she can defend herself.
“!!”
Ubica is not going to let that happen. He slams his hands on the ground the snow around Leviathan’s feet melts and latches onto his legs before violently swinging to the side and tossing the demon over a hundred meters away.
“Thanks Ubica, I owe you one.” Tsubiri said as she can feel the immanent danger from Leviathan still lingering in the space right in front of her.
“How much energy do you have left?” Ubica asks as he stands in front of her and watches Leviathan catch his footing way out in the distance.
“I’m a little tired, but I think I have a good amount. What’s up?”
“I have an idea... But it involves you using the rest of your strength.”
“Well, will it work?”
“I think it will, but if it doesn’t it can put you in a real bad spot.”
Tsubiri puts her forehead on his back and asks, “You’ll protect me if that’s the case right?”
“Of course.”
“Then let’s do it.”
“Alright, take a few steps back, the ground is going to get really unstable around me.”
Tsubiri does what he says and gains a fair amount of distance between him. She wonders what he has planned and her thoughts are answered when a bright blue light starts to shine around him and it sinks into the snowy ground.
The snow melts dozens of meters in diameter around him, and rises up into the sky as though they were rain drops falling in the opposite direction.
“I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m impressed that you can control water so well.” Leviathan said as he watches the scene from afar.
The water accumulates and forms into a large lake floating in the sky.
“But whatever it is...” Leviathan says as he spreads his arms and creates water of his own by using the snow on the ground. “I won’t let you try it.”
The water freezes over into thousands upon thousands of sharp icicles and shoot up into the sky and make their way towards Ubica and Tsubiri.
Tsubiri can see the icicles coming towards them that look like arrows shot forth to impale anything in their way. She knows that there’s just about nothing they can do to avoid them.
“Ubica!” she shouts, hoping that he can do something about it.
Ubica claps his hands together while looking up at the mass of water he created and watches it vaporize into steam before becoming a giant dark cloud.
“Tsubiri, send as much electricity as you can into that cloud!”
She doesn’t hesitate and throws all of her energy into multiple streaks of blue lightning that disappear into the cloud.
BBBBBBOOOOMMMMMMM!!!!!!
A thunderous rour echoes itself in the sky and rain starts to fall in gales of wind so great it’s hard to stay standing.
“So this is what you’re going to do..?” Tsubiri asked after taking a deep breath in exhaustion.
“Yeah.” he replies. The oncoming icicles feel as though they are moving in slow motion as he points his sword at them. “We’ll stop him with this.”
He’s created a lighting storm.
To do that, he needed cold air and warm air. By heating the water he created into steam, the cold air above made contact with the warm. And when they met, the warm air continuously went up and created a massive thunderstorm cloud.
The cold air has ice crystals.
The warm air has water droplets.
Inside of that thundercloud, the droplets and crystals bump together and move apart in the air. This rubbing makes static electrical charges in the clouds. Having Tsubiri throw in her own electric current in the already fully charged cloud, triggered a natural phenomena so strong that it drastically altered the snowy and cold environment surrounding the 4th Gate.
This phenomena; this mega thunderstorm cloud, is under the direct control of the person who created it.
That person being Ubica.
And he doesn’t hesitate to use that power.
With a swift swing of his sword, a green lighting bolt so large shot down in a bright flash and slinged directly through the onslaught of icicle arrows. In an instant, the majority of them are blown into bits. One by one they are taken out by the splintering electricity of the lighting bolt.
The remainder of the icicles fall to the left and right of Ubica and Tsubiri and harmlessly stick into the ground after missing their target.
Even Leviathan has to reveal a face of shock, that attack was ridiculous. He knows that if he’s hit by one of those bolts, his body would completely evaporate.
“Clever...” he said with a rare tinge of anger.
He rushes forward but is met with the biggest obstacle he’s ever faced.
KKKKSHHHHHHSSSHHHHBBBBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!
Dozens of lighting bolts crash around him and he can feel their current enter his body, almost numbing his senses. He desperately tries to avoid them, fleeing in every which direction his legs can take him as each bolt utterly demolishes the areas that he just moved from.
The bolts are so strong that the mountain to his left is struck and explodes like a crumbling volcano.
Now he has even more obstacles to deal with, the crumbling mountain falls in his direction and millions of pounds of debris flies towards him. He can’t materialize into water to avoid the mountain because he would become super conductive and be a magnet for the bolts, and he can’t stay the way he is because the weight of that mountain will crush his physical body to sawdust.
Leviathan grits his teeth, any moment now one of those two results will come to pass. It’s not a matter of using his strength to get out of this alive, it’s a matter of how much time he has before he’s dead. As the second most powerful demon in all of Hell, he’s never been put in such a dire situation before, and doesn’t have the experience to think his way out of such a situation.
However, when one’s life is one the line, instinct takes over and they either form superhuman amounts of strength in their last moments, or they reach a moment of clarity that slows everything down and allows them time to think. In this case, Leviathan can’t get any stronger, so the latter reveals itself in his mind in a brilliant fashion.
What is Ubica’s only weakness?
That answer is simple; it’s the girl behind him.
Leviathan smiles and shoots a ball of water into the ground that rips a hole in Purgatory’s surface. He continues his run towards Ubica and shouts, “You’ve truly gotten stronger since the last time, Ubica! But you’re still weaker than ever!”
Ubica can barely hear Leviathan, but he can sense what he said.
And that’s when he hears a scream behind him.
“Yyyaahh---Gbbbbbhh!?”
He quickly turns around and sees Tsubiri engulfed in a square cube of water that rose up from under the bare ground.
“!?”
“We both share the same advantages here!” Leviathan says as Ubica’s distraction causes to the lightning bolts to become easier to dodge. “What do you think is under the frozen ground??”
Ubica’s face jolts in shock, he knows the answer to that and is amazed that he never even thought of it.
Under the frozen ground of the 4th Gate is permafrost. It is cryotic soil that can only form if it has been below the freezing point for two or more years. Very rarely is permafrost found in places other than the tundra, because most places don’t stay under the freezing level for the necessary amount of time; but this isn’t Earth, there are no seasons in Purgatory. It’s likely that this land around the 4th Gate has been frozen since the beginning of time, that being said, there’s likely an abundant amount of permafrost that only serves to Leviathan’s advantage. This is supposed to be ice that never melts, that is, unless you’re someone who can manipulate any form of water.
The mass of extremely cold water that has tanked itself around Tsubiri rises into the sky towards the lighting cloud Ubica’s using to attack with. If she makes any kind of contact with that thunderstorm cloud, she will be electrocuted into soup inside that conductible fish tank.
“UURRYYAAAAAHHH!!!”
With a great roar of determination, Ubica throws all his efforts into destroying the amazingly powerful cloud above by using the same method he created it with.
Just like a battery, these thunderstorm clouds have a "plus" end and a "minus" end. The plus, or positive charges in the cloud are at the top. The minus, or negative charges are at the bottom. When the charge at the bottom gets strong enough, the cloud lets out energy, resulting in a lighting bolt.
Ubica’s using the positive charges in the cloud to overwhelm the stronger negative charge at the bottom and subsequently discharge the whole cloud itself, returning it back into the air. This is taxing, he’s not an expert in electric current, and can’t control it like Tsubiri can, he can only control the water in the cloud to alter the effect of the electricity.
And somehow, he pulled it off by risking his own body and jumping into the middle of that dangerous cloud. When he entered, he used his own body as a wall to keep the plus and minus charges of the cloud from reaching each other. With his arms spread out wide at each of those charges, he shouts,
“PULSUS!!!”
BBBOOOOMMM!!!
The cloud is completely separated at each side and quickly fades off into the sky, and not a second too soon. Tsubiri, engulfed in the square tank of water flies up directly aside Ubica just moments after the electrical current was blown away. If Ubica hadn’t dispersed the cloud at that exact time, Tsubiri would’ve been fried.
“Brilliant Ubica!” Leviathan shouts from below, “You gave me back my advantage.”
Tsubiri is still stuck in the tank, and her face is beginning to turn blue from lack of oxygen; Leviathan thought through this, he knew that if she wasn’t going to die by the thundercloud, he could at least drown her.
“Tsubiri!!”
Ubica kicks off of the air as though it were an invisible wall and jumps forward, he has to get her out of there as soon as possible. He gets within a couple feet when the tank encompassing Tsubiri shoots out a stream of water that hits him in the gut and pushes him all the way down to the floor so violently that the ground shattered upon his landing.
“Guuaah!?”
Ubica was not expecting that, his mind was too focused on getting Tsubiri out of there, because of that, he’s been knocked back further away from her.
Leviathan starts walking towards Ubica as he watches him slowly get to his feet. “This is sad.” he says, “Watching all your efforts to protect these people has really got me down... You try so hard, only to fail in the end.”
“SHUT UP!!!” Ubica shouts, sending him a vicious glare before looking up to Tsubiri, preparing to attempt to free her once more.
“Ah, I wouldn’t do that. You know, I can simply freeze her to death right now if I wanted.”
“!!”
“But there’s no fun in that, I want you to watch her suffer slowly until she dies.”
Ubica frowns and grits his teeth, he’s gripping the hilt of his sword so hard that his entire arm is unnaturally shaking. “I’ll never let that happen...”
“You tend to say that a lot, ‘I’ll protect my friends’... But the inevitable always happens, someone you care about always dies. Can’t you see it? You have no way to guarantee their safety, you can’t even keep them from fighting amongst ‘themselves’.”
“...What?”
Leviathan smiles and points out in the distance, gesturing for Ubica to look.
That’s when Ubica sees it, a fierce battle. Not any different from all of the other battles currently going on, except one thing...
This battle is being fought between two people he cares about.
“Messor... Trojia..??”
“That girl Trojia, she’s strong, perhaps even stronger than the False Prophet.” Leviathan points out, throwing more kindling onto the fire of devastation burning in Ubica’s chest. “Surely one of them, maybe even both will die unless you do something. Are you going to let your Idol the False Prophet be killed by one of your so called ‘friends’? Or are you going to let your Idol the False Prophet kill one of your ‘friends’? How do you feel knowing that if you try to stop them, the girl I’m holding captive will die as well?”
“.....”
Ubica’s expression is broken, he doesn’t know what to do.
“You are going to have to make a decision, you must decide who to sacrifice for the other to live. You have to choose which one is most important to you.”
“.....”
“However, you also have a choice that'll keep you from making those sacrifices. You have the power to ensure their safety, the power to save their lives, the power to take my life, the power to succeed where you have only been failing. You have the power of Dantega! If you want to change the outcome of all this, you must choose to use it!”
Leviathan points up to Tsubiri and balls his hand into a fist. The water engulfing the already suffocating girl begins to freeze over and the ice crystals begin to make their way toward her from every side of the tank. The water must be so cold already that she’d likely pass out from the shock of hypothermia before suffocating.
It’s decision time.
Ubica can no longer wait to make up his mind.
Because at any moment, Messor might die, Trojia might die, and Tsubiri ‘will’ die.
Leviathan’s voice rings loud and clear in Ubica’s ears when he asks,
“So which is it Ubica!? Will you choose the power of Dantega, or will you choose to watch everyone you care about die!?"
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