Amid the fragments of violet stars that already filled the sky, flames of annihilation, burning with space itself as their fuel, began to twist like a colossal serpent and merge together.
Every scene before her eyes vibrated as though screaming, and the opponent’s world, which had been nothing but darkness, was pushed back by the waves of mana Celestia emitted, trembling precariously from its very depths.
[ High-Level Magic: Meteor Crash ]
[ High-Level Magic: Searing Heat (灼熱) ]
On top of the overwhelming destructive force of the meteor already falling, the flames of Searing Heat—capable of vaporizing anything they touched without a trace—overlapped completely.
For an ordinary mage, merely casting a single high-level spell required wringing out every last drop of mana from the soul, and collapsing unconscious immediately afterward was the natural common sense of the world.
Even for any sage or professor of the Academy, maintaining two spells of such magnitude at the same time, and at their full power, was no different from wagering one’s own life.
But in Celestia, there was no sign of any restriction or limitation.
As though taking a light stroll, she wore an indifferent, cold expression while drawing endless power from the vast sea of mana she had been born with and pouring it into the air.
Far from running dry, her mana only grew sharper and more ferocious in response to her rage.
“Impossible. High-level magic simultaneously... and continuously, without any restrictions?”
The voice of the opponent, who was desperately maintaining the barrier, trembled as it twisted miserably.
Above his head, a constellation of destruction bore down on him, and from all sides, violet flames that melted space itself tightened around his throat.
Even a being who wielded World Creation, considered the pinnacle among upper-tier magic, was nothing more than a piece of paper easily torn before the abnormal total quantity of mana emitted by an existence beyond all standards like Celestia.
Kuuung—! Kwaaaang!
In the end, the black chains that had reached their limit shattered with a scream and scattered into the air.
What filled the eyes of the opponent, who had lost his shield, were Celestia’s cold violet eyes looking down on him like an insect, and the blinding light of destruction pouring down.
“Aaaaaaargh—!”
A desperate scream tore the dark space to shreds.
The flames of Searing Heat mercilessly swallowed the opponent’s body, and the powerful shockwave of the meteor that erupted afterward brutally crushed that existence all the way into the ground.
Within the overwhelming execution pyre Celestia had created, the opponent was shattered so horribly that even his shape was difficult to recognize, and he was hurled into the abyss of darkness.
The price of touching her reverse scale was a miserable and overwhelming defeat that mocked the common sense of magic the intruder had believed in all his life.
The violet radiance that had covered the sky receded, and the remnants of the massive explosion scattered into ash.
Celestia was certain of her victory.
After all, a single strike created by overlapping two high-level spells possessed enough power to leave not even the form of an upper-tier practitioner behind.
Thinking that with the opponent’s death, this grotesque dark world he had constructed would now collapse as well, she slowly steadied her breathing.
But the scene she expected did not appear.
Far from disappearing, the dark space instead sank even more stickily and heavily, tightening around Celestia’s throat.
“...It hasn’t vanished?”
The instant doubt flashed through her mind, Celestia’s eyes, which had been looking down at the smoke-filled ground, shook violently.
From within the pitch-black smoke, dozens of black shadows shot upward like lightning.
Clank—!
With a sharp screech of friction, the cold touch of metal tightly bound Celestia’s wrists, ankles, and waist.
Thrown off balance by the sudden assault, her body was fixed in midair.
“Middle-tier magic... Bind?”
She instinctively released the mana within her in an explosive burst.
Normally, mana output of this level alone should have torn apart something like middle-tier magic without leaving a trace.
But strangely, the more mana she emitted, the more the chains refused to break; instead, they devoured her mana ravenously and tightened around her more powerfully and sharply, enough to dig into her flesh.
“...Ah!”
With a groan, Celestia’s complexion turned pale.
This was not simple magic.
It was an ominous and wicked authority that gnawed away at life force itself, beyond human mana.
Only then did she realize that the chains before her eyes were the Chains of the Evil God, a forbidden power spoken of only in myths.
At that moment, from the smoke-cleared ground, an indescribable terror revealed itself.
With a writhing noise, hundreds of ominous tentacles began to spread grotesquely across the entire floor.
And at their center, between the torn space, a gigantic blood-red eye flashed and stared straight at Celestia.
What had emerged by tearing through the darkness was the colossal form of the evil god of destruction, Crocell, who had lain dormant in the ancient abyss.
A shadow larger than a mountain range fell over Celestia’s head, and merely by existing, it crushed her beneath a dreadful pressure, as though the laws of the world were collapsing.
What the opponent had left behind was not a simple remnant of magic.
It was a passage that summoned a calamity that should never descend upon this land.
Bound in chains, Celestia felt instinctive fear for the first time within the gigantic eye of the evil god looking down at her.
The enormous shadow of the evil god Crocell moved to swallow Celestia, but in her eyes as she hung bound by chains, there was not the slightest sign of submission.
Even amid the pain of the chains gnawing away at her mana, Celestia bit her lip hard and forcibly drew up the mana within her.
[ High-Level Magic: Meteor Crash ]
[ High-Level Magic: Meteor Crash ]
[ High-Level Magic: Meteor Crash ]
If one was not enough, then two; if two were not enough, then three.
As though mocking the common sense of the magical world, Celestia began chanting high-level magic in succession.
When the dark void screamed and opened the first gate, stars of burning violet flame poured out; soon after, the second and third dimensional gates were torn open one after another, and destruction on an unprecedented scale covered the sky.
The constellations of destruction summoned three times in a row poured down like a waterfall above the head of the evil god Crocell, transforming the entire space into a massive violet meteor shower.
Bound in midair and breathing roughly, Celestia turned her head toward the gray shadow that supported her and growled low.
There stood the high spirit Silver, his mane bristling as he protected his master even before an enormous terror.
Enduring the pain of the chains digging into her flesh, Celestia met Silver’s gaze.
The fierce bond of a companion and family member who had shared her life was carried by mana and conveyed to each other’s souls.
“Silver, help me.”
At Celestia’s desperate yet resolute request, Silver answered with a roar that shook the heavens.
“Contractor, your will is my will. I shall tear that hideous abyss apart with my own fangs!”
At the same time as that cry of their bond, Silver leapt, kicking off the air while wreathed in violet lightning.
Silver’s silver form, now larger than a mountain range, seemed to become completely one with Celestia’s mana as he fell like a meteor, trampling the tentacles on the ground and crashing head-on into the evil god’s main body.
Kwaaaaang—!
The overwhelming explosion of the triple meteor strike and Silver’s desperate charge struck the evil god at the same time.
Violet radiance and silver mana mingled, burning the dark world white, and the gigantic eye of the evil god Crocell began to twist with pain and astonishment.
Celestia’s triple Meteor Crash, condensed from her mana, and the desperate charge of the high spirit Silver possessed destructive power great enough that even an incarnation of a god would be unable to leave its form behind.
If this had been the northern mountain of the Academy in the real world where Celestia lived, the evil god Crocell would have been caught by the world’s restrictions and had even its soul torn apart.
It was a moment worthy of adorning a page of myth: a human body driving back an ancient calamity.
But before the afterglow of the explosion had even faded, a bizarre shudder ran down Celestia’s spine.
“...The wounds are disappearing?”
Where the violet radiance had subsided, the gigantic form of the evil god Crocell was not collapsing; instead, it was swelling even more grotesquely.
The tentacles that had been torn apart by Silver’s sharp claws were restored in an instant, as though time had been rewound, and the huge eyeball crushed by the direct hit of the meteor once again stared at Celestia with cold killing intent, as if nothing had happened at all.
Only then did Celestia realize the cold truth.
This was not the real world she knew.
This dark space constructed by the opponent itself was the divine domain of the evil god Crocell—and the evil god itself.
Within this closed world, the evil god was immortal, and it was an uncollapsing law.
The mana Celestia poured out was not annihilating the evil god; rather, it was becoming fertilizer that increased the mass of this space.
“Indeed, that is power worthy of Avelon’s successor. But in this space, your mana is ultimately nothing more than my nourishment.”
Pushing through the thickly settled smoke, the robed being whom she had clearly believed had turned to powder and disappeared earlier appeared once more.
With not even the hem of his garment damaged, he walked out of the darkness like a ghost in a neat, pristine state and looked down mockingly at Celestia, who was bound in chains and breathing hard.
His cold blue eyes flashed as though piercing into the depths of Celestia’s inner self.
“Looking at you has made me certain. You, too, carry a terrible darkness deep within you. I mean that black essence you have hidden behind those dazzling violet flames, the one even you wish to turn away from.”
His voice burrowed persistently into Celestia’s ear like a venomous snake.
The Chains of the Evil God writhed once more and ravenously sucked in her mana, while the tentacles on the ground crawled up to Celestia’s feet, emitting an ominous pulse as they finished preparing to devour her.
Amid pain that felt as if her limbs would be torn apart, Celestia sensed her fate.
The mana pouring out like a waterfall through the Chains of the Evil God was, paradoxically, becoming nourishment that swelled the evil god Crocell’s enormous body into something even more grotesque and vast.
At this rate, with her entire existence denied, she would undoubtedly be reduced to a key that opened the gate to a calamity that would destroy not only Lowell, but the very world in which she lived.
“...I won’t let that happen.”
Beside her, the high spirit Silver, who had been howling in agony as his soul was shaved away, was also wrapped in tentacles and losing his light.
Even as he was fading into extinction, he cried out to Celestia in a desperate voice.
“Celestia! You must flee! This thing is trying to feed on the darkness of your soul and manifest!”
But Celestia’s violet eyes were already burning with a resolve that surpassed human emotion.
Instead of fleeing, she used the chains binding her entire body in reverse, compressing every last drop of mana remaining within her into a single point.
It was the forbidden realm said to have been wielded only by the gods and heroes of the Age of Myth, a peak of destruction that could be reached only by burning away the very foundation of a mage’s life force and soul.
[ Highest-Level Magic: Supernova ]
Within Celestia’s small hand, a brilliant star appeared, as though the beginning and end of the universe had been compressed into it.
The divine domain of the evil god, which had been nothing but darkness, was instantly covered in white light thousands of times more dazzling than the sun, and the space, unable to withstand that heat, crumbled like paper and screamed.
Even Silver could not hide his shock before that overwhelming hierarchy.
He was a high spirit who had lived for thousands of years and witnessed countless spells, but this insane sight of a human body recreating the authority of a god shattered even his common sense from the roots.
“Celestia... Don’t tell me that magic is...! You must not! Your soul won’t withstand it!”
Despite Silver’s desperate attempt to stop her, Celestia did not hesitate to detonate the star and annihilate the space itself.
It was a choice close to suicide, one that could erase even her own existence.
“With nothing but a human body... how can you wield such a realm of the gods...!”
For the first time, the voice of the robed being became drenched in wretched fear and turned into a scream.
The evil god’s space was helplessly torn apart before the destructive waves of the Supernova, and the darkness that had devoured everything was swallowed by the absolute light of annihilation, vanishing without a trace.
Kwaaaaaang—!
It was that eternal instant when the entire world collapsed.
Even within the explosion that numbed every sense in white, Silver saw it clearly.
He saw the ominous moment when the evil god Crocell, turning to ash and vanishing, wrung out the last of its malice and drove one of its black fragments deep toward Celestia’s heart at an invisible speed.