DID YOU KNOW? YOU CAN NOW READ THREE TO SIX CHAPTERS AHEAD. CHECK MY PROFILE FOR THE LINK.
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Jaune, the Primordial Yellow, was in an exceptionally good mood, and for good reason too.
Things were finally moving again. After what had felt like an eternity of stagnation, the world had begun changing once more, and with change came excitement.
It wouldn't be long now before her days were once again filled with things worth looking forward to.
One such moment was standing right before her.
Leon was finally ready to play with her. Oh, how long she had waited for this.
She had been bombarding El Dorado with daily casts of {Nuclear Flame} for years, partly to repay Leon for destroying the vessel she had painstakingly prepared centuries ago, but mostly because she wanted him to stop ignoring her and finally fight back.
Now, at long last, she was getting her rematch. Of course, she had no intention of killing Leon. Quite the opposite, in fact.
She intended to form an alliance with him once the fight was over.
The other Primordials had already begun making their moves and choosing where they belonged. Wisteria had apparently found herself a new playground, and Noir seemed to have done the same.
Jaune had no intention of being left behind.
The red-haired boy standing across from her was interesting as well. Not nearly as interesting as Leon, of course, but interesting enough that she found herself curious.
Maybe she wouldn't kill him after all. If she spared the boy as a favor to Leon, then Leon would owe her one in return. That sounded like a good deal.
"You ready!?" she shouted enthusiastically.
The air around her immediately came alive, countless sparks of golden energy flickering into existence like stars scattered across the night sky.
Across from her, Kanade simply withdrew one hand from the sleeve of his robe.
Without changing his relaxed expression, he lazily bent his wrist and curled his fingers toward himself in a silent beckoning gesture.
Jaune's grin stretched even wider. "Cocky little shit."
Behind her, an enormous magic circle unfolded into existence.
It was composed of dozens upon dozens of intricate rings layered atop one another, each overflowing with ancient symbols and characters drawn from countless languages.
"{Nuclear Blast}."
An evolved form of {Nuclear Flame}, it possessed the terrifying ability to pierce magical barriers and overwhelm defensive spells through sheer destructive force.
A second magic circle appeared beside the first.
Then a third. A fourth.
They continued multiplying until fourteen identical circles hovered behind Jaune, spreading outward into the shape of a massive cross, each one humming with terrifying amounts of compressed nuclear energy.
There was just something beautiful about a mushroom cloud.
With nothing more than a thought, she released the spells.
The fourteen circles blazed with crimson miasmic light before simultaneously unleashing a barrage of nuclear destruction toward the lone figure standing opposite her.
Naturally, this was the part where Leon would finally step in and destroy her magic.
Even Jaune knew these attacks were excessive.
The combined bombardment carried enough force to erase El Dorado hundreds of times over.
...Except Leon hadn't even moved.
Jaune blinked.
The blazing streaks of crimson light had stopped.
Every single {Nuclear Blast} hung suspended in midair, frozen exactly where it had been a fraction of a second earlier.
"Ah," Kanade's relaxed voice drifted over to her once again. "Leon wouldn't be very happy if we accidentally blew up his country, you know."
He smiled apologetically. "So maybe dial the destruction back a little, Jaune."
His free hand was raised between them, countless transparent threads of light extending from his fingertips like invisible strings attached to each frozen spell.
With a gentle twist of his wrist, the threads rotated anticlockwise.
The fourteen streaks of crimson light obediently reversed their course.
Each {Nuclear Blast} flowed backward into the magic circle that had created it, the overwhelming energy compressing itself back into its original form without so much as a single spark escaping.
One after another, the magic circles flickered weakly before quietly sputtering out of existence, leaving the battlefield as though they had never been there at all.
Jaune stared over her shoulder at the fourteen magic circles as they crumbled into fading motes of light, genuine surprise spreading across her face. "...What?"
"That didn't surprise you, right?" Kanade asked, raising his free hand with a bright, almost wistful smile. "Demons are supposed to be the masters of conceptual magic, after all."
Jaune's surprise gradually melted into an excited grin.
"That was pretty cool." She chuckled, sounding genuinely impressed. "You didn't just stop the spells. You even froze their esoteric properties."
Kanade snapped his fingers. "And that's not all I can do." The space directly before him suddenly blurred.
A thin, almost invisible haze burst forward, slicing across the battlefield so quickly that it seemed to vanish the instant it was born.
Jaune watched it approach without the slightest concern. Keeping her eyes fixed on Kanade the entire time, she casually stepped to one side and allowed the strange attack to pass harmlessly beside her.
"What was that supposed to do?" she asked, sounding almost disappointed. "Not very impressive."
Kanade's smile never faltered. His sweet and polite voice returned. "Then you definitely shouldn't look behind you, Jaune-san."
Jaune frowned. For the briefest instant, a chill ran down her spine. It was an odd sensation. Even stranger was the blistering heat that followed it immediately after.
Her expression changed, and she quickly spun around.
Hovering directly behind her was a swelling sphere of crimson light, its unstable mass overflowing with terrifying amounts of nuclear energy.
Her own {Nuclear Blast}.
"...Eh?" Without hesitation, Jaune threw herself backward. She barely moved a meter before her back slammed into something solid.
A translucent violet barrier had silently formed behind her, curving around her body.
In the blink of an eye, similar barriers appeared on every side, sealing together into a perfect sphere of violet light with Jaune trapped at its center.
She looked around once. Then back at the rapidly expanding sphere of nuclear energy now rushing toward her.
"...Uhh..." A nervous smile crept onto her face. "...Shit."
The {Nuclear Blast} detonated, filling the entire sphere in an instant.
Blinding crimson light swallowed everything within as unimaginable heat and pressure erupted outward, yet not a single fragment escaped the violet prison.
From the outside, the transparent sphere simply turned molten red, glowing like a miniature sun suspended before the Gate of Hell.
"Nice. {Perfect Sphere} held just like I thought it would." Kanade nodded to himself with quiet satisfaction. "I had to combine four unique skills to create that one."
The barrier shattered apart into countless violet motes that drifted upward like embers from a dying fire, dissolving before they could fully settle.
The lingering sphere of smoke they left behind burst apart a moment later with a small contained shockwave, and from within it emerged Jaune, laughing freely, her white fur-lined jacket singed at the edges but otherwise remarkably unscathed for someone who had just been sealed inside fourteen simultaneous nuclear detonations.
She pointed directly at Kanade. "Well hot damn." Her grin hadn't budged in the slightest. "What the heck was that?"
Of course, she already knew exactly what had happened.
The haze slash he had sent toward her hadn't been an attack at all. It was a vacuum of sorts, one that had quietly absorbed all of the esoteric energy from her reversed {Nuclear Blasts} before following behind her and detonating everything simultaneously inside the sealed barrier.
The combined might of fourteen nuclear explosions, all of it locked inside with her.
It was glorious.
And that barrier hadn't budged even once despite her having smashed and punched against it over a hundred times in the brief instant before the explosion slammed her into it from every direction.
'He's probably going to turn any attack spell I use right back at me.' Her eyes gleamed with excitement as the thought settled. 'Ugh. He's just like Noir.'
Her grin stretched wider as her fingers sharpened slowly into claws.
"Alright then." She rolled her shoulders once. "Let's keep going."
She burst forward, her afterimage's foot barely kissing the scorched earth before she had already crossed the distance entirely and arrived directly before Kanade.
Kanade raised his free hand once again. "[Dark Imprisonment]."
Jaune's feet, already launching off the ground in her burst forward, slammed back down as though magnetized to the scorched earth beneath her. She grunted at the sudden arrest of her momentum, her eyes flickering briefly to a deep golden hue as she processed what had just happened.
'A Unique Skill?' The thought crossed her mind immediately. 'No. This is the second one.'
Kanade moved his hand to the left. "[Providence]."
Jaune's head snapped to the right as something struck her across the left cheek without warning, the impact clean and precise despite nothing visible having moved. She spat once and grunted, steadying herself.
He moved his hand to the right.
The same impact came from the opposite direction, catching her across the right cheek with equal precision.
Dark energy began gathering around Kanade's raised hand, pooling slowly at his knuckles before intensifying into something considerably denser. He drew his arm back with deliberate calm before driving it forward in a straight line directly into the frozen Jaune's guard.
"{Dark Armament}." His fist connected with her head. His eyes widened almost immediately.
His fist had gone straight through, in a shower of gore, her bursting eyes somehow still managing to hold their smile through the destruction, crimson and feral and entirely too amused for someone whose skull had just been caved in.
Kanade blinked.
He was standing exactly where he had been standing a moment ago. Back at his original position. Untouched.
"A dream?"
A flash of movement behind him forced him to turn, but it was too late.
Squelch.
Jaune's hand burst through his back and erupted from the center of his chest, fingers already closing around the beating heart within her grip. Blood poured from Kanade's mouth as the sound tore itself from his throat, raw and involuntary, and Jaune's fist tightened without hesitation.
The heart burst.
Jaune's grin, however, froze.
Kanade's body had begun to flake away, piece by piece, dissolving into wisps of pale blue light that drifted upward from the wound before scattering into the air like burning paper catching a current. The light moved like water, fluid and unhurried, dancing across the ruined landscape in a quiet, almost beautiful display that had absolutely no business being as calm as it looked.
"Hah?" Jaune slowly turned her attention toward the Gate of Hell.
Kanade was standing there, and his hands were no longer tucked inside his sleeves.
Jaune laughed again, though this time those listening closely noticed that the sound was just a little strained.
"You..." She pointed at him accusingly. "Just how many skills do you have?!"
Kanade's gentle smile remained unchanged, though his eyes slowly narrowed.
"Well..."
The space behind him suddenly stirred. It folded open along invisible seams, the fabric of reality peeling apart like the cover of a book.
No... It was a book.
An enormous tome stood suspended behind Kanade, its pages turning slowly of their own accord. Even the distorted space surrounding the Gate of Hell shuddered as though reality itself had been forced into the shape of a moving page.
Then another book appeared beside the first.
Then another.
And another.
Within moments, they had begun multiplying at an impossible rate.
Jaune's amused expression slowly gave way to bewilderment.
Around them, Leon, Claude, Maureen, Tingle, and everyone else instinctively lifted their heads toward the sky.
The heavens rippled.
One after another, countless enormous books unfolded from empty space, revealing themselves by the tens of thousands until they filled the entire firmament.
There was no end to them.
Between each floating tome, reality fractured into shifting mosaic colours before parting entirely.
Beyond those fractures lay another world.
Towering bookshelves stretched endlessly into the distance, rising so high that they disappeared beyond sight.
Volume after volume rested upon them, forming a library vast enough to dwarf nations.
The sight alone seemed to overwrite the surrounding landscape.
Unique Skill [Akashic Records].
Kanade slowly raised his gaze to meet Jaune's. A faint crimson radiance flickered within his eyes. His smile never disappeared.
"Why don't you tell me?"