-Broadcast-
A thousand years.
That was how long it had been since demons last walked openly in this world, and according to Grandine's memories, no era in which they appeared had ended cleanly. The question was never whether disaster would come. It was only whether the people alive to face it would survive it — and the last time, the margin had been thin enough that Wendy's inherited memories still carried the weight of it.
"Demon King-class," Wendy said quietly, more to herself than to Esdeath. "I really did not expect to win that particular lottery today."
Esdeath's response to this information was to tighten her grip on Murasame and look more interested.
That was, in its own way, reassuring. A battle maniac was the ideal partner for the precise situation of standing in an arena across from an existence that had no ceiling visible from here. Esdeath wasn't calculating odds. She was calculating angles. The prospect of facing something stronger than herself made her more alert, not less — which, Wendy had come to understand, was simply how Esdeath processed the world. She'd spent years looking for an opponent who could actually challenge her. She wasn't going to waste the opportunity by being afraid.
Ainz Ooal Gown regarded them both. The empty eye sockets conveyed nothing directly, but something in the tilt of the skull — some quality of stillness — read as reluctance. He tapped the crown of his golden staff against one bony finger, a small, fidgeting motion that seemed almost unconscious.
When he spoke again, his voice had lost the ceremonial weight it had carried at his entrance. What replaced it was something quieter.
"Wendy. I have no desire to fight you." The red soul-sphere in his ribcage pulsed once. "But I don't have much time left in this world. I need to take you back with me."
"She is a Marine Admiral." Esdeath's voice cut across his before he could continue. Clean, flat, final. "Whatever she was before, in whatever memory you're carrying — she's human. She belongs here." Frost was already forming along Murasame's blade, crawling from the hilt outward in slow crystals, the chill radiating off the demon sword carrying its own particular quality of cold — not merely temperature but something with intent behind it. Kokushibo's original blade, carrying centuries of accumulated deaths, was not merely cold. It was hungry. "Whatever you're offering, save it."
Ainz Ooal Gown looked at the sword for a moment.
"That blade carries the breath of demon blood," he said. "I can smell it from here. It would be better suited to hands that understood what it is."
"It's suited fine to mine."
He seemed to accept this, or at least set it aside. The golden staff rose.
"Summon the Root Fire Spirit."
The magic stones set into the staff — red ones, several of them, mounted in the carved gold framework — ignited simultaneously. The chant was brief but the effect was not. Pure magical energy gathered at the center of the arena with the speed of something being called rather than built, and then the fire came up from the stone floor all at once.
It rose in a column first, a tight rotating pillar of heat that displaced the arena's air in a single sharp pulse. Thousands of degrees — Wendy felt the temperature spike through the Armor of the Sky auxiliary magic circle, which dampened the worst of it but couldn't make it comfortable. The column expanded as it rose, and shape began to emerge from the churning flames. A figure. Enormous, humanoid, composed entirely of living fire.
The Root Fire Spirit stood a hundred meters tall. Her form was female, broad-shouldered, face flickering between coherence and dissolution as the flames that made her breathed and shifted. Her eyes held a light that was more than combustion — something old and attentive behind the blaze, an intelligence that had been answering summons since before anyone present was born. When she moved, the air around her moved with her, heat waves bending the visible world.
The chill from Murasame died instantly. Even the Infinity Castle stone around her feet was beginning to glow.
"Destroy the two in front of you."
The Fire Spirit didn't speak. She simply began, pulling the ambient magical energy toward herself and converting it in the span of a breath. Fire elements saturated the air around her — and then the fireballs came, dozens first, then hundreds, then thousands, igniting into existence at every altitude simultaneously and beginning their descent. Each one was roughly the size of a person, and they fell in a density that turned the space above the two Admirals into something resembling a sky on fire.
A rain of meteors. Every one aimed.
Esdeath and Wendy moved.
The Galloping Wind auxiliary circle was doing its work — gravity reduced, sky-attribute added to movement, reaction speed elevated by a threshold that made the difference between taking one to the chest and not. They split without coordinating, reading the geometry of the barrage independently and finding gaps in it that would have been invisible a half-second earlier. A fireball the size of a cart horse detonated against the stone where Wendy had been standing. Three more cratered in quick succession across Esdeath's previous position.
"This is a Demon King." Esdeath dodged left, pivoted off a pillar of arena stone, and was twenty meters in a different direction before the fireballs tracking her original path arrived. Her tone was the tone of someone making a positive assessment. "One summoning, and something like that comes out. I have to admit, the magic in this world is something else."
"The Galloping Wind isn't infinite." Wendy banked hard, a pair of fireballs passing close enough that she felt their heat through the Armor. "Freeze the spirit, Esdeath. Now — before she starts stacking effects."
A beat. Just long enough for Esdeath to locate the optimal angle.
Then she swung Murasame.
The slash was blue and it moved like cold light, cutting from one side of the arena to the other in a single arc. Blue-white trails remained where the sword energy passed, the temperature plummeting from thousands of degrees to lethal cold in the fraction of a second it took the attack to travel. Everything in the slash's path iced over mid-motion — fireballs caught in flight turning to spheres of frozen fire, stone cracking from thermal shock, air crystallizing visibly.
The Root Fire Spirit took the attack directly.
The flames didn't gutter out gradually. They simply stopped, the fire element in her body overwhelmed and converted, and the hundred-meter figure became a hundred-meter ice sculpture in the time it takes to exhale. For a moment she stood there — perfect in shape, every detail preserved, a frozen monument to the technique that had caught her.
Then the cracks spread from her core outward, lacing the ice in fracture lines, and the sculpture detonated. Ice crystals swept outward in a slow-motion wave, catching the remaining fireballs and extinguishing them as they went, until the arena was quiet and cold and the only sound was the crystals settling against the stone floor.
Albedo, who had been watching from beside the portal, appeared — just briefly — surprised.
She looked at Esdeath with an expression that suggested she was revising something. Whatever preliminary assessment she had made of the Rabbit Hunter Admiral, at least one of the assumptions in it had just proved incorrect.
Ainz Ooal Gown's empty gaze rested on the scattered ice crystals where his summon had stood.
He said nothing for a moment.