-Broadcast-
The effects of Wendy's two auxiliary circles were not subtle about announcing themselves.
The Knight of God worked across all attributes simultaneously — strength, speed, reaction, magical output — compressing the distance between the blessed party's current ceiling and some theoretical higher ceiling, then pushing through it. Not a small lift. Depending on the baseline, the enhancement could approach doubling effective combat power at its upper end. The Crown of God worked on a different axis: not amplification but absorption, converting what would be damage into something the body could disperse, a defensive layer that functioned at a depth armor couldn't reach.
Between the two, a strong person became something appreciably more dangerous than they had been. The stronger the foundation, the larger the gain.
Lissandra, wearing Esdeath's body and working through the controls of an ice power she had spent eons building before the trap took her, was a very strong foundation.
"Remarkable," she said, and the word came out with a quality of genuine surprise — the ancient being encountering something outside the scope of what she'd catalogued. She flexed Esdeath's hand and watched the frost move around the fingers. "The blessing runs deeper than I expected."
Wendy, standing beside her, noted the tone and filed it in the already crowded mental space labeled this is not Esdeath. There was nothing she could do about that right now. The Demon Lord standing across the arena was a more immediate problem than the question of what had actually woken up in her ally's body, and the correct sequence was to survive first and figure out the rest after.
Ainz Ooal Gown had been watching them both with the unhurried attention of someone performing an assessment rather than a reaction. He stood motionless while the sacred light settled over the two women, tilting his skull slightly as if a different angle would give him more information.
"The Sky Dragon's blessing magic lives up to its reputation," he said. "Leaving it in human hands seems increasingly wasteful." He turned to Albedo, who had moved closer in preparation. "Stand down. I'll handle this myself."
Albedo's expression didn't change, but something in her posture did. She looked at him for a half-second longer than agreement would have required.
"As you command." She withdrew to the arena's edge without another word, and stood there with the quality of stillness belonging to someone who wanted very badly to do the opposite of what they'd been told, and was choosing not to because the order had come from the only person whose orders she respected.
Now Ainz turned back to the two Admirals. He raised his staff.
And began buffing himself.
The chant was continuous — not dramatic, not slow, not building to a visible climax, just sustained and methodical, one casting resolved cleanly before the next initiated. The magic stones along the staff lit in sequence and went dark as each effect completed.
Glorious Emerald Body.Blessing of the Magic Chanter.Infinity Barrier.Magical Barrier: Holy.Magic Triple Strongest Level Upgrade — Magic Arrow.
He kept going.
By the eighth, Lissandra's hand had moved to Murasame's hilt. By the fifteenth, she was calculating angles. By the twenty-third, she was looking at Wendy with an expression that said we should have interrupted this and Wendy was looking back with an expression that said I know, I know.
At twenty-seven, he stopped.
The blue barrier that rose around the Bone King afterward was not the same quality as the barrier from before. The defensive runes circulating through it moved faster — interlocking, overlapping, each one covering angles that the others left open, the whole structure functioning less like a shield and more like a logic that had decided certain things would not be permitted to happen to what was inside it.
The silence that followed had the quality of everyone in the arena doing calculation.
Lissandra was the one who broke it.
"Let me find out if that shell is actually as hard as it looks."
She moved upward, Esdeath's body dissolving into blue mist at the apex of the jump and reconsolidating cleanly above the barrier's coverage zone. From that height she swung Murasame, and the slashes came down in dozens — not the clean blue of ordinary ice technique but something with a different quality underneath, darker at the edge, carrying a hunger that regular cold didn't have.
They landed against the barrier and the barrier did what it was built to do. The initial contact produced ripples at the impact points, nothing more. Against standard ice element, the structure would have held without difficulty.
The issue was that the ice wasn't standard.
The red-black frost that spread outward from each impact point moved against the barrier's internal logic rather than with it — not pushing through by force but consuming, finding the magical energy that composed the defensive runes and converting it, the spreading cold functioning less like an attack and more like something that had decided the barrier's substance belonged to it now. The runes flickered where the frost made contact. The ripples became gaps.
Ainz watched the cancer-spread pattern with the focused attention of someone realizing they have encountered a category they had not prepared a category for.
"The thief has developed the ice element considerably further than I credited," he said, and the tone held what might have been appreciation if it hadn't been immediately adjacent to the decision to move.
Advanced Teleportation.
He was no longer inside the barrier when the True Ice broke through. The space he'd occupied compressed and then was empty, and he reappeared several meters clear of the spreading frost, his robe still settling from the displacement, watching the barrier he'd spent a minute constructing get systematically disassembled from the inside.
Lissandra landed. She did not look at the destroyed barrier. She was already reading his new position.
Wendy didn't need to be told.
She exhaled slowly, pulling the arena's air inward — not a breath but a conversion, the ambient atmosphere becoming input for the process running through her fruit's capabilities in human form. The space immediately around her shifted in a way that was visible without being dramatic, a distortion at the boundary between her body and the world, the sky-attribute magic concentrating where she had chosen to concentrate it. She didn't need the dragon form for this. The dragon form was simply larger.
The Sky Dragon's dominion over atmosphere was not a function of scale. It was a function of what the fruit was.
She raised both hands.
Ahead of them, Ainz Ooal Gown recalculated.