As The Captain raced toward the towering pillar of light erupting from Natlan, Mavuika was also hurtling toward the same location from another battlefield.
Mavuika's hair wasn't ablaze, indicating she wasn't at her peak strength. Yet even in this state, no Abyss Monster dared to challenge her.
Like a blazing Sun, each of Mavuika's attacks unleashed explosive force. Thanks to her presence, the Natlan warriors on this battlefield suffered far fewer casualties compared to other fronts.
Summoning her motorcycle, Mavuika traversed the Spiritway, a dimensional conduit, to reach the Pillar of Light.
-
On the battlefield, Lumine stood poised in mid-air, her sword gleaming. Paimon hovered behind her, her small body trembling violently. She gripped the corner of Lumine's cloak tightly, her knuckles white from the strain.
Her usually bright eyes, always shining with curiosity and appetite, were now wide and horrified, reflecting the hellish scene below.
"Th-that's..."
Her little mouth opened and closed several times, her voice barely a whisper, trembling with disbelief.
She saw a young Natlan warrior, the same one who had smiled warmly at her yesterday and given her a piece of roasted beast meat. Now his spear was broken, and he knelt on the ground, desperately using a shattered shield to fend off a monster's ravenous bites. His other arm hung limply, blood gushing from the torn shoulder armor.
"No... no! Don't!"
Paimon's voice broke into a sob, almost a scream.
On the other side, several warriors were struggling to push back a massive, shell-shattered monster, trying to save their comrade pinned beneath it. But the monster's death throes sent its razor-sharp claws tearing through one of the warriors' chests with horrifying ease.
The overwhelming stench of blood, burning flesh, and the Abyss's foul miasma rushed in with the wind, choking her and triggering violent retching.
The rousing war drums had vanished, replaced by the sickeningly clear sounds of blades piercing flesh, bones shattering, the stifled groans of the dying, and the frenzied howls of the monsters.
"Why... why is this happening?"
Tears welled up in Paimon's large eyes, blurring her vision, yet the brutal images seemed branded into her mind like hot iron.
"It's all a lie... This can't be real, right, Traveler?"
She whirled toward Lumine, her voice trembling with childlike helplessness and desperate pleading, as if hoping for a denial. But all she saw was Lumine's tightly pressed lips, her cold profile, and those golden eyes blazing with fury and sorrow.
Paimon's sobs finally erupted uncontrollably. These were no longer the fake tears she often used to wheedle and cajole, but genuine wails of terror and grief.
"We... we have to defeat them quickly, okay...? Please, let's end this soon..."
Her voice, muffled by her small hands, broke into desperate sobs: "I can't watch anymore... I don't want anyone else to die... sniff..."
She didn't even dare to look up, flinching away as if burned by every crimson flash in her peripheral vision.
Suddenly, Paimon's sobs were abruptly cut off by an earth-shattering roar that nearly shattered her eardrums!
She lifted her head in terror, her vision blurred by tears. Through the haze, she saw Lumine floating in mid-air, her hands clenched tightly around the hilt of the Unrelenting Will Sword, which she had raised high above her head.
A suffocatingly vast golden energy surged at an unprecedented speed, the sword's blade humming and vibrating, emitting a piercing shriek like the simultaneous roars of ten thousand stars!
The aura erupting from Lumine's body coalesced into an almost tangible, all-consuming inferno of rage!
"BOOM—!!!!"
In the next instant, Lumine poured every ounce of her strength into a ferocious downward slash!
A colossal, indescribably brilliant golden sword beam—like the Judgment of a god, or a deluge of celestial light cascading from a shattered sky—plunged with absolute Destruction into the densest mass of Abyss Monsters before them!
The light devoured everything.
No screams, no struggles.
Where the sword beam passed, whether through shrieking monsters, charred earth, or the suffocating miasma of the Abyss, all instantly vanished into nothingness as if wiped from existence by an invisible, colossal hand!
The blinding radiance even forced Paimon to instinctively close her eyes. The gale-force winds sent her tumbling through the air several times before she finally managed to regain her balance.
When she opened her eyes again, she saw an impossibly vast, fan-shaped vacuum before her.
The previously overwhelming and despair-inducing Monster Tide had been brutally carved away, leaving behind only a bottomless, searing gash in the earth that shimmered with golden sparks, and a few vaporizing monster remnants along its edges.
Weaker monsters that touched the searing gash were instantly incinerated!
The entire world seemed to have been muted.
Whether Natlan's warriors or the remaining monsters, all were momentarily stunned into deathly silence by this godlike power.
Paimon floated in the air, her small mouth agape in a perfect "O" shape. Tears still streaked her face, but her wide eyes were now filled with extreme shock and confusion. All her earlier sorrow and fear had been temporarily blasted from her mind by this unimaginably powerful sword strike.
She stared blankly at the cleared battlefield ahead, then dazedly at Lumine, who was slowly descending, her breathing slightly ragged but her eyes still burning with fury. After a long moment, she managed a faint, trembling gasp:
"Lumine... you... you..."
Lumine's right hand cracked audibly as she gripped her longsword, charging back into the monster horde.
-
Far away, Aether led the Chaos Order in their own desperate defense against the Abyss. Under the clash of nearly identical energies, the Chaos Order was clearly losing ground.
Put another way, the Chaos Order's power was more fragmented and far less pure than that of the Abyss.
When Lumine unleashed her sword strike, Aether froze mid-motion.
He snapped his head around.
Even from such a distance, he could clearly sense the immeasurable resolve and... fury... contained within that strike—a force far surpassing anything she had displayed before.
"Lumine..."
Aether's pupils constricted slightly, his fingers tightening unconsciously around his sword hilt.
A fleeting, complex emotion flashed across his handsome face—shock, a primal concern for his sister's sudden surge of power, but mostly a profound, inexpressible awe.
The light from her sword flickered in his deep, dark eyes, growing and fading like a dying ember.
His lips moved slightly, a whisper so faint it vanished into the cacophony of the Chaos Order clashing with the Abyss. No one heard it but himself:
"...Has it...already come to this..."
His tone betrayed neither satisfaction nor bitterness—perhaps both.
It was the complex emotion of witnessing something precious transform and grow at an unimaginable pace, becoming immensely powerful yet drifting further from a simpler past.
Aether withdrew his gaze and once again raised his sword to face the enemy before him, crushing Abyss Monsters one after another.
Under his leadership, the Chaos Order began to push back against the Abyss Monsters.