"Clatter, clatter..."
The iron chains broke apart all at once, snapping loose from the great black lock.
Countless black chains, like startled serpents, went streaking away from the hull of the Black King amid the grinding and clashing of metal, plunging into the seawater and setting the black three-masted sailing ship completely free.
On the deck, the black-haired woman in the black dress rose to her feet once more.
"Hiss..."
The Black King's hull immediately stopped smoking, and Silas felt a wave of pleasant coolness wash over him.
Overhead, the scorching, violent sun still blazed with fierce light, but its influence, upon reaching this place, was somehow warped and twisted, no longer able to do any harm.
She lowered her head to look at her own body, as if confirming that no chains remained wrapped around her, or perhaps savoring a freedom hard-won.
In a moment, the corners of her mouth curved into a smile, and her gaze slowly lifted, coming to rest at last on the Intis ship across the water.
Those people were staring at her, faces full of terror.
An Angel of Sequence 2 had, in this moment, gained the ability to act on her own will. How would she deal with the ones who had hurt her before?
"Damn it!"
Pierre felt a fear he had not known in a long time, not since he had become a Beyonder of the Sun Pathway.
Once again he summoned all the spirituality in his body, pouring it into the black short staff in his hand. Soon his figure grew majestic and imposing, as though he were a god beyond question.
"My Lord brings justice to this world!"
He cried out loud, his white-robed figure shining in unison with the shrunken sun above, representing righteousness, pronouncing judgment upon his enemy. "He says that all who defy Him shall..."
The black-robed woman gazed at him calmly, her eyes as ruby and radiant as gemstones, holding within them a note of arrogance.
"!"
Silas suddenly felt the hair on his body stand on end, his spirituality shrieking a frantic warning.
Some invisible force spread outward, swiftly blanketing the entire stretch of sea.
He didn't know how to put it into words, but he felt as though some underlying logic of this whole region had been forcibly rewritten and distorted, as though the very rules by which the world operated had changed.
"BOOM!"
Golden flames suddenly surged upward, burning on the body of Archbishop Pierre!
Holy fire spewed from within his body, and the roaring flames scorched him, quickly turning him into an upright, human-shaped torch.
The blinding light and searing heat lit up the ship, and the attending priests and the crew of the steamship could not withstand it at all, every one of them reduced instantly to ash.
The flame of purification, no longer wielded by Pierre, instead burned him from within!
"Lord... my Lord..."
Pierre mumbled, dazed and in agony, his twisted face barely visible through the fire. "I have not violated my own principles, I have not!"
As the "Teacher of Justice," he too was bound to obey the very principles of justice he himself had set, for this was the "contract" reached between himself, the divine, and the world.
Should he violate it, he would suffer backlash, even risk falling into a state of total collapse.
But though he himself had, in truth, broken none of his principles, the flames paid no heed to his explanation. They simply kept burning, as if he were the very evil that deserved destruction.
The underlying order here had already been twisted by his opponent!
The instant he grasped the situation, Jean Pierre made his decision at once.
"Whoosh!"
His entire body was ablaze, and there was no time to deal with it. Instead, he thrust the short staff toward the shrunken sun hanging in the sky.
The golden sphere of light, which had been floating there slowly burning outward, underwent a sudden change. It rapidly drew inward, compressing into a single dense point of light.
In this frenzied compression, its energy gathered on a massive scale, until at last it reached the critical threshold of collapse!
This "sun" exploded!
Not good!
Silas watched golden light flood the sky, energy accumulating to a terrifying degree, about to bring horrific ruin down on everything here, provided it actually burst.
An unseen force acted upon the sphere of light, and it rippled outward gently, spreading bit by bit.
Though its expansion carried all the hallmarks of an explosion, its speed was impossibly slow, like the shuffling gait of some ancient elder.
The very process of the explosion had been "distorted"!
The woman in the black dress spread both hands, her full attention fixed on that sphere of light, pushing it steadily away, out of this stretch of sea.
Beneath that spreading sun, the Intis steamships had already dissolved, most of them gone.
Jean Pierre had long since fled; the instant he triggered the shrunken sun's explosion, he had turned into a streak of burning light, clutching the black staff with its point of light, and shot off into the distance, already no more than a speck on the far horizon.
Intis had suffered a total, crushing defeat. Its entire fleet was destroyed, the dead and wounded beyond counting.
The only one to escape was Jean Pierre, a Sequence 3, and all he had managed to carry off was 0-15, "The Fourth Sun."
It was something of a pity, but the man was, after all, a Sequence 3, and armed with a powerful Level 0 sealed artifact besides. Not an easy man to kill.
With that thought, tinged with regret, Silas glanced once at the retreating figure of his fleeing enemy, then turned his gaze back to the woman in the black dress, watching how she activated her power, skillfully dissolving the energy within the sphere of light even as she sent it drifting further and further away.
In the end, what should have been a blast of terrifying destructive force was reduced to something far smaller, detonating at an extreme distance.
The dull, muffled boom took a long while to reach them, and by then it could no longer do any harm here at all.
"Whoosh—"
The roar of water rose up as the seawater, dried out earlier by the shrunken sun, began to flow back in, quickly swelling into towering, monstrous waves.
Of course, by the time every one of those waves reached the waters around the Black King, they turned as docile as a well-fed dog.
"..."
The black-haired, red-eyed woman drew back her arms and turned to look at Silas, something hard to put into words lurking in her eyes. This was an Angel of Sequence 2; the sheer pressure she gave off needed no explanation.
"So, um," Silas spoke up first, breaking the silence. He shifted his body slightly and suddenly heard a crisp, clattering sound from his right arm.
He looked down and found a black iron chain there, one end hanging naturally loose, the other connected to his palm. The black key had turned into a chain, still bound to his body.
I'm just saying, Roselle, how many more tricks do you have up your sleeve? And what exactly is this one supposed to do?
A sense of foreboding rose instinctively in Silas's heart.
He lifted his head to face the woman in the black dress, and the moment he took in her current state, the corner of his eye couldn't help but twitch.
There, wound around the woman's beautifully curved neck, was another chain, just like a collar, binding her movements as well.
"Clink..."
Silas moved his right hand without thinking, and the chain around the woman's neck shifted in response, yanking her head up slightly against her will.
The woman looked at him, and in her lovely eyes there seemed to be a flicker of anger.