Chapter 96: The Power of a Burning Planet
At Alexander Gascoigne's words, the eyes of both Annie Charlton and Madame Aisha widened slightly.
"To be able to defeat both that sword-idiot and martial-idiot, and for even the oldest Demon King, Marquis Voban, to lose to him..."
Madame Aisha, like an adolescent girl, covered her mouth and let out a gasp of wonder. "That's incredible...!"
While the three of them were speaking, the battle-maniacs Luo Hao and Salvatore Doni had already lost their patience and struck out at the "King of the End," Rama.
Luo Hao moved so fast that Rama barely had time to swing his 「Salvation Dungeon Blade」 before her attack was upon him.
"Battle at the city's south, death at the ramparts' north. Dead in the wilds, unburied, for the crows to feed. Tell the crows for me: enjoy the feast of the brave."
"Dead in the wilds, surely unburied; how can rotting flesh escape you? The sound of water splashes, the reeds grow dark; the elite riders die in battle, the weary horses linger and neigh."
Above the firmament, a massive golden Buddha's palm descended from the heavens. Cult Leader Luo Hao arrived like a phoenix on soaring wings, and her long-charged palm technique crashed down. The golden palm pressed down from the horizon as if to smash the island to dust; peaks trembled, countless boulders shattered and fell, and the very mountains groaned.
"Let me be your opponent!"
With a great shout, Lakshmana broke away from Rama's shadow and soared into the sky to intercept Luo Hao. Rama ignored the descending palm technique, knowing Lakshmana had it handled. His gaze remained fixed on Shirou, the strongest among the Demon Kings.
At that moment, Salvatore's voice reached Rama's ears.
"Hey, hey, it's not nice to ignore me~!"
Speaking with a flippant tone, Salvatore Doni activated his authority, 『Silver Arm the Ripper』. His arm reflected a brilliant silver sheen under the sunlight.
"Since losing to Brother Shirou last time, I've strengthened my ultimate sword technique. The 'swords' I can manipulate now number in the hundreds!"
Following his defeat at Shirou's hands, Salvatore Doni immediately improved his technique. Not only did he increase the number of meteors, but he also developed a new move that clustered a hundred meteors together into the ultimate "Sword."
"This time, I'll use you, the 'King of the End,' to test my move: 『The Sword of the Guiding Star』!"
With this declaration, Salvatore Doni's raised right hand swung down violently.
Far from the realm of men, in the heavens where even birds cannot reach, hundreds of pebble-sized points of light appeared. These points rapidly converged, expanding as they fell. From a distance, they looked no larger than a quail's egg, but their speed of expansion was staggering. In an instant, they pierced the stratosphere—revealing a gargantuan silver Star Sword forged from a hundred meteors!
Salvatore Doni was never a "good" person in the traditional sense, but he wasn't evil either; he was simply a sword-idiot who lived for the blade. He hadn't even considered the catastrophe it would bring to the island nation of Japan if the "King of the End" failed to catch his meteor.
At this moment, the massive meteor was, of course, observed by Japan's natural disaster monitoring stations.
"Oh God! Why is Japan so cursed? Why is this happening!!?"
The head of the monitoring station let out a cry of agony. Clutching his head, he had completely abandoned rational thought, muttering the names of every deity he knew, hoping for the protection of a distant god.
What he didn't know was that this situation was being orchestrated by the hands of gods themselves. Gods do not care for the lives or deaths of mortals.
"Should we notify the Prime Minister now?!" a staff member asked, drenched in cold sweat.
The director merely shook his head helplessly. "It's too late. In a dozen seconds, this meteor will crash into the North Sea. At such a close distance, Japan cannot escape." Despair clouded his face. "And with a meteor that large, wiping out humanity like the dinosaurs would be easy. No one can run..."
Everyone in the station knew this. All they could do was emit their final prayers and wails of life.
Meanwhile, in cities across Japan, many pedestrians saw the giant meteor falling from the horizon toward the North Sea with the naked eye. They stopped in their tracks, staring in shock.
"My God... what is that!?"
"A meteor! It's a meteor!! We're doomed!!"
"It's over!"
"I don't want to die, I haven't finished the game I just downloaded, waaaaah!"
If it were a shower of small meteors, people might have seen it as a grand meteor shower. However, Salvatore Doni's demonic sword—the convergence of many meteors—was so magnificent that its scale was visible to everyone, plunging the populace into terror.
Just as people watched the sky in despair, a brilliant white-gold light suddenly soared upward, charging toward the falling star!
BOOM—!!!
The white-gold light pierced the troposphere and collided with the falling meteor. Light flooded the firmament; heaven and earth turned blindingly white! The massive explosion cleared the clouds instantly. Although it didn't cause a direct disaster, the sea below was affected by the aftershocks, waves surging and crashing against the edges of the nearby island nation.
"You cannot defeat me."
Slightly raising his 「Salvation Dungeon Blade」, Rama spoke these words with a calm tone.
"Is that so? I never said my 'Star Sword' was limited to just one." Salvatore Doni laughed heartily.
Then, his silver hand swung down again. In the next moment, several more points of light were reflected in Rama's pupils.
A sword cannot be singular. After seeing Shirou's combat style, Salvatore Doni had grown fond of the method of manipulating multiple high-quality blades. Thus, he had put a great deal of effort into turning a vast number of meteors into his own demonic swords. However, the curse power consumed by this move was immense, so he couldn't summon them all at once.
While Rama was dealing with the first "Star Sword," Salvatore had already pulled down even more.
"How troublesome..."
Rama looked at the numerous giant meteors falling from the sky. His tone remained flat, as if he didn't care at all about Salvatore's full-power strike.
The divine power he obtained from the Covenant was not created from nothing; it was drawn from the essence of this planet—forged from the fires of a burning world to create the ultimate Steel.
In the next moment, under Salvatore Doni's horrified gaze, a vast, suffocating white-gold divine power erupted from Rama's body!
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