"Huh..."
The sound escaped Jay's lips as a low breath of genuine confusion.
Hearing that weird greeting for someone that you've just met, a heavy silence settled over the flower-strewn sanctuary.
Jay raised his eyebrows, his dark hazel eyes narrowing as he scanned the towering, crystalline red entity before him.
"Hm… You do not remember me? I see..." Malacoda said.
The entity fell silent for a moment, the single burning eye at its crown pulsing with a slow, rhythmic light that felt like a heartbeat. It was as if he was sifting through eons of memory.
And suddenly, a tail-like spear of deep crimson demonic energy materialized in his hand, its surface shimmering like rubies.
Malacoda began to descend the porcelain stairs of the shrine, his movements fluid and unsettlingly silent. Each step he took on the pristine white stone sent a ripple in the space through the vibrant green grass at the base of the stairs.
"It does not matter… At last, we stand before one another. The hundred years I endured in confinement were unforeseen, as was your arrival here… But none of that matters now," Malacoda stated.
The way he spoke, his voice a surreal layering of gentle whispers and grinding stone, threw both Jay and Lavinia off.
There was no hatred or even any emotion in his tone.
Suddenly, an ominous aura erupted from his lanky body, so dense and foul that Jay could not help but be reminded of Azi Dahaka, the three-headed dragon said to be the literal embodiment of malice. That alone spoke volumes about Malacoda.
"Illya-kun... He is strong," Lavinia whispered, her voice trembling slightly as her absolute demise aura flared in an attempt to counteract the suffocating presence of the Evil Tail.
"Yeah… This guy is said to be on par with the original Four Satans... And maybe even stronger," Jay said.
'And he is even stronger than the current Satans, of course except for Sirzechs and Ajuka,' Jay thought, corrected himself as Avesta ignited within his pupils. The golden cross flared to life, attempting to deconstruct the monster before him.
"But why does he keep insisting that he has been waiting for me? And from his words, I do not think he was waiting for me to arrive here with Lavinia... It feels as if he has been waiting for me for hundreds of years."
Before Jay could finish his thoughts, Malacoda's figure blurred.
Jay's eyes widened at the sheer explosiveness of his movement.
The towering three-meter entity had vanished from the stairs and reappeared almost instantly in front of him.
The red spear shot forward in a piercing strike aimed directly at Jay's heart as Jay brought Ame-no-Habakiri up to parry the blow just before the spear's tip could tear through the fabric of his sweatshirt.
CLANK
'He is incredibly fast,' He thought, the vibration of the impact rattling his bones.
Without losing momentum, Malacoda contorted his body in an abnormal, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree, a movement defied the laws of biology, as if he possessed no bones or spine to limit his rotation.
He swung the red spear in a horizontal arc intended to sever Jay's head from the right.
CLANK
Jay parried the second strike with Alichino, the black jagged blade sparking against the crimson energy of the spear.
And then, as both of them froze in a stalemate for a fraction of a second,
Jay whispered.
"Severed."
SPLURTTT
Malacoda's single eye fluttered as a look of clinical surprise crossed his halo-like crown.
In a fraction of a second, both of his crystalline hands were suddenly severed at the elbows, as if sliced by an invisible blade. Thick, crimson blood spurted across the white marble and the grassy field.
And Jay did not give the Evil Tail a single moment to breathe.
He stepped into the creature's guard and unleashed a violent horizontal slash with Habakiri, aiming to cut Malacoda's body in half.
But Malacoda's predatory instincts screamed as he leaped backward in a desperate retreat, covering twenty meters in a single bound.
Yet Jay's slash was never meant to strike physically.
"Stop."
The Desire rippled through the air. Malacoda, caught in mid-air during his retreat, was suddenly suspended in time and space, his momentum cancelled by Jay's new authority.
"Cleave"
SHIIING
SPLURRT
A black slash instantly appeared on the Evil Tail's suspended body.
Malacoda's torso was severed clean in half and his upper body tumbling through the air toward the back of the grassy yard.
But even as his guts spilled onto the pristine grass, the impossible happened. In a fraction of a second, both halves of his body sprouted hundreds of thin, needle-like tendrils that pulled themselves back together. His flesh knitted as he regenerated completely in a visceral and horrifying display of biological immortality.
The Evil Tail regained his footing, landing softly in the center of the flowery field fifty meters in front of Jay. He stood tall, his spear reforming in his grip as if the previous ten seconds of violence had never occurred.
"Alichino… I see. You have betrayed me," Malacoda said, his eye fixing on the jagged black blade in Jay's left hand.
Alichino remained silent. She did not pulse or whisper, her consciousness tucked tightly away within the steel as she served her new master.
"All of your kin has been defeated, Malacoda. My goal in this place is solely to obtain access to the Ars Goetia, which is stored right here, inside that shrine," Jay said, pointing toward the white entrance with the tip of Habakiri.
"So, unless we are going to spend the rest of the afternoon wasting each other's time, step aside. Let me go inside and take the book."
Malacoda remained motionless, the burning eye staring at Jay with a strange, contemplative intensity.
"So you did not come here to fight me?"
"No," Jay answered simply.
Malacoda's eye flickered with a pulsing light, though a hint of disappointment was visible in that single eye.
"That cannot be possible… Ars Goetia has been permanently sealed here. After the King and Mother tore one of its pages and used it to give birth to the Devils, it has remained here, from the day I was created… from the day I was sealed."
Those words caused the expressions of both Jay and Lavinia to turn serious.
"What do you mean by permanently sealed?" Jay asked, his voice low.
"It means that no one can unseal it, not even with your power of creation and commands over seals," Malacoda stated.
Jay raised an eyebrow at that. The entity spoke with a familiarity about his abilities that was deeply unsettling, even if none of it were true.
"What are you even talking about?" he asked, genuine confusion in his voice.
Before he could receive an answer, thousands of red tendrils erupted from Malacoda's back like a blooming lotus of gore.
Each tendril was tipped with a razor-sharp shard of crystal, and they all launched forward simultaneously. They traveled at subsonic speeds, weaving through the air like a swarm of angry hornets.
Jay's Avesta ignited, analyzing the incoming wave, but the result was the same as before.
All of them was constructed from the singular concept.
Evil.
"Stop" Jay commanded, projecting his will through the Sword of Desire to freeze the projectile swarm.
But something strange happened.
Jay's eyes narrowed as his heart skipped a beat.
FRUUUUUTTTT
The red tendrils did not stop.
They ignored the Desire, the same Desire that had worked just a few minutes earlier.
What? What just happened?
Jay's mind raced.
And as he saw that his efforts had yielded nothing, Jay moved his hand gently, purple flames flickering as they formed dozens of magic circles.
"Rupture,"
Jagged tears in space appeared directly in front of him, and the crimson tendrils, only a few meters from his chest, were instantly deleted. The momentum of the attack collapsed as the severed tendrils of demonic energy dissolved into harmless red mist before they could reach him.
Beside him, Lavinia's brow furrowed.
She had watched Jay's newly acquired ability to inflict Desire from Alichino fail to take hold.
"Illya-kun, that's..." She stepped closer to him.
Jay didn't answer immediately.
He glanced down at the jagged black blade of Alichino in his left hand, then at the Black Grail hovering at his shoulder.
The artifact was pulsing, yet it remained frustratingly silent, failing to provide any information about what had just happened or why the Desire had failed to work.
'Alichino, what is happening? Why didn't your power work on him?' Jay projected the thought with a sharp edge.
'That is likely because of his power, Master,' Alichino's voice echoed in his mind, sounding unusually solemn.
"If you haven't realized, Malacoda is currently in his Embodiment of Evil. In this state, the original Lucifer called him the biggest bug they ever created among the Twelve Evil Claws."
'The biggest bug?' Jay raised his eyebrows.
"You do not need to explain it to him, Alichino. You do not need to betray me any further. I shall tell him myself."
The voice of the Evil Tail cut through the air, vibrating with a surreal clarity. Jay's dark hazel eyes snapped to the crystalline entity, his gaze turning razor-sharp.
'Did he just read my mind?'
"I shall tell you about my power, Spirit… in case you have forgotten," Malacoda said, his single burning eye fixed on Jay.
"When Lucifer forged me, I manifested a specific law within my Embodiment of Evil... It called Evil Shall Be Eternal... An ability that allows my existence to perceive anything that touches or influences my body as Evil. And once I perceive a particular thing as Evil, I become eternally immune to that specific influence from that specific individual."
The revelation caused both Jay and Lavinia's eyes to widen.
"That is why Alichino's power of the same command will not work on me twice, as you have likely realized by now," Malacoda added.
He spoke of his own mechanics with a chilling nonchalance, as if knowing the secret wouldn't grant his opponents any advantage whatsoever.
Jay stood still, his mind racing through the implications.
To perceive everything as Evil and then become immune to it, what kind of power is that.
"You have got to be kidding me,..." Jay muttered, his voice dropping into a low disbelief. "Then as long as you have an immortal body, doesn't that mean you are basically invincible?"
"Don't tell me it is also possible for your black flames to not work, Illya-kun," Lavinia said, her voice laced with concern.
"I am confident I could annihilate him completely using True Cross, but that would erase his entire existence. And his ability is far too unbelievably broken to simply destroy him," Jay replied, his eyes never leaving Malacoda.
His mind raced.
'And if I can use it and gain the same ability, that would be a massive power boost against Sirzechs. If I could even become immune to his power of destruction…' Jay thought, the prospect and potential of this power filling him with awe. Its usefulness for the future, especially if he truly wanted to fulfill his creed, was enormous.
"Though, if he becomes immune to the flames before i can seal his soul inside the grail... we might need to use a different, last-ditch approach."
"And what is that?"
"Steal the book and run," Jay said flatly.
Lavinia blinked, her expression momentarily blank. "That is... something, I guess?"
She hadn't expected such an unheroic suggestion from him, but given the circumstances, it was hard to argue.
As they spoke, Malacoda opened his mouth again, his tone shifting into something almost nostalgic.
"You know... I still remember the last thing you said to me, Spirit. That last question..."
Jay shifted his focus back to the ancient being, listening intently. There was a history here he didn't possess, a ghost of a memory that Malacoda was projecting onto him.
"You asked me... what did I think about Evil? What is Evil?" Malacoda's eye pulsed with a rhythmic light.
"Truthfully, I am embarrassed to say that even after hundreds of years of my confinement, thinking of nothing else, I still do not know how to answer that question." Malacoda said, sadness in his voice.
"But I do not think that you actually expected any answer from me, a being like myself, created from nothing but evil. But there is one thing that I have finally understood about why you asked is this... you wanted me to understand myself. What am I? Who am I?"
A new red spear, larger and more ornate than the last, manifested in Malacoda's hand.
"Who is Malacoda?" he repeated.
And suddenly, his physical form seemed to glitch, flickering in and out of existence before he rushed toward Jay in a blinding red flash of speed.
"Immobilize," Jay said, attempting a variation of the command.
Malacoda did not stop. Once again, he ignored the Desire.
CLANK
The spear met Jay's blade with a shower of sparks. Jay narrowed his eyes against the weight of the blow.
'It seems it does not matter the cause, only the effect that touches or influences his body. I thought using different words would bypass the immunity...'
This meant that anything that had already influenced him, such as the spatial severing of Rupture or the Desire to stop his movement, had become useless.
FWUOOOM
Suddenly, a massive burst of frost erupted from the ground beneath Malacoda's feet. Lavinia unleashed a blizzard of her Absolute Demise, her white mist and ice instantly encasing the Evil Tail's towering body in a block of temporal ice.
The red-figure was frozen mid-swing, his crystalline body locked in a translucent ice prison.
Jay didn't waste the opening.
He brought the Black Grail forward, the dark flames licking the rim as he prepared to pull Malacoda's soul into the vessel. But before the extraction could begin-
CRACKLE
BOOM
The ice shattered into a million glittering shards. A wave of pure, dark crimson demonic energy exploded outward, pulverizing the Absolute Demise.
Jay and Lavinia were forced to retreat several meters to avoid the blast.
Jay took a breath, putting Ame-no-Habakiri back into his pocket dimension.
In its place, the pale silver blade of Ame-no-Murakumo appeared at his side. Having already used Cleave to sever Malacoda earlier, he had to assume that Ame-no-Habakiri's divine authority, the World Cutting Slash, was now useless against him.
Jay stepped forward, his eyes cold and focused.
"Lavi, let me handle this one..." he said, his voice dropping into a serious tone.
'Besides, we don't have much time left before Ajuka or Sirzechs find us here. They have likely realized what is happening in the Eighth Circle by now.'
Lavinia, hearing the finality in his voice, shook her head firmly.
"No, Illya-kun. Think about it... He might be adapting to my power, but I can still immobilize him using my Ice, even if only for a few seconds at a time. That is enough for you to absorb his soul, isn't it?"
Jay looked into Lavinia's sapphire eyes for a moment, seeing the unwavering resolve there.
"You are right. What was I even thinking?" Jay said, his aura flaring.
He still had plenty of things to decapitate Malacoda.
"Let's finish this together."
"Um!"