"World Slasher."
And as the jet black blade of Ame-no-Habakiri moved, a thin, wide black slit tore through the fabric of space.
It began at the western edge of the floating Agreas Island and streaked toward the east with the speed of a neural impulse.
For a microsecond, there was only silence.
Then the eruption followed.
FWUOOOOM
A burst of black flame instantly engulfed the rocky underside of the floating island. It crawled across the foundations in a blur, turning the massive pillars of ancient stone, sedimentary rock, and Agreas Crystals used to create Evil Pieces within it into drifting black ash.
Everything it touched was erased to nothing in an instant, the whole underground were consumed in the blink of an eye.
Jay watched with an unreadable gaze as the first flakes of black ash began to drift downward, preceding the rain of cursed water like a morbid snow.
In the span of mere seconds, the core of the Underworld's technological progress was gone.
The specialized crystals of Agreas required to construct the entire Evil Pieces system were reduced to drifting history, taking the future of the Devils with them.
However, Jay noticed something as the black flames, intended to rise and consume the city above, were being forcefully swept away before they could reach the metropolitan streets of Agreas.
Avesta ignited in his left eye, the golden X glowing as it deconstructed the hundreds of Kankara Formulas cast by Ajuka near the edge of the city.
He momentarily considered focusing his mental energy on deconstructing those equations one by one to burn the city down.
But he never got the chance, as a violent burst of freezing wind suddenly roared from behind him.
Jay cast a brief glance over his shoulder.
The air temperature plummeted by hundreds of degrees in a millisecond. The gale was meant to freeze his cells instantly and shatter his body before he could even register the threat.
"Incinerate Anthem," he muttered.
FWUOOOM
His body was instantly enveloped in a searing purple glow.
The holy fire of the Incinerate Anthem surged outward in a wave of flames, colliding violently with the incoming demonic frost magic. The clash of absolute heat and absolute zero triggered a massive steam explosion that shrouded the sky.
As the vapor began to thin, a figure materialized through the white haze. Standing in mid-air was the Strongest Woman in the Underworld, Serafall Leviathan.
Her blue eyes were as sharp as the sword in Jay's hand and as cold as the ice she commanded.
The sheer weight of her killing intent was a physical pressure that would have stopped the heart of any lesser man.
She stared at the ruined Agreas Island before her, then back at the young man, her beautiful face a mask of unprecedented fury.
"You! You won't be able to get out of here alive!" she declared.
The memory of meeting Jay once before in the stadium, and of his escape then, was a stain on her pride.
Today, as ash rained from the weeping sky,
She would not let him run again.
Not after what he had done.
Jay looked down past her. Below the floating ruins, he saw a series of wide, expanded green shields constructed from raw demonic energy.
They completely enveloped the entirety of Agares City, acting as a massive umbrella against the corrosive cursed water.
Jay recognized it instantly, Falbium's Absolute Defense.
The two of them stood suspended in the open air, locked in a stare-down amidst the rain of the damned.
Every time a drop of the cursed water attempted to touch Serafall, it was instantly encased in a micro-sphere of ice and discarded.
Jay, meanwhile, kept the Incinerate Anthem active, the purple flames burning the demonic water into harmless vapor before it could reach his skin.
"Serafall Leviathan," Jay acknowledged, his voice toneless.
A blue magical circle layered with Leviathan-class runes, ignited in front of her.
She didn't bother with words as she intended to freeze him from the inside out, starting with the very blood in his veins.
Avesta ignited once more and with a single pulse of his intent, the golden X processed the magical structure, and Serafall's magic circle instantly shattered into sparks of light.
Serafall's blue eyes widened in shock.
'Anti-magic!?' she thought, her mind reeling at the ease with which her spell was nullified.
"Why... Why did you do all of this!? What have we even done to you?" Serafall asked.
Her voice cracked slightly, the frustration of the situation bleeding through her facade. She looked at the young man.
Jay remained silent for a long moment.
What they did to me?
He looked up, watching Sirzechs Lucifer.
The Crimson Satan was pushing his power of destruction, creating a dome-shaped crimson annihilation that obliterated the black flood before it could drown the entire region of Agares.
But the scale of Graffiacane's Embodiment of Evil was simply too vast. From Jay's vantage point, the black sky stretched across the entire horizon, reaching into the distant forests and the mountainsides of the Agares region.
It was a God-slaying weapon for a reason.
Even the whispers of the Black Grail said that this flood would not stop for forty days and forty nights unless someone had the power to destroy the very sky where the ability originated.
Below the dome, Ajuka Beelzebub was spreading his mind thin, maintaining thousands of individual Kankara Formula magic circles to flash-evaporate every stray droplet.
Grayfia Lucifuge had already rushed toward the outskirts of the city, using her ice magic to create massive levees, freezing the water that had already landed in the forests to prevent it from surging into the residential sectors.
Jay then turned his gaze back to Serafall.
"Right," Jay suddenly said.
Serafall studied the man. His black hair fluttered in the gale, and his empty dark hazel eyes stared into hers with an unreadable expression. His face was handsome, with youthful features.
And he was also human.
And regarding Serafall's question, he simply said.
"You've done nothing...,"
Suddenly, a purple flame began to lick at Jay's boots, rising to engulf his body.
Recognizing the signs of a spatial magic, Serafall lunged forward.
She threw her hands out, attempting to freeze the very space around him to lock him in place.
But with a casual, raised hand, Jay focused his Avesta on her magic.
The ice shattered as the magic circle forming her assault collapsed into nothingness once again.
"Stop!" she screamed.
Her hand reached out, grasping only at the fading purple embers, but Jay's figure had already vanished, leaving nothing behind except the sound of ash and cursed waters falling from the sky.
Serafall hovered alone in the sky, her hands clenched tight.
She had failed to stop him once more.
"Damn it!"
***
High above the skies of Agreas, Sirzechs Lucifer hovered as a lone point of defense as his body enveloped in a swirling crimson aura.
His hands were raised toward the black sky, as if he were physically holding back the weight of a breaking dam.
From his palms, the Power of Destruction bled outward in a relentless tide, expanding into a colossal, shimmering dome that spanned the entire horizon of Agares City and the remains of Agreas Island.
Every time the black, cursed droplets of the flood made contact with the shell of the dome, they were simply erased from existence.
The sound was a continuous, low-frequency hum of annihilation.
Yet, Sirzechs' brow was deeply furrowed.
Despite the magnitude of his power, he was merely treating the symptoms of a terminal disease.
The dome was a shield, not a cure, offering no solution to the source of the flood.
Sirzechs had no choice but to hold a defensive stance.
A streak of green light cut through the red haze, and Ajuka Beelzebub suddenly appeared at his side.
"Ajuka... Why are you here? The city?" Sirzechs asked, his voice strained by the effort of maintaining the massive barrier.
"It's okay. Serafall and Falbium have arrived," Ajuka replied, his expression unreadable as he surveyed the black sky.
Sirzechs cast his gaze downward.
Far below the ruins of the floating island, the sprawling metropolis of Agares City was now safely encased within Falbium's Absolute Defense. The massive, green shields shimmered under the pressure of the falling rain.
Simultaneously, any cursed water that leaked through the fractures or dripped from the edges of the suspended Agreas Island was instantly crystallized into shards of ice or harmless snow by the overwhelming magic of Serafall Leviathan.
But finally, Sirzechs' eyes fixed on the area beneath the suspended island.
The ground beneath the island had been scoured to nothingness. A fine, persistent rain of black ash continued to drift through the air, settling like a funeral shroud over the city.
"The crystals..." Sirzechs muttered, his heart sinking as he looked at the empty space where the island's underground once resided.
"So that's what he was after."
Ajuka gave a solemn nod.
The loss was immense. The research, the laboratories, and the very foundation of the materials that created the Evil Piece system had been utterly destroyed.
Sirzechs turned back to his friend, his eyes narrowing with a dark suspicion.
"Do you think that's all he was after? Or..."'
"I don't think so," Ajuka interrupted, his voice cool and analytical.
"This is probably only the beginning… but we can worry about the long-term consequences later. Right now, the most important thing is to stop this flood from falling."
Sirzechs nodded.
"Even if I use my Power of Destruction, it seems this flood won't stop," Sirzechs said, gesturing to the sky.
"This is the Balance Breaker equivalent of the Evil Claws, Graffiacane's Embodiment of Evil," Ajuka explained, his eyes glowing.
"Though I haven't witnessed it myself until today, the old scriptures regarding the Malebranche describe it as an ability to summon a cursed rain that will not stop for days. The exact duration wasn't specified, but the intent is clear... It was total submergence."
Sirzechs' face turned grim.
"Days... If we allow this to continue for even a few hours, this entire region will be flooded and flattened into a mire of mud." He muttered, temembering how his skin felt after being touched by the cursed water.
"Then, how do we stop this?" Sirzechs asked.
"Since this appears to be a single, self-sustaining activation sequence, I can't simply stop it by manipulating its magic circle," Ajuka explained, his aura beginning to pulse with a bluish-green light.
Sirzechs sent to a deep thought.
'Even if I entered my True Form, the most I could do was destroy the flood on a larger scale."'
He could not erase the magic that the scythe had etched into the atmosphere.
But-
"Wait... You said you can't stop it as a whole by manipulating the magic circle. Does that mean there is another way to stop this completely?" Sirzechs asked, catching the subtle nuance in the scientist's tone.
"Well, of course," Ajuka said, a confident edge returning to his voice as his aura flared.
"But I might need some time to set up my Formula."
"Your Formula?... What are you going to do?" Sirzechs asked, watching his friend with a mixture of confusion and burgeoning hope.
Ajuka remained silent for a moment, looking up into the heart of the black, weeping sky.
The rain pattered against Sirzechs' dome.
"I will change the entire sky," Ajuka declared.
Sirzechs' eyes widened.
The audacity of the plan was pure Ajuka Beelzebub.
Yet it was exactly the Ajuka Beelzebub Sirzechs knew all too well.
A thin, knowing smile touched the Crimson Satan's lips.
"I see. Then... I will be opening up your path."
And with a sharp flick of Sirzechs' wrists, he funneled his Power of Destruction into a concentrated vertical pillar.
The black floodwaters were torn apart, carved open to form a hollow corridor of clear air leading straight into the upper atmosphere.
But, as every particle in the sky had already been orchestrated by Graffiacane, the cleared air quickly filled with cursed water once more. Still, it was enough time for Ajuka.
Ajuka nodded, his body flickering for a second before he launched upward.
He moved as a streak of bluish-green light, ascending through the channel Sirzechs had carved.
High above the world, a gigantic magic circle began to form.
It started as a faint lattice of light, but it rapidly expanded, growing wider and wider until it covered the entirety of the horizon.
The green glow of Ajuka Beelzebub's signature magic began to illuminate the Underworld, casting a lime-colored hue over the black sky and the red dome.
Below, Falbium and the terrified civilians of Agares City looked up, the green light reflecting in their eyes.
Grayfia, still hovering near the mountainside where she was busy freezing the encroaching floodwaters to prevent a mudslide, paused to witness the spectacle. The sky was now a layered tapestry of demonic power, from the black flood, the crimson dome of destruction, and the overarching green canopy of the Kankara Formula.
Serafall, too, stood still, the snow of the cursed water drifting around her like frozen diamonds.
"Ajuka-chan," she whispered, a breath of relief escaping her.
In the center of the black sky, Ajuka Beelzebub closed his eyes.
He became a conduit for pure calculation.
As each component of the formula was being meticulously constructed in the theater of his mind, transcribed into the massive circle one by one.
An hour passed, a grueling sixty minutes of total concentration where a single mathematical error could result in a spatial collapse. He carefully threaded the ultimate formula through the cursed atmosphere, weaving his logic into the very fabric of reality.
To change the sky is a godlike feat.
But to a man who has the world beneath his feet…
To Ajuka Beelzebub, nothing is impossible.
And as he slowly opened his eyes…
A memory surfaced through his mind. He thought of the human, a young man who had orchestrated this catastrophe with such efficiency.
He thought of the Evil Pieces, his greatest invention, created with the help of the Ars Goetia and the Malebranche as a reference. He thought of the Agreas Crystals, the only material in the world capable of constructing them.
But they were gone now.
The means to replenish the Devil population through reincarnation had been completely annihilated.
But it wasn't a problem.
Even if Devils could no longer reincarnate other races, and even if future generations could not replenish themselves that way, it made no difference.
"We lived without the Evil Pieces once," Ajuka mused to the empty air.
"If we must live without them again, then so be it. The Devils will still find a way to survive as a whole. It has been that way for thousands of years, and it will be that way for thousands more."
Because Ajuka Beelzebub trusted that future generations would be better than them-
him, Sirzechs, Serafall, or Falbium, just as they were better than their predecessors.
And so, his job was to protect the present and let the future generations of the Devils forge their own path.
And with silent words, Ajuka Beelzebub's voice echoed across the black sky of Agreas.
"Kankara Formula…"
The world was swallowed in a brilliant, cleansing green light.