BOOM!
A massive roar sounded behind him.
At the same moment, Vincent felt a wave of chaos flood his mind — his body suddenly slipping out of his own control, spinning around and flying straight back the way he'd come, just in time to see the silver serpent collapsing to the ground.
This was the "Distortion" ability.
Vincent understood exactly what was happening, but he had no way to resist it.
The fragment of his soul residing in the Nation of Disorder, gripping the Black Emperor card, tried to counter Distortion with Distortion of his own — but one was only Sequence 3, and the other Sequence 1. It made no difference at all.
All he could do was watch himself fly straight back into the trap, wasting the precious chance the great serpent had bought him.
At this point, Ouroboros had his hands full just surviving, and Adam clearly intended to stay nothing more than a spectator. Which meant, right now, Vincent had no one to rely on but himself.
I might be about to die, but I'll be damned if I make this easy for any of you.
"Screw all of—"
Vincent took a deep breath, tilted his head back, and started to shout, in Giant language:
"Le—"
"Wait!"
Right then, Bernadette suddenly cut off his "spell." "Wait — there's still something we haven't tried!"
Vincent froze. "What?"
"Black Box!"
Bernadette said, serious. "You've used 'Black Box' plenty of times in the Nation of Disorder to trade for a bunch of useless junk, sure — but every time, you only ever spent a small amount of gray crystal. There's nothing better to try right now."
"Let's gamble on it!"
The moment she said it, it clicked for Vincent.
The rule of Black Box in the Nation of Disorder was: the more gray crystal you spent, the more valuable the reward could be — but it was still full of unknowns and uncertainty. Even dumping a huge amount of gray crystal in at once was no guarantee of getting anything actually useful.
So his original plan had been: rather than waste the gray crystal, save it up and use it toward advancing to Sequence 4 instead.
But right now, there didn't seem to be much point in continuing to save it — save it too long, and he'd end up taking it straight to the grave.
"Understood."
Within the Nation of Disorder, the fragment of Vincent's soul walked up to the ancient, unadorned scale — golden mist still churning within it, and faintly, he could make out a voice — Klein's, calling for help.
But there was nothing Vincent could spare for that right now. He reached out and pulled off the largest chunk of gray crystal he'd seen since gaining access to the Nation of Disorder — far more than what advancing to Sequence 4 would have required.
The scale, which had been tilted to the left, snapped back to tilting right once more.
He didn't dare hesitate, letting the spirituality within him surge into the scale, activating the "Black Box" ability.
Instantly —
Boundless darkness poured out from within Vincent once more, transforming the entire palace into one enormous "black box."
The twelve chairs lit up, and the ancient, unadorned scale transformed once more into a ceaselessly spinning black vortex, nothing but emptiness and darkness within it, as if leading toward some unknown world or dimension.
Vincent gripped that chunk of gray crystal — the largest he'd seen since gaining the Nation of Disorder — and murmured, "Since Black Box in the Nation of Disorder is a gamble on luck, and the two greatest embodiments of luck in this entire world happen to both be on my side right now — there's no reason I shouldn't pull something good out of this."
People are gamblers at heart. Not gambling is just gambling that you'll lose by default.
With two Snakes of Mercury backing me, the least I deserve is a ten-pull double-gold hit!
Vincent released his fingers, letting the gray crystal drop into the vortex.
The black vortex's spinning slowed at once, forming, just as before, a round, pitch-black "hole," indistinguishable from any of the times before it.
Vincent took a deep breath, reaching a hand through that black "hole," into a space that looked, at a glance, no different from the world outside it.
The next instant, his fingertips brushed against something scalding hot. He felt his own skin, his own bones, as if they were about to be seared to ash in that heat, a searing, needle-sharp pain tearing through his entire body from the fingertip outward.
Crack.
He kept his fingers curled around it anyway, gripping tight, and yanked his hand back hard. At the same moment, the darkness around him rapidly contracted, swallowed back into that pitch-black "hole," and a blinding light burst from the object now in his hand, illuminating the "black box."
By the time Vincent had pulled the object fully free, everything around him had already returned to normal: the hole had become the ancient scale again; the "black box" had become the palace once more.
Vincent stared, fixed, at what he now held in his hand... a tachi?
An ordinary-looking tachi, with a deep purple hilt, an oval tsuba, an entirely unremarkable design?
He stood frozen.
Why in the world would it be a tachi?
This thing didn't match the visual style of the Lord of Mysteries world at all, and it certainly didn't match Harry Potter's either — it was like a stray magnet-wielding lunatic wandering into a pure romance anime, or Tom and Jerry showing up in the middle of a shonen battle series.
Didn't matter, though. Black cat, white cat — whichever one catches the mouse is a good cat!
Maybe this tachi was some sealed item, forged by some legendary figure who'd survived since the First Epoch — or by some "transmigrator" who'd specifically shaped it this way.
Come on then. Whether I live or die is up to you now.
Vincent tightened his grip, and every piece of information about the tachi flooded into his mind at once:
"!!!"
How could this be?!
His pupils contracted violently, the shock on his face even greater than when he'd first learned, months ago, that he'd been transmigrated into the world of the Lord of Mysteries — greater, more disbelieving, more utterly incomprehensible.
...
In some barren, desolate space, a towering black spire rose up, coiled by a massive, scaleless silver serpent, its blood-red eyes fixed coldly in one direction.
Across the serpent's scales, dense patterns and symbols formed interlocking wheels, slowly turning, casting off faint traces of light that rose into the air, gathering into an even larger wheel above.
"Sigh."
The little snake, Will Ansaten, let out a sigh: Never would've guessed that after a thousand years apart, Ouroboros and I would actually end up working together again — something I never would've dared imagine, before.
Still — fate, which used to be reasonably clear to me, is a complete mess right now. Hope the call I made, going with my gut, was the right one.
...
Beneath Backlund.
The battle between Mr. Z's black-armored monster form and Butis had already reduced this stretch of underground space to ruins.
Only the descent altar itself remained largely untouched.
Partly because Butis had been doing everything he could to protect it, but more importantly, because Mr. Z had no intention of destroying the altar at all — in his eyes, using Lanevus to hold the ritual and bring their Lord down wasn't wrong in the slightest.
The one who was wrong was Butis, the traitor who'd betrayed their Lord.
All he needed to do was kill Butis, or drive him off, and he could take over the altar himself, complete the ritual, and let their Lord's light descend.
"Mr. Z, have you betrayed our Lord?"
Butis still couldn't quite wrap his head around it — he had no idea why Mr. Z harbored such intense hostility toward him, why he was fighting this hard, even willing to transform into a monster to do it.
"You're the traitor!"
To be continued…
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