Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti stood there.
His men deployed in a circle without a word.
He stopped a few meters away. Tilted his head with that sincere, natural curiosity, the one of a man facing something he finds genuinely interesting.
The smile of the Archbishop of Sloth widened even further, splitting his face to the ears as he pointed a skeletal finger toward the boy.
Petelgeuse : « Well, well, well! The one you hold so tenderly against your chest, wouldn't that be the half-devil girl? Oh! How diligent you are! Wonderfully diligent! Even before we could begin the preparations for the trial, you yourself took the life of the half-devil in the name of our holy mission! HEHEHEHEHE! THIS IS LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! »
The laugh exploded and closed just as quickly, the two registers separated by a fraction of a second, and it was that speed — that ability to swing from one extreme to the other without transition — that was the most disturbing thing about him.
Subaru looked at him, the shock temporarily paralyzing his vocal cords.
Subaru : « I am… diligent? »
Petelgeuse : « That's right! You are of absolute diligence! Fantastic! Admirable! »
He stopped dead. The smile disappeared, replaced by something flatter and colder, his expression instantly transforming into a mask of absolute contempt as he met Subaru's gaze.
Petelgeuse : « Always the same refrain... Incapable of overcoming even a single trial, let alone facing one of the sins of the holy Church... And after all this waiting, all this preparation... She stumbles on the first pebble that comes her way, and it's over. Pouah! »
His gaze slid toward Emilia's body with the expression one would have before damaged merchandise.
The man in green approached a few steps, his jerky movements accompanied by sinister bone crackings, a snyper smile on his lips.
Petelgeuse : « Ah, you are truly of a crass sloth. »
Subaru's gaze, until then consumed by sadness, contracted under the effect of surprise.
Behind the Archbishop's back, the air began to distort abnormally.
Two long dark silhouettes, of absolute blackness, burst from his flesh envelope — not quite arms, not quite shadows, something between the two that moved with a fluidity that did not respect the usual laws of motion.
He had barely perceived them in the previous loop, a fleeting impression at the periphery of his vision.
But this time, after accumulating so many traumas and brushing against death repeatedly, he saw them clearly.
Two Invisible Hands, palpable and terrifying, rose above Petelgeuse.
The Invisible Hands deployed toward Emilia.
Subaru moved without thinking — he firmly took the body in his arms and leaped to the side, and the phantom hands sliced the air where she had been a fraction of a second earlier. The snow flew in a white cloud around the point of impact.
Petelgeuse froze. His eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, his face decomposing under the effect of total stupefaction.
Petelgeuse : « You… saw them? »
The voice had become low. Almost soft.
Petelgeuse : « You... Did you see the Invisible Hand just now? You avoided it? »
His voice had become even lower, creeping, betraying a deep disturbance in the face of such an anomaly.
Subaru did not answer, contenting himself with staring at him with a fierce defiant gleam, readjusting his grip on Emilia's frozen body, his legs trembling but holding.
Petelgeuse : « No... No, no, no, This is bad… this is impossible... This is unthinkable! »
The word came out like the conclusion of an equation whose result he did not like.
The Archbishop instantly passed from feigned stupor to destructive rage, feeling profaned in his faith.
Petelgeuse : « This is not good! Everything is going wrong! This is a mistake! A heresy! An insult to love! »
He began to scream, his vocal cords tearing under the effort.
Subaru's eyes widened in horror as Petelgeuse brought his own hand to his mouth and savagely bit his index finger with a force that made blood spurt onto his chin, tearing the flesh and nail in a bone crack.
Then another finger, the same treatment, the same absurd force.
Petelgeuse : « My Authority...! »
Ignoring the pain, he moved to his middle finger, crushing it under his yellowish teeth, projecting drops of hot blood onto his own clothes and deformed face.
Petelgeuse : « The Authority of Sloth...! »
Yet another finger was in turn crushed, bent at an impossible angle with masochistic satisfaction —
Petelgeuse : « My Invisible Hand, which was granted to me by her unconditional love...! »
His entire hand now, the fingers crushed one after the other in this maniacal self-mutilation that resembled less pain than liturgy.
The hand was now nothing more than a bloody and mutilated mass, but his face displayed a fanatical ecstasy.
Petelgeuse : « NO ONE ELSE HAS THE RIGHT TO SEE THEM! NO ONE!! »
In a scream of pure dementia, six new Invisible Hands burst from his back, rising toward the sky like the legs of a titanic spider before swooping down on Subaru.
The young man tried to get up to flee — three steps, four — but the circle of hooded fanatics that had deployed in the shadows closed in on him from all sides like a living wall, blocking any exit.
He searched for an opening, pivoted, but his movements were quickly hindered. An invisible hand wrapped around his ankle and pulled him back.
He fell, Emilia slipped from him, he rolled to take her back immediately — but a second hand seized him by the neck and lifted him into the air, his legs kicking in the void.
Despite all his roars and contortions, Subaru was far too physically weak. His mind, saturated by the pain and macabre visions of the day, threatened to sink definitively into unconsciousness.
He was reduced to total impotence, suspended in the air by intangible bonds.
Emilia's body was out of his reach.
Petelgeuse : « You held her as if she were your most precious possession, your dearest treasure... But tell me, how much will you cry, how much will your soul break when this half-devil's body is torn to pieces before your eyes?! HAHAHAHAHA! »
The Archbishop burst into sadistic laughter, ordering with a gesture of his mutilated hands the dark appendages to converge toward the abandoned corpse of Emilia.
Subaru : « Stop... STOP!!! MERCY, STOP!!! »
Tears of pure agony flowed down his cheeks as he screamed with his entire being, his vocal cords breaking under the intensity of his despair.
He struggled, his throat compressed, his arms beating against something his hands could not grasp.
Subaru : « Please, stop... Don't do that... Don't touch her! »
Petelgeuse savored every second of this psychological torture, his Invisible Hands hovering only a few centimeters from the half-elf's face.
Suddenly, just before the dark fingers could profane the remains…
Suddenly, just before the dark fingers could profane the remains, a dull rumble, of tectonic power, made the entire place vibrate.
Petelgeuse : « What...? »
The Archbishop interrupted himself, surprised by this disturbance.
A dull noise.
Then another. Then a series — short, dry — an ice spike pierced a cultist through and through, then a second, then a dozen, surging from the ground and the trees and the air itself, each finding its target with a precision that had nothing natural about it.
These last ones were instantly impaled, pulverized or crushed under the impact of the frozen blocks. The hooded men fell without a cry.
A voice — A titanic voice, of absolute gravity and devoid of any warmth, resonated throughout the valley.
Puck : « WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY DAUGHTER!!! »
The earth exploded from a central point and from this explosion emerged something that no longer had anything to do with the familiar little silver spirit.
Before them, occulting the sky, stood a monumental creature.
A gigantic feline, several dozen meters tall, with storm-gray fur, whose head alone reached the tops of the nearest trees and whose golden eyes illuminated the snow like two cold suns of pure extermination.
The Beast of the End had just awakened.
.....
The invisible hand released Subaru. He fell into the snow.
He raised misty eyes toward the monster that dominated him with all its stature, his breath cut off by the magical pressure escaping from its body.
Subaru : « You... You are... Puck...? »
The gigantic beast lowered its golden gaze toward the boy, its voice devoid of all the affection it usually wore and something strange and painful passed in that immense gaze.
Puck : « You cannot say it? It may be cruel of me to ask that… »
Around them, the snowstorm redoubled in intensity, the blizzard becoming so dense that it began to whiten the trees of the surrounding forest instantly, freezing time itself.
Petelgeuse looked at the beast with a stupor that did not erase the smile.
Petelgeuse : « Incredible... »
The Archbishop of Sloth growled, braced against the gusts of frozen wind, staring at the Great Spirit with a mix of fascination and hatred.
Petelgeuse : « It is incredibly impossible! Not after all my efforts! Not after everything I have accomplished in the name of her love! »
The man plunged his mutilated hand back into his mouth, beginning to bite the raw flesh with such frenzy that geysers of blood sprayed his own clothes and deformed face.
Puck : « A simple being like you has no right to address a Great Spirit in that manner. »
Puck's voice fell like a divine sentence. Before Petelgeuse could even formulate another heresy, a thick layer of frost instantly enveloped him.
Petelgeuse's body began to freeze — the ice rising from his feet, progressing at a lightning speed along his torso. His body began to crack under the effect of immediate cellular freezing. Yet the Archbishop retained his demented smile until the end.
Petelgeuse : « I would like you not to compare me to an imbecile of your kind! A being who possesses eternity, but who wastes most of it in idleness and sloth! »
He screamed these words in a final outburst of fervor, raising his frozen arms that instantly shattered into a thousand ice shards under the action of the cold.
Petelgeuse : « Ah… my brain trembles… »
As the frost reached his neck, Petelgeuse emitted a rattle of profoundly sick pleasure.
Puck : « Death is not even a punishment worthy of the name for you. That is why I hate you all so much. »
The Great Spirit pronounced these words with sovereign disgust, staring at the fanatic now transformed into a translucent ice statue.
Petelgeuse : « No matter your words! Everything is already over! I have accomplished what had to be done in the name of love, and I will depart with joy to rejoin our beloved… ehehe… »
The rest of the body froze.
Puck's paw came down on it with the total indifference of something too great to feel the difference between a rock and a man.
What remained of Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti was nothing more than a trail of frost dust that instantly dispersed in the blizzard.
A silence.
The gigantic beast then turned its immense golden eyes toward the only human survivor of the square.
Subaru — on his knees, curled up in the snow, trembled with terror in the face of this divine entity, Emilia's body clutched against him.
Puck : « Well, Subaru. Let's have a little discussion, just the two of us. »
The Great Spirit sat down in all its height, shaking off a bit of snow that had accumulated on its massive whiskers.
It nonchalantly wiped something off its muzzle, and that nonchalance, in the circumstances, was the most disturbing thing it could do.
Puck : « You have committed the greatest, the most unforgivable of sins. »
Subaru : « A... Sin...? »
Subaru stammered, his mind unable to follow the monster's logic.
Puck : « You let Lia die. »
The sentence fell, glacial, definitive. The golden eyes fixed the boy, piercing him through and through despite the proportional size difference.
Subaru's face lost its last colors without losing a second.
Puck : « You arrived too late. Despite everything she did for you, despite the trust she placed in you, you proved incapable of saving her when the situation demanded it. You are weak. You are pathetic. »
The temperature dropped further. The snow fell in thick, almost horizontal curtains.
Subaru's lips began to turn blue.
Subaru : « It's… I couldn't — I tried — »
Subaru could do nothing else but that to sustain the giant demon's gaze, fear and despair engraved in each of his features.
Puck : « In accordance with the terms of my contract, I will now destroy this world. »
Subaru : « Why...? Why do that...? »
Subaru asked the question in a hoarse voice, his own tongue beginning to numb under the effect of the frost progressing in his body.
A time.
The beast closed its eyes for a fraction of a second, and in that brief movement something passed over its gigantic face — an immense sadness briefly altering its beast features, a true pain, that of a being who has just lost the only reason for which it had chosen to continue existing.
Puck : « Lia is... Emilia is the one and only reason for my existence. There is no reason, no justification for me to exist in a world without her. »
The Great Spirit reopened its golden eyes, which no longer contained any pity.
Subaru : « Why?!... »
Subaru's mouth began to transform into ice as the words came out.
Puck : « You came here. You let her die. And now, you are going to die in turn... You are truly of an afflicting uselessness. »
His entire body was freezing now.
The ice rose from his feet, his fingers, his shoulders, his body frozen in a posture of submission, his skin blue from the extreme cold, and each joint threatened to break at the slightest impact.
Puck raised its gigantic forepaw — immense, silent in the absolute white, its ice claws sparkling under the pale light.
It brought it down toward the boy to crush him.
The impact resonated throughout the valley with the sound of a mountain collapsing.
Yet, when the Great Spirit slowly lifted its paw to ascertain the death, there was nothing.
The snow was intact.
.....
A silence.
Then — from somewhere above all that, at an altitude human eyes would not naturally have sought, from a point in the air where nothing should be able to exist in a seated position —
Voice : « Kekekekeke... »
A mocking laugh, high-pitched and perfectly recognizable rang out from the air, breaking the solemnity of the beast.
Puck : « What...? »
Puck let out a growl of surprise, raising its head to scan the sky.
It pivoted its gaze upward with the slowness of a thing whose reaction speed was usually never put in default.
What it discovered there instantly froze it and made it recalibrate several certainties simultaneously.
A man was sitting in the air. Legs crossed. Arms behind his head. Dressed in an immaculate white suit. His light white hair floated in the wind, and a mocking smile barred his face.
The total casualness of someone who has never had to make any effort to exist where he wants.
Kozuwa Kurisu stood there.
And in his hand, held by the collar with the nonchalance of a man who had just picked up something that was about to be crushed by inadvertence — Natsuki Subaru. Intact. Breathing.
Kurisu : « Well, well, well... It seems I arrived right on time, didn't I? »
He glanced toward the adolescent who seemed on the verge of definitively sinking into unconsciousness.
He looked at him with the expression of someone who expected thanks and was not particularly surprised not to receive any.
Kurisu : « Oh, come on, Subaru... I save your skin and I don't even get a little thank you? You are quite rude. »
Subaru raised glassy eyes toward him, with eyes that contained many things, and none of them resembled gratitude, only an abyssal void and total incomprehension in the face of this apparition.
Kurisu let out a theatrical sigh.
Kurisu : « Anyway... »
He raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
CLAP.
In a thousandth of a second, an invisible distortion wave crossed Subaru's body.
Instantly, what was freezing in his body stopped freezing, color returned to his cheeks, the rigidity settling in his limbs dissipated, and the air in his lungs stopped burning. His superficial wounds closed, and warmth returned to his veins. He was entirely healed, at least physically.
All at once, as if someone had changed a setting.
Subaru : « What... What did you do...? »
Kurisu : « Shh. »
Kurisu cut him off sharply with a gesture of his index finger, his smile widening.
Kurisu : « Stay quiet for a moment, kid. I suddenly feel like having a bit of fun with this giant plush toy. »
With a casual movement, he threw Subaru into the air. But instead of falling, the adolescent's body froze, held in levitation by an invisible force.
He was perfectly conscious, able to move his eyes, his gaze fixed ahead on the snow-covered panorama below, unable to move and unable not to look, condemned to be the powerless spectator of what was to follow.
Kurisu turned toward the Beast of the End, adopting a relaxed posture in the void.
Kurisu : « Well, now... Puck. What if we had a little discussion, just the two of us, between adults? »
Puck : « What do you want, you wretch!... »
The Great Spirit roared, its voice making the surrounding trees tremble.
Kurisu : « Oh, me? Not much... Just someone who had an urgent need to let off some steam. And it turns out you have the perfect build to serve as a punching bag. »
This explicit provocation brought Puck's fury to its paroxysm. Its golden eyes blazed.
Puck : « No matter the extent of your absurd powers, I will annihilate you… you and this entire world!... »
In a thunderous rumble, the Great Spirit caused hundreds of giant ice lances to appear around it — no, thousands — their sharp points all directed toward the man in white.
The ambient temperature made a vertiginous drop beyond what the domain's atmosphere could normally contain, approaching absolute zero, the air itself beginning to solidify on the edges under the effect of extreme cold.
But Kurisu did not flinch. His smile became sharper.
He raised his hand again and snapped his fingers.
CLAP.
The sound was short. Dry. Almost disappointing in its simplicity.
And everything disappeared — not under the effect of a contrary force, simply disappeared.
All of Puck's magical attack evaporated. The thousands of ice lances, the snow, every particle of ice that Puck had created, transformed into harmless dust, erased from the fundamentals.
The blizzard stopped dead, and the temperature instantly rose to a spring-like level. The absolute cold had just been purely and simply erased from existence.
Puck : « What... What is this heresy...? »
The Great Spirit did not have time to finish its sentence before Kurisu was in front of it. He had not run — he was simply there, just above the monster's skull and in that displacement there was something that defied normal causality.
Kurisu : « Lower your eyes when I speak to you. »
His voice had become of a polar coldness, far more terrifying than all of Puck's magic.
With a sharp movement, he brought his right foot down on the beast's muzzle with a force that had no reason to exist in an ordinary human body.
The impact was titanic.
An invisible shockwave spread over several hundred meters, creating a crater of beaten earth beneath the monster, the snow rising in a wave around the point of impact.
Puck, despite its monumental mass, was thrown to the ground in a deafening crash, its jaw crashing into the mud.
Before it could even sketch the slightest movement to get back up, Kurisu landed on its muzzle, calmly, maintaining a divine pressure with both feet, pinning the Great Spirit to the ground.
Puck : « Hgh... Filthy... Filthy monster...! »
The feline spat these words through its broken fangs, its limbs clawing vainly at the ground to free itself.
Kurisu : « Kekeke… me a monster? No no no, big plush… I am a demon. Kekeke…»
Kurisu snapped his fingers again.
Instantly, Puck's gigantic body was immobilized, ensnared by dozens of invisible and indestructible threads that sank into its spiritual flesh and nailed it in place with the precision of a mechanism designed exactly for that.
Kurisu accentuated the pressure of his heel on the beast's skull, making the entire area tremble under the impulse.
And his smile disappeared.
It was perhaps the most destabilizing thing of the entire scene — for Subaru watching from above, for Puck watching from below.
Kurisu's smile was a constant. Losing that constant amounted to losing a landmark one had never consciously identified as such.
What replaced it was not anger in the ordinary sense. Something colder. Emptier. An absolute judgment that nothing tempered.
That facade smile gave way to a face of abyssal coldness, his clear eyes becoming two slits devoid of any humanity.
Kurisu : « You know, Puck... You are really quite a hypocritical bastard, are you aware of that? »
His voice resonated with an unbearable clarity in the silence of the devastated forest.
He pressed down with his foot, a pressure that was not made to injure — to force one to stay there, to listen.
Kurisu : « You spend your time blaming the boy. You accuse him of arriving too late, of not having saved her... Yet, despite the fact that you are supposed to be the protector of your precious daughter, you are NEVER there when she really needs you. »
He pressed even harder with his foot — the entire place trembled under the impact, a sinister cracking escaping from the monster's skull.
Kurisu : « You are fucking useless when the situation demands it, and you dare come lecture an adolescent? He, at least, vomited his blood. He was dismembered, he suffered fucking martyrdom to save her, he broke his bones and his mind trying to offer her a future… And you in the meantime…? »
Kurisu leaned down, grabbed the thick whiskers of the feline with one hand and violently pulled its head upward to force its golden eyes to meet his gaze of nothingness.
Kurisu : « You were sleeping nice and warm in your cheap crystal while he bled for her! »
BAF!
Before Puck could formulate the slightest reply, Kurisu dealt it a magisterial slap with the back of his hand.
Not a simple punch, no, an open-palm slap, with something inside that transformed the impact into a directional shockwave of unheard-of violence.
The breath instantly swept the entire forest over a hundred-meter radius in the direction of the blow, uprooting century-old trees and vaporizing the snow as if it were a simple breeze.
Puck : « ARGHHH! »
The Great Spirit's cry of agony was short-lived. Under the incommensurable violence of the slap, its magical structure instantly collapsed.
Its gigantic Beast of the End form dissipated in gray smoke volutes, and the titanic monster was brutally brought back to its original appearance.
When everything stabilized, Puck was a small silver cat in the snow. Its giant form had disappeared in one blow, like an illusion that lets go.
What remained was what it had always been underneath everything else — a small feline spirit of a few centimeters no bigger than a hand, floating limply in the air, blinking in the snow with the air of someone from whom something had just been taken that it did not know it had.
It had just suffered an unprecedented humiliation, stripped of all its splendor in a single slap.
Higher up, still suspended in the void, Subaru observed the scene, his eyes widened by a terror of a new nature.
He could not believe it.
He had seen Kurisu in many of his states — the troll, the player, the manipulator, the condescending of precision. He had seen him do impossible things with the air of not thinking about it.
But there — that low voice, that smile that had disappeared, that slap — it was different. It was the first time he seemed really angry. Not like someone annoyed and even less disenchanted.
Angry.
And that discovery did something strange to Subaru — it frightened him more than everything he had seen since the beginning of this loop.
Kurisu caught the small gray cat with a firm hand, closing his fingers on its small trembling body with cold hatred and held it at face height.
Kurisu : « And the worst part? Pretending to destroy this world simply because your daughter is no longer there... Let me laugh. You are nothing more than a coward. A failure who throws a tantrum because he has lamentably failed in his role as a father. Pff... Pathetic. »
He let out a contemptuous laugh.
Puck, confined in its miniature form, was incapable of pronouncing the slightest word.
Its magical power, considered one of the four Great Spirits of this world, was reduced to the state of a grain of sand, crushed under the weight of this being who transcended all established laws.
Kurisu : « And I am not done having fun with you yet… — »
A voice.
Masculine, of a crystalline clarity and incontestable natural authority, suddenly resonated from the edge of the crater.
Not loud. Not threatening in the ordinary sense. Simply present, with that particular quality of something that does not need volume to occupy all available space.
Reinhard : « That is enough! »
Kurisu stopped dead, released his grip on Puck who fell heavily into the mud, and slowly turned his back toward the origin of the interruption.
Reinhard van Astrea stood there.
He had appeared without anyone hearing him come — no sound of footsteps, no disturbance of the air, as if the world had simply decided it was time for him to be there.
He wore the white and elegant attire of the Royal Guard Knights. His flamboyant red hair stirred in the breeze, and his azure blue eyes rested on the scene before him with mortal gravity and attention that had nothing distant about it.
His alliance with the world was felt in each of his steps.
His face was closed. He looked at what surrounded him — the destroyed village, the snow, the traces of the horror Subaru had gone through — and sighed.
Around him, something had changed in the atmosphere. The snow seemed to hesitate slightly in his perimeter. The pressure Puck had exerted on the space had disappeared, and that void had been filled by something else — less cold and no less absolute.
Kurisu raised an eyebrow.
Kurisu : « Oh... If it isn't dear Reinhack. So, how is our great national Hero doing since our last little meeting? »
Kurisu instantly adopted his playful and casual tone, his arms spread in a theatrical welcoming gesture.
But Reinhard did not share his enthusiasm. He was not smiling.
His blue eyes swept the field of ruins, stopping for a moment on Emilia's frozen body in the distance, then on Subaru suspended in the air, before fixing again on the man in white.
His features were of absolute severity.
Reinhard : « Allow me to ask you one single question... Are you the author of all this?... »
The question fell into the deathly silence that had just settled.
Kurisu let out a laugh — not long, just a brief and sincere sound, almost amused by the situation.
Because obviously, NO.
He had nothing to do with the village massacre, nor with Emilia's death, nor even with the magical snowstorm. He had strictly nothing to do with what had happened in the Mathers domain.
Reinhard, thanks to his innumerable divine protections, must probably suspect that a third party was involved — the Sword Saint was not someone one abused easily.
But as Kurisu prepared to answer, an idea of rare perversity germinated in his mind. If this world was doomed to be destroyed anyway...
Why not make the spectacle memorable? Why not play the role to the end?
Kurisu : « Well, yes! It's me. Everything is my doing, from beginning to end! The village, the maids, the half-elf... Everything. So, tell me, oh great Sword Saint... What are you going to do now? »
Reinhard's face closed completely, an infinite sadness altering his delicate features.
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, waging an invisible inner battle between his deep intuition and the rigid duty that fell to him as protector of the kingdom.
He let out a long sigh, his right hand coming to rest with solemn slowness on the golden hilt of his Dragon Sword, Reid.
Reinhard : « By virtue of the fundamental laws of the Kingdom of Lugunica... I, Reinhard van Astrea, will slay Kozuwa Kurisu here and now. »
A silence.
Then Kurisu burst into resounding laughter — really, from the heart, a hundred percent, a laugh of pure and unfeigned joy that resonated through the entire valley.
The kind of laugh that does not perform but that comes out because something had genuinely found something amusing.
Kurisu : « Ahhh, Reinhard, you are funny you know? You always have a way with words! But... If you really have the ambition to want to confront the Demon King... You should first prove your worth by slaying his Generals. »
With a brusque movement, Kurisu took altitude.
Slowly, naturally, as if gravity was a suggestion he chose not to follow this evening, rising several dozen meters into the sky, coming to position himself right next to Subaru suspended in the air, until the scene below looked like something one looks at from a cliff.
A smile of wild and primitive excitement barred his face.
He spread his arms toward the firmament and violently struck his hands together.
TAP!
The sound of the hand clap was not that of a simple percussion, it resonated in the still air.
And the world tore apart.
Not metaphorically. Not progressively. Something in the structure of the surrounding space ceased to hold its usual form, and what rushed in had no precedent in the history of all Lugunica.
The script of reality broke into four distinct pieces, forcing the world to manifest entities that should never have coexisted in one place.
In a rumble that made the atmosphere vibrate, the sky above them literally tore open, revealing an abyss of fog from which emerged a titanic silhouette.
A long creature, similar to a mythological whale, sliced through the clouds while letting out an otherworldly chant that made Subaru's ears bleed.
The White Whale appeared in the sky — like a thing that is suddenly there, whose presence occupies a portion of the atmosphere that the atmosphere had not planned for it. Its immense white flanks blocked the light, the shadow beneath it covering hectares, its half-open maw letting out a fog that was not fog.
It floated majestically to Kurisu's left.
At the same instant, the ground beneath Reinhard's feet began to bubble with frenzied agitation.
From the snow, the trees, the frozen earth — everything dispersed in a centrifugal wave from a central point, and from that point, they came.
Hundreds. Thousands of distinct points, letting out a white and swarming tide.
Thousands, tens of thousands of small creatures with the appearance of alpine rabbits, endowed with a single horn and an insatiable appetite, poured onto the plain in a terrifying gnashing of teeth.
The Great Rabbit — a mass of small white bodies with red eyes that poured from the earth itself as if the earth had always contained them and was waiting for permission to let them out.
To Kurisu's right, the air suddenly became heavy, saturated with a venom so toxic that the surrounding grass instantly liquefied into a blackish mud.
A dark and serpentine mass, of infinite length, began to deploy, its black rings reflecting a malevolent light.
The Black Serpent — long, black, fluid, its venom tinting the air with a slight iridescence, a presence whose smell alone sufficed to communicate in primitive language what it was.
The most destructive of the three calamities created by a Witch, materialized its corrupting presence in a hiss of death.
And finally, at the center of this triumvirate of nightmare, Kurisu pointed his finger toward the small gray cat oscillating in the mud.
A purple energy discharge struck Puck, forcing its magical structure to mutate by force, transforming it again into its most powerful version, but this time, its golden eyes were empty, totally enslaved to the will of the man in white.
Puck, under its Beast of the End form, reconstituted, forced to exist there by something that nothing should have been able to impose, who looked around with the expression of a thing that has lost control of its own manifestation.
Four of the greatest calamities in the history of this world were gathered in a single point, forming a wall of absolute destruction facing a single man.
Kurisu lowered himself slightly and calmly sat in the void, legs crossed, resting his chin on the hollow of his hand, adopting the perfect posture of the final boss contemplating his arena from his celestial throne.
Reinhard did not move.
He stood, facing him:
The Great Rabbit by the thousands on the ground.
The White Whale floating to his right.
The Black Serpent and its toxic venom to his left.
Puck under its Beast of the End form in the center.
And above all that — Kurisu, seated in the air, legs crossed, the smile returned — of pure excitement this time, the simple and total excitement of someone who looks at something he has created and that works exactly as planned.
Reinhard looked at the scene with the eyes of someone whose entire frame of reference was processing something impossible.
For the first time in his life as an infallible Hero, he displayed an expression of total shock, his face decomposing in the face of the impossible.
As an inhabitant of this world, he knew perfectly well that the simultaneous coexistence of the Three Great Mabeasts and the Beast of the End was an absolute mathematical and historical anomaly.
It was not a rule that suffered exceptions — it was a fact, like gravity, like the succession of seasons. The circumstances that had created them made them mutually exclusive in space and time.
Except now.
Except here.
Except because someone had decided that facts were a suggestion.
It was the end of times materialized live.
His blue eyes passed from the White Whale obscuring the sky, to the Black Serpent corrupting the earth, to the thousands of rabbits scratching the ground at his feet.
His divine protections all activated at the same time, overloading his senses with warnings of imminent death.
Subaru, for his part, held in levitation next to Kurisu, was nothing more than a broken spectator.
He was too destroyed to do anything else — his mind in pulp, saturated by the tragedy of this loop, could no longer even conceive the grandeur of the scene.
His body frozen in the air, his eyes on a scene that no inhabitant of this world should have been able to see in a single life.
He was simply there, his gaze empty, witness to the apocalypse about to descend on the domain.
Reinhard remained standing at the center of the crater, his hand clenched on the hilt of his Reid sword ready to leave its sheath, the sacred blade estimating that its bearer faced a crisis of a divine nature.
Facing him, the pool of rabbits growled, the Whale began its descent, and the Serpent raised its toxic rings.
Above this nascent chaos, Kurisu's face split into a smile of pure, almost childish excitement, his eyes shining with a gleam of creative madness as he fixed the Sword Saint below.
Kurisu : « So… Let's see then, Sword Saint… »
A pause.
Kurisu : « How many calamities does it take to bring down a Hero? Kekekekeke… »
His voice, amplified by the distortion of reality, resonated like the starting signal of a confrontation that was going to redefine the geography of the kingdom.