"Hey, Aurora, what's wrong?"
Claire swirled the blood-red water she had collected from the receding crimson waves. She had been wondering what the inexplicable apocalyptic flood had been when she suddenly looked behind her in surprise.
Aurora, who normally slept inside her body and refused to come out even when called, had suddenly appeared. She was rolling and writhing through the air, clutching her chest with a pained expression as though enduring unbearable agony.
"...I feel like I've seen you like this once before. Could this be some kind of physiological reaction ghosts have, like a period? That's quite an interval, though. It actually takes several years to come around?"
When Aurora showed no intention of answering, Claire frowned and stared closely at her agonized appearance, vaguely remembering that she had seen Aurora like this before.
If she remembered correctly... the last time had been more than a year ago, around the time of the World Fusion. After all, it had been the first time Claire had ever seen Aurora, who normally remained perfectly composed no matter what happened, suffering like that. Since it had also happened on the historic day of the World Fusion, Claire remembered it quite clearly.
The only difference was that Aurora's left leg had hurt last time, while this time it seemed to be her heart. That was probably why she was clutching her chest.
Claire thought about it casually, but Aurora, who was desperately enduring the excruciating pain along with the instinctive urge that threatened to drive her mad, immediately went dark-faced upon hearing Claire's ridiculous guess. She abandoned her original plan of simply letting the pain knock her unconscious and glared fiercely at Claire instead.
"Idiot. Even for you, that train of thought is ridiculous. I'm convinced your mother gave all your intelligence to your younger brother when she gave birth to you. Otherwise, how does that pig brain of yours jump from this to a ghost having physiological reactions? The last time I was like this was when the three worlds fused together. This time, the world nearly got destroyed just a few minutes ago. No matter how stupid you are, that should be what you connect it to..."
Aurora's insults rang in Claire's ears, but Claire paid them no mind. She showed absolutely no sympathy for Aurora's miserable state. Instead, she swirled the blood-red water from the apocalyptic flood in her cup, brought it to her nose for a sniff, then dipped a little onto her finger and tasted it.
"What? Are you saying you can sense it whenever something major happens to the world? Then why weren't you like this three or four days ago when the world almost got destroyed? Why weren't you like this five or six days ago when the Black Spot nearly drained those guys of their life force? And what about over ten days ago, when the Three Great Dragon Gods were fighting, Evil Dragons were running wild, huge numbers of Sacred Gear Users rebelled, and one breath from Great Red came flying out of the Dimensional Gap and nearly blew us to pieces? Why didn't you react then?"
Claire couldn't taste anything unusual in the blood-red water. It felt no different from drinking a few drops of cooled boiled water, and nothing happened to her body. If anything, drinking so little only made her slightly thirstier.
She shrugged and continued teasing Aurora, treating the other woman's miserable condition as entertainment.
"Idiot. None of those things had anything to do with me. How was I supposed to sense them?"
Aurora rolled from her back onto her stomach and gave Claire a withering look.
They had been together for so long, yet Claire still couldn't understand what she meant. If Aurora had possessed some ability to tell fortunes or predict the future, how could she possibly have chosen a host as recklessly troublesome as Claire? She would have picked someone less exhausting.
"Huh? So... you caused the World Fusion? And that sudden Great Flood was your fault too?"
Finally understanding the implication of Aurora's words, Claire glanced at her in mild surprise.
Was this woman really capable of something that enormous?
Claire seriously doubted it.
"No."
"Then why did you say all that?"
Claire's furrowed brow relaxed again. She rolled her eyes at Aurora, turned back around, and resumed examining the bottle of blood-red water in her hand.
"The World Fusion had nothing to do with me, but Demon Possession appearing on people from other worlds afterward did have something to do with me."
"Hm?"
Feeling Claire's probing gaze, Aurora noticed that the terrible pain in her heart had eased considerably. Even the instinctive craving for her other missing body parts had subsided. Pale and drenched in sweat, she panted softly as she casually explained.
"When the worlds fused, it seems a space deep underground where one of my body parts had been stored was broken open. My left leg had originally been preserved as experimental material, so the rotten flesh on it had been left untreated. When that space collapsed, the flesh was ground into pieces. The Demon Possession cells spread throughout the world along with those fragments. After all these years, the residual bacteria from them have probably spread Demon Possession to everyone by now."
"So what happened to you back then was..."
"Once the rotten flesh suppressing it was pulverized, my left leg returned on its own and fused into your body, becoming a source of your power. You know, those two things you normally sense."
Seeing Claire fall into thought, Aurora added the explanation before Claire could let her imagination run wild and invent some bizarre interpretation.
Claire was the only person Aurora could communicate with reliably. She had no desire to have Claire start looking at her strangely.
"So that Great Flood just now really was your doing...?"
Claire put away the cup containing the blood-red water and looked Aurora up and down before asking tentatively.
She still didn't really believe Aurora.
Fine, maybe she could accept the explanation the first time. But what about this second incident?
Was Aurora seriously trying to tell her that the body part she had left behind this time could not only summon a Great Flood, but Heavenly Fire and sulfur too?
Yeah, right.
She would have to be an idiot to believe that.
"I already told you it wasn't me."
"Then why are you telling me all this?"
"Can you please use your brain...?"
Question after question, coupled with Claire's endlessly speechless stare, finally got on Aurora's nerves. Taking advantage of the fact that nobody except Claire could see her, Aurora began making a whole series of gestures at Claire that she had learned in other worlds to express her displeasure.
"The Great Flood has nothing to do with me. But whoever caused it seems to have developed a rather significant connection to me..."
"What kind of connection?"
Claire hated people who deliberately withheld the important part.
She absolutely hated them.
Still, she knew her limits. She currently had no way to hit Aurora's soul form, so she took a deep breath and obediently played along.
After all, a sudden worldwide catastrophe like this was hardly reassuring. Until she understood whether the world might suddenly be destroyed again the next second, and what was causing it, she wouldn't even dare sleep too deeply.
"I can sense that a part of my heart has been taken by the entity that caused the flood and used as the foundation for some mysterious creature. It seems to be trying to use my heart's adaptability and capacity to accommodate something..."
Aurora spoke hesitantly, clearly uncertain herself.
But Claire had already lost interest halfway through. She turned back to examining the blood-red water, no longer intending to listen.
Then, as though something had suddenly occurred to her, Claire turned toward Aurora again.
"So the reason you looked so miserable just now is that your body is reviving? You're recovering the body parts you lost, and those parts can return to you by themselves, right?"
"Right. Otherwise, how do you think an extra piece suddenly appeared inside you more than a year ago?"
There was nothing worth hiding, so Aurora admitted it outright.
"Then does getting your body parts back benefit me at all?"
A gleam appeared in Claire's eyes.
No matter how she looked at it, she was currently the host of Aurora's ghost. If Aurora recovered, surely Claire would gain something from it as well.
"A little, I suppose. Why are you asking?"
Aurora admitted it casually and looked at Claire in confusion.
Wasn't that obvious?
"I was thinking that instead of waiting for your body to revive on its own and come looking for you, why don't we strike first? We can find your body parts ourselves and revive you."
Claire spoke thoughtfully.
If helping Aurora revive came with some benefits, then she genuinely wouldn't mind helping her. It would even make things more convenient when she wanted to take action herself.
"Wait, are you insane? Do you even know where my body parts are being kept? Do you have any idea what might happen if you just dig them up?"
Aurora stared at Claire in disbelief.
She genuinely could not understand how Claire's mind worked.
Wouldn't any normal person avoid something like this at all costs? Anyone could tell that her scattered body parts were tied to something extremely serious.
So why did Claire look eager to try?
"I don't care."
Claire answered without concern.
She genuinely didn't.
This had nothing to do with her younger brother anyway. All she needed to do was make sure she kept her identity hidden.
"You're insane..."
Noticing the excitement buried deep in Claire's eyes, Aurora gave her a strange look and muttered her judgment.
Then she seemed to realize something and added,
"Just like your brother. You're both lunatics."
Aurora was about to continue when, in the next instant, she and Claire simultaneously turned toward the same direction.
Dense purple energy had once again appeared in the sky.
...
In the cloudless sky, the two colossal beings, one hideously terrifying and the other eerily sacred, now resembled two information-based lifeforms.
The bodies of the Angel and Devil began to collapse, dissolving into black and white particles of light that drifted toward the mass of flesh that had suddenly burst out of Itogami Island.
Once the two gigantic beings had completely disintegrated, the black and white particles representing the Angel and Devil transformed into dense purple energy. It gathered around the mass of flesh and completely concealed the grotesque thing within.
Watching the transformation unfold, Cid narrowed his eyes.
A tremendous amount of Magical Power gathered around him and transformed into attacks composed of various natural elements. With overwhelming momentum, they surged toward the vast, densely concentrated region of purple energy.
If possible, Cid would have liked to see what kind of trick the other side was about to pull.
But this time, he decided against it.
He couldn't understand that "Core" at all. If the other side actually finished whatever it was doing, Cid had absolutely no idea what might emerge.
"Boom!"
A dazzling beam of purple light shot into the sky.
Cid's attacks were instantly blocked and erased.
The purple light shone all the way into outer space, illuminating half of the planet that had already entered night and bathing it in a faint violet glow.
"Hum..."
A violent vibration rang out.
An unprecedented explosion shook the entire world.
Boundless darkness began spreading outward as a catastrophe far more terrifying than the previous apocalypse started to take shape.
Then came the horrifying figure beneath it.
An existence far beyond the Angel and Devil.
A bizarre being that could not be described in words.
It completely violated natural evolution and the laws of the world. Through a combination of accidents, mistakes, and deliberate schemes by countless people, it had evolved along a path that should never have existed.
It had far exceeded everything the world's development had ever anticipated.
It defied the natural order.
Simply allowing the darkness leaking from its body to spread would drag the entire world into a hell of destruction.
It was a creature that should never have existed, born from a plan gone catastrophically wrong.
Purple and pale pink threads began to intertwine.
Beneath the endless darkness, a solid, humanoid pale-green figure stood in outer space like a sculpture.
Against the boundless darkness surrounding her, the towering bronze-colored figure clad in pale-green armor slowly opened her eyes, revealing deathly pale pupils.
Behind her, four pairs of eerie yellow wings spread wide.
A terrifying aura carrying both disaster and darkness swept outward, covering the entire world in the blink of an eye.
Under the shroud of darkness, the flood, sulfur, and Heavenly Fire once again began descending upon the world.
But the people beneath that darkness no longer cared about the natural disasters that would reach them moments later.
Starvation, blindness, deafness, plague, death, greed, and countless other forms of destruction descended randomly upon them.
No matter how healthy someone had been, how full their stomach, or how energetic they had felt moments before, they began exhibiting strange behaviors and conditions. Binge eating, physical weakness, cowardice, and more.
The mental and physical destruction already taking place was far more immediate than the disasters that had yet to fall from the sky.
Once the darkness covered the entire globe, every living creature whose mind and life had fallen under its control would be completely drained within mere minutes.
Everything would become nourishment for the monster in outer space.
By then, even Cid would probably be helpless before a world already reduced to ruins.
Well, assuming the creature chose not to skip the procedure.
Assuming it insisted on spending several minutes completing its programmed process before destroying the world instead of simply wiping everything out instantly.
"Seriously, do you have some kind of special obsession with the Apocalypse Protocol? You finally evolved and fused into a form this powerful. You could wipe the surface clean instantly, yet you're still going through the whole procedure?"
Countless Magic Circles appeared.
In an instant, they completely surrounded the colossal being standing among the stars.
The darkness stopped spreading.
Aside from the planet's rotation, all movement came to a halt.
Before the wrongly evolved Seated Angel, an incomparably tiny figure dressed in a white tuxedo stood suspended in space.
Cid slowly extended an arm toward the Magic Circles restraining the violently struggling Seated Angel.
"So you were hiding in here. That was pretty careless of you. Be more careful next time."
A standard classical clock divided into forty sections was pulled from the Seated Angel's body.
Cid placed one finger against its hand.
Once again, the enormous clock spanning the heavens appeared above the planet.
With a faint smile, Cid began turning it backward right in front of the Seated Angel, which thrashed wildly after having the power of the Day of Destruction extracted from its body.
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