Chapter 213: Me Becoming Weaker Does Not Mean You Became Stronger
Light is roaring.
The torrent of light, transformed from the blade of [Excalibur], is rushing toward the Cursed Spirit of [Pandora's Box]—which has been weakened layer by layer by the Reality Marble and the interference magecraft prepared by Tohsaka Rin—with an unstoppable momentum.
It was as if a drop of water had merged into the vast ocean...
Were the Reality Marble of Emiya-MW and the magecraft developed by Tohsaka Rin specifically to interfere with Deterrence (World's Suppression) effective?
If you ask if they were effective, they certainly were.
But the Cursed Spirit of [Pandora's Box] becoming weaker does not mean that Saber became stronger.
Even though the magical energy supply provided by Emiya Shirou to Saber was extremely abundant through the magical link between [Pseudo-God Atum] and the Greater Grail—abundant to the point where she could release Noble Phantasms at will—the magical accumulation gathered by the Greater Grail over sixty years through absorbing the ley lines of Fuyuki City, when compared to the accumulation of magical energy inside [Pandora's Box] which had already formed the size of a world, was a massive gap that could not be filled, no matter how much Tohsaka Rin and the others weakened it!
The radiance of [Excalibur] could not even shake the Cursed Spirit of [Pandora's Box] in the slightest.
"Although I had long anticipated that the result wouldn't be so simple, I didn't expect that even Saber's holy sword would be unable to cause damage... No, it's not that Saber's holy sword didn't cause damage."
Emiya Shirou, holding the [Pseudo-God Anubis], saw his eyes change into a pair of exceptionally brilliant blue eyes at this moment. He seemed able to see many details that were usually invisible: "It is because the recovery ability of [Pandora's Box] after its curse-transformation offset the damage caused by the holy sword."
It was not healing magecraft.
It was a recovery ability piled up from a vast amount of curses.
Just like the Cursed Spirits in the Jujutsu Kaisen world—who do not need positive energy derived from reverse cursed technique to heal themselves, but can directly use the negative energy of cursed energy to heal their own bodies, which are themselves accumulated masses of negative energy—the [Pandora's Box] is equivalent to the curses of an entire world.
Unless [Excalibur] could achieve planet-destroying power, the endless curses on the Cursed Spirit of [Pandora's Box] would allow it to continuously recover no matter how much damage it sustained.
"..."
In the instant Emiya Shirou finished speaking, inside this Reality Marble symbolizing the mental landscape of Emiya-MW—a world that should have had its sky and world covered by relentlessly falling wind and snow, like Emiya-MW's contradictory psychology, having neither stars (hope) nor paths (a way forward)—the snow filling the sky suddenly stopped falling and vanished!?
...No, it didn't stop, and it didn't vanish.
Rather, it was shattered!?
Rumble!!
Compared to the sonic booms caused by the thermal expansion and contraction of air when [Excalibur]'s high-heat light cannon pierced through it, what was lingering in the ears of Emiya Shirou and the others at this moment was true thunder.
"—[Mjölnir: The Hammer That Can Crush All]!!"
It was a natural phenomenon triggered when the human girl—who had stolen and displaced the divinity of Magni, the son of Thor—leaped down from the sky and forcefully swung the [Mjölnir] she had also obtained through displacement.
It was the world responding to the divinity of this Thunder God, following the strike of the divine lightning capable of destroying all things!
And it wasn't over yet.
Since Emiya Shirou had returned all the Class Cards he had taken from Beatrice and the others to Julian once Julian agreed to help them challenge this plan to save everyone—allowing Julian to continue performing displacement magecraft on the dolls so that Beatrice and the others could be displaced, resurrected, and return—who could say that Beatrice was the only one who showed up here to follow up with an attack after Saber released [Excalibur]?
Rumble!!
A similar roar was produced as the air was torn apart. A similar divine aura.
It was just that, unlike Magni, who inherited the godhood of the Thunder God and controlled destruction and thunder, this new divine aura mastered not only the destruction of the world but also the creation and protection that follows destruction.
It was the manifestation of the guardian avatar sent down by the supreme God-King of the highest specifications in human mythology to eliminate the Demon King.
At this moment, the [Brahmastra: The Indestructible Blade]—which had once made even the Rakshasa King submit and possessed massive restraint and destructive effects against any demonic existence—was being fired by the blonde "Onee-san" who had used displacement magecraft to graft the power of this Heroic Spirit and Noble Phantasm onto herself.
"—[Brahmastra: The Indestructible Blade that Pierces the Rakshasa]!!"
"...As long as our attacks can make it so you cannot recover, or at least cannot recover so quickly, wouldn't that work?"
Along with these two new Noble Phantasm attacks, whose power was in no way inferior to the previous [Excalibur], the rest of Emiya Shirou's sentence, which had been interrupted, was slowly spoken by him:
"Step one: Use a method that counters Deterrence, through the Reality Marble and other magecraft with similar effects, to distract the Cursed Spirit of [Pandora's Box].
Because curse-transformation itself is a means of accelerating the hatching of Deterrence by a world.
Therefore, the Cursed Spirit of [Pandora's Box], which inherits the identity of Deterrence, will be like the Deterrence of our world.
It holds great hostility toward high-level magecraft like Reality Marbles that can erode the world, and will constantly fight against it.
When the attention of [Pandora's Box] is drawn by the Reality Marble, we reach step two.
Use all our strongest attack methods to launch a concentrated assault on [Pandora's Box].
This step is the hardest, because the Cursed Spirit of [Pandora's Box] is, after all, Deterrence—and Deterrence gestated by a world comparable to Earth at that.
In the face of that curse and magical energy capable of creating a world, can we, as mere humans, truly cause it harm? ...This is the hardest point in our entire plan.
But as long as we can succeed, even if we only cut a small wound into the Cursed Spirit of [Pandora's Box]..."
Watching as the Divine Thunder and the [Brahmastra] successively pierced the Cursed Spirit of [Pandora's Box] right along the path where [Excalibur] had struck, Emiya Shirou—a flash of his memory from when he first told Julian and the others his plan crossing his mind—smiled and spoke along with his past self:
"...leave the rest to me!"
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