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As the blow from Amnez’s blade took hold, the decapitated titan didn’t leave a corpse. Instead, its golden mass began to dissolve into shimmering particles of ethereal stardust, drifting upward like embers from a dying fire.
“Phew… that was a little too close for comfort,”
Faznir exhaled.
“Yeah. A formidable opponent,”
Amnez replied, taking Faznir’s hand to help her up. They watched in a grim silence as the last vestiges of the Celestial Beast faded into nothingness.
“Hey… do you think Lord Gilzenth knew that thing was down here?”
Zigre asked, her voice laced with suspicion. If the creature had been placed there to cull intruders, then why? And by whose hand?
The thought was cut short by a violent, tectonic groan. The very foundation of the sanctum began to convulse.
“Get down! The ceiling is coming apart!”
Amnez roared.
She focused her remaining Aether, wrenching shards of the shattered walls into the air to form a makeshift kinetic dome. Huddled together, the three maidens could only watch as their world disintegrated around them.
“What the hell is happening?!”
Zigre shouted over the roar of falling stone.
“Maybe… maybe we weren’t supposed to kill that thing,”
Faznir whispered, her eyes wide with a realization that chilled her blood.
The Celestial Beast was no mere monster. It was a kin of Ioks, a servant of the Emissaries. It wasn’t there to haunt the darkness; it was there to guard it.
“Even so, we couldn’t just stand there and be slaughtered,”
Amnez countered, her mind racing as she deflected a boulder the size of a carriage. The beast had attacked with murderous intent. There had been no room for mercy.
Suddenly, a sound like a detonating star drowned out the earthquake.
Only meters away from their shield, a titanic pillar of incandescent heat erupted from the abyss, screaming toward the surface. The stone floor didn’t just crack; it liquefied into glowing slag. The beam tore through the ceiling as if it were parchment, and for the first time in centuries, the sun’s rays pierced the subterranean gloom.
“What in the…?! Was that… a heat ray?”
Zigre stammered.
She had seen such fire before, wielded by Lesser Beast-Devils. But this? This was a solar flare contained in a single strike. Its scale was beyond anything recorded in the archives of Varney.
The tremors began to subside.
In the center of the newly forged crater, a massive shadow ascended through the shaft of sunlight. Its hide was a void of pitch-black, etched with pulsating, geometric runes of malevolent crimson. As it cleared the ruins and took to the sky, it let out a roar that seemed to tear the very atmosphere asunder.
“Sis Amnez… is that…?”
Faznir’s voice trailed off, her jaw slack as she stared at the silhouette blocking out the sun.
“There’s no mistaking it,”
Amnez said, her grip tightening on her Omni-Gloom Steel.
“One of the Three Calamities. The Great Beast-Devil, Elzenag.”
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