What Karkinos really wanted at the moment was information. Knowing why wouldn’t solve anything. What was important was the identity of the man, what powers he had, and what his goal was. The first thing Karkinos needed to do was gather as much of that information as possible.
“My name is Sanieve. In the past, I had the title of the Ouroboros of Heaven.”
“Ouroboros of Heaven...? H A H A H A. N I C E J O K E! M E knew the Ouroboros of Heaven, and he was not you.”
“I suppose you’re speaking of the Ouroboros of the Sun? He just happened to be the one who was given leadership of the ouroboroses after my fall. That’s all,” explained Sanieve.
That gave Karkinos pause. Is this man’s true body the two-headed ouroboros swirling above?
Two-headed. Not two ouroboroses, but one with two heads, though it might have been clearer to call it twin-headed. At first, Karkinos thought that there were two ouroboroses up above, but that wasn’t the case. It was a single ouroboros with the power of two. This meant that what the man was talking about had some credibility to it.
Now that I think about it, there wasn’t much difference between the Ouroboros of the Sun and the rest of the ouroboroses, even though he claimed to be the leader. Actually, wasn’t the Ouroboros of Earth stronger? So, what if there is another Ouroboros of Heaven, one who is clearly even stronger than the other ouroboroses?
Supporting this theory was the fact that the group of ouroboroses clearly had two elements missing. It was said that Dina, the Goddess’s avatar, filled that hole, but there was clearly a large gap in power between her and the ouroboroses. However, if there had been ouroboroses of Water and Metal long before her time, and those ouroboroses had had a leader, then everything made sense.
“So, what do you want to accomplish, laying your hands on an unrelated world like this?”
“Mizgarz is already in the Goddess’s hands. It is not a world I can do anything with or affect in any way, so I decided to make this world my new home and become its deity. And I will make Virgo my spouse. She will preside over this world with me as its goddess.”
“Are you sure you can do such a thing?” asked Karkinos. “You don’t understand the current Mizgarz. I believe you’re going to be K I L L E D by Miss Lufas and the other Thirteen Stars right away.”
“I can. That is my ability, after all,” said Sanieve.
All the ouroboroses had a unique skill with the same name but different effects. The skill’s name: Ouroboros. It was the skill that had caused the Thirteen Stars a lot of trouble a while ago. Of course, Sanieve had the same skill.
“Be at ease. My unique ability is not an offensive one. The skill is one meant for protecting the world. By covering the world with my ouroboros’s body made of mana, I can submerge myself and the world with me between dimensions to prevent all aggression. That is the effect of my skill, Ouroboros. Nobody can find a hidden world that is constantly moving, unseen and undetected.”
That’s more troublesome than I could have ever imagined, Karkinos groaned.
Alovenus was on the same side as Lufas, and as long as the Goddess was around, they could deal with most problems. However, the Goddess was neither omnipotent nor omniscient. She had the weakness of being so extradimensionally large in the scale of her existence that she found herself unable to focus on the small details. That was why she had overlooked and fallen to Lufas’s plan, as well as why she had been unable to immediately find Dina when she hid.
Asking Alovenus to find a world that was constantly flowing between dimensions was like asking someone to find a microbe that had jumped into a flowing river. It was possible for her to simply blow the entire river away and kill Sanieve along with everything else, but finding Sanieve alone would be a very tall order.
In the first place, Lufas and the others were in another dimension. Though they would immediately notice if something was wrong in their world, they weren’t constantly monitoring the goings-on of this dimension, so it would probably take quite a while for them to notice any problems here. They would most likely look this way eventually, worried that neither Virgo nor Karkinos had come back for a while, but that could take days.
Still, there was something Karkinos had understood after that exchange. Unlike other ouroboroses, Sanieve’s main body was not the dragon up in the sky. His main body was actually the man standing in front of them.
“And...”
Sanieve used another skill. When he did, the people, towns, and the entirety of Japan—or rather, the entirety of Earth—became encapsulated in gold, transforming them into silent and still golden statues. The invasion of gold swallowed the entire world in an instant, after which the only ones left active were Sei and Karkinos.
“This is also my skill, Ouroboros. It identifies the citizens of the world I protect and transforms them into golden statues. People commit sins because they are people, so as long as they are inactive statues, no one will come to harm, and no one will cause harm. Those who became gold will crumble away into the earth after a cycle of this planet (twenty-four hours), and new life will bud from the loam. This planet has been a mite too greedy. I will erase everything, returning things to what it once was, and changing it into a beautiful world for my Goddess and I to reign over.”
“Wha...?!”
“However, I will give you a chance. Even if you are rotten, you are the man Virgo chose...” Sanieve admitted. “I would experience some regret if I were to move forward with this course of action without claiming victory over you in some way. That is also the reason why I have told you of my abilities. So, I challenge you to battle. Try to retake Virgo from me in the time it takes for this world to come to ruin.”
The outcome of this fight was already set in stone. There was no way for Sei to defeat an ouroboros. True, he’d gotten stronger in Mizgarz, but his strength was still within the reasonable realm of a biological, living being. There was no way he could fight against an ouroboros, who had far exceeded the territory of a natural creature. The reason why Sanieve had excluded both Sei and Karkinos from his ability was simply that he was confident he could win anyway.
“Well then, Minamijuuji Sei. Spend your last day alive in my jaws, knowing you are not worthy of Virgo.”
In the end, it seemed Sanieve had no intention of participating in an actual contest. He just wanted to torment Sei and make him feel his own powerlessness. You’re a man who can’t even rescue Virgo. Sanieve wanted to shove this point in Sei’s face.
After looking down upon and scoffing scornfully at Sei, who was already looking defeated and in despair, Sanieve disappeared.
ＥＸ－７
The situation was almost the worst possible. Sanieve’s strength was above that of the ouroboroses they’d fought before. Meanwhile, only Sei and Karkinos were present to oppose him. There was no way for them to win.
The time limit for victory was twenty-four hours. Once that passed, the entire world would disappear. The chances of outside reinforcements arriving was basically none. There was even a chance that Lufas and the others hadn’t even noticed something was going on. Even if they had, it would be difficult to catch Sanieve, who was continually running through and hiding in different dimensions. If Taurus were here instead of Karkinos, they would have still had a chance. His skill-breaking attack, Aldebaran, could forcefully end Sanieve’s skill if it hit. However, Karkinos had no such ability. In short, they had to either stop Sanieve’s skill or somehow alert Lufas and the others from the inside and tell them where Sanieve was.
“Now then, what should we do...?”