That was why Zelos had used Dark Judgment. He’d been desperate to defeat the givleon before it became a demon lord.
“Tell me, Ado... Do you think you could defeat that thing?”
“No chance in hell. I can say that with confi— Huh?! What the—”
Suddenly, they felt an enormous mana signature appear above them. Looking up, Zelos and Ado saw three sigils floating midair. Unlike the ones they were used to, these sigils weren’t made up of the magic letters or numbers; they were unlike anything the two had ever seen.
“Are— Are those sigils? But they...” Ado mumbled.
“Mm-hmm. Never seen any formula like that before, have we? I can’t decipher it either. Could this be...”
A figure began to emerge from each of the three sigils: a blue-haired woman with an eye-catching sheer dress, a red-haired goth-loli girl, and a green-haired middle school girl in a sailor uniform.
By appearances alone, they were just a trio of brightly colored oddballs.
But they emanated so much mana that the two mages barely even registered the strangeness of their looks.
“Z-Zelos? Are... Are those...”
“Yup. The Four Gods, I’d guess. Well, three of them, at least. The other one was probably busy with something. No idea what.”
The sensation of mana against their skin told Zelos and Ado that these entities were definitely hostile.
“FOUND YOU, reincarnators!” the redhead shouted. “We’re here to take—you—down! Get ready for—”
“Grand Superexplode.”
KA-BOOOOOOOOOM!!!
Without any warning whatsoever, Zelos had gone from standing in a seemingly casual stance to making a preemptive strike with an improved version of the Explode spell.
The top-level area spell, boosted to its limits by Zelos, engulfed the three goddesses.
“Wh-What are you doing? We haven’t even introduced ourselves!” the blue-haired one cried. “This is why humans are all—”
“Darkness Nova,” Ado said, clearly not in the mood for a discussion.
VWOOOOOOOOOM!
While not as powerful as Gluttonous Void, Darkness Nova was roughly on par with Grand Superexplode.
Whether you saw Zelos and Ado as early birds eager to get the worm, fearless knights riding forth to smite down evil, or moths racing toward the nearest flame, their lack of hesitation was obvious.
They were up against the Four Gods. They saw no need for mercy, or tolerance, or trying to talk things out.
“Th-They’re trying to kill us!” Aquilata cried.
“Mm. No hesitation,” Windia agreed.
“Hey! You jerks!” Flaress shouted. “What do you think gods are?!”
“Huh? Piles of shit, that’s what,” Zelos and Ado spat out in perfect harmony, both seething with rage. “How dare you waltz up and show your faces in front of us? It’s time to take out the trash. You just float there—we’ll handle the rest!”
“Are you, like, actually not gonna respect us?! We’re gods!” Flaress shouted down at them. “We’re the ones who saved your lives!”
“That’s some bullshit if I’ve ever heard it!” Ado replied. “Drop dead, bitch! Shining Nova!”
“Trying to act all divine after you dumped your toxic waste onto our world? Bit late for that, don’t you think?” Zelos sneered. “Now it’s your turn to die. Dark Lightning Concerto, random fire.”
The goddesses had evaded Shining Nova’s gravity implosion, but Zelos’s Dark Lightning Concerto created a swarm of heat-seeking projectiles that mercilessly attacked the goddesses from their blind spots and denied them every escape route.
Zelos and Ado immediately followed it with another cast: “Blossoming Explosion!”
Zelos had created this spell himself. It could generate a flash of heat above ten thousand degrees, turning its fiery explosions into partially ionized plasma. It was potent enough to overcome even Flaress, the Goddess of Fire. She couldn’t ward off flames that had morphed into something else entirely.
Their attacks had no visible effect on the goddesses—perhaps because their bodies were virtually nothing but pure energy. But as the spell began damaging them, their forms repaired themselves, steadily depleting their mana reserves.
The two mages gave each other a thumbs-up.
“Solid explosion.”
“Very solid explosion.”
The three goddesses trembled at the reincarnators. They’d thought the only real threat would be the Dark God, but these mages had just hit them with attacks they couldn’t laugh off.
They quickly realized: If the fight continued, at this rate their deaths were inevitable.
“These ungrateful little pricks!” Flaress screamed.
“You would’ve been dead if we hadn’t taken you in! Do you even realize that?!” Aquilata said. “And this is how you repay the favor?!”
The two of them were fuming.
“Save your nonsense for someone who’ll believe it,” Ado said.
“Just to confirm—you are the same goddesses who made our world’s gods clean up your mess, then dropped us reincarnators into random locations, yes?” Zelos said. “How do you expect us to repay that favor? Besides, if I may add, you’ve shirked every one of your duties, including the ones related to us and the heroes... You know, you really should’ve been more thorough when you ‘destroyed’ the Dark God. Heh heh heh...”
“We shouldn’t have come here,” Windia mumbled. “They know about everything...”
Combined, the fragments of intel that Zelos and Ado had discovered were more than enough to paint a clear picture of what the Four Gods were really like.
And above all, Zelos and Ado harbored a deep-seated grudge toward these goddesses.
“You trampled all over my plans for a quiet, happy family,” Ado said. “It’s time for payback.”
“I was so looking forward to drinking that sake...and now, because of you, I’ll never be able to. So would you mind atoning with your deaths?”
“The first guy’s thing is whatever, but is the second guy trying to kill us over missing out on some alcohol?!” the three goddesses cried together.
“The world’s a cruel, unfair place, you know?” Zelos said. “And I’m sure you’d understand, hmm? Given all the cruel, unfair things you’ve done yourselves. What goes around comes around, after all. Ready for your trip to hell? Got your one-way tickets?”
The Sage and the Great Sage’s mana flared, bolstered by rage and hunger for revenge. They had even more mana than the Four Gods.
“A-Are you seriously trying to kill pretty little girls like us?!” Flaress shouted.
“Little girls?” Ado scoffed. “You may look young, but I bet you hags are way older than us, right?”
“Didn’t your parents ever teach you to treat women with respect?!” Aquilata said.
“I’m related to a truly awful woman,” Zelos said. “And unfortunately, I’ve spent a long time dealing with her shit. So if another bitch like her tries to mess with me, I won’t bat an eye if I need to cut her down to size.”
Silence hung in the air for a moment.
Then Windia said, “I request a lawyer.”
“Nope!” Zelos and Ado spat back. “You get no rights, no lawyer, and no last words. We are judge, jury, and executioner!”
“You tyrants!” the three goddesses shouted.
Both the goddesses and the humans here were acting like tyrants—but at the end of the day, in this world, might made right. If you got hit, hit them back. That was how it worked.
The time for words was over. Would the goddesses maintain their iron grip on this world, or would David take down Goliath?
These goddesses had looked down on mankind for so long, and now mankind had driven them into a corner.
✦ ✦ ✦
Ultimately, these goddesses were naught but stand-ins. They were no true Observers; they weren’t omnipotent.
“All right—let’s get this party started! Geh heh heh heh heh!” Ado cackled.
“I have no mercy for the likes of you three,” Zelos said. “Regret all you’ve done as you disappear into the darkness. No one’s going to place flowers at your graves once you’re gone. Mnuh huh huh...”
Some said that demons lurked in people’s hearts, but right now, Zelos and Ado looked like the devil himself, alive and breathing. They gathered mana in their hands, preparing to pass judgment in the form of annihilation, with wicked grins plastered across their faces.
They’d been awaiting this moment for what felt like an eternity.
They fired a relentless tempest of brutal, raging magic at the goddesses without incantations, intending to completely erase them from this world.
They were convinced their foes were trivial, good at nothing but scampering away.
The idea of justice was the last thing anyone would think of watching these two demonic, hateful men fire colossal waves of mana at the three goddesses trembling in fear.
No, this was wrath.
“Gluttonous Voi— Huh?”
Suddenly, an enormous mana signal appeared in the distance—from the direction where they’d fought the great givleon.
“Wh-What the— What could that much mana possibly belong to?” Flaress stuttered.
“It exceeds even ours,” Aquilata said. “Is... No. Is this the Dark God?!”
“No,” Windia replied. “It’s...different...”
Zelos and Ado were just as shocked as the goddesses by the insane level of mana.
In the distant field of craters, the thoroughly battered, pulverized body of the great givleon stirred.
Then, within the creature’s tattered form, it awoke.
A deep crimson light shone through its carapace, and then an incredible surge of mana coursed through its limbs. Its current was too much to contain, and mana erupted from the creature’s body like flames, blasting its outer shell high up into the sky; it was no longer needed.
The creature’s antennae twitched on its head. It immediately sensed what it was looking for and sprang into action, ready to carry out its mission.
The two wings on its back flapped, covered by an immense field of mana, propelling the creature through the sky like lightning.
It was time for this thing to battle the enemy embedded in the very core of its consciousness...