Finé turned around to check if she was mistaken. She sensed something moving in the shadow of the swirling smoke. Someone was unsteadily getting to their feet—it was unmistakably the silhouette of a person.
As the north wind swept the smoke away, that person was gradually revealed.
“How are you still standing?”
The man who appeared in her field of vision was Tsushima, battered and broken. Seeing him, Finé showed a hint of being shaken for the first time.
He was covered in mud and blood. After taking Finé’s attack head-on, his body was so torn apart that his organs were spilling out, and tears of blood streamed from his eyes due to the strain of Code execution.
He no longer resembled anything that could be called human. He looked like some kind of wicked monster, like a demon or an evil sorcerer.
And yet what remained disturbingly clear was the sinister gleam of his eyes, visible between the strands of his tousled bangs. Eyes that had surpassed blue and now radiated a deep, dark light brimming with a malice far surpassing mere bloodlust.
He had suffered damage beyond repair. And yet his lips were curved in a smile. What kind of emotion could possibly produce such a grin?
Finé intuitively understood from looking at him.
She didn’t know the reason, but something had snapped inside Tsushima in that moment. It was a horrifying feeling, as though she was slowly getting ensnared in a world one must never enter.
As Finé took a step back on reflex, Tsushima fixed her with a demonic stare.
“Even a shitty god does something good once in a while.”
Standing atop a mountain of rubble, Tsushima took a single step down the rubble and stumbled. Then he looked questioningly down at his own body.
“What’s this? I’m practically dead?” he muttered to himself.
Hearing his words, Finé regained her composure. Tsushima might have looked calm, but in reality, he was hanging on by a thread. One more hit and he would be finished, she determined. Finé constructed a platform of light at her feet and used it to leap high into the sky. Then she began to execute an even more powerful Code.
“I never thought I’d have to use this.”
Finé raised her hand high toward the heavens. Bands of light gathered in her hand, intertwining. The massive bands of light compressed to their limit, flooding the entire area with a radiance more intense than the midday sun.
Gradually, the light amassed in her hand transformed into a single spear.
“Spear of Divine Punishment,” Finé said as she gripped the spear of light.
This was the most powerful attack she could wield. The ultrahigh-density mass of light was so dazzlingly bright that it seemed capable of swallowing everything. This light could probably even be seen from beyond the horizon.
“Your existence should end here. Suffer my master’s divine punishment.”
She looked down at the ground and swung the spear’s tip down toward where Tsushima stood. The mass of light, now possessing real weight, was terrifyingly heavy. Clenching her teeth, Finé hurled the Spear of Divine Punishment from her hand with a furious expression.
The Spear of Divine Punishment collided with Tsushima’s head, scattering the surrounding dust clouds in an instant. It was a single hit beyond human comprehension that could shoot through Tsushima, gouge into the earth, and reach the bedrock layer of the Earth’s crust at worst.
But things didn’t go that easily. Just as the Spear of Divine Punishment was about to hit him, it lost momentum and vanished in an extremely unnatural way. All that remained was the violent wind created by the spear.
The dust that had filled the ruined town was blown away in an instant. With a clear view of his surroundings, Tsushima stood atop the rubble as if nothing had happened.
Despite the overwhelming force of the attack, he was completely unscathed. In fact, there wasn’t even a single groove in the ground where he stood.
Tsushima slowly looked up at Finé with ominously glowing eyes, one of which was completely crushed. His body was even more broken than before, the result of excessive Code execution.
Yet even as tears of blood streamed down his face, Tsushima grinned from ear to ear and raised a hand at Finé.
Something was happening—Tsushima was executing some unknown Code, different from anything Finé had anticipated. She knew this on an instinctive level but couldn’t comprehend it rationally.
Not only had her most powerful attack been neutralized, but her opponent was now launching an unknown assault. She couldn’t run, couldn’t defend, couldn’t move at all.
“What is this? This is nothing!” Finé shouted, trying to summon the Spear of Divine Punishment again, when all of a sudden, she felt a strange sensation run up her right side. It was a warm feeling, as though something were wrapping around her. Looking up, she saw light was shining through her right arm, which was now as transparent as glass.
“Wha—?!”
Finé’s face twisted in shock. Instinctively, she used a band of light to sever her arm at the shoulder.
Her detached arm vanished completely before it could even hit the ground, disappearing soundlessly as if dissolving into the world itself—a strangely beautiful end.
Clutching the wound, which gushed blood like a waterfall, Finé dropped to her knees on the platform of light. The pain was so intense that she couldn’t focus on executing her Code. Gritting her teeth, she struggled to process what had just happened in front of her.
“What is this? What the hell did you do?”
Sweating profusely, Finé glared at Tsushima. He just shrugged on top of the rubble, grinning fearlessly.
“Who knows? I don’t really get the logic behind it. But heat, existence, it’s all just energy, right? If it can increase, then it can disappear. And all I did was wish, harder than anything, for you to vanish from this world.” Tsushima explained the mysterious Code he had created and laughed. Finé, sweat beading on her brow, shook her head in disbelief.
“So you’re saying you erased the energy of existence? There’s no way you could pull off something so absurd. That’s nothing more than an abstract concept. This isn’t science anymore—you’ve crossed into the realm of philosophy.”
“That’s what I’m saying. This isn’t about logic. This Code is, in a sense, a wish. I wished for you to disappear from this world.”
Staring into the void, Tsushima tilted his head with a half smile.
“What, do you not like my answer?”
With that unsettling gesture, Tsushima exuded an aura of dread. Finé was seized by a terror so intense it felt like a brush with death itself, and she suddenly recalled the one other moment in her life when she had felt a similar sensation.
“This ridiculous Code. I do remember seeing it just one time before.”
Finé stood once more on her platform of light and looked down aggressively at Tsushima.
“You’re one of the Seven Heroes of the War of Independence— the Shadow Informationist, aren’t you?” Finé asked.