Merka lay flat on his back, staring up at the clouds on the horizon.

Right now, the clouds overhead had been ripped open by the gale Turing’s high‑speed dash had stirred up, leaving a huge gash in the sky. The radiant evening glow shone through that gap, like a shy girl finally lifting her head and flashing a brilliant smile at the one she loved.

“Merka, sorry, that angel took me a bit longer to deal with… Did you catch Mira?”

Bordeaux arrived late with Scarlett in tow and called out to Merka.

They walked up to him, took in the blood‑soaked ground and the piles of flesh around him, and for a moment neither of them knew what to say.

“No. She got away.”

Hearing that, Bordeaux and Scarlett exchanged looks, both of them a little at a loss.

“No time to worry about her.”

“…If Mira really read my memories, she’s probably on her way to destroy the missile trucks right now.”

“But that’s not what matters most.”

Merka looked at the faint, silk‑like splendor of the clouds on the horizon and spoke softly.

“…Then what matters most?” Bordeaux asked curiously.

“Since Samael managed to sneak into Bordeaux by rewriting memories…”

“Oedipus can copy that trick herself.”

“She can overwrite her own memories, turn herself into an ordinary, unconscious angel, set a destination with a curse, fade into the air, and infiltrate all the way into the deepest part of Bordeaux.”

Merka’s voice carried a trace of sorrow.

“What… do you mean? Merka, what are you talking about?”

Bordeaux couldn’t follow a word of it, and Samael didn’t understand a single thing Merka was saying either.

But Merka didn’t rush to explain. He just spoke calmly to Bordeaux again.

“Bordeaux, did you use the radio to contact Bishop Maria earlier? Try it again now.”

“…”

A hint of gravity crept onto Bordeaux’s face. She did as Merka said, took out the radio, dialed Maria’s number—no answer.

“What’s going on, Merka?”

Panic started to creep into Bordeaux’s voice. She knew Maria should be in the safest place in the whole of Bordeaux—at the very heart of Lone Mountain Castle.

If even something had gone wrong there, then this battle was probably reaching its endgame.

“We’ve got to get back to Lone Mountain Castle. Fast.”

“I’ll explain on the way… I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Merka’s lips twitched slightly as he spoke, worry written across his face.

————————————————————————

“What’s wrong, my little goldfish?”

“Not happy to see me?”

“Why would you pick up a call right in front of me?”

In the underground armory of Lone Mountain Castle, Oedipus stretched out a hand toward Maria. A short burst of flame spat from her palm and blew a hole straight through the radio in Maria’s hand.

Maria only smiled calmly, as if victory was already in the bag.

Lone Mountain Castle—Montecristo’s ancestral seat.

Its taste was unique, its construction elegant, famed as the “white and courteous beast of spires.”

Of course, it was far more than just a pretty face.

It came with a complex defensive system and underground air‑raid shelters built for emergencies.

What the Acadia nobility loved to boast about most was that Lone Mountain Castle had watched over The Montecristo family for more than two hundred years, and in all that time it had never lost its strategic value.

It was the pride of the Montecristo family—and the place Merka and Turing had visited earlier to attend the mage gathering.

Maria had moved the armory where she built weapons into the Sunforge Workshop beneath the castle.

Since she no longer trusted her subordinates, Maria hadn’t allowed any of them into the armory to guard her. She’d ordered them all to stay outside.

But now, that move looked like she’d only shot herself in the foot.

“You don’t look surprised to see me at all.”

Oedipus walked in through the main door, shrugging slightly, drifting in like a patch of shifting cloud, beautiful and elusive.

“Of course not. I know you as well as I know myself.”

“You love decapitation strikes the most, don’t you? Obviously you’d be coming for me.”

Even as Oedipus drew closer, Maria didn’t seem nervous at all.

She stepped back a few paces, retreating until her back was to a massive machine covered with black cloth.

“Seeing how confident you are…”

“Don’t tell me you know how I slipped past all those guards outside and just popped up here?”

The fact that Maria wasn’t afraid and even had the mood to chat piqued Oedipus’s interest.

She realized this Maria might be fundamentally different from the Maria she’d fought last time.

“That, I don’t care about. And I don’t want to know.”

“But I do have faith in you.”

“I believed that, sooner or later, you’d come to me.”

“And I knew it would be you. Not anyone else.”

“Because you’ve been longing to see Abdiel, haven’t you?”

Maria suddenly laughed.

Her smile was sugar‑sweet, like some brightly colored mushroom giving off a tempting fragrance—so sweet it made you recoil deep down, made you doubt.

She suddenly backed up and yanked off the black cloth draped over the machine behind her, revealing the whole thing to Oedipus.

A massive culture tank was instantly exposed under the lights.

Oedipus looked toward it with a trace of anticipation, but what floated inside wasn’t the Abdiel she’d been hoping for. It was heaps upon heaps of minced flesh that she didn’t recognize.

Oedipus’s face sank at once, the smile fading from her lips.

“Yes! That’s the expression!”

“That’s the face I made when you killed Joan back then. Remember?”

Maria picked up something that looked like a remote from the machine and clenched it in her hand.

Her eyes flashed ferociously; her whole expression was fevered.

Anyone who knew this Pope Maria would never have believed that the gentle, tolerant High Pontiff they revered could wear a face like that.

“That’s better. That’s more like it. Living or dead, I had to see her with my own eyes.”

“Now you see it. I’ve ground Abdiel into mince, into pulp!”

“I used her to forge countless weapons. After torturing her in every way I could think of—she finally got to die in peace.”

Oedipus’s brows furrowed slightly.

The poker‑face smile she’d maintained all this time finally cracked in front of Maria.

Seeing how shaken Oedipus looked, Maria burst into wild laughter and dropped all pretense of dignity, plopping down on the machine behind her. She toyed with the remote in her hand, mockery written all over her face.

“Oh~ oh, I’d strongly suggest you don’t do anything rash.”

“Right now, I’ve already mixed Mechanized Apotheosis into Abdiel’s minced flesh and turned her into a final, ultimate bomb.”

“As long as I press this button, Lone Mountain Castle will be blown to dust.”

“You and me included, Lucifer.”

Slowly, Maria reined in her laughter, and her tone turned chillingly cold.

“Terrible mistake, Lucifer.”

“Looks like even you can miscalculate.”

“You didn’t send Kyopa over. Instead you had them tie up my people in Lachésis.”

“That’s because you didn’t want the war to spread, right?”

“Otherwise, even if you won in the end, all you’d get would be a scorched‑earth Acadia.”

“But you were wrong.”

“You underestimated me.”

“You thought you could take this country without even deploying an army, without shedding blood.”

“That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done in your life.”