Chapter 185: The Past Under Fire, History Will Be Unrecognizable
Just like when the second Moon King of Rahu's Seven Luminaries, Hazyirus, suddenly appeared and was dragged into a different dimension.
What entered Rias's field of vision was an otherworldly space—a temple that didn't align with any religion she knew of.
The blue battleship had also been pulled into this space.
Regaining her senses, Rias immediately gathered a sphere of destructive magical energy in her hand. Unlike the magical bullet she had used to intimidate Kuroka earlier, this was a genuine, full-powered strike.
A beam of annihilation, capable of destroying everything, shot forth and slammed fiercely into the blue battleship.
However, the opponent immediately deployed a defensive barrier, but it wasn't completely impenetrable.
It was possible—she could break through it.
With Rias's spirited cry, she compressed a destructive magic sphere so large her hands could barely contain it, then launched it like a cannon blast.
"Boom—!"
Accompanied by a deafening roar, the opponent's barrier shattered like glass in an instant, and the magic projectile continued its trajectory, crashing into the cyan warship.
"Boom—!"
Another thunderous explosion followed, and the warship transformed into a massive firework as it plummeted downward.
Rias then approached the wreckage of the warship and quickly returned, clutching a strange metallic sphere in her hand.
The reason she could defeat the opponent so swiftly seemed to be that after unleashing that inexplicable attack, the enemy had expended most of their power.
"Where did you fire that blast just now?"
The one asking wasn't Rias, but the master of this space.
At that moment, Rias noticed his appearance had changed—he was now clad in ancient robes and exuded an aura of royalty.
"Hehehe, that was an attack capable of transcending time and space, firing a shot into the past," a cheerful mechanical voice emanated from within the metallic sphere.
These words caused Rias's expression to shift slightly.
"Into the past?"
A cannonball aimed at history?
Where would it land? What changes would it cause? How would it drastically alter this world?
"Correct. That was my—Rumaitola's, one of the four strongest generals under Lord Rezoroyado of Rahu's Seven Luminaries—proudest strike. You are already too late to stop it. The existing history will be utterly unrecognizable because of that blast!"
Completely unconcerned about his own perilous situation, or perhaps because Rumaitola—one of the four strongest generals under Rezoroyado of Rahu's Seven Luminaries—had already accomplished his mission, he cared little about his own fate.
He was a death warrior!
These words turned Rias's face completely ashen.
That attack had been one she herself felt could be fatal. Fired into the past, if it landed in the human world, it might very well erase an entire nation.
The disappearance of a country would cause an unprecedented shock to all of human history, simultaneously triggering massive upheavals in mythology.
The entire history would become completely different from what she knew.
"History will be unrecognizable?"
The one muttering in a daze wasn't Rias, but Kuroka.
This sudden turn of events had caught her completely off guard.
When she first heard about the otherworld from Vali, she had suspected the shrine maiden might be exaggerating.
But now, she had witnessed the enemy's power with her own eyes.
And this was merely one of the four generals under a single member of Rahu's Seven Luminaries. The energy fluctuations from that cannon blast made her feel that being hit would mean certain death.
This implied the attack was at the level of a Maou—and a top-tier Maou at that.
In other words, were all four generals at least Maou-level?
And since each of the Rahu's Seven Luminaries had four such generals, that would make twenty-eight Maou-level beings?
Just how many Maou-level entities were there in total?
For a moment, Kuroka felt her scalp tingling with dread.
She was truly beginning to fear that other world.
Returning to the issue at hand, if that strike had hit the past, it would trigger the so-called butterfly effect, and who knows how human history would be rewritten.
In that case, as people of this era, they would also be affected by the changes in history.
It's possible they might not even be born in this era—they could simply vanish.
Vanish?
But aren't they still here now?
Could it be that the opponent's strike didn't actually hit the past?
Or perhaps the feedback from the spacetime disruption hasn't reached them yet, and they might disappear from this world at any moment?
"President, Sister, will we disappear?"
Koneko murmured in a daze, her voice filled with unease.
"No, absolutely not! Such a thing will never happen!"
Rias declared with firm resolve, though inwardly she was uncertain. Still, she couldn't show any sign of doubt in front of Koneko.
Come to think of it, maybe there really was nothing to worry about. Hadn't they previously discussed that the otherworldly shrine maiden might be from the future?
They had also touched upon the concept of a time paradox.
If the past had truly been bombarded and history altered, they should have vanished by now.
Since they hadn't disappeared, and their memories remained intact—untwisted and consistent with their previous understanding—then everything should be fine.
Suddenly, Rias immediately deployed a magical barrier.
"Boom——!"
The otherworldly mechanical lifeform—Rumaitola—had self-destructed.
"Rias, keep an eye on this one, there's still time!"
The master of the Temple of Time space—Renji—also promptly dismantled the space, returning everyone to the normal realm.
At the same time, he detected ripples still lingering in the space.
These spacetime ripples weren't meant to last long. By manipulating the internal time of the Temple of Time, he had altered the flow of time inside relative to the outside world. As a result, when the space was dissolved and everyone emerged, only a few minutes had passed inside, while less than a second had elapsed in the real world.
Therefore, without hesitation, he activated spatial teleportation and plunged directly into the undulating spacetime disturbance.
"Huh?"
By the time Rias reacted, he had already vanished, clearly disappearing into that ripple.
"Kuroka!!!"
Rias's expression changed sharply because, in the instant the ripple faded, Kuroka—whom she had been tasked with watching—took advantage of her momentary distraction and teleported into the disturbance as well.