How could anyone describe what they were feeling at that moment?
It was like a group of drifters who had lost all sense of direction, floating in a tiny boat on a bottomless black sea.
They could all clearly see the dark thunderclouds rolling along the distant horizon, yet the only thing they could do was stare in terror and pray that the storm would not come any closer.
This was suppression from a level above life itself.
Even beings like Hades and Makarov, who stood at the peak of human magic, could do nothing now but flounder like insects trapped in amber.
At the center of that storm stood Ereshkigal. As her divinity and magic flared higher, those crystal-clear eyes of hers, like red jewels, were gradually dyed into a majestic pure gold.
She tilted her head slightly and cast a cold, indifferent glance at the master of Grimoire Heart not far away.
"So… the one up there losing his temper must be the god of this world who governs life and death."
The moment those words fell, Ereshkigal slammed the butt of her spear-staff into the ground.
Screeeech—
Three masses of gray-white curse-energy, even denser and murkier than before, were brutally ripped free by her hand!
Rumble—!!!
The instant those curses left their hosts, the deathly still night sky seemed to fly into a complete rage, erupting with a peal of thunder so violent that even the earth trembled beneath it.
Ignoring the fury of the heavens, Ereshkigal turned to Shane and explained calmly, "It seems the one up there is quite angry that I used an authority similar to his over life and death."
Boom! Boom! Boom!
As the deafening crashes continued one after another, the gray-white malice above descended like countless bolts of gray lightning, lashing wildly into the earthly underworld below—a place of pure black and dead silence.
Two completely different divine laws, yet both embodying death, slammed into each other in an invisible collision.
Everyone below felt as though an unseen hand had seized their hearts in a death grip.
Their vision began to warp. Breathing felt like drawing knives into their lungs. A suffocating sense of impending death, impossible to describe, flooded over everyone present in an instant and drowned out their reason.
Faced with the malice descending from the sky, Ereshkigal did not retreat. Instead, she stepped forward and lightly swept her spear-staff once again.
Hummm—
A ring of deathly ripples, completely invisible to the naked eye, exploded outward from her in all directions!
In the span of a heartbeat, the people watching in horror saw the ancient trees around them—towering, snow-covered, and still standing proud in the heart of winter—begin to peel, wither, and gray away the moment they touched that ring.
It was as if every trace of life had been ripped out of them at once, leaving behind nothing but dead wood and drifting ash.
"What a brutish way to behave."
Ereshkigal's beautiful brows drew together slightly, and disgust flashed through her golden eyes.
"To treat death as a punishment and a curse to fling about at will… I do not like the way you use the authority of death."
Seeing life itself stripped so cleanly from everything around them, Shane, still holding Ultear, finally confirmed what he had suspected all along.
"So it really wasn't Chronos, the god of time, who marked us and laid down that curse."
"It was Ankhseram—the same god of life and death tied to Zeref."
"What a petty god. What a vicious, vindictive god."
Shane cursed silently in his heart.
And at the same time, he couldn't help feeling a deep surge of relief.
Thank god. Thank god he had used the Grail to release Ereshkigal's full divine power from the Age of Gods.
Otherwise, against a god of life and death who could erase things conceptually at any moment…
even if he had managed to summon a Heroic Spirit with some kind of anti-curse answer from the "pool," it would have been hard to deal with something like this.
In midair, the gray ripples that represented death were still raging madly as the powers of the two gods continued to clash.
As the law of the underworld and that malicious curse ground against each other, the affected area began expanding outward at an absurd speed!
It was no longer just this ancient forest hiding the ruins of Nirvana.
At that moment, whether it was ordinary citizens in bustling cities hundreds of kilometers away, or mages deep in meditation…
almost everyone in the entire Kingdom of Fiore felt their hearts jolt all at once.
As though obeying the same instinct, they all stopped what they were doing, stepped outside, and lifted their heads toward the night sky with the primal terror of creatures sensing some vast calamity descending.
Though they could see nothing at all, in the deepest part of their souls they felt as if some invisible, transcendent beings were confronting one another high above the distant heavens.
At the same time, in a crude cave far from the kingdom, a black-robed boy stepped outside and stared fixedly into the far reaches of the night sky.
For once, Zeref's usually gentle, melancholy face was twisted into something else entirely.
Hatred.
Fierce, violent hatred.
He had felt it.
That was the aura of the god who, centuries ago, had arrogantly stripped him of his right to live as a human being and condemned him to endless tragedy.
And then there was—
"Another presence… completely unfamiliar, yet of a similar order."
A complicated light flickered in Zeref's deep black eyes.
"Gods…"
He slowly rose to his feet and murmured in a hoarse voice,
"So the gods of this world have not completely vanished. They… can be found."
In an instant, countless overlooked clues flashed through his mind.
He thought of the vast empire he had built on another continent.
Among his subordinates, there seemed to be one war-maiden who could receive and wield the soul of the God of Time.
If divine power could be received, if gods could be called down and made manifest…
Then, in that very moment, something subtle changed inside Zeref's heart—a heart that for centuries had desired only death, obsessed with going back in time and killing himself before he ever began researching resurrection magic.
"Find Ankhseram… and kill him. Or be killed by him…"
"Either ending… would be a thousand times better than living like this under a curse, hiding in the dark like a monster…"
"Could it be… that the direction of my research for all these hundreds of years was wrong from the very beginning?"
Zeref's eyes grew brighter and brighter.
"Maybe from the start, I shouldn't have been studying how to kill my cursed self. Maybe I should have been figuring out how to kill the god who placed the curse on me instead!"
"Why did that thought never occur to me before? Was it because the teachers at Mildian Magic Academy revered the gods so much that I unconsciously ignored that possibility altogether?"
As his way of thinking shifted, Zeref took a heavy step forward.
That violent emotional upheaval caused the Curse of Contradiction inside him to surge out of control again.
Dense black deathly energy burst from him in all directions, turning the already barren grass and trees around the cave into shriveled ash in an instant.
But this time, unlike before—when he would always be wracked with guilt and grief over life being stolen away—he had no room left to care.
He simply kept staring toward the direction of Nirvana, a probing light shining in his eyes.
"That other god… were they brought here by those two children? Do they know how to communicate with the divine?"
At this moment, even people separated by mountains and oceans could clearly feel the impact of this clash between gods.
So for those standing at the absolute center of the storm—Hades, Shane, and the others—it was even more overwhelming.
If Ereshkigal in front of them had not so decisively swept her spear-staff and blocked every last bit of the aftershock, then everyone there would have been drained dry in that instant, just like the trees and grass around them, and withered into ash.
Standing behind her, Shane was witnessing divine power with his own eyes for the first time in his life—truly seeing it, truly feeling it, and being utterly shaken by it.
And there, in the depths of his mind, he made a firm decision.
"The next Heroic Spirit I summon, no matter what, has to be a god-tier existence."
Even the Caster class he had been hoping for all this time could be pushed back for now if necessary in the face of this kind of power.
Once Shane finished silently revising his future summoning plans, he turned his head—
and immediately the corner of his eye twitched as he glared hard at the group that had somehow crept up beside him.
Hades, along with Rustyrose, Bluenote, and the rest of Grimoire Heart's kin, were now standing in a neat line less than two meters behind Shane, completely expressionless.
Because that goddess of the underworld had shown obvious favor toward Shane earlier—and equally obvious dislike toward Hades—
Hades had made the extremely decisive choice to lead his subordinates straight into Shane's "safe zone" and take shelter behind him.
He clearly feared that while blocking Ankhseram's curse-ridden aftershocks, the goddess—whose temperament he could not read—might "accidentally" let some of those gray-white ripples slip through onto outside bystanders like them.
"What a sly old fox…"
Staring at Hades standing behind him, rare and utterly unreadable now, Shane could only grit his teeth and curse inwardly.