ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA—ORA!!
Under the suffocating, inescapable barrage of the "Comet Punches," the indestructible armor plating covering Tiamat's upper torso—along with the remaining decorative horns on her head—were violently shattered into countless fragments, scattering across the sky and earth like morbid shrapnel.
Following a final, agonizing "Aaaaaahhhhh," a world-ending uppercut from the golden giant violently launched Tiamat into the air.
Her colossal, mountain-sized body traced a massive, helpless arc across the sky. Accompanied by a deafening, atmospheric shriek infinitely more terrifying than a crashing passenger jet, she slammed brutally back down to the earth. The sheer kinetic impact triggered a localized earthquake so violent it could be clearly felt all the way at the Northern Wall.
The golden giant lowered its fists, standing completely still.
To prevent Tiamat from instantly initiating yet another horrifying [Self-Modification], Takumi had consciously, precisely controlled the raw output of his absolute barrage. While the resulting damage looked incredibly brutal and visually spectacular, for a fundamentally immortal entity with Tiamat's absurd physical mass, the attack essentially amounted to a severe, full-body concussion rather than genuine, lethal trauma.
CRACK... CRACK...
The heavily damaged, hardened carapace covering Tiamat's face peeled off in massive, jagged chunks. Instinctively sensing an unprecedented, absolute conceptual threat from the golden giant, the Beast curled her colossal frame slightly. Digging her massive claws deeply into the earth for leverage, she violently flared her Wings of the Firmament, instantly generating a massive hurricane that scoured the surrounding plains.
[You're trying to take flight, aren't you?]
It was an undeniable truth: the Underworld was fundamentally a subterranean, earth-bound domain. If Tiamat successfully achieved sustained, high-altitude flight, dragging her conceptual mass down into the Underworld would become physically impossible.
Therefore...
BOOM!
In the span of a single, untrackable microsecond, the golden giant transformed into a blinding golden blur. Utilizing a terrifying burst of raw acceleration, it instantly closed the distance. Before Tiamat could generate enough lift to leave the ground, the golden colossus slammed its massive hand directly onto the crown of her head, pinning her brutally to the earth with entirely unreasonable, god-like brute strength. No matter how violently she thrashed or how much magical energy she vented from her thrusters, she could not budge an inch.
With its left hand absolutely suppressing Tiamat, the golden giant reached its right hand backward, assuming a grasping posture.
Miles away, resting just outside the walls of Uruk, the colossal axe originally left behind by Marduk—the exact weapon Takumi had retrieved earlier—began to violently tremble. Suddenly, with a deafening SHING, the massive weapon rocketed through the air, answering the silent call and flying directly toward the golden giant's outstretched hand.
When planted in the ground, Marduk's Axe was so unimaginably massive it rivaled the height of the Uruk Ziggurat itself. However, when compared to the thousand-meter-tall [God of Humanity: Uruk], it actually appeared somewhat diminutive, almost like a hatchet.
Recognizing this immediate discrepancy in scale, Takumi—still hovering within the giant's forehead—experienced a sudden, profound flash of conceptual inspiration. Reaching into his own chest, he manifested the [Sword of the Heart] and violently hurled it directly toward the incoming, mountain-sized axe.
The exact millisecond the two conceptual weapons collided, brilliant golden ripples flared outward. Just like a drop of water seamlessly merging into a vast ocean, the [Sword of the Heart] perfectly assimilated into Marduk's Axe.
And the instant that fusion occurred, the already colossal divine construct began to rapidly, violently expand. During the brief three-second window it took to cross the remaining distance, the axe explosively magnified to over three hundred meters in length!
When the golden giant finally caught the weapon, it perfectly, flawlessly matched the colossus's titanic proportions and grip!
According to the Babylonian mythos that succeeded the Sumerian era, Marduk—despite not being a primordial deity—was the absolute hero who ultimately slaughtered the "Mother Goddess of Creation," Tiamat. He cleaved her colossal body in two to forge the heavens and the earth, thereby ascending to become the absolute, uncontested Supreme God of the pantheon, the "King of Kings and Lord of the Gods."
While the actual historical events within the Nasuverse differed slightly from the myths, it was an undeniable, conceptual fact that this specific axe had successfully severed Tiamat's throat in the past. Therefore, utilizing this exact weapon to strike Tiamat inherently carried a massive, highly lethal conceptual "Anti-Tiamat" advantage, even now that she had fully devolved into a Beast of Calamity.
Furthermore, the super-sized axe now resting in the golden giant's hand was actively infused with the absolute, reality-severing Authority of Takumi's [Sword of the Heart]...
The golden-green pupils of the [God of Humanity: Uruk] flared with an intense, deep-blue fiery light.
Utilizing the absolute, omniscient perspective of the [God of Humanity] combined with the [Mystic Eyes of Death Perception], perfectly clear, distinct "Lines" materialized across the structural joints connecting Tiamat's colossal wings to her back, as well as the mounting points of her bio-magical thrusters.
[Right here, right now, I am permanently severing your capability to touch the sky.]
WHOOSH——!!
The golden giant swung the colossal axe with terrifying speed. A massive, blurring arc of gold and deep-blue slashed through the air, generating a deafening, high-pitched shriek as the atmosphere itself was violently torn apart.
SSHHHHK——!
Despite its unimaginable, mountain-sized mass, the colossal axe didn't feel the slightest bit cumbersome or sluggish in the hands of the [God of Humanity] piloted by Takumi. Executed with blinding, god-like speed and flawless precision, a single, devastating swing perfectly cleaved through both of Tiamat's massive wings and her secondary thrusters. Completely severed from her divine chassis, the massive structures yielded to gravity and plummeted heavily to the earth.
"Aaaaaahhhhh——!!!"
Having suffered yet another brutal, incomprehensible defeat at Takumi's hands, Tiamat let out an agonizing, heaven-shaking shriek. The sheer volume of the roar, combined with the hurricane-force breath violently expelled from her maw, completely obliterated the surrounding landscape.
However, this wasn't like Takumi's previous, individual attacks—which, while capable of breaching her defenses, were ultimately superficial wounds she could easily regenerate.
Fueled by the absolute parameters of the [God of Humanity], amplified by the profound "Anti-Tiamat" conceptual advantage of Marduk's Axe, and finalized by the reality-severing Authority of the [Sword of the Heart]... this amputation was absolute. Even if Tiamat aggressively churned the [Sea of Life] to initiate another full-body [Self-Modification], those specific wings and thrusters would never grow back.
Simply put: Tiamat's ability to achieve sustained flight had been permanently, conceptually annihilated.
Empowered by the absolute Authority of the [God of Humanity], Takumi's conceptual capability to "sever all things in creation" had been astronomically amplified. If he truly desired it, holding Marduk's Axe, the golden giant undeniably possessed the raw power to perfectly recreate the ancient myth—systematically butchering Tiamat into pieces and forcefully banishing her shattered remains back into the Imaginary Number Space.
The only reason Takumi hadn't chosen that route was simply because he feared a slight miscalculation could result in incomplete annihilation, leaving her a chance to retaliate.
But with the immediate threat of her taking flight completely neutralized, Takumi hesitated no longer. Piloting the golden giant, he ruthlessly grabbed Tiamat by the horns of her skull. Dragging the pitiful, thrashing Beast of Calamity behind him like a disobedient child, he instantly bolted toward the city of Kutha, located southeast of Uruk.
[Earth Shrink] fully activated!
With every single stride the colossal giant took, the very concept of distance was violently compressed. The surrounding scenery blurred into a completely unrecognizable smear of colors. It was a terrifying, paradoxical display of movement; every step left absolutely no physical trace upon the earth, yet the sheer speed was mind-numbing. From crossing vast lakes to traversing dense, sprawling forests, everything transpired in the literal blink of an eye. It was as if the entire geographical expanse of Mesopotamia had been reduced to a tiny chessboard beneath the giant's feet.
"He's heading directly for Kutha! We need to follow him immediately!"
Seeing the golden colossus vanish over the horizon, Gilgamesh instantly dismissed his clay tablet and completely deactivated the [King's Signal Cannon]—which was fundamentally useless against Tiamat's current durability anyway. Locking onto the giant's trajectory, he immediately gave chase.
Simultaneously, while sprinting at top speed, Gilgamesh began actively experimenting with the profound, miraculous power surging through him via the conceptual connection of the Heart of Fire.
"Yahoo~! I genuinely never realized Big Brother Merlin could run this incredibly fast!"
ヾ(≧▽≦*)o
Having perfectly synchronized with Takumi's ultra-high-speed state and [Earth Shrink] technique, Merlin cheered with sheer, unadulterated delight. His legs pumped so fast they became a literal blur, leaving a glowing golden afterimage trailing behind him exactly like a certain comic book speedster.
Seeing his pristine white hair violently whipping back in the wind, and watching him literally run with both arms stretched out to the sides like airplane wings, it was undeniably clear he was having the time of his life.
As for a certain feline gag-character, her behavior was even more absurd. While maintaining absolute top speed, she continuously cycled through a variety of bizarre, completely unnecessary poses. One second she was running with her legs crossed in mid-air, the next she was executing continuous front-flips, and then she literally curled into a ball and rolled across the earth at Mach speed.
Only God knew how she managed to maintain such velocity while performing those ridiculous stunts.
Is this the exact same world Takumi constantly perceives when he moves?
In stark contrast to the others' chaotic excitement, Ana was incredibly well-behaved. She simply ran in silence, her eyes sparkling with profound wonder as she watched the world violently blur past her.
"It's so... slow..."
Watching the seemingly frozen trajectory of falling debris and the agonizingly slow descent of dust kicked up from the ground within her hyper-accelerated perception, Ana couldn't help but mutter to herself.
At this level of absolute speed, if she were to fight her normal, un-buffed self, she realized she could probably decapitate her past self before she even registered she was under attack.
...
[Eresh, is everything ready?]
Having dragged the completely disoriented Tiamat directly above the geographical coordinates of Kutha's Underworld, Takumi immediately re-established the telepathic link with Ereshkigal.
[You're here already?!]
Utilizing her absolute Authority as the Goddess of the Underworld, Miss Ereshkigal had instantly teleported back to her domain. Startled by his sudden arrival, she blurted out in genuine shock. However, quickly regaining her composure, she coughed twice and replied with absolute seriousness:
[—Ahem! Yes! Everything is fully prepared!]
Truthfully, aside from Ereshkigal herself, the Underworld didn't actually contain anything of significant material value. All she had to do was safely quarantine the remaining clusters of soul-fire in a heavily fortified sector and forcefully clear out a massive, empty subterranean arena suitable for an apocalyptic deathmatch.
Compared to manually excavating a massive tunnel toward Uruk with a pickaxe, this task was infinitely easier.
Ereshkigal was fully prepared, and Gilgamesh's group was rapidly approaching his current coordinates... Takumi knew with absolute certainty that the final, decisive clash was imminent.
[Understood. Prioritize your own safety—the big one is dropping right now.]
Delivering his final message, Takumi took a deep, steadying breath. He shifted his gaze down to Tiamat, who was still thrashing and struggling pointlessly in his grip.
The golden giant once again ruthlessly pinned her to the earth with its left hand. It raised its right hand, securely gripping the colossal axe, and pulled it back in preparation for an absolute, maximum-power swing.
Resting several dozen meters above the giant's head, the colossal golden-and-blue axe gleamed ominously, a blindingly pure white aura continuously flashing across its razor-sharp edge.
VMMMMM~!
Accompanied by the continuous, majestic resonance of the "BGM" echoing across the sky, countless motes of light began violently converging toward the massive axe, exactly like dust being sucked into an industrial vacuum.
It was currently dusk. In the west, the sun—which had been steadily sinking toward the horizon—suddenly flared with an unnatural, blinding brilliance.
Simultaneously, in the east—where the horizon should have been cloaked in the encroaching gray darkness of evening—a brilliant, golden dawn suddenly began to rise.
The light from both the setting and rising suns perfectly pierced through the golden Divine Realm, intersecting flawlessly upon the raised blade of the colossal axe.
SHIIING!
At the sound of that single, piercingly sharp resonance acting as an absolute signal, the colossal axe—carrying enough raw, cataclysmic kinetic force to cleanly bisect the earth itself—violently descended, aiming squarely at the skull of Tiamat, who had instinctively sensed the apocalyptic threat and was struggling frantically.
BOOOOOOOOOOM——!!!
An earth-shattering, world-ending explosion violently detonated!
The sound was exactly like the furious roar of a million thunderbolts and the chaotic stampede of ten thousand warhorses. It violently shook the surrounding mountains and caused the very tectonic plates to tremble in absolute terror. Following a rapid, deafening series of localized sonic booms, the bedrock of Kutha violently splintered and collapsed like incredibly fragile glass. Massive, bottomless fissures spider-webbed outward at terrifying speed. Wherever the shockwave passed, solid rock was instantly pulverized, and millions of tons of earth were violently launched into the sky, creating a suffocating, apocalyptic dust storm.
The earth had been flawlessly cleaved open. The ground completely collapsed.
Driven by the sheer, apocalyptic kinetic force of that world-cleaving strike, the golden giant and Tiamat plummeted simultaneously into the unfathomable depths of the Age of Gods' Underworld.
Seeing this, Gilgamesh and the others—who had just arrived at the edge of the newly formed crater—exchanged a single, resolute glance. Without a microsecond of hesitation, they threw themselves into the abyss.
The Underworld of the Age of Gods was situated roughly three thousand meters beneath the surface. It was difficult to classify that depth as either incredibly deep or relatively shallow. However, using the thousand-meter-tall [God of Humanity: Uruk] and Tiamat as the baseline metric, a three-thousand-meter drop was functionally equivalent to jumping over a slightly tall garden fence.
Both colossal entities rapidly crashed onto the barren floor of the Underworld.
"WAAAAAH! I-It's unbelievably massive!!"
Standing in a far, elevated corner of her domain, Ereshkigal stared in absolute, unadulterated panic at the two mountain-sized entities that completely dominated her line of sight. She couldn't help but let out a terrified shriek.
Although Takumi had explicitly warned her they were going to be "large," hearing the concept and physically bearing witness to two thousand-meter-tall titans suddenly dropping into her living room were two entirely different experiences! How was she supposed to know they were this impossibly huge?!
A thousand meters might not sound particularly intimidating in theory—many modern human skyscrapers easily exceeded that height—but when that sheer volume of mass was compressed into two hyper-agile, actively warring titans of flesh and divinity...? The sheer, suffocating scale was paralyzing.
"Wait... Wait! This is completely impossible! Between 'Mother's' current, apocalyptic form and a Divine Spirit possessing a conceptual weight far exceeding a standard Chief God... my Underworld fundamentally lacks the conceptual capacity to simultaneously suppress both of them!!"
After briefly extending her divine perception, Ereshkigal instantly realized the catastrophic flaw in the plan and began panicking violently.
If the absolute Authorities of her Underworld couldn't successfully overwrite and suppress Tiamat's conceptual existence, then her absolute "Immortality" could not be negated!
"Disperse!"
Having perfectly anticipated this exact conceptual conflict, Takumi reacted even faster than Ereshkigal. He decisively swung his blazing flag, issuing the absolute command for every single soul composing the golden giant to instantly disband.
The physical form of the colossal golden giant immediately disintegrated. In its place, nearly a hundred thousand brilliant "Golden Stars" violently scattered, forming an immense, suffocating spherical blockade entirely surrounding Tiamat. Peering through the blazing golden aura of each individual "Star," one could clearly see the resolute faces of the Uruk citizens within.
The [Divine Realm Conversion] Authority of the [God of Humanity: Uruk] was undeniably potent enough to entirely suppress Tiamat's [Sea of Life]. However, because that specific Authority was so inherently aggressive and dominant, maintaining it within this enclosed space would inevitably begin actively corroding and overwriting the fundamental Laws of the Underworld itself! Fully aware of this severe conceptual clash, Takumi had always planned to immediately disband the [God of Humanity] the second they made landfall.
However, the immediate consequence of disbanding the giant was that nearly a hundred thousand Uruk citizens were now physically present within the Underworld. While roughly twenty thousand of them were already deceased souls, the remaining eighty thousand were genuinely, biologically alive!
The fundamental, absolute Law of the Underworld explicitly forbade the existence of the living. While Takumi possessed the conceptual resistance to effortlessly ignore this Law, the ordinary citizens absolutely did not. Furthermore, if they wanted to forcefully impose a state of "Absolute Death" upon Tiamat's immediate vicinity—without instantly killing the eighty thousand living citizens in the crossfire—Ereshkigal had to manually, actively grant every single one of them the "Right of Existence," simultaneously classifying them all as "Non-Living Entities" within her domain's registry.
Granting that level of extreme, reality-bending privilege to the living was an egregious violation of the Underworld's rules, even for its Patron Goddess. Doing it for one or two people was exhausting but manageable. But attempting to simultaneously sustain that absolute paradox for nearly eighty thousand living souls...? It was a guaranteed, instant death sentence for Miss Ereshkigal!
—However, Takumi had fully anticipated this as well!
Conveniently, the exact moment the [God of Humanity] was disbanded, a massive, unfathomable reservoir of unified magical energy and raw Divinity was suddenly left without a physical vessel! The solution was incredibly simple: directly transfer the absolute entirety of that accumulated power directly to Ereshkigal! By doing so, he would drastically, artificially inflate her baseline power and temporarily elevate her administrative Authority over the Underworld to an entirely unprecedented level!
Without a single second of hesitation, Takumi forcefully redirected the entirety of the vacant, golden energy straight toward Miss Ereshkigal.
"What do I do... what do I do...? Eh? What is this sudden surge of power?!"
Still frantically wracking her brain for a solution, Miss Ereshkigal watched in stunned silence as a blinding beam of golden light shot across the cavern and slammed directly into her. An ethereal layer of golden, blazing aura instantly enveloped her body. The very next second, she felt her absolute administrative control and conceptual Authority over the Underworld skyrocket to a level vastly exceeding even her original, un-summoned mythological peak!
Even the fundamental, conceptual purity of her Divine Core had been violently, artificially reinforced to an utterly terrifying degree!
Skill Altered: [The Hidden Great Crown (A)]-> [The Grand Crown of the Underworld Goddess (EX)]!
[Goddess's Divine Core (B)]-> [Goddess's Divine Core (EX)]!
"Mhm! With this level of absolute power... I can definitely do this!"
Taking a brief moment to rapidly adapt to her newly supercharged, god-like parameters, Ereshkigal's face flushed with intense excitement. Absolute, unwavering confidence instantly returned to her features.
Conveniently, Tiamat—who had been rendered completely unconscious by the golden giant's mercifully restrained, skull-crushing blow—finally regained consciousness at that exact moment. She instantly triggered another apocalyptic surge of the [Sea of Life], violently thrashing against the suffocating, spherical blockade maintained by the scattered "Golden Stars" Takumi commanded.
"Spirits of the Underworld, Gallu! The towering spears of rot and decay! Descend upon the trespasser and deliver the absolute, inescapable judgment of Our Underworld—!"
Her expression returning to one of absolute, terrifying majesty, Ereshkigal thrust her spear-blade forward. She simultaneously commanded the entire legion of Gallu Spirits and the newly supercharged, absolute defensive mechanisms of the Underworld to violently suppress Tiamat, while flawlessly maintaining the paradoxical existence of the hundred thousand Uruk citizens.
"Aaaaaahhhhh...!"
Dozens of colossal, crimson-glowing cages composed entirely of massive spears—radiating an unimaginable, soul-scorching heat—violently materialized and clamped down entirely around Tiamat's body. Blinding, pale-blue lightning violently arced across the Beast's colossal frame. Under the crushing, absolute conceptual suppression of the empowered Underworld, Tiamat was once again violently forced into absolute paralysis.