(Heartfelt thanks to Yuezuki Tatsuha for the 1,100 reward, and to Yunqi Qinggu, Wei Zhi De Yue Ding, Erciyuan de Shuangxiezuo, and Hai Dao Zhi Xin for their rewards!)
"Boom!!!"
By the time Hinagiku, Mikoto, Rin Tohsaka, Luvia, and Bazett followed the traces of battle to the beach closest to the battlefield, a deafening explosion had already erupted between heaven and earth.
The tremendous blast made the girls' eardrums ring and left their minds completely blank. They even became dizzy, their consciousness forcibly scattered for a brief moment by the thunderous noise.
When the girls finally recovered from their dizziness and their minds began working again, the sight before them left them frozen in place, unable to react for a long while.
The once-calm sea had turned turbulent, as though a storm were raging, and even the water's color had darkened.
Across that churning, dim ocean, a vast sea of white flames burned slowly. It seemed to treat the seawater as fuel; not only did it show no sign of fading, it was growing at a visible rate.
At the same time, a sea of flames of the same color spread through the sky, forming a stark contrast with the fire on the ocean below, like two sides of a mirror.
The only difference was that beneath the white flames in the sky, a savage wound had been carved into it...
That was indeed a wound!
A wound in space!
It was like an enormous pane of glass had been violently struck by something, shattering into an uneven fault line that stretched from one corner of the sea upward, only to abruptly end beneath the sea of flames in the sky. Its interior was pitch-black.
That was the spatial fault line carved out by the Sword of Rupture, Ea—the world's