It had happened in an instant.
Touko immediately understood that her own sister had used a calamity that was absolutely forbidden from being displayed in modern society—
Aozaki Touko did not hesitate to bring out her trump card: the many mysteries she had collected while traveling across Europe.
Countless runes cycled and arranged themselves behind Touko. Like the finest works of craftsmanship, they bloomed into golden flowers resembling angelic wings.
They were magical crests that should have been engraved upon a magus's skin—crests Touko could never have inherited, passed down through generations by the many distinguished mage families of Western Europe.
Within the torrent of light that blotted out the sky, Touko's final trump card swayed like a lone boat.
These essences of magecraft, bearing histories of hundreds or even thousands of years, were now fully activated and used as expendable protections for Aozaki Touko amid destruction on this scale.
Yet even principles of magecraft on such a scale proved inadequate against someone who wielded laws from beyond the heavens.
The vast cluster of magical crests behind Touko, like golden wings, was constantly melting away—literally.
Among the many ways to use magical crests, using these precious crystallizations of civilization as a shield was undoubtedly the most wasteful.
But Aozaki Touko had no choice. If she still wanted to live, sacrificing those crests to withstand this attack had become inevitable.
As for what would happen after those crests had been exhausted, she gave it no further thought. Touko had no strength left to consider matters so distant.
Touko's magical energy was rapidly draining away. Her magical circuits, once capable of extremely precise conversion, were now overloaded, and pain throughout her body warned her that her vitality was about to run dry.
Yet Touko stubbornly continued wringing out her life, because if she did not, then no matter how much vitality she had left, she would immediately be reduced to ashes.
After an unknown length of time, the torrent of light vanished.
More than half of Aozaki Touko's once tender, fair skin had suffered severe burns. Her originally lovely face was now ruined beyond recognition, like charred coal.
Her beautiful clothes had all turned to ash, with only the areas most thoroughly protected by external crests retaining a few remnants.
She collapsed to the ground and barely summoned the last of her strength to look around.
The building once known as the old schoolhouse had now been reduced entirely to ruins. The remaining wooden wreckage, billowing thick smoke, still burned quietly.
The small mountain behind the schoolhouse had vanished completely. Only a smooth gap, continuously melting into lava, proved that it had once existed.
"Can you still hold on, Touko?"
Aoko's cheerful voice rang beside Touko's ear. Touko tried to identify its owner through the blurred vision no longer aided by her glasses.
"I didn't want to go this far, Touko." Aoko spoke to herself in a voice that sounded almost mournful. "But you knew I'd hated dogs since I was little, and you still went and found something like that to deal with Alice and me. That was truly tasteless."
"So I threw it into a prison with nothing in it," Aoko said brightly. "Let that lowly mongrel spend the rest of its life enjoying the torment of nothingness—I will never let it out."
"As for you, my sister." Aoko looked over Touko's bedraggled body lying on the ground with a distinctly frivolous gaze.
"Are you going to... kill me?" Touko said in broken fragments. "What a failed life... in the end... I still lost to you..."
She painfully tried to sit up, but failed, so she could only find a somewhat more comfortable position and continue lying there.
"Can I... ask one question...?" Touko asked. "Consider it... the final request... between sisters."
"Go ahead," Aoko said generously. "I've always been a generous person."
"Aoko... is your magic a means, or a result? Which one is it?" Touko laboriously forced out her question and waited expectantly for Aoko's answer.
"Of course it's a result," Aoko answered decisively. "I entered the place that old man never reached. I almost had even my personality and self dissolved there. The crests you see now are all spoils I brought back from there."
"Ah, and by the way," Aoko added in a tone of generous giveaway, "I also encountered a white dog on the shortcut. It nearly killed me. Maybe that's why I hate dogs even more than I did before?"
"...The Fifth and the First share the same coordinates. The sins grow ever deeper... I heard the Second and Fourth were both means to reach that place... Like kinds must repel one another. Perhaps one day, you and the First—Alice—will devour each other? And... inheriting magic means inheriting the path. The entrance to the spring really is here, isn't it?"
"You're thinking yourself into a corner, Touko." Aoko looked up at the starry sky before continuing, "The Fifth Magic, in essence, bears the principle of elimination and consumption, while the First represents creation and denial. Looking at it that way, aren't we inseparable partners who work perfectly together? How could we possibly oppose each other?"
"To you, obsessed with Nordic culture, that is a spring of wisdom. But to me, it is merely a gold mine waiting to be seized. It's a boring place, Touko."
"It was a path that vanished the moment it was completed," Aoko said. "After I succeeded, it disappeared along with Grandfather."
"...Is that so?" Touko said in an increasingly weak voice. "How incomprehensible..."
After saying that, Touko spoke no more. Her breathing grew weaker and weaker.
Having endured an immense amount of light and heat, not only had a vast area of her skin been burned, but even her airways had begun to constrict.
The fact that Touko could still remain conscious was already remarkable. Her powerful magical circuits were draining the last trace of her life, barely converting it into magical energy to keep her alive, but that could not last much longer.
"Don't think I'll let you die so easily, Touko." Aoko crouched down and spoke to Touko in the tone of someone whose prank had succeeded. "You still owe me so many debts. You have to be punished."
What nonsense is this rotten little sister spouting?
Unable to speak, Touko barely maintained her increasingly blurred consciousness and used all her strength to glare contemptuously at Aoko.
Then Aoko wiped a hand behind her back... and pulled out an elegantly decorated narrow-necked glass bottle. She held it close and shook it before Touko's eyes, letting her see the faintly glowing blue liquid inside.
Then Touko watched helplessly as Aoko popped off the stopper with a "pop" and unreasonably poured the liquid from the bottle down her throat.
Touko: "!"