The word had barely left her lips before it was forcibly caught in her throat, because Ele's grip tightened once more—so hard it nearly crushed her skull.
She gave her no chance to struggle.
Grabbing silver-haired Ishtar by the face, Ele spun sharply through the air, using the momentum to add force to her next blow. At the same time, her gaze swept over the ground below and locked onto an uninhabited stretch of open land in the outskirts of Snowfield City.
Then, she concentrated all her weight and magical energy into her right hand and activated her Noble Phantasm.
"Kur Kigal Irkalla—!!!"
With a roar full of fury, Ele hurled the remains of Ishtar in her hand violently toward the distant ground, as though she were throwing a bowling ball.
This Noble Phantasm was the counterpart to Ishtar's "An Gal Tā Kigal Shē." But rather than being cast from the sky down upon the earth, it was the hammer of the mistress of the underworld, unleashed from beneath the ground through the endlessly stretching land.
It was activated through earthquakes and shifts in the earth's crust, a tremor powerful enough to bring down Mount Abif.
Though its destructive power could not match Ishtar's Venusian bombardment, the true essence of this Noble Phantasm was to "turn the terrain into the underworld." And within the underworld, Ereshkigal would be greatly strengthened.
Ele had not deployed the underworld, nor had she activated the Noble Phantasm from the ground, but it was more than enough to deal with this cursed program that had merely copied a portion of the true Ishtar's power, memories, and divinity!
The instant Ele's fingers released her, silver-haired Ishtar's body became a crimson meteor and plummeted straight toward the earth.
The air shrieked past her ears, and everything in