At the very center of the shockwave was Dancing Skirt.
Or, more precisely—the remains of Dancing Skirt.
At the moment the battle fully began, the wounds that the blood blade had torn across her earlier revealed themselves. Her entire body had been ripped cleanly in two... Between the two halves of her slantedly severed body, a pitch-black crystal floated in midair.
It was no larger than a fist, yet it seemed capable of devouring everything around it.
The instant it appeared, all the surrounding matter began to dissolve, turning into nothingness. That naturally included Dancing Skirt herself.
Her eyes had completely lost their pupils and whites, becoming as black as the crystal.
Fragments visibly peeled away from her two remaining halves, one after another—each about the size of a thumb. Then the fragments crumbled further, breaking down into grains of rice, slowly turning into nothingness.
During this process, the solid earth became a liquid resembling mud. It then transformed into gas before finally dissipating.
The dissolution was astonishingly fast. In an instant, the wine cellar had vanished completely. Next came the church above it.
From the way it appeared, it looked as though unparalleled ripples of energy had erupted, erasing and pulverizing everything they touched... But that was not its true nature.
It was the "dissolution of meaning."
Everyone had things they once cared about but considered childish after growing up, things they no longer paid attention to. Likewise, every country and civilization had, during its successive stages of development, goals it had once pursued at all costs, only for those goals to become troublesome, backward things in need of optimization and reconstruction at some point in the future.
The bricks on the ground, old homes, ruined city walls... The wine cellar beneath them, and the church above.
At some