The manor gates shattered under the combined assault of several priests.
The heavy oak panels, reinforced with ironwork, burst inward. Splinters flew like cannonballs, pinning several animated plants that had been about to pounce behind the gates to the ground.
Hubert charged at the front. His warhammer swept through the air, smashing the still-pulsating dark green runes on either side of the doorframe and clearing away the last remnants of the entrance's ward.
"Charge!"
The team shot into the manor like an arrow.
But the instant they crossed the threshold—
Funai Er's summoning ritual had passed a stage. Her voice fell silent for the moment as she held her breath and awaited the result.
The next second, the sky changed color. The swirling clouds spun faster, bringing with them a more fundamental distortion of space.
The low-hanging dark red canopy of sky seemed to be torn open from the center by an invisible hand. At first, the crack was only a thin line, but it quickly widened, revealing a deep, dizzying expanse of cosmic black beyond.
A closer look revealed countless tiny, twinkling galaxies flowing within it, spiral nebulae, spinning star clusters, meteor belts, and even the faint outline of some enormous, incomprehensible creature swimming through the void. The sight was breathtakingly magnificent, as if the entire universe had been compressed into it.
Above the black curtain, something opened its eyes.
A dark red point appeared, like a bead of congealed blood. Then it began to expand and distort, stretching into an oval shape as fine, capillary-like lines emerged around its edges.
The lines spread and intertwined, eventually sketching out the complete shape of an eye—a vast eye that covered nearly a third of the sky within everyone's field of vision.
Its iris was bloodred. There was no focus at