"Is that... Zeus's true form?"
Fujimaru Ritsuka looked up, the metal head occupying half the sky reflected in her retinas. The overwhelming pressure made her lungs feel as though all air had been drained from them, turning even breathing into a luxury.
She had seen her share of things on this journey.
In Russia's frozen wilderness, she had faced Ivan the Terrible, vast as a mountain. In India's cycle of rebirth, she had looked directly upon the Mighty Form god, Arjuna.
But the thing before her was on an entirely different level from those previous foes.
No matter how enormous Ivan the Terrible was, he was still within the limits of a living creature.
No matter how powerful Arjuna was, he still conformed to phenomena comprehensible to Earth's humans.
But Zeus before them was something beyond human understanding and imagination.
It was a war fortress composed purely of superalloy, antigravity engines, and interstellar-class main cannons.
The high-temperature circuits flowing across its armor heated the surrounding air until it warped. Simply hovering there, the gravitational waves produced by its own mass made the New Artdeissei's deck emit teeth-grating sounds of metal fatigue.
"Warning! High-energy reaction! Mana threshold has exceeded the critical point! Faraday cage effect is collapsing!"
At that moment, Little da Vinci's voice rang out.
Along with it came red warning windows popping up across the screen.
The warning windows stacked densely together, like a wall bleeding red.
In the sky, that enormous metal face made its proclamation.
"I am Thunder That Tears the Stars!!"
Accompanied by an emotionless mechanical voice, thunder far more immense than before gathered within the clouds.
This was no longer ordinary lightning, but highly compressed plasma.
Tens of thousands of lightning bolts, each comparable to Artemis's Anti-Star Noble Phantasm, intertwined and formed an inverted sea