Gardenia’s Heart

Purple hair that shimmered like amethyst. Crimson eyes so intense they seemed to contain living flames. A slender body with graceful curves that would undoubtedly be considered beautiful anywhere in the world.

She was an existence whose beauty alone could shake entire nations.

Standing proudly upon the dead star-shaped island, the woman fixed her gaze ahead, sending a shiver through Bahamut’s entire body.

From the base of her neck to the tips of her fingers, from the swell of her breasts to the soles of her feet, she was cloaked in the cosmos.

As though galaxies and nebulae flowed beneath her skin, her ethereal attire seemed alive in its very essence.

A long, split cape trailed behind her, gleaming alongside her purple hair, which radiated a cosmic glow.

Searching for words to describe what she looked like was futile.

She was unlike anything.

That alone was enough to describe her.

”...”

There, in the cold of the night, at the very first second the spell took effect, Bahamut stared at that existence without moving, to the very core of her being.

Her surroundings became hazy, as though the icy chill racing down her spine had driven her senses into overdrive in an instinctive act of self-preservation. Her entire focus narrowed to that woman—and nothing else.

A single second stretched into eternity.

Her mind raced, accelerated, and struggled desperately to comprehend what stood before her.

A creature that warped its surroundings simply by existing.

A being whose mere presence shattered every remnant of common sense.

When was the last time her mind had gone completely blank? When she had been unable to form even a single coherent thought?

She remembered.

It was at the edge of the world.

When she stood before that person.

”She’s just like the Demon Kin—”

Bahamut never finished her sentence.

For the first time that day, searing pain erupted through both of her forearms.

”Argh!?”

The cry that escaped through her clenched fangs was as bewildered as the expression that twisted her beautiful face.

---

Bahamut, The End.

Without a doubt, that hero was one of the most battle-hardened individuals in the entire world. As the commander of a military clan, it could be said that she lived for combat.

Even if her eyes were distracted, her ears would warn her of danger. Even if her sense of touch was dulled, her sense of smell would never fail her.

That truth had been proven over centuries of battle, clash after clash.

As the one who had stood at the forefront of her group against the Demon King and his army, her body had endured blows that no one else in the world had survived.

Thus, even against an attack her mind could not react to in time, her body would answer automatically through instinct alone.

”Jelly... you damn bastard.”

At that moment, that instinct was the only reason the woman had lost both of her arms instead of her head.

Leaping backward while ignoring the pain, Bahamut felt her blood whirl through the air like a floating river. With a sound like water boiling inside a kettle, the crimson liquid flowed on its own. The shattered remains of her severed arms were drawn back toward her body, reconstructing themselves in an instant.

”Something’s wrong—”

That was all the dragon managed to mutter before her newly restored left arm was torn away once again.

Her vision had been swallowed by the cosmos.

Appearing at her side in an instant, her fist extended toward Bahamut’s heart, the beautiful girl with purple hair stared at her with narrowed crimson eyes.

As crystallized scales scattered across the ground with a sharp clatter, Bahamut twisted her body and threw her right fist forward with such speed that it shattered the sound barrier as though it were nothing.

Yet, as if she had struck empty air, the target standing directly before her vanished.

”Tsk!”

The click of her tongue escaped alongside her body pitching forward.

Bahamut didn’t need long to understand what had happened.

A crimson jet painted the night as blood erupted from her knee. Her center of gravity vanished the instant her right leg was silently severed.

Without wasting even a glance on the limb she had lost, two ivory wings unfurled from her back, and she shot into the heavens.

Within seconds, the entire circumference of the island lay beneath her. The powerful, frantic beating of her wings carried her high into the night sky.

Ironically, however, when she looked upward, she saw no stars.

Instead, her reptilian eyes remained fixed upon the cosmic maiden standing atop the mountain’s summit, as though she had become one with the night itself.

Something was wrong.

Bahamut knew that much.

She simply couldn’t explain what it was.

Was it like stopping time?

No... it was similar, but fundamentally different.

Previously, whenever the metamorph moved, even if she vanished from one place and appeared in another, her magic was still crude enough that its activation was obvious.

To become a portal.

Without needing to physically pass through it, the user could relocate without giving their opponent any chance to interfere. Moreover, by distorting the space surrounding her attacks, not even Bahamut’s crystal scales could withstand the resulting spatial destruction.

Naturally, such a technique was anything but simple.

Even setting aside the risks, it was a spell so absurdly complex that no sane person would ever attempt to master it.

Bahamut had only ever known one fool reckless enough to push spatial magic to such an extreme. Though she had witnessed it only a handful of times, she had spent enough years with that arrogant boy to study the technique thoroughly.

Although she didn’t understand every detail with complete precision, Bahamut knew enough about the technique to grasp that this method of using the spell relied heavily on self-suggestion.

For example, by defining the entrance as the place where you currently stood and the exit as the place you intended to reach by walking, it was possible to shorten that distance through a spatial jump. Even so, the brain still had to process the movement. Because of that, anything that helped guide the process instinctively—such as the motion of the feet, the bend of the knees, or the twist of the hips—would unconsciously occur before the teleportation itself.

And yet, that girl...

”She’s faster than Malus.”

Like successive flashes appearing and disappearing before her eyes, Bahamut watched the metamorph close the distance at an overwhelming speed.

---

”So, she figured it out,” Nia murmured.

A hand to strike, feet to walk. Even though Nia used that principle, she wasn’t bound by it.

Even while mimicking a human form, her transformation was nothing more than an outward change.

A metamorph was, quite literally, its gelatinous body. Though she possessed a heart and a brain in this form, neither of them was truly a vital organ. She had never had one to begin with.

Every tiny part of her body was her entire being. By moving every part of herself, shortening every movement, and teleporting every part simultaneously, there was no action between what she intended to do and what she actually did.

After calculating every motion required to throw a right hook, Nia teleported every one of those actions at once. As a result, in less than the blink of an eye, she appeared directly behind Bahamut and struck the back of her neck at the very same instant.

”Argh!”

Bahamut’s cry echoed through the night as her body was hurled toward the ground.

By pouring as much dark mana as possible into every impact and combining it with the shortening of every movement, the spatial distortion created at the point of contact became even more destructive. To an outside observer, it looked like nothing more than a punch, yet the cataclysmic force hidden within it was powerful enough to send the mighty dragon soaring through the sky.

”Eight minutes and forty seconds.”

Counting the time she had left, Nia immediately pursued her opponent.

Although she had finally begun to inflict real physical damage on Bahamut, it would mean nothing unless she could land a fatal blow.

Nia had no way of knowing how much damage to a dragon’s humanoid form was equivalent to killing them once.

Would destroying their heart while they were human, or beheading them, be the same as doing so in their draconic form? The fact that Bahamut had repeatedly protected her neck and heart seemed to support that theory, but relying on it alone was far too risky.

Without the answer, there was only one thing Nia could do.

Kill the woman before her until she stayed dead.

”You’re losing focus, Jelly!”

Feeling the boiling blood finish reconstructing her leg and shattered ribs, Bahamut roared into the heavens.

A thunderous boom, louder than the fiercest lightning, split the clouds as two ivory wings beat once.

With overwhelming force, the pair of wings displaced a massive wall of air, halting the dragon woman’s fall—no, launching her straight back upward.

”Hahaha!”

Charging toward the maiden clothed in the cosmos, the hero clenched her fist, encasing it in a dense layer of crystal scales.

As the two rushed toward one another, their collision seemed inevitable.

Yet the instant Bahamut threw another punch, her target vanished from sight.

”If you’re going to keep attacking the same way, I’m going to get bored!”

The moment those words left her lips, Bahamut felt a tremendous impact crash into her back. Crystal scales and blood scattered in every direction, yet her body, supported by her ivory wings, didn’t budge an inch.

A wide grin spread across the dragon woman’s face as she spun around with such speed that she broke the sound barrier. The violent creaking of muscles and tendons pushed beyond their limits erupted through the air.

Azure mana enveloped her body, staining the dark night like a stroke of paint.

So fast it bordered on the instantaneous, Bahamut’s clenched fist slammed into Nia’s stomach just as the metamorph teleported behind her.

It was a clean hit.

No matter how fast Nia had become through teleportation or how devastating her attacks now were, a direct blow should have been enough to bring her down.

”...!?”

Or so Bahamut thought.

”So it really works in practice. You have my thanks, Hero.”

Looking down at the fist resting harmlessly against her stomach, Nia tilted her head with a smile.

She vanished.

Reappearing with her right leg already pressed against the side of Bahamut’s head, the metamorph drove a vicious kick into the dragon. Crimson blood burst into the air as an irritated grunt escaped the hero’s lips. Bahamut immediately retaliated, swinging her white tail toward the girl’s slender waist.

”What?”

Yet it was as though she had struck something that didn’t exist.

The attack that should have cleaved the girl in two did nothing more than pass harmlessly through her.

Nia’s counterattack came instantly.

Teleporting beyond the ivory tail’s reach, she unleashed blow after blow upon Bahamut.

Her face. Her back. Her arms. Her legs. Her stomach.

Without pause, the purple-haired girl alternated her strikes, each impact so powerful that the sound of the dragon woman’s bones breaking echoed through the night.

”You nullified it?”

As Nia’s relentless barrage continued to rain down on her, Bahamut muttered under her breath. The assault never ceased, yet she continued to analyze it until, at last, her mismatched eyes widened.

”No... It was like hitting nothing.”

Spinning away while releasing a dense wave of mana to force her opponent back, Bahamut beat her wings powerfully and stared at Nia in disbelief.

”You’re teleporting the force of the impacts?”

The absurd question was answered by nothing more than a faint smile.

Whenever force is applied to something, the energy it carries inevitably reaches its target, producing a reaction proportional to that force. It was one of the most fundamental laws governing the physical world.

But as a living portal, Nia no longer had to obey common sense.

The metamorph had become an absurd enigma, one that defied every principle of science.

And that gave rise to an impossible theory.

Just as she could shorten the act of throwing a punch by teleporting the sequence of actions required to perform it, she could do the same with the punch’s consequences.

Even if Bahamut’s fist struck one side of the portal, if the ”path” never led to the other side, the blow would never reach the metamorph.

Bahamut was certain her fist had touched Nia’s stomach.

Yet all her senses registered was the feeling of striking empty air.

She stood directly before her, and yet her hand simply couldn’t reach her.

No...

That wasn’t quite right.

She was touching Nia.

Her fingers simply couldn’t produce any effect on the existence before them.

”You’ve come up with something pretty irritating, Jelly.”

With a grin that revealed her sharp fangs, Bahamut beat her wings against the dark sky and charged toward the maiden clothed in the cosmos.

”But it’s not invincible.”

It was like a deluge.

An enormous quantity of mana flooded the air all at once, condensing around Bahamut’s right fist. The atmosphere trembled, and the surrounding pressure plummeted, creating such an immense vacuum that Nia’s body was dragged toward her as though caught by a giant magnet.

Even if she could unleash instantaneous attacks with every teleport, Bahamut knew Nia still had to decide which strike would be most effective.

For someone as methodical as she was, seeing an entirely new technique at this stage of the battle was unexpected enough to create an opening—if only for a fraction of a second.

And for the hero, that was enough.

The impact came.

With enough force to redraw the maps of entire continents, the dragon’s fist, clad in crystallized scales, slammed into the center of Nia’s stomach.

Crystal scales clashed against the cosmos, bluish mana colliding with the dark mana that enveloped the girl’s body like a cataclysm descending from the heavens.

Blows should no longer have been able to injure her. As before, the force should have been teleported away. Yet the dragon woman smiled.

”I knew it. Even you can’t teleport all of it.”

Her two-colored eyes narrowed as Bahamut watched bubbling purple fluid spill from the corner of Nia’s mouth.

It didn’t even take a blink for the girl to retreat dozens of meters, hovering in the air with the aid of four wings forged from black lightning. Dragon blood, empowered by her dark mana, instantly began healing the damage.

”So if the impact amplified by mana exceeds a certain threshold—if I apply enough force—your body can’t bear the burden of teleporting all of it, can it?” Bahamut declared with a smile as she stared at the girl.

At that moment, Nia thought Lily could probably have bluffed her way through this situation. But she knew the irritation now written across her face was all the confirmation Bahamut needed.

Teleporting such a dense mass of mana wasn’t easy.

Although she could transport countless things through her portals, there was a limit to how much she could move at once.

If she opened a massive portal beneath the ocean, for example, transporting hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of seawater for even a few seconds would push her to the brink of exhaustion. Mana was no different.

Nia quickly realized that even if she managed to divert ninety-nine percent of the punch, the remaining one percent still carried enough force to hurt her.

She had less than ten minutes of [Nebula Maiden] remaining. If she suffered even a single fatal wound, she might lose more dark mana than she could afford to spend on healing, shortening that time even further.

”But it’ll still be enough.”

Muttering those words, Nia clenched her fists as she faced the dragon hero.

Every one of her previous blows had barely scratched the outermost layer of Bahamut’s scales. But now, she possessed the power to inflict a mortal wound upon the dragon.

The last three days had pushed her body beyond its limits. Not even the extra pair of wings granted by the innate ability of the Wing Clan could replenish her reserves fast enough if they were completely drained.

At best, she would simply collapse once the ten minutes ran out.

At worst...

For the first time in her life, she refused to think about that possibility.

This was her last chance.

And so, once again, Gardenia declared her resolve.

”I’m going to kill you.”

The hero blessed by the world gave her answer.

“Do it, if you can.”

The cataclysmic thunderclaps that followed those words shattered the night sky.

Moving faster than any ordinary eye could follow, the two girls exchanged blows powerful enough to make the world itself tremble.

The black radiance filled with the cosmos collided with crystallized white, giving birth to impacts whose color could not be described.

Again and again—not in a single clash, but in every collision that followed—blows that seemed powerful enough to erase all of reality continued to collide.

Sound, heat, light, and everything that gave reality meaning ceased to make sense.

”I’m going to have a problem if the island collapses with my brat still on top of it.”

Hurled backward by a blow so powerful that it sent her crashing into the labyrinth island, Bahamut watched the entire structure shudder like it had been struck by a massive earthquake, threatening to fall from the heavens.

Baring her fangs in a grin, Bahamut condensed mana into her fist and struck the girl who had just teleported in front of her.

”Do me a favor and let’s take this somewhere else!”

Crystallized white light overwhelmed the cosmic black. In a single instant, Nia’s slender body was launched across the sky like a comet.

”Argh!”

She was no stranger to pain, but enduring the crushing force of gravity amplified dozens of times by such violent acceleration was another matter entirely. Her four lightning wings frantically fought to slow her down. Even giving everything they had, it still took dozens of kilometers before she finally regained control of her body.

Far enough away that the floating labyrinth had long since disappeared from sight, Nia found herself surrounded by nothing but the stars overhead and the endless sea of clouds formed by the mist below.

That was, except for the white blur streaking across the heavens.

”Tsk.”

Clicking her tongue, Nia shot after it.

At such extreme altitudes, the air grew so thin that flying at absurd speeds became possible. With aerodynamic drag nearly disappearing as fewer air molecules collided against her wings, Bahamut accelerated at speeds well beyond the sound barrier.

Did she realize there was a time limit? Nia wondered if that was what this was about.

”Five minutes and twenty seconds.”

If Bahamut simply focused on running until her dark mana was exhausted, Nia would be in trouble. She couldn’t afford to let the dragon hero leave her sight.

Two hundred meters—that was the farthest she could teleport in this state. Even after two days of relentless training, that remained her limit. Even so, by chaining together countless short-range teleports, she could cross incredible distances in the blink of an eye. Combined with her thunder wings, it was enough to keep pace with the dragon hero flying at full speed.

As she wondered where Bahamut was headed, Nia’s crimson eyes widened at the sight emerging on the horizon.

Rising so high that it pierced through the dense mist, a colossal wooden structure split the heavens. Trunks that looked as ancient as time itself pulsed with a faint golden glow. Branches covered in emerald leaves intertwined in patterns so vast and intricate they seemed almost infinite.

The World Tree revealed itself in all its glory.

”I was just flying without a destination, but who would’ve thought we’d end up here?”

Despite flying ahead of the metamorph, Bahamut’s amused voice reached Nia’s ears.

They had crossed the entire distance from Athamas to Lampides at such tremendous speed that even Nia hadn’t realized just how fast they had been moving.

Still racing through the sky, the white blur approached the immense branches before casually landing on one of them.

The thick, twisting limbs intertwined like a web of living wood. Like a small forest nestled within the tree itself, slender beams of moonlight filtered through the emerald canopy, forming pillars of silver.

”You’re not affected by the World Tree’s barrier?” Nia asked with a puzzled frown as she landed on a nearby branch.

Like an enormous dome covering the forest, the invisible barrier protected the land of the elves from the Demon King’s mist. Thanks to it, even from this height, the silhouettes of the forest below remained clearly visible.

”Let’s just say you’re not the only one with a special exception from that woman.”

Rolling her shoulders as though loosening up, the dragon gently cracked her neck before turning toward the purple-haired girl.

”So... shall we continue?”

Beneath the branches of the World Tree, their fists collided once more.

Leaping onto a higher branch, Bahamut wrapped her tail around the wood and swung her body aside, narrowly avoiding Nia, who appeared exactly where she had been about to land. Launching herself away, the dragon’s eyes darted frantically in every direction, her senses pushed to their absolute limit as she searched for where the metamorph would emerge next.

However, as if yanked by an invisible hand, Bahamut suddenly felt someone grab her foot midair. Her body was violently pulled off balance, twisting at a sharp angle before crashing into one of the massive branches and burying itself deep within the wood.

”Argh!”

Snorting more in annoyance than pain, Bahamut planted her hands against the branch and forced herself free.

The moment she rose, however, the sole of a high heel wreathed in cosmic radiance slammed into her face.

The kick landed squarely across the bridge of her nose, sending her reeling backward.

There was no pause.

Pressing the attack, Nia unleashed blow after blow from every conceivable angle.

After so many exchanges, she had finally understood the strongest dragon’s fighting style.

By remaining in her humanoid form, Bahamut preserved both her immense strength and mass while taking full advantage of her speed.

There was nothing particularly elaborate about her style. In fact, compared to many of the opponents Nia had faced throughout her life, it was remarkably straightforward. But the overwhelming power she possessed rendered sophisticated technique unnecessary.

”Jelly, you’re amazing!”

Teleporting from branch to branch, Nia evaded the small crystal scales Bahamut fired like projectiles. Watching the dragon laugh with exhilaration, she couldn’t help but frown.

Every attack she dodged slammed into the World Tree instead, sending massive chunks of ancient wood crashing toward the forest below.

If they kept fighting here, they could end up destroying part of the elven forest—or worse, damaging her own home.

“If you don’t mind, return that favor to me.”

Nia’s seemingly out-of-place remark made Bahamut knit her brows in confusion for a brief instant.

Then confusion gave way to pain.

Like a tidal wave of cosmic energy crashing into her, Bahamut was completely engulfed by a fist that materialized directly against her stomach.

In a single instant, the mass of black cosmic light surged through her flesh. Every bone, every strand of cartilage, every nerve, every drop of blood trembled violently for what felt like an eternity compressed into a single second before her entire body was hurled skyward without the slightest chance to defend herself.

She tore through the branches of the World Tree—

No.

She flew even higher.

Far above its highest canopy, Bahamut could still feel herself being launched ever upward, while just behind her, Nia chained together teleport after teleport in pursuit.

All sound vanished.

An endless black void, strewn with countless points of light, welcomed them.

They had no need to breathe.

There was no reason to keep their battle confined to the edge of the stratosphere anymore.