The stars of the Taurus constellation shined bright, their light coming down and collecting in two spots at the sides of Nyx's head. They formed into golden horns on her head like those of a bull, electricity crackling at their tips.

Streams of lightning that made Jupiter's Godbolts look like nothing but mere flickers of electricity fired from each horn. They numbered over nine hundred googolplex and they were all zipping towards Jeanne.

The knight dodged around many of the bolts, but there were too many moving too fast. Jeanne used her relic to compensate. Any that she couldn't avoid, she stabbed with her lance, returning them to the nonexistence from whence they were born.

The streams of electricity began to shift trajectory midair, making every dodged bolt a threat that still had to be considered, and making it so that predicting where the bolts would go was impossible, at least for the average individual. Jeanne's Voices helped mitigate that issue. The extant issue was that, no matter how perfect the advice The Voices gave Jeanne, it didn't matter if she couldn't follow that advice before she got hit. That was an increasingly clear problem as the bolts began getting paired with more spacetime transcending swipes and thrusts of Nyx's clawed fingers and toes.

The Maid of Orléans began taking grazing hits from the claws, deep cuts forming across Jeanne's body. She occasionally touched bolts that burned her skin, heated up her armor so much it began to melt, and tried to paralyze the knight, Jeanne having to overpower the spasming of her muscles. She was slowing down despite her efforts, causing her to take more hits as time went on.

Jeanne had to counterattack or she'd eventually get overburdened. Jeanne came up with a way to do so, realizing that since Belial's weakening affected anything it touched, that could include omnipresent things. The lance stabbed forward, weakening and breaking through spacetime, allowing Belial to copy Nyx's feat of transcending spacetime with her claws.

Nyx felt something materializing inside her head and jerked her cranium out of the way just in time to avoid Belial's tip which had travelled through a wormhole.

Since the lighting was coming from the horns on her head, when Nyx shifted her head to the side, all the bolts had their vectors shift wildly and no longer directly targeted Jeanne.

With more spacetime ignoring thrusts, Jeanne now put Nyx on the defensive. The goddess dodged around, unable to focus on aiming her lighting streams making it easy for Jeanne to dodge as well thanks to her Voices.

Jeanne used her psychic powers to keep attacking with Belial, freeing her remaining hand to grip the handle of her sword. Right as she was going to pull it out of her sheath, the Maid suddenly couldn't. Her heart felt like it was banging against her ribs. Bile was coming up from her stomach and filling her mouth.

A panic attack was hitting Jeanne. Her lifetime of avoiding using her blade on another had created a complex. The act of keeping her sword sheathed was her whole purpose in her possession of the blade, to prove she won't kill even while possessing a clear method to do so. Now, upon needing to do so, it felt like a betrayal of her ideals to try and wield the blade. It would make her a murderer. At the same time, she only determined her old ideology to be hypocritical because she was still leading her countrymen to kill. That made her guilty, too.

Her self-loathing. He conflicted feelings on killing. Her feeling of betrayal toward Yahweh. Her blade had come to be the embodiment of all her emotional conflict, the internal war that kept her mind in a bedlam. Attempting to try and wield that weapon brought all the chaos writhing in the back of her mind to the forefront.

Jeanne was gasping for air from her panic, not realizing she had stopped dodging nor was she attacking.

All of Nyx's lightning streams converged on Jeanne, her body burning and turning her armor to a white hot slag. The Maid of Orléans' voice trilled out from the physical pain compounding the mental conflict. Nyx swung all her limbs as their claws pierced the fabric of reality to teleport to the knight. Jeanne forced her body to move despite the tension of her muscles, much of her muscular tissue ripping as she deftly dodged the four sets of claws.

Jeanne was back to dodging the lighting and claw swipes. The knight tried to use her powers to redirect one of Nyx's claw swings, but the goddess of night, knowing it was a possibility now, reacted in time to resist Jeanne's control and avoid hitting herself.

Jeanne grabbed and thrust her lance to create a wormhole again. When the relic was about to appear where Nyx's head was, she pulled her head out of the way again.

Right as Nyx did and Beleil was at the very tail end of materializing, Jeanne shifted her arm, turning the position of where her weapon would appear just enough that it would overlap with one of the goddess' horns. When Belial appeared the horn was destroyed, all the lighting coming from it ceasing.

The surprise success caused Jeanne's head to clear again. She realized another new application of Belial's power.

Jeanne stabbed her relic into the fabric of existence again. Nyx got ready to dodge, but the lance's tip didn't reappear after disappearing. It just vanished into the air. Jeanne twisted her arm again as she continued thrusting forward. Instead of a vortex of air, the fabric of reality itself became a vortex, all physical, mental, spiritual, and conceptual laws became an incoherent slurry that spiraled forward like a drill.

The remaining streams of lighting got sucked into the vortex and were eliminated. Feeling the shadow of death looming over her, Nyx flew up as fast as she could. She felt her legs and the platform they stood on barely get caught in the storm of raw existence. Leo's defenses gave way and were ripped to bits, the goddess' legs getting destroyed. She began getting pulled in further.

Nyx formed an avalanche of tendril from the sky that wrapped around the goddess. They tried to pull her out, but they weren't strong enough on their own to remove her from the whirl of existence. More lightning fired from Nyx's horn that curved and hit the ground, pushing off it to help the pull of the tentacles. Nyx managed to free herself of the suction of the vortex, though her legs were completely gone.

Nyx was so focused on getting out of the vortex that they barely had time to react to the appearance of Belial's tip from a wormhole, only getting her head out of the way while her remaining horn was not so lucky, getting shattered.

To replace her lost legs, Nyx formed a couple of tendrils into new legs, actually providing the benefit of allowing easier flight since she could telekinetically control the legs to move herself around.

Hypnos, who had been watching half-awake rather than commentating because of his confidence in his mother's victory, was suddenly fully conscious at seeing his mother so brutalized.

Neptune and Pluto felt their jaws hang, never imagining for the briefest instant that Nyx would be in such a state.

"This fight is brutal! Yet, it doesn't seem like either fighter is gonna slow down!"

"That last whirlpool of distorted reality was truly a surprise! I wonder why Jeanne didn't use such a splendorous technique before?"

The reason was that it was an improvised technique. Jeanne herself was constantly growing. Despite training for combat and strategizing, she avoided direct combat during her lifetime, and so she lacked personal experience. Now she was fighting to the death for the first time and it was unlocking her potential. Her growth was rapid.

She was the opposite of Nyx. She was an ancient being, one of the oldest of all. A mahā-kalpa is 311,040,000,000,000 years, and Nyx had existed for 989 googolplex mahā-kalpas. Throughout the ages, she had collected numerous weapons and abilities and had acquired near unparalleled combat experience. She was only exceeded by a few beings in these regards such as Yahweh, Ādi-Buddha, Brahman, and Azathoth.

Still, Nyx is a being who has been overlooking history from its early days.

In the early days, the personalities of the gods were not so different from those of humans. The main difference was that, without the worry of death for the most part, they were a lot less motivated by any sense of self-preservation. Indulging desire was their main source of incentive.

The gods gave birth to a culture of hedonism. Something that pervaded even to Revelations.

Nyx could not say she was much different and in a way it was just the natural result of their type of existence.

To ease the boredom, they began making new races that they considered lesser such as humanity. They existed to be more limited than the god so the gods could watch their greater struggles and be entertained. It was their equivalent of watching a movie and it made them feel a sense of pleasure knowing they didn't have to deal with the same struggles their creations did.

The problem is that this led to a sense of superiority in many of the gods. They felt so superior that they started demanding their creations worship them, build monuments to them, and give them sacrifices that served no practical purpose and were just because they wanted to make the other races work hard for their sakes. They felt they were owed worship from their creations because they considered themselves greater in all positive respects.

The gods also became highly judgemental of their creations. They began pointing out the faults of their creations and criticizing them for them while downplaying any strengths they had.

This eventually led the gods to feeling disdain and even malice towards their creations, humanity most of all.

This malice festered like an infected wound, pusing and bleeding cruelty and a lack of empathy.

And thus were born the circumstances that led to Revelations.

But, Nyx disagreed with this perspective. She always saw humanity and all the other species as being rather similar to the gods. The only difference was that the gods sat on such a high throne in the hierarchy of reality and unreality that they lacked any perspective on themselves. They possessed a deficit in self-reflection.

Her issue was that she lacked any method to help humanity, at least by the time Revelations began. Not only that, but then she was forced by Yahweh to be a tool in humanity's elimination.

"Libra."

The Libra constellation shined bright, but this time, the light didn't gather together to transmute into something. Instead the photons became spotlights on both Nyx and Jeanne.

The effect was immediate.

Nyx's hand, the same one Jeanne had lost, was gone. The goddess' body was burned and her muscles were torn to bits, just like Jeanne.

Jeanne found a hole in her chest, her organs liquified and spilling out the hole. Her legs were lopped off by nothing, more blood leaving her. The knight felt her head get light, her human physiology unable to withstand the same wound Nyx had so easily.

The click of Yahweh's tongue accompanied a flex of her power. Libra's effect was that it made it so both fighter's wounds and all negative influences upon them at the point of activation get mirrored. The problem was that it included the surprise Yahweh put inside Jeanne just before the fight started. The creator had to go out of her way to remove it from Nyx. Yahweh was still waiting for the right moment to use her hidden bombshell.

The Maid of Orléans used her telekinetic power to pull her lost blood back into herself and force bodily systems, especially the ones in her brain, to keep moving so she stayed alive despite her lost organs and the lack of the proper chemicals to naturally keep her body functioning.

This constant use of psychic power put Jeanne under strain and made it so any other usage of her psychic abilities would be multitasking, making her telekinetic attacks weaker.

In comparison, Libra was a technique that was constantly active, its mirror effect had already been initiated. It wouldn't continue mirroring their wounds beyond the ones that already had been, so Nyx could activate another constellation without issue.

"Pisces."

The Pisces constellation was the next to shine, the light forming a golden rope that wrapped around Jeanne, every limb of hers bound by the cord. Even her head was looped. Belial and Jeanne's sword were also tied up, Nyx not wanting to take any risks.

The rope began to tighten. Pressure was beginning to build on Jeanne's body, threatening to slice her body into chunks.

Psychic power began molding some of the checkerboard ground that both fighters floated high above into a collection of spears that flew up toward the goddess of night.

Nyx's claws were swung once more and the spears were ripped apart, but they were just a distraction.

Having remembered a strategy used in the previous round, Jeanne used her telekinesis to suck away all the air from around Nyx and leave the goddess in a vacuum. Nyx's eyes vaporized, along with all her other bodily fluids, and her body tried to explosively decompress, only withstanding the experience thanks to her toughness.

The goddess was mummy-like in her new dried out appearance.

Jeanne, while Nyx was still reacting to her loss of sight and dehydration, began pushing back against the squeeze of the cord around her while also tugging on them with telekinesis until the rope tore, the knight freeing herself.

Jeanne thrust her lance, the tip stabbing through Nyx's head. A twist of the relic and the goddess' cranium burst. Nyx's body fell lifelessly to the ground.

"Nyx is down, headless! Is she gonna stay down, or will she rise again?"

Jeanne wanted to pray that Nyx would stay down, but she knew no god would listen to her. She was half-dead, only able to keep herself going thanks to her psychic powers. She wasn't confident she could win if the fight continued.

Sadly for the Maid of Orléans, the fight would continue, signaled by the illumination of a constellation above.

"Gemini."

One of Nyx's lives had been lost, but she had a spare.

The goddess stood back up. All her wounds healed. Even her head was restored. She wasn't only revived, she was in peak condition.

It was a worst case scenario for Jeanne.

The knight floated to the ground, plopping onto her buttox, having no legs to stand on.

"You've won."

"What?"

"You've won. I can't win, not at this point. I'm too weak and you're back to full strength."

"…You haven't used your sword yet."

"It'd make no difference."

"How do you know?"

"I hear voices that tell me what the best thing to do is in any situation and they're saying there's nothing I can do."

"And are those voices infallible?"

"Yes."

"So you've never made a mistake?"

"N-no, I have."

"And you always listen to those voices."

"Yes."

"So, that means they can be wrong. They may say you should give up, but screw that. You got your whole species to protect, right?"

Jeanne couldn't say she was wrong so she grabbed the handle of her blade and she immediately started having another panic attack.

This was Nyx's chance. She couldn't ask for a more perfect opportunity. Just one attack while Jeanne was in such a fragile state, both physically and mentally, and she'd win. It'd be so easy, yet Nyx wasn't doing that. For some reason, she was conflicted over it. It felt wrong. She couldn't place why, considering she was trying to kill Jeanne just before. Pragmatically speaking, killing Jeanne was the smartest choice.

Nyx got on her knees before Jeanne and put a hand on the knight's.

"What's wrong?"

"I-I-I just, I just, there's just so much."

"Please, tell me what you mean."

"There just, I mean, there's just, the gods hate us, I caused people to die because I was following what I thought God wanted, but they hate me, and everyone else, and now I have to kill, and I promised to never use my sword, but that means I'm not using everything I have to protect humanity, I'm a bad person because of that, right? I can't, I shouldn't be here, someone else should be doing this, I'm not good enough, I'm a bad person!"

A finger came up to Jeanne's lips. Nyx smiled.

"Jeanne, the gods have been abusing all the other races since the beginning of time. I haven't done anything to stop them out of fear of Yahweh. I am definitely partly responsible for the sins of the gods by not interfering when I could. Am I a bad person?"

"Wh-no. Yahweh might have killed you."

"But, there's always the chance she wouldn't. Yet, I was too afraid."

"You were scared, we all get scared."

"So it's okay that I'm not perfect."

"Absolutely, you can't be perfect. What matters is doing the best we can."

"Then why are you different?"

"What?"

"You made mistakes, just like me, just like everybody. But, you were doing your best, right?"

"Ah, yes."

"Then you're fine. Unlike me, you were still fighting for a reasonable cause and you didn't know your god hated you."

"I…"

"You're doing your best, and you're doing good."

"But, so many people died because of me."

"It wasn't like you were going on a crusade or something, you were trying to protect your country. Meanwhile, I stood by and let trillions of beings suffer and die. Again, am I a bad person?"

"No."

"And neither are you."

Arm wrapped around Jeanne, Nyx hugging the Maid of Orléans. The goddess' hand stroked Jeanne's head, her fingers running through the knight's hair. Jeanne's blood soaked into Nyx's clothes, but she paid it no mind.

Jeanne stopped breathing for a second, her body quivering as she was suddenly embraced. She couldn't speak. Nyx's finger's ran through her hair. Jeanne was crying, she didn't know when she started. She felt like she was wrapped in a blanket. She felt a confusing blend of sensations. She felt like she was finally going to sleep after so many hours of being forced to stay awake, yet also that she was finally awakening after a long nightmare. Jeanne nestled into Nyx, indulging in the moment of release.

There was a silence throughout the arena, most of the spectators feeling disconcerted watching a tender moment between two individuals that were tasked with killing each other. They wanted to see the fight continue, but none could bring themselves to interject into the moment of peace in the ring.

Sin was clinging to her mother, crying over the beauty of Nyx's kindness. She wanted both Nyx and Jeanne to live, but such a future could never be.

Jeanne gently pushed away from Nyx.

"Thank you."

"No problem."

Right as Nyx tried to stand up, Jeanne grabbed the goddess' wrist.

"Why are you going so far out of my way to help me? You could have killed me easily when I was distressed earlier. Why put yourself at risk?"

"At this point, I'm not sure, or, maybe I don't know how to put it into words." Jeanne released Nyx, who took a few steps back. "Now, it's the final act. Are you ready?"

Levitating off the ground, Jeanne wiped her eyes clean of her tears. She gripped her sword's handle and took a deep breath. She felt at ease.

One slow pull, and the weapon sheathed at her side was free, the once simple looking short sword with five crosses on the blade morphing, its power as a weapon activating.

The weapon's new form was still that of a sword, but the handle was as long as Jeanne's arm, the blade as long as she was tall. It was double edged, and barely thicker than the handle, which was only as thick as a finger. Most eye-catching were the flames that wreathed the blade that were a rainbow of colors that were hypnotic in their graceful flickering.

The sheath also changed, turning to more colorful flames that engulfed Jeanne's body before dying down, the knight having transformed. Her hair became chromatic fire, her eyes shifted to a rainbow of colors. All her wounds were healed, limbs regrown, stamina restored.

It was called The Sword of Attila when the infamous Hun owned it, then it fell into the hands of the Lady of the Lake, who gifted it to King Arthur and it was called Excalibur. In Rhydderch Hael's hands it was called Dyrnwyn, and in Charlemange's it was called Joyeuse. Before fate was broken, it was destined to be wielded by the fire giant named Surtr, who would use it to devastate reality and kill the Norse pantheon.

Within its hilt was the tip of the Lance of Longinus, the spear that pierced the side of Yahweh, bathing in her blood and becoming infused with some of her power. It could control fate, at least back when fate still existed, but it was still a weapon on the level of Amaterasu and Elizabeth Báthory.

Jeanne's name for the weapon was The Sword of Sainte Catherine de Fierbois.

"I'm ready."