"You're still a prickly youth," Oni-Goroshi notes. "Really, I don't see the problem. If they're dead, they're dead."

"Fuck off, Goddess."

"You know as well as I that –"

Ting. Her blade resonates for a moment.

"Stop. There's something in that building."

"...can you be more specific?"

"It is something to do with magic."

"Thanks."

Enter the dilapidated shell of a library! Theopolis had a lot of libraries. Fire loves those, as it turns out.

...but the frame of this one is unusual. Solid granite, and there's a safe-room inside with a door of steel. Emil puts Oni-Goroshi through the hinges; they clank to the ground, and the door falls open.

Behind it is some kind of grand orrery. There's also racks upon racks of circular stones, inscribed with runes.

Oni-Goroshi shhhhings excitedly. "This is so strange. Pick up a rock!"

Emil does so.

There's some kind of slot in the device, perfectly shaped to hold one. He puts it in...

"No, you –"

There's a lurch in his gut, and suddenly he's somewhere else.

"fucking idiot!"

They arrive on the deck of a ship in the middle of the sea.

Said ship is swaying more than ships ought to. Quite a lot more, actually.

The reason it's doing that is, it seems, that it is hanging, by way of a harpoon, onto some sort of monstrous creature akin to a whale, only the top of which Emil can see, and it seems to be swimming much more rapidly than this boat is accustomed to. The tiny iceberg tip of the creature might be enough to nevertheless give Emil the impression that it's many, many times larger than the last enormous creature Emil had to fight.

That's not all, though. There are several people on deck fighting some disgusting little creatures about half as tall as an adult human, using magic quite unlike anything Emil has seen before.

(The disgusting little creatures.)

The people fighting the creatures include:

A black-haired woman wearing a fluffy black dress that not only defies gravity but also any conventional wisdom about the number of belts people are meant to wear, or what they're meant to be attached to, who seems to be casting elemental spells of destruction.

A boy in ceremonial-looking gear, with numerous necklaces on top of his bare torso and a skirt that looks too elaborate and fancy for combat, holding a long metal staff that he seems to be using as a focus for various kinds of supportive spells.

Another boy in a different kind of skirt, this one wielding a sword made of a strange blue crystal that reflects and refracts the sun in a way that looks almost like it's made of water.

A man in a yellow vest top cut away at the stomach and blue and yellow baggy trousers gathered above the ankle whose weapon seems to be a ball of some kind which hits a lot harder than it ought by rights to and which always seems to somehow finds its way back to his hand.

And some sort of tall blue humanoid lion-person wielding a lance taller than he is, managing jumps into the air much higher than seem possible that end in landing his spear bladefirst into the creatures.

The monsters don't seem to take damage in a conventional sense, though; they immediately heal of any cuts or immediate physical harms, but after sustaining enough damage they evaporate into wisps of light that dissipate in the air.

Emil's snap tactical judgments improved, over the course of his exile. This isn't a difficult one.

An ampoule of quicksilver on his belt bubbles vigorously. At superhuman speed, he slashes straight through the nearest monster; it explodes into hellfire (and those same wisps, which dissipate as normal), and he explodes into a very different kind of fire. Blue-green, the same color as the length of sharpened jade that's now slashing even faster at another monster that could've sworn, if it swore, that he was five yards away.

He goes after clusters of enemies, generally. It's not difficult to see why, what with how he can swing his blade and bisect three monsters that then explode and take out three more apiece. Individuals are low priority.

Except the big one. That one... once the disgusting little monsters are less of an issue, he'll have to figure out what to do about that.

While he's fighting, a voice calls out, into the ears of everyone present. Almost all of them hear it in Spiran. One of them hears it in Al Bhed. One hears it in a Ronso dialect which very few people outside of a particular mountain range should know anything about.

"Hello," the voice says, female and disconcertingly calm. "Would anyone mind getting us up to speed on what the fuck is going on?"

"Sin is heading towards Kilika, we're trying to be enough of a distraction that it'll give up, it's currently throwing—"

Several more disgusting little creatures shoot off from the bigger monster's carapace like evil ticks and fly straight at the deck.

"—more Sinspawn at us continuously."

"Convenient," she says opaquely. "Should we know anything about this Sin? Its defenses and resistances, its likelihood to escalate, whether it's the only thing preventing the apocalypse..."

"That was one time!"

(This is not spoken in Spiran, Al Bhed, or any other language that anyone on this vessel might speak, nor is Emil a deity, so it doesn't come through.)

??????

"It is invulnerable to—most things—but is not as far as I know preventing the end of the world. It may be causing it."

(The others seem to be accepting that he's speaking for them and are in any event too busy to worry about it.)

"Invulnerable is as invulnerable does."

Now Emil is standing on the beast's back, jade fire pooling around his feet, boiling away any water that splashes near him. And he funnels the sparks he picked up from the monsters into a particular gem...

and, for the next few seconds, things get odd. He is not literally in five, or twenty-five, or a hundred places at once; that would be silly. And the slashing blades from those phantasms don't do anything. But when the flickering is over, he swings, and swings again, and then thrusts his blade into the intersection of the two slashes, and it has the terrible weight of a hundred blows.

That breaks through the outer magical shielding that covers the surface of the creature and sets in on fire. Fire that is not being put out by the seawater splashing at high speeds and Sin's own resistance to fire, and that fire is rapidly spreading from the point of contact. The creature sways in place a bit more than it was, and then—

—a section of the monster's outer carapace including where Emil is standing and where the fire has spread, about a hundred square metres in area, is ejected out into open sea with what would be enough force to leave a medium-sized crater on land.

Being extraordinarily fast is a not insignificant part of Emil's entire deal. As the carapace launches into the water, he's already off it, flicker-boom creating another pool of jade fire, and he's on the offensive, slashing wildly (though not so existentially), intermittently producing more explosions.

Sin's magical shielding has already regenerated by the time he's doing that, and several of the creatures that boy called "Sinspawn" earlier, which are attached to Sin all over everywhere, are now being shot in Emil's direction like bullets, or perhaps more precisely like guided missiles, one after another tracking Emil's position with uncanny accuracy. Any that aren't destroyed and miss or are deflected open their "wings" and start shooting rays of light at Emil from the air.

At the same time, a much larger Sinspawn shoots up into the sky and then down towards the boat, a towering thing about four times the height of an adult human which looks much meaner than the smaller creatures.

The adds are not only not a problem, they're a gift. Intermittently he lobs a burning missile at one, chaining through their little shooting gallery, and gathers up a few more soulsparks from the fission of corpus and anima.

The big bastard... he'll keep half an eye on the situation on deck. If it looks too dire down there, he may have to distract himself. Right now, he's working.

The situation on deck is actually deteriorating very rapidly. The people there are clearly used to fighting but—not to this much pressure.

There's another creature with them, now, which wasn't there before and didn't come from Sin. It seems to be fighting on their side, though, and doing reasonable if perhaps not sufficient work to even the odds.

Damn it.

They can hold on for one more second, while he takes out another cluster of the flying turret-things, and then he'll have enough soulspark to repeat his flicker-flurry, in the convenient gap in Sin's carapace that he made earlier. Then he'll fuck off back to the ship and start helping them out.