Just before Heinrich could deliver another blow—one that could potentially end the whole fight—Adam's body suddenly fell into the shadows beneath him, vanishing as if submerged in a dark ocean.
"Running away, are we?" Heinrich mocked. "There's no point hiding in your shadows. I'll find a way to force you out, no matter where you slither."
But just then, as Adam vanished completely into the whirlpool of darkness, a fresh swarm of shadow creatures erupted from the ground—similar to the ones from before, only now in greater numbers. They surged at Heinrich like a black tide, relentless and shrieking.
"What a nuisance," Heinrich muttered with annoyance as he braced himself.
One creature launched a flurry of clawed blows while others hurled their bodies like living spears, trying to knock him off balance and pin him down with sheer numbers. But their attempts were futile. With a single sweeping motion of his hand, Heinrich summoned a flow of negative space into the neutral field surrounding him. The sudden flux created bursts of force that bent and shattered the assaulting creatures, disintegrating them in midair.
A shadow beast leapt from behind, claws slashing down. But Heinrich moved like wind—effortless, fluid, almost dancing. He sidestepped and twisted, gripping the creature by the neck and hurling it into the air. More creatures followed, and with another gesture, Heinrich seized the space around them as if grabbing a blanket, flinging them aside like ragdolls.
The shadows now levitated midair, caught in a temporal freeze. Heinrich's arms extended, eyes gently closing as he murmured:
"Endless Fulmination."
Suddenly, the creatures lit up from within, their forms warping grotesquely. Then, one by one, they detonated—fireworks of shadow and void. Each had been infused with negative space, their forms imploding from the inside out. It was a more stable, controlled technique than combining both polarities—a calculated form of devastation.
Heinrich's hair fluttered in the forceful wind stirred by their annihilation. As his eyes opened, he looked upon the imploding beasts with quiet admiration.
"Truly marvelous," he whispered. His face was calm—serene even—as he stood amid a world burning and crumbling around him.
But the peace didn't last. Heinrich's eyes narrowed.
Behind him, towering spikes of pure darkness erupted—so vast they could be mistaken for mountains.
"So... you've finally come out of hiding, Adam."
With barely a second to spare, Heinrich manipulated positive space, expanding the distance between himself and the attack in a blink, just before the spikes could pierce deeper into his now bloodied side.
Adam emerged below the dark spikes, his abdomen bruised and torn from Heinrich's earlier strike. The injury was healing—but far too slowly. Even so, he moved without hesitation, dashing across the jagged spires with explosive speed before launching himself forward, daggers in hand, his body cloaked in seething rage. Shadows coiled around his blades, elongating them unnaturally.
"Twin Shadow-Tiger Fang!"
With a roar, Adam spun his daggers in unison, forming a black circle of rotating death. From that vortex, a colossal tiger of shadows burst forth—its presence commanding, its fangs long enough to pierce any creature alive.
Heinrich tried to wrap himself in space like a shroud for defense. But it was too late.
The tiger struck.
Slash after slash of compressed shadow ripped through the battlefield. Houses, stone, flame, even space itself—it was all shredded. Heinrich screamed as he was caught in the attack, blood spraying as he was thrown violently back.
But he did not fall.
Without hesitation, he gathered his aura—injecting positive and negative space into the area around him, which was still stable enough to hold the surge.
"Fracture Bloom!"
The moment the two attacks collided—a black tiger of shadows versus the raw implosive bloom of warped space—the world bent.
A soundless quake swallowed everything. Space cracked. The battlefield collapsed. Dust, rubble, fire—everything evaporated in the blinding aftermath.
The two were launched into a nearby inn, smashing through walls and floors until they crashed at the topmost level.
Groaning, they rose. A wooden table stood between them.
Thinking fast, Heinrich kicked it upward, obstructing Adam's line of sight. But Adam wasn't fooled.
Without pause, he clenched his fist, channeling ethereal energy to shatter the obstacle and strike Heinrich through it.
The two fighters stood firm. Both of their fists ignited with aura—twin meteors poised to collide.
Time itself seemed to slow.
The table remained in the air, caught in that suspended moment of destiny. As their fists surged forward from opposite ends, they struck—
BANG!
A deafening blast rang across the city, followed by a searing flash of light. Aura clashed, colliding with such raw force that the table—and the entire inn—was obliterated in an instant.
And yet, amid the rubble, the battle raged on.
As the two foes now floated amidst the air, debris from the shattered inn suspended around them like remnants of a forgotten storm, they locked eyes—silent understanding sparking between their battered forms.
In a blink, Heinrich closed the gap, folding the space between them to zero by pouring negative space into the atmosphere around them. The air compressed, snapping like a rubber band as he appeared right before Adam.
They clashed. The exchange of blows was no longer calculated, no longer elegant. It was pure chaos—brutal, unrelenting, primal. With their mobility hindered in the zero-gravity aftermath, every strike was a gamble. Every counter, a desperate attempt to gain control.
Heinrich drove his elbow into Adam's jaw with brutal precision, sending him hurtling down toward the earth. But before impact, Adam retaliated, slicing upward with a surprise wave of darkness from his dagger. It caught Heinrich off-guard, narrowly grazing him. A lock of his light blond hair drifted in the air—severed.
Heinrich's eyes twitched. That singular strike sparked a wildfire of rage.
"You damn bastard!" he roared.
With a burst of force, he propelled himself downward, igniting a push of positive space behind him. The explosion of light behind his back sent him careening toward Adam like a meteor.
Adam braced himself, forming a dense, dome-like shield of darkness around his body. The moment Heinrich struck, the ground beneath them shattered violently under the impact.
Without hesitation, Adam slashed upward again, sending another wave of compressed darkness toward Heinrich. This time, Heinrich twisted mid-air, barely dodging it. The blade of shadow tore past his face, slicing the skin on his cheek.
He rebounded mid-air, regaining his stance with such speed it left fading afterimages. He landed a point-blank punch, driving his fist into Adam's face with thunderous force.
Adam was flung back like a cannonball, his body crashing through a boulder of debris. But he didn't stop. Gritting his teeth, he summoned several small orbs of darkness and hurled them forward.
"Devastating Shadow Orbs!"
Heinrich snapped his fingers repeatedly—each time imploding the orbs by collapsing negative space around them. One after another, the spheres caved in and vanished with sharp pops.
Before the last orb had even dispersed, Heinrich launched forward. He wasn't giving Adam a moment to breathe.
But Adam was already smirking. Just as Heinrich's fist struck, it passed through him—his body intangible, like mist.
Shadows.
Adam's form flickered, then multiplied.
Two. Three. Four. More.
Shadow clones emerged, surrounding Heinrich from all angles. Each attacked in perfect synchronization, leaving no opening to breathe or counter. Heinrich punched through them with grit and power, but they kept multiplying, giving Adam time.
Time to charge.
Darkness swirled around Adam like a living storm. Every shadow in the vicinity twisted and bent toward him, feeding into the growing tornado of power.
"If I can't beat him in this world..." Adam whispered, eyes glowing. "Then I'll pull him into one of mine."
Heinrich, still fighting off the remaining clones, felt the disturbance. The pressure in the air changed—he could feel the malice gathering.
Before he could react—
"Pure Darkness."
Thrust.
A spear of darkness impaled Heinrich from the side. He hadn't seen it travel. It simply appeared, embedded in his torso like divine punishment.
Then another.
And another.
Spears of pure darkness erupted through him in an instant—through his limbs, his side, his back. Blood spilled freely as agony overtook his senses.
"That smug face of yours," Adam said coldly, slowly walking forward, "it's finally gone. You thought just because you knew my abilities and I didn't fully know yours, you had the upper hand. That no matter what, you'd control the fight."
Heinrich coughed blood, grinning bitterly. "You're... right."
Adam blinked. He hadn't expected that.
"I let my knowledge of you go to my head. You caught me off guard..."
He paused, then chuckled darkly.
"But that only proves my point. If you had to resort to tricks just to land a hit, then I did have the upper hand."
Adam scowled but said nothing. They both knew Heinrich wasn't wrong.
Before he could move again, Heinrich's aura flared violently, distorting the world around him. Space cracked. The sky trembled. The ground writhed.
Adam leapt back just in time.
He raised his blades as they began to fuse into one. The air turned thick, suffocating. Shadows burst forth around him, swirling upward.
A massive armored figure formed behind him—a towering knight's upper torso, holding a gargantuan spear formed of condensed darkness.
Adam's aura swallowed the night sky. Heinrich looked up, jaw clenched in awe and disbelief.
"SHADOW KNIGHT... Abysmal Lance!"
The knight hurled the titanic spear downward. The sheer force of it cracked the heavens.
Heinrich tore free of the spears binding him, scrambling to form a powerful barrier by injecting positive space around himself. But before he could stabilize—
The ground beneath him dissolved.
Shadows opened like a mouth beneath his feet, hands clawing up to seize him. He hesitated for a breath—and that was enough.
The Abysmal Lance collided.
It tore through Heinrich's barrier, dragging him downward. The moment of impact ignited a cataclysmic explosion of dark force. He was flung into the churning pit of shadows that now consumed the earth.
Heinrich was gone.
Dragged below.
Into the Shadow Realm.
The world around them was gone.
This was no longer the battlefield they stood upon a moment ago, nor was it anywhere familiar to any living being.This was the Shadow Realm—a dimension parallel to reality. Not infinite, but vast, spanning the breadth of a nebula. Every shadow ever cast in the material world was tethered to this place.
There was no light here. No warmth. No sound. Just silence so absolute, even the beat of one's heart felt absent. The air, if it could be called that, clung like oil—dry, sharp, and suffocating. Each breath scraped at the lungs, like it was stealing something with every inhale.
Movement was unnatural, like swimming through the densest layers of the ocean. The pressure was immense. Invisible tides pulled at every limb, each motion sluggish and disjointed. Yet surrendering to these currents allowed one to glide through at impossible speeds—not the speed of light, but the speed of darkness.
Time here twisted. Seconds unraveled into eternities. Awareness frayed at the edges.
The Shadow Realm didn't kill. It consumed.
But for Adam, it was home.
This was the domain he passed through whenever he traveled between shadows. He knew its void rivers, its gravity wells, its suffocating silence. While others drowned in fear and confusion, he walked its depths as if it were air.
And now, Heinrich had fallen into it.
Welcome to my world.
Adam darted past the massive obsidian spear still pulling Heinrich deeper into the abyss. His eyes tracked the man's descent with surgical precision.
"Now that I have him here," Adam calculated, "he won't be able to see me at all. But I can see him."
He struck without mercy.
Shadow-slick blades slashed from every direction, carving through Heinrich with relentless ferocity. The air—if it could be called that—rippled with violent bursts as dark energy collided with flesh.
Heinrich grunted in pain, but each breath he tried to take only emptied his lungs further. No oxygen. No recovery.
Adam pressed the assault, focused and brutal, as his thoughts slipped inward.
"I will... I might actually be able to see my son again. When I win this."
"I don't know what I'll even say to him. Will he remember my face? Or hate me for not being strong enough back then? Will he... hug me?"
"I just want to see him. That's all that matters."
His resolve hardened into something cold and desperate.
"So I'll keep this man alive. Not fully. Just enough. At the brink of death. I'll use him to find my son—by any means necessary."
Adam let the hope distract him. It was all Heinrich needed.
Suddenly, space trembled.
Adam's instincts screamed. The realm around them distorted, warping with unnatural tension. Heinrich was bending the structure of the Shadow Realm itself.
But by the time Adam moved, it was already too late.
A blinding explosion tore through the void—space imploded and then surged outward, violently destabilized by Heinrich's unleashed polarity.
Positive force expanded. Negative force collapsed. Together, they cracked the uncrackable.
"I refuse to lose to someone like you," Heinrich murmured, voice trembling not with fear, but fury.
"I REFUSE TO LOSE TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU!"
"DEVIATING EXPANSION!"
"FRACTURE BLOOM--- OVERDRIVE!"
Then, the realm shattered.
Light engulfed Adam—pure, chaotic light—as the image of his son burst like a flare in his mind.
The two warriors were hurled back into the material world. The realm of shadow rejected them, spat them out like poison.
Heinrich's final gambit had twisted the flow of darkness itself, forcing the currents to collapse and rupture. No one had ever broken out from within. But today...
Today was different.