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Dante staggered.
For the first time in countless ages, the King of Hell, the Conqueror of Dimensions, the Usurper of Souls, found himself on the defensive. Not by strategy, not by choice. By necessity. The ground beneath his feet was no longer a throne—it was a battlefield that denied him dominion.
Dan pressed him like a beast freed from all chains. There was no more technique, no more style. Only pure motion channeled through a body burning from the inside out. His punches and kicks merged with white flames so intense they exploded in the air with each impact, leaving luminous trails that persisted like ghosts of violence. The sound was not of blows—it was of thunder muffled inside a volcano, each thud a localized earthquake.
Dante tried to counter. His pride, that old companion, demanded he strike back, that he crush this insolence. But Dan intercepted everything. Each of the king's advances was anticipated, blocked, deflected, and punished with a brutality that was less rage and more conclusion. It was a deadly dance, but Dan did not dance—he conducted the rhythm with his fists, and the promise burning in his eyes was simple, crystalline, absolute: kill Dante.
— I admit… — Dante's snarl came through gritted teeth, dark blood spitting between his lips like spoiled wine. — …you are different.
Dan did not respond. Words were a waste of breath, of time, of existence. He advanced.
And the world around Dante replicated.
In an instant, dozens—not illusions, not reflections—but versions of Dan surrounded him. Clones of white fire and pure energy, each moving with the same concentrated fury, the same murderous intent. They encircled Dante from all sides, blind spots, dead angles, and attacked in perfect synchrony. They were not coordinated attacks—they were parts of a single, greater attack, a multiplied explosion.
And upon contact, they detonated.
The blasts did not overlap—they fused. A single wave of annihilation swept the local hellscape, swallowing sound, light, air. Dante tried to move, his divine body cutting through the air in a whirlwind of shadows, dodging between flames that sought his flesh like famished serpents.
But Dan, the real one, was not among the clones.
He appeared above. His foot, charged not with energy but with the pure intention to crush, descended like a guided meteor.
The kick struck Dante squarely in the chest.
The impact was so violent the sound ruptured space—a crack that came not from the air, but from the very fabric of reality being torn. And Dante, the King, was launched. Not pushed. Ejected. Like a human projectile, he tore through the burning barrier of the infernal domain, his body spinning in black flames that struggled to extinguish, to regenerate, as the world spun around him.
He fell. Not on hell's ground, but on the devastated field of the real world. On his feet, by pure divine instinct. The ground trembled under the weight of his landing, opening a shallow crater.
And before a single breath could enter his lungs, two flares split the gray horizon.
A golden lightning bolt. Another of pure white.
Stella and Amara.
They did not come in sequence. They came in perfect synchrony. Like two notes of the same deadly chord.
Dante leaned back, his speed still divine, still beyond human. But Amara's fist—charged not with brute force, but with an acceleration that distorted the air before it—reached him. It struck his face with an impact that cracked the bones of Akira's face.
And in the same instant, in the same microsecond his head snapped sideways, Stella's blade—a band of liquid gold—crossed his torso.
It was not a cut. It was a declaration. The golden blade pierced spiritual armor, divine flesh, ancient bone. It tore through the collarbone, shattered ribs, cleaved a clean path through organs that should not be able to be wounded.
The scream that followed did not sound human. But it was not divine either. It was the sound of something eternal feeling pain. Real pain. Sharp. Deep.
Even without Tekio there, even with the boy fallen elsewhere, Dante felt as if it were he who struck him. Every blow from Amara and Stella carried a distorted but unmistakable echo of Tekio's essence—the unyielding spirit, the strength born of denial, the ghost of a soul that refused to die in vain. As if Tekio's death had not weakened them, but blessed them. As if his sacrifice had distilled his will and injected it into them.
As Dante flew among the debris, carving a trench of destruction into the ground, the irony struck him with the force of a second blow.
He was being pushed, hurt, humiliated… by those he had mocked minutes before.
The weapon without will.
The false successor, the pale substitute.
The walking biological mistake.
— Ridiculous… — he hissed, the sound coming from a throat full of blood that boiled and regenerated at once. — Pathetic…
But the thought could not finish. Dan was back.
And he brought with him not dozens, but hundreds of clones. All converging, not to where Dante was, but to where he would fall. A net of fire and fury, woven in the air.
And together, like a single organism, they exploded.
The light born from that combined blast devoured the field. It was not a flash—it was an erasure. For a split second, everything within a fifty-meter radius ceased to have color, form, substance. It was only white. Absolute white.
The boom that followed split the sky, made the smoke clouds dissipate in concentric patterns.
As the dust—what remained of dust—began to settle, it revealed the three of them.
Reunited. Side by side. Not panting, not desperate. Planted.
Their auras burned. Dan's white and gold, Stella's pure gold, Amara's pure white. Three lesser suns, but blazing with a flame that was not of power, but of promise.
They were winning.
They were pressing the king.
And Dante… Dante remembered.
That feeling. The perfect rhythm. The synchronicity that went beyond tactics, becoming a single combat consciousness divided into three bodies. Power flowing between them not as borrowed energy, but as a shared river.
It was familiar. Painfully familiar.
Jade. Konan. Yara.
The memory of the Great War, of the last time he, as Hazau, had faced something that was not an army, but a collective soul, burned within him like rekindled embers.
Then, he understood. Not with his mind. With his guts.
They were not merely children who had inherited power.
They were the living legacy. The reincarnation of that trinity that had once wounded him. Not in blood, but in spirit. In purpose.
Dante's smile returned. Slow. Like an old wound reopening. The flesh around his cracked lips stretched into an expression half recognition, half pure hatred.
— I see… — his voice came out a murmur laden with blood and epiphany. — You don't just want to win. You want to be like them. You want to be the shadow that haunts me again.
And the world shook.
When the three advanced together in that next moment, it was like watching a tide of light rise. The space before them curved, compressed by the sheer pressure of their combined will.
But at the exact instant the distance became zero, the moment their attacks should have found flesh…
An almost imperceptible ripple formed behind them.
Not in the air. In the fabric of the air. A subtle curvature, like water before a fish leaps.
The pressure changed. Suddenly, violently.
The air died. Sound vanished.
Light seemed to drain away.
And Dante appeared.
He did not teleport. He did not run. He manifested. As if he had always been there, waiting, and the rest of the world had moved to meet him. His presence was not physical—it was gravitational. It crushed the air, made the ground yield, compressed their lungs as if they were at the bottom of the sea.
Amara barely had time to process. Her body—trained, fast, divine—locked. Not from fear. From weight. The weight of a mountain being placed upon her shoulders, upon every joint, every muscle.
Dante smiled. While she fought to move a finger, he regenerated. Grotesquely, obscenely. The black flames licked his exposed flesh, his broken bones, and under the fire's touch, tissue reconstituted, bone fused, skin closed. Not with the golden light of divine healing, but with the wet darkness of something being remade from corruption.
In his hand, a glow appeared. It was not fire. It was something transparent. Unnatural. A vacuum with edges, an absence that shone. Fire that did not burn—it consumed. Consumed heat, light, sound, existence.
Stella and Dan tried to turn, their bodies fighting the oppressive pressure. But all they saw, before they could complete the motion, was that smile.
And the vacuum flame expanded.
Not with speed. With certainty.
Amara, by pure instinct, pivoted her body. A desperate kick, an attempt to intercept, to touch, to deny.
But Dante moved first. Not to dodge. To allow.
A single strike.
A single transparent flash.
And Amara vanished.
The air where she had been exploded. But not with fire. With implosion. Her blood—bright red, human—hung suspended in the air for a microsecond, ruby droplets that did not fall, merely trembled, then began to disintegrate, not into ash, but into nothing, being sucked into the point where the vacuum still pulsed.
The impact was so absurd, so far outside the scale of the possible, that the sound came later. A dry, deep pop that seemed to come from inside the listener's own skull.
She was not hurled away. Not vaporized.
She was recalled.
Erased from that point in space.
The silence that fell was of another kind. Not the quiet of contained battle. The silence of vacuum. Of a place where something that should exist simply no longer did.
Dante slowly raised his gaze, as if waking from a deep dream. The vacuum fire on his fingers flickered one last time and dissipated, not into smoke, but into a ripple of air that smoothed itself flat.
— Now… — his voice was low, distorted, as if speaking through water. — …let us fight for real.
The sound of the implosion still echoed in their ears—a hum of absence—when true silence took hold of the field.
Where Amara had been, where her last motion had frozen in the air, there was nothing. No body. No fragment. Only slightly distorted air, like glass after an impact that did not shatter, only bent. And floating in that air, a few drops of red blood, flickering faintly in the light before, one by one, dissolving into a mist that evaporated.
Stella took a step forward. The movement was mechanical, as if her limbs no longer obeyed her. Her breath caught in her throat, trapped between a groan and a scream that would not come. Her eyes, always so focused, so determined, widened. Not with fear. With a failure to process. The brain refused to accept what the eyes saw: the void where a sister had been.
Dan froze. Literally. For a moment, all the fire around him—the white flames, the golden spirals—extinguished. Not snuffed out; contracted, sucked back into him as if his body were a black hole of pain. His fist was still raised, still wrapped in the incandescent residue of a blow that had never been delivered. He trembled. Not from exhaustion, not from fear.
From fury.
A fury so pure, so raw, so inhuman, it seemed to freeze the air around him before it could explode.
— Amara…? — Stella's voice escaped. It was not a scream. It was a hoarse whisper, a question thrown into the void, a prayer without a recipient.
The void did not answer.
Only the low crackle of distant fire in the ruins, the eternal sound of a world burning.
Dante remained motionless for a long moment, observing them with an empty, distant gaze, like a painter contemplating a canvas where he had just applied the final brushstroke. The white-transparent fire in his hand slowly dissipated, the vacuum particles dissolving in the air like dry ice smoke. He closed his hand, then opened it, as if testing his fingers, as if making sure the tool still worked.
— You still don't understand… — he said, and his voice held a strangely calm, almost sad, pedagogical tone. — I was only… warming up. Stretching. Remembering the taste. — He looked at his own hand, then at them. — Now… now my nerves are awake.
Before Dan could react—before the frozen fury could thaw into action—Dante moved.
It was not a movement. It was a transition of state.
His body dissolved into liquid darkness, a stain of black ink spilled in the air. And from the black mist that remained, a cold, deadly, familiar silver gleam emerged.
Akira's kusarigama.
The double sickle chained together. The weapon of the murdered master, now wielded by the murderer's hand with a perfection that was a profanity.
He raised it, and the metal sang. A low, sharp hum that cut the silence. Then, he began to spin it.
Not with brute force. With grace. A deadly dance. The silver blades whirred through the air in impossible trajectories, ellipses and hyperbolas that defied physics, the chain a silver lightning bolt drawing circles and spirals in the air.
Dan blocked the first strike—the larger sickle—with his forearm. Metal met incandescent skin with a metallic clang. But the chain, alive, intelligent, coiled around his arm in an instant, and pulled with a force that was not muscular, but dimensional. Dan was ripped from the ground, his feet scraping the earth.
Dante pivoted his own body, the movement fluid like water flowing over stones, and launched the second sickle—the smaller, faster one—straight at Stella.
She leaped, pure instinct. The blade passed centimeters from her leg, but its tip, or the intent behind it, grazed her. A thin cut appeared. Blood—bright red—sprinkled the air in an elegant arc.
Dante, smiling, pulled the chain back with a flick of his wrist. The sickles returned to his hands like obedient birds of prey, and the chain recoiled with a sound of sliding metal. As if he were pulling not a weapon, but destiny itself back into his grasp.
The arena darkened. Not because the sun set. Because light fled.
The ground began to writhe. Not like in an earthquake. As if something alive was waking beneath their feet. Patches of soil turned into black, mirrored ice. Others sprouted corrupted vegetation, black and twisted, that grew and died in seconds. Other areas simply became… nothing. Pure vacuum, patches of absence where matter refused to exist.
— I understand now… — Dante's voice was a contemplative murmur. He closed his eyes, as if listening to distant music. — Hazau's essence… the Abyss's gift… is not power over elements. It is… dialogue.
The black fire that always enveloped him vanished. In its place, shadows began to rise from his own body, not as an aura, but as exhalations. Living smoke, serpentine, taking indistinct shapes, mouths, eyes, hands.
The nature of the Abyss responded to him. He did not control it. He conversed with it. Every step he took was a question, and the world around him reshaped itself as an answer.
Dan advanced first. The fury had thawed. Become action. His fists were miniature suns, striking with all he had. Each impact created shockwaves that cracked the already unstable ground. Each of his steps opened craters.
But Dante evaded. Not with superhuman speed. With grace. A perverse grace. He danced between the blows, his body bending at impossible angles, his feet sliding over the ice he himself had created, using the shadows as veils.
The chains of the kusarigama spun, extensions of his arms. Shadows stretched from the ground like blades seeking Dan's tendons. And ice formed under his feet at the exact moment, pinning him for fractions of a second that were eternities in such a fight.
Stella tried for an opening. Her sword, now a line of pure golden light, cut the air in a diagonal strike meant to cleave him in two. Dante did not even look. He intercepted the blow not with a blade, but with a wall of shadow that rose from nothing. The golden blade plunged into the darkness… and vanished. And Dante materialized behind her, his lips close to her ear, the whisper an icy wind:
— You shine so dimly… compared to the darkness I carry…
Stella spun, her left fist—charged with golden energy—punching through the air where his head had been. It hit… mist. Dante had dematerialized again, reappearing behind Dan, who struggled to free himself from the shadowy claws.
The shadows surrounded him, trying to swallow him. Dan roared—an animal sound—and exploded. White flames erupted from every pore, so hot the shadows themselves recoiled, melted, evaporated. He stood naked at the center of a sphere of fire, panting, his eyes two embers.
The two collided again the next instant.
Fist against sickle. White flames against the silver blade that now gleamed with a bloody red.
The impact opened a new, larger crater, and sent gusts of energy that erased the surrounding fire for a moment, sucking the sound, creating a bubble of absolute silence where only the distortion of air between them was visible.
Dante stared at him through the momentary vacuum. His face was covered in a mixture of his own black blood and an expression of… pleasure. Deep, primal pleasure.
— Now, boy. — He laughed, the sound rough and wet. — Now you are dancing with me.
Stella came from the side, a phantom of light and pain. Her sword cut the air in a series of fast diagonal slashes, a whirlwind of golden energy blades. Dante spun, and the kusarigama's chain moved with him, a perfect partner. Silver blade against golden blade, clang-clang-clang, golden and silver sparks flying.
She pressed him. Her body moved with the cold precision of a divine machine, the golden aura gleaming like a solitary beacon in the sea of darkness Dante created.
But, no matter how they fought, no matter how they moved, no matter how they burned…
Something was wrong.
Something deeply, terribly wrong.
Between one blow and a defense, between a ragged breath and the sound of their own blood pounding in their ears, they realized it.
Dante was still not using everything.
That monstrous strength—the manipulation of the Abyss, the instant exchanges of essence, the ability to assume the nature of everything around him—was still only the beginning. The warm-up. The stretching.
He was playing.
Dan, panting, took a step back. Sweat mixed with blood streamed down his face, dripping onto the corrupted, seething ground.
Dante stopped spinning the kusarigama. The chain stopped abruptly, the blades hanging in the air as if time had frozen. He pointed one of them at the two, the gesture casual, almost disdainful.
— Don't hold back yet… — he smiled, and this time, his eyes were not red. They were purple. A deep, royal color that sucked in the light. — …Because true hell…
The ground beneath them opened. Not a crack. A hole. A portal into an abyss from which voices began to rise. Not screams of pain. Whispers. Whispers of ancient wars, broken pacts, devoured gods. Echoes of a past so old it predated language.
The air twisted. The lines of the world folded.
Time… flickered. For an instant, Dan saw Stella moving in slow motion, frozen in the air. For an instant, Stella saw Dan as a statue of fire. The flow of causality was being manipulated, distorted.
— …has not even begun.
Dan and Stella braced themselves. There was no more strategy. No more tactics. Only instinct. The white fire and the golden light intertwined for an instant, a final silent salute before the end.
There was no time to think of Amara.
No time to feel the loss.
Only a certainty, cold and heavy as a tombstone:
If Dante was only now starting to fight seriously…
The whole world was already doomed.
In an instant—or an eternity, there was no difference anymore—he appeared beside Dan.
The kusarigama spun. Not with the grace of before. With deadly precision. The first sickle, the larger one, pierced Dan's shoulder not as a blade, but as a bolt of solidified darkness. The flesh did not part—it dissolved around the metal. The second, the chain, coiled around his waist and pulled.
Dan was hurled. Not backward. In an arc. His body, a human missile, cut through the air, collided with a pile of rocks, tore through it, continued, dragged by the chain Dante still held, carving a furrow of destruction in the ground, sparks of blood and stone flying in its wake.
Stella reacted with a cry half pain, half pure rage. She descended from above, not jumping, but falling with the force of a meteor, her sword transformed into a single blade of golden light so intense it seemed to cut the darkness itself.
The impact split the ground, not into a crater, but into a fissure. A bright line that opened for meters.
Dante blocked it with the kusarigama's handle. The clash did not produce sound—it produced a silent energy wave that expanded in a perfect ring, illuminating the entire field as if a sun had been born and died in the same instant.
She advanced without hesitation. Without thought. Quick, short, economical movements. Cuts aimed at knees, wrists, throat. She spun, a war dancer, each movement leaving a persistent golden trail in the air, as if painting her own death with light.
But Dante evaded. His fluidity was inhuman. His body bent backward until it touched the ground, then rose in a serpentine motion. Twisted in the air to avoid a slash at his throat, the blade passing by a hair's breadth. He was water. He was smoke. He was the nightmare you cannot grasp.
He suddenly whipped the chain, not to attack, but to entrap. The metal wrapped around Stella's wrist, swift as a viper, and pulled with brutal force, yanking her off balance.
In a single fluid motion, he slammed her into the ground.
And from the ground, exactly where she would land, a spike of black ice emerged. Not growing. Materializing. Sharp as a spear, cold as interstellar vacuum.
The impact was brutal, wet, final.
Stella's body was impaled. The spike entered through her abdomen and exited through her back, lifting her from the ground like an insect on a pin. Blood—bright red—gushed, splattering the black ice that immediately began to suck her warmth, her glow, her life.
Dante watched, his head slightly tilted. Then, his purple eyes narrowed. He saw. Not the impaled body. The particles of golden light in the air around her, trembling, like gold dust under black light.
And then, Stella appeared behind him.
Not the wounded one, not the dying one. Whole. Golden. Her sword already in motion, a horizontal slash aiming to decapitate him with all her strength, all her speed, all the will she had left.
Dante blocked. Not with the kusarigama. With his forearm. The golden blade met black, divine flesh with a metallic shing that should not have been possible. The impact hurled him back, his feet furrowing the ground for meters.
Stella kept moving. Dazzling in golden light. But the light flickered. It was uneven. Tired. She was burning out.
And Dan returned.
Not staggering. Burning.
Wrapped in white fire so pure it was almost transparent, and in pulsating energy that distorted the air around him in heat waves. His shoulder still bled, but the blood evaporated before touching the ground. His eyes were no longer eyes. They were two miniature suns.
He leaped. Not a jump. A translation. He spun in the air, a movement of pure destruction, and collided his fist with Dante's.
The sound was not a thud. It was a divine thunderclap. The shock of forces opened a momentary void between them, a sphere of rarefied air that sucked in dust, debris, even the light seemed to bend inward.
— YOU WON'T KILL ANYONE ELSE! — Dan's roar did not come from his throat. It came from the fire, the air, the very ground.
He pushed. With everything. Every ounce of strength, every drop of hatred, every memory of Tekio, of Amara, of everything being lost.
Dante smiled. And then, laughed.
A loud, clear laugh, full of genuine, perverse pleasure.
— Don't be naïve! — he spat the words along with black blood. — I have already taken two of you! What stops me from finishing the job? From grinding your faces into the dirt until nothing but stains remain?
And then, the ground rose.
Not in a tremor. The soil literally rose like a wave, carrying Dante with it. And from the raised earth, corrupted, black, pulsating roots emerged, writhing like agonized serpents. Parts of the ground instantly froze into ice thorns. Others caught fire with purple flames. Others simply became… pure shadow, patches of absence.
The Abyss was not merely responding. It was singing to him.
Dante took a step back—a step in the air, onto a platform of ice that formed under his foot—and extended his hands, palms down, like a conductor ready to lead.
And the world changed.
Shadows detached from the ground, solidifying into black blades that flew like a cloud of metallic locusts.
Corrupted trees grew in seconds, their branches becoming pointed lances that shot forward.
Ice blocks the size of cars formed in the sky and fell like meteors, each hissing with absolute cold.
Purple flames sprouted in spiral patterns, seeking to ensnare, burn, devour.
Each attack had a different nature. Fire, ice, plant, shadow, vacuum. And the essence of each one swapped in fractions of a second—a shadow blade that, when deflected, became a web of roots, which when burned, released an explosion of ice. It was impossible to predict. Directed chaos.
Dan leaped between the explosions, his body a blurred figure of white fire, dodging by pure instinct, his brain no longer even trying to process, just reacting.
Stella cut her way through with golden light, her sword creating golden vortices that dissolved shadows and melted ice, but each vortex left her paler, more translucent.
And Dante was everywhere. He had not multiplied. The world around him distorted, creating residual images of him at every point of pressure, every angle of attack. Each image attacked, each movement was perfect, fluid, deadly.
A shadow blade, thin as a hair, slipped past Stella's light defense and pierced her abdomen.
Not a large cut. A clean puncture. She screamed. The sound was swallowed by the roar of fire, the crack of ice, the whisper of shadows. She doubled over.
Dan turned to her, a movement of panic. A microsecond of distraction.
It was enough.
Dante—the real one—was behind him. The chain of the kusarigama looped around his neck, not to cut, but to snare. A perfect noose. And pulled.
Violently. Downward.
Dan was slammed into the ground not as a body, but as a hammer. The impact did not make a thud. It made a boom that made the entire field jump. His body sank into the earth, opening a shallow crater, and the chain, still tight, held him there, pinned.
Dante stepped.
Not on the ground. On Dan's chest.
The black boot, reinforced with divine energy, sank into flesh, into ribs. The sound was of bone groaning, on the verge of breaking. Dan tried to breathe, but the weight was absolute. It was as if an entire mountain were upon him. Blood spurted from around the edges of the boot, jetting in hot streams.
Dante leaned down. Slowly. Like a hunter examining his prey. His face, now a mask of shadows and purple light, twisted in an expression of obscene pleasure, inclined over Dan's.
— Look at me, boy… — the voice was a rough, intimate whisper. — Did you really think you could predict me? That you could kill me? You… — he pressed harder, and Dan groaned, a muffled, animal sound. — …really thought you could be any different from Tekio? That your rage was special? It's all the same thing. Hatred. Despair. Weakness disguised as strength.
The ground around them cracked, fracturing under the pressure. Dan fought to breathe, each inhalation a stab to his crushed lung.
— Let me show you… — Dante turned his head, slowly, his purple eyes finding Stella, who was dragging herself, trying to rise, her hand pressed against the hole in her abdomen. — …what it's like to watch someone you love die. Up close. Powerless to do anything.
He raised the kusarigama. The chain still attached to Dan's neck pulled, making him arch his back in pain. The larger sickle, the blade still dripping black blood, he raised, pointing it at Stella.
— First her. — the voice was calm, didactic. — I will be slow. You will feel it. You will hear it. — He turned the blade, its tip gleaming under the ghostly light. — She is so fierce. So… similar to that worm from your team. The one who screamed so much before he faded. Want to bet how long she'll scream before she burns from the inside? Before her light becomes just… ash?
The air trembled. Not metaphorically. The air vibrated, like the string of a giant instrument being plucked.
Dante felt something.
A different heat. Not Dan's white fire. Something beneath. Vibrant. Growing. Not from the atmosphere. From below. From the sole of his boot. From the earth beneath Dan's chest.
— I said… — Dan's voice emerged. Not a roar. A whisper. But a whisper that cut through all other sounds, that silenced the Abyss's whispers, the crackle of fire. — …shut up.
And the flames erupted.
Not from Dan. From the ground. From the crater where he was pinned. From the soil beneath Dante's boot.
White fire, but tinged with deep gold at the core, with black veins like cracks in reality traced over the intense white. The heat was not merely heat—it was a vibration, a frequency that made the very air sing in agony.
The flames spat Dante backward as if he were made of straw. The kusarigama's chain snapped, the sickles flying in opposite directions. The crater expanded in concentric circles of molten earth and fire, the heat distorting the air, tearing dust and debris into the sky in an incandescent whirlwind.
Dante landed on his feet, many meters away, his eyes—now only glowing purple dots—narrowing to slits. He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, a slow, deliberate gesture. And a smile appeared. Not of anger. Of satisfaction. Of deep recognition.
— So that's it… — he murmured, and his voice held a tone of near-respect. — The collapse. The crumbling. You finally broke.
He remembered. On rare occasions, on battlefields forgotten by time. Moments when a warrior's soul, under unsustainable pressure, did not shatter into despair… but collapsed into something new. The fury, the despair, the fear, the love, the hatred—all the violent emotions that composed the core of spiritual strength—fused into a singular point. And the spirit, in response, transcended. Not to enlightenment. To annihilation.
A peak of power that could be momentary, a final glorious gasp before death. Or, for the lucky and the cursed, something lasting. A new baseline of pain.
Tekio had come close. Had felt the abyss of collapse, looked inside, and stepped back. Had preserved something of himself.
Dan, however… Dan was sinking. Completely.
The loss of his friend. Amara being erased before his eyes without even time for a scream. The constant, crushing threat of death not only upon himself, but upon all who remained, upon Stella bleeding, upon a world that depended on their failure.
All of it had formed the perfect weight. The hammer that finally shattered the vessel.
And what was leaking out… was Total Annihilation.
Dante spun what remained of the kusarigama—just the shaft of the larger sickle—and advanced. Dan moved at the same time. Both vanished in a flash of white light and pure purple shadow.
The first shock cracked the ground again, but this time, the cracks glowed with white fire from within. Dan's fire was no longer a weapon—it was an extension of him. It mingled with the black and purple vapor Dante exuded, creating a spectacle of intertwined light and darkness.
Every blow was a localized thunderclap. Punches that made the air crack. Shadow blades that Dan parried with incandescent forearms that not only blocked, but exploded on contact. Elbows. Energy claws. The space around them burned and writhed, the laws of physics challenged every second.
Dante tried the lateral dash, the spinning hook he had used before. Dan parried with his forearm, and at the moment of contact, the forearm incandesced, becoming pure white, and exploded. Not an explosion of damage, but of pure repulsive force. Dante was thrown back, the skin of his arm cut and burned.
He counterattacked with a low kick, which Dan dodged by a millimeter—and the fire following Dan's motion cut the air, and with it, half the skin of Dante's arm. His fire did not merely burn now. It consumed. Actively, aggressively destroyed, as if it had its own will.
Dan was in the mode his own soul, in tatters, had created as a last resort.
Total Annihilation.
— You… — Dante's snarl came out, the first note of genuine irritation mixed with pleasure. — …are beginning to annoy me.
He spread his arms, and from the center of his chest, a wave of black energy—not shadow, but pure darkness, the antithesis of light—expanded in a silent ring.
Dan went through it.
He did not block it. He went through it. The flames around him swallowed the darkness, consumed it, and he emerged on the other side untouched, his body now fully enveloped in flames that were a man.
The two collided once more at the center of the field.
Dante unleashed a diagonal slash with the kusarigama shaft, a move meant to cleave Dan in two. Dan spun. Not to dodge. To let the blade pass close to his torso, and in the same motion, punch Dante's abdomen with enough force to shatter the black energy armor protecting him like glass.
The roar that came from Dante was a perfect mixture of pain, surprise, and pure rage.
The black blood—his true blood, the blood of the king—gushed from his mouth, dripping from his chin in heavy drops that steamed upon touching the ground.
And for a second, just one, the King of Hell… retreated.
A step backward. Unconscious. Instinctive.
Stella, leaning on her sword stabbed into the ground, watched from afar, stunned. The world around her was a blur of pain and exhaustion, but she saw clearly.
Dan moved differently. It wasn't just amplified strength. It was… pure instinct. Every movement was the perfect, economical, lethal response. There was no hesitation. No doubt. Only one objective, and every muscle, every gush of energy, was channeled toward it. It was rage, yes, but rage refined, distilled into absolute precision.
She swallowed the blood in her mouth—red, human blood—feeling the weakness trying to pull her down. Not yet. Not yet. She raised her sword. The golden light was weak, flickering, but still there. She ran toward Dante's flank, her feet dragging on the unstable ground. With a hoarse cry from the depths of what remained of her, she cleaved a golden fissure in the ground—a bolt of light that shot toward him—and unleashed a diagonal slash aiming for his neck.
Dante leaped back, the movement still divine, but… slow. A microsecond slower.
The slash caught him a glancing blow. Not on the neck. On the shoulder. The golden blade did not cut flesh. It dissolved it. Part of Dante's shoulder simply disintegrated, turning into a cloud of black particles that dissipated. Regeneration began immediately, the black flesh bubbling to replace what was lost, but… with a delay. Visibly.
— So much persistence… — Dante's voice came out, but the mockery in his tone was weakened, replaced by a raw weariness. — Why don't you just die already?
He raised his hand. And hell answered.
Purple, black, and white flames sprouted from every point of the field at once, swallowing everything in a tidal wave of corrupted fire. The wave hit Stella, hurling her away like a rag, her scream lost in the roar. It hit Dan, who was swept back, his white flames struggling against the purple sea.
Dante laughed. The sound echoed over the roar of the flames.
But the laughter stopped.
Cut short.
Because Dan appeared before him again. In silence. The flames around him dead for an instant, absorbed back inside. His face was calm. Empty. And then, his fist—not wreathed in fire, but in something denser, more real—advanced.
The next impact had no dramatic sound. It was a dull, deep thud.
And it sent Dante flying for tens of meters, his body spinning in the air, tearing through the remains of columns and shattered walls, until he disappeared into a cloud of dust and debris.
The king rose. Slowly. Very slowly. His skull, deformed by the impact, recomposing with a wet sound of bone fusing. His purple eyes still glowed, but the glow was… shaken.
And for the first time since the beginning of it all, since the moment he stepped into this world as a fallen god…
Dante was breathing heavily.
To be continued...
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