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The dust hadn't even settled when the world collapsed upon Dante.
He had barely managed to lift his head, his vision still blurred from the prior impact, when a white blaze tore through the curtain of debris. Dan wasn't running—he was materializing in front of him, space folding under the violence of his passage. His punch wasn't a movement, it was an event: the air compressed, cracked, and exploded in a sonic pressure wave that anticipated the blow by a microsecond.
Dante reacted by millennial instinct. The shaft of the kusarigama crossed his torso, a metallic bone against the end of the world. The impact wasn't a simple sound—it was the visceral sensation of planets colliding. His feet plowed the ground, deep, steaming furrows opening behind him as he was dragged for dozens of meters. The ground didn't yield; it bent, like ice under pressure, shattering into angular pieces that flew like shrapnel.
Dan didn't stop. There was no pause, no breath, no transition. He crossed the flare of his own energy like a ghost through mist, disappearing into Dante's blind spot only to reappear behind him—not with teleportation, but with pure kinetic speed that fooled perception. The energy around him didn't accompany him; it *was* him. It molded to his arms like a second fiery skin, flowed with his muscles, breathed with his lungs.
A kick came—a lateral movement that could split a mountain. Dante twisted his torso, the kusarigama's blade spinning to intercept. The metal sang, a sharp wail of pain. Before the sound ended, another kick, this time a frontal thrust aimed at the solar plexus. Dante dodged by a hair's breadth, the tip of the boot passing centimeters from his chest, the wind of the blow cutting like a blade.
The sound of their bodies in motion was a drum of thunder—low, deep, resonant, muffling all other noises in the world. Each impact was a note in this symphony of destruction.
Each time the kusarigama's chain spun, its shadowy fire tried to bite, twist, consume Dan's white fire. But it was like trying to grasp sunlight with bare hands. The white fire didn't burn—it purified. It distorted around the chain, bent, but did not extinguish. And Dan… Dan anticipated. His body read the micro-tensions in Dante's shoulders, the slight shift in foot placement, the almost imperceptible tremor in tendons before each attack. He predicted, cornered, tightened the siege.
— Impressive… — the king murmured between blows, his voice a hoarse whisper barely escaping his lips. He dodged a hook by a thread, the white fist passing so close it singed his eyelashes. — You fight as if hell were your home, boy. As if you were born in the embers.
Rage then exploded within Dante—not the cold, calculated fury of a king, but the bestial hatred of a cornered beast. From his back, shadows and flames vomited outward, materializing into two monstrous wings. They were not delicate appendages, but limbs of pure destruction: muscular tissue of darkness intertwined with veins of lava, claws at the tips of the bony joints. Their beat was a double explosion, a shockwave that swept everything clean in a thirty-meter radius, tearing stones and creating a momentary vacuum.
Dante used the momentum to attack, the kusarigama spinning in a lethal whirlwind of sickle and flaming chain. It was a desperate, chaotic attack—all his enraged mind could conceive.
Dan responded not with fury, but with absolute clarity. His body leaned, a minimal, efficient movement that made the sickle pass centimeters from his face. And then, his right fist advanced. The white fire within it condensed until it glowed with the intensity of a miniature star, and golden fragments—vestiges of the spiritual energy Tekio had bequeathed him—orbited his fist like small suns. The blow had no name. It was the pure essence of impact.
It struck Dante's newly formed wings not as a punch, but as a blade of dissolved reality.
The roar that escaped Dante was primitive. It wasn't from physical pain—a king of hell knew intimate pain—but from profanation. His wings, extensions of his being and power, cracked in half with a sound of cosmic glass shattering. Darkness leaked from the severed limbs like ethereal blood, dissipating into the air with an agonizing hiss.
He counterattacked in a frenzy. The ground beneath his feet darkened, and from it emerged claws of shadow, tentacles of pure void that lunged to seize Dan by his limbs, his neck, seeking to drag him into the depths.
But Stella descended.
She didn't fall from the sky—she split it. Her descent was a golden lightning bolt, a vertical line of pure will. In her hands, the sword of liquid light was already in motion, a perfect arc that seemed to cut the very concept of darkness. The shadowy tentacles simply ceased to exist where the blade passed, dissipating without sound, without smoke, like nightmares before dawn.
— These tricks of yours won't work with me here! — Stella's voice was not a shout. It was a declaration, clear and sharp as her blade.
She didn't stop at the cut. Her feet touched the ground and, in the same fluid motion, her free hand rose, palm facing Dante. From the air around her, runes of golden light materialized—not drawn, but sung into existence by the flow of her spirit. They connected in concentric circles, forming a sacred geometry that pulsed with gravitational attraction. The force pulled Dante, still staggering, back to the center of the field, to the epicenter of her light.
The king raised his arm, shadows coalescing into a thick, pulsating shield to disperse the energy. The moment the light touched the darkness, a sharp hiss filled the air. And then, Dante screamed.
It wasn't the scream from before. It was a ragged sound, of genuine surprise and agony. The light didn't reflect, didn't deflect—it infiltrated. It burned through the shadows like acid through paper, reaching the pale skin beneath. Where it touched, Dante's flesh steamed, not with the black of a burn, but with a cauterizing white. It was a different pain, a violation of his own abyssal nature.
— Damned… — he snarled, the sound more of a spit than a word. His eyes, pits of infinite darkness, fixed on Stella with a new kind of recognition. No longer disdain, but the look of a predator identifying a new, and genuinely dangerous, prey.
Stella advanced through her own radiance, a divine silhouette amid the golden storm. From her body emanated two distinct energies, intertwining in a symphony of power. The sacred light, cold, impersonal, relentless as divine justice. And the spiritual light, warm, personal, vibrant with Stella's essence—her determination, her empathy, her contained rage. They danced around her, one in calm, radiant waves, the other in aggressive, living spirals.
Her sword moved not to strike, but to weave. The movement was a graceful, deadly spiral, and from its wake arose ethereal chains of pure light. They weren't solid, nor liquid, but seemed made of crystallized willpower. They wrapped around Dante's shoulders, his ankles, with the tenacity of oak roots growing in accelerated time.
The king roared, a sound that came from the depths of the earth. His corded muscles tensed, the veins under his pale skin bulging like black ropes. He pulled. The chains of light stretched, emitting a sound of crystal under tension… but did not break. Worse: they reacted. They vibrated like the strings of an instrument, and the vibration transmitted into Dante's body, dampening his strength, dissipating his power, binding him not just physically, but energetically.
Dan chose that exact moment to reappear in front.
He hadn't run. He simply was there, as if he had always been. The white fire in his fists no longer roared—it hissed, concentrated into a point of such intense brightness it hurt the eyes. His gaze held no hatred, no triumph. It held the unbreakable coldness of a sentence already passed.
— Now, Stella! — His voice echoed, clear and unquestioning over the roar of energies.
Stella crossed her arms in a sharp, decisive motion.
The snap that echoed was not physical. It was a metaphysical sound, a thunder that rolled not through the skies, but through the very fabric of reality. The chains of light crossed at the center, on Dante's body, and pulled with cataclysmic force.
Dante was hurled forward, his feet uprooted from the ground. His body, a mass of darkness and fire, distorted under the overwhelming force of the light, like a shadow under a relentless spotlight. He was helpless, off-balance, dragged directly into the zone of annihilation.
Dan leaped.
To any observer, the world seemed to stop. The dust in the air froze. The sparks of energy hung suspended like stars. In the absolute silence of that split second, only Dan moved. His fist traversed the air, leaving an incandescent trail so bright it seemed to cut the retina of anyone watching.
The impact was perfect. Absolute. The fist covered in white fire and golden fragments struck Dante's face squarely.
The explosion that followed had no fire. It had light. Golden sparks and jets of white fire were launched in all directions like the rays of a rising sun. The impact split the earth into a perfectly circular crater dozens of meters in diameter. The air tore with a deafening echo, a BOOM that vibrated the bones of any being within miles.
Dante's body was catapulted like a divine projectile, crossing hundreds of meters in an instant before colliding with a rocky formation that marked the edge of the plateau. The rock didn't break—it pulverized, reduced to a cloud of fine dust that rose in a low mushroom cloud.
But the duo gave no respite. Before the dust of the collision could settle, before the very thought of recovery could cross the king's shattered mind, Stella pulled the chains again.
The light still enveloping Dante's limbs converged, twisting into a bright vortex that pulled him from the wreckage, dragging him back to the center of the field like a fish hooked on a line of stars.
Dan was already advancing toward him, his boots crushing the cracked ground. The synchronicity between them wasn't trained; it was organic. A flow of intention that passed from one to the other without need for words, as if they shared a single hunting instinct.
Dante, inside the vortex of light, fought. His body, shattered and regenerating in a grotesque spectacle, tried to force the chains. But the light was not just a prison; it was a poison. It corroded his abyssal flesh, undoing it faster than the darkness could reconstitute it. Dan's white fire burned the very abyss within him. Each roar that escaped the king's throat was more bestial, more primitive than the last. Among the sounds of fury, one could distinctly hear the wet crack of his skull reforming, the grinding of vertebrae snapping into place, a macabre chorus of forced regeneration.
— Insolent ones…! — he bellowed, his voice a cavernous distortion. The kusarigama appeared in his trembling hands and he spun it with desperate force. The ethereal chain of light binding his right arm burst in a shower of golden sparks.
But in the next instant, before he could exploit the opening, Stella reformed the chains. With a fluid gesture of her hands, the dissipating light regrouped, condensed, and bound Dante again—this time in three new lines, each thicker than a man's forearm, luminous as forged sunbeams. They wrapped his arms, locked his joints, immobilizing him with a force that seemed like gravity personified.
Dan collided with him again.
The second punch was an uppercut that struck Dante's abdomen. The sound was muffled, deep—the sound of a universe being compacted. The king's body split. Not merely broke, but separated into distinct pieces before the darkness could hold it together. For a horrible moment, he was two disconnected halves, joined only by smoldering filaments of darkness, which immediately began to regenerate amid thick, black smoke.
Dante staggered back, his feet dragging irregular furrows in the ground. He spat—not blood, but a dark, viscous, hot substance that evaporated before touching the ground, leaving a smell of sulfur and ozone. The white fire and the golden light did not diminish. They shone brighter, fed by the very darkness they consumed.
For the first time in countless ages, the King of the Abyss was being genuinely pressured. Not merely challenged, but contained. Damaged.
His gaze, when it fixed on the two, was different. The divine arrogance, the certainty of being a force of nature, had dissipated. In its place was a silent recognition, sharp as winter. He saw. He saw Dan, wrapped in flames that were the antithesis of his realm, his body marked by a determination that came from the depths of the soul. He saw Stella, a human beacon of celestial power, her veins now traced by golden lines that pulsed in unison with the light around her. She was no longer merely a light user; her body was becoming an avatar, a living vessel for that force.
Both were transcending. Not in isolation, but together. Their individual tempests—one of purifying fire, the other of relentless light—merged, fed each other, creating a single front of annihilation.
And for a fleeting moment, something beyond anger passed through Dante's eyes. Something that could be… respect. The recognition that those two mortals, united by a legacy and a fierce will, were doing something extraordinary: they were wounding the untouchable.
The silence that followed the last roar was heavy, laden. Only the hiss of Dan's flames, the hum of Stella's light, and the grotesque chorus of Dante's flesh stitching itself could be heard. Bones snapped together with muffled cracks, muscles wove like carpets of dark worms, pale skin stretched over new tissue. The dark blood evaporated, creating an acrid mist around him. His body, now almost complete, trembled—but not the tremor of weakness. It was the tremor of contained euphoria, the excitement of a challenge that finally justified his millennia of boredom.
He raised his chin, his neck still marked by luminous scars slowly darkening. His lips curved into a distorted, unnatural smile on his normally stoic face.
— You are growing too fast… — his voice came out hoarse, but with an almost contemplative tone. — Faster than anyone who ever dared face me.
Then, the veins in his neck and arms began to glow. Not with light, but with an internal fire, dark amber in color, visible under his translucent skin. The pale skin cracked, not bleeding, but revealing ancient, living symbols moving beneath it, like lava snakes under a thin layer of ice. They spun, intertwined, pulsed with primordial power.
And then, with a sound that tore at eardrums—a mixture of flesh tearing, bone shattering, and the beginning of thunder—wings emerged from his back.
They weren't the bestial wings from before. These were demonic in their pure essence, archetypes of infernal power. Made of living fire and darkness so dense it seemed solid, they extended, each feather a curved blade of obsidian with an incandescent edge. Their beat did not create wind; it created a heat wave that made the air above them shimmer like asphalt in the desert. The temperature on the plateau rose dozens of degrees in an instant.
Dante flew.
It wasn't a jump, or propulsion. His body simply rose, smooth and imposing, in slow spirals. The flaming wings left trails of black and red fire in the sky, like open scars on the firmament. He hovered high above them, a commanding silhouette against the now-corrupted sky, a true king observing his rebellious subjects from his celestial throne.
Dan looked up, his face illuminated by the fire still dancing on his fists. His gaze was fixed, analytical. — He's preparing for something else… — he murmured, more to himself. It wasn't fear. It was a warrior's assessment upon realizing the opponent had changed strategy.
From above, Dante's laughter descended. It wasn't the mocking guffaw from before. It was lower, almost intimate, laden with perverse amusement.
— Perhaps I underestimated you. — the voice echoed, clear and distant. — It is rare… so rare that someone forces me to show my wings. To remember what it's like to see the world from above.
He wasn't retreating from fear. Every movement, every word, was pure calculation. The clinical observation of a millennial predator who, for the first time in centuries, found prey that didn't just flee, but counterattacked. And he wanted to see more. He wanted to measure the extent of their growth.
Dan took a step forward, the fire around his body roaring louder, taking almost animalistic forms around him. Instinct demanded he attack, to reach the sky and drag that god down.
But before his tendons tensed for the leap, a firm, warm hand touched his arm.
— Wait… — Stella's voice was calm, but with a vibration of conviction so deep it made the very air tremble.
Dan turned his face to her. His eyes, once completely human, now had golden reflections. The air around him distorted not just from heat, but from the spiritual energy emanating from her, gaining visible form—thin threads of golden light intertwining in concentric circles around her feet, like a living mandala.
She wasn't looking at Dan. Her gaze was fixed on the hovering figure in the sky, her golden eyes trembling not with fear, but with an absolute certainty.
— I will bring him down to us.
She knew. The knowledge didn't come from her own memories, but from the echoes Jade had left in the world, in the flows of light that now ran through her veins. She had "seen" that scene before: Dante, hovering with his wings of fire and darkness, looking down with the indifference of a god toward ants. Jade had faced that gaze. And Jade had not bowed.
But Stella was not Jade. She was the successor. And successors don't live in the shadow; they grow beyond it.
— No more living in her shadow… — she murmured, the words more of a vow than a thought. Her eyelids closed. Inside, she didn't see darkness. She saw a sea of golden light, an inner sun pulsing in unison with her heart. — Now it is my light.
When her eyes opened again, they were miniature suns.
Behind her, the air solidified with a sound of crystal being forged. Pure, dense, conscious energy sprouted from her shoulder blades and expanded into two majestic golden wings. They weren't made of feather and bone, nor flame and shadow. They were light condensed into concept. The shape of wings, yes, but with edges sharp as energy blades, each "feather" a facet of a divine crystal. There was no hatred in their construction, nor empty pride. There was beauty, yes—an aggressive, fierce beauty, destined for flight and combat.
The light emanating from her didn't illuminate the field. It swallowed it. It grew from her core in an expanding, golden wave that swept away every shadow, every dark corner, making the very ground tremble as if alive. The crater, the rubble, the dust—all bathed in liquid gold.
And then, Stella launched herself.
It wasn't a jump. It was the liftoff of a being claiming the skies. The golden wings beat once, and the resulting flash was so intense Dan had to shield his eyes with his arm. The sonic boom that followed was like the thunder of a creation.
She cut the sky toward Dante, an arrow of solar vengeance.
The king's millennial instinct made him dodge, his demonic wings beating to sidestep him in a sharp motion. But Stella was too fast. Impossibly fast. Her trajectory corrected itself in the air effortlessly, as if the light guiding her anticipated his movements.
In her hands, her sword was no longer a weapon. It was the physical manifestation of her will. An extension of her being. The blade, of a living, pulsating gold, seemed made of solidified sunlight. Its surface wasn't smooth, but rippled gently, as if breathing. Down its center, from hilt to tip, ran a line of even more intense brilliance—the line of her soul, the focus of all her determination. When she moved, the sword didn't leave a trail, it left a memory—ethereal golden sparks that persisted in the air, telling the story of each cut.
Dante tried to crush her with the kusarigama in the air, the flaming chain spinning in a deadly vortex. Stella didn't block it. She dodged in a luminous spiral so tight it seemed to defy physics, her body spinning around the chain itself like a planet around a black sun. At the apex of the spin, her blade extended in a lightning strike.
The thread of golden light scored Dante's shoulder. There was no strong impact. Just a clean hiss, and then a steaming white line appeared on the king's pale flesh. The blood that trickled was black as oil, but evaporated into acrid smoke before falling.
— That… is all? — Dante's mocking voice echoed, but there was a strained note in it now, almost imperceptible. His free hand spun, and from his fingertips, a concentrated wave of demonic fire—black inside, blood-red at the edges—exploded toward Stella, a tsunami of destruction that swallowed half the sky.
Stella didn't stop. She didn't slow down. She went through. Her sword spun before her, not as a shield, but as a disc of light. The demonic fire collided with it and split, divided in half by the golden blade like a sea parting for Moses. She emerged on the other side of the wave, intact, her wings shining even brighter, wetted only by the light she herself created.
And then, she screamed.
It wasn't a battle cry. It was a scream of overcoming. Of liberation. The sound came from her chest loaded with all the frustration of living in the shadow, all the pain of loss, all the fury against injustice, and all the courage that had made her move forward. It was a pure, primordial sound, and the light surrounding her responded.
It grew. Multiplied. Intensified to a blinding point.
For an instant, Dante didn't see Stella. He saw only a golden, indistinct silhouette, a being of pure radiation with wings that were expanding suns. The millennial instinct, the one that had kept him alive through countless conflicts, screamed a warning of absolute danger.
The cut came.
The blade didn't seem to move. The light simply stretched, from one point to another in the space between them, in a straight, perfect line. A divine laser beam.
It pierced Dante's chest.
There was no explosion. Only a sudden silence. The king's body arched, his eyes wide with genuine surprise. A gush of black blood—so much blood—exploded from his back, atomizing into a dark mist. The force of the impact, purely spiritual and kinetic, hurled him downward. His flaming wings fluttered, failed, and he fell several meters in the air before regaining control, hovering again, but lower, visibly staggering.
On the ground, Dan watched. The fire around his body no longer pulsed randomly. It pulsed to a rhythm. A rhythm he felt echoing in his own chest. And then he understood. It wasn't just his heart. It was the rhythm of Stella's light. Their energies, seemingly opposite, were in tune. The same flame Tekio had ignited in them—the flame of the human spirit, stubborn, resilient, and full of love—burned in both, creating a resonance. He didn't just see her fight; he felt each of her assaults as a vibration in his own soul.
Stella descended then, not in controlled flight, but in deliberate free fall, a golden shooting star. Her hair, loose, floated back like strands of liquid gold. The sword in her hands shone like a miniature sun, the brightest point in the universe at that moment.
Dante intercepted her mid-path, the clash of their bodies creating not a sound, but a discontinuity in the air. A spherical crater of compressed air and pure energy exploded around them, visible as a distorted bubble for a second before bursting into a howling wind.
And then the final dance in the sky began.
Stella's chains of light—now conscious manifestations of her will—snaked from her sword and wings, intertwining with the black, flaming chains of Dante's kusarigama. It wasn't a struggle of brute force. It was a duel of control. Fire, shadow, and light collided and intertwined in a hypnotic, deadly whirlwind, a kaleidoscope of destruction that spun faster and faster.
The air screamed, shredded by conflicting frequencies. The ground, hundreds of meters below, trembled continuously, cracks propagating like giant spiderwebs.
And for an instant, a glorious and impossible instant, the figure of the King of the Abyss, the untouchable sovereign of darkness, was seen being pushed down. Stella's light, her fierce determination, was overcoming the millennial inertia of his arrogance.
Dante sighed. A long, almost weary sound that seemed to carry the weight of ages. His black eyes, infinite pits, reflected the dancing flames and light, but also something more: the echo of a distant memory.
The kusarigama in his hands vanished, dissolving in a silent explosion of black smoke immediately swept away by the wind. In its place, materializing from the void as if it had always been there, appeared a sword.
It was long, taller than a man. The blade was not of dark metal—it was solidified darkness. It reflected no light, it absorbed it. To look at it was to feel a void sucking at the eyes. It pulsed faintly, as if breathing, and the air around it contorted, corrupted, as if reality couldn't bear its presence. It was the very essence of the abyss, materialized into a weapon. The perfect antithesis of what Stella wielded.
Stella hovered before him, her breathing controlled, the golden sword firm in her hands. She wasn't just light. She was concentrated strength, indomitable will, rage purified into purpose. Her every movement in the air was battle choreography, each step a precise adjustment. Her blows didn't just cut the air; they cut space, leaving gashes of light that persisted like scars on reality.
Dante looked at her. And for a moment, echoes came. Not just from Jade—from all the brave souls who had challenged him. The firmness in her posture, the decision in her gaze, the strength that refused to bend… But Stella wasn't Jade. Jade had been fire and passion. Stella was light and conviction. She was faster, colder in her fury, more relentless in her determination. And in a flash of clarity, the king knew: underestimating the heir of light would be the last mistake of his eternity.
The swords collided.
The sound cannot be described with human words. It was the universe being torn in half. Darkness and light, abyss and star, chaos and order—met at the tips of the blades. Sparks didn't fly—meteors did. Small fragments of pure energy, golden and black, were expelled from the collision, streaking the sky like an inverted meteor shower, each one burning the air in its wake.
Each blow from Stella made Dante retreat just a hand's breadth, but each hand's breadth was a victory. The abyss within him roared, trying to envelop, consume, erase the golden blade. But it resisted, its light unshakeable, balancing supernatural agility with titanic strength.
Dante attacked then, abandoning defense. A swift, brutal sequence of spinning blows that created a spiral of darkness around him, a mill of black blades that tried to crush Stella by sheer volume of attacks.
Stella didn't block. She leaped, using a wing impulse to rise above the spiral. At the peak of her jump, she spun in the air and, with the same hand holding the sword, made a pulling gesture. From the tips of her wings, new ethereal golden chains gushed, not to bind, but to swing. They ensnared Dante's black sword mid-attack, deflecting its trajectory, twisting its momentum, creating a tiny opening.
She fell through that opening like a lightning bolt, dictating the rhythm, forcing Dante to react to her.
Dan watched, his fists so tight the white fire gushed between his fingers. His heart beat in a frantic rhythm, not of anxiety, but of attunement. It was the first time he saw Stella fight like this—not as a partner, not as an apprentice, but as a force of nature in her own right, pushing a god into a corner. Her every movement, every spark of light, made the energy inside him grow, as if Tekio's spirit were there, in the space between them, uniting his fury to her strategy, his strength to her light.
— Impressive… — Dante's voice emerged, an almost hoarse murmur she barely heard over the roar of energies. He dodged another of her blows, the golden blade passing centimeters from his neck. — Almost… like Jade.
A memory, warm and painful, pierced the king's chest. Past and present collided. Only Jade, in all his existence, had challenged him like this in the skies, making him feel the heat of light burning the edges of his abyss. The confusion was a blow as strong as any physical one.
Stella used that microsecond of hesitation. She jumped again, and the sword in her hand… transformed. The light forming it condensed, solidified even further, until it no longer seemed like energy, but an unknown divine material. It was her true essence. A blade that was pure manifest will: golden, solid and ethereal, capable of cutting both matter and the very concept of darkness.
It was the perfect parallel to Dante's sword. Light against Darkness. Determination against Chaos. Order against Abyss. The symmetry was so perfect it seemed predestined.
They spun, collided, separated, and clashed again, a choreography of destruction that painted the sky in their opposite colors. Stella's chains wove a golden net around Dante's black attacks, swinging him, destabilizing him, forcing him to perceive, in his millennial mind, that this woman was not an obstacle to be overcome. She was an opponent to be defeated. An equal.
It was then that Dante, in a burst of pure ferocity, launched not one, but a series of eight concentric spheres of black flames. They didn't fly straight; they swirled, curved, pursued Stella like intelligent serpents of smoke and flame, sealing her escape routes.
Stella stopped for a fraction of a second, her golden eyes analyzing the pattern. And then, she didn't try to escape. She began to fly faster, her body becoming a golden blur. She guided the flames, attracting them, making them follow her luminous trails in ever-tighter loops, until, with a final sharp movement, she led them to collide with each other at the exact point from which they had originated.
The black explosion that followed swallowed Dante for an instant.
— You… are getting slow, king. — Stella's voice reached him, clear and cold as glacier water, even over the roar of the flames. Her eyes burned with a conviction that seemed to pierce even the densest darkness.
Dante heard the words, and for the first time in centuries, something within him contracted—not his body, but his certainty. The eternal arrogance cracked like ice under pressure. He frowned, a microgesture almost human of perplexity and concentrated irritation.
Stella gave no time for hatred to replace surprise. She propelled herself with a complete spin in the air, a movement that served not only to gain momentum, but to *declare*. Her body described a perfect spiral, leaving a luminous trail in the shape of DNA in the sky, a double, ascending symbol of her ascendance.
Dante raised the black sword, instinctively, to block what seemed to be a direct descending strike. His millennial calculations, based on thousands of celestial duels, predicted the angle, the speed, the point of impact.
He was wrong.
Stella dodged at the last possible millisecond, an adjustment so subtle it seemed like a flaw in gravity. The golden sword didn't come from above. It came from the side, in a horizontal slash that began at Dante's right shoulder and ended at his left abdomen, a clean, brutal arc of pure light.
There was no sound of metal. Only the hiss of reality being cut in half.
The blade of light passed through flesh, bone, and darkness with the same ease with which daylight pierces fog. The blood that gushed wasn't liquid—it was black vapor, thick as tar, expelled with the force of an eruption. The darkness within him tried to cling, tried to regenerate immediately, but the edges of the wound glowed with a cauterizing white that resisted, that burned the very essence of regeneration.
The impact, purely kinetic and spiritual, hurled Dante down like an inverted meteor. He plummeted in free fall, his body a dark blur against the golden sky, his demonic wings fluttering uncontrollably. As he fell, the flesh tried to stitch itself, bones welded with muffled snaps, but it was slow. Too slow. Stella's light had left a mark on the wound, an active resistance to healing.
And on the ground, where the dust from prior clashes hadn't settled, Dan was already in motion.
He didn't run. The ground under his feet *imploded*. Each step wasn't a stride, it was a crater opening, launching stones and earth skyward. The white fire no longer covered him—it *flowed* from him, gushing from his pores, his eyes, the mouth slightly open in a silent roar. The flames condensed in his fists, not as gloves, but as shards of sun forged into knuckle-dusters. The heat was so intense the air behind him distorted, creating mirages of a white hell.
As Dante, still falling, neared the ground, Dan leaped.
It wasn't a leap. It was the *negation of the fall*. The ground under his feet didn't propel him—it *disintegrated* into a disc of fire and pulverized rock. He rose like a divine missile, at a perfect angle, his body a straight line of concentrated fury.
The blow was an uppercut that began on the ground and ended on Dante's chin. It didn't seek to wound. It sought to *annul*.
The impact was the antithesis of sound—a vacuum of noise followed by an explosion that didn't come from the bodies, but from space itself being crushed. White light and golden sparks erupted in a luminous mushroom that swallowed both. The ground, sixty meters below, split in concentric waves like a lake struck by an asteroid, raising walls of earth and rock.
Dante was thrown not backward, but upward and away, his body spinning uncontrollably through the energy cloud, colliding with the distant horizon with a dull thud that made the entire plateau tremble.
The boom of the collision still echoed when the king's body hit the ground—not with an impact, but with a *collapse*. The earth cracked in a stellar pattern, an instantaneous crater from which dust and residual energy exploded in all directions.
Inside the crater, before the dust could settle, before a single neuron in his millennial brain could order regeneration, a shadow crossed the air above.
Dan.
He hadn't fallen. He had reached the apex of his leap and now descended like a vengeful angel, fists first. The white fire around him compressed into a singular point between his arms, a nucleus of pure annihilation.
The second punch had no mercy, no calculation, no rage. It had *finality*.
It came from above, a god's hammer forged in flames. It struck Dante, still dazed, at the bottom of the crater.
The king's body wasn't crushed against the ground. The ground was crushed *against him*. The pressure distorted the air, creating a lens that magnified for an instant the grotesque scene: Dante's torso sinking, his spine arching at an impossible angle, his ribs disintegrating into dark shards before even piercing the skin.
Before the scream of pain could escape his throat, before the darkness could grasp the fragments of his form, Stella appeared from behind.
She hadn't descended. She had appeared, as if teleported by a sunbeam. Her golden wings were closed, her body an aerodynamic arrow of light. The sword in her hands no longer shone—it *blazed*, with an intensity that made the previous light seem like shadow.
Her blow had no name. It was a diagonal slash that began at Dante's left shoulder and ended at his right hip, passing through the center of his being. It didn't cut just the body. It cut the *connection* between his flesh and the darkness that sustained it.
The king's body, already split by Dan's punch, separated into two distinct pieces.
But Stella didn't stop. The determination on her face was absolute. Her hands moved in a fluid gesture, and the ethereal chains still hovering in the air—remnants of her prior attacks—materialized again. They were no longer loose lines. They were divine shackles, thick as trees, made of compacted light. They wrapped the two pieces of Dante's body, locking them, immobilizing them, enveloping them in a luminous embrace that prevented the coalescence of darkness.
Dan advanced again, a demon of light in his own right. The white fire now enveloped his arms up to the shoulders, flowed from his torso like an inverted cascade, and the ground cracked and melted under his feet, forming puddles of molten rock. He didn't breathe. He *radiated*.
— Now! — Stella's cry wasn't an order. It was an agreement. A full stop.
She pulled the chains with all the strength of her spirit, the muscles in her arms tensing, the golden veins under her skin glowing like power circuits. The light responded, contracting with a force that would make mountains tremble.
The pieces of Dante's body—still pulsating, still trying to regenerate—were hurled forward, one against the other, straight into the epicenter of the storm that was Dan.
The impact that followed wasn't a collision. It was a *miniature apocalypse*.
Dan didn't land a single punch. He landed a symphony. His fists moved so fast they disappeared, leaving only traces of white fire in the air—an incandescent web that enveloped the king's fragments. Each impact was a muffled thunderclap, an implosion of energy. Dante's black flesh shattered before it could reform, evaporating into corrupted smoke immediately purified by the white fire.
Stella accompanied, dancing at the periphery of the storm. Each time Dan knocked a piece away, her golden sword appeared, not to cut, but to *dissect*. Fine, precise slashes of light separated tendons of darkness, isolated power cores, exploded energy junctions. Each of her cuts glowed for an instant before bursting into a mini-solar explosion, burning the darkness at its core.
It was a methodical, divine, synchronized massacre. As if Tekio's spirit were there, not as a ghost, but as the invisible *maestro* of this orchestra of annihilation. Dan struck with the raw brutality of the earth, of primordial force. Stella cut with the divine precision of the sky, of the light that separates darkness. Each punch, each flash, each explosion was a sentence written in the book of the king's destiny.
Dante tried to roar, but his voice was lost in the chaos. He tried to reform his wings, but they dissolved into ashes before materializing. His body—the concept of his body—began to collapse, not in parts, but as a whole. It melted, reformed halfway, melted again. It was like watching a wax statue being thrown into an oven and pulled out repeatedly—each time, less defined, less him.
Dan drove the final punch home. It wasn't the strongest. It was the *most precise*. A straight, linear punch that pierced what remained of Dante's chest, where a heart of darkness still tried to beat.
In the same instant, in the same perfect rhythm, Stella dove from above, the tip of her golden sword piercing the same point, coming from the opposite direction.
The fusion was instantaneous. White fire and golden light met at the center of Dante's being.
And exploded.
Not outward, but *inward*.
A silent flash swallowed everything. It wasn't white, nor golden. It was a color that didn't exist—the color of *nullity*, of absolute vacuum after annihilation. It lasted less than a second, but for all present, it lasted an eternity. When it dissipated, there was no sound. Only a deep, abyssal silence, as if the universe were holding its breath.
And at the center of the silence, Dante.
Kneeling.
His body was no longer contorted. It was… *still*. Half his face was there, pale and perfect as marble. The other half was a trembling mass of semi-solidified shadow, trying to form and failing. The visible flesh was intact, but translucent, as if lacking substance. The wings had vanished. The black sword lay broken beside him, reduced to fragments dissolving like ice in the sun.
He raised his gaze.
His eyes, once infinite pits of darkness and arrogance, were now just… eyes. Human in their pain, in their exhaustion. They wavered between a rage so deep it could freeze the sun and an incredulity so absolute it bordered on madness. The king, the abyss, the god of darkness… in that moment, kneeling in the dust of his own power, seemed incredibly, devastatingly *small*.
The golden and clear dust still fell slowly, like ashes from a dead sun. The air vibrated—hot, heavy, dense with the smell of ozone, burnt blood, and spent power.
Stella landed softly a few meters ahead, her feet touching the ground without a sound. She panted, her shoulders rising and falling in a desperate rhythm. The sword in her hand still sparked, but the light was weak, intermittent. On her body, the golden marks—the energy veins—still glowed, but no longer like furious rivers. Now they seemed like luminous scars, calm watercourses after a flood. She was the avatar of light, and her body, marked, panting, but unshakeable, conveyed that truth more eloquently than any scream.
Dan landed beside her with a dull thud that made the ground tremble. He remained standing, but it was the posture of a pillar about to fall. His body was covered in blood—his own, Dante's, it was impossible to tell. His skin was marked by burning fissures where the white fire still tried to escape, small flames emerging from cracks like lava from a split mountain. His fists still smoked, but the bones within were visibly cracked, each finger a masterpiece of fractures and willpower.
He took a step forward. His leg nearly gave way, but he straightened it with an audible grinding of tendons. Then another step. Each movement made the ground crack under his feet, each breath a ragged, hot puff, like fire from a damaged furnace.
Stella watched him. There were no more words between them. No triumph, no celebration. Only the heavy silence of what needed to be done. Pity had died with the friends they had lost. The truce, with the king's broken promises. Only the end remained.
Dan stopped before the kneeling king.
The height difference was absurd. Dan, a mortal man, standing, marked by battle. Dante, a cosmic entity, kneeling, reduced to ruins. The hierarchy of the universe had been turned upside down.
Dan raised his right fist. Not quickly. It was a slow, deliberate movement, laden with the weight of every loss, every tear, every instant of pain that being had caused. Blood dripped from his elbow, mixing with dirt and soot. The white fire, weak but persistent, reappeared around his fist, condensing into a small, intense halo.
The air around him trembled. Not with power, but with *intention*. As if the entire world were contracting, ready to crack at the moment of the blow.
He looked directly into Dante's eyes. He didn't seek hatred in the king's gaze. He sought *recognition*. He sought for him to see, in the gaze of a mortal, the consequence of his reign.
And with a voice that was little more than a ragged whisper, torn by smoke and pain, but laden with unshakeable firmness, Dan said:
— I said I'd kill you… you goddamn king.
The words weren't an insult. They were an *epitaph*.
The fist descended.
Not with the speed of lightning, but with the inevitability of a falling asteroid. The white fire traced a perfect arc in the air, a scythe of light against the purple and golden dusk of the battlefield.
The impact had no sound.
Or rather, it had a sound not meant for human ears. It was the sound of a concept unraveling. Of an era ending. Of a darkness being erased not by light, but by a force even more primordial: the *will* of two beings who refused to bow.
Dante's body didn't fly backward. It didn't explode. It simply… *disintegrated*. Starting from the point of impact, it dissolved into particles of mixed shadow and light, which for an instant shone like dust of black stars before dissipating in the wind that now blew, clean and cold, across the devastated plateau.
Dan's fist continued its trajectory, striking the ground where the king had knelt. The earth didn't crack. It merely emitted a deep sigh, as if it could finally breathe.
Dan remained there, bent over the point of impact, his fist still buried in the soil, his shoulders rising and falling with heavy breaths.
Stella let her sword vanish in a shower of golden particles. She walked to him, slowly, and placed a trembling hand on his shoulder. She said nothing. It wasn't necessary.
Behind them, the sun, which had seemed to stop during the battle, finally began to set on the horizon, tinting the devastated world in shades of orange, purple, and gold.
The Guardian's first flight had ended. And with it, the reign of a god.
To be continued…
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