Swish
The kinetic force of the collision was greater than his resistance and sent Beelzebub flying violently backward once more.
Losing his stability, he rolled uncontrollably through the air, spinning until he flapped his wings with desperation, managing to break his fall.
!
And when he looked down at his right hand, he noticed the price he paid. The fleshy membrane between his thumb and index finger had been brutally torn, and a thread of thick purple blood sprouted from the wound, dissolving the rock of the ground on contact.
His surprise attack had failed miserably.
"Ahhhhh!"
Reason abandoned him completely. His millennia-old pride was crushed and left space only for a devouring obsession that only existed to tear apart the flesh and digest the soul of the human who had just humiliated him.
Accompanying his roar of madness, a dark energy erupted from him and a gravitational singularity burst violently from the center of his chest, expanding at a terrifying speed and quickly engulfing the entire stadium in a blink to continue its voracious advance until covering almost half of the Land of the Dead, claiming everything in its path.
Panic exploded with absolute virulence when the suction force trapped the living dead without making any distinction.
The physical integrity of the crowd came undone and both the skeletons and their souls disintegrated instantly to become torrents of gray energy that ascended violently toward Beelzebub's suspended body.
"Monarch! Mercy!"
And their desperate clamors found no answer.
The screams of agony from tens of thousands of spectators were extinguished in a matter of seconds upon being devoured by the vortex, and soon a sepulchral silence claimed the place.
However, this massive and forced absorption of souls, far from healing him, began to destabilize his physical structure.
Beelzebub's aura turned violent, vibrating with an instability that threatened to tear him apart.
The wounds inflicted by Lief gave way to the internal pressure and opened even more, causing his blood to gush out.
He was voluntarily incinerating his own life and using that amalgam of souls as fuel to forge his final strike.
"Come to me!"
With his voice, he raised his claw toward the newly formed abyss.
"Ruumble!!!"
Using his gravity, he ripped the fractured foundations and the tons of debris from the crater out by the roots, forcing them to ascend violently toward the sky.
And while they ascended, the matter began to collide and compress, while he injected a crimson fire between the cracks of the rock to fuse it all into a single mass.
In just an instant, a titanic sphere over one hundred meters in diameter took shape and eclipsed the light above his head.
Its surface burned in dark flames and pulsed with a rhythm, revealing the agonizing faces of the thousands of devoured souls that now acted as the nuclear fuel of an unstable reactor about to explode.
"This is the price for angering me!" he howled with madness, with the froth of insanity spouting from his mouth. "Turn into cosmic dust!"
Squeezing out even his last breath of life in a final effort, he thrust his arms forward and threw the death star against Lief.
The colossal mass descended toward Lief and began to distort space in its wake due to its density, but the projectile advanced with an inexorable heaviness, a flying mountain whose mere physical presence crushed the spirit and fragmented reality itself long before the impact occurred.
However, far from showing fear before the imminent extinction rushing down upon him, a strange smile curved Lief's lips.
"So this is what Tony Stark felt, right?" He murmured, and raising both hands quickly, a low-frequency hum made the entire Land of the Dead vibrate.
The crust creaked and fractured in a radius of hundreds of meters around the crater. City blocks and entire buildings that extended to the sky were ripped out by the roots and began to levitate forming a titanic shield.
And injecting all his purification energy without reservation into the floating mass, he hurled it toward the sky.
The island ascended with the power of a planetary catapult and collided head-on against the crimson death star.
"...."
In that precise instant, sound abandoned reality.
Absolute silence claimed the space for an eternal microsecond before a sphere of light, infinitely brighter than a supernova, exploded at the point of impact, blinding everything in its path.
With it, an omnidirectional shockwave swept the Land of the Dead like a hurricane and pulverized the remaining buildings instantly, also dissipating the black clouds that had appeared.
The dust took time to settle and fell slowly like heavy gray snow over the ruins.
When visibility finally returned, it revealed an altered landscape and a huge smoking crater.
At the edge of that abyss, Beelzebub knelt.
His majesty had disappeared, and his body now looked like porcelain about to shatter, furrowed by deep cracks that faintly shone with a bluish tone.
In his hand, the dreaded Crimson Rose had snapped in half, and his vital presence was as weak as a candle flame battered by the wind.
Raising his eyes with difficulty, he fixed his gaze on Lief's suspended figure. Seeing the human's impeccability, whose clothes showed not a single wrinkle or trace of dirt after the cataclysm, the bitterness of disbelief appeared in the demon's eyes.
"Mortal... I must admit that your strength is an anomaly," he growled with resignation, trying to force his legs to stand once more. "But don't make the mistake of thinking this ends here—"
He made an agonizing attempt to straighten up to launch a final attack, but his voice cut off before he could finish.
His body, starting from the tips of his claws, began to crumble into motes of black light, becoming translucent.
"What...?" Watching with disbelief as his own arms disintegrated, he roared. "No! I'M SO CLOSE! Damn it, I just needed a little... JUST A LITTLE MORE!"
His will fought to maintain the cohesion of that physical form, but the collapse was irreversible and the speed of disintegration increased exponentially.
"Consider yourself lucky, mortal..."
Poof
Without time for anything else, his figure exploded into a cloud of dark particles that dissipated in the wind, taking the fragments of his rapier with them and leaving the place plunged in a sepulchral silence.
Landing softly on the edge of the crater, Lief observed the empty space where he had been seconds before, and a shadow of doubt crossed his face.
"He left...?" he murmured, feeling that he hadn't died.
He had barely finished warming up and was starting to enjoy the rhythm of combat when the demon simply disappeared, leaving him with that anticlimactic sensation of having thrown a punch with all his might only to hit the air.
"Fufufu~..."
A melodious and amused laugh broke his reverie.
Dorothy advanced with elegance among the debris, dissipating the magical barrier in front of her with a gesture of her hand while her eyes raked over Lief with voracity.
"Don't look so disappointed, darling~" she said as her red lips curved into a charming smile. "What you just saw was nothing more than a projection of Beelzebub, a puppet that barely contained a tenth of his real power."
She stopped right in front of him and extended an index finger to gently touch Lief's chest.
"However, that a simple human was able to destroy the projection of a Monarch of Hell and reduce it to dust... that proves you are extraordinary... so extraordinary that I can barely repress my urge to turn you into the most perfect piece of my collection."
________
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