The High Soul's blade tore through the air, dragging streams of screaming light behind it. I caught the strike with my claws, the impact detonating through my arms like bone-shattering thunder. My knees sank into the cracked ground, shards of black stone skittering across the battlefield.
"You're not enough," the High Soul's voice was calm calm like the stillness before a tidal wave swallows a city. His eyes burned with pale fire, their light eating away at the shadows around us.
"I'm not done," I growled, though my breath was ragged. Every muscle in my body screamed rebellion, but I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing me kneel.
I pushed back hard and the ground ruptured beneath us, geysers of molten shadow erupting skyward. My tendrils shot forward, hundreds of them, each tipped with hooked, serrated ends. They whipped through the air like hunting serpents, latching onto the High Soul's armor, tearing chunks away.
For a moment, I saw it flesh.
Not divine. Not perfect.
Flesh that could bleed.
I lunged. My claws sank into his side and tore. His roar was more than sound it was a vibration that made my bones ache, my vision stutter.
Light erupted from his wound, a torrent that burned my skin to ash on contact. The pain was absolute, but it fed me. I shoved my other hand into the wound and ripped wider, gorging myself on that radiance, drinking it like liquid agony.
His blade came down again, faster this time. I moved barely. It still carved across my chest, taking a slab of meat with it. My vision went red, my ears filled with a rushing tide, but the hunger kept me standing.
"You think devouring makes you a god?" he snarled, his voice now carrying a crack of fury.
"No," I hissed, spitting black blood at his feet. "It makes me something worse."
The ground beneath us groaned. The Abyss was responding shadows boiled up in cyclones, the sky splitting into jagged tears of blinding light and infinite black. Our auras collided, shattering the air between us into shards of screaming void.
He moved. I moved.
No more testing no more holding back.
Our blows blurred into each other claw against blade, soul-flame against abyssal venom. Every strike carried a piece of will, a shard of intent to erase the other's existence entirely. His strikes didn't just cut flesh they carved into the soul, leaving wounds that bled memory and thought. My counterstrikes didn't just tear muscle they gnawed on essence, stripping away the layers of him until the raw core pulsed beneath.
His palm struck my chest. A light like the sun ignited inside me, searing my ribs to powder. I staggered back, but my shadow tendrils snapped out, wrapping his throat, yanking him forward into my knee which shattered against his skull, but left a dent in the mask of his perfection.
The High Soul's voice deepened, vibrating through the ground.
"Enough."
He exploded outward in a storm of white fire, each flame a screaming soul fragment. They latched onto my skin, tearing chunks away. I howled, my own abyss surging to meet them, devouring flame after flame, choking them into black smoke.
We slammed together again no space, no thought, only the roar of two predators refusing to die. My claws ripped through his stomach. His blade rammed through my spine. Blood his silver, mine black splattered in arcs across the ruined battlefield.
Still, neither of us fell.
The Abyss above cracked wider, as if even it couldn't hold this fight much longer. The ground split into rivers of shadow and light, each screaming with the voices of the damned.
I tightened my grip on him, staring into those pale, burning eyes.
And I smiled.
Because I could feel it
The High Soul was slowing.
And the hunger inside me was only getting stronger.
The High Soul stopped holding back.
I felt it the moment the ground beneath us fractured not from his blow, but from the sheer density of his killing intent crushing the space between us.
It was like the Abyss itself bent its knee to him.
He no longer walked he flowed, movements so unnervingly silent it was as though reality refused to acknowledge him until his strikes landed.
I caught the blur of his claw an instant before it split the air beside my skull, the vacuum screaming in my ears as stone vaporized into dust.
"Your strength is nothing without purpose, boy," he snarled, and then he vanished.
The next moment, pain exploded across my ribs his knee driving in with the weight of a collapsing mountain, hurling me into the wall. The stone didn't shatter. It liquefied under the impact, fusing with my flesh before I tore myself free in a spray of molten rock and blood.
I didn't breathe. Breathing would mean hesitation.
I lunged claws ripping forward only for his forearm to catch mine. My talons carved through his flesh, black ichor spilling into the air, but his other hand gripped my skull and slammed me into the floor.
Boom!
The impact cratered the arena, the Abyssal Cage's obsidian walls webbing with fractures that hissed with raw void-energy.
I pushed back, shadows exploding from my spine like spears, stabbing for his throat. He turned his head slightly just enough letting them scrape the side of his jaw instead of piercing. He smiled, a cold, predatory curl.
"Better… now again."
He vanished. Again.
My instincts screamed I dropped low his strike cut over me, tearing a canyon through the ground. I didn't counter; I moved with the flow, letting his momentum carry him forward before slamming my hand into his back. Soulfire surged from my palm, burning his essence. His roar was not pain it was fury.
The air warped. His shadow detached from him a mirror of his form and lunged for my throat. I cut it down, only for it to reform instantly, seizing my limbs. The real High Soul was already in front of me, claws raised, soul energy spiraling around them like a vortex ready to pierce worlds.
No choice.
I unleashed it the forbidden technique I'd stolen from the ancient I devoured days ago.
My body split or rather, my presence did. Four. I thought with this technique I would have the upper hand, but to my surprise I felt something on my chest. The High Soul's blade was in my chest.
Not my shoulder. Not my side. My chest.
It slid in with that sick, whispering sound of steel tearing through wet muscle, the cold metal scraping bone. I could feel my heartbeat stutter against its edge before it lodged itself deep. The air left my lungs in a wet, rattling gasp.
He leaned close, his breath nothing but frost and whispers.
> "You're nothing but hunger wearing skin."
I didn't respond. My answer came in the form of my claws raking across his ribs, snapping two of them in an ugly crack that made him flinch just enough.
Pain roared through me but pain was fuel. My hand shot up, gripping the blade still buried in me, and with a snarl that shook the very shadows around us, I pulled it deeper. His eyes widened for the first time in the fight.
"Not… done," I hissed.
The ground beneath us was fracturing under the pressure of our powers. The Cage groaned like a dying beast, its walls buckling inward as if the Abyss itself wanted to swallow us both whole. The darkness was thicker now, almost solid, pushing against my skin like the pressure of deep ocean trenches.
The High Soul lunged again, but my shadows moved first black tendrils erupting from my back, spearing toward him like living javelins. He cut through the first two, but the third wrapped around his throat and pulled.
We slammed together. Bone against bone. Will against will. His forehead crashed into mine, and for a heartbeat, the world was only a ringing void.
I bit him.
Yes I sank my teeth into the side of his neck, through armor of soul and flesh alike, tasting something ancient and wrong, something that burned my mouth yet sent waves of strength crashing through me. He roared, and the force of it shook free chunks of reality from the Cage walls.
We tore at each other now. Not like warriors like beasts. My claws shredded through his plated chest; his fingers sank into my side, curling under my ribs, trying to rip something vital free.
Black ichor poured from my wounds.
Blinding light bled from his.
Each drop that fell to the floor ignited the ground, either in shadowfire or in soulflame, until the entire battlefield was a storm of colliding elements.
Then we both went for the kill.
I channeled everything. Every soul I had devoured in this cursed abyss howled in my veins, a tidal wave of darkness that surged into my right arm. It swelled, bones grinding, veins bursting as the shadow tendrils wrapped it into a monstrous weapon of claw and blade.
He gathered his own that same blinding, sickly purity, the light that had cut me open so many times before, now concentrated into a spear of blinding judgment.
We charged.
The impact was… indescribable.
The Cage screamed. The world inverted light and dark folding into each other, collapsing into a singular point where our blows met. The sound wasn't a sound at all; it was the absence of one, a vacuum that ate the roar of destruction only to vomit it back out a second later as a shockwave that tore the Cage walls apart.
My arm drove forward.
His spear drove through me.
We passed each other.
For a moment, neither of us moved. I could hear my own heartbeat again.
One.
Two.
Three
He dropped first.
The High Soul's body hit the fractured stone with a crash, his weapon dissolving into motes of dying light. His chest rose once… twice… and then stilled. The oppressive weight that had been suffocating me since I entered this Cage evaporated, leaving only the whispering hush of the abyss.
I stood over him.
My body was ruined torn, bleeding, half-shadow, half-flesh but I didn't care. My claws reached down, hooking into his soul as it began to rise from the shell of his corpse.
That's when I heard it.
Lucifer's voice not soft, not distant but everywhere. Inside my ears, my bones, my thoughts.
> "Nice one, boy. Now devour it… and come to me."
The darkness above me split apart like a wound in the sky.
Through it, golden light spilled not warm, but heavy, ancient. Heavenly stairs, impossibly vast, descended in silence, each step carved with runes that pulsed faintly as if they were breathing.
The path led up into the torn heavens.
And I knew whatever waited at the top was going to change everything.
But first… I tightened my grip on the High Soul's fading essence.
And I began to devour.