Chapter 99: Alexander vs Abraham .
A low rumble, heavy as a tectonic earthquake, rose from deep within Abraham. His jaw of pure gold parted with a metallic screech, revealing a rigid, polished smile completely devoid of the slightest trace of human fatigue. It was the smile of an unchangeable idol facing the fragility of the world.
"You are determined to kill me, Alexander! I recognize the true Sacred Dragon of Destruction in you!"
Abraham's right arm lowered with ceremonial slowness, his index finger pointing toward the center of the plain. There was no explosion, no destructive flash of light. Just a sharp, terrifyingly pure snap, evoking the simultaneous snapping of millions of steel cables across the continent. Under the shockwave of this command, the metallic earth fragmented. In a fraction of a second, the perfectly flat surface tore upward into thousands of rectangular slabs several meters thick, shooting into the sky at oblique angles. Blocks of raw iron, pillars of transmuted bronze, and structures of heavy steel floated in mid-air, colliding in an unstable, purely vertical geometry. A labyrinth of open-air suspended platforms had just replaced the realm, instantly redrawing the rules of the battlefield. At the center of this ascending chaos, Abraham froze for a moment. His golden legs, massive as temple columns, bent slightly. Then, with a disconcerting rhythm, the titan began to bounce on the spot. His feet struck the metallic slab in an ultra-fast sequence left, right, left a footwork of such fluidity and lightness that it violently contrasted with his stature as a metal colossus.
His shoulders swayed in a perfect pendulum motion, his guard rising to the level of his golden chin, testing the elasticity and responsiveness of the matter he had just bent to his will. He transferred his weight from one foot to the other, his gaze locked onto his target, focused, ready to kill.
Then, the physical impulse triggered.
Abraham uncoiled like the spring of a siege catapult. The block he was bouncing on was literally blasted backward, pulverized by the shockwave of his departure, while the tyrant plummeted toward Alexander in an oblique trajectory, cutting through the air with a shrill hiss. Three hundred meters away, taking cover behind a golden superstructure created by Abraham, Lancelot desperately tried to lift Damian. His hands, smeared with soot and dried blood, trembled at the spectacle before him. He, who had thought he could exterminate the dragons, now understood that it would remain nothing but a utopia; facing monsters like this, there was no choice but to surrender.
"What is that thing..." Lancelot gasped, his eyes wide, fixed on the suspended labyrinth undergoing constant reconfiguration.
"So this is... the Sacred Dragons?!"
Kana, one hand pressed firmly against her broken ribs to contain the pain, spat a thick stream of black blood before whispering, her voice cracked with visceral terror:
"What speed... I can't even see their bodies anymore. They are going to destroy everything if this keeps up."
The deathly silence weighing on the witnesses was instantly shattered. Alexander had launched himself forward in turn.
Rather than simply running, he instantly converted the gravity in front of him into a vacuum of aspiration, letting himself fall forward at a phenomenal speed. He didn't use the floating slabs as steps, but rather as friction walls; his combat boots cut deep, glowing grooves into the vertical blocks as he described a curved trajectory, defying the laws of physics to intercept the Dragon. The two opponents then began to run side-by-side at insane speeds, covering phenomenal distances with giant strides through the maze of perpetually moving slabs. Even as they ran at this mad pace, their blurred silhouettes inexorably closing in on each other, their arms and legs exchanged strikes at a truly maddening rhythm. The hand-to-hand combat engaged the very instant their trajectories crossed.
The first frontal collision occurred halfway up an immense suspended bronze pillar.
Abraham, perfectly grounded even at full speed, utilized all the inertia of his momentum to deliver a left jab. A direct punch of geometric rectitude, aimed precisely at Alexander's windpipe. The movement was so clean, so academic, and executed with such technical perfection that it left absolutely no opening. Alexander tilted his torso back by just a few degrees; the golden fist passed a mere millimeter from his skin, tearing the collar of his jacket by the sheer pressure of the compressed air accompanying the strike. In the same fraction of a second, capitalizing on the dodge, Alexander's right arm countered with a lightning-fast straight line aimed at the center of the giant's face.
BANG!
The titanic impact snapped Abraham's head back, but his golden vertebrae did not give way. Drawing from the recoil and the energy of the shock, the tyrant initiated a perfect roll; his torso dipped beneath the left hook Alexander was already throwing to follow up. Abraham slipped under the S-Class's arm with the fluidity and ring craftsmanship of a legendary athlete, realigning his massive body in a flash before exploding his hip into a devastating rotation for an upper-cut of stunning violence.
"Eat this!" roared the tyrant, the sound of his stentorian voice vibrating directly through the metal of the surrounding slabs, making the maze resonate like a giant tuning fork.
Alexander instantly bent his thighs, lowering his center of gravity beneath the trajectory of the fist of light that shot up to torch the golden sky. Taking advantage of his flexed position and Abraham's overextension, he swept his back leg in a low circular kick, aiming to cut the colossus down at the ankles. But the Ancient Dragon, anticipating the change of axis with the instinct of a highly experienced warrior, stepped off the side of a floating block with a perfectly timed side-step. He dodged Alexander's leg and, in the exact same tempo, unleashed a short, direct side kick, driving his massive golden heel into his opponent's left flank.
The sound was like a steel armor plate struck full-force by a battering ram. Alexander was propelled sideways, smashing entirely through an isolated iron slab that shattered into thousands of sharp shards under the force of the impact. His boots plowed deeply into the next platform, leaving long furrows of molten gold to slow his momentum. Without waiting for the residual inertia of the throw to fade, he instantly modified the mass of his own body at a molecular level, canceling the remaining impact to bounce back like a spring toward Abraham's blind spot.
His fists became completely invisible to the naked eye. In the span of a single breath, a billion distinct impacts of unheard-of violence battered the giant's torso and face: plexus, liver, base of the neck, right temple. Each of Alexander's strikes integrated a kinetic inversion technique; the energy didn't just hit the surface, it penetrated beneath the golden cuticle to shatter the Dragon's internal molecular structure he who existed as a concept was literally being touched by Alexander, who could interact with him.
Further down, Vulcan, leaning against a smoking piece of metal debris, followed the incessant crackle of shockwaves sweeping through the atmosphere. His teeth clenched to the breaking point, cold sweat pouring down his forehead.
"It's not possible..." he stammered, his eyes bloodshot from the superhuman effort of concentration required to follow the duel, except that now... his perception was too slow.
"Their speed has increased again... it hasn't stopped growing since the beginning. I can't keep track of them anymore."
At the same moment, Abraham nevertheless withstood the barrage without breaking. Bringing his two forearms in front of his face in a tight, ultra-rigorous high guard, elbows tucked against his body to protect his flanks, he weathered the storm. Alexander's repeated shocks caused bright, blinding white sparks to fly from his transmuted skin, digging slight indentations into the gold that immediately closed and smoothed over thanks to his regenerative alchemy. A ferocious, almost demented smile distorted his sculpted features.
"HIT ME HARDER, ALEXANDER!"
With a violent shove of his forearms, he forced Alexander's fists apart, breaking his rhythm, and instantly countered with a combination.
He launched a double of quick jabs to harass his opponent's line of sight, immediately followed by a straight rear right cross, charged with the entire mass of his shoulder and divine stature. The first jab forced Alexander to cross his hands in an emergency block; the second passed through the broken guard anyway and struck his nose, spraying a trail of crimson blood that immediately shrank and retracted under the effect of his cellular regeneration, which had now become instantaneous. But the right cross, thrown with a complete and perfect rotation of Abraham's hips, hit him full-force, right in the center of his stomach.
The pressure of the impact was so monumental that all the air left Alexander's lungs in a sharp, agonizing wheeze. His body doubled over under the piercing force of the blow, but his hands, driven by a pure survival reflex, instinctively locked around Abraham's massive wrist, which was still extended at the end of his strike. Using it as a fixed, unshakeable pivot, the S-Class swung his entire body through the air, executing a full twist over the giant's extended arm. His right heel, reinforced and weighed down by a localized pulse of inverted gravity, came down like a heavy axe blade onto the Dragon's temple.
CRACK!
Deep, whitish fracture lines instantly webbed across Abraham's golden cheek and forehead, shattering the illusion of his invulnerability. The colossus staggered, his feet breaking the supporting slab beneath his own weight, which had multiplied from the violence of the shock. Shaking his head vigorously to clear the vibration that threatened to disconnect his consciousness, Abraham used an instinctive body feint worthy of the greatest tacticians in history: he simulated a left-hand departure to force Alexander to slip toward the outside. That was exactly where his back leg was already chambering, rising in a raw, powerful upward knee strike meant to definitively shatter his jaw. Alexander caught the murderous intent the exact moment the knee cut through the air, generating a Mach cone. Crossing his forearms in an emergency defense beneath the golden kneecap, he took the vertical thrust full-force. The impulse was so phenomenal that it propelled him away at a truly inconceivable speed. The kinetic force instantly ripped both combatants out of the maze of slabs, rocketing them in a fraction of a second far above the stratosphere, beyond the limits of the Earth's atmosphere.
It was at this precise moment, in the freezing silence of the exosphere, that reality shifted into a completely different dimension.
Freed from air friction, atmospheric resistance, and the chains of Earth's gravity, their blows became infinitely more violent, sharper, and cleaner. The impacts no longer produced the slightest sound in the vacuum of space, replaced instead by blinding flashes of pure light that tore through the cosmos with every collision, illuminating the curvature of the Earth below.
Suddenly, the pure speed of their movement broke all theoretical barriers of physics. Their trajectories ceased to be simple straight lines or ballistic curves. The two titans began to virtually teleport across the starry sky, tracing insane and perfect geometric shapes complex polygons, multi-pointed stars, and hexagons of pure energy drawn at an absurd velocity, reaching quintillions of times the speed of light. To an observer left on the ground, the night sky suddenly looked gridded by a network of golden and red neon lights, a hyper-dense web woven in a fraction of a microsecond.
At the center of these impossible geometric shapes that defied human understanding, the exchange of blows took on a truly terrifying turn. Each of Alexander's punches was no longer just heavy or powerful; it had become sharp, keen as a razor cutting through concepts, literally tearing chunks of gold from Abraham's divine armor with every contact. The Dragon tried desperately to counter, relying on his perfect, unchangeable boxing style, polished by the ages. But over the milliseconds and the billions of crossing trajectories chaining together at an infinitesimal scale, the features of his golden face began to distort, betraying a deep, immense incomprehension.
Abraham no longer understood. The Dragon's arrogance was fracturing right along with his armor.
The further the fight progressed, the more the overall intensity escalated, and the more Alexander adapted to a rhythm that should have been destructive for any living being. This was no longer just the S-Class's surhuman resistance or endurance he was actively breaking, rewriting, and pushing past his own biological and physical limits in real-time, with every single assault. With every new geometric figure drawn in the sky, each time Abraham tried to accelerate further to overwhelm his opponent, Alexander handled the onslaught with a disconcerting, almost insulting ease. He fired back increasingly surgical strikes, visibly becoming stronger, faster, and infinitely more terrifying with every passing billionth of a second.
"Am I dreaming, or is he adapting to me?" Abraham thought, panic creeping into his millenary mind for the very first time as a new transverse red line carved through his defensive space, completely blitzing his speed and tearing away a part of his shoulder.
To be continued...…