Chapter 101 — The Soul-Burning Blaze
At that very moment, within the World of the Thousand Moons, the combat had reached a level of savagery and beauty that surpassed anything the hybrid spectators could have imagined in their worst nightmares. The arena, once an architectural masterpiece of white marble, pillars adorned with gold engravings, and intricate lunar motifs, was now nothing but a field of smoking ruins. The sacred ground was lacerated by gaping chasms from which magmatic heat escaped, the cyclopean walls collapsed in a cataclysmic din, and the very air seemed to scream, distorted and torn under the phenomenal pressure of the two clashing forces.
Seth was completely dominating.
His fists, enveloped in pure red flames of a red so deep, so alive that it recalled the pulsing heart of a primordial volcano struck with a rigorously controlled rage and devastating precision. Each battering blow shattered the barrier of light and sent Seshomarû reeling back by several meters, the earth imploding beneath his footsteps while his massive body trembled violently from head to toe under the impact. The rose-orange Lunar Blaze of Vaeris's eldest son, once so majestic, hypnotic, and feared by all, now appeared pale, sickly, almost suffocated like a mere firefly choked out by the splendor of a blood-red sun.
"How...?!" Seshomarû roared between two desperate parries, his voice echoing in his head like broken thunder through the tumult. His katana, forged from the purest metals of the world, trembled violently in his numbed hands. The lunar flames wrapping around it flickered miserably, like the wick of a candle on the verge of dying out in a storm.
"How can a human like you be this strong?! ...This is impossible! I am the eldest son of the Goddess! I am the strongest in this universe!"
Seth did not reply immediately. His gaze possessed an imperial, almost terrifying calm. He chained together a succession of punches and knee strikes with perfect fluidity, each impact generating a shockwave that made the air detonate around them in dull, repetitive explosions. Seshomarû blocked, he endured, but with every contact, the magical wave pierced through his defenses. He felt something far worse than the mere agony of the flesh an intimate, metaphysical burn that seeped into the deepest recesses of his being, touching what he held most sacred.
His soul.
"Your flames..." Seshomarû gasped, his eyes wide with stupor, injected with a visceral fear he had never known in all his existence.
"They aren't just burning my body... they are burning my soul! How is this possible?! I feel my very essence consuming itself... my memories, my power... everything is crumbling! He is going to kill me if this continues..."
Seth sketched a tired but fierce smile, a thin trickle of blood running down the corner of his mouth, bearing witness to the physical toll such power demanded of him.
"Because I am no longer fighting only with my magic. I am fighting with everything I am. With my will, my rage, and everything I have learned across the world and the flames incarnate this will hidden within me!"
The hybrid spectators, perched on suspended balconies and upper terraces that were still miraculously standing, were struck mute. A leaden shroud had fallen over the audience. Many had wide eyes, frozen in disbelief, refusing to credit what their senses were dictating to them. Some wept in silence, tears of despair flowing down their pale faces without them even realizing it. Others trembled with terror, their hands gripping the railings so tightly that their fingers bled, unable to utter a single word.
The eldest son of the Goddess, the idol of war whom they considered invincible the very pillar of balance in their world was being trampled and dominated by a human from another universe. Seshomarû finally fell to his knees, one knee heavily planted on the cracked and incandescent floor of the arena. His breathing was a ragged rattle, his kimono was in tatters, and his body was covered in red burns so deep they were still smoking, devouring his regeneration. He clenched his teeth to the point of breaking his jaws, his fists pounding the ground in pure rage and incredulity.
"Why...?" he whispered in a hoarse voice, almost broken by the tears of humiliation.
"I was the strongest man in this universe... Why can't I beat you?! Tell me! Why?!"
Seth stopped a few meters away from him. He was breathing heavily, his chest heaving with the effort, but the red flames still danced with a royal regularity around his fists and forearms. He looked down upon Seshomarû with a complex mixture of sincere pity and implacable firmness.
"Because I am simply stronger than you," he replied calmly, his voice cutting through the hissing of the brasiers.
"In the world I come from, there are people far stronger than me. Suo, Alexander, Obliranca, Flora, Vulcan... I have crossed paths with monsters who would make you look like a child. You cannot claim to be the strongest if you have never left this world. If you have never faced opponents who truly surpass you, you are just locked in your own little bubble and have never been confronted with a real challenge."
These words shattered the final barriers of Seshomarû's sanity. He snapped, his pride trampled, his eyes completely bloodshot, his voice rising into a shrill register under the effect of a demented rage and intolerable humiliation.
"Who do you think you are to speak to me like that?! Who do you think you are, miserable human?!"
He unleashed a howl of rage, a primal and tearing scream that shook the very foundations of the entire domain. Then, the unspeakable occurred. Seshomarû's body began to grow, distorting in a sickening crunch of bones breaking to reform and flesh tearing apart. The energy remaining within him exploded in a geyser of rose-orange light. His nine fennec tails thrashed frantically before fusing together, lengthening and thickening like pythons of pure energy. His body became massive, colossal, covering itself in a flamboyant fur with red and pink reflections, while scales embedded with lunar runes appeared along his spine.
In a matter of seconds, he took the form of a gigantic fox-dragon, twenty meters tall—a mythological creature both majestic and terrifying. His lunar eyes gleamed with a insane fury and his fangs, as long as executioner's swords, dripped with a saliva of fire.
The entire area instantly turned into a boiling cauldron. The temperature rose brutally, reaching levels unsustainable for any biological life form hundreds of thousands of degrees. The oxygen itself seemed to burn under the effect of this transformation, becoming toxic, heavy, and suffocating.
The atmosphere became a hell of superheated gases. The spectators began to flee in a general panic, trampling one another, screaming in terror. Some fell to their knees, their lungs scorched by the air, suffocating in agony. Others collapsed outright, their eyes bulging from the crushing energetic pressure emanating from the monster.
"I WILL KILL YOU THIS TIME!" Seshomarû roared in a multiple, monstrous, and polyphonic voice that echoed in shockwaves through the entire domain, shattering the remaining stained glass and structures of the arena.
"I WILL USE MY ULTIMATE ATTACK AND DESTROY EVERYTHING WITH YOU!"
A sphere of Lunar Blaze of titanic proportions began to condense before the gaping maw of the fox-dragon, vacuuming the energy of the arena. Seth did not react immediately. Facing this titan of destruction, he appeared minuscule, a mere human silhouette. Yet, he remained standing, calm, anchored in the midst of the burning arena. The red flames danced softly around him, forming a perfect protective aura, an invisible dome against which Seshomarû's heat came to shatter.
"Since my arrival in the realm of dragons... I've been feeling strange," Seth murmured to himself in his mind, briefly closing his eyes.
"I don't understand everything that is happening to me. My power is changing, I still haven't recovered my memory, and yet I feel like... I've already lived through all of this... But it doesn't matter. The most important thing is to finish you... and go back to save Flora."
When he reopened his eyes, they had become two crimson furnaces. He deployed his flames fully.
The thermal shockwave was instantaneous. Seth's red flames expanded in seismic waves, entering into a head-on collision with Seshomarû's Lunar Blaze. The visual clash was unbelievable: instead of a simple explosion, Seth's flames literally began to consume those of his opponent.
The pink and orange lunar flames, powerful though they were, were devoured, burned alive by Seth's red flame which was purer, denser, deeper, and infinitely hotter. It was the original fire dominating a derivative fire.
Seth slowly raised his hand toward the sky of the dimension, his fingers clenching as the air liquefied around him. His eyes shone with determination and an iron will that nothing could bend.
"This time... it's over."
The heat crossed a critical threshold, becoming utterly unbearable. The entire domain was plunged into an infernal boiling point. The elite soldiers and the last spectators could no longer flee; the air was so hot that their katanas and armor began to melt onto their skin. Some collapsed, totally asphyxiated by the superheated air burning their throats, while others screamed in pure terror as they watched the walls of the domain liquefy and run like wax around them.
It was then that Seth unleashed the occult technique he had developed during his intensive training and deprivations under Obliranca. He drew from the deepest depths of his soul, where his true essence resided, and pronounced the words of the verdict:
"Infernal Blaze of the King of Hell."
A colossal column of red flames, with a diameter so vast that it instantly encompassed the entire arena and then the whole domain, erupted from Seth's body. The pillar of fire surged toward the heavens, tearing through the clouds and the dome of the dimension. The twenty-meter fox-dragon was instantly swallowed up, his howl of triumph turning immediately into a shrill cry of agony as his scales, his flesh, and his energy were vaporized.
The released energy was so phenomenal that it triggered a psychic shock across their world. The map of the global dimension briefly appeared, forcefully engraved into the mind of every living being present: five great distinct domains, located at different points in space-time, separated by illusory barriers and complex portals created by the Goddess Vaeris to divide her empire. In reality, these five domains were but one and the same dimension, artificially fragmented.
Seth's fire defied the laws of spatial geometry.
Carried by his iron will, the red flames rushed into the magical channels. Seth burned, calcined, and reduced to ashes the interdimensional portals that separated the territories. In an instant, Seshomarû's domain was completely volatilized, followed immediately by Seijuromaru's, and the other three were likewise swept away by the tempest of scarlet fire that tore through dimensions like sandpaper.
Across the broken connections, the main domain of Goddess Vaeris herself trembled violently. Earthquakes of an unparalleled magnitude shook her palace, the ancient walls cracking through and through under the thermal shockwave. In the crimson sky of the dimension, the sacred moons flickered dangerously, paling before the red and destructive glow that had just consumed two of the greatest princes of this world.
At the center of the crater of glass and ash that was once the arena, the column of fire slowly began to recede, giving way to a deathly silence.
To be continued....