----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The field was not silent. It was dead.
The sound that persisted was not the wind, nor the crackle of distant flames. It was a viscous, organic, profane noise—the flesh of a god reconstituting itself. A sound of tendons stitching together like wet ropes, of bones snapping back into place with moist cracks, of torn skin crawling back into place like a dying animal. The center of the crater was not a point of impact, but a womb of darkness. From it, Dante emerged, piece by piece, in a process that was less regeneration and more an obscene parody of creation.
His body was no longer a coherent form. It was a pulsating heap of abyssal matter—bones rising like black branches of a tortured tree, veins glowing with a thick, black blood that pulsed with its own rhythm, pieces of pale flesh sticking and unsticking, seeking a form the power within him could no longer perfectly remember. The regeneration was grotesque, chaotic, as if the very hell inside him were desperate, trying to cling to any form that could keep him manifest.
And even in this state, even reduced to a project of a being, his eyes—one of the few intact parts—still held a gleam. But it was no longer the gleam of sovereignty, of absolute power. It was the gleam of hatred tempered with something new, something strange: the pale shadow of astonishment. It trembled under the residual light that dominated the field—Stella's golden light, painting the dust with gold, and Dan's white light, tinting the shadows with silver.
And they were coming.
Stella and Dan walked. They did not march. They dragged themselves forward. Each step was a conquest over pain, over the weight of broken bones, over the spiritual fatigue threatening to erase their consciousness. The dust their feet kicked up was not simple earth; it was a mixture of ash, crystalline fragments of solidified energy, and tiny particles of light still floating, reluctant to dissipate—the last echoes of the powers they had pushed to the limit and beyond.
They knew, with a certainty beyond thought, beyond instinct, that to stop was to die. Dante was not an enemy who succumbed to wounds. He was an idea, a personified force of nature. To defeat him, victory wasn't enough. He had to be unmade. Crushed, piece by piece, until the very void from which he drew power grew tired of rebuilding him. Until the Abyss, looking at the ruin of its king, simply gave up.
But what moved them now was not just that practical, brutal necessity. It was something heavier, deeper, that made each step ring like a funeral bell.
The terror of war is not just the fear of death. It is the accumulated weight of every loss. And Dan and Stella did not walk alone. They walked, burdened by an invisible procession.
They carried the echo of Amara's last defiant smile, the warrior who had entered their lives like a storm and departed like a blizzard—abrupt, brutal, leaving a cutting silence in the air. She was not a long-time sister, but her courage, her instant loyalty, had etched itself into them like a blade of ice in the heart.
They carried the fierce dignity of Aisha, the Empress who was not a title, but a truth. The strength that was both shield and spear, the motherly affection that transformed into a goddess's fury when her wards were threatened. The memory of her imposing posture, her eyes that saw through any lie, her voice that commanded not through fear, but through the certainty it inspired.
They carried the mute pain of Akira, the warrior whose body had been violated, turned into a puppet, but whose soul, they knew, would never bend. The memory of his teachings, his relentless philosophy: never hesitate, never retreat, even when the end is certain. The image of him, lost between life and death, was an open wound throbbing with every blow they struck.
They carried the silent sacrifice of Tenklyn, not the distant Emperor, but the fallen brother. The man who had traded his destiny for theirs, who had fallen so that the world, so that they, could breathe for another day. His legacy was not of glory, it was of debt. A debt that could only be paid with victory.
And above all, enveloping them all, weighing more than any other ghost, was the absence of Tekio.
His name was not a battle cry. It was a whisper that burned from within, a void shaped like a person. He didn't need titles to be important. His essence was simple and monumental: the one who lit the path without trying, who turned the impossible into routine with an awkward smile and stubborn determination. They were three—Dan, Stella, Tekio—an improvised family of mended hearts, finding strength in each other's cracks. His absence was not a hole; it was the removal of the foundation. The world without Tekio was colder, quieter, heavier.
And yet, paradoxically, it was as if he were pushing them forward. As if his ghostly shoulders were behind them, his invisible hands on their shoulders, his voice echoing in the depths of their exhausted minds: "Keep going."
Stella felt an additional layer of this weight. Through Jade's memories that now inhabited her being, she did not merely remember the last war against Dante—she relived it. She felt the heat of burning cities, the metallic taste of blood in her mouth, the sound of the skies splitting. She saw the faces of Konan, of Yara, of legions of soldiers whose names were lost to time, but whose fury, whose despair, whose final courage were now fuel for her soul. The golden light around her did not tremble from weakness. It trembled from contained wrath, from an inherited promise, from a centuries-old debt she was there to settle.
She would burn everything. Dante's darkness, the pain he sowed, the bloody past itself. Until not even ash remained of the shadow that dared call itself king.
Beside her, Dan was the silence echoing the same fury. His fists were clenched not just from muscular tension, but because they held within them all the impotent rage, all the pain transformed into purpose. His gaze, once so human, now shone with the same spiritual fire Stella carried. It was the reflection of the same unspoken oath: Never again.
They finally stopped before the heap of darkness that was Dante. He was rebuilding, yes, but slowly, with difficulty. Their light seemed to inhibit the process. In that moment, standing over him, the king seemed ridiculously small. A ruin trying to remember how to be a throne.
It was then that the heap trembled.
A deep tremor, followed by a sound that was part laughter, part choking. The mass of flesh and shadow reorganized itself with a sudden snap. From within it, Dante stood up. He did not rise—he erupted. The black flames, once dispersed, converged in a vortex around him, sucking in the surrounding darkness. The black blood stopped flowing and began to boil, evaporating into a sulfuric mist. Each muscle sewed itself back not with the previous slowness, but with a sudden violence, as if pulled by invisible ropes. The smile that was born on his still-reconstructing face was a spasm that fixed itself, becoming an expression of pure, maddened arrogance.
Stella and Dan braced themselves on the ground, ignoring the pain protesting in every fiber. There was still fuel in the furnace of their souls. They would move, attack, repeat the massacre as many times as necessary.
That's when the weight descended.
It was not physical. It was metaphysical. An invisible, inaudible tremor tore the fabric of reality around them. It felt as if the world itself held its breath. The ground under their feet did not yield—it sank, as if local gravity had been multiplied a thousandfold. Their bodies, already at their limit, bent at once. Knees cracked, spines groaned. It was as if invisible mountains had been tied to their backs.
The sound of the battlefield vanished. It was sucked away, leaving a terrifying vacuum. Stella's vision began to fragment—not darkening, but breaking into thousands of pieces, as if she were looking through a nightmare kaleidoscope. She tried to blink, and the world blinked back, distorted. She tried to breathe, and the air was thick as honey, sticky, reluctant to enter her lungs. She tried to move a finger, and time seemed to crush her intention before it could become action.
And at the center of this collapse of reality, Dante laughed.
It was no longer a human laugh. It was a deep sonic wave, vibrating at multiple frequencies at once, as if a thousand voices, a thousand demons, were guffawing through him. His body was now complete, perfect, transcending even its prior state. His black hair fell like a liquid mantle to his shoulders. His eyes… his eyes were a spectacle of horror: the red of blood, the gold of the crown, and the darkness of the abyss fused into a hypnotic whirlpool. He was no longer just the King of the Abyss. He was the incarnation of the concept.
— Feel that? — his voice reached them, clear and calm, cutting the silent vacuum like a scalpel. It had an almost didactic tone, of a teacher explaining a fundamental truth to slow students. — It is the weight of a dominion you will never comprehend. The gravity of a kingdom with no end.
The energy around him rippled, visible as heat above asphalt, but twisting light, color, the very form of objects. Dan, with great effort, tried to look around. What he saw made no sense. The lines of the horizon curved and broke. The debris in the distance seemed to merge with the sky. It was as if space were being kneaded by giant hands. He barely noticed it, but they were immersed in the purest and most advanced Abyssal Distortion—the technique Dante had used to disintegrate the Emerald Gate Agents. Only now, it was not a spectacular attack with meteors. It was something intimate, personal, surgical. A slow drowning in impossibility.
— Do you know what happens when a human tries to gaze upon the abyss? — Dante asked, beginning to walk amid the distortion. His steps made no sound, but the shadows around him fluttered like living veils, dancing to the rhythm of his power. — The brain implodes trying to process infinity. The body grows heavy as if carrying all the stars that have ever died. Time breaks, and the pieces cut the soul. And the soul… the soul only knows how to scream.
What Dante had done was simple and monstrous: he overlaid a fraction of the Abyss's reality onto the material plane. For a human brain, unprepared for such a dimension of void and paradox, the effect was an existential shock that paralyzed body and mind. It was not an illusion. It was the imposition of an alien physics.
Dan and Stella tried to fight. Frantic commands were fired from their brains to their limbs. Move your arm! Take a step! Scream! Nothing. Their bodies were statues of flesh trapped in amber of darkness. Their minds, still lucid, beat against the bars of a prison made of pure nonsense.
And Dante, now fully restored, more powerful than ever, observed them. His gaze was not of hatred now. It was of hunger. The hunger of a gourmet before a rare delicacy.
— You fought well. You were even… inspiring — he admitted, tilting his head in a gesture that could have been respect, had it not been so laden with condescension. — But playtime is over. It is time for you to understand, in flesh and soul, what Power truly is. What it means to challenge a King.
He slowly extended his right hand. The air around him did not move—it curved. Space literally recoiled, as if fearing his touch. The intention was clear: Dante would plunge them, conscious and powerless, into the heart of his kingdom. Show them the true abyss, not as spectators, but as victims who would dissolve in the comprehension of horror.
Then, silence descended again, deeper than before. An accepted verdict.
Dante positioned himself exactly between Dan and Stella, motionless as a divine statue. His gaze lowered to the cracked ground at his feet, where dark, thick shadows began to drip from his boots, flowing like rivers of living ink, painting reality black. There was no sound. No wind. Only the growing pressure, the suffocating prelude to absolute end.
Dan tried, with a willpower that cracked something inside his skull, to move his little finger. Nothing. Stella tried to force a deep breath, seeking the last remnant of pure air. The air was static, heavy, dead. Time no longer passed; it bent in obedience to the king.
Dante closed his eyes for long seconds. The atmosphere around him trembled, not with vibration, but with the tension of a universe about to rupture. When he opened them, reality itself wavered. His eyes—the red of sacrifice, the gold of tyranny, the darkness of eternity—shone like profane suns, sources of a light that darkened everything it touched.
He raised his hand to the height of his face. His fingers, still stained with his own black blood, traced a complex, ancient symbol in the air. It left no visible trace, but the space through which they passed bled darkness. And then, in a whisper that was less sound and more a direct invocation into the world's fabric, a single word, dragged, laden with the weight of millennia of solitude and power, escaped his lips:
— Veil… of the Abyss.
The world did not explode. It imploded.
The shadow did not spread—it swallowed. It expanded from Dante in a living, conscious, voracious wave. It didn't block light; it consumed the very concept of luminosity. The ground vanished beneath their feet. The sky was erased. Sound was sucked into a bottomless pit. Even the sensation of being in a body, of having a form, began to dissolve. It was like watching reality bleed to death, with Dante as the source of the hemorrhage.
He overflowed with power in a way Dan and Stella, even in their transcended state, could not begin to comprehend. It was the difference between controlling fire and being the wildfire that consumes a continent. The impotence was total. Despair, a cold, logical certainty.
But then…
A chill.
Not a physical cold. An existential shiver. An ancient, almost forgotten vibration that echoed through the distorted space, cutting the abyss's symphony like a scream in silence.
Dante trembled.
It was impossible. Unthinkable. But he felt it. At the core of his being, at the heart of his absolute power, that energy infiltrated. Familiar. The same chill, the same intractable presence that had defied him centuries ago, in the days when his victory seemed certain and the world was about to fall. The presence that had made the very abyss hesitate.
And in the heavy smoke falling like ashes from an already dead sky, among the dying sparks of energy and the blood suspended in the air like drops of cosmic moisture, Dante saw.
An aura. Not golden, not white. Crimson. It tore through the distorted space like a lightning bolt that doesn't come from clouds, but from the vacuum between worlds. And at the center of that aura, hovering like a ghost made of pure will, were eyes. Eyes of a blue so cold it burned, so sharp it seemed to slice the soul. Unmistakable.
A shiver ran down Dante's body from the base of his spine to the root of every hair. It wasn't fear. It was something more primitive: recognition. The smile that formed on his lips was first nervous, trembling, an involuntary reaction. Then it spread, revealing his teeth in an expression of pure, uncontrollable ecstasy.
— No… — he murmured, the word escaping between clenched teeth, laden with a mixture of denial and profane desire. — It can't be…
But it was.
The silhouette gained form, not of flesh and bone, but of pure energy, memory, and will condensed. The lightning warrior. The shadow of his only true defeat. Yara.
But his rational mind, still present beneath the wave of emotion, knew the truth. It wasn't her. It was a ghost, an echo of Dante's deepest fear, conjured by his own subconscious as he toyed with the limits of reality. The memory of the one who had once said "no" to him with the power to sustain the word.
Even knowing, the reaction was visceral, automatic. His scream tore through the distorted space, a thunder of rage and challenge that made the illusion itself tremble:
— YARA!!!
The name echoed, not through the air, but through the souls of Dan and Stella, still trapped in the abyssal paralysis. And upon hearing that name, upon feeling the sudden crack in Dante's absolute dominion, something within them reacted. It wasn't a large physical movement. It was a tremor. A pulse of will. The minimum indicator that the impossible—resistance—still existed.
And it was enough. The first crack in the unbreakable glass.
Then, from the crimson mist, the face revealed itself completely.
And it was not the face Dante expected.
It was serene. Impenetrable. And the eyes were not blue.
They were crimson. Alive. Determined. Burning with a flame Dante knew all too well.
The illusion dissipated. The ghost of the past transformed into the presence of the present. The chill Dante had felt was not for the echo of Yara.
It was for him.
— Tekio… — The name left his lips in a hoarse whisper, between teeth still clenched in a smile that now didn't know if it was fury, fascination, or pure terror.
He was there. Or something of him. Not a mirage, not a trick of the exhausted mind. It was the presence of Tekio, but amplified, purified, fused with the will that had overcome death. It was as if his essence had been distilled into a form of pure purpose.
The wound in Dante's dominion vanished instantly. The paralyzed air stabilized, becoming merely heavy air again. The Veil of the Abyss, the technique that consumed reality, dissipated into fragments of shadow that evaporated like a dream at dawn.
And Dante… retreated.
Not a strategic step. An involuntary movement, almost reflexive. Not from fear of brute force, but from respect for the antithesis. Because no king, not even from the deepest hell, could wear the mantle of the abyss before one who was born, lived, and breathed to deny it.
The battlefield changed. Stella's golden light, Dan's white light, and now Tekio's crimson flare intertwined, not canceling each other out, but creating a symphony of impossible colors. Tekio's spiritual thunder united with Stella's celestial light. The true combat, the one that would transcend everything before, was about to begin.
And Dante realized something crucial: Dan and Stella were beginning to move. Within the collapsing bubble of distortion, their bodies responded. Minimal movements, just the flexing of a finger, the rotation of a wrist, but they were real. And he understood the reason immediately.
They were reacting to Tekio.
His mere presence, his aura of denial, was undoing the layers of the abyss. The energy Dante shaped with absolute perfection wavered, fragmented, dissolved as it approached the crimson. It was like trying to maintain a sandcastle before the high tide. The order he imposed was denied by the very nature of the boy.
Tekio did not need to attack to wound the king. Existing was already an attack. Dante understood it with a clarity that chilled his blood, even in flames. Tekio was not his opponent. He was his inverse. The counterpoint the universe, in its eternal balance, had forged to nullify him. And this realization enraged him to the core of his being, to the root of his essence of darkness.
The residual sound ceased. The king lowered his head, taking a deep breath once. A low, bestial growl escaped his throat, vibrating the air. Then, in a sudden movement of pure, concentrated frustration, he raised both arms and, with a sweeping gesture, hurled Dan and Stella away.
It was not an attack meant to injure. It was to remove. Like a painter brushing two unwanted colors off his canvas.
The impact was inhuman. Their bodies were thrown like dolls, cutting through the air, smashing through piles of debris, rocks, and dust, until they vanished into the distance, the sound of their passage lost in a muffled echo. The bubbles of abyssal distortion around them unraveled like soap bubbles—maintaining them required a focus and power Dante could no longer spare.
Now, his problem had a face, crimson eyes, and a silence that screamed.
And Tekio was no longer standing still.
The instant the Veil shattered, he moved. It was not a step, nor a leap. It was a disappearance followed by an appearance. A crimson streak scored the space between them, not like lightning, but like the thought of lightning—instantaneous, inevitable.
Dante tried to follow him with his eyes, but saw no movement. He only saw the aura shift, a blotch of living will that surpassed the need for physical form. The air deformed, not from speed, but from the refusal of Tekio's presence to submit to the laws of space Dante tried to bend.
He did not speak. He simply appeared. Before the king.
And the impact came.
The clash was not between two bodies. It was between two realities. The ground beneath their feet did not crack—it disintegrated into fine dust immediately swept away. Their arms met in a block, and the boom that followed was not of bones, but of the very air being torn in half.
Dante retreated. Two steps. His teeth clenched with enough force to crack diamond. His blood, that black, boiling blood, seemed to boil even hotter within him. He counterattacked, driven by a blind, primordial fury. His fist rose, and around it, space darkened, sucked in to form the Vacuum Flame—the same monstrous technique, pure negation of existence, that had erased Amara from the world without a trace.
The energy was a silent vortex of absence, consuming color, sound, heat, even the idea of matter. It was the touch of absolute nothingness. And Dante directed it straight at Tekio, with the clear intention to erase him. To undo him from reality definitively, permanently.
Tekio did not retreat. He did not dodge.
He advanced.
His crimson eyes shone with an intensity that outshone even the darkness of the flame. The air around him crackled, not with electricity, but with the tension of spiritual force being forced to a breaking point. His right fist closed, and around it, the energy did not take the form of fire or lightning. It was something more brute, more pure: materialized willpower. Spiritual power in its rawest, indomitable form, the fuel of the human soul that refuses to die.
Dante roared, a sound from the depths of the abyss, and unleashed the blow.
Tekio did the same.
Fist against fist. Vacuum against Will.
The flash born from the clash had no nameable color. It was blinding in an absolute sense, erasing all perception for a second. Sound vanished, sucked away by the violence of the event. And then, the explosion.
It was not a wave of fire. It was a wave of pure force, white and red mixed in a collision of opposites. It destroyed the ground not by raising debris, but by pulverizing everything within a fifty-meter radius into dust so fine it seemed like smoke. The air was pushed away, creating a momentary vacuum that later filled with a deafening roar.
When the dust and glare subsided enough, the image revealed itself:
Dante was on his knees.
His right arm, the one that had unleashed the Vacuum Flame, trembled uncontrollably. The skin, from fingertips to shoulder, was cracked in thin black lines, like broken porcelain, and from within leaked not blood, but a dark, smoky amber glow. His hand tingled, numb, nullified. He had not just lost the contest of strength. His own technique, his ultimate weapon, had been denied by a force even more fundamental.
The rage that arose within him then was of a new kind. It was the rage of the artisan seeing his masterpiece undone by a savage. The rage of the logician before the absurd.
But he had no time to surrender to it.
Tekio was already behind him.
How? There was no perceptible movement. It was as if he had always been there. And the punch that struck Dante's back was not just strong. It was precise. It hit a point between the shoulder blades, an energy center, and hurled him like a ragdoll against a pile of concrete rubble that collapsed on him with a monumental crash.
Dante spun in the air, and even in pain, his millennial mind reacted. Tentacles of pure shadow, cold and piercing like stakes of eternal ice, erupted from the ground and the surrounding shadows, seeking Tekio from all sides, trying to impale, entangle, consume him.
Tekio had already vanished.
A crimson flash to the left. Dante turned, blocking a blow to the abdomen that made him double over. Another flash behind—a knee to the back that made him spit blood. A third from above—an elbow that struck his shoulder with a dry crunch of cracking bone.
It was a choreographed massacre. Dante, the god of war, reacted with growing desperation. He invoked ice barriers that shattered at the touch of crimson. Black flames that dissipated before touching Tekio's skin. Earth tentacles that crumbled to sand. He molded the environment like a god, trying to crush a tempest that was, by nature, ungraspable.
And Tekio always reappeared. Implacable. Cruel in his efficiency. Like the thunder that never stops falling, always finding the most direct path to the target.
The next fist tore through the smoke and darkness, hitting Dante's already damaged arm. The impact didn't just break the bone. It broke the air around it, deforming space locally. The sound that followed was that of thunder being crushed inside a flask.
Dante was hurled like a weightless object, spinning uncontrollably through the air until he collided with a reinforced concrete wall from some long-destroyed building. The structure collapsed on him, burying him in an instant tomb of rust and dust.
The pain that struck him then was not physical. It was spiritual. Something burned inside his flesh, something that corroded his essence. It was not a wound his regenerative power could understand or mend. The spiritual fabric of his being did not mend. The darkness within him, his power source, trembled. As if they were afraid.
— This… — he murmured from within the rubble, his body arching in an unknown agony. The sound of his own bones cracking echoed in his skull. — What… what is this?
He forced his eyes open, sweeping away the dust with his gaze. And he saw Tekio.
The boy walked slowly through the dust cloud, his body erect, his breathing controlled. His gaze conveyed no emotion. No hatred, no triumph, no fatigue. Only focus. The crimson aura around him pulsed—alive, conscious—as if it were a separate entity observing Dante with as much interest as Tekio himself.
Each step Tekio took made the ground react. Not tremble, but vibrate subtly, as if the earth refused to fully support him, or perhaps bowed before him. It was as if the world rejected his presence for being an anomaly, a walking contradiction.
And Tekio moved again.
A blur. This time, Dante tried to predict. His mind, accelerated by adrenaline and desperation, calculated trajectories, analyzed micro-expressions, read the tension in Tekio's muscles. It was knowledge from millennia of combat.
He was wrong.
Tekio was already in front of him, his fist plunging into his abdomen with a force that seemed to come not from muscles, but from a direct impact of the soul. The blow folded him in half. The sound that emerged was not of flesh being pierced, but of something deeper breaking—a spiritual connection being undone.
The pain… spread. Like a virus. Like a poison running through his veins of darkness, not killing, but nullifying. Dante staggered, panting, gasping. He tried to absorb energy from the environment, conjure more shadows, anything. But the flow of power was… interrupted. Cut off at the source. Each blow from Tekio seemed to disconnect him a little more from the very chaotic essence that fueled him.
Tekio was a demon. But not a demon of the abyss.
He was a demon hunter.
Dante felt this truth with crystalline, terrifying clarity. It wasn't a metaphor. Tekio's body, his aura, his simple existence, nullified his own. Chaos recoiled in his presence, fearing to be touched. And Dante—the emperor of chaos, the sovereign of the abyss—was being pushed back not by greater force, but by cosmic incompatibility.
Tekio vanished and reappeared. He struck with a brutality that was almost surgical in its lack of hesitation. Dante tried to create distance, and Tekio took it back, not with speed, but with presence. Space no longer obeyed Dante's distortions. The rhythm, the force, the initiative—everything was in the hands of that silent boy.
Each punch was a small explosion of negation.
Each impact left a grotesque snap of something beyond bone breaking.
Dante felt his soul—yes, he had one, a black and twisted soul—fragment. He felt his flesh lose connection to his will. He felt his power leak through wounds that were not physical, but existential.
He roared, a sound of bestial desperation, trying to mount a counterattack, anything. But Tekio intercepted it, broke his flow, nullified his intention before it could materialize.
"How?"
The question echoed inside his skull like a muffled scream. How had that boy, who should have been just a receptacle, a fragile container for borrowed power, become this? How had he survived the blow that should have erased him? Who, or what, had patched him up?
Dante looked, with the eyes of an artisan studying an impossible work. Tekio's body seemed almost untouched. There were marks of war, yes—tears in the uniform, dirt, dried blood. But no deep wounds, no sign of the catastrophic trauma he had suffered. Only… scars. Old. Closed. As if his body had healed from something that happened long ago, not minutes ago.
"Is someone behind this?"the thought crossed his mind, swift and paranoid. Between one blow and another, he tried to scour the shadows, feel another presence, some hidden puppet-master pulling strings. But no. The air was clean of any influence beyond the three present: his own, Stella and Dan's in the distance, and Tekio's. And that, the solitude of Tekio's transformation, terrified him even more.
They clashed again, and this time the impact tore the sky above, creating a momentary vacuum that sucked dust upward before spitting it out in a rain of earth. They fell together amid debris, opening a new crater, hurling debris for miles. Tekio was lightning incarnate—and Dante, for the first time in his infinite existence, did not see himself as a god looking down.
He saw himself as prey.
He counterattacked in a final surge of fury, releasing a concentrated explosion of black flames that did not burn, but disintegrated. The wave cut across the horizon, opening black fissures in the air, vaporizing everything in its path, leaving a trail of pure nothingness. The world around seemed to crumble under that power, reality retreating before annihilation.
But, even then…
Tekio's fist went through the inferno.
The black flames, which should have erased anything, parted before him, like the Red Sea before Moses. They did not touch him. They recoiled. The punch, wrapped in pure crimson, struck the arm Dante had instinctively raised to block.
The impact was not just strong. It was definitive.
Dante was hurled backward, his body twisting in the air in a spiral of pure pain. He fell heavily, dragging himself through the dust, leaving a deep furrow.
In the slowly settling dust, he saw Tekio walk toward him again.
The boy. The lightning. The anomaly. Light cuts, dirt, but nothing that seemed able to stop him. And that energy around him, vibrating—it was not static. It was mutable. Alive. Responded to the environment, to Dante, to something within Tekio himself. Dante felt, for the first time in countless ages, a pang of something that might be recognized as fear.
Perhaps Tekio had gained more than just survival. Perhaps he had acquired something. Something that altered the very nature of his body. That transformed him into the impossible—a being existing beyond the axes of life and death, order and chaos.
The air around Dante broke into a sudden silence, as if sound were also afraid. He took a deep breath, his chest rising and falling in a slow, almost ritualistic rhythm. The abyssal energy surrounding him, the distortion of space, began to dissipate, to fade. Not from weakness, but by choice.
In its place, something older began to emerge. Something purer, in its infernal context.
Black Flames.
They were not the dark flames from before. These were the very primordial matter of hell, the power that existed before light even conceived darkness as its opposite. They were the darkness that burns, the void that consumes. They were so dark they seemed to tear holes in vision, pulsing with a life of their own, sucking light, heat, hope from the surrounding space until everything seemed like a cracked mirror reflecting nothingness.
Dante's body enveloped itself in these flames. They did not burn him; they merged with him. His muscles visibly tensed under his skin, which now glowed with an opaque, charcoal sheen. His eyes turned into an amalgam of gold stained with ruby, like embers under ashes. Each exhalation released a jet of fiery smoke, and when he opened his mouth, the sound that emerged was not human—it was the ancient roar of a cosmic furnace, of a primordial beast that remembered the birth of fire.
— Enough tricks… — his voice came out hoarse, laden with the weight of the power that now consumed and fed him. — Enough abyss. The King… has returned.
The ground under his feet did not tremble. It bent, like paper under an invisible hand. And Dante advanced.
Tekio reacted. His movement was the definition of instantaneity—a crimson streak that scored the air from one end of the devastated field to the other. They collided exactly at the center, and the impact did not break the ground into pieces. It created concentric rings of pure force that propagated, leveling everything around in a perfect circle of destruction.
Dante's fist, wrapped in the primordial black flames, struck Tekio in the abdomen. The blow was so brutal the air around Tekio imploded, creating a momentary vacuum that later burst in a secondary shockwave. Tekio bent forward, the impact evident.
For half a second.
Then, he straightened and responded.
His counterattack was a straight, clean punch that hit Dante's jaw with a dry, metallic crunch that echoed like a single, precise thunderclap.
Dante laughed. The sound came out hoarse, mixed with black blood. And he pivoted his body.
A perfect arc of black fire, as thin and sharp as the blade of a cosmic scythe, cut horizontally through the air. It moved so fast it seemed to erase the space it passed through. It struck Tekio in the chest with enough force to hurl him like a projectile against a distant mound of debris. The impact was cataclysmic—the structure completely collapsed, burying Tekio in an avalanche of twisted concrete and steel, dust rising in a thick column.
But before the dust could begin to settle, before Dante could breathe a sigh of relief, Tekio emerged.
Not from within the rubble. From the air above them. His body scored the sky like a crimson meteor, a human lightning bolt that did not care for the logic of hell. He fell upon Dante with a sequence of blows that defied rhythm—punches, knees, elbows—a continuous, merciless flow that left no room for reaction, only for suffering. Each impact made the ground yield a little more, and Dante, even with his body now reinforced by primordial fire, felt. Felt the pain. Felt the pressure. Felt the nullification.
— Tsk… — he spat a jet of black blood, hot and steaming, and laughed again, insanity shining in his eyes. He grabbed Tekio's arm mid-swing, his fingers wreathed in black flames that tried to consume the crimson flesh.
And hurled him away.
It was a movement of pure brute force, fueled by fury and primordial power. Tekio was thrown like a toy, crashing through what remained of a containment wall and disappearing into the mist and dust of the distant battlefield.
Dante took a deep breath, his chest burning. He did not wait. He knew it was useless.
And he was right.
The moment of respite was all Tekio needed. He reappeared not in front, not behind, but in the blind spot, beside Dante's right shoulder. Two blows: a punch to the ribs, immediately followed by a straight to the sternum.
The king's black fire exploded in response, not as an attack, but as a reflex of pain. It created an instant vortex of heat and shadow that swallowed both for a moment. Inside that small, personal inferno, two silhouettes danced the final dance: one wrapped in living, pulsating darkness, the other in crimson that beat like a giant heart.
Dante attacked again, abandoning all defense. His fist, charged with flames that consumed light itself, descended like a hammer forged in the furnace of creation. The blow struck Tekio in the left shoulder.
The sound was that of a hollow thunderclap, muffled, as if it occurred inside a cocoon. The impact not only opened Tekio's flesh, but a fissure in the ground itself that propagated for dozens of meters in both directions, deep and smoking.
Tekio did not yield. He did not scream. His body merely absorbed the impact, bending slightly. Even wounded, even panting (Dante could finally hear a sound of ragged breathing), he raised his gaze to the king.
And that gaze… was cold. Impassive. Empty of anything Dante could recognize as human emotion. As if the black fire did not burn him. As if the concept of fear did not exist in his existential dictionary.
Dante felt, then, an acceleration in his own chest—a rapid, anxious heartbeat. And he hated feeling it. Hated the weakness, the biological reaction of prey. With a growl, he kicked Tekio away, sending him rolling across the devastated ground until he stopped some distance away, kneeling, but still… present.
That presence was wrong. A human, even a transcended one, should not resist the primordial essence of hell. Dante was using his true flames, his innate ability, the root of his being. There was no abyss to alter the essence there, only pure destructive power.
And it seemed Tekio did not just consume the abyss.
It seemed he consumed all that was impure.
The black flames around Dante weakened near him. They flickered, not with strength, but with agitation, like normal flames under a strong wind, trying to flee the proximity of that crimson body.
It was the abyss being denied. But it was more than that. It was fire being denied. Destruction being questioned in its own right to exist.
— What are you…? — the question left Dante's lips before he could contain it. He panted, the shadows oscillating behind him like wounded wings. — What are you?
Tekio did not answer. He never answered.
He simply stood up. And advanced.
And the sound of his footsteps—light, precise, implacable—was the only sound in the world, and it sounded like the prelude to final destruction.
The crimson fist tore through what remained of the black fire. The impact made Dante spit an arc of black blood and hurled him backward like a ragdoll, his body bouncing on the cracked ground several times before finally stopping, on his knees.
The silence was broken by a single, dry, monumental boom—the sound of two bodies colliding with a force that made the very air scream in protest. Tekio and Dante clashed once more, at the exact center of the largest crater, fists meeting mid-air, bones echoing the impact like bronze bells struck by hammers.
The world stopped for an instant that seemed to last an age.
Then came the avalanche.
The king's black flames roared one last time, exploding from him in concentric waves that merged with the ground, turning the earth into a black, glassy surface. Tekio, in response, cut space. His body was a living crimson blade, that did not move through air, but seemed to erase the distance between one point and another.
Primordial fire against indomitable will.
Hell incarnate against blood that refused to cool.
Dante did not retreat. He could not. His fists were the synthesis of a million forgotten combat styles, the muscle memory of a thousand wars. Each blow carried the weight of a fallen empire, of a body forged in conflict and then perfected by the brute force and tactical knowledge of Akira's body. He moved with the lethal grace of a king and the unpredictable ferocity of an animal. His attacks flowed, round, brutal, beautiful in their deadly efficiency.
But Tekio kept up. With no defined form, no recognizable technique. It was pure instinct. It was adaptive speed, survival elevated to the art of war. Dante unleashed a sweeping punch, Tekio leaned to the side and counterattacked with a knee in the same instant, making the black flames writhe and recoil.
The sound of the collisions was a continuous, brutal drum. The ground cracked under their feet in an increasingly complex pattern. The air vibrated, saturated with their energy. Crimson sparks and fragments of darkness crossed with each touch, painting the air with the colors of a profane sunset. It was a war without respite, without room for thought, only action and reaction.
Dante advanced, spinning in a high kick that was pure destructive poetry, the flames forming an arc of black fire. Tekio lowered his body beneath the blow, not dodging, but invading his space. He grabbed Dante's leg in mid-air and, with a movement that seemed to use the king's own momentum against him, slammed him into the ground with crushing force.
Dante rolled, the fire spreading in a defensive pattern. He rose in a leap, and without touching the ground, punched the air—not at Tekio, but at the space between them. An explosion of pure, burning pressure launched itself, invisible until the last instant, and struck Tekio in the chest, hurling him back.
But Tekio spun in the air, a pirouette of pure control, landed on his feet, and returned in the same momentum, his fist advancing like a spear of crimson energy. The blow struck Dante directly in the face.
The impact was so brutal, so personal, that the king's head snapped at an unnatural angle. The black flames around him went out for a full second, as if startled.
And Dante laughed.
Laughed like a madman, spitting black blood and fragments of teeth. The sound was chilling, laden with pain, fury, and something close to amused desperation.
— Tsk… it can't be that… — the thought cut through his mind as he dodged by a hair's breadth a blow that would have pierced his throat. The body of Akira inside him, its reflexes, its muscle memory, reacted before his own consciousness, reading Tekio's movements, predicting them.
And it was at that instant, in the midst of chaos, that perception hit Dante like a punch to the gut.
The way Tekio moved. The way he attacked in the intervals between Dante's blows—the lightness in his feet, the precision in his fists, the economy of movement, the total commitment of the body in the attack. It was a style he knew. That Akira knew.
It was not Tekio's style. It was the style of Aisha.
The Empress. The warrior he had killed.
Akira, the soul trapped within Dante's flesh, recognized it. Every sequence, every calculated retreat, every breathing pattern—Aisha had taught that to Akira. And Akira, even imprisoned, saw those movements executed by someone else, and her soul must have been screaming from within.
Dante narrowed his eyes, rage tempered by a sudden coldness. "So that's it… you're not just fighting me. You're affronting me with her."
With the one he had impaled with his own hands. Whose light he had extinguished with a smile.
The thought corroded him from within, more effective than any poison. And a rare, genuine fear crossed his mind, clearing the fog of battle for a second. If Tekio was reproducing Aisha's movements… If Akira's soul, trapped inside him, recognized and reacted to those movements…
Then perhaps Akira's very consciousness was being stirred by Tekio. Perhaps she was about to awaken.
"If this boy makes Akira awaken within me…"the thought ended in a vacuum of terror. "…not even all of hell will save me."
Dante roared, a sound of pure anguish transformed into violence. The black fire exploded from every pore, a final surge of power that distorted the air around him in heat waves. The ground at his feet literally melted, forming a puddle of molten rock. He attacked, fast, wild, abandoning all technique in favor of pure brute force.
But Tekio intercepted him.
The crimson fist collided with the king's chest, and the black fire around him split, dissipating like smoke in the wind. The force of the impact bent Dante forward for an instant. And then they returned to the exchange, but now it was something more primitive, more visceral. Punch for punch, knee for knee, headbutt for headbutt. Each impact was a small explosion of blood and shadow.
Black blood flowed.
Acidic smoke rose.
Energy ash fell like dirty snow.
The sound of bones breaking, of flesh being crushed, filled the world. Nothing else mattered. Only that dance of mutual annihilation.
Until Dante retreated. A small leap back, to gain a hand's breadth of distance, an instant to breathe.
And it was then, in that fleeting instant, that he saw.
Tekio's torn uniform fluttered in the hot wind of battle, exposing part of his collarbone. And from there, climbing up the side of his neck, disappearing under the fabric to emerge again on his back, visible through a larger tear, there was a mark.
It was not a scar. It was something alive. Black, but not the blackness of Dante's darkness. It was a deep blackness, almost purple, that pulsed softly, as if it had been engraved not with fire or iron, but with lightning and an impossible will. Intricate, almost organic lines spread from it, like roots or veins of power.
Dante clenched his teeth so hard he felt his own molars crack. Memory struck him with the force of a freight train.
"The mark… he had one on his back."
His gaze, already hardened by pain and fury, fixed on that pulsating symbol. That was not a simple seal or a battle scar. It was a change. An evolution.
He dodged a sweeping blow from Tekio by a hair's breadth, and the thought raced through his mind, swift and clear. "It grew… changed. The mark matured."
For an instant, an instant of pure clarity in the midst of the storm, the king almost smiled. It was a bitter smile, full of a sick admiration and deep understanding.
Now he understood. Perhaps the answer lay there. The answer to how Tekio had survived certain death. The mark was not just a seal, a passive power source. It was a symbiotic entity. A power that not only inhabited his body, but nourished his body, his spirit, his own time. That kept him together, functioning, denying annihilation.
Dante wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his trembling hand and laughed again. The sound was hoarse, broken, insane.
— So… that's how you survived, isn't it? — he said, his voice laden with perverse respect. — You didn't heal. You created… your own curse.
Tekio did not answer. He never answered.
But his crimson eyes, fixed on the king, shone in the gloom of the devastated field, as if those words had touched upon a deep truth.
And the next blow came. Without warning. Without preparation.
The fist tore through what remained of the black flames and struck Dante with a force that no longer seemed to belong to this world. The impact did not just hit the king—it erased the flames around him in an instant. The air around the point of impact cracked, forming a web of luminous fissures in space before shattering.
The blow tore open the sky above them, as if it had pierced a layer of reality.
Dante was hurled back, not flying, but being erased from his current position and reappearing a hundred meters behind, colliding with a mountain of steel and concrete debris that imploded under the impact. His body caught fire—not his black fire, but ordinary fire, fueled by friction and the released energy—and black blood gushed from multiple wounds, dripping onto the ground with an acidic hiss.
Even so, he stood up. Trembling, staggering, but upright. His knees did not touch the ground.
The King of the Abyss would not fall to his knees.
Not before a boy.
But perhaps, before something not even hell itself was capable of understanding.
To be continued…
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------