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The ground was no longer ground—it was a tapestry of overlapping craters, each deeper than the last, marking the rhythm of a duel that transcended mere violence. With each impact, the earth did not merely crack; it yawned open, like a famished mouth swallowing pieces of reality.
The two combatants were blurs of motion. They advanced and retreated in a choreography so swift that the sound of blows merged with the roar of flames into a single chorus of destruction. It was impossible to distinguish where a punch ended and a jet of fire began.
Dante pivoted his torso with the brutal elegance of a stone lion, intercepting Tekio's kick with his forearm—not of flesh, but of solidified black flame. The heat was so concentrated that the air around it liquefied, shimmering in visible waves of distortion. And yet, the boy pushed. Not with muscles, but with pure kinetic will. The impact shattered the ground beneath the king's feet, sinking his ankles into molten earth.
Tekio's body trembled. Not from exhaustion or pain—it trembled from contained strength, from pure energy compressed to the point of ignition, ready to explode with every movement.
He is growing, the thought cut through Dante's mind like a cold blade. Growing as he fights. Learning as he bleeds.
The black flames around Dante's arm intensified, spiraling up to his shoulder in voracious coils. He advanced, not with a step, but with a displacement of the space before him. The blow he aimed at Tekio's abdomen should have cleaved him in two, should have vaporized organs and shattered his spine.
The sound was a dry, horrible thud—the wet smack of flesh receiving absolute force.
Tekio slid back, his feet furrowing the earth, a ragged cough tearing blood from his lungs… and then, without pause, without hesitation, he advanced again.
The boy's fist pierced the wall of fire as if it were mist. He did not dispel it—he ignored it. It struck Dante on the chin with an impact that made the king's world reel. Two steps back. The metallic taste of his own blood, divine and ancient, rose in his throat.
This is not human resilience, Dante understood, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. This… is something beyond. Something that denies the rules.
His gaze, trained over centuries to see the invisible, traveled up Tekio's exposed collarbone, where his clothing had been charred away. And there, beneath the sweaty skin marked by old scars, he saw it.
The Mark.
It pulsed. Not like a heart, but like a black egg. Alive, conscious, expanding through the boy's veins like roots of static lightning, weaving a network of power under the skin. A symbol. A signature. Proof of something greater nestled within a boy's flesh.
So this is it, Dante swallowed the blood and the bitter knowledge. You have evolved. Truly evolved.
Tekio did not respond. His gaze was entranced—a state of focus so absolute it bordered on emptiness. Calm and wild at the same time. And as he moved, every step, every pivot, every feint…
He moves like her.
The footwork, the balance transferring weight without waste, the clean, economical cuts of air between one movement and the next. Dante, inhabiting Akira's body, knew every nuance, every signature. He recognized it immediately.
Aisha.
The king's heart, an organ that for centuries had beat only for war and power, clenched in a spasm of painful recognition.
He learned from her… learned to fight like her. Carried her style within him. And now… now he is her shadow dancing with my fire.
Dante clenched his fists until the bones in Akira's hand creaked. The black flames responded, growing, becoming serpents of flaming darkness around him.
—It's not just the Mark, boy— he murmured, his voice a roar muffled by the flames. —It's everything. You're fusing everything you carry inside. Emotions. Memories. Souls. You're becoming a walking graveyard of ghosts fighting for you.
They clashed again.
Fist against fist—Tekio's crimson meeting Dante's black in an explosion of antagonistic colors. Knee against rib—the sound of cracking bone echoed, but whose it was remained unknown. Skull against skull—a primitive, animalistic impact that made the world darken for an instant for them both.
The earth around them simply exploded, not into pieces, but into fine dust, lifted by a wave of pure energy that swept everything clean within a ten-meter radius.
Dante roared. The roar came from the depths of his chest, from the place where the true king, not the usurper Akira, still resided. The black flames enveloped him completely, the muscles of his borrowed body pulsing under the skin, swollen with power. And Tekio answered. Not with words. With a cry.
It was the first sound he had uttered in that battle. A ragged, hoarse cry, coming not from his throat, but from the foundations of his being. A cry that was half pain, half liberation.
Each time Dante struck him, Tekio hardened—literally. His skin grew denser, his muscles compacted. Each time the black fire licked him, he returned not only with more strength, but with more presence, as if each aggression defined him more clearly in the world.
Dante felt Akira's body—already worn, already betrayed by previous use—beginning to give way. His chest heaved, panting, his lungs burning. Sweat, mixed with divine and human blood, evaporated before touching the ground, creating a red, salty mist around him.
But he would not stop. The king did not stop. Not for honor, not for duty. Because something within him, something older than Dante, older than Akira, perhaps older than the very concept of royalty, demanded that he continue.
—Come on, boy!— his roar swept across the field, the black flames growing until they touched the low, sooty sky. —Show me what you're made of! Show me the price of your survival!
He punched the air. Not empty air—he punched the space before him. And from the impact was born a wave of pure black fire, a wall of annihilation that advanced, deforming the terrain, melting stone, sucking the light.
Tekio did not dodge.
He went through.
His feet slid over the black embers the wave left behind, the soles of his boots steaming, his body trembling visibly under the infernal heat that transcended the physical and burned the soul. And when he emerged on the other side, covered in soot, his skin red and blistered…
Dante felt it.
An instinct. A muscle memory. The ghost of a movement seen a thousand times, in a thousand battles, in a thousand lives.
The posture was identical. That minimal dodge, that pivot on the heel, that moment of suspended inertia before the counter-attack.
…Aisha.
Tekio's fist, charged not only with force but with perfect intent, struck Dante's body.
The impact had no sound. It had silence. A silence that sucked all noise from the world for a split second. And then Dante was hurled backwards, not like a body, but like a human projectile. His body furrowed the earth, opening a channel of destruction for meters, until he collided with the carbonized rubble of a wall and collapsed, motionless.
The sound of the impact arrived later. A solitary, deep thunderclap.
Dante rose. Slowly. He coughed, and what came out was a gush of dark, almost black blood. His gaze, clouded by pain and surprise, fixed on the boy.
Tekio stood before him. His chest rose and fell rapidly. His eyes… his eyes were alight. Not with fire, but with a deep crimson glow, like embers in the bottom of a furnace. It was a gaze too deep, too ancient, to belong to anything merely human.
But there was something else there. Something behind the light. Something that was just… Tekio. The silent stubbornness. The absolute refusal. The child who had never accepted the world as it was given to him.
The king smiled. The smile was stained by blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
—You truly are…— his voice came out hoarse, but clear, —chaos and balance incarnate. The accident that became a law.
The black flames around him had not been extinguished. Now they grew again, taller, denser, dancing in slow, hypnotic spirals. They were no longer just fire. They were the physical manifestation of a reign, of a weight, of a history of domination.
—But I…— Dante's voice vibrated, distorted, as if two people spoke at once, —am the King.
He advanced. And Tekio did too.
The black fire and the solid crimson crossed in the center of the devastated field, and for an instant, they tore the sky into two antagonistic colors—eternal night and the blood of dawn.
The battle continued. Dante bled. Tekio stood firm. And the king now fully understood what he faced. And deep down, in a place hidden beneath centuries of arrogance and power, something he thought extinct stirred.
Fear.
Pure fear. Primitive. Forgotten for ages.
Dante watched, and his reason, his oldest tool, bowed before the impossible. Tekio was not just fighting. He was evolving. In real time. Before his eyes.
He could still injure him. Yes. His blows still found flesh, still broke skin, still made blood gush. But it was useless. Blows that should have crushed skulls, disintegrated organs, reduced a man to a stain on the ground… resulted only in cuts. In bruises. In pain that the boy seemed not only to ignore, but to absorb.
It was like hitting a living wall. Tekio's skin was not just hard—it was adaptive. It seemed to harden at the exact moment of impact, redistribute the force, respond to aggression not with weakness, but with a resilience bordering on the supernatural.
The boy hadn't changed in appearance. He remained short, of slight build, his face still marked by youth. But every punch he threw carried the weight of a falling anvil. Every kick had the force of a steel staff wielded by a giant. Dante felt it in Akira's bones. He felt his vertebrae creak, his long bones vibrate like tuning forks.
This was different from fighting Dan or Stella. This consumed him. For real. Left him panting, Akira's breath burning in his lungs, the rhythm of his divine power broken by the pure, obstinate persistence of a boy.
He burned him—and Tekio returned, his skin black with soot, but his eyes clearer.
He tore at him with claws of shadow—and he returned, the cuts already closing into pink scars.
He froze him with Kael's cold—and he returned, breaking the ice with a tremor of pure effort.
He hurled him against rocks, buried him under tons of rubble conjured from nature—and he returned, emerging from the wreckage like a seed sprouting through asphalt.
Nothing stopped him. Nothing tamed him. Nothing seemed capable of teaching him the meaning of "defeat."
But Dante did not retreat.
Not before this.
Not before someone like him.
There, in that field of ruins, for the first time in uncounted centuries, the true king saw not an enemy, but a true warrior. Someone who carried within himself not only strength, but the flames of persistence. The voices of Yara, whispering strategies from beyond. Aisha's spirit, guiding his movements. And so many other souls, so many other echoes, all united in a single purpose: to survive.
Dante roared, and his roar was accepted by the field. The black flames set everything around him ablaze, and the air split into luminous fragments, as if reality could not withstand the presence of so much concentrated power.
The king was becoming king again. The usurper Akira disappeared beneath the shell of flames, and only the essence of the conqueror, the dominator, remained.
And yet… the boy advanced.
Tekio was pure instinct now. Pure reflex. An entity whose only purpose was to deny. Deny the fire. Deny the pain. Deny the very idea that he could be defeated.
He was beaten and gave back in equal measure. He fell and rose faster each time. Each blow he received did not weaken him—it refined him. As if pain were a brutal teacher, and he, a prodigious student.
The boy who once survived by luck, by chance, by the intervention of others, now faced a fallen god as an equal. Alone.
And, the most terrifying thought for Dante, he was surpassing him.
The battle spread, leaving the center of the main crater. They now danced over the rubble of buildings, among twisted beams and glass shards that reflected fire and crimson. The scene was an expressionist painting of destruction, and they were the only living brushstrokes.
It was pure, raw exchange. No elaborate defenses, no complex tactics. Just will against will. Hatred against determination. Fire against flesh.
A punch. Another. Flames licking the air. Dull impacts echoing.
Tekio was struck full in the face—his head snapped violently, his body spun. But he used the momentum, completed the spin, and unleashed a roundhouse kick that hit Dante on the temple.
The king staggered, the world spinning, a roar of surprise and anger escaping him.
They collided again mid-air, before even touching the ground. Fists met, and this time, black and crimson sparks didn't just fly—they painted the air, leaving luminous streaks slow to fade.
The sound was of thunder being split in half.
Dante screamed, insults, curses, commands in dead languages.
Tekio responded with the absolute silence of lightning—mute, swift, deadly.
And then, as in every dance, came the perfect opening.
Tekio pivoted his body, a movement that began in his heels and ended in his shoulder. The crimson energy around him, once diffuse, shimmered and converged, flowing into his fist like water to a whirlpool. His fist became a small red sun.
The blow came. Not fast. Inevitable.
A boom, different from all others—deeper, lower, like the sound of the earth splitting.
The fist struck Dante squarely in the ribs.
The king was not pushed. He was driven. The impact did not move him back—it buried him in the ground. The soil under his feet did not crack; it disintegrated, opening an instantaneous crater several meters in diameter, with him at the bottom.
Dante stumbled within the crater, blood flowing from his mouth, his nose, his ears. He looked up at Tekio standing on the rim, a silhouette against the smoldering sky.
There, before the boy who denied the abyss with every fiber of his being, Dante felt something strange happen.
He, the king, the conqueror, the entity that devoured gods and terrorized dimensions… denied his own divinity.
For an instant, he was not a fallen god. He was just a warrior. A man. Someone fighting for his life, his pride, his right to exist.
The black flames dancing around him no longer seemed like serpents of domination. They seemed… banners. Standards of a wounded but unbroken pride.
And for the first time, Dante smiled. Not a smile of joy or pleasure. A smile of recognition. Of a mirror found.
A man. A warrior. Finally, someone who made the very hell within him breathe heavily. Someone who made the ancestral fire hesitate.
Even losing ground, even feeling Akira's body fail, even with the taste of potential defeat bittering his mouth… a familiar spark ignited in his chest.
It was a bitter taste. Metallic. Almost nauseating.
But it was addictive.
He was enjoying the fight.
But he was Dante. The King. The crowned calamity.
And even in the face of the inevitable, even seeing the tide turn, his mind, trained by millennia of victory, repeated in silence, like a mantra of madness and pride:
He will not defeat me.
It was not a logical conviction. It was a belief. Blind, irrational, born from the same well of arrogance that had made him challenge heavens and hells.
Perhaps it was pride. The pride of a king who had never kneeled.
Perhaps it was denial. The refusal of the predator to accept it had become prey.
Or perhaps, in that instant, even the very hell he carried within him… was afraid of the boy who dared challenge it.
Tekio's body was different now. Dante perceived it. Not bigger, not more muscular. Denser. As if the matter composing him had compacted, become more real than the rest of the world.
Each punch carried an impact that was not just force—it was pressure. An absolute pressure that made the air tremble even before the blow landed, that made the bones of Akira's borrowed body creak in protest even when blocked.
It was unbearable. Every defense was a smaller battle, every impact a divine sledgehammer hammering not just the body, but the will.
And it was… addictive.
The black flames surrounded Dante, a mobile wall of destruction. But Tekio advanced through them as if they were a summer breeze. The boy did not hesitate. Every movement was pure economy of energy, mathematical precision applied to brutality. He was a beast, but a beast trained by the dirtiest war possible.
Dante resisted. Counterattacked. The metallic sounds of impacts—flesh against solidified flame—echoed like funerary bells, making the ground tremble in concentric waves.
And then, something changed.
The rhythm.
Dante began to read the movements.
Not with his eyes. With something deeper. With Akira's muscle memory, with the experience of Hazau's thousand battles, with the king's own bestial intuition. He began to see the openings, the microscopic timings between one step and the next, the almost imperceptible pauses where Tekio recharged.
He was evolving too.
The exchanges grew more intense, but also clearer. Less chaos, more dialogue. The strike, the defense, the counter-attack, the dodge. A deadly dance now with recognizable steps.
Tekio's blows still came like avalanches, but now Dante responded. He did not just block—he deflected, redirected.
A sequence was born from his will: fist to the stomach, knee to the solar plexus, palm to the chin—three movements in less than a second, a trinity of perfect violence.
Tekio staggered. Truly. For the first time since the instinctive healing had manifested, he lost his balance, retreated two steps.
And Dante saw it.
The opening.
Not in the body. In the attention. A microsecond where the boy's crimson focus dissipated, turning inward, toward the pain.
The shadows around Dante—not his own, but the world's, those of the field's eternal twilight—rose up. Not like mist, but like solid smoke. They converged on his outstretched hand, condensing, solidifying, until they formed a blade.
Not a blade of metal. A blade of absence. Black, matte, reflecting no light, but sucking it in.
He pivoted his body, a deadly dancer's motion, and unleashed the strike. The blade hissed through the air, a sound of cutting vacuum, aimed at Tekio's face.
The boy moved by instinct, a near-supernatural dodge. Almost.
The blade did not hit him squarely. It grazed him.
But it was enough.
It cut his face. A clean, deep cut that began at the upper lip, passed close to the nose, and ended below the left eye, on the cheekbone. It was not a cut that bled immediately. For a split second, it was just a dark, perfect line. And then the blood gushed. Warm, bright red, spattering the ground in brilliant patterns.
Tekio did not hesitate. The pain did not stop him. It only guided him.
The retaliatory punch struck Dante squarely in the sternum. The sound was dry, hollow, like a thud in an empty barrel. The king felt Akira's ribs groan.
But he did not retreat. Instead, he made the shadow blade whirl in the air, transferring it to his other hand in a fluid motion, and drove it into Tekio's leg.
The impact was brutal. The ground cracked under the boy's foot, sinking. The blade should have pierced through the thigh, should have pinned him to the ground.
But it entered… only two inches.
And stopped.
Dante frowned, a look of genuine perplexity crossing his bloodied face.
He had put his full strength into it. The blade was the materialization of his will to cut. And yet… nothing. Tekio's flesh did not yield. It was not like hitting steel. It was like trying to cut the very idea of solidity.
Even with the boy's leg reinforced by spiritual energy—something he could feel—the result made no sense. That resistance surpassed any technique, any power. It was… physical. An intrinsic property of that flesh, that bone.
Dante took a step back, his eyes—a pair of black suns—analyzing every detail of the boy. Tekio spat out the blood flowing into his mouth, a disdainful gesture, and Dante saw it.
The wound on his face… was closing.
Slowly. Visibly. The living flesh at the edges of the cut moved, pulling itself inward, stitching itself back together. There was no glow of energy, no flash of power. It was an organic, almost biological process. The skin reconstituted itself, the outermost layer first, then the deeper ones.
Regeneration.
But it was not natural. It did not seem a blessing, a bestowed gift. It seemed… earned. Like a muscle exercised to failure, which then remakes itself stronger.
How? Dante's thought was a whirlwind. In this world, instinctive healing… you are either born with it… or you develop it.
And developing… was a personal hell. Complex, painful, a one-way path demanding more than talent. It demanded survival. Fighting, falling, breaking, bleeding, over and over, until the body, by pure instinct of preservation, learned to remake itself. Most died in the process. The body failed before the lesson was learned.
But in Tekio… it made sense.
The boy had been through battles that were less fights and more massacres. Tortures. Falls from impossible heights. Burns that went to the bone. Cuts that should have been fatal. Always on the front line. Always the first to receive the blow, the last to fall.
His body had not been trained. It had been forged. It had evolved like an organism under extreme stress, shaped by pain, by resistance, by the stubborn will not to die.
That was no common regeneration. It was a bodily evolution. A biological response to the hell he had lived.
And in that instant, under the weak light of the dying sky, Dante fully understood.
Tekio was not just a boy fighting a king.
He was the final product of war. The sum of everything that had survived. Living proof that, even under the most impossible conditions, life—stubborn, obstinate, furious—finds a way.
He was what should not exist… existing.
And he had attained instinctive healing. A feat that would instill fear even in the most ancient, in those born with gifts.
What had truly happened, however, was one step away from Dante's deduction.
After the devastating blow, after bleeding on the earth, after convincing Stella with a look to leave him, Tekio had accepted death. The true, final, absolute kind.
But a part of him, deep, primal, instinctive, refused to yield. The body was exhausted, emptied, but the mind… the mind still burned. Still clung.
He had closed his eyes there, on the cold ground. Not in prayer. In listening. He had felt the vibrations of the distant battle, the echoes of power, the remnants of energy hanging in the air like radioactive dust. And then, he had felt something specific.
Amara.
At a critical moment of the others' combat, a lancinating pain, sharp as an ice knife, had shot through his back. It was not his own physical pain. It was an echo. A resonance. He thought he was delirious, on death's doorstep.
But the pain was not his. It was hers. As if they were linked by an invisible thread, as if their Marks—his, hers—were two halves of the same circuit reacting to each other. And indeed, they did. Amara's own evolution, her own leap against death, pulsed through that connection, and Tekio, even on the brink of the abyss, responded.
Even bleeding, even with his body a wildfire of pain, he remained alive. The Mark on his back, normally dormant, burned with unbearable intensity. The heat had coursed through his skin, his muscles, his bones, announcing not death, but transformation.
His pierced kidney screamed in silent agony. He had tried to scream, but only blood and a weak, ragged gasp came out. His body had convulsed in spasms of pain, a suffering so profound it found no voice.
And it was that pain—total, absolute, crushing—that triggered the final mechanism. The trigger.
Tekio's body had begun to develop instinctive healing not as a gift, but as a necessity. Everything he had endured—the accumulated pain, the near-deaths, the stubborn resistance—had finally reached critical mass. It had fulfilled the obscene prerequisites such evolution demanded.
But it was not Mei's divine, complete healing. It was not the Abyss's regeneration, which erased marks as if they had never existed.
It was something more… earthly. More human. Evolution. Adaptation. Pure survival.
The bleeding had ceased. The wounds began to close, not with a flash, but with the determined slowness of a flower blooming against winter. His metabolism had violently accelerated. His heart pounded like a pneumatic hammer, forcing new, rich blood through partially destroyed veins.
His mind, once foggy, became crystalline. Cold. Clear.
Tekio trembled, not from weakness, but from reconstruction. His body reformed before his internal gaze, like a conscious organism rebuilding its architecture.
He was almost transcending. Almost leaving humanity behind. But something pulled him back. The memory of a voice. A familiar, warm voice calling him from the other side of the pain.
His sister.
For a moment, Tekio truly thought he had died. That this was death—painful, lonely, more terrible than he had imagined. But fate, capricious and cruel, had other plans.
When the transformation ended, he was not merely alive. He was revitalized. For the first time since the start of that endless battle, the pain was gone. Not completely—his kidney had not regenerated. The body had merely adapted to the loss, as if saying: "I don't need that anymore." The closed wounds left visible scars, wrinkles in the flesh, physical memories of the price paid.
It was not a complete cure. It was compensation. Enough to continue. Enough to fight.
Enough.
Tekio opened his eyes. The battlefield called him, not as a duty, but as a magnet. His new body vibrated with contained energy, every muscle fiber, every nerve, charged with the accumulated strength of all the times he had almost died.
With a focus that cut the world around him, he advanced. Each step firm. Each movement, a promise.
And the king awaited. And Tekio was ready. Not to win.
To defy.
He should have died. But the same stubbornness that had made him a problem, a survivor, an accident, refused to allow it.
And here they were.
Tekio and Dante faced each other in the most brutal way possible: body to body, instinct against instinct, will against will. Every blow truly made the air shudder, every impact made the ground tremble as in an earthquake.
But something about Dante was different now. He was smiling. Not his former smile of superiority. It was a strange, disconnected smile, one he himself could not define. There was a glint in his eyes—ecstasy? Fear? Excitement? It was a spontaneous, genuine feeling that did not fit any of the archetypes the king knew.
They exchanged blows, hurled themselves with total force, using every muscle, every fragment of technique, every drop of power they possessed. The clash of energies was devastating, and yet, neither of them took a step back.
Then, spontaneously, almost choreographically, they collided again at the center.
A single, synchronized blow: Tekio and Dante punched each other in the face, simultaneously.
The impact did not break bones. It did not destroy muscles.
It shattered mental barriers.
And in the instant their fists met, a memory—vivid, painful, forbidden—awoke in Dante.
He saw hands. Small, slender hands, but firm as steel. Punching him with a precision that was pure technique, but also… warmth. Affection disguised as training.
And he felt… Jade.
Not the Jade of war, of destruction, terrified by the very power consuming her. Not the enemy.
This was a Jade who was smiling. Bruised, sweaty, but happy. Close. A friend. A companion.
A memory of how they could have been. Of how, in another life, in another web of possibilities, they had been.
A younger appearance. A looser face, less marked by war. Eyes with a light that was not of hatred, but of camaraderie.
In rapid, painful flashes, he saw himself—or saw someone who could have been him—training with her. Simple training clothes, dirty with earth. Sun beating down on a stone courtyard. Her laughing after a fall, him extending a hand to help her up. A duel not to kill, but to learn. To grow together.
Moments of companionship. Of silent trust. Of shared laughter echoing in a world that had not yet collapsed.
All fleeting. All unreal.
All painfully true.
When Dante returned to the present, it was with a thud that was more mental than physical. Tekio was before him, working his jaw, spitting out the blood from the blow he himself had dealt.
Dante stared at him. His eyes, now free of the king's mask, were wide. Something strange, hot and sharp, tightened in his chest from within.
A pain. But not physical.
A feeling. Something he, in all his aeons of existence, had never experienced.
Confusion. Longing for something he had never lived. Grief for a friendship he had never had.
He asked himself, stunned, what that vision was. It was not from Akira. It was not from Hazau. It was… his? But how? Dante had never been close to Jade. He had never shared a moment of lightness with her. His memories of her were of war, rivalry, destruction.
Yet, the memory was so real it hurt. Raw. Undeniable.
The combat continued, but something had broken inside Dante. Blind fury had given way to an agonizing confusion. Tekio advanced, dodged, attacked, each blow as firm and solid as before. But in the king's mind, the memory of Jade did not cease. It looped. Each smile, each stolen moment of innocence, each fragment of a happiness that had never been his corroded his confidence, bringing doubts like acid on the metal of his soul.
Irritation grew within him, a fire different from any that had ever burned. It was not a fire that consumed the world. It was a fire that consumed itself. His own mind. An internal combustion of nostalgia and pain.
He did not understand. But it hurt. And because it hurt, it enraged him.
He advanced with a renewed anger, but this time it was a dirty, desperate rage. The black flames devoured everything around, consuming the air, the rubble, the very light. But Tekio continued. Always continued.
Every punch from Tekio awakened new flashes of the Jade memory. Her smile after he fell. The extended hand. The innocence in her voice saying "again!" Each memory made Dante feel small. Fragile. Young. A feeling that disturbed him, hardening his mind even as it shattered it.
He screamed. A cry that was hatred, despair, and disbelief fused into a single hoarse sound.
—DIE! DIE! DIE!— he bellowed, hurling flames and blows with blind, uncontrolled fury. —WHY WON'T YOU VANISH? WHY WON'T YOU ACCEPT DEATH? WHY… WHY?!
His voice trembled. Not from physical weakness. It trembled from existential confusion. He cursed Tekio, but every syllable carried the echo of Jade's smile. Every blow the boy dealt reminded him of her training punches. He cursed the very existence of Tekio and, at the same time, felt anger at himself for caring. For feeling that pain. For recognizing that phantom smile pierced him deeper than any blade ever had.
—WHY WON'T YOU VANISH?!— Dante howled, his chest heaving violently between words. —WHY DO YOU FORCE ME TO SEE THIS… WHY DO YOU FORCE ME TO FEEL… YOU, HER, ME… EVERYTHING! I SHOULD HATE THIS! I SHOULD DESTROY THIS! BUT YOU… YOU KEEP STANDING THERE, BREATHING, LAUGHING, SURVIVING… AND I… I CAN'T STOP YOU, I… I…— he swallowed his own hatred, swallowed the pain burning like fire in his chest. His voice came out a ragged, broken whisper: —WHY, TEKIO… WHY DO YOU HAVE TO DO THIS!?
Tekio, relentless, dodged the next desperate attack with a precision that was almost an insult. And then, he retaliated.
The precise punch struck Dante's face with enough force to displace the world.
The king was hurled back. But what truly flew away, what truly detached and fell into a dark, damp place, was his consciousness.
The gray, sooty sky transformed.
Now it was a stormy sky, low, heavy. Cold rain fell on him, washing the blood from his face, mixing with tears he didn't know he had.
Dante was in a forest. Not a dream forest, but real. The smell of wet earth, moss, rotting wood. He was fallen, his cheek throbbing from the punch's pain—but also from an older pain, a pain of memory. His eyes teared, not just from the rain.
Before him, standing like statues in the rain, two women.
He did not know them. But he loved them. With every fiber of a heart he did not know he possessed. A deep, rending love that hurt more than any wound.
Their faces were obscured by the shadow of their hoods, by the rain, by the very veil of time. But he knew who they were. He felt it.
They were… important. The most important.
One of them spoke. Her voice was firm, laden with a sadness so profound it was like a physical weight.
—It is our duty. We cannot let them die like this. One day you will understand this… One day…
And they turned. Left. Dissolved into the rain and mist, leaving him alone, small, kneeling in the mud.
And then, the terror.
Not a fright. A tsunami of horror.
Rapid flashes, sharp as knives:
Blood. So much blood. Bodies laid out in endless rows. The populace—faces he recognized, faces he loved—with expressions of fury, of betrayal, of absolute hatred.
The sound of a war that was not glorious, it was a slaughter.
And finally… the guillotine. The dry sound of the blade falling. Not once. Many times. One snap after another, one thud after another.
Every scene hammered his mind. Every image was a blow to the chest, a cut to the soul.
When Dante returned to the real world, it was with a scream.
A scream that was not human. Not divine. It was the sound of a soul being torn in half. A scream that ripped the air, made the rubble tremble, made the very rain of black flames around him cease for an instant.
He screamed in the memory. He screamed in reality. The two layers of existence trembled in unison, destroyed by that roar of absolute despair.
Everything exploded. The black flames erupted from him in an uncontrolled geyser, so intense Tekio was forced to retreat, shielding his face from the heat distorting the air.
Dante stood with his head bowed, his body hunched, panting like a wounded animal. His breathing was a saw tearing through his chest.
When finally, very slowly, he raised his head…
Tekio saw.
And what he saw, he would never forget.
Through the soot, the blood, the burnt skin and the features of Akira distorted by pain… tears flowed.
Clear tears, clean, washing pale tracks in the grime of his face.
Silent tears.
For the first time in all his aeons of existence, in all his stolen lives, in all his masks of king, conqueror, fallen god…
Dante wept.
To be continued...
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