"Enough."
Bani's voice cut through the air like a cold razor, abruptly ending their reunion. He stepped between them, his eyes fixed dead ahead. He wasn't about to share his vengeance with anyone.
"This does not concern you, human. Leave."
Kyle spared the masked figure a single, cold, unblinking glance, but offered no response. Instead, his focus snapped entirely back to Vilthrax, refusing to afford the demon prince even a microsecond to breathe, let alone initiate an offensive spell.
"I've been waiting for this moment," Kyle breathed softly, the air around him beginning to shimmer with heavy, high-tier pressure. "It's time we end what we started."
Vilthrax couldn't help but laugh—a breathless, unhinged cackle that genuinely amused him. "Nice trick you got there," the demon sneered. As he spoke, a complex, high-tier armor of condensed, defensive runes rapidly wove itself into existence around Kyle's frame, sealing him in radiant, silver-lined protection.
The ambient mana in the clearing thickened, turning heavy and viscous. It began to surge and spiral violently, bending the light around the three combatants as the three-way standoff officially began.
Bani, unable to discern whether Kyle was a temporary ally or a dangerous variable, prepared to strike the silver-haired boy down should he prove to be a threat. Yet, seeing that Kyle's attention was locked entirely on Vilthrax, the shadow recognized a rare, fleeting opening to exploit the demon's blind spot.
Silence blanketed the canopy before hell descended. The ambient mana surged.
As the brawl erupted, Bani quickly assessed the dynamic: Kyle's fighting style was meticulously woven to counter Vilthrax, while Vilthrax could read Bani as an open book. On the other hand, because of the gruesome, hellish torture the demons had subjected him to during his training, Bani's body nullified most of Kyle's targeted attacks against him. Still, he remained hyper-aware of Vilthrax's blades—weapons coated in a virulent poison capable of instantly paralyzing an archmage. He had experienced that agony firsthand, and it was clear Kyle was well aware of it too.
Kyle rained down furious ice projectiles from the sky. Bani elusively evaded or batted them away with swirling shadows. Vilthrax, holding no inherent advantage against the barrage, simply relied on raw instinct and twisted skill to weave through the storm. For a terrifying stretch of time, no one held a definitive advantage, though the surrounding forest floor suffered heavily from their relentless, collateral clash.
It was an impressive feat for Bani to stand his ground against two archmages as a newly ascended highmage—but that delicate balance shattered the moment Kyle decided he was done playing.
"Screw this," Kyle muttered coldly.
Bani and Vilthrax instantly halted, their instincts screaming as they realized the ambient mana was frantically, dangerously vibrating out of control.
Kyle raised his hand, his voice dropping into an absolute, chilling calm.
**"SOUL WORLD MANIFESTATION: ETERNAL VOID."**
The scenery warped instantly. One minute, Bani was standing in a ruined, burning forest; the next, he was cast into an infinite, lightless realm. He maintained his composure—there was no use panicking now.
Instead, a primal instinct made him look up.
Two gigantic, abyssal eyes—vast, ancient, and entirely as indifferent as the cold cosmos itself—peered down from the upper reaches of the dark, burning sky, fixing him in their crushing, inescapable gaze. Maintaining his composure through sheer, ironclad discipline, Bani slowly lowered his gaze back to the blood-stained earth, his gloved fingers tightening around the hilts of his shadow daggers until the leather groaned and his knuckles turned stark white.
Across the abyssal plain, Vilthrax stumbled. The demon prince looked around the bleak, oppressive expanse, his pale, taut skin twitching as he adjusted his footing with a snarl of pure, visceral revulsion.
"What kind of forsaken realm have you dragged me into?" Vilthrax spat, his voice echoing hollowly in the dead air, his wild, unhinged eyes flashing with a dangerous, erratic light under the glare of the burning sky.
Suddenly, the ground beneath their feet groaned—a deep, tectonic shriek that tore through the silence. The black earth shuddered violently and split wide open, raining jagged debris into the dark below.
Rising slowly from the deepest trench of the abyss came a colossal onyx throne, towering upward like a blasphemous monolith until it seemed to pierce the burning sky. Atop the monolithic steps, Kyle walked with unhurried, mechanical precision, ascending through the oppressive gravity until he reached the apex. He sank heavily into the black stone seat, resting his chin on his black-gloved knuckles as he looked down upon his trapped adversaries like a sovereign surveying insects.
"Shall we continue?" Kyle's voice rolled across the endless void, carrying the crushing, physical weight of a descending mountain.
*THWIP—!*
Without warning, a jagged, obsidian-sharp earth spike erupted violently from the ground. Vilthrax's reactions, heavily sluggish in the dense abyssal pressure, were a fraction too late. The stone spear grazed through his shoulder with horrific velocity, shearing away armor, shredding muscle, and sending a dark, boiling spray of blood misting into the void.
Beside him, Bani instinctively tried to weave a protective lattice of living shadows, but his mana sputtered and instantly died.
Something was profoundly, fundamentally wrong. He couldn't grasp the threads of his power. It wasn't merely a suppression—the entire conceptual foundation of magic had been stripped away, erased from this realm as if spells, elements, and mana had never existed in the history of creation.
Kyle grinned down from his throne, his silver-gold eyes glittering with a cold, terrifying amusement as he watched them grapple with the absolute, unyielding rules of his domain.
Vilthrax clutched his mangled shoulder, his pale face breaking into a bloody, feverish smirk as he forced his broken body to endure the agony.
"Oh, I get it... this is how your soul world operates," Vilthrax wheezed, his madness boiling over into manic laughter that scraped against their eardrums. "You know, I've always wondered how a soul world is forged..."
Another stone spike tore upward from the dark earth, plunging straight through Vilthrax's calf with a sickening crunch. Shifting his weight heavily off his ruined leg, the demon prince threw his head back, his voice echoing in the dead air. "Seeing it up close just gave me the exact edge I need to create mine!"
Deep within the abyss, the very fabric of space began to violently buckle, groaning under the strain of a foreign, terrifying will.
Vilthrax's eyes dilated until the irises were nearly swallowed by darkness. He threw his arms outward, his throat tearing open in a desperate, earth-shattering roar.
**"SOUL WORLD MANIFESTATION: UNHOLY SANCTUM!"**
What followed was a spectacle so grotesque and inconceivable it defied the laws of physics. If it could be explained in a single sentence: reality unraveled itself before their eyes. A foreign soul world was violently forcing its birth inside another, and even though the mana required to fuel a new domain theoretically did not exist within Kyle's abyss, Vilthrax's sheer, unbridled madness willed it into stubborn, agonizing existence. The sky tore open, bleeding jagged, crimson cracks across the dark canopy as two hostile realms fought for absolute supremacy.
Sensing the catastrophic instability, Bani seized a microsecond of vulnerability where the two domains clashed. He knew he would be atomized if he got caught up in the crossfire. Bypassing the abyss's absolute restrictions through sheer, desperate technique, he conjured a dense sphere of living shadows, sealing himself inside a dome of impenetrable darkness.
*BOOM—!*
The two soul worlds violently rejected one another, canceling out in a cataclysmic, reality-shattering detonation that tore the void apart from the inside out.
The shockwave swept through the consciousness realm without mercy, a wall of pure, concussive force that pulverized everything in its path. In the physical forest far above, Xavier was violently flung from his branch, crashing hard onto the scorched grass as the psychic feedback slammed into his nervous system.
Inside the imploding abyss, Bani's shadow dome shattered instantly like blown glass. Before the searing backlash could consume him, he dissolved entirely into a wisp of dark smoke, fleeing the collapse just as the very edges of his physical form dissolved into nothingness.