Kenji gasped, a ragged, wet sound that whistled through his punctured lungs as he rolled across the jagged remains of a building.
Pain. It was a sensation he'd been feeling so much today, his entire body was screaming at him to just lie there and be done with this fight, but he could not yet.
His vision swam in a sickening sea of grey and red, the horizon tilting at nauseating angles. His ears rang with a high-pitched whine that drowned out the distant sounds of the dying city, and he could feel the warm and viscous, thick, iron-scented blood pouring down his side from a jagged opening in his ribs.
He coughed, and a spray of crimson splattered against the cracked asphalt beneath him. His entire body screamed, every nerve ending firing away.
Slowly… painfully… he turned his head to scan the devastation.
Erza lay not far away, half-buried in a pile of rubble. Her armor was shattered into plates. Yet she still looked like she was trying to push herself up, her fingers clawing at the dust, but her arm trembled with an uncontrollable spasm before her strength failed and she collapsed back into the ruins.
A few meters beyond her—
Kenji's breath hitched, a sharp spike of adrenaline momentarily cutting through his agony.
Van. Or what was left of him.
The lower half of the dhampir's body lay on the ground. It was a clean cut, unnervingly so.
He'd been Bisected.
Kenji frowned as He pushed himself to his knees, his hands shaking, and then something invisible grabbed him, crushing him, holding him in place.
"Ghk—!"
The force wrapped around his torso, his limbs, and his neck. It squeezed him, lifting him off the ground like a broken puppet. He kicked his legs uselessly, the air in his lungs becoming a luxury he could no longer afford.
He struggled to turn his head, his neck popping under the strain.
Barbara.
She walked toward him with sneering, her lips pulled back to reveal fangs, with nails that seemed to grow longer with every pulse of the Shard. Her body was littered with deep, blackened slashes, wounds that refused to heal despite the Shard's power. Courtesy of the Yamato.
The properties of the blade had left "scars" that disrupted her regeneration. But they were closing. Slowly.
In her right hand, the Shard glowed with a radiant, hungry light.
"You," she growled. Her voice was no longer human, it was a discordant harmony of a thousand screaming voices layered over her own. "You have been quite troublesome."
The invisible pressure increased. Kenji felt his sternum groan. One rib snapped with a sickening crack, then another. He didn't scream. Instead, he let out a weak, wheezing laugh, blood dripping from his lips onto his chin.
"I-it's… my pleasure…" he croaked out.
Barbara's eyes, now pools of pure violet chaos, burned with a localized hatred. She raised her left hand casually, as if swatting a fly. To the side, a torrent of white-hot flames roared toward her, an attack from a fire spirit Kenji had summoned earlier.
The fire slammed into an invisible barrier inches from her skin, washing over a translucent dome of warped space. She didn't even look at it. With a lazy flick of her fingers, the spirit was unmade, its essence shattered and blasted away like the sparks of a light.
Kenji's mind spun as he looked back at how they got here. 'How did it get this bad?'
It was like the moment she started using the Shard's power, everything had changed.
Flashback – A few moments ago
It had started with the laugh. Specifically, his laugh at her. The Gollum comparison.
In hindsight, mocking a woman currently merging with a multidimensional artifact was perhaps his worst tactical move when they still had no idea what the shard did.
But let's just say that she hadn't found it funny.
Kenji hadn't even realized what happened when the first blast hit him. He had been mid-sentence when a beam of pure purple energy slammed into his chest with the force of a railgun.
He went flying through three city blocks, crashing through brick, steel, and glass like a rag doll. He barely managed to right himself midair with gravity, slamming into the street and carving a hundred-foot furrow in the pavement.
The smile was gone. No more jokes.
Yamato appeared in his hand, the steel shimmering as he charged back into the fray. The moment he entered a fifty-foot radius around her, His strength plummeted. It felt like his very muscles were being siphoned, his mana leaking out of his pores like invisible smoke. he seemed to slow down.
Barbara didn't even use a weapon. She ducked his slash and drove an uppercut into his jaw. The force sent him twenty feet into the air, spinning uncontrollably before he crashed back down.
He stood, breathing hard, tasting copper. The purple mist that had been a nuisance before was now a thick, rolling fog. It spread wider, a plague. Anyone caught in it, vampire or human, withered instantly, their life force streaming into Barbara.
Five mutated vampires, their bodies now hulking masses of muscle, rushed him. They didn't flinch as the mist started to drain them of everything they were, now they were thralls, bound to her will.
Suddenly, dozens of silver threads appeared from the shadows, wrapping around the mutants. In a single pull, they were sliced into perfect cubes.
Van landed beside him, the threads retracting into his fingertips. "Thanks, Van," Kenji grunted.
"Hm." The dhampir was as expressionless as ever, which made Kenji smile for a moment.
Erza arrived seconds later. She was struggling, her metal-based defenses were a terrible match for something like this.
"We end this fast!" Kenji shouted over the roar of the wind. "The longer this drags, the weaker we get and the stronger she gets! Don't hold back!"
He meant it. Lightning exploded from Kenji's hand, aimed at her heart. Erza followed, drowning the vampire in a torrential sea of fire. Van moved like a ghost, his arm elongating into a whip of poisoned claws that carved a jagged 'X' into Barbara's back.
She screamed in pain and outrage. The Shard flared, and the wound on her back closed as if it had never existed. She spun with impossible speed, grabbing Van by the throat. But the boy wasn't exactly known for his humanity. His neck elongated, his tongue lashing out like a razor-wire whip, slicing across her eyes.
She shrieked and tossed him away like trash. Kenji was already there, six black holes forming in the air above her. He dropped them.
She looked up at the collapsing spheres of gravity and simply raised the Shard. A wave of white light erupted, and the black holes… unraveled into nothingness.
Kenji couldnt keep the shock off his face as he saw what just happened.
The fight became a blur of high-speed devastation after that. Every time they landed a hit, the Shard healed her. Every time they tried to flee, she was there. She materialized above Kenji and drove him into the earth.
He locked her wrist, trying to use a submission hold, but she turned into a cloud of purple smoke. Her retaliatory kick shattered his spine's alignment, sending him tumbling through a bank.
"World Cannon!" Van's flat voice echoed.
A beam of pure, condensed mana, a city-destroying nuke, engulfed Barbara. The explosion devoured four city blocks, leaving a crater of molten glass. She walked out of the flames angrier as she started to heal again, her skin glowing with the stolen life of the thousands she was currently shriveling in the city area.
Kenji decided to try again and tried to seize the Shard with gravity, but the artifact retaliated with that instantaneous lightning, nearly taking his arm off.
Lucky, he had been expecting it, and just as it came, he had already dodged.
He tried again, but this time his aim was her entire arm, and just like last time, the shard retaliated, but he also noticed how Barbara's entire arm was protected by a purple light.
Kenji was really starting to suspect that the shard had a level of sentience. The thing, he had noticed was always seemed to try to protect Barbara, and Kenji started to get the urge to just let everything go and nuke the entire area, though he doubted that she was lost.
Without warning, Barbara suddenly created mist shields around her as water and earth spirits appeared behind her, launching an attack on her, but as he said before, he really thinks this thing has a level of sentience, and as he watched, the shield protected her.
He already noticed how some attacked, she didn't even see or know was coming was blocked by her powers, so he could only assume that it was the shard.
Van suddenly came looking like something that came out of a biblical accurate angel mentions, two heads, 8 arms, a halo, and wings as he was casting spell after spell, but even he couldn't keep it up forever.
He carved the grounds beneath him as he pushed himself with full force. erza had reached high up in the air as she switched armor. This one didn't even fly, yet erza already knew this after all, and yet still chose to share with.
She was wearing her Giant armor, holding a large spear. Kenji made sure to grab onto Barbara, van seemed to contain her in a magic bubble to prevent her from turning into mist.
With a mighty roar, she lunched the spear, and just as it seemed it was about to reach the god damn shard, it acted again.
Kenji was really starting to hate it.
The shard released a blast so powerful that it shattered the bubble and sent them all flying.
Barbara seemed to be on her knees panthing, and Kenji used this chance as he pulled out his sword, eyes gleaming.
Finally, Kenji plunged Yamato into the ground, his eyes glowing with intensity.
"LAW—"
He never finished the sentence, never got to even add the rule. The Shard pulsed, and for a split second, reality itself looked like a paused video frame. Then, it shattered.
"It stopped LAW?" he couldn't help but whisper. For Kenji, this was something else.
Breaking the law from the inside was one thing, but during activation that should not be possible.
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