Arche's golden-white eyes narrowed, locking on Kyle as her voice cut through the void.
"This bastard… you dare use that uncertain flame against me? You think you can cheapen the fight with reckless destruction?"
Her hands began to glow, the glow swelling into blinding radiance. At first it was a faint shimmer, then a burning purity that roared like a newborn star. The pure flame danced across her fingers, spilling upward to wrap her entire arms, until the fire itself looked like it was sculpting new laws into existence.
Several fists blurred through the void, slamming into Kyle's body with merciless speed. Each blow cracked his bones, shredded his scales, and rattled even his dragon blood. For the first time in a long while, Kyle felt something he rarely knew and that was pain.
Before him stood not the calm Elder Arche, but a hybrid Arche, her aura blazing. Her fists glowed with radiant power, each strike rewriting fragments of reality every punch birthing a new beginning, a fresh structure of existence.
Her eyes burned with fury.
"You think you're tough? You've always done whatever you pleased! Tell me, Kyle shall we end this with the score we left unfinished?"
She seized his collar with one hand. In the other, her white flame ignited, holy and merciless. With each surge, the flame intensified, its heat not burning flesh alone but scorching through infinite beginnings themselves.
Kyle's body writhed, charred, and cracked apart, the fire consuming him in an endless cycle killing him across countless new existences, over and over. The pain was beyond regeneration, beyond immortality. His smirk faltered, replaced with a grimace of raw agony.
At last, his body shattered completely, dissolving into nothingness. The void fell silent.
Kyle was gone.
Arche stood in the aftermath of Kyle's disintegration, her white flames still dancing across her knuckles. Yet her eyes narrowed. She was waiting. Watching. Something about the silence was wrong.
Nothing. No scream. No laughter. No mocking voice returning from the ashes.
Just emptiness.
Her jaw clenched. "...Don't play with me, Kyle."
In a flash, Arche's aura flared, and she launched herself across the void. Her steps cracked the empty expanse like glass until she halted before a faint distortion. A space where shadows bled unnaturally. Without hesitation, she plunged her hand through the veil of nothingness.
Her fingers closed around a form.
Dragged out from the void came a figure cloaked in a black robe, its hood masking the face beneath. But Arche didn't need to see, it was the real one. The true hybrid Kyle, the one who had hidden while his false body burned to dust.
"Got you," Arche hissed, yanking him into the open. With a violent twist of her power, she tore both of them from the void and hurled them into a place far beyond the ordinary realms.
They landed in a world where time had not yet begun, a realm before the first spark of existence. The air was heavy with stillness, an endless silence where even concepts refused to form. The ground was neither light nor dark, only a formless haze of pre-creation.
Kyle's robe fluttered, hiding his smirk. Arche's fists blazed brighter than ever.
"In this place," she said coldly, "your tricks won't matter. No endings. No beginnings. Only us."
Kyle chuckled, his voice echoing unnaturally in the hollow expanse.
"Heh… so even here, you cornered me, Arche. Impressive. Looks like my tricks don't work on you."
With deliberate calm, he reached for the black robe and slipped it off his shoulders. The fabric dissolved into the void, revealing him in his true identity.
His hair flowed thick and black, darker than shadow, darker than night, so absolute that even the void recoiled. His eyes… they weren't glowing, weren't alien, weren't monstrous. They were simply black, perfectly ordinary yet infinitely terrifying. Because within them was the representation of the Final Thing, the inevitable collapse of all. Destruction. A black that turns everything into itself.
Arche stared, her golden irises flickering like dying flames. Slowly, they shifted back to their original state pure white, so bright they carried no color at all. It was not radiance, not divinity, not flame. It was something deeper. The First Light. The blank canvas of reality before existence ever painted upon it.
Kyle's smile widened, fangs barely peeking through.
"Darkness at the end of all things." He pointed at his own eyes. "That's me."
Arche's expression hardened, her white eyes unblinking.
"And emptiness at the very beginning." Her gaze burned with stillness. "That is me."
The void around them quivered as if the very foundations of existence could not bear these two forces facing each other. The First Light and the Final Darkness.
The clash was no longer just a fight.
It was the beginning versus the end.
Kyle's laughter rumbled low as a dark fire erupted across his body. The flames weren't ordinary, they weren't heat, they weren't smoke. They were absolute dissolution. Wherever the black fire touched, it devoured without mercy, erasing matter, time, even the concept of form itself. Half of the battlefield collapsed into a sea of endless black, a void of pure nothing where existence went to die.
On the opposite side, Arche stood tall. Her breath was steady, her fists clenched. From her body, white fire burst forth, yet it did not burn but it purified. It stripped all things back to their blank state, before thought, before being. Half of the space around her dissolved into blank white emptiness, a canvas of untouched beginning.
The world fractured, split cleanly down the middle.
On one side: Kyle's black flames, dissolving everything into the final end.
On the other: Arche's white flames, resetting all into its first beginning.
All colors, all sounds, all movements faded away. Only two forces remained Black and White. Destruction and Beginning.
Kyle smirked, his eyes gleaming like dying stars.
"Arche… it looks like there's no room left for anything else but us."
Arche's gaze stayed sharp, her white eyes unyielding.
"Then let it be us. Beginning and End… finally colliding."