The Light's core technique, had expanded to absolute capacity. The goldish-white waves of photon energy did not merely illuminate the area—they dissolved the concept of geometry. Every pillar, every archway, and every shattered brick was struck by light from every conceivable angle simultaneously.
There were no shadows left.
Without a single dark patch on the floor, wall, or ceiling, Shadow's liquid coat of darkness was actively boiling away. His physical form was forced out of the ground, stumbling onto the blistering marble. Wisps of shadows evaporated from his shoulders like black steam under the intense, unyielding glare of the light's golden halo.
"Looks like you survived," Light chanted, his voice carrying the rhythmic weight of a grand executioner. He hovered ten feet in the air, his white royal robe billowing perfectly despite the chaotic thermals. The golden insignias across his chest glowed with a blinding, blinding intensity. "You built your entire combat philosophy on a flaw in creation. You rely on the absence of my majesty to exist. But when the light is absolute, the shadow will disappear."
Shadow stood in the center of the blinding white waste. His skin was scorching, and his vision was swimming with white spots.
Twelve seconds remaining.
"You talk too much for a flashlight," Shadow rasped, his voice vibrating with a low, unnatural echo. He didn't retreat. Instead, he forced the remaining shadows around his body to compress inward, tightly wrapping his limbs until he looked like a silhouette carved out of obsidian rock. "You think your light is absolute, you're nothing more than a flashlight, after all darkness existed before light."
Ten seconds.
Light sneered, his aristocratic features twisting with divine disgust. "Then perish in the cradle of your foolishness!" With a majestic sweep of his hands, Light summoned : Judgment Spear. A massive, solid bolt of solid light—spanning thirty feet in length and vibrating at supersonic frequencies—materialized above his head and rocketed downward, aimed squarely at Shadow's sternum.
Shadow didn't try to dodge the light-speed projectile. He knew he couldn't. Instead, he used his own blood.
As the searing heat of the flare cracked the skin of his forearms, Shadow violently flexed his muscles, forcing droplets of dark crimson blood to spray into the air before him. The moment the blood left his body, it cast a microscopic, structural shadow behind each droplet for a fraction of a millisecond.
Eight seconds.
Shadow dropped his entire mass into those microscopic flecks of shade.
To Light, it looked as though the Judgment Spear had successfully vaporized the vanguard soldier, leaving nothing but a cloud of boiling red mist. But before the Elite could celebrate, a cold, liquid-black hand materialized directly out from the shadow of a falling droplet of blood right beside his neck.
"What—?!" Light gasped, his golden eyes widening as his flight trajectory locked up in surprise.
Touch Three.
Shadow's palm didn't strike with physical force. It merely tapped Light's left cheek, smooth and silent.
One second remaining on the interval.
The internal metronome stopped.
"Time's up," Shadow whispered, his form completely materializing in mid-air behind the Elite.
Instantly, the golden, blinding glare of the solar flare choked. Light froze in place, his face locking into a mask of pure, unadulterated horror. The shadow cast by his own nose, the shadow beneath his jaw, and the dark space behind his golden ankle rings suddenly turned a deep, oily black. The darkness didn't attack from the outside; Light's own personal shadow rose up from his skin like liquid iron, wrapping around his throat, his chest, and his skull.
"No! I impossible...—" Light choked, his voice cut off as his own sentient shadow forced its fingers down his throat while simultaneously crushing his ribs from the inside out.
The golden halo behind the Elite's back cracked down the center, its divine heat sputtering into gray smoke as Light's body was dragged violently down to the marble floor by his own silhouette, pinned in a permanent, suffocating embrace of his own making.
Shadow fell to the ground injured and worn out he could barely breathe.
Feet away from shadow
Tenebris's miniature black hole had grown from the size of a marble to the size of a fist. The black holes hovered above his obsidian-clad palm, its immense gravitational field creating an unholy screaming sound as it tore the very fabric of the atmosphere apart. Steel walkways were being ripped from their hydraulic anchors, spinning into the dark vortex where they were instantly crushed into subatomic dust.
Drakye Void was on his knees, his fingers dug deep into the ground.
His evoliths was the only thing keeping his lungs from exploding; he had forced a hyper-compressed bubble of high-pressure oxygen to wrap around his head, but the black hole was actively drinking the air right out of his system.
The skin on his face was tight, his veins bulging as the vacuum pulled his body weight toward the hole.
"Look at you, human," Tenebris rumbled, his heavy obsidian armor clanking as he stepped forward, entirely unaffected by the black hole.
"You command the wind. You command the breath of life. But what is wind against a well that has no bottom? Every current you throw at me only makes my horizon heavier. You are fighting the inevitable conclusion of all matter."
Drakye spit out a mouthful of blood, the liquid instantly flying horizontally into the black hole. He forced himself up onto one foot, his muscles tearing against the gravitational drag.
"Shut the hell up ?" Drakye shouted .
"All I know is I'm gonna win and make it off this planet alive?"
Drakye slammed both palms flat against the floor, utilizing his ultimate move
Instead of trying to fight the gravitational pull, Drakye completely stopped creating a vacuum around Tenebris. Instead, he focused every ounce of his evolith power on the entire square mile of air remaining in the area.
He compressed all of it—millions of tons of atmospheric weight—into a single, hyper-dense, horizontal jet stream that rocketed directly toward Tenebris from the opposite direction of the black hole.
"If your hole wants to eat," Drakye roared, his eyes flashing with raw energy, "then let's see how much it can swallow before the pipe bursts!"
The sheer volume of air moving at Mach 7 didn't just feed the black hole; it overwhelmed the black hole ability to compress matter in real-time.
The micro-black hole began to wobble violently, spinning out of control as the massive, focused hurricane of dense oxygen molecules jammed its core structure.
"What are you doing?!" Tenebris bellowed, his heavy obsidian boots sliding backward as the sheer mechanical wind pressure of the jet stream began to push him toward his own singularity. "Stop this! You'll tear the entire planet apart!"
"That's the point!" Drakye yelled back, his hair flying wildly in the gale. "You wanted to swallow everything so why don't you?"
The air molecules inside the hole became so tightly packed that the gravitational pull reversed for a microsecond due to pure molecular repulsion.
The marble-sized black hole flared into a brilliant blue color before violently detonating in a localized gravitational shockwave. The blast tore the obsidian plates clean off Tenebris's chest, sending the Elite flying backward through three structural buildings , his armor shattering into useless shards of black glass.
fight between Ried Gideon Swallow and Janus, the Rift Walker, had turned into a terrifying game of chess.
Janus was no longer hiding inside his portals. He was running across the walls, his hands moving in a blur as he opened dozens of interlocking, violet rifts all around Ried's position.
The portals weren't just doors; they were moving blades. Janus would open a portal in front of his own fist, and the punch would materialize out of a portal an inch away from Ried's face.
Yet, every single strike stopped exactly two inches away from Ried's skin.
Ried stood in the center of the platform, his arms crossed over his chest, his expression entirely bored.
His evoliths treated the space around him like a perfect, mathematical grid. It didn't matter if an attack came from another dimension; the moment the physical matter of a fist or a blade entered his field, it possessed a velocity and a direction. And because it had those two things, Ried owned it.
CRACK. BANG. THUD.
A spatial blade intended for Ried's throat was redirected downward into the floor.
A kick meant for his ribs was flipped 180 degrees, the force traveling back up Janus's own shin bone, causing the Elite to wince as his own impact rattled his joints.
"Why do you fight so passively?" Janus hissed, stepping completely out of a rift thirty feet away, his violet hair disheveled, his breathing becoming ragged. "You just stand there and reflect. You're a coward if I stop moving, your power is completely useless!"
Ried finally lowered his arms, his cold, calculating eyes locking onto Janus's position.
"Coward?" Ried said, his voice quiet, yet easily carrying across the metallic hub. "Says a guy who likes playing hide and seek instead of fighting"
Ried took a single step forward. The moment his boot touched the ground, the entire area groaned as the forward vector of his footstep was multiplied by a factor of a thousand.
"Everything in existence relies on a vector," Ried continued, his voice steady and cold. "The blood flowing through your veins has a vector. The electrical impulses firing in your brain have a direction. Even the light entering your eyes has a magnitude. You aren't safe from me just because you stay inside your portals, Janus. Because wherever you go... you still possess a direction."
Janus's eyes widened in sudden, absolute panic. He clapped his hands together, trying to open a massive, defensive cross-dimensional portal to slip entirely out of this reality. "Damn you!"
"Too slow," Ried whispered.
Ried didn't strike Janus physically. He simply held out his right index finger and flicked the air.
Instantly, Ried manipulated the molecular vectors inside Janus's own body. The direction of the blood pumping out of the Elite's heart was violently reversed, forced to flow backward into his arteries. Simultaneously, the energy of Janus's own hand-clap was magnified and turned inward against his chest cavity.
CRACK!
Janus let out a horrific, choked scream as his own internal pressure blew outward.
Reid looked down on him "looks like you where the
perfect test subject for this move, I never knew it would work".