Inside the moving planet something big was about to happen.
Zane stood perfectly still in the center, of the moving planet and Directly across from him stood the nightmare made flesh: the demon of melancholy called Despair.
He was a monolithic entity of absolute psychological and physical horror, pulled directly from the deepest, blackest trenches of the underworld.
He had been summoned from Hell by Malkor specifically to stop Zane from reaching the core. Malkor knew that Zane's unyielding momentum could not be halted by ordinary cosmic means; it required an anchor of pure, unadulterated hopelessness.
Despair smiled, his jaw unhinging slightly to reveal rows of jagged, crystalline teeth that scraped together with a sickening, grinding sound. "Let's begin Zane, this is going to be great I can feel it."
Zane looked at him with a cold expression, his eyes narrowing into two razor-sharp slits of absolute, unwavering focus. He didn't flinch at the suffocating aura of depression and decay rolling off the demon, He just stood hands in his pocket,
"Shut up and fight," Zane said, his voice cold as ice .
All of a sudden Time seemed to stop.
The physical laws of the universe completely shattered as the space between them collapsed in a single, imperceptible millisecond.
Despair was already in front of Zane, his fist hovering mere inches away from his head before the sound of his movement could even travel through the atmosphere of the platform.
The sheer, overwhelming intent behind the blow was enough to paralyze a lesser warrior's nervous system.
Without a single micro-second of hesitation, he threw his upper body violently to the left, snapping his neck back as far as his spine would allow.
He managed to dodge, but he was grazed. The passing knuckles of the demon caught the side of his cheek, tearing a thin line through his skin and unleashing a blinding flash of raw friction.
BOOM!
The true, horrifying scale of Despair's physical pressure manifested instantly. The casual shockwave of the punch swept past Zane's head, expanding outward into the open space of the internal sector with a deafening, reality-splitting roar.
The compressed air and demonic kinetic force traveled at faster-than-light speeds, slamming directly into the massive, captive blue gas giant suspended below the platform. The entire celestial body didn't just fracture—the shockwave wiped out planets in an instant.
Zane didn't even look back at the exploding world behind him. He capitalized on the demon's extended arm, pushing off the platform with enough force to shatter the alloy plates into twisted scrap metal.
He blurred upward, his leg snapping out in a ferocious, silver-infused crescent kick aimed directly at Despair's exposed temple.
Despair casually raised his left forearm, blocking the impact with a sickening THUD that sent out a secondary shockwave, shattering the remaining structural foundations of the orbital platform. The two fighters plunged into the open internal cosmos of the moving world, completely untethered by gravity.
The confrontation instantly escalated into a cataclysmic battle .
Despair used different techniques cosmic and demonic, blending the ancient, unholy power of the underworld with the volatile, raw gravitational forces of the stolen solar systems around them.
The demon threw his hands forward, his eyes burning with a violent purple intensity as he chanted a low, multi-frequency curse. "rain of despair!"
Instantly, a massive cluster of dying, miniature stars caged within the structural beams of the sector were violently pulled from their orbits, turning into black, compressed meteors enveloped in dark demonic flames. They rained down upon Zane like a continuous, unholy firing squad.
Zane was just dodging and fighting back, his movements reduced to a flawless, hyper-instinctive dance of evasion.
He flipped vertically through the zero-gravity void, a burning black meteor missing his shoulder by a single inch, before twisting his body sideways to let a secondary cosmic blast pass safely beneath his boots. He didn't just run; he used the debris of the destroyed planets as launching pads.
Thud!
Zane planted his feet against a floating fragment of a shattered iron moon, launching himself straight through the barrier of demonic fire. He closed the distance, his fists moving in a furious, blinding barrage of high-impact strikes. He drove a heavy right jab into Despair's ribs, followed instantly by a rapid combination of palm strikes and a devastating elbow to the demon's collarbone.
BANG! BANG! CRACK!
Every single punch Zane landed sounded like a star exploding . Yet, Despair's body simply absorbed the attacks effortlessly.
The demon laughed, a chaotic, echoing sound that reverberated through the metallic sky, and countered with a sweeping, wide-arched backhand that caught Zane squarely in the ribs, sending him rocketing across space..
Their battle shook the entire moving planet which was billion of times bigger than the sun and most of the planets and stars in the moving planet where destroyed due to the battle.
As Zane was hurled backward through space, his body crashed through three separate, captive moons .
Despair did not give him a single breath to recover. The demon materialized directly above Zane as he tumbled through the burning planetary rings. He brought both of his hands together, forming a colossal hammer of condensed gravitational energy.
The downward strike hit Zane dead in the chest, driving him out of that specific sector entirely. They moved from planet to planet, as the battle continued.
Zane was driven straight through the core of an inhabited, stolen techno-world, his body exiting the other side of the planet's crust just as the sheer gravitational pressure from Despair's technique caused the entire world to collapse inward, imploding into a silent, compressed sphere of iron dust.
Despair floated casually across the vacuum, stepping through the burning remnants of a shattered ring system as if he were walking down a quiet street.
He looked at Zane, his jagged, crystalline teeth bared in a continuous, mocking grin.
"Zane, you can see the difference in power between us can't you," Despair said smiling, his voice echoing directly inside Zane's mind like a heavy, inescapable weight designed to break his will to fight. "You can't win your have so much hatred and malchony in you, it's so overwhelming."
Zane didn't answer with words, He knew the clock was ticking, and he was ready to tear the solar system apart if it meant bringing Malkor down.