The reddish-black void of the Masked Man's dimension was a silent, stagnant theater, completely indifferent to the apocalyptic forces being unleashed within its borders. The air was thick, heavy with the suffocating pressure of a realm that existed outside the bounds of natural law. I stood my ground, my golden aura blazing against the oppressive crimson mist, my war axe held in a defensive grip. Across from me, the Demonking was a maelstrom of violence, a continuous, unrelenting force of nature that refused to be denied.
Zaltraf kept laughing and kept attacking me.
The sound of his laughter was a physical weight. It was a deep, resonant booming that vibrated not just in the air, but in the very marrow of my bones. It wasn't a laugh of joy or amusement; it was the chilling, ecstatic roar of an ancient predator that had finally, after an eternity of boredom, found a prey capable of withstanding its fangs. He threw himself forward, his body a blur of motion, launching a storm of physical strikes that defied any conventional martial art. He didn't use weapons; he had become the weapon. Every swing of his arm, every thrust of his knee, every sweeping kick carried the kinetic force of a falling meteor. The space between us became a blinding sphere of explosive impacts. My war axe moved in desperate, high-speed arcs, the golden blade screaming as it met the hardened, continuously regenerating flesh of his fists. Sparks of clashing mana showered the invisible floor, illuminating the dark mist in brief, violent strobes of light. He was a tempest of destruction, stepping into my guard, forcing me to yield ground just to survive the sheer, overwhelming volume of his assault. His laughter echoed with every clash, a terrifying soundtrack to the catastrophic barrage that threatened to break my divine defense.
I pushed my senses to their absolute limit, tracking the microscopic twitches of his muscles to anticipate the next blow. He threw a devastating, wide right hook, a punch carrying enough concentrated energy to shatter a continent.
He just smirked after I dodged it.
I didn't block it. I couldn't afford the structural damage to my stance. Instead, I shifted my center of gravity, dropping my shoulder and swaying my torso backward by a fraction of an inch. The monstrous fist passed over my chest, the displaced air from the strike tearing across my clothes and howling in my ears like a hurricane. I had evaded the catastrophic blow perfectly, slipping through the impossibly narrow window of safety. But as my eyes locked onto his face, I saw his expression.
He wasn't frustrated by the miss. The Demonking's face twisted into a sharp, terrifying smirk. It was a look of absolute, chilling confidence. It was the expression of a master chess player who had just forced his opponent to make the exact move he desired. The smirk conveyed a single, horrifying truth: the relentless physical assault, the storm of punches, the maniacal laughter—it had all been a setup. A distraction. He had corralled me into this exact position, leaving my balance slightly shifted and my momentum momentarily halted.
And he just pointed all of his fingers at me and said, "Die."
The transition was instantaneous. Before my body could recover from the backward sway of the dodge, Zaltraf brought both of his hands up. He didn't ball them into fists; he extended his palms toward me, his fingers spreading wide. Ten digits pointed directly at my chest, my head, and my limbs. The laughter stopped entirely, replaced by a sudden, terrifying silence that seemed to suck all the sound out of the dimension. The oppressive reddish-black mist around us froze. Then, with a voice that carried the absolute, undeniable weight of a universal law, he spoke the single word.
"Die."
He didn't yell it. He didn't scream it with rage. He stated it as an inevitable, undeniable fact. It was a command issued to the very concept of my existence.
I suddenly felt 10 beams of guaranteed death coming to me.
There was no blinding flash of energy. There were no roaring lasers of destructive plasma. The attack was entirely invisible, a total absence of visual phenomena. But my instincts, honed by countless battles and elevated by my divine power, screamed in pure, unadulterated terror. The air between us didn't heat up; it died. I could feel the space collapsing, a localized erasure of reality traveling toward me at a horrifying speed. Ten distinct vectors of absolute oblivion had been launched from his extended fingertips. This wasn't a physical strike that could be parried with a blade, nor was it a concussive blast that could be endured through sheer durability. This was the conceptual manifestation of an end. If even a microscopic fraction of those invisible beams touched my skin, my clothes, or my aura, it would bypass all defenses. It would not injure me; it would simply define my state as 'dead'. The pressure of their approach was suffocating, a creeping frost that threatened to extinguish the burning sun of my soul. I had less than a microsecond to react before the ten lines of inevitable erasure intersected with my body.
The physical speed I currently possessed was completely insufficient. Blocking was impossible. Standard evasion would be too slow. I had to break the boundaries of conventional motion.
I suddenly used my light magic to enhanced my speed and I moved at light speed and dodged the invisible death beams.
I reached deep into the core of my being, bypassing the physical reserves of my muscles and tapping directly into the absolute essence of my light magic. I didn't just channel the energy; I became it. A blinding, pure white-gold radiance erupted from my body, completely overtaking the reddish-black hues of the Masked Man's realm. The magical enhancement flooded my nervous system, supercharging my synapses and transmuting my very flesh into a vessel capable of handling the ultimate velocity.
The world around me came to a dead, sudden halt.
As I accelerated to the speed of light, the flow of time relative to my perception stretched into an infinite standstill. The chaotic, swirling mist of the dimension froze into motionless, jagged statues of red fog. The sparks from our previous clashes hung suspended in the air like trapped fireflies. And there, closing in on the space I had just occupied, I could perfectly sense the ten invisible beams of guaranteed death. Moving at this speed, the 'invisible' became tangible to my hyper-elevated senses. I could perceive the distortion they caused in the fabric of the void, ten distinct, creeping cylinders of absolute nothingness inching forward in frozen time.
With a motion that defied the laws of mass and inertia, I stepped through the gaps. I glided through the frozen world, a streak of pure, divine light weaving between the vectors of erasure. I twisted my torso, letting one beam of death slide mere millimeters past my chest, the sheer cold of its proximity threatening to numb my glowing aura. I pivoted on a stationary point of air, narrowly avoiding a cluster of three beams aimed at my legs. I was entirely untouchable, operating on a frequency of speed that left the rest of the universe standing perfectly still. I had successfully navigated the impossible maze of absolute destruction, leaving the lethal attack behind me to strike the empty void. I had won the exchange. I had outpaced death itself.
And suddenly I saw Zaltraf on my back.
The triumph lasted for an immeasurably small fraction of a second. As I cleared the trajectory of the ten beams, still maintaining my state of light-speed acceleration, a shadow fell over my blinding radiance. A sudden, terrifying fluctuation in the frozen environment registered in my periphery. I turned my head, my eyes wide with a shock that bordered on genuine disbelief.
He was there. The Demonking was directly behind me.
He adapted to my speed quickly and also went as fast as me.
It made no sense. It broke every logical boundary of combat. To reach the speed of light required a fundamental transformation of energy, a specific, specialized application of high-tier magic. Zaltraf had not cast a spell. He had not enveloped himself in an aura of acceleration. He had simply looked at the impossible speed I was traveling at, processed the sheer velocity required to match it, and his monstrous, ever-evolving form had instantly forced itself to adapt. The dimension around us blurred into a smeared tunnel of red and black as the two of us existed in this realm of absolute velocity. His body was tearing through the fabric of the dimension to keep up, his dark mana radiating a terrifying, unnatural pressure. He hadn't just matched my speed; he had completely neutralized my greatest advantage in the blink of an eye. The smirk was gone from his face, replaced by a look of predatory focus. He was a nightmare that could not be outrun, a monster that evolved to conquer whatever obstacle was placed before him.
He Punched me and I flew a bit.
Because we were both moving at the speed of light, the physical mechanics of the strike were catastrophic. He pulled his right arm back, the muscles in his shoulder bulging with terrifying power, and drove his fist forward. I had no time to raise my war axe. I had no time to shift my guard. I was entirely exposed. The knuckles of the Demonking slammed into the center of my back.
The impact was an apocalyptic event compressed into the size of a fist. The sheer kinetic energy transferred into my body was beyond calculation. The sound of the blow didn't exist in this accelerated state; there was only the sickening, visceral sensation of my spine bowing under the unimaginable pressure. The golden light of my aura shattered at the point of impact, exploding outward in a shockwave that distorted the very concept of space around us. The force of the blow ripped me out of my controlled light-speed trajectory. I was launched forward, my body transforming into a helpless projectile hurtling through the reddish-black void. The environment, which had been frozen, suddenly snapped back into a high-speed blur as I was thrown violently across the invisible floor, the air screaming as my body displaced it. I tumbled uncontrollably, skipping across the nothingness, the agonizing pain radiating from my back and threatening to completely disrupt my focus.
I was flying through the air, completely off balance, highly vulnerable, and acutely aware that an opponent who could travel at the speed of light would not let this opening go to waste. I needed to stabilize. I needed a defense that didn't rely on evasion or physical hardness, because Zaltraf had just proven he could bypass both.
I used my dark magic to absorb his attacks.
While still hurtling backward through the air, I forced my mind past the ringing pain and the disorientation. I completely shut down the light magic that was radiating from my core. The blinding white-gold aura vanished, instantly plunging me back into the dim gloom of the dimension. In its place, I summoned the direct opposite. I reached into the deepest, heaviest reserves of my power and ignited my dark magic.
A thick, viscous aura of absolute blackness erupted from my skin. It didn't radiate outward like the light; it clung to me, swirling and churning like a localized black hole. This magic was not designed to deflect or harden; its sole purpose was consumption. It was a hungry, endless void designed to eat kinetic force and magical energy, neutralizing the catastrophic impacts before they could reach my physical body. I righted myself in mid-air, landing heavily on my boots and skidding backward across the invisible floor, my war axe held low, my entire form enveloped in this swirling, absorbing darkness.
I didn't have to wait long.
And he kept attacking.
Zaltraf materialized in the space directly in front of me, instantly closing the massive distance I had been thrown. He didn't pause to gloat. He didn't give me a single moment to catch my breath or fully solidify my stance. He resumed the relentless, brutal assault with even greater ferocity than before.
He lunged forward, throwing a massive, sweeping kick aimed at my ribs. The blow struck the swirling dark magic surrounding me. Instead of the deafening crack of bone or the explosive shockwave of a blocked strike, there was a heavy, muffled thud. The kinetic energy of his kick sank into the dark aura, the violent force being swallowed and dissipated by the absorbing properties of the magic. But the Demonking did not stop.
Realizing that a single strike would not penetrate the defensive layer, he unleashed a torrential downpour of attacks. His fists and feet became a blurring storm of violence. He struck with rapid-fire jabs, heavy hooks, and crushing knee strikes, each blow landing against the dark magic barrier with the force of a detonating bomb. The space around us became a chaotic flurry of motion. I held my ground, gritting my teeth as the dark magic churned and boiled, struggling to consume the endless, overwhelming tide of kinetic energy he was feeding it. The sound of the battle shifted from sharp, ringing clashes to a continuous, deep, guttural roaring as his fists relentlessly pounded into the absorbing void of my aura. He was a machine of endless destruction, a being of pure, violent intent who would not stop until my defenses were entirely overwhelmed, forcing me to endure the storm and search for a single, fleeting opening in his impossible assault.