The silence of the dimension had become a physical weight, a suffocating blanket of reddish-black mist that seemed to swallow the very concept of sound. I stood there, my chest heaving with a shallow, ragged rhythm, my fingers twitching against the cold hilt of the white gold sword. My classmates lay broken in the distance, the twenty Wolves of Destruction remained a wall of silent, violet-eyed judgment, and the man with the black mask loomed over me like a shadow cast by the end of the world. My mind was a fractured landscape of desperation and failure, but a single, burning question managed to claw its way through the wreckage of my thoughts.
I asked the masked man on what his name is before we continued fighting.
The question hung in the stagnant air, a small, fragile thing in the face of such absolute power. I needed a name. I needed a target for the rage that was currently devouring me from the inside out. I needed to know the identity of the void that had systematically dismantled everything I cared about. For a long, agonizing moment, he did not move. He simply stood there, his hands loosely at his sides, the featureless black mask angled slightly toward me as if he were contemplating whether I was even worthy of an answer.
The masked man just stood there and said, "It is Sagha Vain Damuire."
The voice was calm, devoid of any theatricality or malice, but the name itself hit me with the force of a collapsing star. It was a sound that didn't just vibrate in my ears; it echoed through the very marrow of my bones, triggering a catastrophic chain reaction of memories I had tried to bury in the deepest recesses of my consciousness.
Upon hearing that name, the name that the orb of truth said, the man who killed my mother... everything seemed to have stopped.
The reddish mist froze in mid-swirl. The flickering violet light in the wolves' eyes became static. The very atoms of the dimension ceased their vibration. The name "Sagha Vain Damuire" acted as a key, unlocking a vault of absolute, unadulterated trauma. The image of the Orb of Truth, glowing with an impartial, cruel light as it spoke that singular name, flashed across my mind like a lightning strike. The man standing before me wasn't just a powerful foe; he was the architect of my original sin. He was the reason for the silence in my home. He was the shadow that had haunted my every waking moment.
Suddenly, the theater of the dimension vanished entirely. I was no longer standing on the fractured, invisible floor. I'm in a place of pure darkness.
There was no up, no down, no horizon. It was a void so absolute it felt like it was physically pressing against my eyeballs. There was no sound of breathing, no heat, no cold. It was the space between heartbeats, the silence between thoughts. And in that hollow, infinite nothingness, I saw myself.
It wasn't a reflection. It was a separate entity, standing a few feet away in the gloom. He was wearing the same battered armor, his hands gripping a spectral version of the white gold sword, but his face was a distorted, horrific parody of my own. He looked at me, his eyes wide and burning with a dark, predatory light, and he was smiling creepily. The smile was too wide for a human face, stretching back until it threatened to split his skin, revealing rows of teeth that caught a light that shouldn't have existed in this darkness.
He said, "There's our guy. The guy who killed mother. You know what to do."
The voice was a distorted mirror of my own, dripping with a sickening, gleeful anticipation. He didn't need to explain. He didn't need to elaborate. The weight of the shared memory was enough. The "me" in the darkness wasn't a separate person; he was the physical manifestation of the absolute, murderous intent that had been suppressed by fear and Bond magic. He was the part of me that had been waiting for this specific name, for this specific moment.
And he laughed.
The sound was high-pitched and jagged, echoing endlessly through the void of my mind until it became a physical pressure behind my eyes. It was the laughter of a man who had finally found the one thing he was looking for in a burning house. The sound grew louder and louder, a cacophony of madness and resolution, and then, with a violent, jarring snap, everything went back to normal.
I was back in the dimension. The reddish mist was swirling. Sagha Vain Damuire was standing there, his black mask indifferent to the psychological apocalypse he had just triggered. But I was no longer the boy who had been played with. I was no longer the student who had been launched into the ground.
Suddenly, only on pure determination of killing him, my Body enhanced state activated.
It wasn't a magical transformation that I had to consciously trigger. It was a biological and spiritual shutdown, a total realignment of my physical vessel to accommodate the singular purpose of slaughter. I felt my skin tightening. It felt as if my very dermis was becoming a reinforced layer of leather and steel, pulling taut over my muscles until every fiber was coiled like a high-tension spring. The sensation was cold and mechanical, stripping away the feeling of pain and replacing it with an absolute, unyielding rigidity.
I felt my heart slowing down to a rhythmic thrum. It wasn't the frantic, panicked racing of a terrified fighter. It was a deep, heavy, resonant beat that pulsed through my entire body like a slow-motion war drum. Thump. Thump. Thump. Each beat sent a wave of cold, calculated energy through my limbs, clearing my vision and sharpening my senses until I could see the individual pores in the material of Sagha's black mask. The fear was gone. The confusion was gone. Even the grief was gone, replaced by a crystalline, diamond-hard focus.
The dimension could not contain the shift in pressure. Suddenly the floor got broken as I stepped forward.
I didn't even push off. The simple act of shifting my weight to my lead foot exerted a force so immense that the invisible, reality-warping floor of the arena simply disintegrated. A massive, jagged crater exploded beneath my boot, shards of crystallized nothingness flying in every direction.
But it launched me impossibly fast.
I wasn't a blur; I was an instantaneous event. One microsecond I was standing in the wreckage of my previous position, and the next, I was a foot away from the black mask. Atmospheric resistance didn't just yield; it vanished. The air around my body ignited into a white-hot sheath of friction as I bypassed the laws of motion.
And I punched him.
I didn't use the sword. I didn't use a spell. I put every single ounce of the "Body enhanced state" and the determination of a son into a singular, straight right hand. My fist collided with the center of the black mask with a sound that was less of a hit and more of a localized atmospheric collapse. The shockwave of the impact was so powerful it physically blew the twenty Wolves of Destruction back, their massive bodies tumbling through the mist like dry leaves in a hurricane.
And he got sent far.
Sagha Vain Damuire, the man who had casually backhanded sovereigns and erased twins with a flick of his wrist, was violently stripped of his immovable status. He was launched backward through the air, his body spinning out of control as he tore a jagged path through the reddish clouds. He flew for hundreds of yards, a dark streak against the dim sky, before finally slamming into a towering obsidian pillar on the far edge of the battlefield. The pillar, a structure that had likely stood for eons, was instantly pulverized into a cloud of black dust.
And he bled.
A spray of dark, crimson droplets decorated the invisible floor in a jagged arc, tracing the path of his flight. It was the first sign of mortality he had shown. It was proof that he could be reached.
He stood up.
He emerged from the cloud of obsidian dust, his black mask cracked slightly down the right side, a thin trickle of blood running down his chin and staining the dark collar of his clothing. He didn't look angry. He didn't look surprised. He brushed a stray piece of rubble from his shoulder with a slow, deliberate motion.
And he laughed.
The sound was different now—deeper, more resonant, carrying a edge of genuine, dark delight. It was the laughter of a man who had finally found a reason to stop playing.
I didn't react.
The "Body enhanced state" didn't allow for emotional responses. I didn't feel triumph at seeing him bleed. I didn't feel fear at his laughter. I only felt the rhythmic thrum of my heart and the tightening of my skin. I was a weapon in motion.
But I dashed again.
I broke the floor a second time, the shockwave of my takeoff shattering the nearby ridges into fine sand. I was a streak of emerald and white light, closing the hundreds of yards in a heartbeat. I reached him as he was still straightening his posture, and I swung my sword.
The white gold blade hissed through the air, the emerald fire replaced by a silent, terrifying pressure. I didn't aim for his chest or his head. I aimed for the limb he had used to deflect my friends.
And his hand got sliced.
The blade bit deep into his wrist, the metal passing through bone and sinew with a sickening, wet crunch. His hand spun away into the reddish mist, a trail of blood following it like a macabre ribbon.
He regenerated it.
I watched in real-time as the dark, viscous blood at the stump of his wrist began to churn and knit. In a fraction of a second, the bone reformed, the muscle wove itself back together, and the skin closed over the wound as if the injury had never happened. He didn't even flinch. He didn't even break his stride.
But I kept attacking and he kept getting sliced.
I became a whirlwind of blades. I moved around him in a hyper-accelerated circle, a blur of motion that attacked from a dozen angles at once. I slashed at his shoulders, I carved into his thighs, I sliced across his chest. Every time the white gold blade connected, it left a deep, jagged opening that sprayed dark blood into the air.
He just laughed while getting sliced and he kept regenerating.
He made no effort to block. He made no effort to dodge. He stood in the center of my storm, his head thrown back, the laughter echoing off the invisible walls of the void. His body was a map of opening and closing wounds, a grotesque cycle of destruction and rebirth. Every time I opened a gash in his torso, the flesh would knit shut before I could even pull the blade back. Every time I severed a finger, it would sprout anew in the blink of an eye.
The intensity of my assault was so great that the physical environment began to react.
Every swing I made there was a wave of the air getting pushed.
The "Body enhanced state" was generating so much kinetic force that the atmosphere itself was being used as a secondary weapon. Each horizontal slash sent a massive, visible crescent of compressed air screaming across the battlefield, carving deep, miles-long furrows into the invisible floor. The waves of air hit the obsidian ridges in the distance, shattering them into dust. The reddish mist was being violently churned into a massive, spiraling cyclone with us at the center.
I swung again. A wave of air slammed into Sagha's chest, pushing him back a step, even as my sword carved a deep diagonal line across his ribs. Blood sprayed, the flesh knit, and the laughter continued.
I swung again. A vertical wave of air split the floor beneath his feet, while my blade took his left arm at the elbow. The arm fell, a new one grew, and the laughter grew louder.
I was moving so fast that the "thrum" of my heart was the only thing I could hear over the constant, booming cracks of the air being displaced. My skin felt like it was made of cooling lava, tight and burning with a cold fire. I didn't think about my mother. I didn't think about the Orb of Truth. I didn't think about the classmates behind me. I only thought about the next swing.
I was a machine of absolute determination. I was the personification of a son's vengeance, focused into a three-foot length of white gold metal and a rhythmic, thrumming heart.
The waves of air grew in size and frequency. The entire dimension felt as if it were being shaken by a continuous, localized earthquake. The pressure in the air was so high that the dark blood being sprayed from Sagha's wounds was being instantly vaporized into a fine, crimson mist that joined the swirling cyclone around us.
He stood in the center of the carnage, his black mask now stained with his own blood, his clothes in tatters, yet he looked more powerful than ever. He wasn't just tanking the hits; he was feeding on the sheer intensity of the fight. Every slice, every wave of air, every drop of blood only seemed to fuel the dark, resonant laughter that filled the theater.
I didn't stop. I couldn't stop. The determination to kill him was the only thing keeping my molecules together. I lunged forward again, the floor exploding under my feet, the air screaming in protest, as I prepared to unleash a strike that would test the very limits of his regeneration.
The "Body enhanced state" pushed my muscles to the breaking point, the skin on my knuckles splitting from the sheer pressure, but I felt nothing. I only saw the black mask. I only saw the man who had taken everything. And as I brought the sword down once more, the waves of pushed air merged into a singular, devastating shockwave that threatened to tear the very dimension apart.
The cyclone of reddish mist and vaporized blood roared around us, a vertical tunnel of chaos that reached into the dark, churning heavens. Inside the eye of the storm, the air was static and heavy, vibrating with the continuous thrum of my heart. Sagha Vain Damuire stood his ground, the laughter finally subsiding into a wide, jagged grin that was visible through the cracks in his mask.
He raised a hand, the skin still fresh and pale from its latest regeneration, and for the first time since I had activated the enhanced state, he moved his feet to match my rhythm.
I swung again, a horizontal blow that carried enough force to level a city. The wave of air it produced flattened the obsidian ridges for miles, turning the horizon into a smooth, black plain.
He didn't laugh this time. He just watched the blade approach, his eyes—hidden behind the dark slits of the mask—finally reflecting the same singular, murderous intent that had consumed me.
The white gold sword screamed through the air, the "Body enhanced state" driving it at a velocity that ignored the very concept of time. The air waves ahead of the blade were so dense they turned the crimson mist into solid walls of pressure.
The battle wasn't just a fight anymore. It was a collision of two absolute forces, one driven by the memory of a mother's death, the other by a dark, unfathomable amusement that had finally found its match in the determination of a son.