Lucifer vanished.

He did not just move fast. He shattered the sound barrier within the confined neutral space of the pocket dimension.

The white marble floor cracked beneath his boots as he accelerated.

Malphas did not flinch. The Demon King raised his massive green-flaming broadsword.

Lucifer reappeared directly in front of the Level 85 Primordial.

He swung his ruby-red longsword with both hands. He aimed a brutal horizontal strike at the demon’s throat.

CLANG!

The impact echoed across the endless gray sky. Malphas had blocked the True Damage blade perfectly with his hellfire sword.

The sheer physical strength of the Demon King held the Warlord’s strike at bay. The two weapons sparked violently as ruby-red and sickly green magic clashed.

"You are fast, mortal," Malphas sneered. His black-armored face was inches from Lucifer’s. "But you are weak. You rely on artifacts to compensate for your fragile shell."

Malphas pushed hard and shoved Lucifer backward. The Demon King did not wait. He stepped forward and swung his massive blade in a continuous heavy flurry of overhead strikes!

Lucifer parried. He did not try to block the full weight of the blows. He angled his sword and let the heavy green blade slide off the red steel.

He stepped smoothly around the relentless assault. The Warlord moved with the flawless terrifying efficiency of a veteran who had fought this exact fighting style a thousand times before.

He had! He had died learning these patterns.

"You call it weakness," Lucifer stated coldly as he dodged a massive downward smash that cracked the marble floor. "I call it optimization."

Lucifer raised his left hand. The Gauntlet of the Void King crackled with black lightning.

"Gravity Crush," Lucifer whispered.

He targeted the space directly on Malphas’s right shoulder. The localized singularity snapped into existence! It slammed immense crushing weight onto the demon’s primary sword arm.

Malphas grunted. His swing faltered for a fraction of a second.

Lucifer lunged into the opening! He drove his left iron-clad knee directly into the demon’s armored midsection and staggered the towering entity backward.

He immediately followed up and swung the Blade of Ruin in a tight upward arc.

The red blade sliced through the dark-matter plate armor covering Malphas’s chest! It left a deep smoking gash.

[System: True Damage Applied.]

[Target: Malphas (Health -3%)]

The Demon King roared in sudden sharp anger. He backhanded Lucifer with his free hand. It was a heavy armored strike that threw the Warlord thirty feet across the arena!

Lucifer landed on his feet and skidded backward on the white marble. He did not check his health bar. He was a Level 50 Archmage wearing basic dark leather armor against a Level 85 boss. One clean hit with a spell would end him.

"You draw blood, Regressor," Malphas hissed. The six wings of green necrotic fire on his back flared brilliantly. "But you fight like a brawler. You forget what you are facing."

Malphas raised his empty left hand. He did not cast a fireball or a shadow bind.

He was a Primordial entity. He wielded concepts, not elements.

"I am Desolation," Malphas declared with his voice echoing with ancient absolute authority.

He pointed his hand at Lucifer.

[System Warning: Conceptual Magic Detected!]

[Spell: Severing of Hope (Mythic)]

[Effect: Permanently deletes all positive buffs, auras, and healing regeneration. Inflicts absolute despair.]

A wave of invisible oppressive heavy gray magic rolled across the arena. It did not look like an attack. It felt like the sudden crushing realization that every battle was pointless and that the world was already dead.

The wave hit Lucifer.

The Starweaver’s Celestial Regeneration immediately snuffed out.

The passive empowering heat of the Warlord aura faded. The heavy rhythmic pulse of the Heart of Ruin went silent.

Lucifer felt a sudden profound exhaustion settle into his bones. His mind clouded. A heavy gray fog threatened to pull him to his knees and accept defeat.

Malphas smiled cruelly and walked slowly toward the stationary Warlord.

"You built an empire in a month," Malphas mocked. "You gathered queens and forged machines. But without your glowing buffs, without your stolen divinity, you are just a tired man holding a sword."

The Demon King raised his green-flaming broadsword and prepared to execute the broken mortal.

Lucifer looked up. His void-swirling eyes were dimming, but they were still locked onto the demon.

"You think this is a buff?" Lucifer whispered with his voice dry and ragged.

He slowly lowered his longsword. He let the tip of the blade rest on the white marble.

"I spent ten years fighting your Vanguard in the mud," Lucifer said. His voice dropped into a low terrifying rumble that had nothing to do with magic. "I fought without a system. I fought without angels. I fought when the sky was burning and everyone I loved was ash."

Lucifer raised his head. The swirling voids in his eyes suddenly ignited! They did not burn with magic. They burned with pure unadulterated human spite.

"I am not tired, Malphas," Lucifer stated with his voice turning into a roar. "I am pissed off."

He did not need the system buffs to move. He had lived through the apocalypse. He knew how to fight when hope was dead.

Lucifer activated the Gauntlet of the Void King.

"Spatial Rend," Lucifer commanded.

He did not target Malphas. He targeted the invisible conceptual wave of despair that was clinging to his body.

He reached up with his black-lightning-clad hand and physically grabbed the empty air around his own chest! He clenched his fist and locked onto the magical concept of the Severing of Hope.

Lucifer violently ripped his hand sideways.

He physically tore the concept apart! The gray oppressive magic shattered like cheap glass and dissipated into harmless mist.

[System Alert: Conceptual Magic Overridden.]

[Source: Physical Spatial Severing.]

Malphas stopped walking. The Demon King’s burning green eyes widened in absolute shock! A mortal could not punch a concept. It broke the fundamental rules of reality.

"My turn," Lucifer said coldly.

He did not pick up his sword. He left the Blade of Ruin resting on the marble floor.

Lucifer activated Zephyr’s Grace! He flooded his Archmage-level mana into the speed emblem and pushed his physical acceleration past the system’s intended limits.

He vanished.

Malphas swung his heavy green broadsword in a wide defensive arc and tried to catch the blur.

Lucifer slipped effortlessly under the massive blade. He materialized directly in front of the Demon King.

He raised his right hand. The Gauntlet of the Void King crackled with blinding black lightning.

"Gravity Crush," Lucifer roared.

He did not target the demon’s arm or legs. He targeted the massive heavy dark-matter breastplate covering Malphas’s chest.

He slammed his iron-clad fist directly into the center of the armor.

The microscopic singularity detonated on impact! The intense localized gravity slammed into the Primordial’s chest with the force of a collapsing star.

CRUNCH!

The indestructible dark-matter armor caved inward! Malphas gasped with the air violently forced from his lungs. The Demon King was thrown backward and his boots skidded across the white marble.

Lucifer did not let him recover.

He sprinted after the staggering boss. He was faster. He was more aggressive.

He was fighting with ten years of suppressed trauma and rage and unleashed it purely through physical violence.

Lucifer jumped and drove his heavy iron knee directly into Malphas’s jaw! The demon’s head snapped back.

Lucifer landed, grabbed the demon’s right wrist with his left hand, and twisted brutally.

He raised his right gauntlet and delivered a devastating black-lightning-infused punch straight to the demon’s exposed ribs.

CRACK!

Bones shattered! Malphas shrieked in agony and dropped his green-flaming sword.

The Demon King realized he was losing a brawl to a mortal. Panic, a foreign and terrifying emotion, flared in his ancient core.

Malphas violently shoved Lucifer away. He hovered ten feet into the air and his six green wings flared defensively.

"Enough!" Malphas roared with his voice trembling with fury.

He raised both of his dark-armored hands. The green fire in his eyes expanded and engulfed his entire head.

"I am the Desolator!" Malphas shrieked. "I will end your timeline!"

He bypassed standard spells. He channeled the ultimate absolute concept of his Primordial existence!

[System Warning: Ultimate Conceptual Magic Detected!]

[Spell: Absolute Defeat (Mythic)]

[Effect: Imposes the permanent, unavoidable concept of failure upon the target. Target instantly dies.]

A massive invisible weight crashed down on the entire pocket dimension. The flawless white marble floor instantly cracked and turned to gray ash. The swirling gray sky froze completely.

It was not a projectile. It was a localized edit to reality! The system was being forced to accept that Lucifer of Obsidian had lost the duel.

Lucifer felt his heart stutter. His vision blurred. His legs buckled and forced him to one knee on the turning ash. The concept of death was rewriting his physical state.

Malphas laughed. It was a wet victorious sound. "You cannot punch death, Regressor."

"I don’t need to," Lucifer whispered.

He forced his head up. His void-swirling eyes locked onto the hovering Demon King.

He did not use a spell. He did not use a buff.

Lucifer raised his right arm. The Gauntlet of the Void King was sparking weakly and struggled under the conceptual weight of Absolute Defeat.

Lucifer channeled every single drop of his remaining Level 50 Archmage mana directly into the gauntlet! He pushed the Void Arcanist core past its safe limits and ignored the agonizing burning sensation tearing through his chest.

"Spatial Rend," Lucifer commanded softly.

He did not target the concept. He targeted the distance between them.

The Gauntlet of the Void King had a third passive effect. Distance Negation.

Lucifer clenched his fist and punched the empty air in front of him!

The space between Lucifer’s fist and Malphas’s chest completely folded. The thirty feet of distance was physically deleted.

Lucifer’s iron-clad fist crackled with intense concentrated Void magic and materialized instantly out of thin air directly in front of the hovering Demon King.

Malphas did not even have time to blink.

Lucifer’s fist punched straight through the ruined caved-in dark-matter breastplate! It plunged deep into the Demon King’s chest and completely bypassed the conceptual magic of Absolute Defeat.

Lucifer grabbed the pulsing corrupted green divine core hidden inside the demon’s ribs.

Malphas gasped. The conceptual magic instantly shattered and the gray ash turned back into flawless white marble.

"You..." Malphas choked and looked down at the armored arm sticking out of his chest.

"I win," Lucifer stated coldly.

"Void Singularity," Lucifer whispered directly into his comms rune and triggered the spell at the point of contact.

A microscopic black hole materialized directly inside the Demon King’s divine core.

The explosion was contained entirely within Malphas’s body. The intense gravity crushed the Primordial essence into absolute density and then violently decompressed.

Malphas did not scream. The Demon King expanded and glowed with blinding white and green light from the inside out and then shattered.

The massive Level 85 Primordial entity exploded into millions of tiny harmless gray shards of light that rained down over the pristine white marble arena.

[System: Sovereign’s Duel Concluded.]

[Victor: Lucifer of Obsidian.]

[Target Eliminated: Malphas, The Desolator (Level 85 - Demon King)]

Lucifer lowered his arm. The Gauntlet of the Void King smoked and was completely drained of mana.

He stood alone in the center of the pocket dimension. The architect of his past life’s apocalypse was dead. He had executed the vanguard commander of the Abyss in a fistfight.

Lucifer exhaled a long steady breath.

"The tutorial is officially over," Lucifer muttered.

The white marble arena shattered. The gray sky dissolved. The pocket dimension collapsed and returned him instantly to the real world.

He expected to land back on the balcony of Zephyria.

He did not.

Lucifer materialized in absolute freezing darkness! The wind howled past his ears. The feeling of weightlessness was immediate and terrifying.

He was falling.