Amon looked up at it. He did not try to dodge the attack. He did not even raise his sword.

Instead, something moved inside him. Something vast and deep, like a tide pulling back before a wave. The darkness across his body pulsed once. Then it began to move.

The shadow separated from him.

It rose upward from his body in a single enormous mass, expanding as it climbed, spreading outward through the air in every direction like ink dropped into water but moving with terrifying speed and purpose.

It grew and grew, unfurling like the wings of something incomprehensibly large, covering the gray sky in a canopy of pure black darkness.

It swallowed the gray light that was coming from sky covered with gray clouds.

The purple glow from Kazriel's attack cast strange violent light against the edges of the expanding shadow, but the shadow kept growing, kept spreading, until it covered everything above them in a vast dark ceiling that stretched from horizon to horizon.

Kazriel watched it rise with his black and purple eyes tracking every movement.

Then the beam of purple destruction made contact with the shadow.

And the shadow ate it. That shodow didn't try to block or reflect it.

It simply devoured that destruction.

The purple flames that had burned blood, that had resisted every attack Vetaal had thrown at them throughout the entire fight, that had been spreading across

Amon's shadow slowly consuming him. The roaring purple flame beam was consumed from its starting point to its end side, the destruction simply ceasing to exist as the darkness swallowed it completely. The purple

light died. The sound died. The heat died.

It was death.

Kazriel stared in disbelief.

For a moment, one single suspended moment, he was completely still.

"What....is he? What is that?'

The white feathers of his enormous wings did not move. His spear was lowered slightly. His purple eyes, ancient and proud and sharp as blades, stared at the dark sky above him where his attack had simply ceased to exist.

He had put genuine power into that. Genuine destructive force. And it was gone like it had never been.

The power that was bestowed upon him by Goddess of Destruction...the power that was a very small part of her. Yet it was power that belongs to god.

Then the shadow in air trembled.

It pulled back inward, rushing back toward Amon from every direction, folding and collapsing and pouring back into his body like a tide retreating back into the sea.

The sky returned to its dull gray. The darkness settled back across Amon's body, layering over him, tightening around him.

The black wings behind him beat once.

And he moved.

He crossed the distance between them instantly, black sword already in motion, already swinging in a wide horizontal arc aimed directly at Kazriel's side.

Kazriel barely got his spear up in time.

CLANG!

Even blocking it, even with the spear between them, the force drove him sideways through the air hard enough that he had to beat his wings twice just to keep from being sent tumbling.

He shoved back. He pushed Amon away and created distance, putting thirty meters between them in a single moment, breathing harder than he wanted to admit.

Amon hovered in place across from him.

"Where are you running!" Amon yelled with smile.

The black veins across his neck and jaw were visible even beneath the darkness layering his skin. His pitch black eyes stared at Kazriel with absolute unwavering focus. His chest was rising and falling steadily.

Like he had all the time in the world. It felt like Amon was just getting started.

He raised the black sword slowly and held it at his side. The shadow coiled around the blade, tightening it, layering onto it again and again.

The darkness that surrounded him flowed into the sword as well, pouring into it from his hand, up the hilt, along the edge, until the blade was not just dark but utterly consuming, a void in the shape of a weapon that seemed to pull the light toward it and kill it.

Amon swung. He swung through the open air in front of him. And from the arc of the blade, enormous black slashes tore outward.

They were not small. They were not thin lines of energy like a typical mana technique. They were vast and wide, each one the height of several men, shaped like the swing that created them, curved and enormous and moving with tremendous speed.

Five of them,

six, seven. Tearing through the sky toward Kazriel one after another in rapid overlapping succession like a storm of black crescent blades.

They made no sound as they traveled. That was the most unnerving part.

Just silence, and darkness, cutting through the air.

Kazriel moved.

His wings carried him in sharp explosive bursts, weaving between the first two slashes, letting them pass on either side of him, the edges close enough that the darkness grazed the tips of his white feathers and left them black.

He dove beneath the third, angled hard to avoid the fourth and fifth. The sixth caught him at an angle.

Not dead on. He twisted at the last moment and his spear came around, the purple flames erupting in full force as he drove the spear edge into the black slash at an angle, trying to deflect it.

BOOM!

The collision was violent. The black slash detonated against the spear with force that sent Kazriel spinning sideways through the air.

BOOM!

His control disrupted for one full second, his wings beating hard to recover. He spun back upright just in time to see the seventh slash coming directly at him.

He swung his spear hard into it.

BOOM!

The impact was enormous. Even deflecting it was too hard, the force blew him backward again, his body cutting through the air in reverse, his violet cloak snapping around him from the shockwave.

He came to a stop. He looked down at his spear hand. Then back at Amon.

Amon was watching him with those black void eyes. He was hovering. Still breathing steadily. He was still holding the black sword loosely at his side like it weighed nothing.

Still smiling that wide, maddened, burning smile.

Kazriel said nothing.

The man in air standing like madman.

The pair of huge black wings spread outward.

His skin covered in layer of darkness and shadow. His eyes were two black empty void. His neck length hair were swaying in air.

He was fighting to free everyone from him. What he was trying to do was something that an angel should do, yet he looked nothing like an angel.

Amon float there like some Death Angel...or maybe a Devil.