Amon moved again.

"Shit!" Kazriel cursed and tried to stop Amon. He blocked the incoming strike from Amon with his spear.

The collision sent a shockwave through his body as he was shot through the air toward the ground.

BOOM!

But Kazriel didn't fall on his back; his legs met the ground as a huge pit formed from the impact of his landing. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Amon moved again. The darkness trailing behind him cut through the gray sky like a blade.

"Shit!"

Kazriel cursed, a word unbefitting of his composure, torn from him by pure instinct. He brought his spear up fast, both hands gripping tight, purple flames surging along its length in a desperate roar of heat and light.

He pushed up from his bent knees. The purple flames across his spear surged higher, brighter. His violet eyes ignited with a deep purple glow that lit the inside of the pit around him.

The ground beneath his feet cracked further from the pressure of the mana he began pulling into himself.

He shot upward like a beam of purple fire.

His spear tip led, aimed directly at Amon's chest, his wings driving him forward with every ounce of speed he had. The purple light streaked behind him like a comet tail. His golden hair whipped back. His violet eyes blazed.

From above, Amon dived toward him like a dark arrow falling from a storm cloud.

The two of them closed the distance in less than a heartbeat.

BOOM!

Their weapons collided in the center of the sky. The shockwave tore outward in a perfect sphere, scattering clouds and sending cracks of pressure down toward the distant ground. Both of them held their position for one suspended moment, sword pressed against spear, force against force, darkness against purple fire.

Then Amon's free hand moved, faster than Kazriel's eyes could track cleanly. His fist connected directly across Kazriel's face.

Kazriel's head snapped sideways. His blonde hair flew across his face. His vision whitened for a fraction of a second. He was pushed back through the air, wings scrambling to hold position, one hand going to his face instinctively.

He did not finish processing it before Amon was already above him.

Then Amon's kick drove into his stomach with the full weight of his darkness-covered body behind it.

BOOM!

Kazriel folded slightly from the impact and was driven downward again, fast, toward the ground that had only just stopped trembling from his last landing. He caught himself faster this time, wings snapping wide, dragging him to a halt in the air above the earth below.

He hovered there, breathing.

His spear hand was trembling slightly from the accumulated force of every blocked strike. He needed to end this before it got worse.

He closed his eyes for one single second.

When they opened, the purple glow in them was different. It was deeper and more destructive. The energy that began gathering around him was not like before.

The air around Kazriel darkened with purple. Not the bright, violent purple of his flames, but a deep, suffocating purple that seemed to drain the light from the sky around him.

The temperature plummeted, then rose, then plummeted again.

The atmospheric pressure became visible as distortion in the air around him.

He raised his free hand outward, then released it.

The space in front of Kazriel simply caved inward. A deep purple sphere of absolute, destructive flames formed and then expanded outward in every direction at once. It swallowed the air, swallowed the light, swallowed everything within its rapidly growing radius.

It expanded toward Amon like a dying sun consuming everything around it.

BOOM.

The sound came after. It was much worse than a storm. The dust, force, and purple light consumed everything.

For several seconds, nothing was visible.

And Amon who was hit by it fell. His body dropped from the sky and hit the ground hard, skipping once across the cracked earth before grinding to a stop in the ruined landscape below.

The darkness across his body had taken the brunt of it, had absorbed what it could. But even it had limits against something that old and that vast.

He lay still for a moment.

Kazriel descended slowly, his breathing ragged. He landed on the ground a distance away from where Amon had fallen and stood upright, watching.

Inside Amon's body, Vetaal's voice came through the ringing silence.

'Boy. Get up.'

Amon did not respond immediately.

The darkness across his body was still there, still covering him and filling his veins with black, spreading through his blood. But it had been disrupted by that attack.

'Boy.'

Amon's fingers moved. Then his hand pressed against the earth. He pushed himself up.

He was not done yet.

He got up on one foot, then the other foot forward. He stood back up. His black void eyes found Kazriel across the ruined ground between them.

His smile returned, smaller than before but somehow more dangerous for being quiet.

He started to fly back into the air, his black wings flapping.

Kazriel stared at him.

He was breathing harder than Amon.

The realization settled over him like cold water.

He had used an attack of that magnitude. He had poured genuine ancient power into it. He had felt it leave him, felt the cost of it, and the boy was standing again within seconds.

Standing, smiling, and looking at him with those black, empty eyes that looked like death wearing a human face.

He needed to finish this now.

Kazriel straightened fully.

He planted his feet wide, his left foot forward, his right foot back, his body lowering into a stance he had not used in so long that the motion felt like remembering rather than deciding.

He raised his spear, pointing it above into the sky toward the floating Amon.

He drew it back behind his shoulder, in a throwing position, the shaft running along the line of his arm upward, the blazing tip pointed forward and skyward at a slight angle.

And then the purple flames of destruction responded. They erupted.

The color shifted at the core of the flame from bright, blazing purple to dark violet, so hot and so dense that the air around the spearhead became distorted.

The heat was immense. It was visible. Waves of it radiated outward in every direction, causing the cracked earth around Kazriel's feet to glow faintly red at its edges.

The spear itself began to disappear beneath the flames until the whole weapon was simply a column of blazing purple fire in the shape of a spear, so bright it cast hard shadows behind every rock and crack in the ground around them.

The light it threw across the ruined landscape turned everything purple.

Kazriel's violet eyes blazed at their absolute brightest.

He had put everything into this. Every remaining fragment of power he was willing to spend.

This attack was meant to end. He put his left leg forward. He exhaled once. And threw it.