The spear left his hand and became something else entirely. It was no longer a weapon moving through air. It was a streak of pure purple destruction.

It tore through the air with a sound like the sky being split open. The air beneath its path distorted from the heat alone as it passed over.

It reached Amon in a flash. Amon had not moved.

He stood exactly where he had been standing, black void eyes watching the blazing spear cross the sky toward him with no change in expression.

He simply watched it come. At the last possible moment, his left hand rose. His fingers closed around the shaft of the spear in blink of an eye.

The purple flames of destruction, the flames that had been burning blood all throughout this fight, the flames that had been slowly consuming Amon’s body and resisting everything Vetaal threw at them, erupted across his hand and arm in an immediate violent surge.

They spread fast, racing up his forearm, reaching for his shoulder, blazing and roaring and burning with the full concentrated power Kazriel had put into this final throw.

But Amon’s body was covered with darkness so they hit the darkness. And this time it was different from before.

Before, the darkness had extinguished the flames cleanly, swallowing them without struggle.

This time there was a battle.

The purple flames pushed hard against the darkness, resisting it, fighting it, burning against the shadow that came flowing down from Amon’s shoulder and upper arm toward his hand.

The two forces clashed at his skin, visible as a churning border of purple and black, light and void, wrestling along his forearm and hand and across his fingers that were still clenched around the spear shaft.

Amon’s jaw tightened.

Inside, Vetaal said nothing. He watched. He continued absorbing mana quietly and said absolutely nothing.

The darkness pushed harder.

It spread from Amon’s palm and fingers outward onto the shaft of the spear itself. Creeping along the wood, moving toward the blazing head. The purple flames resisted, surging back, trying to reclaim ground they had already lost.

Then the darkness reached the head of the spear.

And the purple flames started change color.

It happened slowly at first. At the very edges of the flame, where the darkness made first contact with the concentrated fire, the purple began to shift. Its started to change into darker shade. And soon it turned black.

Dark fire.

The color spread inward from the edges, consuming the purple from outside in, replacing it not with cold absence but with a fire that burned with the combined nature of both things.

It was black color fire.

Blazing, hungry, consuming black fire that looked like someone had reached into the deepest part of something ancient and terrible and pulled out a flame from there instead of from anywhere in this world.

The entire spear was covered in it within moments. The shaft, the head, the full length of the weapon that had been Kazriel’s greatest attack now blazed with black fire in Amon’s left hand.

Amon looked at it.

He rotated the spear once in his grip, slowly, fingers adjusting around the shaft, feeling its weight, feeling the dark fire that now answered to what was flowing through his blood and his body and his shadows.

Then he looked up at Kazriel.

Across the ruined ground between them, Kazriel had not moved.

He was frozen. Not from any technique. Not from any power Amon had used. He was frozen because of what he was looking at.

His spear, the flames he had used.

The flames of destruction that he had spent centuries practicing, that he had poured every remaining measure of power into, that blazed with the oldest and most fundamental destructive force he carried from Goddess.

They were black now. They were Amon’s now.

Kazriel’s violet eyes stared at the black blazing spear in the young man’s left hand and something moved through his face that had not been there at any point in this entire battle.

He could not move. His body was not responding to him.

Should he should attack Amon? Ir run away from here? He didn’t knew. And even if he wanted to run, he couldn’t since his body would not obey.

Because whatever part of a living being understands, on a level beneath words, when it is in the presence of something that can end it completely, that part of Kazriel was screaming.

Amon smiled.

Wide and slow and completely unhurried. It was the smile of absolute certainty. It looked, in that moment, exactly like death wearing a young man’s face. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

He pulled his left arm back.

Rotated his shoulder. Shifted his weight. Drew the black blazing spear back behind him into a throwing position that mirrored what Kazriel had done moments ago, but in downward.

His black void eyes were fixed on Kazriel’s chest. At the exact center of it.

And he threw it.

The dark spear left his hand and became something that had no proper name in any language spoken in this world.

It crossed the distance between them not as a streak of fire but as a rip in the visible world, a moving point of absolute black fire that dragged darkness behind it as it traveled, trailing void the way a comet trails light.

It reached Kazriel before his body could finish deciding to move. The tip entered his chest. At his heart’s position.

"AARRGH!!!" Kazriel screamed in pain.

The sound made of spear entering his chest was quiet. Almost gentle compared to every other collision in this fight.

Kazriel looked down.

The black fire spread from the entry point outward across his chest in thin branching lines, like cracks forming in old stone, like roots spreading through winter earth.

The lines moved slowly. Deliberately. Traveling up toward his shoulders, down toward his stomach, branching and spreading and deepening as they went.

Where the black fire spread, his body began to change.

The skin at the edges of each line turned gray. Then pale. Then began to lose its definition, its solidity, its existence. It was not bleeding. It was not simply burning. It was becoming something else.

Decaying, his body was dying slowly. No blood came out of the wound, as if the fire destroyed the blood.