Azaron and Valentine moved with effortless grace and lethality, every movement from each of them meant to kill the other once and for all. They did not aim to injure, they did not aim to cripple, they did not aim for anything that was not death itself. They moved with the certainty that the other would dodge, they moved with the certainty that the other would block, they moved with the certainty that the other would counterattack, they moved with the certainty that the other would retaliate in kind, without hesitation or mercy.

Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!

They tore into one another like mortal enemies who could and could never exist within the same plane of existence, as though they were beings fated to clash as long as they were both alive at the same point in time. Their weapons screamed with every collision, the sound echoing like a funeral bell tolling again and again, announcing death that refused to arrive.

They aimed for every vital organ within the human body known to man of this age. Lungs, eyes, head, neck, chest, heart, ribcages, kneecaps, nothing was spared, nothing was sacred. They aimed for it all without discrimination. Mercy? Pity? Holding back? What were those concepts in a battle such as this, where survival demanded annihilation?

Azaron rolled Ender over his neck, the tip of the soul-bound weapon tearing forward in a vicious horizontal sweep as it lunged toward Valentine's neck. But Valentine was already there to meet the attack. He was not slower than Azaron by any means, not even by a fraction. His twin short blades tore upward, intercepting the spear in a ravaging burst of strength that sent tremors rippling through the air.

Showering flickers of sparks exploded outward around them as their weapons collided. Valentine retaliated without hesitation; he pushed Azaron's spear to the side with brutal ease, his blade screaming toward the narrow gap between Azaron's armor as it tore toward Azaron's waist.

Azaron merely grinned as he watched the attack close in. His hand twisted sharply as he drove Ender into the earth below, using it as support. In a blurring burst of speed, he pulled himself upward, his body snapping out of harm's way. The dagger carved through the space where his waist had been with sundering force, the air itself shattering upon impact.

Azaron was inverted midair, his head pointed toward the ground, yet that did not stop him from countering. His hand remained clamped around his spear, Ender humming violently as he moved. With a savage motion, his arm blasted sideways, slamming the body of the spear into Valentine as though the weapon were no longer a spear at all, but a staff meant to crush bones and shatter organs.

But Valentine was no mere human or ordinary man. He possessed an outrageous amount of battle experience carved from countless life-or-death encounters. Even before Azaron fully committed to the attack, Valentine had already calculated it. His center of gravity shifted, his feet twisting upon the earth as he narrowly dodged the blow. The air detonated beside his head, exploding violently into his ears. His eardrums trembled from the sheer strength behind the attack, pain blooming but never slowing him.

Before gravity could seize Azaron and drag him back toward the ground, Valentine vanished from where he stood. Darkness and shadow coiled around his body, twisting like a living vortex as he disappeared in the next instant. It was as though reality itself had blinked. He reappeared a meter above Azaron, his short blades already blitzing downward, madness glittering along their edges like hungry stars.

Azaron's head snapped toward the incoming assault. He could not retract Ender in time to block, but that did not mean he lacked other means. A smile remained plastered across his face as space twisted violently upon itself. In the same breath, he vanished from his position, effortlessly dodging Valentine's lethal descent.

He appeared above Valentine, his arm drawn backward like a bowstring stretched to its absolute limit. Then, with overwhelming strength, he thrust forward. A terminating, booming sound followed as the attack descended from above with apocalyptic force. Valentine felt his body scream, felt his soul shriek, felt the world itself send frantic alarms through his mind. Without even turning to look at the incoming attack, darkness coiled around him once more, and he vanished again.

Ender, meeting no opposition, collapsed into the earth below with irremediable savagery. The instant its tip kissed the ground, it was as though the world itself was on the verge of ending. The spear tore through the Earth's crust, sand and stone geysering upward in catastrophic plumes. In the next instant, it bored through the mantle, then the outer core, then even the inner core, as though the planet itself were nothing more than fragile flesh beneath its point.

Heat immediately spiked and blazed outward, melting everything within sight. The world began to turn molten, as though a volcano of impossible scale was being born beneath the battlefield. Tens of kilometers of land were reduced to an irrecoverable hellscape by a single thrust from one man, the terrain forever scarred by his will.

Azaron's head snapped upward toward the sky, where Valentine floated calmly above, the building heat doing nothing against his monstrous physique. With a simple thought, Azaron lifted himself upward, rising into the air with gentle ease as he casually defied gravity, space, and the laws that bound lesser beings.

A pair of massive black wings stretched from Valentine's back, unfurling as though they sought to blanket the entire sky. They were forged from his absolute control over darkness and shadow. Unlike Azaron, who possessed the ability to fly naturally, Valentine lacked such an innate gift, but he compensated in his own way, bending darkness itself to serve as his wings.

They hovered in silence for a single second. Before that second could fully transition into another, before even a millisecond could pass, they were already gone from their positions. Like twin thunderbolts, they crashed into one another, their figures tearing through the sky as though it were mere fabric, and they were the blades meant to cut it apart.

At this moment, they were done with the earth. It had already suffered enough beneath their clash. Now, it was the sky's turn to understand, to endure, and to attempt, vainly, to withstand the apocalypse contained within the might of their hands and the depths of their power.

Their momentum never slowed for even an instant. Just because they had paused for a single second did not mean they needed to rebuild their speed from nothing. No, they simply continued from where they had stopped, carrying their destructive force forward without interruption. Madness met madness, apocalypse answered apocalypse, destruction clashed against destruction, and the sky itself trembled as though it feared what these two beings would unleash next.

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