"Con-un-drum!"
The word hung in the freezing air like a death knell.
In an instant, a colossal, spectral dragon of shimmering gold manifested around Noah, its translucent scales rippling with raw, volatile energy. It was a terrifying visage of ancient power, and at the very center of its gaping, roaring maw sat Noah's clenched fist, glowing with the concentrated fury of a dying star.
Ikaris had thought himself clever. He had banked on his superior aerial mobility, intending to slip into Noah's blind spot while the "mortal" was committed to a forward swing. He acknowledged that the stranger possessed a freakish level of physical durability, having caught his earlier blows, so he had decided to stop trading hits and instead use his speed to end the farce.
He was the swiftest of his brothers, bar only Makkari. And while Makkari could outrun the wind, she lacked the celestial weight he carried in his bones. To Ikaris, victory was a matter of simple physics: velocity plus mass equals a broken foe.
But as the golden dragon's head snapped around with impossible speed, filling his entire field of vision, Ikaris realized he had drastically miscalculated the nature of his opponent.
Noah had read Ikaris like an open book. From the first exchange, he saw the flaw in the Eternal's combat style: there was no style. Ikaris fought with the lazy arrogance of a man who had never been truly challenged. He relied on the "Superman Blueprint"—brute force, flight, and eye-beams. Whether it was the Man of Steel himself, the depraved Homelander, or this Celestial puppet, they all fought like brawlers because their power usually rendered technique redundant. One punch ended the fight; one beam turned the enemy to ash.
But when a "superman" meets an equal—or a superior—that lack of refinement becomes a yawning grave.
Noah was no grandmaster of the mystic arts or a black belt in a dozen styles, but he carried the lived, bloody experience of Sett's underground fighting pits. He knew how to take a hit, and more importantly, he knew how to give it back ten-fold.
As Ikaris tried to bypass him, Noah tapped into the "Grit" he had accumulated from Ikaris's opening salvos. He pivoted on his heel, his entire body acting as a coiled spring, and unleashed the stored kinetic energy in a devastating counter-rotation.
The golden dragon roared.
Ikaris's eyes went wide. He tried to pull his reaching hand back, tried to cross his forearms in a desperate guard, but the world had already turned gold. Noah's movements were a blur of perfected violence.
BOOM!!!
The impact was cataclysmic. Noah's fist buried itself into the center of Ikaris's chest, the spectral dragon head shattering upon contact into a blinding supernova of light and force. The air itself seemed to crack. Ikaris tried to pulse his cosmic energy to create a last-second barrier, but the golden tide of Noah's "Conundrum" washed over it like a tsunami over a sandcastle, snuffing out his celestial light instantly.
The Eternal was launched backward as if fired from a railgun. He became a streak of blue and gold, his body smashing through the ancient pines with the sound of a series of rapid-fire explosions. Trees shattered into clouds of splinters and pine needles, unable to slow his frantic flight.
Ikaris's journey only ended when he slammed into the side of a massive granite outcropping. The stone buckled, a spiderweb of deep cracks radiating outward from the point of impact, forming a perfect, cratered silhouette of his body.
For a long, agonizing moment, he remained pinned to the rock, his limbs twitching feebly. Then, with a wet, heavy thud, he slid down the stone face and collapsed into the snow.
Pushing himself up with trembling hands, Ikaris coughed violently, spitting two thick globs of golden blood onto the pristine white powder. The celestial ichor burned with its own internal heat, melting the snow into small, steaming pits, looking like two cursed, golden flowers blooming in the wasteland.
"Hah... hah..."
His face was a mask of ashen shock. His brow was furrowed not just in pain, but in a deep, existential confusion. He was an Eternal. He was a weapon of Arishem. How was he bleeding in the dirt at the feet of a human?
A sharp, stabbing agony radiated from his sternum. He could feel the jagged edges of broken ribs grinding against one another with every shallow breath.
Wiping the golden smear from his lip, Ikaris forced himself to stand. He channeled the remaining cosmic energy in his core, using it like a splint to hold his shattered frame together. His eyes locked onto Noah, who stood fifty yards away, casually lowering his smoking fist.
"Damn you..." Ikaris hissed, his voice thick with bile. "If only I had my armor!"
The Armor of the Eternals was more than a uniform; it was a conduit, a celestial amplifier that bolstered their defense and multiplied their output of cosmic energy. But it was a relic of the Domo, their ship. They couldn't simply summon it at will; they had to be aboard the craft to interface with the technology.
Without it, he felt naked. Vulnerable. He had no healing factor to knit his bones—among the ten of them, only Ajak held the touch of life.
Yet, Ikaris could not retreat. If he fled now, Ajak would surely find the others. She would tell them the truth of the Emergence, she would poison them against their creators, and the grand design of the Celestials would crumble into dust. His pride, his duty, and his growing hatred all converged into a single point of resolve.
Steadying his breathing, Ikaris's eyes began to hum with a lethal, concentrated radiance. He had learned his lesson: engaging this man in a fistfight was suicide. It was time to play to his strengths.
Vvzzzzzt!
Twin lances of solar fury erupted from his eyes, slicing through the air toward Noah. As they traveled, the sheer heat caused the snow beneath them to flash-boil, creating a rolling wall of steam that followed the beams like a ghostly wake.
Noah didn't even move his feet. He simply raised his right hand, palm open.
The beams struck a shimmering barrier of sapphire-blue light—a hexagonal shield of pure eldritch energy. The cosmic fire hissed and spat against the magical ward, scattering into a million golden sparks that drifted through the air like dying fireflies, but the shield didn't so much as flicker.
Ikaris poured more power into the attack, his eyes becoming twin suns, his teeth bared in a snarl of effort. The energy felt bottomless, a constant stream of celestial destruction.
Noah, however, looked bored. He began to walk.
Step by step, he advanced through the blinding light, the sapphire shield held effortlessly before him. He moved with the slow, inevitable gait of a predator that knew its prey had nowhere left to run.
Sensing the futility of the frontal assault, Ikaris cut the beams. Before the retinas of a normal observer could even adjust to the sudden darkness, he was gone.
CRACK!
A sonic boom thundered through the valley as Ikaris broke the sound barrier, using his flight to wrap around the mountain's edge. In a heartbeat, he was hovering high above and behind Noah, his eyes already glowing again. He didn't wait. He didn't boast. He simply fired, determined to burn a hole through the back of Noah's head.
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