Arthur allowed himself a brief smile. The Creator's statue stood behind him, and the power flowing through his body felt steadier and stronger than ever before. The eight wings spread across his back proved it.
He lowered his eyes to the silver sword in his hand. The golden markings along the blade glowed with a steady light. The last time he had drawn this weapon, the power had threatened to tear through him. Now he held it with control, his grip firm, his breathing even.
Far ahead, Thomas remained mounted on his horse. His lance was wrapped in layers of shadow and void that twisted slowly around the shaft like living smoke. Behind him, the massive monster loomed, its body tense and ready to strike.
Their eyes locked for several seconds.
Then both of them moved.
They charged at the same time, accelerating to their peak speed in only a few steps. The ground below cracked under the force of their advance. Behind them, the giants moved as well.
The stone giant pulled its empty arm back. As it swung forward in a slashing motion, stone gathered and shaped itself into a massive sword along its hand. The newly formed blade crashed into the shadow weapon of the monster at the same instant Arthur's sword collided with Thomas's lance.
A violent wave of power burst outward from the point where their weapons met. Released mana rolled across the battlefield in expanding rings, tearing through the air and dragging loose debris with it. The sky above reacted to the surge. Clouds churned, and lightning began to fall in erratic streaks around them.
Arthur and Thomas exchanged blow after blow without pause. Sword met lance in rapid succession, each collision sending tremors through the ground and shockwaves through the air. The force of their strikes carved trenches into the earth below them. At the same time, behind them, the giants continued their battle. The stone sword and the shadow weapon clashed repeatedly, their impacts echoing like distant thunder.
Arthur beat his wings once and flipped backward, creating distance. As he steadied himself in the air, he raised his left hand. A spear of light formed in his grip, enormous at first, as large as the giants' weapons. Then it began to compress. The light folded inward, shrinking while growing denser, until it became a short spear no longer than his arm, glowing with an intensity of a star held in his hand.
Thomas reacted immediately. He lowered the tip of his lance slightly and pointed it forward. A short distance in front of him, thick threads of void began to gather from different directions. They connected into a tight pattern that resembled a spider's web stretched across the air. Shadow wrapped around the threads, reinforcing them and turning the structure into a dense barrier of layered power.
The spear of light struck the center of the void web.
For a moment, it pushed forward. The threads bent inward, stretching under the pressure without snapping. The structure absorbed the force by distributing it across the entire web, each strand tightening and pulling against the others to keep the spear from passing through.
They held like that for several seconds.
Then the spear detonated in place.
Light burst outward in a tight sphere, shredding the web into fragments of void and shadow. The barrier collapsed, but it had done its job. The explosion did not reach Thomas.
Before the dust and fading light could clear, Arthur moved.
He shot forward as a streak of golden light, crossing the distance in an instant. Thomas reacted by lifting his lance to guard his front, but Arthur's body dissolved into radiance and passed beside him, reforming behind his back.
Arthur's sword cut forward toward the unguarded opening.
At the last moment, Thomas's mount reacted. The shadow horse reared and lashed out with its hindlegs in a sudden counterattack aimed at Arthur's torso.
Arthur lowered his blade just in time and caught the strike on its flat side. Using the momentum, he twisted his wrist and followed through with a powerful horizontal slash.
The arc of light extended beyond the sword's edge and passed through the horse's legs.
All four limbs separated cleanly.
The shadow horse released a sharp, distorted neigh before its body dissolved into drifting smoke and vanished.
Thomas dropped from the dissolving saddle and halted in midair. He straightened as if his feet rested on solid ground and fixed his eyes on Arthur.
"You shouldn't have done that."
Shadow and void began to circle his body in tightening currents.
"When I use the horse, I divide my power. Now it returns to me."
The energy around him thickened into a violent storm. It pressed inward, compressing around his frame, then burst outward from his back as two wings of darkness. The flow did not stop. It gathered again, denser than before, and two more wings tore free. The cycle repeated, power condensing and unfolding until eight dark wings spread behind him, each one formed from layered shadow and void.
From a distance, the sight looked unreal. Two figures hovered in the sky facing each other one wrapped in clean, radiant light, the other surrounded by deep, shifting darkness.
They moved at the same time.
Light and shadow slammed together. Sword and lance met in rapid succession, the impacts ringing across the battlefield. Neither yielded ground as their weapons collided again and again, each strike strong enough to shake the air around them.
They spun through the air like two shooting stars and broke into the cloud layers above. Vapor tore apart around them as sword met lance again, and the force of the collision pushed both fighters backward.
Arthur recovered first. He raised his sword and released a wide slash of condensed light.
Thomas answered by lowering his lance and firing a massive beam of void. The two attacks met head on. For a brief instant they held, light pressing against darkness, but the void consumed the slash quickly, swallowing it and continuing forward.
Arthur veered sharply to the side and avoided the beam as it passed.
Thomas smiled from a distance. Five spatial gaps opened around him in a loose circle. From each one, a new void beam fired at once.
Arthur accelerated, weaving downward with precise wingbeats, moving between Thomas's attacks with incredible speed. He threw three massive spears of light toward Thomas, each streaking through the air like molten arrows.
Thomas rotated his lance in front of him, stopping the spear aimed directly at him while the other two sailed past to the sky above. Before the rotation could fully end, Arthur appeared in front of him and slashed forward. Thomas blocked the strike, but the force pushed him higher into the sky.
From above, thousands of small spears rained down toward Thomas, streaking like shooting stars. He smirked, using a strong push and a spin of his wings to create a tornado of wind that destroyed the falling spears before they could reach him.
Then he shifted his lance to the side, he tapped the air while whispering under his breath.
"Devourer."
A dark gap tore open beside him. From it emerged a massive creature shaped like a whale, but twisted and unnatural. Its surface looked layered with void and shadow instead of flesh. As it moved toward Arthur, its enormous mouth opened and released a deep, vibrating roar that shook the clouds around them.
Arthur lifted his sword high and shouted, "Stars of Apocalypse."
Far above him, points of condensed mana formed in the sky, compressing into brilliant spheres of light before dropping at terrifying speed toward Thomas, their descent accelerated by gravity and guided by Arthur's will. This was not a spell learned from any scripture or master; like many S-ranks, Arthur had shaped his own techniques from his understanding of his power and his domain.
The first falling star was swallowed whole by the Devourer. For a fraction of a second the creature's vast body bulged from within, then light burst through its void like skin in dozens of cracks. The next instant, the monster tore apart in a silent explosion.
Thomas tapped the air three more times with the tip of his lance. Three new gaps opened, and three more Devourers emerged. Each one rushed forward and consumed a star that was about to reach Thomas. Each one was destroyed from the inside moments later.
The remaining stars struck nearby and detonated in flashes of blinding light that flooded the sky and tore apart layers of cloud, but Thomas himself remained unharmed within the chaos.
As the light began to fade and the air trembled from the aftershocks, Thomas's dark wings snapped once with force. His body shot forward like a black spear, cutting straight through the lingering brightness and charging directly toward Arthur with terrifying speed.
Arthur lifted his sword just in time.
Thomas's charge struck the blade with such force that the impact rang like a bell across the sky. The shock traveled through Arthur's arms, into his chest, and then exploded outward, hurling him backward dozens of meters through the air like a fragment of light torn from a star.
He tried to stabilize himself with his wings, but before he could slow down, his back collided with something that did not feel like air.
He jerked instinctively and tried to turn his head.
His eyes widened.
Behind him stretched a vast web made of condensed void, its threads thick as chains and pulsing with dark energy. The moment his body touched it, the strands tightened and wrapped around him. Void coiled around his wrists, his arms, his waist, and even his neck, pinning him in place. The more he struggled, the deeper the threads sank into the glow of his armor and wings, feeding on the light that touched them.
Arthur gathered power in his core, ready to release a burst of pure radiance to burn the web away.
But before he could act, a gap tore open above him.
From it, void did not simply flow, it poured. Thick, heavy, and endless, like black blood spilling from a wound in the sky. It crashed down onto him like a waterfall, drenching him in darkness. The substance spread over his armor, slid across his wings, and then continued downward until it struck the ground far below, where it began to corrupt everything it touched. The earth blackened, stones dissolved, and the air itself seemed to rot.
The brilliant glow of Arthur's wings began to dim under the pressure of the void pressing on him from all sides.
And it did not stop there.
More gaps opened in the sky around them. One after another, they split the air, and from each of them the same torrent of void poured into the world, turning the battlefield into a descending rain of darkness.
In front of him, Thomas hovered calmly.
Then, slowly, four more wings of shadow unfolded from his back.
Twelve wings of darkness spread wide, blotting out what little light remained.
His voice echoed through the collapsing sky.
"This world will be devoured by darkness."
…
Beneath the churning clouds, the lower half of Thomas's giant had transformed into a massive serpentine body of shadow and void. The coiled length wrapped tightly around the Creator's stone giant, locking its arms to its sides while the upper body hammered relentless punches into its face. Each blow cracked stone and sent fragments raining down through the air like falling meteors.
Far to the south, Leo paused mid battle and glanced toward the north.
"A twelve winged angel," he murmured with a faint smile before returning his attention to the enemies before him.
At that same moment, the stone giant shuddered.
The immense arc of light behind its back shifted upward by a few degrees, no longer aligned with it's back. Its aim adjusted toward the monster, and deep within the arc, power began to gather, dense, silent, and blinding.