Ultra led with a flurry of strikes thrown at a speed that turned his fists into afterimages, and Bellion met every one of them, his blade shifting fluidly between rigid steel and coiling whip, deflecting, guiding the sheer violence of Ultra's assault past him rather than trying to stop it outright. Sparks screamed where metal met fist. The stone beneath them cratered with every blow that missed its mark, a widening ring of ruin spreading outward from the two combatants as they traded strike for strike, faster than the watching Marshals could fully track.
"You keep dodging," Ultra said, driving an uppercut that Bellion slipped by tilting his whole body sideways, wings flaring for balance, "keep deflecting. When are you gonna actually fight me?"
"I am fighting you," Bellion said, and his blade snapped taut, the whip's trailing length cracking forward like black lightning to catch Ultra across the jaw, snapping his head sideways with a force that actually staggered him half a step. "You mistake patience for hesitation, they are not the same thing, you are clearly still inexperienced Ultra and unfit for the Grand Marshal title."
Ultra's grin didn't waver, he looked almost delighted.
"Okay," he said. "Now we're talking."
He surged forward again, faster this time, and the exchange that followed left afterimages hanging in the twilight air Ultra's fists a hammering rhythm of strikes aimed at closing the gap for good, Bellion's wings carrying him in short, precise bursts that kept him a fraction out of true range even as his blade lashed in and out, cutting, drawing shallow lines of injuries across Ultra's forearms, his shoulder, once across the bridge of his nose. None of it slowed him down. If anything, each new wound seemed to feed something in him, a rising, hungry delight at finally, finally facing something that could leave a mark on him after a long time.
High above, on the platform overlooking the battle, Didi watched with open, unguarded interest, her chin resting lightly against her knuckles.
"That angel is not bad," she said. "I'd say he's slightly stronger too, even with your Kryptonian being so utterly ruthless about it."
Arthur's smile was slow, and full of pride. "Of course he is," he said, eyes never leaving the battle below. "Bellion was Ashborn's Grand Marshal, once. His battle experience is second to none in this entire army, centuries spent commanding armies, ending wars, surviving betrayals.. He still stood by his side, and now he is with me." He watched Bellion weave through another storm of Ultra's fists with the unhurried grace. "I imagine he wishes very much to keep that former title. A man like him would not settle for merely a Marshal's rank. Not when he remembers what it was to be the Marshal."
As if the words themselves had reached him across the arena floor, something in Bellion's bearing shifted.
His wings snapped wide, all four of them flaring in perfect unison, and the whip-blade in his hand seemed to sing as it stiffened, lengthened, black lightning crawling along its edge in a way it hadn't before. His eyes, calm until now, took on a harder, colder focus, the look of a commander who had simply decided the testing phase of a battle was over.
"Enough," he said, quiet, almost gentle. "Let me show you why they called me Grand Marshal, and not simply Marshal."
He moved.
It was not the same fight anymore. Where before he had danced at the edges of Ultra's reach, now he closed the distance entirely, his four wings driving him forward in short, violent bursts that left the air cracking behind him, his blade a blur of black steel and lightning that struck from every angle at once high, low, left, right, the whip-form lashing out to wrap and yank at a leg even as the rigid blade drove in from the opposite side, forcing Ultra into a defense that had, for the first time in the fight, no room left to counterattack.
"Wait!" Ultra started, catching one strike on his forearm, only for the whip to crack across his exposed ribs a heartbeat later, the sting of it drawing a genuine grunt of surprise.
"No," Bellion said simply, and struck again.
He drove Ultra backward across the arena floor in a relentless sequence of strikes, wings beating in perfect rhythm with every swing, each blow landing even as the sheer speed of the assault blurred sword into whip and back again almost too fast to follow. Ultra caught what he could, blocked what he could, took the rest on his body that refused to break beneath anything but the sharpest edges, but for the first time since the bell had rung, he was not laughing. He was working, jaw tight, eye narrowing, the glow behind his eyes burning brighter as something in him finally recognized that this fight had stopped being a game.
"Alright," he growled, catching a strike aimed at his throat with both hands, halting the blade inches from it through sheer brute strength, muscles straining, "alright. You want to see ruthless?"
His eyes flared red, heat building at point-blank range, close enough now that there would be no dodging it.
Bellion's wings answered before the beam ever left him a single, precise beat that carried him backward and up in the same instant the heat vision tore through the space he'd occupied, close enough that a scatter of black feathers, scorched and smoking, drifted down in its wake. He didn't retreat far. He used the momentum of the dodge to invert, diving back down at an angle Ultra hadn't accounted for, his blade shifting to its whip-form one final time and lashing out to wrap around Ultra's wrist, yanking him forward, off-balance, directly into the path of a rising knee that Bellion drove up with all the force his wings could lend the blow.
The impact rang out across the arena like a thunderclap.
Ultra staggered, genuinely staggered, and Bellion did not let him recover, already spinning past him in a blur of dark feathers, his blade whipping around to open a long, shallow line across Ultra's back before he'd even fully turned to track the movement.
"You wanted honesty," Bellion said, circling now, wings spread wide, blade steady and gleaming with dark lightning, his composure entirely undisturbed "Here it is. I have led armies against beings who could unmake worlds." His eyes, calm and merciless in equal measure, met Ultra's. "Strength alone has never been enough to win. Not against me."
Ultra straightened slowly, rolling the shoulder that had taken the last strike and remarkably, he was smiling again, wider now, something fierce and hungry lighting up behind the glow of his eyes.
"Good," he said.
There was a pressure building, gathering, the ground beneath his feet cracking under a weight that had nothing to do with mass.
Bellion's wings flared once more in answer, four shadows of black and violet spreading wide against the twilight sky, his blade steady in his grip. "Come, then. Show me the god you think you are."
What followed could not rightly be called a fight anymore. It was a cataclysm in two shapes.
Ultra rose first, tearing skyward in a column of displaced air that cracked the ground beneath him into a crater twenty feet deep, and Bellion met him there, four wings driving him upward in a burst that left a shockwave rolling across the arena floor below. They collided in the open air above the ruined battlefield, fists and blade meeting in a detonation of pure force that sent a visible ring of pressure rippling outward through the twilight sky, shattering the nearest spires' windows for a mile in every direction.
They fought like that high above the arena, then low across its cratered floor, then high again a running battle that tore the landscape apart wherever it touched down. Ultra's fists cracked the very air with every swing, each miss gouging fresh ruin into stone that had already been broken and rebuilt by Arthur across the previous battles, Bellion answered with a blade that never stopped changing shape, whip and sword and something in between, lashing out from angles no ordinary combatant could have managed, his wings carrying him through gaps in Ultra's assault that shouldn't have existed.
Heat vision tore red lines across the sky, hunting a target too fast and too precise to be caught cleanly, scorching the underbellies of drifting clouds instead. Bellion's whip found Ultra again and again in answer, thin lines of injury tracing Ultra's arms, his chest, his throat, each cut shallow but relentless, a death by a thousand precise incisions rather than one killing blow.
"You don't slow down," Ultra snarled, driving a punch that Bellion rolled beneath, wings snapping to redirect his fall into a spinning strike that opened another line across Ultra's ribs. "Why won't you just stay still?"
"Because you would kill me if I did," Bellion said, utterly calm. "I have never needed to be the strongest in a room. Only the last one still thinking clearly in it."
Ultra roared and threw everything he had into a single overhead strike, a blow meant to end the fight through sheer, overwhelming Kryptonian force and Bellion did not dodge it. He met it head-on, wings flaring wide, blade rigid and braced crosswise, and for one impossible, groaning instant the two of them were locked together at the center of the sky, fist against steel, strength against precision, the shockwave of their stalemate cracking the dark clouds above them into spiraling fissures of violet light.
Then Bellion's blade gave.
It transformed, the rigid length of it going liquid and fast in his grip, the whip-form snapping free of the block entirely and lashing around in a wide, impossible arc that Ultra had no way to anticipate, still mid-strike, still fully committed to a blow that had nothing left to push against.
The whip caught him across the torso.
It should have simply cut. Instead, empowered by every ounce of speed and force Bellion had built across the entire fight, condensed into a single decisive stroke, the blade tore through with a violence that split Ultra clean apart at the point of impact, his body separating into pieces that scattered outward in a spray of shadow, tumbling limply through the open air before crashing down into the ruined arena floor in a wide, scattered radius of shadowy smoke.
Silence fell across the entire arena.
Even the Paradragons circling the distant spires seemed to pause mid-flight, as though the whole realm itself had paused to absorb what it had just witnessed.
Bellion hovered above the wreckage, wings spread wide, his blade steady once more in its rigid form held loosely at his side. He did not gloat. He simply looked down at what remained of his opponent.
/-\
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