The sickly purple energy slammed into Deadpool's chest with the force of a spectral sledgehammer. It wasn't an explosion of light or a concussive blast; it was an implosion of pure, distilled malice. The air around him curdled. The sound was a horrifying shriek of a thousand tormented souls, a sound that bypassed the ears and drilled directly into the brain. For a terrifying second, a ghostly image of a skull, wreathed in violet flames, superimposed itself over Deadpool's masked face.
To the onlookers, it was the image of death itself claiming its due.
Kazuma, peeking over the rim of the rain barrel, felt his stomach drop into his boots. It was over. The statistical anomaly, the unkillable meat shield, the single greatest asset and liability he had ever known, was gone. A strange and unwelcome sense of actual loss pricked at him.
Aqua let out a gasp, her hand flying to her mouth. There was a flicker of grim satisfaction in her eyes, the heavens did not suffer such mockery lightly, but it was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer terror of the situation. Their strongest piece had just been removed from the board.
Darkness, however, was experiencing a profound and soul-crushing disappointment. Her face, which had been alight with ecstatic anticipation, fell into a pout of epic proportions. "He stole it," she whispered, her voice trembling with envy. "He stole my curse… The beautiful, perfect, inescapable death sentence… was meant for me…"
Beldia, the Dullahan, allowed himself a moment of grim triumph. The curse had found its mark. The annoying, red-and-black creature would now wither and die over the course of the next week, his very soul rotting from within. It was a fitting end for such an insolent worm.
Then, Deadpool coughed.
It wasn't a death rattle. It was a wet, phlegmy cough, the kind you get when you swallow a bug. He staggered back a step, clutching his chest.
"Whoa," he wheezed, his voice raspy. "Okay… that was… tingly. And it tastes like purple. Not the good purple, like grape-flavored candy, but the bad purple, like a three-day-old eggplant. Very earthy. 1 star, would not recommend."
He straightened up. He patted his chest. He rolled his shoulders. He seemed… completely fine.
The entire square was silent, save for the wind. Beldia's glowing red eyes widened, a feat of spectral physics that shouldn't have been possible.
"What…?" the Dullahan's head stammered. "That's impossible! No mortal can withstand my death sentence! You should be dying!"
Deadpool cocked his head. "Dying? Oh, yeah, no, my body and I have a very strict 'no dying' policy. It's in my contract. See, my healing factor is a bit of an overachiever. A real go-getter. You threw a curse at me. My body registered it as an unauthorized foreign substance, like a bad burrito or a politician's promise. So, it did what it always does: it attacked it."
He tapped the side of his mask. "I could feel it, you know. A little civil war in my bloodstream. Your spooky skull-ghosts versus my hyperactive cancer cells. It was a real barn burner for a second there. The skull-ghosts were all like 'We are the eternal night! Your soul is forfeit!' and my cells were like 'Nuh-uh!' and just started eating them. There was a bit of indigestion, a moment where I thought I might get the magical flu, but we worked it out." He patted his stomach. "Everything's fine now. We're all friends again."
Beldia was speechless. His ultimate attack, the very pinnacle of his power as a General of the Demon King, had been shrugged off and described as a case of mild food poisoning. It was a violation of the fundamental laws of magic and reality. It was like throwing a boulder at a man, only for the man to complain that it had wrinkled his shirt.
"You… you lie," Beldia hissed, though the conviction in his voice was gone, replaced by a creeping, horrified doubt.
"Do I?" Deadpool said, his voice suddenly losing its playful edge and taking on a dangerous calm. "You're a being of pure magical energy, right? Take a good, long look. Scan me. See if you can find even a whiff of your little curse left."
Compelled by a desperate need to understand, Beldia focused his senses on the creature before him. He scanned for the lingering tendrils of his curse, the mark of death that should have been irrevocably branded onto the man's soul. He found nothing. Not a trace. It was as if it had never been cast. All he could sense was a chaotic, churning vortex of life force, a biological storm that seemed to actively repel and consume any outside influence.
It was in that moment of profound confusion, as Beldia's mind reeled from the impossibility of it all, that Deadpool made his move.
He didn't draw his swords. He didn't pull a gun. He exploded into motion, a red-and-black blur that moved with impossible speed and grace. He wasn't running; he was flowing, a river of chaos carving a path directly toward the dumbfounded Dullahan. The town guards didn't even have time to raise their spears. Darkness was still pouting. Kazuma was still halfway inside a barrel.
Beldia's body, reacting on pure instinct, swung its massive sword, a blow that could have cleaved a building in two. Deadpool didn't dodge. He slid under it, the wind from the blade ruffling the top of his mask. He used the momentum of his slide to pop up on the other side of the horse, leaping onto its back behind the headless knight.
The nightmare horse reared, surprised by the sudden new passenger, but Deadpool's balance was perfect. Before Beldia's body could react, before his mind could even process the tactical shift, Deadpool reached out.
His hands were a blur. One moment, Beldia was holding his helmeted head securely under his arm. The next, his arm was empty.
Deadpool landed gracefully on the ground a few feet away, skidding to a halt. In his left hand, held casually like a bowling ball, was Beldia's head.
The headless body froze, its arms flailing slightly as if searching for something important. The horse stomped nervously.
"Hey! Give that back, you cretin!" the head shouted from its new location in Deadpool's grasp.
Deadpool held the head up, bringing it close to his masked face so they were eye-to-glowing-eye. "Looking for this?" he asked cheerfully. He turned the head around so it could see its own body, which was now patting itself down in a panicked frenzy.
"This is an outrage!" the head roared, its voice tinny without the resonance of a chest cavity. "A violation of my personal space! Unhand me, you degenerate fiend!"
Deadpool ignored the insults. He tucked the head under his own arm, perfectly mimicking Beldia's earlier pose. He turned to the stunned crowd and gave a jaunty wave with his free hand.
"New plan, everyone!" he announced, his voice ringing with triumph. "The boss fight has been postponed due to a… change in management. We're moving on to the hostage negotiation phase of the evening. Now, who wants to talk about my ransom demands? I'm thinking fifty thousand Eris, a public apology, and all the socks in this town. And I mean all of them."