The cluster of light that was accumulating in Lief's palm was not simple illumination, it was a sacred energy that buzzed with a frequency that made teeth vibrate.
It compressed in on itself, becoming denser, brighter with every millisecond.
"..."
Art, who was in the middle of a little hop with his balloon trident, froze and for the first time since he had entered the warehouse, his attention abandoned the mockery.
His gaze detached from Lief's face and fixed with absolute intensity on the sphere of light.
He stopped smiling.
There was no human fear in his expression, but something closer to understanding. He knew, somehow, that that was not "physical damage". That… was the antithesis of his own existence.
"The game is over" declared Lief and pushed his palm forward.
Boom
The sphere of light burst in a controlled manner like a thick and blinding pillar of light, that shot out from his palm, crossing the distance in an instant and devouring the clown's figure completely.
SSSSSHHHHHHH
Under the torrent of light, the physics of Art's regeneration ceased to matter.
His body began to convulse violently. The clown suit was the first to come undone, sublimating into strands of smoke that were purged instantly by the sacred glow.
Then it was the flesh's turn.
Under the erosion of the light, the matter that composed Art reacted like ice exposed to the surface of the sun.
The outer layer of skin blistered and vaporized in seconds, peeling away to reveal that dark substance.
Art did not scream. But his agony was visible.
His face deformed violently under the pressure of the light. His eyes melted in their sockets, and his features elongated and compressed in a rapid sequence, representing a final pantomime of extreme suffering.
"..."
Lief, observing the disintegration, clenched his teeth and increased the energy output.
He could feel Art's resistance, his desperate attempt to "regenerate" and cling to reality, but it was useless. The purification was attacking the very root of his being.
The pillar of light intensified until becoming unbearable, illuminating everything with an incredible clarity, eliminating every shadow from the corners.
At the entrance, Tara and Dawn, who had just reached the threshold in their desperate flight, stopped dead, blinded by the sudden glare that exploded behind their backs.
They covered their eyes with their hands, looking through the gaps of their fingers with a mixture of awe.
They witnessed how the clown's silhouette, trapped in the center of that column of light, became increasingly translucent, losing consistency, until turning into nothing more than a flickering shadow that finally dissolved in the air.
And then, the light went out.
Silence returned to the warehouse, but this time it was a clean silence.
In the center of the floor, where seconds before an immortal clown was standing, nothing remained.
Not a piece of fabric, nor a drop of black blood, nor a bone. There was only a circular mark on the floor, slightly blackened, and a faint trail of white smoke rising toward the ceiling.
Even the dense and coppery stench of blood seemed to have been erased from the air.
Lief stood motionless.
"...Is that it?" he murmured, lowering his arm slowly.
He looked at the mark on the ground feeling a strange sense of anticlimax.
He had expected an epic battle, a fight of attrition against evil. But reality had been disappointingly simple.
Art's resistance to the sacred power had been pathetic.
"Sigh…."
Sighing, he shook the dust off his clothes.
He understood the lesson instantly. Physical immortality is a cheap trick.
The thought that victory had been too easy had barely crossed the synapses of his brain when reality decided to slap him in the face.
"WATCH OUT!"
"BEHIND YOU!"
Two harrowing screams shattered his victory.
Lief did not need to process the words since his combat reflexes, burned into his muscle memory, took control before his conscious mind could even formulate a question.
He pivoted on his left foot, anchoring himself to the ground, and threw his right leg backward in a blind spinning kick, executed with the precision of a whip and the power of a wrecking ball.
Thud
His heel connected squarely with something solid.
The sensation of impact vibrated up his leg to his hip.
A brutal kinetic force exploded at the point of contact, and the figure that had materialized in silence just behind his back was sent flying like a rag doll trapped in an explosion.
The guy flew through the air out of control, crossing the empty space until crashing violently against the warehouse wall with a crash.
Lief turned with his guard high, ready to finish him off. But his eyes narrowed upon seeing what he had just kicked.
The infamous black and white clown suit, immaculate.
The face covered in makeup, intact.
The ridiculous little black top hat, still perched on his bald head.
Art.
The clown slid from the dented wall and landed on his feet with grace. There were no wounds… There were no signs of burns by sacred light. He brushed a little imaginary dust from his shoulder and straightened up as if nothing had happened.
For the first time in the night, a shadow of genuine bewilderment crossed Lief's stoic face.
"What the hell...?"
His perception had not failed him before. He had felt with total clarity how Art's existence had been erased, eradicated by the force of purification down to the last atom.
There was nothing left to regenerate.
This was not accelerated healing. It wasn't even resurrection in the traditional mystical sense.
This felt... different. It felt like a "reset".
It was like facing a glitch in a video game: you kill the boss, the code breaks, and the system simply respawns him at the point of origin with the health bar full, ignoring all previous progress.
But Art did not give him time to theorize.
Lief's reaction speed seemed to have awakened an interest. Ignoring completely the two girls screaming at the door, he fixed his attention exclusively on Lief and began to walk toward him.
"Incredible…" murmured Lief, and a cold spark of scientific curiosity replaced his surprise.
If brute force didn't work and conceptual erasure didn't either... he needed to understand the rules. He needed to know how the mechanism of this monster worked.
He decided to perform an experiment.
While Art approached with that nightmare smile, he raised his two pistols again.
"Let's see what you have inside."
Bang Bang Bang
This time, it was not an indiscriminate rain of bullets. It was a ballistic dissection.
He shot with precision, making the bullets impact the left shoulder, the right knee, the lower abdomen.
Art's body exploded in geysers of that black liquid.
His left arm was torn off completely.
His right leg disintegrated from the thigh down and a hole opened in his stomach.
The amputated fragments went flying, while Lief watched as the separated pieces twisted for a second and then collapsed, turning into inert puddles of black mud that evaporated quickly.
However, the main torso, remained active.
Like a malignant tumor in fast motion, the flesh began to bubble. From the destroyed stumps, bones, muscles and fabric sprouted in an explosion of frenetic cellular growth.
One, two, three seconds and Art was complete again.
He shook his newly grown arm and took a step with his new leg.
"..I see" Said Lief, nodding to himself, "Regeneration takes as a core the largest remaining portion of biomass. The rest is discarded."
It was a useful piece of data. But it left a disturbing question: What was the minimum limit?
"Very well. Phase two."
Lief put away the weapons and extended his right hand once more, the purifying light began to buzz in his palm again.
Art tilted his head, recognizing the light that had killed him before, but he did not back away.
"This time, we are going to be precise."
Lief fired the beam of light. But it was not a massive torrent. It was a concentrated beam..
With absolute mental control, he swept over the clown's body. The light vaporized the legs. Vaporized the torso. Vaporized the head and the left arm.
Lief stopped the attack at the last microsecond, leaving intact only the pinky finger of Art's right hand which fell to the ground.
"..."
Lief leaned in, observing the solitary and glove covered finger lying on the ground.
"Let's see…"
What happened next was that the finger did not stay still… It started to tremble.
And then, it inflated.
Like a balloon filling with air at incredible pressure, the finger expanded. Crunches of bones growing at incredible speed were heard. From the base of the finger sprouted a hand, then an arm, then a shoulder.
It was grotesque.
Flesh, organs, black blood and clown clothes generated from nothing, spiraling outward from that single point of origin.
In the time it takes to take a single deep breath, the mass of flesh had reconfigured completely.
Art "sprouted" from his own little finger, recovering his full height and form in an instant.
The clown shook himself off like a wet dog, looked at his hands, flexing his fingers, and then touched his nose to make sure it was in place.
Slowly, he raised his gaze toward Lief and greeted him with a smile.
"…"
Lief frowned deeply as he grasped it.
Biological regeneration was only the tip of the iceberg, as long as a single trace of "information" remained, whether it was a finger, a drop of blood or an atom, Art used it as an anchor to rebuild himself.
"Then... the logical answer is absolute elimination" he concluded.
Taking a deep breath, he made a decision.
The testing phase was over.
!
The purifying light burst for the third time, but this time it was not a beam, but a gigantic sphere of bluish-white light that expanded from him, swallowing Art completely.
At the same time, he activated his telekinesis like a vise, blocking and sealing every cubic centimeter of the space where Art existed, creating a pressure prison to ensure nothing escaped.
The sacred light and the mental force worked in tandem to erase him completely… and not even dust remained.
When the light finally dissipated, Art had disappeared again.
But Lief did not lower his guard and expanded his sensory perception like a radar, sweeping every corner of the place.
One second of silence…
Two seconds…
Just when he was starting to consider that perhaps this time it had worked, a chilling cold burst from out of nowhere from above.
Lief looked up and there he was.
Hanging from the ceiling beams, upside down like a spider in his suit, Art watched him in silence and was intact.
This monster did not have the concept of "death" in his source code…
Destroying him partially activated his regeneration in situ. But destroying him completely... that only activated a "reset" mechanism. He simply reappeared at the nearest available point, like a computer virus that automatically reinstalls itself when you try to delete the root file…
He was an existence impossible to kill.
A parapsychological phenomenon that existed purely to propagate fear and pain, a universal constant of cruelty.
"What problematic trash" he spat feeling his patience running out.
It was useless to keep playing this game of whack-a-mole. If he couldn't kill him, and couldn't erase him, then the only logical option was to take him off the board.
Ignoring the clown who kept moving through the beams, he turned his head abruptly toward the warehouse entrance.
Tara and Dawn were still there, paralyzed. They hadn't managed to flee, the terror of seeing the clown reappear again and again had left them anchored to the ground.
"You two!" barked Lief snapping them out of their trance, "Find me a bottle! Now!"
?
The girls looked at him with wide eyes, not understanding.
"A bottle!" he insisted, shouting to cut through their panic, "Glass, plastic, I don't care! Anything with a lid!"
The urgency in his voice activated their obedience instincts and although they didn't understand the absurd request in the middle of all this, Tara and Dawn began to frantically rummage through the pile of trash accumulated at the entrance.
"Here!" shouted Dawn.
She ran toward him, tripping over her own feet, and handed him an empty glass Coca-Cola bottle.
"Here!"
Lief snatched the bottle from her hand.
At that precise moment, Art dropped from the beams. Landing a few meters away and tilted his head, looking at the bottle in Lief's hand with genuine curiosity.
Lief placed the bottle on the ground, uncapped, and secured it with the sole of his boot.
Then, he straightened up and looked the clown in the eyes.
"Come closer" he said sketching a defiant smile, "I am going to show you a real magic trick."
Art, always willing to participate in every game of Lief's, began to walk toward him.
Lief spread his legs and joined his hands in front of his chest.
Instantly the air in the warehouse changed.
It was no longer the bright light of purification. This time, a suffocating presence began to emanate from Lief's body.
It was an emerald green energy that began to light up in his hands.
"Ma—Fū—Baaaa!"
And with a shout he pushed his palms forward.
Quickly the green energy that was accumulating in his hands, shot out but not like a beam, but like a vortex.
The energy spun in a spiral, expanding instantly to become a tornado that roared through the warehouse and enveloped the clown completely.
Art's smile froze.
When that green energy touched him, he felt an irresistible gravitational force pulling on every atom of his being.
He tried to take a step back, tried to use his strength to resist, but it was useless. This energy was not designed to damage, but to seal, and against that, his immortality was of no use.
His body began to stretch.
His physical form elongated and deformed like gum under the suction of a black hole, spinning in a spiral following the flow of the emerald wind. His face, his hat, his limbs... everything became a twisted line of matter.
The green swirl, carrying the clown who was now waving his arms, began to contract with violence.
The vortex closed, spinning faster and faster, channeling all that mass of evil toward a single point of destination: the small and dirty mouth of the soda bottle that waited on the ground.
________
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