The world contracted into a singular point of violence.
In a split second, a blur of motion erupted from Zackier's frame as he poked Nomoro's body a total of fifty times in a mere blink, the strikes landing with the precision of a needle and the force of a hammer.
Before the impact could even register on Nomoro's nervous system, Zackier pivoted.
He held and extended his arm behind him, his muscles coiling like a serpent ready to strike.
A full-powered Emoplotion began to manifest at the center of his palm, hovering with a volatile, humming energy.
As the sphere grew, Zackier's eyes were consumed by a reddish-pink fire—a terrifying glow that mirrored the absolute depth of his hatred.
With the singular intent to end the struggle right here, he slammed the unreleased Emoplotion toward the off-guard Nomoro.
Nomoro, however, was not yet broken.
Gritting his teeth through the pain of the fifty punctures, he forced his left arm to undergo a violent transformation.
The skin bubbled and blackened, hardening into its demonic form just as he launched a desperate, powered punch to intercept the oncoming annihilation.
Their weapons clashed with a sound like tectonic plates grinding together—Zackier's raw emotional energy against Nomoro's hellish physical strength.
Shockwaves drenched in hues of purple and reddish-pink aggressively rippled outward, the atmospheric pressure pushing anything as weak as an umbrella away like scrap paper.
Neither combatant backed down.
The ground beneath their feet began to spiderweb, cracking and caving in until they stood at the center of a crater that looked as if a meteor had claimed the rooftop.
They pushed against one another, veins bulging, each waiting for the other's spirit to stagger.
Suddenly, Zackier broke the stalemate.
With a predatory hiss, he leaned down until he was inches from Nomoro's face, his arm scraping harshly against the boy's demonic arm armor.
Using the friction to pivot, he landed a devastating, bone-shaking punch directly onto Nomoro's jaw.
The sheer force of the blow was enough to send the demonic warrior staggering back, his vision swimming in a sea of static.
Trizha seized the opening.
She stepped into the vacuum left by Nomoro, intercepting Zackier's follow-up swing with the jagged remnants of her iron pipe.
Zackier had intended to use the second hit to slice Nomoro in half diagonally, but Trizha's metal met his forearm with a ringing clang.
To Trizha, the parry felt effortless at first, but a cold dread soon followed.
She could feel a titanic strength emanating from his limbs, a pressure so immense it felt as if the atmosphere itself was trying to crush her.
He wasn't just fighting anymore; he had decided to release every reserve of power he held.
Trizha began to sweat profusely, her heart hammering against her ribs.
The aura surrounding Zackier was no longer just hostile—it was suffocating.
She prayed that his next move wouldn't be a guaranteed kill, but as he swung his fist, she saw the reality of their situation.
The fist was moving at hypersonic speed.
Before this moment, Zackier's movements had been interceptable to the trained human eye, but the Harbinger state now allowed Trizha to perceive the terrifying truth.
Hypersonic velocity was a frontier neither of them had crossed until now.
She knew, with the cold clarity of a death sentence, that she could not dodge a strike of that speed through physics alone.
But she could avoid the fate of being hit.
Because she was aware of it—because her Harbinger state allowed her to perceive the "inevitability" of the strike before it landed—she could adjust her own destiny.
Nomoro recovered, his demonic eyes glowing with a renewed, desperate light.
He stepped up beside her, the two of them standing side-by-side against the lurking monster.
Zackier stood before them, a pillar of newfound, raging power he had been cultivating for this final exchange.
This was the climax.
The air felt brittle, ready to shatter.
Nomoro held the desire to end everything in one final, crushing blow.
Trizha bore the burden of bringing about her opponent's downfall.
And Zackier radiated an intensity that laughed at the usual laws of benevolence.
None of them faltered.
Each stepped forward toward the finish line, neither willing to lose to the other.
And so it began.
With one final clash that made the very air crack, a massive push of energy threw the three of them apart, leaving exactly one meter of breathing room.
In the same heartbeat, they leaped back into the fray.
They collided head-on, shattering the atmosphere surrounding their bodies.
A massive shockwave explosion erupted on impact, turning the rooftop into a hellscape of sound and light.
Emerging from the smoke like phantoms, they began a race across the rooftop at blinding speeds.
They left a graving wake in their path, the two heroes continuously swinging and parrying every attack they could perceive against the one Antagonist who refused to die.
The battle hit a brief, agonizing pause as Zackier caught Trizha off-balance.
With a hard grit of his teeth, he delivered a devastating arcing kick to her chest in an upwards motion.
The force repelled her into the sky like a discarded doll.
Without looking up, Zackier turned his full attention to Nomoro.
He intended to finish the boy off first before dealing with the girl in the clouds.
Nomoro, however, did not retreat.
He lunged forward, his voice tearing through his throat.
"Hybroth Obliteration!!!"
Nomoro launched his demonic arm in a blur.
Then He pulled it back, then instantly transformed his other arm into its demonic state, launching it as well.
He repeated the process—left, right, left, right—accelerating into a momentum-based barrage of demonic punches that sought to pulverize Zackier's guard.
Meanwhile, Zackier met the madness with his own.
He screamed at the top of his lungs, his arms becoming a blur of powerful hand-chops that moved at speeds comparable to the hypersonic strikes from moments before.
"Hundred Propelled Thrust: Constant!!!" Zackier bellowed.
They barraged each other endlessly, hitting a standstill in their race as they devolved into a full-fledged exchange of raw power.
Each punch and chop sped up as the previous one ended, sending out ripples of colored energy that engulfed the rooftop.
In the chaos, it was visible that hits were getting through.
Blood sprayed as knuckles met flesh and chops sliced skin.
Yet, neither faltered.
They bore the backlash, neither backing down until the other's spirit broke.
High above, Trizha hovered for a moment of deceptive elegance.
She reached the apex of her flight, her inertia finally spent.
As she began to fall, her eyes flickered open, taking in the relentless atrocity occurring on the rooftop below.
She gripped the two halves of her broken iron pipe.
With a surge of her Harbinger energy, she clasped the ends together with such force that reality seemed to buckle.
The metal fused, returning to its original state as if she had reversed time itself on the object.
"First Achievement…" she whispered to the wind. "Environmental… Connectivity."
As the words left her lips, she spread her hand.
The breeze that should have flowed past her instead began to swirl around her like a glowing aura.
She became 'one' with the air.
The atmosphere itself repelled her toward the ground, making her fall faster than a raindrop in a hurricane.
With a raise and a thunderous slam of her revived pipe, she interrupted the endless barrage between the two men.
The metal struck Zackier directly on his upper right shoulder, forcing a silent groan of pain from his lips as he was driven toward the floor.
Trizha landed softly, but the peace lasted for zero seconds.
The aggressive race resumed instantly.
Now, they were charging in a straight line toward the very edge of the rooftop.
Nomoro and Trizha parried and attacked Zackier simultaneously, their movements a perfect, desperate harmony.
Zackier kept up without a pause, his hands a blur as he fended off the dual assault while retaliating with his own lethal thrusts.
They reached the edge.
Zackier stood with his back to the abyss—a drop into certain death for any mortal who dared the fall.
Nomoro and Trizha charged one last time, weapons raised high.
But Zackier didn't flinch.
He generated a fresh, unreleased Emoplotion in each of his palms and lunged at them with unremarkable speed.
They clashed.
BANG!!
Nomoro's demonic fists met the first Emoplotion, and Trizha's iron pipe met the second.
The resulting explosion was cataclysmic.
A dome of light engulfed more than half of the rooftop, obscuring everything from the world outside for dozens of seconds.
This entire exchange, from the first poke to the final explosion, had taken barely five seconds.
As the smoke began to swirl, one could only hope the next few seconds would last longer.
Or perhaps, for one of them, time was about to run out entirely.