The environment began to die.
Not slowly.
Not gently.
Violently.
Amaterasu rose higher, wings unfurling to their full, terrible span. The air screamed as a hurricane tore outward, flaying the crater walls to bare stone. Lava was ripped from the earth and hurled skyward, freezing mid-flight before shattering like glass.
Then the ground answered him.
Black flame erupted from the earth itself.
Not from breath.
Not from motion.
From will.
Pillars of flame tore through the volcanic basin—dozens, then hundreds—directed upward like the screams of a million men, some reaching hundreds of meters into the sky. Where they touched, reality folded inward and vanished. Entire sections of the crater ceased to exist, replaced by smooth, impossible hollows.
Nature had chosen a side.
And it was not the world's.
"Behold," Amaterasu thundered, voice layered with the roar of the planet itself. "The fire that answers no master. The flame that remembers the first dawn."
The black pillars moved.
They twisted, curved, hunted—tracking the figure of light as he tore across the battlefield in a blur of motion. Dashing between eruptions, skimming across falling debris, sliding along collapsing stone as the void snapped shut inches behind him.
Too close.
A pillar curved sharply—
Amaterasu's tail struck.
The impact was titanic.
The figure was smashed out of the air, his body tearing through layers of stone before slamming into the crater wall hard enough to shatter the mountain's spine. Another ridge collapsed, burying him in magma-lit ruin.
Amaterasu did not pause.
His wings beat once.
The resulting shockwave annihilated everything in its path—debris, flame, air itself—forcing the figure to erupt from the rubble at the last instant, light bending instinctively into a barrier shield before him.
The hurricane hit.
The figure was hurled backward, boots skidding across molten rock as the shield screamed under the pressure. The force alone would have liquefied cities.
"Enough games," Amaterasu growled.
The figure answered with violence.
He raised both hands and unleashed hell.
Light blasts screamed forth in relentless succession—rapid, precise, overwhelming—each one detonating against Amaterasu's armored hide in blinding bursts. The sky filled with streaks of aura as the figure spammed attack after attack, never stopping, never relenting.
Like a torrent of stars.
The difference was immediate.
Where earlier light had dispersed, these strikes bit.
Not piercing—but pressing, forcing Amaterasu back step by step, scales grinding, armor fracturing along old fault lines. The Dragon roared, not in pain—but in exhilaration.
"Yes!" Amaterasu laughed. "I can feel that!"
The figure's aura changed.
It flared outward violently—no longer just light, but flame, pink and incandescent, roaring around his body like a living mantle. His hood tore apart under the pressure, cloth disintegrating into ash.
The figure's vibrant hair whipped wildly in the wind.
His eyes burned.
Focused.
Furious.
Alive.
He raised one hand.
The light split.
Dozens—then hundreds—of radiant rays erupted outward, bending mid-flight, separating into bladed arcs of condensed rose-light. They curved, spiraled, and rained down upon Amaterasu like a volley of divine arrows.
The Dragon crossed his wings, black flames surging to meet them.
The impact illuminating the night sky.
Explosions tore across the crater, carving trenches miles long, hurling molten stone into the sky. Amaterasu retaliated by ripping the battlefield apart—claws tearing free entire sections of mountain, hurling them like meteors.
The figure evaded—using falling debris as stepping stones, vanishing and reappearing in flashes of light. He seized a shattered peak mid-fall, kicked off it, and vanished again—reappearing behind Amaterasu in a streak of radiant light.
Hit.
Gone.
Hit again.
From the Dragon's perspective, he was no longer fighting a man—
—but a beam of light, ricocheting across the battlefield at impossible speed.
Amaterasu snarled.
"These tactics," he roared, annihilating floating debris with a violent pulse of black flame. "Hit and run. Flicker and flee."
Flames erupted in all directions—sweeping arcs of death shredding stone, air, and light alike.
"Face me," the Dragon commanded. "No being alive can stand before me and endure."
The battlefield fell eerily still.
The figure landed.
Boots touching stone.
Aura flaring quietly now—contained, dense, dangerous.
He looked up.
Amaterasu stood above him, a towering silhouette of night and flame, wings spread wide, black fire cascading from his scales like falling stars. He was calamity incarnate—the last Great Dragon, nature's final arbiter.
"I know not why you have come here," Amaterasu said, voice low, ancient, carrying across the broken landscape. "But remember this, Child of Light."
The black flames coiled tighter.
"You shall never find that which you seek. Not here."
The figure's smile faded.
Completely.
Light intensified around him, his aura tightening into a controlled inferno as his gaze sharpened—cold, furious, absolute.
"That's where you're wrong," he said.
His voice carried.
"O wisest," the figure continued, fists clenched as the ground beneath him fractured, "and greatest of calamities."
The air trembled.
"For you see—"
His eyes burned brighter.
"That which I seek… lies only in darkness."