The air in the laboratory didn't just vibrate; it screamed. Asm moved with an unnatural fluidity that defied the laws of biology. His limbs snapped and contorted, his body appearing as a blur of black cloth and jagged motion. He wasn't just fighting; he was conducting an orchestra of destruction. With a wave of his hand, reinforced steel pipes were torn from the walls like blades of grass, whistling through the air with a precision that bordered on precognition.
Elin, the girl who represented the pinnacle of the Hero Agency's hope, countered with blasts of searing, holy light. Each beam was meant to purify, to burn away the darkness. But Asm's aura was different. It wasn't just shadow; it was a suffocating, black tide—a conceptual void that swallowed the radiance whole.
From the sidelines, a Hero Agency guard stood trembling. His heavy armor felt like a paper suit in the face of this power. With shaking hands, he tried to charge a black projectile, a specialized "Null-Curse" weapon. "He's a monster!" the guard cried out, his voice cracking with terror. "He's not human! He can't be judged by human law!"
Asm didn't even bother to turn around. He simply rolled his eyes, a gesture of pure, casual boredom. With a flick of his fingers, the air around the guards didn't just move—it detonated. There was no sound of a struggle, only the sickening thud of silence. In an instant, the interference was gone. The guards' heads fell lifelessly to the floor, their bodies collapsing like marionettes with cut strings. Elin's companions were erased from existence before they could even draw a breath to scream.
The distraction gave Elin the opening she needed. She lunged forward, her fist glowing with the concentrated power of a thousand suns. The impact caught Asm square in the chest, the force nearly knocking the lungs right out of his body. The shockwave shattered every remaining glass tube in a fifty-yard radius.
Elin collapsed to her knees, gasping for air. Tears of anguish and pure disbelief streamed down her face, carving tracks through the soot and blood on her cheeks. She looked at her hands, then at the boy standing before her. How could a fifteen-year-old kill with such casual ease? How could a heart be so cold that it didn't even skip a beat after ending a dozen lives?
Asm rose slowly from the debris. He didn't look like a man who had just taken a devastating blow; he looked like a bored student. He spent a few moments meticulously dusting off his blazer, his lips curling into a small, mocking smirk.
"Oh?" he whispered, his voice carrying perfectly through the ruins. "I seem to have grown faster than even the 'Great Elin' could perceive. You're still fighting like a child playing with matches, while I am learning how to burn the world."
He stepped closer, his head tilting with a bizarre, twisted curiosity. His eyes searched her face, not for mercy, but for data. "I don't know why... but I feel a certain... attraction to females. Is it biological? Or is it just a desire to see something that looks so 'pure' finally break under my hands?"
Driven by a mix of rage and terror, Elin struck at him again in a frenzy. Her movements were faster than the human eye, but Asm was no longer playing by human rules. He leapt back effortlessly, his laughter echoing off the jagged remains of the facility.
"Fun, isn't it?" he mocked, his eyes gleaming like polished obsidian. "You might wonder if I do all this for revenge. If I'm angry about being abandoned. But no." He paused, a strange, distant look crossing his face. "I remember my birth. I remember the moment the 'blessings' were announced and the immediate rejection that followed. My own mother looked at me and saw the end of the world. Even I would tremble if I gave birth to a monster like me."
The air suddenly turned heavy. The pressure in the room increased until the floorboards began to groan. With blinding speed, Asm launched her across the facility. Elin hit the far wall with enough force to crater the concrete, her armor finally shattering.
Asm moved to deliver the finishing blow, his hand glowing with the dark energy of his Creation Gift. He paused for a fraction of a second, wanting to savor the look in her eyes—the moment the light finally went out.
But the ceiling didn't just crack. It vanished.
The entire underground facility was torn open as if a giant hand had peeled back the crust of the earth. A power so immense it felt like a physical weight poured into the lab. It wasn't shadow, and it wasn't the "Good Will" of the Hero Agency. It was Sunlight.
Not the gentle light of morning, but a solar flare. It was hot enough to melt the sand on the floor into jagged shards of glass. The darkness Asm had spent the last hour building was vaporized in a heartbeat.
"Where were you trying to kill my sister, Asm?!"
The voice thundered from above, vibrating in the very marrow of Asm's bones. It was a voice of pure authority, the kind that belonged to someone who had never known the word "defeat."
Asm looked up. The golden radiance blinded most, but he stared directly into it. His grin returned—not the mocking smirk from before, but a calm, chilling expression of pure joy. Against the backdrop of the falling sun and the hero descending from the heavens, Asm looked like he had finally found what he was looking for.
"Oops," he whispered softly, his eyes gleaming with the anticipation of a god who had finally met his match. "Am dead."
The lab quaked as two great auras in the world finally collided. The air between them ignited, turning oxygen into plasma. The stage was set, and for the first time in his life, Asm's smile felt real. This wasn't a chore anymore. This wasn't a disruption. This was the fight he was born for.