The grey demon took one heavy step backward-a step that produced a muffled sound like a boulder dropping into a deep well. For the first time since this entity had been created to reign over the depths of the Crystal Sanctuary, a powerful wave of stupefaction washed over its hard stone features. It was a stupefaction it had never encountered across centuries of isolation and absolute dominion. It had always been the predator, the executioner who decided when and how the prey that dared enter its domain would die. But now its white oval eyes, which moments ago had overflowed with contempt and sadistic arrogance, were narrowing and widening with a primal, instinctive terror that belonged not to a Rank B entity but to a cornered animal staring into the face of an oncoming natural catastrophe.
The creature standing before it now represented a blatant violation of every law of reason. The creature that minutes ago had been nothing more than a shattered human insect-a bleeding torso without limbs, crawling in a pool of its own blood and saliva, begging for borrowed seconds of life-now stood upright in the midst of the surging magma lake as though bathing in the warm waters of a healing spring. There was no trace of ash on its body. It radiated a terrifying purity.
The entire scene defied every law of Earth Mana and gravity that the demon understood and governed. The blue Phoenix flames surrounding Dex were not merely a chemical reaction burning the air. They were not simply consuming oxygen-they were reshaping the very fabric of reality around him. The space encircling Dex visibly distorted under the absolute heat, as though the air itself were screaming, trying to flee from the density of his presence.
Dex's new skin, glowing with a faint silver sheen, appeared to have been sculpted not from the clay of the earth but from the essence of cold starlight itself-hard and impenetrable, reflecting the magma's blaze without being touched by its heat. In captivating contrast to his skin, his jet-black hair-threaded with pulsing blue and crimson filaments-whipped and undulated behind him with violence. Not from any wind inside the cavern, but from the immense pressure of magical energy erupting from the Mana channels in his body, an energy that refused all restraint.
But pride is a sickness from which recovery is rarely swift, and the pride of beasts that feed on a high magical rank is the most incurable of all. Inside the demon's mind, a violent war erupted between the survival instinct screaming at it to flee and bury itself in the deepest crack in the earth, and its arrogance as an unconquered guardian.
"Impossible. This is nothing but a cheap magical illusion. Mere mind manipulation born from a wretched death-throes."
The demon reassured itself in these terms, snarling in a low voice resembling the grinding of mountains and the friction of tectonic plates. It decided to erase this visual miracle by the only method it knew: crushing violence. It gathered every particle of the black Mana lurking in the depths of its dark heart. The corrupt energy flooded into its rope-like steel muscles, causing its volume to swell slightly. Black veins rose across the surface of its grey skin, pulsing with lethal force. It lowered its massive body into a launch stance, concentrated its entire weight and power toward a single point, and... struck.
It was not an ordinary charge that any human eye could track. It was a literal penetration of the sound barrier. The air behind it detonated in a violent shockwave-a sonic boom-that shook the foundations of the Crystal Sanctuary. The enormous blue crystals adorning the walls fractured and scattered like glass rain under the atmospheric pressure. In a thousandth of a second, the creature had crossed the distance between the rim and the centre of the lake. It drove a superhuman, devastating fist-loaded with pure darkness-directly toward Dex's still face. This was the same blow, with the same angle and force, that had shattered Dex's ribs before, torn his insides apart, and sent him to the brink of death. The fist was driving forward like an enormous grey meteorite seeking to obliterate this divine vision from existence, pulling a trail of empty air in its wake.
But for Dex-whose consciousness had merged with the eternal energy of the Phoenix-time flowed at an entirely different rhythm. In his eyes blazing with celestial blue, the demon's fast attack appeared slow, laboured, and deserving of pity. He could see the black Mana channels gathering in the creature's fist before it had even released the blow.
With total composure, and in a motion entirely devoid of muscular effort, Dex raised his left hand. That very hand which had been severed and amputated at the shoulder mere minutes ago-which had been rebuilt from pure Phoenix Mana and tempered in the hell of the magma. He raised it with a provocative slowness, palm open and relaxed, in a movement that appeared to mock the sonic speed of the demon and every law of physics that attack represented.
BAM.
The anticipated collision arrived. The sound was terrifying-not the sound of flesh striking flesh, but of a meteorite slamming into a wall of solid titanium. The shockwave produced by the impact split the magma lake beneath them in two for several seconds, exposing the black cavern floor beneath, and sent a cyclone of fire and wind that destroyed whatever remained of the nearby stone platforms.
But the results were staggering-mind-shattering. The demon's enormous fist, which carried sufficient force to level a military fortress, stopped dead at Dex's open palm as though it had struck an eternal wall that simply could not be crossed. Dex's body did not shift a single millimetre backward. His knee did not buckle. His torso did not waver. The very stone floor beneath his feet did not crack. The Phoenix fires in his hand had absorbed every last particle of that colossal kinetic energy as though it were a raindrop falling into an ocean.
"Is that all you have?"
Dex spoke at last, in the midst of the storm that followed the collision. His voice was no longer entirely human. The trembling, feeble timbre was gone entirely. His voice now carried a deep metallic resonance, an echo rising from the depths of a raging volcano-as though living, conscious fires were speaking through his throat. His tone was calm, emptied of any blazing anger, filled instead with a cold and merciless pity.
The demon's eyes widened until they nearly burst. It attempted to wrench its hand back in instinctive panic-having realised its fatal error-only to discover too late that Dex's left hand was no longer merely a human hand. It had become a hydraulic vice of concentrated Mana, a cosmic lock with no mechanism for opening. Dex's long silver fingers closed around the demon's fist, driving into the hard grey stone skin the way a blade heated to cherry red drives into a soft cube of butter.
And then the demon's true nightmare began. At the precise point of contact between the two hands, the demon's thick grey skin-which had always prided itself on deflecting magical blades-began to change. It blackened first, like charcoal. Then it split with deep cracks, like earth struck by sudden drought. And from within those cracks, blazing blue light began to pour out. Dex's hand was not merely gripping it-it was thermally dissolving it.
"The temperature of my body now exceeds one thousand degrees Celsius-and it rises with every breath I draw," Dex said with a terrifying calm, his blue ember gaze penetrating the demon's soul. He was not threatening. He was explaining a scientific and magical fact to a dying creature.
He tightened his grip further. The hiss of evaporating flesh rose to fill the air.
"You are not touching a human being. You are not touching the weak prisoner you broke. You are pressing your filthy hand against the beating heart of a small sun-one that was just born. In the presence of the true Phoenix, there is no such thing as rock or hardness. There are only two categories of matter in this world: that which melts within moments, and that which evaporates into nothing. And you... are about to experience both at once."