The light did not fade so much as it was consumed. The brilliant flare in the corridor collapsed inward, shrinking into a perfect, silent sphere of absolute black that enveloped Bradley. It was a void that drank the light and sound from the air around it.
Within that darkness, Spirit Bradley's form dissolved not into mist, but into a storm of black, crackling sparks. They did not simply merge; they were violently, joyfully absorbed, rushing into the human Bradley's body like iron filings to a magnet. The process was no longer a partnership—it was a completion.
This fusion was fundamentally different. Before, it had felt like two separate entities sharing a space. Now, it was a single, unified consciousness. The synchronization was so profound it was dizzying, a perfect, seamless union where thought and action became one. They were no longer host and spirit; they were a single, terrifying entity.
The floor beneath the black sphere trembled, not from an impact, but from the sheer, suffocating pressure it released, a weight that seemed to bend the very air.
Inside the sphere, Bradley's broken body was remade. Bones snapped back into place with audible crunches. Gaping wounds sealed shut, leaving behind unblemished, pale skin. Torn muscle fibers wove themselves back together as if guided by an invisible hand. The physical transformation was mirrored by a more subtle one: the vibrant red tips of his hair darkened, the black creeping upward like spilt ink until his entire mane was the color of a starless midnight.
He opened his eyes.
They were no longer human. The brown was gone, replaced by a solid, terrifying black—pupil, iris, and sclera merged into two perfect voids. The air around them seemed to crackle and warp, as if reality itself was struggling to process his gaze. To look into them was to stare into the abyss, and the abyss was now staring back.
The black sphere shattered, not with a sound, but with a silent, explosive release of spiritual energy. It was a sea of power, vast, cold, and suffocating, flooding the corridor and pressing down on everything it touched.
Under her pile of rubble, the Nurse grunted, her body suddenly feeling impossibly heavy, as if a mountain had been laid upon her back. The shock was a physical blow. How? How could a mere fusion cause such a leap in power?
"Damn it!" she spat, shoving chunks of concrete aside and forcing herself to stand. Her own wounds had already knitted shut, but a tremor of primal unease, a feeling she hadn't experienced in centuries, coiled in her gut. Calm down, she commanded herself. It's just a perfect fusion. I've drained them. They should be weaker. It was a logical thought, a lifeline in the face of this sudden, illogical power.
She was wrong. The being that stood before her was not the sum of its parts. It was something new, something more, and its energy reserves felt bottomless.
Bradley clenched his fists, feeling the power course through him—a raw, humming current that made his previous strength feel like a faint echo. His very skeleton seemed to hum with potential.
This feels... different, Bradley thought, the internal voice a blend of his own and his other self's.
[It's more than synchronization. It's unity. We are one.] Spirit Bradley's voice echoed, not as a separate entity, but as a deeper layer of his own consciousness, sharp and focused.
I feel like I could tear the world apart. He noticed his perspective had shifted slightly; he was taller, his frame still lean but now thrumming with condensed power. So this is a perfect fusion. So Goku and Vegeta felt like this whenever they fused.
He caught his reflection in a shard of glass amidst the debris. "My hair... it's black," he murmured aloud. His voice was deeper, layered with a resonant, distorted power that seemed to vibrate in the chest of anyone who heard it.
[It suits the whole 'emissary of death' vibe we've got going on. Don't let it go to your head, though. Your face is still ugly as fuck.]
Still a critic, I see, Bradley thought wryly.
He finally lifted his head, his void-like eyes locking onto the Nurse. The moment their gazes met, a profound, instinctual chill seized her spine. It was the chill of a prey animal realizing it is no longer the hunter. The sensation of countless invisible insects crawling over her skin was almost unbearable. The more she stared into those eyes, the more she felt her own sense of self begin to fray at the edges.
Centuries of survival instinct kicked in, forcing a cold calm over her panic. She was no novice. She faced him now, reassessing the threat. The boy was gone. In his place stood something dangerous, its power having escalated in a way that could definitively turn the tide. She would need to tread with extreme caution.
Bradley's lips parted, and the distorted voice that emerged seemed to grate against the silence. "You know, I almost thought I was a goner back there. I didn't particularly want to survive, but it seems fate had other plans."
She frowned, the unnatural timbre of his voice setting her further on edge. *What is causing that distortion? It's like hearing two voices at once.*
Her mind raced back to the spirit she had seen. Its aura had been one of profound darkness, the kind that only coalesced around entities that had dealt in death on a massive scale. She had known one other being with a similar, though infinitely more potent, aura. The fact that this weak spirit possessed even a shadow of that same feeling was deeply confusing and unsettling.
Bradley simply moved his hand backward. Dark spirit energy, visible as a shimmering black haze, wrapped around his fingers. From across the room, his katana tore itself free from the rubble and flew through the air, slapping perfectly into his waiting grip with a solid, final thwack.
"Telekinesis? Cool," he whistled, the sound a distorted, multi-tonal echo. He hadn't even been sure he could do that.
His void-like eyes studied her, and the Nurse felt laid bare, every weakness potentially exposed. He was not a fool drunk on new power. He understood the gulf of experience between them. A higher-ranked spirit was a creature of centuries, its skills honed over lifetimes. A single mistake born of arrogance would be his end.
The realization made him smile—a slow, chilling curl of his lips. A true battle of life and death was a rare and exhilarating thing. But then he remembered the whisper in the darkness, the warmth of a hand on his cheek, the final, heartbreaking request. Live my son.
He looked at the Nurse, the amusement fading from his expression, replaced by a cold, purposeful intensity. "Since you beat my ass so badly before," he said, his voice dropping to a deadly calm, "I think it's only fair I return the favor." He smoothly sheathed the katana at his waist in a single, fluid motion.
He moved his foot forward as if to take a step, but the sole of his boot never touched the ground. Instead, he vanished. Not in a blur of speed, not with a sonic boom, but with an utter, silent absence. He was simply... gone. His spiritual presence, which moments before had been a crushing pressure, winked out of existence as if it had never been.
"Where did he go?!" Her head whipped around, frantically scanning the ruined corridor. For a fleeting second, she thought he had fled, but her honed instincts, older than the country they stood in, screamed that he was still here, a predator in the shadows.
Suddenly, every hair on her body stood on end. A presence, moving with impossible speed, was rushing toward her left flank. She crossed her arms, bracing for an impact that never came.
Bradley had not teleported. He was moving with a velocity so immense it bypassed her conventional senses entirely. His logic was simple: if he couldn't out-skill her, he would overwhelm her with sheer, incomprehensible speed.
"The hell, I swear I—" Her words were cut off by a sound like a thunderclap happening inches from her face.
SMACK!
The force of the slap was not physical alone; it was imbued with spiritual power. It felt less like a hand and more like a localized explosion. Her body was launched like a cannonball, smashing through one corridor wall, then another, and another, before finally skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust and splinters.
Bradley stood exactly where she had been, his hand still slightly extended, a look of mild surprise on his face. "Damn," he said, the distorted voice thoughtful. "One slap and she just flew like that. This new fusion is no joke." He had only augmented his legs with a fraction of his energy. The result was beyond his expectations.
The Nurse pushed herself up, spitting a thick glob of blood and a shattered tooth onto the floor. "How... fast." She reached up, her face a mask of fury, and with a sickening crunch, violently snapped her broken nose back into place.
The shock was giving way to a twisted sense of amusement. A brat, still wet behind the ears, was moving in ways she couldn't track. It had been decades since she'd faced a genuine challenge. Perhaps he could provide the decent fight she had been craving.
She rose to her full height and lifted her arms. From the blood pooled on the floor and the lingering essence in the air, spheres of crimson liquid coalesced above her. With a single, focused thought, they elongated and sharpened. Dozens of spears, forged from solidified blood and humming with malignant power, materialized, their razor points aimed unerringly at Bradley.
She didn't waste a moment on banter. "Go," she commanded.
The spears obeyed. They shot forward, not like thrown weapons, but like hypersonic missiles, tearing through the air with a sound like a hundred angry hornets. Their trajectory was perfect, aimed at his heart, his head, his limbs—a coordinated assault designed to obliterate him.
To Bradley, the world had slowed. The spears, which moved faster than the human eye could follow, now seemed to crawl through the air. He could see the individual ripples in their bloody surfaces, track their spiraling paths with ease. His perception and reaction speed had ascended to another plane.
He drew his katana in a single, horizontal arc of pure black light. The first spear, aimed directly for his heart, was sliced cleanly in two. His hand was a blur, his body a statue of calm as his sword moved with impossible economy. He didn't block; he intercepted, the katana meeting each subsequent spear with a series of sharp clinks, severing them with surgical precision. Before the bisected halves could even hit the ground, they were consumed by clinging tendrils of black spiritual energy, erased into nothingness.
He was taking no chances. The memory of being impaled by her blood was still fresh.
She had expected him to survive the first volley. A grim smile touched her lips as she rapidly conjured hundreds more. These new spears were larger, thicker, and hummed with a deeper, more destructive resonance. "Let's see if you can block this many!" she yelled, her voice a triumphant snarl.
Bradley actually smiled at the sight of the swarm, a dark constellation of death hurtling toward him. He tightened his grip on the katana. Spirit energy flared around his body, his heartbeat a powerful drum in his chest. The veins in his legs bulged as he settled into a new, low stance.
Then, he moved. He didn't retreat; he charged into the storm of spears.
His body became a living weapon, tearing through the air. The moment he reached the leading edge of the swarm, his katana was already a whirlwind of black destruction. It slashed through a dozen spears in a single, sweeping motion. He pivoted, the blade dancing, cutting down another cluster. For the few he couldn't immediately intercept, his body flowed around them with an acrobat's grace, contorting in mid-air to let them pass harmlessly by.
But the spears were not so easily defeated. Those that missed him curved in the air, their tips swiveling to lock onto him again, homing in for a second pass.
"Tsk." He clicked his tongue and vanished from his spot. A dozen spears stabbed violently into the space he had just occupied, shattering the floor.
He reappeared several meters away, but the spears were already reorienting, streaking toward him once more.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.