The sterile, alien corridors of Boros's ship echoed with a sound they were never designed to hear: the wet, percussive impact of flesh against flesh, punctuated by the sharp, clean shink of invisible blades. Hakai moved through the vast chamber like a phantom of controlled violence, a black-hooded artist whose canvas was the multi-formed body of Melzargard.
The general was a Dragon-level threat, a being who had laid waste to entire worlds. Here, he was a toy.
Hakai flowed around a wild swing from a fist the size of a boulder, the wind of its passage ruffling his hair. He didn't retreat; he advanced, his own fist, imbued with crushing force, driving into the creature's central mass with a sickening crunch. Before the pained roar could fully form from Melzargard's five mouths, Hakai's other hand flicked outward.
Shink. Shink.
Two of the general's heads were severed cleanly from their stalks, hitting the deck with simultaneous, wet thuds. They began regenerating immediately, the stumps bubbling as glowing, yellow marbles within his body pulsed, pulling matter from the air to reassemble the lost forms. But Hakai was already elsewhere, a spinning kick catching a third head and snapping it backward with a crack of chitinous bone.
"Is this the best a general can do?" Hakai taunted, his voice a melody of mockery in the chaos. He landed lightly, his red pupils alight with amusement. "Your regeneration is more entertaining than your fighting style. Hehe... don't run out of marbles on me now."
He was a symphony of motion, a perfect fusion of taijutsu and instant-death slashes. A brutal uppercut to a jaw was seamlessly followed by a vertical Zen slash that carved a deep canyon down a torso. A low sweep to unbalance a leg was accompanied by a horizontal flick that severed a grasping arm. Melzargard was a puppet of pain, his body a patchwork of fresh wounds and hastily regenerated tissue, his five-headed consciousness overwhelmed by a single, relentless predator. This wasn't a fight; it was a dissection, and Hakai was the gleeful anatomist.
It was at this moment, as Hakai delivered a powerful roundhouse kick that sent the general's primary head slamming into the deck hard enough to crater the alien metal and bounce, that an audience arrived.
A section of the wall tore away, and four figures entered the chamber, their auras blazing with intent. Bang, the Silver Fang, his form relaxed but ready. Atomic Samurai, a hand resting on his hilt, his gaze sharp enough to cut. Puri-Puri Prisoner, striking a dramatic pose. And Metal Bat, his bat slung over a shoulder, already looking irritated. They had fought their way through the ship's defenses to confront the powerful energy signature of a Dragon-level threat.
They froze.
The scene before them defied comprehension. Melzargard, a monstrous entity whose power they could all sense, was being systematically dismantled. A lone figure in a black hoodie moved with a fluid, cruel grace, treating the general as a personal punching bag. A flick of a wrist sent near-invisible slashes that carved the alien being into chunks. A spin kick sent those chunks flying through the debris and ruined architecture of the ship's interior.
"What... what is this?" Puri-Puri Prisoner breathed out, his usual flamboyance gone.
Atomic Samurai's knuckles were white on his hilt. "He's... playing with it."
Hakai sensed their presence the moment they arrived, a minor fluctuation in the backdrop of his entertainment. As Melzargard's body bubbled, regenerating a half-formed torso much slower than before, its marble cores visibly dimming from the strain, Hakai finally turned his head. His eyes, those unsettling pools of white and red, met the stunned gazes of the S-Class heroes. A wide, grating smirk spread across his face.
"Hehe... you call yourselves humanity's strongest?" he said, his tone dripping with condescending amusement. "You arrived just in time for the finale. What perfect timing... I'll show you what it truly means to be strong."
He turned fully away from the regenerating horror, giving the heroes his back as if they were utterly beneath his concern. He clapped his hands together.
A serpentine dragon of shimmering energy, a hybrid of roaring flame and crackling lightning, coiled into existence around his left hand. He pulled his hands apart, and the dragon stretched between them, forming a bowstring of incandescent blue power. The energy settled, coalescing onto the first two fingers of his right hand, drawn back like a nocked arrow. The air itself hummed, charged with apocalyptic power.
"Blaze Vortex," Hakai whispered, a final, playful note.
He released.
The world turned white, then blue. A blinding column of blue-black fire and lightning, shaped like a colossal arrow, screamed across the chamber. It didn't travel; it manifested upon its target. The sound was not an explosion, but the universe itself tearing apart.
The light consumed Melzargard. There was no struggle, no final roar. The general, his body and all his precious marble cores, was simply erased from existence. The column of destruction continued, vaporizing a multi-kilometer swath of the ship's internal structure and the ruins of A-City visible through the shattered hull. The very air was sucked into the vortex before a shockwave of unimaginable force erupted outward.
The four S-Class heroes, the pinnacle of human power, were thrown off their feet. They skidded backward across the deck, shields of arms coming up instinctively against the blinding light and concussive force. When the light faded and the roar subsided, leaving only a ringing silence, they lowered their arms.
Where Melzargard and a significant portion of the ship had been, there was now a smooth, glassy trench leading out into the open sky, the edges of the vaporized metal still glowing molten red.
Hakai stood at the epicenter of it all, his back still to the heroes, his hoodie undisturbed. He slowly lowered his hand. He didn't look back at them, at their shock, their fear, their utter disbelief. He simply stared out at the destruction, at the beautiful, overkill flourish he had painted across the sky.
For the S-Class heroes, it was a humbling, terrifying revelation. For Hakai, it was just a fun way to end a game.