Everything cuts out. A deafening silence crashes down, and then a single sound rings out. Two fingers click together.
Two spheres rocket forward at impossible speed, and they collide head-on. The red sphere pierces through the yellow one as if passing through nothing, but something yanks both spheres backward. They slam into each other with devastating force.
The ground shatters beneath them, and debris explodes upward. Purple, red, and yellow energy floods across the entire area.
A massive circle forms around Sakoura and Akos, the boundary glowing with the color of their clashing energies. The two spheres hammer into each other again and again, each collision unleashing showers of sparks that rain down like lightning, filling the sky.
The two collide with such terrifying force that the ground shatters all around them. Only two fragments of floor remain standing, Akos on one and Sakoura on the other, while everything around them has collapsed into a gaping crater.
The red wave swells rapidly, ballooning into an enormous spherical mass of pure electric-blue light. Energy erupts where it slams into the purple and yellow wave, the two forces spiraling and dancing around each other's spheres. In one violent instant, both explode and vanish in a fraction of a second.
The flash of the explosion rips across the sky. For a single second, the blast carves out the shape of a face, its eyes glowing pink.
Silence swallows the entire area. Even the sea, which had been crashing violently against the shore, falls still. Its surface glows a deep, dark blue, lit by countless bioluminescent creatures beneath the waves. The moon casts its light across the water.
In one sudden burst, Sakoura roars, "AFA!" Akos answers with a roar of his own: "YO!"
At the center of the collision, a massive bubble tears open, purple, yellow, and red swirling together, devouring everything in its path. Buildings, cars, and entire streets are ripped from their foundations. The blast radius stretches 1,032 meters before collapsing back into itself. From its core, a colossal pillar of smoke, fire, and light erupts, a blinding white-orange glow that swallows whole city blocks in fractions of a second.
Both of their bodies are torn apart, covered in wounds so severe that every breath comes as a struggle.
"You gave me no room to react," Sakoura says. "So I'll do the exact same to you. You see how far this battle has gone? I have no choice left. Your strategy of trying to finish me off fast is useless now."
Akos answers from the other side, "Your strategy to destroy me, making my body unable to carry out my technique, has failed. Bahahaha."
Sakoura answers him, "Watch what you're saying. You're trying to provoke me into delaying so I don't activate my UNIVERSE ZONE. But every time you shift the power of your technique, you're only tearing yourself apart from the inside."
Akos answers him, "Keep talking, idiot. My energy never runs dry, because my will only grows stronger every time I'm in battle. Sakoura, I am the strongest one in this fight. I've told you dozens of times, understand this: the only one who can destroy me in half a second is God."
Sakoura answers him, "Akos, God isn't coming down to fix your amateur mistakes."
Akos answers him, "My mistakes, my amateur moves, they come from my own will. That's my responsibility, not God's. He gave me the will, and I use it well to erase you, along with the Devil."
"Akos," he says, "if you think you're perfect, you're wrong. Nothing is perfect. If something were perfect, then either I wouldn't have this technique, or you wouldn't be a Devil, or Devils wouldn't exist at all. I don't care what you did 2,500 years ago, when you turned into a devil that powerful. Neither you nor I are perfect, not everywhere, not always. But I know that somewhere in this world, there are people suffering far more than I am. That's why I've made up my mind: I won't give up. Because I know there are people who went through the same thing and never gave up either. I know there are people who don't see results right away, but two or three years later, they finally see what they built two or three years before."
Sakoura ignores everything Akos just said. He lunges at him with sudden speed, grabbing him by the throat, driving him forward. Akos grabs him back by the throat in return, and the two of them tear through buildings, Sakoura's body ripping in one side of a tower and out the other, leveling it in an instant. He slams Akos down through a floor, and they crash through level after level, shattering ceiling after ceiling, until they burst out into open sky.
He tightens his grip around Akos's throat. "I didn't become a devil because I gave up," he says. "I became one because nature, because this world, never accepted me. In my time, I was never allowed to be human. That's why I'm not here to give up."
He hurls Akos back down into the building below.
His fists ignite with energy. The sky turns red again, the entire area bathed in its glow. Sakoura drops down at blinding speed, straight onto Akos. Akos's eyes flash red, galaxies swirling within them [RUSH CALLS].
A violent explosion tears through the building, flattening it into the ground below. Akos struggles to understand what's happening, but Sakoura gives him no room to breathe. He grabs him by the throat and drags him back through the ruins, tearing out one side of a building and straight into the next. He hurls him back into the sky.
"They keep shouting that this is the era of the Chosen One," Sakoura says. "But this era stands beneath mine, an era that will never end. Two thousand four hundred and eighty years since it began, the Era of Chaos still rages on. Understand this: you belong to now. I belong to the past."
Akos answers him, fighting to keep his body steady in midair. He lands. "We're different..."
You gained your power because nature chose you to be a savior," Sakoura says. "You're not a hero; you're human. Someone who feels, who suffers pain, who carries emotions. But nature chose me to be a devil. I have no emotions. I don't even know what pain is. In that piece, we're different. But we're still the same thing underneath, living organisms."
He teleports behind Akos and kicks him, sending him crashing down. As Akos falls, Sakoura grabs him by the throat and drags him straight through an entire building, tearing it apart floor by floor until they slam into the ground, carving out a crater. A terrifying look crosses his face.
"Now you'll see," Sakoura says. "The living organisms you people call devils, we were tortured for thousands of years in hell before we ever climbed out. Like me. Every second down there is a hundred years up here. I will never give up, Tasaku."
Akos, seething with rage, drives his hand straight into Sakoura's stomach, punching clean through to the other side, tearing a hole out of his back. But it doesn't stop Sakoura; he keeps dragging Akos down, deeper into the earth.
Akos drives a brutal punch into his head, sending Sakoura flying up through the crater and out into the sky. Akos climbs out after him, struggling, his breath ragged and cut short. Inside himself, he thinks, If that hit hadn't landed, I could have died. He really does deserve his place as the third strongest devil in history; his will never stops.
Sakoura hurls a truck at him. Akos dodges it, barely, straining to regenerate half his brain, torn apart from the impact. But Sakoura closes in, driving both hands around his throat, and whispers into his ear, "The Winner Takes It All." He shoves him back.
Sakoura closes his left eye, forms his fingers into the shape of a gun, takes aim, and fires, a burst of flame that tears through half of Akos's body. Akos staggers back from the pain, reaching his hand toward his shoulder, but there's no shoulder left. It's gone entirely, and his hand grasps nothing but air.
"This is your end, Akos," Sakoura says. Akos stares at him, shock written across his face; he can't believe he's about to lose. He tries to force energy into his arm, desperate to heal it, but nothing responds. Nothing works.
Sakoura prepares another attack, but suddenly his own body locks up. His energy cuts out, dead. "You bastard," he says. "You used RUSH CALLS on me."
Akos answers him, "If I die, then you die with me. Bahahahahaha."
"You locked me down with RUSH CALLS, and I locked you down with RUSH CALLS," Sakoura says. "I won't lie, you really have no limits," inside himself. This is suicide.
Akos's body begins to regenerate, slowly, painfully slowly. Inside his mind, he replays the earlier hits, the strike that tore through half his brain. I can barely even form scenarios anymore. In a single fraction of a second, I can only manage fifty.