Hilary didn't roar. The silence from him was worse. It was the quiet of a mountain before an avalanche. He stepped over the rubble of his prison, his eyes never leaving Damian. The three surviving guards—the rhino-man, the speedster woman, and the gravity elder—flinched back from the fury rolling off their chief in almost visible waves.
"You," Hilary said, the word flat, dead, and final. "You speak of our blood as a 'diluted dreg.' You wear the Progenitor's cursed form like a stolen cloak. You think you are the first hungry shadow to crawl out of the dark, looking to feast on the scraps of a forgotten god?"
He took another step forward. The ground didn't just harden under his feet; it crystallized, spreading out in a web of gleaming, dark quartz. "We have hidden here for centuries. We have let our power fade into myth. We have lived small, quiet lives, not because we are weak." His voice began to rise, trembling with a pain so deep it shook the air. "But because we remember the price of that power! The hunger! The madness! The thing you are becoming!"
Damian scoffed, the sound a wet rattle in his chest. "Spare me the tragic history lesson, old man. You had a legacy and you buried it. That makes you a coward. I'm just… recycling it."
Hilary's face twisted. "There were other ways! You could have asked! You could have sought a better path that didn't require killing my people! Even while slow! We guard them too!"
"Slow?" Damian laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. "I don't have time for 'slow.' I have enemies at my back and a soul cracking like an egg. You offered a library when I need a weapon. Now, step aside. I have three more pests to swat before we finish this."
He made a move towards the exhausted guards, a final, brutal lunge.
Hilary moved.
But not towards Damian. He slammed his own fist into his chest, right over his heart. A sickening crunch echoed, not of breaking bone, but of something deeper, more fundamental shattering.
"No, Chief!" the gravity elder cried out, his grim face finally showing terror.
"Don't!" the speedster woman begged.
But it was too late.
Hilary threw his head back and screamed. It wasn't a scream of pain, but of release. Of surrender. From the point of impact on his chest, inky black lines erupted, spreading under his skin like fast-growing vines. They were the same color as Damian's shadow-armor, but they looked like a lesser version.
[Alert: High-Energy Bloodline Combustion Detected.]
[Subject 'Hilary' is forcibly igniting latent Shadow God lineage.]
[Warning: Process is irreversible and fatal. Power surge imminent.]
The air around Hilary shimmered with heat haze. His body began to change. Not the elegant, controlled horror of Damian's Fiend form, but a violent, ugly mutation. A single, stunted black horn, cracked and rough, pushed out from his forehead. Patches of coarse, scale-like shadow-armor erupted across his skin, ill-fitting and bleeding at the seams. His fingers curved into blunt, dark claws. His power, which had been a solid Rank 6, began to climb violently.
Rank 7... Rank 8... It slammed into the peak of the 3rd Order, Rank 9, and hovered there, unstable and leaking chaotic shadow-energy. The sheer pressure forced the three remaining guards to stumble back, their faces ashen.
Hilary lowered his head. His eyes were now pools of swimming darkness, just like Damian's, but shot through with veins of agony and despair. His body trembled, cracks appearing on his skin, glowing with an angry red light from within. He was burning up from the inside.
"You want our bloodline?" Hilary rasped, his voice now a dual-toned horror, his own and something deeper, angrier. "Then take it! From ME! I am the chief! My line is the strongest! Take my life, take my power! Spare what's left of my people!"
Damian stared, his Fiend-form smirk gone. This wasn't a tactic. This was a sacrifice. A last, desperate gambit to trade one life for many. For a second, he felt something ugly and unfamiliar—a flicker of respect. It was quickly smothered by cold logic.
"Touching," Damian said, his voice still distorted. "A noble sentiment. Truly. But it doesn't work that way." He shook his head, a gesture of pity that was more insulting than any mockery. "I need volume, Hilary. Concentration. You, alone, even burning yourself to cinders, are still just one bottle. I need the whole cellar."
Hilary's despair turned to a final, cold understanding. There would be no bargain. No mercy. The monster before him operated on a logic of pure consumption.
"Then we burn together," Hilary whispered.
He moved.
He wasn't fast like the speedster. He was immense. He crossed the distance in two ground-shaking strides, his mutated form leaving after-images of weeping shadow. He didn't use a technique. He simply swung a fist, a mass of broken horn, shadow-scale, and burning life-force.
Damian met it. He had to.
BOOM.
The collision wasn't metal on flesh. It was two forces of darkness crashing together. The shockwave blew back the remaining guards, sent bodies sliding across the bloody square. Damian skidded back, his boots carving trenches in the stone. His arm, where he'd blocked, throbbed with a deep, bone-deep ache. Hilary's power was raw, wild, and fueled by his very soul.
This was no longer a fight of skill. It was a brawl. A primal clash of two beings touching the same cursed legacy.
Hilary came again, a battering ram of grief and fury. Damian ducked a claw-swipe that would have taken his head off, and drove his own shadow-clawed fist into Hilary's gut. The scale-armor cracked. Hilary grunted, ignored it, and brought an elbow down on Damian's back, driving him to his knees.
Damian rolled, lashing out with a kick that shattered Hilary's knee. The chief stumbled, but didn't fall, his burning bloodline holding him together. They grappled, horn locking against horn, claws digging into shadow-armor, each trying to rip the other apart.
It was horrifying and mesmerizing. Damian was a masterpiece of predatory efficiency, his movements flowing from a thousand life-or-death fights. Hilary was a force of nature, a storm of pain and power, his every move fueled by the last moments of his life and love for his people.
Damian used his Earth affinity, causing spikes to erupt under Hilary's feet, trying to impale him. Hilary shattered them with a stomp, his own earth mana, now tainted with shadow, turning the spikes to dust.
Damian breathed a stream of Piercing Shadowflame. Hilary crossed his arms, his crude shadow-armor absorbing the flames, the energy making the cracks on his body glow brighter—he was using Damian's own attack to fuel his combustion.
They broke apart, panting. Both were a mess. Damian's armor was in tatters. Hilary looked like a broken statue held together by will and black light, his body a web of glowing cracks.
"This is your glorious power?!" Hilary spat, a trickle of black blood running from his mouth. "It's just hunger! It's just taking! You're not a king! You're a plague!"
"And plagues," Damian shot back, his breath ragged, "tend to win."
He couldn't let this drag on. The soul-burn was a screaming void inside him now. He was below 30%. He had one chance.
He feinted left, then dropped low, sweeping a leg at Hilary's already damaged knee. As Hilary shifted to block, Damian didn't follow through. Instead, he channeled all his remaining focus, all his will, into his Darkness affinity. Not for an attack. For one, simple skill.
"Veil of Stillness."
But he pushed it. He pushed it through the Fiend form, through the rage and the pain. He aimed it not at hiding himself, but at stilling Hilary's raging, burning bloodline for just a heartbeat. To freeze the fire.
For a fraction of a second, the chaotic shadow-energy wreathing Hilary flickered. The glow in his cracks dimmed. His monstrous form hesitated.
It was the opening.
Damian surged forward. He didn't use his claws. He brought his hands together, fingers interlocked, and with every ounce of his Fiend-enhanced strength and his SS-Grade Earth power, he brought a double-fisted hammer blow down on the crown of Hilary's single, stunted horn.
CRACK-SNAP.
The sound was like the world breaking.
Hilary's horn shattered. The feedback of his own combusting power, suddenly interrupted and driven back into him, was catastrophic.
The glowing cracks on his body blazed like suns. He didn't scream. He just looked at Damian, his dark eyes clearing for a moment, showing the old, heartbroken chief beneath the monster.
"At least…" Hilary gasped, blood—now red again—filling his mouth. "At least… I die… for something."
Then the light consumed him from within. His body didn't explode. It disintegrated, crumbling into a pile of dark ash and fading embers, leaving only the smell of ozone and sorrow.
The last chief of the shadow-blood village was gone.
Silence, heavier than any before, fell over the corpse-strewn square. The only sounds were the crackle of fading shadow-flames and Damian's own ragged, agonized breathing. The three remaining guards stared at the pile of ash that had been their leader, their last hope.
Damian stood over it, his Fiend form unraveling. The horns retracted. The shadow-armor dissolved like smoke. The claws shrank back into human fingers. He was left as just a young man, covered in blood and terrible wounds, swaying on his feet, the void in his soul now a yawning chasm.
He turned his head, his grey eyes, exhausted and pitiless, settling on the last three.
"Now," he whispered, the word barely audible. "Where were we?"