Vaelcrest moved first.
That was new.
It wasn't the calculated repositioning of a strategist choosing his angle—it was the instinctive shudder of a system that had detected a predator. His hands came up and the shadows of Shadow Garden responded with a violent, metallic urgency, pooling and hardening as if answering a command issued before he even spoke.
What emerged from his hands was not elegant. It was massive.
A bazooka of compressed shadow—the barrel longer than either of them was tall, the chamber packed with Fantasia energy so concentrated it hummed at a frequency that sent hairline fractures racing across the arena's obsidian surface. The energy within wasn't the standard deep red; it was a blinding, unstable crimson that made the shadow floor vibrate in protest.
He aimed it.
The purple eyes watched the barrel come up with an idle, terrifying curiosity. The smile hadn't changed.
What type of witch is this? Vaelcrest thought. He feels like a whole new person. A different personality altogether.
He fired.
The discharge was instantaneous. There was no travel time, no streak of light—only the immediate, violent erasure of the space between them as a concentrated lance of red Fantasia tore through the atmosphere. The dimensional fabric scorched along the path where the beam was, the sound arriving seconds after the impact.
The figure wasn't there.
Vaelcrest didn't see him move. One moment the figure was centered in his sights; the next, a purple gaze was already present at his left shoulder, the black Spada raised, violet energy casting strange, rhythmic light across the shadow floor.
Vaelcrest teleported.
He folded the dimension vertically, depositing himself twenty feet above the arena floor. From his elevated position, he fired again—three beams in simultaneous, instantaneous bursts, calculated to intersect at every rational point of escape below.
The figure didn't dodge. Dodging implied a transition through space. Instead, the purple eyes tracked the intent of the fire, and when the beams manifested, the figure was simply inhabiting the negative space between them. He moved with a fluency that made the beams look like they had been aimed at empty space from the very beginning.
A jaw construct erupted from the shadow floor directly beneath the figure. It snapped shut on nothing.
Then, the figure was moving toward him.
He wasn't flying. He was running, but his feet found purchase on the shadow air itself, each stride pushing off a vacuum with a complete disregard for physics. The violet energy trailing from the Spada left brief, burning streaks in the air—afterimages of purple that faded slowly, painting the impossible path he had taken.
Vaelcrest fired everything.
The bazooka dissolved in his hands, its shadow mass redistributing into a dozen simultaneous beams. He sent them in every direction at once—an absolute sphere of red Fantasia expanding outward. No gaps. No angles uncovered. An instantaneous wall of energy designed to leave no atom of the arena untouched.
BOOM!
The explosion turned the entire dimension white for three full seconds. The red and shadow energy combined into a concussive wave that cracked the floor from edge to edge and sent fracture lines racing up the walls of the castle. Shadow Garden shook to its foundations.
Vaelcrest floated in the aftermath, his breath labored. His Fantasia reserves had taken a devastating deduction. He looked at his hands—at the slight tremor in his fingers.
He looked at the smoke.
It drifted in slow, dark clouds. The obsidian surface was gone, replaced by a crater of pure void. Nothing moved.
Vaelcrest exhaled. Finally, he thought. "Finally it's—"
A shape in the smoke.
A silhouette, walking. It moved through the dissipating cloud with the unhurried pace of someone crossing a familiar room. Each step landed on the void as if it were solid ground. The smoke parted around the figure with simple, indifferent physics.
The wounds were already closing.
Vaelcrest watched the cut across the ribs knit shut; the shoulder wound sealed from the inside out. The body was repairing itself with the cold efficiency of a system that had decided damage was merely a temporary suggestion.
The purple eyes found him. Still amused.
"You—" Vaelcrest started.
The figure raised one hand.
The index finger extended, rotating slowly until it was aimed directly at Vaelcrest's chest. The violet energy that had been running along the Spada gathered at the fingertip, compressing into a point so small it seemed to collapse the light around it.
The voice was quiet. Almost gentle.
"Eiha."
The beam was thin—a single thread of violet so compressed it barely registered as a physical object. It didn't scorch the air. It didn't roar. It simply existed as a perfect line between the finger and the target.
Vaelcrest moved. He forced a full teleport, folding himself twenty feet sideways to the arena's edge.
The beam hit the wall behind where he had been. The wall didn't crack or burn. A perfect circle of the dimension simply ceased to exist—a hole punched clean through the fabric of Shadow Garden, through which the absolute, terrifying void of the "outside" was visible before the shadows could seal it.
Vaelcrest looked at the hole. He looked at the clean, cauterized edges. He looked at what a beam that thin had done to a world built from his own soul.
Then he looked at the figure.
Who was still pointing the finger. Who hadn't moved since firing. Who was looking up at him with those purple eyes and that smirk.
Fear wrote itself across Vaelcrest's face—the expression of a man whose calculations had returned a result so impossible that composure was no longer an option.
The Crown of a continent. Afraid of one finger.
The figure tilted its head, and the smirk widened by a fraction.
"Run," it said quietly. "Lions are faster than ants."