The entire stadium stood frozen as the dense, pitch-black Astrager Abha radiated outward in violent waves from the core of Ninten's giant chest. High above the shattered metallic staging ground, the air cracked under the sheer weight of spatial distortion. Down on Team Thunder's bench, all five watching teammates—Thunder, Mark, Gic, Fi, and Dent—braced themselves against the vibrating reinforced containment barrier.
Mark's cybernetic visor flashed with blinding crimson warning indicators, scrolling through thousands of lines of real-time diagnostic data as the system calculated Ninten's rapidly plummeting energy levels.
"His primary core is taking direct, concentrated Abha corruption!" Mark called out over the deafening roar of the atmospheric pressure, his voice sharp and intensely analytical. "Shan didn't just pierce him; he injected localized energy-nullification particles directly into Ninten's central mana network. If Ninten can't purge that residue immediately, his energy circuit will collapse!"
"He's not done," Fi said quietly, his arms tightly crossed over his chest, his eyes unblinking as he tracked the subtle, rhythmic micro-twitches in Ninten's right hand. "Ninten wouldn't let a straightforward ambush end his game. He knows how to stall, and more importantly, he knows how to manipulate the fight's pacing."
Dent adjusted his defensive gloves, his eyes scanning the hovering structural monitors. "Look at the spatial density around the platform. Shan is expending a massive portion of his own reserves just to keep those blades anchored in Ninten's chest. It's a double-edged sword. If Shan lets go, Ninten heals. If Shan stays, he drains his own stamina."
"Precisely," Gic added smoothly, a faint, confident smile playing at the corner of his lips. "It's a game of endurance now. And when it comes to unpredictable game mechanics, nobody out-lasts a stubborn gamer."
High above the shattered platform, Shan tightened his deadly grip on his twin daggers, pressing the dark, glowing blades even deeper into Ninten's giant, cloud-wrapped torso. The dark Abha flickered like corrupted lightning, burning through Ninten's Gear 5 rubbery skin and eroding his Fallen Angel invulnerability layer by layer.
"Your transformations are undeniably versatile, Ninten," Shan whispered, his cold voice barely audible above the howling wind as he hovered inches from the towering white giant's face. "You bring gods, monsters, and game logic into a serious arena. But raw size without absolute spatial control just gives an assassin a much bigger, much more obvious target to strike. You made yourself impossible to miss."
A thick, suffocating silence fell over the ring as Ninten's giant white head slumped forward, his glowing red eyes flickering out. The spectator stands held their breath, expecting Ninten to crash onto the metallic tiles.
Then, a low, ominous rumble echoed from deep within Ninten's giant frame—not a sound of pain, but a deep, vibrating chuckle that shook the metal bedrock of the entire citadel.
"Who said... I was relying on size?"
FOOM!
Instead of collapsing under the dark corruption, Ninten's Gear 5 giant form compressed with terrifying speed. In less than a fraction of a millisecond, his massive rubbery body imploded into an ultra-dense, blinding vortex of blood-red kinetic energy. The sudden, violent shift in physical mass and gravitational pull completely threw off Shan's balance. His daggers slipped out of the collapsing chest cavity, forcing the assassin to retract his weapons and execute a series of rapid backflips through the air to regain his footing.
As the swirling crimson smoke cleared, Ninten stood back in his normal human form. But his energy profile had shifted completely. Gone were the pristine white wings and the cartoonish clouds of steam. In their place, two massive, phantom Ashura broadswords hovered at his flanks, glowing with an ancient, bloodthirsty purple light. A dark aura of absolute, unyielding domination wrapped around his limbs like liquid fire.
Invoking the legendary character profile of Martis, the Ashura King from Mobile Legends, Ninten tossed his head back and let out a fierce, bloodcurdling grin that echoed through every speaker in the arena.
"THREE THOUSAND WORLDS... AND NOT A SINGLE WORTHY FOE!" Ninten roared, his voice layered with a multi-tonal, demonic resonance that shattered the remaining glass screens in the surrounding sector.
Without giving Shan a single microsecond to re-evaluate his range, Ninten activated Martis's iconic second skill—Mortal Coil.
SWOOSH!
Ninten bounded forward, turning into a whirlwind of uninterruptible kinetic momentum. The twin phantom Ashura blades cleaved through the air in a grand, 360-degree arc, creating a swirling vortex of dense knockback force that completely tore apart Shan's shadow-evasion routes.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Shan raised his dark daggers to parry the incoming storm, but the sheer, brutal physical weight behind Martis's blades was unlike anything Ninten had displayed prior. The force of the first strike cracked Shan's arm guards; the second strike drove him backward, his boots carving deep, smoking grooves into the reinforced floor plates. Every single movement from Ninten carried absolute crowd-control resistance—Shan's desperate attempt to slow him down with swift shadow slashes simply dissolved upon touching Ninten's unstoppable aura.
"Take this!" Ninten roared, stepping into the final phase of Mortal Coil. With a heavy, upward double-slash, he unleashed a localized gravitational shockwave that lifted the platform floor and launched Shan directly into the open air.
"He's airborne!" Mark shouted from the sidelines, his visor calculating the trajectory. "Shan has no solid foothold to leverage his shadow steps!"
Without allowing his airborne target a single frame to recover or stabilize his body, Ninten tapped directly into Martis's ultimate execution mechanic—Decimation.
SWOOSH!
Ninten's entire body turned into a singular, blood-red streak of light. He zipped across the arena in a sharp zig-zag pattern, gathering momentum before driving a lethal, dual-blade thrust straight toward Shan's exposed midsection while he hung defenseless in mid-air.
Down on the bench, Dent leaned forward over the barrier, his fists clenched tight. "He locked him into a flawless airborne juggle! If Decimation connects while Shan's health points are below the threshold, the automatic reset mechanic will instantly trigger a second strike!"
The entire stadium leaned in, watching the blood-red streak close the distance in a thousandth of a second. But high above the ring, inside the quiet vacuum of the air, Shan's eyes remained dead calm. His assassin instincts, honed through thousands of life-or-death missions in the Castrophireal District, operated at a frequency far beyond panic.
Shan knew he couldn't block the raw physical impact of Decimation. He knew he couldn't dodge it without a surface to kick off from. So, he targeted the game system's logic itself.
Just as Martis's execution blade was millimeters from piercing his heart, Shan executed a frame-perfect, brilliant tactical counter. Rather than trying to defend his physical body, Shan instantly detached the concentrated shadow aura from his left dagger, sacrificing the weapon's energy to construct a hyper-dense, micro-sized Shadow Decoy directly in front of his chest armor.
THWIP!
Ninten's Decimation struck the microscopic shadow construct with full execution force.
BOOM!
The shadow decoy detonated, absorbing the initial kinetic impact completely. Because the arena's automated matrix registered the hit as connecting with a full-health shadow construct rather than Shan's primary body, the system failed to detect a low-health execution trigger—completely cancelling the ultimate's automatic reset protocol!
"What?!" Ninten's eyes widened in sheer disbelief as his crimson streak ground to a sudden halt, his execution momentum completely vanishing into thin air.
"Got you," Shan said softly, his cold voice echoing right beside Ninten's ear.
Leveraging the brief moment of shock and the physical momentum of Ninten's stalled execution strike, Shan flipped gracefully over Ninten's shoulders in mid-air. Tying his residual shadow threads around Ninten's wrists like unbreakable steel cables, Shan redirected Ninten's own tremendous kinetic force downward.
With a swift, fluid motion, Shan hurled the Ashura King form straight toward the ground while simultaneously driving his remaining right dagger deep into the center of Ninten's exposed upper back!
BOOM!
The catastrophic impact shattered the central arena platform entirely. A colossal plume of pulverized metal, smoke, and fiery energy erupted upward, reaching fifty meters into the air and sending massive shockwaves tumbling over the outer protective barriers.
Down on the bench, Thunder didn't blink, his leadership gaze piercing straight through the thick dust cloud.
As the howling wind slowly cleared the haze, the brutal scene revealed itself.
Ninten was pushing himself up on hands and knees, panting heavily as the purple Ashura aura flickered before completely fading from his body. Blood dripped steadily from multiple deep cuts across his arms, chest, and back, the black Astrager Abha burning relentlessly against his stamina reserves.
Across the massive crater, thirty meters away, Shan landed on one knee. He was breathing in short, ragged gasps, his left shoulder clearly dislocated and bleeding profusely from the kinetic feedback. His left dagger was shattered into pieces, but his remaining blade flared with a terrifying, pitch-black shadow aura.
Neither fighter backed down. There was no timer stopping them, no barrier rising, and no system referee stepping in. The atmosphere inside the stadium turned suffocating as both combatants unlocked their absolute upper limits.
"You're bleeding out, Ninten," Shan growled, forcing his trembling legs straight as his remaining dagger swelled with a massive, localized eclipse of Astrager Abha. "No more games. This next strike ends your entire run!"
Ninten wiped a thick trail of blood from his chin, his exhausted face splitting into a wild, unhinged grin as his gamer sub-interface flared with blinding golden code.
"Ending my run? Bro, you just unlocked my boss phase!" Ninten laughed maniacally, raising his fists as thousands of game aura particles burst from his veins. "Let's see if your daggers can cut through pure game-breaking reality!"
*BOOM!*
Shan blurred into motion, leaving a trail of dark sonic booms, while Ninten charged forward like a unleashed comet. The twin forces of shadow and chaos hurtled straight toward each other in the ruined center of the ring, preparing to collide in the ultimate, fatal climax!