Golden flickers of sparks flew across the room as the two collided. Vincent thrust his katana downward, using the floor to anchor his block against Michael's dagger, which was still propelled by the residual force of the black powder explosion.
Realizing the block, Michael released the dagger mid-motion, letting it clatter away.
Vincent smiled. "I watched your fight on the first day, Michael. I know you're not straightforward."
"Really? How slithery am I?" Michael muttered.
With a chilling lack of hesitation, Michael ripped his own skin open, pulling a hidden lighter from his belt while slicing his lower lip wide open. He spat a mouthful of raw gunpowder straight into the air and snapped the lighter's flint. A violent fireball erupted, scorching the classroom. Because his newfound regenerative abilities allowed him to treat his flesh like disposable scrap, Michael had zero regard for his own body; his jaw immediately unhinged and snapped back into place with a sickening pop, resembling a feral, half-rotted corpse.
The room choked on thick black smoke. A few slower students caught the edge of the blast and suffered burns, but Vincent stood untouched.
"Michael, the tactical brute-force genius," Vincent sneered, his paintbrush glowing intensely. "If only you weren't fighting me. My ability, PAINTER, allows me to draw whatever I want, however much I want into physical existence.
As much as I want to play this game, this class needs to realize you're nothing—just a pathetic emo kid whose love life with Elizabeth is a joke, just like that pathetic display you pulled with a weakling like Zion."
The bristles of Vincent's paintbrush shifted, melting and expanding until they morphed into a massive, ornate cannon. The terrifying part wasn't the weapon itself—it was the ethereal barrel connecting directly to Vincent's chest, drawing power straight from his beating heart.
Across the smoke-choked room, Mrs. Eimar raised an eyebrow, a flicker of genuine surprise crossing her features. "Well... Michael, you might actually be dead. A student who can already draw power straight from their core..."
The cannon radiated a blinding, searing golden energy. Before Michael could even calculate a counter-strategy, a massive beam of pure blue light detonated across the room.
"Bye-bye, Michael," Vincent murmured.
Downstairs, the classroom of Nmesoma and her peers sat quietly through the wasteland survival lecture. Suddenly, a deafening roar shook the ceiling. A hole blasted straight through the floorboards above them, vaporizing desks, concrete, and several students completely into ash.
Nmesoma and her classmates stared up in horror through the smoking crater.
"Michael..." she whispered.
Upstairs, the beam had been so intensely hot that even Mrs. Eimar had been forced to throw up a barrier to shield the surviving students. Elizabeth stood frozen, staring at the empty space where Michael's body should have been, her breath catching in her throat as she realized there wasn't even a trace of ash left.
On the far side of the room, Vincent stood smugly amid the only patch of floor that hadn't been blasted to atoms. "So that was the Michael you all feared? Just a penny in the ocean—"
Before he could finish, warm, viscous drops fell onto his shoulder. He blinked and looked up.
"Michae..."
Before he could get the name out, a mangled torso—completely stripped of its lower body, jaws dripping with raw blood and jagged fangs—dropped straight from the ceiling rafters, landing squarely on top of him.
"I WISH I COULD DIE, VINCENT!" Michael roared, his voice a distorted, unholy screech echoing off the shattered walls. "BUT I'VE BEEN CURSED TO OUTLIVE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY ENEMIES! NOW THAT I CAN'T DIE, LET'S SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TWO CORES COLLIDE!"
Before anyone could process his movement, Michael's hands plunged deep into the chests of two nearby, unconscious classmates. His fingers glowed with a blinding, toxic red energy, his eyes hollow pits of absolute darkness devoid of a single shred of humanity. With a sickening crunch, he smashed their extracted cores together.
"My new move," Michael screamed, a blood-soaked grin tearing across his face. "I call it: BOMB OF GENOCIDE!"
The moment the two foreign hearts collided, Michael's own hands vaporized instantly from the sheer thermal overload. Vincent shrieked, pouring every ounce of his life force into his paintbrush. No constructs this time—just a raw, desperate energy field that drained his core so fast his pitch-black hair turned completely grey before his eyes.
On the opposite side, Michael laughed maniacally, channeling every scrap of his regenerative energy into his obliterated arms, forcing his flesh to melt and regrow in an endless, agonizing loop just to keep the blast expanding. He wanted the explosion to never end. He didn't care if he died; he wanted to die.
Vincent's shield flickered and shattered under the pressure. But instead of shielding himself, Vincent threw his barrier outward, desperately trying to contain the blast to protect the remaining room.
Through the blinding white-hot light, even as Michael's entire body was disintegrating down to the bone, a terrifying joy was plastered across his face.
The surviving students looked over at Mrs. Eimar, and a collective shiver froze their blood. Even their teacher—the cold, unfeeling administrator of Emox—was smiling.
"Ability..." Eimar murmured under her breath, her eyes widening.
Before she could finish, Michael's voice cut through the roar of the core overload. "Oh, you want to save them? You want to save yourself?! You could have stopped this conflict before it started, but you let it rot! Now I must purge every single piece of dirt from this world!"
He channeled the final drop of his core.
The classroom detonated. It wasn't just an explosion; it was a localized core-nuke. The blastwave obliterated everything—the upper floor, the lower floor, the reinforced titanium architecture, and every single soul trapped in that wing of the building.
For a terrifying second, there was absolute nothingness. Total erasure.
Well, that's what I thought, Michael realized as consciousness flickered back.
A sudden, jarring wave of compressed time hit him as his torn, vaporized lifeforce was violently dragged backward against its will.
A voice he despised echoed through the void:
"Ugh, you children and your little fights..."
Ability: CONTROL Z.....