Kenji hissed as he gritted his teeth in pain.
His fist burned.
His punch had gone straight through Sirzechs' shifting body, a form that had long since abandoned the pretenses of flesh and bone. In this true state of the devil, the Satan was no longer a man, he was a sentient mass of power.
The moment Kenji's hand entered that roiling mass of crimson and black, the concept of Ruin bit back with hunger as it ate at him. It was attempting to erase him.
Before he could recoil, Sirzechs' hand snapped forward as He grabbed Kenji's wrist.
"—!"
A silent scream caught in Kenji's throat. Where Sirzechs held him, the air screamed as pain hit his skin and bones, burning away. Kenji's skin turned to gray ash and then to a terrifying void, the Power of Destruction eating its way toward the marrow.
With a yank, Sirzechs pulled him forward, closing the distance until they were chest-to-chest, eyes locked in a clash of gold and crimson.
BOOM—!!
A point-blank detonation of pure Ruin erupted between them. Kenji was sent hurtling toward the scorched earth.
He didn't stay down. Not for a second.
The earth exploded as Kenji launched himself back into the sky, propelled by a burst of gravity. He was beyond anger now.
"…Tch."
This was getting troublesome.
Before Sirzechs had shed his "human shell," Kenji could have overpowered the bastard with raw violence. But now? Touching him was like trying to punch a hurricane made of sentient acid. Every strike cost Kenji a layer of skin as the bastard's power tried to erase him.
It was annoying. He rushed at the bastard as they continued fighting.
They clashed again. And again. And again.
In the skies of the territory, their fight created a series of thunderclaps that shook the very foundations of the Gremory Castle miles away.
Physically, Kenji was superior and he knew it without a doubt, sirzech stats was in the 50's but that was not all the stats, his strength and agility were in the 30's and lower than his, that was natural after all stats worked different for him and others seeing as others dont and cant max out their stats before moving to another tier.
And then there was Stat Shift, too.
As they traded blows, Kenji adjusted on the fly. He felt a kick coming, he shifted points into Agility to blur past the strike. He landed a counter, as he flooded his Strength, shifting his stats as he fought.
He had even used all his free stats and made sure every single one of his attributes now sat firmly in the 40s.
He was, pound for pound, the most powerful physical being on the battlefield here, and he doubted there was anyone in the underworld who would match him.
But against a man who had become a living concept of "destruction," physical strength was a secondary concern. Everything Kenji threw was neutralized. Elements were consumed by the crimson tide. Physical attacks did nothing. Most magic was simply devoured by Sirzechs' presence before the spells could even hit him.
Kenji raised his gravity shield, the violet light flickering and groaning as it took the brunt of a torrent wave of destruction that looked like a blood-red tsunami.
"Give up, and we can end this here, Kenji," the floating mass of power spoke. The voice didn't come from a mouth, it resonated from the very air, calm and maddeningly patronizing.
That was the final straw. It felt like the bastard was still looking down on him, treating his rage like a child's tantrum. It may not seem like it, but he, too, was proud, and to be looked down on by an enemy was annoying as hell.
"Looking down on me, huh?" Kenji's voice growled.
The sky warped.
Gravity surged around him in a violent, vertical pillar.
BOOM—!!
The sudden increase was so intense that Sirzechs was caught off guard, his fluid form flattening for a second before he was blasted away across the horizon, skipping off the air like a stone across a pond.
Kenji lowered his hand, staring at the raw, red meat of his palm where the skin had been erased. He closed his eyes. He had never tried this, but the situation demanded an evolution. He needed more if he wanted to win.
'Focus.'
He reached deep into himself, grasping his power. He pushed.
'Condense. Layer. Stack.'
He forced the gravity to fold over itself Dozens of times, creating a multi-layered mantle around his own body.
"—hnn…"
His bones creaked, His muscles screamed as they were asked to support a mass equivalent to a small moon. He forced his body to endure the crushing pressure, maintaining his humanoid form through sheer, stubborn will and high-level regeneration.
His body began to glow, a dark, distorted purple bleeding into existence around him. Space bent. Light warped. He looked like a tear in the fabric of the world, a silhouette of bruised violet and black.
He took a deep breath...and launched.
Sirzechs was already returning, his crimson aura flared for another exchange. He didn't bother to block Kenji's incoming punch. Why would he? Physical contact was useless against him.
That was his mistake.
BOOM—!!!
The impact didn't pass through. The "Black Hole" cloak around Kenji's fist met the mass of Ruin with a sound like two bombs colliding. The gravity was so dense that it caught the destruction and crushed it within its own event horizon.
Sirzechs was sent crashing into the ground with enough force to shift the earth, creating a crater so deep.
"…Wha—what?"
The Devil King looked up from the center of the wreckage, his fluid form flickering with instability. For the first time in centuries, Sirzechs Lucifer looked genuinely shocked that he'd been touched in his true form.
He had gone all out, something he hadn't done since the Civil War against the Old Satan Faction. Even then, the only person who could truly match him was Ajuka, or Rizevim Lucifer.
And yet, this human was hurting him. This human was hurting his true form.
Sirzechs' form shifted like gas, maneuvering out of the way of several miniature black holes that Kenji slammed into the crater. The moment they touched the earth, the area simply vanished, leaving perfectly spherical voids in the bedrock.
Sirzechs launched back into the air, a streak of crimson fury. He blasted waves of pure Ruin at Kenji, hitting him squarely.
The explosion was blinding, swallowing the horizon. Sirzechs narrowed his eyes as the smoke cleared.
Kenji floated there. A purple shield manifested in front of him. Destruction was eating away at the edges of the shield, but Kenji was pumping more power into it to keep the destruction from getting through easily.
Kenji could feel his bones aching, the very fibers of his muscles tearing apart from the pressure he was putting on them with this technique he was using.
He was mimicking Sirzechs, trying to become a living gravity, like how he was living destruction, but it was taking a toll on his body.
It was taking everything in him to maintain this, very difficult, but luckily, he had a healing factor that was helping him out, and thanks to that, his gravity manipulation was leveling up.
Notifications rang endlessly in his mind, skills leveling up, new abilities gained in the heat of combat, but he paid them no mind, he didn't have time for them now.
He clapped his hands together. Lightning gathered between his palms. He pulled them apart, stretching the energy into a black sphere wrapped in crackling, unstable electricity.
"…Go."
He chucked it.
Sirzechs felt the danger. Every instinct honed screamed at him. He raised a hand to intercept and destroy it, but the "bells" in his head reached a crescendo of terror. He aborted the parry and dove to the side, his fluid body stretching to avoid the contact.
The sphere passed his shoulder by a hair's breadth. Then it triggered.
It collapsed and then exploded outwards.
A black hole formed in the wake of the lightning, expanding with terrifying hunger. It began to devour everything, the air, the light, and the very ground thousands of feet below. Everything.
The pull was so immense that Sirzechs, even in his weightless fluid form, found himself being dragged toward the darkness.
He glared at Kenji, who was floating safely out of range, looking down with cold, golden eyes.
With a sudden, defiant roar that shook the atmosphere, Sirzechs stopped fighting the pull. He accelerated, flying into the black hole at the speed of a comet.
Silence fell for several long seconds. The black hole pulsed, growing red at the edges, looking like a bloated, overfed tick. Kenji hovered, his chest heaving, wondering if he had finally finished it.
Then—
ROOOOOOOAR—!!!
The black hole distorted. Its violet-black hue bled into a blinding crimson. It vibrated until the fabric of space could no longer contain the energy inside, and then it shattered like glass before it exploded.
Sirzechs emerged from the center of the detonation, his regal form panting, his aura ragged but still terrifyingly potent. His red form was flickering wildly, and his eyes were glowing brighter than before.
Kenji gritted his teeth, his jaw aching. "…Of course."
The two rushed each other again, clashing with a violence that made the previous rounds look like a playground scuffle. They fought for what felt like hours, time losing all meaning in the blur of Ruin and Gravity. Every strike leveled a mountain; every missed blow carved a new valley.
Suddenly, Kenji felt a third presence approaching at a speed that nobody below his level should be able to.
He dodged a beam of emerald-green energy that sizzled past his ear. He backed away, hovering in the air as he frowned at the newcomer.
'Why can't people mind their own damn business?'
Ajuka Beelzebub had arrived.
The second Super Devil of the Underworld floated into view, his green hair fluttering in the winds. Unlike Sirzechs' wild, destructive aura, Ajuka felt like a cold splash of water.
"Are you alright, Sirzechs?" Ajuka asked, his voice calm, though his green eyes were already scanning the battlefield.
"I'm fine, Ajuka."
"You look like you could use a hand," Ajuka noted, his eyes narrowing as he looked at Kenji. Sirzechs gave a sharp, reluctant nod. He was a proud king, but he was also a pragmatist.
"I didn't expect him to be this powerful," Sirzechs admitted, his voice low.
"I don't think any of us did," Ajuka replied. He was already running the Kankara Formula in his mind.
"Stop this now," Ajuka said, turning his gaze to Kenji. "And we'll consider this settled. We can discuss terms for your daughters' safety."
Kenji simply raised a brow. Discussion? Terms? These people still didn't understand. He just wanted his pound of flesh from that crow bastard, and they caused this.
With a sharp thought, he summoned his familiars. Five massive forms manifested around him. They were colossal.
"Keep the other one off my back," Kenji commanded.
The spirits roared and charged at Ajuka. Kenji knew they wouldn't defeat a Satan, but he also knew that Ajuka's formula relied on the logical laws of the world. Spirits and Fae operated on an elemental logic that preceded those laws. Their magic didn't follow any known logic. It would buy him a bit of time for a window of opportunity.
As Ajuka began to systematically dismantle the spirits when Kenji moved.
A massive purple barrier erupted from the earth, encasing the entire battlefield in a giant dome. A black hole appeared at the absolute center, pulling Sirzechs and the newly arrived Ajuka toward one another.
Before Ajuka could finish his calculation to crack the dome, Kenji compressed the shield. The dome slammed inward, forcing all three combatants into a tight, pressurized space.
Kenji summoned Yamato.
He didn't swing it at them. He threw the blade straight down. It stabbed into the earth in the middle of them.
The two Devil Kings watched, confused. They didn't hear what Kenji whispered next, but they felt the shift.
"…Law."
The world froze.
Ajuka's eyes widened to the size of saucers. He felt his power drop and not just a little, but halved. And he could feel the same happening to Sirzechs. The Power of Destruction dimmed from a roaring sun to a flickering candle. Even Kenji's aura died down significantly.
Then.
All three of them plummeted. They crashed into the ground, the impact of their bodies hitting the stone sounding dull, heavy, and undeniably human-like.
Ajuka looked at his hands, "I'm...impossible," he whispered. "Wha… what just happened?"
"Ajuka!" Sirzechs yelled, pushing himself up from the dirt, his fluid form gone, replaced back to his normal body.
"Yeah, I know," Ajuka muttered, "I can't feel my magic. Not even a spark... It's gone."
Kenji stepped out of his own crater, cracking his knuckles. He looked smaller without the glowing purple aura.
"Now the field's even," Kenji said, a dark, vicious grin spreading across his face.
He was powerful, yes, but he knew he couldn't win a magic fight against the two smartest and strongest devils in history. So he had gambled his own power. He used the first order of LAW to halve their output, and the second to cancel magic entirely. To ensure they couldn't recover, he had added the condition of his own gravity manipulation to the seal.
He was now just a man. But he was a man with physical stats in the 40s of tier 5, and they were now just devils in tier 5 physic too, though their bodies were untrained for a brawl of this magnitude.
"This is going to be funny," Kenji whispered.
He vanished.
He reappeared in front of Ajuka in the blink of an eye. With no magic to shield his senses, the green-haired Satan couldn't even track the movement of the human's feet.
BOOM—!!
A punch slammed into Ajuka's face. sending him flying through a stone pillar.
Kenji rolled his shoulders, his golden eyes gleaming with a dark, predatory intent. He turned toward Sirzechs.
"Come on, you devil bastards."
His voice dropped.
"Since you decided to interfere with something that was none of your concern… I'll take my anger out on both of you."
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