"Even still....With all what you spoke about...Why destruction...Why not look for an answer...We can..."
The punch came before Jason could finish his sentence.
Empty Hand's fist buried itself in Jason's gut—not with force, but with the weight of eons, the accumulated mass of every moment of suffering he had endured. The impact sent Jason hurtling backward, tearing through the dead planet's atmosphere, through the thin layer of clouds that had long since forgotten how to rain, through the vacuum of space itself.
He flew.
Planets blurred past him—dead worlds, lifeless rocks, the debris of systems that had died before humanity had learned to walk upright. His body was a projectile, his trajectory a straight line carved through the void by a single punch that carried the hatred of billions of years.
Jason caught himself.
His hands found purchase on nothing, his feet braced against the fabric of space itself. He skidded to a halt, the momentum of the blow still rippling through his body, his organs screaming, his ribs cracked in three places. He looked up.
Empty Hand was already there.
He moved like a comet, his body wreathed in darkness that devoured the starlight around him. His fist was already cocked, his eyes blazing with the fury of a being who had long since abandoned reason.
"There is nothing to look for." His voice carried across the void, defying physics, defying logic. "No more talking."
He swung.
Jason twisted, the punch grazing his shoulder, and the force of the near-miss sent a shockwave rippling through space—a wave of distortion that bent the light from distant stars. Jason countered, his palm open, a Dismantle exploding from his fingers.
The slash cut through space itself, a blade of pure sharpness that could carve planets in half. It struck Empty Hand across the chest.
The darkness absorbed it.
Empty Hand didn't even slow. His return swing caught Jason across the jaw, sending him spinning into the surface of a nearby moon. The impact cratered the grey rock, sending debris flying into orbit. Jason was already moving, launching himself from the crater, his hands weaving through the air.
"Dimensional Cleave."
The attack was invisible, absolute, a cut that split dimensions. It carved a path through space, through reality, through the very fabric of existence. It struck Empty Hand's shoulder.
The darkness rippled.
A gash opened on his form...not blood, not wound, just a gap in his existence that slowly, painfully, began to seal. Empty Hand looked at it, then at Jason.
"Clever," he said.
He raised his hand. Darkness erupted from his palm—not a beam, not a blast, but a sphere. A sphere of pure void that expanded outward, consuming everything it touched. Space itself crumbled at its edges. Light died. Particles ceased to exist.
Jason moved.
He dove around the sphere, his body trailing Frenzied Flame, the yellow-orange fire licking at the edges of the void. The two energies collided—chaos and darkness, creation and erasure—and the space between them screamed.
Empty Hand's other hand came up, another sphere forming. Jason slashed it apart, his Dimensional Cleave cutting through the void before it could fully manifest. The darkness parted, then reformed, then parted again.
They moved.
Planets became stepping stones. Jason's kicks cracked the crust of dead worlds; Empty Hand's fists shattered the cores of moons. They fought across the void, each blow sending shockwaves that distorted the light from distant stars, each attack carving new scars into the fabric of reality.
Jason's slashes found their marks. Cleaves and Dismantles carved furrows into Empty Hand's form, cutting through the darkness that made up his body. The wounds healed slowly, too slowly, but they healed. Empty Hand's void attacks left trails of nothingness in their wake, erasing the space they passed through, leaving behind only the absence of existence.
Jason dodged one, his Frenzied Flame flaring to burn away the edges of the void as it passed. The fire consumed the darkness, fighting it, devouring it, but not fast enough. The void grazed his arm, and the flesh simply... stopped existing. No wound. No blood. Just absence.
Jason gritted his teeth. His arm was already regenerating, his cells screaming as they rebuilt themselves from nothing.
Empty Hand was in front of him again.
His fist connected with Jason's chest, and this time, the darkness came with it. The void erupted from his knuckles, burrowing into Jason's torso, eating away at his insides. Jason's eyes went wide. His lungs. His heart. His ribs.
He slashed downward, a Death Slash aimed at the attack itself. The concept of the void—not the darkness, not the space it occupied, but the fundamental idea of erasure—was cut. The attack died. The void collapsed. And Jason was left with a hole in his chest that was already closing.
Empty Hand stared at him.
"That was different."
Jason coughed blood, his body struggling to keep up with the damage. "I can kill attacks too."
"Can you kill the end of all things?"
Empty Hand raised both hands. The darkness around him swirled, gathered, condensed into a single point of absolute nothing. A singularity of erasure. He threw it.
Jason ran.
The void followed him, devouring planets as it passed, leaving nothing but empty space in its wake. Jason dodged, slashed, burned....his Frenzied Flame eating away at the edges of the void, his Death Slashes cutting at its core, his Dimensional Cleaves splitting its path.
The void kept coming.
It was faster than him. Hungrier. It had been waiting for this moment, for the chance to consume the one being who had dared to defy its master.
Jason turned. He raised his hands, his body flaring with Frenzied Flame, his eyes blazing yellow. The fire erupted from him in a storm, a tidal wave of chaos and madness that met the void head-on.
They collided.
The space between them became a battlefield of two fundamental forces. The Frenzied Flame sought to burn the world to ash and rise anew from the destruction; the void sought to erase all that had ever existed, leaving nothing behind. They pushed against each other, neither giving ground, neither retreating.
Empty Hand was moving again.
He appeared behind Jason, his hand already extended, a blade of pure darkness forming from his palm. He swung.
Jason turned, his own blade of Frenzied Flame materializing in his grip. The two weapons met...chaos and darkness...and the shockwave that erupted from their collision sent both of them hurtling backward, crashing into a nearby planet.
They carved trenches across its surface, each impact gouging miles-deep furrows into the crust. The planet groaned beneath them, its core destabilizing, its surface cracking. Jason pushed himself up, his body screaming, his flames flickering.
Empty Hand was already rising.
"You fight well," he said. "But you know what I am. You know what I want. There is no victory for you here."
Jason spat blood. "There's always victory. You just have to be willing to pay the price."
The planet exploded behind them. They were already moving, already fighting, their battle continuing across the debris field of a world that would never exist again.
Jason's Frenzied Flame erupted in a storm of sparks, a rain of yellow-orange fire that sought to burn away the darkness. Empty Hand's void swallowed them, devouring them, but not before they had carved new wounds into his form. Jason's slashes followed—Dimensional Cleaves that cut through space itself, Death Slashes that killed the darkness that tried to protect its master.
Empty Hand answered with darkness. Blasts of void that erased everything they touched, leaving only the absence of existence. Jason dodged, but not all of them. A blast caught his leg, erasing it below the knee. He fell, caught himself, and was already regenerating as Empty Hand descended on him.
His fist connected with Jason's face. Again. And again. And again.
Jason's regeneration struggled to keep up. His body was burning through energy, through life, through everything he had. The Frenzied Flame was growing unstable, lashing out in unpredictable bursts, burning away the darkness but also burning away the space around them.
Empty Hand grabbed him by the throat.
"This is what you are, Jason Anderson. A man with borrowed power. A man who was given everything. A man who will lose everything."
He raised his other hand. The void gathered in his palm, a sphere of pure erasure that would consume anything it touched.
"Goodbye."
He pressed it against Jason's chest.
The void expanded.
Jason's body began to disappear. His skin, his bones, his organs...all of it eaten away by the darkness that had been waiting for this moment. His eyes went wide. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. He reached out, his fingers grasping at nothing, and then—
Nothing.
Empty Hand stood alone in the void, his hand still extended, his chest heaving. The space around him was empty. Jason was gone. Erased. Removed from existence.
He lowered his hand.
"It is done."
Silence.
.
.
.
.
.
Then, a crack.
It was small at first....a sound like glass breaking, like the shattering of something that should never have been whole. Empty Hand turned, his eyes narrowing, his body tensing.
The crack widened.
Reality itself was breaking. Splintering. Coming apart at the seams. The darkness that had consumed Jason was being pushed back, torn open from the inside, forced to yield to something that should not exist.
Jason stepped out.
His body was whole. His clothes were gone, replaced by the black haori and white kimono of a Lord...That controls Curses...Death....and Chaos... His face was no longer his face....it was the face of the Frenzied Lord, a mass of orange-yellow flame with a black core at its center, a void of chaos that had devoured the void of darkness.
The Frenzied Flame was no longer contained. It was everything. It was the air he breathed, the light he saw, the space he occupied. It burned with the fury of a million dying stars, the madness of a billion broken minds, the chaos of existence itself.
Empty Hand stared.
"What... Have you become....?"
The Frenzied Lord tilted his head. His voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere, layered, distorted, utterly inhuman.
"I am what you made me."
He raised his hand. The Frenzied Flame surged around him, a storm of chaos that bent the laws of physics, that rewrote reality, that burned away the darkness that had tried to erase him.
"Now," the Frenzied Lord said, "let's begin."
The real fight was about to start.