The ground split into craters with every impact.
The two advanced and retreated so fast the sound of their blows mingled with the echo of the fire.
Dante twisted his torso, blocking Tekio's kick with his flame-covered forearm. The heat was so intense the air rippled—but the boy pushed through anyway, the impact cracking the ground under the king's feet.
Tekio's body trembled, not from pain, but from pure, compressed force.
He's… growing as he fights, Dante thought, gritting his teeth.
The flames intensified, covering his arm up to the shoulder. He advanced, striking Tekio in the abdomen.
The sound was dry—it should have broken him in two.
But Tekio merely slid back, coughing blood… and advanced again.
The boy's fist cut through the wall of fire and struck Dante's chin. The king retreated two steps, a metallic taste rising in his throat.
No… this isn't human resilience… this is something beyond.
Dante's gaze traveled up Tekio's collarbone, and there, beneath the torn fabric, he saw the dark mark pulsing, alive, expanding through his veins like roots of lightning.
A symbol of something greater.
So it's true… you really have evolved, boy.
Tekio did not answer. His gaze was in a trance—focused, calm, wild.
He moved like Aisha—the footwork, the balance, the arcs of air between one movement and the next.
And Dante, within Akira's body, recognized every detail.
He… learned from her… he fights like her.
The king clenched his fists.
"It's not just the mark… you're fusing everything you carry inside, emotions and souls."
They collided again—fist against fist, knee against rib, skull against skull.
The earth around them exploded in a wave of energy.
Dante roared, wreathed in fire, muscles pulsing, and Tekio answered with a ragged cry, the first time he had screamed in this battle.
Every time Dante hit him, he hardened.
Every time he burned him, he returned with even more force.
The king felt his own body weakening.
His chest heaved.
Sweat mixed with blood evaporated before it could hit the ground.
But he did not stop.
He would not stop.
—Come on, boy! Show me what you're made of!— Dante roared, punching the air and creating a wave of black fire that deformed the terrain.
Tekio charged through the wave, his feet sliding through the embers, his body trembling under the infernal heat.
And when he emerged on the other side, Dante felt it.
An instinct.
A memory.
The stance was identical.
That dodge, that spin.
…Aisha…
Tekio's fist struck the king's body—a dull, dry impact, and Dante was thrown back, carving a trench meters long in the earth.
The sound echoed like thunder.
Dante rose, coughing blood, looking at the boy before him, chest heaving, eyes blazing.
That gaze… too deep for a merely human existence.
But there was something more.
Something that belonged only to Tekio.
The king smiled, the corner of his mouth stained with blood.
—You truly are… chaos and balance incarnate…
His flames grew again, black, dancing around his body.
—But I am the King. — his voice vibrated, distorted, burning with an ancestral power.
He advanced.
And Tekio did too.
Fire and crimson crossed, tearing the sky in two colors—black and red.
The battle continued.
Dante bleeding, Tekio firm.
The king now understood what he faced—and deep down, he felt fear.
A pure fear, forgotten for ages.
Dante observed the boy before him—and for the first time in ages, felt reason bend before the impossible.
Tekio was evolving. With every second, every blow.
He could still wound him, yes, but it was useless. Blows that should have broken bones, mutilated flesh, or pulverized organs… resulted only in superficial cuts, in muffled impacts.
It was like punching a living wall. Tekio's skin seemed to adapt, harden, respond to pain with strength.
The boy's appearance hadn't changed—he was still short, with a slender frame and an empty gaze. But every punch of his carried the force of a hundred men.
And Dante felt it in his body. Felt his bones vibrate.
Unlike Dan and Stella, this combat truly consumed him. It left him breathless, burning energy, breaking the rhythm of his own reign.
He burned him—and Tekio returned.
He tore him—and he returned.
He froze him, hurled him against rocks, buried him under nature—and he returned.
Nothing stopped him. Nothing tamed him.
But Dante did not retreat.
Not before someone like him.
Here, for the first time in centuries, the king saw a true warrior—someone who carried within him the flames of persistence, the voices of Yara, Aisha… and so many other souls that accompanied him.
Dante roared. The black flames set the field ablaze and the air split into luminous fragments.
The king was becoming the king again.
And even so… the boy advanced.
Tekio was pure instinct. Pure reflex. Pure denial.
He took hits and gave them back. Fell and rose. Every blow refined him—as if the pain itself taught him.
The boy who once survived by luck now faced him as an equal. Alone.
And, worse, he was surpassing him.
The battle spread across the entire ruin—shattered buildings, wreckage, and flames serving as the frame for the chaos.
Pure exchange. No defenses, no tactics. Only will.
One punch.
Another.
Flames.
Impact.
Tekio was hit in the face—his body spun, but he used the momentum to spin and kick Dante hard in the face.
The king staggered, roaring.
They collided again, fists clashing, black and crimson sparks illuminating the broken world.
The sound was of shattered thunder.
Dante screamed, and Tekio answered with the silence of lightning.
And then, the perfect opening appeared.
Tekio spun his body. The crimson energy shimmered on his fist.
The blow came, dry, loaded, devastating.
A boom echoed—the punch struck Dante's ribs squarely, pushing him back meters, opening a crater under his feet.
The king staggered, blood dripping. He looked Tekio in the eyes.
There, before the boy who denied the abyss, Dante denied his own divinity.
The black flames danced around him like proud serpents, and for the first time he smiled—not with joy, but with recognition.
A man.
A warrior.
Finally, someone who made hell breathe heavily.
Even while losing ground, Dante felt a familiar spark in his chest.
A bitter, yet addictive taste.
He was enjoying the fight.
But this was Dante.
The king.
And even before the inevitable, his mind repeated in silence—
He will not defeat me.
For some reason, Dante believed it.
Perhaps out of pride.
Perhaps because, in that instant, even hell itself feared the boy who defied it.
Tekio's body was different.
Heavier. Denser.
Every punch carried a real impact—an absurd pressure that made the air vibrate and Dante's bones creak.
Even when he blocked, the king was dragged back several meters, feeling the force pass through his body like a divine sledgehammer.
It was unbearable… and addictive.
The black flames surrounded him, but Tekio advanced.
The boy did not hesitate, he struck like a trained beast, pure precision and brutality.
Dante resisted, counterattacked, and the metallic sound of impacts made the ground tremble.
Suddenly, the rhythm changed.
Dante began to read the movements.
To understand the openings, the timing, the almost invisible pauses between one step and the next.
He was evolving.
The exchanges became more intense, faster.
Tekio's blows still came heavy, but now Dante responded.
A precise sequence—fist, knee, palm.
Tekio staggered.
And Dante saw the opening.
Shadows rose from the ground and, in an instant, formed a black blade in his hand.
He spun his body and delivered the strike, aiming for Tekio's face.
The boy dodged by instinct, but not fast enough.
The blade tore across his face—a deep cut that split his lip and extended to below his eye.
Blood gushed hot, spattering the ground.
Tekio did not hesitate. Even wounded, he retaliated.
The punch hit Dante squarely, the dry sound echoing like thunder.
But the king did not retreat.
He spun the blade to his other hand and drove it into Tekio's leg.
The impact was brutal—the ground cracked under the weight of the blow.
But, to Dante's surprise, the blade penetrated… only two inches.
Dante furrowed his brow.
He had put his full strength into it, and still—nothing.
Tekio's body would not yield.
Even with spiritual energy reinforcing his leg, the result made no sense.
That resistance surpassed any defensive technique.
This was… physical.
Dante retreated, his eyes analyzing every detail of the boy.
Tekio spat out the blood flowing from his lips and Dante saw the wound on his face close—slowly, but continuously.
The flesh reconstituted itself, stitching from the inside out.
An ability of regeneration.
But it wasn't natural.
It didn't seem granted—it seemed earned.
In that world, there were only two ways to have the ability to heal.
You were born with it, or you developed it.
But developing it was complex and painful; few achieved instinctive healing.
For that, more than talent was needed.
One had to survive.
To fight until the body broke so many times it learned, by instinct, to remake itself.
A technique born between life and death—and, most of the time, the body failed before reaching it.
But with Tekio, it made sense.
The boy had been through battles that were more like wars, tortures, falls, fatal burns, and cuts.
Always on the front line, always the first to fall and the first to rise.
His body had evolved like a living, conscious organism—a creature molded by pain, by resistance, by the will not to die.
It was not common regeneration.
It was a bodily evolution, a natural response to the hell he had lived.
And in that instant, Dante understood.
Tekio was not just a boy fighting him.
He was the final product of war itself—the sum of everything that had survived.
What should not exist… but did anyway.
He had achieved instinctive healing. A rare feat even among the best.
What had really happened wasn't far from Dante's deduction.
After receiving the blow, bleeding, and convincing Stella to leave him, Tekio had accepted death.
But an instinctual part of him still refused to yield.
His body was exhausted, but his mind was not.
He closed his eyes, feeling the vibrations of the battle, absorbing every remnant of energy around him.
More specifically, he felt Amara.
At a critical moment in the combat, a lancinating pain shot through his back.
Tekio thought he was already dead or delirious.
But the pain wasn't his—it was Amara's.
As if they were linked, as if their marks reacted to one another, and indeed they did.
Amara's evolution pulsed within him, and Tekio reacted.
Even bleeding, even with his body burning with pain, he remained alive.
The mark on his back burned intensely, traversing his skin and muscles, announcing transformation.
The pierced kidney screamed in agony, but he couldn't scream; he was too hoarse. All that came from his mouth was blood and weak breaths.
His body merely convulsed, suffering silently.
It was that pain—intense, agonizing, and absolute—that triggered the final mechanism.
Tekio's body began to develop instinctive healing.
Everything he had been through was enough to fulfill the requirements for this healing.
But it wasn't Mei's healing or some other divine or abyssal power that closed everything and erased the marks. This was evolution, adaptation, pure survival.
The bleeding ceased, the wounds began to close slowly.
His metabolism accelerated, his heart pumped with intense force, and his mind became crystalline.
Tekio trembled, his body reforming like a living, conscious organism.
He was almost transcending, but still human.
His mind began to remember everything, and he managed to hear his sister's voice.
Calling him.
Tekio truly thought he had died, a death more painful than he had imagined. But fate had other plans.
When the transformation ended, he was revitalized for the first time since the battle began.
The pain disappeared, but the kidney did not regenerate.
His body had merely adapted to the loss. As if it no longer needed that kidney.
The closed wounds left visible scars, physical reminders of the combat.
It wasn't a complete healing, but it was enough.
Enough to continue, enough to fight.
Tekio opened his eyes.
The battlefield called to him.
His new body vibrated with contained energy, ready to unleash every fiber of accumulated strength.
With extreme focus, he advanced again, every step firm, every movement calculated.
The king awaited—and Tekio was ready to challenge him.
He should have died, but he refused.
And here they were, in the real combat.
Tekio and Dante faced each other in the most brutal way possible. Every blow made the air tremble, every impact made the ground shake.
But Dante smiled. Something about him was different.
There was a strange gleam in his eyes, a smile he couldn't define: ecstasy, fear, excitement? A spontaneous, genuine feeling that didn't fit even his own comprehension.
They exchanged blows, hurling themselves with maximum force, using every muscle, every technique, every fragment of power they possessed.
The clash of energy and force was devastating, and yet, neither retreated.
Then, spontaneously, they collided again.
A single, simultaneous blow: Tekio and Dante punched each other in the face at the same time.
The impact didn't break bones, didn't destroy muscles—but it shattered mental barriers.
And in that instant, a memory awoke in Dante.
He saw small, firm hands, hitting him with precision and warmth.
And he felt… Jade.
Not the Jade of the war, not the Jade bleeding or terrified by her own power.
But a Jade smiling, bruised, happy, close—a friend, a companion.
As they had once been, as they could have been.
A younger appearance, looser and more innocent.
In flashes, he remembered her in training clothes, from a duel he never thought he had lived.
A moment of camaraderie, of trust, of shared laughter on the training field.
All fleeting, but painfully real.
When Dante returned to the present, Tekio was before him.
Touching his jaw, spitting out the blood from the blow he himself had dealt.
Dante stared at him, eyes wide, feeling something strange in his chest.
A pain—a feeling he had never experienced before.
He wondered what that vision was.
It wasn't Akira, it wasn't Hazau.
It was… his own.
But how?
Dante had never been close to Jade, had never remembered such intimacy.
Confusion dominated his mind.
Doubts about himself, his memories, his very essence.
And yet, the memory was real. Painful. Raw.
A feeling the king, until that moment, had never known.
The combat continued, brutal and tireless. Tekio advanced, dodged, attacked, and every blow he landed remained firm, solid. But in Dante's mind, the memory of Jade did not cease. Every smile, every moment of innocence, repeated relentlessly, corroding his confidence and bringing doubts he did not know how to contain.
The king felt his irritation grow, a fire different from the one that always burned within him. A fire that consumed not only the world around him, but his own mind. He was filled with a nostalgic and painful feeling. He didn't understand it, but it hurt, and because it hurt, it enraged him. He advanced with renewed rage, his black flames devouring everything around, consuming the air and the wreckage of the battlefield. But Tekio continued. Always continued.
Every punch from Tekio triggered flashes of the memory of Jade. The smile, the innocence, the lightness he never expected to feel again. Every memory made Dante feel small, fragile, young again. A sensation that disturbed him, hardening his mind even as it shattered it.
He screamed. A cry mixing hatred, despair, and disbelief.
—Die! Die! Die! — he bellowed, launching flames and blows with blind fury. —Why won't you vanish? Why won't you accept death? Why… WHY...
His voice trembled, but not from weakness. It trembled from confusion. He cursed Tekio, but every syllable also carried the memory of Jade, every blow from the boy reminded him of her. He cursed the boy's very existence and, at the same time, felt anger at himself for caring, for feeling this pain, for recognizing that that smile pierced him deeper than any blade.
—Why won't you vanish?! — Dante howled, almost gasping between words. —Why do you force me to see this… why do you make me feel… you, her, me… everything! I should hate this! I should destroy this! But you… you keep standing there, breathing, laughing, surviving… AND I… I CAN'T STOP YOU, I… I… — he panted, swallowing his own hatred, swallowing the pain burning like fire in his chest. —Why, Tekio… WHY DO YOU HAVE TO DO THIS!?
Tekio, relentless, dodged with precision. A sure punch struck Dante's face, throwing him back. But what truly flew was his consciousness.
The gray sky transformed. Rain fell on him.
Dante was in a forest. Fallen, feeling his cheek burn as if he had been punched in the memory too, his eyes tearing up.
Before him, two women he did not know, but loved with every fiber of his heart.
Their faces obscured by shadow, and yet they reached for him.
His heart raced faster than when he had remembered Jade.
He was small, fragile before them. Younger.
One of them spoke, her voice firm, but laden with weight:
—It is our duty. We cannot let them die like this. One day you will understand this…
And they were gone.
Terror came in flashes: blood, bodies strewn about, the furious populace, the horror of war. The guillotine. Each scene hammered his mind and his heart.
When Dante returned to the real world, he screamed. A scream that tore the air, echoed through the wreckage and the rain of black flames. Everything exploded with the intensity of his despair; in both the memory and reality he was screaming.
The two parallel realities trembled with that roar which destroyed everything in both.
Tekio recoiled, feeling the flames burning, intense and powerful, but not enough to stop the boy.
Dante, head bowed and panting, recovered his breath. When he lifted his head, Tekio saw something he would never forget: tears streaming down Dante's face.
For the first time, the king was crying.
To be continued…