Unknown POV:
I stood at my spot, watching Arla and Kael with a certain interest. I tried connecting my mind to theirs, but in the end, I was only able to connect to that of Kael.
I guess Arla ain't the demon king for nothing.
He charged at Kael immediately with a brutal speed that screamed terror.
The thought 'This is it' had barely formed a ghost in my mind when the world vanished in a slow motion.
Color, sound, depth, reality.
Everything bled away into a single frame of black and white. In a split second everything felt like it was in a photograph.
I saw Arla fly past Kael in a smear of gray against a gray backdrop.
SLAAAAAAASHHH!!!
But he hadn't moved, nor did he touch his sword. He was just… there. Inches from him.
A line of violet light, impossibly thin and perfect, appeared in the air between them. It was like a crack in reality.
My brain tried to process it. What....?
The monochrome snapped off.
Sound and color crashed back in, deafening and violent as I felt a searing, cold heat bloom at Kael's right shoulder. His eyes, dragged by some primal instinct, looked down.
He watched his own right arm, from the shoulder down, slide cleanly away from his body.
It fell to the cracked concrete with a dull, meaty thud that was somehow both muffled and louder than anything I'd ever heard.
"That's… my... my... hand. The... one... one... that... just... just... held... the... the... boxes. The... the... one... that... that..."
He stammered to no one in particular.
I saw the raw, cross-sectioned flesh of his shoulder, the stark white of bone peeking through with a fountain of his own blood painting the ground in a violent arc.
Then the pain arrived.
"Arghhhhhhhh!!!"
A raw, ragged scream that scraped my ear drums tore from his throat.
His left hand quickly reached out for the boxes in his right pocket, transferring it to the left.
And again, Arla flew to his side and the world flickered instantly.
Not to monochrome this time around, but to a terrifying negative.
I found myself trapped in a blinding white cocoon with a floor of absolute black beneath my feet.
And another...
SLAAAAAAASHHH!!!
In that infinite, silent space, all I saw was blood flying as I saw another line of violet light slice through Kael from head to toe.
Then, reality reasserted itself with a nauseating lurch.
He stood still as a clean, perfect line divided his vision.
His eyes. His legs. He was split in two.
I watched the other half of him tilt, then collapse forward, while the other half fell backwards.
He lay there, in two pieces on the cold ground, unable to understand how he was still able to stare at his separated own body parts lying on the concrete.
I felt his mind shatter.
All the brave thoughts he had, the thought of being able to get revenge.... all of it felt like a lie.
This was the truth. This was Kael. A boy, broken in half.
"I don't want to die."
The words came like a weak, childlike whimper.
"I don't want to die. Somebody… anybody… help, please…"
The remaining part of his lips moved, forming the words with the last of his breath.
"Seems like my work's done here," Arla's voice cut through my strings of thoughts with a bored dismissal as I heard his footsteps begin to turn away.
But then they stopped.
A light of contrasting temperatures flickered from deep inside the ruin of Kael's body where his left hand was still jammed in his pocket, still touching the cold and warm familiar surfaces of both boxes.
A mix of red and blue light looking like twisted, living threads, erupted from his core.
It was like a bizarre, electric stitching sensation.
The light wasn't healing him; it was re-weaving him. His DNA itself was being used as the loom with the red and blue energies as the furious, clashing threads.
The boxes in his pocket opened.
"ARRRGGHHHHHH!!!"
This scream was different.
It wasn't a scream of pain, but of release as a tsunami of icy clarity and volcanic rage that overwrote every signal of pain invaded and flooded his nervous system.
His mind went blank, numb and empty.
He was moving before I knew it.
His legs, his hand, were being re-attached as the two halves of his body became one, fusing back together by bonds of furious light.
I looked down at his left hand. The boxes were open, their contents gone, their power now his.
I looked at Arla.
I went into Kael's mind. His body was light and totally weightless as the world became a smear of color in his eyes.
Almost immediately, he was in front of Arla, not by running, but by arriving at a speed that my eye couldn't grasp.
From his left hand, a blade of blazing, incandescent red sword materialized.
He swung it.
CLAAAAAAAANG!!!
The sound was a physical shockwave.
Arla's own sword was now in his hand, blocking that of Kael. His green eyes widened in surprise.
Kael didn't stop.
His body was now a puppet controlled by the storm inside him. He struck again, and again, and again.
The air itself screamed as they both moved at speeds that defied physics, that made light seem slow.
Arla's blade was a purple blur, meeting every single one of his attacks.
But he was only looking at the red blade.
From Kael's right hand, a silent cold blue sword that was invisible to Arla's rage-blinded eye, emerged. He thrust it forward.
Arla blocked it with a confident, almost lazy parry.
And the blue sword… separated.
It dissolved into a thousand shards that passed straight through Arla's blade, through his skin, through his very being, before reforming instantly in Kael's grip.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, a single, perfect line of crimson welled on Arla's cheek. A drop of blood, black as midnight, traced a path down his face.
He froze.
His hand came up as his fingers touched the wound. He stared at the blood on his fingertips as if it were a fundamental error in the universe.
His eyes which were filled with pools of ancient, demonic arrogance, bulged.
A human. A mere human had drawn his blood.
The air changed.
It became thick, heavy, toxic.
Arla's green eyes drowned in pools of absolute black just like that of Leisa earlier.
His vast, terrible, yet breathtaking black wings erupted from his back, casting a pall over the entire street.
His sword blazed with a venomous purple energy that felt like it could divide the earth, burning down everything with just a slash.
"YOU'RE DEAD!!!" His growl carried an ear piercing sound and a nerve racking terror.
"Boom."
What followed was a demolition of reality as their powers collided.
His fist instantly occupied Kael's entire vision.
The air in front of his face became a shattered shield of compressed atmosphere an instant before the knuckles connected with his cheekbone.
His skin stretched to its elastic limit with the underlying fat and muscle compressing and the bone itself transmitting the shockwave through his skull in a single, precise line of fire straight to his optic nerve.
I could hear his soul rattling in its cage as his head snapped back and his body began spinning in a lazy, broken cartwheel but it wasn't flying.
Arla's impassive black eyes tracked his trajectory, and then the asphalt.
The impact with the ground wasn't something I hoped for Kael to survive.
First, his shoulder buckled and dislocated with a wet pop I heard inside my head. Then his hip jarred the shattered pelvis as his head whipped back to crack against the concrete, making his teeth slam together so hard I could swear he tasted enamel dust.
Before I could bat an eyelid, he was back on his feet. He quickly did a flip in the air. His heel connected with the side of Arla's knee.
Arla's joint exploded, bending the wrong way.
The anterior cruciate ligament tore with a sound like ripping canvas that I could feel the meniscus ground into paste between the femur and tibia.
Almost immediately he was above Kael with his foot descending to his ribs.
The kick was a piston driving Kael through the floor of the world because I didn't just hear his ribs break. I felt the individual cracks propagate like lightning forks across each bone
The fifth rib fractured first at the point of impact, the shock traveling along its length to snap the fourth and sixth ribs at their most vulnerable points near the sternum. The air in Kael's lungs was forcibly ejected in a single, pressurized jet that misted with blood from his lacerated trachea.
They clashed again, powers splashing with bright colors and substance of red, blue and violet. A wave of Arla's purple energy hit me, with each particle of it burrowing into my skin, trying to reach the flesh beneath.
Kael's red rage lashed out in retaliation with superheated hornets that dissolved against Arla's demonic aura. Each one popped with a tiny, frustrated hiss of extinguished fury.
Every movement was a dissection. Every impact was a lesson in anatomy and pain. Arla wasn't just fighting Kael, he was deconstructing him piece by piece, sensation by sensation, proving his supremacy through an intimate, terrifying knowledge of how a body breaks.
Kael was getting weaker by the minute with each crazy strike.
Arla began toying with him. I could feel it. The gap was oceanic. Even with this power, Kael was like a child swinging a stick.
Arla was more experienced, faster, stronger and infinitely more precise.
"Too weak."
I heard Arla say, scoffing with arrogance.
He was only using 10% of his true powers after all.
The world became a blur as Kael's vision fractured.
He saw himself from four different angles at once. From above, from the side, from behind and through his own eyes as six simultaneous, invisible slashes tore through his flesh.
Before Kael could even scream, Arla's fists became a storm. Punches were flying from all corners.
A hundred punches flew to Kael's face, stomach and ribs, all in the space of two heartbeats. The air left his lungs in a bloody spray as his ribs splintered and his jaw cracked.
Arla's rage was like a cold, surgical instrument.
He made a forbidden hand sign, his hands moving in an elegant manner that seemed to snatch the light from the air.
SNAP.
It was one sound, yet it came from everywhere inside Kael.
His spine, his arms, his legs. Every single bone in his body screamed in unison as they were simultaneously broken.
The pain was so immense, so all-consuming that I could even scream.
Kael on the other hand, couldn't help but scrape his vocal cords in an orchestra of undiluted agony mixing with the snap of his bones.
Arla stood over him. A condensed purple sphere of absolute annihilation, gathered in his palm. This was the end. I had imagined.
Kael looked Arla in the eyes with a bloody face as his body gave out. It fell forward as his broken form hit the concrete with a final, pathetic thud.
The energy on Arla's palm dissipated.
"So that's all?" He scoffed with disbelief.
He bent down to Kael's body as his pure black eyes met Kael's almost lifeless broken ones.
"If you still plan on taking revenge," he said in a whisper that carried the weight of continents. "Then come find me in Gargaloth. I want to fight you again."
He disappeared.
"Gargaloth."
I heard Kael utter weakly as his internal organs surrendered and began to bleed out onto the cold concrete.
"So this is the human that seeks revenge against the king of demons?" I muttered to myself.
"Pathetic indeed."
My blue wings popped out as I flew over to his body, lifting it carefully.
"Mhennnn, he broke a lot of bones."
I chuckled as I flew away with him.
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