Jhonathan released his power.
The moment it spread, everything began to decay.
Not in the usual sense of destruction—but in transformation.
Stone turned brittle.
Metal lost its certainty.
Magic structures collapsed into rusted echoes of their former shape.
The entire battlefield became a field of corrosion, as if existence itself was being rewritten into something older and more fragile.
Jhonathan stood at the center of it.
Watching it all.
Breathing heavily.
Then—
Jessabelle smiled.
Not afraid.
Not surprised.
Almost like she had been waiting for this version of him.
She raised her hands.
Daggers of nothingness formed in her grip—weapons that didn't reflect light because they didn't agree to exist properly. They flickered in and out of perception as she moved.
Then she disappeared into the shadows.
---
Inside Jhonathan's mind—
Reynaldo spoke.
Not loudly.
But clearly.
"They are coming."
Jhonathan tightened his grip on the katana he had taken earlier.
And then—
his other swords reacted.
They floated around him like living forcefields, orbiting his body and intercepting attacks before they could fully form. Each strike from Jessabelle's shadow movement collided against them, sending shockwaves through the rusted space.
But she kept moving.
Faster.
Deeper into the battlefield.
---
Jhonathan's eyes shifted.
Blue light ignited within them.
Something inside him changed at a fundamental level.
Not evolution.
Not mutation.
Adaptation.
A divine system unlocked within his existence—one that didn't give him fixed power, but instead allowed him to become what was needed against what he faced.
For a moment, he stood at the edge of something beyond power scaling.
Something closer to divinity itself.
---
He exhaled.
And spoke quietly.
"…Reynaldo."
"Let's defeat them."
The swords around him sharpened in response.
Reality bent.
Spells and attacks from multiple directions collided with him at once—fire, void, chains, illusions, compressed mana bursts.
Everything hit.
Everything stacked.
The arena became unrecognizable under the pressure of simultaneous destruction.
---
But Jhonathan remained standing.
For a few seconds.
Then his body trembled.
The divine adaptation overloaded.
His breathing broke.
His vision blurred.
And slowly—
he collapsed.
Not from defeat.
But from exhaustion of existence.
The battlefield fell silent.
---
When he woke up again…
the world was different.
Jessabelle was sitting beside him.
Calm.
Unarmed.
Watching him like she had all the time in the world.
Jhonathan blinked slowly.
"…Why aren't you finishing me?"
Jessabelle tilted her head slightly.
Then smiled.
"Let's go on an adventure, hun."
The words didn't match the battlefield they were in.
They didn't match the war.
They didn't match anything that had happened before.
But she said them anyway.
As if this version of the world… was the one she preferred.