Elizabeth lay unconscious beside the river, unaware that the world around her was about to cease to exist. Every hair on the two-headed beast's body stood on end, its instincts screaming at it to flee. Michael and Vincent stood on the threshold between life and death, oblivious to the impending catastrophe. Beebah watched with a crooked smile, its grotesque face twisting in anticipation. The twins hovered above the battlefield, their fused body radiating enough energy to turn the surrounding forest into a graveyard. And Michael? Michael had already abandoned the boundary separating a man from a monster. The encounter would determine who survived, who was consumed, and who would disappear without leaving even a trace behind. Yet none of them understood what was coming. None of them understood what Michael was about to become.
"FULL RELEASE!" I screamed at the heavens. Steam erupted from every pore in my body as my blackened skin began to split apart. Beneath the charred flesh, new cells multiplied, devouring the damage as my body desperately rebuilt itself. The flames inside me burned with a purpose, an almost religious devotion to destruction. My thoughts spiralled into nothingness. There was only emptiness inside me, an endless void that wanted the world to become as empty as my soul. My jaws stretched open, accommodating the newborn canines forcing their way through my gums. My grip on humanity weakened with every passing second, while my grip on death tightened. With this transformation, I was burning away a future I had never wanted to live. My name is Michael Ozor. As much as I want to eradicate humanity, I also want to save it by eradicating it. And if my own future must become the price, then so be it. It had finally come. I could no longer see the world as it was. Everything disappeared except my prey, a brilliant orange silhouette burning against the darkness. It had to die. It had to die for my progression. "FULL RELEASE!"
Michael crouched on all fours, his movements no longer resembling those of a human being. Red energy swirled violently within his eyes, circling his pupils as steam poured from his regenerating body. He did not speak. He did not threaten. He simply stared at the twins, his head tilted slightly forward, his fingers digging into the scorched earth. There was something profoundly wrong with the way he watched them. It was not the gaze of a warrior calculating his opponent's weaknesses, nor the stare of a desperate man fighting for survival. It was the stare of a predator that had forgotten the difference between hunting and dying. Beebah's smile widened. "It seems I'm not the only monster here." Its eyes shifted toward the radiant silhouette hovering above the battlefield. "Twins, kill him. I'll deal with this artist." Vincent, however, had no intention of standing aside and watching Michael tear himself apart. "If we're all going all out, then why the hell shouldn't I?" His paintbrush began to swirl through the depths of nothingness. Darkness condensed into mass, mass transformed into form, and form erupted into light. Vincent's eyes burned blue as his imagination reached beyond the limits of ordinary construction. "Material isn't the only thing I can draw. Even Emo itself exists within the confines of my imagination!" CLICK. A tiny branch snapped beneath someone's foot. The battlefield erupted into chaos.
Michael charged on all fours, tearing through the earth with every stride. The twins' energy intensified as they unleashed a barrage of radiant spheres, each carrying enough radiation to kill an ordinary human almost instantly. Michael did not slow down. The spheres struck his body, peeling away his skin and eating into his flesh, but the damage closed almost as quickly as it appeared. Muscle tore. Cells disintegrated. New tissue forced its way through the wreckage. He charged straight through the explosions without calculating the distance or searching for an opening. He was no longer fighting like a strategist. He was fighting like an animal that had discovered pain could no longer persuade it to stop. Left, right, above. He launched himself toward the floating twins, reached behind his back, and drew his dagger. Energy flooded the blade before he hurled it forward, leaving a streak of light in its wake. The twins scattered into countless particles. "CLONE!" Multiple copies materialised around him, each unleashing beams of energy so intense that their radiance rivalled the surface of the sun. Michael hung suspended in the sky as the beams descended from every direction. Then he laughed. A horrible, broken laugh that seemed to rise from somewhere deeper than his lungs. "DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! I JUST WANT TO DIE! I WANT TO DIE WITH ALL OF YOU! AAAAAAGHHHH!" Pure energy erupted from his mouth, blasting him downward at incomprehensible speed. He slammed into the ground hard enough to pulverise the earth beneath him. The twins followed without hesitation, raining beams into the crater as their laughter echoed through the destruction. "It's over!" they shouted. But Michael had no intention of dying before them. NOT BEFORE YOU. NOT BEFORE THE READER. NOT BEFORE EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU! His fists hammered into the ground, punch after punch, each strike breaking through another layer of earth. He dug through the soil as the beams crashed down above him, turning the battlefield into a blazing grave. The twins laughed, certain that nothing could survive the bombardment. Then silence fell. A hand emerged from the opposite side of the crater. Michael pulled himself free, his ruined body dragging itself out of the darkness. He looked up at the twins and grinned. "Finished, you monkeys? I CAN'T BE FINISHED!" Before they could react, he launched himself straight at them. His jaws opened, and he tore a massive bite from one of their necks. Blood, cells, veins, and fragments of flesh filled his mouth. He tasted the warmth of life and the bitterness of death at the same time. The sensation flooded his mind with an ecstasy so obscene that he could barely distinguish pleasure from agony. He was losing himself, drowning in the intoxicating sensation of his own destruction. Full Release felt like suicide made beautiful. A fantasy in which Michael could finally stop existing, and yet take everything else with him. Because I wanted to die. Michael wanted to die. And for one fleeting moment, it felt as though we were the same person.
The twins screamed in horror and forced themselves away from him, desperately creating distance. Their fused body flickered as they exchanged a silent message within their shared consciousness. WE HAVE TO DO IT. Their energy began to gather again, but this time the concentration was far denser than before. This was the same attack that had left Elizabeth shattered, unable to walk, and barely capable of speaking. Yet the twins were pushing it further, pouring everything they had into a single, catastrophic release. Their cores blazed brighter and brighter, then began to turn grey as their reserves dwindled toward absolute exhaustion. Michael barely noticed. Every energy gateway within his body had opened, and the power surging through him made the pain feel almost insignificant. He twitched, his head jerking as he watched the twins gather their final attack. "OHHHHH! So THAT'S what killed my ex-girlfriend?" His bloodshot eyes widened with terrible delight. "WOW! GIVE IT TO ME! GIVE IT TO ME! ACTUALLY, SCREW THAT. I'LL MAKE MY OWN!"
Blood began pouring from his eyes in thick streams, running down his cheeks and dripping from his chin. Above his hands, red energy condensed into a sphere that seemed almost alive. It pulsed like a grotesque imitation of life itself, beautiful in the same way a wound could be beautiful when it revealed something that should have remained hidden. Michael poured more energy into it. The sphere swelled, its surface twisting and churning like a living blood-red sun. A blood nuke. The air screamed around him. His veins bulged beneath his skin before bursting from the pressure, spilling blood across his arms. His muscles convulsed, and his body trembled under the relentless overload. He did not care. I did not care. The pain we carried could not be cured.
Not by healing, not by love, not by power. The only cure I could imagine was death. I wanted to die. Michael wanted to die. So he continued pouring energy into the sphere, doubling its power again and again, even as the twins' cores faded into a lifeless grey. Above the battlefield, the sky itself seemed to widen beneath the gathering heat. Rain began to fall, only to hiss into vapour before reaching the scorched earth. The sphere continued to grow. More energy. More blood. More pain. Until, finally, the multiplication stopped. Michael had reached the climax of Full Release. Yet he kept pouring energy into it, his entire body vibrating violently as though the force within him was threatening to tear him apart from the inside. The twins drew back, their voices rising together in one final, desperate cry. "RELEASEEEEE!"
Two colossal forces collided above the battlefield. One burned with the ferocity of the sun. The other pulsed with something far more disturbing, the raw, overwhelming sensation of life itself compressed into a single point of destruction. For an instant, everything went white. Anyone who looked directly at the collision was blinded by the light. Trees disintegrated into dust, their trunks and branches erased before they could even fall. The ground cracked open beneath the pressure, and the air became a furnace that swallowed every sound. Then came the explosion. KABOOOOOOOOOM! A mushroom cloud swallowed the entire field, climbing into the sky as the shockwave tore through the forest. Vincent and Beebah, who had barely begun their own fight, were forced to abandon everything and scramble to avoid being consumed by the blast. The river ceased to exist. The trees vanished. The surrounding forest was reduced to a desolate expanse of scorched earth, with nothing left to mark where the battlefield had once stood. The beast curled protectively around Elizabeth, but even its enormous body was battered by the shockwave. Then, from the heart of the cloud, two separate bodies fell out of the sky. They struck the ruined earth amid falling ash and drifting embers. One belonged to the twins. The other was Michael. The dust settled slowly, revealing a landscape that no longer resembled the world that had existed only moments earlier.
Michael lay motionless, his body so damaged that it was impossible to determine whether he was alive or dead. Some would have looked at him and declared him dead. Others would have searched for the faintest sign of breathing and insisted he was still alive. But I was happy. Not because I had won. Not because I had survived. I was happy because, for once, everyone was too busy fighting to stay alive to know who had actually survived. No one knew who was breathing. No one knew who was dying. No one knew whether the next movement would be the beginning of recovery or the final twitch before death. And as the steam began to clear, the outcome finally emerged from the Hollow Veil.