Elias stood mere feet away. His entire body radiated a suffocating, blood-red aura that warped the air around him.
His crown of crimson flames flickered wildly, casting long, demonic shadows against the fractured bulkheads, and his burning red eyes were fixed on Malkor with unblinking, predatory hatred.
Malkor didn't wait. He threw his hand forward, invoking a time lag to freeze the space directly surrounding Elias's ankles.
At the exact same instant, Malkor vanished, reappearing behind Elias with a dense, spatial-pressure blade aimed straight at his neck.
Elias didn't even turn around.
The moment the time lag locked onto his ankles, his body's physical frequency shifted instantly, completely ignoring the delayed constraint.
He ducked under the spatial blade as it whistled through the air, pivoting sharply on his heel.
Before Malkor could retract his arms, Elias drove a brutal, high-speed elbow straight into Malkor's ribs.
*CRACK!*
The force of the strike was deafening. Malkor's eyes bulged in shock as the impact shattered his ribs and sent him hurtling sideways across the room.
He slammed violently into a reinforced steel pillar, denting the metal inward before sliding face-first onto the deck.
Elias didn't give him a single second to recover.
A blur of red ash erupted from the floor, materializing instantly above the fallen conqueror. Elias brought both hands together, forming a compressed sphere of energy, and slammed it down onto Malkor's chest.
*BOOOM—!*
The explosion tore through the battle field like a bomb.
Malkor roared in fury, pushing his power to the absolute maximum. He manipulated the heavy gravity around the crater, multiplying it a thousandfold to crush Elias under his own weight. Simultaneously, he hurled a barrage of time-lagged shockwaves outward to blast his opponent away.
The crushing gravity hit Elias instantly, forcing him down onto one knee. The ground beneath him groaned and splintered into dust.
Malkor scrambled to his feet, coughing up a mouthful of blood, his hands glowing with dark energy as he prepared a lethal counter-attack.
"Die!" Malkor screamed, unleashing a concentrated beam of spatial erasure directly at Elias's head.
Elias looked up, his red eyes burning through the blinding light. Instead of resisting the gravity, his body adapted instantly, redistributing the crushing weight across his entire frame until it felt like nothing more than a gentle breeze.
He stood straight up, raised his bare hand, and sliced his palm straight through the spatial erasure beam.
*SREEECH—!*
The beam split in two, dissipating harmlessly against the walls on either side of the room.
Malkor's breath hitched. Before he could process what had happened, Elias was already standing right in front of him.
The retaliation was merciless. Elias grabbed Malkor by the collar of his shredded coat, headbutting him with bone-shattering force.
*CRUNCH!*
Malkor's nose broke instantly, blood spraying into the air.
Elias followed up with a vicious, rapid-fire combination: a left hook that caved in Malkor's cheek, a devastating knee strike to the stomach that knocked the remaining wind from his lungs, and a roundhouse kick that launched the conqueror through three consecutive steel walls.
Malkor crashed heavily into the outer corridor, his body battered, broken, and completely overwhelmed. He tried to raise his hand to invoke another time lag, but his fingers trembled uncontrollably. The invincibility he had worn like armor all day had been completely stripped away, beaten down by an unrelenting tide of pure, unadulterated wrath.
Elias walked slowly through the destroyed bulkheads, stepping over chunks of twisted steel. His red eyes gazed down at the broken conqueror, devoid of any mercy, any hesitation, or any trace of the boy he used to be.
Far away from the noise of the battlefield, across light-years of empty, silent void, a different kind of hell was raging in absolute quiet.
Deep inside the infinite seal—a colossal black hole one hundred times larger than any ordinary stellar collapse—the laws of physics ceased to exist. Light could not escape; space was twisted into impossible knots; and the gravitational pressure was so absolute that it compressed subatomic particles into nothingness.
Yet, moving through the center of this crushing void, a lone figure pressed forward.
Zane's body was pushed to the absolute brink of destruction.
Every muscle fiber in his body screamed in agony, his skin tearing and healing in micro-seconds as he fought against a tide of gravity that could crush a planet into dust. But his eyes were wide, clear, and filled with a terrifying newfound clarity.
"I understand now," Zane whispered, his voice steady despite the roaring chaos around him. "It's time to escape"
Instead of fighting the pressure, he allowed it to carry him, bending the space around his body until he broke through the absolute center.
The singularity.
The crushing pressure vanished in a single, eerie heartbeat. The deafening roar of the abyss cut out completely, replaced by a suffocating, dead silence.