The searing heat of the sudden volcanic transformation struck like a hammer. The serene, dreamlike ash falling from the gray sky created a bizarre contrast against the raw threat of the five legendary silhouettes standing on the distant obsidian ridges. A suffocating panic gripped the group. Everyone took an involuntary step back, their eyes wide.
“Are these… are these really the same people from last night?!” Silarias stammered, his voice cracking. The warm, laughing mentors who had been raising mugs hours ago had instantly transformed into cold gods of destruction.
Beside him, the breaking point had been reached. Ren and Miki had turned completely pale. They walked in tight circles over the glowing ground, muttering to themselves as if their minds couldn’t process the immense pressure.
“We’re done… we’re finished, it’s over,” Ren muttered hysterically, clawing at his hair. “We’ll never survive this. We’re going to die right here. It’s over…”
Miki walked right behind him, arms crossed tightly, her lips trembling as she repeated in a monotone whisper, “Finished… completely finished. This isn’t training. This is a slaughterhouse…”
“Get a grip!” Aurelius snapped, though sweat poured down his forehead and the hilt of his sword trembled in his iron grip. “If we break mentally now, they’ll cut us to pieces before we even land a blow!”
“The pressure is rising to an unmeasurable level,” Nicola said with extreme effort. His hands shook so violently he could barely keep his glasses on his nose, while Blitz had shrunken on top of his head into a pitch black, terrified storm cloud. “Their biological patterns… they’re shifting. This isn’t a normal Anting power anymore.”
Jane swallowed hard, her jaw tight. “This is what they meant by the absolute emptiness. They’re daring us to stand while the whole world melts around us.”
Then, the curtain fell.
The sluggish speedster took a slow step forward and let his oversized puff jacket slide off his shoulders. The moment the garment hit the obsidian floor, its unreal, dense weight caused a massive boom, blasting a meters deep crater into the stone. The devastating shockwave swept across the battlefield, instantly clearing all the thick smoke and drifting ash clouds.
The horizon opened up, crystal clear. The legendary horror of the five titans from the Bang District stood fully exposed in the firelight, revealing their Second Forms. Suddenly, the words the mentors had spoken the night before returned, echoing through the flames like living laws.
The sky opened with a terrifying display as Master Ometol slowly floated upward. His golden cloak had completely dissolved into spinning rings of liquid gold that orbited his body. His skin glowed from within, and where his eyes should have been, two pitch black holes simply swallowed the light of the surrounding lava. The gravitational implosion of The Dying Star was active; the air around him hissed as it began to compress.
“Fill each other’s emptiness, Nobodies, or be erased from reality!” Ometol’s voice echoed directly in their minds. The group instantly remembered his words from the night before: absolute cooperation, where their specific divine powers had to complement each other perfectly to demolish their limits.
At the same time, along the right flank, hundreds of glass vials belonging to the Powder Witch shattered with a loud clash. The purple, highly explosive powder was pulled forcefully into her bloodstream. Her veins flared a bright purple beneath her skin, and behind her back, four giant arms of compressed, hissing gunpowder formed, whipping wildly through the air.
“If you don’t lock your heat inside, you explode from within!” the Powder Witch screamed with a maniacal laugh. Beat and Apollo experienced a sudden flash of her lesson on Rhythm and Heat: never waste energy or let it explode mindlessly, but build the internal pressure to a boiling point for maximum impact.
Right behind her, the armored cook underwent a monumental transformation into the Iron Empress of the Iron Crucible. Her matte black armor began to liquify, melting from the immense heat of her own core. With the loud, hissing screech of bending metal, her cooking utensil like Anting weapons fused into her arms and chest plate until she transformed into a terrifying, mechanical centaur of glowing copper and iron.
“The claw lands in absolute silence!” the heavy voice of the armored cook hammered through the heat. Izumaru envisioned her lesson clearly: Controlled Silence. No loud displays, but absolute stillness and discipline right before the strike to hit with maximum efficiency.
On the left side, the man with the silver gray beard raised his giant sword and drove it into the ground with brute force. Upon impact, the blade shattered with an ear splitting crack into thousands of razor sharp shards. But instead of falling, the fragments hung motionless in the air, caught in a pulsing, neon blue resonance field. The Shattered Symphony God had risen.
“Bend with the steel, or break like glass!” the old man’s voice thundered. Balamore immediately recalled the lesson: Moving with the Struggle. Never stand rigid against danger, but absorb the vibrations and force of the enemy to maintain balance.
And then, the sluggish speedster exploded into The Absent Tachyon. His human form blurred into a continuous, flashing line of white hot neon light that shot across the volcanic landscape. The sound of his sleepy yawn had transformed into a non stop, rhythmic thumping of consecutive sonic booms. He was everywhere at once. Thousands of solid afterimages flashed around them.
Reality collapsed around them. The neon blue shards hummed, the purple powder arms hissed, the golden rings warped gravity, and the mechanical centaur crushed the ground while the white hot neon line drew circles around them.
Nyx looked at the approaching apocalypse. Her eyes became as sharp and icy as pure glass, filled with the untamed power of the Moon Queen. In a single fraction of a second, her fear turned into deadly focus.
“Silarias!” she yelled, her voice piercing through the chaos. “Absorb the vibration with your presence! Now!!”
Silarias slammed his giant fist into the palm of his other hand, releasing a shockwave from his own body that absorbed the first sonic booms. Pure adrenaline rushed through his veins, his face twisting into a hungry grin.
“REAL NOBODIES!!” Silarias roared, his voice battering against the walls of the volcanic hell. “BRING ON THAT BRUTE STRATEGY!! WE’RE BREAKING EVERYTHING!!”
With an explosive leap, the Nobodies charged forward, straight into the insane wall of fire and the reality bending forces of the five legends. The war for survival had officially begun.
But the legendary power of these gods was no illusion. The confrontation wasn’t a fight; it was a high level execution. Before the Nobodies’ attack could even form, reality struck back mercilessly. The vibrating shards of the Shattered Symphony God delivered a pulsing shockwave that tore the air, while Ometol’s golden rings bent gravity with such violence that the Nobodies were tossed through the sky like helpless puppets. With dull, rattling thuds, they were all forcefully hurled into the absolute center of the battlefield, bleeding as they skidded across the glowing obsidian floor, groaning to a halt.
There, right at the epicenter of the chaos, Beat was already standing. He hadn’t budged. While the rest gasped for air and tried to scramble up, Beat stood there shaking his head. His eyes were tight and worried, but his entire posture radiated deep, sharp frustration.
“You guys don’t get it at all!” Beat yelled, his voice cutting through the hissing lava. “Look at yourselves! You’re way too emotional! Panic is ruling your heads, and you’re letting yourselves be guided by pure terror!” He took a step forward, pointing directly at the approaching silhouettes. “You have to let go of everything! The fear, the logic, the expectations of how a fight is supposed to go! If you don’t throw away that emotional baggage right now, you’re not warriors here, you’re slaughter meat!”
In the middle of this intense, shouting exchange, while the heat continued to pulse around them, Ren and Miki suddenly went quiet. The hysterical muttering vanished. They stood motionless among the debris, staring at each other with wide, shining eyes. Something clicked hard in their connection.
“What would that old head Juro do?!” Ren asked aloud, his voice suddenly vibrating with a completely different kind of tension.
Miki answered him immediately, her fear vanishing like snow in the sun as she began to move in perfect sync with him. She started walking in small, rhythmic circles around him, bringing her fingers to her mouth as if holding an invisible pipe. “Yeah… think along the lines of…” She shifted her stance, dropping slightly into her knees, mimicking Juro perfectly as she spoke through an imaginary cloud of smoke with that typical, nonchalant, invincible tone: “You’ve observed enough by now, kiddo… Did we really come all this way just to serve as punch bags, or are we going to take that absolute chaos and the vibrations they’re throwing at us and just use it right back against them?!”
It was a small, pure eureka moment in the middle of the burning hell. The realization spread like wildfire through their ranks. With a renewed, defiant look, they turned at the same time and looked straight at Izumaru.
Izumaru looked at their suddenly altered faces, saw the spark in their eyes, and a broad, challenging grin broke across his face. “Haha… yeah! Now you chicks think it’s a good time to try that out?! You certain?!”
The dust hadn’t even settled before the air began to hiss. Suddenly, an approaching, playful yet terrifying whistle sliced through the volcanic atmosphere. It was a sound that grew at an insane speed, as if a meteor were dropping straight onto their necks.
Silarias and Nyx reacted first, snapping their heads back. Their eyes narrowed and they flinched for a fraction of a second, caught off guard by the raw speed of the object cutting through reality. It was a massive, glowing obsidian ball, charged with a frightening amount of kinetic energy. The friction burned the air around it, turning the surface of the sphere into a blinding white sun that bled trails of molten glass.
“Ren! Miki!” Izumaru roared, his voice thundering across the plains. “That’s your cue!!!”
The fear in the duo’s eyes vanished instantly, replaced by a wild, hungry focus. The lessons of the past few days clicked into place.
“Hmm, she’s using Cinder Pulse?!” Miki called out with a wild, sharp laugh, analyzing the approaching wall of fire. “I’m calling this Amber Flux!”
Without losing a second, Ren dived beneath her. With a powerful, explosive movement, he launched Miki into the air with a massive push, sending her straight toward the fireball. Miki spun through the ash rain, tensed her muscles, and kicked the ball even further downward with a devastating bicycle kick, sending it directly into her partner’s path.
Ren was already waiting below, his face twisted in a grimace of pure tension and excitement. “SAW speed mode!!!” he shouted, his legs turning into a blur of kinetic flashes. With insane acceleration, he ran toward the falling mass and kicked it with a deafening boom straight back up into the air, into the stratosphere.
There, high above the battlefield, Izumaru was already waiting. He had jumped with an impossible leap right in front of the burning sun, leaving his silhouette standing out like a black god of war against the bright light. The obsidian ball had meanwhile transformed into a house high, flaming fire missile, warping the air around it. The sheer speed of its ascent dragged a column of liquid magma up from the trenches, weaving a helix of white gold fire around the projectile.
“FAMILY VOLLEY!!” the three of them screamed together, their voices vibrating with pure adrenaline.
The ball was fired with a massive kinetic explosion. Izumaru hung horizontally in the air, tensing his entire body like a steel spring, and slammed the ball back toward the earth with a masterful overhead kick. The impact was so epic that its speed instantly multiplied tenfold. The blast wave shattered the clouds above, creating a ringshaped shockwave that cleared the sky to reveal the dead space of Sector Null.
Like a blood red falling star, the projectile hurled back to the ground, straight at the Powder Witch. The ball tore across the floor with such force that the obsidian ground ripped into thousands of pieces, leaving a deep, glowing trench that split the battlefield in two. Lightning arcs generated by pure friction snapped off the projectile, melting the stone before it even made contact.
The flaming woman looked up, her purple powder arms whipping forward wildly in a desperate attempt to fend off the approaching apocalypse. But the pure, unstoppable speed of the Amber Flux was too insane. The fire missile deflected off her defenses with a hissing shower of metallic sparks, before crashing brutally, with the sound of breaking bone and exploding powder, straight into her face.
The impact was blinding. A miniature supernova ignited at the point of contact, a dome of violet and gold expanding outward, turning the falling ash into ash glass instantly. The Powder Witch was launched backward at an otherworldly speed, straight through the meters thick, massive volcanic wall, which collapsed with a thundering crash. A gigantic cloud of purple powder and black dust swallowed her silhouette completely.
It remained dead silent on the battlefield, while the deep trench still glowed and the Nobodies watched the gaping hole in the mountain, breathing heavily.