The darkness behind Brother Sanguis does not yield willingly to the approaching heat; reality itself is shoved aside by sheer brute force. Silarias commits. With an inhuman, world-shattering strength, the colossal figure lunges forward like a burning, deep-blue flash that leaves the onlookers' retinas blinded. The massive stone floor beneath his feet fails instantly under the immense pressure, exploding into a tearing trail of glowing grit, razor-sharp splinters, and crackling sparks.
Sanguis does not even have time to turn his deformed neck or register the terror in his brain before the catastrophic blow lands.
Silarias crashes into the monk’s fleshy, misshapen body with the destructive impact of a falling meteor. The collision delivers a shockwave that causes the arena walls to fissure. His pitch-black fire gauntlets seize into the heavy meat and breaking cartilage of Sanguis with a ruthless, possessed frenzy.
"You will die, monster!" Silarias roars, his voice an overdriven mix of masculine pride and raw, bestial power.
With a primordial strength that defies all laws of nature, he maxes out his muscles and finally tears the terrified Manic Monk apart. Muscle and tendon snap with the bone-dry, chilling sound of thick tree roots breaking under a storm. Thick veins burst under the immense pressure, and pitch-black, viscous blood sprays in a horrifying fountain meters high against the ceiling and walls of the arena. Sanguis's massive body is literally reduced to a grotesque mash of flying limbs, bursting organs, and rancid debris that hit the battlefield with heavy, sickening thuds.
This is for everyone you have broken, flashes through Silarias's mind as he flings the last remnants of flesh from his hands.
Immediately after the brutal execution, all color returns to the arena in one jerky, flashing burst. The suffocating darkness dissolves into thin air. Beat's insane, rapid-fire drums fall abruptly silent. A heavy, deathly silence settles over the field, and everyone instantly transforms back to their normal form, panting heavily, legs trembling, and drenched in sweat.
However, this peace is a terrible illusion. From the furthest, darkest corners of the arena, a sinister, echoing laughter suddenly begins to sound. It is a rancid, gurgling noise that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
"Hahahahah... Do you really think... Do you really think this is the end?" Sanguis’s distorted voice rasps through the space.
The flying, rancid debris and the thick pools of black blood on the ground begin to vibrate unnaturally. As if pulled by an invisible, malicious magnet, the remains are dragged toward each other. They slide across the stones and flow together with a sickening, hissing sound into one giant, pulsing blob of pure flesh. The blob begins to restructure itself at a lethal pace; muscles weave together, veins pump full, until a monstrous, terrifying heart takes form. The thing pumps violently and irregularly, swelling frighteningly larger with every beat and glowing a dangerous, pulsating red. The heat radiating from it is suffocating; the thing is about to erupt in an apocalyptic, nuclear explosion and reduce the entire arena to ash.
Nicola’s eyes begin to flash like a madman, his pupils darting back and forth across the pulsing flesh heart, the walls, and the distances at impossible speeds. In his brain, he calculates every complex variable in a fraction of a second. Lines of pure energy and mathematical formulas flash through his vision until he sees the exact, razor-thin chance of survival.
"EUREKA!!" Nicola roars at the top of his lungs, turning to the great lion with a deadly serious, corpse-pale face. "Sil... can you handle this?! If you do this with perfect timing, you could use the brute kinetic energy of this explosion to keep up with us and launch us! But the timing must be perfect, down to the millisecond! WE have to get the younger one to safety and keep the damage here contained!!"
Nicola looks at him with a resolute but deeply concerned gaze. Tears finally begin to burn in his eyes from the crushing, suffocating pressure of the moment. "I don't have another option, damn it... If we don't do this, everything here will be lost! Everything!"
His panicked, screaming explanation is cut off completely and ruthlessly by the heavy, deep voice of Silarias. In his form, he does not flinch; his presence is like an immovable rock in the surf.
"Aren't you gone yet?"
Silarias turns his head briefly. His gaze is fixed, intense, and aimed straight at Nyx. A faint, meaningful grin appears on his scarred face. "Nyx, when I get back, I have something special for you. Make sure you are ready."
Nyx looks at him with tear-filled eyes. The raw fear of losing him cuts through her soul like a knife; her heart hammers in her throat. She knows his unyielding pride, his refusal to ever give up on the people he loves. She swallows her emotions with difficulty, clenches her fists so hard her nails dig into her palms, and gestures at him commandingly: "THEN YOU BETTER COME BACK!! DON'T YOU DARE STAY BEHIND!!"
The sunset colors the sky blood-red as they step into the chariot with breakneck speed without wasting another second. In the background, the heavy, thundering footsteps of the Bastion can be heard sprinting away in a blind, panicked dash to reach safety before the coming shockwave. As the chariot starts with screeching wheels, Jane looks at Nyx with a deathly pale face and thick, shimmering tears streaming down her cheeks.
"Why are you crying, Jane? Are you scared?" Nyx asks with a trembling voice as she sets the chariot in motion.
Jane swallows the thick lump in her throat, looks outside with a feigned coolness, and brushes it off casually: "Crying? Hardly, don't worry about it. Just some bullshit and dust in my eyes from all this brute violence... My eyes just can't take it." Hoping that everything will be okay with Aurelius, she tries to mask everything.
The chariot shoots away with brutal acceleration, leaving behind a massive, thick cloud of dust that completely obscures vision. Silarias remains all alone on the battlefield, his back to the pulsing, ticking flesh heart that begins to hiss louder and louder.
This is it, Silarias thinks deep inside, his breathing calm and controlled. Just me and this ticking monstrosity. I must hold my ground. For them. For the family.
But just as the thick dust cloud begins to clear slightly, he suddenly hears a bone-dry, familiar double cough right behind his left and right shoulders.
Silarias jumps out of his skin. His breath hitches audibly. His eyes widen, and he spins around in a shock-alert reflex.
"Hahaha... Honestly, I couldn't have thought of it any sooner, Sil..."
Silarias looks to his left in astonishment. Coughing, sputtering, and with a wide, challenging grin on his face, Beat emerges, still fully enveloped in his terrifying, purple Oni form. The purple electricity still crackles softly around his shoulders.
Their eyes lock in a fraction of a second. At that exact moment, the deepest, most meaningful memories flash through Silarias's head like a high-speed film. The memories rush in: he sees again how Beat literally fed him when he was a hungry nobody without a penny to his name. How Beat taught him, step by step, with infinite patience, to experience real human emotions, to cry, to laugh, and to feel. The countless hours by the campfire, the deep stories, and the hard life lessons the purple Oni gave him when he thought the world had abandoned him.
With a lump in his throat and a laugh of pure amazement, Silarias looks directly the other way, to the right. To his absolute, dumbfounded amazement, Aurelius is standing there too, with his sword held loosely in his hand and an imperturbable look in his eyes.
Their eyes lock. And the memories rush in, hard and merciless. Silarias thinks back to the hard times when he was constantly teased, challenged, and brought down by Aurelius, only to find out much later that, despite all the hard lessons, Aurelius was his true big brother after all. Aurelius, who just unexpectedly showed up on his birthday when no one else looked or cared. Aurelius, whom he encountered just when the ward was captured and Jane was imprisoned; the man with whom he stood back-to-back in that brutal, intense fight just recently.
Back to the deadly, shimmering moment in the arena. Reality strikes back in. Silarias quickly wipes an emerging tear from the corner of his eye and shakes his head with a deep, emotional sigh.
"Mm... This is difficult... What are you idiots doing here? You were supposed to get out of here with the rest!" Silarias says, his voice trembling with emotion.
Before he can take a step back, Beat places a heavy hand on his shoulder. The calm, familiar voice of the purple Oni encourages him with ironclad, unshakeable conviction: "Everything will be fine, Sil. Don't worry. We'll clear the path here. You do your thing with that explosion in a moment; we've got your back until the very last second." "Yes, we are the shield, and you are the sword," Aurelius adds.
Silarias feels the pure, unadulterated brotherhood flowing through his veins. The doubt vanishes like snow before the sun, and he clenches his fists until his knuckles turn white.
"YES!" he roars out, full of renewed adrenaline.
But deep within his own inner monologue, while looking at the monstrous, swelling construction in front of him, the ultimate tension gnaws at him: Can I really do this? Isn't this too big, even for my awakened form? If my timing is off, I'll blow all three of us to the hereafter...
His inner doubt gets not a millisecond more to breathe. The giant, bloody flesh heart is now completely out of control and reaching the absolute, critical boiling point. The thing pulses so hard that the stones around it begin to crack and melt from the pure, accumulated chaos energy.
With a shrill, rancid sound that cuts through bone and marrow, dozens of thick, razor-sharp, and blood-stained tentacles grow out of the pulsing blob in a fraction of a second. They swing wildly through the air, breaking the sound barrier with loud bangs, and shoot toward the three commanders at a murderous, terrifying speed to impale them.
The tentacles break the sound barrier with the screeching noise of tearing reality, razor-sharp spears of pulsing flesh that consume the air between them millimeter by millimeter. There is no room left to retreat. No time for a plan.
"LOCK IN!!" roars Silarias, his voice an overdriven, raw lion's roar that cleaves the rising heatwave in two. Deep inside, everything in him converges. Do not fail now. Focus on the intersection.
The world around him reacts instantly. Aurelius's right hand closes with an impossible, iron grip around the hilt of his sword. His fingers squeeze so hard that the leather of the grip creaks. The metal in the scabbard begins to vibrate unnaturally, a terrifying, humming sound seeking resonance throughout the entire arena.
Then, like a thunderclap from a clear blue sky, a voice breaks through the chaos. It does not come from his mouth, but echoes straight from the steel itself, possessed and hungry for blood:
"DRAW ME!!"
With one ruthless, fluid movement, Aurelius pulls the blade from the scabbard. Reality explodes into a blinding, white-hot sea of light. Total darkness and the rancid red of the flesh heart are sliced away in a fraction of a second. The stones beneath his feet light up intensely, and thousands of bright, razor-sharp light particles break free from the ground, sucked upward along his body like an inverted meteor shower. The pure silver particles dance in a high-speed spiral around his shoulders and weapon, while his pupils completely pull back into two brightly glowing, pure light sources that display no emotion anymore. He stands there as an immovable pillar of pure, divine energy, ready to slice every tentacle into atoms.
Right next to him, Beat's transformation synchronously shifts to apocalyptic mode. The purple Oni form can no longer endure the pressure and mutates under the brutal tension. The crackling purple electricity that surged around his body expands into massive, meters-thick lightning bolts that strike the ground with deafening bangs. The purple lightning begins to flicker blue with an insane frequency, an unstable, overloaded energy so intense that the air around him spontaneously begins to ionize and smell of ozone. His clothing and hair flare electrically upward, pulsing wildly between terrifying purple and nuclear blue, while the vibrations of his pure presence simply crumble the remaining walls of the arena into fine dust.
Back-to-back, blinding silver and crackling purple-blue beside the deep-blue sea of fire of Silarias. The tentacles are only millimeters away from their faces, the pointed tips reflected in their glowing eyes, while the monstrous flesh heart behind the mass of flesh swells to a deafening boiling point.