The four heroes moved their weapons back in unison and unleashed their destructive forces in one all-devastating blow. What followed was the total annihilation of the entire outer ring.
From the left side, the alliance of hundreds of dojo fighters and bandits charged forward blind with rage, while from the right side, the possessed monks dived out of the trees like a demonic, dark tidal wave. Izanagi made the first brutal strike. With a sideways sweep of his meters-long, pulsating hellfire sword, he carved a deep, pitch-black fissure through the marble ground. The high-frequency vibrations beating off the jet-black blade were so intense that the bodies of the front attackers literally began to vibrate.
“What’s happening to my sword?! It’s crumbling!” screamed one of the enemy commanders. Before he received an answer, the steel in his hands shattered into pieces and he crashed backward onto the ground with bleeding eardrums.
“Keep your head down, little brother! I’m breaking their lines!” Izanami shrieked over the hellish racket.
With a brutal, sawing motion, she drove her gigantic ice sword into the advancing horde of monks. The crystalline ice armor that had snapped around her arm muscles creaked under the immense pressure of her own spiritual power. Upon impact, dozens of enemies froze in a fraction of a second into massive, lifeless statues. Izanami regained her balance lightning-fast and rammed her heavy ice shield into the foremost ice statue with a crushing impact. With a sharp screech, the frozen bodies shattered into thousands of sparkling, lethal shards.
“Look at them searching! Chase my afterimages if you dare!” Kali laughed devilishly.
Her form split through the sizzling air into dozens of flashing illusions, making it seem as if the entire square was filled with her divine battle form. Her four arms moved like a razor-sharp windmill of light and steel. With two arms, she mowed through the lines of bandits using her curved sickles, while pressing her other two hands, glowing with massive spheres of pure light, directly into the faces of the rear attackers.
“My eyes! I can’t see anything! She’s everywhere!” a bounty hunter squeezed out, as the hissing light energy exploded and entire groups of warriors clutched their hands over their scorched eyes, screaming as they began hacking away at their own allies in blind panic.
“You wanted to wipe the Shinto Dojo completely off the map, right?! Then come get some!!” Malaka bellowed.
His gold-white aura flared up into a scorching sea of fire that cast the entire square in a divine light. The energy poured so hard from his palms that the marble tiles under his feet simply dissolved into fine dust. He brought his massive fists together and pounded them with brutal, raw power straight into the bursting earth. A linear shockwave split the remaining lines of the hostile alliance completely in half. The ground surged like water, catapulting the monks meters into the air and turning the complete outer ring into an apocalyptic whirlpool of ash, ice, and pure destruction in no time.
While the complete battlefield was being torn apart, a shrill, metallic screech suddenly squealed through the complex’s loudspeakers. The booming, theatrical voice of the Hype Man echoed once again over the massive, trembling grounds.
“The hourglass is running out, fighters! ONLY A HOUR AND A HALF LEFT! Complete groups and legendary dojos are being wiped off the map in record time in the outer ring at this exact moment! The slaughter is unprecedented! Anyone still on the wrong side of the wall by now is relentlessly out! Get yourselves to those monumental outer gates!”
Outside the walls, the four elite fighters caught the broadcast, but it didn’t even truly register in their consciousness. They were in a zone of pure, brutal focus. They didn’t throttle back a single millimeter and didn’t even think about taking up a defensive formation to conserve their strength.
“That guy with his loudspeaker is starting to irritate me quite a bit,” Izanagi sneered through his teeth, as he turned his meters-long pillar of black flame with a slow, brutal yank and reduced a new line of dojo fighters to ash.
“Less talk, more hitting, brother!” shouted Izanami, who intentionally let her ice armor crack to catch a heavy chain from a corrupt monk, grabbed him straight by the neck, and slammed him against the ground. “We have no time to lose!”
“They still don’t get it! We’re blasting straight through in one line!” Malaka roared, his fists pulsating with gold-white energy as he launched shockwave after shockwave. “No mercy, full throttle!”
Instead of fighting defensively to survive, they decided to double down on the attack. They had zero awareness of the chaos around them; their focus was absolute. Like an untamable, destructive wrecking ball, Malaka, Kali, Izanagi, and Izanami rammed through the remaining hundreds of hordes in a straight line to break toward the inner ring, simply pulverizing everything in their path to dust.
Meanwhile, deep within the walls of the complex, Jeshua, Aurelius, Silarias, and Kaelid were engaged in an intense sprint. The stone hallways vibrated incessantly to their foundations. In the background, they heard the heavy, gigantic explosions of the fight in the outer ring echoing, as if the world outside was being buried alive.
“Beat and Blitz are still nowhere to be seen!” Aurelius yelled while running, his breathing heavy and his eyes wide with panic as he looked over his shoulder. “If we don't hurry up now, they’ll lock those gates with them still outside! Those two sleep through earthquakes!”
“Keep focused on the gate! He can handle himself!” Silarias barked back in his monotonous, cold voice, maintaining his pace with mechanical precision and double-checking his armguards.
Before anyone could answer, the group was suddenly ambushed on their flank. A hostile gang of rival fighters sprang unexpectedly from the deep shadows of the side halls, their weapons gleaming in the scarce light.
“Ambush! Right! They’re cutting us off!” Kaelid warned with a sharp shout, but the brute force and rush of the attackers relentlessly pushed them into a narrow side path. They ran at full speed around the bend, until they abruptly hit a massive, heavy wall of solid stone.
“Damn it, a dead end! You’ve got to be kidding me!” Aurelius cursed. He yanked his weapon from its sheath with a hard tug and turned around to face the enemy, who immediately blocked off the hallway behind them with drawn swords. “This is it then, we’re trapped like rats! We’ll have to fight our way through with sheer force!”
But just as the attackers were about to strike wildly with a blood-curdling roar, the labyrinth stopped following the rules. With a loud, metallic screech, the deep rumble of shifting stone, and rattling chains, the entire environment unexpectedly switched in their favor. That massive wall directly behind them slid open in a flash, while simultaneously, with a deafening crash, a heavy, meters-thick barrier thundered down right in front of the charging enemies’ noses.
Dust, sparks, and splinters flew around as the walls repositioned themselves. The attackers were completely cut off from their prey. Their furious shouts and the futile clatter of their swords against the barrier died out immediately behind the thick stone.
The four warriors looked at each other in utter disbelief, the adrenaline still pumping through their veins. The sudden turn of events was so surreal that the tension instantly flipped into pure relief. They all began cheering aloud at the same time.
“Luck is in our favor!!” Aurelius shouted with a broad grin, throwing his arms triumphantly in the air and doing a little jump for joy.
“You can say that again, yeah. The gods are smiling upon us today,” Jeshua exhaled in relief, lowering his sword and calming the spiritual storms within him once more.
Leaving the cut-off enemies behind, they started walking relieved into the newly opened, quiet hallway. As the pace slowed down slightly to catch their breath, Kaelid looked at Silarias and Aurelius with a deeply raised eyebrow. Jeshua looked sideways with open curiosity as well.
“Say... while we’re walking here and things are quiet for a second,” Kaelid began, his voice echoing loudly against the cold stone walls, “how do you all actually know each other so well? That looked awfully coordinated just now when we rounded that bend.”
Silarias, who was checking the final buckles of his gear once more with cold, mechanical precision, didn’t even look up from his task.
“I am Flamo,” he said in his monotonous, cold voice. He raised his arm and pointed a stiff finger straight at the broadly grinning Aurelius. “And Photo over there is my brother-in-law.”
Jeshua and Kaelid froze mid-step, their feet coming to a sudden halt on the stone floor. Their jaws literally dropped in pure, dumbstruck bewilderment. They stared at Silarias as if he had just said the sky was green. The silence that fell over the hallway was completely absurd and heavy; nobody moved.
“Wait... what?!” Jeshua stammered after a long silence, pointing his finger back and forth between the two. “You are... Flamo?! And he is Photo?! And you guys are family?! My brain really can't handle this right now!”
Kaelid blinked a few times, his tough composure completely shattered. “Are you serious? This is how the puzzle pieces fall together?”
However, the bizarre, peaceful moment was abruptly smashed to pieces. From an adjacent hallway further down, a loud, hysterical scream suddenly sounded, followed by the terrifying noise of clashing steel and heavy combat.
Jeshua reacted to the threat instinctively. He snapped right back into absolute focus, activating his lotus position training, and pointed forward with his drawn sword.
“Over here, it’s coming from this way?!” Jeshua shouted loudly, after which all four immediately sprinted toward the screaming with drawn weapons.
Meanwhile, the four elite fighters from the outer ring blasted deeper and deeper into the inner ring with undiminished brute force, leaving a path of total devastation behind them.
On the complete other side of the complex, in the quiet bedroom, movement finally began to stir in the two lifeless blocks of concrete. Beat slowly and heavily opened his eyes. Those faint, cobalt-blue sparks were still crackling softly over his sheets, the final remnants of Raijin’s otherworldly energy finally fully absorbed.
Blitz, who had been waiting faithfully and impatiently next to the bed the entire time, bounced up instantly. He started hyping up completely, bouncing wildly back and forth in place as if hooked up to a massive power surge.
“Friend friend friend!!!” Blitz shrieked in a high, excited voice. “You’re awake! Finally! We have to go, the clock is ticking, the gates are closing, we’re almost out!”
Beat looked at the hyperactive Blitz, shook the heavy fatigue out of his head, and spontaneously burst out laughing. Hearing his comrade brought the energy right back into his body.
“Hahaha, come on friend, lock in!!” Beat shouted, throwing his blankets aside.
Blitz reacted to the command immediately. He stopped jumping instantly, snapped his heels together with a loud click, and stood bolt upright. He saluted with his hand tight against his forehead, like some extremely disciplined cadet standing at strict attention for his general.
Beat stepped out of bed, stretched his back, and began walking back and forth past the saluting Blitz with serious, measured steps. His voice was low, intense, and commanding, as if inspecting an army before the most important battle of their lives.
“Focus. Outside that door, Beto. No more Beat from now on, but Beto. We need to take a massive run-up if we want to make that gate. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Blitz gave a sharp nod, his eyes locked motionless onto Beat. He signaled with a quick, sharp hand gesture that he understood the plan completely and flashed away in a fraction of a second. The sound of breaking air filled the room as he shot out of the complex with his otherworldly speed, running until he was quite a distance past the monumental outer gate.
Beat was left alone in the empty room. He looked around, calculated the gigantic distance Blitz had just covered in his head, and thought aloud with a broad, dangerous grin on his face.
“1 + 1 = 3... ohhhhh, so that’s what he wants?! Clever bird, he knows how we have to bend the laws.”
With a deafening boom and a bright, cobalt-blue flash, Beat vanished from his spot, leaving the air in the bedroom with a strong smell of ozone. A fraction of a second later, he appeared with explosive upward force right beside Blitz, on top of a meters-high, frost-covered mountain located far outside the arena and the outer gate. That sudden, ice-cold gust of wind on the mountain peak made their clothes flap wildly.
Beat looked around at the snow-covered rocks, then looked at Blitz who was already in a fighting stance, and took a deep breath. “This is pretty damn far, huh, friend. But this gives us exactly the space we need.”
From the high mountain peak, the two had an insane, epic wide-shot and a view that took the breath right out of their lungs. Deep below them lay the monumental, gigantic opening to enter the tournament complex. The sky above the entire arena was filled with magnificent, escalating visual splendor: beautiful fireworks exploded in every imaginable color, magical light particles floated glistening around in the cold air, and a colorful, pulsating glow illuminated the whole grounds like a festival for the gods.
But as Beat and Blitz’s ruthless gaze shifted to the distant horizon at the foot of the mountain, the festive atmosphere wiped away in an instant, and their faces hardened.
There, with a thundering noise that shook the whole earth, knocked trees aside like matchsticks, and kicked up a gigantic cloud of dust, they saw a massive, terrifying bastion coming thundering down at the foot of the mountain, heading straight for the monumental entrance.
“That’s going to make a huge bang,” Beat whispered, his eyes beginning to gleam dangerously with cobalt-blue electricity. “Time to jump, friend.”
High on the icy mountain peak, Beat stared with a fierce gaze at the enormous dust cloud the gigantic bastion was causing in the distance. The wind howled with a sharp screech around his ears, tugging wildly at his clothes, but his focus was dead silent. He turned toward Blitz, who was still standing at strict attention saluting like a possessed cadet.
Beat ran a hand over his chin, took a big step forward, and hit Blitz bone-dry with an ice-cold, tactical glare. He placed a hand on his comrade’s trembling shoulder and bent forward deep to whisper something directly into his ear.
“Listen very carefully,” Beat whispered, his voice dangerously low and barely audible above the storm. “When we land in a moment, you don’t break the fall, you break the law of the landing. We aren't jumping to fall, we're jumping to redirect the impact. The second we hit the ground, you redirect that kinetic energy straight, horizontally forward. Understood?”
Blitz nodded slowly, the hyperactivity in his eyes making way in a single instant for a deep, terrifying focus. The cobalt-blue sparks around his boots began to crackle brighter, shooting wildly upward along his legs, ready to defy the laws of gravity.