The light from the impact hadn’t completely dissipated when sothing inside began to move.
It wasn’t a desperate reaction, nor a body thrown uncontrollably. It was a step.
Slow.
Heavy.
Deliberate.
The column of energy connecting heaven and coliseum began to fragnt from within, as if being corroded by an opposing force that refused to be extinguished. Dark fissures appeared in the luminous structure of the lightning bolt, cracks that didn’t belong to electricity, but to the very authority that sustained it. Then, with a dry snap, the discharge split in two and exploded outwards in scattered currents that streaked across the isolated horizon created by Alice.
In the center of the newly ford crater, Dante stood.
His body was scarred. His clothes partially charred. Small sparks still traced his skin, dancing like remnants of an energy that hadn’t managed to finish its work. Smoke rose slowly around him, but his eyes... his eyes were more alive than before.
He tilted his neck slightly, cracking it, as if he had just stepped out of a cold shower.
"That was... polite of you."
His voice wasn’t angry.
It was amused.
Above him, the atmosphere rearranged itself. The artificial clouds enveloping the coliseum spiraled open, revealing an impossible geotry drawn in the firmant. Seris wasn’t supported by anything visible. She simply was there, suspended as if the very concept of gravity had been temporarily disregarded. Around her, multiple smaller circles orbited her body, each rotating on a different axis, composing a control system that resembled a living constellation.
She watched Dante with the serenity of soone who had already calculated dozens of possible futures.
"I expected you to resist," she said, her voice descending like a controlled breeze. "But you always turn correction into spectacle."
Dante laughed.
And then he disappeared.
The sound ca before the image.
A violent displacent of air exploded where he had been, and in the next instant he appeared before her, sword already in motion. Rebellion didn’t just cut in a straight line; the blade described an arc that seed to split multiple layers of space simultaneously. The attack targeted not only Seris’s physical body, but the magical systems surrounding her.
Three of the orbital circles shattered on impact.
The rupture was not silent. The sky vibrated like glass struck by an invisible hamr, waves of distortion spreading in concentric rings that traversed the isolated coliseum. Down below, the fight between Vergil and Angelo was montarily illuminated by that celestial reverberation.
Seris retreated not out of necessity, but out of calculation. Her body disintegrated into luminous particles before the blade completed its movent, reappearing dozens of ters above, while dozens of vertical lines of energy began to fall around Dante like divine spears.
He didn’t block.
He spun.
Rebellion beca a central axis, and his body followed the movent in a perfect rotation. Each downward thrust was deflected by fractions of a second, the steel finding energy and tearing it sideways. So spears hit the ground, piercing the coliseum and creating pillars of destruction that evaporated entire stands.
Even so, two struck him.
One pierced his shoulder.
Another tore his side.
The impact launched him down like an inverted teor.
He fell.
But he didn’t crash.
Before hitting the ground, Dante plunged his sword into the void, and space itself responded as if it had been physically pierced. The blade found support in nothingness, and he used that as leverage to change trajectory, sliding sideways while tearing away the energy that held him.
He landed on his feet.
Blood trickled down his arm.
He looked at the wound, then up.
He smiled.
"Do you really think control trumps instinct?"
Seris didn’t answer imdiately. Her eyes analyzed. Every exchange was being registered, adapted, rearranged. She extended her right hand, and all the circles around her aligned into a single horizontal plane. The sky darkened not from a lack of light, but from the compression of authority.
The space between them ceased to be neutral.
It beca territory.
Dante felt it.
Her smile diminished just enough to indicate real attention.
When Seris closed her fingers, the very concept of distance was compressed. There was no visible displacent, but Dante was instantly crushed by a multidinsional pressure that tried to bend his body inward. The air disappeared around him, sound was suppressed, and the ground below began to give way under the invisible weight.
For a full second, he didn’t move.
Then he laughed.
And the laughter echoed even without air.
A dark aura erupted from his body like an inverted fire. It wasn’t light. It wasn’t shadow. It was sothing prior to both. The pressure around him began to crack, fissures spreading like glass under tension.
"You keep trying to put in a position to conform to rules," he said, his voice now deeper, vibrating with sothing that hadn’t been there before. "But I never played fair."
The ground beneath his feet exploded.
Not outward.
Upward.
A wave of ascending energy broke through the compressive field and surged straight toward Seris, not like a beam, but like a tide. It was chaotic, unruly, brutally dense. Wherever it passed, magical structures were forced to recalibrate to avoid falling apart.
Seris raised both hands.
The attack hit her head-on.
The impact didn’t destroy her.
But it pushed her.
For the first ti since she had appeared, her body was forcibly displaced, dragged through the sky as the defensive layers around her shattered in sequence. One, two, five, ten layers undone before she could stabilize her position.
She breathed.
There was no fear on her face.
But there was recognition.
Dante appeared before her again, faster than before, as if each previous blow had been rely a warm-up. His sword t the newly ford magical barrier, and the shock produced a wave that pierced Alice’s barrier, making her vibrate dangerously.
They exchanged blows at a speed that made ti irrelevant.
Cut.
Explosion.
Counterspell.
Rupture.
Each of Seris’s attacks was precise, orchestrated, sustained by laws rewritten in real ti. Each of Dante’s responses was unpredictable, aggressive, instinctive, breaking patterns before they even solidified.
Neither of them completely dominated.
Neither of them retreated.
When they finally moved a few ters apart, the sky above was unrecognizable. Luminous streaks crisscrossed the firmant, fragnts of energy floated like cosmic debris, and the isolated coliseum itself trembled under the weight of that contest.
Dante swung his sword once before resting it on his shoulder.
His body was wounded.
But his posture remained relaxed.
Animated. "Now we’re talking."
Seris kept her eyes fixed on him, the circles around her rearranging themselves once more, not in imdiate defense, but in preparation.
"You really are a problem," she said, not as an insult, but as a mathematical observation.
And then they both moved again.
Not to end it.
But to continue.
Because that battle wasn’t about imdiate victory.
It was about asuring limits.
And Dante, even facing an architect of laws, made it clear with each exchange that he wasn’t just brute force.
He was rupture... And he hadn’t shown everything yet.
The fragnted sky still trembled with the echoes of the last clash when sothing in Seris’s posture changed.
It wasn’t hesitation.
It was decision.
The magic circles orbiting her body began to slow down, one by one, until they ceased completely. The runes didn’t disappear—they were absorbed. The light that had previously remained organized around her began to seep under her skin, like golden veins spreading inside her body. The air beca heavy, not from external compression, but from the concentration of power being internalized.
She descended slowly until she was at the sa height as Dante.
Her feet touched the void—and the void accepted.
The first crack ca from within. A dry sound.
The muscles in his arms expanded, not grotesquely, but with perfect definition, fibers rearranging themselves beneath the skin like ropes stretched to their maximum. His shoulders broadened, his posture beca lower, more centered. His abdon defined itself with sculptural precision, each line marked as if drawn with a blade. His legs adjusted to the new structure, denser, firr.
It wasn’t just aesthetics.
It was efficiency.
His aura changed.
The architectural vastness of before gave way to sothing concentrated, sharp, almost predatory.
Two lines of light erged in his hands.
They solidified into blades.
Not ornate swords.
Not symbolic weapons.
But pure extensions of intention. Two long blades, slightly curved, translucent as compressed crystal, each vibrating with stabilized energy at absurd levels.
Dante observed everything without interruption.
His smile widened.
"Now that’s more like it."
He adjusted the grip on Rebellion.
And then Seris vanished.
There was no visible displacent. Just a gap in space where she had been—and the next instant the tallic sound exploded behind Dante.
He spun the sword reflexively.
The first blade of Seris struck Rebellion with enough force to produce a circular shockwave that ripped through the ground below. The second ca milliseconds later, aid at the side of his neck.
Dante leaned back, the blade’s tip passing inches from his skin, cutting a strand of hair that fell spinning slowly.
He kicked.
Seris blocked with her leg, the impact creating a burst of compressed air that pushed them both back several ters.
Neither retreated.
She advanced first.
Two quick, crossed thrusts, one high, one low. Dante dodged the first and blocked the second, but the block wasn’t perfect—the blade grazed his abdon, opening a shallow cut that imdiately began to bleed.
He smiled at the pain.
He spun and counterattacked with a brutal horizontal slash.
Seris crossed both swords before her.
The impact caused the space between the blades to crack.
Not figuratively.
Crack.
A black fissure appeared between the weapons, as if the very fabric of reality had been crushed by the collision. The pressure was so intense that the entire coliseum vibrated, Alice’s barrier rippling dangerously.
Seris slid to the side, using the force of the impact to reposition her body. Her movent was now purely martial—no long-range conjuration, no floating circles. Each step was calculated to generate maximum torque. Each hip rotation amplified the power of the blades.
She unleashed a sequence.
Three quick slashes, a full spin, and a downward strike that carried not only muscular force but a thin layer of magical reinforcent compressed into the blade.
Dante blocked the first two.
The third opened a cut on his shoulder.
The downward strike hit him directly.
The impact hurled him against the ground like a projectile, creating a deep crater that spread in radial cracks for dozens of ters.
For an instant, dust and debris covered everything.
Seris didn’t wait.
She plunged into the crater.
Dante stepped away from her.
The two collided mid-air.
Sword against sword.
Fist against blade.
Knee against rib.
The combat ceased to be an elegant exchange and beca brutal.
Seris spun her body, using the montum to deliver a direct elbow strike to Dante’s jaw. The impact sent his head snapping violently to the side, blood splattering into the air.
He responded with a headbutt.
The shock caused the air to explode between them.
She slid beneath a wide cut from Rebellion and plunged both blades into the side of his torso, piercing flesh and exiting through his back at a diagonal angle.
The silence that followed lasted half a second.
Dante looked down.
Then at her.
And laughed.
With the swords still piercing his body, he took a step forward, forcing the blades to tear even further as he closed the distance between them. Her left hand gripped her wrist with absurd force.
Her right hand lifted Rebellion.
And lowered it.
Seris released the swords at the last instant, her body leaning back as the blade passed milliters from her face, cutting the air and splitting a floating mountain in the distance into two perfect halves.
She spun in the air and kicked Dante in the chest with both feet.
The impact finally ripped him from the embedded blades, throwing him backward as the swords dissipated into particles of light.
He landed on his feet.
Heavy breathing.
Blood trickling from multiple wounds.
But his eyes were alight.
Seris landed a few ters ahead.
Her body, now fully adapted to physical combat, exhaled a light vapor from skin heated by the exertion. Small fissures of energy coursed through her defined muscles, reinforcing each contraction.
She assud a new stance.
Low.
Stable.
Focused.
Dante wiped the blood from his mouth with his thumb.
He spat on the ground.
And spun Rebellion once before pointing it directly at her.
"This is much better."
The ground beneath them began to give way again, unable to withstand the density of the clash.
And then they both advanced at the sa ti.
No distant magic.
No elaborate preparation.
Just blade.
Flesh.
Instinct.
And enough strength to make an isolated world tremble with each impact.
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