A.N. Ramadan Mubarak to my Muslim readers. I hope your fast is easy.
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Blood poured out in rivers as the two furious fighters engaged one another in the most vicious and bloodthirsty duels they'd ever exchanged with one another in all the years they had known each other. The very Floor they were situated in shook under the weight of each exchange as rocks dislodged themselves from the ceiling and plummeted into the abyss below the Colosseum. The Loki Familia did their very best in making sure to avoid being crushed by one of these giant boulders, and could do nothing but stare helplessly at the colosseum.
The custom darkness of the 37th floor disappeared as it gave way to the lightshow that burst out of the great stone arena. Licks of lighting and plumes of fire as well as magical energy spewed forth even over the walls of the Colosseum from their perspective and a rising heat began to emanate from there of such a degree that the lower levelled adventurers began to fear that if they tried to venture forth and help their comrade against this deadly foe, they would just be incinerated.
Lyze roared as he decided to unleash all that he was physically capable of doing, no longer holding himself back for the sake of his Familia. Lyze had several powers and techniques in his arsenal. However, as Ottar had advised him, they were all far too destructive and would endanger anybody he worked with simply because he could not control the consequences of his actions. It was why he often worked alone and why he had not busted out these moves because he was afraid of hurting somebody.
But his master had spurred a festering hatred and resentment in him, and had pushed at every single one of his buttons. Nekros had trained the boy, so he knew exactly what riled him up and what would bring out the beast lurking in the boy. None of Lyze's enemies, not even Zanis Lustra who had been consumed by Chaos and whose life force was devoured by Lyze's soul so he would never reincarnate ever again, had seen the vengeful monster that clashed with the Transcendent being in that arena.
Lyze swung out with the Unity Excalibur, the blade now being longer and sharper than its original form, at his old master with such force that the air pressure it generated cleaved the monsters surrounding them in half as well as the walls behind them. It clashed with an even heavier blow from Nekros as his master cancelled out the blow but it did nothing to stop the ground cracking beneath and destroy a large portion of the colosseum wall as a huge laceration formed in its wall.
As they wrestled in a contest of raw strength with one another, each wobble of their arms created blasts of pressure that pulverised the rubble and the monsters that continuously spawned around them as the Dungeon relentlessly threw her offspring at the pair to minimize the damage being done to her. Nekros broke the hold and punched Lyze in the face, completely shattering the boy's skull. Any normal person would have instantly died but Chaos regenerated the boy's face as the Flame roared to life and Lyze clenched his own fist.
He punched a Flame powered blow into Nekros stomach, into the same wound he'd made earlier with Geranos. A shockwave passed through Nekros body as the man hunched over, splattering the monsters behind him against the wall. Lyze then tried to hack towards the back of Nekros's nape in hopes to decapitate him. But Nekros quickly ran Lyze through with his own sword, making the boy gasp as blood spurted out of his mouth. As Lyze had been charging up the Flame, arcs of silver lighting had been running over his body as he was simply brimming with energy.
Seeing this, Nekros lifted the boy up with the sword so Lyze's body hung on one end like the head of a mallet. And just like a mallet, he swung the whole thing down making Lyze impact the ground with force that it rocked the entire arena and the Origin energy that was bursting out of Lyze's body detonated in a blast of silver fire that roared with a screeching noise as a pillar of flames shot out of the colosseum towards the ceiling with such ferocity that it made the Loki Familia closed their eyes to blot out the brightness. Some put their hands over their closed eyelids but even then, it was so bright that through their eyelids and through their flesh, they could see the bones in their fingers.
A storm of silver lightning raged forth from the colosseum like laser beams as they burned through walls, cliffs and ground creating ruts of lava as the sheer heat of it instantly melted the white bedrock.
Out of the consequential mushroom cloud, Lyze came bursting forth grappling with Nekros as they both flew out of the colosseum and collided with walls of the Floor. Lyze flew his master through the walls, holding Nekros's head down purposefully so his skull would dig out a trench in the walls of bedrock as they dismantled the entire thing, raining stones, boulders and dust down the wall to the ground below. Their weapons both followed them as they tried to keep up with their owners.
Nekros grunted and reached around behind him, managing to grab one of Lyze's wings and harshly pulled.
He twisted them both in the air and this time slammed Lyze into the wall, burying a deep punch into Lyze's gut. The boy choked as blood and spit blew out from his mouth along with some of the linings of his lungs as his chest felt like it was on fire. Nekros then punched his head into the wall before a flurry of blows buried Lyze deeper and deeper into the wall. He leaned out of the hole he'd made with Lyze's body and grabbed the boy by the foot, swinging him around again only to throw him down to another part of the warrior's room.
Lyze's body regenerated again with Chaos magic as he turned in the air and held out his hand. Excalibur broke direction and sailed into the hands of its wielder as Lyze's feet hit the ground, creating craters with in craters as Nekros grabbed his own sword and jumped after him, bring his weapon down on Excalibur. The clash created sparks as well as spews of lighting tearing across the ground as a blast wave destroyed everything around them. They relentlessly began trading blows with one another, each collision of exploding magic and pressure as loud metal clangs threatened to burst everybody's eardrums even though they were over a mile away. The earthquake they made with each blow knocked some adventurers off their feet.
Lyze clipped both their swords together and drove both blades into the ground as he punched Nekros in the throat, this time brimming with Chaos magic. Momentarily Nekros's head morphed into an abomination a creature that threatened to explode with what looked like an increasing volume of blood. But Nekros kneed Lyze in the chest so hard that the boy's heart exploded and Lyze screamed as a that sharp furious pain rocked his entire being with shock and agony.
Nekros's head returned back to normal before he backhanded Lyze into the air. The boy's body shot through the air like a meteor and collided with the top of the Colosseum wall again. Lyze's heart regenerated again as he gasped in relief before he saw Nekros begin flying towards him again. Lyze let go of Excalibur momentarily and held out both hands.
"{Cruel Sun}, {Dark Sun}" He chanted as both miniature suns appeared in the respective hands of the sides that represented their origin of magic. Both suns burned with furious intensity, one of golden fire emitting great light and one of black fire devouring light. "Merge!" He yelled as he pushed the two suns together.
This was a magic attack that had been so dangerous, he'd promised himself he would not use it except in the face of the greatest foe due to how destructive it was. With it, he had created a hole in the ocean floor which in turn induced a giant whirlpool that threatened to suck in entire ships and tear them apart. It was a terrain altering attack which he now had no qualms of using against Nekros.
The two suns joined together and immediately lost their appearance as they simply became a ball of purple energy, unstable Chaotic Force that threatened to rip apart space as reality almost seemed to cave in around it. Lyze released it in the direction of Nekros and the Loki Familia were privy to a giant laser beam of searing purple energy firing across the Warrior's room and engulfing Nekros. But the Transcendental held up his sword and cleaved right through the attack, dismantling it into null as he continued straight for the boy.
Lyze was forced to lean out of the way as the sword impaled the stone by his head. He tried to swung Excalibur at Nekros, but Nekros punched him in the face, wrenched his bastard sword out of the rock and spun around as he brough his weapon in a roundhouse swing. Lyze ducked to avoid being bisected and the attack collapsed the entire portion that wall, bring in thousands upon thousand of tons of structure down as the giant colosseum seemed to begin collapsing on itself. Such might boggled the Loki Familia as not even the greatest they had ever known could just destroy the colosseum walls like that.
Seeing as his blade had missed and they began to fall due to the wall collapsing, Nekros grabbed the boy by the throat and swung him round and round as they approached the ground before slamming Lyze's face into the floor as deep cracks ran along it and started to collapse the rest of the colosseum walls like a domino effect. Lyze wrestled himself out of the grip and backflipped backwards as he summoned Chaos and launched it the man.
Nekros saw the metaphysical form of Chaos approach him in the form of thousands of abominable creatures who desired to devour him. But a flurry from his blade sliced Chaos into pieces and the entity retreated back into Lyze as the boy lifted his brows in shock.
"How did your physical blade touch something in another dimension?" Lyze asked, utterly bewildered.
"The peak of swordsmanship." Nekros smiled at him. "You might get the hang of it someday."
The man leapt at the boy and tried to impale him into the ground but Lyze flapped his wings as he jumped backwards and flew into the air, allowing Nekros to impale the ground with his sword. Lyze's Goddess wings on his Nephilim form glowed brighter as he lifted a hand in the air.
"{Celestial Avalanche}!" He cried as dozens of what looked like Cruel Suns appeared in the air around him. They were of varying colour, of red to gold to yellow to orange to white to blue, every possible colour that a star could exist in came into being by the might of Chaos as they rained down on Nekros. Each explosion was like the detonation of a bomb as the immediate area of the colosseum began melting under the extreme temperatures.
"{Trillion Darkblade}" Lyze said as the Goddess wings died down and the Demon wings flared to life. Tendrils of darkness began to leak out of the wings and they started to condense as they became thick with dark density and therefore extremely solid and durable. They shaped out into razor thin blades that stormed the approximate area that Nekros was in, flying in and out of the chaos as they sliced everything they touched into dust. It looked like millions upon billions of black shockwaves were cleaving the same spot millions of times a second as Lyze spammed them continuously, hoping to destroy this finite avatar that his master had sent to fight him.
Lyze had taken inspiration for this attack from two sources. One was Meliodas's 'Trillion Dark' where the demon prince had condensed his Darkness into tiny balls of solid darkness that had so much compressed mass to them that they put holes in the Demon King.
The other source was from Sukuna's Malevolent Shrine in which both Cleave and Dismantle rained down endlessly on the Curse King's victim until they and everything around was cut up into nothingness.
With heavily compressed blades of Darkness that did practically the same thing, Lyze could not see a way in which Nekros would be able to escape this onslaught, not even as Lyze clicked his fingers and those razor blades lit with the black flames of hell through {Hellblaze}, which nullified any form of regeneration. But still Lyze knew his master and how slippery he could be and that these sort of attacks were nothing new to Nekros.
So he had Excalibur at the ready when he let up the attack and all the soot and dust subsided from the fiery glow beneath the smokescreen. It revealed Nekros with his upper body completely bare, riddled with scars and black fire covering open wounds pouring blood that dripped to a pool of lava in which he was sunk in about halfway up his calves. The Transcendent being huffed and breathed as he looked up at Lyze with shock in his eyes.
"I would never have thought that you were capable of such precise control over your powers." Nekros confessed. "But you have so much more to learn!" Nekros held his hand forward and clenched his fist.
All of Lyze's magic was cancelled out and his body was violently pulled forward by a telekinetic grip. Lyze flipped and rolled in the air as he foresaw the oncoming attack, so he righted himself at the right moment, pouring all physical and magical might into his fist as his fist lit on silver flames. His fist crashed into Nekros's as they both punched towards each other. That seemed to be the most that the colosseum could handle as the whole structure just exploded outwards from the shockwave.
The Loki Familia began to panic as large pieces of the arena came shooting their way, like meteorites about to flatten them as the whole 37th Floor completely rocked with the power of the connection. But just as it seemed they were done for, the rocks began to slow down until they stopped completely in mid-air. Everybody's hairs then began to stand on end as they felt a rising pressure of some kind that bore down on their bodies and their souls.
Before their eyes, discarded weapons, boulders, stones, dirt and injured monsters began to levitate in the air as the two fighters started leaking powerful magical energy from their bodies all the way in the arena as they clashed once more. Sparks showered off their blades as they exchanged sword blows, shockwaves slicing up the area as deep slashes and lacerations began appearing all over the ceiling and the walls as well as the floors. The more they fought, the more powerful their attacks seemed to become as even more magical pressure started to be exerted on them all.
Some of the adventurers began to clutch their throats and feel lightheaded as they were soaked in the magical power of the master and the student.
"It's like we're looking at two titans." Finn groaned as he shielded his eyes from the brightness of Lyze's flames. "The stronger one of them gets, the quicker the other catches up. On and on."
"Where the hell has the kid been hiding all this power?" Bara asked as she was forced to her knees under the pressure. "Why did we not see any of this before?"
"I don't know." Riveria replied. "But accept it or not, Lyze has hidden many things and it is all connected to that man he's fighting. Lyze only started to show power like this when he showed up."
"Something tells me this battle is about to reach its climax." Dain said as now Lyze and Nekros were visible to them. "The kid looks like he's pressing an advantage."
...
Lyze twisted around Nekros's blade in an awkward way and kicked the man's wrist, making him drop the sword as he uppercut Nekros in the face, sending the Flame into the avatar's body in hopes to try and damage whatever spiritual source was holding it in this realm. He landed a series of combos with his flaming fist that shook the ground before he pulled Nekros arms and swung him upwards.
The disorientated Nekros went sailing in the air as Lyze flew around him at near lightspeed, raining down blows after blow on the man's body. Every time Lyze flew past his body, the boy landed some sort of physical or magical attack, and then came back around to deliver the same thing again.
Nekros at one point managed to see where he was coming from and kicked Lyze in the face so hard, that the boy's jaw ripped of completely and Lyze went spinning through the air in a tumble of blood, teeth, feathers and sweat. Chaos instantly regenerated his jaw and Lyze righted himself as he fired a blasting stream of silver lightning at Nekros. Nekros stayed afloat and fired his own stream of lighting as both attacks connected and they were stuck in a contest of willpower as they continued to generate more and more lightning.
Everybody's hair began to fuzz and sparks of electricity fizzed between their own hair as their skin started to prickle.
A ball of lightning began to form where the two streams met and grew bigger and bigger as more energy began to concentrate and began to grow unstable. Space and light began to distort around the ball of energy, and it began to pulse and contract until it could be contained no longer and it exploded, making everybody's ears ring as their entire bodies were rocked by the shockwave before a wave of magical energy washed over the Warrior's Room.
Nekros was sent plummeting back to the platform where the colosseum used to be. The avatar began to crumble and lose strength as glowing cracks appeared over his skin. Nekros got on his hands and knees and looked around as he noticed that the pieces of the colosseum which had been floating about different parts of the Warrior's Room were now orbiting the platform. He looked up at his student as he reached for his sword.
Lyze's eyes changed once again as the Goddess symbol and the Demon eye disappeared. "I have you where I want you. While it's just against a mere avatar, I finally get a victory over you Nekros!" Deep pits of void appeared in Lyze's eye sockets with glowing points of purple as the full power of Chaos were brought to the forefront and Excalibur was sheathed back in its scabbard.
"Your overconfidence will be your undoing." Nekros said as he stood to his feet. "You have no idea the extent of my experience or the reach of my power, even as I am in this form."
"Save your cliché lines for when you're gnashing your teeth in Valaron! Because the cycle ends here!" Lyze held up the Hand of Sabazios as he gleefully chanted his next line.
.
.
.
"{Ryoiki Tenkai: Konton no fukyōwaon}"
Chaos emerged from Lyze's body as it's presence filled the Warrior's Room. Chains burst forth from the ground and wrapped around Nekros's limbs, restraining him and pulling him to his knees as the ground began to melt again. Chaos roared towards him and began tearing him apart.
The minds of the Loki Familia were unable to comprehend the image of Chaos, so they could not see what was happening at all as Lyze's flames had covered the entire area and it was making things too bright for them to see. However, one member of the Loki Familia began to suffer an exceptional stress.
Coinciding with Chaos's emergence, Riveria shrieked as a sharp pain hit her head and her brain quite literally felt like it was about to explode as she was bombarded with images. She fell to her knees and continued wailing in agony, much to the distress of her peers as Rivera's nightmares were replayed to her over and over again.
The image of a young man with black hair, green eyes and a handsome face flooded her senses as well as a sense of overwhelming despair, love and grief as the emotions of somebody else smashed into her own soul. Her entire being began to resonate with something as she felt a literal pull to...somewhere. Or perhaps something was being pulled towards her. Either way, she was provided no comfort as she was continuously assaulted with someone else's memories until she finally overloaded and fell unconscious as her brain just switched off from too much pressure.
"LADY RIVERIA!" Kalos shouted as he caught her and held her up.
...
Just as Zepha has suffered, Nekros was continuously disembowelled and then regenerated, only to be shredded again millions of times a second as he was also bombarded with every spell, elemental of practical, and every sort of physical attack one could conceive. Lyze smiled as he sensed his master finally beginning to weaken and he held out his hands, silver flames coming to life as he blasted them into the mix.
The colosseum walls and rubble that had been orbiting the platform where they once stood together as a structure began to melt instantly into molten rock and metal as they too were bombarded at Nekros, burying the man under a fiery ocean as thousands of more chains came out of the ground and restrained him further.
Lyze sensed that his time was almost up and he would not be able to hold this form much longer, so he descended to the highest ledge overlooking the colosseum as he poured all magical power and energy currently available, along with his stamina and his mental fortitude into a new attack as a giant silver arrow of fire formed in his hands and pointed right towards the Transcendental who was on his last legs.
...
"{Kratos...Thymós}" Lyze said as the arrow fire blasted towards Nekros and the whole platform was set alight with a nuclear explosion of Origin energy as a pillar of silver fire devoured everything in that area, dissipating and eviscerating all within as people were crushed by the pressure and spiritual heat bearing down on their souls, the brightness about to burn their eyes out of their sockets. Eventually, every single member of the Loki Familia thereafter fell unconscious as they could no longer cope under the power of Lyzof Keele.
The flames eventually subsided as darkness returned to the 37th Floor and peace was restored. Lyze stumbled as he lost his Nephilim form and he was forced to close his eyes to prevent Chaos from ripping HIM apart. He stood straight, smiling as Excalibur returned to his original form.
"Hahaha...HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA..." The boy began to laugh dementedly. "I WON! I ACTUALLY WON! I FINALLY GOT ONE OVER THE BASTARD!" He began to pump the air with his fists in his excitement, the exhilaration of revenge tasting like the sweetest nectar you could find. "Who's weak and cowardly now huh?! Who prevailed?! You'll do well to remember this day Nekros! That in this fight, the one who was victorious was not you!"
Lyze proudly gestured to himself, still drunk on satisfaction, vengeance and power as the influence of Chaos failed to completely leave him.
"IT WAS ME!" He shouted proudly.
Throwing his arms out widely, he looked like as if he wanted to embrace the sky as he became high on the one victory that actually felt like something worthy of being called a great feat.
"Throw whatever you want my way you old coot! Come rain or sunshine, you shall take example from this today! That no matter what I do, I ALWAYS WI- URRKK!"
Blood spewed out of Lyze's mouth as a sharp object impaled him from behind. He shakily looked down to see the entire length of Nekros's bastard sword stuck right through his body, having cut through his guts and abdomen in a diagonal cut as all the strength left him and his legs collapsed from beneath him, serving to make the blade cut through more of his flesh.
He looked behind him to see a grim looking Nekros standing behind him gripping the handle of the sword.
"I told you." Nekros said. "Overconfidence...would be your undoing."
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