Black didn't stay down.
The moment his body finished knitting itself back together, he rolled to the side and pushed himself up. The bruises were gone and the look in his eyes had changed. He wasn't laughing anymore.
He was pissed.
Veneri exhaled slowly, rotating his shoulders once as if loosening tension from his joints. I stepped forward beside him.
"Don't hog all the fun. I've been watching you show off for long enough."
He didn't look at me but the corner of his mouth twitched.
"Try to keep up."
"Two of you now? Good. I'll break both of you."
The difference between one martial artist and two was immediate. Black swung his axe in a sweeping arc aimed at Veneri's neck but I slid in from the side. My foot slammed into his forearm just as the blade reached peak momentum. The strike didn't stop the swing entirely but it knocked it off course enough for Veneri to duck underneath it and drive a punch straight into Black's ribs.
The impact went through Black's torso but he twisted mid-stagger and lashed out at me with a backhand strike that would have crushed my skull. I barely got my forearms up in time. The force sent me skidding backward as pain shot up my arms. Even with reinforcement from Darling's Enhancement Mystic Circle, his raw strength was insane.
Gods, this is rough.
But that's the thing about fighting Black using martial arts. There was no safe distance. Every second was spent inside his lethal range where one mistake meant broken bones or worse.
Veneri dashed in again. His Time Divinity flickered for a fraction of a second as he slipped past another axe swing. From my perspective, it looked like he had simply teleported from one spot to another, reappearing behind Black. He drove the punch into the base of Black's spine.
The soul-infused strike caused a visible distortion in the air around the point of impact. Black roared and spun with his elbow lashing out. Veneri blocked just in time to absorb the blow.
That was when I realized how he was still standing against someone like this.
Black is a Fifth Enlightenment Divine. Someone who, on paper, should have been able to crush Veneri in a straight fight. And yet here he was, trading blows with Black.
There were reasons for that. The first was his bloodline.
Veneri is an Aeterium. That meant Body Reconstruction wasn't just some emergency healing technique. Even when Black's strikes slipped past his defenses and landed cleanly, I could see the damage repair itself in real time. It wasn't instantaneous but it was fast enough to keep him in the fight.
The second reason was his Base Tether: Limitless. It was honestly unfair.
Limitless didn't just give him a massive energy reserve. It optimized his energy usage, letting him achieve greater effects with less expenditure. While most fighters would have been gasping from energy loss by now, Veneri's breathing remained steady.
Black, despite his monstrous regeneration, was starting to show the first signs of fatigue.
The third reason was his Time Divinity.
I saw it every time Black attempted a lethal strike. He used it to give him those crucial fractions of a second needed to evade attacks that should have been impossible to dodge.
Then there was his Protection Divinity.
Black finally managed to land a clean hit.
His fist slammed into Veneri's side with a sickening thud. The force was strong enough to send shockwaves through the air. But instead of Veneri's ribs collapsing, a translucent barrier emerged for a split second between the point of impact and his body, absorbing the worst of the blow.
He still got launched sideways, rolling across the ground but he wasn't crushed.
I rushed forward, intercepting Black before he could chase him down. He blocked with the shaft of his axe but that only opened his midsection. I followed through with a spinning elbow that cracked against his temple.
He staggered—only slightly—but it was enough for Veneri to re-enter the fight.
His Soul Energy covered his strikes that made every hit not just painful but existentially damaging. That was the fourth reason he could keep up.
His Soul Energy.
Most fighters focused solely on physical damage, especially against someone with regeneration. Veneri attacked both body and soul. Even when Black's flesh healed, the soul damage lingered, slowing down his reactions and dulling his coordination over time from the pain.
We attacked together again, this time in a coordinated rhythm.
I went low, sweeping my leg toward Black's ankles. He jumped to avoid the sweep, which was exactly what we expected. Veneri was already airborne. His knee slammed into Black's chest mid-jump. Water spiraled around his leg to amplify the impact.
Black fell down but he was still smiling, though.
"You're strong," he admitted, wiping blood from his mouth. "Both of you are. But you're not strong enough to kill me."
And that… was true. That was the one brutal limitation Veneri and I had.
Darling is a monster in terms of endurance, versatility and defensive capability. He could fight Fifth and even some Sixth Enlightenment Divines and survive, sometimes even dominate them in short bursts. But finishing them off? That required something else.
An Overwrite.
Without it, his attacks, no matter how precise or soul-damaging, simply couldn't generate the overwhelming, irreversible destruction needed to permanently put down someone with Black's level of regeneration and divine resilience.
The only reason he had managed to defeat Diov in the past was because his Soul Energy had bypassed Diov's conventional defenses and his own durability had allowed him to outlast the fight. Against Black, though, we were in a drawn-out war of attrition.
And it was exhausting.
Black surged forward again. I ducked under one swing, Veneri twisted around another and we countered in tandem. Sapphire coated fists and reinforced kicks hit him from both sides. The battlefield around us was already scarred with craters and shattered stone. Each missed strike from Black's axe carved new destruction into the ground.
"This is insane," I muttered between breaths, barely managing to deflect another wild swing with a reinforced forearm. "He just won't go down."
Veneri didn't answer immediately. He slipped past Black's guard and drove three rapid punches into his abdomen, each one accompanied by a ripple of water and a burst of sapphire shards that shattered on impact. Then he stepped back beside me but his chest was rising slightly faster now.
"I told you, we're not here to kill him. We'll leave that to Ely. Thank goodness I put Protection Barriers on her."
Black cracked his neck, grinning again as the last of his wounds sealed shut.
"I'm not done either, Aeterium."
I exhaled slowly, raising my fists again, violet energy coiling around my limbs.
Yeah, this was going to be a long fight.