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The battlefield became chaos the moment Dove's light exploded outward.
Jason moved before the glow faded, his hands already weaving through the air, slashes racing toward the two monsters who had positioned themselves as his obstacles. Red Death vanished in a crackle of crimson lightning, reappearing twenty feet to the left, already grinning. The Devastator didn't bother dodging....he absorbed the hits, his gray flesh rippling where the invisible blades struck, healing before the wounds could fully form.
Jason's eyes narrowed.
'Death Slash.'
The blade left his hand, absolute, final, the attack that had never failed. It struck the Devastator in the chest.
Nothing happened.
The monster didn't fall. Didn't die. Didn't even seem to notice. He just kept coming, his bone protrusions scraping against each other, his dead eyes fixed on Jason with mindless hunger.
'Soul Slash.'
Another attack. Another perfect hit. The same attack he killed The Absolute Joker with...Yet it was... Another failure.
The Devastator kept walking.
Jason's mind raced. Death Slash killed everything. Soul Slash ended anything with a soul. He had used both against enemies far stronger than this creature, and neither had ever failed. But here, in this nightmare realm at the edge of darkness, something was wrong.
Death didn't exist here.
Neither did souls.
He understood it ...not the logic of it, not the reason, but the cold, simple fact. This place was outside the jurisdiction of the Endless. Death had no power here. Souls had no meaning here. The very concepts that made his most powerful attacks possible were absent, erased, never born.
Then how had he killed the others?
The silent Batman. The machine. The scarecrow-thing. They had fallen just as easily as any enemy in any world. His slashes had worked on them.
Because they were physical.
Jason dodged a swipe from the Devastator's massive claw, the air whistling past his ear, and answered with a Dimensional Cleave. The blade cut through the monster's arm at the elbow, sending the limb tumbling to the ground in a spray of black blood.
The Devastator didn't scream. He just looked at his stump, then at Jason, and kept walking. The arm was already regenerating.
'Physical attacks work' Jason thought, ducking another swing. 'Conceptual ones don't. Death. Soul. Anything that relies on the rules of the real world is useless here.'
He understood now. This place had no rules. Or rather, it had different rules...rules written by the Empty Hand, by the darkness that Dream had warned him about. Death couldn't enter here. Souls couldn't exist here. Only bodies. Only flesh. Only the brutal, physical reality of violence.
'Fine'
Jason's lips curled into a snarl. 'I can do violence'
He unleashed a barrage of Dimensional Cleaves...not aimed, not precise, just a storm of cutting force that filled the air between him and the Devastator. The monster's flesh parted in a dozen places. Arms separated from shoulders. Legs buckled at the knees. His torso split into segments, each section falling to the ground with a wet, heavy thud.
The pieces continued to move.
Even as Jason watched, the severed limbs began to crawl toward each other, drawn by some invisible force. The Devastator's head sat in the dirt, blinking up at him, already reforming a neck, a shoulder, a chest.
"Doomsday regeneration," Jason muttered. "Of course."
He turned his attention to Red Death....the real threat, the one who could actually catch him off guard. The speedster was circling the battlefield, never still, never predictable, his crimson lightning leaving afterimages that made it impossible to track his true position.
Jason sent a slash toward him a clean Dimensional Cleave. Red Death dodged it effortlessly, his body blurring to the side, but Jason had already turned away, already focusing on the Devastator again.
The monster was almost fully reformed. His adaptation was already beginning....the wounds that had taken seconds to heal now took less. The next time Jason cut him, it would take even less than that. Eventually, the Dimensional Cleaves would stop working entirely.
'I need to finish him fast'
....
Above the battlefield, light and lightning danced.
Dove flew through the air on wings of pure white radiance, her hands blazing with energy that left trails of heat in the darkness. She aimed not at the creature in front of her, but at the space he was about to occupy..leading her shots, predicting his movements, adjusting her aim as he twisted and turned.
The Merciless flew ahead of her, his bat-skull helmet gleaming, his sword crackling with divine lightning. He didn't run from her blasts—he dodged them, weaving through the light with the grace of a god who had fought wars that spanned millennia.
"You lasted longer than most," he called out, his voice echoing from the depths of his helmet. "But not longer than all. Do you remember your friends, Dove? The ones I found hiding in their little caves?"
Dove's jaw tightened. She fired faster.
"I remember the woman who begged," the Merciless continued, spinning around a blast that would have vaporized anything else. "The one with the red hair. She cried for hours before I got tired of listening."
"Shut up!" Dove's voice cracked as she fired again, a beam of pure force that carved a trench across the battlefield below.
"I remember the man who thought he could reason with me." The Merciless laughed, the sound hollow and metallic. "He talked about mercy. About honor. About the better angels of our nature." He dodged another blast, this one close enough to singe his cape. "I showed him my better angel. My sword. Through his chest."
Dove's hands shook. The light around her flickered.
"You were the only one who got away," the Merciless said, his voice dropping to something almost intimate. "I searched for you. For years. I wanted to be the one to break you. It was... disappointing, when you vanished." He tilted his head. "But now you're back. And we have so much time to catch up."
Dove screamed.
Light erupted from her....not beams, not blasts, but an explosion, a nova of pure radiance that engulfed everything around her. The Merciless dove, dodging the worst of it, but his cape caught fire and his armor cracked.
He wasn't smiling anymore.
The Merciless changed direction, abandoning his aerial dance with Dove and diving toward the ground...toward Jason, who stood with his back to the melee, focused entirely on the regenerating monster in front of him.
Jason sensed him coming.
He didn't turn. He didn't dodge. He just raised his hand and slashed.
The Dimensional Cleave caught the Merciless across the thigh, severing his leg just below the hip. The god-warrior tumbled through the air, crashing into the ground, his divine blood painting the earth black.
Dove's follow-up blast didn't hit him....his fall had carried him beneath her aim. But it struck the ground beside his crumpled form, and the explosion sent shockwaves rippling across the battlefield.
Red Death hadn't expected it.
He had been circling Jason at impossible speeds, waiting for an opening, timing his attack to catch the human off guard. The explosion didn't hurt him—he was too fast for that. But it surprised him. His rhythm broke. His foot caught on a piece of debris that hadn't been there a moment before, and he stumbled.
Just for a second.
Just long enough.
Jason grinned.
He turned, raised his hand toward the off-balance speedster
The Devastator's claw punched through his chest.
Jason looked down. The monster's hand had emerged from his torso just below the ribs, fingers slick with blood, gripping something that Jason really hoped wasn't his spine. He hadn't heard the approach. Hadn't sensed it. The Devastator had adapted so completely to the Dimensional Cleaves that they no longer slowed him at all.
"Yup....This...Is the pain of getting hit by doomsday...." said Jason as he pushed himself off the hand and kicked the beast away with a powerful kick sending him flying
"Now....How to beat up a monster that adapts...To everything?" questioned Jason
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If you Like this story! Check out my other story ! Shadow Monarch in Danmachi!
AND
If you wish to read more or simply support me just because ? than check out my patréon at
"https://www.patréon.com/Riadooo"
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want !