They took one step toward each other.
Then another.
The night wind howled across the ruined valley, carrying ash and the copper stench of the dead. The ground between them was a cracked mosaic of blood and shattered stone. Neither man's body looked capable of continuing. Both refused to acknowledge it.
The Contractor of Shadows stopped first.
A low chuckle escaped his throat. It started quiet, then grew into something dry and bitter, echoing off the broken mountainside. Dark blood still leaked between the fingers pressed against his caved-in ribs.
"I see…" he rasped, voice rough. "It seems we should have made certain you died even in Hell. Who would have thought the previous Contractor of the Divine Flame of Curses would stoop so low… and make a pact with the Devil's Serpent?"
Eryndor did not answer immediately.
His eyes flicked over the older man's body. The Contractor's torso was a ruin of bruised flesh and leaking shadow-blood, yet his stance remained steady. His breathing, though heavy, still carried power.
"Huh…"
Eryndor's internal voice was cold and distant.
"From the way he looks… ordinary physical attacks alone won't be enough to put this bastard down."
A slow smirk curled across Eryndor's blood-stained lips.
"However… I still haven't used my trump card."
The Contractor's eyes narrowed.
"Why are you smirking?"
Eryndor's head suddenly began to smoke.
Thin trails of black and crimson vapor rose from his temples, then from his cheeks, then from the crown of his skull. The temperature around him spiked. The air shimmered. The Contractor's expression shifted from confusion to sharp alarm. He took an involuntary step backward.
Jae, watching from high above beside the Divine Flame of Curses, felt his own breath catch.
"What… is that?"
Below, Eryndor's face disappeared beneath a living mask of black-and-red Hellfire. The flames were not wild. They were precise, sculpted, almost elegant in their cruelty—forming a sinister, featureless visage of pure heat and shadow. Only two burning points remained where his eyes should have been. The grey corruption covering his body flared in answer, veins of darker red lighting up beneath the ashen skin like cracks in a dying star.
His power surged.
The pressure that rolled off him was no longer merely that of a man who had crawled out of Hell. It was something refined. Something that had taken the borrowed eyes of a sister who once saw the threads of fate and fused them with the Serpent's abyssal.
The Contractor of Shadows stared, stunned.
"What… did you do?"
Eryndor's voice emerged from within the flaming mask, distorted and layered, as if more than one throat spoke at once.
"After I inherited my sister's eyes… the Sacred Echo… I finally understood something. Her power didn't just show me possible futures. It showed me the shape of power itself. The way divine authority flows. The way it binds. The way it can be rejected."
He raised the shadow blade he had ripped from his own chest earlier. The purple-black edge still dripped with his blood.
"I used those eyes to carve a new form. One that exists between Hell and the threads of fate. I call it…"
The flames around his face roared higher.
"Abyssal Flame Mask."
The Contractor's pupils shrank.
Eryndor continued, voice calm and merciless.
"In this state, the authority of the Divine Flames cannot properly take root in me. Their power slides off the surface of the Mask like water off black glass. Your shadows, your condensed darkness, the very essence of the Flame you serve… they will not harm me the way they once did."
Jae and the Divine Flame of Curses remained silent, but the divine flames of curses form flickered with something that might have been unease.
Below, the explanation ended.
There was nothing more to say.
They moved.
The third phase of the battle erupted without warning.
The Contractor of Shadows poured everything into his next attack. Waves of pure umbral force—dense enough to crush stone into powder—slammed into Eryndor from every direction. Shadow blades by the dozens formed in the air and launched themselves like a storm of purple spears. The very night seemed to bend toward the older man, answering his will.
None of it mattered the way it should have.
The Abyssal Flame Mask burned. Black-and-red fire flared each time a shadow technique struck Eryndor's body. The divine authority behind the attacks simply failed to sink in. Wounds still opened—flesh was still flesh—but the deeper, soul-searing effect that should have accompanied a Divine Flame's power was smothered. Eryndor's regeneration, already monstrous, worked even faster under the Mask's protection.
He walked through the storm.
The stolen shadow blade in his hand sang.
Eryndor closed the distance in a blur of grey skin and red fire. The Contractor tried to fold space and retreat. Sacred Echo whispered the exact moment the fold would complete. Eryndor's free hand clamped down on the Contractor's wrist before the technique could finish. Hellfire poured from the Mask and down Eryndor's arm, searing the older man's skin.
Then the stolen shadow blade drove forward.
It punched through the Contractor's already ruined side, the same place Eryndor's Hell's Crushing Verdict had caved in earlier. The purple-black edge erupted from the Contractor's back in a spray of dark blood. The older man's eyes widened in pure shock.
For the first time in the entire fight, the Contractor of Shadows staggered.
A heavy cough tore from his lungs. blood sprayed across the cracked ground. His knees almost buckled. The second shadow blade in his free hand flickered violently, nearly dissolving.
Eryndor did not relent.
He ripped the blade free and swung again. The Contractor barely raised a wall of condensed shadow in time. The impact still sent him skidding backward, feet carving twin trenches in the blood-soaked earth. More blood poured from his mouth. His breathing had become a wet, labored rattle.
High above, Jae leaned forward involuntarily.
"He's… winning. Eryndor is actually winning."
The Divine Flame of Curses said nothing. Its gaze remained fixed on the Contractor, as if waiting for something inevitable.
Below, the Contractor of Shadows planted his feet.
His body was failing. Ribs ground against one another. Internal damage from the earlier Hell's Crushing Verdict and the fresh stab wound left him coughing up more blood with every breath. The arrogance that had carried him through centuries was gone, replaced by something colder and far more desperate.
He looked at the grey-skinned monster wearing a mask of living Hellfire.
A man who had escaped death once already.
A man who should not exist.
The Contractor's voice came out hoarse, thick with blood, but still carried absolute conviction.
"I have to make sure you die here… now. A man who could escape death and crawl back from Hell itself… is a nuisance that cannot be allowed to live."
He straightened despite the agony, purple-black energy beginning to gather around him in quantities that made the air scream.
"You are a nuisance… Eryndor."
The shadows of the entire valley seemed to lean toward him at once.
His eyes locked onto the Abyssal Flame Mask.
"Divine Art—"
The words left his mouth like a death sentence.
"—Infinite Shadow Cataclysm."