The floor began to ruptured. The windows burst outward in a roar that sent reams of paper spilling out into the open air like a blizzard. Sirens began somewhere below, faint, distant, pointless.
The fight left the building in the next second—Ryo slammed clear through the exterior glass and out into the open sky, Max following at his heels, flames trailing behind him like comet tails.
They crashed across the city like meteors.
Cars swerved. People ducked. No one understood what they were seeing until it was already too late.
Max caught Ryo mid-air by the collar, swinging him downward.
The impact cratered the hood of a parked bus. The chassis folded in half like paper; windows blew out in a radial burst. Pedestrians nearby were thrown like ragdolls by the shockwave—impact, blood, silence.
Ryo clawed himself out of the crushed metal, blazer scorched black at the edges.
"You really don't hold back, do you?"
Max didn't answer.
He dropped down, foot first. His heel struck Ryo's sternum. The concrete beneath the bus collapsed, folding downward, the entire transport sinking into the street. The pressure from Envy's aura pressed outward in all directions—heat radiated like a solar flare, baking asphalt, buckling metal.
People within twenty meters blistered instantly.
Dozens fell screaming, skin peeling, hair igniting, clothes melting into their flesh. Traffic lights bent downward as the plastic housings sagged, dripping molten streams.
Max still didn't look at them.
Not once.
Ryo rolled off the ruptured bus, coughing as his blazer fused to his skin in places. He stood, chest rising and falling—not in fear, not in exhaustion, but calculation.
Max sprinted again.
This time Ryo stopped him with a single raised palm.
"Up."
Gravity inverted. The ground beneath Max lurched upward, crushing him into the ceiling of an underpass. The concrete overhead shattered around his shoulders, showering chunks onto the traffic jam below.
Then gravity was suddenly tripled.
Cars flattened. Engines ruptured. Gas ignited. A fireball roared up the road as fuel tanks detonated one after another—chain reaction, deafening, lethal.
Pedestrians were lifted off their feet only to be slammed down with such force that bones snapped through skin, bodies pancaked into the asphalt. Blood and tissue turned the sidewalk into a slick of red.
Max tore free of the ceiling slab, boots carving gouges as he landed.
The flames around him burned a darker green. His breathing was shallow, not from pain, but animal focus. Envy stirred through him, no words, just drive.
Ryo brushed dust from his shoulder and looked around.
He gestured lazily to a row of burning cars.
"Launch."
The vehicles obeyed. They lifted, then accelerated—hurling toward Max like artillery shells. He blurred—dodging the first three, slipping between the next two, catching the seventh with both hands. The car screamed against his grip, metal bending inward.
He redirected it.
The sedan fired back toward Ryo with enough force to bend the air behind it.
Ryo lifted his hand.
"Split."
The car ripped into a thousand pieces mid-flight, an airborne storm of steel that peppered storefronts, pedestrians, and passing cyclists indiscriminately. People ducked too slowly—shards tore through throats, torsos, cheeks, eyes. Blood misted across windows.
Max dashed forward through the metallic rain, heat vaporizing the smaller fragments before they could strike him. He smashed his shoulder into Ryo's ribs, then his knee into his stomach, then his elbow into the side of his jaw.
Three hits.
Three cracks.
Ryo staggered.
He wiped blood from his lip, but didn't regenerate yet.
"I killed the Virtues you came with, you know."
Max paused for the first time.
Ryo smiled—just a little.
"Imani. Elias. Ceal."
He tapped his temple.
"Blessed little lambs. Thought they could even touch Dominion."
Max's flames flared upward.
Heat rippled out in concentric circles. Glass warped in nearby buildings. Asphalt began to soften, blistering in dozens of spots.
Pedestrians in the blast radius caught fire where they stood.
Clothing ignited. Hair burst into flame. Skin cracked, peeled, charred. People ran—their limbs dripping liquefied fat—leaving burning footprints behind them until their legs gave out and they collapsed, sizzling.
Max didn't react.
Not even a twitch.
Ryo lowered his hand. "And you worked with them."
Max's breathing deepened.
Ryo tilted his head.
"You're an excuse for a Vice."
Max moved.
Ryo reacted—too slow.
Max's fist collided with his face with a crack like thunder. Bone shattered. Teeth scattered across the street in bloody white flecks. Ryo flew into a pharmacy, shelves collapsing around him. Bottles burst, chemicals spilled, alarms shrieked.
Ryo dragged himself out of the wreckage of the pharmacy, blood still slick around the edges of his collar. He was breathing hard—not from exertion, but from restraint. His eyes tracked Max with clinical hunger, like he was dissecting him mid-fight.
Max stalked forward, heat boiling off him in black– forest green pulses that melted signage on nearby storefronts.
Ryo raised his hand—not to command—but to signal silence.
Max froze only because he wanted to hear it.
Ryo tilted his head slightly, blood trailing down from his lip.
His voice came out low, deliberate:
"I could tell you to jump. To break. To kneel. To choke on your own tongue."
He flexed his fingers once, letting sparks of Dominion spill off the nailbeds.
Then he lowered his hand and looked Max
dead in the eyes.
"But there's one word I can't use."
The air tightened.
The fight paused—not officially, not by agreement, but by gravity. Something old and ugly pressed between them.
Ryo exhaled, slow, almost reverent:
"Die."
He didn't shout it.
He didn't test it on Max.
He just let the word exist between them like a loaded gun.
A wind broke across the intersection, pulling dust and heat sideways.
Max didn't move.
Didn't blink.
His flames didn't dim.
Ryo continued, voice steady:
"Death is the only order in the world that cannot be obeyed by force."
His face changed—not in shape, but in weight. The arrogance thinned, replaced by something older, something that remembered centuries.
"Don't you get it?"
Ryo shouted.
"Death is a choice."
He gestured loosely toward Max with two fingers, palm open—not threatening, just stating.
"And no one can take that choice away."
His eyes darkened.
"Not even Dominion."
It sounded like a confession.
Like a rule of physics spoken by the thing that tested them.
Behind him, flames from overturned cars flickered in the wind—bending, bowing, but not dying.
Ryo wiped his lip with the back of his hand and grinned, the arrogance sliding back on like a worn jacket:
"Free will," he added, almost laughing, "I guess that's my only loophole."
Max didn't respond with words.
His answer was the way the pavement under his boots began to blister.
The way his pupils constricted to pinpoints.
The way the green fire around him sharpened into spears.
Ryo saw all of it—and welcomed it.
"So stop acting like this is your last chapter," Ryo whispered, stepping forward, "and start fighting like you want to live."
Max was already mid-swing.
This punch sent Ryo through the back wall of the pharmacy and out into the next building—office cubicles erupting around him, monitors sparking, workers screaming, diving under desks as debris rained down.
Ryo slid to a stop against a filing cabinet, leaving a groove of broken tiles behind him.
Max barely had time to register Ryo's words about death before the air changed.
Not heated.
Not pressured.
Hollowed.
As if sound itself had been sucked away from the world.
Ryo's body jerked once—violently—like someone yanking a marionette string. Flesh bulged beneath his shirt, seams splitting one by one until the blazer tore off his back like wet paper. The white spread across his skin unevenly at first, then flooded outward—bleaching hair, bleaching eyes, bleaching every edge of him until only absence remained.
Muscles swelled, cords tightening beneath the surface, ripping seams. His shoulders broadened, spine lengthened, ribs expanded until the office cubicle collapsed beneath him.
His face dissolved. The eyes sank. The nose melted. Only a single vertical mouth remained, stretching open into a pitch-black void ringed in bone-white lips.
No sound came from it.
This was Dominion in it's finest.
And the city itself seemed to brace.
Ryo — no longer Ryo — took a step forward.
The buildings nearest him sank three inches from the weight of it. Entire floors collapsed into each other. Cars imploded on impact. People were crushed into pulp instantly—flattened, ruptured, unrecognizable.
Max didn't hesitate.
He sprinted—heat rolling off him in serrated sheets, flames whipping behind him in green-black banners.
He swung.
The punch hit Dominion's chest like a meteor. The force threw him backward into the side of a bank tower — glass and steel wrapping inward around his body before the entire façade crushed inward, folding around him like tinfoil.
There was a beat of stillness inside the hole.
Dust. Paper. Glass shimmering in the air.
Then the tower erupted outward as Dominion burst free, body enlarging with each stride, growing into a hulking white monster that tore through office floors like cardboard.
Max leapt upward to meet him mid-air.
They collided twenty stories up.
The shockwave rippled through the skyline. Windows in a three-block radius shattered into glittering rain. People below clutched their ears and collapsed as the sound wave ruptured eardrums and left thousands bleeding.
Dominion grabbed Max by the skull and swung him downward, yanking him through the air like a hammer on a chain. At the last second Max twisted, warped the vector, and smashed Dominion into the underside of a skybridge.
Concrete burst. Steel cables snapped. The entire skybridge sagged, groaned, then dropped straight down into traffic.
Dozens of vehicles vanished beneath it.
No screams. Just instantaneous compression—metal, glass, and bodies crushed into a single flattened sheet that buckled into the road.
Max didn't look.
Dominion rose from the rubble of the collapsed bridge and slammed both palms together.
The air detonated outward.
The force was invisible but everything caught in it flattened — cars buckling in on themselves like soda cans, trees snapping, storefronts collapsing, street performers and passing crowds dropping as their ribcages imploded.
Max dug his hands into the asphalt to anchor himself, molten tar boiling around his fingers as the pressure forced the ground to crater beneath him.
Heat answered pressure.
Flame burst from Max's spine, blasting upward in a pillar that cracked nearby windshields and ignited hanging banners.
The air took on a toxic green tint.
Before the white giant could move, Max was already on him—no hesitation, no restraint, no human rhythm left in his movements.
He slammed Dominion through the remaining wall and out into the open street. Cars flipped from the impact, rolling end over end into burning storefronts. Street signs twisted. Lamp posts bent. Bus stop glass vaporized in a wash of heat.
Dominion pushed up on one knee.
Max didn't allow a second.
He seized the Vice by the jaw—one hand gripping the bone-white mouth, the other driving deep into Dominion's sternum.
Heat exploded from Max's arm, so intense the blacktop liquefied under their feet. Dominion's body convulsed, muscle tearing, bone cracking under the pressure.
Then Max pushed his fist.
Not forward.
Down.
Driving Dominion into the street with a force that broke the surface tension of the city. The asphalt gave first, then the concrete, then the sublayers beneath.
The world caved in.
A crater opened—ten meters, then twenty,
then deeper—spiraling downward as Dominion's massive frame carved into the ground like a meteor.
Max managed to create distance by that time.
After a couple of seconds Dominion climbed out—white form steaming, mouth stretched into an abyss.
He raised both arms.
Max's flames went black-green, spinning around him like a cyclone, searing the air itself.
Dominion brought his fists down.
The world bent.
The city collapsed inward in two kilometer wide ring distance—buildings folding like teeth under a continent-sized jaw. Thousands of tons of concrete, glass, and metal plunged into the bowl of destruction.
People didn't scream.
There was no time.
Hundreds were crushed, flattened, atomized.
The shockwave rippled for miles.
Max didn't care.
He blitzed through falling debris, flames slicing through stone like melting butter, and slammed his hands into Dominion's throat—green fire erupting point-blank.
Dominion staggered into the center of the crater — massive, white, and steaming, his abyss-mouth sucking in air without sound. The gravity distortion around him faltered for the first time, warping inward instead of outward, like the world was finally dragging him down.
He raised his head.
Max stood over him.
No flames.
No aura.
Just a boy stripped down to pure intent, shoulders rising and falling with silent breaths.
Dominion's abyss-mouth widened, preparing another gravitational collapse — until he saw Max's eyes.
Not green.
Not human.
Pure black.
Depthless. Lightless. Like staring into the bottom of a well made of hunger and silence. The kind of black that didn't absorb light — it erased it.
Dominion froze.
For the first time in his long memory, the Vice of Dominion hesitated.
His body tensed, ready to command the world again, voice forming the beginning of a sound—
Max moved.
The world didn't blur. It didn't distort. It simply didn't have time to witness him.
His fist came down.
First impact:
Max's knuckles cratered Dominion's skull — white bone splintering outward like porcelain hit by a hammer. The force drove Dominion's massive body half a meter deeper into the shattered asphalt. Shockwaves rippled through the crater, launching dust in thick gray clouds. The ground underneath glowed dull orange from the heat bleeding off Max's bones.
Dominion's command flickered and died in his throat.
Max's fist rose again, trembling with pressure.
Second impact:
The punch slammed through the upper jaw — the abyss-mouth twisted sideways, teeth breaking like chalk under a sledge. Black and white fluids sprayed across Max's face and chest, steaming on contact from the heat in his skin.
Dominion's limbs spasmed, fingers clawing uselessly at crushed earth. Gravity around him wavered — patches of the crater floor bulged upward then flattened as his control glitched.
He gurgled something that might have been "Regenera—"
Third impact:
Bone fragments exploded outward. The upper half of his head flattened into the dirt, white bone chunks skipping across the crater like shrapnel. Max didn't blink as shards cut into his cheeks — his black eyes just drank in the motion.
Dominion's hand twitched, reaching toward Max's throat — not to command, but to hold, to anchor, to exist.
Max didn't let him.
Fourth impact:
Heat scorched the crater floor. Asphalt liquefied. White muscle turned to paste. Dominion's fingers curled inward as the force traveled down his spine, cracking vertebrae like dry twigs.
There was no scream.
Dominion's abyss-mouth couldn't scream — it could only gape wider, black hole widening, sucking in dust, debris, and broken air as if trying to swallow sound itself.
Max's fist lifted one more time.
Dominion saw his eyes again — saw the absence — saw whatever ancient thing Envy truly was looking through a human vessel.
For the first time, Dominion's abyss-mouth trembled.
Not in fear of pain.
In recognition.
He had seen this before — centuries ago — in a burning palace, in a sinking ship, in a plague-wiped city.
Envy.
Then Max's fist fell.
Final impact:
Max's knuckles punched through what was left of Dominion's skull — the crater floor split, molten asphalt splashing outward like black lava. Dominion's head collapsed inward, bone and white matter and black viscous fluid filling the impact hole like a ruptured vessel.
His body jerked once.
Twice.
Then went slack.
No more gravity distortions.
No more commands.
No regeneration.
Just a massive white corpse steaming in a crater of molten pavement.
Max's fist stayed buried in the ruin for a long moment, his breath shallow and
irregular, black flames smoldering off his shoulders like slow-burning coals.
When he finally withdrew his hand, the crater floor sizzled — bone fragments glowing dull red before turning to ash. White steam curled up from the corpse as the crater settled into eerie quiet.
Max stared at what was left — eyes still black, expression unreadable, not even the ghost of relief.
Dominion's body did not twitch.
Did not rebuild.
Did not move.
There was nothing left to regenerate from.
The Vice of Dominion was gone.
Dust settled across the crater, blanketing the corpse in a thin gray film. And in that silent, ruined bowl of a dead city, the truth settled like ash:
Dominion is dead.