The missing chunk of diamond rose from the cobblestones.
Elya watched it happen. The fractured debris — every shard, every splinter, every grain of crystal dust — lifted silently from the ground and drifted back toward Zaziel's shoulder like time running in reverse. The pieces found their places. The cracks sealed. The joint reformed, smooth and perfect, as if the last sixty seconds had never occurred.
Zaziel rolled the restored shoulder once.
"Don't get cocky," he said.
His voice was controlled. But underneath it, buried beneath the diamond and the title and the decade of training — something had shifted. A heat that had nothing to do with Fantasia.
"I will prove myself," he thought. "No matter the cost."
His gemstone eyes found Elya across the broken street. And then they changed — the colorless depth of them flooding with color, a deep, burning red that bled outward from the pupils and consumed the entire iris until both eyes were twin coals in a crystal skull.
He gradually gathered fantasia from his mouth. It detonated — a shockwave of pressure that cracked the remaining windows on both sides of the street and sent loose debris skittering across the cobblestones. The fantasia in Zaziel's mouth shifted from amber to a deep, arterial red, pulsing faster, brighter, the color spreading up through the crystal lattice of his body like blood filling a glass statue.
He raised his palm.The beam came out silent.
A lance of pure red Fantasia, thin as a spear and moving faster than sound, cutting through the night air and leaving nothing behind it — not even the memory of what had been there. The cobblestones it grazed didn't crack or burn. They simply ceased. A clean line of absence carved into the street where solid stone had been a moment before.
Elya moved left.The beam took a building behind him. The structure didn't collapse — it disintegrated, the entire facade dissolving into fine red mist that dispersed silently in the night air, leaving a perfect rectangular absence where the wall had stood or even a rubble.
Zaziel fired again. Then again.
Elya moved through them — not frantically, not desperately, each dodge deliberate and minimal, his body shifting the exact distance required and no more. A beam took the ground six inches from his right boot. Another passed through the space his head had occupied a half second earlier, dissolving a chimney into nothing somewhere behind him.
Then Elya stopped moving away.He came forward instead. Straight into the beams.
Zaziel fired three in rapid succession — a triangle of angles designed to cover every rational direction of movement. Elya went through the center of the triangle, the beams passing on three sides of him close enough to dissolve the remaining scraps of his coat, and then he was inside Zaziel's range with the spada already moving.
The clash rang out like a cathedral bell.
Spada against diamond arm — a diagonal slash met by a forearm that had hardened into a single solid block, and the impact sent a shockwave rippling down the street in both directions. Elya felt it travel up through his wrists and into his shoulders. He pushed through it.
Zaziel reshaped mid-exchange — the blocking arm splitting into three separate blades that fanned outward, trying to catch Elya from multiple angles simultaneously. Elya's blade found the gap between the first and second, redirected off the third, and the tip drew a clean line across Zaziel's crystal chest.
Another hairline fracture. Thin as a thread.
Zaziel's elbow came around like a wrecking ball.
It caught Elya across the left ribs.
The sound was awful — a deep, dense impact that lifted him off the ground and sent him skidding sideways across the cobblestones, one hand catching the ground to arrest the slide, his teeth locked against the pain blooming up through his left side.
He was back on his feet before the dust settled.
But he felt it. The ribs — not broken, but close. Each breath now had an edge to it, a sharp reminder of what Zaziel's arm weighed when it moved with intent.
Zaziel looked at the fracture line on his chest.
Then charged.
Not with beams this time — with his body. A full sprint, diamond feet detonating against the cobblestones with each stride, both arms reshaping as he closed the distance — the right becoming a broadsword, the left a spear, the geometry of his attack covering high and low simultaneously.
Elya read it and he dropped.
Below the broadsword, inside the spear's range — a blind spot that existed for exactly one stride — and came back up with the spada driving upward in a rising slash that caught the underside of Zaziel's jaw.
The crack that ran up through the crystal neck was audible.
Zaziel's return strike — a headbutt with a skull made of solid diamond — caught Elya across the forehead before he could disengage.
Pure white.The world went sideways.
Elya hit the ground on his back and lay still for one second — one full second where the night sky above him tilted and swam and the Cathedral bell rolled somewhere in the distance — then he rolled onto his side and pushed himself upright, one hand pressed to his forehead where the skin had split, blood running warm into his eyebrow.
Across the street, Zaziel stood with a crack running from his jaw up through his left cheekbone, the fracture glowing faintly red from the Fantasia burning inside him. His neck had a hairline split that hadn't been there before.
He didn't regenerate this time but just looked at Elya.
Elya looked back, chest heaving, his spada hanging loose at his side, blood dripping from his brow onto the broken stone beneath his boots.
The street between them was unrecognizable — cobblestones dissolved into nothing by Fantasia beams, buildings reduced to rectangular absences on both sides, the entire block looking like something had taken bites out of existence itself. Smoke drifted through the gaps where walls had been. The moonlight fell through spaces it had never touched before.
Neither of them moved.
The Cathedral bell rang again.
Three rings now.
Zaziel's red eyes found the spire in the distance. Then returned to Elya.
"You're bleeding," Zaziel said.
"So are you," Elya replied.
A beat of silence came for a moment.
Then both of them moved at exactly the same moment.