"Awe fuck."
The Great Demon's claws descended.
Mahoraga saw death rushing toward him in two enormous arcs of black flesh and jagged talons. There was no time to dodge. No time to think. The battlefield itself seemed to slow down under the weight of the Great One's terrifying Will.
For all his time, he never believed that he would die.
Mahoraga always thought that the Strings of Fate would twist to his survival… but alas, that was not the case.
And even though he was faced with his imminent destruction, Mahoraga didn't regret his decision to challenge the Second Nightmare.
A person could be defeated. They could die. But the moment they regretted walking their chosen path… that was true defeat.
Thus, beneath the descending shadow of the Great Demon's claws, Mahoraga simply bared his teeth and laughed.
He could already picture it — the Demon's talons punching through his chest, ribs splintering apart, his body reduced to ruin beneath that monstrous weight.
Then flesh burst apart.
Blood exploded across the dunes.
The claws punched clean through a body with enough force to atomize bone and bury themselves deep into the earth beneath.
But only — it wasn't his.
A Fallen Nightmare Creature writhed between the Demon's claws instead, its mangled torso twitching violently as organs spilled across the sand. The creature gave a wet, choking screech before the Great Demon ripped straight through it entirely.
Mahoraga stared for a second, stunned.
The Fallen One had lunged at him.
No, a better way to put it would be that it had thrown itself between them.
And somehow, impossibly, the creature's lunge — driven by the very same intent to tear into his chest — shifted his position by the smallest margin, just enough for the Demon's claws to miss him.
Yet, he didn't dwell on it much longer…
What was there to dwell on?
Life had always been absurdly unpredictable. One moment, a man stood at the peak of heaven — the next, he was a corpse trampled beneath someone else's ambition.
Whether he lived because of luck, coincidence, or some twisted whim of Fate itself meant nothing. The only thing that mattered was that he was still alive.
So Mahoraga simply accepted it.
Accepted the scars on his chest. Accepted the narrow escape. Accepted the impossible turn of events without confusion or gratitude.
And moved.
The dunes beneath his feet exploded apart as he lunged forward, to salvation… The Great Demon didn't take his survival too kindly, its enormous head snapped toward him, its countless eyes burning with hunger.
Its claws had missed.
The next would not.
The Great Demon's wings folded in, its hind legs pressed against the sand, pushing the ground deeper into the earth.
A moment of stillness gathered in its massive frame, like the calm before a storm. The air itself felt heavier, dragged inward by the beings unholy Will.
Mahoraga had already felt it — his movements beginning to drag, as though the air itself had grown stronger, each step pulled him backward towards the Great One.
"Move!" Dharma said.
He already had.
The ground behind him exploded.
The Demon's body didn't simply follow — it arrived as though a meteor had crashed. A brutal, collapsing mass of muscle and bone that erased the distance between them as if it had never existed. Where it landed, dunes ceased to be dunes. They became a shallow basin of shattered sand and crushed stone.
Mahoraga skidded across the edge of the impact zone as he struggled to keep himself upright. Another step slower — he wouldn't be here anymore.
The beast searched for him without sparing a second.
Its ears flicked upwards and the quills on its back rose again, poised to volley him into a corner once again.
But he didn't wait around.
Changed direction mid-sprint, he hurled himself into the ruins of a fortress. What had once towered into the sky now barely rose above the sand, its shattered remains reduced to a field of collapsed stone and broken foundations scattered like boulders across the dunes.
A second torrent of darts descended.
Quills hammered into the ancient structure with catastrophic force, punching through thick reinforced stone as though it were brittle clay. Cracks raced across broken walls before entire sections collapsed inward beneath the relentless impacts.
Mahoraga darted between the rubble while the world around him exploded.
He slid behind the remains of a fractured wall just as another volley struck. The reinforced slab above him shuddered violently. Dust poured down over his shoulders while quills dug deeper and deeper into the stone with monstrous force, each impact sounding like firing artillery.
"Oh, that's bad," Dharma muttered.
The second phase had started — the Great One crashed into the ruins.
Its colossal body slammed through the fortress like an avalanche given flesh. Stone turned to pebbles, pebbles turned to fragments, and fragments turned to a plume of smoke.
A tidal wave of debris swallowed everything.
And within that storm of dust and destruction — the Demon accomplished nothing.
The Great Demon tore through the remains of the fortress and skidded across the dunes for nothing.
Mahoraga was already gone.
Several hundred meters away, tangled vines suddenly burst from beneath the sand. They twisted upward violently before unraveling apart like severed tendons, and Mahoraga stumbled out from between them.
In front of him lay a stretch of battlefield untouched by the Demon's passage.
Units still tried to hold their intended positions, vanguards split into smaller scores and singles their enemies while each flank guards aided with their rear guards tried to circle their opponents but were met with devastating resistance.
Nightmare Creatures exploited gaps as always, only to be met by counters from both sides that kept them out.
This region was still locked in war…
And yet, this battlefield was the heart of Dharma's plan.
Mahoraga's breath steadied as he stepped forward, and for a brief moment, the chaos behind him felt distant, almost irrelevant.
But he couldn't play around for long, after enjoying his bout in the sun, he made his way to the centre of the battle.
The Demon was still on him, infuriated by the struggle of his prey there was only one way it could soothe its anger — by hunting him. Its great wings spread forth and traced the remnant vibration in the sand, no doubt arriving in a few seconds and it did exactly that.
Sensing the exact vibration that belonged to Mahoraga a short distance away, it let out a shrill cry of triumph, locking onto him the moment he knelt with his hands pressed to the ground.
Mahoraga didn't give the distant cry the dignity of a reaction. He remained where he was, and took a breath, recalling Dharma's exact plan.
...
An Hour Ago
"How do we build a bomb in a desert?" Mahoraga said with a frown. "And even if we did, a mundane explosive barely rattles a Dormant Beast — how is that supposed to kill a Great Demon?"
Dharma shook his head, visibly disappointed. "I'm not talking about a mundane bomb," he said, his eyes sharpening. "Listen closely, pay attention…
"Everything has a counterpart. In the same way, cursed energy — drawn from negative emotions — has its own inverse: positive cursed energy. But unlike its opposite, it isn't born from sunshine and rainbows, giggles and smiles. It can only be produced through a single method — by multiplying cursed energy by itself. Simple mathematics.
"But here lies the problem — the process is nearly labyrinthine. No Incarnation has ever managed to learn it alone; they've always needed a leg-up. So—"
"What kind of leg-up?" Mahoraga interrupted, his tone tentative.
Dharma scoffed and brushed. he question aside. "Don't interrupt me for god's sake! I'll explain that later. Now, where was I… yes. We're going to cheat the system. Instead of creating positive cursed energy ourselves, we'll borrow it."
"Borrow it from where?" He asked cautiously.
"Borrow it from who, you mean?" Dharma said with a grin. "You see, humans are inherently composed of positive cursed energy — it's the foundation of life itself. In contrast, Nightmare Creatures are formed from cursed energy. Because of this, humans are naturally twice as resistant to cursed energy, while cursed energy is twice as effective against them. Conversely, Nightmare Creatures are twice as vulnerable to positive cursed energy, while being twice as resistant to cursed energy in return."
Mahoraga doubted his explanation for a moment then cleared it up with his own understanding, "So… like Pokemon?"
Dharma tilted his head in confusion. "What the hell is a Pokémon?" he asked, before rifling through Mahoraga's memories. After a moment's pause, he nodded. "Yes! Exactly like Pokémon!"
He continued in a solemn tone, "Since Nightmare Creatures are resistant to cursed energy, a bomb made from it would be largely ineffective. And there's also the issue that you can't form a proper explosive without a viable energetic medium to begin with."
"So," he continued, his tone sharpening, "you don't use cursed energy as the payload at all. That part is worthless here."
Mahoraga's brow tightened slightly, but he didn't interrupt.
"You use positive cursed energy as the energetic material instead," Dharma said. "That's your fuel." He paused briefly, letting the idea settle before continuing. "And cursed energy becomes the initiation system. The trigger. The spark that forces a reaction."
Mahoraga's eyes narrowed a fraction. "A trigger?"
Dharma nodded. "Yes. You don't detonate one with the other. You make them collide. Cursed energy destabilizes the positive structure on contact — forces it into collapse. And when that collapse happens…"
His grin sharpened.
"You get a neutral state."
"But where do you get the positive cursed energy?" Mahoraga raised his question, still uncertain.
"That's the neat thing," Dharma said lightly, almost playfully. "You don't create it — you take it. Humans are made of positive cursed energy, so you use them." He gestured around the battlefield. "Look around. There are countless sources of it here. You treat them as fuel."
…
Mahoraga focused sharply, reaching into the roots hiding beneath the dunes, the remnants of Floreen and the carrier for his explosion.
Then he pulled.
The reaction began quietly.
Across the battlefield, buried vine networks shuddered awake as if something had grabbed them from every direction at once. They slithered upwards to the source of their wakening, gliding through the smooth sand before breaking through to the surface.
Innumerable roots pierced the sand and appeared from all directions at once, pulled to the call that awakened them from their slumber. They rustled under the wind, waiting for their master's command.
The sudden rise of the vines did not go unnoticed.
For a moment, both sides hesitated.
Then their instinct replaced their confusion.
A front-line squad from the western flank mistook the writhing roots for a new Nightmare Creature and opened fire immediately.
Spear-like constructs and condensed energy projectiles tore into the emerging vine mass, shredding sections of it mid-ascent.
The vines did not retreat, instead they reinforced themselves, thickening around the points of impact and anchoring deeper into the sand.
But, after this, they could not attack a second time.
Mahoraga willed the vines to attack his human compatriots, and so they did. Following his will, the vines coiled themselves tighter and struck.
They pierced through armor and flesh alike, threading into every presence they could reach in an instant.
Soldiers from both sides froze in place.
Roots spread through the battlefield like a living circuit, connecting every pierced body into a single, vast lattice buried beneath the dunes.
Mahoraga, was using them as fuel!
The Demon was carving through the rear formations in a desperate attempt to reach him, but the losses didn't even cause a ripple. The system of roots had already ensnared hundreds of thousands — perhaps even millions — of humans.
But another question plagued him…
Linking every individual through the network forming a single interconnected whole, was only the first step. The next required using them as the medium against which his cursed energy would be driven to collide.
But simply flooding their bodies with cursed energy would achieve nothing on its own.
It would disperse uselessly through the body, diffusing into the air without ever reaching the threshold of reaction. The structure needed opposition, not saturation — two forces driven into each other until neither could maintain form.
Think! Think! Think!
Mahoraga's thoughts were like a tidal wave of desperation, he could feel the Great One approaching through the loss of his roots and could do nothing to stop it.
Every connected body across the field pulsed faintly in his perception, like a single vast organism stretched across the dunes. He could feel the cursed energy he had already seeded inside them, dormant but present, waiting for structure. Yet it still lacked a counterweight. Without resistance, it was just circulation — power with nowhere to break.
Then, out of nowhere, something old surfaced in his mind. A memory from when he was a kid — his dad pitching to him in a forest they resided in during one of their travels.
That old game allowed him to break through, and understand the missing piece! It wasn't about pushing harder into them. It was about forcing them to oppose themselves!
Rotation…
A baseball in flight did not travel in a straight path; it carved a chaotic spiral through the air, its motion shaped by invisible forces acting against it. Even if his father was a deadbeat asshole, he had explained this much correctly.
Spin did not merely alter direction — it governed how force unfolded upon impact, deciding how energy would be released the moment contact was made.
A pitch thrown wrong was just chaotic. A pitch thrown right became an impact.
And if the bat met it.
The collision didn't merely stop motion — it transformed it. The snap of contact wasn't just sound, it was release. The potential energy resolves into a clean expression of force.
That was it. It wasn't about flooding nor forcing or overwhelming them. It was about instability — a structured spin that demanded collision to resolve itself. His cursed energy didn't need volume. It needed geometry.
Across the battlefield, every connected human body flickered in his awareness like points on a vast lattice. He seeded his cursed energy through them as though it was a release valve for his essence.
What it needed was a rotational axis.
His expression shifted, this feat was going to be a testament to his mastery in his aspect.
"Spin…"
And then he imposed it.
Cursed energy across the network began to rotate — each stream forced into controlled orbital motion within the bodies it occupied. But raw rotation alone was unstable. It would tear apart unevenly, losing coherence before release.
So he refined it further, tightening the construct until it obeyed a precise proportional rule — a recurring spiral, expanding and contracting in a pattern that never fully repeats, ensuring that every collision point remains slightly misaligned until the moment of convergence. A perfect imperfection that guarantees instability at scale.
The Golden Ratio.
And now, it only required contact with an opposition.
The Great One wreaked havoc behind him, mutilating and devastating all those of the Flame as it hungered towards him.
His cursed energy surged through the vine network in spiraling currents, twisting around itself as it raced across the battlefield. Then, at last, it permeated into the bodies bound within the lattice.
Its ears somehow gained the ability to feel the mystical vibrations around him and honed onto the source of it — Mahoraga, who was still focused on carefully introducing the two separate energies.
The moment the opposing force was introduced, the system collapsed inward along its own spiral and collided against the positive energy of the body. The two forces spun around each other in an elliptical orbit before finally closing in, and collapsing in on itself, creating a neutral state of energy.
The Great One let out a roar of delight, its marks mere inches away. The Bird extended its razor-sharp talons, ready to pierce the Sleeper's body.
Mahoraga diffused the energy into the vines and feeling the Demon behind him, used the last bit of cursed energy that coursed through his veins and commanded a single vine he left out to finally surface.
The vine grappled upwards, responding to his will and burst forward from the ground in a plume of sand and penetrated the Great One's flesh.
And with that final act, Mahoraga had won…
The neutral energy that laid dormant in the roots moved towards its lonesome brother who established a connection to the corrupt sovereign.
What had once been cursed energy and positive energy no longer existed as separate forces — the collision had annihilated both into something terrifyingly pure.
And now, all of it had a path.
Straight into the Great One.
The vine embedded within the Demon's flesh trembled violently as the dormant energy finally arrived.
The neutral energy erupted through the Great One's body like divine judgment, racing through every vein, every nerve, every fragment of cursed flesh connected to the pierced point. The spiral collapse propagated infinitely inward, each reaction birthing another before the previous one had even finished.
Its body began to unravel.
Layers of flesh peeled apart into streams of dissolving matter. Entire sections of the Demon vanished soundlessly. One wing disappeared first, erased from the shoulder outward in a wave of distortion. Then its torso caved inward, its ribs collapsing into nothingness.
The Great One screamed.
The sound shattered the battlefield.
But alas, there was no one to hear its last wretched cry.
The Awakened hosts withered into mummified husks as their life force was siphoned away. Vitality fled their bodies in moments, leaving behind nothing but desiccated corpses still frozen upright.
The Golden Ratio continued to propagate through the network inside its body, only this time it was made of the neutral state of cursed energy, each spiral collapse feeding the next. The Demon's own cursed existence became fuel against itself.
Its desperate, hateful and terrified claws reached toward Mahoraga one final time.
Then they dissolved before they could touch him.
Its frame lost cohesion entirely as expanding fractures of pale light spread across its body like cracks through porcelain. Through those fractures, nothingness shone.
And then — the Great Demon collapsed inward.
The dunes rose.
The sky split apart beneath a force that rose far beyond the clouds themselves. Sand vaporized across countless kilometers, while the desert below melted into oceans of glass beneath the radiating heat. Yet even that devastation did not mark the end of it — the lingering thermal wave burned the newly formed glass back into ash and sand far beyond the initial blast radius.
It was as though the sun itself had descended upon the earth, annihilating thousands of Awakened and incinerating immeasurable hordes of Nightmare Creatures in its wake.
[You have slain a Great Demon; Skypiercer]
[You have slain an Awakened Human; Bran]
[You have slain an Ascended Human; Shoka]
[You have slain a Fallen Tyrant; Sand King]
[You have slain a…]
[You have slain a…]
[You have slain a…]
[You have slain a…]
[You have slain a…]
[You have slain a…]
[You have slain a…]
[You have slain a…]
[You have slain a…]
…
Hundreds of thousands of kilometres away.
Dharma stood frozen, watching the realm ignite beneath a second sun. With the Great One itself consumed as fuel, the reaction had escalated far beyond even his calculations, transforming the explosion into something vastly more catastrophic than he had ever intended.
For several seconds, he could not even comprehend what he was seeing.
The horizon had vanished.
The desert realm — once an endless expanse of dunes beneath a pale sandy sky — now looked as though the sun itself had descended upon the earth. A pillar of incandescent light pierced the heavens, stretching beyond the clouds in a widening spiral of destruction. The atmosphere warped around it, folding in waves of distortion that spread across the sky like cracks through glass.
Dharma's grin slowly disappeared.
"…That idiot."
Even from this distance, the heat reached him.
"What an overachiever," he scoffed.
A few seconds later, his body unraveled into shadows as Mahoraga's essence finally ran dry.
______
A/N - We back and we smokin on that flame pack 😤😤😤
Also, if y'all think the fight was too short. Js know that the total word count of this fight is 6k, that's almost 8 ss chapters. So this fight is long enough, G3 writes short chapters