Chapter 47: Bane
[A new transformation has been unlocked.]
[Demonic Entity Linked: Nyroth.]
[Transformation: Bane has been activated.]
Silence...
Jax stared at Axel for a long moment.
Axel sat there in silence, his hands hovering inches away from his face... His eyes had gone dark and two cyan dots found its place as pupils, dilated and hollow..
On his mouth a mask had formed. It didn’t stretch to the other parts of his face... it just sat there on his mouth — jagged teeth present on top of it.
The scar on his face also changed to a cyan color, running from above his eyes to his cheek.
"Uhhmm... you doing alright bro?" Jax asked after a moment. He was stunned and shaking.
The oppressive aura radiating off of him made it hard to breathe...
Axel didn’t say anything. He just nodded and stood. Cyan energy crackling around his body and buzzing around him like he was a living live wire.
The ground shook when he stood and the graveyard rumbled.
Nightmare looked up and smiled.
Not an excited one... but a nervous grin slowly finding it’s way on his face.
"Well, this is bad..."
Axel began walking forward ever so calmly like he wasn’t freaking out about this power moments ago...
[Host status: Stable]
[Host’s aura is unstable and hungry...]
Nightmare took a stance. He let his own aura surge.
"If I keep letting you live, you’ll become too much of a problem..."
Axel exhaled. His mouth didn’t open bit steam blew out from the gaps in the teeth of the mask.
He leaned forward...
Then, he vanished. The ground exploding behind him...
Nightmare barely had time to react when a streak of cyan light flew past him, tearing his side open.
He pivoted sideways, his side closing up instantly.
He lounged immediately...
He came in low in a blur, and the ground where he’d been standing cratered from the force of his push-off.
Axel didn’t dodge. He did a half step and tilted to the left causing Nightmare’s claws to rake through empty air where a throat used to be.
"Fast," Nightmare muttered.
"Faster," Axel murmured.
He had finally spoken.... His voice came out wrong, like two people as one, in the body of one person...
He gave a strike of his own, cyan light detonating from his knuckles as his fist closed the distance.
Nightmare got an arm up in time to block it, and the impact still threw him back, gouging twin potholes into the graveyard dirt with his feet.
Nightmare rolled his shoulder, testing it, and grinned the same nervous grin again. "Okay," he said. "Not broken...."
He came again, faster this time, feinting high before dropping into a sweep aimed at Axel’s legs.
Axel simply stepped into it, letting the sweeping leg knock him over. He pivoted with his hands just before hitting the ground and swung his heel into Nightmare’s side hard enough that something popped audibly.
Nightmare groaned, twisted, and drove a knee up into Axel’s back as both of them broke apart, skidding across the floor.
Steam hissed out from the edges of Axel’s mask. His chest didn’t rise and fall in the way that indicated that his was breathing. He straightened his posture, cyan energy crackling up and down his forearms.
A brief moment came where they just stared at each other before Nightmare moved again, rushing at him with blinding speed.
They traded for what felt like minutes...
Nightmare’s claws screeching off Axel’s forearms in sparks, Axel’s fists cratering earth and stone every time Nightmare slipped a hit, the two of them carving a widening ring of destruction through the graveyard as more tombstones came undone when their fists collided and thundered through the air.
Nightmare was good, a devil built for exactly this kind of close, ugly violence.
But he still couldn’t land a clean hit.
Axel caught a claw strike an inch from his collarbone, twisted hard something in Nightmare’s wrist gave way with a wet crack that made the devil groan.
That was when Yuri arrived.
There was no shout, no dramatic entrance just a steady gust of wind and then a tendril with the thickness of a man’s torso came whistling out of the dark toward the back of Axel’s skull.
He deflected...
**CRACK**
Bare-handed, without turning around, cyan light flaring across his forearm as the tendril thrashed and retracted.
Axel brought him arm down... it was hanging wrong as the force of the hit twisted his arm brutally to the side.
He stared at it for a moment...
Then...
**CRACK**
He forcibly twisted it back in place, the bones popping in ways that sounded wrong.
He caught another tendril, and it writhed, trying to wrench free, and Axel pulled, hauling Yuri’s full mass forward and slamming his fist directly into his face with a force so heavy it sounded like a thunderstorm.
"Two against one," Axel said. Through something that looked like a smile. His mask didn’t move but from the way the edges of his eyes narrowed, anyone could tell...
"Sure. Why not."
Yuri answered by sending four more tendrils at once, slashes aimed at his chest, head and both knees, while Nightmare circled wide to flank.
Axel exhaled again...
He drove forward into the tendrils, cyan energy wrapping his forearms and tore. The first tendril split open along its length, black liquid spraying in an across the tombstones.
He caught the second tendril as the remaining two retracted, twisted, and planted a heel directly into Nightmare’s jaw as the devil closed in from the side.
Bone crunched. Nightmare’s head snapped and he went down hard, rolling twice before he stopped moving.
Yuri took a step back before lashing at him again, multiple tendrils firing towards him in a torrent of flesh.
Axel dodged... though he took cuts and dashed forward closing the distance within seconds.
He caught the next strike two-handed, both palms slamming flat against a tendril and this time he didn’t just tear it....
He crushed it.
The flesh popped as black liquid started everywhere and Yuri recoiled, screaming in agonizing pain as managed to free himself, dragging his ruined body backward across the ground..
Behind Axel, Nightmare was pushing himself back up onto one knee, jaw hanging at a wrong angle.
He looked at Axel then spat a mouthful of blood.
"This is very bad...."
Axel rolled his neck, joints crackling with cyan sparks, and took a single slow step toward him as they clashed again.
~~~~~
Hayley watched the fight go on with a look on her face that borderd between horror and awe.
She was nearly completely drained and running out of options.
Axel’s aura wasn’t making it better....
She coughed a handful of blood as she felt the sheer weight of the power emanating form the boy.
The ground shook, the air exploded... soon she was just looking at cyan light streaking past her in every direction.
Axel was moving too fast for her to see...
Yuri stumbled before falling next to a tombstone and sitting up, resting his back on it.
The fight raged on and even though he couldn’t see anything clearly, one thing was certain.
Nightmare was losing...
**WHOOSH**
Axel appeared before him and stood. His breathing was audible and the mist leaking from his mask made him look terrifying.
’This... this wasn’t the plan.’ He choked. ’He didn’t tell me that the boy was this powerful.’
Axel stared at him with those hollow eyes of his. The dark dot drilling directly into his soul...
Yuri’s eyes shook as fear clawed at his heart and grim realization sprung in his heart...
He had realized that all the people and devils he had hunted, every moment before inevitable death, he had stared at them like this.
His victims were in the same position as him many times before now...
The predator had now become prey... Karma had ran it’s course and he was now in the same position he once laughed at.
’This boy...’ he thought in fear... ’is a beast...’
**BOOM**
Nightmare crashed into him sending Axel flying backwards.
Axel skidded backwards and stopped right next to Hayley.
He straightened his posture and stepped forward.
"Axel."
He turned at the voice and his gaze settled on Hayley as she layed there breathing heavily.
"Axel," she called again. "Is... is that you?"
Axel swept his gaze over her and took in her broken
form.
It was obvious that she was trying to heal herself but the process has become painfully slow.
"Get somewhere safe," he said.
"Axel, are you—"
"Now."
He cast a side glance that made her breath hitch. His hollow eyes holding contact for just a few moments causing her to go quite.
Then, she murmured, her voice so low one would file it away as an inaudible whisper:
"I don’t like the look in your eyes..."
He paused at that. For a long moment he said nothing...
Then he blitzed forward...
~~~~~
"Nightmare!" Yuri shouted. "You told me to kill the boy. This wasn’t in the plan."
"You should know by now that by the looks of it, even I didn’t account for this to happen." Nightmare answered calmly, he was battered, his left arm completely useless and holes in parts of his body that made him leak.
"I won’t stay here for this. I’m not dying for your sake!"
Yuri yelled again as he scrambled to his feet, stumbling before steadying himself.
"Yuri."
He was about to leave when Nightmare called out to him.
"Our deal was to capture him dead or alive. We are not finished, where are you going? Get back here."
Yuri shook his head. "No. I don’t take order from a walking corpse."
Maybe he couldn’t see it, but Yuri knew that staying here longer was just pushing him faster towards an inevitable end.
After he said this, he vanished, blitzing away from the battle field and leaving nothing but a puddle of his own blood behind.
**BANG**
Axel’s fist met with Nightmare and the force opened the ground beneath them.
They were about to clash again then suddenly...
**BOOM**
It came from the direction of the light.
Seeing this, Nightmare grinned. Then he looked at Axel and said to him— triumph bleeding through his voice.
"Hahahaha. You see that? You’ve lost."
Axel stepped back and looked towards the pillar of light.
Red energy crackled along it and the ground opened, a pentagram forming on it.
Then from the depths of whatever void it opened, something reached out..
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