Surviving the Death Hunt-Chapter 72: Ominous

Emotions...

Everything in Scar, his body, soul, and whatever lived between the two detested what stood before him.

Adisa’s Inheritance, Breath of Hell, came in slashes, each one powerful enough to melt the ground it touched and collapse whatever buildings it found.

Scar registered it all and felt nothing in response. Not fear, not the hatred he had been carrying for months. Just the quiet, consuming desire to remove that smile, to remove Adisa entirely.

And underneath it all, the feeling he couldn’t shake, responsibility. For all of it.

His gloves permitted him to wield his flames without consequence, but only twenty times. He had used nearly all of them with two attempts left, no more.

The decision to hold back was deliberate. There was no point in spending what little remained carelessly. So the entire battle had been fought without a single flame. He just used the Enhancement technique to layer over his movements and his blade, Black Sun, in his hand.

Scar had been doing exactly what he needed to survive, reflecting Adisa’s attacks and letting Black Sun absorb the worst of the slashes when reflecting wasn’t enough.

And yet the fight hadn’t moved. He had launched nothing, not even a single attack, and had spent the entire battle behind his own defense. Surviving wasn’t the same as winning, and he was starting to feel the difference.

Everything about Adisa suggested a game. Ten minutes of staring inexplicably into the distance, and then the slashes came, and laughing through all of it.

The laughter might have been reassuring if Scar didn’t know better. He did. Adisa wasn’t playing. The smile and the laughing were surface things, and beneath them, the fight was being taken as seriously as anything Scar had ever faced.

’He won’t let me get close. Damn bastard... I just need an opening. Just one, and I’ll finish him.’

Scar let his eyes move, scanning the destruction they had carved into the buildings around them, searching for an angle, something to tip the balance.

Nothing obvious presented itself at first. Then he deflected one of Adisa’s slashes, and the force carried into a wall, collapsing it entirely, and a thought began to form.

Chills coursed through him but didn’t hold his attention. Adisa’s attacks were escalating, and that was the more pressing concern. Scar didn’t dwell on that.

Debris scattered the terrain now, concrete shards scattered across the ground, and Scar put them to use.

It was the first offensive move he had made in the entire battle, kicking fragments toward Adisa and pushing something back for once.

Adisa’s slashes swallowed it all before anything connected. None of it mattered in terms of damage. What mattered was time, and Scar was buying it however he could.

"Come on, Scar! This is why I used to pick on you back on campus. Show me something. Show me your resolve. I know you can do better than this."

Whatever Adisa was saying wasn’t reaching him. Scar had other things to focus on.

The Moon’s Blessing was doing its work, amplifying the force of each debris launch enough to pull Adisa’s attention away in a short, reliable moment.

Scar was spending every one of those windows closing in, but not in a straight line, which would have given the game away too easily.

He spread himself across the field with his enhanced speed, scattering his movements and working to dull Adisa’s read on where he was and where he was heading.

It was effective for some time. Adisa’s attacks lost their rhythm, coming less often than before. The strategy was doing exactly what Scar had needed it to do. But the damage had already been accumulating on his side, and the worst of it was catching up.

The Enhancement technique came with a cost, and it was collecting it. Scar could feel it spreading through him.

Sluggishness settled into his limbs, fatigue building to the point where each movement required more than it should have, and through all of it, his head spun in a way that made focus a genuine struggle.

’I need to finish this. Come on, Scar!’

Something came to him at that moment. It was a small thing, almost nothing, but the more he turned it over, the more he saw what it could become.

Adisa had been living in one of the most dangerous districts for over a month. The conditions of that place had a way of forcing growth, and Scar was certain Adisa had at least awakened his Emotional State by now. Allowing him to activate it would be game over.

After all the movement, he stopped. His legs shook as he drew a breath and assumed his stance, not continuing the fight but restarting it, the posture carrying the weight of something new.

The effect was immediate. Adisa went down to one knee, the ground around him crumbling just slightly, sweat breaking across him in sheets, his eyes wide and full of something Scar hadn’t expected to see there. Terror.

His uncle had taught him the threatening presence, but Scar had never truly grasped the scale of it. He couldn’t see it from the outside.

But Adisa’s state gave him a reference point he hadn’t had before, and what he understood from it was that against an ordinary human, that presence alone would have been enough to put them on the floor, unconscious, before anything else could happen.

Watching Adisa grovel had its appeal, but Scar wasn’t here for that. He tightened his grip on Black Sun and launched it toward Adisa without ceremony.

The launch carried tremendous force, the kind that left a heavy toll on everything in its path. It should have been enough.

But Adisa, buried under the weight of Scar’s threatening presence, somehow found his strength, caught the blade in his grip, and stopped just short of piercing through his skull. Impossible, and yet.

Scar had anticipated it. The smirk was already there when Adisa released the blade, tossing it aside with pain carved into his expression and confusion not far behind.

Adisa had no idea what he had just touched. A moment longer and it wouldn’t have been confusion on his face. It would have been nothing at all. His soul would have vanished. No one could hold that sword but Scar.

<< Flash Step >>

Before Black Sun could reach the floor, Scar took a step, and he was already beside Adisa.

He extended his hand, and the blade pulled itself back into his grip, and the slash came in the same breath, he slashed Adisa’s chest open.

Adisa hit the ground and skidded, but Scar wasn’t finished. The attack should have split him clean in two—and it would have, if Adisa hadn’t thrown his hands in the way.

He’d sacrificed them to absorb the force, keeping himself alive at a cost that would have stopped most people from moving at all.

Scar moved to close in again, ready to press the advantage, when something overrode the intention entirely. His body reacted before his mind did, pulling him back.

"Shit... what’s that power? Did he activate his Emotional State? No... that’s not it... Protector State?"

The area thickened instantly, the air growing dense and oppressive, and Scar felt his threatening presence flatten against it.

Dark smoke poured in around where Adisa stood, swallowing him entirely, and from within it something emerged. Something that wore Adisa’s shape but felt like an entirely different being.

What marked him first was the sigil on his forehead. The sigil was a small circle with an upside-down cross embedded within it, proof of his connection to the underworld for anyone who knew what they were looking at. His hair had shed its red entirely and gone dark. Two pointed horns curved upward from his head.

The dark smoke moved around him, coiling and spreading until it had shaped itself into two wings that held him suspended in the air.

His body had darkened entirely... every part of it black as the smoke, save for his face. And the hands he had sacrificed to block Scar’s attack had returned, as though the cost had been refunded.

Tsk

"All this power... Emotional State, I understand. But Protector State? This is bad."

Scar had gone through the entire fight without feeling much of anything. That had changed. He couldn’t move, his body held in place while his heart hammered against his chest with an aggression that left no room for composure.

Every rational thought had narrowed to one: run. And somewhere beneath that, less rational but just as loud, he found himself wishing Haven was here.

He was terrified. Completely, honestly terrified, the kind that made him feel like a lost child all over again.

Laughter.

"That was impressive, Scar. I knew this fight wouldn’t be easy, but I never expected such brutality. I didn’t even know your sword was one of those that binds themselves to their wielder."

He wished he had something cocky to throw at him. The words wouldn’t have left his throat even if he did.

What stood before him was a Protector State, the pinnacle for most Inheritances and the highest point they could reach.

Its power was unparalleled, and in the hands of someone with proper control, it could hold its own against a newly awakened God Killer.

Scar had held onto something resembling hope throughout the fight. The Emotional State would have kept that alive since it drew from the Protector State, a reflection of its strength rather than the thing itself.

But this wasn’t a reflection. This was the source, in full. Whatever hope remained dissolved. He was completely broken.

Suddenly, Adisa’s mood changed.

"I’m sorry, Scar. This is where your journey ends. You’ll soon join your parents... and Isaac."

Scar’s heart clenched, and his breath came harder than it should have. It wasn’t the dying that sat heaviest, he had made a kind of peace with that possibility long before today.

What he couldn’t make peace with was the rest of it. Isaac, still unavenged. His parents were still unavenged. The whole reason he had gotten this far, the whole reason he had pushed as hard as he had, and it was going to end here, unfinished.

Then...

A single flicker of his finger and a slash of wind tore toward Scar with more force than anything the fight had produced so far.

Every part of him was horrified. And yet his body moved without asking permission, positioning itself to block the attack before his mind had caught up to what was happening.

He pushed Black Sun toward the slash, willing it to absorb the force the way it had before.

But the blade wasn’t its own thing. It was tied to him, drawing its strength from his, and right now, Scar’s wasn’t close to sufficient for what Adisa had become. The blade failed. The scream that followed was unbearable.

The slash didn’t wound, it erased.

His left shoulder was gone, everything from it wiped clean, leaving only his neck behind, and that still carrying burns from the edge of it.

His stomach to his waist was the same. Flesh, blood, and bone were all absent, replaced by a gap that had no business existing in a living body.

The only thing keeping Scar in one piece was a small portion of his chest. That was all that remained between him and coming apart entirely.

Thinking wasn’t possible. The scream had been the last thing his body produced with any coherence, and even that felt like it belonged to someone else now.

What moved through him wasn’t pain in any recognizable sense. It was beyond that, beyond anything his mind had the capacity to process. His brain had stopped responding. There was just the void of it.

While he died over there, Adisa was amused.

"You’re really something, boss. It’s insane that you’re still alive. That attack isn’t just a slash, it’s a portal to hell itself. It devours everything it touches... and yet you’re still standing."

In the end, Scar managed something, he cried.

Not from the pain. From his own incompetence. He was supposed to be the one who survived, the one among all his predecessors who lived long enough to end the hunt.

And here he was, losing. Not to Dain. To Adisa.

"No matter, Scar. I won’t allow you to survive any longer. It’s time to say goodbye."

Adisa was crying now as well. Whatever state he had awakened, whatever power had taken over his body, it hadn’t taken everything. He was about to kill his master. The person he had looked up to his entire life. The tears came whether he wanted them to or not.

"Protector State, Hell’s Gate."

A portal opened where Scar lay, reality tearing apart at the seams around him as though the world itself had decided to swallow what was left of him.

He wanted to run, and every surviving instinct screamed it. The only response his body could manage was his toes, moving faintly, driven by whatever will hadn’t yet given up on him.

Then he saw something. Something strange but familiar.