The moment Caissa arrived behind him, Darius grinned.
'Perfect.'
He clapped his hands. They came together at the exact moment before Caissa's blade pierced his neck.
And the Sun Flame responded.
The massive columns disappeared, and instead, a powerful spout of lava-like flames burst out from underneath Darius' feet and swallowed both him and Caissa.
The woman immediately screamed.
Darius was immune to the flames, but Caissa wasn't anything close to it.
Especially when the flames in question were Heavenly Flames from another cosmos.
Darius grinned, spinning around and grabbing her by the throat.
Her dark cloak was burned away, revealing her beautiful appearance and figure, but Darius wasn't fazed.
Damien was quite thorough in training him.
Knowing Darius was still a hot-blooded youth at heart, Damien made sure he was taught not just how to use his power properly, but on how to be a proper man.
He couldn't be affected by beauty or unwanted emotion when he didn't need to be. For that purpose, he had to learn how to separate his emotions into those he wanted and those he wanted to throw away.
Perhaps a decade ago, Darius would have hesitated seeing this woman almost naked in front of him, but he didn't have any of those feelings anymore.
This was an enemy, and enemies could not be shown mercy.
With sharpened eyes, he flared his flames, exponentially increasing the surrounding heat.
Caissa's skin began to melt off.
She used malakh to slow down the burning and save herself, but her main focus was on finding a way to escape.
She now understood how disadvantaged she was.
The surrounding darkness belonged to the enemy. If she tried to move through it, she'd immediately give away her position, which would be shared with Darius.
If she wanted to kill him, she needed to do it now, at a time when her loss was the expectation from everyone present.
She gritted her teeth and endured the pain.
Darkness began to creep out of her body. It was the darkness in her heart and soul, formed through the endless suffering she'd experienced at the hands of many powerful figures.
Most of them were dead. As they died, however, the darkness in her heart faded.
So Caissa stopped killing them.
She left them alive so the seething hatred she felt could continue to fuel her power.
And the man who made her feel such emotion most viscerally…
That was the man she decided to dedicate her loyalty to.
Because just as much as she hated him, she couldn't help but love him.
Malice, hatred, and twisted emotion created darkness beyond darkness, a force that Caissa could control even better than she could regular darkness.
Damien always said pain was power, but Caissa took it to another level.
She allowed herself to suffer constantly, because only in suffering could she make those she despises suffer as well.
The new darkness oozed like sludge. As it came out of Caissa's pores, it swallowed the surrounding flames, trapping them in a prison without light.
Caissa turned into a blob of blackness. Her physical body melted into the substance, allowing her to maneuver in ways a human could never imagine.
Darius' eyes widened at the sight he didn't expect.
He took several steps back as the blackness got closer to him. It was already on his body, since he was holding onto Caissa's throat when she turned, and as he tried to use the Sun Flame to burn it away, he frowned.
'Dangerous.'
His eyes went up to the growing blackness.
He could sense the twisted insanity within that mass. It was far deeper and more cynical than anything he'd seen before.
'I can't burn it.'
His flames weren't strong enough to compete against such malevolence.
'Dammit.'
He almost had it. The fact that he lost it at the last moment irked him, but he had been learning to control his emotions.
He focused on the battle.
His inherent battle instinct, the one Damien himself praised, was telling him to retreat.
He had no choice but to follow what it told him.
He took several steps back, covering his retreat using the Sun Flame.
Caissa had grown massive in the few seconds it took for him to make that decision.
She was like a tsunami that melded into the surrounding blackness, charging forth with such stealth that one wouldn't recognize one was within it even after being swallowed.
Darius knew that even he would be heavily injured if he was struck by that.
He varied his path, making it hard for Caissa to track him. At the same time, he enveloped himself in flames to burn off the small bits of darkness that had stuck to him.
If she could possess those, his life would be over. It was absolutely integral to make sure no part of it could reach him.
Darius' eyes narrowed.
He stopped in his tracks, stomped his foot into the ground, and summoned the height of his flames.
They formed a huge tsunami to fight against the one approaching, and as they met, the atmosphere itself exploded under pressure.
BOOOM!
The Sun Flame wasn't good for a battle like this.
It was good for head-on collisions, of course, but in her current form, Caissa was hardly a physical entity.
He needed something more magical to defeat her. At most, his current flame could only hold her back.
'How long…?'
Darius looked up into the sky.
The sun had moved far along the horizon during the time he'd been fighting.
It was already approaching evening when the battle started, but with the minutes ticking by, the sun had already made it to the end of its cycle.
Soon, it would set beyond the horizon and be replaced by its serene counterpart.
'Ten minutes.'
Darius had learned how to judge exactly how much time it took for the sun to set over the horizon. In every new world he visited, the first thing he did was judge this cycle.
Ten minutes.
He was assured that in ten minutes, the moon would rise.
And the Moon Flame would awaken.
Darius continued to watch his flames compete against the darkness.
The physical weight of the flames created the wall they represented, but they weren't actually able to burn much of Caissa's darkness.
Small flecks could be destroyed, but a mass like that wasn't something it could handle in its current form.
The Sun Flame was powered by emotion, and compared to the emotion he could put into it, the emotion within Caissa's darkness was monstrous.
Physical damage wouldn't work here.
'And if physical damage won't do anything…'
Darius gritted his teeth.
'...then I have to hit her soul.'
It was something he never thought he'd be capable of in the past.
'Speaking of the past…'
The Sun Flame probably wasn't the right choice for this job.
Until the Moon Flame appeared, space and time techniques would be Darius' best bet at cutting down Caissa's size.
He smiled slightly as he watched the darkness crash through his fire.
'It's been a while, huh…?'
A sword appeared in his hands.
He took a stance that he'd nearly forgotten due to all the retraining he'd undergone.
The 16 Swords of Heaven…
…what would they look like when the current Darius used them?
