The ruins of the warehouse became their arena.
Nocthar stood amidst the rubble, yellow energy swirling around him like a living thing. His broken nose had healed, but the memory of the pain still lingered, a humiliation he hadn't experienced in years. Around him, the debris began to float, caught in his telekinetic fear-field.
"You think silence makes you strong?" he taunted, gesturing. A ton of rebar shot toward Steven like a railgun projectile. "It makes you predictable. No creativity or passion. Just... mechanical repetition."
Steven didn't dodge. He caught the rebar in one hand, the impact driving him back two meters, his feet plowing furrows through shattered concrete. He examined the twisted metal for a moment, then crushed it into a ball and dropped it.
"Five thousand," Steven said.
Nocthar blinked. "What?"
Nothing. Steven hadn't spoken. The words had been in Nocthar's imagination, a trick of his own mind, desperate to hear something, anything, from this silent engine of destruction.
"You're getting in my head," Nocthar growled, but his voice lacked conviction. He thrust both hands forward, and a dozen chunks of debris each weighing dozens of tons launched simultaneously from all angles.
Steven moved.
Not fast but efficient. He stepped between two projectiles, let a third graze his shoulder (the flesh tore, then instantly sealed), caught a fourth and used its momentum to redirect a fifth into a sixth. The remaining strikes he simply absorbed, his body tanking impacts that would have pulverized buildings.
He emerged from the barrage with a new wound bisecting his left pectoral, deep enough to show the darkened, reinforced muscle beneath. It was already closing.
"You're slowing down," Nocthar observed, but he didn't sound pleased, but wary. "The bigger you get, the more that energy tears you apart. I can see it. Your organs are failing. Your bones are microfracturing under your own weight. How long before you just... pop huh ?"
Steven's answer was to attack.
He crossed the twenty meters between them in a single leap, coming down with both fists interlocked like a hammer. Nocthar threw up a shield and still was driven knee-deep into the rubble, the shockwave flattening debris in a fifty-meter radius.
"Persistent little fuck, aren't you?" Nocthar snarled, and his fear energy lashed out, not as a weapon, but as tendrils. They wrapped around Steven's arms, legs, and throat, trying to force their way into his mind, to find something to feed on.
Steven ignored them.
He reached up, grabbed the tendril around his throat, and pulled . The fear energy shrieked a sound like dying souls, and dissolved under his touch. Not absorbed nor destroyed but simply negated, as if his very existence rejected the concept of fear.
"That's not possible," Nocthar whispered. "Everything fears. Everything ."
Steven's fist answered him.
The blow caught Nocthar's jaw with enough force to spin his head nearly 180 degrees. Yellow energy flared in panic, wrenching his neck back into place, but the damage was done. Nocthar stumbled, genuinely staggered for the first time in half a decade.
He retreated, putting distance between them, and for the first time, he looked at Steven with something other than amusement or cruelty.
He looked at him as prey looks at a predator.
"No," Nocthar hissed, shaking his head. "No, no, no. I am the nightmare. I am the thing that makes gods weep. You don't get to—"
Steven's eyes glowed.
Not the annihilation beams. Something subtler. A pulse of dark energy that rippled outward, and where it passed, the air itself seemed to die. Nocthar's fear energy flickered, starved of its sustenance. The floating debris crashed to the ground.
"I don't understand you," Nocthar admitted, his voice dropping to a whisper. "And that... that makes me want to tear you apart even more."
He attacked with everything.
The years of consumption poured out of him. Five thousand souls' worth of power manifested as a titanic construct of yellow fear energy, a spectral beast thirty meters tall, shaped like a dragon made of screaming faces. It lunged at Steven with jaws that could crush mountains.
Steven stood his ground.
The dragon struck. Its jaws closed around him, lifted, and slammed him into the earth with enough force to create a crater twenty meters deep. It bit down, grinding, and tearing, trying to find purchase on flesh that simply refused to yield.
In the depths of the crater, Steven reached up with both hands.
And pried the jaws apart.
The construct shrieked as he tore it open from the inside, dark energy warring with yellow fear-force. He didn't destroy it elegantly, he ripped, shredded and reduced the manifestation of five thousand souls' terror into dissipating wisps of light.
Nocthar fell to one knee, blood pouring from his nose, ears, and eyes. "That's... that's not..."
Steven climbed from the crater.
He was 3 meters tall now. His current maximum growth. His body had become a monument to destruction, every muscle defined to an inhuman degree, skin stretched tight over a frame that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space. The vein-patterns covered him completely, a network of living shadow that pulsed with each labored heartbeat.
And he was damaged .
His left arm hung at an unnatural angle, the shoulder dislocated from the dragon's assault. A chunk of his right side was simply gone, the flesh trying to regenerate but struggling against the sheer amount of energy coursing through him. His left eye had ruptured, healing slowly, leaving a trail of black ichor down his face.
But he did not falter, scream nor did he even acknowledge the pain in any way.
"You're dying," Nocthar wheezed, climbing to his feet. He was diminished now, his golden aura flickering, his movements slower. "You can't maintain this. One more push and you'll—"
Steven moved.
He crossed the distance in a blur, his dislocated arm swinging with the force of a wrecking ball. Nocthar blocked, but the impact drove him backward, his feet skidding through rubble. Another blow. Another. Each one precise, devastating, relentless .
Nocthar's blocks grew sloppy. A strike slipped through his guard and caught his ribs, three broke instantly, yellow energy struggling to knit them. Another crushed his left hand, fingers mangled beyond recognition.
"STOP!" Nocthar screamed, and unleashed a point-blank fear shockwave.
It hit Steven's chest and detonated.
The explosion threw both fighters backward. Steven crashed through the remains of a concrete wall, his body leaving a man-shaped hole. He lay still for a moment, three seconds, four, and then slowly and mechanically rose.
His regeneration was slowing. The damage was outpacing his body's ability to repair. His skin had begun to crack in places, dark energy leaking out like pressurized steam. He was a boiler about to burst.
But he walked forward anyway.
"Why won't you die?" Nocthar screamed, genuine panic in his voice now. "Why won't you fear? Why won't you break ?"
Steven's remaining eye fixed on him.
And for the first time, something changed in his expression. Not emotion nor humanity, but intent. A shift from defense to termination. From survival to execution.
He raised his hand, and the dark energy around him condensed. Not into a beam. Into something worse. A sphere of absolute blackness, smaller than a fist, that seemed to devour the light around it. The air screamed as reality itself bent around the projectile.
Nocthar's eyes widened. "You wouldn't—you'll kill yourself—"
Steven threw it.
Nocthar threw everything he had left into a shield, a dome of solidified fear energy, the strongest defense he'd ever constructed. The black sphere struck it.
And punched through like it was paper.
The impact lifted Nocthar off his feet, sent him flying backward through the ruins, through a standing wall, through the foundation of a neighboring building. He finally came to rest in a pile of shattered brick, his body a broken mess, yellow energy flickering weakly around his wounds.
He tried to rise but couldn't.
Steven walked toward him through the devastation he'd created. Each step left a bloody footprint, his feet had worn through flesh and were now bleeding into the rubble. His body was shutting down system by system. His heart was arrhythmic. His brain was showing signs of hemorrhage.
But he kept walking.
"You're... you're a monster," Nocthar whispered, dragging himself backward with his one functional arm. "Not a predator nor prey. Just... a thing . A force of nature. That's not fair. That's not how this works."
Steven stood over him.
He raised his hand for the finishing blow.
"Wait—" Nocthar's voice cracked. "Wait, we can—I'll serve you. I'll give you everything. The souls I've consumed, the power, the—"
The blow fell.
Not a punch, but an execution. Steven's hand, wreathed in dark energy, drove through Nocthar's chest with the precision of a surgeon and the brutality of an executioner. It found the core of yellow fear energy, the condensed essence of more than five thousand consumed souls, and crushed it.
Nocthar's eyes went wide. Then empty.
The yellow energy didn't dissipate. It screamed as it died, a chorus of liberated souls finally freed from their prison. The sound echoed across the ruined district, a requiem for the consumed and a dirge for the consumer.
Steven withdrew his hand.
Nocthar's body collapsed, truly lifeless for the first time in five years. The fear-feeder who had consumed gods was now just meat and bone, his stolen power scattered to the winds.