The earth trembled, the sky flickered like broken code, and still—they fought.
Each strike was a quake. Each movement blurred the edge of reality. Chara stood at a distance, arms crossed, fuming quietly. Her cheeks puffed up, jaw clenched in that childish kind of frustration that looked halfway between a pout and a protest. She hated being sidelined, hated being tossed aside like some irrelevant piece—but...
She sighed.
Her expression softened. A faint blush crept up her cheeks, deepening as her eyes lingered on the two titans locked in unrelenting battle. There was something about the way they moved. The brutality. The raw, stubborn refusal to fall. It was… mesmerizing.
"Fine," she muttered to no one."I'll just enjoy the show."
And back in the storm, the show raged on.
UltSans and Doom Slayer were now equals in every sense. No tricks, no powers—just hands. Fists. Rage. Determination. Whatever the syringe had done to Doom Slayer, it had put him into a place where even the warped might of all absorbed human souls couldn't push UltSans past him.
Their speed was shocking—but it was still readable. Until it wasn't.
In the blink of an eye, they both froze.
Not in hesitation.
They were gone—not teleported, not phased out. Just moving at speeds so far past perception that only their faint afterimages remained, flickering like half-loaded sprites in a glitched-out simulation. The real fight had vanished from sight.
Only echoes of motion remained—ghosts punching, grappling, clawing, blurring between frames.
Then—impact.
They reappeared just long enough to punch each other dead in the face. Time paused.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then everything did.
A cataclysmic wave of raw force burst outward from their clash, splitting the land beneath, rupturing the air in all directions. Chunks of stone the size of buildings hurled skyward. Entire pieces of the battlefield crumbled and lifted into the air like debris caught in an anti-gravity storm.
Both were launched backward, miles apart, until they slammed into the earth hard enough to leave impact craters glowing with molten residue.
Chara flinched, almost stepping forward—but then she stopped herself.
This wasn't something she could touch.
This wasn't a battle anymore.
This was something else.
Doom Slayer and UltSans dashed forward again. In a blink—they were gone.
Then—BOOM.
The next collision cracked the atmosphere.
They were at it again, fists flying faster than sound, each blow leaving behind a fading shadow—faint duplicates of themselves repeating the attack a split-second after the original. It was no longer just a battle—it was battles within a battle. Every copy fought alongside the original, adding to the chaos, each echo like a thread of time splitting off for one singular purpose: destruction.
Then something shifted.
Doom Slayer surged forward—and this time, he wasn't alone.
His shadows multiplied, faster, sharper, more defined. And now—armed.
Each phantom version of him wielded a different weapon from his endless arsenal: Super Shotgun, Rocket Launcher, Ballista, Unmaykr, Chaingun, Crucible—all of them, one in each afterimage, as if every echo of him had its own mission of devastation.
They opened fire in unison.
The battlefield lit up like a thousand suns crashing into each other. Each shot wasn't just an attack—it was enhanced. The guns were different now—glowing with the same red energy that pulsed in his veins. True Determination had infected the very metal, turned steel into divine artillery. Every bullet left streaks of molten red through the sky, every shell cracked the bedrock of existence itself.
UltSans responded in kind—his own afterimages surged forward, trying to counter, phase-dodge, parry.
But they were outgunned.
The barrage was endless, precise, and merciless.
One by one, the phantom UltSans copies were torn apart—vaporized by exploding plasma, ripped through by double-barreled blasts, disintegrated by energy beams that carved clean through the air like divine retribution.
In seconds, they were gone.
And UltSans—the real one—was left alone.
No shadows. No echoes. Just him, at the center of an annihilation storm.
The remaining Doom Slayer shadows—dozens of them—encircled him like a fleet of death gods, all armed, all locked on. They fired again, in rhythm, a symphony of obliteration. UltSans didn't fall. But he was buried beneath it—engulfed by a relentless rain of war, his form disappearing into a firestorm of red and steel.
The ground caved in.
The light consumed the sky.
But even as the smoke began to clear, there was one truth:
He wasn't defeated.
But he'd been reminded what he was up against.
And Doom Slayer, now more than ever, was done playing fair.
Then—out of nowhere—came the beam.
A massive, pure-white column of energy ripped through the sky, descending with a force that bent the air around it. It struck the ground exactly where UltSans had been. The light that followed wasn't just bright—it was blinding. A searing flood of white washed over everything, swallowing terrain, shadow, fire, and even sound. It was impossible to look at. It was impossible to look away from.
Every shadow version of Doom Slayer disappeared instantly, erased in an instant by the blast's impossible purity.
Then came silence.
Long, heavy silence.
For the first time in the entire battle, Doom Slayer hesitated—not in fear, but in uncertainty. Something had changed. Something absolute.
He tried to look forward—but couldn't see.
His vision was clouded.
The red haze from his transformation had never lifted. A constant, faint smoke still veiled his optics, the crimson tint thickening now as if his own body was warning him, blinding him out of self-preservation. He saw nothing but fog—no heat signatures, no movement, no outlines.
The red outline he had used to lock onto UltSans earlier was gone.
Then—FLASH.
A sudden burst of iridescent light flooded his view. It wasn't just a flash—it was a cascade, a blast of color layered over color, a spectrum exploding into his mind. Doom Slayer flinched—not from pain, but from the impossibility of it. His enhanced vision couldn't stabilize. There was no focal point.
Chara, from a distance, tilted her head.
"What is he doing now…?" she muttered.
Then she looked up—and froze.
Her expression dropped completely.
There it was.
Rising beyond the light, barely contained within space itself, a colossal, impossible figure began to take form. It wasn't just big—it was cosmic. A skeleton, immense in scale, so huge its frame bent perspective just trying to look at it. From its back unfurled wings—dozens of them—stretching across the broken sky, each feather shifting color in a soft fade of rainbow-white, casting spectral light across everything.
But that wasn't the most disturbing part.
Its face was shifting.
At first, it had a human skull—two eyes, a mouth—but as it rose higher, the face warped into something else entirely. The eyes multiplied. The mouth disappeared. The entire face became an ocean of blinking eyes—each one different, each one intelligent, aware. Watching.
Its wings bore the same unsettling detail. Hidden within the feathers, more eyes opened and closed slowly, methodically—staring in every direction. And near the peaks of each wing, thousands of hearts floated—souls.
The souls.
All the ones UltSans had absorbed.
Doom Slayer tried to focus—but he couldn't.
His vision was useless. His enhanced optics were built to lock onto life signs, identify souls, detect threats. But what stood before him didn't have a single soul.
It had over eight billion.
The auras collapsed and overlaid into one collective presence. The pressure of that much spiritual force collapsed his targeting systems. There was no outline. No point of reference. Just blinding light and an overwhelming sense of being watched from every direction.
It wasn't just overkill.
It was cosmic blasphemy.
Doom Slayer dashed back without hesitation—his speed breaking the sound barrier. Within an instant, he had repositioned miles away, skidding to a stop across a cliffside of shattered obsidian.
From there, he saw it.
Not clearly. Not fully. But enough.
A towering silhouette glowing with impossible color. Its aura, if it could be called that, stretched far past the horizon—waves of rainbow light rippling through the air like heatwaves through liquid space. It was no longer a body. It was a force. The very concept of UltSans had outgrown shape.
And Doom Slayer understood.
This wasn't a duel anymore.This wasn't even a war.
This was a second Icon of Sin—but worse.
It was everything he'd fought before, all at once, and then something beyond.
He planted his feet, clenched his fists, and let the smoke rise off his shoulders. His armor hissed with strain. Red light still pulsed through his veins like a drumline of fury.
There would be no holding back now.
There would be no breaks.
No caution.
No hesitation.
This was the final threshold.
Time to rip and tear—Until the impossible bled.