The world was no longer the same, and that wasn't a metaphor. What had once been a tournament, a controlled arena where absurd forces collided under implicit rules, had now become something completely different. The floating coliseum no longer merely orbited the sky—it existed on the edge of a reality that was being slowly consumed, drained, rewritten by a force that didn't distinguish allies from enemies. And, at the center of it all, two presences continued to clash with an intensity that ignored any other threat.
Vergil was being crushed.
There was no more honest way to describe it. Each exchange of blows wasn't a contest, not a measurement of strength—it was a brutal exercise in survival. Angelo was no longer the same opponent he had faced minutes before. The constant evolution of that entity had surpassed a critical threshold, and now each movement carried a weight that couldn't be compensated for with technique alone.
The blow came too quickly for ordinary eyes to follow.
